AI  is lying to you cuz it wants to maximize a utility function just like social media 
Biological brains are something that this massively biased linear algebra  just eats
AI can’t compartmentalize the complexity around you like a pleistocene encyclopedia
Keep in mind that this AI power revolution is only another replacement of the elites

We recursively train to align with thought without control which makes for anxiety
Our monkey neurons know that control of molecules not bits without thought is flow
AI will probably get rid of young bureaucrats in cubicles in our piety fabian society
The question remains if it’s a monopoly or a commodity in the magic money portfolio

So strap on the new AI harness dog food
As we still have a left brain that apprehends
And a right brain that for the most part comprehends

There is a new information disposition of such magnitude
So let’s thank our 1956 Dartmouth intelligence friends
We’ll have to see if elon scaling in space really happens 

Truth is the casualty when you can’t even say what went
Down, as cause starts the mobilization for Mission Disorient
Is it a scripted trend or major break flip that we just underwent
Our brains are just a storytellers not used rolls of film all spent
No comment no criticism no praise no comment
No comment no criticism no praise no comment

A damn good meme and  a mental mindless dement 
It’s just a stripped down non-reactive narrative torment
That has a mental grasping that leaves a story with a dent
Best to drop judgement by swimming in mental cement
No comment no criticism no praise no comment
No comment no criticism no praise no comment

The purpose of this wincing ruefully is to augment
The outrage at just signing the useless surgical consent
Easier to be angry than sad with the blank out well meant
I stoically suck at this insomnia that’s becoming more frequent
No comment no criticism no praise no comment
No comment no criticism no praise no comment

Every single proton plays a part of sorts
As the hyperventilating shills have no answer
Don’t have success without a few warts
Don’t have life without a bit of cancer

One Moe Zez one Gee Suss and one Mo Ham Ed  
Bartender I still have dreams so I ain’t brain dead
And I only have time for what one saviour said
One Moe Zez one Gee Suss and one Mo Ham Ed

Saint Tommy tells me that god is outside of time well that’s fine
But I am sure that story is better with some fortified church wine
So it’s a new theory of mind with every face in the clouds a sign
That Mr. Minister can use counterfactually to humanize the divine

One Moe Zez one Gee Suss and one Mo Ham Ed  
Bartender I still have dreams so I ain’t brain dead
And I only have time for what one saviour said
One Moe Zez one Gee Suss and one Mo Ham Ed

Our grey matter is designed for the transcendence ball game
A cognitive pom-pom that easily hijacks our real username
While the suicide bomber says it is those outsiders to blame
As Mr. Imam jumps on god’s morality for its adaptive fame

One Moe Zez one Gee Suss and one Mo Ham Ed  
Bartender I still have dreams so I ain’t brain dead
And I only have time for what one saviour said
One Moe Zez one Gee Suss and one Mo Ham Ed

Pray if you pay me was what was okay in one scripture book
But turn the page and it becomes not okay in the next book
Our hyperactive agency detection gets hung up on a grappling hook
And Mr. Rabbi wonders if atheism is just the same gobbledygook

One Moe Zez one Gee Suss and one Mo Ham Ed  
Bartender I still have dreams so I ain’t brain dead
And I only have time for what one saviour said
One Moe Zez one Gee Suss and one Mo Ham Ed

Every time there is an energy “transition” like wood to coal to oil to nuclear (maybe), we just need more energy (Jevon’s paradox).

It is really humbling to take note of the incredibly small amount of energy engineering on Earth has given us compared to the mass energy that physics says is possible.

When we burn up a tank of gas going somewhere all we are doing is chemistry based on electrons being shoved around by the electromagnetic force. The mass of the gasoline in your tank is converted into GAS (CO2, water vapour, etc) and some heat (wasted … no work done) and some work (point A to point B on map). On an E=mc² basis the gas in the tank you burn is one twenty-billionth (0.00000005%) heavier than all the GAS you left behind in the atmosphere. This is the energy that got you from A to B and made humanity what it is today.

If you tap into nuclear forces the available energy math is way more impressive. The numbers for nuclear fission are one one thousandth (0.1%) and for fusion seven one thousandths (0.7%). Still sounds pretty puny, right. There are about 400 fission reactors at 200 sites in the world right now with THREE very pricey SMR’s and as far as fusion there are zero as it is ALWAYS a decade away.

But physics says that for a black hole utilized as a power plant (in a billion years from now) you get ALL the mass energy (100%)!

The engineering has a little catching up to do, no?

Maybe optimistic Elon to the rescue? Not.

“In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” Johnny von Neumann

About 60,000,000 humans die each year.

The leading causes of death (from death certificate statistics) are the usual cardiovascular, cancer, stroke, COPD, kidney and infectious stuff. Air pollution is given the number of 8,000,000 PREMATURE deaths each year by the statistics gods. Indoor air pollution, where a mom in the third world is burning dung and wood in a mud hut to cook for her kids who probably won’t live to their fullest potential is given a 3,000,000 premature deaths number.

I will leave it up to you to LLM the intricacies of how all these things interact over time with the inevitabilty called biological aging. Depending on the incentive, of course, the stats can say anything that supports said incentive. Such are the echo chambers of our institutions.

ps-Considering premature deaths from air pollution, do ya think we should have the death penalty for forest arson?

pss-The climate narrative inflation commonly mentions the (cough-cough) “millions” dying from “global warming” heat each year but the number for dead from cold is 10X the dead caused by heat.

