How I wish for a tinfoil hat
One like most have, so to not appear
a belfry bat.
To Linda, Tom, Mary and George
Who if they read them would find my words
just a scourge.

Last night I had food delivered, two submarine sandwiches and an order of fries. Even though I had healthy salmon (just discount the fishy antibiotics and microplastics) and zucchini and onions on hand (cyclosporiasis anyone?), a quick one pan meal, I felt too exhausted to make the effort. These are exhausting times for the collapse aware. The tab with delivery and tip came to $43 and change.

The delivery guy appeared to be about half my age, early 30s and he mentioned how hot it is. Yesterday hit the high 80s which IS hot for Buffalo, NY, but nothing like the killer heat in the western and southern states or the heat dome in Europe setting Spain, Portugal, Greece and France on fire and killing at least 10,000 so far. Me being me, I took the opportunity to test his knowledge. I enjoy gauging ignorance.

“Yeah, it’s hot, but look at what’s happening in Europe,” I replied.

Blank expression. “What’s happening in Europe?”

“There having record temperatures well over 100°. In Germany, 5,000 people have died so far.”

“My mom went to France. They didn’t even have air conditioning.”

“They didn’t need air conditioning until climate change you little twerp.”

Okay, I didn’t say that last part. And I actually don’t want to be condescending or disrespectful. This young guy is working in an economy that requires two or more jobs to stay alive. Whatever time he has for news is what our long marginal MSM dishes, getting worse by the minute as Trump makes reporting the truth potentially criminal and attempts to double down on billionaire media control. Trump’s NSMP-7 makes anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-American, anti-establishment, pro-trans views subject to prosecution as DOMESTIC TERRORISM while ICE roams the streets, licensed to kill. This was formerly known as free speech. The “Prairieview Nine” protesting ICE made some tactical errors in my view adding vulnerability to their prosecution. However, labeling them “Antifa” which is not an organization, just shorthand for antifascist, and handing out sentences up to 100 years disturbingly demonstrates where our country is now.

The odds are my delivery guy was a liberal Democrat, that’s the majority of the blue collar, working-class city of Buffalo and its suburbs. Problem? The Democratic Party have been selling us down the river ever since the Clinton years, breeding conditions for MAGA to rise. Meanwhile, no serious discussion let alone vision or coordinated action on climate change has ever taken place, a far more existential threat than even the considerable terror of fascism.

2015 Paris Accords dead, dead, dead

In 2015, CO₂ emissions stood at 402 ppm. Today, they stand at 431 ppm.

The 195 country voluntary participation 2015 Paris Accord seeking to limit warming to 1.5°C is dead, bank on it, buy air conditioning stocks says Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase, and the U.S. — the second-largest polluter after China — has withdrawn from the agreement for a second time. Psychopath and Chief Trump withdrew in his first term, Biden rejoined, then Trump withdrew again.

Climate scientist James Hansen who warned our erudite congress of climate change in 1988 for bleeps sake is predicting 1.7°C of industrial-driven temperature rise in 2027. It appears he will easily be correct with an El Niño on the way increasingly looking to be a monster record setter since such records were kept. The oceans have absorbed 90 percent of our excess heat, time for a record burp.

Ocean heat compared to average

It’s all worth it though, bought me a USB Pet Rock.

According to this article from Earth.org, already pushing two years old, emission cuts of 42 percent by 2030 and 57 percent by 2035 are necessary to get back to the 1.5°C suggested in Paris. Yeah, right. That’s gonna happen. The article also suggests 3.1°C of temperature rise by 2100.

That opinion is in line with the vast majority of climate scientists who predict a temperature rise of at least 2.5°C by end of century with almost half predicting 3.0°C. This could be optimistic, though. A study from ScienceDirect suggests 3.0°C could be breached BY 2050.

From the article (my bold):

Nevertheless, all these long-term energy and emission savings across world regions have been ultimately insufficient to counter the climate footprint of ever-richer and ever-larger populations. The ‘rebound effect’ seems to have prevailed everywhere over the last two centuries: efficiency gains have been absorbed and outpaced by the growing scale of the economy. If the best performances from the past were replicated in terms of reducing carbon intensity, we would only maintain current emission levels, and thus temperatures would exceed the 3° threshold by 2050. Even if future efficiency gains manage to outshine all historical precedent, further ‘rebound effects’ will remain a risk and require novel agreements and policies (Grubler et al., 2018b).

Record El Niño on the way

Fortunately, that record El Niño is arriving as I write. This will help cast all doubt aside about where we’re heading and row our boats over rising oceans in the same direction, right? I feel a giant leap of human wisdom coming on. Or maybe one of my subs is coming back on me.

On our burgeoning El Niño from Zeke Hausfather and The Climate Brink:

With the July runs now in from 667 ensemble members across 14 different seasonal forecast models, it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin.

My bolds again.

Zeke is usually conservative in his assessments. I’m more of a James Hansen guy, with his more urgent views (Hansen’s assessment is here) so Zeke’s words speak loudly to my old ringing ears.

With wildfires raging in U.S. Western states and Europe, and drought devastating agriculture worldwide, it’s not irony that as I wind this article down the skies are hazy with Canadian wildfire smoke again — in fact it’s at street level here, hazing the view of my neighbor’s house across the street and filling my nose. It’s just as it was three years ago when I wrote There’s Something in the Air, but crazier for the time lost.

We’ve made progress since then. All in the wrong direction, and the clock is running out. I’ve got tinfoil though, gonna make me a hat.

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The foundation for the United States was laid in revolt against a king and an empire that saw this land as a resource to be exploited, nothing more. The first colony, Jamestown was established May 14, 1607. This was a corporate venture with the London Company granted territory from Cape Fear to Long Island Sound in the interest of its shareholders, who sought to increase their wealth. By exploiting the seemingly endless natural resources of the New World, colonizing North America to enrich the British Empire was the plan.

Jamestown settlers arrived in three boats, Susan Constant, Discovery, and Godspeed. They carried just 214 people. Note: there seems to be confusion about the exact number. Here, it’s indicated there were 144 arrivals with just 104 remaining when Captain Christopher Newport returned to England. Britannica indicates only 105 embarked on the voyage at all which is almost certainly wrong.

I call these ships “boats” because of their size. The largest was Godspeed with a hull just 68-feet long. Discovery was the smallest, a “fly-boat,” and measured just 38-feet. The voyage took four months.

Having seen the Mayflower replica in Plymouth Massachusetts at 110-feet long, I can’t describe the sensation of the chilling vulnerability of these vessels adequately. The motivation of colonists to take such risks must be discussed.

Becoming wealthy (or wealthier) was the primary motivation. Some were shareholders in the London Company. Many of the voyagers lists (here and here) were “gentlemen,” the lowest rank of landed gentry of England. Willingness to take such risks speaks to the depths of their desire to become rich and advance in social rank. There was also motivation to find sea passage through the New World to Asia and the Indies, and establish new colonies demonstrating English power.

Another motivation was to flee religious persecution. The Church of England dictated religion, and dissenters faced persecution. However, the Virginia Company’s charter required settlers to follow Church of England practices and spread Christianity to Indigenous people, ironically inflicting the persecution some were fleeing.

The company’s instructions stipulated that “the true word and service of God and Christian faith be preached, planted and used according to the doctrine, rights, and religion now professed and established within our realm of England.”

We know what happened to “heathens” if they resisted, but that’s not today’s subject.

An aside, if you’re curious to find out if you have any connections to the Jamestown colonists, the Jamestowne Society is the place to find out.

Why this matters in an Earth Bill of Rights

Since its independence, America has prided itself on the these words from the Declaration of Independence, full text here:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Little doubt, these words were well-intended, but they fall short in these times. As we watch our physical security deteriorate and fatalities rise world over with climate change-driven heat, fire and ocean rise, where are the words about responsibility? Who defines happiness? Can there be happiness without meaning? And what is meaningful? What can we agree on universally, not just as a nation among many?

I wish to argue the universal value that has the best chance of uniting us is the health of our planet. In that pursuit, we are in desperate need of an Earth First Constitution.

This would be a completely non-political pledge, blind to race, religion or creed that recognizes there is power far beyond our petty machinations.

An Earth First Constitution would recognize that her health and our well-being, our very survival is inextricably interlinked, and that we, the most powerful species on this blue and green miracle planet have responsibilities. Life is NOT just about liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Happiness is the result of living with purpose and purpose involves satisfying work and responsibility. We can’t experience satisfaction or joy without also sacrificing.

It’s yin and yang.

Born to be wild

There is a malaise enveloping every nation now as the end game of capitalism plays out, a doubling down on a system birthed by greed, now dying from both resource depletion and the toxic effects of extraction and endless burning.

Humans have only been on this planet for 300,000 years, originating in Africa, while the Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Evidence of her age has been established beyond a doubt by study of fossils and techniques such as radioactive dating. So Creationists, STFU. “Civilization” if we can call it that as we continue to inflict terrible violence on each other sprang up just 12,000 years ago, defined by settled agriculture. Dinosaurs by comparison ruled for 180 million years, far surpassing our short tenure. They didn’t mess with the environment, rather dying out (for the most part, if you see a bird, you’re seeing a dinosaur) from environmental collapse beyond their control, an asteroid strike that destroyed the climate conditions which they depended on.

We Homo sapiens, the supposed pinnacle of evolution are functioning as our own meteor. Just. Fucking. Brilliant.

Civilization is overrated, just a word that has misled us to believe we are above all other creatures and the limits of the Earth. We are not. This is why we need an Earth First Constitution.

The truth is we’re just another wild animal on the planet, and the further away we remove ourselves from her, the sicker we become both physically and mentally. Almost every day, there is another mass murder by someone made unreachable by predatory, manipulative corporate culture. This culture determines our day and lives to the minute as we are trapped and reduced to commodities toiling as monitored cattle in our own self-destruction.

We have felt this misery increasing over the last 50 years as neoliberal economics put capitalism on steroids. Capitalism was always destructive and unsustainable on our tiny planet, the neoliberal version merely hastened its outcome. With the relentless corporatization of life, we lost of self-determination so essential to meaning. Every invention of technology has taken us further from living as we truly are, as wild creatures intimate with the Earth.

When we discovered fire, it wasn’t a plot. It was, “Man, I sure am digging not freezing my nuts off again.”

It is a plot now, though. Vacuum the air to remove emissions with fossil fueled infrastructure? Yeah, right.

In our drive to make life safe, to protect ourselves from being eaten by wild beasts, we merely deferred the inevitable, the inescapable laws of physics. By harnessing fossil fuels we learned to create living conditions the richest king never imagined, and even delay death. These achievements came from harnessing energy — millions of years of sunlight stored as organic matter — which we have released with impunity. This massive energy release has overwhelmed the slow, wise workings of a planet whose processes are imperceptible in the whisper our of short lifespans.

We invented an illusion of safety when life is inherently dangerous, and we created a culture which makes meaning barren. It’s A Whole Earth Ponzi Scheme. Watch as the insurance market implodes in the face of climate change.

An Earth Bill of Rights

We need an Earth Bill of rights and I want your input. This is just a start.

In recognition that you, Mother Earth are a complex and sensitive living entity of the greatest possible beauty and irreplaceable life-sustaining nourishment provided to all creatures great and small, the source of oxygen from humble clover to towering sequoias on land, and tiny phytoplankton and vast coral reefs in the seas we and our related brethren depend on, humans belatedly recognize your power is far greater than ours and always will be.

We now understand all life which only you can provide is part of your intricately interwoven and wondrous body of which we are just a part, essential to your health and therefore our well-being. We recognize our behavior has been destructive and resolve to become nurturing to you, as you have been to us, lest we perish.

We have inexcusably failed to grant human rights to our own kind. We have failed to grant human rights to animals, land and oceans on which we depend. We have failed to grant human rights to you, dear mother. There are no human rights — we will eliminate the term — only universal rights to life will save us. All life is connected. All life is interdependent. If we lose a species, even one we fear, we increase our ultimate jeopardy by ignoring the balance you provide. We now see we are just another species here by your benevolence, completely dependent on you. The new term we will agree to, Universal Life Rights wisely won’t be extinguished.

We recognize that for something to live something must die. We will now treat that law with fundamental respect, minimize the suffering and recognize when it’s time to make room for the new.

We pledge to work tirelessly on your behalf, and now recognize that’s our purpose. We have come to understand nourishing you nourishes us. There is no other sustainable or desirable path. We must be kind to all that lives, listen to the trees, and grant you special Mother Earth Rights. Without your rights upheld there is no future and no pursuit of happiness in your gracious embrace. Even what we perceived as lifeless is alive and needs love. The rocks speak to us through the iron in our bodies.

Happiness can be achieved, but only by recognition life is not played, but earned. Life lived with recognition of mortality makes it more meaningful and vivid. Safety from the unalterable laws of the universe have been merely delayed by destroying your body. Your way of life and death, governed by unalterable physics which you obey with ancient knowledge is the truth.

We will now give way and live by your wisdom.

The corporate culture of Jamestown was brutal, destined to be genocidal, but nothing compared to what we face today. It’s fight or die time. Fuck Trump. Fuck Musk. Fuck Thiel. I’d rather die than accept their world. What are you going to do?

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Hello, dear readers. This is a short read ahead of the holiday weekend which will find me with family, all of whom are oblivious to or in denial of climate change. I will be forced to put on a false face, smile and be patient with conversation that denies what the future holds, because ultimately the planet decides, not Donald Trump and his fascist brigade. If you live in the Western United States, please take care. Wildfires are roaring, and the landscape is tinder. Wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday.

The Cottonwood Fire in Utah started Monday, June 22. In just a little over a week it has spread to nearly 94,000 acres and as of the 29th was only four percent contained. 94,000 acres is the size of Denver.

This is not the only fire to ravage Utah in 2026. There has been the Iron Fire, 41,842 acres, the Babylon Fire, over 70,375 acres, the Cherry Fire in 34,252 acres and the Grapevine and Hastings fires, both exceeding 26,000 acres.

The Hastings Fire is 100 percent contained, but the Babylon Fire is zero percent contained. Percentages vary. In total, Utah has suffered 40 fires this year as mountain snowpack disappears, and fire seasons start ever earlier and last longer. In total, 324,426 acres have burned.

But Utah isn’t even the star of the show. Western states including Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma are burning “bigly” this year. Kansas has lost 193,331 acres, and Oklahoma 207,661 acres. Although Colorado is coming on strong at 837,411 acres, Nebraska is in the lead with 927,159 acres up in smoke. Utah at 324,426 acres clearly needs to try harder. What will the trifecta be? Place your bets on Polymarket or Kalshi. Capitalism is death. Perhaps betting on death is its greatest expression.

Colorado also lost three firefighters trapped by overburn. They were Emily Barker 38, Nick Hutcherson 27, and Sydney Watson, 27.

As far as I’m concerned, every Big Oil executive knowing with remarkable precision from their own scientific studies dating to 1977 (Exxon particularly) should be tried for manslaughter. Every man, woman and child burned, drowned or starved as a result of climate change is evidence. Hell, there’s proof they knew what they were doing by the 1950s.

California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Wyoming are burning as well of course. It’s hardly worth mentioning, the five of them add up to just 570,803 acres. Whatever. All the states mentioned total just 2,644,867 acres, a trifle compared to 2020.

That’s about 28 Denver sized cities.

2020 featured record-breaking megafires, 10.2 million acres burned, required tens of thousands of firefighters, and caused nearly $20 billion in damages. 37 people died. Poor forest management was a contributor, but increasing drought and longer fire seasons are undeniable now. They make lightning strikes more deadly.

Burning fossil fuels equals dwindling mountain snowpack, the worst megadrought in 1200 years, the last 22 the driest ever, and an atmosphere laden with seven percent more moisture for every 1°C (1.8°F). This figure varies by the complexities of the planet by region, but is causing ever more catastrophic hurricanes, typhoons and flooding as weather patterns shift.

With drought covering 62 percent of the country, AccuWeather is predicting 5.5 to 8 million acres to burn in 2026. We’ve averaged 7 million acres since 2000.

Rapidly increasing burning of Western U.S. forests

With a “super” El Niño on the way, this article is from James Hansen who first warned Congress of our peril from climate change in 1988.

AccuWeather opines:

NOAA CPC issued an El Niño Advisory on June 11 — it's officially here. CPC gives a 63% chance of a very strong event by winter, potentially the largest since 1950. ECMWF projects SST anomalies of +3°C by December.

Here are some photos of the fire in the Pueblo Colorado area. If you’re in the west or any state suffering from drought, and you see someone with fireworks, hit them in the head with a fire extinguisher. Tell them Geoff said you could.

Aspen Colorado fires near Pueblo

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As President in 1949, plain speaking Harry Truman famously said, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” He wasn’t referring to global warming. However, were he President today, he would have little choice but to acknowledge the Earth is on fire and there is nowhere to get out to, unless he took the line of the ecocidal Trump administration, claimed climate change is a hoax and did everything possible to undermine science, destroy environmental regulation and open our precious and irreplaceable national parks to irreversible, devastating exploitation.

Symbolic proof of this administration’s environmental ignorance and soulless disregard for life of any kind is perfectly illustrated by the foul smelling algae infestation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, killing ducks.

Truman was far from perfect (his bio is fascinating, BTW), but he evolved as many of us do if we’re fortunate and led America out of WWII after FDR’s death. I believe he would have tried to be on the right side of climate change and environmental policy. Whether he would have been misled by so-called green “renewable” energy advocates that led pre-Trump policy is a question which will never be answered.

Criticizing renewable energy brings controversy, but I hope newer readers (welcome and thank you) will hear me out. The conditioning to believe solar and wind are going to save us has been pervasive for many years and created jobs. However, there are fundamental problems beyond the anti-renewable Trump regime that consigns this energy deceptively labeled green to a generation or two, no more. The core issue is shrinking natural resources.

Fundamental to that problem is economic return on investment (EROI), sometimes referred to as economic return on energy investment (ERoEI). As resources shrink, costs rise.

Every last product or service we take for granted is dependent on fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are rapidly approaching the end of EROI. This can be seen in oil majors turning to ever more expensive extraction projects ranging from fracking in the Permian Basin to deep water offshore drilling. If higher profit margin oil was available, that’s where the projects would be. Don’t take my word for it. Professional investment analysts Goehring & Rozencwajg, purely concerned with investor profit NOT the health of the planet see this as well, articles here and here.

From the second article:

Admittedly, the incoming administration features several well-informed and capable figures in the energy sphere, including Chris Wright and Scott Bessent. Their leadership will undoubtedly foster a favorable climate for drilling activity. Yet, even with their expertise and the administration’s likely zeal for energy development, we remain convinced that these efforts will struggle to offset the entrenched declines now gripping the shale sector. The geology of the shale patch has spoken, and its verdict seems increasingly final.

