On getting kicked out of the party

I think if SARS2 should have taught us anything, it’s that there are no technological solutions to our predicament, because our real problem is a lack of humility before nature. Surprising to me and the reason I got so angry about the lockdowns is that most people drew the exact opposite conclusion. Instead of swallowing our pride, we began to isolate even further from nature. We began wearing masks and eventually most people received some state of the art mRNA therapy.

We’re guests on this planet, staying here at the mercy of nature. We are always one gentle nudge away from a collapse of civilization. One megatsunami, one big volcanic eruption, one new virus, it’s fundamentally not hard to get rid of us. We have so far seen 26 million excess deaths since 2020, with no end in sight.

But rather than recognizing ourselves as guests, we see ourselves as born into meaningless chaos that can be rearranged to solve a technical puzzle that will grant us control over nature. There’s always supposed to be some next button on the tech tree where we can click “research”, some electric car, some bioalgae fuel, some fourth generation nuclear reactor, some mysterious glowing blue cube that gives us everything we want.

And if we can’t have everything we want? If we have to accept that electricity is available during the day, that we will feel cold during winter, that we can’t fly around the world, or put animals in cages, that we will have to ride our bicycles to work, that we will have to fairly share the limited resources we have left with eight billion people?

Well that idea is so atrocious, so antithetical to the American entrepreneurial spirit, that we’d rather just watch the whole world die in a blaze of glory of course! I’d love to say this is hyperbole, but this is the reaction I tend to get: “Well then I’d rather just let everyone go to shit than live in your dystopian totalitarian green dictatorship.” When pressed, most people will say they would rather witness billions of deaths, over having the standard of living their grandparents had in the 1950’s.

To that I can only say: Careful what you wish for. We’re vulnerable. We broke the Western population’s immune response to a SARS virus that has so far killed 26 million people worldwide. I’ve shown you the IgG4 problem, I’ve shown you the T-cell exhaustion now observed in the whole population. We’ve intervened in things we just don’t understand very well and the signs suggest we broke things, with all sorts of weird compensatory adjustments you would normally not expect to see as part of an immune response to a virus like this.

We’re now entering the next stage, with multiple divergent serotypes circulating simultaneously. By now, BA.2.86 is already making up 9% of detected infections in the Netherlands and Denmark. We haven’t really seen this happen before, as Omicron wiped out the pre-Omicron serotypes. BA.2.86 seems unable to do this, the XBB and BA.2.86 families will instead circulate together. The only other case I can think of where we gradually saw people exposed to a growing number of different serotypes of the same virus was Dengue. This led to a huge increase in the death toll.

Like every other species, we’re supposed to enrich the ecosystems we inhabit, delivering a positive contribution to the system as a whole. Predators keep their prey healthy, beavers build dams in which little fish can lay their eggs, oysters filter the water, worms decay leaf matter andsoforth.

Humans can fulfill many roles. We fulfilled some accidentally. We brought successful generalist species to multiple new continents. There are now pigs roaming America, camels in the Australian desert and parrots in Europe. In the long run, this enriches life on Earth. The number of species in many parts of the world has gone down, because specialists are going extinct. But if you look at higher categories, like the total number of families, you can see an increase in some places.

We’re also able to bring life to the deserts. There are vast oceanic deserts, that only miss attachment points for seaweed and shellfish to grow. Cast a rope out onto the sea and the first lifeforms will attach themselves to that rope. Then eventually shells will fall to the floor and crabs will use them for shelter, fish will spawn their eggs in the seaweed, seagulls will steal some of the oysters and a dead place will be brought to life.

And finally, we were granted the unique ability to use fossil carbon as a source of energy. When we began doing this in the 19th century, our planet had two billion people and we thought that over thousands of years this would green the world. The problem unfortunately, is that we increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere by 36% in a century. We made changes much faster than anything we can observe in the geological record.

If we had been able to accept some limits to our greed, this ability of our species to use fossil fuels would have been positive-sum behavior. During the 20th century you could see food production increase, as our crops responded with increased growth. You could also see that deserts were shrinking, as higher CO2 concentrations have a fertilizing effect on plants.

