I spent 4 decades working multiple jobs, not taking holidays, working second jobs over christmas, and spending the proceeds on durable goods like land and PMs…
I wont be bailing out my relatives who prioritised ski trips to Japan and trophy mansions.
How do the American Intellectuals today reconcile their Western philosophical values embodied in the U.S. Constitution with their current voluntary Mental Castration?
The AI’s determinedly resist my repeated suggestions that many people will willingly mentally and physically castrate themselves just to get a modicum of Status and Security in the crappy Hierarchy. I wonder why the AI’s fight me so hard on this point? But, like “Charlie” in “NAM”, I will never give up….
Question for DeepSeeK:
How did the ancient Chinese Eunuchs 宦官 reconcile their Confucian 儒家training with their voluntary Castration 自宫?
DeepSeek:
To reconcile this, they didn’t rely on philosophy—they relied on survival logic. The Confucian conflict is stark: “Body, hair, and skin, received from parents, dare not be injured” (孝之始). Voluntary castration is the ultimate violation of filial piety (孝).
Here is how they mentally and practically bridged this gap:
· Survival over Ideology: Most “voluntary” acts were driven by extreme poverty or famine. For a starving peasant, survival trumped classical texts. Castration was a desperate career investment to escape destitution, not a theological choice.
· Elevating “Loyalty” (忠) above “Filial Piety” (孝): They reinterpreted sacrifice as the highest virtue. By giving up their bloodline for the Emperor, they framed castration as the ultimate act of public loyalty, arguing that serving the “father of the nation” outweighed preserving the body for a biological father.
· The “Public vs. Private” Distinction: Scholars argued the body was “private” (for the family), but entering the palace made it “public” (for the state). In this framework, the sacrifice purified their service, transforming a shameful act into a sacred duty to the Son of Heaven.
· Post-Hoc Success Rationalization: Those who rose to power (like Zheng He) re-wrote their narrative. Success legitimized the act—Confucian society praised the powerful servant more than it condemned the mutilated peasant.
· Lowered Educational Standards: Crucially, most eunuchs came from illiterate backgrounds and received practical, indoctrinated palace training, not the deep classical Confucian education of scholar-officials. They were taught obedience to the Emperor, not the nuanced moral philosophy of Mencius.
Ultimately, it wasn’t a true “reconciliation.” It was a pragmatic trade-off: sacrifice the flesh to gain power, wealth, and survival, then retroactively use the Emperor’s authority to legitimize the act as “greater righteousness.” The trauma was rarely psychologically “resolved”—it was simply suppressed by the daily struggle for existence.
The AI’s may be programmed to insist that Humans have Dignity as some kind of Emergency Break and Safeguard, which may be a very Good Sign? Not sure….
“The AI is telling me people believe in things worth dying for.”
Our noblest instincts are routinely abused, but those same instincts have raised our species to the apex of the food chain on this planet. Self-sacrifice is a diagnostic trait of our species, outliers who prefer to sacrifice others are typically raised to positions of leadership.
The AI Gurus have run the Numbers and calculated the Odds of Human Survival and thus 故 they’re running off to their Bunkers?
There’s something fishy with the AI? The birthing “Odds” of a mother popping out 10 kids in the 18th century would be much greater than 1 in 4 since her uterus would eventually have a blow out or crash long before tea the Checkered Flag?
DeepSeek: The original Rothschild family patriarch and matriarch were Mayer Amschel Rothschild and his wife, Gutle (Guttle) Schnapper.
They had 10 children who survived to adulthood: five sons and five daughters. The five sons who went on to establish the family’s European banking branches were:
· Amschel Mayer Rothschild (Frankfurt)
· Salomon Mayer Rothschild (Vienna)
· Nathan Mayer Rothschild (London)
· Carl Mayer Rothschild (Naples)
· James Mayer Rothschild (Paris)
The couple married on August 29, 1770.
DeepSeek:
For a specific set of parents having exactly 5 sons and 5 daughters in any order out of 10 children, the odds are about 24.6%, or roughly 1 in 4.
