Woo-woo and News Compression? Yup. Afraid so. I’m retired. But still watching the Test-Fitting Ape’s behaviors as closely as ever.
News Compressor: On
Pillows and programs call – so we will be laser-focused.
1 — Hormuz stays lead-story locked, but the risk has migrated from “war around shipping” to an attempted redesign of shipping itself. Iran says it will announce a restricted Gulf zone and a new international shipping corridor through Hormuz, while actual commodity-vessel traffic has fallen to its lowest level since May after U.S. and Iranian attacks on tankers. Brent is holding near six-week highs around $96 as the physical-flow constraint becomes the economic transmission mechanism. Our outlook is hinging around the Fed meeting rate decision a week from Wednesday.
2 — Lowell is now a direct Hawaii operating problem. Watches are in effect for Kauai and Niihau, with Lowell still a Category 3 hurricane Sunday evening and tropical-storm conditions expected Monday; heavy rain, flash flooding, coastal flooding and very large surf are the main threats even if the center remains offshore. Hawaii has declared a state of emergency. A bit deeper data in Around the Ranch in a sec.
3 — Israel-Lebanon has taken another step up. Israeli strikes on Kfar Rumman early Monday killed at least 11 people, including two children and two medics according to Lebanon’s state news agency, after seven deaths were reported from Israeli strikes Sunday.
With Rosh Hashanah starting at sundown Friday, we notice that religion and wars are as tightly (and paradoxically) tied as ever.
4 — The Ukraine diplomatic run has ended without the breakthrough its choreography suggested might be possible. Witkoff and Kushner completed Moscow-to-Kyiv talks with territorial and security disputes unresolved, while both combatants continue military operations outside the limited restraint surrounding the diplomatic visit. The signal this morning is continued negotiation layered onto continuing war, not transition into peace.
But seriously: Food and energy hits are quickly locking for this fall forward.
Inside Pages
An Amazon-linked Boeing 767 cargo jet overran a runway at Miami International Airport Sunday, crossed a roadway and struck vehicles, killing at least five people and injuring five. The NTSB investigation begins Monday while airport operations recover from hundreds of delays and cancellations. Investigation opening.
North Korea has commissioned its second 5,000-ton destroyer as the U.S., South Korea and Japan begin the five-day Freedom Edge exercise near Jeju. Pyongyang says its naval buildup is part of a more diversified nuclear deterrent. NorK Military capacity increasing.
Seven Indonesian airports remain closed because of Anak Krakatau ash, with roughly 2,300 flights and more than 270,000 passengers affected. The “thar she blows” eruption has eased, but authorities warn renewed activity remains possible.
UBS now expects two Federal Reserve hikes this year after the strong August jobs report, joining a broader repricing toward tighter policy. Friday’s CPI report becomes the next major confirmation or rejection point. Rate pressure rising.
Deutsche Bank now expects the ECB to continue tightening through December as Middle East energy inflation persists. The ECB decision arrives Thursday. European rate pressure rising.
Japan’s foreign reserves posted their largest monthly fall on record after Tokyo’s huge yen-buying intervention, while the yen has subsequently strengthened sharply. Markets are now leaning strongly toward a September Bank of Japan hike. Monetary tightening advancing.
India’s central bank is simultaneously fighting excess domestic liquidity and currency pressure from rising oil. It removed more than 6 trillion rupees from the banking system while traders report large-scale dollar selling to support the rupee. Liquidity being drained.
China’s August exports are expected to show very strong year-over-year growth when customs data arrive Tuesday, even as domestic demand and investment remain comparatively weak. Export dependence is therefore becoming more—not less—important to China’s growth model. External dependence increasing.
Berlin police are investigating another transformer-substation fire amid a sequence of suspected attacks on Germany’s electrical infrastructure. A separate substation security fence was found tampered with in Wesel. Infrastructure threat widening. Soft underbelly of all high-tech societies – can’t defend everywhere.
Volkswagen’s Osnabrueck auto plant is slated for conversion toward defense production under an Aurelius/Lower Saxony deal, with Rafael air-defense work expected among its first projects. We have been warning that “Europe needs a war” and we see this as the leading-edge of Big War Stimulus.
The U.N. human-rights chief is calling for stronger global AI safeguards. We’re still wondering why they are not calling out the rising human/carbon danger to the world’s future. Hmm. We must not have an axe to grind and control to grab, you think?
Bangladesh’s dengue outbreak is accelerating. Wasn’t there a Peggy Lee song a zillion years ago? Yes.
Anti-migrant protests spread from Dover to Portsmouth England after the arrival of migrants transferred from France. So – give away a country and people get pissy? Who would have thought, right?
The WMO warns that increasingly intense wildfire smoke and heat are eroding gains from cleaner industrial and vehicle emissions.
We’re still waiting for an honest discussion of how smoke from fires increases albedo which might actually help chill warming (if real).
Domestic Casualty / Disaster Sweep
The Miami cargo crash is the dominant fresh U.S. casualty event: at least five dead, five injured, and an NTSB investigation now under way after the Boeing 767 overran the runway and crossed a road.