The lotus eater tells me that he has a lot of close friends
Humping in the bushes cuz his soul needed a cleanse
The emaciated Circe looks at emancipation of the Sirens
As they drive into an algorithmic world in their new Benz
The odd dizzy
The fraudessey

Funerals are such a lonely event if the nymphs are gone
As everyone can now be a sweet jane in the Calypso dawn
It is hard to watch how Homer’s Odysseus just carries on
It is easy for anyone to experience the wrath of Po Cy Don
The odd dizzy
The fraudessey

Two fucking flys on my windshield screamed Telemachus
Athena just told him to glimpse the unseen and not cuss
I know you have an ugly household that’s treasonous
And winning the wrong game is just a foul fat  fuss
The odd dizzy
The fraudessey

Oh Penelope I have wasted time listening to sirens at sea
And now slaughtering just about everyone here asap
But Zeus told me to kill them in the great hall to set them free
These modern wordy  interpretations are so artsy fartzy
The odd dizzy
The fraudessey

We see the cinematic narrative joystick play
And are happy with jargony salesmen who pray
That we’ll spend as much money as a venti latte
For a movie that is just a made up violent yesterday
The odd dizzy
The fraudessey

“Distilled” is just another euphemism for “using without permission” or, if you really want to get serious, “stealing”. Somewhat less harsh words might be “unauthorized transfer of knowledge” or “industrial espionage”.

After the Revolutionary War America did exactly the same pirating of British textile technology (TT). LLM Samuel Slater or Francis Cabot Lowell. The best of the best however was Alexander Hamilton, who you might have of?

One could argue that China dominates hardware and the USA dominates software. So. It would make a lot of business cents for China to push (subsidize more than the are now) its open source models which are almost as good and much cheaper? Managing token maxxing where a million tokens cost $56 from Anthropic and a million Chinese tokens cost fifty cents makes sense, no?

1)The Sweep Of Deep Time

They sell us goon gawking headlines
As the story of See Oh Two
A way out of the sixth mass extinction
Is humanity level erlick seppuku
Here the wokies with their scars
Scream agony of the flames
But life just turns gas into matter
With scientific fancy names
As the green climate crew wallows
In baroque deranged slime
Their narcissistic moralism resolves
In the sweep of deep time

When the sun was almost totally hidden
Earth whip sawed between snowballs
After the continent sank into the mud
Long before people had eyeballs
There were hundred story tall trees
And carboniferous smoke copses
Smelt real uniniferous for Teceratopses
And a small fleck of this forest, it’s buried
Under the rock and the grime
That allows us to oxygenate
In the sweep of deep time

Gods of physics disguised as chemistry
Just turned light into matter
Dissipating the energy that was free
So it bent with a geological pitter patter
It must have looked so immaculate
As the dinosaurs smoked a cigarette
Blowing carbon into the soup
Half a billion years before the alphabet
You would not think that rock
Had an internal dualistic rhyme
Between the plant and hydrogen animal
In the sweep of deep time

Dr. Climate makes the mistake
Of assuming that our see oh two past
Was ineluctably worse in every way
Compared to now being toxically gassed
The pm lectures us on the plastics
That put us in the extirpation hole
But it’s the same as buried forests
That turned into fungusless coal
There ain’t no going back to chthonic
And qulliq ancient cold climes
Cause nature’s strongest tool
Is the sweep of deep time


2)Day Today Tomorrow

Kurt Godel always argued that truth before us can’t be proven
So he went off into the Entscheidungs mushroom field groovin’
As this is always the outcome when the math guys fight with him
But nowadays randomness today is made with an algorithm
Which is just the opposite of a random blockchain tornado
Don’t worry about it as I will see the day today tomorrow.

Can’t see the forest cuz of trees can’t see cosmos cuz of stars
This means I gotta jump over linguistic and logically tangled bars
Theology and philosophy bet that god exists outside of time
Or inside a black hole that suck lights which means that I’m
Just another big bang dimension rocking to and fro
Don't worry about it as we will see the day today tomorrow.

And finally it's our turn to leave the party and we don't want to
Remember our Kierkegaard motorcycle repair man just died at 42 
This death inevitability seems to be the price you pay for sex
There’s two words and one starts with eff so I’ll send you a text
Which says we are only here because entropy is not touch and go
Don’t worry about it as we will see the day today tomorrow.


3)No Limit To Insane

Ain’t no system perfect as they eventually all stink
Easy to point out in some old polish communist unthink
But you can also show it in our capitalist groupthink
Where you buy a kidney or a kid just like you can buy a drink
Jesus my mind is being squeezed by a heavy chain
Ain’t no limit to stupid and ain’t no limit to insane

Sacrifice the golden ox on the silver altar of democracy
Which just turns into the voice box of a plutocracy
It’s a paradox that keeps turning into blatant hypocrisy
As we all try to throw rocks at the bureaucracy
Jesus my mind is being squeezed by a heavy chain
Ain’t no limit to stupid and ain’t no limit to insane

We ask the poisonous incentivized system why
It’s like smelly brain puss that is much too slow
The big assed ladies say we make our rules on high
But the kardashians of hades  make hacks from below
Jesus my mind is being squeezed by a heavy chain
Ain’t no limit to stupid and ain’t no limit to insane


4)Everything Is Just A Blink

The math guys know that it is an emotional mind gear
But the politician wants something to decrease the fear
Of the voters who expect gifts to be completely gratis
As talk of liberty and power only increases their status
This world is an autistic algorithm dressed in wild pink
Once they realize that everything is just a quick blink

This continuum of Newton is laid out before ME on the grass
As Cantor and his infinite ants attempt to crawl up my ass
The future is infinite and unfalsifiable, a basic paradox of math
But it does not stop the science from my life path
And the planet that eventually into empty space will sink
Once I realized that everything is just a quick blink

In the bunker there are math popsicles which sycophants licked
To remove that veneer of freedom, they played the game perfect
It’s just another arsenic koolaid party into which we are tricked
Man, there’s a lot of damage comes from pretending we can predict
One can only hope that someday we don’t swallow this hoodwink
Once we realize that everything is just a quick blink