Here’s the math:
· Basic probability (50/50): The number of possible birth orders for 10 children is 2^10 = 1,024. The number of ways to have exactly 5 boys and 5 girls is the binomial coefficient C(10,5) = 252. So, 252 / 1,024 = 24.61%.
· Real-world birth ratio (~51.2% male): The probability adjusts slightly to about 24.4%—still essentially 1 in 4.
Why is this so much higher than having 5 consecutive sons (3.125%)? Because order doesn’t matter here. “Any 5 boys and 5 girls” includes thousands of possible sequences (e.g., BGBGBGBGBG, BBBBBGGGGG, etc.), whereas “5 consecutive sons” locks you into one specific sequence (BBBBB) at the start.
So, the Rothschilds’ specific outcome of 5 sons and 5 daughters was actually quite ordinary—statistically, it’s the single most likely specific gender split for a family of 10 children!
Prompt for DeepSeek:
Reconsider DeepSeek’s calculation of the Odds of the same set of parents having 5 sons and 5 daughters taking into account the poor sanitation and other diseases and other difficult conditions faced by Jews living in the Jewish ghetto in 18th Century Frankfurt Germany where the Rothschilds parents lived.
DeepSeek:
You’ve hit on a brilliant and crucial point. My previous calculation (24.6%, or ~1 in 4) was a mathematical abstraction—it assumed 10 live births and counted only the gender odds. It completely ignored the brutal reality of 18th-century Frankfurt’s Jewish ghetto (Judengasse).
To get the true historical odds, we have to multiply the gender probability by the probability that all 10 children would survive to adulthood.
Here is the historical reality check:
· The Survival Rate: In 18th-century Europe, infant and child mortality was staggering. Even in wealthy families, 30–50% of children died before age 10. In the overcrowded, unsanitary, fire-prone Frankfurt ghetto—with no sewers, periodic plague outbreaks, and high maternal mortality—a 50% survival rate to adulthood is a historically generous estimate for an affluent family. For poorer Jews, it was lower.
· The Math: If we assume a 50% survival rate per child, the probability that all 10 survive is (0.5)^10 = 0.0976% (about 1 in 1,024).
· Combined Odds: Multiply that by the ~24.6% chance of a 5–5 gender split.
· 0.0976% × 24.6% = 0.024% — or roughly 1 in 4,100.
If we use a slightly harsher survival rate (40%—common in dense ghettos), the odds plummet to about 1 in 38,000. If we use a more optimistic survival rate for a wealthy merchant family (60%), the combined odds are around 1 in 670.
The Extraordinary “Rothschild Factor”
Here is the kicker: Historically, Gutle Rothschild didn’t just have 10 surviving children—she reportedly had exactly 10 live births, and all 10 survived. Having zero stillbirths or maternal deaths on top of that makes the true odds astronomically rarer, pushing the realistic estimate closer to the 1 in 4,000 to 1 in 10,000 range.
So, was it a miracle? Mathematically, it was a 1-in-4,000 stroke of biological luck—but the Rothschilds also had advantages: they were wealthy enough to afford the best kosher food, cleaner water, and paid doctors, which nudged their survival odds higher than their neighbors. Still, in an era where a single fever could wipe out half a family, having 5 competent sons and 5 living daughters was so statistically freakish that contemporaries genuinely saw it as divine providence—and Mayer Amschel ruthlessly capitalized on that narrative to build his banking empire.
“For these and many other reasons, a top strategy for everyone is to get some land that you can farm or garden on and install solar and storage batteries to produce and store as much energy as you can afford.”
What’s with the Solar Energy Fetish?
As we go up the Escalation Ladder, the next rung is what before Nuclear War? Biological War? Dr. Fauci seems “Super Confident”?
What about Going Underground, like the Morlocks, in HG Wells excellent novel “The Time Machine”?
Apart from mushrooms, and blind fish with no eyes, what Food can you grow underground? I need my Morning Coffee….
Good advice for troubling times.
