Decline of the Empire

George Monbiot Has No Idea What Despair Is

George Monbiot opens the video below by talking about his occasional feelings of despair. After all, there is lots to be despairing about. The climate is rapidly transitioning to a hostile state, though it is happening far too slowly for humans to grasp what's going on. The world's top soil is disappearing, again rapidly on any time-scale longer than the human one. On the global scale, a relative handful of humans own most of the wealth and are accumulating even more wealth as I write this. George even talks about humans as storytelling animals.

Ironically, the title of the video is How to Really Take Back Control. Take back control? I say "ironically" because nothing can be done about anything George talks about. Nothing. Not the climate, not the topsoil, not the global wealth inequality. These problems can not be fixed and therefore will not be fixed. Human nature itself created these problems. Human nature did not allow for solutions to them.

Stop reading for a moment. Let that sink in for a while.

But Monbiot believes these problems can be fixed. We Shall Overcome and all that. He thinks that if we just replace one narrative with another, a miracle will occur. So Monbiot's "despair" is really hope in disguise. That's always true in Flatland. Evolution guaranteed humans would feel that way to keep the game going (to get your gene spellings into the next generation).

That's why Monbiot has bothered to get up in front of an attentive crowd and tell them a story. Because he thinks there's some point to doing so. And for George himself, of course there is a point because it must be very satisfying for him to get up in front of an audience of spellbound people and tell them a hopeful story, however delusional it is.

So Monbiot has no idea what despair is. I'll tell you what despair is. A person feels despair when he able see the ineluctable working out of humankind's tragic fate. When he can see some (if not all) of the flawed qualities which make that self-destructive outcome unavoidable. When he can see that every effort he might conceivably make to reverse that outcome is utterly futile.

That's the despair I feel every day. I would never get up in front of roomful of people to talk about humanity's problems. What would be the fucking point? I wouldn't get anything out of it and neither would they.

Outside of evolution's wicked game, all this serves to underscore the utter pointlessness of human existence, even as humans everywhere desperately try ever harder to create meaning & purpose by clinging to one type of delusion or some other one.

I never feel such despair all the day long. Those feelings are fleeting. Most days I compose or arrange music because it makes me happy, even as the inevitable aches and pains of aging rob me of precious vitality over time (I am now 66).

So George Monbiot has no clue what real despair is. Fuck off, George.

Trump Derangement Syndrome Goes Infinite

Well, what do you do when you realize that the very powerful turd-flinging monkeys elite journalists working for our corporate-owned media are bat-shit crazy? What do you do when you see them getting worse every day? When you see them going down some unhinged Alex Jones conspiracy rabbit-hole? When you finally understand the meaning of the phrase divorced from reality and can easily apply it to what you're seeing? When Trump Derangement Syndrome goes infinite?

Tim Pool doesn't know what to do. He's at the end of his rope now—he sees the double standards, the moral hypocrisy, the lies, deceptions and conspiracy delusions repeated endlessly. Count how many times he uses the word "insane" or some variant in this video.

I could get all serious here and talk about existential threats, social status & power, filtering, projections, tribalism, confirmation bias, innate feelings of moral superiority leading to inevitable immoral behavior and hypocrisy, etc. Human Nature stuff. But hardly anyone would be able to figure out what the fuck I was talking about. I've learned that lesson. Perhaps you've heard the phrase "falling on deaf ears"? Hmm....

Or I could say "Hey, Tim, come over to the Dark Side. Read my Flatland essays." But there's no chance of that. Still, there is a dilemma. At what extreme point does a person with integrity, a person like Tim Pool, say to himself—

"Oh, man. The human condition really is a crock of shit. I'm outta here."

So what do you do if you're not the suicidal type? Or don't want to stay numb all the time?

Well, kids, the answer is obvious, whether it's the Atom Bomb as it was in the 1950's, or CNN, Buzzfeed, Vox, The Daily Beast and The New York Times today. You must Duck and Cover.

Very powerful elites are really pissed off about the usurper Trump. They do not control the him and the levers of power, which has deranged them. First, they're coming for #OrangeManBad, and in so doing they will attempt to destroy what's left of our democracy. What was the heinous crime committed by 62,979,879 people in November, 2016? They did the only thing the elites still let them do—they voted. This kind of "wrongthink" must destroyed. The hopes & aspirations of those who committed this vote crime must be crushed.

As you watch this, and I hope you will watch the whole thing, try to view it as encapsulating the unassailable absurdity of the Human Condition.

