how to save the world

image by AI; my own somewhat hyperbolic prompt Reconnaissance The ravens come to feast upon the deer. Their talons are too dull to tear like claws. They smartly team with wolves, as hunting peers And point the way to road kill with their caws. These creatures love to play, nurse others’ chicks, Do barrel-rolls and bathe collectively, Use rocks for self-defence and play with sticks And flying upside down proclaim they’re free. But still, to man, an animal can’t feel — We daren’t believe they…

Image of wildfires in Montana comes from rawpixel.com, and is labeled Public Domain. The media are full of ‘explanations’ (opinions) about what is going on in the world. What is Trump thinking. What does country X ‘want’. Why is this the way it is. What will happen next. Why does the Epstein Class behave like monsters. Great fodder for the doom scroll. Easy to come up with, since every idiot has an opinion. But really absolutely useless. Un-actionable, and very reaction-able. Meanwhile, what is…

AI image, my own prompt; text screenshot from the website of Soundraw music software. All music lovers who perform others’ work are constantly walking a line between plagiarism (stealing music from other artists without acknowledgement) and appropriate use (eg singing in choirs, or building on others’ musical compositions and ‘ideas’). This line has become murkier as digital technology, and now AI, allows users (and plagiarists) to effortlessly cut and paste from one work into another. This…

In a recent interview by Chris Hedges, XR founder Roger Hallam, recovering from a series of imprisonments for protest activities in increasingly repressive and struggling post-Brexit Britain, talks about what we can do, and what we are likely to do, as collapse deepens. We are already responding, largely subconsciously, to the horrifying reality that our civilization culture is living on borrowed time, and that there simply is not enough of any essentially resources to go around anymore. And…

This is #56 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. Two teenagers, possibly a younger brother and older sister, are sitting opposite each other at the café at the table beside mine. They are playing a game of chess, on his phone screen and on her laptop screen. Their ‘moves’ are thoughtful, probably longer than the ‘timer’ on a serious chess tournament game would permit. I can’t resist asking…

This is a work of fiction. “So there’s no self, no ‘I’ or ‘you’, just bodies conditioning each other. And those bodies ‘decide’ everything we do, based on that conditioning. And then our brains get to work, after the fact, to rationalize those decisions, to ‘make sense’ of them and integrate that knowledge into their completely useless belief systems, as if that makes any difference. Is that what you’re saying?” “That’s what the current evidence from neuroscience would suggest, yes, as…

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the seventeenth of a series of articles on some of these signposts. In the “old days” when I was growing up (the 1960s) we started to hear the term “disposable society”. In part this was due to an inevitable failing of capitalism: the preference to produce cheap, shoddy products…

image by AI; my own prompt Earlier this month, I was looking at my ‘upcoming blog post ideas’ list just before going into my bathroom for my morning shower. I was lamenting that none of the subjects on my list were very interesting, and contemplating skipping a couple of posts until there was something I really wanted to write about. And then, as I was brushing my teeth, not just one, but three interesting new ideas just ‘came into my head’. I raced around for a scrap of paper and pencil to…

image by Layers on Pixabay (please check out the rest of her extraordinary and anonymous work at the same link) I’m in the process of writing an essay, and a song, about how, when it hurts too much, we reach the point we have to stop reading, stop watching, and even stop caring ‘too much’ about the endless atrocities happening everywhere in this world, and the suffering they cause. I keep linking to some of the news and articles about this, but I can no longer bear to read them, or internalize…

It hardly needs to be said, but one of the most nefarious activities of the corporate oligarchs and their fellow Epstein Class tech bros is trying to get us all to use ‘apps’ for everything online, instead of the open World Wide Web. Apps are simply a covert attempt at privatization of the commons of the internet. When corporations put stuff on the web, they have to (mostly) play by the well-established rules of what you can and can’t do there, established in the public interest. But when…

