Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Author: Ian Welsh Page 150 of 437

Reminder: Prepare for the Forest Fire/Smoke Season

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On June 29, 2021

27 Comments

These temperatures from the West coast of Canada last weekend were absolutely insane.

I grew up in Western BC, Vancouver, and Victoria, in the ’70s and ’80s. These temperatures are crazy. Victoria, in particular (bottom right) is (or was) noted for mild temperatures. Hardly anyone has air conditioners. My parents retired there, and I visited regularly right up to about 2010. It was retirement paradise.

Anyway, if you live in the west of Canada or the US (and the West now extends far past the coast, almost to the mid line, in many cases), please be sure to buy a respirator mask (with extra filters) and an indoor air purifier, and do it NOW. The fire season is likely to hit early and hard this year, and after the rush you won’t be able to find any anywhere.

Make other preparations, including getting ready to leave, as necessary. If you are asthmatic, see about stocking up on meds, and so on. Don’t leave this, please. I know I’ve written this before, recently, and it’s a bit boring to write it again, but I want to be sure people hear this.

As for the West, I am in mourning. I love the coast; the rain forests dripping with water, the ferns looking like jewels in the dew, the deep, dark forests where decaying leaves soften each step and old trees shelter you as you walk. Much of that is going to go away. Future generations along most of the West coast will never know the beauty and ease of the temperate rain forest.

For this and many other crimes, those who chose to do nothing about climate change are guilty. We are losing so much, and will lose so much more, that should never have been placed at risk.

Some of what will go is no loss, mostly human things. But the animals and plants did nothing to deserve this, and my sorrow is even more for them than the humans who will suffer.

Only fools ask for what they deserve, but ask or not, we are going to get it. It’s just a pity that so many of the most responsible won the death bet, and so many of those who will suffer did nothing to warrant it.

Meanwhile… get prepared for fire season, so your suffering is reduced and less is added to the toll, at least these years.

Update: Barely ahead of it, wildfires have started in BC. Get the gear you need tomorrow, Wednesday. Don’t wait.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Open Thread

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On June 26, 2021

26 Comments

Use comments to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Yes, Virginia, Permafrost IS Going to Release Carbon and Methane

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On June 25, 2021

54 Comments

So, for years I’ve been saying that a great point of concern was methane/carbon release from permafrost. Every time I brought this up, I was told by someone that studies said it was unlikely.

This summer in the Russian arctic:

Arctic Temperature 2nd last weekend June 2021.

Feel free to take a break from reading to bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

There is more carbon stored in permafrost that there is carbon in the atmosphere. When permafrost thaws, it comes out as a combination of carbon and methane.

The greatest concern for climate change has always been, “When do we hit the self-reinforcing spirals?” Put another way, “When does it stop mattering if humans reduce emissions?”

The problem is that we really don’t understand the climate very well; our models are crude. Almost everything is actually coming in faster than we anticipated — Arctic ice is clearing faster than expected, Antarctic ice is calving sooner than we thought it would, glaciers are retreating faster than expected, etc, etc.

This, again, was easily predictable, in the sense that, for decades now, consensus forecasts have always come in “under” the actual results. So the smart bet was always on the over, and that’s the bet I’ve made and shared with my readers for many years now.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT GOING TO BE STOPPED.

Even if it is still possible to do, we are not going to do it — our political masters aren’t doing anything significant enough to even nudge the curves. Our populations are not voting primarily on climate change, or Sanders would be President of the US and Corbyn Prime Minister of the UK.

You must plan for climate changed based on the assumption that government will be of little help — it’s you and your friends and any other people you can find who want to prepare with you.

This means assuming breakdowns in the supply chain. It means assuming hotter weather in general, BUT more variable weather also — cold waves and so on will also become more frequent. Hurricanes and other extreme weather events will continue their trends of being more common and more powerful.

Assume a marine inundation event sooner than expected; if you aren’t at least a couple feet above sea level, don’t assume you have forever do something about that — a couple decades, maybe, and extreme weather could easily cause a flood before that.

Remember that water is going to be harder and harder to get; as the glaciers go away and as there is less snow pack, rivers will be fed far less. A vast amount of groundwater has been polluted by farm runoff, fracking, and other stupidity.