Art Berman is an oil geologist with over four decades of industry experience. Berman is also aware of diminishing returns on investment. He points out, America is not energy-independent. The light, sweet crude we produce and export is not the heavy crude necessary to make diesel fuel required to harvest the materials necessary for “renewables.”

This also explains our incursion in Venezuela, my analysis, not his. Strategically, from a narrow, traditional, destructive sort of thinking, we need the heavy crude.

As Berman writes in America Has Plenty of Oil—Just Not the Right Kind, currently the US imports heavier crude mainly from Canada out of structural necessity.

In Telling the Truth About Our Future, he points out renewables are a diffuse form of energy and produce power only about one-third of the time. This is the Achilles heel of renewables, necessitating battery storage.

This storage, vast systems of battery backup can only be achieved by mining which is dependent on diesel fuel. Without diesel, growth or even maintenance of the capitalist Western world collapses.

The problems go deeper though.

Renewables resources are just as finite as the oil required to harvest them. It’s not just lithium (which may be falling out of favor as vying battery technologies compete). Shortages of formerly prosaic materials such as copper, steel and aluminum pose serious problems, too. Even sand for concrete is a challenged resource with glass and concrete essential for solar and wind power. Slabs to anchor wind turbines can weigh over a thousand tons, never mind the CO₂ generated. Like oil, the easiest to access deposits of all these materials have been extracted.

The linchpin is diesel for mining and transport. Without heavy diesel-powered equipment ranging from bulldozers, excavators and hauling trucks to semis dragging wind turbine components up mountain tops blasted flat, “green” energy and backup battery grids can’t happen. With the lifespan of solar and wind installations being about 25 years before needing replacement one or two generations of this technology can be built at most as viable oil deposits dwindle.

Additionally, Jevons Paradox holds true. As misnomered “clean” energy has been added, it’s not been used to ramp down fossil fuel burning, but to add to the energy mix. TotalEnergies has used offshore wind turbines and bogus carbon offsets to claim it makes their oil greener. Shell, BP and ten other oil companies, too.

BTW, wind turbines are entirely dependent on oil.

Forbes calculations show that just laying the foundation for a single offshore turbine can require 18,857 barrels of marine petroleum during construction. Wind turbines require oil for proper operation, with an average turbine consuming up to 2000 gallons of oil annually. This oil consumption is divided between gearboxes and transformers, with each turbine using 800 gallons of gear oil and 1200 gallons of transformer oil yearly. Each turbine can contain up to 80 gallons of oil for lubrication, which is not vegetable oil but a PAO synthetic oil based on crude.

The air don’t care. CO₂ is CO₂. The oil required for renewables is not calculated in the rosy analysis of “clean” energy.

Meanwhile, the world bathes in heat as a super El Niño bears down, promising significantly worse temperatures next year. Wet-bulb temperatures are taking lives and destroying economies NOW. What oil companies own scientists predicted in the 1970s can now be counted in bodies.

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The heatwave cooking the world

India

India appears to be the canary in the coal mine. This is not hyperbole as according to data from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy, India burns more coal than the continents of Europe and North America combined. Worse, India's coal consumption could double or more by mid-century. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a climate change denier and this scientific study indicates a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally and a five-day heatwave nearly 30,000. This is shocking, real and indicative of the heat that will creep outward from the equator taking ever more lives.

On a single day late this April, the 50 hottest cities in the world were in India. Akola, a city of 600,000 recorded the country’s highest temperature as of April 26 at 46.9°C or 116.4°F. The United Nations is concerned that the heatwaves are pushing food supply “to the brink.” Concerned? This is a certainty.

India coal consumption 2024

Europe

France

France is in the grip of its second record heatwave. The first one took place during the French Open, when some of the fittest athletes in the world struggled with and nearly passed out from heat.

Obviously, the circus must go on because the bread may not as drought-stricken wheat harvests collapse.

France is enduring a second heatwave that has exceeded 42°C (116°F) in places, and high humidity is increasing the danger.

In Paris, where there is virtually no air conditioning, but thankfully a proliferation of tin-roofed, oven-like multistory apartment buildings, the government is allowing swimming in the Seine River. Over 40 people have drowned. Posthumous interviews reveal joy that their deaths didn’t take place in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool.

Overall, 35 million people are under a red heatwave alert. 40 million more under an orange alert, and 2000 schools are shut down.

Britain

Keeping a stiff upper lip has never been more relevant as the UK withers in record heat. Although it appears only a disappointing 15 have died so far, just annoying teenagers, there is potential for so much more. In 2022, nearly 3,000 excess heat deaths were recorded during five CO₂ charged episodes. That was an exciting 253 deaths per day. Although 37.3°C (99.1°F) was achieved on June 26, India remains unimpressed.

Spain

Spain has outdone the Merry Old England by a wide margin, recording 43.7°C (110.6° F) on June 24 in Cantabria. Spain is also far ahead in heat deaths with 327 as of June 26. As an American and offspring of the British Empire, I find this to be a moral outrage. Sure, Christopher Columbus brought genocide to South America and the Spanish Inquisition was pretty cute, but until America nobody did empire better than the British. I take umbrage.

Germany

On Friday, a new German record of 41.3°C was hit near the city of Saarbruecken on the French border, according to Germany's National Meteorological Service. In taking radical, effective action, bureaucrats urged citizen’s to save water. It’s this kind of visionary leadership that will clearly save us all. Honorable mentions to, Denmark, Poland and Switzerland.

No mention. Africa.

Information on Africa is always harder to find. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Morocco nearly touches Spain, and Algeria is just miles from beloved Southern Italy. The silence is no wonder — the entire country is filled with dark-skinned people after all — and her colonial rape has fueled the Western world. We don’t want to talk about that. Thanks to the gods South African emerald mine heir Elon Musk escaped. Sure, Morocco is ancient and Casablanca was the setting for the famous Humphrey Bogart-Ingrid Berman movie, but I much prefer The Jerk in which Steve Martin demonstrates his ignorance of what’s valuable in dialogue with a waiter about wine:

Waiter: Would monsieur care for another bottle of the Château Latour?
Martin: Ah, yes, but no more 1966. Let’s splurge. Bring us some fresh wine. The freshest you’ve got. This year’s. No more of this old stuff.

This comedic exchange brilliantly sums up rejection of wisdom and a refusal to learn important lessons.

Morocco, Algeria and all of Africa is experiencing life ending heat and agricultural devastation. We are all connected in a world of 8.3 billion people built on the one-time dopamine hit of fossil fuels.

The deaths that Truman ordered in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are destined to look like a party compared to the heat of fossil fuels.

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In 1968, Credence Clearwater Revival recorded their first album of the same name. Susie Q is probably the best known hit from the recording, but I Put a Spell on You is the song that weighs on my mind today, belted out by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in pure, swampy, raw grit.

I put a spell on you
Because you’re mine
You better stop the thing that you doin’
I said “Watch out!”, I ain’t lyin’
Yeah

I ain’t gonna take none of your
Foolin’ around
I ain’t gonna take none of your
Puttin’ me down
I put a spell on you
Because you’re mine
Oh, alright!

That year I was a little boy, unaware of Vietnam War. I was unaware of the rising counter culture movement embodied in much of the music at the time, or hippie communes. I have a vague memory of Walter Cronkite on black and white television anchoring the news in austere fashion, far removed from the hyper, loud, glitzy “news” we endure today serving as a vehicle for advertising pharmaceuticals as our bodies and minds are assaulted by the air, water and food we have little say over that sickens us with ever profitable depression and autoimmune disease. This is predatory capitalism at work.

In those days news was considered sacrosanct by ownership and not expected to turn profits. How far we have strayed from news based in fact and journalism that protects and supports the democracy we never achieved. There were no screaming heads and liars elevated to society destroying prominence.

With just a little imagination, the lyrics of I Put a Spell on You easily describe the ever present surveillance state we live in, now blinding in the speed of its progression.

Following the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, the US Congress passed a resolution that gave President Lyndon B. Johnson the authority to increase military presence without declaring war. Sound familiar as the Iran War supposedly winds down with an agreement costing 3000 Iranian lives and $300 billion in reparations? America is forever at war directly or by proxy.

The evil deeds of our government are endless and well-documented. Infecting black servicemen in the Tuskegee Experiment from 1932 to 1972 with syphilis was acceptable, as was dosing unsuspecting citizens with LSD in the CIA’s MK-Ultra program to see if the drug was an effective agent of mind control.

From a detailed article on History.com:

MK-Ultra’s “mind control” experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals. These experiments relied on a range of test subjects: some who freely volunteered, some who volunteered under coercion, and some who had absolutely no idea they were involved in a sweeping defense research program. From mentally-impaired boys at a state school, to American soldiers, to “sexual psychopaths” at a state hospital, MK-Ultra’s programs often preyed on the most vulnerable members of society. The CIA considered prisoners especially good subjects, as they were willing to give consent in exchange for extra recreation time or commuted sentences.

Today, the government is the most frightening I have seen in my lifetime and the threats have increased in the form of outsourcing, specifically to billionaires equally psychopathic when compared to the perpetrators of Tuskegee and MK-Ultra.

What is the purpose of AI and hyperscale data centers?

While we justifiably worry about the water and energy use of hyperscale date centers needed to power AI, there is much more cause for concern. As these data centers are built, we need to seriously question what is the purpose of AI, and what is the likely outcome?

We know AI is already eliminating jobs, a feature that will only worsen. Combined with rapidly advancing robotics, this elimination affects both physical and intellectual labor. Out of work humans cannot buy goods and services, so the argument that AI will increase efficiency and therefore economic output is nonsensical.

Of course, the entire model of an economy based on endless consumption on a finite planet is nonsensical.

The advance of humanoid robots is happening with stunning speed now.

This article lists seven of these machines already entering the workforce.

The article does not list the T800 named without irony after the infamous Arnold Schwarzenegger robot in the Terminator movies by Chinese robotics firm EngineAI. The T800 is advanced enough to perform martial arts if these videos can be believed, video 1, video 2. EngineAI claims to churn out one humanoid robot every 15 minutes and also features a smaller model called PM01.

The videos are so shocking that doubt had to be countered. Robocop, step aside:

The Shenzhen-based company released new footage showing founder and CEO Zhao Tongyang being safely knocked to the ground by a forceful kick from the T800. Shot from multiple angles in a plain studio, the clip highlights the robot’s stability and precise,
high-speed movements, offering clear evidence that the stunts are physically real.

Looks like the Tesla Optimus robot has some catching up to do. But really, offering BS IPOs to pocket cash is the point, right? Elon will go to Mars (quickly please), while you and I are kick boxed to death for writing and reading this article.

So, deluded and inhuman as the tech bros are, (Facebook and social media provokes suicides in young people for instance), the question becomes what’s the plan here? These hyperscale data centers egregious use of water in an increasingly drought stricken world and power grid demands not up to the task make no sense.

Unless.

Unless there’s a far more nefarious plan.

Could the tech bros solution to run “temporary” methane spewing turbines that evade EPA regulations be nefarious? Global warming is hardly a secret. Let’s just speed that along. Musk’s Colossus hyperscale data center in Memphis currently runs 57 of these roaring beasts 24/7 with plans to bump that to nearly 100. It’s worth it though, right, for Grok generated child porn and refuge of 150 pro-Nazi accounts on X?

Little surprise. This is happening under the policies of known racist Donald Trump and tiny-brained, boot-licker EPA head Lee Zeldin who destroyed the endangerment finding essential to regulating GHG emissions.

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The case for circumstantial evidence

Sometimes we need to act on circumstantial evidence, even if that may or may not hold up in a court of law, particularly courts diseased by far-right zealots for decades. We know what the Supreme Court is now. Every action of this administration has been about billions of dollars in graft, including the “Big Beautiful Bill,” racism and building an AI police state.

When we look at the latest transfer of wealth to the top and the gutting of everything from environmental law to forced closure of community hospitals by private equity goons, we experience the policies of death, now or later. Recently, in Pennsylvania a woman showed up at a hospital with a barely breathing baby to find it shut down. People in India are dying wet-bulb temperature deaths as I write.

Circumstantial evidence suggests radical population reduction of the masses is the plan and every action of this foul government supports this thesis.

People ask will AI achieve consciousness, and how will we know?

I say it doesn’t matter.

Whether these machines become self-aware or not, AI self-codes beyond our ability to comprehend. The tech bros literally have no clue as to the outcome of what they’re unleashing. Ex-Google insider Tristan Harris and high-tech savant warns of this. You may remember Tristan from his warnings about social media from the 2020 film The Social Dilemma.

From Tristan’s warning:

There are quotes from people inside of OpenAI who believe that they’re not just building this narrow technology that’s a helpful blinking cursor. They want to build Artificial General Intelligence. And so what that means is being able to do everything a human mind can do. And the joke inside the company is we’re going to cover the world in data centers and solar panels. Like they want to cover the world essentially in these big boxes that have huge clusters of Nvidia chips that then compute away and ultimately create something like a super-intelligent god entity that they believe they will use to own the world economy, make trillions of dollars, and from kind of an ego-religious intuition, they will have built the god that supersedes humanity.

The stunning physical manifestations of AI — robots add a new dimension of peril. Their programming teaches these machines to self-improve and strive for greatest efficiency. These factors point to a machine dominated world using calculus without conscience, making decisions on the logic of what is efficient, not what is best, not what is kind.

Humans are wildly inefficient. If we were truly wise we would understand inefficiency is where the beauty of life lives. Time when we’re not engaged in tasks. Time spent holding a baby or listening to the wisdom of an elderly loved one. Time spent marveling over the stunning patterns and radiance of a butterfly that travels thousands of miles to ensure the next generation. We will never create anything remotely as remarkable in silicone, titanium and plastic. It’s a soulless joke, the dreams of forever adolescence created by obscene wealth.

What do you think AI “intelligence” is going to conclude about human inefficiency? Are you under the spell? Are you going to let them put you down?

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We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
— Chief Seattle

According to the USDA, the Kansas winter wheat crop stands at 26 percent good to excellent, 30 percent fair and 44 percent poor to very poor. Kansas suffered 116,000 acres burned this spring. Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma harvests have been similarly affected. A million acres burned in Nebraska and over 300,000 in Oklahoma. Increasingly, climate change is coming for our crops.

Democracy in America was always a charade, a carrot dangling on a stick, a promise never to be fulfilled. This country is the result of an invasion by King George III for the purpose of exploiting her vast natural resources for British Empire, premised on foul ground from the beginning. The uprising that ensued, the Revolutionary War, was not a romantic quest for the equality of all men, but as we know a tax revolt, a reaction to the Stamp Act and Townshend Acts. The thirteen colonies were capitalist to the core. Hellbent on riches and the products of empire, the colonists proceeded to build a nation on theft, genocide and slavery.

The fact that the Declaration of Independence stated that “all men are created equal” is telling and predictive to this day. Women’s right to vote was a nearly 100 year effort not realized until the 19^th Amendment of 1919. While women were able to vote to varying, uneven degrees before, universal suffrage was not gained until 1920.

Among Project 2025’s vile goals is to remove that right and reduce women once again to chattel. However, this article is not about that. It’s about all of us being reduced to serfdom.

We are living in a world the Industrial Revolution stripped bare. Not only are the easiest to harvest resources gone, but the harvesting has resulted in the Sixth Extinction. Although the speed is debated, it has never been remotely seen in the previous five. Toxicity permeates not just our air, water and soil, but our bodies as well. This is the result of unfettered capitalism which extracts without replenishing and demands without nourishing.

Oligarchs ranging from the Koch brothers (one deceased, excuse me while I weep) to Neo-Nazi Elon Musk emit more carbon emissions in 90 minutes than you, or I will in a lifetime. That’s just from their yachts and jets, not their mansions and investments, the latest being AI data centers jammed down our throats with global warming and environmental damage that unabated may well dwarf what they have done in the past.

Billionaire Peter Thiel (who recently relocated to popular Nazi destination Argentina) has perfected AI technology used to assist in drone assassinations of Palestinian civilians (Musk’s Starlink has been complicit, too) and been awarded billions of dollars in government military contracts. His AI was used in targeting the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Iran killing 170, mostly school girls.

His clever software is also being used to eliminate firewalls between government agencies that protect us. Dare I apply for Social Security? This article and others I have published could become twisted as evidence that I am an enemy of the state. Case in point the conviction of Prairieland Detention Center protestors in Texas for wearing black while protesting this ICE facility. They were also accused of being Antifa. Antifa is not an organization, it’s shorthand for anti-fascist. Here’s how the Whitehouse views it. Speaking truth to power becomes more dangerous by the day.

Although I may not be an enemy of the state, I am the enemy of fascism, racism and continuing to do business as usual that destroys an inhabitable planet. I am aware this work is increasingly dangerous. I’m old now, arthritic and in danger of seizures from the lingering effects of a 2019 brain tumor, physically powerless, but as a famed Emperor and general said:

“Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.”
― Napoleon Bonaparte

Guns are power. So are words. We must act with courage together.

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The drive to a totalitarian state is well along. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, around 50 percent of the manifesto’s goals have already been accomplished. From USAID to SNAP benefits for the working poor international and national safety nets are being removed, already resulting in thousands of lives lost. The Ebola outbreak in Africa including Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo is an example of the results of USAID being eliminated (many thanks to Musk and his DOGE assault as Jessica Wildfire details here), which was less than one percent of the federal budget.

And the beat goes on. Literally in beatings.

Delaney Hall in Newark, NJ has certainly been in the news lately. This is a 1,000 bed privatized prison where The GEO group has a contract with ICE worth $1.2 billion to incarcerate brown people — for the crime of being brown. Those incarcerated include teens and elderly who are subjected to tasers, beatings, foul, chemical plant laden air and expired food. Toilets don’t work and the guards delight in alternately using the HVAC system to bake and freeze their victims. Medical attention and medications are routinely denied. One woman suffered a miscarriage, but received no medical care. 88 percent incarcerated there have no criminal convictions and over 70 percent having no criminal history whatsoever.

Chris Hedges describes the sadism quite effectively.

Sadists are running the country.

Meanwhile, collapse of the southwestern basin states grows imminent. This is no longer an abstraction 20 years down the road. Lake Powell and Lake Mead are rapidly approaching dead pool levels, guaranteeing the loss of electricity and water 40 million people depend on. I covered this in Leaving Las Vegas. Electricity loss in desert environments such as Phoenix, AZ guarantee a horrifying explosion of wet-bulb temperature deaths.

Fortunately, Maricopa County has solved this problem with a dashboard for tracking heat deaths. That’s all we need — a dashboard — problem solved. How I am buoyed by visionary leadership! This will also be useful in betting on this year’s victims with Polymarket and Kalshi, how considerate. Since the oligarchs wish to replace us with AI, best to EMBRACE the new economy, no? Investing in the smoking hot private prison industry is a good bet, it’s the HOTTEST as my hero likes to say, one of twenty words in his vocabulary, and betting on people suffering spontaneous combustion when they step outdoors or the grid melts down on Polymarket or Kalshi sounds fun!

