Dear Daily Disaster Diary, January 25 2026

 

Run For Exit — Part X

Inside Russia’s Human Meat Grinder: Prison as Ideology, Torture as Policy

There are places where hell is not a metaphor.

Russia’s prison system is one of them.

This is not a story about “abuses.”
Not about “isolated incidents.”
Not about “both sides.”

This is about a system designed to erase humans, administered with bureaucratic boredom, lubricated by propaganda, and justified by an ideology that treats cruelty as patriotism.

What follows is drawn from the lived experience of Maksym Butkevych—Ukrainian journalist, human rights activist, anarchist, Christian, and former prisoner of the Russian Federation.
But it is not his story alone.

It is Russia’s story, told through a body that survived it.

---

Prison Without Darkness, Silence Without Sleep

In Russian captivity, light never turns off.

Neither does the television.

This is not accidental. It is not neglect. It is psychological warfare.

The lights stay on so guards can always watch.
The television stays on so prisoners can never escape.

Day and night, propaganda bleeds into the cell:

• Ukrainians are “corrupted Russians”

• Ukrainians are “Nazis”

• Ukrainians deserve to die

This loop does not aim to convince.
It aims to occupy.

Propaganda here is not argument—it is atmosphere.
It seeps into conversations.
It colonizes language.
It rewires emotion.

Even prisoners who hate state propagandists still repeat their phrases unconsciously. That is the point.

This is not persuasion.
This is total immersion in a false reality, where empathy is replaced by tribal ecstasy and cruelty becomes normal.

---

War Porn as Entertainment

Russian prisons broadcast what inmates themselves call “war porn”:
Videos of Ukrainian soldiers dying.
Bodies torn apart.
Execution footage treated as leisure content.

One prisoner tells Maksym to stop reading the New Testament and watch instead:

“Look how your brothers are slaughtered like pigs.”

This is not fringe behavior.
This is normalized sadism.

The most chilling moment comes when another inmate—himself a former fighter in a Russian-backed militia—suddenly explodes in rage:

“Turn it off. You’re civilians. You don’t know what you’re watching. This is propaganda.”

Even inside hell, truth occasionally claws its way to the surface.

---

No Toilets. No Toothbrushes. No Time

There are no toilets.

There is a hole in the floor.

There is no toilet paper.
No toothbrush.
No toothpaste.

Toenails are shortened by scraping them against walls.

Showers—when they happen—are a cold hose for seconds.
Sometimes weeks pass. Sometimes six.

Medical care is a performance:

• Broken bones ignored

• Fevers dismissed

• Torture injuries waved away

A nurse known among prisoners as “Doctor Death” refuses to treat a critically injured man because she has “too much computer work.”

This is not neglect.
This is policy through indifference.

---

“Seljonka and Forget It”

After being beaten until unconscious, Maksym is finally seen by a doctor.

Diagnosis:

“It’s fine.”

Treatment:
A splash of green antiseptic—seljonka—on a bleeding shoulder.

Instruction:

“Never come back.”

This is Russian medicine in captivity:
Minimal effort, maximum humiliation.

Painkillers become currency.
Diarrhea medication is survival.
Aspirin is a luxury.

Thirty kilos lost.
Bodies shrinking.
Time dissolving.

No fresh air.
No outdoors.
No horizon.

---

Torture as Routine, Sadism as Optional Extra

Some guards are reluctant.
Some are enthusiastic.
All obey.

Forced physical exercises are used to break prisoners.
Some guards add punches and kicks for pleasure.

Propaganda fills in the moral gap:
Ukrainian commanders are Nazis.
They are controlled by America.
They are gay.

The ideological cocktail is incoherent—but it doesn’t need to be.
It only needs to dehumanize.

---

Russia’s Core Lie: There Are No Human Rights

This is the most important truth to understand:

In the Russian worldview, human rights do not exist.

Not as practice.
Not as value.
Not even as language.

They are decorative words used externally, while internally replaced by:

• Obedience

• Power

• Submission

• Violence

Prison is not a failure of the system.
It is the system in its purest form.

Russia does not merely repress dissent.
It feeds on the destruction of moral limits.

---

Freedom Is Not “From Others”—It Is “Because of Others”

Maksym survives by thinking.
By teaching English.
By praying silently.
By remembering people.

He is freed not by mercy, but by collective pressure, activism, names repeated by strangers he will never meet.

This is the part Russia cannot understand.