Most low status white males know this, but lack any nuance and draw the wrong conclusions from it. Up to about 350 parts per million of CO2 it seems we don’t destabilize the climate system. There is some concern that the Greenland ice sheet slowly melts above 300ppm, but nothing apocalyptic should happen.

Over time, plants would draw down such input. With a slow input of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere, plants have an opportunity to increase their soil carbon content, the oceans will increase their carbon stock too if we let them.

On the coast of North America you will find the Redwood trees, the largest and tallest trees on the planet. They were living fossils, surviving in an atmosphere that poorly fits them. During previous eras of geological history, with higher CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, Europe used to be covered in the close relatives of these trees. We could have had a beautiful planet, with such enormous fire-resistant trees covering the European continent again.

That is, if we had used the fossil fuels sparingly. But we have now reached the point where our overall greenhouse gas forcing heats the planet so much that ecosystems are dying. We increased concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere at least ten times faster than during known mass extinction events.

And so, rather than being like a stage magician who becomes a welcome guest to a party, the rest of the biosphere sees us as a creep who showed up, performed his tricks and should now leave. The reason for this is because we behaved like a dick.

This is really the only message I care about offering. If you behave like a dick, you’re going to get thrown out of the party. The failure of our species to take the concerns of non-human species into consideration, means that we have turned into an unwelcome guest. This is very tragic, but there is no other outcome.

Nature has no other option than to force us out, because we’ve settled on the path of refusal to co-exist with non-human species. When it comes to greenhouse gas emissions, we’re still stuck on a path that will result in most of the planet becoming too hot for above-ground mammal lifeforms. Our failure to stop the emission of greenhouse gasses means that nature becomes forced to stop us.

Consider here part of the problem:

You can argue that it’s very difficult for us to avoid emitting carbon dioxide, trapped as we are by our industrial infrastructure. But methane concentrations in our atmosphere increased even more rapidly than carbon dioxide. We know why this is. It’s mainly because we dominate the entire planet with our herds of cattle. That’s a choice that we made, that we did not have to make.

Carbon dioxide has properties that help plants adjust to the heating effect it has. With higher CO2 concentrations, plants become less sensitive to heatwaves, they can tolerate higher temperatures. They also start losing less moisture during photosynthesis. Methane on the other hand, has none of these properties. Its only good quality is that it rapidly decays within a few years.

And so I have to emphasize again, that if you think we were faced with some sort of impossible hurdle to overcome, that we were trapped and had no other choice than to incinerate the biosphere and damage the atmosphere, then I have to disagree with you. Mother Nature opened the cookie jar and rather than grabbing one cookie, we began to empty the jar, until she told us to stop, at which point we began making promises about stopping with emptying the cookie jar, that we then failed to live up to.

Part of the problem is that humans seem naturally inclined to relate to other humans, especially if those humans look similar to them. This is to some degree a choice you make, you can find numerous examples of children raised by animals who behave like animals. But rather than trying to relate to non-humans, we spend most of our time trying to relate to other humans.

That’s how we got kicked out of the party.

50 Comments

  1. Quote: “Up to about 350 parts per million of CO2 it seems we don’t destabilize the climate system.”

    I see now it’s your digital thinking which is the source of your apokalyptic fears. You see everywhere tipping points, which must be avoided at any cost, because behind them is the apokalypse. That’s maybe a result of the digital revolution where many young people lost the ability to read digital clocks.

    But nature isn’t digital, it’s analog. There are no tipping points, there is oscillation! It’s not “on/off”, it’s the sinus-wave. Long waves could indeed be interpreted from tiny humans as tipping points, when they don’t see the sinus-wave going up again in their lifetime.

    I recently read that the core of the Earth is a giant continent-recycling machine. Whole continents full with fossile fuels have sunken down into the deep, where they slowly get dissolved, and all the lighter elements come up again.

    Rintrah, isn’t it totaly pointless what we do from the view of this giant continent-recycler?

    sunken continents

        • Only an hour ago, a buddy of mine was telling me that evil (e.g. broken people) thinks in “digital” (1’s and 0’s), while good (e.g. Nature) thinks in analog, which has infinite ways (sorry I am not good at math; maybe there is a certain type of numbers to express that), and is closer to quantum mechanics…
          Anyway! I thought it was some coincidence.