No new very-large U.S. earthquake emerged from the USGS significant-event material checked this morning. The outlook, however, is shaky…(rimshot).
96 Hour News Outlook
Hormuz: Iran formally publishes or begins enforcing new restricted-zone/corridor rules, or another tanker/naval incident materially affects shipping. Odds: 82%.
Energy: Brent or diesel produces another major inflationary headline directly linked to reduced Hormuz traffic or war-risk shipping conditions. Odds: 76%.
Israel/Lebanon: another Israeli-Hezbollah kinetic exchange produces casualties or new evacuation warnings within the next four days. Odds: 70%.
Ukraine: Washington announces another negotiating session, trilateral format or confidence-building proposal without a comprehensive ceasefire. Odds: 64%.
Fed: Friday CPI strengthens rather than extinguishes the September tightening debate. Odds: 67%.
BlinkLab Guidance — Personally Actionable
The most actionable intersection remains energy plus rates. Hormuz traffic is already measurably depressed, oil is near six-week highs, the U.S. jobs report was stronger than expected, and major banks are moving toward additional Fed tightening; that combination argues against assuming near-term relief in fuel, freight or borrowing costs.
New Signals Rising
Heard here first: Two months back on Peoplenomics I said “global synchronized inflation is the Central Bankster play now.” Well, here we go:
Global monetary policy is synchronizing toward tighter conditions. Fed-hike expectations, a likely ECB move and rapidly strengthening expectations for a BOJ hike are appearing simultaneously while oil remains elevated.
Europe’s civilian-industrial base is increasingly blending into defense infrastructure. Hmm. Who was it saying recently “Europe needs a war” to make their “eCONomy” work?
Odd but Real
The Deep-Middle “absence can communicate” idea (we’ve been working in edge statistics) has a live real-world example in Hormuz: traffic has fallen so sharply that missing vessels in ordinary movement data are themselves part of the signal, although absence still has to be separated from dark shipping and tracking limitations. Kpler’s measured transit collapse makes that negative-space problem operational rather than philosophical.
Paranormal / UAP Check
No fresh September 7 anomalous event cleared the lead item category today. We are unsure if the reason is boring or snoring. threshold. The substantive institutional UAP development remains AARO’s effort to obtain access to the large private NUFOHRC pre-1990 archive; AARO’s own document repository also continues adding government-sourced cases while cautioning that “unidentified” is not an analytical conclusion about origin.
Civilian-reporting transparency remains a live political/media issue, but no new independently verified extraordinary case surfaced in this morning’s scan.
Still, out at the edges, the scan for events continues…
Around the Ranch: Woo-Woo Engineering
This note from (SBE brother) Hank on the Big (of hurricanes) Island caught my eye overnight as maybe holding some promise:
“Woo woo science? I am tired. I hope I can get through this explanation. I have noticed that I get tired like this when a hurricane approaches the island and affects our weather. Much like Ure and others here get the ‘earthquake tireds’. Right now I am the middle of a hurricane sandwich, and the past two days I have been exhausted with a total lack of energy to do anything. I have fallen asleep in my office chair while at the computer here… more than once. And naps and sleep don’t seem to help. I have a wild idea that may be grounded in science.
Professor James McCanney of https://www.jmccanneyscience.com/
Explained that the real energy source driving hurricanes is not just warm water. It is atmospheric plasma charge from the wind and ionosphere… ultimately sourced from the solar wind that charges the planet’s atmosphere. This makes a lot of sense. That would lead to strong anomalous magnetic and electrostatic fields in the atmosphere in the vicinity of hurricanes. These could affect humans also.
So today the ‘I-Ching’ ham radio comes alive with this report.
The ham is a very intelligent, retired software engineer living off-grid in the jungles not far from me. He was wondering if anyone else had noticed strange geomagnetic and electric field anomalies. He was monitoring with a Tri-field meter and getting readings that were out of the normal range he sees! I did not reply, but it seems to me that if Prof. McCanney is right, those readings could very well be out-of-normal range when we have two hurricanes passing on opposite sides of the islands.
I’m too exhausted to find my Tri-field meter and solder in a new battery holder that it needs. Plus I have no historical readings for a baseline to consider. I am, however, making a mental note to contact that ham and get more details and a baseline if he has one. We have electrostatic lightning detectors. Why not a Tri-field hurricane detector?”
Welcome to the world of independent thinkers. Around here, we dare to ask the odd “uncomfortable” question. Now, Hank is asking, too.
Finding those news (or missed) connections with the world around us might not be that human ignorance is so complete as something else.
This week on Peoplenomics.com I’ll be dropping another new book. “Test-Fitting Apes: Home Economics Goes Bananas.”
Sure – a book tout and a signup pitch. But we’re in very serious country here: Could it be there are still interesting (and vital) discoveries yet to be made and that the reason is that we haven’t been looking at the right time with the right tools?”
In the BSL (big schema of Life) – breakthroughs may be almost here, but continue being missed because even with 8-billion “test-fitting apes” – we still don’t have enough of them looking at the odd-ball effects with the strange instruments to pick off the differences that matter.