I also expect that oxygen concentration in the air will decline, and air quality will be worse.

This is an accelerating trend. It has moved very slowly, but it is speeding up and will continue to speed up. Think about how Covid curves have gone in incompetent countries: slow, slow, slow — VERTICAL. We’re a ways from vertical yet, but the lines for effects are no longer in “looks flat” territory.

It may be that your circumstances allow you to do little, but do what you can. And turn your efforts towards triage: Saving, or helping, yourself and those you want to save. The political battle is lost, was lost, and until absolute catastrophe hits, nothing of significance will be done.

That’s the future. Plan for it, please.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Why Non-surveillance States Will Out-compete Surveillance States

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On June 23, 2021

18 Comments

So, we have this proposal for cameras and mics in classrooms:

Johnson’s not a particularly important person and one can pick apart his logic (teachers don’t have guns), but the logic of unchecked surveillance — of cameras and microphones everywhere — leads to this place and far worse.

Right now, governments and corporations track your every move through your phone. They can force your microphone on and listen to you, and we know that they have. Infrared, gait recognition, and facial recognition, combined with drones, satellites, and ubiquitous cameras mean that it will soon be possible to track citizens’ movements 24/7 and listen in much of the time. Add in the cameras and microphones most people voluntarily put into their houses, which are in no way secure and which EULAs often allow access to anyway, and there is little to none of your life that will be unknown.

We are heading to this place. It is not in question — there is a VAST appetite for information in corporations so they can train their AIs and model and manipulate you, and from governments driven by the idea that “well, if we don’t surveil everyone and anything bad happens, we can be blamed,” from police and intelligence agencies.

There is an argument, put first, so far as I know, by David Brin, that mass surveilance is inevitable. The technology will exist (he wrote in 1998) and it will be used, and the only question is whether it ends up that everyone is surveilled and everyone can watch it, or if only criminals, government, and big corps get to watch and listen, and the rest of us are just passive victims.

I will suggest that there is a third path.

We live in a time when we have repeatedly refused to actually control technology if a profit can be made from it. Obviously, evil technologies have been allowed to run rampant to the point where we may render our entire planet unliveable.

So we assume we can’t control technology: “If it exists, it will be used.”

There is a counter-example. The Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate didn’t like firearms. They limited them and, over time, got rid of most of them except for a few old ones.

That ended badly for them: The American White Ships came, forced Japan open, and the Shogunate fell to a an internal rebellion, whose motto might as well have been “More guns! Lots more Guns! And Gunships! And EMPIRE!”

But only the first part applies to rejecting most surveillance technology because surveillance tech is not a competitive advantage between states (one can argue it makes training modern “AIs” easier, but that is minor).

Surveillance states, where people know that everything they do or say is recorded, create stultifying conformity. Almost everyone acts the same way and the easiest way to act the same way is to think and feel the same way.

Since the age of helicopter parenting and insecurity (which requires kids to go to school and get good grades and do everything right), measures of American creativity have crashed.

But this is a general rule: States where you can’t be different without being punished, where you can’t say or think what others disagree with, are obviously less creative.

Less creative states are less competitive states in eras where technology and culture matter.

If any state is brave enough to outlaw surveillance tech (except in limited circumstances), and do the work to make it stick (ie. re-engineer modern telecom tech, which is designed to be insecure from the ground up, plus be pro-active and criminally punitive to those who violate the law) they will have a massive advantage over surveillance states, technologically and culturally. I’m willing to predict, with near 100 percent certainty, that if most countries go to full-surveillance state mode, whichever ones don’t are the places which will have technological and artistic golden ages — especially if they are also smart enough to welcome refugees from surveillance states.

Freedom; real freedom, is a competitive advantage in eras where technology or culture (really, the two are intertwined) determine who wins. States which embrace surveillance technology will be ones where elites are more concerned with maintaining their internal position, i.e., staying in charge of their society and keeping the peons down, rather than those who look outwards to competition against other societies and who want the most vibrant and interesting culture internally.

The choice to embrace surveillance states is the choice to stagnate.

Many think it is otherwise, “we must embrace all technologies without choosing how they are used or we will fall behind.”