Freedom is not isolation.
Freedom is solidarity.

And that is why authoritarian systems fear it.

---

Why “Freezing the Conflict” Is a Lie

A ceasefire without justice is not peace.
Occupation is not stability.
Silence is not safety.

Every pause only gives Russia time to rearm, reorganize, and repeat.

There is no frozen conflict—only delayed violence.

---

Run For Exit

This series exists because we are running out of exits.

Russia’s prison system is not an anomaly.
It is a warning.

A warning of what happens when:

• Propaganda replaces reality

• Violence replaces law

• Power replaces humanity

This is not about Ukraine alone.
This is about where Europe goes if it forgets what freedom costs.

There is no neutrality in hell.

There is only the choice to look away—or to remember.

And remembering is resistance.

---

Run For Exit — Series Mission:
Documenting the systems of collapse we pretend cannot happen—until they do.

Dear Daily Disaster Diary, January 24 2026

 “Climate denial was never about doubt. It was about deciding who gets to breathe and who is ‘too expensive.’”

- adaptationguide.com

Will We Ever Learn? Or Is Human Life Officially Worth Zero Now?

To uncover facts in today’s White House, one would probably need clairvoyant abilities—or a Ouija board. What we do know, right at the outset, is this: the United States plans to withdraw from 66 international organizations, including 35 linked to the United Nations. Which ones exactly? How much money will supposedly be saved? Silence. Fog. Shrugs.

But we are assured they must be dark and dangerous alliances, because the Trump administration justifies its retreat with familiar incantations: “hostile agendas,” “radical climate policy,” “globalism.” The words are vague, but the intent is crystal clear: withdraw from reality, then declare victory.

The full list is buried in an executive order signed by President Donald Trump. Among the casualties are the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, the UN office protecting children in armed conflict, and the UN Peacebuilding Fund. Apparently, justice, children, and peace are now considered optional luxuries.

Environmental and energy-related institutions fare even worse. The most consequential withdrawal is from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—a move so historically ignorant it borders on parody. The UNFCCC was signed in 1992 by Republican President George H. W. Bush and ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate. Not exactly a leftist coup.

And let’s not romanticize that moment too much: the UNFCCC is famously mild. It imposes no binding emission cuts, only voluntary cooperation and dialogue. Its greatest crime? It eventually made the Paris Climate Agreement possible.

Trump announced withdrawal from Paris on the first day of his second term. That alone was reckless. But abandoning the UNFCCC goes further—much further. It makes future reentry harder (likely requiring a two-thirds Senate majority) and sends an unmistakable signal: the U.S. government would prefer to stop talking about climate change altogether.

If the problem disappears from conversation, it can be replaced with something else. Preferably with “alternative facts.”

That explains the simultaneous withdrawal from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the world’s leading scientific body on climate impacts. The IPCC does not make policy. It compiles evidence. Data. Consensus. Facts. Which is precisely the problem.

Because under this administration, facts do not emerge from evidence. They emerge from the president’s ego. Science is expected not to discover truth, but to kneel before it.

And this is where the madness becomes lethal.

---

When Saving Human Lives Is Counted as Zero

In a move that should stop any sane person cold, the Environmental Protection Agency now plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits—not the value of human lives saved.

For decades, the EPA justified clean-air rules by tallying avoided asthma attacks, hospitalizations, and premature deaths. Not anymore.

This is not a technical adjustment. It is a moral rupture.

Environmental law experts call it seismic—and they’re right. The EPA’s mission statement explicitly says its core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment. Under Trump, that responsibility is being rewritten: protect profits first, people later—or never.

This change makes it far easier to repeal pollution limits on coal-fired power plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and industrial facilities nationwide. Cleaner air becomes “too expensive.” Dirtier air becomes policy.

Let’s be clear about what that means.

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5)—particles small enough to enter the bloodstream—causes asthma, heart disease, lung damage, and premature death. Even moderate exposure damages lungs as much as smoking.

Ozone, the main component of smog, worsens respiratory disease and kills silently over time.

The science here is not controversial. The bodies are real.

Yet under this administration, the EPA plans to stop counting the health benefits of reducing two of the deadliest air pollutants when regulating industry. For forty years, Republican and Democratic administrations argued over how much a human life was “worth” in cost-benefit analyses.

No administration—until now—set that value to zero.

Zero.

---

We Have Been Here Before. And We Refused to Learn.

Will we ever learn?

