I know someone that had it and might still. Doctors won't help You with it in the Eastern part of the states.

Eventually he may have to have surgery to have part of his lung removed — but mind you, he was in his early 20s when he got sick and then got better, and this is now almost 60 years on.

Having never had it myself (thank God) I don’t know what the medical protocol is, but you could find out by googling some major medical centers like Mayo. But saying “doctors won’t help you with it in the Eastern part of the States” just sounds a bit weird.

Best of luck.

aren't even aware of Valley Fever. Sometimes people have to really push to get answers and tests that are needed to get those answers.

Here in the Phoenix area we are well aware of it and what it can do. Dogs are particularly susceptible to getting it. It can be deadly. The medication for it is costly and has side effects. In dogs it can affect all different parts of the body including the limbs, brain, and other organs.

meaning (if I have this correctly) she had lumps in her lung (and only one lung) which were Valley Fever. About a third or more of one lung was removed and she lived to age 82, some three decades later. Before this she smoked, and she stopped immediately with this. Good for her.

One unfortunate thing with communicating with humans as our media environment has apparently programmed people to do - the left/greens etc were made to adopt this like type of messaging on serious matters that copies what only really works for demagogues and hate mongers. While these greasy The Atlantic and NYT types peddled a fake adulthood. That book IBM and the Nazis comes to mind when I look at institutions like those.

So what happens is that people who see these Nostradamus like predictions (“after this or that date things get dire”), expect everything to just collapse overnight. That’s then used by the Cato and Koch crew to argue that “look these doomers scared you and nothing happened!”
But something did happen. It just was slow attrition not overnight a Melancholia type event. And its sourced to the things the greens/left were warning about.

I mean a nuclear bomb can wipe everything out overnight but that’s not how really bad things typically work-it’s a grinding slow boil to the hell of degraded infrastructure, polluted, miserable, overcrowded and hot hellscapes. Now Trump and Covid are both a bit like a nuclear bomb and I personally had one such event in my life.

But that’s not how on average climate change, all the stuff Trump is doing now, overpopulation, delayed effects of the pandemic/Trump etc operate. It’s this nightmarish slow attrition where your life keeps getting shittier and one day you look back at what you thought was normal a mere decade ago and it’s gone.

I wish I had bookmarked it. Duer Betty Boom who worked in the federal government posted about how people will viscerally feel it in their lives, but not not attribute it to the correct sources as this football match style that is modern politics distracts people. How can they when education is gone and it’s all apps and bs except for the kids of the elite. They’ll be fine, which I hope is enough for all the rest of us.
I do feel warm inside when I think that at least I contribute to gold lining for Andreessen’s diapers he farts into.

The shit Trump is doing now will probably be hard to reverse without concerted effort. but by then it will be the new normal.

It’s the 1984 thing - things were always like this. They were never any different. Resistance is futile. I have a poor memory in some ways. But not in these ways. Possibly because the long memory I have in some ways is taking away from other kinds of memory I need for routine stuff.

I am appalled in 2025 to see all the things I found atrocious a decade, a decade and a half ago peddled as the better stuff. No. I have a long memory in some ways.
What we are witnessing is the path from WallE world to 1984. But on a long enough timescale with a few shocks here and there.

I would really recommend Harry Harrison’s “Make Room! Make Room!” to anyone who has not read it. It’s the future.

Then, years later, I read an interview of John Brunner, in which he said that there was only one thing in the book which was original,; everything else he had gotten from scientific journals, and a tour of major cities of the US.

There’s nothing in it about "The Greenhouse Effect" that I recall, but, it was written in 1972.

I’ll look it up. You gave me some good suggestions -The Marching Morons (which seems to have predicted Elon Musk), and that cartoon with Porkypine whose name eludes me.
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. I am trying to improve my memory. So I will see if I can retain that long enough to look it up at night.
The lack of a memory seems to be our collective issue as a society. Which is why those nice billionaire men are kind enough to provide us with selectively edited ones. They are philanthropists.

One thing cool about DU is that so many people here are old enough to remember stuff so word of mouth narratives about stuff no people of my age lived through. Most people here are my parents’ age. That’s a lot of information that you can’t really get easily.

As for people my age or younger it’s not clear what garbled garbage will be left online with AI and “fixes for AI”. I cynically look at our not very bright tech billionaires and “generate” predictions about how these guys plan to rewrite all this where they are not quite stupid enough to think you can get away with everything. I have yet to see an idea from transparency, health, fighting disinformation that these guys cannot somehow pervert to produce: a) acceptably watered down, bland pap or b) outright bullshit and c) truly weaponized disinfo and misinfo and propaganda to divide and rule for ever.