BTW, I’m working on a Soylent Green startup and looking for private capital. Yeah, I know I stole the idea from the movie, but farms are going under left and right, a 46 percent jump in 2025. Opportunity calls, and I have the solution! Tastes like chicken! I’d also push a little more investment into Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and the like since we’re running out of bombs and losing jets to giant Iranian slingshots that cost $100 each. We’re going to need to rebuild our arsenal to subdue deeply frightening Cuba which is rumored to soon attack Florida with a flotilla of 1950s cars and owie, stingy rubber bands. Bastards.

In 1997, when Trump’s 16-year-old daughter Ivanka was hosting the 1997 Miss Teen USA pageant, ever amorous he asked Miss Universe who was not a dog, horseface, or piggy, “Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?”

Sorry, multiple levels of wrong there, but fortunately the Trumpster does remind me to recommend air-conditioning stocks! After all, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance agree limiting warming to 2.0° C is dead. Who would know better than Big Oil banks?

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In more awesome news!

Lake Powell has dropped 175 feet below full capacity. It now retains less than 25 percent of full volume. Lake Powell’s dead pool level is 3,370 feet. Today, it stands at 3,528 feet. Powell’s level has been dropping at a rate of nearly a foot per week in recent years, but you didn’t hear it here. That would be gloomy doomy.

Lake Powell water level

Lake Mead’s dead pool level is 895 feet. Full pool is 1229 feet. Today, the largest reservoir in the US stands at just 1,048 feet. A 20-foot drop is predicted for 2026, as reported by the US Department of Interior Bureau of Reclamation. At this rate, Mead has about five years left. However, my math may be overly optimistic and charming just like the rest of this article, ‘cuz University of Colorado scientists are predicting its complete collapse by 2028 in this study. It’s so weird that as snow pack on the Rockies disappear so does our water supply, isn’t it? Huh.

Lake Mead water level

It’s also rumored that Trump has shutdown the Ocean Observatories Initiative. Well, it’s true, actually. Thank the gods. This ridiculous program used 900 stupid scientific instruments to monitor something called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current (AMOC). Talk about a load of hooey! These climate scientists are saying this current could stop and send Europe into a deep freeze. Ridiculous. First it’s too hot, then it’s too cold. This is what I call Goldilocks Syndrome. And besides, the porridge is just right for disaster capitalism! Be happy!

At $368 million, this hoax was an obvious misuse of taxpayer funds better spent as seed money to fund the Trump Family Crime Syndicate™. This is about the same amount Elon Musk shits before breakfast. Speaking of seed, remember farmers, don’t replant that seed from your harvests! Monsanto owns that particular shit.

And remember, “sea” no problem, have no problem.

We shall be saved by artificial intelligence!

Now, to my awesome credit I have kept this article upbeat and sunshiny. I have even provided free of charge investment advice. Do be sure to thank me in the comments section. Unlike your pimply-faced junior broker, I have a lifetime of experience and a bit of shady brain damage to guide you!

Last investment recommendation, yup, AI. After all, it’s built on the cumulative intelligence of white, male, western culture — the culture that got us here today. Wee! What could possibly go wrong from artificial intelligence trained on slavery, genocide and the destruction of planetary boundaries? You know, might makes right.

I take the optimistic view as you can see. After all, AGI could make us live as gods forever in robot bodies or uploaded consciousnesses into a box the size of a funereal urn. We can bypass the misery of love, touch and human connection. Intelligence that doesn’t need flowers, birds or beauty. Intelligence that keeps us safe from violent Mexican taco vendors and brown ladies that pick the fruit that comes to our tables.

Soon we will have a compliant fleet of robot workers, solving the growing resource crisis and overshoot for only the worthy, the oligarchs whose wealth is undeniable proof of superiority. This is truly visionary. And the robot women. Whoo-hoo. You and I are just too dumb to get it.

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During the financial crisis of 2008, we heard the words, “Too big to fail,” as the greed-infested bankers who broke the economy were bailed out. Repeal of the Glass–Steagall Act in 1999 which separated investment banking from depository banking proved fatal. The law that came out of the hard-earned lessons of the Great Depression were tossed aside. In 1999, Bill Clinton deemed the law, “no longer appropriate,” and claimed repealing it had nothing to do with the 2008 financial crash. Also, he “did not have sexual relations with that woman,” and “never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.”

Character counts does it not, and now we are living through far worse than Clinton neoliberal economic policies. It’s been a steady, now accelerating slide since Reagan, and both parties landed us here with greed and ignorance in the climate crisis and overshoot with no preparation for the inevitable end of fossil fuels.

The economy boomed under Clinton and I had my most financially successful years as a self-employed graphic designer. Although I long had an awareness that our way of life was unsustainable, I was guilty of looking the other way as the good times rolled. Rolling for me meant anything on wheels from a beautiful Colnago racing bicycle to an outrageous Honda CBX, a six-cylinder, 101 horsepower motorcycle, briefly the fastest production bike you could buy and testament to wretched excess. I loved the damn thing. It got about 32 miles per gallon, a bit worse than many cars of the era.

My love of wheels and speed started young with a 1965 Mustang. A pedal car that is. At just four or five years old, I was already being indoctrinated into an unsustainable consumer culture featuring the peculiarly American worship of cars. Now your car doubles as a surveillance device. Yes, other cultures laud the automobile, but not like the USA where the open road represents a form of self-entitled freedom. However, lurking under my indoctrination was a suspicion over time that we were all being led down a trap. By my teens I could see this was true.

And a trap it is indeed, every purchase a clever form of enslavement brainwashed into us through relentless advertising that ultimately lives as pollutants in the tissues of our bodies.

My father was the best man I ever knew. Born in 1937, the second of five children he was a depression era baby in a poor family soon to endure WWII. His first job was at age 12, setting pins in a bowling alley. With the help of my mother he put himself through college and a graduate degree, an MBA in fine art. The man was hardly a “capitalist” with his passion for painting and teaching, but the realities of the system forced him to compromise. Eventually, he became the head of a fine arts department, a dean of arts and humanities, and finally president at two different arts schools. Along the way he took freelance graphic design and illustration work in addition to his academic responsibilities, and labored endlessly on numerous houses. The houses were forced on us, as my dad ethical to his core, fought battles with those who were not. As much as I loved and admired him, he taught me what I didn’t want.

Thus, our family moved every four years or so, where I became the new kid on the block often meeting sociopaths in training, boys practicing becoming the people my father got screwed by. I could either fight or hide and did some of both.

There are Bill Clintons and Donald Trumps at every level of society. They’re trained in childhood.

With my parents, I watched Nixon resign on TV, a lesson on how sociopaths and their minions rise to the top. Nixon was a saint compared to what we’re enduring now as Trump, his controllers and cowards that go along destroy social welfare, double down on corporate welfare, and destroy environmental law and science, even as the planet burns. People are dying from wet-bulb temperature deaths in India where Narendra Modi like Trump denies climate change. They’re dying in many countries now.

Yes, they’re dying in America, too, as Europe experiences record-setting heat again. Maricopa County, AZ has seen a tenfold rise in heat deaths in the last twenty years. It is estimated that one heat death occurs per minute now worldwide. Here is the full report from The Lancet. In the meantime, we have attacked yet another sovereign nation, in turn starving countries of fuel supplies and critical fertilizers, further imperiling already stressed agriculture. American farm bankruptcies rose 46 percent in 2025. No worries though, when this unprovoked attack ends with hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and loss to our military and personal well-being, Trump will claim he brought peace to the Middle East.

Of course the fuel supplies being blocked are the very resource that is killing us anyhow. How stupidly ironic.

How many lives have been lost to this malevolent idiot not halfway through his term? We starve Cuba of oil, attack Venezuelan fisherman under the spurious guise of a war on fentanyl, incarcerate and deport agricultural workers critical to our farms with the gestapo called ICE — increasingly failing from the corporate crimes of the Cargill’s and Monsanto’s of this world — and witness Ebola race through the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda. Little doubt the elimination of USAID, less than one percent of the federal budget plays a part in that. More research from The Lancet predicts an additional 14 million needless deaths from this alone.

I have written more than once what this administration would bring. Consider The Administration of Death.

Consider more deliberate death by policy if you haven’t had your fill. Sorry, this is truly not what I wish to write about, but here we are stumbling toward extinction.

Trump’s social media posts grow increasingly unhinged. As Freedom 250 approaches, the so-called “Great American State Fair” with stinky musical acts lined up to play, bailed. In reaction Trump posted that he was:

“thinking about bringing the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar, the man who loves our Country more than anyone else, and the man who some say is the Greatest President in History (THE GOAT!), DONALD J. TRUMP, to take the place of these highly paid, Third Rate “Artists,” and give a major speech, rallying the Country forward like I have done ever since being President!” He continued: “Two years ago, the United States was DEAD. Now we have the “HOTTEST” Country anywhere in the World. I don’t want so-called “Artists” that get paid far too much money, who aren’t happy. I only want to be surrounded by Happy People, Smart People, Successful People, and People that know how to WIN. So, by copy of this TRUTH, I am ordering my Representatives to look at the feasibility of doing an AMERICA IS BACK Rally on Wednesday, Washington, D.C., same time, same location. Only Great Patriots invited—It will be a Wild and Beautiful Celebration of America! President DONALD J. TRUMP”

The man is cerebral, this is undeniable.

How shockingly inadequate our protections of democracy have been, but more important is our complete denial of our relationship to the planet. Mother Earth ultimately decides all.

We endure the closure of community hospitals due to the foul mechanism of private equity and expect adults doing teenager jobs for teenager wages to miraculously afford healthcare. Medicaid dependents are about to be thrown off in the millions. And AI rises, guaranteeing further job loss and economic depression as the wheels come off an economy dependent on the fatal consumption of a finite world which pollutes our bodies with PFAS and microplastics that fall in the rain. These are deliberate policies of extermination.

Small community hospitals can fail, but certainly not private equity.

Fortunately, as we’re sickened, we have an endless variety of pharmaceutical choices as autoimmune disorders rise and doctors are reduced to pushers. There are even injections to cure obesity from eating too many Big Macs. BTW, obesity isn’t a health problem, it’s a perception problem. Making us sick is good business. We can’t let Big Pharma fail any more than Big Ag or Big Oil.

You’re little. I’m little. You and I can’t possibly understand what’s too big to fail, can we? Let’s leave that to the Bigs. Or is that Biglys?

It’s go time. Perhaps UFC cage fighters on the White House lawn will convince us.

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First, it’s 87° F as I write today in Buffalo, NY, on May 16.

This is a temperature that was rarely reached in July or August thirty-five years ago when I attended college here. Returning five years ago, the difference is unnerving.

We face numerous profound crises of our own making. Western US basin states are on the verge of collapse through drought-driven agricultural devastation and power loss to 40 million people. I wrote of this in Leaving Las Vegas. Texas is in equal trouble which I covered in Corpus Crispy. Texas’ water situation is more complex than the basin states, but like California — the fifth-largest economy in the world — also a critical agricultural producer. Fossil fueled drought and depleted aquifers threaten agriculture and the nation’s economic stability.

States such as Kansas and Oklahoma have already been devastated by drought created fire conditions and wind sweeping down the plains before fire season. By February 19, more than 300,000 acres burned in Oklahoma. Currently, 115,000 acres are on fire in Kansas, also part of the Oklahoma conflagration. These fires are starting far earlier as the length of fire season increases from temperatures 20° to 40° F above normal that broiled states from California to Tennessee, not this spring, but this winter. Like Texas and California, these are also crucial agricultural states.

US farmers are hanging on by their fingernails from high profit-driven input costs dictated by the Cargill’s and Monsanto’s of this world for seed, fertilizer and combines that can cost $600,000 — or more, try a cool million — that they’re forbidden to repair themselves through software locks and malicious design. John Deere is a primary offender. Desperation has set in with a shocking suicide rate three and one half times higher than the general population.

Amber waves of grain are endangered. So are fruited plains. America is becoming less beautiful by the day. But fortunately, oligarchs have plans that further undermine our food security, the blinding build out of artificial intelligence data centers covering thousands of square miles and guzzling our drinking water and that needed for crops. They guzzle electricity as well, spewing yet more planet heating GHGs into our atmosphere. If you have been led to believe wind and solar are making a significant contribution, think again. Fossil fuels are their primary source and sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg whose products provenly harm the mental health of our children has proposed a data center the size of Manhattan. This isn’t the largest one proposed or under construction.

BTW, consider bitcoin part of the same problem. Digital currency requires massive data centers, too.

The explosion of AI data centers and their consequences

Growth of hyperscale data centers since the rollout of AI has been explosive. These projects are political giveaways without public hearings or consent, and sweetheart tax deals. I strongly suspect bribes are involved. These nightmare facilities — each one an environmental disaster which can cover up to hundreds or even thousands of acres each — are erected with stunning speed, forever ruining the communities they are built next to. The US already has over 4,000 data centers to date, more than the next fourteen countries combined. The biggest players are the usual high-tech suspects: Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta. Musk’s xAI in Memphis is a prime case study. More on that later.

The irony of writing about overshoot, climate change and energy on a computer reliant on data centers for research and publishing isn’t lost on me. AI however, is an egregious assault that far exceeds previous data centers from the raw computational requirements created stacked by chip sets that run exceedingly hot, requiring water for cooling and electricity at enormously greater levels. I will NEVER use AI in my own work for those reasons and more. I know some of you are forced to use AI. As usual, destructive technology is making hostages of us.

AI data centers: deadly water and power requirements

Power consumption

AI data centers require water and power at levels that make regular data warehouses look benign. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman openly admitted AI is heading for an energy crisis three years ago at the annual 2023 World Economic Forum meeting. He warned the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.

In the meantime, we’ll just keep pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere, I guess.

Data center energy use is measured in Terawatt-hours (TWh). One TWh of energy represents one trillion watts of power used for one hour. A TWh is a measure large enough to describe the annual electricity generation of entire nations or in the case of this article the stunning energy consumption of behemoth AI data centers.

Currently, these centers are estimated to use about 4.4 percent of available energy. However, that is on course to skyrocket in just the next few years.

If we query an AI model, what happens after your question is routed to a data center is a black box. Which data center processes your request, how much energy it takes to do so, and how carbon-intensive the energy sources used are knowable only to the companies that run the models.

Name brand AI you may be accustomed such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude are opaque. So is Musk’s xAI and hateful Grok. Details of their energy use and mix of energy sources are carefully hidden, claimed to be trade secrets. I call bullshit as water and energy use hammer our pockets and health as well. More on health follows. These are issues that should be subject to strong regulation. However, Musk’s DOGE gutted EPA staff and the sycophant stooge Lee Zeldin has undermined foundational environmental law and conspires on these projects.

Researchers have estimated that a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search.

Remarkably, Business Insider found a clever way around the blackout of AI data center power consumption.

At about five minutes into Exposing The Dark Side of America’s AI Data Center Explosion this reveal is explained. In spite of being presented with heavily redacted documents hiding those “trade secrets,” data centers need backup power. This comes in the form of diesel generators. The generators require air quality permits. By filing for public records in every state, the size and numbers of generators were revealed, enabling estimates of the power requirements for any given data center facility. Kudos to Business Insider for diligence on this tedious work.

Water usage

Data centers rely on freshwater for cooling. The AI boom has exponentially escalated that demand. In 2025, data centers consumed hundreds of billions of gallons of water for cooling and power generation. Developers are exploiting rivers, aquifers, and municipal water supplies at unprecedented rates, putting at minimum hundreds of communities at risk.

This is why I started the article with farming. AI water demand competes with our food in even the most drought-stricken regions on the planet, including the desert. In Maricopa County, AZ for instance, where hundreds are dying from heat deaths yearly now, AI server farms enshroud the region. New projects are slated for the Phoenix area where groundwater is the only source for cooling and aquifers were already being depleted faster than they can recover. From 2019 to 2022, Microsoft data centers grew from one to five. More are planned — air permit documents collected from the Maricopa County Air Quality Department reveal the energy and water requirements with 280 backup diesel generators applied for. Each building will use up to one million gallons of water a day drawn from the drying up Colorado River. This insanity can be found at about 18:30 of the Business Insider video.

Only three percent of Earth’s water is considered freshwater. Of that, only 0.5 percent is available for people as the rest resides in glaciers, polar ice caps, the atmosphere, and soil, or is highly polluted or too deep to be extracted. Large data centers can consume up to five million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the use of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people.

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The health hazards of AI data centers

Health altering noise pollution

Competition for water and electricity present their own health hazards, but there is much more to consider. These sprawling complexes create unrelenting, deep pulsing hum, enough to vibrate windows and walls, and create impossible conditions for sleep. The audible sound is destructive enough — a mental and physical toll that can result in depression, chronic insomnia and cardiovascular disease, but there is also insidious infrasound, 30 hertz and lower, well below the human hearing range associated with vertigo, pulmonary embolisms, seizures and heart palpitations.

From an article in Science Direct:

Data centers generate significant noise pollution primarily from diesel generators and Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems, with internal noise levels reaching up to 96 A-weighted decibels (dBA)—well above the 85 dBA threshold considered harmful to hearing [2]. This persistent noise adversely affects data center staff, nearby communities, and local wildlife, prompting increased public concern and a push for noise mitigation strategies.

One of the most densely data center populated states is Virginia with at least 500 such facilities encouraged by tax breaks, since obviously billionaires need all the help they can get. This article from US News speaks of the experience of Donna Gallant among other issues:

“As somebody who has anxiety, it triggers an anxiety attack in me every time they’re doing load testing, to the point where I can’t sleep because it literally rocks your core.”

The article also links to a study from George Mason University published in February which points to long-term impacts that may include increased risk of respiratory and cardiovascular disease, mental health struggles, stroke, diabetes and devastating reproductive outcomes such as miscarriage and stillbirth.

Health altering light pollution

Sleepless in Crowell doesn’t have the ring to it or charm of the movie Sleepless in Seattle. What it does bring is permanent daylight with disruption of melatonin production leading to insomnia, anxiety and fatigue. Residents describe it as permanent jet lag.

This is a feature for any community with the misfortune to have one of these beasts near them.

Supporters include local officials who are appealing to farmers looking to sell land. Remember where this article started? It started with the desperation of farmers, no doubt many will opt to sell their land even if they don’t want to.

A small sample of hyperscale madness

The hyperscale data centers of AI demand energy at unfathomable scale, stunningly approaching or exceeding the energy consumed by the state they’re being built in. Because our energy mix remains dependent on fossil fuels, these colossal facilities inevitably spew carbon and methane into the atmosphere, increasing global warming. The facilities using diesel generators as a primary source for electricity (they’re not just backup where the existing power grid can’t handle them) spew nitrous oxide as well (NOx), a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more powerful than CO₂. They also emit VOCs (volatile organic compounds) such as benzene and formaldehyde.

