Writer. Regenerative Farmer. Author of: Grass-Fed Cattle, Autopsy of a Pandemic, and Plunderers of the Earth - the untold story of soil and CO2.
British Columbia
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Your periodic reminder that a cow cannot add a single atom of carbon to the atmosphere that wasn't previously removed from the atmosphere by a plant.
So, cows cannot increase atmospheric CO2, they merely recycle CO2. It's not a new source of carbon.
And without cows, bacteria would, over time, rot plant fibers and return the exact same amount of carbon to the atmosphere.
But grazing cows help grass sod fix carbon in the soil, thus increasing soil fertility over time.
The climate crusade is built on scientific fraud.
And many of the proposed solutions, like reducing cows, are directly causing much of the soil degradation and forest fires (because of ungrazed fuel in the forests), which activists and dishonest scientists then blame on "climate change".
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To see true happiness, watch a cow kick up her heels in pleasure the 1st time she goes out to pasture after a long winter in a pen eating dry hay.
Happiness is found in the simplest of things. If you focus too closely on the cloudy horizon, you'll miss all that's right beneath your feet
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the more garbage there is on social media, the more time you spend scrolling to find a gem among the garbage.
in the dog training world, withholding rewards is called "intermittent reinforcement". it strengthens the behaviour as the dog tries even harder to get the reward.
garbage on social media drives traffic because instead of driving you away, your frustration strengthens your resolve to keep scrolling.
and that time is monetized by showing you more ads.
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people see the scary headlines. but they never see the retractions.
In a major development, the IPCC has finally admitted its apocalyptic RCP8.5 climate scenarios are "implausible", meaning most media scare stories over the last 15 years are officially junk, says Chris Morrison. dailysceptic.org/2026/05/05/…
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🎯
Here's why the world feels like its falling apart.
In 1895, a French psychologist named Gustave Le Bon mapped out how civilizations are built and how they fall apart.
He called it the lifecycle. Here's how it works:
Scattered people find a shared ideal.
Typically a religion, mission, or vision of order, and it pulls them together into something greater than themselves.
That ideal builds institutions, culture, law, economies, and art. The civilization rises, and for a while, it works.
Then the ideal fades across generations.
The shared purpose that held everything together quietly drains out, and what replaces it is barbaric self-interest.
People stop asking what they owe the whole and start asking what they can take from it. Duty gives way to entitlement.
The institutions remain standing, but they’re running on fumes — coasting on the reputation of a past they had no part in building.
That’s where it gets dangerous. Because from the outside, nothing looks broken.
The buildings still stand, the summits are still scheduled, and the flags still fly.
But the load-bearing structure underneath (the ideal that bound the whole thing together) has rotted out.
Over a century ago, Le Bon watched this pattern devour every civilization he studied. Read it today and it feels like a diary entry.
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Thoughts on the neverending challenge of sustaining civilization...
A high degree of trust in your civilization's institutions makes you a sucker for institutional propaganda as those institutions are perverted or corrupted over time. Trust must be continually re-earned; unearned trust is a major catalyst for civilizational decline.
BUT... equally dangerous is to become so jaded by your civilization's imperfections that you become receptive to the propaganda put out by your civilization's enemies.
Somewhere in between those two extremes lies the ability to reform the things that degrade over time without burning it all down.
Today, as our institutions crumble, we are fighting a three-front war:
1. Against the embedded rot within our system, which has learned to leverage our high-trust institutional system as a tool for personal enrichment,
2. Against those on the "progressive" left who seek to dismantle a system they see as systemically oppressive and which they seek to replace with an overtly socialist successor -- many in this category are also already deeply embedded within our institutional system because, much like the corrupt opportunists in the 1st category, they too have learned to leverage our high-trust institutions as tools to pursue their activism.
3. And against the most radical elements on the Woke Left and increasingly also on the Woke Right, who feel so jaded that they have given up on reforms and instead are doing everything in their power, knowingly or unknowingly, to burn it all down. Like in a game of Prisoner's Dilemma, they are lashing out emotionally against a system that they feel has betrayed them, without thought to the consequences of what will emerge from the smoldering void if they succeed.
To the Ancient Greeks, the myth of Sisyphus, condemned forever to push an immense boulder to the top of a mountain only for it to roll back down, represented the endless, repetitive, and often futile labor required to maintain civilizations, systems, and daily life.