Forget It, Tim, It's Chinatown

A Note On Free Will

I just ran across an article in The Atlantic called A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked. I accept the result. What Benjamin Libet thought he was measuring was something else (he had found reliable brain activity prior to a subject's conscious decision to lift a finger, called the unconscious "readiness potential"). Read the article for details.

That said, the new study does not make a case for free will. It merely debunks an argument that was meant to support the position that free will does not exist.

In the Flatland model, I hypothesized that when there is something important is on the line, free will does not exist. In that model, the phrase "something important" means an actual existential threat to a person or an event (action, speech) which that person's brain interprets as an existential threat. The claim is that this is how the mind works, i.e., it is part of Human Nature according to the model.

In short, the reaction to existential threats (real or interpreted) is automatic and spontaneous in all or virtually all cases. I make the usual allowance for the vanishingly rare exception because variation in the human population may countenance a few exceptions. You will very likely never encounter one.

Note well that asking an experimental subject to voluntarily raise a finger whenever they want and then recording the results does not constitute an existential threat to the subject in any way. In fact, most of our day to day existence does not involve such threats (or otherwise we would go crazy). So the flatland model allows for free will to exist in those cases (e.g., perhaps you freely make a "decision" to eat X instead of Y for breakfast).

Let's consider a non-trivial example where something important is on the line. This is a very common kind of example, especially in the politically polarized times we live in. I'll lay it out simply below.

• political belief X is integrated into P's "internal self" (see the 4th Flatland essay). So belief X forms part of P's self-identity.
• in conversation with P, another person asserts political belief Y
• Y contradicts X in some fundamental way

How does P react to the assertion of Y? My lifetime of experience, and yours too, if you trained yourself to notice, has always given one of two answers—

• person P reacts as if he has been assaulted. He becomes defensive or angry in varying degrees. 
• person P reacts as if he didn't even hear Y, or he dismisses the importance of Y, or he casts doubt on Y, etc., regardless of whether Y is verifiably true. In the flatland model, these are types of filtering reactions.

The key to these behaviors is the well-supported assumption that "the belief X forms part of P's self-identity." The assertion of Y is thus interpreted by P as an existential threat, i.e., a threat to P's sense of self. Of course, contradicting someone's beliefs does not constitute an actual existential threat, but that doesn't seem to matter.

Humans deal with existential threats instinctively (by reacting to Y, or filtering Y). These behaviors are automatic and spontaneous. Some people will filter, others will get furious. It depends on the cognitive "style" of the person in question. Options are limited regardless of style. 

Note that if the belief X does not form part of P's self-identity, there is nothing at stake and therefore no existential threat. Or perhaps the assertion of Y does not contradict X.  In either case, no conflict or filtering ensues. 

There is a boatload of evidence from psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience to back these assertions up, though you won't find that evidence framed the way it is in the Flatland model. All four Flatland essays contain material bearing on this subject.

Lately when I am out in public I do not talk about politics (or other "controversial" things like climate change) with people known to me whose political beliefs clearly form part of their identity. Or I will agree with them to avoid conflict. Non-political people avoid political discussions because there is a very high risk of uncomfortable social friction.

Welcome to America in 2019.

So I don't much care about silly experiments where experimental subjects are told to raise a finger or not. Such experiments tell you nothing at all about Human Nature. Behavior didn't evolve over millions of years based on finger lifting. Humans only passed their genes on based on how they responded to existential threats. The descendants of those using effective strategies are still with us. Those who used flawed strategies left no descendants.

So simple, yet so hard for humans to understand.

Humans Are Making Excellent Progress

Once in a while I check in to see how humans are progressing toward their own extinction. I did so yesterday, which was fortunate because we've gotten some climate data updates lately.

Humans are making excellent progress in this regard.

NOAA updated the global temperature record. July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth (since 1880), coming in at +1.71°F with respect to the 20th century average. But what caught my eye was this illuminating data point—

The year-to-date globally averaged land surface temperature was 2.63°F above the 20th century average of 46.8°F. This value was the third highest for January–July on record, behind 2016 (+3.20°F) and 2017 (+2.74°F). 

[Note — there was a large El Nino event which raised 2016 temperatures. 2017 was more in line with the current year. Last year did not reach this level (for the year +1.12°C (2.02°F).]

OK, those are land surface temperatures for January-July, taking away the moderating influence of the oceans.

In centigrade terms, 2.63°F  = 1.46°C.

Got it? On land during the first half of the year, we are near the dreaded 1.5°C mark. The "ambitious" goal of the Paris conference in late 2015 was to keep global temperatures below that mark. Global temperatures including the oceans were the same as July (+1.71°F). But we don't live on the oceans. We live on the land. That's where the fresh water is. That's where most of the food is grown. And so on.