In that case, you might want to start with his prior book, Stand on Zanzibar. It is frequently cited as his masterpiece. Like Make Room! Make Room! its primary theme is overpopulation, whereas The Sheep Look Up, usually said to be its “sequel," is about environmental degradation.

https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190509-the-1968-sci-fi-that-spookily-predicted-today

I really like the look of his work. Being an environmentalist from the Global South and in the path of the coming eco catastrophes, I have found it outrageous how a segment of “the left” acted in such bad faith (Betsy Hartmann who I suspect is a Cato plant -she attacks even The Centre for Biological Diversity; Naomi Klein whose weird new-age stuff is just bizarre etc) on overpopulation as an environmental issue (ably assisted of course by fundamentalists and the Cato/Koch libertarians).

Fortunately younger lefties are less susceptible to that kind of propaganda and there are also more nonwhite female greens like myself (or Nandita Bajaj of Population Balance) who are not particularly privileged (though educated) countering those chestnuts.

I used to find the bland, generic and implicitly anti-environment drivel outlets like the execrable Atlantic pump out as left of center horrifyingly out of touch. They managed to silence a whole generation of greens imo and lead us here.

I discovered Alan Weisman’s work earlier this year and it’s also environmentally themed and quite unlike anything else I have seen before:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us

I have wondered about “Our World in Data.” One of the things which is a personal gripe of mine is that frequently their data is not current (i.e. it is a few years old.)

I am familiar with some of the authors you cited, but not all.

Regarding overpopulation, you may be interested in this Peanuts comic strip from 1957:

Or this one from 1959:


To put things into perspective, what was the world population at the time?

Last edited Thu Aug 21, 2025, 09:49 AM - Edit history (2)

Jokes aside, that’s a classic bad faith move.

It’s the kind of sophistry that I am shocked ever worked. But it is falling for right wing gambits to be offended by humor whether you agree with it or not imo. Not that it doesn’t have an insidious message like Manbearpig. But still feuding with comedy is just stupid. Everything is combative enough as is 🤺..

But serious allegations of ecofascism from the left..that’s really sleazy and lazy. It is as stupid as a hallmark card that says “love isn’t divided, it multiplies!” And it ignores the ugliness of the world we live in from horrors visited on humans and animals to increasing minor nuisances we are told are inevitable.

You can see the effect of overcrowding everywhere - from education to medical care and the solutions involve even more bullshit jobs, rapacious exploitative data mining and a noxious form of utilitarianism. Very effective altruism-a truly loathsome ideology which I wish wouldn’t corrupt the animal rights movement by associating itself with it. I get why the animal welfare movement takes funding where it can find it. But still, that’s a truly horrible movement.

Instead of finding any reasonable solution, we find more convoluted drivel to address stuff with simple solutions.

It was shockingly irresponsible to not couple basic family planning education as part of a public health policy when infant mortality rates fell. That’s not coercion or propaganda.
All it is is a suggestion to put thought into serious decisions over invading your neighbors’ lives and spaces and then blaming them.

I always wished someone as annoying, asinine and unrelatable as Peter Singer had not become a key figure in animal rights.

When I came across this cool and funny author Deb Olin Unferth I was thinking wistfully that the nicest people sympathetic to animal rights don’t get as much spotlight as a complete ass like Singer.

Anyone utilitarian enough should get that associating a fairly repellant persona with any movement is bad for it..

I personally consider chicken factory farming an abomination as birds don’t even get the most basic humane protections. These are all signs of a society whose sociopathy barometer is broken in many ways-factory farming, ventilation shutdown, species loss, human biomass exceeding all other biomass, war, poverty and stuff like our world in data is daft. The root cause is overpopulation.

I liked this review of Barn 8 in The Guardian. Olin Unferth herself comes across as a delightful person unlike those she portrays (apparently chickens going by societal callousness and animal activists) for once with genuine sympathy ;-/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/18/barn-8-by-deb-olin-unferth-review-the-great-chicken-heist

Last edited Thu Aug 21, 2025, 04:32 PM - Edit history (1)

• ”Empowering” women: When women have a choice, not just about abortion, but about pregnancy in general, they tend to have fewer children.
• Better health care: When people are reasonably confident that their children will live to adulthood, they tend to have fewer children.
• Better education. More educated people tend to have fewer children. — This is the underlying social dynamic of The Marching Morons.