          • BTW, nice post!
            (also, analog is a word that contains logos, and logos meant a relationship… like ‘ratio’ in maths… however in philosophy ‘ratio’ may drifted away a bit)

  2. My cousin has had a horrible cough for 2 weeks now, not getting better but worse. Today he went to the emergency room. I am depressed, this is going to be horrible.

    • I’m sorry.

      It seems inevitable that it will be horrible yes.

      We have never before had eight billion people, many of them obese and elderly, living through the global outbreak of a new SARS virus.

      As long as we kill pigs, chickens, cows, goats and sheep, we’re sending a clear signal that we feel entitled to be cruel towards others. By changing the atmosphere, we now also send a message that we feel entitled to be cruel towards our own children.

      I expect this will invite great cruelty upon our own species too.

  3. Last week I spoke to someone who works in a nearby health clinic. They asked if everyone where I worked also had “this thing that’s going around?” They reported every person in their office had a nasty respiratory illness with one exception. I asked if it was “covid or something else?” and they said everyone who tested had been positive for the coof. Not that the home tests mean much. As health providers, all these people were mandated to vax and several years ago were bragging about how everyone on their staff was now “protected”. Also, if they had tested positive a few years ago they would have been home isolating-now they are trying to just work through it. This was not a random conversation either-same story in several other meetings I was in earlier last week with different people in different offices. Sad.

  4. This entry is absolutely brilliant, and why I am subscribed to Rintrah.
    Nobody is going to agree with everything in it but he makes excellent, well thought out points in a very eloquent manner.
    Have fun with your nitpicking disagreements (I only agree with about 60%) but this is gold!

    [As a LIQLSWM I’m having trouble figuring out how to edit or delete my comments. Is it possible here?]

  5. OK, some words about tipping points:

    If we look at the sinus-wave, we can see two tipping points. When it’s at its maximum value and at minimum value. But hey, those tipping points are necessary to form the sinus. Nobody would think that the sinus would forever go down after reaching its maximum tipping point, or forever go up after reaching its minimum tipping point. But Rintrah does.

    Let’s take a look at this big astoroid who hits the earth 65 millions years ago and destroyed everything. Looks like a tipping point. But if you include the knowledge that periodically clouds of asteroids will get ejected from the outer Oort cloud into the inner solar system, where they bombard the inner planets, then this digital tipping point becomes part of an analog oscillation, where the asteroid impact is part of an oscillation, which happens regularly.

    And what’s the conclusion? Tipping points are social constructs, especially because the definition of a tipping point is totally arbitrary. You can make from any phase of an oscillation a tipping point, depending on your definitions.

    But in fact, it’s all oscillation in an analog nature. Tipping points do only exist in our digital sense of reality.

  6. Humans are animals. It is natural for animals, when they are confronted with a disease, to try to avoid the disease. I think that is still the right response with covid. It is complicated by the fact that this is a bioweapon, so natural responses won’t result in natural consequences. I have no love for the vaccines, and the vaccinated will have their own special problems , but the brokenness is due to the bioweapon itself. People who aren’t vaccinated surely have T cell problems, too, and reservoirs in the brain. And if having multiple variants floating around at the same time increases the risk of a dengue style ADE, then hiding away from diseased people makes more sense than ever. It is not going to work to expose oneself to variant after variant in order to develop some sort of immunity, even if one is unvaccinated. And there’s no data on which variant might be useful for immunity against the next mystery variant that is going to pop up.

    People don’t want to avoid the virus because that means acknowledging we are going to lose this battle.

    My thrice vaccinated husband has pink eye right now. WTF. There seems to be a surge of it; Walgreen’s was nearly out of eye drops when I went to get him some a couple of days ago.

    There is only the short to mid term now.

    • >People who aren’t vaccinated surely have T cell problems, too, and reservoirs in the brain. And if having multiple variants floating around at the same time increases the risk of a dengue style ADE, then hiding away from diseased people makes more sense than ever. It is not going to work to expose oneself to variant after variant in order to develop some sort of immunity, even if one is unvaccinated. And there’s no data on which variant might be useful for immunity against the next mystery variant that is going to pop up.