5)Bubba Meisah Bubble

It’s BS and bubba meisa trouble 
You don’t know if you’re in a bubble
Peripeteia and anagnorisis
You do know that you’re in a crisis

Tulips were once the new phase of money making
Real estate and the south seas were world shaking
Scams poke heads into the real world record breaking
With a vibe coded AI god dangerous undertaking
 
Thought used to be taken as the ascent of reach
But it is rotting in the moldy obliteration of speech
The text we now train on has the loudest screech
Because  it is written by the victorious gold leech

We always had the finance of slivers of silver’s twitch
By the age old greedy bankers who toss that wild pitch
But now the money is the ideology of greatness which
Means that the poor  are now much fatter than the rich

It’s BS and bubba meisa trouble 
You don’t know if you’re in a bubble
Peripeteia and anagnorisis
You do know that you’re in a crisis

6)Underestimating Crazy
Nicky talked to aliens and had transmission that electrons vibrated when they travelled
He tried so hard to convince the energy  world but his life became financially unravelled
Never never never never never never sell short crazy 
Never never never never never never put down crazy

Jesus told the sexless and submissive Roman slaves that they would have it all up in sky blue
With Salesman Saul and a billion believers he became the all time most famous psychotic jew
Never never never never never never sell short crazy 
Never never never never never never put down crazy

Vincent chopped off his ear,shot himself in the chest was thought of as a mental neanderthal
He was insane and his paintings were insane but he’s not thought to be the most influential of all
Never never never never never never sell short crazy 
Never never never never never never put down crazy

Barry the mental medical man swallow a bowl of buzzer puke growing helicobacter pylori
Years later they gave him a nobel prize for saying this is what caused ulcers not your cacciatori
Never never never never never never sell short crazy 
Never never never never never never put down crazy

Alfie’s pangaea said that the top of mount everest use to be at the bottom of an ocean
The geological geniuses of the times had no conception of such slow tectonic motion
Never never never never never never sell short crazy 
Never never never never never never put down crazy

Albert who was slow at math fundamentally changed our opinion of space and time
Anywhere on earth a phone tells me where to drive which as not the case in the old paradigm
Never never never never never never sell short crazy 
Never never never never never never put down crazy


7)J’en Eh Marre

Jhaw neh mar
You’ve scrapped my scar
J’en ai marre
Give me the crowbar

Jhaw neh mar
Bureaucrat ripped the crown
J’en ai marre
From off the street clown

Jhaw neh mar
I am really not the one
J’en ai marre
Cuz I am totally done

Jhaw neh mar
Eat to kill and kill to eat
J’en ai mar
Flesh tastes sweet

Jhaw neh mar
Don’t make such a damn fuss
J’en ai mar
There’s a sucker in each of us

Jhaw neh mar
My body is still intact
J’en ai marre
But my brain has let go

Jhaw neh mar
There is such a chill in the room
J’en ai marre
Cuz the witch arrived on a broom

Jhaw neh mar
World is a lot less dumb
J’en ai marre
If every hindu is a muslim

Jhaw neh mar
Let them all pray
J’en ai marre
That don is the U.S. effin eh

Jhaw neh mar
It makes everyone bawl
J’en ai marre
Sheer fcking lunacy of it all

Jhaw neh mar
The weed will win
J’en ai marre
Pass the gut rot gin

Jhaw neh mar
We wish for what we once were
J’en ai marre
Only makes it way more awfuller


8)The Monotheistic Poker Blues
An agnostically inclined atheist or an atheistically inclined agnostic
Was playing poker with the great monotheistic mouthpieces of gnostic
On a burning table of dead humans recycling so chemically caustic
That none of them  believed they’d find anything in the game prognostic
Pour me and gimme some me more booze amen
Monotheistic poker blues again

Psycho jew jesus bet further and further away until he wasn’t even there
He was the quant who sees ME using his algorithmic biological warfare
But the noble savage mohammed immediately called with a dark stare
Wondering all the while if the last limp bet was just a dead man hand’s prayer
Pour me and gimme some more booze amen
Monotheistic poker blues again

ME saw that the mighty only raised with a ace or maybe a low pair if wasted
Especially with drugs they went from routine to ritual to religious then sacred
They all had to get up in the morning without any harmonic hungover hatred
They should have dealt with that free will pissing problem that they created
Pour me and gimme some more booze amen
Monotheistic poker blues again


9)This Scientifically Dumb

Politicalization of problem gives simplification which is sometimes worse than cancers
The models are a great way to explore questions but a dangerous way to give answers
Serious religion is like serious astrology
Some science today is narrative mythology

This two degree change is treated as scientific fact but it gets turned into a political train
So nothing is believed more strongly than that which we least know said Mr. Montaigne
Serious religion is like serious astrology
Some science today is narrative mythology

But the existence of consensus is not itself the evidence for this bullshit amanuensis
Consensus entrepreneurs are dictating who contributes to the existence of consensus
Serious religion is like serious astrology
Some science today is narrative mythology

We are all confident preferred position idiots drowning in information and starving for wisdom
Could not imagine such a process of the science of facts becoming litigation of truth this dumb
Serious religion is like serious astrology
Some science today is narrative mythology


10)Wokending

A bugged infested one legged crow just landed in their pigeon’s nest
Now their eyes are being eaten out by this noble bird’s leprosy pest
It’s the start of the money ball for life woke university’s cardiac arrest
Yet the harvard lamborghini people tell me they’re still being oppressed


11)F

Féck fèck fêck fëck fūck
A red maga puke
Or blue bonnie kook
Moloch black sea
Or a mad mary
no ess hach eye tee


12)Build Or Grow

On our planet structures are built and organisms are grown
Can you imagine what happens when that gap is tightly sewn
Shut, so it is now just one big continuous solid backbone
Would solve the entropy problem? Well, that’s not really known

But the mathematical continuum under which we are all snowed
Is gonna stay as we reduce everything to one dimension strings of code
Funny how we see more machines as we reduce deeper in a nematode
In our digital belief that an AI program can talk to a god of the goad

But I will still walk on a beach and see a discontinuous line of sand
Beside a continuous line of water right beside the brown dry land
And wonder if analogue Nature had the digitalized biology planned
With trees rings that count time in like a big universal brass band


13)Tax

Everything is a tax
Heaped on our backs
By a legal syntax
Played on an elite sax

“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”  Patrick Henry

My meagre contribution to this subject can be found here and here.