Last edited Fri Aug 22, 2025, 02:49 AM - Edit history (2)

It’s also a personal issue for me. Bear with me OkItsJustMe - what I say can seem a bit confusing because it is about politics being personal and I don’t do that with scripted vague generalities hewing neatly to accepted cliches. Thats what got us here.

There are simpler models of the whole mess that is this really predatory model of reality that’s emerging.

Too many fraudulent economic and behaviorist models thrive while anything against these predatory market forces is squeezed: honest businesses, consumers, citizens, the poor, the disabled, the elderly and lay waste to environmental and labor laws and promote a disgusting type of growth or that Welcome Party middle ground which is Pronatalist bullshit.

I am not handing over my remaining resources for the most predatory take on how society should run. I didn’t even have one kid. I don’t want to let society turn childfree people into what Vance has already overtly said “peopel with fewer rights”. That already happened and is ongoing . It has to stop.

It’s about older people like me being sidelined based on decisions I would never agree with.
We all know that.

It’s not too late to check the worst social and environmental ills.
Educating women without drawing the explicit connection between growing chaos with growing populations and worsening environmental conditions is not going to fix it.

We hear so much bs all the time. This shouldn’t be that hard.

I try to have a consistent worldview on all levels and have a realistic relationship with money and reality.

Instead what I am seeing is the worst kind of degrowth. No regulation so my land and home are now invaded by corrupt or outright criminal tech entities as an example. An honest job would be shutting them down without destroying my property and life and without a slew of creepy cottage industries resulting.

It’s all tied. just not in the stupidest conspiratorial way but when so many of your economic models have so much bs..I am not for the Barbie movie worldview. But I am calling out bullshit. Overpopulation is causing people who play fair to get the rawest of deals and fuck that.
The rise of Graebers bullshit jobs, the tech backlash to Lina Khans competition regulation. This bs narrative that this type of stealthy creepy parasitic super fit cancer cell like growth stressing anyone honest in the soft fields without a secure job, stressing honest peopel with public sector oriented instincts and peopel like me who want to work only in non profit science honestly with a commensurate and stable income minus garbage forced by societal forces beyond my control .

I don’t mind supporting a few “old internet” thjngs like DU or cleverbot (the only chatbot I use) but not as an alternative to a say in how govt gets to hand over my property or space to the private sector sans any consent-to AI and other garbage that’s invading the real world more and that’s not gonna happen.
My home is not an app with music and lights provided by cteeps. Nothing is inevitable except a court case if you are stupid enough to buy the “data is oil” creeps and so bent on spectacle and theatre that you go and mess with the type of random who really doesn’t role play “I am a real person!” Like an internet influencer or by bullshit “security”.

You know being a real person is the norm. But I can’t pretend to be crazy or difficult for seeing something tied very much to overpopulation’s indirect dynamics. My parents’ pensions don’t mean that the state permits “growth” using our property or lives. That’s not security or art.

The rise of the bullshit jobs kills jobs in softer areas that are honest forcing honest journalists to become influencers on Substack,

For me this is a personal issue too. The message seems to be that either you can excel in hard sciences at an austere level that’s managed only by a small subset of people even in the hard sciences or hijacked by technofascist slackers who promote bullshit jobs and junk growth and deflect from that.


The underlying subtext is the old should kill themselves or be starved and you have 3-10 kids to feed into this machine.

The problem is if you don’t degrow junk but like the super fit cancer cells which the Trumpers and the tech grifters represent.

I was pleased to see that locally they are shutting down my down online gambling. But that’s not enough.
I am only middle aged and I vote and talk anonymously.
To preempt trumps shit and data as oil, my state can expect to hear from me for choosing the interests of parasitic leeches in tech and these social media and botnet generating nuisances.
I am not an influencer/ I am an anonymous citizen forced to do stupid shit to contact regulatory authorities because -oh none exist! It’s not a joke. It’s so lame.

I have been coping witb gallows humor when I am not furious or dejected that apparently objecting to an obvious con that perverts concepts-I can’t think of a concept this doesn’t pervert. It’s horrible kafkaesque Idiocracy of no use to man, beast, AI, alien anything. It’s a paen in favor of junk heaps from hell.

And you say anything and they send you to psychiatry insisting “there is no stigma”. I know there is no stigma. I am not stupid or conservative. But I am not handing over ..