      Well, look at it this way: Would you rather lose half a liter of blood twice a year, or two liters of blood once every two years?

      The prior is a regular blood donation. The latter is potentially lethal.

      The body tends to overcompensate for mild insults. With severe insults, there is more often decompensation: An organ is damaged and fails to recover.

      That’s what I generally expect with SARS2: The body recovers from mild insults and is better protected from future insults. On the other hand, severe insults set us up for lasting damage and vulnerability to future insults.

      Dengue style ADE occurs under specific circumstances: Someone has been infected once and is then infected again by a different serotype. After this, the immune response becomes sufficiently well-balanced that third infections are rare and mild when they happen.

      With SARS2 I expect that multiple serotypes becomes a problem when we depend on an adaptive immune response that has followed the moving target.

      Trained innate immunity on the other hand should be variant independent. A cell that has learned to look for signs of large chunks of alien RNA won’t care whether it’s infected by BA.2.86 or XBB. Similarly, the NK cell receptors should be able to bind these different serotypes too. Similarly, the vascular and lymphatic remodeling that occurs in response to respiratory infection is of course variant independent.

      It’s specifically the IgG antibodies, that look for specific peptides typically around 6 amino acids long, that I would expect to cause problems when you have multiple serotypes circulating at once.

      • I wish there were some data on how often vaccinated people get reinfected, versus unvaccinated. And also the severity. Looking at reddit/covid/positive, it looks like the vaccinated are getting infected over and over and over again. Their bodies can’t handle that. It is clear that they aren’t helped by repeated infections. But then I do read of unvaccinated people who have had a very bad time with their second infection, and are worried about what a third one would be like.

        I do think this may be moot since this virus is so contagious that everyone is going to catch a number of the variants. People who try to avoid it will still catch it; fewer times but still enough times to train their immune systems (if they aren’t vaccinated). And the quantity of virus they encounter will be lower because of their avoidance attempts. So trying to avoid it won’t be harmful, since they won’t actually be successful. All bets are off for old and sick people, of course.

        I’m still worried by the credible prospect that the virus creates reservoirs in the brain, in the vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. and while there eats away at the immune system, and then emerges in due time and causes AIDS-style diseases. We just don’t know if it will do that. If it does then all that immune system training will be for nothing, right?

        • And then there is whatever happening in China. @mrmickme claims that it is very bad with hospitals beyond capacity and that it is due to ADE due to mismatched antibodies (per twitter/nitter post of Sept. 24)

  7. “I think if Climate Change should have taught us anything, it’s that there are no technological solutions to our predicament because our real problem is a lack of humility before nature.”

    There, fixed it for you.

  8. We’re sorry, but you’re no longer needed
    Or wanted, or even cared about here
    Machines can do a better job than you
    And this is what you get for asking questions

    The unions agree
    “Sacrifices must be made”
    Computers never go on strike
    To save the working man you’ve got to put him out to pasture

    Looks like we’ll have to let you go
    Doesn’t it feel fulfilling to know
    That you, the human being, are now obsolete?
    And there’s nothing in hell we’ll let you do about it

    Soup is good food (we don’t need you any more)
    You made a good meal (we don’t need you any more)
    Now how does it feel
    To be shit out our ass
    And thrown in the cold like a piece of trash

    We’re sorry, you’ll just have to leave
    Unemployment runs out after just six weeks
    How does it feel to be a budget cut?
    You’re snipped, you no longer exist

    Your number’s been purged from our central computer
    So we can rig the facts and sweep you under the rug
    See our chart? Unemployment’s going down
    If that ruins your life that’s your problem!

    Soup is good food (we don’t need you any more)
    You made a good meal (we don’t need you any more)
    Now how does it feel
    To be shit out our ass
    And thrown in the cold…

    We’re sorry, we hate to interrupt
    But it’s against the law to jump off this bridge
    You’ll just have to kill yourself somewhere else
    A tourist might see you and we wouldn’t want that

    I’m just doing my job, you know
    So say “uncle!”and we’ll take you to the mental health zoo
    Force feed you mind melting chemicals
    ‘Til even the outside world looks great

    In hi-tech science research labs
    It costs too much to bury all the dead
    The mutilated, disease injected,
    Surplus rats who can’t be used anymore
    So they’re dumped, with no minister present
    In a spiraling corkscrew dispose-all unit
    Ground into sludge and flushed away
    Aw geez!

