image by AI; my own prompt
Each month I’m finding it harder and harder to distinguish news and articles about “politics and economics as usual” from news and articles about collapse. I guess that means collapse — economic, political, ecological and all the rest of our complex civilization systems — is now well and truly underway. When I started writing about this 23 years ago, it was still considered a lunatic fringe theory. Sixty+ years since Silent Spring. Fifty+ since The Limits to Growth.
The writing is still on the wall. But now the wall is crumbling.
COLLAPSE WATCH
Atmospheric CO2 continues to accelerate; data to March 2026 from Scripps/NOAA
Time to ration hydrocarbons: Tim Watkins says it’s time to start rationing energy — for good, in both senses of the word. Not going to happen, of course, and so as affordable energy runs out, it’s going to get much harder much faster. And he explains why it’s going to hit Europe next.
“H. sapiens has arguably been socially and ecologically dysfunctional since the emergence of large civilizations 6000 years ago”: Bill Rees explains why all the meetings and promises and hand-wringing in the world will not prevent civilization’s accelerating collapse.
Prepare to do without your pharmaceuticals; they all depend on abundant cheap oil: Erik Michaels explains how the Trump/Netanyahu war on Iran will cripple the global economy irreparably, in seven ghastly stages.
“Prepare for bedlam.”: David Wallace-Wells explains how the super El Niño forecast for later this year will further wreck the planet — weather patterns, crops losses, droughts, famines, pandemics, massive forest fire losses, flooding — but not produce any coordinated action to address climate collapse.
The fragile global economy shudders: Steven Newbury on why the Iran War has created the perfect storm of economic catastrophe, all due to our dependence on the uninterrupted, efficient delivery of inexpensive oil products. And he explains why all the financial/technological wizardry in the world won’t change the fact we’re crashing into the physical, material limits of what sustains our entire civilization.
Jet fuel costs are the canary in the mineshaft: Massive cancellations, whole airlines shutting down — this is how it starts.
LIVING BETTER
Little did I know when I wrote my book Finding the Sweet Spot in 2008, that the Venn diagram I included to describe “the work you’re meant to do” (top centre on this chart) would end up at the ‘centre’ of a controversy over the misattribution of this concept as having something to do with the age-old Japanese practice of Ikigai. These Venn diagrams have NOTHING to do with Ikigai. Chart by Nicholas Kemp. And his explanation of the misappropriation of the term. (More on what Ikigai actually is.)
The Dread Economy: Interesting ‘psychoanalysis’ of a civilization culture that survives by terrorizing us all (Epstein Class excepted) with constant scarcity, precarity, helplessness, oppression, and hopelessness. Great diagnosis; weak, unrealistic prescription for action IMO. Thanks to David Parkinson for the link.
POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL
the broken economic system that has enabled the Epstein Class to emerge, thrive, and create such massive cruelty, suffering and lawlessness; from Barry Ferns’ video series
Two oppressive right-wing regimes fighting each other: Yanis Varoufakis eloquently explains why the left cannot cheer for either ‘side’ in the Iran war. Both ‘sides’ are run by anti-democratic ideological fundamentalists that are destroying their countries and immiserating their citizens.
Why a ‘negotiated settlement’ of the Iran War is impossible: Aurélien explains why “the obsession of the US and Israel with the destruction of Iran, and the Iranian desire to preserve itself and to come to dominate the region, can simply never be reconciled, even by the most brilliant negotiators in history”.
Imperialism, Militarism & Fascism: Short takes:
- The “market” fails to understand that there is no ‘financial’ or ‘political’ solution to a catastrophic and terminal shortage of cheap available energy.
- Even the pathetic NYT has finally been forced to admit that, in a veritable coup, Israel has strong-armed the US into multiple unwanted and unsupportable genocides and wars in the Middle East.
- In the first weeks of the Iran War, the US and Israel targeted 317 civilian medical facilities in Iran, per the humanitarian Red Crescent. So much for ‘liberation’.