We still do not know the true number of people who died during the pandemic. We never will. Those deaths were also abstracted, minimized, redefined, and ultimately normalized in the name of economic “necessity.”

This is the same logic.

Profit over people.
Get rich or die trying.
Except now it’s literal.

This regime does not merely step over corpses—it walks over them deliberately, eyes fixed on quarterly earnings and donor balance sheets, chasing every last dollar while calling it “freedom.”

Climate change does not pause.
Pollution does not negotiate.
Lungs do not care about ideology.

And history will not forget that, at a moment when facts were available, lives were measurable, and alternatives existed, the United States chose to count human life as expendable.

Good luck.
And good night.

yours truly,

Adaptation-Guide

Dear Daily Disaster Diary, January 23 2026

 “A society that poisons its water, air, soil, and minds will eventually elect someone who poisons its politics.”

- adaptationguide.com

Democracy Was Warned: Education, Propaganda, and the Loop of Collapse

This is not a prophecy. This is a receipt.

Every generation likes to believe its crisis is unprecedented. It isn’t. The United States did not accidentally stumble into authoritarianism. It followed a script that philosophers, novelists, and historians have been screaming about for over two thousand years.

Plato warned us. Sinclair Lewis dramatized it. Richard Rorty diagnosed it with clinical precision. And still—here we are.

The question is no longer “How did this happen?”
The question is: Why did we let it happen again?

---

Plato Knew Your Democracy Would Eat Itself

Around 375 BC, Plato wrote The Republic and identified democracy’s fatal weakness: it mistakes freedom for wisdom.

When a society worships freedom without discipline, equality without responsibility, and opinion without truth, it creates the perfect breeding ground for a demagogue. Someone loud. Someone simple. Someone who promises protection from chaos while secretly feeding on it.

Plato described the tyrant before tyrants had branding teams.

A strongman who:

• Flatters the masses

• Lies compulsively

• Invents enemies

• Incites foreign conflict to look powerful

• Claims only he can restore greatness

This was not abstract philosophy. It was a warning label.

---

Sinclair Lewis Saw America Fall in 1935

In It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis imagined a fascist U.S. president who was vulgar, barely literate, obsessed with trade deficits, hostile to the press, and worshipped by followers who believed he alone could save them.

People laughed at the title.

History did not.

Lewis understood something Americans still struggle to admit: authoritarianism doesn’t arrive in jackboots—it arrives wrapped in resentment, entertainment, and promises of easy money.

---

Richard Rorty Called MAGA Before MAGA Existed

In 1997, philosopher Richard Rorty laid out the roadmap almost perfectly:

• Wages collapse

• Jobs disappear

• Unions weaken

• Social safety nets shrink

• The professional class retreats into culture wars

• The working class feels mocked, managed, and disposable

At that moment, Rorty said, something cracks.

People stop believing the system works. They stop trusting experts. They stop listening to nuance.

And they go shopping—for a strongman.

One who promises to humiliate the elites, punish outsiders, and restore a sense of national pride without actually fixing anything.

Rorty wasn’t nostalgic. He was furious.

He blamed a Left that abandoned material reality in favor of moral posturing, academic purity, and symbolic victories that meant nothing to people who couldn’t pay rent.

And he was right.

---

The Uncomfortable Question No One Wants to Ask

Let’s strip this down to the bone:

If we were all highly educated, would propaganda work this well?

Would people:

• Confuse opinion with evidence?

• Fall for obvious lies repeated loudly enough?

• Believe a billionaire speaks for the poor?

• Think cruelty is strength?

Would we accept:

• Poisoned water

• Polluted air

• Depleted soil

• Corporate food engineered for addiction

• A population made sick, overweight, exhausted, and distracted

…and still call it freedom?

This is not a moral failure alone.

It is an educational one.

---

Ignorance Is Not an Accident—It’s a Policy Choice

A poorly educated population is easier to:

• Manipulate

• Divide

• Distract

• Pacify

• Radicalize

Propaganda doesn’t need to be subtle when critical thinking is optional.

When science is treated as opinion, history as ideology, and journalism as entertainment, truth loses its immune system.

Authoritarianism thrives not because people are evil—but because they are exhausted, misinformed, and trained to hate sideways instead of upward.

---

This Is Why the Crackdown Feels Inevitable

Masked agents. Expanded surveillance. Criminalized dissent. Manufactured internal enemies.