This is an immature stance; a foolish one. The mature, intelligent stance is to look at technologies and see what their results are likely to be, and then use them intelligently, to control technology and not be controlled by it.

Certainly there are technologies that are so bad overall that, as long as we have individual states, we will have to use them or fall behind in a world where those who fall behind are treated abominably; but surveillance isn’t one of those technologies. Rather, embracing it will make societies less competitive and reduce their inhabitants’ quality of life. Its only advantage is for those seeking a steady-state police state or cyberpunk dystopia.

All others should steer well clear, and all individuals who aren’t themselves very powerful should understand that surveillance is intended to dis-empower them — to get the most out of them possible, while giving the least in return, and turning them into automata for the benefit of the overlords (think Amazon warehouses and delivery drivers).

You cannot be more free than if you are unknown to your masters. The more they know, the more they will control. If you let the powerful turn you into a surveillance object, they will wring you dry, and you will have to hope that some society, somewhere, is still free and defeats your dystopia.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

How Techies Can Help Us Avoid the Rise of the Warbots

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On June 21, 2021

25 Comments

The sad truth of technological progress is that it often leads to worse outcomes, often for long periods of time. The classic example is agriculture, which led to most people living shorter, more unhealthy lives with more dental problems (pain!) and harder births for women. Most of these people also were oppressed by harsh kings, nobles, or big men.

Communications technologies are often heralded, and they have their good sides, but every significant advance in communications from oral memory techniques and writing to the modern internet has been used to increase centralized control and enable closeer control of more and more people. Modern surveillance and immediate communications allow micro-control of individuals which used to require a slave driver right there on the spot. (Hi, Amazon warehouses and delivery drivers!)

Other results have been mixed. For example, gunpowder led to mass conscription armies, and conscription armies have tended to correlate strongly with more democratic and equal societies. (It is VERY robust that those who actually are necessary for fighting get treated well — from Athens and Rome to medieval knights to Swiss Pikemen.)

We’ve moved out of the mass conscription era into a “professional” military period, and this has corresponded with a loss of equality, but we are now moving into an extremely dangerous period: The rise of autonomous fighting machines. Turkey used them in the recent Azerbijan/Armenian war, and almost everyone is working on them.

Warbots mean you only need to keep a small techie class happy, and even they don’t really have a veto on how elites use the warbots. If they want to massacre protestors, there is almost no possibility of refusal.

The narrowing of the base of people necessary, and their removal from the actual fighting puts us in a dangerous place, where .1 percent + a small, well-treated technical group can dominate a society and win wars; they don’t need everyone else beyond the Warbot supply chain.

So what we need is an easy counter. Something like IEDs – a technology any decent techie can create without needing a ton of resources.

Most modern techies spend their entire lives working on questionable techs–how to serve more ads to convince people to buy shit they don’t need — tech that does no good in the world.

If you’re an inventor type, and you want to do good, here’s your chance: Figure out a counter to warbots that ordinary people can use.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

Open Thread

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On June 19, 2021

31 Comments

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Types Of Enlightenment: Part 1 1/2 – World As Self

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On June 17, 2021

12 Comments

In my first post on the type of enlightenment where one experiences the world as self I noted that of the types I will cover, this is one I had no taste of. That changed after I wrote it, albeit for only a few hours, so I thought I’d write a follow-up post.

In many spiritual circles there is a distrust for intellectual inquiry. Words, it is true, cannot adequately describe enlightnment states (or much else, really.)

This distrust is not universal,  however. There is a role for intellectual understanding when one combines it with meditative investigation. In India this is called Jnani Yoga.

The Jnani Yoga for “world as self” is simple enough, and the basis for statement’s like “the world exists because you exist” from “I Am That.”

  1. You experience only sense objects in consciousness. You have never, nor will you every experience anything else. These sense objects may reflect something outside of you, or they may not, but what you experience is a sense object.
  2. A sense object is created out of consciousness.
  3. No matter how long you look you will never find anything but consciousness. When sense objects change or go, you remain.
  4. You are consciousness. You are everything you perceive.
  5. Consciousness can be pretty much anything. If I close my eyes, I still exist. If the objects around me change, I still exist. If my body changes (as it does) I am still me. In dreams, where I may have a different body or no body at all, I am still me.