Normalcy is, therefore, possibly the best blinding-agent of all. And how to avoid being swamped by it is a dandy ponder as we doze off into nap-times today.
Hank’s onto something. Because once an outlier is spotted, that doesn’t move it over into the “settled science” column.
Do we not look because of systemic inertia which will hold to the groupthink consensus? Or, do we rag on Hank to get the damned battery compartment repairs finished?
Optional Time Travel Note: Snoozed out in the old man’s recliner about 7 PM last night after dinner. Vowed to watch “just one more episode of The Last Ship” on Netflix. After what seemed like an hour, I got up to kill the lights and hit the rack. Figured it was about 8:30.
Nope.
It was 12:48 AM… Which causes the logical mind to ask: Are big screens time machines and we just can’t fathom it, yet?
Write when the iron’s hot and the new data logging serial port is running.
George@Ure.net
`
Retail, when I went to pick up the roasting duck from the grocer, “out of stock”. Why do thy advertise when they are out? Picked up some chicken breasts, we will have chicken parmesan for Labor day today.
We pulled smoked duck breasts product of China out of the freezer and made a quick orange sauce for last night. Was quite good.
Enjoy the 1st Monday of September holiday! everyone.
I love pheasants.. but my friend that raised them for restaurants has made his final journey…so..Cornish hens takes their place……
During the Great Depression, food insecurity wasn’t an abstract idea — it was daily life…. and still the life of the poor today… Families stretched every ingredient as far as it could go, and beans became one of the most important survival foods…. They were cheap, shelf?stable, and versatile. People made bean soups, bean breads, bean patties, bean crackers — anything that could fill a stomach when money and ingredients ran out…. my grandma and mother made things like cracker soup and black eyed or cow peas for a meal…
Most folks today don’t realize how creative Depression cooks and the seriously poor have to be. Oil was precious and rationed( mayonnaise was used to replace cooking oils), flour was expensive, and potatoes weren’t always available. So instead of potato chips, many families made thin, crisp bean crackers or bean wafers — the closest thing to a “chip” you could get in those days. It wasn’t fancy, but it kept people alive…
If someone wants a Depression style bean chip today, here’s a simple recipe that captures the spirit of that era — cheap, filling, and made from what you already have….. you don’t need bean dip for these.. today we have a similar potato product called pringles..
so here’s the wastelands bean chip…
1 cup bean flour (pinto, navy, or black beans)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tbsp fat (lard, bacon grease, or oil — whatever you have)
1/2 cup hot water
Mix bean flour, salt, and fat.
Add hot water and stir until it forms a dough.
Roll the dough thin — as thin as you can.
Cut into chip sized pieces….
Bake at 400°F until crisp.
now if your seeking the potato version..
wasteland potato crackers.. ( a grand daughter that’s pregnant was saying she craved the potato chips we use to make.. with the ninja slicing chips is fast and easy)
1 cup potato flakes (instant mashed potatoes)
1/2 cup all?purpose flour
1/4 cup cornstarch
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1/2 cup hot water (add more as needed)
optional seasonings… paprika, sour cream & onion powder, cheddar powder
the process is the same as the thin bean chmay .
oops we need ranch dressing…
1 cup full?fat mayo
½ cup full?fat sour cream
1/2 cup buttermilk (or milk + 1 tsp lemon juice)
1 tsp dried dill
1 tsp dried parsley
1/2 tsp dried chives
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
Optional: ½ tsp sugar (balances acidity)
I raised ringed-neck pheasant from my early teens for more than 20 years. They were tasty but agree and have switched to Cornish hens as well. Buy them at the store all ready to cook.
I love Cornish hens..wife and I split one…sage dressing with rotisserie seasoning on top baked to perfection.. yumm…
we use to get the pheasants at 3.00 each…at that time Cornish hens was a buck and a quarter a piece..
my son knows was just asking if I would make duck and goose jerky for him.. i simply buy the pre packages seasoning for jerky.. figured out the cost for seasonings and it was about the same price..the secret to jerky is ( brown sugar ) 1/2 cup per pound.. when my oldest mini me was in football..I had to make between ten to twenty pounds a week and four cases of dill pickles..the whole team would come through the snake bin and grab jerky and a jar of pickles.. eat the pickles then drink the brine..( for muscle cramps) my younger mini me is just now getting into high school football and wrestling..won’t be long and the line of team players will be going through again…
interesting new thing..the colonies are not selling any of their excess produce or livestock….I wonder what they are anticipating happening..
I forgot the 1/4 cup of corn or potato starch and the 1/2 cup of flour for the bean flour chips…also cooked and then dry the beans before grinding them into flour…left over beans was what was usually used..
Onion bread gravy was a family meal..
during the hardest times a single order of French fries was a meal out..
My college had a series of courses in visitor hospitality and food service, including how to run a fair sized cafeteria. So of course the school let them run the food service commons for us dorm residents. I remember one holiday they made cornish hens. We called them ‘sparrows… boiled in oil’. Literally large pans of oil with tiny bird carcasses submerged in them. I laughed when you wrote you and the wife split one. I was hard pressed to find any meat on the carcass! I have a permanent aversion to cornish hens now.