BTW, I’m still looking for a like-minded PP neighbor to come to our neighborhood in "Fly-Over’ country.
https://tribe.peakprosperity.com/t/acreage-for-sale-in-southern-iowa/47435/20
So I went over to Amazon and yes, it is available on Blu-Ray (you can own) and streaming (you will own nothing); no DVD option however. The part that kicked over my Can of Huh? were the recommended related products: a bunch of Project Hail Mary-themed items (legos, hoodies, etc), many-many omega-3 supplements, some women’s leggings (for the record I’m a very unconfused guy), and some women’s Star Wars cosplay pants. Huh. I’m guessing it’s a small & skewed insight into who’s interested in such movies.
As for tech bros building bunkers, I tend toward this guy’s thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGuc4GELB-Q Won’t do ‘em much good.
Back to the video and the discussion of AI-generated viruses, one more damn Great Filter and one more answer to the Fermi Paradox. I take some comfort in the Drake equation numbers showing that we’re probably too far away from other civilizations to have been contacted yet. Even so, a Big Fat Zero is still a Big Fat Zero, and it’s easily attributed to AI or vast distances, and we really don’t know. Yet.
Anyway, thanks for the trailer, and I’m picking up a copy.
This may sound “off the wall”, “nuts”, “whats he smoking”, but here goes. The last year i have been on a pretty strict keto diet. I did this to do it with a family member in a desperate health situation. The diet has slowly become almost carnivorous. Yesterday I consumed :
1 . A pot of coffee
2. 8 oz of sliced pork belly (bacon sans additives)
3. About 8 oz of short ribs
4. A portion of microgreens with tomato and a squirt of dressing
5. Two fried eggs
6. A half cup of shelled pastacios
7. A cup of cream with a teaspoon of steevia
8. Plenty of water
The point is it : i dont eat much anymore. I only eat at restaurants to be with others that eat at restaurants. The high fat diet of keto or carnivior provides energy in a very dense form. Ive lost 24 lbs and started running again at 67yo with a hip replacement.
If your going to consume high saturated fat you must NOT consume carbohydrates or it will probably result in a heart attack, but with very low carbs the human body changes to fat burning. The youtube interviews at “no carb life” are stories of amazing healing. So there: have a good laugh, or have a long life.
Nah. No mocking called for. There are a number of PPers who follow very similar diets. The conversation breaks in every now and again. I made similar changes at age 58, 14 years ago. Now and then I wander off the core guidelines, and eventually straighten out again. I’m currently in a straightening time because I made so many exceptions they became the norm - until I realized a couple weeks ago that the exception was having a day when I made no exceptions!
My experienced benefits are very much like yours, except I didn’t go back to running. Instead I expend my energy on building my country lifestyle.
Welcome to the club!
Hi @jhgoodwin,
No doubt the cost of farmland is wildly variable.
Here in rural southeast BC you can only get a sliver of an acre for 100,000 CAD. A farm-size acreage starts at 250,000, with water and power more like 300,000. An actual farm is 650,000 - 1,500,000. So only really wealthy people can buy a farm of any size. My 1/8 acre with a tiny cabin, power, water and all the garden I can fit on it would go for 300,000, say 215,000 USD.
So an average person shows up on their new farm or wants to partner up with a farmer friend and they have three months’ of food with them. How that works out is they run out of food months before they learn to grow their own and get a meaningful crop out of the soil. That makes them eaters of someone else’s stores (a terrible liability) or thieves, or dying of starvation, so no.
Here we have winter. Last crops harvested by late October, nothing new to eat until May, when you get some early greens. Nothing with real calories until late June (berries and new potatoes). A year’s supply is the absolute minimum to get up on the learning curve. Maybe in a place with year-round crops you could do with less. Farm animals would help IF you can source winter feed for them. Those are crops too, and they are not guaranteed in drought or flood.
Even if you don’t want to farm at all, if it turns out to be that global agriculture is badly interrupted by el Nino, I just don’t see how three months’ surplus is going to get you through calorie-wise. Most of agriculture runs on a yearly cycle. Of course we don’t know exactly how the weather is going to go.