So as I said, excellent progress is being made. Naturally this progress is reflected in CO2 emissions as well. We now have the IEA emissions data for 2018, as reported by Reuters in March.

Global energy-related carbon emissions rose to a record high last year as energy demand and coal use increased, mainly in Asia, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday.

Energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 1.7 percent to 33.1 billion tonnes from the previous year, the highest rate of growth since 2013, with the power sector accounting for almost two-thirds of this growth, according to IEA estimates.

Well. My continuing prediction is that humans will be extinct or "functionally" extinct 200 years from now. And achieving this state of Nirvana will be so easy—all humans have to do is just be themselves and that future extinction event will take care of itself!

And by 2040, I'm predicting land surface temperatures will be ≥2°C every year. Smoke 'em if you got 'em!

This new data hasn't gotten much publicity, which is expected because from the normal anthropocentric point of view, all of this is really bad news. Still, one can find climate change discussed here and there. This has been a point of interest for me as time goes on—how will continuing human denial be expressed?

What observations show is that in the developed world climate change has become a political talking point for globalist elites, who wield this issue (among others) like a club. They want to beat up working people with it.

In short, climate change has become a class, power & status issue, just like nearly everything else humans do in the social realm.

Over the past 24 hours, you may have heard about Google Camp, a (formerly) top-secret event where some of the world's most influential people gathered in Sicily, Italy for a three-day private event to discuss important global issues. This year's topic was, naturally, climate change as we are in dire need of making concrete changes by 2030 before we are unable to repair irreversible catastrophic damages.

The problem? Celebrities and top global leaders—which reportedly included Katy Perry, Priyanka Chopra, Harry Styles, Leo DiCaprio, Prince Harry, and even former President Barack Obama—took yachts and private planes to get there, thus emitting an overwhelming amount of greenhouse gas into the air.

Attending "Google Camp" required 114 private jets to be exact. Elites use their alleged desire to address the climate problem to maintain their own power and status (i.e., this is their unconscious agenda). These elites do indeed want reductions in consumption—by the working class. This would not affect them of course because they already own most of the wealth. The "Yellow Vests" protests started in France when the globalist Macron raised fuel taxes, which mostly affected already-struggling working people. Macron's reason for doing this? Fighting climate change.

None of this has anything to do with solving the climate problem of course. Raising fuel taxes in France does nothing at all to fix the climate. But it does have the elite "virtue" of beating down the working class.

All of this despicable elite behavior (the moral hypocrisy, "Google Camp") amounts to class-based virtue signalling. It is also unfortunate that justified reactions to this appalling elite monkey business are equally clueless about the long-term climate threat (for example, watch here).  In short, in all cases humans are behaving exactly as I've predicted they would.

Jesus wept.

Bonus Video — U.K. elites love Greta Thunberg, "a 16-year-old with multiple mental health issues campaigning to make the world a better place." The use of this girl as a shield for their hypocrisy is truly evil, if the word 'evil' still has a meaning in 2019. More virtue signalling. You can't make shit like this up.

The DNC Is Screwing Tulsi Gabbard

Clueless idealists aside, all of those who support Tulsi Gabbard have known that the Democratic National Committee would find a way to fuck Tulsi over well before the first primary next year. And so the inevitable screwing will happen about 10 days from now.

As Kim Iverson explains in the video below, the DNC is desperately trying to keep Tulsi off the debate stage before she does any more damage to their corrupt plans.

After the first debate, in which Tulsi destroyed Tim Ryan, the most googled name in the country was ... Tulsi Gabbard.

After the second debate, in which Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris, the most googled name in the country was ... Tulsi Gabbard.

On Twitter, after the second debate, Tulsi was at the top of the trending list. So Twitter removed her from that list. And you do know that Tulsi is suing Google for $50 million, right? Follow the link to find out why.

I mean, she's a dangerous loose cannon, this Tulsi girl. Next time around, she might destroy Sleepy Joe Biden or even Pocahontas herself! Oh, sorry, I meant Elizabeth Warren there. 

Well, the DNC can't have Tulsi doing that. And so Tulsi must be screwed because any bona fide member of the globalist pro-war elites, including those running the DNC, will tell you that democracy is never a good thing.

And if they were honest, these elite scumbags would also tell you "we have nearly all the money, so we're not finished, there's still work to do. We also want all the money we don't have."

You people think you're living on Earth, but actually you're living in Hell because, as in Tulsi's case, in Hell—

No good deed goes unpunished.

Proud To Be An American!

I'm truly sorry. I literally couldn't help myself.