(“. I laughed when you wrote you and the wife split one. I was hard pressed to find any meat on the carcass!”)
oh wow..the birds we get at the store her weigh around two pounds and each get about a half pound of meat..the problem I have now is a chicken at Costco is cheaper than a Cornish hen..the only problem there for s I need blinders on while I walk back to get it….funny story about the two hundred dollar rotisserie chicken at costco..we have a grocery store the wife and I both Enjoy.. we were heading home yesterday and the wife says oh we need to get potatoes..but she was afraid I would pick up more than we need so she came in with..by the time we were done she had filled the cart up lol lol lol..
I got Huggingface after action report – have any of youse Ai prophets seen the report ?
All the major leading Ai project scientist from google, ms, Anthropic,..etc All of them signed off on the letter/ report BEGGING for a slow down, begging.
This AM watched latest from Farsighted group – 2 ET AI’s came to board meeting- very interesting, but trump regime missed perfect window for disclosure this Summer. Main thing I picked up ? Small group is already making decisions and “running” one word Government, obviously still in the shadows.
? Does the Atom really exist outside of a Gabor Atom, which is a Wavelet ? So how can you split something that Does Not Exist in Wave only environment?
Come on Ai agents splain that “gritology” to this Faithless Skeptic.
‘Light’… photons or waves?… can be split. Into two quantum-coupled packets that interact at a distance. Where ya been?
pause that refreshes what ? down here we have cyclones . force5 storm and 270 kmh wind . in the pause the eye of the cyclone . wind stops , all clear and calm , even a bit of sun . then suddenly the rest of the storm hits , just as ferocious as the beginning.
23Tons in August Len, 23 Tons o GOLD
Why o why would Central Banks continue their Gold buying spree ?
Why not those risk free ( bwahahaha) U S Turderies ( UST) or some MOAR of that Green USD wallpaper ?
It’s not like the whole of Asia is Selling anything and everything US.
We got to maintain that CONFIDENCE in the USD/UST – Got to.
How much Confidence do you think Asia has in the orange monster ?
Really think ANY leader Trusts that thing in the WH?
sounds big Len, but it’s not in terms of finance: Spot gold is trading roughly $4,410–$4,430 per troy ounce (dealers and quotes differ by a few tens of dollars).
1 metric tonne = 32,150.75 troy ounces
23 tonnes = 739,467 troy ounces
739,467 oz × $4,420/oz ? $3.27 billion
So the AIs read it this way:
Short version: all the gold humans have ever mined is worth about $30–32 trillion. Total global debt is about $353 trillion. Debt is roughly 11 times the entire above-ground gold stock. Even if you add unmined reserves, gold still covers only about a ninth of the IOUs.
All mined / known gold
World Gold Council, end of Q2 2026: 222,600 tonnes above ground. Almost all gold ever mined still exists.
At today’s spot (~$4,420/oz):
222,600 t × 32,150.75 troy oz/t ? 7.16 billion ounces
× $4,420 ? $31.6 trillion
WGC marked the same pile at $29.0 trillion at the Q2 LBMA PM fix; end-2025 marks were around $31 trillion when the price was higher. Call the live market cap of all mined gold ~$30–32 trillion.
How that pile is held (WGC, Q2 2026):
FormTonnesShareRough valueJewelry~99,70045%~$14TCentral banks~39,00018%~$5.5TBars & coins~47,80021%~$6.8TGold ETFs~4,0002%~$0.6TOTC / other~32,10014%~$4.5T
“Known” but still in the ground: reserves ~55,000–66,000 t (Metals Focus vs USGS), resources another ~114,000 t that are not yet economic. Reserves alone are another ~$8–9 trillion at current prices — rock, not bars.
Mined + reserves ? ~$40 trillion. That is the generous reading of “mined and known.”
Physical picture: melt every ounce ever dug and you get a cube about 22–23 meters on a side.
Total global debt
Institute of International Finance:
End-2025: $348 trillion (up ~$29T in 2025)
End-Q1 2026: ~$353 trillion
Global debt / GDP: about 305%, roughly flat as a ratio even as the dollar stock keeps rising.
End-2025 mix (IIF):
SectorAmountGovernments$106.7TNon-financial companies$100.6THouseholds$64.6TFinancial sector (implied residual)~$76TTotal~$348T
Mature markets ~$232T; emerging markets ~$117T.
The comparison
AmountAll gold ever mined (spot)~$32 trillionMined + economic reserves~$40 trillionGlobal debt stock~$353 trillionDebt ÷ mined gold~11×Mined gold as % of debt~9%Mined + reserves as % of debt~11%
Your 23-tonne example from earlier (~$3.3 billion) is about 0.01% of all mined gold, and 0.001% of global debt.
What the ratio does and does not mean
This is a stock-vs-stock cartoon, not a settlement plan.