At this point I do feel like a lame Monty Python gag about the “none shall pass” knight 🤺 misses the point. I lost my mom and yes “family plan” or don’t encroach.

It used to be that we had more of a say in our own spaces. I worked at one of those technohells that churn out bs jobs and bs narratives and obviously thinks that govt employees shouldn’t exist and the “evolution” of that is harassing private people and calling that democritization via the deep web?

No that shit leads to harassment complaints and criminal lawsuits where peopel are (like me) not about suing for monetary compensation or theatre or cooperating with a heist or sending ourselves to suicide or prison (which last is the only option if you are not a grifter nor gullible. And you know as awesome as prison/suicide or a strait jacket sound I’d rather risk looking crazy and being unpleasant and it cannot be localised to a few things. That’s the predatory larger worldview that incidentally backs pronatalism over decency).


This used to be the normal reaction to not being a private anon:

https://plork.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-am-become-famous.html?m=1

I can’t say I’d encountered the “data as oil” concept before, but I understand it. For my own part, I have done my level best to keep my data mine, however, I know too much about databases, and I realize that corporations are not as careful with my data as I am.

“Eminent domain” is a legal tool which can be used for valid reasons. However, it can be and is abused. It seems now, more than ever.

For me, our #1 priority must be restoration of the ecosystem. #2 (selfishly) is survival of my/our species. On the whole, I think we’ve accomplished a number of worthwhile things. We’re not all Beethoven , Rembrandt or Leonardo, but a few of us are. We’ve done a lot of damage to our ecosystem, exploited one another, and our fellow inhabitants. I fear we have signed “Gaia’s" death warrant. This saddens me. We don’t yet know of life elsewhere on other planets. Gaia may be unique.

We were warned decades ago of the likely consequences of our actions. We selfishly chose to ignore them. The impression I get is that by-and-large, we still choose to ignore them, even as they begin to play out around us (perhaps because they are simply too awful for us to acknowledge.)

I used to say, “It’s never too late to make life a little less miserable for future generations.” I’ve begun to question that. Perhaps I was too optimistic.

My point regarding “family planning” is not that it’s a bad thing, however, while the Earth’s population likely should have been kept at a fraction of what it now is, we need to make a dramatic change in a matter of years, not decades. Using a very simplistic model, if everyone stopped having children today, we might expect the Earth’s population to be cut in half in say… 40 years (that’s just not fast enough.) If those remaining people keep producing carbon emissions at the same rate “per capita” as today, that would be too much.

If we used a more realistic plan (like China’s now abandoned "one child policy”) we would expect the population to decline even less rapidly.

So, while better family planning would have been good 70 or 80 years ago, I’m afraid it is not the solution to our current crises.

And every additional human needs a lot of resources in such a complex society.

I already feel squeezed and I am sick of it.

And selfishly I already am childfree and maxed out with the number of impositions society has imposed on me. I don’t see random humans who want to shop at malls and impose their values on me while undercutting my love of nature etc as a “we”.


I’d like to prioritize my issues and life over an imaginary “we” that is fine with impositions, negligence and maltreatment for stuff I find no value in and never will. People who take credit when anything goes right and want no blame when stuff goes wrong.

So I feel it is selfish to keep treating the childfree like shit as employers and whatever passes for society does across the board. I would like to prioritize my own stuff at least now. I especially have felt that the last 14 years of my life has been about this parasitic leeching away of all my goodwill and I still try but I am really sick of a forced collaboration with people I dislike and distrust thoroughly who always treat my issues or priorities or work or health like trash and force other people’s interests forward at my expense.

I already restrict my consumption. People with more than 2 kids should stop making so many demands of the childfree like me who already give up so much-I am not giving up the last resources I have left. It’s just selfish and I am sick of it. No.

The more I get it the more I view the last 14 years of my life as driven predatory market forces and people who don’t really think sucking away all I have and without the common decency of a minimal explanation that is not a fraudulent. And all with zero support but lots of impositions.

So it is tied to that kind of stuff.

A bit repetitious but these are things that angered me personally and generally.

I am not a martyr -just an ordinary human woman.

Yes, "family planning" is a good thing (it would have been a better thing in the “post-war era”) it simply is not sufficient to address the crises we face (as many seem to believe it is.)

There is no one solution, if “we” are to survive, it will require several orchestrated solutions.

I try to suppress personal frustrations that are melding with big picture ones. I suppress them more than not but sometimes I let them escape these days. ;-/

Largely I keep it impersonal when I can..but we are definitely way entangled and sometimes it wears on me.