These are not overreactions. They are the logical next steps of a system that no longer believes consent is reliable.

When democracy stops educating its citizens, it eventually stops trusting them.

---

History Does Repeat—But Not Because It Has To

History repeats because societies refuse to learn from it.

Every collapse begins the same way:

• Inequality widens

• Institutions rot

• Truth fractures

• Education weakens

• Fear replaces solidarity

And yet—this is the part people forget—every collapse also creates a rupture.

A moment where new systems can be built.

---

There Is Always a New Beginning

Even in a country soaked in hate and greed, renewal is possible.

But it doesn’t start with elections alone. It starts with:

• Relentless civic education

• Scientific literacy

• Media literacy

• Economic honesty

• Environmental repair

• Rebuilding communities instead of brands

Democracy cannot survive as a vibes-based system.

It requires informed citizens, not just loud ones.

---

Final Truth

Americans were warned. By philosophers. By novelists. By historians.

The tragedy isn’t that the warnings failed.

The tragedy is that we recognized them—and chose comfort, spectacle, and resentment anyway.

Democracy doesn’t die in darkness.

It dies in ignorance.

And it can only be reborn through education, courage, and collective responsibility.

The loop can be broken.

But only if we stop pretending this was inevitable.

yours truly,

Adaptation-Guide

Dear Daily Disaster Diary, January 22 2026

 

“Prepared but not paranoid. Individual but not alone. That’s the whole doctrine.”

— Adaptationguide.com

PART I — 

FEAR: THE PERMANENT EMERGENCY

PART II — 

PREPAREDNESS: AUTONOMY OR ILLUSION?

PART III — 

COLLECTIVE RESILIENCE: THE ONLY STRATEGY THAT SCALES

This is where both camps collapse into each other.

Blind faith in the state is naive.

But bunker individualism is a dead end.

Stockpiles without community are useless. Community without preparation is fragile.

Real resilience is social infrastructure.

The Berlin blackout didn’t prove that prepping is pointless. It proved that people still matter more than equipment. Neighbors checked on each other. Help circulated. Informal systems activated faster than formal ones.

Countries like Sweden understand this. There, resilience is not a fringe hobby or a crisis reflex. It’s normal. Defense is not just the military’s job—it’s a whole‑of‑society project. A society capable of withstanding armed attack is automatically better prepared for floods, fires, blackouts, and storms.

So what actually works?

What to Do

• Prepare for days, not doomsday.

• Store water, basic food, medication, light, and information tools.

• Maintain skills, not just supplies.

• Make family and neighborhood plans.

• Assume systems can fail—but also be repaired.

What to Avoid

• Collapse fetishism.

• Hoarding beyond what you can rotate and share.

• Confusing fear with foresight.

• Retreating into survival cosplay while society erodes.

The Core Insight

If your preparedness makes you calmer, more capable, and more connected, it is wisdom.

If it makes you nervous, isolated, and hostile, it is already part of the crisis.

Crises will continue. That part is non‑negotiable.

The choice is how we adapt:

Prepared—but not paranoid. Individual—but not alone.

That is the only form of preparedness that survives reality.

— Adaptationguide.com

Dear Daily Disaster Diary, January 21 2026

 

“If your emergency plan makes you anxious on good days, it will fail you on bad ones.”

- adaptationguide.com

PART I — FEAR: THE PERMANENT EMERGENCY

PART II — PREPAREDNESS: AUTONOMY OR ILLUSION?

Now the counterargument—because dismissing preparedness entirely is just another form of denial.

A large‑scale power outage like Berlin’s was never a question of if. Only when and where. Infrastructure ages. Climate stress increases. Cyberattacks are real. Storms intensify. Pretending otherwise is not calm—it’s naive.

Politics and society share a fatal habit: acting after the crisis hits. Then come the empty shelves, the panic buying, the generators purchased too late to matter.

Preparedness, done right, is not hysteria. It is autonomy.

A household that can function for several days without electricity or supply chains is not paranoid. It is less helpless, less dependent, and more capable of helping others instead of immediately needing rescue.

Germany’s Federal Office for Civil Protection recommends that households be able to manage ten days without shopping or power. That is not bunker logic—it is baseline resilience. Especially for families, emergency plans are not optional. When communication collapses, you need to know where your children are before darkness falls.

And yes—the security situation has changed. Since February 2022, European risk calculations are different. The German military openly describes Russia as an existential threat. You don’t have to panic. But refusing to adapt to reality is not wisdom—it’s comfort addiction.