Many communities are experiencing skyrocketing energy bills and the failure of dependable water pressure and supply. Here are two examples of current hyperscale projects rammed through without voter consent that pose serious threats.

Elon Musk’s hyperscale Colossus Memphis project

Musk’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, TN has used “behind-the-meter power,” 30 “mini” gas turbines, sufficient to power more than 200,000 homes. These have been run illegally, without permits.

Musk’s xAI is now using 15 turbines at that site. In February, the company received approval to draw 300 megawatts of power from the Tennessee Valley Authority, the federal utility that serves 10 million people in the region. This is one way we civilians pay for the billionaire AI scheme.

In spite of the 300 megawatts generously shared without taxpayer approval, xAI was also approved to add more behind-the-meter power, an additional 40 gas turbines across the state line in Mississippi for a second Memphis facility. Research published in February shows that the facility could significantly increase air pollution in North Mississippi and West Tennessee.

It’s worth it, though. Musk’s Grok spews racist hatred, promotes Nazi ideology and produces AI generated porn.

Kevin O’Leary’s hyperscale Utah project

Billionaire Kevin O’Leary is some kind of Shark Tank star. I really don’t care. He likes to be known as “Mr. Wonderful.” Kevin’s accomplishments are truly confusing to this small-brained, non-billionaire. In addition to Shark Tank, globalist O'Leary co-hosted Discovery Channel's "Project Earth" a television series that explored the financial implications of global climate change. BTW, a globalist is a person who believes what belongs to you actually belongs to me, err, them. My most expensive possession is a piece of antibiotic laden salmon I bought last week.

Project Earth would indicate some awareness of Mother Earth burning up, yet Mr. Wonderful has chosen the state of Utah to build a hyperscale data center. The entire state of Utah uses four gigawatts of energy a year. Covering just 40,000 acres of land or 62 square miles, the data center is estimated to require nine gigawatts. Now that is progress!

Fortunately, Mr. Wonderful’s data center doesn’t depend on those nasty diesel generators. Nope! It relies on global warming LNG, no NOx or benzene and formaldehyde nasties. That is wonderful!

The AI end game

This essay has been exhausting. Sorry to wear you out, too. The question becomes why is AI being jammed down our throats? There are theories out there. My belief? Control. Evidence over recent years points to a drive to a surveillance society from “smart” TVs and appliances sending feedback to the Internet to the cars we drive tracking our habits which are provided to insurance companies to determine our rates, accidents or not. Even the chipped teddy bear you buy your child can be a surveillance device with its microphone and camera.

After WWII America became the preeminent power on the planet. We were giddy after the war and surging technology seemed to point to a future of unlimited miracles. We trusted corporations, and for a while they held up the social contract. Workers could depend on jobs for life and pensions were part of the package. That contract began to erode under Reagan and his neoliberalism was perhaps best expressed by breaking the air traffic controllers union. Neoliberalism was furthered by Clinton in the continued exploitation of nations globally.

That evil came home and has been eroding our country ever since, with Citizens United providing the coup de grâce. AI and hyperscale data centers are the logical conclusion of a corporate-fascist state that wishes to control us even at the price of an inhabitable planet. You see, the more of us who die, the better the odds for the billionaire bunker builders, at least in their deluded minds.

It’s fight or die time.

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From Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here:

Welcome my son
Welcome to the machine
Where have you been?
It’s alright, we know where you’ve been

I was born in 1961 when CO₂ in the atmosphere was 320 ppm, only eight years until the Apollo 11 mission set Neil Armstrong on the moon as the first to walk its surface. I watched on an uncle’s TV, the type of guy always excited by technology. To be fair, we all were. The post WWII economic boom of the US made anything seem possible. He owned one of the first hand held calculators, a Texas instruments device that he was eager to show off. He owned a Corvette, a second generation beauty, (former car admirer here, over that) and eventually a small, four-seater airplane. His television that day was hooked up to an early remote control, a tethered device that clunked jarringly through all four channels that existed then.

Of course now we have hundreds of channels to choose from, evidence of profound progress. Sticking to the Pink Floyd theme, this time from The Wall:

I’ve got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.

Poor Pink Floyd. That was a major underestimation of how society would “improve” with so many channels to “fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way,” as they sang in the song Time. While we’re feeling sad, let’s lament the demise of The Apprentice, which featured Trump gleefully firing people, on “reality” TV for viewers who appreciated a little weekly cruelty, working-class knuckleheads who couldn’t connect that the people getting hurt were just like themselves. There’s no better balm for low self-esteem than being reassured there’s someone lower than you.

When you’re a loser, one of Trump’s favorite words, that hole can be filled by hatred.

The reasons for Trump’s ascent are numerous, but ignorance and racism are two always present factors. Citizen’s United and a Democratic Party that forgot its identity as fighters for the poor and middle class have been bought and owned by AIPAC and Big Oil.

Believe it or not MAGA’s, I understand your ire. We have all been abandoned.

However, unlike the “freedom” of hundreds of brainwashing TV channels, the accelerating 433 ppm of climate changing CO₂ and other GHGs in our atmosphere today was not an underestimate. What we’re experiencing now was predicted with remarkable precision by Exxon’s own scientists in the mid to late 1970s, long before the sophisticated computer models of today. Just like seeing the dark side of the moon we got exactly what we expected. Then the results were buried in the interest of profit. I could provide endless links as evidence of the conspiracy, but perhaps these three from Frontline tell the story best, part 1, part 2 and part 3.

And so it goes

The Exxon conspiracy starkly illustrates the root of our problems: behavior. Heads up, technology won’t save us. What brought us to the precipice marketed in bullshit like carbon capture are just more corporate scams to keep us compliant.

Borrowing from the prescient Kurt Vonnegut in his novel Slaughterhouse Five, “So it goes,” is the dry refrain in a story of the unnecessary obliteration of the beautiful city of Dresden. Germany surrendered to the Allies May 8, 1945. Dresden was firebombed shortly before in four raids from February 13 to 15. Germany at that point was reduced to arming old men and little boys when Hitler retreated to his bunker.

The war was known to be won. Vonnegut, a foot soldier became captive in a German prison camp and was shipped in a railroad car to Dresden for forced labor. British and Americans in an act of criminal vengeance carpet bombed the city to fiery rubble, an unconscionable civilian massacre in which 25,000 died. Vonnegut survived, three stories underground in the freezer of a meat packing plant, hence the title of the book. “So it goes,” dryly reflects the violence we routinely inflict on one and other.

Today we have an equally insidious, but far larger version of the same inhumanity. The Nazi gas chambers have been replaced with gassing the entire planet. Victims of those chambers were told they were merely getting a shower. Now we suffer an oligarch owned media and government actively hiding the truth and dismantling science, healthcare, education and environmental protections. Not only are our bodies poisoned, but our minds as well. Solution? Big Pharma to the rescue to sell us more poison for profit. Obese from eating addictive fast food? No problem, we have an injection for that. Depressed by endless concrete and urban decay? Here’s our latest antidepressant.

The Iran “war” is not a war. It’s an illegal attack on a sovereign nation as defined by the Geneva Conventions America was instrumental in writing after the horrors of WWII. My country, the biggest arms supplier to the world by far is also complicit in the genocide of the human beings in Gaza. As evil entities and individuals carry out greater plans to eliminate most of us, my conscience will not allow me to not call out the plot and immorality. Frankly, a Palantir enabled drone blasting my brains out might be a relief in light of what’s coming.

Did I say evil entities and individuals wish to carry out greater plans to eliminate most of us? Surely, I must be paranoid. Sorry, not so much. I have offered some historic and current deliberate human exterminations here. There are far more I could reference.

The Iran War is a calculated play not just to endanger China’s oil resources as American hegemony fades in $39 trillion of debt that now exceeds yearly GDP. It’s a psychopathic response to overshoot which the oligarchs that control our government damn well see. Given the choice of reducing their consumption or reducing the numbers of you and me, the choice is obvious. After all, their wealth and power are a measure of their superiority. And just like the Aryans of Hitler’s time it’s necessary and justified to eliminate those who are inferior.

The entire planet has been made a deadly gas chamber as the accelerating emissions of CO₂ and CH₄ (and others) trap their waste energy, speed melting polar ice and drying out land, creating volatile tinder. Seasons and predictable weather on which global farming in our hyper-connected world depends is on the verge of catastrophic failure, more now than ever with the loss of nitrogen fertilizer and its LNG feedstock from the criminal attack on Iraq. We have a convergence of crises that add up to death at unfathomable scale in the coming years. No one will be unaffected.

Those that live in the most dangerous places, India and Pakistan for instance are already experiencing wet-bulb temperature deaths. Hell, you can easily find such deaths in the US in places like Maricopa County, Arizona where the homeless have been dying by hundreds. They track this and the numbers are horrifying. And why are they homeless? Because a handful of psychopaths hold the vast majority of the wealth, even buying up housing to jack rents for profit. If you’re on the street you must have a mental problem. No, putting me on the street gives me one.

The same inhumanity that created Nazi death camps and the unjustifiable retribution suffered by Dresden lives on today. We learned nothing from a war that took over six million lives. The malevolence of our “leadership” and passive ignorance of the brainwashed populace enjoying their hundreds of channels of shit that funds their own demise with each Amazon purchase is a synergy of behavioral flaws, a perfect partnership of insatiable greed and ignorance by deliberate, malevolent design.

With the Iran War, the timetable for catastrophic failure that fuels an insidious version of genocide in no need of Palantir AI assisted drones is a matter of months, not years. Agricultural destruction as a result of nitrogen fertilizer loss in addition to farms already going bankrupt due to climate change and endemic corporate malfeasance — held hostage to ever-increasing input costs — undermines your survival and mine, not hypothetically, but in a matter of months or a few short years. This will be preceded be hyperinflation, increasing job loss, failed infrastructure (consider loss of water treatment), and continued degradation of medical care.

It turns out opposable thumbs driven by clever, but woefully short-sighted animal instincts are incapable of wisdom at scale. Even the great Galileo spent the last years of his life imprisoned by halfwits running the Catholic Church for bravely asserting the Earth circles the sun. The same halfwits also favored inquisitions — you know — torture and executions.

We circled the dark side of the moon, so what? Prepare to see the ultimate results of the dark side of human nature powered by the moronic deception of fossil fuels. Our next leap if we are to have one is about behavior, not technology.

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In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, a palantír is a crystal ball used for communication and to see events in the world or its past, distort truth and present selective visions of reality. It is no coincidence that Peter Thiel’s AI company Palantir chose that name.

During the War of the Ring, a palantír falls under the control of Sauron, who uses it to manipulate and deceive in his quest to rule the tale’s Middle-Earth. I would argue any corporation profiting from the murder of unarmed civilians — in the case of Gaza women, children and babies trapped — their backs just coincidentally against a vast sea of LNG and oil the victims of evil. Peter Thiel did not create the Gaza strip, a decades-old, open-air prison, but he did make killing far more efficient. Peter Thiel is Sauron, an evil sorcerer.

Drones enhanced with Palantir AI have been used to murder Gazans. Similarly, the Maven Smart System, developed by the company was used by the US Air Force according to The Military Times to identify targets in the current Iran war, including the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls' school in Minab, struck by a missile on February 28, resulting in the deaths of 156 civilians, including 120 schoolchildren. How smart is a system that murders children? This is advertised as the “kill chain of tomorrow.”

Loitering drones to make murder autonomous and efficient. Facial recognition and cell phone tracking are part of its arsenal, and stateside DHS and ICE are using this technology to collect your personal data in a mass surveillance system predicted by Orwell long ago. ICE specifically uses an app called ELITE, an acronym for "Enhanced Leads Identification & Targeting for Enforcement" to target raids for arrests, incarceration and deportation.

Trump has chosen Palantir’s Foundry “ontology” software to create a master database on every American citizen. From emails to social media posts and medical records every detail of your life is available at the push of a button, no walls. Applying for Medicare? Oh, we see you attended a No Kings Rally as well. Putting in for your Social Security benefits, hmm, we see you have read banned books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and The Kite Runner. Filing your taxes? Yes, we see you there, too. Oh my, that negative article on Palantir you wrote? We know.

Palantir has secured $1.9 billion in military contracts. And so, we have a company that participates in genocide, provides AI software to the US military that indiscriminately targets girls schools and tracks whether you’re naughty or nice by the standards of billionaire Peter Thiel. What could go wrong?

Thiel is a libertarian who has published for the ultra-right Cato Institute. He states that freedom and democracy are incompatible. This is artifice, as his true belief is in authoritarian control. His moral compunction has been demonstrated in exchanging more than 2,000 messages with Jeffrey Epstein. Their relationship began in 2014, long after Epstein’s pedophilia was widely known, and they met on multiple occasions according to The Nation. Gay, Thiel did not share Epstein’s foul sexual proclivities, but Epstein would ultimately invest $40 million in venture capital funds managed by Valar Ventures, a firm co-founded by Thiel.

Peter, who is stalwart believer in planet destroying capitalism and that democracy stands in the way, (stands in his way to do whatever he wants), believes we can exercise the conquest of outer space even as fossil fuels rapidly approach their end of EROI. He also thinks seasteading our dying oceans is a good idea, and that women should not be allowed to vote.

From his thoughts published on the Cato Institute:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

These are the rantings of a typical billionaire, detached from the reality of a finite planet and conveniently clueless that billionaire wealth creates the poverty that necessitates welfare. Obviously, the poor and women have no right voting.

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The Palantir Manifesto

Published in 2025, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, is a book co-authored by Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska, head of corporate affairs and legal counsel to Karp. The book includes a 22-point manifesto among other wishes. The manifesto is easily viewed on Nazi platform X, and a review of the book is here from Stanford where Thiel and Karp met.

Here’s a leaked video clip of Kool-Aid dispenser Karp fervently sales pitching Palantir investors, my bolds for emphasis:

We’re doing it, and I am sure you’re enjoying this as much as I am. Let’s not talk to analysts about the burden of being right. Our burdens of investing in Onthology, our burdens of actually looking at the math, the burden of reading what the Rule of 40 is, the burden of being honest, the burden of explaining what an enterprise software company is. or the burden of explaining to your friends that you’re really happy — maybe we should just stop talking about it. I’m very happy to have you along for the journey, and you are partners for us. Every Palantirian, we are crushing it. Everyone else who’s listening, we are dedicating our company, we have dedicated our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play especially in places we can’t talk about, and we love our success in the US and globally. Also, you know we are doing well in the United Kingdom and many other places. Palantir is here to disrupt and make our institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it’s necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. We hope you’re in favor of that.

The manifesto is a self-serving document written to advance Palantir’s wealth by creating a “post-nuclear” police state, where AI powered weapons systems continue US hegemony since clearly our time as an imperial nation is coming to an end. This is illustrated by the Iran War, the rise of BRICS countries, and abandonment of NATO, likely in Russia’s interest from Trump’s fealty to Putin.

Among the Palantir manifesto’s stated claims, beliefs and goals are:

Point 4: The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

Rebuttal: Let’s forget moral “appeal.” Let’s forget human decision-making. Let’s put that in AI software (built on the foibles of human thinking) and emphasize hard power; in other words the brutality Thiel’s AI has brought on hundreds of thousands of unarmed Palestinians and the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school.

Point 5: The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

Rebuttal: This is an ancient and ignorant argument. We’ve been in an arms race since spear chucking days. Any chance of Homo sapiens surviving requires cooperation and recognition of the limits of the planet. This “vision” is merely an excuse to make billions of dollars at the cost of innocent lives.

Point 6: National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

Rebuttal: National duty is a good idea. What if that duty was to live in poor nations to deeply understand and repair the damage done by Western societies in violently taking their natural resources and consigning them to poverty? Why do you pose war as inevitable? It is a choice, and you are just the latest evil brick in the wall of the military industrial complex Eisenhower warned of long ago.

Point 8: Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

Rebuttal: Public servants are the workers who bring us the essential programs — the social contract of a just society. We paid for social security, unemployment benefits, Medicare and Medicaid. We pay for an EPA in agreement clean air and water are human rights. It is YOU that think you’re a high priest by the ignorance of your stolen, obscene wealth.

Point 9: We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

Rebuttal: Yes, more grace for Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, Chuck Schumer and Rick Scott, please, any of the ciphers who allow you to grow your power and subvert democracy for feudal power.

Point 11: Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

Rebuttal: Seriously? Hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Gaza and a $1.9 billion military contract? We know who is gleeful here.

Point 12: The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

Rebuttal: I must have missed the part where we dismantled our nuclear arsenals. Clearly, a new generation of terrible weapons is a wise step in the interests of humanities’ future.

Point 13: No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

Rebuttal: Ah yes, the progressiveness of neoliberal destruction of the planet and culture taken to the next level, and the opportunity to stock grocery store shelves when you’re 90.

Point 14: American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

Rebuttal: America is ALWAYS at war. WTF are you talking about? Your business model is built by and for war and oppression.

Point 15: The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection [sic] for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

Rebuttal: Oh yes, Germany and Japan were so unfairly scapegoated. The Bataan Death March was no big deal, and making lampshades out of human skin was clever. Let’s make Nazi vivisections great again.

Point 16: We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

Rebuttal: Yes, let’s rehabilitate the image of Apartheid South Africa immigrant Elon Musk who broke immigration laws at one point, criticizes immigrants, and celebrate his making Twitter a Nazi platform.

Point 17: Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

Rebuttal: Silicon Valley is violent crime, none better illustrated by the efficiency Palantir has added to murder.

Point 20: The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

Rebuttal: I shall only pray to a Christian fundamentalist Nazi approving god, and Jesus was white.

Point 21: Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

Rebuttal: “All cultures are now equal…but others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.” Did anyone even proofread this manifesto?

Point 22: We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Rebuttal: Clearly we need billionaires to define what is acceptable and unacceptable pluralism. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, “The elderly are useless eaters.” I ask, do we need elderly people?

Then Henry lived to 100 and to his credit was far more damaging than useless.

Do we need brown people? Of course, how else will we keep those ICE agents employed?

Do we need billionaires? Of course! Wealth is clearly proof of wisdom.

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It was Earth Day a few days ago, and a lovely one where I live in an older suburb of Buffalo, NY. The sun came out after months of gray, some days as dim as night, and trees were flowering in pink and white celebration of sudden warmth and blue skies. Yellow tulips startled my eyes and everywhere trees were awakening — some with small, dark buds impatient for release — others unfurling in youthful saturated yellow greens. Soon the colors will mature into cooling shaded canopies, providing homes for returning birds. Mischievous squirrels will scrabble catch me if you can circles on their trunks. For a few moments, I felt myself breathe out, and my shoulders dropped in relief.