Many modern interpretations of that myth describe Sisyphus' thankless task as "meaningless". And yet, it is quite the opposite. Because only through the sum of those repetitive efforts can civilization emerge and be sustained over time.
The moment you stop pushing that boulder back up the hill, you condemn your civilization to dust.
It's a myth we'll worth remembering in our turbulent times. Civilization isn't an entitlement inherited from our ancestors; every generation has to push that boulder back up that hill -- the example set by our ancestors merely tells us which boulder to push.
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Julius Ruechel retweeted
Once your culture is gone, it isn't coming back.
To preserve a culture, you must continually read the books and ideas that created it.
That's why we started an online book club to study the greatest texts of Western Civilization. Every month, we study a new great work — so far we've covered Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Inferno, The Count of Monte Cristo, Don Quixote, etc.
Currently, we're reading Virgil's Aeneid.
Western Civilization has given us the greatest books ever written, but it takes effort to read them, and even more to read them well. That’s what we’re doing here, slowly, together.
If you want to support our efforts, please consider a paid subscription. It makes a huge difference to the time and resources we can dedicate to this project. Paid members get:
- Live community book discussions (biweekly)
- Deep-dive essays to guide you through the books we’re reading
- The full archive of book reviews, essays, and our 100 Great Texts reading list
- Access to all community discussion threads (via the subscriber chat)
- Ability to vote on what we read next
This is not school. There are no grades, no credentials, and no status games. Just a community of readers serious about recovering what’s been lost, and using it to build something better. Welcome!
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Julius Ruechel retweeted
This is Goethe on why reading alone is not enough:
“People think that by reading they become learned; but it is not so. Reading only supplies materials for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. Without reflection, what we take in remains external and does not truly belong to us.”
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Great thread! 👇 I fear he's absolutely right that it's going to take generations to rebuild the culture that produced good leaders.
G.K. Chesterton's fence, personified.
Roger Scruton observed the good things are "easily destroyed, but not easily created". It took a single generation to destroy Tristin's elite class, sadly, it will take several generations to recreate it. Best start now. 15/15
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interesting read! what if... ?🤔
The Hormuz Hypothesis – What If the U.S. Navy Isn’t in a Hurry To Reopen The Strait?
gcaptain.com/the-hormuz-hypo…
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Julius Ruechel retweeted
For the past decade, legacy media has branded the promotion of exercise and a healthy diet/lifestyle as “fat shaming” while pushing “body positivity” messaging that insists obesity does not actually mean someone is unhealthy.
Simultaneously, big pharma quietly funded new “non-profits” and lobbied aggressively to rewrite clinical guidelines: reclassifying obesity from a modifiable risk factor into a “chronic disease.” This created an enormously profitable new pharmaceutical market of GLP-1 receptor agonists to manage this new “chronic disease” despite the concerning lack of long-term safety and efficacy data.
New data released this week shows that Ozempic has quickly become Canada’s single largest publicly-funded drug cost driver: consuming $807 million of our country’s total $20.1 billion publicly spent on prescription drugs across Canada.
The same legacy media and lobbyists who spent years claiming obesity isn’t unhealthy are now declaring GLP-1-induced “skinny” equals “healthy.”
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It's either sweet that there are so many people with the exact same story about the exact same 84 year old neighbor who is only alive because they have dinner together,
or, this is engagement farming. Based on the huge number of views (all with blue checkmarks), it's quite a lucrative story $$$.
Blocked them all. My eyeballs ain't being used to monetize that crap.
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Once a civilization degrades its principles, morals, understanding of scientific processes, understanding of history, and so on, it takes a generation or more to get them back because these things all need to be taught.
And that timeline is in a perfect scenario in which society recognizes what has been lost and actively begins the process of rebuilding.
Civilization is more than just bricks and stone. The most important building blocks of civilization are inside the mind... and those are the most time-consuming to rebuild.