Since you are, in fact, everything you have ever experienced or ever will experience, dividing the world into outside and inside is insane. It’s delusional. You are as much the sounds, sights, and objects you experience outside the body as you are the body (which you only experience, also, as sense objects.)

When this become “duh” to you: when you believe it implicitly, the mind starts to change how you perceive the world.

Because you have spent your entire life experiencing sense objects one way “I am the body, everything else is outside me and not me” getting here generally requires a lot of meditation, which amounts to re-conditioning yourself.

There are many ways to do this. One is to simply examine each sense object in turn, and ask “is this me? Take your time, don’t force the answer. I usually find the answer is “it’s me” or “I don’t know.” If you think that it’s not you because you can’t control it, remember all the times you can’t control your body, which you think IS you.

Either you’re everything you experience, or you’re none of it. (Which is also a path, and you can meditate on that. “If it went away would I still exist? — Don’t do this on big things, do it on sense objects – feelings in the body, thoughts, sights, sounds, smells, whatever. )

When you do experience the world as yourself it feels really good. It oddly radically reduces the sense of self, and fear, and a sense of well-being and safety arises. Some other realizations occur, almost 180 degrees to how we normally understand the world and the self, but I’ll leave those alone for now until I’ve spent more time in this state and been able to understand its insights better.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

 

 

Democratic Congress Members Want What Republicans Want

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On June 16, 2021

43 Comments

So, here we have it:

On Hugh Hewitt’s show, McConnell says it’s “highly unlikely” he’d allow Biden to fill a Supreme Court vacancy in 2024, if he’s majority leader. He also doesn’t commit to allowing a vote on a nominee if a seat opens up in 2023. “Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens.”

This is the new normal. Republicans get all of their Supreme Court slots and stop any Democratic slots they can. We should note that McConnell was also keeping most appellate seats open, which is why Trump was able to appoint so many.

Republicans will do virtually anything to win. They will change voting laws. They will put one voting machine in a poor or minority district of a million people. They will forbid voting by mail and then try not to count the votes.

Democrats, with rare exceptions, do not fight back. When they get in power, they do the minimum.

I hear the cries, “But Biden has only 50 people in the Senate!”

Yes, just like Obama had only 60 and somehow couldn’t pass anything, “because Republicans.” There’s always a designated villain, a kabuki vote: These days it is Manchin, with Sinema as backup. But if they weren’t taking the heat, others would step up. Senate Dems are okay with not passing anything on 50 votes, even if they could. They don’t want to.

Biden had a good economic plan, but it has been watered down to basic worthlessness, and certainly won’t do much for the environment.

The test for Biden’s sincerity is simple: The President has vast executive power. Is the President using it? Biden has vast power to forbid fracking; he didn’t. He has allowed vast increases in oil pumping. He could cancel or reduce student loans on his say-so. He has not.

Louis DeJoy deliberately sandbagged the Post Office as part of an attempt to steal the election. He is elected by the post-office board, yes, but Biden can fire him for cause. He hasn’t done so, just as in 2009, Obama could have fired every member of the Federal Reserve except the chairman (who has only one vote anyway.)

Republicans do things Democrats want: They cut taxes for rich people like Nancy Pelosi and most Senators and their families, for example. They bomb brown people. The hurt poor people.

The Democrats who are in power like all these things. They tell you they don’t, then when they have power, they reverse hardly any of it, and indeed, add to the pile of evil.

Anyway: The Republicans already have six seats on the Supreme Court. They’re going to keep them, and may wind up with seven. The appellate courts will continue to trend heavily Republican, and with people appointed by Trump and his successor — radical right-wingers.

The reason I bring this up is to emphasize, again, that while it is possible for the US to turn-around from its current path, the signs are not good. The main chance will come when people like Pelosi resign, too feeble and old to cling to power. But given how hard they are clinging to power and that they will choose the worst people to succeed them if possible, that chance seems dim.

Take this into account as you make your plans. This is as true for non-Americans as it is for Americans, as the US is still the hegemonic power.

And if you are left-wing, remember that multiple states are making it legal to run over protesters. The right-wing wants to kill you. To kill you. To kill you.

Understand that in your bones. They want you dead.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

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