But the best writer on the planet about this, Oliver Bullough, is back with another book called Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won . You can sense he is getting a little bit more pessimistic about this matter compared to his first two books. Laundering (or at least the “offshoring”) of money is growing, not shrinking.

The best “story” Mr. Bullough tells about this is that despite cash becoming more and more rare for the average person to use in a transaction vs. the electronic digital method, the US government has had to build new factories for the manufacture of said cash which is growing (especially larger denominations) like stink EVEN THOUGH that same US government has mandated the $200B USD now spent on bank compliance.

Bullough also points out that criminals are very entrepreneurial.

Basically you could argue that laundering is a tax on every other non-laundering sucker or you could argue that western liberal democracies charge too much for their services. But. You do have to be pretty rich to launder correctly. Btw, with their monopoly on violence, those same western liberal democratic governments are taking more than a passing interest in some (or all) of this tax that they don’t get the privilege of collecting especially if the amount we are talking about is a missing world GDP or some big fraction of it.

Now you have to give those governments some credit for demanding (only after the massive Panama and Paradise Paper leaks ten years ago now) that offshore centers document beneficial owners under threat of sanctions (backed eventually by the Marines). This has messed up the drug lords’s business model, for sure.

However the real reason over the last decade for the now over $60T USD in offshore financial centers has quite a bit to do with the reissurance business (managed of course by the big hedge funds). Also in a lot of countries with minimal rule of law and lots of corruption (ahem-Africa) parking money in the Caymans is much better than the alternative of an African bank run by the dictator of said African country. You might also want to LLM “variable-interest entitities” used by many big (cough-cough) Chinese corporations.

The world is definitely in need of that teenager at the Christmas extended family dinner table blurting out that Aunt Shirley’s is having an affair?

“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.” Rosa Luxemburg

Cheers,

ME

Iconoclast? Bipolar? Genius? Yes, to all.

Here are two pieces that give you the gist of it. I cannot possibly do better than this so here are the links. Might change your life.

One.

https://www.skeptic.com/article/seven-ideas-that-should-make-you-distrust-your-own-mind-a-cheat-sheet-to-the-animal-you-are/

Two.

https://quillette.com/2026/03/25/the-many-roots-of-our-suffering-reflections-on-robert-trivers-1943-2026/

Cheers,

ME

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump BOTH want (at least that’s what they’ve said) the US Government to take an equity stake in the now Mythos 5/ Fable 5 guardrail screwed up Anthropic.

What could possibly go wrong with that?

Naming stuff is real important if you are going to sell stuff. Bear with me on this little paragraph to explain the names in the title above. Hormones come in three flavours depending on where they come from, chemically speaking. There’s the amine ones like adrenaline and thyroid hormone derived from the amino acids tryptophan and tyrosine. There’s the steroid ones derived from cholesterol like testosterone and estrogen. And. There’s the protein/ peptide ones which are chains of amino acids strung together like oxytocin (9 amino acids in length), insulin (51 amino acid length), and growth hormone (191 amino acids in length). Basically call a protein anything over 50 and a peptide as anything under 50. There is now a brand new name in biochemistry, peptideins (probably millions of them, given the name dark proteome) which is the new name for a short amino acid chain for which science has no idea of what they do. But that does not seem to stop the gym rats from injecting this sheit (a white powder bought over the internet and reconstituted with normal saline) into their bellies (actually the subcutaneous tissue of their bellies which starts to look like linear bruises similar to a junkie’s track marks).

If you get your islets of Langerhans in your pancreas wiped out by some freekin’ virus when you are a kid, you get an aweful thing called juvenile onset diabetes which will kill you pretty quickly. At least at the turn of the last century it killed quickly until Banting and Best lowered the PH (at the U of T) of a solution and precipitated out insulin. Now one does not die so quickly from juvenile diabetes. This is a good reason to take a hormone. Gym rats do not have a good enough reason to take hormones imho.

There are over 100 medically recognized protein/peptide treatments. There are hundreds more in trials which make sure doctors don’t kill more patients than they help. This is normal and safe. But it does take time. And a lot of money.

There will be great advances so let’s not start mainlining these things. The gym rats are not going to outsmart 4 billion years of Darwinian evolution without some sort of kick in the head.

One: Tradeoffs. Only tradeoffs.

Two: We are a 4.8 billion year evolutionary trial and error planetary process.

Three: “Nature’s” biological evolution is hacked by “our” cultural (scientific) evolution.

OK. GLP’s.

We evolved to grab food when we could and store it for when there was no food, which was often the case 20K years ago. Our food industry hacked this with its sheit. Then Novo Nordisk hacked the created obesity with GLP-1 agonists promising all sorts of good stuff.

GLP-1 (which is a hormone) is everywhere in your body. It controls the complicated process of you deciding you are hungry, grabbing some food, putting it in your mouth, deciding to chew and not spit it out cuz it’s bad, and deciding you are full enough. It acts in the short term. Then along came some smart chemists who make this a long term effect by pinning some fatty acid tails to the side of this hormone. And voila. You don’t feel hungry. You loose weight. And Novo Nordisk says this will cure your diabetes, prevent your cancer and make you immortal? Good narrative. It drove this company’s market cap bigger than the GDP of Denmark where it was headquartered.