Then I remembered I was idling in traffic on a paved road eight lanes wide. The spell wasn’t completely broken, but reality tightened my shoulders again. Bird song is now barely a whisper in my neighborhood — I remember the joyful dawn cacophony of the past — and the town has replaced the maple tree at my curb the squirrels chased on with a stump. The weekly street cleaner droned by dirtying the air in favor of clean pavement over a clean Earth as I cleaned human indifference from under the bushes, fast food wrappers, plastic bags, chunks of styrofoam and airline size booze bottles of despair.

We have made such a mess of our planet and her state reflects the state of our misled minds and toxified bodies. I wonder what humanity would be without the discovery of fossil fuels. Certainly not nirvana yet with our endless propensity for violence, but perhaps the window of opportunity to become enlightened would have been extended. Population was a mere one billion in 1803. It has been fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution that enabled overpopulation, overconsumption, and wild overestimation of the wisdom of reshaping every facet of the planet to suit us, when it is her health that determines our fate.

So why does this writer say no green revolution when so many talk about the miracle of electrification, including most environmentalists? Who is he to say this? Surely, he must be wrong you reasonably think. After all, renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuels we’re told. However, the photo above tells the story. No form of energy aside from passive solar comes without a price. This is embodied in the immutable first law of thermodynamics. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. Heat and pollution are two of those products.

While there are multiple other reasons a green revolution won’t happen starting with the false promise of the words themselves, the most damning one is extremely practical, the availability of diesel fuel.

The Green New Deal, long dead, compromised, inadequate

Not long ago, we were promised The Green New Deal. The name quite obviously was inspired by FDR’s New Deal that lifted the country out of the Great Depression. Biden watered that plan down to “Build Back Better,” which was further weakened in the final result, to the Inflation Reduction Act by Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and our now full out fascist Republican party.

While it had strengths, The Green New Deal fell badly short of the greater vision of degrowth conceived in 1972, and the Inflation Reduction Act was the final, entirely inadequate result. Regardless, even in its best form the Green New Deal still didn’t recognize The Limits of Growth.

As I wrote in The Inflation Reduction Act: Climate Change Farce:

The bill is a shadow of Build Back Better, which when originally proposed was a $2.2 trillion plan to expand education, fight poverty, lower healthcare costs and tackle climate change. The House passed a $1.75 trillion version of that plan which was defeated in the Senate in 2021. What’s left as in investment in the country is a $490 billion bill signed into law August 16. My primary interest is in the bill’s impact on climate change and domestic energy production.

We were led to believe by driving EVs, throwing up some wind turbines and building out solar energy we could solve climate change and have life continue as usual.

What do politicians do for a living? Lie.

The elephant in the room: diesel fuel

Much of the US economy has been powered by the fracking boom for the better part of the last two decades. I won’t go into all of its downsides here, but they obviously include continued and accelerating release of CO₂ and CH₄ into the atmosphere and hundreds of billions of gallons of water use. This water is lost forever from the toxic chemicals also needed to force oil out of shale layers in which drilling involves going down and then sideways for miles. This energy-intensive technique for extracting oil provides industry evidence that large, easy to extract oil deposits are played out.

If cheaper, easier to harvest oil was available, that’s where drilling would be.

Furthermore, US shale oil is light, sweet crude which can’t be processed into diesel, and diesel is the entire backbone of mining, hauling and installing “renewables” which are as vulnerable to failure of EROI as oil. Bulldozers, excavators and giant hauling trucks don’t run on 87 octane pump gas.

Skyrocketing carbon dioxide levels from CO2levels.org

Skyrocketing methane levels from methanelevels.org

Don’t take my word for it. Cold-blooded capitalist natural resource “investors” Goehring & Rozencwajg have warned the Permian Basin fracking boom has peaked and is declining here and here. The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns of the decline at the global level meaning the same — increasing oil prices which drives inflation across every economic sector.

Art Berman, an oil geologist of over four decades argues:

Oil is likely to surge to extreme highs in 2026, but that does not mark the beginning of a long-term structural bull market. It’s a wartime spike inside a debt-saturated global economy. The higher prices go, the more they tighten credit, weaken growth and destroy demand. Oil is more likely to peak with the crisis and then follow a weakened global economy into a longer period of softness.

Whether demand for oil grows or softens almost doesn’t matter. It’s the key resource that has driven economic growth in the US since discovery of first oil on American soil. The Drake oil well was dug to a depth of just 69.5 feet in 1859, practically garden shovel territory. If the economy isn’t running on oil due to lack of demand because high prices and shortages are driven by fading EROI or Iran’s justifiable wrath, the results are the same, global recession at the least. Some fear a worldwide depression.

With the combination of nitrogen fertilizer loss from the Middle East and component feedstock LNG at planting time, the drag of higher fuel prices (or their disappearance at the pump altogether) and resulting higher energy prices in general, across sector inflation including the basics — food and cost of shelter — the voluntary, mindless consumption economy that has led us here will be stultified. It’s an economic model that needs to die, and we have been repeatedly warned for 50 years. We should have been working to degrowth. Now we’re getting it the hard way.

Asian countries and Australia appear to be particularly hard hit with fuel shortages and Europe is suffering as well. Affected refineries in Asia are creating jet fuel and diesel shortages. In India, service stations are running out of gas as panic buying ensues. Australia, also running out of gasoline at the pump, has just a few weeks of fuel left on hand.

Europe is suffering too, here’s a map of diesel shortages in France. Given the essential importance of diesel, LNG and nitrogen fertilizer, what’s your opinion? Recession or depression? Thankfully, unlike politicians, economists never lie, and Wall Street never parties right up to a crash.

Last word: overshoot

Climate change is just one manifestation of the overarching problem of overshoot. Doubtless, climate change is our most immediate threat, but attempting to resolve it without considering all nine planetary boundaries is akin to a bandage when a tourniquet is needed. The magical clean energy we were promised — the “green revolution” was naive hope at best, or a cynical lie of political motive. It fails to address the cold reality that EROI on fossil fuels approaches which will end the build out of renewables (which are finite) regardless of Trump’s regressive policies. It also fails to acknowledge the enormous harms of mining equal to that of oil drilling.

The Iran War — no, the illegal assault on a sovereign nation — may be an act of foolishness or a calculated attempt to bring the world economy to its knees by a fascist, racist government gleefully abducting legal citizens off the street in the tens of thousands and building prison camps for the gestapo called ICE to imprison them in. Frighteningly, this latest act of terrorism (we cannot forget Palestine) may push the globe over the edge or less likely foment needed changes that will require great risk.

Given the gravity, will you fight or roll over?

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Escaping notice while the world suffers the madness of Trump, a major study was published October 13, 2025, by the University of Exeter and international partners including the Stockholm Resilience Centre, The Global Tipping Points Report 2025. You can find a download of the report here.

The findings and recommendations of the paper preceded the annual jester party — COP30 — in which wealthy oil producing nations come together on their private jets and pretend to care about climate change and the rights of victimized poor countries. Another predictable abject failure, the words “fossil fuels” weren’t even included in the final 2025 “agreement.” The conference’s seriousness was preceded by chopping down tens of thousands of acres of “protected” Amazon rainforest for a four-lane highway paving its way to the summit in the Brazilian city of Belém.

This article claims because the highway was planned since 2012, COP30 had nothing to do with yet more destruction of the Amazon which accounts for over 50 percent of such remaining forests. Never mind that rainforests store 250 billion tons of CO₂ and are in danger of tipping into CO₂ emitters.

While a 78 percent drop from 2024, in 2025, 9.5 million acres of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest still burned — about 50 times the land area of New York City. A better rainy season accounted for that drop in a rainforest never less increasingly besieged by drought. As rainforests are laid low for cattle grazing and soy, moisture from the dense shade of the canopy down to the thin layer of soil is lost resulting in man-made drought. The improvement in 2025 is no cause for a sigh of relief.

Back to the fishes in the deep blue sea.

Authored by 160 scientists from 87 institutions in 23 countries, The Global Tipping Points Report 2025 covers both cryospheric and biospheric tipping points, and warns the planet is dangerously close to triggering other catastrophic failures aside from our doomed coral reefs. Melting ice sheets, aforementioned Amazon rainforest dieback and the collapse of key ocean currents are among them.

This as you know is happening at just 1.5° C of average global warming.

It’s going to get worse.

Hundreds of climate scientists polled in May 2024 agreed we’re going to fly by that figure, predicting at least a 2.5°C temperature rise by 2100. “Hopeless and broken,” is how one scientist described her feelings. As dreary as those assessments are, worse can be found, believing 2.5° C is possible by 2050. Well-known climate scientist James Hansen who first testified the dangers of global warming before congress in 1988 is among those with a more pessimistic assessment. This AI assisted study found that regions including South Asia, the Mediterranean, Central Europe and parts of sub-Saharan Africa could reach 3.0° C by 2060.

Seven of nine planetary boundaries breached

Global warming acceleration: Hope versus hopium.

Predicted global temperature increases

Coral reefs were critical were to our survival

From The Global Tipping Points Report 2025:

Even under the most optimistic emission scenarios of stabilising warming at 1.5°C without any overshoot, it is considered that warm-water coral reefs are virtually certain (>99% probability) to tip, given the upper range of their thermal tipping point is 1.5°C.

Coral reefs have been the rainforests of our oceans, providing habitat for thousands of fish species alone. They have acted as a carbon sink and provided protection of our eroding shorelines during storms. Coral reefs have fed nearly a billion people and sheltered a quarter of all marine life. It’s estimated their contribution to the economy in environmental protection, as a food source and tourist attraction has amounted to $2.7 trillion USD. This figure is measured in perverse GDP, a metric of destruction that must be replaced and may be wildly conservative. This article from Science Daily puts that figure at an incomprehensible $9.8 trillion. How does one measure the value of an inhabitable planet?

The now largely dead Great Barrier Reef was the largest living organism on Earth, 1,429 miles long and covering approximately 133,000 square miles. Composed of nearly 3,000 individual reefs, it was large enough to be seen from outer space. Now it’s pronounced officially DOA by science. Way to go Homo sapiens. The University of Exeter report, led by Professor Tim Lenton, a pioneer in Earth system science, covers far more than the reefs, encompassing perhaps the most comprehensive evaluation to date of how close humanity is to breaching all identified planetary boundaries.

When I was a child my favorite television shows were often about the wild world. Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Jacques Cousteau specials stand out in my child’s eye. The movie Born Free about Elsa the lion club raised by the game wardens George Adamson and his wife Joy in Kenya left a huge impression on me about the dignity and awareness of animals, and their inherent right to exist.

I, too, was wild in those days running from sunup to sundown, becoming encrusted in sweat, dirt, itchy weeds and wonder over alien crawdads in the creek, frightening yet beautiful praying mantises, clever stick bugs and thousands of fireflies so tricky to catch on humid summer nights before the reluctance of having to go indoors. I was naturally connected to the Earth at birth as I should be until as I grew older and forced to spend more and more time servicing her destruction.

I have never scuba dived, I have never been to Kenya, but just knowing such places exist have made my world a better place. This may be the saddest article I have been forced to write. To have seen what is coming and not done anything breaks my heart. As the most powerful creatures on the planet our job should be to take care of her. That’s where meaning and connection live in our ever-growing alienation and psychotic disconnection. That’s not just what our physical health depends on, but our mental and spiritual health as well. After all, we are made by the same elements of the planet, which was made by the elements of the cosmos. The Earth is not a checkbook and everything cannot be quantified. Attempting to so do murders our souls, killed the coral reefs and turns us into false gods.

Thank you for being with me.

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Welcome readers, both old and new. I fell off my weekly publishing schedule with this one, partly due to the research needed, and partly due to the distraction of the Mad Orange One running our country into the ground. Iran still stands, and a whole civilization did not die as threatened, although this cease fire is hardly call for assurance. Thank you for being with me as I try to keep climate change in our minds as so many worries press on us.

In my last article Leaving Las Vegas, I sketched the plight of the seven basin state’s water crisis, mentioning Texas at the end not as an afterthought, but because it’s not completely sustained by the Colorado River. Texas water sources vary with the Rio Grande supplying South Texas. The Rio Grande is also critical to New Mexico and seven states of northern Mexico, including Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. In total, six million people depend on this river, that like the Colorado is in a state of failure.

Corpus Christi is a city whose wealth is built on oil. Although there is no fracking in the area, the community of 500,000 is still largely dependent on the oil industry (and chemical industry) for its economy. It’s also as you can likely see from the photo above a popular tourist destination. In fact, Visit Corpus Christi claims it to be the 53rd top tourist destination in the world no doubt due in great part to its beaches on the Gulf of Mexico that will sink under rising seawater.

No worries though, Corpus Christi’s real economy lies in Texas oil — from industry defined by refineries, LNG and chemical plants. With refineries for CITGO, Valero and Flint Hills, and chemical manufacturers such as Chemours (fluoroelastomers resins, lubricants, refrigerants and fluoropolymers such as Teflon), LyondellBasell (ethylene and propylene products), and Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, a partnership of Exxon and Saudi Arabia’s SABIC (monoethylene glycol used in plastic food packaging, fabrics and liquid containers, and polyethylene used in packaging, bottles, containers and “mulchable” agricultural film, yum), the petrochemical industry is the real driver of Corpus Christi.

There’s more I could list, but I feel a tumor coming on.

This article isn’t to bitch about oil, chemicals and plastics, though. It’s about drought. Explaining the Texas water situation and that of New Mexico and Mexico is more complex than the basin states. Although the Rio Grande is irreplaceable in south Texas, cities like Corpus Christi, Austin, and San Antonio depend on other imperiled water sources, in some cases the Colorado River, while the basin states are dependent on it entirely.

Corpus Christi water supply

Industrial demand drives more than half of the Corpus Christi region’s water use. In 2024, that Exxon-Saudi alliance used just under 5 billion gallons of water alone.

More than 95 percent of the city’s water supply comes from surface water — lakes and reservoirs. The storage levels of two of the three reservoirs that supply the city, Lake Corpus Christi and Choke Canyon Reservoir, have fallen to 8.4 percent of capacity as of March 23. The city is on the verge of running out of water.

Fortunately, Governor Greg Abbott has a plan whose wisdom and compassion have been proven by ongoing “Operation Lone Star.” Lone Star has involved entangling desperate brown migrants fleeing abject poverty and life-threatening heat on barbed wire in the Rio Grande. I considered the plight of Mexico City in Will the Revolution Be Televised? Mexico City’s water system and temperatures are in life-threatening crisis.

One woman suffering a miscarriage was caught on the wire in June 2023, and a tiny child, a four-year-old girl passed out due to heat exhaustion as she had tried to cross the barrier, but was pushed back by a kindly Texas National Guard soldier. This is what humanity coming together in times of crisis looks like.

Yeah, in Greg I trust.

The city’s secondary water supply comes from a leak prone 141-mile long pipeline that transports water from Lake Texana fed by the Navidad River. The Navidad River runs through Lavaca County. Corpus Christi (Nueces County) increased the pipeline’s capacity by 24 million gallons per day, and it’s currently working at maximum capacity, delivering about 72 million gallons per day to the region.

However, that desperation lifeline is uncertain.

If the emergency Lake Texana supply falls below 50 percent capacity, that threshold reduces water deliveries rules set by the Lavaca-Navidad River Authority. Of course the real determiner of the rules is Mother Nature ticked about fossil fuel induced heat. The reservoir is nearing that threshold.

Abbott intervened, genius that he is, ordering the threshold be lowered to 40 percent. He’ll simply pump more of the rapidly evaporating life-sustaining resource called water to keep the petrochemical plants spewing heat death alive. Drinking water at the tap, meh. Cooling water for petrochemical plants, of course.

This crisis could cause mass layoffs, disruption of fuel supplies, billions of dollars in emergency spending and literally force evacuation of the city. Evacuation would result in climate refugees, that’s right in the good old USA. Twenty years on, we still have them from Hurricane Katrina. Ironically, Texas took many of those victims in. What changed? Mother Nature doesn’t give a crap about American “exceptionalism.”

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Understanding Texas water supply

San Antonio region

Texas’s water supply comes from two main sources, 54 percent groundwater (aquifers), and 43 percent surface water (lakes, rivers and reservoirs). Texas relies on nine major aquifers and 22 minor ones.

The vast Ogallala Aquifer runs underneath the Panhandle and west Texas. It’s the lifeline for farms and ranches in the Texas High Plains and is the one of the largest aquifers in the world, shared with six other states including Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Oklahoma. However, overuse is rapidly depleting it. Depended on for irrigating a Texas region that supplies $20 billion worth of food — one fifth of the total annual US agricultural harvest — the importance of Ogallala can’t be overstated.

Ogallala Aquifer

Another rapidly depleting water source is the Edwards Aquifer, which provides water to San Antonio, the seventh-largest city in the US and the surrounding Hill Country. San Antonio is actually sinking from the overpumping of groundwater. The largest groundwater system in Central Texas was declared in “unprecedented territory,” 40 feet lower than normal starting 2025. The article above from San Antonio Express News is paywalled, but appears to work once before it’s blocked.

Texas also relies on water from 15 major river basins and eight coastal basins, lakes, and more than 180 man-made reservoirs. Major surface water sources include the Rio Grande, Colorado River, and reservoirs like Lake Travis in Austin and Toledo Bend in East Texas.

Understanding Texas water supply

Austin region

Austin’s water supply is primarily dependent on Lake Austin and Lake Travis, both fed by the lower Colorado River. As such, they are both vulnerable to the Colorado’s tapping out status. Lake Austin is principally fed by the outflow of Lake Travis.

Lake Austin is maintained by releases of water from Lake Travis upstream. Other Texas Highland Lake reservoirs on the Colorado River include Lake Buchanan, Inks Lake, Lake LBJ and Lake Marble Falls.

In 2025, Lake Travis reached its highest water levels in three years, jumping 20 feet in four days of torrential downpours. At the time the lake was only 43 percent full. The storms characteristic of global warming extreme weather events was hardly all good news however. The floods resulted in the tragedy of Camp Mystic for girls in which 27 campers and counselors died.

Today, current Lake Travis water levels are about 663 feet, about 17 feet below full, not at crisis level, but certainly not to be taken for granted in a region gripped by historic, extreme drought.

Understanding New Mexico and south Texas water supply

The plight of the Rio Grande

The US and Mexico share the Rio Grande under a series of agreements administered by the International Boundary and Water Commission.

Rio Grande headwaters start in the southern Rockies, the San Juan Mountains of Colorado 12,588 feet above sea level. The river flows approximately 1,900 miles depending on its shifting course, running through New Mexico, defines the western border of Texas and ends in the Gulf. The river is the lifeblood of communities as diverse as Albuquerque, NM, population around 558,000 (greater area close to one million) and at least a dozen ancient Pueblos that survived colonialism. It’s a critical water source for south Texas as well and provides water and life to approximately six million people.

The river’s final destination and outlet is the Gulf of Mexico, if it can continue to get there.

