r/collapse

I mentioned to a friend we're nearing the end of the age of abundance in human civilization. To my surprise he was like what age of abundance, and proceeded to go on about all the people who lack enough. My response was people who lack resources or are poor are not due to insufficient resources, but lack of access and unequal distribution. This is the peak of resource availability, we have more food, energy, material goods than any point in human history. Yet there are people who still go without.

So, if you think it's bad now, wait until there's not enough. Then things will really get ugly. We can't share when there's more than enough to go around, how do you think people will react when there isn't? Oh wait, we saw that with covid where people were fighting in grocery stores.

We may start to see the age of scarcity begin this summer across the west due to Iran and the subsequent impacts from the war. Buckle up!

One could argue that the US debt is a tragedy of the commons scenario, where the commons are the American people, and a variety of powerful interest groups are exploiting that common "resource" to a point that the system is going to collapse.

And I think there is some truth to that for sure.

But I think the US is mostly being pushed into bankruptcy by deliberate intent.

There are 3 major reasons that Bezos and other oligarchs/kleptocrats are trying to bankrupt the US federal government, even though they benefit from some degree of social and financial stability. (There are other major interest groups, including foreign adversaries and transnational criminal organizations, "lobbying" to accomplish the same thing):

1 - Putting the government heavily into debt maximizes the public's interest payments, to themselves.

Instead of taxing our ruling oligarchs/kleptocrats, we're paying them massive amounts of interest on all the wealth they've stolen and hoarded.

It's one of the dumbest way to finance government spending, by borrowing from, stealing from, and eating the future, but our ruling billionaires/oligarchs/kleptocrats profit from it, so that's what happens.

2 - Bankrupting the federal government creates a power vacuum, which the oligarchs/kleptocrats fill with their own privatization schemes.

It's similar to how oligarchs/kleptocrats were able to consolidate wealth and power during and after the fall of the USSR, and turn Russia into a pure oligarchy/kleptocracy with pseudo-democratic characteristics.

3 - Putting the general public (by way of the government) into massive debt helps them and their puppets argue for cuts to public infrastructure and social services, and for their privatization schemes, which in turn maximizes the public's exploitability, and accordingly their own profits and rents.

At the end of the day, how do you effectively subjugate hundreds of millions of people?

By putting them in debt to you, cutting off their options, and by making them pay massive amounts of interest to you on all the wealth you've hoarded and stolen!

As was the case during and after the New Deal era of broad-based prosperity, we should have been taxing our ruling oligarchs/plutocrats/kleptocrats to keep them from consolidating so much wealth and power that they're able to collapse, bankrupt, and subjugate entire nation-states for their own obscene power and profits.

But that cat's out of the bag now!

People need to understand - billionaires are incompatible with functional governments, human civilization, and legitimate democracies, and they should not exist!

Abolish billionaires before they abolish democracy!

"Unhappy events abroad have retaught us two simple truths about the liberty of a democratic people. The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living. Both lessons hit home. Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing...."-FDR

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."-Justice Louis Brandeis

For 100,000 years, a species had lived on this planet with our bodies and brains. That species and its ancestors were so successful, in a world so plentiful, they evolved a postnatal larval stage of complete helplessness that lasted years and required the full attention of an adult for that helpless infant to not die or be eaten. But here we are.

Was it cruelty that protected our ancestors or did they live surrounded by such bounty, they were ignored? Looking at their descendants,.it appears both strategies were successful.

2000 years ago, I am meant to believe, for the first time in the history of procreation, a human egg was fertilized by the creator of the universe so that he could grow up to preach a set of rules for living that would be eternally rewarded after death. A death that the rulers at the time were all too happy to hand out as part of their reign of cruelty to enslave the 99% of the population whose work was needed to support the obscene privilege of the very few. Since then, this pattern has been repeated, protected by the promise of endless reward or punishment for the suffering endured on earth in service of our masters.

For at least 90,000 of the years a species that looks like us has walked this earth, we lived with no master, no understanding beyond myth and whatever tribal culture had survived the bed time stories of our elders. It clearly wasn't out of a lack of capacity that we didn't spend our lives recording these stories; we painted scenes we chose to and could have recorded more. We apparently didn't need rules to be successful, which also means we didn't need leaders or eternal promises. We lived and life was enough.

Life was enough because we were free to live it. We followed our instincts which survival had cultivated over the infinite generations going back to the primordial soup because our history didn't start at some magical inception of our species because there are now hard boundaries in existence, only in the limited imaginations of a nervous scavenger trying to make sense of a life we're not living.

If youre an adult in any modern society you've been told some version of "life is suffering", by a spiritual advisor whose literal job is to convince those of us who recognize the absurdity of living for the happiness and privilege of our rulers while dismissing the importance of our own happiness as juvenile fantasy.

Ever since we've been working "for a greater good", deciding we wanted more out of life has been pathologized by the authority of the time. We were possessed before we were depressed, but there's always been someone whose job it was to tell us we were broken; we were the problem and happiness was accepting our place as servants to a machine that knew better.

But here we are, living the last years of a planet that would have lived forever if it weren't for the wisdom of the plans that were too big for us to understand.

If happiness isn't the purpose of life as an adult and our place isn't to question our role, but to focus on what's directly in front of us and keep our heads down, why are we building our own extinction? If there were a definition for the opposite of wisdom it would be a lifestyle that changed the climate of our only home so quickly, the people *still leading this fucking shit show wouldn't have been born in a world pre-dating the apocalypse the very same assholes engineered!*

One fucking lifetime of this shit to kill a planet that supported all life for billions of years including more generations of our own species living in balance with this world without any culture or education, than years we've lived under the regimes that had plans.