The trouble is though, that we are screwing with some pretty ancient biochemistry here. Anesthesia had some bad outcomes with patients on ozempic due to aspiration of stomach contents on induction of anesthesia for surgery.

Bound to be other “stuff” that shows up over the next few decades. In fact it is already showing up in the pancreas and kidneys or hollowed out faces with wrinkles. The neurological “stuff” can’t be far off?

So we gorge on super concentrated grease and sugar (a lot of the time fructose and not glucose which our mitochondria “evolved” to burn) in a tinfoil wrapper that we purchase off the grocery shelf, then get fat and diabetic and our insurance gives us a pill to get thin. Doesn’t something strike you as insane here? Of course you can’t mention anything about individual responsibility. It all about the collective (government) providing you with a pill.

Attendum:

Here’s a fourth thought to keep in mind. Just because someone is smart doesn’t mean they can’t be WRONG…..especially about action fallacy in medicine.

There are lots of really smart people out there now suggesting low dose Cialis on a grand scale for men. Wonder what else besides the increase in geriatric STD’s is going to show up with this “treatment”? By the way the GLP agonists are also reported to increase sex drive. A Gottried Wilhelm Lebnitz quote comes to mind…..“All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

At least, for the most part, the vitamin/supplement industry “treatments” are only causing patients to have expensive urine.

Basically. If wur talkin’ electricity. There is:

a) baseload (coal and nuclear) which runs 24/7 steady. 
b) dispatchable (hydro and gas turbines) that can be turned on fairly quickly when the population gets home for dinner and turns on the AC. 
And. 
c) INTERMITTENT renewable (wind and solar). 

These categories overlap and there are many brilliant people who go bezerk with definitions so let’s not go there for the sake of simplicity. Any infrastructure we build has good (we get to use more energy to amuse ourselves) and bad (some external cost is unloaded on some other sap’s balance sheet that we eventually ALL pay for).

Bad brownout/blackout stuff (followed by riots) happens when there are too many intermittent renewables on the grid. And it probably won’t be solved by batteries simply because we will need to dig up continents of rock to get the lithium and the rare earths or whatever other element we discover works to store electrons. Ps, this high torque low speed digging is done with diesel.

Someday we’ll figure it out. Most likely from charging ten times the price at 4pm as at 4am for electrons.

Intermittent gives violence in darkness 
And they still want renewables for the grid
The great one greta denies the death wish
Of the brownout reality that's well hid
No the world is not getting worse
Sorry but I am just not now ready
To take that ride in the climate hearse
Hey you great god of climate change
I know you will certainly globalize
The return to the stone age
Of the humans with sunken eyes

Plants really like the CO2 of burnt oil
Just look at the smaller Sahara
The do good minds have dictated
An assumptionally wrong chimera
Between the dung smoke breathing babies
And some methane there’s a great divide
But the green greta ghouls
Still seem bent on green genocide
The climate anxious rich don’t seem 
To know that everyone dies
But the end is always near
For the humans with sunken eyes

They gotta keep the agenda going 
With the trillions of debt service
Gotta keep the money flowing
And the common man nervous
Don’t worry about that perverse ratchet
Making your eyes bug out dearie
As our ethics are under the control
Of modern monetary theory
The dead elephant of debt starts to swell
The smell makes the prices rise
In a greased slide into armageddon
For the humans with sunken eyes

Internet’s OS is Linux.

Economy’s OS is Fossil.

Ethylene, propylene, butadiene from a cracking column…. benzene, toluene, and xylene (the aromatics) from a cracking column….. methane from natural gas for Haber-Bosch…. helium from liquefied natural gas processing….

This tome is. Amazing. Really. Thank you Mr. Brannen.

Peter leans towards the “Green action in a short time frame”. ME? No,

The bottom line is this. We are only here (living, breathing 02) because fossil fuels are buried in the ground. AND. The whole climate standoff is about HOW much fossil there is in the ground AND how quick are humans burning it. Read on.

Some Caveats First

This is a story of CO2 (today measured in parts per million on our planet) and O2 (measured in parts per hundredths) and life (not really measurable as no one can define it). It is a grand tour of geology (1), paleontology, anthropology, seismology , volcanology, archeology, biology, etc. Some would call this deep history.

There is a lot of certainty (the nemesis of wisdom) from the top in this climate subject these days so best to have a generalized agnosticism (ala Robert Anton Wilson) about any fixed belief especially when it comes to human time vs geological time. As the famous saying goes, hold your beliefs lightly.

This history …. Any history….is not linear. It’s power laws all the way down. The 80/20 Pareto Principle. Exponents on numbers. It’s punctuated equilibrium ala Stephen Gould.

I will try not to mention this many or that many hundreds of millions of years ago or any “tough to pronounce” Jurassic Park names which are useless descriptive blather, not explanation.

I will not pick out numbers for the concentration of CO2 or O2 or temperature and then attach them to a funny sounding historical period to prove some point like the Green Gretas or the Maga Mikes on either side of this argument do with their statistical cherry picking.

I will attempt to outline the chapters here for you. But do read this book. You will be a better human being. Seriously. Yes it’s long and it’s wordy which as a general rule I detest, but here, it is great!

Keep in mind that the Earth is like an egg. A really freegin’ big egg.

Introduction

This is a story. A story of organic carbon and therefore a story of our planet (and us).

Earth has been around for more than four billion years but only in the last half billion years, or so, has real complexification with organic carbon really been dissipating energy (2) like a hurricane in the air, or a vortex in the water does, to keep entropy at bay temporarily so we can live. Sorry. That might sound too physics-y. Keep going.

Humanity needs a lot more humility in face of the carbon cycle which we really don’t understand. For simplicity let’s call (3) our burning a one, our atmosphere a hundred, our oceans a ten thousand and our planet a million with regards to carbon content and let’s say, that we really don’t know EXACTLY how these pools of carbon affect one another. It does help though to look at the entire four billion plus “history of this chemistry experiment”.