The river is “governed,” by the Rio Grande Compact an agreement between Texas and New Mexico. The Rio Grande Project consisting of numerous dams, canals, drainage channels and a hydroelectric plant was begun in 1905, finally completely implemented in the 1950s. A water treaty was signed in 1939.

However, Mother Nature is not impressed with our El Grande schemes.

Nearly 80 percent of the water taken from the river is used for irrigation in both the US and Mexico. This short local news clip shows the dilemma of south Texas farmers forced to pump groundwater in an attempt to grow anything at all. The situation is the same in Albuquerque, with the city forced to pump groundwater — the backup system — now being used as the primary water source. This water does not replenish without snowpack in the Colorado Mountains feeding the Rio Grande.

Corpus Crispy concluding thoughts

This was article was a natural follow up to Leaving Las Vegas, warning of the collapse of the basin states. Texas and New Mexico, dependent on different water sources and infrastructure, demanded a separate analysis. However, they are part of the impending crash of the southwestern states in general. This crisis is not just an economic disaster poised to roll over the country, but a vast human tragedy in the making affecting around 50 million people.

Corpus Christi’s crisis appears to be immediate.

The sheer stupidity of this situation seen coming for decades is breathtaking. No one will be left unaffected. California, the fifth-largest economy on the planet and Texas, both critical to food supplies leave all of us vulnerable. We’re entering a new era in which all we have taken for granted, the very basics — water and food on our tables — is under intense pressure now outside our misguided “control” which has landed us here.

This pressure has been extremely exacerbated by the oligarch fueled regime in office stealing our tax money, dismantling social safety nets and destroying science and environmental protections. The ludicrously stupid gaffe of the Iranian War has expedited a crash that was inevitable regardless. Voting blue won’t save me or you. Both parties have pushed neoliberal economics, refused to understand the limits of the planet, subsidized Big Oil and sold the weapons to Israel enabling a gruesome genocide that the mainstream media sanitizes.

If ever there was a time for revolt, this is it.

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Like most, I have been gripped by the criminal war our criminal president with characteristic stupidity started with Iran. The repercussions will be far, wide and lasting. The impact on energy flow and supply chains is immediate, and the oil and LNG infrastructure being damaged by missile strikes will take years to rebuild. The ease with which Iranian drones and missiles have destroyed and caused US military bases to be abandoned, and allowed punitive strikes on oil infrastructure has been a lesson in the limits of imposing will through military power (again). Anyone remember Vietnam? This war marks a new chapter in geopolitics, the reality of shrinking fossil fuels and additional struggle for the average person from across sector inflation which will result. For Americans this means additional economic hardship and increased homelessness. For the poorest increased starvation will be a result.

This week I return to my original mandate as a writer, climate change, specifically the impending collapse of US western states from heat and drought, a crisis long seen coming. With California being the fifth-biggest economy in the world and essential agricultural powerhouse, compounded by nitrogen fertilizer loss from the war, food on our tables is increasingly at risk. Bellwether changes are at hand. It’s a new world.

No doubt most of you know since 2000 the Colorado River has been under a crushing siege, an intensifying 1200-year mega-drought. A February 2022 UCLA led study disturbingly found from 2000 to 2022 the US southwest mega-drought was the region’s driest in at least 1,200 years. The study was then published in the peer reviewed journal Nature Climate Change in February 2022. That article is irritatingly paywalled after the abstract as if you and I don’t need to know. Nice. The droll headline reads. “Rapid intensification of the emerging southwestern North American megadrought in 2020–2021.” Another study from AGU of the University of Arizona in their Geophysical Research Letters written with equal levity was titled, “Tree Rings Reveal Unmatched 2nd Century Drought in the Colorado River Basin.”

Oh, the wacky world of science writing. That may be the last humor in this article. We’ll see.

I was thinking happy thoughts — you know about the economic fallout of a $2 billion a day war ordered up by a demented “reality” TV show character, a former Fox News moron promoted to Secretary of War, (it’s called not defense anymore, folks), and a twirpy expressionless white nationalist Nazi, named Steven Miller, possibly the real president. The kind of kid who pulled wings off flies and the kind of people that order missile strikes on a girls school.

I was also thinking about agricultural failure, not just from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz which includes critical fertilizer (a third-grader could have predicted this), but about that well-known western drought in upper and lower basin states. Already they have experienced a heatwave, weeks ahead of our lost normal that has resulted in hundreds of unwelcome records. With predictions of a “super” El Niño this summer, this year looks to be one of the hottest ever again rivaling 2023-2024.

This heatwave has featured temperatures dozens of degrees above average, ominous signs for intensified drought and perilous southwest fire conditions. Fires are already sweeping Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska weeks ahead of season, consuming more than one million acres.

These records are bad enough, but there is more to talk about. Sorry.

Not good, El Niño is on the way

2023 was the warmest year on records going back to 1850 with El Niño developing in the spring which warms the Pacific. 2024 was hotter still, as noted by both NOAA and Copernicus. 2025 was slightly cooler than 2024, but still near 2023 levels. The past three years were the hottest ever recorded on the planet and the past 11 the warmest recorded, once again, since 1850.

Currently, we are in La Niña conditions, the cooler of the trade wind cycles, but that is set to flip back to El Niño this summer. 2026 will once again be one of the hottest on record as GHG emissions continue to climb unabated. This imperils every person on Earth, but today I am focusing on the American southwest. Hence, the cheeky title of this article Leaving Las Vegas (apologies to Sheryl Crow), perhaps the poster child for human hubris and collapse, being built in the desert for no other reason than gambling, spectacle and decadent entertainment.

The dam nation of the basin states

The upper basin states consist of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming. The lower basin states are Nevada, Arizona and California. The 1922 Colorado River Compact also provided water rights to a portion of Mexico. This agreement was arrived upon at a time of unusual wetness for the region, over promising the resource before the signatories’ ink even dried. Inclusion of Mexico recognizes water is life and that the workings of the planet see no man made boundaries. We’ll see how that goes as the Colorado River dries up.

In total, the Colorado River basin provides irreplaceable water and power to 40 million people including twenty-nine Native American tribes. It’s essential in irrigating nearly 5.5 million acres of agricultural land, including California whose economy as mentioned is the fifth-largest in the world. Cities such as Los Angeles and Denver are in immediate danger too, as the Colorado River is reduced to a trickle, now barely reaching the ocean.

Less than half the normal amount of water flowed into Lake Powell in 2025 from the upper basin states last summer forcing farmers and ranchers to cut back on water use, fallow fields and eliminate jobs.

Power generation from the Colorado River

Although the Hoover Dam at Lake Mead is far more famous, power generation or the lack thereof starts at the Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell. The Glen Canyon Dam features eight power turbines that stop functioning at 3490 feet of water level. Under current conditions that level is expected to fall to 3497 feet by end of this summer.

Lake Powell water level, March 26, 2026

Lake Mead was 1064 feet above sea level March 21, down 10 feet compared to 2024 and 3 feet compared to 2025. If the surface of Lake Mead drops below 1,035 feet, only five of the seventeen Hoover Dam turbines can operate without damage called cavitation — explosive vapor bubbles which ruin turbine blades.

Currently, the lake is projected to drop to 1032 feet by November 2027.

Lake Mead water level, March 26, 2026

The plight of the Colorado River Compact is a result of far too optimistic assessment in 1922, fossil fuel-driven climate change (lack of snowpack on the mountains) and greedy overuse from an illness called capitalism. Capitalism depends on undervaluing resources critical to our very existence and exploiting them for mindless profit. It’s a sick system that is now on the verge of collapse. In addition to collapse induced by the Iran War, collapse is poised to start in the southwest.

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The last straw for Las Vegas

When water falls below 895 feet above sea level at the Hoover Dam, Lake Mead will become a dead pool. The lowest intake will no longer take water in cutting supplies and power to tens of millions including cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego Phoenix, and Tucson.

Las Vegas has implemented a plan known as the “Third Straw.” It’s a $1.4 billion project started in 2008 and uncapped in 2015. It consists of a pipe 20-feet wide, three miles long and three pumping stations that run under Lake Mead. At a depth of 860 feet, this is deep enough to extract water and avoid dead pool status at least for a bit longer.

Among other things, Las Vegas is famous for extravagant water use. To the city’s credit, it has made serious efforts to conserve water in the last two decades.

• Conservation efforts have reduced per-capita water use from 314 gallons per day in 2002 to approximately 140 gallons in 2024.

• Southern Nevada has reduced its per-capita water use by 58 percent between 2002 and 2025, even as the population increased by approximately 876,000 residents.

• Las Vegas has replaced around 200 million square feet green lawn with desert landscaping, saving more than 10 percent of Nevada’s Colorado River allocation.

• The city recycles treated wastewater back into Lake Mead to use again, returned by the Colorado River, flowing back into Lake Mead.

Unfortunately, these efforts are merely staving off the inevitable dictated by loss of snow pack on the Rocky Mountains, increased evaporation from atmospheric heat due to unabated GHG emissions and short-term human thinking. The overburdened Colorado River is fated to fail.

It’s time to flee the southwestern states. The impending crash is an easy measurable, with just a few feet at both Lake Powell and Lake Mead literally changing the world. Texas is much the same, but that’s a different story.

It’s time to leave Las Vegas.

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As the world approaches a month of war with Iran, each day brings the permanent collapse of civilization closer. The myriad elements of collapse driven by fundamental overshoot are left undiscussed, with climate change just the most obvious element of a far larger predicament presented in our near useless mainstream media at all.

This “war” on Iran is not a war. It’s an attack on a nation that did not attack America and posed no imminent threat. Like Iraq, there are no and never were any WMDs. Under the “rules” of the Geneva Conventions, the US and Israeli bombing of Iran is a war crime — an act of terrorism — as has been the ghastly, complete destruction of Gaza in which innocent civilians bear the brunt of death at the hands of psychopaths who no longer bother to hide their intent. For US citizens, the racist and fascist goals were there for all to study in the 922-page tome of Project 2025 and has lived in Israeli Zionism since the country’s creation.

I have a friend who didn’t vote in the last presidential election. I did, perhaps for selfish reasons. I didn’t want to spend my remaining years under a fascist regime that shortens my life. However, Kamala Harris didn’t feature a single Palestinian at her convention. US backing of Israel was to continue either way. I don’t see this illegal war as a tactic to bury the Epstein files, although that may be an effect. This war is an attempt to control dwindling world oil and LNG resources, with the Gaza much the same, additionally fueled by pure Zionist hatred.

As I wrote in Blind Faith, Blind Rage and Genocide:

The Mediterranean Sea contains vast gas deposits. Egypt and Israel have been producing gas in the eastern Mediterranean for years. Located roughly 81 miles west of Haifa, (130 kilometers) in waters 4,900 feet deep (1,500 meters), according to the US Geological Survey’s estimates the Levant Basin Province holds an estimated 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Located just 20 miles (30 kilometers) off the coast of Gaza, the Gaza Marine field holds just over 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, tiny by comparison. However, its proximity to the shore and lesser depth make it easier and less costly to extract. The net value of the Gaza Marine natural gas is estimated at $4.59 billion — energy and financial resources that could significantly address the poverty of the Palestinians.

However, Israel has worked steadfastly to prevent Palestinians from developing and benefiting from this resource in violation of international law since the early 2000s.

Iran holds the third-largest oil deposits in the world. Just four countries hold over half of the world’s proven oil reserves.

The elements of civilization collapse including the horror of nuclear escalation are dramatically increased by this war. Additionally, Apocalypse “prophesy,” exhibited in both Christian and Jewish thought provide an irrational motivation to end the world. Our future is not prophesy, it’s a matter of choice. Our choices have been poor — unrelentingly violence against our Earth — and each other. God has not forsaken this planet. Humans have. It bewilders me that mass murderers and those that destroy all creation think they are going to ascend to Heaven.

We were gifted a planet which is over 4.5 billion years old. Only in the last 300,000 did humanity rise and only through the benevolent conditions of the Holocene, a climate favorable to our physical survival and that of all our beautiful warm-blooded cousins that we murder for their skins and tusks. The environment that supports them also supports us. The arrogance to think we are wiser than the slow evolution of the Earth, imperceptible to short human life spans is farcical. We have witlessly destroyed Goldilocks conditions for us to thrive in.

Slowness is wisdom. Speed kills.

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What we call civilization was a transition from what sustained human beings for the vast majority of our brief existence, hunter-gathering. When we transitioned to agrarian societies just 7,000 to 9,000 years ago depending on our location in the world supposed civilization was born. It gave rise to science, sophisticated arts and philosophy. It also gave rise to mass governance, standing armies and ever more powerful ways of destroying each other. Archeological evidence suggests we were causing extinction level events long before the Industrial Revolution. It shows Homo sapiens was capable of extinguishing megafauna through mere cooperative hunting, before settled societies. By the bronze age we were laying entire forests low. However, our destructive capability since the discovery of coal and oil sped our increasingly likely self-destruction exponentially. In less than 300 years we have undermined the essential workings of the planet and ecosystems that we and every other innocent creature depends on.

In wealthy western nations, particularly the US as the premier empire since WWII, reality to our dependence on the Earth has been sublimated, perhaps by ignorance at first, but certainly by growing avarice shortly after. The giddiness of defeating Hitler led Americans to believe there were no limits to the future. After two world wars and the Great Depression people were starved for better lives and that hunger filled dreams. WWII turned America into an industrial powerhouse never before seen. Her wealth helped rebuild a broken Europe with the Marshall Plan and marked the end of British empire. Formation of the United Nations, the Nuremberg trials and Geneva Conventions seemed to point to a more just world. However, the war also resulted in NATO, the cynical and ill-fated formation of Israel, and shunning of the Soviet Union, without whose brutal sacrifice, 27 million dead, we would not have won the war.

Yes, Stalin was a mass murderer and the Siberian gulags infamous and horrifying. Dissidents were arrested in their sleep and disappeared without witness. Torture was employed, and Soviet citizens compelled through fear to turn one and other in on the weakest of suspicions of resistance against the state. I was never able to get through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, but read enough.

Chillingly, this is the path America is currently on.

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Playing nice with a mass murderer is questionable, but a country founded on theft, genocide and slavery is hardly in the position to make moral judgments. America could have easily provided a homeland for the survivors of the Holocaust in spacious California at the time. However, there was all that Middle Eastern oil to be controlled, and so rose the military industrial complex Eisenhower urgently warned of in 1961. We had our enemy, the Soviet Union, and we had our Middle East projection of power, Israel, sympathy for which was natural with the devastating images of walking skeletons and mountains of bodies hastily bulldozed into mass graves as Nazis attempted to conceal their gruesome crimes.

The end of WWII was an opportunity to unite the world. Instead, we drew lines in Middle Eastern sands, carving up countries and inventing new ones, regardless of consequences. As for the Soviet Union, exclusion made her both hazardous and wildly profitable.

Now the US military budget approaches $1 trillion, the iron fist, a violent tool used to impose economic world domination under the cloak of “bringing Democracy to other nations.” Since Nixon and Kissinger’s CIA fomented proxy wars in South America, Chile the first victim in 1973, the scourge of Milton Friedman’s Chicago School neoliberal economics has rolled virtually every nation on the planet. It allowed British economic dominance of South Africa even after Apartheid fell. It doomed Poland’s labor movement under eventual president Lech Wałęsa and infiltrated Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Yeltsin appointed Putin and Russian oligarchy has thrived since. Naomi Klein’s remarkable book The Shock Doctrine (PDF here) thoroughly documents these crimes spanning over 50 years.

Capitalism was an unsustainable model on this finite planet. Neoliberal capitalism has been an even more virulent, destructive offspring. Both were made lethal by fossil fuels which have released incomprehensible amounts of heat into the atmosphere largely absorbed by our oceans. Without their absorption, we would already be dead, and they are near complete saturation.

Nature teaches redundancy, diversity and overlapping systems are resilience. Human attempts at domination reduce everything from forests to entire cultures to barren, fragile monocultures. The war on Iran may be our final act of ignorance.

The Iran War is about debt, not just oil

The US national debt is speeding towards $40 trillion. Check out this real time debt counter. For decades our manufacturing base has shrunk as we have been turned into a “service” economy. We create little of tangible value and what has been created is the result of fossil fuels which will become impossible to harvest for shrinking EROI. There is no plan for this guaranteed near eventuality. War is a way of creating a temporary economic “boost” financed by taxpayers who are now mostly insolvent. That boost goes to military industrial complex and the one percent who strangle our lives and promote fatal environmental destruction.

This war is so incredibly stupid it defies belief. For decades, it’s been known the Strait of Hormuz is a critical choke point for 20 percent of world energy supplies. The casualties include the Haber-Bosch process that synthesizes nitrogen fertilizer using natural gas bringing food to our tables. Disrupted LNG supplies halts fertilizer plant production and raises prices to unaffordability for already stressed farmers. Reduced fertilizers now will result in lower, less nutritious crop yields by fall. Shutting down oil and LNG infrastructure due to lack of storage and movement through the Strait of Hormuz will take months to restore, possibly years for facilities like Iran’s South Pars gas field, already damaged by Israel and now threatened by Trump. Even if this war ends tomorrow, the economic shocks will continue.

This is what happens when foul subhumans like Pete Hegseth are elevated to power, idiots driven by sycophancy, ideology and ignorance. This war guaranties increased food insecurity, additional famine, and across sector inflation which could result in a worldwide depression.

But fortunately, we can always eat a gold brick.

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When I was a kid, there was a show from 1969 to 1974 called Love, American Style. Aired on ABC then of Paramount Television, the station is now owned by the Disney Entertainment. I knew the program was inane as little boy and know what passes for entertainment now is worse.

Do you need another zombie or apocalypse movie in your life? How about a “survivor” show where contestants “fight for their lives” surrounded by a camera crew? Intellect, American Style.

The Paramount of today is one of ever shape-shifting variations of oligarch owned media which has undergone radical mega-mergers in recent years. In July 2025, the FCC approved the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance for $8 billion. Skydance media was founded by David Ellison in 2006, the son of 81-year-old tech oligarch Larry Ellison (briefly worth more than Elon Musk) and co-founder of the software giant Oracle. An unwavering backer of Trump and radical conservative candidates (details here from the indispensable OpenSecrets.org), Ellison and Oracle attempted to buy the popular and controversial Beijing-based app TikTok in 2025. Although that bid failed, after tortured machinations by both the Biden and Trump administrations, in January 2026 TikTok was finally sold to three conglomerates: Oracle, Silver Lake (the twelfth largest private equity firm group as of 2024), and Abu Dhabi-based MGX, whose goal is to manage $100 billion in AI-driven investments.

Combined the three hold an 80.1 percent stake on TikTok with China’s ByteDance retaining 19.9 percent ownership. Thanks to the gods. With this sale, our national security interests are secured, and certainly these benevolent new owners won’t keep databases on citizens critical of say waging war for profit or getting annoyed over ICE assaulting, abducting and murdering citizens in the streets or warehouses filled with chain link cages. After all, how else does one populate a booming concentration camp system? Prisons and AI. It’s the new economy, stupid.