The numbers are sobering: fewer than half of Germans have sufficient emergency supplies. More than half have never seriously engaged with preparedness at all.

The real danger is not having candles or water. The danger is confusing equipment with resilience. Gear ages. Diesel degrades. Food expires. Preparedness that becomes a permanent logistics burden turns into another form of captivity.

If your preparation makes you anxious, isolated, and obsessed, it has already failed.

next: 

PART III — COLLECTIVE RESILIENCE: THE ONLY STRATEGY THAT SCALES

Dear Daily Disaster Diary, January 20 2026

 “In one year, the United States did not lose its democracy by force.

It lost it by permission—through laws obeyed, orders signed, institutions hollowed, and cruelty applauded.”

- adaptationguide.com

I. WHAT HAPPENED (THE SEQUENCE)

1. Day One: Power Was Personalized

Trump’s first moves were not about policy—they were about signaling who belonged and who didn’t.

• Mass pardons for Jan. 6 participants, including militant extremists

• Immediate use of executive power as the primary governing tool

• A clear message: loyalty is rewarded, dissent is punished

This established a patronage-based system early, where legality mattered less than allegiance.

---

2. Executive Orders Replaced Democratic Process

Instead of legislation, debate, or institutional coordination, governance became unilateral and reactive.

• Hundreds of executive orders issued rapidly

• Withdrawal from international agreements

• Creation of new bodies (DOGE) without meaningful oversight

• Redefinition of science, gender, education, and speech by decree

This wasn’t speed—it was bypass.

---

3. The Administrative State Was Hollowed Out

Using Project 2025 as a roadmap, the administration:

• Fired tens of thousands of civil servants

• Undermined civil-service protections

• Gave political operatives access to sensitive government systems

• Weaponized “efficiency” to dismantle capacity

Government didn’t shrink—it lost competence, memory, and neutrality.

---

4. DEI Became the Scapegoat

DEI was not the target—it was the cover story.

• Civil rights enforcement dismantled

• Language policing imposed from above

• Grants canceled across science, arts, and humanities

• Highly qualified officials removed and replaced with loyalists

This wasn’t culture war theater—it was preemptive repression of opposition.

---

5. Universities Were Made an Example

Higher education posed a threat because it still had:

• Money

• Expertise

• Independence

So it was coerced.

• Research funds frozen

• International students targeted

• Tax-exempt status threatened

• Harvard singled out to intimidate the rest

The message was unmistakable: comply or be crippled.

---

6. Economic Chaos Was a Feature, Not a Bug

Tariffs were imposed, delayed, reversed, reinstated—sometimes within days.

• Markets destabilized

• Allies alienated

• Domestic industries whiplashed

This wasn’t strategy. It was rule by impulse, with global consequences.

---

7. Immigration Became Militarized

Immigration enforcement shifted from administration to domination.

• Asylum protections dismantled

• Legal immigration restricted and monetized

• Deportations accelerated without due process

• Armed raids normalized

• National Guard and Marines deployed domestically

Immigration policy became a theatre of force, not law.

---

8. Dissent Was Criminalized

After political violence, the response was not de-escalation—it was consolidation.

• Protest framed as rebellion

• Troops deployed against civilians

• Speech chilled through intimidation

• Antifa designated a terrorist organization

• Media and NGOs targeted

This is classic authoritarian escalation: crisis → repression → normalization.

---

9. Retribution Became Governance

State power was openly used to settle scores.

• Security protections removed

• Prosecutors purged

• Law firms threatened

• Regulators intimidated

• Citizenship weaponized

The goal wasn’t justice. It was fear.

---

10. Public Welfare Was Sacrificed

While consolidating power:

• Medicaid and SNAP were slashed

• Disaster preparedness gutted

• Public health dismantled

• Government shutdown weaponized

Cruelty wasn’t collateral damage—it was policy.

---

11. Foreign Policy Turned Imperial

• Sovereign leaders detained

• Annexation threats normalized

• International law dismissed

• “Only my morality restrains me”

This was the external mirror of internal authoritarianism.

II. WHY IT HAPPENED (THE LOGIC)

This was not chaos alone. It followed a recognizable pattern:

1. Democracy was reframed as inefficiency

2. Institutions were cast as enemies

3. Loyalty replaced competence

4. Fear replaced legitimacy

5. Spectacle replaced accountability

Trump didn’t invent these tools—he removed the shame around using them.