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Yes! 💯
i'm coming to an unfortunate realization:
just as covid was a once in a lifetime all singing all dancing happy place jamboree for agoraphobes, hysterics, and scolds, so too was it the happy place for the poorly calibrated conspiracy boffin and the overwrought paranoid.
the "branch covidians" got to stay home, cover their faces, avoid humans, obsess about germs, and had a lovely time screeching and shrilling at everyone and casting their longstanding social anxieties and failings as virtue.
but these were also great days for the overclocked pattern recognition engines of the obsessives. they racked up win after win because, for a hot minute, basically everything was a conspiracy and governments and health agencies and medical boards all around the world really were out to get them (and all of us).
you could blindfold yourself and could throw a dart in a random direction as far as you could and almost inevitably bullseye another horrendous set of plots and lies.
the "utterly hyperactive memetic immune system" finally came into its own.
but as the times covidian attentuated both lost their happy place.
the pro-covid "lock down, mask up, and jab, jab, jab!" crowd had to go back to being viewed as floundering frails and flailures and no one cared any more when they yelled about "but my allegedly compromised immune system! your mask protects me!"
but rather than simply taking the win and digging in on "let's get this data out into the public sphere, attach blame to the blameworthy, and make damn sure this never happens again" some of those who had opposed them remained massively immuno-activated.
i'm watching this now as group after group turn upon one another in some sort of maoist struggle session contest to accuse one another of lacking some form of ideological purity and, perhaps because of the reduction in outside forces attacking them, they now fight one another.
it feels like an autoimmune disease, a response that simply will not turn off and now assaults the healthy host, inflaming organs and tissues that it needs because it has lost sight of friend vs foe.
it's a disturbing thing to watch and a deeply harmful one. many from within a truly once in a lifetime group of individuals who stood up and collaborated during a time when so few would and who formed the kinds of networks and solution generation systems from which so much valuable insight poured now tear at one another over trifles, seemingly because they just need to keep attacking something and have lost calibration and down-modulation.
just one cat's opinion, but guys, there are better targets for this than one another.
we're only just now really starting to see the data and what the "authorities" and "experts" knew and did. this is the part where you can really dig out the problem and perhaps find some accountability.
is this really the moment to go full "obsessive purity test battle royale" on one another?
seems like it's not.
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"our brains extrapolate from what we thought might look like a tiger's ear to actually believing we saw the whole tiger, when in reality 99 times in 100 all we saw was a curled blade of grass blowing in the wind.
But an overactive imagination acting in the absence of reliable evidence still needs to keep you alive on that 1/100 chance, which is why a world devoid of reliable information is quickly overrun by hysterias and conspiracy theories on BOTH sides of the aisle.
It's what our minds default to in the absence of reliable information in order to prevent us from becoming someone else's lunch."
I agree with your description of the problem.
I would counter that, even though it goes against our human nature, the foremost thing to do as information becomes increasingly unreliable is to reduce the certainty of our beliefs and opinions.
But often the opposite happens, especially in emotionally-charged topics, as people begin to interpret patterns in the absence of reliable evidence, and then develop extremely firmly-held opinions about what might cause those patterns.
I think intuition is extremely useful in such a climate to get us to look in new places for evidence, while simultaneously being extremely dangerous if we begin to hold extremely firm opinions based primarily on intuition.
In effect, we have to learn to live with uncertainty - and be willing to live with "I don't know". While we should not cripple ourselves with self-doubt, we nevertheless need a healthy dose of it in order to remain open to new information and remain open to the possibility that whatever info or beliefs we already have acquired might nevertheless be completely wrong.
Easily said in theory, but bloody hard to put into practice because our human nature is designed to make us feel certain even with limited information. Certainty in the absence of good evidence is literally written into our DNA because to our evolutionary ancestors uncertainty was often a death sentence -- "was that or wasn't that the tip of a tiger's ear in the tall grass..." - hesitation gets you killed, so better to be wrong than indecisive.
So, our brains will effectively extrapolate from what we thought might look like a tiger's ear to actually believing we saw the whole tiger, when in reality 99 times in 100 all we saw was a curled blade of grass blowing in the wind.
But an overactive imagination acting in the absence of reliable evidence still needs to keep you alive on that 1/100 chance, which is why a world devoid of reliable information is quickly overrun by hysterias and conspiracy theories on BOTH sides of the aisle. It's what our minds default to in the absence of reliable information in order to prevent us from becoming someone else's lunch.
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According to Mattias Desmet’s theory of mass formation (discussed during Covid), roughly 30% of the population does not fall under the spell or "hypnotized" state of mass hysteria.
Sounds tidy, right?
But since Covid, the "dissident" community from the Covid era has fractured into opposing camps as new mass hysterias have infected society.
If some people are naturally more resistant to mass hysteria, it would always be the same people who manage to steer clear. All the same dissidents would reappear, time and time again, as new mass hysterias emerge. And all the same people who got caught up in it last time would get caught up in the next one.