In additional interest of an honest media system, Trump wishes for the Ellison’s to own Warner Bros. Discovery as well, which includes HBO and CNN. Ha, ha! Move over Murdoch family! Being but an old white guy of modest means, in Larry and David I trust to entertain and inform me. Who needs enforced antitrust laws slowing a burgeoning fascist state? As Bugs Bunny, err Porky Pig says, “That’s all, folks.”

Apologies to Porky, and thanks to reader Rob for calling out my misattribution of that quote. Let the subscription drops begin.

Love, American style: Chemical warfare on Tehran

On Sunday, March 8, the people of Tehran experienced Hell. Israel directed missile strikes to at least four oil storage facilities near the city of 10 million. In the night fireballs rolled across the sky. As day broke, the sun was blotted out as toxic black oil rain fell from the sky. Witness videos showed flames flowing through neighborhood streets. Residents described a river of fire moving through the city. If this senseless criminal war does not end in nuclear Armageddon, the environmental and health consequences will cost lives for decades to come.

The four major oil facilities targeted were oil depots in Karaj, Shehran, Aghdasiyeh and a refinery in Tehran. The Tehran facility alone has the capacity to process about 225,000 barrels of oil per day.

Make no mistake, these attacks were a war crime — chemical warfare directed against civilians, two breaches of international law in one (as if laws ever govern wars). After witnessing three years of Gaza flattened to moon dust including double tap strikes on hospitals, this is hardly a surprise. A double tap strike as you may know waits for the rescuers to arrive then blows their limbs and heads off, too. That was the method of massacre of the 165 Iranian school girls that preceded this attack, now conclusively shown to be an American hit. And these oil facility attacks by the IDF make America complicit yet again, as Israel’s weapons supplier.

Yes, Iran is attacking Israel as well, Tel Aviv in particular. Little wonder. After three years of Israeli genocide killing possibly 600,000 Palestinians — not the BS sanitized mainstream number of about 72,000 — my sympathy for Zionists is zero. These words come from someone who can easily differentiate between a Jew and a terrorist state, thank you. I’ve had Jewish friends and colleagues. I am white, but not a KKK member. That the people perpetrating genocide now were victims of the same within just two lifetimes of memory can commit these atrocities makes me feel hopeless. Homo sapiens frontal lobes attached to opposable thumbs was an evolutionary mistake.

Who is this war for? The military industrial complex of course, making money on human blood. For Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Palantir these are good times. BTW, Peter Thiel’s Palantir is assembling databases on you US citizens which will be handy in predictive policing. Better to lock you up before you even think of a crime. Remember little people, real crime is for billionaires.

World fallout from the Iran War

It feels insensitive to write about anything but the direct victims of this war or the victims of genocides that take place continuously, world over, but I must because no one will be unaffected by this madness. Any country dependent on shipping or receiving oil through the Strait of Hormuz is directly and immediately affected.

Asia is particularly dependent on oil that passes through Hormuz. Nearly 38 percent of China’s oil alone passes through this choke point. Middle East exporters are equally dependent.

Import oil through the Strait of Hormuz

Export oil through the Strait of Hormuz

These factors alone could push the world economy into a great depression, but unnervingly there’s more. As you likely know, our industrial food supply is entirely dependent on oil derived fertilizers. Lack of them or greatly increased expense will directly impact agricultural yields, food availability and expense dramatically. Sarah Connor just published a thoroughly researched article on the subject, Heads-up: Food crisis incoming. I highly recommended you reading this. I have great confidence in Sarah from years of following her work.

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Heads-up: Food crisis incoming

The Strait of Hormuz links the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. It serves as a critical maritime chokepoint for the global agricultural supply chain. Cutting the supply of oil, natural gas, nitrogen, urea and sulfur sets the world up for a food crisis…

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4 months ago · 69 likes · 9 comments · Sarah Connor

Sarah points out:

The Strait carries 20% of the global Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) trade. Qatar sends 93% of its LNG exports through this waterway; the UAE sends 96% (International Energy Agency). Natural gas provides the feedstock for nitrogen-based fertilizers.

The disruption of the Strait imperils the world’s fertilizer supply. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, Bahrain, and Iran produce a concentrated share of global agricultural inputs. Before the blockade, the Middle East exported 60 million tonnes of fertilizer precursors annually. The waterway supports 30% of global nitrogen fertilizer exports (International Fertilizer Association).

She goes on to say:

Farmers consume nitrogen more than any other nutrient. It drives plant growth and protein synthesis. Urea serves as the primary delivery mechanism.

The Haber-Bosch process synthesizes urea using natural gas to extract hydrogen. This combines with atmospheric nitrogen to produce ammonia, which then reacts with carbon dioxide to yield urea. The Middle East scales this production using its natural gas reserves. Qatar’s exports alone sustain the caloric needs of 43 million people across the US, Brazil, and India (IFPRI).

Staple grain crops like maize, wheat, and rice consume 45% of nitrogenous fertilizer. These crops provide 40% of global human caloric intake. When farmers reduce nitrogen application, yields decline and the global food supply contracts. Severing commodity exports threatens the caloric foundation of the global population.

Sarah’s insights need to be heard and understood. This is the kind of work badly needed in a mainstream oligarch media that won’t tell the truth. We “doomers” work hard and dig deep to find the truth. Real doom is ignorance and blithely ingesting entertainment that brainwashes us and the “news” that lies and tells half-truths at best. Survival is hanging by a thread.

Death perpetrated by these psycho clowns is being performed bomb-by-bomb and starvation-by-starvation in victimized poor nations. I came of age in a country expert in hiding the truth. The truth is no longer hidden as the evil parades openly now. If you think voting blue is going to save you, think again. Remember Biden hugging Bibi and declaring, “I am a Zionist.”

We are on our own now. Personal risk is required. Both our parties have been walking us off the cliff. I have participated in protests. They don’t care. You can write letters. They don’t care. You can sign petitions. They don’t care. You can vote. We see how effective that is.

Our superpower is money. Every missile shot that murders our brothers and sisters was built with our tax dollars. Every ICE prison camp and murder the same. Our money is a giveaway to the ultra-wealthy as healthcare, personal liberties, food safety and environmental protections are eliminated. Our money feeds the cancer destroying the planet and builds the war machine. TAX REVOLT NOW. Already, some are on this path. It’s time to join. They can’t defeat us all if we act in unison.

This war makes this moment our last chance. Please be courageous.

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Trump and fellow “Christian” Nazis blew up this post intended for last Saturday when we learned they were blowing up Iran. In reaction, I wrote Hey! I Know! Let’s Bomb Iran!, dripping with sarcasm. This criminal war isn’t about protecting America, it’s about hegemony over the world and recognition that oil is running out, its own danger without a plan and subject I have touched on numerous times in researching climate change. It’s all distressing, and I appreciate you being here. Should we survive the heightened danger of nuclear conflict, climate change remains our other immediate existential peril. BTW, I have been warned this article is likely too long for email.

We are living through profoundly frightening times. Evil has never walked more openly in our lives than with the genocide of the people of Gaza and the unhinged attack of Iran, threatening to end our brief existence on Earth. The Epstein files are throwing light on the depth of depravity governing our lives. Sadists are in charge. The Gaza genocide continues as do genocides around the world, largely unspoken of, a constant feature of human behavior, not an aberration.

Sigmund Freud called this death drive Thanatos after the mythological Greek god, a behavior characterized by destruction directed against the external world and other organisms. Freud believed that aggression stemming from the death instinct must be repressed for civilization to exist. With our weapons of mass destruction and deadly assault on nature, this has never been more apparent.

In America, we raised that behavior to an art form, born of the genetics of British empire, steeped in the blood of Native Americans and built on the whipped backs of kidnapped African slaves. In high school history our violence was sanitized under terms like Manifest Destiny as we swept west, destroying all in our path. We threw off King George III, but retained English psychopathic violence. The founding fathers who spoke of freedom and equality were slaveholders.

In empires if you don’t participate you perish. As a graphic designer and consumer — even as a relatively modest one in my previous life — I played a role.

300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens arose, gifted an ever slowly evolving Earth perfect for us to thrive. 300,000 years, a muffled whisper of existence floating in the silence of an incomprehensible cosmos both in scale and time. Should we extinguish ourselves, no one will come to ponder our disappearance or care. The nearest star after our sun is Alpha Centauri 4.2 light years away. It will be as if we never existed. Our tiny hopes, fears, love and hate, our edifices of arrogance from the great pyramids to the tallest skyscrapers will disappear into the crust of the planet.

Why can we not see and feel in the roots of our being how precious this is? Why are we driven by the shallowest and falsest of values, ownership? We cannot own the Earth and have no right to own each other.

Over four years, ago when I started writing about climate change it was with the hope that my voice alongside others could raise a chorus and affect the future for the better. I thought surely at this moment given the existential threats we face summing up to no less than extinction, we will change our path forward. Instead, we ghoul our way to a self-made hell, systemic evil enabled by ignorance, both divorced from reality.

Our removal from reality was built on a fever dream, fossil fuels, a finite orgy of hallucinatory energy, soon-to-be gas pump vapors as they rapidly run out. Don’t take my word for it. The evidence lies in experts in the field such as decades experienced oil geologist Art Berman and natural resource “investors” responsible for cold-eyed analysis such as Goehring & Rozencwajg, articles here and here. Industry evidence itself tells the story. Fracking is far more energy-intensive than conventional oil drilling. If conventional oil was available, that’s where the rigs would be.

The Hubbert curve predicted the end of oil. Fracking will end, too. We saw this eventuality and did nothing about it. Tragically, we found enough coal and oil to turn the planet against us before harvesting it is no longer possible.

Never mind Trump killing so-called renewables. That was a “green” lie. Thanks, liberals. Without diesel fuel to power heavy equipment rock and minerals can’t be mined or processed. We have around 50 years of economically viable crude left, and similar constraints exist on previously prosaic materials well-illustrated by a copper shortage exacerbated by the massive build out of AI data centers. These data centers and AI further imperil our future living as human beings and physical safety from egregious energy and water use. I touched on this in Artificial Intelligence is Hot. In addition to copper other critical metals face the same EROI problems as oil, with the easy deposits already exploited.

BTW, whether it’s vast solar fields destroying desert ecosystems or mountain tops blasted flat for wind turbines, these technologies need serious replacement or refurbishment in about 25 years. Solar arrays lose their efficiency and 6000 pound wind turbine blades abrade. Motors wear out. These technologies are in no way green and feed overshoot of which climate change is just one component.

A renewable energy economy was a naive promise by politicians hearing what they want to hear from corporate lobbyists at best or a cynical reelection lie at worst. The public doesn’t want to hear hard truths. We’re headed for a low-energy world akin to pre-industrial society. We’re too late for controversial nuclear to have an impact and fusion continues to be a dangled carrot. Either comes back to the great limiter, oil, particularly diesel enabling their construction.

Currently, oil supply is not a problem (unless one considers climate change to be a problem)! Capitalism is a failed model which I wrote of in Capitalism is Dead. Neoliberal capitalism which I wrote of in The Economy We Need to Save Ourselves through corporate consolidation and military backed violence has created a deluded, grotesquely wealthy elite. They consume the vast majority of the planet’s resources, impoverish the rest of us and are responsible for the deaths of millions from the installation of Pinochet’s Chile to the missile that killed 165 Iranian school girls being buried in a mass grave. They believe our deaths are not only justified, but desirable.

In a world of dwindling resources more for them.

The current oil glut will not last forever. Energy, food and housing costs have soared, so oil demand in the consumer economy has flattened, but ultimately every drop that is economically feasible to extract will be. The bastards in charge love their money and power even more. Enough of us perishing solves a lot of problems in their minds.

The oil glut will not last because the search for energy is forever. The oil left will be used to extract rock and minerals in Greenland fated to melt completely and the Arctic, already tipped into a GHG emitter.

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The Iran War: weapons depletion and the Samson Doctrine

The attack on Iran is an oil war — a resource war — for the resource that governs the world economy even as it simultaneously destroys an inhabitable planet.

Ever since the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s, control of Middle East oil has been an obsession of the CIA and Israel’s equivalent, Mossad. One could argue with justifiable suspicion the creation of Israel in Palestine by the Allies after WWII, primarily the US and Britain, was a strategic decision to exert control over Arab oil, not about biblical justice for Jews dating back thousands of years. Additionally, the Israeli hardliners — Zionists have from day one desired Israeli hegemony over the Middle East.

In America, AIPAC (the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) may be the most powerful lobby in Washington. It’s support or lack thereof in political and financial backing determines elections. The money (corruption) is boggling. AIPAC was formerly known as the American Zionist Public Affairs Committee. It’s telling that the word Zionist was dropped. AIPAC funded politicians can easily be tracked at Track AIPAC. These people must be voted out. Do you hear me Chuck Schumer?

Supposed liberals (mostly a dead species) are beholden to AIPAC, and they’re not pissed that Trump is bombing Iran, they’re pissed that Trump started this war without their permission.

As Chris Hedges points out:

Democratic Party leaders are not opposed to attacking Iran — they are opposed to attacking Iran without being consulted. Two dozen Democrats lept to their feet and applauded every time Trump threatened Iran, or lauded Israel, in his State of the Union address. The Biden administration and Democratic Party leadership made no effort to reinstate Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear agreement. It focused instead on sustaining the genocide in Gaza.

Reminder to these dipshits, they subverted the Constitution when they voted to give George W. Bush unilateral power to declare war, leading to the Iraq debacle. Now they want to be consulted?

Iran ain’t no Iraq. Iraq fired a total of 42 SCUD missiles at Israel during the Gulf War, a war knowingly predicated on non-existent WMDs. UN inspection teams had proven this which included American Scott Ritter who feels we don’t have enough ammo to “win” this illegal attack.

Iran possesses at least 1500 missiles, very likely more, not mere dozens that are far more capable than Iraqi SCUDs from decades ago. However, claims they can hit US mainland soil by the worst of the right-wing are fearmongering lies. Known as Persia until 1935, Iran’s civilization is thousands of years old. When the Iranian Revolution took place resulting in American hostages in 1979, it was the long result of the 1953 CIA installation of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavia, a brutal and corrupt dictator. Glad to do Washington’s bidding, his CIA trained “secret” police force the SAVAK tortured and disappeared citizens as he simultaneously enriched himself. Sounds similar to a certain government I’m thinking of now, doesn’t it?

Since 1979 Iran has endured nearly 50 years of US vilification and harsh economic sanctions while being depicted as a crazy, violent terrorist state. As by far the biggest weapons supplier to the world, 42 percent, could the US be considered a terrorist state? Iran weapons production is barely a blip.

The US is short on weapons

Depleted by years of supplying weapons to Ukraine and genocide enabling weapons to Israel, US and Israeli missiles appear to be in short supply. US weapons systems are highly complex and expensive, designed to deter or go toe-to-toe with China and Russia, not fight a small, agile adversary. Replacing them is slow and wildly expensive. Iran’s weapons by comparison are incredibly cheap. $30,000 drones wiping out $4 million missiles is not sustainable.

Analysts such as Joe Costa, the director of the Forward Defense Program at the Atlantic Council think tank points out the US military is expending a significant amount of resources (major understatement), including Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) and Patriot interceptors, the Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), and ship-launched missiles such as SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6.

Costa says in regard to depletion:

“Timelines are difficult without perfect information, but you’re talking weeks, not months.”

This article from Politico expresses much the same. Weapon shortages put our soldiers at risk in this violation of the Geneva Conventions, a war desired for decades.

Meanwhile, Iran has had success in hitting regional US military bases, inflicting billions of dollars in damage and crippling critical communication systems such as radomes on which modern warfare depends.

According to The Hindu, as of March 2 US bases attacked include Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, Al Dhafra Air Base, United Arab Emirates, Ali Al-Salem Air Base, Kuwait, NSA Bahrain, Muwaffaq Al-Salti Air Base, Jordan, Ain Al-Asad Air Base, Iraq, and Erbil Air Base, Iraq. If you prefer an American source, try this.

In the Age of AI and Corporate Disinformation, separating fact from fiction becomes more difficult every day.

Iranian missiles have also hit Arab oil infrastructure with remarkable accuracy, damaging but not destroying the function of the facilities as a warning to vassals harboring US military bases.

The Strait of Hormuz remains technically open, a critical choke point that accounts for the passage of about 20 percent of global oil supply. However, it is effectively at a standstill as oil shippers and traders have suspended shipments due to safety concerns and prohibitive insurance costs amid Iranian attacks on oil tankers in the region.

Marine insurers are canceling war risk coverage and oil shipping rates are surging. The price of Brent crude has jumped 35 percent in one week, now approaching $100. Qatar’s energy minister believes $150 a barrel is possible. Gulf oil production could shut down in days.

Furthermore, Israel’s Iron Dome defense system appears to be proving ineffective, overwhelmed by the quantity of missiles and decoys with Tel Aviv incurring substantial damage and casualties which brings us to the Samson Option.

The Samson “Option”

From The Times of Israel:

There exists a doctrine within the Israeli strategic playbook that is as feared as it is misunderstood —a doctrine veiled in ambiguity and born from the nation’s darkest fears. Known as the Samson Option, it refers to Israel’s implied readiness to resort to nuclear weapons if it were ever facing the prospect of annihilation.

The Samson Option is a strategy of massive retaliation as a last resort against any country whose military has invaded and or destroyed much of Israel. Netanyahu is an unhinged psychopath as is Trump. Coupled with biblical prophesy predicting the end of the world, these factors can’t be ignored and addled, delusional Trump is being led to believe he is instrumental in ushering the second coming of Christ by fringe evangelists and podcasters. Could the situation be any more insane than this?

I can’t claim to have any crystal ball. From years of research from solid sources I know climate change and overshoot are real. This war in addition to being yet more human tragedy, delays and in fact increases our peril from an overheated planet.

Oil as the governing resource for the world economy has created countless deaths through formal military war and corporate hired mercenary violence, with the Global South the primary victim. This has been remarkably hidden by Western media, and the average citizen has been seduced by unsustainable consumption, actually a form of slavery in which every dollar funds our demise.

Trump calls upon the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow their government. This would be good advice for Americans at this point. Instead, predictably Iranians are banding together against those who are raining death from the sky.

This war should we avoid a nuclear event is a loss for America, signaling the end of its hegemony over the world, a good outcome. It’s also a loss for the world, at the very least economic chaos which will cost lives beyond direct military victims. It’s an insane sideshow as the health of the planet that sustains us fails. We must stop funding this with our stolen tax dollars and voluntary purchases and subscriptions enriching the billionaires. The twelve richest men in the world own more wealth than half of humanity.

This is not what we voted for, liberal or conservative. We voted for jobs, healthcare, a safe environment and a shot at retirement when we’re too old to work, not a criminal war. Get mad. Get brave. Take action.