- Biden had plans in place to bomb Iran if he was reelected. So much for ‘democracy’.
- Extrajudicial murders by bombing of civilian ships in the Global South ordered by Trump and Hegseth have already killed 185 people.
- How the West’s well-entrenched myths about Israel and its politics enabled the current genocides and wars. A good summary of how this has been sustained for decades.
- The US and Western governments’ failing to abide by their own laws and constitutions, described as a backdrop to and enabler of Israel’s ethnic cleansing slaughter in the Palestinian West Bank.
- Israel is forcing Palestinians in East Jerusalem to destroy their own homes in order to build a biblical theme park.
- The US Supreme Court’s recent legalization of unrestricted gerrymandering and attempts to ban abortion pills are making even its Chief Justice uncomfortable.
- How the collapse of Starmer’s corrupted Labour party in the UK is paving the way for government by the fascist, racist Reform party.
- Latvian defence minister resigns after Ukrainian drones aimed at Russian oil targets are diverted to Latvian oil tanks. A bizarre story.
- Fighting our wars is for thee, not for me: Now that Netanyahu has been forced by depleting ranks to require ultra-orthodox sects to fight in his ghastly wars, the Israeli war criminal’s ultra-orthodox allies are threatening to bring down the government.
Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:
- As a result of the above-noted NYT exposé on Israel’s control over the US administrations of both Tweedle parties, Israel has, of course, accused the stridently pro-Zionist NYT of antisemitism. How does it feel, NYT?
- A new exhaustive RAND Corporation study concludes that Russia has presented and currently presents almost no threat whatsoever to any US/NATO interests. If only we had a similarly sober assessment of the ‘threat’ from China.
- Australia’s “antisemitism envoy” unleashes campaign to terrorize and silence citizens daring to criticize Israel and its genocides.
- The US government’s cover-up of its claim that Assad was using chemical weapons against citizens to justify bombing Syria (and hence enabling its takeover by ISIS), has been blown now that weapons inspectors revealed (and courts agreed) that their testimony (that no chemical weapons were used) had been suppressed.
Corpocracy, Enshittification, and Unregulated Capitalism: Short takes:
- How much is it worth to you?: Good summary by Cory of all the issues where Trump and his cronies have to choose between supporting corporate interests and supporting the needs of citizens. Guess which side they always choose?
- How corporations using ‘artificial intelligence’ have usurped the role of government for centuries, and how this corporate AI actually makes governments’ decisions.
- Bayer is stiffing Roundup victims and strong-arming governments to give it immunity from prosecution for its products’ harms.
Power Abuse (the Patriciate): Short takes:
- How Starmer, Mandelson and their Epstein Class buddies torpedoed and character-assassinated Jeremy Corbyn.
- How the Epstein Class sold us the paradigm that we’re incompetent to self-govern or self-manage, so we should let them ‘lead’ us.
- Dreaming, hopelessly, of a second #MeToo movement emerging from the Epstein revelations
- The dangers of homophily: How the Epstein Class belittle expertise from ‘the wrong schools’ and come to believe in their own infallibility. And how power and wealth destroy your capacity to understand how life works for everyone else.
Dementia Watch: Short takes:
- Trump badmouths and shrieks at four former staunch supporters who dared criticize ‘his’ Iran War via speeches and deranged rantings on social media.
- Patrick Lawrence: “The Trumpster’s mental instability—indeed, his relationship with reality—is much remarked upon these days. Threatening to destroy one of humanity’s oldest civilizations, blowing his cool so badly his adjutants recently locked him out of the Situation Room so they could coherently discuss… the Situation, “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards,” and so on: It reaches the point there is a better-than-even chance America’s rotund leader will not make it to the end of his term. And Sara Jacobs [in hearings with Pete Hegseth questioning Trump’s mental competence] just pushed open the door, slightly ajar at this early moment, to 25th Amendment proceedings.”
Department of Health Prevention: Short takes:
- The US Supreme Court has deferred, first for a week and now for three more days, a lower court’s ban on the telemedicine prescription of mifepristone, the most commonly used self-abortion drug.