Like you, I lack free will. Not my fault!

Meanwhile, the New York Times, without evidence, claims that they are journalists (see here).

I mean, in 2019 evidence is so passé, right? You win. No Mas.

Proud to be an American!

Good Job, Tim Pool!

Independent journalist and youtuber Tim Pool is the first person I know of to wake up and smell the coffee.

In the video below, Tim explains that those in the authoritarian "woke left" are tools of globalist elites, including the Big Tech oligopoly and the corporate-owned mainstream media. For example, Vox editor Ezra Klein and his "woke" staff don't speak for "social justice" as they claim. They speak for their biggest investor NBC-Universal. Identity politics is merely a ruse enabling an ongoing war on the nationalist working class by globalist elites. That's the main reason Trump won—he appealed to working class people, whether he was actually going to help them or not. 

Make no mistake—there is class warfare going on in the United States (and the EU). The appeal to "social justice" is utter bullshit, even if there are many confused young people who "believe" this nonsense. The Big Picture here in the U.S. will come into sharp focus if you interpret all political events and speech in terms of class warfare (i.e., it's basically our corporate/media/academic/neo-liberal political elites waging war against everybody else).

(I am framing this in "flatland" terms. In the Flatland model, identity politics is motivated and the unconscious instincts driving it are 1) naked self-interest and 2) the need for greater social status, power and control. For example, this analysis of the "woke religion" as a status system gets many things right—identity politics is actually well-off elite white people stomping on other powerless white people, i.e., all those morally inferior "racists" who voted for Donald Trump.)

Why do nearly all of the Democrat candidates for president (Tulsi and Yang excepted) show far more interest in the rights of illegal immigrants than the rights of ordinary working Americans? Why did two of them (Beto and Booker) actually do campaign stops in Mexico recently? Why did the NBC/MSNBC "journalists" moderating the first two Democratic debates keep asking questions about the rights of illegal immigrants? Why do all the candidates not named Tulsi and Yang (but including Bernie Sanders and Pocahontas Elizabeth Warren) implicitly want open borders in the United States? Because the Democratic Party represents the interests of pro-war neo-liberal globalist elites.

You know, despicable scumbags. Globalist business elites love cheap labor and therefore both political parties do too (watch the linked-in video and be sure to note the prominent role of Kamala Harris).

Some of this insanity is pandering and virtue signalling but most of it is not. Kamala Harris is the hand-picked candidate of big corporations (including Wall Street) and the Clintons, who have always represented globalist business interests. In terms of the typical American voter, the Democrats are committing suicide of course. But it seems they don't care. They will represent those who bought and paid for them regardless of the outcome in 2020.

Good job, Tim! You figured it out.

Addendum — Untrustworthy Media Sources

On political matters, you can not believe most (if not all) of what is published or broadcast on the "news" sources listed below. It's mostly elite propaganda. And do not use the selectively edited Google News as an aggregator. It's bad for your mental health. This list is incomplete. I added some notes. All of these sources routinely lie, distort, misrepresent and selectively edit all their political news.

• The Washington Post
• The New York Times
• The Atlantic Magazine (what the elites want you to believe)
• CNN (totally fake news)
• NBC/MSNBC (Rachel Maddow, hopeless)
• ABC
• CBS
• Fox News (it's unclear what's going on here)
• Vox Media (includes Vox and The Verge)
• Vice
• Newsweek/The Daily Beast
• The Huffington Post
• Buzzfeed (home of various defamation hit jobs)
• Salon
• Media Matters (woker than woke)
• Slate
• USA Today
• National Public Radio (clueless but woke)
• The Guardian (embarrassingly woke)
• The BBC (last but certainly not least, state-sponsored media, UK elites)

How Does CBS Report The News?

Fascist Antifa thugs beat up journalist Andy Ngo at a protest in Portland, Oregon, a city which is becoming a shithole due to the enlightened leadership of it's "woke" mayor.

Andy was hospitalized because of brain trauma (bleeding) after the attack. Our "woke" mainstream media didn't cover it much because the narrative isn't politically correct. But CBS did put a small report out.

Here is the paragraph discussing the attack on Ngo. I have annotated it to reflect reality (the italicized text between dashes).

Andy Ngo, who describes himself as—he is—an editor at the conservative website Quillette—the website is not woke, so it's conservative—and says he is "hated by antifa,"—well, they beat him  up for no apparent reason— said on his Twitter feed that he was attacked by anti-fascist protesters—he was indeed attacked by antifa protesters—and [also said he] had to be taken to the hospital to treat injuries to his face and head—he was in fact taken to the hospital for face and head injuries. Ngo also said the attackers took his camera equipment—the antifa attackers did in fact take his camera equipment.