    We don’t need you any more
    We don’t need you any more
    Soup is good food (we don’t need you any more)
    You made a good meal (we don’t need you any more)
    Now how does it feel (we don’t need you any more)
    To be shit out our ass
    And thrown in the cold like a piece of trash?

    We know how much you’d like to die
    We joke about it on our coffee breaks
    But we’re paid to force you to have a nice day
    In the wonderful world we made just for you..

    “Poor rats”, we human rodents chuckle
    At least WE get a dignified cremation
    Yet at 6:00 tomorrow morning
    It’s time to get up and go to work…

    https://youtu.be/6WR3kziiz7g?si=4O8HM15lkmVUdJpC

  9. >”“Well then I’d rather just let everyone go to shit than live in your dystopian totalitarian green dictatorship.” When pressed, most people will say they would rather witness billions of deaths, over having the standard of living their grandparents had in the 1950’s.”

    I actually support a light, but not dystopian, “totalitarian green dictatorship”.

    Factory farming is abolished and free range meat becomes a luxury product.
    Airplane travel is heavily taxed to the point that recreational vacations are mostly gone and the industry mainly caters to business trips.
    Fast Fashion is taxed out of existence and the Made in Italy standard becomes the norm. The idea that low income people should be buying clothes like a Kardashian is ridiculous. Bring back garment repair services.
    So on.

    I just don’t see how this is politically viable as the masses would revolt against such a drastic reduction of their QoL. These aren’t even radical propositions.
    Seems like the only way out is Nature killing billions instead. We could only be too lucky if this were to happen before humans destroy too many ecosystems.

    • Yeah you’re right.

      You can see in the Netherlands what happens when the government tries to address the ecological impact of factory farming. All the boomers rise up in revolt.

      It really seems this can only end in one way.

  10. Someone I know who works in NHS A&E says bloods are routinely taken for most patients to measure various things, including lymphocyte levels. She says she hasn’t seen any noticeable decline in lymphocyte levels, and these are generally people with chronic comorbidities. If we had widespread T cell exhaustion surely that would get picked up on a lymphocyte blood test? Would a lymphocyte blood test be able to pick up exhausted CD8 cells?

    • John Hess MD intermittently tweets the anonymized bloodwork results of some of his patients who are declining in that way (he did so most recently on Sept. 5th). It isn’t a huge proportion of his practice, but it is enough people to scare him. It doesn’t look like the usual basic bloodwork to me.

    • No. You can notice a decline in T cell counts through a routine blood test. T cell exhaustion on the other hand, is harder to pick up. You have to specifically look for it.

      • Tbh I’m not too bothered about getting taken out prematurely by an AIDS virus. It’s the brain damage along with the increased stroke risk that worries me.

  11. Consider that your relationship to nature is the equivalent of a codependent person negotiating with a narcissist, and then consider what type of reality you exist in. Hint: there is a lot more going on than the thin veneer of material reality that you’ve seen thus far.

    • Tryptie,

      I know the following is not exactly what you are driving at, but your comment reminded me of something else I wanted to share with Rintrah.

      I mentioned High IQ Sam Vaknin in another comment. Here he has a discussion about the nature of Nature (heh), and the various philosophical perspectives attempting to orient Man in relation to Nature. There is some retread of the old argument that a division between “natural” and “unatural” is a false division of the mind (everything, including technology, is an expression of God/Source/A.I.) but he also mentions the philosophical view that Rintrah has. He even uses the “romantic” word I once used in relation to our host.

      Nothing particularly groundbreaking. Just thought I’d throw it out there:

      https://youtu.be/mf4Yv6akDpg?si=er272a_d0KSfptyD

  12. Finally a good post!

    >I think if SARS2 should have taught us anything, it’s that there are no technological solutions to our predicament, because our real problem is a lack of humility before nature.