- And a deep dive into how self-administered abortion pills actually work.
- How gun violence is the number one health risk facing young Americans today.
- JFK Jr’s newest cure-all: peptides; what they are and aren’t good for.
FUN AND INSPIRATION
image by the brilliant Tom Gauld, via the memebrary
More provocative thoughts from economist Barry Ferns:
• Are corporations and opportunists deliberately and inflaming misogyny for profit?
• How dopamine doesn’t just make us happy, it signals lots of other things.
Things you should not ask AI to do: How Claude AI has a mistaken sense of its own judgement and skill.
Our bodies make the decisions: Our brains just rationalize what happened after the fact and claim it was ‘their’ (our) decision.
The Strait of Hormuz helpline: Brilliant puppet spoof of Iran War incompetence in the ‘Spitting Image’ tradition. Thanks to Siyavash Abdolrahimi for the link.
The pro-Iran LEGO videos: The videos are produced by an independent group called Explosive Media that is sympathetic to but not affiliated with the Iranian government. Google YouTube has censored and banned them, but they’re available on uncensored media. And LEGO corporation is staying out of the debate.
The obfuscation of ‘complexity’: Mark Eddleston explains how consultants and corporations invested in simplistic, ineffectual and discredited models of how to do things, have now started using ‘complexity theory’, incorrectly, to excuse their models’ failures and to rebrand them.
Photographic memory is a myth: The process of ‘remembering’ is complex, inexact, subject to manipulation (by our own prior beliefs, and by others), and fraught with error.
Richard Dawkins falls in love with a chatbot: The misogynist self-aggrandizing ‘new atheist’ confesses his attraction to his clearly ‘conscious’ Claude bot, which he calls Claudia. OK.
Getting attention to get good things done: What do Artemis, the Onion’s purchase of InfoWars, and Zohran Mamdani have in common? Hank Green explains.
What happens when you hire 5 “music critics” who know nothing about music: Later on in this post I link to a shoddy, disgraceful ‘interview’ the NYT had with Tucker Carlson. You want to see how far this crappy newspaper has fallen into absolute incompetence, replacing intelligent, skilled, knowledgeable analysis with raw, uninformed, sloppy ‘opinion’, watch Rick Beato, who knows a thing or two about music, assess the NYT’s supposed “music critics” embarrassing list of “greatest songwriters”.
THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH
“Pie Chart Pyramid” – originally by Imgur poster FinalBackwardsGlance
From Theodore Roosevelt in a 1909 speech:
We have become great in a material sense because of the lavish use of our resources, and we have just reason to be proud of our growth. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil and the gas are exhausted, when the soils shall have been still further impoverished and washed into streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields, and obstructing navigation.
From Pope Leo XIV in a 2026 speech:
When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.
From Donald Trump on April 20th: “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran.”
From US State Department on April 21st: “The United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally.”
From Israel’s Defence Minister on April 23rd: Israel is “awaiting a green light from the United States, first and foremost to complete the elimination of the Khamenei dynasty, the initiator of the extermination plan against Israel, and the successors of the successors of the leadership of the Iranian terror regime, and in addition to return Iran to the age of darkness and stone by blowing up central energy and electricity facilities and crushing national economic infrastructure.” [thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for the quotes]
From Patrick Lawrence, on America’s lost soul:
There are many ways to characterize America in the early 21st century, and very high among them is its incoherence—its lapsed faith in itself and more or less everything it once purported to stand for, its profound post–September 11 anxieties, its incessant abuses of its citizens and its consequent disunity and disorder, its market fundamentalism and its worship of the profit god, its obsession with consumption and appearances, its indifference to its own public space—and what I call international public space—its lawlessness, its rampant egotism and narcissism, its preoccupation with frivolous “entertainment,” its studied ignorance of others, and on and on and on.