I assume you can see how the bias works here, for example—

Ngo also said the attackers took his camera equipment.

Well, Andy might have said anything, right? Who knows what really happened? According to CBS, Andy merely said some things. Humans bullshit and lie all the time. That's just Andy's side of the story, right?

Millions of years of hominid evolution and this despicable nonsense is what we got at the end of it.

You may not be aware of it because your evolved brain is so fucked up, but there actually is something out there we can call reality. That reality (with a small 'r') may not be the ultimate, cosmic Reality (with a big 'R'), but small 'r' reality is certainly good enough for human purposes, or would be if ... we didn't have this big insurmountable problem with story-telling animals.

Humans can't figure out what small-'r'-reality is and don't care about it anyway. That reality might as well not exist because anything which contradicts some sacred delusional narrative—humans always have one at hand, or several—must be filtered. These humans are doing some terrible shit to others, and always have some beautiful justification for it, but don't (can't) acknowledge what they're actually doing and don't (can't) know why they're doing it because their unconscious instinctual motivations are precisely that— unconscious.

Wow. What a deal. So now you understand how CBS reports the news.

I am sad to be living on a fucking nightmare planet populated by 7.7 billion clueless monkeys and surrounded by an unimaginably huge expanse of cosmic nothingness. At least I wasn't hospitalized for head trauma yesterday because the brains of some of those monkeys have gone completely haywire.

I suppose that's the good news.

Millions of years of hominid evolution ... it's  beyond embarrassing

"Don't Be Evil" Fails Again

Update — Senator Josh Hawley will introduce legislation "requiring companies to prove they are politically "neutral" before they receive protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which largely gives internet platforms legal immunity over content posted on their sites by third parties."

If passed this legislation would end the repeal of our free speech rights on giant social media platforms.  Of course billionaire fuckheads in Silicon Valley will fight this. Their evil representatives, like Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, are distorting the facts and lying like crazy to prevent effective regulation of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Fuck 'em.

---

Yes, the title of this post contains Google's original motto. Do you remember that? Well, it's gone now.

Unfortunately, with H. sapiens, there is a rule you can nearly always count on—Power Corrupts.

Google's subsidiary Alphabet runs YouTube. Alphabet's CEO is serial liar Susan Wojcicki.

Susan, along with her "woke" infantile minions, has declared war on all "wrong-think" content, where "wrong-think" is defined any way YouTube wants to define it. The definition of "wrong-think" changes week-to-week. Lately, their definition seems to change daily. 

Videos are removed, users are banned, videos or entire channels are demonetized. No reason is given for the banning, removal or demonetization and there is no appeal. There is "shadow banning" (hiding) of videos, subscriptions to channels suddenly disappear, and notifications for new uploads don't seem to work whenever YouTube arbitrarily deems a video to be politically incorrect. YouTube has declared war on some of its best creators, the very people who made it a viable alternative to our hopelessly corrupt mainstream media (video below).

Elite control of mass media (aka., "gatekeeping") is incompatible with freedom of expression. The opinions of the hoi polloi must be suppressed, their thoughts controlled. It's for their own good of course. Just ask Susan or CNN or ABC or the BBC or the New York Times or any of the other elite gatekeeping scumbags.

Try hard to get your monkey brain to understand this—

This is what 21st century fascism looks like. At this point you are being lied to constantly. Watch what powerful members of the elite like Susan Wojcicki do. Disregard what they say.

The powerful few are completely out of touch with anything you low-rent common people might call day-to-day reality. The elites live inside a delusional bubble in which their own self-interest is indistinguishable from the Good, the Just and the Righteous. They are accountable to no one and incapable of meaningful self-reflection.

There is a independent free speech alternative called BitChute, and I suggest you start using it because there is a good chance that anyone worth watching on YouTube will disappear sometime before the 2020 election. Another newer alternative is lbry.com (short for Library, and discussed at the end of the video below).

If this video disappears from YouTube, and obviously that is a strong possibility, you can also find it here. The guy who published this video, which suits my own purposes, is a flat-earther! Seriously, he thinks the Earth is flat. So he's bat-shit crazy, as most humans are in one way or another. Evolution doesn't care much about reality. It only cares about getting your gene spellings into the next generation.

On the other hand, preserving freedom of speech means this wacko is allowed to express his views, however delusional they are. Period. This clear distinction between what a person is saying and their right to say it eludes most people. A speaker can get up on that soapbox and say almost anything he wants to. You the listener are also free to laugh at him or get disgusted and walk away.