Most “gold value” is jewelry and ornament, not monetary metal. Central-bank plus bullion/ETF gold is closer to $12–13 trillion.
You cannot sell 222,000 tonnes at the screen price. The market that sets $4,420/oz is a thin slice of that stock.
IIF debt double-counts in places (a bank loan is an asset and a liability). Gross debt is not “net claims on the real economy.”
Debt is a claim on future production and taxes. Gold is a stock of a metal. One compounds (or inflates away); the other just sits there.
Annual new mine supply is only ~3,600–3,700 tonnes (~$160–165 billion/year) against tens of trillions of new debt issuance. Gold cannot “back” the debt stock at current prices without a radically higher gold price or a radically smaller debt stock.
If you wanted the gold stock to equal the $353T debt stock, the implied price is on the order of $49,000/oz for all above-ground gold, or ~$130,000/oz if you only count investment and official gold (~100,000 t). That is arithmetic, not a forecast.
Bottom line: every ounce ever pulled out of the earth is a mid-sized national balance sheet. The world’s IOUs are an order of magnitude larger.
thats AI talking . didnt read it just glanced . monday yada . every day yada yada yada
i saw the damage our most powerful cyclone caused 2 days after . it struck at night . the storm surge tossed 10 ton boulders up off the beach walls like marbles 50 feet back . stripped rainforests of all vegetation . houses stood no chance. spoke to a young guy andrew , a friends son . he was in it as it hit . he said so eerie the eye and the second blast was strongest . you my lads have been living in the eye . prepare for the second wave of cyclone Yasi
re: “Holiwooday”; That’s ape, man!
Yesterday msm platforms reported on the presence of two unelected American multi-billionaire peace envoys in Kyiv. The pair received welcome at the train station by a dressed-down Lt. Gen. Budanov formerly of the SBU. The Ukrainian President had previously promised inquiry by the Prosecutor General into the alleged armed conflicts some days ago between SBU and HUR forces.
Meanwhile Telegram channel AMK posted a video clip on Saturday. It allegedly depicts anti-corruption NABU members scaling security fences surrounding the headquarters of the Prosecutor General’s office in Kyiv. Allegedly divisions of war spoils funds are under armed discussion at elite levels. NABU officers appeared to have reached the scene in a late model BMW X5 projecting an image of restrained authoritarian luxury. A publicly published license plate image points to vehicle registration in the western Ukrainian region of Rivne.
Rivne briefly served as capital of the Ukraine government then fighting the Soviet Union in 1919. Nazi presence from 1941 to 1944 saw Rivne acting as their hub for Ukrainian occupation.
As an aside, European demand for BMW X5 models is met solely by production from a BMW factory in Greer, S.C., USA. The city partially occupies Spartanburg County named after a Revolutionary War regiment. The regiment took its name from the ancient warlike Greek city state of Sparta.
Mea culpa, Lt. Gen. Budanov had previously been head of military intelligence HUR not anti-corruption SBU.
Today happens to be Ukraine’s Military Intelligence Day. Perhaps hoping to smooth the waters between HUR and SBU, the President posted a lengthy videoclip of his medal presentations made at the palace. HUR member “brothers and sisters” received commendation for their “camaraderie”.
Dear Sir, this is a bit off topic, but I think you and your audience might be able to help. In all the philosophies, religions, woo woos, and any and all thoughts about God and reality, is there any reasonable explanation as to why cruelty to animals exists? Thanks. sboccardy
This is a damn tough one to answer Boccaerdy because it is almost all context. For example, if I keep a cow and get a steak (and a standing rib roast) is that cruel or just how the animal hierarchy works? Big fish eats small first with krill and whales the edge/extreme case.
There is no single, universally accepted “reasonable explanation.” What exists is a long stack of partial answers that each cover some of the phenomenon and leave the rest looking worse. It helps to split the problem in two, because they are not the same thing.
1. Predation and natural suffering (the lion, the parasite, the extinction event)
2. Gratuitous human cruelty (torture, factory farming designed for indifference, sadism)
Most traditions have something to say about (1). Almost none have a clean account of (2).
Abrahamic traditions Classical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam start from a creator who is good, powerful, and knows what animals feel. That combination produces the classic theodicy problem: if God could stop it and wants good, why doesn’t He?
Common replies, none of which close the case:
Fall / cosmic disruption. Human (or angelic) rebellion damaged the whole created order. Predation and pain are not the original design. C.S. Lewis took this route for animals: they cannot sin or be morally improved by pain, so their suffering cannot be “soul-making.” He speculated that a pre-human angelic fall corrupted nature, and that animals may lack a continuous self that owns the pain the way we do. He also admitted the data we have about beasts is thin and that the appearance of divine cruelty is an illusion we cannot fully decode.
Stewardship, not license. Scripture and later law (Jewish tsa’ar ba’alei chayim — “the suffering of living creatures”) forbid unnecessary cruelty. Dominion is framed as responsibility, not a blank check. Islam similarly treats animals as having rights from the Creator; needless harm is disobedience. Practice has often lagged far behind the texts.