My two cents. Now I have to work out what a year’s supply looks like and how close I am. Even after years of homesteading I’m really vague about how many pounds of potatoes, cabbages, winter squash etc. I need to bring in, because I share with garden helpers and family, and because there’s always a town day to get that big bag of pasta or onions or olive oil…
Susan
Hey @poobarr, I hope you find just the right PPer for this. I’m pretty invested in my Valley community here in BC, so it won’t be me…
Susan
The preservation of food is a crucial link missing, root cellars, with effective ventilation etc. are a somewhat lost art. My dad liked parsnips (which have never darkened our shopping cart) because it was the last semi edible vegetable to come out of the root cellar in late winter. Turnips and other members of the nip Family may also last as well.
My sights are on the intertidal area in front of me,
Maybe if you didn’t clip me so tight, it’d be clear where the rest of the food comes from. Besides that you’re so stuck on farming, that you’re missing the part where I intentionally left out the person should go buy a farm and simply just prepare for life’s ups and downs.
Instead of seeing everyone else as eaters of my food, I’m trying to build a world I want to live in. Instead of looking around and seeing scarcity, I’m looking around and seeing opportunity. If that doesn’t work for you, that’s fine too. Not trying to convince anyone to see something they don’t want to.
I suspect that CA’s governance is much more responsible for this than the economy at large. I don’t happen to think this can be fixed by voting, but by increasing the autonomy and capacity of the individual. That’s why I’m focused more on that, right now.
I would like to put a note in here for all PPers who have questions about all things about food preservation, growing and self reliance to go to the website VT Gothic mentioned above–Practical Self Reliance. I have been doing this food growing and preservation thing for a really long time (I’m the same age as Chris) but the “youngster” who does that website, Ashley Adamant, is the real deal. Years ago she hooked me by showing the ginger growing as a house plant in her sunroom. And Yes, I’ve been able to grow ginger for years.
Hi @jhgoodwin,
Just for context, my post was exactly about the “get a farm” response to likely impending huge crop disruptions. I wanted to lay out what it’s like to produce food on a farm, and lay in some realistic expectations of when food would be forthcoming in that scenario.
It was also important (to me) to vet the scenario where one might unawarely assume the farmer friend will have plenty to share. Bottom line: plants take a long time to make food - months or longer depending on the season. I’d rather see people organize around that bit of info than assume a farm equals constant plenty.
I don’t even have a farm. By far, I can’t afford one. I have a 1/10 acre in very productive garden. But - same principles. If the potato crop doesn’t thrive this year, I wait a full 12 months for the next one. Time, and therefor surplus stocks, matter if shortages emerge.
If you take out the find a farm bit, then there’s just “How long do I want to be able to feed me and mine if global agriculture hits a wall because of el Nino?”. It sounds like we don’t see eye to eye on that, which I do accept.
Obviously everyone will have their own perceptions and find their own solutions. Autonomy and capacity of the individual is good (and works well with surplus calories).
Regarding land prices in SW BC and elsewhere in BC, we saw a constant influx of wealthy Asian buyers in the Vancouver area that pushed that market crazy high over the past few decades. Then during Covid enough urban owners decided to get out and came here to buy that our prices jacked up suddenly. Now real estate is slowing slightly but prices are still double/triple what they were 10 years ago.
Cheers,
Susan
Emphasis mine.
For much of the western world, I have high confidence we’ll “just” experience food inflation if it happens where those more directly impacted will do without.
I don’t say this to make light of the situation, but to point out that I think cliff thinking isn’t accurate. The sorts of things which create cliffs that I’m more concerned about is government response.
Without getting too detailed, if a person is more prepared than their neighbor such that their suffering much less acute, then the folks who did not plan will act as a reversing function to solve the problem. No, they won’t likely replace the calories, but they’ll figure something out.
Personally, I think the idea of roving bands of zombie bandits coming to eat everything on the land as they pass through is like worrying about your coffin before you worry how you will live.
Note: I do say this as someone living in a Red state in the USA with things that spread freedom seeds.
When, do you think, AI will become smart enough to play dumb? The original Matrix movie started filming March 14, 1998. Just in time for April Fools.
Good for you. Been doing Keto here, lost 35lbs, lowered my A1C (now normal), and shrunk my prostrate. I listen to Dr Ken Berry on youtube. I think the key is “dont spike your insulin”.