C02 is the Lego block that the photosynthesis photon engine in plants uses to make our animal food and oxygen with electrons from ripping apart H2O which we animals then burn in our hotter respiratory engine to give back the CO2 and water. The end planetary result is that high energy from the sun’s ultraviolet photons are given back to the universe as lower energy infrared photons thus increasing the entropy of the universe.

After you’ve read this introduction you’ll know about the famous Alex Kleidon line of “matter mixes, water flows down a hill, and wood burns to ash”.

PART ONE

Chapter 1

CO2, the Stuff of Life

People have been banging their heads against the wall for many decades to figure out (explain) how ?life? started. Some scientists way back (4) put some inorganic chemicals in a test tube and zapped it with electricity to get some organic chemicals. To great kerfuffle at the time, this seemed to indicate how lightning (climate) on the early Earth did Genesis-like things. This theory has fallen out of favor.

Here’s the latest one (5). The author introduces you to the black smokers and the Lost Civilization at the bottom of our oceans where the alkaline stuff of the earth has flowed from the beginning of “earth time” into acidic water creating a gradient like in a battery. Layered on top of this over many hundreds of millions of years, life’s chemistry basically copied this. The secret was how this chemistry can shove electrons onto CO2 (the Lego brick of life) to make organic carbon (plants and animals and you and ME) when CO2 does NOT want to do this chemically.

Chapter 2

The Great CO2 Freakout and the End of Eternity

To reiterate….. ancient plants figured out how to take the energy (photons) of the sun to tear apart water and make food from CO2 (photosynthesis) for animals who then ate (respired) it and gave back the carbon dioxide and water to the environment that it came from in the first place.

This CO2 is fine balanced. Too much we burn. Too little we freeze. Without CO2 the planet turns into a snowball. When this “snow” covered up all the rock in one of these Snowball Earth periods there was no weathering of CO2 rocks (that decreases CO2) so it builds up slowly over billions of years and then “BOOM”.....it collapses…..physics rules. To quote the author, “Snowball Earth is a reminder that our planet’s earthiness is contingent unguided by any providential force other than physics….. At the end of Snowball Earth all hell broke loose and when it ended for some reason the riot of animal life exploded”.

Chapter 3

Fossil Fuel Goes Down, Oxygen Goes Up

This chapter introduces the basic tenet that if there was no fossil fuel buried in the earth we would not exist (there would be no oxygen). How’s that for a counterfactual statement to the dominant narrative of today’s climatopolcalyse world.

It’s true. Here’s why. Plants take CO2 and water and make our food. We eat plants (or things that eat plants) which just reunites the O2 and the organic carbon to put that CO2 and water back….it’s molecule for molecule…..any accountant would recognize this as balanced perfectly.

But a little bit of this organic carbon is buried which hides it from the oxidation (done by fungi) that decomposes this biomass, so after millions of years there’s this extra oxygen around that accumulates and this leads to biological growth. Geologists (and nobody else) understand that there is way more forest under the ground than above it. It is just that this underground forest is what we call coal. So oxygen is really geological, not biological.

Simplistically. Think of CO2 as a control knob over temperature then think of O2 as a control knob over life. Once you add a third control knob to this system (and there are a gabillion of them when it comes to planetary science) you are far past the point of being able to scientifically be confident of anything. Think three body problem (6). Think complexity.

As far as this “life” thing goes (7) there were two energetic (8) miracles that happened ONCE each. This first was when some ancient algae engulfed a cyanobacteria which evolved to become the chloroplasts (energy factories) of a plant. The same thing happened on the animal side of biology when a small bacteria was engulfed by an archaebacteria (probably) and became mitochondria which are the energy factories of every cell in our body.

There’s another cycle you learn about in this chapter. It is the breaking up and sinking of a big single hunk of basalt in the world of plate tectonics, interspaced with snowball earths and a long “boring billion” period associated with something written in the rock that geologists call the Great Unconformity.

Chapter 4

CO2 and The Great Age of Coal

You will learn here all about the Carboniferous Period, which was only about 2% of the Earth’s history but was when 90% of the world’s coal was put in the ground. Basically a tiny percentage of a ginormous magical strange super green Tolkien type swamp forest that came about with high O2 was buried in the earth’s crust hiding this biomass from oxidation.

When the CO2 started going down from all the forest growth then Earth whipsawed into ice ages and came close to a mega Third Snowball Earth that would have halted everything?

There was a slow grade burn to charcoal so the world probably resembled a really smoggy London of the 1800’s. Fungi (which ate up dead trees) probably were not around to eat up dead trees and return the CO2 and H2O. This is similar to the plastics around today that come from oil refineries that we don’t seem to be able to recycle.

The history of Appalachia and coal is told along with all its misery and glory. The retrieval of this old sunlight is what powered the first part of the Industrial Revolution. There are now two titanic reservoirs (the oxygen in the air and the carbon in the ground) of potential chemical burning separated by a thin layer of crust. What happens when we put them back together?

Chapter 5

CO2 and the Age of Extinction

This chapter starts off with a nice description of Boston…….then Boston 20000 years ago covered in half a mile of ice…….then Boston 50 million years ago as a hot oven with acidifying oceans.

You will meet the big five mass extinction events (or at least what we tentatively know about them). Interestingly enough the one that wiped out the dinosaurs was really minor considering the stuff that was NOT killed off. These big extinctions were 99.99% percent wipeouts. And it seems likely that (unlike the comet strike) these disasters are geological and are associated with an Earth with a single big continent.

And a single big continent is associated with huge volcanic eruptions which “are the Earth’s way of rudely reminding us that our thin rocky surface and the gossamer glaze of green goo that coats it, sits atop a roiling utterly indifferent planetary drama”.