---

III. HOW IT WORKED (THE MECHANISM)

This is what the world must understand:

• Flood the zone to exhaust resistance

• Normalize outrage so nothing shocks

• Target gatekeepers first (courts, media, universities, civil servants)

• Punish selectively to deter collectively

• Reward cruelty to solidify base loyalty

This is competitive authoritarianism, not a coup.

---

IV. WHAT THE REST OF THE WORLD MUST LEARN

1. Democracy Doesn’t Die Dramatically

It erodes:

• Through procedure

• Through appointments

• Through “temporary” measures

• Through exhaustion

If you’re waiting for tanks, you’re already late.

---

2. Institutions Are Only as Strong as Their Norms

Once:

• Civil service neutrality

• Judicial independence

• Media freedom

• Academic autonomy

are treated as optional, they collapse fast.

---

3. Culture Wars Are Cover Stories

Authoritarianism rarely announces itself.
It arrives disguised as:

• Anti-elitism

• Efficiency

• Patriotism

• “Common sense”

Always ask: who gains power and who loses protection?

---

4. Economic Pain Doesn’t Stop Strongmen

Instability can strengthen authoritarian leaders if:

• Enemies are blamed

• Fear is redirected

• Loyalty is subsidized

Markets don’t save democracies. People do.

---

5. Resistance Is Ordinary—or It Fails

What still matters:

• Mutual aid

• Local solidarity

• Professional ethics

• Refusal to comply quietly

Democracy is defended daily, not heroically.

---

V. THE BOTTOM LINE

What the world witnessed wasn’t American exceptionalism—it was American vulnerability.

The lesson is brutal but simple:

A democracy that tolerates cruelty, rewards loyalty over truth, and treats institutions as obstacles will not survive its own elections.

And the final warning:

If you think “it can’t happen here,” you are already rehearsing your own defeat.

Dear Daily Disaster Diary, January 19 2026

“Fear feels rational in a permanent emergency—but it quietly replaces thinking with rehearsal.” 

- adaptationguide.com

Prepared or Paranoid?

A Three‑Part Series on Fear, Preparedness, and Collective Resilience

Adaptationguide.com

---

PART I — FEAR: THE PERMANENT EMERGENCY

It just doesn’t stop.

First a pandemic shuts life down. Then Russia turns off the gas. Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine. Donald Trump wants Greenland, Venezuela, and who knows what else. Then parts of Berlin lose power—for days. Who’s next?

Germany has been living in permanent crisis mode for almost six years. Emergency has become the background noise of daily life. Unsurprisingly, people start scanning the horizon for the next disaster—and then the next one after that.

What’s wrong with a few bottles of water? Some canned food in the basement? A box of bandages? A generator? Camping stoves? Emergency medicine? Iodine tablets? A helmet, folding shovel, bivy sack?

Nothing. And everything.

Because once you start, it doesn’t end.

Preparedness is sold as rational foresight. But embedded in the word Vorsorge is Sorge: worry. What begins as reasonable planning quickly mutates into a lifestyle of anxiety management. You don’t prepare for fear—you begin to live inside it.

The Berlin blackout showed how fear works. Yes, it was deeply unpleasant. Cold apartments. No elevators. No cash machines. No certainty. But it also showed limits: 100,000 people affected in a city of nearly four million. Four and a half days—not weeks. Not months.

And still, the apocalyptic imagination immediately escalated: What if this happens everywhere? What if it lasts longer? What if next time it’s war?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the only scenarios most Germans truly cannot imagine—total, long‑term collapse—are almost always war scenarios. And in war, private stockpiles are fantasy. No pantry defeats missiles. No camping stove stops artillery. At that point, survival depends on movement, shelter, and other people.

Extreme prepping starts to resemble obsessive health optimization: counting every gram of sugar, training relentlessly—only to be run over by a tram. You cannot prepare for everything. The attempt itself becomes corrosive.

Fear does not make societies safer. It makes them brittle. And it serves those who want to destabilize democratic systems remarkably well.

yours truly,

Adaptation-Guide

Next:

PART II — PREPAREDNESS: AUTONOMY OR ILLUSION?

Dear Daily Disaster Diary, January 18 2026

 

“The energy transition didn’t become unpopular because people hate the planet. It became unpopular because it pays the rich to feel virtuous while everyone else pays the bill.”