Mystery / skeptical theism. God’s reasons are not available to us. This is honest but not explanatory.
Eschatological repair. Some modern Christian writers (Dougherty and others) argue higher animals will be raised and “deified,” so present pain is not the last word. That is a hope, not an account of why the pain was allowed in the first place.
Descartes’ earlier dodge — that animals are unfeeling automata — is now scientifically and morally dead. Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” and various “necessary byproduct of a law-governed cosmos” arguments remain, but they sit uneasily with an omnipotent designer who could have chosen different laws.
Process theology and some open-theist views simply drop omnipotence: God lures and persuades but cannot override creaturely process. That saves divine goodness at the price of divine power.
Dharmic traditions
Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought do not start from an omnipotent personal God who owes an explanation. Suffering is built into samsara.
Animals suffer because they are in a lower rebirth produced by prior karma. The “why” is moral causation across lives, not a designer’s choice. Ahimsa (non-harm) is the ethical response, not a theodicy.
Buddhism is especially blunt: the animal realm is dukkha by definition. Cruelty arises from the three poisons — greed, hatred, delusion — in the minds of beings who have not yet seen interdependence. There is no cosmic parent to blame; there is only the work of ending the causes.
Jainism pushes this furthest: every act of harm, however small, binds karma. The existence of cruelty is just what unawakened beings do.
These systems explain persistence of cruelty better than they explain origin. They also make human cruelty morally heavier, because the victim may have been your mother in another life.
Naturalistic / evolutionary account
This is the one that requires no God and still covers a lot of ground.
Pain evolved because organisms that detected tissue damage and withdrew lived longer. Predation, parasitism, and infanticide are common because they increase the actor’s inclusive fitness. Humans inherited the same machinery plus a large prefrontal cortex, theory of mind, and the ability to treat other beings as objects. That combination produces two extra things other species rarely show at scale:
Instrumental cruelty — we can organize suffering at industrial scale for cheap protein, entertainment, or status.
Sadistic cruelty — some humans get a dopaminergic reward from another’s pain. Evolutionary psychologists treat this as a misfire or an extreme of the hunting/dominance circuitry that once paid off. It is not “for” anything cosmic; it is a byproduct that culture can amplify or restrain.
On this view there is no reason cruelty exists in the sense of a purpose. There are only mechanisms and incentives. That is intellectually tidy and emotionally cold.
“Woo” and esoteric layers
You asked for these too. Recurring themes:
Dualism / Gnostic-flavored stories: a lesser or rebel power (demiurge, fallen angels, archons) made or corrupted the biosphere.
New-age and some occult streams: density, polarity, or “necessary contrast” so consciousness can know itself. These usually collapse into either karma or a weakened-God story.
Simulation or test-universe ideas: suffering is a parameter of the run. That relocates the question rather than answering it.
None of these are more testable than classical theodicy.
What is actually left
If the question is “why does a good, all-powerful God permit a cat to play with a mouse or a human to torture a dog,” the honest survey is:
Religions that keep omnipotent goodness have to invoke fall, mystery, future compensation, or limited power.
Religions that drop the personal omnipotent God treat cruelty as an expected output of unawakened minds in a karmic or evolutionary system.
Naturalism says there is no “why” beyond selection and psychology.
Human gratuitous cruelty is the hardest piece. Predation can be given a functional story. Deliberate enjoyment of an animal’s terror cannot, except as a dark capacity that appeared when brains became able to represent another’s inner state and then use that representation as a toy. Most ethical systems — religious and secular — treat that capacity as something to be constrained, not justified.
So the short answer Boccardy: there are coherent partial explanations in several traditions, and none of them makes the phenomenon sit comfortably with a simple picture of a kind cosmos. The darkness is real; the accounts are all after-the-fact attempts to live with it.
Then we come to the matter of sentience as a break point. But don’t trees have analogs to nervous systems?
Sentience is used as a breakpoint because it is the point at which there is something it is like to be harmed — a subject on the inside of the event, not just tissue reacting. Trees complicate the slogan. They do not collapse it.
Plants really do have electrical signaling. That part is not woo. Wound a leaf and a voltage change can travel through the vascular tissue. Venus flytraps fire action-potential-like spikes. Trees share chemical warnings through mycorrhizal networks. Some of the same molecular families that animals use as neurotransmitters show up in plants. Anesthetics can slow or shut down certain plant responses. None of that is in dispute.
What is in dispute is whether those facts add up to a nervous system, or to feeling.
They do not, on the current evidence, for several structural reasons:
Plants have no neurons. No axons, no dendrites, no synapses in the animal sense. Reviews that went looking for plant “synapses” concluded the claimed structures are ordinary cell contacts doing ordinary plant work, not synaptic transmission.
Plant “action potentials” are a different machine. They are usually Ca²?/Cl?/K?-driven, slower by one to three orders of magnitude (often centimeters per second, not tens of meters), osmotically leaky, and tied to immediate physiology — closing stomata, moving ions, triggering defense chemistry — rather than to an integrative map of the world. Animal nerve spikes are fast, osmotically neutral, and exist to compute.
