image by AI of səl̓ilw̓ət (Burrard Inlet); my own prompt In a recent interview by Krishnan Guru-Murthy, comedian-musician Tim Minchin reviews his nine life lessons for uni graduates from his acclaimed convocation speech. Here is the one that most hit … Continue reading →| how to save the world
‘reconstructed’ image of Homo neanderthalensis, in the Neanderthal Museum, from wikipedia, CC-BY-SA 4.0 One of the functions of this blog — in addition to chronicling collapse and making sense of how our world and its complex systems ‘work’ — is to document … Continue reading →| how to save the world
a murmuration of thousands of starlings briefly takes the form of a giant bird; photo by James Crombie on Loch Ennell, Eire Twenty years ago I wrote a whole series of articles on James Surowiecki’s then-new book The Wisdom of … Continue reading →| how to save the world
selfie c.2020| how to save the world
artwork by by fellow collapsnik and NTHE-Love founder Wendy Bandurski Perhaps it’s just a sign of old-age crotchetiness, but I am told, and I accept, that my take on many things is now decidedly more negative than it has been for … Continue reading →| how to save the world
… or, Everything you thought you knew about Homo neanderthalensis but is actually probably wrong. (And a book review explaining why that’s so.) This is the tenth of a series of articles summarizing some remarkable and little-known facts about a … Continue reading →| how to save the world
drawing by Chaz Hutton People have been writing about whether the internet is a form of ‘commons’, and hence whether it is prone to the ‘tragedy of the commons’, for almost as long as the internet has existed. But … Continue reading →| how to save the world
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 tenth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.| how to save the world
quote from a James Taylor song; photo is my own, taken out my window| how to save the world
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 ninth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.| how to save the world
image: creative commons CC0 license from pixabay| how to save the world
image produced by AI; my own prompt| how to save the world
from the memebrary| how to save the world
AI-generated recent ‘photo’ of ‘me’, writing. Looks a lot like me, yet somehow not like me at all.| how to save the world
Human behaviour, even at its worst, doesn’t seem all that difficult to explain. Our behaviour seems to be entirely the result of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment. Our biological conditioning seems to drive us to maximize our physical pleasure and minimize physical pain. Our cultural conditioning would seem to drive us, similarly, to maximize our emotional and intellectual pleasure and minimize our emotional and intellectual pain. And all of tha...| how to save the world
photo of my friend Mike’s new shirt, courtesy of his partner Angelina| how to save the world
If you think the evidence that we have no free will is faulty or flimsy, or if you have a strong religious or moral sense of personal responsibility, you are likely to find this article annoying; you might even not want to read it. The very word “responsible” is triggering for a lot of people. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, just trying to get straight in my own mind why I’m coming to believe that the guilt and shame I feel over my actions, and my inaction, in a world f...| how to save the world
image by AI; my own prompt| how to save the world
I‘ve written before about why I see our species as being pathetic, in the original sense of the word — meaning deeply suffering.| how to save the world
photo by my friend Angelina, taken at a Banksy exhibition in Seattle| how to save the world
image from pxhere, CC0 public domain| how to save the world
I have often written that I think what humans (at least modern humans) seek more than anything else in their interactions with others are: attention, appreciation, and reassurance. But I’ve never speculated on why that might be the case.| how to save the world
my own photo, taken on a trail on the west coast of Bowen Island| how to save the world
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 sixth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.| how to save the world
modern Australian version of Japanese configurable house, with engawa deck and amado sliding doors opening the space to the outside| how to save the world
AI’s take on “pointing the finger of blame”| how to save the world
Beneath that fire that lights your eyes so red| how to save the world
image from The Daily Show; “this Canada place is kind of in the way, and they have this giant water faucet, so let’s annex them too… what do you mean Greenland belongs to Europe?”| how to save the world
the remnants of Musk’s latest failed space launch burn up over the Bahamas last week; photo by Reuters/BBC| how to save the world
Renaee says: | how to save the world
ChatGPT’s (DALL-E) representation of Ozempic, with the following explanation: “Here’s a molecular representation of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic. It shows the peptide backbone, fatty acid side chain, and key functional groups that enhance stability and receptor binding.” I have no idea if this is accurate, an AI ‘hallucination’, or a complete fiction.| how to save the world
map and headline via the Vancouver Sun| how to save the world
Image from wikimedia by Nick Hobgood, CC-BY-SA 3.0| how to save the world
Pew Research surveys of other countries’ view of China, over time; thanks to Indi for the link| how to save the world
In a very general way, we know what we want. We want to live as wild, free beings in a world of wild, free beings. The humiliation of having to follow rules, of having to sell our lives away to buy survival, of seeing our usurped desires transformed into abstractions and images in order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How long will we put up with this misery? We want to make this world into a place where our desires can be immediately realized, not just sporadically, but normally. ...| how to save the world
There seems to be two main types of reaction to the chaos that Trump and de facto VP Musk are creating all over the world: A wait-and-see reaction and a deer-in-the-headlights reaction.| how to save the world
artwork by fellow collapsnik and NTHE-Love founder Wendy Bandurski| how to save the world
Tim Morgan recently posted about our apparent lack of agency in the face of all the economic and other crises we are facing in the early years of this century.| how to save the world
image by Willgard from Pixabay, free for use under Pixabay’s content licence| how to save the world
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 fifth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.| how to save the world
AI image; my own prompt| how to save the world
photo by Burkhard Müche, on wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0| how to save the world
