Police are people who like to hurt people. They’re people who are given blanket permission to act as the dominant individual in nearly every circumstance one can think of.”
An informed observer
I call on those who pursue justice and truth. Those who will stand for right and resist oppression. Minds rejectful of the system of deception and control into which we are conscripted at birth. And those who refuse to bend to its demands without question or second thought. I cannot be alone in this.
I was once naively optimistic that we might avert large-scale ecological and economic collapse and their consequent privations, chaos, wars, and other horrors. I wanted to believe that people would awaken and hold our abusers to account in time to avoid catastrophe. Instead, generations of good people stood by as wave after sociopathic wave of corporatists, industrialists, financiers, tyrants, demigods, and their propagandists steered us onto a collision course with disaster.
Now our world is speeding headlong into a confluence of anthropogenic calamities that will devastate our civilization. Distortions of climate patterns, changes in the jet stream and thermohaline circulation, near-continuous extreme weather, insect die-offs, deforestation, crop failures, disappearing or poisoned groundwater, acidifying oceans, the increasingly-toxic air we all must breathe, rising sea and the inevitable dislocations of hundreds of millions of people… The magnitude of the crisis grows year after year like a snowball, easily stopped at first but now raging with exponentially-increasing force and inevitability.
Delusions of business-as-usual and infinite growth are colliding with the very real catastrophes now poised to crash down upon us and our children. We are below the crest of crushing waves of forces that feed and grow relentlessly by their own momentum. We’ve finally gone past the hilltop; no brake in the world can halt our downhill run.
The biosphere upon which every living person on Earth absolutely depends will succumb to this debasement as global average temperatures rise 4°C, then more, above pre-industrial baselines. These disasters will lead to the death of all (or essentially all) humans on Earth within 30 to 50 years. Some scientists are raising alarms that billions of people will perish before 2050.
Human civilization as you know it today will be impossible long before the ball drops in Times Square in 2050, however. The day-to-day comforts and security of modern life depends on a narrow range of consistently favorable ecological and climatic conditions that must remain in balance for us to survive. We have destroyed that balance whether you choose to face the truth or not.
This is not a problem for some unborn generation. It was happening yesterday. It is happening today. And the reality will become more incontestable with each passing year. To be blunt, your grandchildren will probably not have grandchildren of their own. If the worst foreseeable feedback loops kick in, the Earth could be enveloped by an atmosphere resembling that of Venus a few centuries from now.
I’ve mostly given up trying to persuade people of these facts. It is up to you alone to choose to open your eyes, to seek the truth. The psychosis of individual self-importance and selfish materialism is so deeply-ingrained that changing someone else’s views — or even promoting deeper understanding when someone is determined not to see — feels like shouting into a gale. Your reticence is understandable; consider how Morpheus explained the problem in “The Matrix”:
“The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”
I offer this collection of information curated from around the web with the hope that it might illuminate and quicken at least one person’s understanding of the maladies steering us headlong into Earth’s 6th (and perhaps final) mass extinction. Among those are extreme climate change, bankers and other criminals, malignant social phenomena, educational malpractice, tyrants and their war machines, and numerous other injustices that you and I had no say in creating.
This knowledge will not make you a happier person. And speaking the truth to others will not make you popular. But it is the truth as best as I’ve been able to figure out. For me personally, the knowledge brought a sort of liberation from a life-long fog of confusion about the world and its mass-marketing of trivialities and self-interest. Maybe the truth will provide some perspective and free your own troubled mind, too. Find some way to make whatever good you can of the days that remain. This relative calm will not last forever.
What’s with “BlueThirtySeven”? It’s an expression I coined during a long losing streak playing roulette. My luck was so improbably bad on that day that the ball might as well land on a number that isn’t even available for a wager. For me, BlueThirtySeven embodies a recognition of futility, of hoping for an outcome that just isn’t in the cards, to mix metaphors. To put it another way, I have studied the rules and conditions of the “game” we are all part of and see no high-probability “winning” solution to save the billions of human lives or the millions of other interwoven species we depend upon.
As for my choice of pen name, Cassandra was the mythological daughter of King Priam and of Queen Hecuba of Troy. She was cursed to utter prophecies that no one believed. Clathrates, or gas hydrates, are crystalline water-based solids physically resembling ice, and which hold an estimated 6.4 trillion tons of methane in deposits frozen on the deep ocean floor.
Good luck in your search for truth in a world filled with lies, misdirection, Newspeak, and intentional half-truths.
— Cassandra Clathrate
p.s. I can’t say with certainty if it will take 10 years or 30 for the wheels to come completely off this crazy train. I am pretty sure it’s not all going to come crashing down tomorrow. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to learn something about cryptocurrency and use that knowledge to make your remaining time more comfortable.
p.p.s. If my words here struck a cord with you then go read The People vs. the United States next.