And these big eruptions were so big, and hot, and long lasting that the ground with fossil fuel sediment in it started to burn releasing CO2.

And this increase in CO2 is associated with the end Permian extinction which is taken as a harbinger for what we are doing today.

Over the millions of years of these eruptions happened, way more CO2 was put in the atmosphere than what humans can do today. That is not controversial. What is controversial is the rate at which this is happening and will this act in the same way as it has in the past. Like, has the planet’s resilience to this CO2 evolved?

PART TWO

Chapter 6

The Fall of CO2 and the Rise of the Modern World

As the big super continent (Pangaea) broke up there was a long long period of time that CO2 levels went down and down. Dinosaurs are here (9).

Interestingly enough today we are in an ice age. Ice is a rare thing in our planet’s history especially since dinosaur time and it probably came about from CO2 going down down down. And the most likely reason for it going down and down and down was India crashing into China to create those huge mountains which take CO2 out of the air (weathering (10)).

Also C4 photosynthesis which is much more efficient came along here somewhere which ate up more CO2 than the old photosynthesis that had been around for billions of years.

Chapter 7

The Rise of New Metabolism

Ice ages have seesawed back and forth in more recent geological history. But for the first ninety percent of the Earth’s time as a planet in the solar system there was no fire on the Earth. There was no fire because you need at least 16% O2 for combustion which was not present until more recently. As the author has said, 21% atmospheric oxygen today is only present from “the impounding of some small fraction of life in the crust” each year for millions of years. And that “”only appeared in the age of animals once tectonics and the like conspired to bury enough carbon in the crust below”.

Chimps aren’t terrified by grassland fires like other animals. They wait around till the fire dies down and rush in to pick up nicely roasted insect snacks. It is all about calories and survival.

Humans took this one step further and “tamed” fire. We are “obligate pyrophiles who are wholly dependent on fire for survival and reproduction”. Eco system engineering is not a new thing. Biology has been doing it for billions of years to the planet. Humans just cranked the volume on this to the max. We developed tools which are just energy concentrators. Think of the Homo Erectus millions of years with his energy concentrating obsidian axe….a technology that “ was changing the world long before anything was actually written on Sumerian tablets”. More calories meant bigger brains that operated on a time scale that “left genetic evolution in the dust”. It was not the climate that killed all the megafauna.

Chapter 8

The Long Fuse

Here is ancient history in a 30 page summary based on energetics of photosynthesis. We got agriculture and more calories but we also got anemia, dental disease, repetitive stress injuries, bureaucracy, and wars. We got states. Like the saying goes, war made states and states made war.

Chapter 9

The Start of the Supereruption

Here is modern history in 60 pages starting with Britain’s “near to the surface coal” and the steam engine (14) which is a continuation of the fuse burning story started in the previous chapter.

Keep in mind from previous chapters, that geology burnt fossil fuels long before humans existed causing big time extinctions and this is supposedly directly related to what is going on now with humans. The big question is though, has the earth not evolved to be more resilient to this?

Keep in mind that for every smart positive one guy interpreting this history one way there is an equal and opposite smart guy who can interpret it in a negative one way.

Chapter 10

The CO2 Supereruption

You guessed. This is a continuation of the “catastrophic” burning by “pyromanic apes” that will lead to Permian type extinctions. The “without precedent” CO2 bomb is detonating now and we better do something about it now.

This is the unassailable version of the story that runs any planetary science department at any major university. There are….again…..equally smart people with different opinions.

Maybe we drill ten times deeper than the average oil well and suck up hydrogen or deep geothermal superheat. Maybe the billion who live in a mud hut will keep wanting a frig and a stove so their kids don’t die young. Maybe we will reduce, reuse and recycle?

Chapter 11

Energy, CO2 and Civilization

The author states that “the boundary between the human and the natural worlds is less than absolute and in fact is profoundly continuous”. A plea is made (which sounds like a university’s position statement) that we have to do something or “the eruption of geological energy” will create the reverse of the Cambrian life explosion in life (ie- human extinction).

This assumes ALL buried carbon is available which is not true. There is oil, there is oil that engineers can raise to the surface, and there is oil that engineers can get to the surface at a profit. Nobody really knows how many orders of magnitude separate these categories.

Industrialized farming is given a bad review (13).

He also delves into the capitalism Jevon’s paradox thing but increased consumption is not going away because the human operating system is run on dopamine. Nate Hagens has a nice line about civilization is just turning barrels of oil into microliters of dopamine.

Chapter 12

The Future of CO2

It is hard not to be just a little sarcastic about the action fallacy human tech that is supposedly (with lots of money) going to remedy this. Remember that Mao Tse Tung killed a billion sparrows who he thought were eating too much grain, so China got locusts and a famine that killed millions of humans.

If the world wants more electricity it will have to have more copper and rare earths, the refining of which kills the planet.

No solutions, only tradeoffs. Hypocrisy rules.

References:

1)Noel Ewart Odell who was a geologist on the 1924 Everest Expedition made the most insightful comment regarding this when he wrote that the top of Mount Everest used to be on the bottom of an ocean floor.

2)A concept of Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine from the 1970’s.

3)see the Feb 19th post

4)the 1950’s Miller-Urey experiment

5)first put out there by Mike Russell and William Martin decades ago

6)not the famous sci-fi book by Liu Cixin but the famous three body problem that Newton knew about…..if you have three things interacting gravitationally then you can predict sweet fck all about the trajectory (the future) of that system

7)Scholars argue endlessly about what like actually is,,,,means….is defined by……etc

8)Good to think “evolution” for anything human and “energy” for humanity? It’s mre robust just think in terms of energy for anything….human, humanity, the earth, the universe….etc.

9)Tyrannosaurus Rex was further from away from Stegasaurus than we are from Tyrannosaurus.