a Palestinian boy in Gaza with both legs amputated after being bombed by the Israelis, uses roller skates as prostheses to navigate the rugged terrain between tents; screen cap by Caitlin Johnstone from this video of him; a recent Guardian survey found “virtually all children in Gaza now feel their deaths are imminent, and half of those surveyed said they wish to die”| how to save the world
ChatGPT/DALL-E’s portrait of the great ancient Persian philosopher Siyavash Abdolrahimi, my friend’s namesake.| how to save the world
famous line from The Princess Bride| how to save the world
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,| how to save the world
photo from Pexels, free license| how to save the world
One of the things my study of our culture and human behaviour has led me to believe is that, from early childhood, we tend to do what those we trust do, more than what we’re told to do. This can be observed in wild animals, where youngsters observe and emulate what their mother eats, and don’t touch what she doesn’t eat. It’s an essential lesson, and an essential behaviour.| how to save the world
a very simplified description of some of the feedback loops and interconnections in our civilization’s major systems, just to show how massively complex these systems are, how the feedback loops between them make them so difficult to change, and how collapse of any of three huge systems spells ‘END GAME’ for our civilization| how to save the world
from GapingVoid.com by Hugh Macleod — In his comment on this cartoon, Venkatesh Rao wrote: “Organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs. Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.”| how to save the world
Pew Research surveys of other countries’ view of China, over time; thanks to Indi for the link. These polls seem to track very closely the prevailing tone of stories in the media about China. According to ChatGPT, only about 3% of residents of these countries have ever visited China. | how to save the world
propaganda posters used as covers by The Economist; exposé by Indrajit Samarajiva| how to save the world
This is a work of fiction.| how to save the world
In his book Determined, Robert Sapolsky presents the scientific argument for how and why it is that we have absolutely no free will, even though we “feel” that we do. Worse than that, he says, we have no free will to believe anything other than that we do have free will, and no free will to do anything other than to rationalize our actions as if we they were the result of our free will.| how to save the world
“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am… I am enough of the artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”| how to save the world
my own photo, from 2015| how to save the world
part of a recent comic by the brilliant Grant Snider at Incidental Comics| how to save the world
As I admitted in my edit to my November 7th post, the chart in that post was materially wrong, because it failed to acknowledge that there were still millions of uncounted votes several days after the election. And my conclusion, that Trump’s total popular vote was actually lower than in 2020, and that perhaps as many as 14 million young (age 18-29) people had stayed away from the polls in 2024 after voting in 2020, were both consequently incorrect.| how to save the world
Much has been written about the denial, by many if not most of the world’s people, that climate collapse is accelerating, and that it will irrevocably precipitate or intensify and quicken the collapse of our entire global human civilization, with catastrophic consequences possibly including the extinction of most or all life on the planet, including human life.| how to save the world
Change in popular vote for president, per ZeroHedge via Moon of Alabama; (see discussion of this chart below)| how to save the world
Tim Morgan’s chart comparing the ‘real’ economy (in aggregate; the per capita picture is even worse) — the amount of affordable real goods and services our economic system produces — with the fraudulent, fake “financial” GDP economy. A significant part of the latter is the wildly inflated “value” of people’s homes, which have been perverted from an essential human good and need, to a Ponzi scheme — a vehicle for unsustainable speculative capital gain. | how to save the world
This is #35 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community. | how to save the world
(right-click and open the image in a separate window/tab to view a more legible version)| how to save the world
cartoon by Sergio Duce, from his instagram| how to save the world
image: from Björn Láczay on flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0| how to save the world
Image from wikimedia by Nick Hobgood, CC-BY-SA 3.0| how to save the world
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 fourth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.| how to save the world
screen shot from a recent Guardian video of anti-war protesters outside the DNC convention in Chicago this week| how to save the world
Cartoon by Chaz Hutton at Instachaaz| how to save the world
artwork by Simeon Netchev (CC BY-NC-ND) from World History Encyclopedia| how to save the world
images of Alice Walker and Ursula Le Guin, CC-SA 2.0 from wikimedia| how to save the world
(This chart is yet another attempt to create a model of how human conditioning works. This article is focused on the fourth example — situations that make us long for what we believe and imagine “could be”, or what we nostalgically believe and imagine “once was” — and the feelings those beliefs and imaginings engender in us.)| how to save the world
yep, whether you look at us through a moral lens, a scientific lens, a philosophical lens, or a satirical lens, we cannot help be only and exactly what. and who, we are; cartoon by Will McPhail| how to save the world
What is a “belief” anyway, and how does it get “there”?| how to save the world
Tardigrade photo by Frank Fox at www.mikro-foto.de, from wikimedia CC-BY-SA 3.0| how to save the world
This is #29 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk, hike, and explore in my local community.| how to save the world
my synopsis of the some of the elements that might comprise one’s Ikigai; any misunderstandings about ikigai here are mine| how to save the world
New Yorker cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti| how to save the world
OK, yes, I suppose this article is a bit of a rant, again. Sometimes I can’t help myself. I blame my conditioning. (Not all workplaces are like this.)| how to save the world
If I were invited to talk to a group of students (of any age) today, to explain why everything seems to be hopeless and falling apart, this is what I think I would tell them.| how to save the world
… in which Dave reveals some unhappy and mostly politically unacceptable truths about our having no free will, and about aspects of Christian moralistic evangelism that permeate our western ways of thinking about ‘good and evil’, ‘healing’, and trauma.| how to save the world