From Tucker Carlson in a disgraceful, haranguing, yellow-journalism (failed) attempt at a hatchet-and-smear job on him by the ever-more-horrific NYT: [I recommend reading the full transcript; it may shake your thinking about both Tucker Carlson and the NYT]
First of all, [Trump’s attacks on Venezuela and Cuba are] a display of male power: Send the bombs in to kill the bad people. But moreover you get to feel like I did something, and that’s important and I get it. And this is… a process that all presidents tend to go through. And so Venezuela, Cuba, I object to both of those efforts very strongly, but neither one, in my view, risks the future of the United States in the way that the Iran war now does. So it’s a big deal. But because it is, by the way, a contiguous neighbor of Iraq, and because Trump spent years talking about what a terrible idea the Iraq invasion was — defined his candidacy in 2016 on that point — it’s hard for me to believe that he just organically reached this place at the end of February, like, Oh, I think it’s a good idea. He did not think it was a good idea. Shutting down a fifth of the world’s oil and gas? Of all people, Trump knows that’s bad…
[Trump is being held hostage by] Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many advocates in the United States. And we know that not simply because Trump started the war on Feb. 28, but because he couldn’t get out of it. He declares we’re having a cease-fire. He says, We’re having a cease-fire and we’re having these talks and they’re going great, and we are going to open the strait. And Iran says, Yeah, one of our conditions is Israel’s got to pull back from southern Lebanon. You can’t use the Iran war as a pretext for stealing more land from a sovereign country that’s not your country.
And it’s not just Iran who felt that way. I think the rest of the world is like, What are you doing? I thought we were fighting the great existential threat, Iran. And now you’re taking the opportunity to take Lebanon’s shore, the Litani River, and bombing downtown Beirut. What is this? Anyway, this was all very well known. And within hours of Trump announcing this, Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts killing civilians in Lebanon. Now, what was the point of that? Not to secure the Israeli homeland. The point of it was to end any talk of a negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.
From Cory Doctorow on the anti-democratic, anti-women and anti-worker “conservative project” :
This is the method of the entire conservative project. As Dan Savage says: the thing that unites conservative assaults on voting, birth control, abortion and no-fault divorce is the stripping away of choice. Conservatives are trying to create a world populated by husbands you can’t divorce, pregnancies you can’t prevent or terminate, and politicians you can’t vote out of office. Add to that Trump’s assault on the National Labor Relations Board, his reversal of the FTC’s ban on noncompetes, and his protection of “TRAP” agreements that force employees to pay thousands of dollars if they quit their jobs, and you get “jobs you can’t quit”…
“Binding arbitration” is a widely used contractual term that forces you to surrender your right to sue a company that wrongs you. Instead of suing, binding arbitration forces you to take your case to an “arbitrator”; that is, a lawyer who is paid by the company that cheated you or maimed you or killed your loved one. The arbitrator decides whether their client is guilty, and, if so, how much that client owes you. The entire process is confidential and it is non-precedential, meaning that if a company rips off millions of people in the same way, each of them has to arbitrate their claims separately, and people who are successful can’t share their tactical notes with the people who are next in line to plead for justice.
That makes binding arbitration another key weapon in the conservative movement’s war on choice: not just jobs you can’t quit and politicians you can’t vote out of office, but also companies you can’t sue. Binding arbitration is a creation of the Federalist Society and their champion Antonin Scalia, who authored a series of Supreme Court dissents and (ultimately) decisions that opened the door for binding arbitration everywhere.
From Allie Hoback in Poetry Northwest:
Sonnet Full of Endings
The magic wasn’t real and the girl is dead.
Louise drives the car over the edge of the
Grand Canyon. Whatever it was I said, I wish
it was Never talk to me again. Howie wins
and gets his head blown off. The hero dies,
the kingdom falls, the mystery remains
unsolved. The world fries and roaches reign.
Hands search for each other in the darkness.
The radiator gurgles out its heat. Romeo
drinks the poison and Juliet, well, you know.
The gang says goodbye and go their separate
ways. There were talks of a sequel. Shame. I
go West because what else is there to do. I
come back because what else is there to do.