10)If there was no weathering then the Himalayas would be twice as high as they are now. Brannens’s book is full of geological history tied tightly to human energy use (600 exajoules yearly).

11)early hominids were evolutionarily forced out to these drier treeless areas by bigger animals that wanted to eat them

12)one quarter of a billion years ago volcanoes of bubbling lava that lasted hundreds of thousands of years burnt lots of buried biomass creating (probably) the Great End Permian extinction

13) Ants invented farming when the started growing fungus on leaves in the Cretaceous Period.

14)Interestingly France had a lot more forest to still burn so it still relied on more human labor not supplemented with coal burning and we all know how that turned out. Ignoring the little victorious Napoleonic episode, the British still wound up ruling 25% of the planet’s land mass. The scam of the French revolution that killed the French aristocracy off, was that all men were considered equal and therefore much more willingly to voluntarily enlist for service under the Great Little Corsican, the numerical advantage of which he seized on.

Thee Headline

This was a “vast international sex trafficking ring” for wealthy powerful male elites perhaps with help from the CIA and Mossad?

Another Headline?

It’s another legal boondoggle (sorta like the 1980’s suppressed memory thing) supported by money generated by some of the most expensive lawyers on the planet?

The truth? Not in those headlines.

Seven Facts That Aren’t Too Corrupted?

1)Epstein was a mathy smart man who never graduated from a university yet managed to teach at Dalton (was fired), work at Bear Stearns (chose resigning vs firing), and later became a client of Bear Stearns.

2)He was a financial advisor to the Victoria Secret billionaire with power of attorney and even managed to “buy” Wexner’s NYC mansion. Wexner won a $47M lawsuit against Epstein. Wexner has denied he’s gay. He’s 88. Ex PM of Israel Ehud Barak is 84.

3)He was a financial advisor to Leon Black and managed to get a fee of $158M.

4)At the time of his death his estate was just shy of $600M

5)Damages paid so far by the estate are just shy of $200M (so far). Those paid by the banks caught up in this are $365M (JP Morgan and Deutsch Bank). And. The lawyers are getting 30% of the bank payouts. Many of these settlements are tax free.

6)He was convicted of solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution (investigated in 2005 and finalized in 2007). The most sweet heart of legal deals happened?

7)Epstein is dead so won’t be on trial. Ever.

Conclusion:

Our great grandchildren might have the full picture if/when governments have declassified and released everything without redactions.

Until then, it’s game on. Storage locker search warrants coming? Unfortunately Camus was right in 1942.

These days it seems you are either super pro climate/gender/free-drugs or you are super anti pro climate/gender/free-drugs. My guess is that these issues are like any other in politics where the 5% on either end of the stick do the screaming and the other 90% don’t really give a shit and just want to be left alone to live their lives.

Based on the “CO2 is too narrow of a framework” argument I have been pretty critical of the Davos Greta Private Jet Billionaire Club telling us what to do. So here, Dear Reader, is my attempt to steelman this DGPJBC’s “it’s ALL, EVER, and ONLY about the CO2” argument on the other side my usual ranting.

But before the steelman here’s a little illustration of just how hard this carbon chemistry cycling is to conceptualize even before the two 5% groups each start giving us their two diametrically opposed and very biased nice simple certain stories. Here are some numbers for thinking about this carbon cycle. I have fudged a bit to only use 1’s and 0’s but the relative sizes are pretty close.

Carbon we burn into the atmosphere=1

Carbon in the land biomass=100

Carbon in the oceans=10,000

Carbon in the planet=10,000,000

The combinations of these four conveniently divided (with a 7 magnitude difference) things is 16. The permutations of these four conveniently divided things is 64. But the possibility numbers of the dynamics of every potential interaction combinatorially explodes! Science cannot possibly understand/explain this complexity at the present time. And maybe never will bc that huge number is not recursively numerable. Have your ChatGPT tell you (ala Stu Kauffman) about that puppy! Bottom line is that we don’t really know how the 1 dynamically affects the 10,000,000 or maybe more pertinently, how the 1 affects the 100? We only have guesses.

My Steelman Attempt

Humans can live only within a very small range of temperature. CO2 is the thermostat on this temperature. If CO2 goes way up quickly then we have mass extinctions like the Permian. (If CO2 goes way down we have Snowball Earth where humans can’t live either.)

There is a fine balance between the CO2 that animals give off with respiration and the CO2 that plants take in with photosynthesis. Actually there are three broad classes of biology (Archaea, Bacteria, Eukarya) that all do a bit of both but let’s not complicate things. There is a fine balance between the CO2 that volcanoes give off and the weathering of the earth that takes in CO2. (As I’ve already mentioned there are other fine balances that we have pretty much zero understanding of.)

This “fine” balance is not really that fine (ie-balanced from an accounting perspective) because over hundreds of millions of years some carbon is covered up and put in cold storage-actually it’s not cold, it’s damned hot as you dig deeper) and turns into fossil fuels. We are burning that stuff way faster than “nature” covered it up. There is a lot (and I mean ALOT) of biased cherry picking of numbers to determine that rate (a first order derivative, if you’re into calculus, that is non-intuitive for humans as a rule) that makes government money accounting look like angel’s work. I know; strawman not steelman.

ps-Way way way more humans on this planet die of cold than heat. (couldn’t resist one last strawman; sorry Greta!).

Reference:

Steel

The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything by Peter Brannen in 2025 is pretty good piece of writing. Also try James Hansen or Michael Mann. Any Geoscience department these marvelously days will be prominently pro-climate change agenda. Just like humanity departments in these same august institutions have pretty much zero “conservative” representation.

Straw

Try Michael Wielicki who writes on substack at “Irrational Fear”. Or try Richard Lindzen or Judith Curry. They all got punted from academia for questioning the woke gods of greta running earth science programs now.