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Short one this week folks in reaction to war we started in Iran. Longtime readers know my preferred topics revolve around climate change and overshoot, but insanity can’t be overlooked either. After all, our many predicaments come down to behavior, an underlying theme of my writing. Welcome new readers, thrilled to have you.

Damn, I had an entirely different article planned, you know, beating my tired drum about climate change and overshoot, but thanks to Dear Leader my silly subjects which are a HOAX lent me new inspiration. This is what great leaders do. Inspire. Thank Zeus. I mean Trump in whom we trust. I finally saw the light after shining a light up my ass at 3 in the morning for an impromptu Covid check.

True genius is always difficult to grasp for we mere mortals, no?

Anyhow, I snuggled back under the covers with my iPad enraptured by the moment (or should that be in The Rapture of the moment?) by NEW news! Thank Zeus, err Trump, because the news cycle is SO slow these days. It seems America victimized as usual has been tragically forced once again to generously attack another country for not attacking us. It’s so disappointing. Can’t these other stupid countries understand the sacrifice we make in bombing them to keep them safe? Fortunately, a country that does appreciate our efforts, sporty sidekick Israel and newly minted Board of Peace shining star Bibi joined in, quickly pointing out their right to defend themselves from imaginary attacks and to boink and disappear little girls at will.

They say idle hands are the devil’s workshop. This is evidence. The Epstein files show us bombing Iran is the effort of pedophiles to improve. Better to keep those roaming hands busy pushing missile buttons!

So far, our fight for justice has exploded with the moral clarity only Christian-Nazi righteousness can impart in Tehran, Isfahan, Qom, Karaj, and Kermanshah. This is necessary because the nuclear facilities which weren’t producing imaginary bombs that we wiped out months ago weren’t actually wiped out due to a clerical error. Fortunately, ICE investigation revealed this person was of suspicious origin, being brown and the mother of three and ILLEGALLY eating our American food imported from Chile, Mexico and Guatemala. She and her children now live (or possibly not), in a country of unspecified destination.

This is good because only through violent oppression can you have freedom. Until you have a friend or family member incarcerated, tortured or murdered you will never understand how good you have it. When will you people learn this? I’m so exhausted from educating you.

Now, the nattering nabobs of negativism will start pointing out stupid things like there was no UN security vote, no congressional approval, no imminent attack from Iran and no evidence of nuclear weapons. Some will even say we broke the Geneva Conventions again, but dammit, we Americans basically wrote those “conventions” so we can do whatever the fuck we please with them. I mean, look at where conventional thinking got us, on the verge of nuclear war and the second coming of Hitler. Speaking of which, I will put my money on the very stable genius with bigly ideas. Especially my bitcoin money.

Iran’s government has responded without remotely justifiable provocation by lobbing hypersonic missiles at multiple, totally non-threatening military bases in the region. Don’t they know we’re peacekeepers? Obviously, we must pound that point home one dead Iranian human being at a time or perhaps (preferably) apartment buildings full of them, because suffering under a totalitarian regime isn’t enough. And they’re brown and have a weird non-Neo Nazi religion. Sure, they held the beacon of enlightenment and advanced science through the Dark Ages of Europe. Now we can return the favor by lighting up their skies bomb after bomb, after bomb.

US Middle East military bases

All this after careful negotiations with Steve Witkoff and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. It used to take a team of experienced diplomats and military professionals to not start a war we started. Now, with the brilliance of Trump we can dispense with those silly teams to fuel the Qatar jumbo jet he was gifted or not rebuild the destroyed East Wing of the White House. Well, maybe after the bomb shelters that were under it are reinforced. Better hurry on that project Dear Leader!

And never mind China and Russia which supply weapons to Iran. I’m certain they won’t conclude America is berserk and supply dirty bombs — tactical nukes as we nobly advance fake Democracy that makes their interests in the Middle East so much more secure! BTW, tactical nuclear warheads have yields up to the tens of kilotons, or potentially hundreds, several times that of the weapons used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How cool is that?

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In April 2007, our formerly Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse gases are air pollutants in Massachusetts v. EPA covered by the Clean Air Act of 1970. This key ruling led to Lisa P. Jackson the head administrator of the EPA in 2009 issuing the “Endangerment Finding” which identified six greenhouse gases that “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.” The finding became foundational to all EPA regulation of greenhouse gases since, ensuring the agency could not legally ignore climate change or eliminate greenhouse gas regulations. You know, protect us as the name implies.

Ms. Jackson attended Tulane University on scholarship (ironically sponsored by Shell Oil, I guess that investment backfired on the shareholders, tears) and was named a National Merit Scholar. At Tulane she was inspired to pursue engineering graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering in 1983. She earned a Master’s degree in the same from Princeton in 1986.

To her discredit and no doubt profound disappointment, Lisa did not attend Trump University. Well, we do the best with the opportunities we’re given. More tears.

Her mother was living in New Orleans in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina submerged 80 percent of the city changing its culture forever, so Ms. Jackson knew personally of the permanent individual and collective price extreme storms exact. Nearly 1400 people perished and caskets floated into the Gulf of America. I mean the Gulf of Trump. The storm wrought $125 billion in damage. Adjusted for inflation that figure today would be $320 billion.

Below is a graph of US climate catastrophes exceeding a billion dollars through 2023. Climate change carnage has only increased since. Each of the last three years broke records. We’re crossing permanent thresholds unless GHG emissions are reduced as Trump removes safeguards that were already inadequate.

1980-2023 billion dollar climate disasters exploding

The disappearing Louisiana coastline

In 2005 far fewer had drawn the connection between fossil fuels and climate change even though Big Oil knew as early as 1953. Twenty years later the link is undeniable. The science is proven and the number and scale of tragedies growing yearly. 2023 was announced to be the hottest ever. Then 2024 was given that credit. Not to be outdone, 2025 was hotter still.

Yet, the dumbest Americans our society produces elected a serial liar. Again. The greatest flimflam man ever claims climate change is a hoax. Never mind the hundreds, if not thousands of studies and repeated warnings from the science community. Never mind Hurricane Helene destroying Asheville, NC, formerly considered safely inland, killing hundreds. Never mind fires currently torching 300,000 acres in Oklahoma weeks ahead of fire season or the 35 consecutive days of rain currently submerging southern France. Nope, we elected the poster boy of ignorance and inspiration of racists — forever part of the American fabric — that used to scurry into dark crevices when the lights were turned on.

I once stated the only difference between a sociopath and psychopath is opportunity. With the Epstein files we see the world is not run by mere sociopaths.

And let me just say, fuck the Democrats, too. They are equally complicit in bringing the world to the brink. Liberal, conservative, it doesn’t matter. Both parties march in lockstep when it comes to neoliberal capitalism and an obscene military budget used to enforce and grow that capitalism with violence and denial of reality of the limits of the planet.

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Keeping us fighting each other is always the plan of oligarchy and there’s no doubt of the ruthlessness of billionaires, high-end millionaires and their political lackeys who don’t think twice about sacrificing the average American, starving African child or obviously, Palestinian baby buried in the rubble. If you’re not in the pedophile club, consider yourself fair game. And when it comes to providing the tools to kill each other, America is number one.

Let’s circle back to the elimination of the endangerment finding, another facet in The Administration of Death.

Ramifications of undermining the endangerment finding

Trump and former Congressman now EPA head Lee Zeldin gleefully announced overturning the endangerment finding at a press conference on February 12. They claim $1.3 trillion dollars in savings for the consumer by effectively freeing polluters to do what they please. This decision will lead to billions of extra tons of greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades and cause conservatively tens to hundreds of thousands of otherwise preventable deaths. For the first time in 17 years, the EPA will no longer consider greenhouse gases a threat to public health and welfare. It’s not a smoking gun, but Lee Zeldin’s has received $269,608 from the oil and gas industry in his career. Just saying.

If you want a hotter smoking gun, Deviant Donald openly solicited pay-to-play as he campaigned, promising windfall profits to the fossil fuel industry by undermining environmental regulations if they raised a billion dollars for his war chest. Apparently, $760 billion of US taxpayer subsidies annually and $7 trillion world-wide including “externalities” (i.e. costs of floods, fires and oil spills) is insufficient for companies earning tens of billions in profits every year. Now he and Lee are delivering.

Just a little over a month ago, Zeldin announced that he was canceling more than 400 “DEI and Environmental Justice grants” totaling $1.7 billion under the guise of “saving taxpayers money.” Considering the climate disaster numbers from 2023 to 2025 and the inevitable increase in disasters from removing all guardrails, the math doesn’t add up. Perhaps Lee attended Trump University.

The EPA has also stopped collecting emissions data from polluters. Zeldin described the reporting program as “burdensome.”

According to Zeldin:

“Working hand-in-hand with DOGE to rein [sic] in wasteful federal spending, EPA has saved more than $2 billion in taxpayer money. It is our commitment at EPA to be exceptional stewards of tax dollars.”

Uh huh. Let’s all enjoy our cancer if we’re not flooded or burned out of our homes and jobs. It’s all good. After all, rebuilding from such tragedies count as GDP.

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A personal experience of idiots and late stage capitalism

Back in 2020, coming off a brain tumor in which insurance and medical incompetence nearly killed me, I grabbed a part-time job in a liquor store. My profession of graphic design had long been driven down to “why bother” by the internet, crowdsourcing and computerization. I did better for longer than most designers through some fortuitous connections, but eventually threw in the towel. Who can compete with a designer in Bangladesh selling corporate identity packages for 25 bucks?

The store was nice, in a well-to-do area, but what was most appealing were the solo shifts. I got to be boss, and it was a low-key job in which I could read a book or carry on text conversations with friends. The job was in a suburb of Albany, NY, and Andrew “the groper” Cuomo was governor. He had just announced Covid masking requirements when three laughing, unmasked, oblivious people walked in at about 9:10 in the morning.

This was irksome because before Trump and Covid, I definitely didn't recommend drinking before at least 10AM!

The three of them were having a merry old time, but I was irritated. So six steps in I asked, “Where are your masks?”

I asked this in sincere concern for their health of course, idiots are people, too.

They eruditely pointed out masking requirements started on Saturday, and it was only Thursday! This was true, but really not caring about selling them a bottle of Bacardi or whatever, I retorted, “Yeah, well I don’t feel like dying on a Thursday.” Duh. I sent them out requiring masks if they cared to return. They didn’t. Was this poor customer service? Naturally, I feel guilty to this day.

The owner was a guy who was rarely around, spending as much time as possible in Key West. Covid made the store very popular. He told me sales were up 25 percent while he paid me jack. Good capitalism, that!

An unpleasant weight lifter who forgot to work his skinny little legs, I wonder if he had any clue his favorite place in the world is fated to go underwater? Nah. BTW, I’m not insulting weight lifters, just this particular one.

On those rare days he was around his demeanor was like a little Hitler. Little Hitlers are everywhere, enjoying huge signing bonuses with ICE. The recruitment ads are on YouTube as is a lot of AI generated garbage.

It’s bite the bullet now. Or take the bullet later. We must fight in every way possible.

Thank you for being here.

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Welcome new readers. I have been at this endeavor over four years now. My original subject was climate change to educate myself and share as our oligarch owned media largely peddles capitalist propaganda. Capitalism is destroying an inhabitable planet. My thousands of hours of research encompasses overshoot, so-called renewable energy and the impending end of the Age of Oil. I have also been forced to address the Gaza genocide and AI and fascism, as ICE goons invade our cities and attempt to cow us into submission. All of these issues are deeply related and reflect profound behavioral problems in Homo Sapiens leveraged to dehumanizing extinction level gravity by uncontrolled technology.

The importance of our rainforests

Most of us have heard the term “Lungs of the Earth,” a myth referring to the Amazon Rainforest. This myth attributes rainforests as providing 20 percent of the oxygen on the planet. The truth is the local animals and microscopic life in rainforests consume most of that oxygen. Net production of oxygen by rainforests (or any forests) is close to zero. The oceans provide the majority of the air we breathe, around 50 percent dependent on humble phytoplankton and photosynthesis. However, rainforests DO sequester a massive 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide, critical to mitigating human caused global warming. As reference, in 2022 we deluded apes emitted 40 billion tons of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

In the last century, oceans have absorbed about 90 percent of our excess energy from burning fossil fuels resulting in its bastard offspring heat, and roughly 30 percent of carbon dioxide, now reaching full saturation levels, acidifying and killing coral reefs. These ancient ecosystems, critical to biodiversity of the oceans, provide protein to 20 percent of the human population and comprise an annual $3 trillion economy, the fourth largest in the world as measured by the sickly yardstick of GDP foisted on us by ignorant economists and dependent on planet rape.

Would you rather eat a fish or a gold bar?

Remember, matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is transformed, as per the Law of the Conservation of Mass, established in the 18th century. This heat we have produced is equivalent to a mind-bending 25 billion Hiroshima size nuclear bombs going off continuously for the last 50 years. Between 1971 and 2020, it’s estimated that 380 zettajoules of energy has been trapped in our oceans. Do billionaire oligarchs understand these basic physics lessons? If they don’t, they are fools and if they do, they are psychopaths.

Let’s attempt to write that Hiroshima number for good effect. The energy of a joule is one watt per second. Written in mere joules, 380 zettajoules, it looks like this:

Yeah, I can’t absorb that number either and neither can the oceans. This I do know. If not for the oceans absorbing our excess, greed-driven, Industrial Revolution heat, we would all be dead now or land surface air temperatures would have long ago become uninhabitable. As unabated ocean warming continues, this heat sink will no longer protect us.

Overshoot driving billionaires

There are two kinds of overshoot, the mindless consumption that has persuaded us material possessions are happiness and massive overpopulation only made possible by fossil fuels. The former is a clever form of enslavement and the latter a subject of justified profound concern as it results in human crime at scale. Who decides who lives and who dies? Who gets to play God?

The horrifying genocide of the Palestinian people is just one example. Sad truth, genocide is a current and historic routine feature of Homo sapiens behavior and the source of military industrial complex profits.

The Levantine Basin holds around 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas — that just happens to be in the Mediterranean off the shores of Gaza — as EROI on oil approaches its end. While the racist philosophy of Zionism factors hugely, diminishing energy resources tell a story as well.

Somehow, I’ve barely managed to address rainforests so far. Let’s rectify that. This is the challenge of writing because as in nature, everything human is also connected. The Amazon Rainforest, seriously jeopardized, is a key biological system critical to our survival.

Let’s honor Jeff Bezos and his disgustingly named Amazon empire. Jeffrey just laid waste to his environmental reporting staff at the Washington Post. Please boycott all things Bezos, including Whole Foods.

Rainforest facts

Rainforests can be found on every continent except Antarctica, both temperate and tropical. They comprise just two to six percent of the Earth’s surface. The lack of consensus on this figure surprised me given satellite proliferation, but it is agreed by multiple sources tropical rainforests provide ecosystems for over 50 percent of all known animal and plant species. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) puts rainforest coverage of the Earth at 6 percent, but Mongabay another non-profit reporting on environmental destruction estimates 3.6 percent.

The Amazon accounts for more than half of Earth’s remaining tropical forests.

Although rainforest coverage as a percentage of the planet’s land mass is low, they play an outsized role in moderating climate and maintaining an inhabitable world for human beings and myriad life that evolved with us. The Holocene epoch, a period of coolness on our ever-changing planet provided favorable conditions. As mentioned, rainforests store 250 billion tons of CO₂ — both in their leaf canopies and floor peat. Additionally, like coral reefs they provide habitats for the greatest biodiversity of any terrestrial ecosystem.

However, their ability to continue absorbing carbon dioxide at this level indefinitely is under dire threat as the forests are destroyed for monoculture plantations, animal grazing (particularly cows for beef) and mining projects that cause vast amounts of greenhouse gases to be released.

A list of the ten largest rainforests can be found here.

Refugia: an explanation of rainforest diversity

Details of the astonishing biodiversity of tropical rainforests is a subject of debate, However, the core evidence is agreed upon. Nowhere on terrestrial Earth is there a greater density of unique species. The refugia hypothesis offers the explanation.

The last Ice Age, spanned a period around 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago.

The last Glacial Maximum occurred a scant 23,000 and 19,000 years ago or perhaps 25,000 to 18,000 years ago (older estimate), dated through well-established radiocarbon techniques pioneered in the 1940s, AKA carbon-14.

During this period ice sheets advanced enormously, dropping ocean levels hundreds of meters, creating a much colder, drier climate. As the ice advanced, although it didn’t reach the tropics, rainforests were profoundly affected. Formerly expansive, warm, moist ecosystems were separated by savannas and woodlands in response to the cooler climate. Remaining pockets of rainforest harbored life that evolved on separate evolutionary paths for thousands of years. As the Pleistocene gave way to the Holocene savannas and woodlands faded reuniting the fragmented rainforests.

I once read years ago that those pockets of humid rainforest that persevered could be as small as five square miles. For this reason, every hectare burned likely destroys countless undiscovered plant and animal species. Aside from the moral questions, are practical ones. 25 percent of the pharmaceuticals we depend on come from rainforests including some of the most mundane such as blood pressure medications.

The current state of the Amazon

The Amazon has been under withering assault in recent years during the feeding frenzy of President Jair Bolsonaro. A military product, he rolled back environmental and indigenous protections in an attempt to fix Brazil’s struggling economy. This boosted multinational corporate profits, punished the poor and resulted in record Amazon destruction. In 2022, Brazilian forest loss accounted for a boggling 43 percent of global deforestation.

In 2023, Lula da Silva came to power in part by vowing to reverse the carnage at COP30. He pledged to end deforestation in the Amazon by 2030. Remarkably, it appears he’s on the right track. According to this article, in 2023 the rainforest shrank 50 percent less than in 2022. However, we must remember this is merely a reduction in the rate of destruction and the Amazon could be tipped by 2100. Given that climate thresholds are being broken faster than modeling has predicted, I have to wonder if 2100 is a conservative assessment.

Act, you have power

These are the most challenging times many of us have ever seen. It’s easy to become overwhelmed and feel powerless. Trump’s re-election drained me, but I’m back on the horse. We have tools, particularly economic power. The vampires destroying the planet require our money that they literally convert into blood money. With organized strikes, forever boycotts and courageous protests, we can deprive the depraved of their lifeblood. The Minnesota protests are the blueprint. We need to honor Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Organize at the local level, and watch it grow. Channel your anger, let it empower you and inspire others.

Move your money to credit unions, away from fossil fuel banks. They finance death. Cancel culture? Cancel Jeff Bezos. Don’t buy ANYTHING you don’t absolutely need. Cut out beef that’s driving deforestation of the rainforests. Fast food is poison. Get pissed about it. Don’t pay taxes. Remember your history. NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION. Our tax money is killing babies in Gaza and used to abduct Americans off our streets. It’s beyond time to draw the line.

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