For more than 20 years, I have been writing about civilizational collapse. I’m not an expert in the subject, just someone who’s read a lot about anthropology, the history of civilizations, human nature, and how complex systems work. My fundamental thesis has remained basically unchanged over this time: Our now-global industrial civilization culture is utterly unsustainable and has now entered a period of increasing chaos leading inevitably to the complete collapse of all its underlying and…

Last month I presented a bit of research on how our bodies’ chemicals appear to drive, direct, and dictate (ie ‘condition’) our behaviour by trying to maximize the body’s feelings of pleasure and minimize its feelings of pain. They do this because that’s been a successful evolutionary strategy for millions of years (ie it’s in ‘our’ and our bodies’ best interests), and they do it with a remarkably small arsenal of chemicals. When we feel good, we want to do the thing again, and when we do it…

image by Mike Licht on flickr, CC BY 2.0 Facebook and Xwitter are dying. Their membership is shrinking, their usage is dropping, and satisfaction with them is at an all-time low. Copycat “social media” have arisen, but they lack the huge user base to replace the wreckage of today’s greedy oligopolies with something better, and their owners seem as devoid of imagination as the tech bros they’re trying to supplant. To understand the enshittified wreckage of today’s “social media”, I think it…

(photo from U. Berkeley, with the caption: “New study reveals the brain mechanism that makes rats feel empathy for other rats, yet refrain from helping rats they deem to be ‘outsiders’. Photo by Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal”) Chris Hedges is a busy guy. In addition to being one of the most relentless public critics of the US/Western Empire (no matter who is in power), the award-winning journalist and former war correspondent also frequently interviews a wide variety of people with unique insights on…

The cognitive bias codex from wikipedia; if you want to print it out so it’s legible and useful, print the original over four letter-sized pages and paste them together (my printout is taped, tellingly perhaps, over my rarely-used TV). The model was developed by John Manoogian III and refined by Buster Benson; the online version includes links to, and pop-up summaries of, the wikipedia articles explaining each bias, by TillmanR. The technical term for the phenomena described in this article’s…

This is #55 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. For most of my life, I’ve loved doing statistical analysis. Part of that, I suppose, is the ‘collector’ in me. And part of it is unearthing information from the data that isn’t obvious, and provides some interesting insights. Recently during my wanderings in the neighbourhood I started observing people’s facial expressions, and wondering if…

child labourers, Pennsylvania, 1910, photo by Lewis Hine in the National Archives A couple of people have asked me, after I’d written several times about what I call the “Patriciate” and what many call the “Epstein Class” or simply the “Elite” (among other conspiratorial-sounding names): Do you think this is a new phenomenon, or has this Class always existed and been this awful, vindictive, destructive, oblivious, unrestrained, unpunished, and paranoid? Or, thanks to the proclivities of the…

all images in this post are my own photos (not AI) There seems no limit to the number of writers, artists and scientists intrigued and even obsessed with the challenge of trying to understand what it’s ‘like’ to ‘be’ a non-human creature. I’ve read more than a dozen books on the subject. My sense is that there might be strong clues if we were to study human babies, before they acquire the skills of language and form a sense of themselves as separate from everyone and everything else. I’m one of…

Twenty years ago I did a brief study of The Chemistry of Love, to explore how our bodies seemingly compel us to fall in love in the interest of procreation. And how in the process (what I then thought was) our ‘free will’ is totally taken away from us. Now I know a little better, and I’m convinced we never had any free will in the first place. As I’ve written about at length, it appears all of our behaviour is entirely conditioned by our biology, our culture, and the circumstances of the…

from the brilliant Scottish philosopher-cartoonist Tom Gauld in New Scientist I am haunted by this cartoon. Not only because Tom has captured so perfectly our propensity to anthropomorphize everything from pets to stuffies to cars to AI. But also because Tom’s delivery bot seems the perfect metaphor for all of us tragically caught in an unnatural, prosthetic, anxiety-ridden culture we did not ask for, turned into obedient, conditioned wage slaves dreaming of a better world. COLLAPSE WATCH from…