But clearly that has not been the case.
Immunity to one bout of mass hysteria is no guarantee that you will have immunity to the next.
So, resistance to mass hysteria obviously does not come from some genetic predisposition, nor is there some kind of lifetime psychological immunity.
It changes from issue to issue.
Most likely, personal circumstances play the biggest role. In some cases, being away from the crowd gives people time to reflect. Or personal familiarity with an issue or the people involved might create the disconnect needed to recognize the mass hysteria. Or the luck of seeing some comment or post that makes you think about something differently than what the crowd is discussing. Or how many in your close tribe fall prey and sweep you along.
And some people simply have a habit of verifying original sources and thus are in the habit of testing and retesting their own ideas -- it's not that they are immune to propaganda and conspiracy theories and mass hysteria, but rather that their habits provide a mechanism to lead them back out. But, considering how the Covid dissident community has fractured since then, this category of people seems to be vanishingly small indeed.
It's also worth noting that mass hysteria can arise from different places (i.e. government propaganda vs crowd-sourced), which also either sets you up to be more or less likely to fall prey depending on your psychological state.
For example, if, due to a prior experience, you have completely lost your trust in government institutions or legacy media, that would make you more resistant to official propaganda. But if you have high trust in those institutions because you've never had a transformative run-in with how flawed they are, you're likely more easily misled by govt propaganda.
By contrast, the inverse is also true. If you don't trust govt institutions, that might actually make you more susceptible to falling into some crowd-sourced conspiracy theory because you extend trust to "dissident voices" that provide alternate explanations for how the world works -- after all, if you don't trust the govt and the media, you're probably already out there looking for alternate explanations to make sense of the world.
Whereas those who have a high degree of trust in government and media institutions are likely relatively immune to crowd-sourced conspiracy theories because they're not out there looking for alternate ways of making sense of the world and aren't likely to extend their trust to someone who isn't some media-approved institutional expert.
Furthermore, if someone you trusted as a reliable source of information during the last mass hysteria falls for the next one, your trust in them might easily lead you down the same rabbit hole.
In short, while there may be some validity to Desmet's idea that 30% are immune, it's a little more complicated than that. Clearly it's not the same 30% every time. Not even close.
If anything, if you're busy congratulating yourself that you managed to avoid getting caught up in the mass hypnosis the last time, you may actually be overconfident in your ability to resist the next one and thus not have enough self-doubt to question your most strongly held opinions, which might just turn out to be wrong this time.
That's why, no matter how confident you are in what you believe, the only safeguard to prevent you from deceiving yourself is the habit of continually putting all your beliefs to the test, verifying original sources, and giving consideration to what those you don't agree with are saying.
As Richard Feynman so famously said: 👇
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"The greatest dangers Odysseus faces are not always monsters or storms. Sometimes they are places where life becomes so comfortable that a man forgets what he was trying to do in the first place."
One of the strangest episodes in the Odyssey happens when Odysseus and his men arrive at the island of the Lotus-Eaters.
Nothing dramatic seems to happen there at first. No monsters appear, no storms rise, no battle begins.
Odysseus sends a few men inland to see who lives there. They meet the Lotus-Eaters, who offer them the fruit of the lotus plant.
The fruit is not poisonous and it does not harm the body. What it does instead is erase desire. Anyone who eats it loses the will to return home. The men who taste it suddenly stop caring about Ithaca, their families, or the long journey waiting for them.
They do not panic or go mad. They simply want to stay where they are, eating lotus and letting the days pass.
When Odysseus finds them, they are calm and content. They do not want to leave the island at all. In a way it would have been easy for Odysseus to let them remain there. The island is peaceful and the men seem happy enough.
But Odysseus understands what has happened.
The lotus has taken away the one thing that keeps the entire journey alive: the desire to go home. Without that desire the voyage ends.
So Odysseus drags the men back to the ships by force. Homer describes them weeping and protesting as they are carried away and tied down to the benches of the ship so they cannot escape.
Only once everyone is secured does Odysseus order the ships to push back into the sea.
It is a small story compared to the Cyclops or the Sirens, but it reveals something important about the Odyssey. The greatest dangers Odysseus faces are not always monsters or storms. Sometimes they are places where life becomes so comfortable that a man forgets what he was trying to do in the first place.
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