There is no centralized integrator. Consciousness, as we can study it, tracks organized nervous tissue above a complexity threshold: vertebrates, arthropods, cephalopods. Plants have none of that architecture. Analyses that set a minimum brain organization for even primary consciousness put the likelihood for plants near zero.
Behavior that looks “smart” is still, so far, stimulus-following and local computation, not evidence of a point of view. Learning claims in plants (if they hold) do not require awareness; classical conditioning does not either.
So the honest wording is: trees have analogs of signaling, not analogs of a nervous system. Analogy of parts is not identity of function. A hydraulic line is not a spinal cord because both carry a pulse.
That matters for the cruelty question. Pain, as ethicists and physiologists use the word, is not “tissue damage plus electricity.” It is nociception plus a subject that owns the signal as bad. A tree can mount a defense cascade when bark is stripped. That is real, costly, and worth respecting as a living system. It is not the same kind of event as a dog being kicked, because there is no good evidence of a center for which the damage hurts.
If you drop that requirement and treat any coordinated electrical response as sentience, the breakpoint disappears and you inherit a different problem: harvesting wheat, pruning an orchard, and stepping on grass become acts in the same moral category as tormenting a mammal. Almost no tradition — religious or secular — actually lives that way, which is a clue that people are tracking something besides “cells talk to each other.”
The live scientific dispute is narrower and more useful: how far down the animal tree sentience goes (insects now look more plausible than they did twenty years ago), and whether any aneural organism could host a different kind of subjectivity we would miss with neuron-centric tests. Plants are the hard test case for that second question. The majority of plant biologists still say the speculation-to-data ratio is too high. A minority keeps pressing anesthesia and systemic signaling as reasons not to close the book.
For the original problem — why cruelty to animals exists and why it feels like a special darkness — the tree does not dissolve the breakpoint. It shows why the breakpoint is drawn where integrated feeling, not mere reactivity, starts. Predation and human sadism both act on beings that appear to have an inside. Logging a pine does not, on present evidence, do the same thing. That does not make the pine a machine. It means the moral shock is aimed at a different kind of harm.
Obviously, I have thought about this a great deal – but yes, I still commit the crime of red meat.
If if makes your study easier, there’s a book that provides a useful analog. Three Felonies A Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent
From the Amazon book page: In Three Felonies a Day, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets. The dangers spelled out in Three Felonies a Day do not apply solely to “white collar criminals,” state and local politicians, and professionals. No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch, and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.
The hint in all this? Maybe – God like runaway government is just overdoing things and rules as a control test to see how far humans can be driven.
For me? that’s the closest gin joint with a good steak. Your mileage may vary.
The last animal God created was for man and he appropriately named him God – Dog
You may be missing an obvious reason why people are unnecessarily cruel to other species- because they can.
Individuals I suspect of having a cluster B or C personality disorder tend to have reputations for practicing their head issues on small animals, and graduate to larger quarry as their proficiency increases. I’ve dealt with a handful of them.
I’m starting to wonder about one public figure.
thank you for your thoughtful reply. i guess learning to live with uncertainty is one of the great struggles we have. i think that the innocence of the animal affects me a lot on this. i can live with animals being eaten by humans and other animals. deliberate cruelty is beyond my capabilities to accept and i hope that there are answers to this and other questions somewhere, probably on the other side, if there is an other side.
I ythi9nk my first
I think my first question will be something like: “Hi – just got off the Earth ride – neat ride, but why are there assholes AND never enough really good people? You can’t design a ride with all joy and no tower or terror? Aren’t y’all supposed to be the highest ascended yada-yada’s? Help a brother out?
God gave humans free will. He will never interfere with a human being’s free will. Each of us must choose to believe in what God says or reject it and that choice must be our choice — we own it. Those who are cruel to animals, children, and each other will ultimately answer to God for those choices and that will last for eternity. No one will escape the eventual consequences except through true repentance.
Well Carol, that puts God way above any government! Governments can be relied upon to interfere with free will at any opportunity.
I absolutely agree regarding wanton cruelty toward any being. Even those that are truly evil need to be neutralized with the least possible pain in a given set of circumstances. Whether God chooses to hold us to account for our deeds and misdeeds is beyond our knowing, but experience with karma and internal reality can teach us consequences in our own lifetimes. The smart ones learn early. Then again, some will never learn.
NM Mike — it is a certainty that God will hold us accountable for out deeds. For believers, this takes place at the Bema seat (1 Corinthians 3:12 – 15 and 2 Corinthians 5:10). For everyone else, that judgement takes place at the end of Christ’s millennial reign (Revelation 20:11-15). Check out this web site https://lesfeldick.org/ for teachings about the Bible. Les Feldick was not a minister or preacher; he was an Oklahoma rancher that had a great love of word of God. It was through these 30-minute studies that I was finally able to understand the Bible.
Good find
I agree G…great find…… and I don’t disagree with the accountability part at all….. My only issue with how we use the Bible today is that we tend to pick and choose. We take one sentence or one paragraph and build an entire doctrine around it, instead of looking at the full context of the message.