council of clan mothers in an imagined post-civilization culture; diorama from Afterculture (redrawn by AI to make the image crisper and more legible — right click to open full size in a new window) Lyle Fass has recently written a series of articles lamenting the staggering incompetence and destructiveness of patriarchal societies (which almost all societies in the entire history of our civilization have seemingly been), and wishing we might instead live in a matriarchal one, with the men…

image by Layers on Pixabay Ever had one of those awkward moments when you’re talking with (or messaging with) someone who is struggling with an acute or chronic crisis (a terminal illness, recent loss of a loved one, a severe bout of depression etc), and you don’t know what to say? I’m guessing it happens to most of us pretty regularly. And in some cases there are no ‘right words’. The internet is full of unhelpful advice on what not to say, but its suggestions on what to say are mostly lame,…

image by AI; my own prompt Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how reluctant we humans are to accept truths that clash with our worldview — our beliefs about the world. This is, of course, understandable. Our worldview is a complicated, interwoven set of judgements, feelings, and other results of sense-making that we have amassed over a lifetime. It’s the lens through which we see and evaluate everything. And it’s our bulwark, our fortress that, we think, protects us from dangers, from…

The image on the History and Context card in the Group Works deck. Image by Nomad Tales on flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0 (this artist is no longer on flickr). Before our average attention spans were reduced to something less than a minute, we were required, if we expected to be taken seriously in any discussion about the state of the world, to have invested a significant portion of our leisure time to learning the “lessons of history”. Indeed, people who had made such an investment were among our…

image by AI; my own prompt — ‘me’ imagining worst-case scenarios Every day, something happens that gets me anxious or upset. Technology failures, news about outrageous events, abuses and other horrors, meanness and unfairness by people I know or observe. Small worrisome physical or mental health issues. Dismay and shame at my own behaviours. Dread about something terrible that someone who I don’t even know says they will do tomorrow. Re-thinking something I or someone else did yesterday, or…

This is a work of fiction. image by AI; my own prompt I had been blathering on about our lack of free will, in my usual annoying way, when my friend said to me: “You keep insisting that we have no free will, and no ‘self’ even to have it. But at the same time you say that we are somehow able to become more ‘self-aware’, enough to recognize our conditioning for what it is, so when we are ‘self-aware’ we aren’t so reactive.” I nodded. She went on: “But if there’s no ‘self’, how can there be…

This is #54 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. my own photo, from a number of years ago As I trace the path around the lake, I stop to watch a mother pushing a baby carriage who is talking to her baby and pointing excitedly at a mother goose and her goslings nearby. It’s obvious what the woman is thinking. But what, I wonder, is the baby thinking? Is the baby thinking at all? How exactly…

Yes, this is a rant. image by AI; my own prompt Travel by Canadians to the US is down almost 50% from last year’s already drastically reduced levels. Part of this is a quiet Canadian protest against US imperialist foreign policy — Trump’s arrogant assumption that Canadians wouldn’t find the idea of being a US state repulsive, his threats of annexation, his endless tariff wars against former US allies, and the US Uniparty’s financial, political, and military support for Israel’s genocides and…

Screencap of Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s interview of Tim Minchin The idea that asking good questions is the best way to contribute to learning and intellectual discussions is probably as old as civilization. I’ve written about the value of questions often on this blog, notably in a post summarizing the six qualities of a good question, the six benefits of asking questions, and the six types of question that can achieve these benefits. But recently it occurred to me that there’s a seventh quality,…

image by AI; my own prompt I am reading Italo Calvino’s last and unfinished work Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Or, I should probably say, I am half-heartedly trying to read it, since it is all over the place, and packed with references to literature some of which was written millennia ago, some of it in dead languages, that I find utterly unfathomable. Still, he’s a good writer, in the sense that he has interesting ideas and keeps things moving along, so I persevere. The book is a…