We've even managed to normalize dropping bombs on civilians inside the territory of leaders our leaders are fighting with, like murder and terrorism are a reasonable and meaningful path to political change.

Your discomfort is not the problem. You're right to feel out of place inside a zoo, solving a maze so your boss can eat the cheese at the end, so you can read more stories about the whims of an evil glutton whose power is your obedience. Your pathology used to be the instincts that protected you in an untamed wilderness, but now they're the disease the same rich fucks you work to support, will sell you the cure for to medicate and retrain you into complacency and the life plan, "the dream", you just happen to share with everyone else that involves spending all the fruits of your efforts remaining after paying for your fucking survival on the widgets made by the ultra rich.

What in the fuck are we all doing, going along with this, being miserable to support another day of being fucking miserable, inside a society that rewards cruelty and violating the values we preach, with privilege, wealth, and power. We vote for our bosses to run our lives out of some perverted expectation we're one day away from our own ship coming in, while we celebrate our exploitation as the nature of hard work.

If the purpose of life isn't happiness, what in God's infinite wisdom is the purpose? Dropping death from the sky on people because, despite living nearly identical lives, their skin, language, and culture aren't ours... and some of us take real comfort in dolling out pain and suffering to people that aren't like them like there's justice to be found in torturing people simply for being different.

The descendants of our ancient past that protected their young with wanton cruelty, have proven it is a functional strategy for survival, if cowardly and stupid... but so are the descendants of those who survived through trust and cooperation, or the cowards would have no one to exploit.

You are not sick. Your revulsion is justified and accurate. Be proud of it. It's the deeper truth earned through surviving every generations challenges since the beginning of life on earth. The truth did not begin with the industrial revolution and doing the right thing didn't start with God authoring a book after impregnating a woman without intercourse.

We're ending the world for narratives no more absurd than Santa Claus.

Time to get up and do my part by gifting my life to burning oil for the death machine, lest the bank take my home and with it, my humanity. After all, the homeless aren't *real* people, are they? No, they're the problem, not the bank putting people out into the streets or the billionaires hoarding the wealth of nations... nope, it's the homeless and their drugs. That's the problem.

Rough way to wake up. Nothing a fistful of the good drugs doctors prescribe, made and sold by billionaires, won't numb for the day. Sorry, I mean "medicine". Thank God for all those evil street drugs the bad people take to make the difference so clear. The same parents who want homeless drug addicts punished even more than being robbed of their humanity by the rest of us, feed their children enough speed that they never go a day without their "medicine".

This fairy tale is my worst nightmare and the closest I can get to being heard is paying someone to pretend to listen while trying to steer my thoughts towards celebrating the nightmare and, failing that, feeding me more "medicine" until I'm too doped to tell the difference between dream and nightmare.

Published recently on ZME Science, this article covers the heat stress currently facing rice crops. As a staple crop that feeds billions, yields are dropping quickly. This is without accounting for current events like the war in Iran.

Rice has adapted to colder climates in years past but, per the article -

"You don’t see that kind of flexibility on the hot end because at some point - the plant will physically stop working"

Collapse related because rice has been at the base of civilization for thousands of years and it is quickly losing the ability to feed the human race. In America we are seeing similar issues with corn, soy and wheat crops.

SS: Around 60% of the worlds sulphuric acid is used in fertilizer production, with China supplying 40%+ of that globally. It's also used in metal refining and textiles, so you can expect those things to get more expensive or more scarce. The polycrisis thickens...

the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on may 17 for a bundibugyo ebola outbreak in DRC and uganda.

this matters because bundibugyo is not the strain we've been vaccinating against. ervebo and inmazeb target the zaire strain. there is no licensed vaccine and no approved therapeutic for bundibugyo. the only experimental candidate has been tested on monkeys at roughly 50% efficacy.

the numbers so far: 8 lab-confirmed cases, 246 suspected, 80+ deaths in ituri province. two confirmed cases in kampala, including one death. patient zero was a nurse in ituri who showed symptoms april 24.

what makes this different from the usual DRC outbreak: it's already crossed into uganda. kampala has 4.5 million people. ituri province has ongoing armed conflict, displaced populations, and informal health facilities that make contact tracing nearly impossible. the WHO's own assessment says the case numbers probably undercount the real spread significantly.

this is DRC's 17th ebola outbreak since 1976. the first two bundibugyo outbreaks ran 30-50% case fatality rates. and this is hitting while global health bandwidth is split between the hormuz crisis, the lebanon situation, and routine pandemic preparedness.

the response relies entirely on supportive care, early detection, contact tracing, and safe burials. no vaccine wall. no therapeutic backstop. just boots on the ground in an active conflict zone.

sources: WHO PHEIC declaration may 17, ECDC risk assessment may 19, NPR, Al Jazeera, UN News

Published recently on Times of Israel, this article covers a decision that has everyone outside this subreddit shocked.

Collapse related because the NSC has decided that climate change is not an existential threat and no longer merits our concern.

This could be flaired under "conflict" just as well. From the article:

"Some 40 of the countries most in danger of water shortages are in the Middle East. Since 2011, dozens of violent conflicts over water have been documented in the region.

In the most serious case, water shortages caused 1.5 million Syrians to leave their villages for the cities, creating the preconditions for the country’s civil war."

Worth remembering that Bernie Sanderbern Sanders was the first major US politician to blame the Syrian civil war on environmental collapse. He told the truth - which is why he was never gonna be president.