- adaptationguide.com

Climate Policy for the Rich, Bills for Everyone Else

How Governments Turned the Energy Transition into a Welfare Program for the Wealthy

For millions of people, behaving in a “climate-friendly” way is astonishingly easy.

All you need is property.

If you own a house, you get to choose: a climate-friendly heating system, generously subsidized by the state. You benefit twice—first because you already had the capital to build wealth in the first place, and second because taxpayers now help you increase the value of your property. Over time, you save energy, save money, and walk away with a modernized asset.

Add an electric car in the driveway, charge it from your privately owned rooftop solar system, plug it into your wall box—also subsidized—and congratulations: your personal energy transition is complete.

You are officially “green.”
And you were paid to get there.

Let’s be clear: nobody begrudges people who can afford this setup. But let’s stop pretending this is climate justice. What this actually shows is something far uglier:

The wealthy can buy their way out of the fossil energy crisis—using public money. Everyone else is trapped.

---

Subsidies That Flow Upward

Current heating subsidies actively reinforce inequality. They do so quietly, bureaucratically, and very efficiently.

Yes, it makes sense to incentivize homeowners. Governments are asking private households to invest tens of thousands of euros into climate protection—investments that benefit society as a whole and determine whether national emissions targets are met.

And yes, the policy works technically: more households are choosing heat pumps over gas boilers, despite years of culture-war hysteria about “heating bans.”

But here’s the part politicians prefer not to emphasize:

A large share of the subsidy money goes to people with high incomes—people who would have installed a heat pump anyway.

This is not climate policy.
This is a transfer of public money to private wealth.

The so-called “social component” introduced by the government sounds good on paper. Households earning under €40,000 in taxable income can receive up to 70 percent of eligible costs.

In reality, this changes almost nothing.

Retirees with old houses. Low-income owners with leaky buildings. People without savings, without credit access, without risk tolerance—they don’t take the leap. Because even 30 percent of €30,000 is still €9,000 they do not have.

And there’s another dirty secret nobody likes to say out loud:

Heat pumps in Germany are absurdly expensive—partly because massive subsidies inflated prices and enabled pure profiteering.

This is what economists call rent extraction. Everyone else calls it a scam.

---

A Country of Renters Locked Out of the Transition

Germany is a country of renters. Renters have less wealth, lower incomes, and almost no control over how they heat their homes.

They don’t choose the system.
They don’t choose the fuel.
They don’t choose the future cost.

When landlords install gas heating again, they quietly dump long-term costs onto tenants. Not just rising fossil fuel prices—but exploding gas grid fees that will hit hardest precisely as fewer people remain connected.

And who lives in cheap, poorly insulated buildings?

People with little money.

The same people already struggling are now expected to shoulder the most volatile, expensive, and politically neglected energy costs in the system.

If that isn’t structural injustice, nothing is.

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This Was Entirely Avoidable

Think tanks like Agora Energiewende—and many others—have laid out how this could be fixed without restarting the heating culture war.

The solutions are not radical:

• Gradually reduce subsidies for wealthy homeowners

• Massively increase support for low-income owners

• Tie landlord subsidies to real rent caps

• Protect tenants from “green” modernization becoming a new extraction tool

This is boring policy work. It exists. It’s ready.

And yet the government does the opposite.

Instead of correcting the distributional failure, it plans to weaken heating standards. The result is predictable:

• Fewer households transition

• Inequality deepens

• Climate policy becomes visibly class-biased

At that point, the energy transition stops being a collective project and becomes what it already looks like to millions:

A luxury lifestyle upgrade for the rich—paid for by everyone else.

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Don’t Blame Climate Protection. Blame How It’s Done.

When public acceptance of climate policy collapses, politicians love to blame “ignorance,” “populism,” or “resistance to change.”

That’s cowardice.

People are not rejecting climate protection.
They are rejecting being screwed.

They see governments writing checks for:

• electric SUVs

• rooftop solar on million-euro homes

• private wall boxes

• subsidized property value increases

—all while telling renters and low-income households to “tighten their belts” for the planet.

That’s not a transition.
That’s redistribution upward with a green label.

And no amount of moral preaching will fix that.

If climate policy keeps rewarding wealth and punishing poverty, it will fail—not because people hate the planet, but because they recognize injustice when they live inside it.

Climate collapse isn’t inevitable.
But a class-war energy transition absolutely is—unless this changes.

yours truly,

Adaptation-Guide