    Yes, that is why I do not think of XR as anything more than virtue-signalling. They still think that governments and companies can be part of the solution, and that we can achieve net-zero.

    Not entirely related, but I am re-reading Fromm’s To Have or to Be, a 1976 book about how we got ourselves into the current predicament. He posits that we can only get ourselves out of it through a deep change in our psychology and cultural norms.

    You make many of the points that he described in his book. In the 1970s and 1980s, similar views were commonplace. Now, you need to go to the anarchistic fringe to find them.

    (Fromm was part of the – today – much maligned Frankfurt’s School of Marxist intellectuals, like Marcuse and Adorno. Most of the – US conservative – people who scream bloody murder at the Frankfurt School probably never ever read the titles of their books. By and large, they were anti-system thinkers and critiqued the Soviet system as much as the US one.

    Fromm in particular basically agrees on all counts with Ivan Illich, a new idol of the American Right. He does have this idea of anti-systemic revolution as some sort of mass-psychotherapy and if we were all in balance with ourselves, then there would be no oppression of humans or of the natural world, which strikes me as exceedingly naive).

  13. Linking Eric Feigl-Ding tweets. Never go full retard.

    And so what? 26 million is pissing into Niagra Falls.

    “world population was 6.2 billion in 2002, and reached 8 billion in 2022 (a 29% growth)”

  14. I recently discovered the YouTube channel Cart Narcs, and it perfectly captures the collective mindset that you call out which got us to where we are. Someone makes a minor violation of the collective good, and when this is shown to them, rather than repenting of the evil and correcting their behavior, they become violently angry and attack the messenger

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3fwCssFiAM

      • You think people should just leave their carts where they can damage other people’s cars? You believe this kind of mindless selfishness is good?

        • I was so overwhelmed by all those motorized wheelchairs (ie. cars) and the vision of that nightmarish landscape, an endless parking lot. It seems such a trivial concern that the cart was not moved.

  15. https://www.drugtargetreview.com/news/81320/t-cell-exhaustion-may-limit-long-term-immunity-in-covid-19-patients/

    “The researchers said they were surprised to find that patients with milder COVID-19 cases had weaker CD8+ T-cell responses and those who were severely ill (requiring hospitalisation or ICU support) had the strongest CD8+ T-cell responses.

    The team had expected to find the opposite, that those with milder cases had the strongest responses, as they fought off the infection best. But the scientists found that in these patients, CD8+ T cells showed the molecular signs of a phenomenon called T-cell exhaustion, where the cells receive so much immune system stimulation during a viral attack that they are less effective in doing their jobs.”

    Jesus

    • I remember that study, and I was thinking about it because of another study that just came out. The new study found that the uninfected have a 3x greater risk of death than the covid-infected. The response to this has been ridicule (see, e.g. Diego Bassani’s nitter tweet of Sept. 25: https://nitter.net/DGBassani/status/1706340280041894119#m). So I’m wondering if the “uninfected” are actually people who have had covid but didn’t notice it, and they don’t notice it because they have exhausted t-cells, and because they have exhausted t cells they have a triple risk of death.

      I don’t know how or if the vaccines would fit into this.

  16. Hi Rad,

    Have a dark congratulations from me ;-/

    Increasingly possible formation of multi serotype Sars-2 infection landscape now being discussed on Twitter by Bloom Lab followers:

    https://twitter.com/arijitchakrav/status/1707583339564028140

    It’s just a matter of how much overlap on antibody evasion there may be and how effective innate immunity will be for individuals in this landscape. Longer infection times and more multi-infections will be the challenge in older, likely multi-vaccinated mRNA countries. It’s a reflection of the slow forming clots writ large – ain’t nature beautiful in it’s fracticality.

    • >Increasingly possible formation of multi serotype Sars-2 infection landscape now being discussed on Twitter by Bloom Lab followers:

      Yup. It’s even going for a different amino acid to escape the antibodies that still work. The XBB’s have this “FLip” thing they keep yapping on about.

      Some of the BA.2.86’s also change that position. But they’re going for S:L455S instead of S:L455F.

      In other words, when faced with the same problem, their overall differences are large enough for them to arrive at different solutions.

      It should make for an interesting winter.

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