The pandemic is manifestly not over & risk reduction is the rational disposition If you are not masking now it is because you are a nervous social conformer or you've been gaslit by morons into believing you should square up against multiple reinfections of a systemic vasculitis

Here's why I think about the Roman empire everyday
youtu.be/C9xhjmIvVsM

Neoliberalism destroyed education and intellectualism as anything except tributary to profit thereby making them structurally stupid

Working from home can reduce climate emissions.

Working from home keeps employees and their families safer from COVID-19.

But CEOs are forcing workers to return to the office so that they can protect real estate profits.

by self conscious I mean in the ecological non individuated unatomized sense of 'self' that realizes the colloquial notion of self for the fairytale that it is. We are mostly made up of microorganisms with nonhuman DNA. We require ecological dialectical relations to exist there is no individual

Self conscious political action and modes of socioeconomic rearrangement + living are possible & the concept of self is an illusory amalgam of subpersonas that represents convolutedly interconnected clusters of neurons in the process of allostasis & homeodynamics being is enough

sociocultural expectations & conditioning that we use to form our fantastic notions are the only substance of the story of self, but that story is baseless, ridiculous and corrupt the philosophers of the axial age figured this out before neuroscience confirmed "self" is fiction

We are mostly made of microorganisms with nonhuman DNA. We require ecological dialectical relations to exist and modern neuroscience shows the narrative of self to be fictitious in concert with the assertions of the axial age philosophers One need not conform to expectation to be

youtu.be/4e7AX1N0jcM

every now and then, the Fed quietly acknowledges the dystopia

I'm bracing myself for all the posts about everybody knows which social media platform did what and where everyone is going in the cyber diaspora

But can we save Tamineh from the clutches of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek

We ablate the spirits of intuition with cold calculation and cure the soul with draughts of envy.

The ideology of exchange for profit has permeated all aspects of living, & has taken hold in our minds, such & to the point, that we have allowed it to cause rifts between families & communities of all kinds. Human beings are forgetting how to be human & how to be together.

A disturbing amount of modern human thought is done squarely within the lines drawn by marketeers, billionaires, their millionaire punditry class, the corporate media, commercialism, and established hegemonic structures Very good for business Very bad for being human

Capitalism drives excess consumption even further
and reduces us
to those things it teaches us
to tell ourselves we are

It has been brought to my attention that Venus is in retrograde this Leo season

Capitalism is not the best market and monetary framework, but it does seem to be the most violent; it is perhaps second only to neofeudalism and necrocapitalism

None of us knows
Uncertainty the norm
No universal algorithm for success
The decision you make is the best

It is the same flatline on the marginal product return curve, the complexity curve and the consequent collapse of complex civilization We are like the red queen running faster and faster just to stay in place We are aggressively metabolizing all we can just to preserve complexity

that it is a prevailing
spirit of communism,
and not exchange,
that makes possible
the best things in life

Feels like weak liberal elites have not learned the lessons of Weimar! If you do not address the material concerns of the population, if you do not address the perceptions and feelings, needs and desires of the people, you will get revolution or fascism! We have seen this before!

even when labor can be socioculturally and psychologically viewed as useful/meaningful, that is no guarantee of its being good for people, for ecology, for society, etc.,on those merits alone
Think of how the Romans overworked the soil
there is respected counterproductive labor as well

Economics is a system of human social relations, of sociocultural and psychological traditions, and tendencies. We must not let our conventions be our undoing. Some labor is wasteful, much labor is wasteful and predatory. Let's focus on wellness flourishing felicity+human dignity

Are we locked into the maximum power principle and Klieber's law? Will we always act, as dissipative structures seem to, in order to maximize energy consumption? Can degrowth or postgrowth economies be run in ways that don't exhaust to the point of ecological overshoot? How can we overcome ourselves

Are we locked into the maximum power principle and Klieber's law? Will we always act, as dissipative structures seem to, in order to maximize energy consumption? Can degrowth or postgrowth economies be run in ways that don't exhaust to the point of ecological overshoot? How can we overcome ourselves

this quote from MIB sticks with me as well

This has been one of the most cathartic and interesting reads of my life
It so wonderfully synthesizes a beautiful constellation and web of facts throughout the cyclic march of monetary and moral philosophical religious sociocultural and mass psychological history
Just straight truthjuice!loved it

Lobotomized Goldfish

The Washington Post: CLIMATE SOLUTIONS Your body can build up tolerance to heat. Here’s how. Small gradual exposures to heat can help the human body build tolerance to rising temperatures, experts say

This isn't a climate solution. We can't "you do you" ourselves out of the climate crisis. We need federal standards that protect workers from the heat, and to keep fossil fuels in the ground.