Over the centuries we’ve ended up with multiple versions — King James, modern translations, paraphrases — and each one reflects the choices of the translators. The most complete version I’ve come across is the Ethiopian Bible, and even when you compare that to the Dead Sea Scrolls translations, you still see variations…. that disagree with other translations
But through it all the pattern stays the same:
Every prophet, every teacher, every tradition tried to guide humanity in the right direction…. And over and over, we take their message and carve out a tiny portion to justify whatever position we already hold…… We bend the text to fit our desires Or the desires of the region or community instead of bending ourselves to fit the text and teachings……
That’s how we end up destroying in the name of God, or peace, or righteousness — not because the message was wrong, but because we only listened to the part that suited us and our desires….
two examples..
1) If one curses his father or mother, his lamp will go out at the coming of darkness. (Proverbs 20:20 NAB)
2) All who curse their father or mother must be put to death. They are guilty of a capital offense. (Leviticus 20:9 NLT)
oh my god my neighbors kids constantly argue with their parents…
then messages where if there’s more than one church the whole community should be destroyed…or …this one is a hoot…
(Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NAB)
If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father. Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her….and if her father refuses the money..she is suppose to be killed in front of her father for her sins..
when I was a child in bible lessons..I read the bible..and started asking questions..the pastor couldn’t answer any of them..because all he knew was pick and choose.. this is the part people forget. Christ wasn’t crucified because He was “evil” — He was crucified because He refused to bend the Torah to fit the desires of the political and religious leaders of His time.
When you read the full context, not just the cherry picked verses, we see how often scripture gets weaponized by those in authority.
In every translation —leaders bend the teachings to fit their own desires for their region, their politics, or their personal gain.
the laws of the Father are simple, and they’ve been simple since the beginning….
Do unto others,Respect your elders,Honor your father and mother,Do not kill, covet, or steal, and above all Love the Lord thy God…
Every prophet across every tradition tried to guide humanity toward those principles. We’re the ones who twist the message to fit the desires of man,we carve out the parts we like, and use the rest as justification for whatever we already wanted to do.
That’s how people end up destroying in the name of God, peace, or righteousness — not because the message was wrong, but because we refused to read the whole thing.
2 words – Mental Retardation
gateway to alphabet work, who they recruit…if ya got the brains to go with..
early indication of being a pyscho – prerequisite for leadership in world govmint.
..prison planet where all sorts of “malogenes” get dumped, especially pedo’s.
“Normalcy is, therefore, possibly the best blinding-agent of all. And how to avoid being swamped by it is a dandy ponder as we doze off into nap-times today.”
Like the bumper sticker says: “Why Be Normal?”
Lowell seems to be closer, and spreading out more than expected. At 5am a Tropical Storm Watch is now posted for Honolulu and the island of Oahu. And the two hurricanes are pulling up this plume from the south that is bringing rain to the whole island chain. Passing intense showers here on the Big Island impact zone.
“Write when the iron’s hot and the new data logging serial port is running.”
I’m too damn tired! But I will reach out to the ham who made the observation and request more data.
link to space weather: https://www.spaceweather.gov/products/wsa-enlil-solar-wind-prediction
G, have you programmed your AI to skip attacks done by MAGA Maniacs?
https://tiffinohio.net/posts/ohio-gop-amplifies-laura-loomer-amy-acton-attacks/
‘Ohio Republican Party was using its official account to amplify Loomer’s attacks on the Democratic candidate for governor
“Vivek Ramaswamy and other MAGA hacks like Donald Trump Jr and Laura Loomer have been lying about Amy Acton for months — calling her a ‘leftwing psychopath,’ an alcoholic, a socialist and other hateful slurs.
The attacker’s brother:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/dark-twist-emerges-armed-republican-080909235.html
‘The brother of an armed man alleged to have attacked Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton on Sunday is a Republican political volunteer who was fired after the discovery of his sexual misconduct with a minor.’ (must have had that carpal tunnel problem that some on this site feel necessary to share, misogynists enjoy referring to women as mere sexual objects, ‘hot babes’, no dignity or humanity allowed for the female gender).
The attacker:
‘Patrick Havas reportedly pushed through the crowd, knocking over at least two older adults.
Police found two pistols and a taser in the suspect’s possession,’
Oh , those are some news sites that publish “real news” . sarc
Wilson, Thx for noticing how George is unwilling to post unflattering news about Republiicans, keep those MAGA Bigoted Misogynists HUSH! HUSH! (Sweet Charlottesville, Virginia!) Coddle those Trump Supporters!
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-charlottesville-led-to-the-capitol-attack/
{Trump said} both sides present at the rally shared blame and had “very fine people” among their ranks.
“You have a president of the United States who is willing to give tacit approval to some of the darkest elements of American politics,” Charlie Sykes says about Charlottesville. “And even when it goes wrong, even when it turns ugly, he’s unwilling to denounce it. ‘
‘Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte’ sung by Patti Page, from the 1964 movie of the same name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyYMXjmzjwQ