Why are we seeing so much violence recently? One explanation is that people are sympathizing with those in the Minneapolis area who are upset at the death of George Floyd. They believe that a white cop used excessive force in subduing Floyd, leading to his death.
I believe that there is a much deeper story involved. As I wrote in my recent post, Understanding Our Pandemic – Economy Predicament, the problem we are facing is too many people relative to resources, particularly energy resources. This leads to a condition sometimes referred to as “overshoot and collapse.” The economy grows for a while, may stabilize for a time, and then heads in a downward direction, essentially because energy consumption per capita falls too low.
Strangely enough, this energy crisis looks like a crisis of affordability. The young and the poor, especially, cannot afford to buy goods and services that they need, such as a home in which to raise their children and a vehicle to drive. Trying to do so leaves them with excessive debt. If the affordability problem changes for the worse, the young and the poor are likely to protest. In fact, these protests may become violent.
The pandemic tends to make the affordability problem worse for minorities and young people because they are disproportionately affected by job losses associated with lockdowns. In many cases, the poor catch COVID-19 more frequently because they live and/or work in crowded conditions where the disease spreads easily. In the US, blacks seem to be especially hard hit, both by COVID-19 and through the loss of jobs. These issues, plus the availability of guns, makes the situation particularly explosive in the US.
Let me explain these issues further.
[1] Energy is required for all aspects of the economy.
Energy is required by governments. Energy is required to operate police cars. Energy is required to build schools and to operate their heating and lighting. Energy is needed to build and maintain roads. Tax revenue represents available funds to buy energy products and goods and services made with energy products.
Energy is needed for any type of business. Operating a computer requires electricity, which is a form of energy. Heating or cooling a building requires energy. Growing food requires solar energy from the sun; liquid fuel is used to operate farm machinery and trucks that transport food to the locations where it is sold. Human energy is used for some of these processes. For example, human energy is used to operate computers and farm machinery. Human energy is sometimes used to pick the crops, as well.
Wages paid by governments and businesses indirectly go to buy energy products of many kinds. Food is, of course, an energy product. The heat to cook or bake the food is also an energy product. Metals of all kinds are made using energy products, and lumber is cut and transported using energy products. With sufficient wages, it is possible to buy or rent a home, and to purchase or lease an automobile.
Interest rates indirectly reflect the portion of goods and services produced by energy products that can be transferred to parts of the system that depend on interest earnings. For example, banks, insurance companies and those on pensions depend on interest earnings. If interest rates are high, benefits to pensioners can easily be paid and insurance companies can charge low rates for their products, because their interest earnings will help offset claim costs.
Interest rates are now about as low as they can go, indicating a likely shortage of energy for funding these interest rates. The last time interest rates were close to current levels was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Figure 1. Ten-year and three-month US Treasury interest rates, in chart made by FRED.
[2] When there is not enough energy to go around, the result can be low commodity prices, low wages and layoffs.
This is not an intuitive result. Most people assume (low energy = high prices), but this is the opposite of what actually happens. The problem is that the amount workers can afford to pay for finished goods and services needs to be high enough to make production of the commodities used in making the finished products profitable. When affordability falls too low, the system tends to collapse.
We are really dealing with a two-sided problem. The prices of commodities such as oil, wholesale electricity, steel, copper and food tend to fluctuate widely. Consumers need these prices to be low, in order for the price of finished goods made with these commodities to be affordable; producers need the prices of these commodities to rise ever-higher, to cover the cost of deeper wells and more batteries, to try to partially offset the intermittency of solar and wind electricity.
Most people assume that the situation will be resolved in the direction of commodity prices rising ever higher. In fact, commodity prices did rise higher, until mid 2008. Then, something snapped; commodity prices have been falling ever-lower since mid 2008. In fact, ever-lower commodity prices have been a world-wide problem, causing huge problems for countries trying to support their economies with export revenues based on commodity production.
Figure 2. CRB Commodity Price Index from 1995 to June 2, 2020. Chart prepared by Trading Economics. Composition is 39% energy, 41% agriculture, 7% precious metals and 13% industrial metals.
Even before the lockdowns, low commodity prices were leading to low wages of those working in commodity industries around the world. These low prices also led to low tax revenue, and this low tax revenue led to an inability of governments to afford the services that citizens expect, such as bus service and subsidized prices for certain essential goods/services. For example, South Africa (an exporter of coal and minerals) was experiencing public protests in September 2019, for reasons such as these. Chile is a major exporter of copper and lithium. Low prices of those commodities led to violent protests in 2019 for similar reasons.
Now, in 2020, lockdowns have led to even lower commodity prices. At times, farmers have been plowing their crops under. Oil companies are laying off workers. The trend toward lower commodity prices had been occurring for a long time; the recent drop in prices was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” If prices stay this low, there is a danger of falling production of commodities that we depend on, including food, metals, electricity, and oil. Businesses producing these items will fail, and governments with falling tax revenue will be unable to support them.
[3] Historical energy consumption data shows that violence often accompanies periods when energy production is not growing fast enough to meet the needs of the growing population.
Figure 3 shows average annual growth in world energy consumption, for 10-year periods:
Figure 3. Average growth in energy consumption for 10 year periods, based on Vaclav Smil estimates from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects (Appendix) together with BP Statistical Data for 1965 and subsequent.
Economic growth encompasses both population growth and rising standards of living. Figure 4 below takes the same information used in Figure 3 and divides it into (a) the portion underlying population growth, and (b) the portion of the energy supply growth available for improved standards of living. During most periods, increased population absorbs over half of increased energy consumption.
Figure 4. Figure similar to Figure 3, except that energy devoted to population growth and growth in living standards are separated. A circle is also added showing the recent growth in energy is primarily the result of China’s temporary growth in coal supplies.
There are three dips in the Living Standards portion of Figure 4. The first one came in the 10 years ended 1860, just before the US Civil War. Most of us would say that was a period of violence.
The second one occurred in the 10 years ended 1930. This is the period when the Great Depression began. It came between World War I and World War II. This was another violent period of our history.
The third dip came in the 10-year period ended 2000. This was not a particularly violent period; instead, it reflects the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union, leaving the member republics to continue on their own. There was a huge loss of demand (really, affordability) on the part of countries that were part of the Soviet Union or depended on the Soviet Union.
Figure 5. Chart showing the fall in Eastern Europe’s materials production, after the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991.
[4] The world is facing a situation in which total energy consumption seems likely to drop by 5% per year, or perhaps more.
If we look back at Figure 3, we see that even in very “bad” times economically, energy consumption was rising. In fact, in one 10-year period, the average increase was more than 5% per year.
If the world economy is reaching a point in which we consumers, in the aggregate, cannot afford the goods and services made with commodities, unless commodity prices are very low, we will likely experience a huge drop in energy consumption. I don’t know exactly how much the annual change will be, but energy consumption growth and GDP growth tend to move together. We might guess that GDP growth is shifting to 5% GDP annual shrinkage, and energy consumption will be shrinking by a similar percentage.
Clearly, shrinkage of 5% per year would be far worse than the world economy has experienced in the last 200 years. In fact, for the 10-year periods shown in Figure 3, there has never been a reduction in energy consumption. Even if I am wrong and the shrinkage in energy consumption is “only” 2% per year, this would be far worse than the experience over any 10-year period. In fact, during the Great Recession, world energy consumption only shrank in one year (2009) and then by 1.4%.
History doesn’t give us much guidance regarding what impact a dramatic reduction in energy consumption would have on the economy, except that population reduction would likely be part of the change that takes place. If half or more of energy consumption growth goes toward rising population (Figure 4), then a shrinkage of energy consumption seems likely to reduce world population.
[5] What the world is really facing is a competition regarding which parts of the economy can stay, and which will need to be eliminated, if there is not enough energy to go around. It should not be surprising if this competition often leads to violence.
As I indicated in Section [1], all parts of the economy depend on energy. If there is not enough, some parts must shrink back. The big question is, “Which parts?”
(a) Do governments, and organizations that bind governments together, collapse? If countries are doing poorly, they will not want to contribute to the World Trade Organization, the United Nations or the European Union. Governments, such as the government of Saudi Arabia, could be overthrown, or may simply stop operating. In fact, any government, when it faces insurmountable problems, could simply stop operating and leave its functions to lower levels of government, such as states, provinces, or cities.
(b) Do pension plans stop operating? Are pensioners left “out in the cold”? How about Social Security recipients?
(c) Can international trade be kept operating? It is a big consumer of energy. Also, competition with low-wage countries tends to keep wages in developed nations low. Without international trade, many imported goods (including imported medicines) become unavailable.
(d) Which companies will collapse, leaving bond holders and stockholders with $0? People who formerly had jobs with these companies will also find themselves without jobs.
(e) If the world economy cannot support as many people as before, which ones will be left out? Is it people in rich countries who find themselves without jobs? Is it people who find themselves without imported medicines? Is it the ones who catch COVID-19? Or is it mostly citizens of very poor countries, whose income will fall so low that starvation becomes a concern?
[6] The violent demonstrations represent an effort to try to push the problems related to the shortfall in energy, and the goods and services that energy can provide, away from the protest groups, toward other segments of the economy.
In an ideal world:
(a) Jobs that pay well would be available to all.
(b) Governments would be able to afford to provide a wide range of services to all, including free health care for all and reimbursement for time off from work for being sick. They would also be able to provide adequate pensions for the elderly and low cost public transit.
(c) Police would treat all citizens well. No group would be so poor that a life of crime would seem to be a solution.
As indicated in Section [2], back in 2019, before COVID-19 hit, protests were already starting because of low commodity prices and the indirect impacts of low commodity prices. One reason why governments were so eager to adopt shutdowns is the fact that when people were required to stay inside because of COVID-19, the problem of protests could be stopped.
It should be no surprise, then, that the protests came back, once the lockdowns have ended. There are now more people out of work and more people who are concerned about not having full healthcare costs reimbursed. Social distancing requirements are making it more difficult for businesses to operate profitably, indirectly leading to fewer available jobs.
[7] Violent protests seem to push problems fueled by an inadequate supply of affordable energy toward (a) governments and (b) insurance companies.
In some cases, insurance companies will pay for damages caused by protesters. Eventually, costs could become too great for insurance companies. Most policies have exclusions for “acts of war.” If protests escalate, this exclusion might become applicable.
Governments of all kinds are already being stressed by shutdowns because when citizens are not working, there is less tax revenue. If, in addition, governments have been paying COVID-19 related costs, this creates an even bigger budget mismatch. Governments find themselves less and less able to pay their everyday expenses, such as hiring teachers, policemen, and firemen. All of these issues tend to push city governments toward bankruptcy and more layoffs.
[8] Dark skinned people living in America tend to be Vitamin D deficient, making them more prone to getting severe cases of COVID-19. Vitamin supplements may be an inexpensive way of reducing the severity of the COVID-19 epidemic and thus lessening its diversion of energy resources.
There are a number of reports out that suggest that having adequate Vitamin D from sunlight strengthens the immune system and helps reduce the mortality of COVID-19. Adequate Vitamin C is also helpful for the immune system for people in general, not just those with dark skin.
Dark skinned people are adapted to living near the equator. If they live in the United States or Europe, their bodies make less Vitamin D from the slanted rays available in those parts of the world than they would living near the equator. As a result, studies show that Vitamin D deficiency is more common in African Americans than other Americans.
Recent data shows that the COVID-19 mortality rate for black Americans is 2.4 times that of white Americans. COVID-19 hospitalization rates are no doubt higher as well. Encouraging Americans with dark skin to take Vitamin D supplements would seem to be at least a partial solution to the problem of greater disease severity for Blacks. Vitamin C supplements, or more fresh fruit, might be helpful for all people, not just those with low Vitamin D levels.
If the COVID-19 impact can be lessened in a very inexpensive way, this would seem to be helpful for the economy in general. High-cost solutions simply divert available resources toward fighting COVID-19, making the overall resource shortfall for the rest of the economy worse.
[9] Much more equal wages would seem to be a solution for wage disparity, but this doesn’t bring the wages of low earning workers up enough, in practice.
There are a huge number of low-earning workers in many countries around the world. In order to increase commodity prices enough to make them profitable for producers, we really need wages in all countries to be much higher. For example, wages in Africa and in India need to be much higher, so that people in these parts of the world can afford goods such as cars, air conditioning and vacation travel. There is no way this can be done. Furthermore, such a change would add pollution and climate change issues.
There is a fundamental “not enough to go around” problem that we do not have an answer for. Historically, when there hasn’t been enough to go around, the attempted solution was fighting wars over what was available. In a way, the violence seen in cities around the globe is a new version of this violence. Governments of various kinds may ultimately be casualties of these uprisings. Remaining lower-level governments will be left with the problem of starting over again, issuing new currency and trying to make new alliances. In total, the new economy will be very different; it will probably bear little resemblance to today’s world economy.
In breaking news, in Hong Kong the Chinese Red Guards have captured Fast Eddy!!
https://cdn1.i-scmp.com/sites/default/files/styles/1920×1080/public/2014/06/20/red_guards_1.jpg?itok=WJQ5jc2C
Perhaps the name should be changed to Slow Eddy, as FE wouldn’t have been caught.
Kim, this site is not a site to talk about race. You have been harping on this. This site is about finite world and how the riots are coming into play, especially on the energy perspective.
As I have stated in one of my previous post, racial bias is the norm. We are trying to subvert the norm. Getting a penguin to be equal to an ostrich in the plains of Savannah is insane. Everyone knows it but for humans, it is ok.
Ra.ce will always be caught up in any riots and will be used politically by people. This are the trees. You need to look beyond the trees, which is the forest. It is the economic and energy that brought upon this riot issue.
Speak of the forest and not the trees. You are just driving people nuts because most of the people here and the old timers are those who can see the forest and are not interested in the trees.
Looking for the trees and seeing it is just arranging deck chairs are the Titanic now.
A few important points:
1. The originating topic is “the thermodynamic causes of violence”. This is a topic that – without my help – very quickly devolved nto a simplistic discussion that inclned towards “poverty causes violence”, a position that statistics and common daily observations can dispose of in moments.
The question then very quickly becomes, “what if the causes of violence are in us?” And of course it must be so. Humans, after all, hunt and kill to eat. They have been known to hunt and kill each other.
2. In every case in this discussion it has not been me who has initiated the discussion of race. (I would be perfectly happy to drop it if others would) Go back and survey the comments. How does the discussion proceed? Somebody makes some ill-informed and immature slander of white people (do you want me to quote the slanders?). Then I pop up and refute the slander. Am I the bad guy or racist in thd situation?
3. This post by Gail has been made as a response to current events, has it not? Then it would be unreasonaqble to expect that current events are not discussed. And if you look at the media covereage, it is all race, all day long. But you want me to shut up about race? Tell CNN. Tell the NYT. Tell the other commenters on this blog.
What you really want is for me to stop disagreeing.
4. So the real problem with my commentary – and that of a few others here – is that it offends against the opinions of a set of orthodox totalitarians commenters who would prefer to read here without ever having any of their false claims (unlike my claims, as my claims are backed by statistics abd solid argument) and vile slanders against whites ever challenged.
5. Up until now, free speech – assuming at my guess that it is not vulgar, nor uses personal invective, nor is irrelevant – has been very generously tolerated on this blog. This is very especially generous of Gail considering that WordPress has been very vigorous in recent years in shutting down sites that offer a different opinion from that which is approved by the bolshevik and trotskyite totalitarian mainstream. It may be the case that the appearance of unapproved ideas on this site could lead to her being shut down. I very much doubt this because her own commentaries are not very cntroversial in their divergence from the mainstream and because my voice and that of those who are like me is so very small. Anyway, that is for her to consider. It is not for me to shut up when lies are told. That is too much to ask.
Finally, if other commenters will refrain from lies and racial slanders, I will no longer be required to refute them with facts, confronting real-world examples, and reasoned arguments,
It is as easy as that.
well said my dear
At this juncture, what difference does it make?
I am against censoring free speech but don’t keep harping on it and every single comment people post on riots and race, you will have a word on this. You say your point and let it be.
I am in the camp of fast collapse but do I go out and shoot down every comment on slow collapse? Say your point and let it be.
I agree CTG, enough of this rac.ist BS.
Whites are so innocent, it’s not like Whites have ever murd.ered, rap.ed, pill.aged, kid.napped or ensl.aved coloured people ever is it? They have nothing to complain about after willingly going across the ocean to work in the high paying liberated jobs of the cotton fields a couple of centuries ago.
Whites are so innocent in all this…
sarc off…
Gail’s site and posts are going to be much better received without all the BS, rac.ist and cons.piracy type posts in the comments section.
Hide-away and CTG: When you say “BS, rac.ist and cons.piracy type posts in the comments section” do you mean anybody who doesn’t agree with your world view?
Kim makes good points, with data to back them. The deeper point she’s also trying to make is that the data is deliberately suppressed because it doesn’t fit the required narrative.
That narrative includes immigration and the supposition that you should be happy and grateful to accept unlimited immigrants into your community, even though they come from a fundamentally different culture with values that conflict with yours.
E.g. In Sweden the crime rate of recent immigrants, who are mostly Muslim and black is approx. 2x that of indigenous whites. Rape of young white women features high on the list. The Swedish Governments solution to this unacceptable-to-the-narrative fact has been to first stop publishing, then secondly stop collecting crime data.
In northern UK an Asian (mostly Pakistani) grooming gang sexually abused young white women for years, because police were afraid it would be viewed as racist to investigate them.
In Australia, black African gangs in Melbourne are major contributors to street crime. Their crime rate is way out of proportion to their numbers in the population.
Unfortunately for all of us, the crime rate is almost certain to go up as economy goes down, because people will be fighting for survival.
Would I want to live near a black neighbourhood in those circumstances? Absolutely not. The data says that as a white I’m at a much higher risk.
Under the prevailing narrative, to point out the above facts means I’m racist.
As they say in Australia – good on yer Kim.
I agree! Wouldn’t our creepy Stormfront friends be happier revelling in their ethnic superiority elsewhere?
“Gail’s site and posts are going to be much better received without all the BS, rac.ist and cons.piracy type posts in the comments section.”
Yeah, but isn’t Gail the comments moderator too? Something not right here. I’m sad to see she appears to be endorsing racist comments by publishing such hate filled screed. It sure does not make her site look so great.
Gail doesn’t want to censor. She let it be but we have to be conscious on not harping on this again again and again. Say a few times and you are done.
>>I’m sad to see she appears to be endorsing racist comments by publishing such hate filled screed.
For example?
“For example?”
How about Z’s fondness for the term ‘joggers’? It involves the ingenious replacing of ‘ni’ with the prefix ‘jo’.
I can see racist comments all over the place since various people recently started commenting here. Seems like I misunderstood Mosey’s comment – I thought he was stating Gail herself was posting racist comments.
“At this juncture, what difference does it make?”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sFSv5vHE1rk
Does anything ever NOT matter?
😐
Cheers,
-GBV
Right, because calling an entire group of people evil is facts and logic, lmfao. Good and evil are myths created by humans to provide incentives for desired behavior. You cannot just broadly call an entire race of humans evil and think that you’re not incredulously biased or winning an argument. Maybe black people behave the way they do because they were dragged over to the Americas as slaves 500 years ago? Their psychology and culture are different, it doesn’t mean someone is evil. “OH YOU FAILED TO DOMESTICATE INTO COLONIALIST CULTURE, YOU ARE EVIL HERR DERR HERR.”
CTG,
I disagree “You are just driving people nuts because most of the people here and the old timers are those who can see the forest and are not interested in the trees.” I am an old timer, I have been around this scene for a long time even to the point of sitting next to Dennis Meadows and asking him a few questions which he graciously answered.
We are humans, acting for the long time is a recent phenomenon, most of human history is finding enough to eat for the day, the same with all mammals, etc.
Some of us will make it through this, some of us will pass due to natural causes during this and some will not. Old timers will go first except for a few, there is some wisdom to age if one allows it.
All the best,
Dennis L.
Dennis, you still could not see the forest. Your ahead is above the trees but not high enough. I can know, from comments, whose head is below or above the tree line. Nothing to comment if you still at or below the treeline because those above the treeline and can see the forest, they don’t argue with people here. They just keep quiet and them be. It is pointless to argue because they are still below the treeline.
” I can know, from comments, whose head is below or above the tree line.”
https://i.redd.it/rbs5234qbte41.gif
Cheers,
-GBV
It is possible to get insights from various people. Whether or not they see above the tree line doesn’t matter too much. Different people might disagree where the tree line really is.
Comments on a blog are a self-organizing system. I learn from responding to wrong comments, and readers learn from reading to my responses to wrong comments. So both right and wrong views are welcomed.
Also, a lot of comments have to do with digging out new articles with new insights regarding what is happening now. Dennis L. makes a lot of fine comments, IMO. Some of them involve articles he has found.
https://buildnationblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/1842-lombard-street-riot/?fbclid=IwAR2iilI_genNaQwXrmvUOuw4qgvx8qxta66AVrl5Vhs1GeVqSBsT9fBYUSg
No mention of energy. But it’s clear that if you identify and are identified with the stronger group, might (which makes right) will favor you.
It says “religious and racial bigotry”.
As soon as you see a group’s concerns for its own interests dismissed with a boilerplate pejorative like this, you know you are no longer dealing with a disinterested or fair-minded interlocutor.
Is this an energy/economics blog, or a racial conspiracy and white nationalist site? i don’t mind seeing what the bigots are saying, but I need some good information on finance and peak oil. Where is that now?
The issue is “overshoot and collapse,” not peak oil. Unfortunately, all of the problems with increasingly poor citizens rioting is a feature of collapse.
Peak oil focuses on one piece of what happens during collapse: a fall in oil production. This fall in oil production occurs because of falling oil prices and failing governments. Peak oilers models don’t really work, because they assume that the oil we can see in the ground can be extracted, as prices rise in the future. In fact, much of what seems to be reserves can never be accessed, because of low affordability.
Unfortunately, oil data tends to take at least a couple of months to be reported. This makes real-world drops in production hard to follow in real time. Also, it is hard to see how much is in storage in boats and other places.
“Peak oilers models don’t really work, because they assume that the oil we can see in the ground can be extracted, as prices rise in the future.”
Isn’t this how economists’ models work?
Economists have not figured out that the economy is a self-organizing system that depends on energy. There is a two sided problem: Prices need to be high enough for sellers at the same time that they are low enough for buyers to buy finished goods made from commodities.
Economists’ models do, indeed, assume that prices will rise when there are shortages. They assume that these shortages will lead to substitution or new products or more efficient use, so there will be no problem in the future. Politicians like these findings, so there has been no motivation to improve their models. Peer review makes certain that old, wrong models persist indefinitely.
Economists have not figured out that the many collapses in the past were very much influenced by populations outgrowing their resource bases. (Climate fluctuations may have played a role as well.) They haven’t figured out that prices go down, rather than up, in collapses. They might stop and look at Revelation 18, which talks about the collapse of Babylon, implying concern about another eventual collapse. Revelation 18:11-13 says
This was a problem of inadequate demand. There was not even a market for the energy product of the day, “human beings sold as slaves.” This indeed could happen again.
Just an idea, you could go write your own blog rather than coming to someone else’s and expecting to get exactly what you want – that might satisfy you?
To be fair though, I guess in the past I’ve been guilty of posting pressuring comments to Gail to consider that collapse wouldn’t happen everywhere all at once in favour of a view that collapse will happen at a different pace / extent in different places (something I think you’re on board with now, Gail?), so perhaps I should take my own suggestion and go start my own blog as well…
Cheers,
-GBV
I expect that there are other people who have the same concern as Pintada. So I thought it was a reasonable question to answer.
An awfully lot of people come from a “peak oil” perspective and think that this pretty much the only problem we have. The problem is really a little different.
The Bolshevik media is of course ignorant of the daily militarized police brutality and child murder dished out by police and soldiers in that slc. Instead they focus on a fake event created in their deep state hysteria factory to sew discord between Americans and deflect attention from their heinous financial crimes.
Palestine Lives Matter
“daily militarized police brutality and child murder dished out by police and soldiers”
Daily murders? By police or military in the USA? Who? Where? What rubbish this is. If you have facts, put them forward. If not, then it is YOU that are the attempted distraction from reality.
Killings by law enforcement officers in the United States 2010-2019: 3 784 or 378.4/year. 1.06 / day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_States
When MSM picks this up, something is not right. The elites could be fighting among themselves.
For those of you out there in OFW, who keeps on talking about ra.ce or colo.ur, please stop. Please open your eyes wide. If you cannot open your eyes, then probably, you may find this place not suitable for you. Here, all our eyes are opened and we change our stand when we find that the facts do not support our belief. If you keep on holding to a belief that even if the facts change, then this place is not your place.
NYPD finds stash of bricks, rocks across NYC
NEW YORK CITY (WABC) — The NYPD released video of more evidence that they believe proves the looters who have caused damage across the city all week are well-organized.
Officials said they found bricks and rocks hidden in strategic places on street corners in Brooklyn and Queens.
The boxes were not in the vicinity of any protests, but the NYPD believes they were to be picked up to be used at a future protest.
Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said bricks were recently stolen from a construction site in Manhattan, and police are looking into if that burglary is connected.
He also revealed that “seemingly innocuous plastic bottles” thrown at police during protests “are often filled with cement.”
Along with being thrown at officers, protesters are also throwing the bottles at police cruisers, causing large amounts of damage.
https://abc7ny.com/nypd-finds-stash-of-bricks-rocks-across-nyc/6230327/
Exactly.
“For those of you out there in OFW, who keeps on talking about ra.ce or colo.ur, please stop.”
So scared of social disapproval that you won’t even write the words “race” or “color”? What kind of woke totalitarian absurdity is this?
Of course this is a class war. But it is also a race war. As long as blacks are killing, assaulting, raping, robbing and threatening whites – every day of the year – then I will speak out against it and especially I will speak out against any kind of precious Kumbaya-ism that is intended to shut me up about the truths of this (yes, elite-supported) race war.
Kim, do you know that software (probably WordPress of something) will put this comment on hold for moderation if you put in certain sensitive words. Do you realize that many here are spelling it differently? like kkkklimatttee ccc.hange ?
The fact that there is an automatic censor is troubling. Please stick to the point here on OFW. If you want to entertain us, fine but if you are not going to do serious discussion and accept facts when it is changed, then this might not be a right place for you.
So scared of social disapproval that you won’t even write the words “race” or “color”? What kind of woke totalitarian absurdity is this?
The sentence above shows immaturity.
One might argue that if you don’t like the reality that some people view the world in a lens of race and colour, and that the options they post here are a reflection of that reality, that this is not the place for you?
I’d suggest we stay open to all points of view, and while we may disagree with each other, stop trying to shut down the thoughts/opinions of others by assuming some sort of moral high ground as to what is “true” or acceptable to say.
Cheers,
-GBV
I wonder if the new white supremisists that just started posting are real people. Sure, I know that there are a lot of narrow minded bigots out there, but why did they just show up now?
Have you been holding these racists back until now Gail, or did they just crawl out of the woodwork? Do you agree with these racists? Why else would you allow it?
“Do you agree with these racists? Why else would you allow it?”
She may be stronger than your social pressure, comrade. She may actually believe in – horror of horrors – free specch.
say sorry pintada gail has worked tirelessly to provide OFW do not blame her for the way people feel
Why is telling the truth an act of white supremacism or racism? Quit with the name calling and if you dispute some of Kim’s facts then lets have your evidence.
Kim initially posted in response to a FE post about the death of George Floyd due to white racism. Like many FE posts it was totally deluded. I’ve known the truth about inter racial crime in America for many years thanks to Colin Flaherty (www.minds.com/colinflaherty), but thank you Kim for bringing it to people’s attention here.
Anybody unable to see the anti-white agenda in the MSM really needs to open their eyes. For some reason, the elite are intent on replacing white people in their own nations, this is crystal clear. Collapse will stop them from ever completing their agenda. Multi culturism will hasten the collapse of white nations and make it more chaotic and violent. Perhaps this is the intent.
You’re out of line man.
Unfortunately, there are real difference between the races. Asians do significantly better on college entrance exams than other races, for example. It is not just people’s imagination.
Of course, it isn’t just black-on-white killings. There are all sort of other crimes that blacks commit against whites Does poverty cause this? Or is it just evil?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/06/13-year-old-girl-autism-says-attacked-twice-white-pro-trump-family/
Of course, Gateway Pundit tries to obscure that fact that this was a black-on-white attack. But the situation becomes very clear once you look at the twitter video.
https://twitter.com/willo1246/status/1265837969514127362?s=20
And check out the housing and the cars. Neat, well-tended (not by the inhabitants) single family homes. Shiny, recent model vehicles. Oh, the unbearable poverty of the ghetto! When will the suffering end?!
They are certainly driving better cars than I am. But to be fair, I’ve made the choice to carry no debt.
Point being, everyone in the ghetto can appear rich when central banks push ultra-low interest rates and financiers extend amortization periods. That same dynamic applies to Realtors and stock brokers driving around in BMW model 7’s, despite being on the verge of bankruptcy…
Cheers,
-GBV
Every single day, somewhere in the United States, a black person criminally kills (murder in some degree) a white person. On many days, it is more than one white person that is killed. Shootings, stabbings, beatings with blunt objects, rapes followed by stranglings, carjackings, burglaries “gone wrong”, prostituites ands pimps poisoning-to-rob johns, people being run down with cars, or even like that one a few weeks ago where a 29 year old black man lay in wait with a sniper rifle at a Deleware cemetery and killed two old people (85 and 86) visiting their son’s grave.
The killer had no reason for doing this. He did not know the old couple. He just wanted to kill.
https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/elderly-couple-murdered-in-cemetery-shooter-then-shot-at-first-responders/
But you never hear about this in the national media. Any such reports are restricted to local media so that people get the impression that this is some kind of one-off that occurred only in their own neighborhood. The media are very careful to ensure that the general populace is not alert to the fact that there is in fact a national plague of uinprovoked and FATAL black-on-white violence.
For anyone who doesn’t believe me about the numbers I am suggesting, I am willing to provide as many links as you like to these stories. I can link you to sites that keep some track of this epidemic (but I will not link them unless invited by Gail as they are usually not what sensitive types here might call politically correct). I can provide links to new criminal black-on-white killings almost every single day. Some days I can provide two or three or four links. Sometimes the killings have multiple victims.
So, if youwish, I can flood you with hundreds of links to hundreds of horrific recent black-on-white murders. They happen in the USA every day. Every single day. And it has nothing to do with peak cheap fossil fuels.
How about you, Kim? Are you a white nationalist?
Pingback: Increased Violence Reflects an Energy Problem – Olduvai.ca
• Black males age 18-35 years of age are only 1.8% of the U.S. population, yet have committed 52% of homicides from 1980-2008. Black males (all ages) are only 6% of the U.S. population, yet commit 46% of all violent crimes, and 50% of the gun homicides. If Blacks were removed from the equation, the U.S. gun homicide rate would be equal to Great Britain’s, who have some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the world.
• The Black homicide rate is 17 per 100,000, a rate over 9x that of the White rate, and comparable to some of those most murderous countries in the world. If the homicide rate for the U.S. were the White-only rate, the homicide rate would drop 84%, making the U.S. rate comparable to European countries.
• According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018 survey of criminal victimization, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between Blacks and Whites last year, including White-on-Black and Black-on-White attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and Whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent.
• According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting for 2018, of the homicide victims for whom race was known, 53.3% were Black, 43.8% were White and 2.8% were of other races. In cases where the race of the offender was known, 54.9% were Black, 42.4% were White, and 2.7% were of other races.
• Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving Blacks and Whites, Blacks commit 85 percent and Whites commit 15 percent. This means that a Black is 27 times more likely to attack a White person than vice versa.
• For each one standard deviation increase in proportion of Black population, firearm homicide rate is increased by 82.8%. Therefore, the U.S. has a Black problem, not a gun or violent crime problem. When Blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-Blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.
• 40% of gun crime occurs in just three cities: 596 (10%) – St Louis, MO, 53 (11%) – Detroit, MI, and 1,527 (27%) – Chicago, IL.
• Murder is the leading cause of death for Black men, ages 15 to 34. Their murderers are other Black men 93 percent of the time.
• Black males between 16-35 years of age are only 4.2% of the population, yet commit 72% of the street crime in America.
• The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is Black.
• If New York City were all White, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent. In an all-White Chicago, murder would decline 90 percent, rape by 81 percent, and robbery by 90 percent.
• The United States is third in murders throughout the world, but if you omit just five Black cities (Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, St Louis, and New Orleans) from the equation, then the United States is fourth from the bottom.
• Black serial killers have comprised over half of documented serial killers since the dawn of the 21st century at 56 percent, making up a total of 40 percent in years dating back to 1900. Blacks constituted 44% of the known serial killers during the 1995-2004 period and 38.2% of all multiple murderers (serial, mass, and spree combined) during 1976-1998 period. During the 2000-2010 decade, 62% of serial killers were Black.
I saw film save the last dance )
Marco,
My ancestry is from tuscany and calabria. I love the Italian people and Italy.
The United States is extremely screwed up.
I’d rather head back to Italy but I am not sure about getting citizenship, is it true you can obtain italian citizenship by ancestry?
Yes. A lot of people from argentina came in Italia for take Citizen. You only must live in Italy 1 month. U welcome
Well, I’m sorry, Z, but I don’t know that we can admit you fully to our special Caucasian club. Calabrians are quite swarthy and you are *very* close to Tunisia down there.
Also, talk about crime! Isn’t it interwoven into the very social fabric down there? 😂
“The global war against mafias has a new number one enemy: the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta.
“At the centre of drug busts and manhunts throughout Europe and around the world, this mafia group from the deepest south of Italy seems to be everywhere.”
https://www.thelocal.it/20190709/meet-the-ndrangheta-its-time-to-bust-some-myths-about-the-calabrian-mafia
Yes, in my families history there have been associates of the Mafia. I am not part of that though.
A more useful crime statistic might be poor vs rich, not black vs white…
Not that it matters, tribalism is deeply rooted within our instincts. When SHTF we all feel the need to belong to “our group”. We will have both increasing inequality and increasing racism as we go down the stairs.
I posted this just a few pages back, but I suppose you must have missed it.
……………………………………………………….
Does increasing poverty cause crime? Apparently not in rural (white) West Virginia.
“Rural areas [of West Virginia] which are mostly white have more than double the poverty rates of urban areas, but among the lowest crime rates…
The Sentencing Project data below shows that even poorest all white states such as West Virginia have white incarceration lower or nearly equal to far more affluent states such as Virginia, Oregon, and Washington State.”
http://sullivan-county.com/racism/poverty_crime.htm
………………………………………………………………………………………………….
And to repeat another point I have made. There are many places in the world that are far, far, far, far more impoverished than any part of black America (which is in fact incredibly wealthy by any world or historical standards). These poor places are cities or town like Surabaya where a kid might have no clothes except for a few rags (not so common nowadays). I personally know a woman who grew up with nothing to wear apart from an ill-fitting school uniform for school days (no shoes, not even sandals) and when out of school had only a man’s singlet to wear as her only dress!!!!! These were her only clothes throughout her childhood. Virtual nakedness! She grew up in a tiny house made of bamboo and her family cooked with sticks they gathered each day. As a staple meal they ate rice with boiled papaya leaf. She vividly remembers a day when, for a special treat, her father bought the kids a small, single piece of candy and cut it up to share between them. One small piece of cheap candy to be cut up and shared. She thought it was heaven.
This is grinding poverty. But where’s my Bamaphone?
I occasionally see men walking along the roadsides here in the hot tropical sun who are going door-to-frigging-door selling (not a word of a lie) wooden desks and wardrobes. They TIE THE DAMNED FURNITURE TO THEIR BACKS and walk with it in the hot sun!!!! Yes!
But in my experience these people today are the finest, kindest, most generous – and often it seems to me the happiest – people on earth.
And not a single criminal amongst them. Kill someone for his shoes? Doesn’t happen! Wha kind of animal would do that?
Poverty does not cause crime. Having an evil, predatory, selfish, criminal nature and having it played up to, minimized and excused by the PTB is what causes crime.
Of course, black-on-black crime is even worse. Here is a black on black murder from a few weeks ago. Kind of hard o blame it on “poverty”.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/calvin-munerlyn-michigan-security-guard-shot-dead-family-dollar-face-mask/
“Three people have been charged in the fatal shooting of a security guard at a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan. Calvin Munerlyn, 43, was shot dead after an altercation May 1 when he refused to allow a customer’s daughter inside the store because she wasn’t wearing a face mask, a local prosecutor said Monday.
Ramonyea Travon Bishop, 23; Larry Edward Teague, 44; and Sharmel Lashe Teague, 45, all face first-degree premeditated murder and gun charges in connection to Munerlyn’s death. Sharmel Teague is in custody. Police are still searching for the two men, who are considered armed and dangerous.”
Damn those white people with their racism! When will the oppression end? No justice, no peace!
Z, regardless of the overall stats it’s not ok to compress a person’s windpipe with a knee while pinned down with knees of other cops on a person handcuffed for 8 minutes until that person is suffering/dying from asphyxia.
Floyd was loaded on drugs and died due to cardio-pulmonary failure not asphyxia….see the original autopsy not the one done by Celebrity Doctor Baden.
You need to actually read the autopsy CM, not blindly follow the talking heads on CNN.
Had a heart attack. His respiration was already compromised by fentanyl consumption.
That is actually (apparently) how police are trained in that state. They had the Israelis train some of them, FWIW. Multiple sources on this you can google. It’s not supposed to asphyxiate the person, and I don’t think Floyd was reported to have had signs of asphyxiation.
I’m not really sure how anyone is supposed to safely restrain a person who is 6’6″ and high on drugs. Maybe we just don’t. Maybe the protesters are right and we should just dismantle the police forces.
Are you a white nationalist, then, Z?
I believe people are different as shown through science which shows that each of the races are very different. I am a European and believe in living among other Europeans. I stick with my own people as that makes the most sense through my own observation, science, and even religion.
I have been living in the US and have been front and center to see how each of the different races interact, behave, etc. and there are many differences. Anyone who believes in the multicultural utopia is believing in an illusion as everyone can see the clown show that is the US.
“Anyone who believes in the multicultural utopia is believing in an illusion as everyone can see the clown show that is the US.”
I agree with this sentiment; economic growth and resource abundance have made us sheltered and unwilling to accept truths that were more evident to those that came before us. That the races- not necessarily individuals, but certainly by aggregate- produce starkly different sociocultural and technological outcomes should be clear to anyone not looking through a very thick ideological lens.
Personally, I am unwilling to defer my interests as a European to any other group; least of all one that lazily blames me for all their collective failures. If we keep on giving up ground, eventually we walk ourselves off a cliff. I have a feeling that the facade among white liberals that ‘we’re all in this together’ will begin to slip as their conveniences and jobs fall away as well, but they could as easily fall into the communist utopian trap. Time will tell.
Hmm… its not being black thats the cause, its having a redneck culture. “Black rednecks snd White liberals” by T. Sowell explains it.
So what are you suggesting?
In europe you could in theory stop letting in people belonging to groups overrepresented in bad contexts.
But what can US do?
The list is long.
The first thing to do is to allow people to exercise their right to freedom of association. Governments should also stop trying to force so-called “integration”.
Governments should also stop imposing this kind of socially destructive nonsense.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-29/california-groups-demand-uc-drop-the-sat-saying-they-illegally-discriminate-against-disadvantaged-students
The last one was funny.
I’m sorry Z and Kim, but you are guilty as charged. Just because you can’t remember putting your knee on that poor chap’s neck it doesn’t mean you weren’t there. You’re probably going to claim innocence for the slave trade, the patriarchy and the Crusades but every denial just increases your guilt. A tribunal of the wokest of the woke will conduct trials based not just on every waking word and action since your birth but your bloodline back into the mists of time. However, there is still time to repent.
I was never part of the slave trade, but one of my crusader kinsmen did capture an island from the Moslems many years ago. You may have heard of it: it is called Malta.
Then you may have heard the saying, “More Moslems, more treasure!” It meant the greater the risk, the greater the reward.
I recently read a wonderful history “The Great Siege of Malta1565” by Bradford Ernle. I got it online, I think, from ebook3000dotcom, where I get many free books.
Wonderful story.
Malta celebrates the Great Siege with a fine dry beer called “1565”. Recommended, and it’s not often you get to drink a piece of history.
Facts schmacts:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sm7ArKlzHSM
But in all seriousness, I would argue that most (if not all) statistics do little to explain their own underlying causes. And as the saying goes, correlation is not causation…
Cheers,
-GBV
It would be helpful it you could include links to support what you are saying. I found this link, supporting a bit of what you are saying.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls
There is a Wikipedia article called Race and Crime in the United States. It tends to give more of a balanced story. One claim in the Wikipedia article is
The eurozone is expected to contract by ~10% in 2020.
A 5% contraction of world energy consumption and world GDP is perhaps a reasonable estimate.
A 5% contraction of world GDP is ~ $4T or 350 million people that must be pushed off a cliff.
I doubt there will be volunteers…so more violence is probably to be expected…year after year.
Good equation
so-called “experts” are paid to be overly optimistic…
my wild guess estimates compared to 2019 quarters:
5% down in Q1 is the prologue…
50% down in Q2 is the bottom…
40% down in Q3 will be headlined as “record 10% growth in Q3!”…
30% down in Q4 “another quarter of record-high growth!”…
so perhaps 30% down year over year…
I don’t see how the economy can ever recover to the 2019 level (valued in 2019 dollars… high inflation/hyperinflation could push a near future year above 2019)…
even with this low economic forecast, I would expect population growth to be at least 100,000 per day, or even much closer to the current rate of 200,000 per day…
it would take “mass starvation” of about 200,000 per day to stall population growth… though it could happen quickly in the third world, with or without UN “programs”…
>>it would take “mass starvation” of about 200,000 per day to stall population growth
It’s coming.
I am afraid you might be right. Population may need to fall pretty much proportionately to GDP (and to energy supply).
This came to me this AM, it is a session regarding networking, working from home, etc. Some may find this interesting.
https://www.govexec.com/feature/testing-governments-connection/?oref=ge-events-upcoming
This could have wide ranging social implications:
1. It is color blind – on this site we really have no knowledge of a person’s color, nor do we really care, we seek a place to throw out ideas and see how those we have learned to respect react to them, most of us adjust rather quickly, we want to be part of the group.
2. Workplace interactions could change, if results are measured, how does one brown nose the boss?
Nodes of a network have traditionally been locked in place, have we unlocked these nodes? Imagine a critical worker being simultaneously in a similar network, sliding out of the original network until, puff, he/she is gone. If getting paid depends on that individual’s contribution, the rules have changed.
Collaborative software has been around for a long time and improving. Could this lead to a small group or individuals bidding on certain parts of a job? That is huge socially, some are going to be much better than others and Pareto’s rule comes into play? What happens to the 80% who only produce 20% of the result?
Think it can’t apply to manufacturing? Modern, high end CNC machines are popping up in garages all over the US, the owners seem to be one of the 20%. Sometimes, the former owner of a large shop sells out and still maintains a small, independent area within the larger company – he can’t be replaced. Peter is on both YouTube and Instagram – he is off the wall good.
e. g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toT5JRkRViw
It is a 20 minute video, the Mazak is a $1m machine, he claims it is his along with other equipment. The “community” recognizes this guy as one of the best cnc machinists in the world, a commenter on Youtube noted that very few machinists on this level will share has he does and in the US there are perhaps 50 with similar abilities – it is a very small community. I have commented often that a mistake in programming these machine leads to errors costing in the 10’s of thousands. He shows a pile of raw material next to his machine, a 1″ dia bar is $5/inch , notice the size of the material, tens of thousands, make one wrong, make them all wrong, scrap, you are out of business.
This is a second video, he tells of being asked to return to his former building, nice rent deal, they wanted Peter. It is a good tour of what modern manufacturing looks like.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwNP3EwzQFk
I follow a very small network of incredible machinists, one in PA, one in Germany, one in CA at Lawrence Livermore, and Peter in Houston. They not only post(advertising), they also collaborate electronically.
We are seeing change, but not change as traditionally envisioned politically.
Here we are a small network, many others exist, virtually as does ours, it is a different game.
Dennis L.
Working online works better for some groups of people–people who can’t drive, for example. People who are somewhat autistic, who have a hard time interacting with co-workers, as another.
Below, from this article on the possible relevance of the French revolution to current times. Rising expectations dashed by an economic downtown. Interesting.
“Revolutions do not necessarily erupt at the moment when people are most oppressed. Rather, revolutions have more often been the result of “rising expectations.” Periods of progress followed by crushed hopes can be especially dangerous, leading to rage and violence..
https://www.thehour.com/opinion/article/Are-we-on-the-brink-of-revolution-15316674.php
“This fuller picture conforms to the late sociologist James Chowning Davies’s theory of political revolutions, which suggests that revolutions are a response to a downturn in the economy after a significant period of growth that allows individuals to envision a more promising future. A population subjected to unmitigated poverty and oppression cannot imagine a better alternative, and consequently, is unlikely to revolt. However, as life begins to improve and a happier life is conceivable, a sudden reversal of fortune can seem unbearable and trigger revolutionary activity.”
That is a very good point. I think that China has a similar problem with its many migrant workers. They thought things were getting better, and that a better life would open for them. They went back to Wuhan, but found that many of the jobs that they had had were no longer there. So now they are back in the countryside, living with relatives. I am sure that they are not happy. China would seem to be a country where collapse would be possible as well.
What the “pandemic” left behind.
One of the most valuable brands is “MIT.” MIT doesn’t have to carve off all of a universities students, only the best ones. I have done distance learning, half semester Calc II when school physically shut down, it works and is getting better, whether school is classroom or virtual next semester is of no concern for me, it cuts down on commuting, less gas, less time, and reduces wardrobe requirements all of which are consistent with Greta – seemingly a long game player. MIT has been at this a for years – they play the long game. There are a wide variety of courses, a MIT brand on a course taken may be worth more than regular courses taken in an accredited manner. A college degree is not worth a great deal, a good test score or series of scores from MIT would potentially be worth a great deal. Said somewhat sarcastically, getting drunk on weekends can be done locally, sex is the same which negates two of the main social reasons to attend college, spring break is open to all and is a short term rental to boot. Again, would living at home a couple of years, avoiding rent, doing a multi generational thing be all bad? Is coming home blind drunk and throwing up on the floor really socialization? Might mom have a few things to say about that? I was a housefellow at Madison, saw it in real time.
This pandemic changed many things, we have yet to see many of them.
https://us6.campaign-archive.com/?u=ad81d725159c1f322a0c54837&id=1db2e4b1c6&e=d94c610f30
The world is not going down, but it is changing.
Earlier I commented to FE the virus might be a one and done, many have speculated the virus could mutate to something worse, doomers again, it could mutate to something milder. Moving more manufacturing to the US would be very positive on the GDP, modern manufacturing is not our parents manufacturing, the jobs will be better not worse; unfortunately they require more and more skills not less. The long game has many twists and turns, fascinating game.
Dennis L.
Unfortunately, it may very well be going down. We will see what happens.
“The new coronavirus is losing its potency and has become much less lethal, a senior Italian doctor said on Sunday. “In reality, the virus clinically no longer exists in Italy,” said Alberto Zangrillo, the head of the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan in the northern region of Lombardy, which has borne the brunt of Italy’s coronavirus contagion.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-italy-virus-idUSKBN2370OQ
If Zangrillo is correct, the lab grown virus was apparently not yet stable when released.
Good news!
This whole thing smelled as a “Plandemic”. Now that they, meaning TPTB realized they blew up the Global eCONomy and they have riots taking place around the world, they are now conditioning the Shee.ple that the Coronavirus is not as serious as first thought. I don’t have the 800+ IQ of Fast Eddy and even I figured it out that this was all manufactured “Fear, Hype and Hysteria”.
compolsury vaccines for all
Zangrillo Is doctor of Berlusconi. And Berlusconi Need Money and optimism
So you think that Zangrillo is being too optimistic. Get people back to work, for example?
Gail,
thank you for the clear argumentation and impressive data!
From my point of view the problem is not “too many people relative to resources” but our inability to deal with it.
a. Resource restrictions demand adapted distributions. The revolts are negotiations about the share of what is left and could be avoided with just and fair policies.
b. Past investments into infrastructure do not pay under the paradigm of sustainability. So people wait until trigger points force them. The GND approach tries to implement sustainability into a system based on energy dissipation. How could that ever work?
c. Still existent resources should be invested under a new paradigm: Securing Majak/Tchernobyl/Fukushima. Research into plants and gardening procedures suited for non-industrial cultivation under the conditions of climate change (like Emmer or ‘Waldstaudenroggen’ Secale cereale/multicaule). Education and tradition of knowledge in times of transition. Simple but effective medical knowledge. Preparation for food shortages like the obligation to create gardens and small livestock, non-electric water supply. Settlements in by natural means easy to defend areas.
d. Such investments could even pay under the current paradigm – why should underprivileged people not be granted a garden, where their can use their unimployed time to grow healthy food for their family? Currently those areas compete with real estate speculation so regulation is needed.
Peter Turchin has shown on historical data that an intelligent adaptation to changed conditions is vital for the survivial of a society and culture.
It means the invisible hand is not enough. Drug people to keep more resources for the rich is not a policy that is fit for the future.
There are a lot of examples that we do not invest into durable, stand-alone and easy to operate technology like the singer sewing machine but into proceedures that demand the unlikely stability of electricity, communication lines, global just-in-time and highly integrated semi-conductor production.
The catastrophies we are facing are manmade and a lack of adaptation to the conditions of life. The estrangement from nature does not allow us to react in a sensible way.
I am convinced that we have enough resources for a transition and that noone of the now existent persons would be forced to die on any shortage. People die on manmade injust wealth distributions. We should be very clear that it is the consequence of a mindset: We want chaos, crime, death and desaster!
Religions compete in who has the most births. Contraception is considered as from the devil, as if morals could be forced by overpopulation. As an atheist I wonder how people could believe in a benevolent God father that created an obviously finite world inhabited by intelligent man and nevertheless demands to overpopulate it. The consequence is very clear: If we dont reduce the numbers of people we must reduce their age.
For me a God that demands overpopulation to create death, war and destruction does not exist and if it wouldnt be mine. This is not the symbol of the cross! My very religious friends say: Of course not! But that does not seem to have any consequence on religious policies.
The challenge of energy scarcity is not a technical one. It is a question of mindset. Can we give up the elevator principle as it is called in German where you do what the elder tell you and will reach prosperity? What psychological skills are needed to bear ambiguitiy and the admission that cities like Venice, Amsterdam and New York are not build to survive raising sea levels?
At the moment it looks as if societies with no unnatural energy injections like from coal, oil and gas deposits are bound to the fruits sun energy and water produces in the local area. Peak oil and peak energy seems to go hand in hand with peak population and peak culture.
But looking to relicts of past civilisations like the pyramids, gigantic temples in the middle and far east and monoliths as in stonehenge, technology and ingeneering knowledge is also possible for civilisations that obviously gained no energy injection by fossil fuels.
History, science, intelligence, social community and love is not over with the end of oil.
It has just begun!
Jan, wonderful to see a positive post. Than you.
Lovely post, Jan. It was hard to find one thing to disagree with. And Gail appears to concur that inputs of energy into projects need to be balanced (at least) by outputs of energy means for society. That’s a pretty simple formula to follow.
>>History, science, intelligence, social community and love is not over with the end of oil.
The end of oil means the end of the green revolution, and a distinct lack of food, maybe enough to feed 500 M people. I am not sure that the starving can thrive on love alone. If they feel that way, then certainly their lives might end peacefully, that is a pretty good way to go.
Thank you, Jan. Of course, some people will tell you the Pyramids were built by space aliens as esoteric power plants (I saw that on TV so it must be true). But the question in my mind is: why have we moderns built so little that can compare with the builders of Antiquity? Sagrada Familia, perhaps, but not much else.
However, let me agree with you by posting part of a little known poem by James Elroy Flecker (1884 to 1915):
I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.
But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?
“The world’s poorest – who have lost their incomes from illness or because of lockdowns – are disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus pandemic and, unless they receive enough support, hunger levels will soar and some countries may see rising violence, experts say.”
https://horizon.scienceblog.com/1299/for-worlds-poorest-coronavirus-loss-of-income-threatens-ability-to-eat/
“Like millions of Guatemalans, Leidy is out of work due to coronavirus lockdown restrictions and she is struggling to feed her family.
“The white flags, appearing in droves hung from residences or waved from roadsides across Guatemala, signify a surrender to hunger.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-03/coronavirus-restrictions-guatemala-collapse-informal-economy/12307508
“The health system in Yemen is in a state of collapse after five years of war, disease and starvation, and now coronavirus, the United Nations has said.
“A fund-raising conference yesterday was told that the country was billions of dollars short of the regular annual funding intended to ease its long-running humanitarian crisis, even before the virus began to affect the country.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/war-pestilence-and-famine-have-pushed-yemen-to-brink-un-warns-lhgsj66dq
“A group of starving foreign nationals [in South Africa] have had to resort to eating one meal of one boiled potato each per day, as they hope to survive the continued lockdown without any income or other sources of food.”
https://citizen.co.za/news/features-news/2296310/a-potato-a-day-is-all-that-stands-between-them-and-starvation/
If Yemen has received billions of dollars of regular annual funding, why is there still a crisis? Could it be, just perhaps, that giving money to failed third world hellholes is just pouring it down an unfillable drain? Why not leave the money with the stable societies and civilised people that earned it in the first place?
Because, the state is broke and insolvent the creditor receives no money.
I think the article is stating that they did not receive billions in funding. Same old, same old. Promises made and not kept.
Yemen’s population is 29 million. Australia’s population is only about 25.5 million. Canada’s population is about 38 million. Yemen has way too much population for its limited resources.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/yemen-oil-production-and-consumption.png
Yemen’s population grew as its oil supply grew, but that is now gone. It doesn’t have enough water either.
Gail, Yemen should provide good information on how de-growth progresses.
Unfortunately!
Thank you Harry!
Thanks, also from my side!
And again to Gail, of course!
You are both welcome!
“The world’s low-income and emerging market economies will likely remain deeply damaged even five years after the coronavirus pandemic and associated lockdowns began, according to a new study from the World Bank.
“The virus has already plunged the world into a severe recession, the World Bank said, and its research casts doubt on scenarios in which emerging markets bounce back quickly after the health crisis has eased.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/low-income-nations-likely-to-remain-deeply-damaged-five-years-after-pandemic-world-bank-says-11591106400
“Capital flows to emerging markets securities fell 78 per cent in May despite efforts to reopen economies in Asia and North America that have been hit by Covid-19, the Institute of International Finance said…”
https://www.thenational.ae/business/economy/capital-flows-to-emerging-markets-down-78-in-may-amid-pandemic-1.1027857
“Turkish policy makers are pumping money into the economy at the fastest pace in over a decade to contain the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, a move that risks weakening the currency and stoking inflation…
“After nine straight interest-rate decreases, the lira already has one of the lowest yields in the world when adjusted for inflation.”
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/turkey-surging-money-supply-revives-210001645.html
“Argentina’s ninth default on external debt is now official after Fitch and S&P cut bond ratings to default status.”
https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/argentina-default-buenos-aires-times
Emerging markets have been what has been pulling the rest of the world forward. Cutting off flows to them doesn’t really work.
“Three former UK chancellors have warned the government to prepare for 1980s levels of unemployment as the coronavirus crisis sinks Britain into the deepest recession in living memory.
“Lord Alistair Darling, George Osborne and Philip Hammond said the government urgently needed to announce measures to cushion the blow as job losses began to mount.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/03/prepare-for-1980s-level-unemployment-former-chancellors-warn
“Poverty campaigners have called for an emergency cash support scheme to help struggling low-income households after UK food bank charities reported that the first full month of coronavirus lockdown was their “busiest ever”…
“The charities said… current social security safety net measures were not enough to prevent poorer families being swept into destitution.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/03/record-numbers-used-uk-food-banks-in-first-month-of-lockdown
“Experts have warned that millions [of UK citizens] are gambling with their future by relying on inheritance to boost their pensions…
“But many may have to change their plans: depressed stock markets caused by the coronavirus pandemic and an expected slump in house prices means many will end up getting much less than they had first thought.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/pensions-retirement/financial-planning/property-slump-will-crush-retirement-dreams-two-thirds-bank/
Harry, my children have repeatedly told me they do not want any “inheritance”, and I should spend the money on myself. I remember giving the same advice to my father fifty years ago. I guess we are an old fashioned family from way back. Remember the old Spanicsh proverb: “Take what you want, said God, and pay for it.” Words to live by.
“The French government has cut its annual GDP forecast to -11% from -8% this year, in anticipation of a deeper recession than expected triggered by the coronavirus pandemic.
“”The economic shock is brutal,” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said in a tweet translated from French.”
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/france-economy-gross-domestic-product-will-shrink-11-this-year-2020-6-1029271725
“Tear gas choked Paris streets as riot police faced off with protesters setting fires Tuesday amid growing global outrage over George Floyd’s death in the United States, racial injustice and heavy-handed police tactics around the world.”
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2020-06-02/demonstrators-abroad-identify-with-the-cause-of-us-protests
“Germany’s Second Coronavirus Stimulus Package Brings Total Support to €1.3 Trillion.
“Scale of support has raised concerns about lopsided recovery in Europe, where many governments have struggled to put together similar packages.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/germanys-second-coronavirus-stimulus-package-brings-total-support-to-1-3-trillion-11591226131
“The European Central Bank scooped up all of Italy’s new debt in April and May but merely managed to keep borrowing costs for the indebted, virus-stricken country from rising, data showed on Tuesday.”
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/ecb-scoops-italys-debt-just-141335562.html
“Record rise in Spanish unemployment in May – unemployment now stands at 3,857,776, excluding all those on temporary redundancy notices.”
https://murciatoday.com/record_rise_in_spanish_unemployment_during_may_1445481-a.html
It sounds like Spain is slow to open back up again. That cannot help employment.
“Australia has entered its first recession for 29 years after the economy went backwards by 0.3% in the March quarter, with the impact of bushfires and the coronavirus ending the nation’s extraordinary, uninterrupted run of economic growth.
“The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, told reporters a recession was inevitable…”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/03/australia-enters-first-recession-in-29-years-after-blow-from-bushfires-and-coronavirus
“A surge in online shopping wasn’t enough to pull Australia’s retail sector out of its worst slump on record for this time of year…”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8386735/Australian-retails-suffers-worst-slump-record-nation-braces-recession.html
“Mortgage stress levels among Australians have continued to soar amid the global outbreak of COVID-19, with data showing more than 1.4 million Australian households are now in mortgage stress and almost 100,000 could soon default on their loans.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-04/covid-recession-mortgage-stress-default-home-loans-jobkeeper/12318274
I thought a recession took two quarters of negative growth. When I look up Australia’s growth by quarter, the fourth quarter of 2019 showed positive growth.
https://tradingeconomics.com/australia/gdp-growth
That is a good point, Gail. I think the article is saying that Australia’s economy is so certain to contract in Q2 due to the lockdown that, on top of a contraction in Q1, a recession is guaranteed. They are technically jumping the gun though.
Although Australia’s 28 years without a recession (until now) has been much ballyhooed, like many nations their economic performance has been shaky in recent years. I recall that they had a 0.5% contraction in the Q3 of 2016.
Came across this on Critical Environmentalism
Elizabeth Hadly of Stanford, one of the Barnosky study’s authors, added some warm-blooded remarks:
“We may already be past these tipping points in particular regions of the world. I just returned from a trip to the high Himalayas in Nepal, where I witnessed families fighting each other with machetes for wood – wood that they would burn to cook their food in one evening. In places where governments are lacking basic infrastructure, people fend for themselves, and biodiversity suffers. We desperately need global leadership for planet Earth. “
“We desperately need global leadership for planet Earth “
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Funnily that phrase (in a translation of course) was writen on a wall by wich i passed every day in my childood in the 70’s, in my way to school. Never forgot it.
What would “global leadership” do to give people more infrastructure and at the same time more biodiversity? This person seems confused.
Global leadership would end the refugee problem, because there would be nowhere for a refugee to go. The whole world would be a single concentration camp. Which is exactly what the globalists are trying to create.
Bill Gates could be committed to this globalist vision.
Using more renewable resources really means “cutting down more trees,” if these resources have to be affordable to people. Wind and solar panels are parts of big systems. They don’t function by themselves. Their cost is high, when all costs are considered. Cutting down trees is the low cost source of fuel.
What are global leader supposed to say? We don’t want you using more renewable resources?
Release a virus that kills 99% of the human race. Please do not condemn the person who simply made the logical inference. I am no more happy with the mess humankind has created then you are.
“The coronavirus outbreak could trigger a $25tn (£20tn) collapse in the fossil fuel industry…
“The looming fossil fuel collapse could pose “a significant threat to global financial stability” by wiping out the market value of fossil fuel companies, according to financial thinktank Carbon Tracker.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/04/coronavirus-crisis-collapse-fossil-fuels-demand
“Coal consumption in the U.S. is the lowest it’s been since 1964. Here’s why the industry is never coming back…
“…coal consumption isn’t just going down because of the push for more renewable energy; it’s actually getting harder and more expensive to mine.”
https://therising.co/2020/06/03/coal-consumption-never-coming-back/
“The U.S. Bankruptcy Court on Wednesday approved a settlement allowing Philadelphia Energy Solutions to pay a small portion of the millions of dollars it owes in unpaid renewable energy obligations, clearing a major obstacle facing the bankrupt South Philadelphia refinery’s reorganization.”
https://www.inquirer.com/business/pes-phladelphia-refinery-renewable-fuel-obligations-20200603.html
Harry, our high tech renewable energy has never made a thin dime of profit and never will. It is an energy sink, and so inevitably a money sink.
This is a reduced subsidy to the ethanol industry, being paid by a bankrupt refinery.
We are past peak coal.
“The collapse in demand for new vehicles from U.S. rental car fleets hit automakers hard in May…
“Automakers could lose up to 12% of their annual U.S. vehicle sales in 2020 as car rental companies slammed by the coronavirus pandemic slash fleets and restructure…”
https://business.financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/rental-fleet-collapse-drags-down-u-s-vehicle-sales
“This week, Wells Fargo confirmed that… “it would not be accepting new auto loan applications from most independent dealerships. The news underscored a growing issue bubbling beneath the surface of the U.S. economy—consumer debt.”
https://www.ccn.com/auto-appocolypse-could-shove-us-economy-off-cliff/
“The last three months have been catastrophic for segments of the trucking business, after an already tough period that started in late 2018…
“In 2019, as a result of the sharp downturn in the freight business, declining mileage rates, and pressures from debt, hundreds of smaller trucking companies filed for bankruptcy.”
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/06/03/trucking-skids-into-ditch-hits-bottom-after-19-months-of-downturn/
What happens to all of the unneeded rental cars?
Give them to Mythbusters Junior to blow up.
Send them to Paris.
“April’s employment report set records for all the wrong reasons. The unemployment rate increased from 4.4% to 14.7%, the largest one month increase in history and the highest rate in the history of official government data (started in 1948)…
“On Friday the Department of Labor will release May’s employment report, and expectations are for an additional 9 million people to have lost their jobs.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2020/06/03/mays-unemployment-rate-could-exceed-20-and-even-hit-the-great-depressions-25/#2e58833e515d
“Even as the federal government has paid out unemployment cash at an unprecedented level over the last three months, an estimated one-third of those laid off due to the pandemic’s economic meltdown have not gotten checks…
“For millions of Americans, the unemployment checks have not been in the mail. Or anywhere else.”
https://www.pymnts.com/economy/2020/many-jobless-still-waiting-for-unemployment-checks/
“The pandemic has sent child hunger soaring to unprecedented rates.
“The national rate of food insecurity tripled between March and April; a May study from the Brookings Institution revealed that one-fifth of mothers were struggling to feed their kids—the highest rate since such data became available in 2001.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/rural-childhood-hunger/
I can see that child hunger might make parents more accepting of violence if that is what it takes to feed their children. Who can blame them when Bezos is worth $100-200 billion and they have nothing?
Agreed unconditionally! But how many children could Bezos feed, even with meat stretcher? Perhaps we shall find out.
Great. $200 billion / 8 billion = A one time $25 for every person on the planet.
Then what?
Why would anyone expect Bezos to share all his wealth with the rest of the planet? I have no clue what your point is. But if Bezos’ wealth was shared more equally among Amazon employees, they could all take home a decent income. Not that it really matters if the end result is collapse.
A very sad situation.
Does increasing poverty cause crime? Apparently not in rural (white) West Viginia.
“Rural areas [of West Virginia] which are mostly white have more than double the poverty rates of urban areas, but among the lowest crime rates…
The Sentencing Project data below shows that even poorest all white states such as West Virginia have white incarceration lower or nearly equal to far more affluent states such as Virginia, Oregon, and Washington State.”
http://sullivan-county.com/racism/poverty_crime.htm
I very much doubt that The idea that violence in or between various communities can be blamed on the rise or fall of the differential shares of society’s total energy available to a community.
That is not to say that energy is not the sine qua non of society-building and that people (especially conceived as tribes, dynasties, or nations) can fight over their “share”. But that is a different question.
One could also point to the British working class in the 1920’s and 30’s: terrible hopeless unemployment, constant insecurity when employed, but for the most part they would rather have died than steal anything.
There were known criminal families, and decent families, however poor, and that was that.
A difference appeared in the 1970’s, when crime came to be seen as a blow against an unjust System and as fundamentally political in nature.
A commonplace of Left thinking, which always looks kindly on any violence by favoured groups.
The terrorists of that time also called their murders ‘political actions’, and still insist on the fact that they were not killers as such.
Crime is not crime, murder is not murder if you can cover it with the cloak of politics, some ideology, ‘justice’, and of course, patriotism – like the radical Left ETA group in Spain.
It has its roots not only in normal human hypocrisy, but Trotsky’s doctrine of revolutionary violence, and the end always justifying the means used to attain it.
Aren’t the richest landlords of England the heirs and descendants of companions of William the Conqueror, descendants of Scandinavian pirates, who took the lands by killing on the battlefield? Their revolution was to take the land from the Saxons. The Saxons revolution was to take the land from the Romanised Britons.
Ecclesiastes 1:9 : What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
(I’m not a Trotskyst nor a communist)
Absolutely right. Violence, selfishness and greed are just necessary parts of human nature. How could it be otherwise?Are we amoeba? Even they hunt and eat in their own way, don’t they?
But everyone wants solutions. The problem is that in issues of power, there are no solutions. One defeats the other. To think otherwise is to be like a wizened old saInt sitting up on a stela(?) and twisting himself into guilty knots on how to live in this world without the sin of eating.
There was an anarchist who died in prison, I forget his name, who they say died in his cell recoiling from the morning rays for fear he might get more than his fair share of sunlight.
Except that Duke William had been promised the throne by Edward the Confessor, and Harold Godwinson had promised before the altar of God to support his claim. When Harold reneged on that promise, he automatically became an outlaw. And whatever else William might have done wrong, at least he saved us from the Danes.
Robert, “William might have done wrong, at least he saved us from the Danes” :
And Harold saved you from the Norwegians just before Hastings. For the rest, I don’t really know : the winners write history. The Bayeux tapestry might be Norman propaganda.
For rufus: Yes, Harold saved us at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, when he defeated Harald Hardrada of Norway. An emissary asked what would Harold be willing to concede, to secure peace. “Seven feet of English ground, seeing as he is taller than other men.”
History has many noble deeds, as well as crimes, follies, and misfortunes.
The aren’t criminals, Trotsky wouldclaim. They are “class allies” unburdened by the false consciousness of bourgeois morality.
It was a great success in St Petersburg in 2017 when they emptied the prisons. Those charmers were immediately appointed to the NKVD, the people’ commissariat for internal affairs.
Not 2017, 1917, of course, but perhaps in some ways closer in time than we might like.
“A commonplace of Left thinking, which always looks kindly on any violence by favoured groups.”
I’m sure the Right does this as well.
I’m so sick of Left-vs-Right BS. Both want to control an overblown State that pushes violence and misery on all those not considered to be socially acceptable.
Collapse the State down to a shadow of its former self (i.e. reducing it’s influence and eliminating the power that comes with controlling it) and Left-vs-Right arguments will quickly disappear…
Cheers,
-GBV
Like Robin Hood.
Also, Japanese during events like Fukushima? Basically no looting. I’m really not sure what the incentive is in pretending all groups have similar capacities or behave similarly under similar conditions.
In respect the british working class perhaps we must take into account the centuries of indoctrination via harsh penal punishment. Along centuries, in England (as in many other countries i suppose) it was common practice to flogg or hang a commoner for light offenses. That was not the case in 1920’s, but who knows if the memory of past severity couldn’t influence people’s behavior two generations ahead?
In my family, I was the first person in living memory to attend university. Yes, they were poor. But they were moral, upright, law abiding, and worked hard to improve their lot as best they could. To me, they were examples to be copied, and they taught values not to be forgotten. And no, back then there was no “welfare”; there was charity, which you accepted only out of desperation. And opportunity, even on the street corner selling newspapers. In sum: there was civilisation, and our prime duty was to defend it, preserve it, and bequeath it to our descendants.
“Does increasing poverty cause crime?”
Criminals cause crime. Everything else is an excuse. Now for the real question: what causes criminals? The liberals have one answer wrapped in several buzzwords: society. And having lived and worked on four continents, where much of the time I was a 1% minority or less, I don’t believe it.
“The country’s biggest lenders have been warned by the Bank of England to bolster their planning for a no-deal Brexit as worries grow that the UK will fail to strike a trade deal with the EU.
“It is understood that Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s governor, told bank bosses in a conference call on Tuesday to push on with their Brexit contingency preparations.”
https://www.bmmagazine.co.uk/news/get-ready-for-no-deal-brexit-bank-of-england-governor-tells-high-street-banks/
“The UK government is struggling to rebuild stockpiles of drugs eroded by Covid-19 amid fears that a “no-deal” Brexit will jeopardise medicine supplies just as a second coronavirus wave hits the country.
“Matt Hancock, health secretary, has accepted the need to finalise a formal plan to rebuild a six-week stockpile of drugs, but senior Whitehall officials said that the impact of coronavirus on supply chains and stockpiles was causing serious concern.”
https://www.ft.com/content/4611bf7d-c749-4cfd-bf7c-7a5e2967f9f7
“The UK’s fishing industry has accused the EU of using a “nuclear option” to secure a Brexit deal, warning that it is prepared for blockades by the French if trade talks collapse.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/jun/02/uk-fisheries-accuse-eu-of-using-nuclear-option-in-brexit-talks
Only SIX weeks – tells one everything about the fragility of the system when that pitiful level of supplies is regarded as adequate….
And while the health secretary is “accepting the need to finalise a formal plan”, who is going to provide the drugs? Why, who else: people who act and ignore formal plans finalised or otherwise. Matt Hancock is another useless time serving bureaucrat, like 90% of the UK civil service.
Let’s hope that China and India are making the drugs needed for stockpiles.
QUOTE: ***As I wrote in my recent post… the problem we are facing is too many people relative to resources, particularly energy resources.***
I believe this is not the only problem. Another problem is that some of us have and want way too much. Just look at the enormous income gap between the ‘elite’ and the rest of the populace in, say, the US (though of course the same sorry tale repeats itself in many other countries). And as if that’s not enough, we’ve all been taught to look up to the ‘elite’ as examples, to think that it’s good and right to strive for MORE.
Two quotes come to mind:
“There’s enough for every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed.” (Gandhi)
“There’s no calamity greater than lavish desires, no greater guilt than discontentment, no greater disaster than greed.” (Laozi, Daodejing ch 46)
Unfortunately for Ghandi, Nature itself regularly fails to come up with ‘enough’ for basic needs.
Once inequalities become possible in human groups, then to have more means greater reproductive success, safety and social power.
So to seek more and be pleased by it is inevitable.
In a way, it’s not even a moral issue, but a biological one.
Not that mass-consumerism isn’t an ugly phenomenon, soon to go away.
I have been reading a book about the moaist guerillas working with the forest people in India. The forest people are on land rich in iron ore and the Tata family want it. The Maoists oppose that but still want the forest people to give up their traditional ways and cultivate without moving around and hunting, with which they are very happy.
How to make them change their ways? “Give them television.” says the Maoist. “It makes people greedy.”
“No. Give them education, ” says a development expert from an NGO. “It turns people into cowards who think only of their careers.”
Thanks for the Ghandi saying. Can’t be quoted enough.
Enormous amounts of food are thrown away every day.
From private households, from restaurants, from grocery stores. And farmers also let large parts of their crops rot in the field because they do not meet the size and packaging requirements.
Who doesn’t believe me. I like to look for a few internet links.
I’ve looked at those links, and they suggest that there is a huge cost to distributing food like that to the needy. The ifrastructure for storage isn’t there, among other things. Much safer for the farmer to ploughthe excess under.
It is understandable that the farmers react in this way. Reasons for acting can always be found. And it almost always has to do with economic reasons. If we only follow the logic of the current financial system, we can avoid any discussion. Then we are where our politicians are today, who have to explain the economic constraints to the citizens. TINA.
This is what everyone’s teeth are always biting on.
Tomorrow the day after tomorrow at the latest I will post two longer posts. Then we have an alternative and thus a new basis for discussion.
Society needs a large number of very cheap ice boxes that are within walking distance of every community. The communities need to help build and manage those ice boxes, including findinjg the local energy to make ice.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdkeller
The first paragraph in google translator:
An earth cellar, also a natural cellar, has a floor that makes contact with the ground, so that the surrounding air humidity and its low temperature can penetrate the storage room unhindered. Archaeological studies show that ancient times people stored food in cool caves.
Doesn’t matter. You feed people with every last crumb, and you just get a bigger population at the end of it to feed for your trouble. Then what? The problem is already that humans have arrogated to themselves 90% (or whatever majority amount) of the biosphere. If you don’t let the mice and the worms and the birds even have the gleanings, we won’t have mice and worms and birds.
There was a quote, I think from Warren Buffett, about the class war. He is supposed to have said “We won.” Similarly, “frankly”… here we are as human in the species war: “We won.” This is what #winning looks like.
You are right; we don’t really want to feed every crumb to humans. The result is way too many humans.
Human population explosion doesn’t seem to be mainly a factor of food availability. A world system based on infinite growth of production requires the infinite growth of consumption. The general mind set that grows out of that will lead to such things as using a bi product of oil to build roads to suburbs, Suburbanization promotes nuclear family formation with a resulting growth in population. There are countless other ways in which the economic system–and not just food–leads to population growth. Paved roads and sprawl are also not particularly beneficial for “mice and the worms and the birds.”
I agree
I learned that in Africa watching the antics of Oxfam. Feed a million starving people, and in a few years you have to come back and feed two million starving people. But of curse, that mightily fattened the coffers of Oxfam, hence their property speculation racket in North Oxford.
When we get more and more “complexity,” we get more and more wage disparity and wealth disparity. Some people get to be winners and others get left out.
Television tends to add to this effect. You need to have all of the stuff that others seem to have.
Gail, that is, as usual, excellent systems thinking. The bigger and more complex the network becomes, the more important the “gatekeeper” nodes become. And, being managed by humans, they turn into rent seeking nodes. Yet again, the only answer to the problem of complexity is simplicity. Let us hope we are at last on that trajectory. As Dmitri Orlov put it” “shrink the technosphere”.
Yes, Orlov can hand back his fancy computer, website, teevee, mobile phone. Yes, please, the technocrats want it back. Let’s hand the stuff he despises to some poor family in Asia or Africa.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-george-floyd-coronavirus-died-22135610
“George Floyd had coronavirus and died after cardiac arrest, police report claims”
also, due to lockdown, he had lost his job as some sort of security guard for a restaurant (?)…
so that gives some explanation for why he needed to use a counnterfeit $20:
https://www.sctimes.com/story/news/2020/06/03/what-we-know-fake-currency-and-george-floyds-death-minneapolis-counterfeit-police/5310999002/
lots of consequences to the lockdown/overreaction to the virus…
He was was also a meth addict and had fentanyl in his system and the autopsy showed that he died of a heart attack, not asphyxiation or strangulation.
Fentanyl and other opiate overdoses cause around 50,000 deaths a year in the United States. His death was not remarkable in the least.
As for his “needing” to use a counterfeit twenty because he had lost his job – like millions of other Americans who did not decide to commit a felony – Floyd was a convicted arm robber (meaning he used guns to threaten to kill people who would not give him money) with a long rap sheet – he was no stranger to crime and didn’t require special circs to indulge in it.
So,after seven minutes,another officer can’t find a pulse,and suugests that they sit him up.
Chauvin declines,and keeps his knee on for another minute. And that is ‘ not remarkable
in the least ‘ ?
Sterling citizen! But I’m sure his mother loved him all the same ……
The unfortunate thing is that while police forces – essential as they are – do have to be watched over so that they do not become lawless and arrogant, even criminal themselves, an outpouring of misplaced, theatrical, ‘grief’ and rage for someone like Floyd, without whom society is much better off, only devalues a just cause.
philip zimbardo has a intuitive take on that
Excellent video
Interesting video by psychologist who studied evil, and why some people give into the temptation to do evil.
Milgram studied blind obedience to authority. 65% of Americans would give college students a bigger and bigger electric shocks, as they screamed out in pain.
In a study by Philip Zumbaro, a group of 24 college students was randomly into two groups: 12 prisoners and 12 guards. The prisoners immediately became submissive and the guards became cruel. The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but was ended after 6 days, because of the cruelty of the guards and the dehumanizing nature of the experiment.
Need to do the reverse of this. We need to make ordinary people who do heroic things. Like Rosemary Parks, who wouldn’t sit in the back of the bus, and thus was able to start the move toward integrating transportation.
Zumbaro has developed the Heroic Imagination Program, to try to teach people to do heroic things. For example, when you are at a party, make someone feel special. Go over to someone you don’t know, and talk to someone. Learn their name. When you leave, give the person a genuine compliment.
coincidentally, that study was reviewed on UK radio this morning, BBC world service
well worth listening to—it surprised me, i think it will surprise you too. Not at all what we’ve been led to believe
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cszbxb
The pertinent segment is 8 minutes in, but the whole 23 minutes makes superb listening
to Norman Pagett
Towards the end, Bregman speaks the sentences:
“… it ‘all about saving capitalism, it’ about reforming capitalism …”
From there I had enough. Too bad for the time.
Always the same crap in new disguise.
Gail, I think that sounds really good on the surface, but isn’t it also somewhat manipulative in its own way? Would one be doing that to make the other person feel good, or just to make oneself feel good for being “heroic”? [Also, there has been an awful lot of grade-inflation on the “hero” front, lately.]
A lot of psychopaths charm people by making them feel special in the way described. Politicians and salespeople in particular make a big point of remembering names.
Rosa Parks was a long-time activist whose protest was planned; she wasn’t just a random bus-rider who happened to be fed up that day.
One of my sons told me that the jail experiment reported in the video has not led to the same effect, when others tried it later.
And you are right about psychopaths charming people by making them feel special.
Perhaps children of a couple of introverts have a problem because they have not learned the techniques others have learned to use to charm people. Some would call these techniques manipulative, but others would say that if a young person wants to find a spouse, it helps if they charm the opposite sex a bit.
Then by all means the police had every right to kill / murder him with impunity.
The police is there to protect ALL citizens. The police are funded with taxpayer money (of which I have paid plenty) and for that money and “hero status” they are expected to act with professionalism and a degree of humility. Don’t like it then go get a job some where else.
Sitting here bitching about a $20 counterfeit bill. Big whoopdy dooo!!! Remind us again how many $trillions (it was north of 6 just recently) that were printed up out of thin air and handed to banks and corporations? The priorities of people are appalling.
You are missing the point. It was not murder. Not by a long shot. Learn to read.
When you handcuff someone, have them subdued laying on their stomach, place your knee on their neck and place the entirety of your weight on them, do that for nearly 10 minutes, and then that person dies within minutes from having that happen – then it is in fact murder.
I can read just fine and I can read the smallness of your words.
As I read another poster comment to you below – we’ll just agree to disagree.
What was lost?
A multiple time convicted felon who committed armed robbery against women by putting a gun to their pregnant stomachs.
A serial drug addict.
LOL.
You guys are clowns.
“What was lost?”
A very large chunk of moral high ground… and perhaps an era that, for all its flaws, the US will look back on fondly as being one of relative peace.
That is a fantastic reply. Thanks you.
Dying as a result of a $20 bill is the sad state, all while monied CEOs take home $50M in salary and bonuses.
Perhaps a localized help network, with local guv support can help with this. A guy needs a $20 for food or something….with all the trillions printed….it is a testament to our failed society.
The inequality is sickening.
Guy was driving a Mercedes SUV. Since I can’t afford a Mercedes SUV, I guess I should be appealing to a “localized help network, with local guv support” to give me a hand up. Thanks for the idea.
One rumor is that the club where he and the cop worked as bouncers was terribly shady: drug-dealing, possibly connected to counterfeiting, I don’t think the situation is as simple as it looks.
https://thedailycoin.org/2020/06/03/the-story-begins-to-unfold-floyd-chauvin/
Or, it could all be fake like the moon landing! 😉
[kneels in honor of FE]
There is more that needs to be figured out. Derek Chauvin and George Floyd worked together at the club El Nuevo Rodeo for years. The person who owns the club is Muna Sabri, owner of Omar Investments. She seems to be a Palestinian woman. Basim Salim is a relative of hers, who is also involved in real estate investment, including some investments to help (or perhaps exploit) the Somali community in Minneapolis. This is an article about Basim Salim.
I think some people are discussing the wrong topic (just as they were intended to, i would say), that is, they are discussing Mr. Floyd’s alleged character and police racism. To me that’s irrelevant.
What intrigues me in this case is the likelihood that we are before another staged event, another psy-op to direct the perception and the action of the masses. How else can you explain that the cops let themselves be filmed committing a brutality like the one shown? I thought the police didn’t like to be filmed beating people, but apparently Minneapolis is different. I seem to recall that the Rodney King beating was filmed from afar and on the sly. And I am pretty sure that we do not have clear images of any of the countless “massacres” perpetrated by “Islamic terrorists” (TM) during this century in France, UK, Spain, US, etc. But suddenly in this Floyd case we had the rare privilege of watching everything clearly. How strange is that?
Most people will never realize that MSM is just an instrument for shaping social perceptions and manipulating emotions. When an event (real or simulated, doesnt matter) goes viral in the media, that never happens by accident. Never. There’s always an intention behind it. In fact, It’s MSM that decides if something happened or not, and what is important to show or not. The events themselves are totally irrelevant. The media is anything but a mirror of reality. In a way, we can say it fabricates reality.
I have a criminal record, and thus I am a criminal / convict.
I’d prefer that the State didn’t grant it’s officials a monopoly on violence to be used against me as they see fit…
Also, it would be nice if more people could recognize their own biases… whether is be “all criminals are bad”, “all black people are oppressed”, “all cops are sadists”, “all religions are lies”, “Orange Man bad”, etc. Reality is more complicated than any of those simple assertions would suggest.
Cheers,
-GBV
The State always has the “legal” monopoly on violence. That’s kind of the definition of The State.
Gail, how much time do we really have? (To provoke you, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire took several centuries, remember?) And remember 2008, when Collapse appeared imminent, the Ruling Elites managed to kick the can down the road another 12 years! And I first heard the alarm bells of Limits to Growth as a Grade 7 student, and I am a pensioner now. John Michael Greer, used to profess that it might all take a while, whereas reading yourself, Foss, CH Smith, Martensen, and all the others, always leaves the impression that disaster is nigh. We mostly understand that we cant have compound growth on a finite planet indefinitely. But Rate of Collapse is far more interesting and relevant to our actual predicament. Timing is harder than the Fact, for sure, but actuaries specialize in noodling out problems that no one else can fathom…
We really don’t know how long collapse will take. Except for JMG, we have all expected events to occur much more quickly than they have. Coal has played a huge role in keeping things going, and we now seem to be past peak coal, worldwide. Low coal prices have been the problem, just as low oil prices are the problem.
Right now, the expectation is that things will get back to normal quickly. It seem to me that there will be another step down as soon as this summer, at least in some parts of the world. As Marco keeps reminding us, Italy is in particularly bad shape. Its debt could be downgraded. Also, the EU could start falling apart, even more than the UK leaving.
In many ways, it seems like so many things are going wrong that the world currency will come apart in the next year. But we don’t know this for certain. It could take longer. It might be that particular countries have problems, and drop out, and the rest continue for a while longer.
I think that pension plans cannot continue very much longer. If you were in 7th grade in 1972, it sounds like you were born in about 1960, so you must be about 60 years old. If you can still work, and there are jobs near you, you might take some sort of a job, sort of as an insurance policy against the economy sputtering along for a few more years. Trying to live without a pension or a job will likely be very challenging.
I first found out about peak oil in March 2003, the month before the invasion of Iraq. What I was actually looking for was how much and from where the USA imported oil. Took me two weeks to find the info (the US EIA used to be an excellent source of historical data, where I got the info from, don’t know if it still is). But that day I came across dieoff,org and an article by I think Colin Campbell that forecast peak year of 2010. I thought that things would start going seriously downhill about then, and game over by 2015. And here we still are.
David Stockman, whose analysis (of various aspects of the USA economy) is usually spot on, has one weak point. He has been predicting imminent global financial meltdown for the last 5-10 years, still is. We should not underestimate the ability of governments and their central banks to create huge amounts of money out of nothing to keep the whole show going. What they have been doing quite spectacularly, even by their usual standards, over the last few weeks. Debt is what has been keeping us going. It is huge amounts of debt that allowed us collectively to drill oil that was essentially uneconomic, probably same for coal. Debt levels are now so high just about everywhere, you would think a crash was imminent and unavoidable. What David Stockman has been saying for years. At some point a straw will break the camel’s debt-laden back, and a crash we will have.
Very fine post again, Gail. Thanks!
In portuguese there is a popular saying that sums up the predicament you talk about: “Home where there is no bread, everyone scolds and nobody is right”. (It sounds better in portuguese, and rhymes)
My Sicilian grandmother had a similar expression. “When hunger strikes, love flies out the window.”
Home where there is no bread, no food
Nobody is right and everyone in a bad mood
Much better!
All things uncomely and broken,
all things worn-out and old,
The cry of a child by the roadway,
the creak of a lumbering cart,
The heavy steps of the ploughman,
splashing the wintry mould,
Are wronging your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.
The wrong of unshapely things
is a wrong too great to be told,
I hunger to build them anew
and sit on a green knoll apart,
With the earth and the sky and the water,
remade, like a casket of gold
For my dreams of your image that blossoms
a rose in the deeps of my heart.
William Butler Yeats (1865 to 1939(
Psychology Today has an article, Why the Increase in Domestic Violence During COVID-19?
People that were taught and encouraged to expect more and more, can feel awfully frustrated in a world of less and less. And as every amateur psychologist knows, frustration breeds violence of all kind. Unfortunately there’s no way to deny it: tomorrow will be less peaceful than yesterday, and next year will be much less peaceful than yester-year.
Hey… where is FE ? Skiing or having fun somewhere without internet?
Looks like CDP…. with riots spreading to Europe and who knows soon, will be in Australia or NZ.
FE was on South Island from his last post that I remember.
There are worse places. Culinarily challenged, but you can do just about anything without
the elite putting the dogs on you.
Plus, the fly fishing is outstanding.
Skiing? OK, but not by western US standards.
Winter starting down there.
It appears that FE, has left the building once again.
he’s gone back into that tibetan monastery for a refurb
I have my doubts whether anything is still possible.
nope
every 10000 conspiracies, a service schedule falls due
I don’t know yet who I have to regret, the monks or FE
FE doesn’t hate black people. That makes it difficult for him to stay. I got used to people like lidia long ago
I suspect FE mostly posts here when he’s a had a few too many and wants some fun: he’s posting in an intelligent and informative way about NZ on Wolfstreet just now -although he has claimed to hate and despise Wolf Richter. If only he could keep up that level all the time…..
Foil Eddie seems “frustrated” (his own word) that The Collapse and/or human extinction is taking more than the first 5 months of 2020 to be fulfilled…
in other words, he’s frustrated that the seeeecret CDP plan, which he was easily able to figure out due to his remarkable menntal abilities (sarc), just didn’t become reality…
meanwhile, this year has become a fascinating case study for how govs/CBs/billionaires/elites will react to a crisis which seems severe enough to threattten the continued existence of bAU within the wobbling structure of IC…
IF this virus/lockdown/overreaction crisis does NOT result in The Collapse within a year or so, that will give us more information about the resilience of the networked global economy…
I feel like OFW is a front row seat to some real nuanced thoughts about what is actually happening now…
and today again another timely and well thought article by Gail…
it’s amazing that we were told way back in January that there could be vast overreactions to the virus, and the dire consequences were foretold very well…
“IF this virus/lockdown/overreaction crisis does NOT result in The Collapse within a year or so, that will give us more information about the resilience of the networked global economy…”
That’s right, people tend to get caught up in the idea that Collapse = Event. Collapse is a process not an event like waves eroding a shoreline or beach. It takes time and the Banksters are full aware of the consequences to makes sure they can keep things running.
In the end it will all fail because “that which can’t continue, won’t”. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this all drag out for months, years or maybe even decades. No one knows.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future” – Yogi Berra
We all thought this thing couldn’t keep going once the financial, banking and monetary systems collapsed back in 2008-09 and here we are. Things are still chugging along because those pulling the strings have more tricks up their sleeves.
The length of time things have kept going has surprised me. I was also very surprised by the shutdown response to COVID-19, in many parts of the world.
just over 300 years ago, an accident of geology, geography and poltical intent set the world on a course of division that would eventually tear it apart.
The industrial revolution gave wealth to a minority of the world’s people, and in so doing denied it to everyone else.
Now ‘everyone else’ is suddenly realising they are never going to get their share of what the world provided to that minority, and are understandably annoyed about it.
The ‘black lives matter’ crisis directly links in to that, because the industrial revolution made the American nation (and other industrial nations) possible, and black slaves were shipped in as an energy resource. They were part of a trading triangle between Europe Africa and America. That is the legacy we all have to live with. And what we are in denial of.
The ‘white race’ got there first, and doesnt intend to share the winnings
The white race was and is determined to hang on to a depleting resource system, while the coloured races want their share. All the talk about this or that commercial system (airlines or shipping say) collapsing is just a side issue.
Ever watch the sequence on the ‘Titanic’ movie where the third class passengers suddenly break out on deck and find the lifeboats gone?
that is what you are seeing now. White folks grabbed the good life for themselves, while they could
Police suppression of black rights is the same as the crew keeping third class passengers below decks. The third class passengers, (who were in the majority) have suddenly figured out there’s no way off the ship for them. The white race has taken everything.
difference is of course that everyone is going to sink together this time.
Norman, you have got it entirely backwards: the Industrial Revolution meant there was less need for the conventional slavery system that had been operating for millennia without much prior pearl-clutching over it. Also, the Industrial Revolution was not some deus ex machina that “gave” people things… Europeans worked hard mentally and physically to build what they thought were improvements. Indeed, generally speaking their improvements raised the standard of living for billions across hundreds of years!
You’ve got it wrong about the other stuff, too, I am sorry to say.
Tell the 10 million who died in the Belgian Congo all about your hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_II_of_Belgium
Perhaps you could be more specific about all the other things Norman has got wrong.
His ‘End of More’ seemed a pretty good summary of the overall situation. Have you read it?
David, yes, I have read Norman’s book. “Man’s inhumanity to man” is still not a product particular to the Industrial empire, to my mind, as opposed to any other. I’m thinking more along the lines of the 40-50% of humans who wouldn’t be here without the Haber-Bosch process, for example, or the populations which have exploded because of access to clean water and other disease controls. Many people are happy to upgrade to a concrete-block house from a mud hut, and they seem to enjoy having electricity now and then. For those billions, IndCiv has been a good thing.
ultimately, we created the slide to our collapse when we decided that the planet was ‘property’ to be divided up, bought and sold.
lots of seemingly unconnected side issues to that hypothesis, but nevertheless they all seem to lead back to that
if you enclose space, you need someone to guard it and rule over it, and count it—they can only be supported on the excess of those producing from it. So the production of ‘excess’ becomes critical.
In bad years, there isn’t enough excess to support a top heavy population.
That leads to the next stage:
Where no one is content, because your neighbour’s parcel of property is producing more than yours, so you invent a god to tell you that it belongs to you anyway, so you go to war over it, thereby destroying both.
But in the meantime we beget more of us, cramming ourselves closer and closer together in proximity to animals, and we exchange diseases.
We find cures for most of those diseases, but that just allows more of us to survive.
Which takes us to the endgame, where instead of minor ‘enclosures’ in expansion /collapse difficulties, we have entire continents facing the same problem.
But the solution to the ‘problem’ is the same as when we started, expansion and appropriation from weaker, ‘lesser’ people. But on a global scale.
My ‘western’ wealth enables me to buy (appropriate) avocados from Bolivia, or beans from Kenya. highly water intensive products from nations in water stress. A few get wealthly, most go short of water. Who is more important? The concept is idiotic.
But it isn’t just in faraway places.
Deprivation is everywhere, because ‘owning the planet’ has created colossal disparities and unpleasant social legacies.
The slave trade left a permanent mess in the USA and elsewhere (slaves represent expropriation of resources from one place to produce excess somewhere else)
It was never the intentiom, in the 17/1800s that slaves should be free and demanding the same as their owners.
Now they are, and finding that that wealth is now in the hands of a privileged minority who intend to keep it. (This applies equally to poor whites too btw) But the planet can’t grow any more. I’m not ‘wealthy’ but I count myself in the priveleged minority. I own my bit of planet.
That wealth is based on infinite growth on a finite planet. Something that politicians gods and economists tell us is perfectly possible,
This worth a listen, on BBC world service:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3cszbxb
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Norman, everyone seems to want to find a culprit, and a moment in time before our fate was sealed. It’s a matter of religious faith even among most atheists that humans once existed in a “pre-lapsarian” state. Some people say it was the development of agriculture, some people go as far back as our control of fire (I think Gail has mentioned this as a vehicle to access higher nutrition). If I had to come up with something, I might choose language, a technology which allows us to plan together in the abstract.
But I don’t really think there is such a particular culprit, nor was our fate ever *not* sealed. The fate of humans will be to go extinct, as has been the fate of 99.9% of all species which no longer could maintain themselves in a changing ecological context, to which they may or may not have contributed.
What you call “ownership” in human terms is just an expression of territoriality in which (I will arrogantly aver without relying on any sort of particular scholarly reference) all vertebrate species engage. I might have to say all living species bar none: I have a butternut tree with a murderous antipathy towards anything I might choose to plant nearby. If you cannot maintain territory for yourself, you will die, hence there is a strong incentive to maintain territory. I don’t see how this has become mysterious to the modern mind.
Rather than point to ownership as some kind of original sin, codification of ownership (even with its inherent degrees of unfairness and corruption) is exactly what allows for civilization and actually a more peaceful day-to-day experience than that which exists outside of civilization (eg. in areas where ownership is temporary because theft and looting and robbery are normative). Since civilizations have risen and fallen in various parts of the world, they are a human feature just as termite mounds came to be a feature of termites.
I think you’ll find that ‘ownership’ in human terms is unique to our species, at least in a modern context.
I ‘own’ my bit of planet because I exchanged my energy output for cash tokens, then used those cash tokens to pay the previous owner for what I now own
I did not have to engage in mortal combat with him for possession of it, slaughter his offspring and take possession of his womenfolk
Male animals of many types, such as dogs, mark of pieces of land that they “own” with their urine. According to Craig Dilworth in the book, Too Smart for Our Own Good, this seems to be a way of preventing overpopulation. The amount of land marked off is far greater than the individual animal and its “family” would need for hunting prey.
I would point out that ownership allows “debt.” Indirectly, it allows the owner of debt some sort of claim on future output, to repay that debt. Debt also permits construction of structures, such as homes and factories, to be paid for over the lifetime of the structures. Thus, individual ownership enables growth.
Controlling property using a lease is in some ways like ownership. The frequent payment is then built in having the lease. The leaseholder can count on having the property or automobile or tool.
When there is no individual ownership, as in Cuba, it becomes difficult to build new businesses or new buildings, because of the inability to get loans for building new structures.
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No species does not strive to “expan[d] and appropriat[e] from weaker, lesser” individuals. If they did, they would no longer be viable. You can find this distasteful, but it’s just how the game works. In fact, the civilizing game has worked so well that you don’t even seem to be aware of the extent it has screened you from certain realities.
I find it is people with the most “privilege” who seem to think territoriality is bad, and that giving up territory is No Big Deal (as long as it is others doing so). Have you put your money where your mouth is, Norman, and invited a few young Somalis to take up residence chez vous? If not, why not? I’m sure there’s only a 5% chance or so of them murdering you in your sleep.. that’s not much when you think about it.
I started listening to your BBC talk show, but I just couldn’t make it very far. What the author sees as altruism I see as selfish: we do “good” things for others because we want to be treated well in return, and also to be thought of as good. It works out well, mostly, because it helps hold society together. But wait! Norman, it’s this very vexatious society-holding-together thing that’s facilitating population growth and increased energy and resource throughput!
Why must people be good? Why must people be bad? What if they are neither good nor bad.. they just “are”? Gail has stated we are dissipative structures, a concept I have come across elsewhere as well. She has talked about hurricanes as dissipative structures. Are hurricanes good or bad? Do they bear moral weight?
Moral agency is a purely human construct which we have evolved to keep each other in line and working together more smoothly. We are, by and large, in denial of our true nature, which is at any rate ephemeral and ultimately of no import. We are not in control of ourselves, never were, and never will be.
/////No species does not strive to “expan[d] and appropriat[e] from weaker, lesser” individuals. If they did, they would no longer be viable./////
Not exactly sure of what you are trying to say there Lidia. Odd construction which doesn’t seem to be a typo.
There also seems to be an anger there which I can’t quite fathom. A rage about life in general maybe, directed at whatever displeases you personally.
We all have that problem. I don’t vent it here.
Having my own bit of planet is just a statement of fact, not a cause for universal resentment. I’ve made it clear in other comments that I think that one of the prime causes of our problem is ‘owning the planet’ I’m not going to wrack myself with guilt over it.
I make no excuses for following the universal line 50 years ago.
Seems to me that extracting from weaker lesser nations/people is exactly what humankind has done, and as a result, we as a species are looking less and less viable.
We find it impossible to accept that we an not supreme beings, and are dependent on the lowliest forms of life for our survival
I agree. TO me, it seems as though “good” is to a significant extent “following the rules that governments demand.” If they are demanding a one-child family, a person will comply with this. If they are demanding that you only park on one side of the street, you will comply with this. Governments can demand that parents support their children. In theory, they could also demand the reverse: Parents over a certain age (say, 65 or 75) are to be supported by their children.
oops, not sure why this first part did not go through..
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Norman, everyone seems to want to find a culprit, and a moment in time before our fate was sealed. It’s a matter of religious faith even among most atheists that humans once existed in a “pre-lapsarian” state. Some people say it was the development of agriculture, some people go as far back as our control of fire (I think Gail has mentioned this as a vehicle to access higher nutrition). If I had to come up with something, I might choose language, a technology which allows us to plan together in the abstract.
But I don’t really think there is such a particular culprit, nor was our fate ever *not* sealed. The fate of humans will be to go extinct, as has been the fate of 99.9% of all species which no longer could maintain themselves in a changing ecological context, to which they may or may not have contributed.
What you call “ownership” in human terms is just an expression of territoriality in which (I will arrogantly aver without relying on any sort of particular scholarly reference) all vertebrate species engage. I might have to say all living species bar none: I have a butternut tree with a murderous antipathy towards anything I might choose to plant nearby. If you cannot maintain territory for yourself, you will die, hence there is a strong incentive to maintain territory.
Rather than point to ownership as some kind of original sin, codification of ownership (even with degrees of unfairness and corruption) is exactly what allows for civilization and actually a more peaceful day-to-day experience than that which exists outside of civilization (eg. in areas where ownership is temporary because theft and looting and robbery are normative). Since civilizations have risen and fallen in various parts of the world, they are a human feature just as termite mounds came to be a feature of termites.
Norman, you wrote, “…the solution to the ‘problem’ is the same as when we started, expansion and appropriation from weaker, ‘lesser’ people.” I’ll edit my initially-inelegant response to read, “There is no form of life which does not expand and appropriate from weaker and lesser exemplars.” Not sure why you find it a difficult concept to digest, grammar notwithstanding.
You put ‘lesser’ in quotes. There is always a ‘lesser’ depending on context. Self-abnegating Swedes who kneel in front of violent Afghans and moan when their ass-rapists risk being deported are ‘lesser’ in the eyes of the Afghan, certainly. Such Swedes will be chewed up and spit out. Their previous “success” was only relative, and highly contextual; their civility, education, and self-domestication quickly went from being an asset to a liability once global over-population and The Limits to Growth exerted the slightest pressure.
I watched a friend’s chickens one day, and the lowest on the pecking order just lay there in the dirt being pecked mercilessly. I wondered why it did not try to fight back, or at least run away. Those are the goodwhites today—lowest on the pecking order. Kneeling FBI agents and police world-wide send a message of Islam/Submission. I think it is fascinating. It may be a sub-conscious understanding on their part that Civilization will not hold—that they are not strong enough to maintain it—and “barbarism” will become the “new normal”. I doubt we will have the luxury of “high-trust” societies going forward (why the Swedes chose to accelerate this process on their territory, I have no idea.. maybe they are “self-aborting” the way a defective fetus cannot often be brought along by its host mother).
I’m actually not angry at all. People sometimes seem to think that declarative statements which challenge them imply anger, but that’s not always the case. What I talk about seems like a given to me, as it seems like a given that if one sets one’s sights on trying to change human nature or any natural force, one is bound to become disappointed and angry. To my mind, it’s as pointless and absurd to rail against hard-wired human survival instincts as it is to rail against masturbation. It becomes a pious crusade to steer people towards angelic behavior that they were never cut out for, and any secular religionist will bang xir head on that wall until xe passes away.
Re: ownership, you write “I did not have to engage in mortal combat with him for possession of it, slaughter his offspring and take possession of his womenfolk”.
Exactly! Those are the “benefits” of Civilization! Including the “cash tokens” and the whole lot. The State does the expropriating, so you don’t have to! But the paradox is that Civilization has other costs which we will eventual be unable to bear going forward under these circumstances.
I live within the confines of western civilisation because I do not have the means or incllination to step outside it
neither, i imagine do you
I watch with amusement the arctic survivalists on TV–living beyond civilisation. Somehow they all have bullets and IC engines, regular flights in and out.
For what little meat I eat, i pay someone else to do the hunting and gathering for me, just as my taxes pay policemen and doctors to look after me should I need them. Luckily I don’t
There is little I can do about that state of affairs
We are hard wired into the situation which we currently exist. Perhaps the ultimate survivors will be the bushmen of the Kalahari or somewhere
Gail, yes debt is indeed a fascinating technology!! If one takes on board the MPP/MEPP (Maximum Power Priniciple/Maximum EmPower Principle).. it’s as though “we” “needed” to develop a way to consume *more* than could be consumed at a normal daily pace.
I’ve referenced this quote elsewhere in the past, but it always sticks with me. It’s from back during the 2007-8 financial crisis, when people were trying to figure out what was going on. Below is an old e-mail I wrote to a friend at the time.
====================
In an interview, a hedge-fund manager admitted being subject to a seemingly supernatural process: http://www.nplusonemag.com/interview-hedge-fund-manager
////////////
HFM: …the traditional way to think about financing is “OK, I find an investment opportunity, that on its face, I think, is a good opportunity. I want to deploy capital on that opportunity. Now I go look for funding. So I think that making mortgage loans is a good investment, so I will make mortgage loans. Then I will seek to fund those, to fund that activity, by perhaps issuing CDO paper, issuing the triple-A, double-A, A, and down the chain.” But what happened is, you had the creation of so many vehicles designed to buy that paper, the triple-A, the double-A, all the CDO paper… that the dynamic flipped around. It was almost as if the demand for that paper created the mortgages.
n+1: Created the loans?
HFM: Called forth the loans… it got even more extended in the sense that vehicles were set up that had a mandate to kind of robotically buy that paper and fund themselves through issuing paper in the market.
So what happened is this machine—let’s call it, it’s a big machine that wanted to gobble up, you know, rated paper—needed to be fed. So there were people who could make a lot of money feeding the machine, and they were like, you know, “We need to keep originating mortgages, and feeding them to the machine,” and if you have a robot bid, you tend to get a bubble. Someone is hungry for paper, paper will be created
///////////////
I continued:
This is not just the exotic EFFECT of finance, this IS finance, in a nutshell. This is what happens in all modern economic transactions, although we don’t have the opportunity to see it quite so clearly.
Governments worldwide have stepped in to backstop the banks and to take on the out-of-control-exponentially-growing debt that has brought the private sector to its knees; they’ll keep loading up on their own out-of-control -exponentially-growing debt and/or keep printing money (two sides of the same coin, excuse the pun) because they can’t do anything else, short of intentionally imploding the system. But the longer it goes on, the worse the consequences.
In Europe, unelected bankers are ALREADY OFFICIALLY RUNNING THE GOVERNMENTS of Italy (kicking out a right-wing PM) and of Greece (kicking out a left-wing PM). The presidencies of GWB and Obama are equally signed with the shadows of the eminences griges from Goldman Sachs; no matter which party’s superficially-stated policies you prefer, there is only the fiction of underlying “change”, as should now be clear to all.
Beyond discarding this as a left-right issue, we must also discard it as even—to a large extent—a political issue at all. It’s larger than any country’s politics or any politics humankind has ever known. It’s certainly larger than the communist-capitalist divide (both of these systems pimped “growth” and championed the imposition of industrial labor as a human norm). It is literally a fight for the survival of humanity, nothing less.
Gail wrote: “Governments can demand that parents support their children. In theory, they could also demand the reverse: Parents over a certain age (say, 65 or 75) are to be supported by their children.”
That is already actually the law, as I understand it, in Italy.. possibly other places in Europe. Here’s a kind of garbled report on the mish-mash of systems there:
https://www.matiainstituto.net/sites/default/files/archivospdf/caregiving-contexts.pdf
“Italy and Spain include half siblings among the legally responsible, but
Spain also makes a distinction between the extent of support, that is, spouses, children
and grand-children carry a ‘heavier’ commitment than siblings and their ascendants
and descendants. Obligations extend to grand-parents also in France and some other
countries…”
Interesting! Once governments promise pensions to the elderly, children see less need to have children. So, the tax revenue that might be used to support the elderly disappears. Governments make promises, but being able to keep those promises is a different story.
Lidia Kim Gail–and others
The industrial revolution kicked off when iron was made cheap as chips. (1709-on), using coke as the heat medium
with cheap iron, ships and guns and powered machinery could be made bigger and built more efficiently and in vastly greater numbers. The accident of geology was that this happened in the northern hemisphere, England to be exact. It could have happened elsewhere. It was the global lottery if you like, Had to happen somewhere.
That’s how we carved out the world’s biggest empire. We lost it when our energy resource ran out. (Geology factor again).
The American empire was built on an energy resource. That is also fading as their energy resource runs out. (geology is a killer). The American empire will dissolve. Americans will fight to deny it, just as we Brits did.
But getting back to the 18th c, with cheap iron, and a growing empire, the drive was to make more and more money.
It was clear that machinery made money, so more machines had to be made. And purposes found for those machines. Steam engines were the prime mover because they pumped out mines and allowed more iron and coal to be dug. Cheap iron needs a purpose. Near where I live they used it as kerb edging, it was so cheap.
A typical one was the cotton mill. Take a look at one. They are full of iron.There are many other examples. The main patents for improved cotton spinning were in the mid 1700s, following the availability of cheap iron.
With multiple iron frames, cotton spinning took off, because the world needs clothes. But the more machines you build, the more cotton you need as feedstock.
But cotton was grown (among other places) in the US southern states. Where cheap manpower could be brought in as slaves and worked to death. (btw we used our own slave labour to mine the coal, children as young as 6 until 1842–well after we abolished ‘slavery’ here)
The drive was for more of everything, because ‘enough’ profit is never enough.
The ultimate feedstock for the cotton industry was slave labour. Unfortunate, but in the 17th/18th century commercial thinking was different. (or was it?) Without slave labour the cotton mills couldn’t expand fast enough to meet demand. Cotton had been spun since ancient times, but at a far slower rate. Speed = profit.
Fast forward to now, and it remains an unfortunate situation we find ourselves in. The ‘slave labour’ mentality has not left the mindset of millions of people, (white or coloured). Other races called it the caste system.
Here in UK your accent will put you in a certain ‘caste’ and create social exclusion. Same mindset.
The mental infection has passed itself down the generations, even though actual slavery has ended. We have blighted ourselves with it. ‘We’ might ‘know better’ but the attitude of individuals doesnt count for much when millions of people are rioting in anger and frustration. You can create ‘improvement programs’ but if the collective inclination works against this, there will be massive droputs from it.
Take the meaning of the word ‘denigration’—we use it freely and without thinking. But dissect it to realise what it is actually saying.
Already in the 1300s half of Britain’s consumption of joules was in the form of coal.
I can’t verify the joules consumed in 1300, I have my doubts, so I’ll need verification. Interesting point though. Coal mining was always constrained by water ingress until the invention of the steam pump—
but I’ll keep trying with the other stuff.
A fundamental component of progression of civilisation (in the sense that we currently expect it to be) is iron.
By the early 1700s, UK forests were being consumed so fast to make charcoal, (the basic heat source of ironmaking}, that another way had to be found to make it—hence coke, which was abundant and cheap
the key factor is volume
you can make a horseshoe or a sword in a 13th c blacksmiths forge, but you can’t make them in millions,
It was a point made in (I think) smil’s energy and civilzation.I remember it because it is a startling factoid. I will try to search out the ref.
@ norman
Sorry, i was wrong. I looked it up in Smil and find I misremembered. England began exporting coal to France in 1325. But coal didn’t take over from biomass as providing more than 50% of joules in England until 1620.
thanks for filling me in on that Kim.
problem with coal is the energy to weight problem when you have to transport it vast distances
that’s why they put in canals in UK and elsewhere. I imagine the coal to France thing was from the Kent coalfields.
Where I live, the foundry was only 1.5 m from the coal mine, but they built a canal to transport it.
Interesting though
‘carving out the empire’ included a great deal of pillage as well.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/06/11/british-pillage-of-india/?fbclid=IwAR03QNe7UfzAjPjJIW172Lha0z-QwIb8aNGSS0fewP3MF6mRJ1KAddMtIeA
Worth watching if you haven’t seen it
While there are interesting ties, the etymology of “denigration” doesn’t support your assertion Norman.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=denigrate
This posted way down the thread, meant to be a reply to Norman at 06:13 June 4.
it says ‘denigrate’ is to blacken
I don’t understand what you are talking about
Actually, the US has been trying since the 1960s to make integration with blacks work out and haven’t been very successful. There have been all kinds of “affirmative action” programs and all kinds of other programs. Colleges have tried to add more minorities, but too often good intentions have not worked out well. Drop out rates have been very high, when colleges have tried to admit a selected percentage of black students.
I think that the tax law has worked out badly for black couples. For people with relatively low incomes, taxes are lower if a couple simply lives together, without getting married. If the woman has one or more children, then she can file as an unmarried head of household, and this provides extra benefits. This tax situation seems to lead to a lot of single black women with children, plus men who do not feel very needed as part of a family unit.
Children growing up in single parent homes do poorly in school whatever the color of the parents. Now, we are also seeing more poor white couples who do not get married because of the tax law. Schools become filled with children who do not have very stable home situations. The mother may be trying to work two part time jobs and may not be home when children need her.
“The white race has taken everything.”
Whites have done nothing that other races haven’t done and continue to do.
South Africa was originally populated by the hunter-gatherer Bush people. About 1000 years ago the pastoral Hottentots arrived from the north and pushed them into marginal territory and took the lushest Bushmen territory for themselves.
Evil Hottentots!
Then around 1500 the first whites arrived, Portugese and later Dutch. The Dutch pastoralists took over from the Hottentots.
Evil Dutch!
Then in the early 19th century, the pastoralist Bantu tribes of Central Africa erupted into south east Africa. They pushed aside earlier groups. In the period of Shaka Zulu (1820s), the Zulu pushed side and killed 2 million people of other tribes and took their land.
Do I hear “Evil Bantu”? If not, why not?
I can tell similar stories for India pre-white, North, Central. and South America pre-white and anywhere else you like. Whites did not invent greed or selfishness. They did not invent war or slavery. Korea had slavery until 1894. A third of the population were living as serfs! Why do we never hear of this?
Whites (white civil and miltary social arrangements) did however invent a hell of a lot of other things which for better or worse changed the world and that many people around the world may be very grateful for. The Haber Bosch process, for example, without which most of the people born in the last 100 years would not have been born.
So now we arrive at the point where we have to agree that this is how humans are and there is no changing us.
An along with recognizin this we must also recognize the particular point about humans that – one way or another because it is a matter of survival – they form groups. Because it is only as part of a group that a human can survive.
Blacks and Hispanics and Muslims and other groups in the USA have already formed their groups and declared and shown their allegiances. This is accepted and even praised. It is only whites who are denied this right by people like you, the rights to freedom of association and self defense.
But as history has shown us again and again, those who do not form into groups will not survive. And certainly those fools who think that they will be welcomed as equal members of an enemy group will also not survive.
Very true, the very primitive Bushmen were marginalized and then given only inferior positions among the pastoralists who lorded it over them.
A pattern repeated all over the world as human beings developed in their power over nature and their own kind.
Personally I am very bored by race issues, and particularly being described as ‘white’, when at present I am the most delicious honey-brown and would not look out of place in North Africa!
‘At present I am the most delicious honey-brown’
Oh no, not Xabier too! The narcissism just abounds on OFW recently. Perhaps you’d like this little ditty I read on a ‘futurism’ site some years ago. It begins:
‘O to clone my own sweet self
And suck on my horn of plenty’.
Sadly I’ve forgotten how it ended, apart from the fact that the word ‘twenty’ was in there.
I have heard that within Assisted Living Centers, there is discrimination. The ones in better physical shape don’t want to associate with the ones who are less able.
I wonder if there are more people alive today of every race thanks to “white men”?
Lets face it without the steam engine, the Haber-Bosch process, penicillin there would only be less than a billion of us. All were invented or discovered by dastardly white males.
Though I could spin it that they also wrecked the planet. Bar stards.
Very good example
A female third class passenger on the Titanic had a 75% chance of survival. A male first class passenger had a 32% chance. But of course the *real* discrimination does not fit you narrative.
i was using it as a loose analogy, not a tight one
i thought that would be obvious.
I don’t see it. The energy situation was very different back in 1968, but the race riots were similar. I realize that people have been looking at the “color revolutions” of other countries in light of climate and resource availability (including water).
I would want to distinguish between the behavior of principled protesters, who are genuinely motivated by racial injustice (no new thing); anarchists, who are looking for opportunities to cause mayhem; and looters, who just want free stuff. For all I know the second and third group may be motivated, directly or indirectly, by economic conditions, but we would have to establish whether the mix is any different this time around than in earlier eras, with their different energy situations. We should probably also inquire into the motivations of police and police unions for doing what they do. Certainly their behavior is nothing new either.
PS. I vaguely recall research showing protests are more likely to occur after a population reaches a certain economic level–apparently a little success raises their expectations. Also, ethno-racial conflict is highly dependent on the proportions of the various identity groups within the larger society.
There can be two very different situations, with similar reactions.
Back in 1968, it was clear that the amount of energy available was increasing. Old ways, which had been developed to deal with a very energy constrained world, no longer were appropriate. Changes were needed.
At that time, handicapped children were not necessarily served by school systems, either. Trying to add more diverse populations to the schools required considerable “complexity.” More administration was required. More buses were required. Teachers no longer knew the parents of children in the school, making discipline more of a problem. Parents weren’t necessarily happy. Often, parents moved to the suburbs to avoid the changes.
The killing of Martin Luther King was (rightfully) very upsetting to many.
But trying to make this transition has been a nightmare.
It’s a game that is getting harder to win. Fewer middle class chairs on the Titanic world economy, but still I think the game will just keep going even as it gets really difficult for more people. Think of life like a version of a dream you have in your sleep in which you simply accept situations as they change. Oh sure, people will get riled up from time to time, but most of the time they’ll simply take whatever they can get. There’s plenty of resources and energy to play the game a lot longer in my opinion, and even if many notice the decline they’ll simply adjust to it. Why? Because there is no other game. Apparently it doesn’t just collapse in one fell swoop. It either evolves or devolves or as it was said in Shawshank Redemption, “Get busy living or get busy dying.”
It is interesting to contemplate that changes in social behavior over broad periods of time (Multiyear? decades?) might be reduced down to a single physical variable (or two) as the ultimate driver of causation of those social behaviors. Gail has made a strong case for this in other posts. Maybe the case is made here but I am wary. The current outbreak of protests and violence in the U.S. seems best explained social factors of intermediate and higher levels of explanation, or at least those factors must be included in a full understanding.
For example: The lack of social status, especially for some significant percent of minority males, must account for some significant portion of the violent behavior. (I don’t know, but you may need to be a human male to fully and intuitively grasp the deep need for social status and the feeling of envy towards other men.) The tendency towards racism, or at least tribalism, in human beings in general. Differing social norms among social ethnic groups fueling the perceptions of one tribe towards another. And of course, actual racism itself.
The is a lot of overwrought commentary going on in the mainstream about what the current unrest means for the U.S. and globally. So here is my own over-reach. As we have begun the energy descent in a “full” world, the very idea of the what the nation state of the United States is beginning to come under question. The idea that all men were created equal was a statement made by men of European descent to other men of European descent. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness were conceived of when the U.S. was a vast and open frontier to be plundered. (True in part because European diseases wiped out the majority of the indigenous people). Can we have a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-value country of 325+million people as prosperity declines? If yes, is it governable by representative democracy? I suspect we are going to find out the answers in the near future. I hope we do try to find a way to live together mostly peacefully, but history says it will be difficult. Worth giving it a try though.
Shawn,
Thank you, realistic and yet “Worth giving it a try though.” Of course it is worth it, what do you have to lose?
Dennis L.
“Can we have a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-value country of 325+million people as prosperity declines? If yes, is it governable by representative democracy? I suspect we are going to find out the answers in the near future. I hope we do try to find a way to live together mostly peacefully, but history says it will be difficult. Worth giving it a try though.”
But we already know that it is NOT “worth giving it a try” because we have already tried for 70 years now and seen nothing but destruction.
From the general discussion that one reads in the media, one would expect that what we are seing in the USA today is bread riots by starving and imnpoverished people, but black communities in the USA are better looked after than kings of old: they live in so called “ghettoes” where people live in charming single family homes or well-maintained units, where the gutters are painted and the lawns are trimmed by government-paid workers and the car parks are full of new SUVs, as children – who are well dressed and may have smart phones – they are fed breakfast lunch and dinner at schools, they get cheap housing and numerous subsidies. A vast number of State and Federal jobs and business opportunities can be accessed only by blacks. There is an endless news and entertainment media propaganda that is intended to build up the myth of black success and achievement. The list of benefits and pro-black policies is almost endless.
But what have we got out of all of that largesse, that share of the economy’s “energy”?
Dysfunction, family destruction, drug addiction, crime, separatism-when-it-convenient….blacks have a rate of violent crime that is THREE TIMES that of whites! And now nationwide riots based on the idea that they are discriminated AGAINST!
The disparities in behaviors between different communities cannot be explained by the old “poverty causes crime” argument. And the days of continuing to try, like Knut on the beachfront, are gone. The last 70 years has overwhelmingly disproven that.
Today they do not have less than ever. They have MORE! And yet violence is stil the result. This is the part of the whole discussion that nobody seems able (or willing) to explain.
“…we have already tried for 70 years now and seen nothing but destruction.”
*Tiny* generalisation there, Kim, but then that is the difference between someone with an axe to grind and someone interested in offering an objective analysis.
I like the part about the “shiny clean” ghetto houses, too!
Black people love in exactly the same quality of housing that whites do.
Please explain to me how the black family has not been destroyed since the 1950s. Please explain to me how forced integration of schools has not destroyed educational quality for non-blacks in the usa.
Where is the (erroneous) generalization in these statements? These are quite simply facts. And I could add more the the litany of *objective* destruction.
But of course these are facts told the kind that many people are deeply afraid of admitting.
I would be more interested to know the details of your personal journey than to hear more of your diatribes, Kim.
You are working hard to seem reasonable, in the literal sense, but clearly you have a visceral dislike of black people (and gays, apparently).
I am sincerely curious to know how this dislike originated. Also, was your worldview instrumental in your move to Indonesia or is that unrelated?
Kim is exactly right. Obviously you have never resided near black people.
Data from 2016, despite only being 12% of the population, blacks committed 52% of all murders.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/table-21/#overview
We are regressing due to importing and appeasing these people.
https://i.redd.it/vktl8n8epc641.png
It is a deliberate ploy to destroy society.
“Obviously you have never resided near black people.”
Funnily enough I grew up in Holland Park and the house next door was for a few years a grace and favour property owned by the Nigerian embassy.
On one occasion some Nigerian children who were staying there informed me over the fence that if our (free range) cats entered their garden again they would kill them. Very rude!
You’ll be glad to hear our cats remained unscathed.
Holland Park???
I hope the residents of Islay realise that such a posh person is living in their midst
Norman, I’m not all that plummy. I lived there from the 70’s to the 90’s back when there were still some English families and a sense of community, and property values weren’t akin to lottery wins.
I am hopelessly priced out of The Royal Borough these days.
Forgive me Harry
My main concern was that , in times of privation, the locals might see a rich Englishman just as haggis filling.
An excellent analysis, Gail!
“When Americans think of U.S. intelligence officials, they may imagine spycraft, surveillance, and covert espionage, but intelligence agencies are also filled with analysists whose job entails monitoring developments around the world, looking for patterns and potential threats.
“And as the Washington Post reports, some of those analysts are now feeling a sense of dread, not because of events unfolding abroad, but because of developments in their own country.
“The scenes have been disturbingly familiar to CIA analysts accustomed to monitoring scenes of societal unraveling abroad…”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/intelligence-analysts-unnerved-by-latest-trends-in-us/ar-BB14YMaC?ocid=sf
I am afraid that is how it is, or perhaps, that is the way it will be.
This is all part of a broader pattern. There is not really any way we can fix things, unfortunately, as far as I can see.
It is interesting that our super funded spy and intelligence agencies, who can place undercover agents in any white patriot militia “wargame playing/pretend army” group to get evidence to indict them, does not seem to have a single clue as to who and what is behind much of the “organization” that has been observed in many cities with rioting. When it comes to Antifa, or whatever, they seem to not even be aware of the terrorist planning activities. So on the one hand, they are everywhere, on the other they are absent.
Mighty interesting.
Of course CIA wasn’t created to deal with commies everywhere. Apparently they love commies NOW. HUmmm. Maybe CIA is some steps ahead, as usually, dont you think?
Gail, well done. You are just about the only popular blogger who looks at our current problems with a systems lens. I am sick of various pundits and media heads looking at what;s going on and saying it’s a racial problem ( PBS/NPR Huffington). Others see it as a economic problem, a federal reserve problem, a political problem. You seem to see it as all of these and more which it is: An overpopulation problem. a declining resources problem, a pollution problem. an inequality problem . But almost no one sees it as an energy problem which underlies almost all of the other problems.Not to mention a LTG problem which you recently resurrected in a classic blog post. Thank you for seeing this and trying to inform us. You have also pointed out in many posts the cyclical aspects which it does seem to be.. IT is hard to avoid a cyclical view of history and Howe’s Book on the 4th Turning now more than 20 years old really nailed it IMO but even he missed the energy aspect of it all almost completely. I hope he gets it eventually. I am afraid that there is minimal hope for a reboot of society without getting trampled by the 4 horsemen of the Apocalypse . It may take wars and pestilence and famine to allow us to shed the elites, inequality and economic deadwood but it does seem we are heading in that direction at a good clip. I hope sane and lonely voices like yours will still be here a year from now.
Thanks for your vote of confidence. It is amazing how many people can write about current events, and miss the role energy plays.
The same people miss the point that to burn as much carbon as climate change models assume is possible, the people in India and Africa would need to all purchase cars and get air conditioning. Coal from under the North Sea would be shipped to those areas, to help them in making this change.
They miss the role energy plays because they think we’ve always had enough energy and always will. It’s literally unthinkable to even some of the smartest people on the planet that we’re headed for a lower-energy future with no flying cars or Wal-Marts in every town.
There is a huge amount of denial among public figures that there could ever be a problem. People in academia know that if they want articles published, they can’t write anything that is too gloomy, or it will never pass peer review. “Sustainability” seems to be the most popular topic today.
That is not necessary. Australia is happy to supply the coal for India
http://statedevelopment.qld.gov.au/coordinator-general/assessments-and-approvals/coordinated-projects/completed-projects/carmichael-coal-mine-and-rail-project.html
Australia has a Prime Minister who brings a lump of coal to Parliament.
“happy to supply” but at what price? This seems to be the penultimate question. Can India afford the lowest price Australia is willing to sell the coal for? Can Australia survive on the lowest price India is willing to pay? Assuming they can find a price that works for both, does this include the full system costs of pollution and its effects, including the medical costs for treating people whom suffer from the after effects of dealing with the by products of burning/processing the coal?
It seems it is the full system/systemic costs in a fully realized world model that is what many are missing, one of the many things I have learned from this website over the years(and am very thankful for, I started reading this site in detail to try and find a flaw and or explanation of peak oil, what I found, was not what I was looking for but so far has not been debunked). They just assume, like when we ran low on whale oil, another energy supply will appear. It did before! Science and technology will save the day, because we went to the moon and computers got faster and cheaper at the same time, somehow this will also be the case with energy. They say batteries are more efficient today, not saying that they cost almost twice as much as just a few years ago, and that these minor % increases are not sustainable) They assume energy costs can rise to the level needed to support itself or support the transition to a new energy source. I was told, if it takes $300 a barrel to get oil out of the ground, that is what we will do, and we will use that “profit” from $300 a barrel, to figure out the “next” energy system. I was told super high energy prices was the “sign” we are running out of oil, not low energy prices, in fact low oil prices are great! People have more money to spend on other things, the oil companies can make a profit at $5, their marketing person told me that, why don’t you believe them! We will convert all our gas/diesel engines to propane/LNG (I had an otherwise very intelligent person tell me this, when I asked if they did the math to see how long that would take, how much it would cost, and if it would even work for very large engines-as we had this discussion in front of a medium sized piece of earth moving equipment as I explained the propane tank might need to be the same size as the backhoe because of energy density and be a near impossible pain to fill in some situations- I was told, we are smart, we will figure out). They truly did not understand the size and scope and cost of the situation, and wrongly assumed because in the past we dealt successfully with changing energy system (whale oil, coal, wood) we will do the same here. They were not worried if they could not articulate a solution, someone would figure it out, and anyway, this is all 50/100 years in the future, why worry about it now?
And the kicker is, let us just say, an infinite supply of affordable coal(or other energy) somehow was available, we would just run into other limits. The fact that we seem to be running into many issues at the same time, limits on energy, resources, water, food, topsoil, phosphates, helium, to name a few, seems like the perfect storm. If it was just one, or two, perhaps we could muddle through or some how McGyver a solution. But just like when the piles of bricks seemed to magically appear during the protests/riots, all these resource limits and energy issues appearing at the same time or nearly in the same time frame has me wondering if this all is not some sort of Alien Human Farm simulation. They take a huge pile of “humans” setup these “conditions” and … see what happens? Perhaps different areas or different genes will behave differently? Of course there seems no way to prove/disprove the simulation theory, but if true, it would surely seem to be poetic justice I would pontificate based on our collective historic and present behavior.
My current guess is for a slow/fast decline, slow at first, then speeding up, perhaps faster and faster, until it is near instant?(at least in geologic time frames). So the big question for me regarding this is, is this initial “slow” collapse months, years, decades in the making? Or have we already lived through most of that and we are nearing the faster sections? It does seem like we have a certain amount of inertia, and as many have pointed out, we still have many decades perhaps of usable resources, if the cost conditions can be met. But I am not all that certain we are able/willing to transition to a command economy to extract those last economically extract-able resources, if that indeed would be what would be required for that level of activity. I do almost feel that if this is a simulation, we are getting to the best part shortly, and it would be a shame for that to be over too fast. So I think for this and other reasons, a few years, maybe a half decade or so, of slow decline, stair step or curved, as different parts of the global, local economic system(s) fail and we attempt to repair/replace them to various degrees of affect. Add in the current anti-vaxxer mentality and soon to be perhaps less hygienic living situations, it seems we are creating a ripe petri dish for one(all?) of the 4 horsemen to have a field day. In a few years, could the real Black plague make a comeback? Stay tuned and find out, perhaps…
It seems the next weeks/months will bring a host of additional challenges both emotionally and economically and physically. Hurricanes, fires, then perhaps (more) epic rainfall and flooding if the lack of global dimming causes some (more) minor warming which causes increased atmospheric water amount/density. And at the rate we are going, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and meteorite impacts would not surprise me in the least. At the same time we will be having more and more corporate bonds, stock dividends and loans due. Usually they just borrow a few more million/billion/trillion and kick the can down the road a bit more. Will the derivative pool allow this to continue, let alone the banks and governments. Do we reach a point where we run out of debt and the whole house of cards comes tumbling down? My guess is if that does happen a new system might emerge from the ashes, for a while at least, but it will not be very healthy, more like a punch drunk prize fighter at the end of their rope, hoping to get a few more punches in at least before they go down for the count.
People might be realizing, in their own way, this is the end, or at least its beginning. Last May set the global world record for most firearm checks in the US. Whatever else does or does not happen, between that and the insta hyper media access, it seems we have the circus part of ancient Rome covered. The biggest question then seems, how long will the bread last?
Learn to swim, indeed…
You make some very good points!
A big issue is the price that India can afford to pay for coal. India seems to have had a very major shutdown. It was not doing very well before the shutdown took place. Its price is likely quite low.
Also, the next few months will bring a lot of challenges. In the US, the $1,200 checks paid to adults will have been spent. In July, the $600 supplemental unemployment will run out. Besides all of the things you mention, plus, at some point, a second round of COVID-19.
But it IS a racial problem. If you are white, you are being warned again and again that you are the enemy. Do you think that they are kidding?
When people tell you that they hate you and want to kill you and take everything you have, it would be prudent to take them at their word.
Observing what the human condition is capable of is fascinating.
It appears that the “taking the knee” in public is now going to be required to prove you are not a racist and saying “black lives matter” will be required of everyone in public. Saying “all lives matter” will be forbidden.
If this were to become the norm at all public events (think of pro sports events where all player, coaches and officials AND spectators) first selected players take the knee, perhaps raise a fist, perhaps shout “black lives matter”. Then all players are required to (or be publicly shamed , then banned from the sport). Officials will be next, then all spectators are required to bend the knee, perhaps even shout black lives matter…or be publicly (even violently) forced to…it would tend to remind one of another past notorious regime where salutes and verbal pronouncements of loyalty were required.
Discussion about it was forbidden.
Of course there is presently no law to require these things. They will be, and are being enforced in the public sphere of social media and media, and then with violence if needed. It could get to be like the Red Guards going around and enforcing “correct thinking”. Think Obama’s brown shirt army.
This is all possible, some of it even probable at this point.
After the public displays of subservience are required and enforced, laws will be passed requiring private subservience. They will press their present advantage to appropriate more wealth.
I think the end result will be more civil strife…and breakdown in a lawful order.
The shame of police brutality is that the bad apples seem to flourish with the protection of the badge, and the internally enforced silence within the department. No-knock warrants where a goon squad armed to the teeth comes in and ends up killing innocent people. This abuse of power needs to stop for all of us.
All my thoughts are for equality, and peace for all.
There are a few other online analysts who basically discuss the same problems. Such as Richard Heinberg and Kurt Cobb.
Richard Heinberg definitely writes for more of a “sustainability” crowd. With a name like “Post Carbon Institute” for the group he works for, it is clear whose “side” the PCI is on. It depends on contributions from “green” organizations. Most of its income comes from “Foundation and Community Grants.” So his writing has a certain bias to it, IMO. This is a link to a recent financial statement. https://www.postcarbon.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2018-Financial-Statements-PCI-FINAL.pdf
Allow me to cast my vote alongside yours. Gail is a rare and welcome voice of reason, as well as a good systems thinker.
Thank’s for another excellent report Gail. There’s no way to put the evil genie back into the bottle. It’s time to accept reality. IMHO all we can do is try to stay as independent from the collapse as possible. Try to have solar panels for energy, food, water, heat, medicine etc so you can last as long as possible, and stay mentally and physically healthy. The prepared will survive.
Prepper Will not survive too. But i Will try waiting God. Great tribulation Will be a short periodo of time . Otheewise no One meat of human Will survive
Hi Marco. Preppers will fair a lot better than non-preppers when the fireworks get started.
So who do you think the Antichrist is? Trump has the morals for it, but surely the devil can do better.
I have a good friend who is a Jehovah Witness and he thinks, “THIS IS IT” and I told him don’t be so sure. Humans are a gnat on an Elephants ass. In the grand scheme of things we will all be in the grave before things turn out the way we want them or expect them to be.
We’ve a fairly big vegetable garden here, a few cattle and sheep and an orchard. We also have enough firewood to supply us till the end of the century. As soon as the collapse hits, a furious mob will come storming out of the nearest town to steal everything we’ve got.
Neil, you are exactly right.
I lived on 20 acres with orchards, gardens and livestock.
It has crossed my mind.
Peasants, their lands, flocks and crops, are just one big sitting target – which is why knights once had their function of course, even if they were , in the economic sense, exploitative.
Just as the villagers in Nigeria at the moment are being raided, kidnapped and murdered by bandits who lurk in the forests.
The government (to which no doubt they pay taxes) fails to protect them – they have no knight to watch over them – and so they suffer in isolation.
Thankfully they do have some access to weapons and are trying to fight back.
The raiders and murderers in Nigeria (my former home) are not bandits. They are Boko Haram, and are being armed and funded by foreign powers, No prizes for guessing who.
I’m not well informed about this. I’m guessing Saudi Arabia?
This is what Fast Eddy has always said, but I wonder whether it is a certainty. In the US at least, rural people are much more heavily armed than urban people. Would the raiders succeed in defeating the rural defenders? By the time urban people get hungry enough to think about raiding rural areas, will they have enough strength (or fuel for vehicles) to do so? And would they know what to do with what they found, as in how to grow and harvest crops, raise and butcher livestock, and cook food? Even the largest garden wouldn’t feed many people for very long — the raiders would probably die before they figured out how to make a living from the land. As I look around rural areas, few farmers seem able to support themselves, even now when fossil fuels are available. Not many farmers grow their own gardens any more or have their own livestock (if they grow monocultures of crops) or grow many staple crops (if they raise livestock). Most are just as dependent on complex supply chains to feed themselves as many urban people. Those of you who have large and diverse food producing gardens/farms might be rare and fairly unknown to most around you. I suspect raiders would be more focused on stockpiles of harvested food — grain silos, slaughterhouses/meat processing plants, and warehouses of produce. And when those run out, who knows? Maybe just death.
I believe armed and united and somewhat isolated rural communities could survive die-off. But how coul they survive nuclear apocalyse? Hardly Thanks to our nuclear madness, end of IC means extinction level event.
A just as most important requirement is to have numbers. Individuals and small groups are easy targets.
Right, I am afraid! It probably helps to have an easily defensible location, and part of the group assigned specifically to defense.
Actually, I think taking advantage of what time one has available is as important as anything else. We don’t know what the future will bring. The temptation is always to “prepare for the last war.”
I encounter [on ZOOM] some people who don’t want to leave their homes. They are concerned that a coronavirus will find them and kill them if they go anywhere. They spend hours washing down groceries that they have delivered to their homes. They don’t want to visit their grandchildren except on ZOOM. What kind of life is this?
Prepping is for some, but not others. Most people don’t have the available land for prepping. Preppers also need skills, and necessary supplies, such as seeds and a shovel.
Regarding “solar panels for energy,” figure out what kind of energy you really need. Heat for winter? Energy to keep an irrigation pump running? Lights at night? Liquid fuel for mechanical devices? Then work on what you need. Don’t count on the system providing anything. If you plan to have electricity for devices with motors, you likely need solar panels, batteries, and an inverter. You may need to oversize the panels, and buy lots of batteries, if you want electricity when it is cloudy. Don’t count on much solar electricity in winter.
We don’t know whether we truly are approaching end times, or whether one or another prophecy will be fulfilled. This is truly a strange time.
“Prepping is for some, but not others. Most people don’t have the available land for prepping.”
You don’t really need room to prep, Gail… just a closet or some space under the bed for freeze-dried foods and a bug-out bag. Or are you conflating prepping and “sustainable living” (i.e. permaculture practices)?
I think many who never grew up on a farm start as peppers (i.e. buying supplies), but eventually recognize the need to have some control over the production of necessities (e.g. food, water, power).
Cheers,
-GBV
Whoops, that wasn’t supposed to be all italicized…
😐
This is why I can’t understand the frequent references to normal times–like men having stuff in order to attract mates, as one example.
I sense that this is a global “time out” period, when many of the “rules:” can be modified. I see it somewhat like how we have different layers of brain, starting with the so called lizard brain. Other more complex brains overlay it, but the lizard brain remains. So why wouldn’t all the normal patterns of human behavior, like for mating, not be able to remain and yet be bypassed by a currently forming “new brain?”
Surgisphere, whose employees appear to include a sci-fi writer and adult content model, provided database behind Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine hydroxychloroquine studies
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/03/covid-19-surgisphere-who-world-health-organization-hydroxychloroquine
(don’t know if the Guardian is too progressive of a news source here)
More info on the adult content model please
Surgisphere does not exist. It is a phantom, a shell company whose purpose is to fabricate “science” for big pharma. Almost every claim in its report has been discredited: it did not gather data from the places it claimed; it did not analyse the data with open source, peer reviewed algorithms, and it published its results in a journal with a history of publishing falsehoods. Its editor has a track record of fabricating hoaxes for political reasons, including the infamous 1998 anti vaccine paper, which he retracted only after 12 years of criticism when forced to do so by the General Medical Council.
Scarce energy is not the only reason for unaffordability. There is a long line of expenses after commodities that go into finished goods. In our present arrangements, complexity greatly adds to those expenses including huge nonessential sectors like advertising and credit cards. There is also the predatory oligarchic class to support. Our value system which glorifies material wealth is optional. We could instead value the quality (not quantity) of human life, which would be far less expensive overall and would lead to a natural reduction in population without violence.
Susan,
You are a woman, we guys need stuff to get a mate; reality, we guys learn fast. When the girls are young it is the sports hero, sometime when consideration is given for children, it becomes “responsibility.” Get enough stuff as a guy, and a younger woman is willing to make certain accommodations on age.
Somewhere in my past I read a statement by an African chieftain who saw a woman pass by and said to effect, “Good butt, wide thighs, many children.” Sorry, no children, game over for man in which case do we really care if earth goes on or not?
“There is also the predatory oligarchic class to support.” Have you noticed many of them have many wives? Have you noticed more than a few of them have more than two children? A guess, there is no end to the line of women willing to try out for a position with these oligarchs. Again, it is basic biology, the woman’s children get to go to the best schools, learn the game and it starts all over again. Women compete to get these guys, otherwise no makeup, no short skirts, no heels, etc. Doubt it? Tune in the nightly news, serious subject, they are all good looking.
“We could instead value the quality (not quantity) of human life, which would be far less expensive overall and would lead to a natural reduction in population without violence.” Sounds good, if you do it and the person with power does not, your genes lose. Again, that goes against biology, oligarch gets first choice, pretty woman gets first choice, is that what you have in mind with quality?
Nice to have a woman here, gets boring bantering with all the old guys. I hope you reply, we are an interesting and open group. There is no offense meant in this reply, willing to learn from a different viewpoint.
Dennis L.
I am afraid you are right. A man without a job has a hard time finding a woman who is interested in him. In the US, having a pickup truck seems to be essential for a man. Or, a boat for a nearby lake.
Historically, there have been very many more women who were mothers than there were men who were fathers. Rich men tended to have lots of children; poor men had a hard time finding a wife.
I’m really tired of the ongoing political/ideological denial of human nature.
You would think that when TSHTF that people would “get real”.
“Glorifying wealth” is NEVER OPTIONAL. “Wealth” is the state of being well, as “health” is the state of being hale. Animal species display their wealth—their degree of well-being—by showing prospective mates big tails (peacocks), large antlers (elk), nicer nests (weaverbirds), etc.
Life itself is almost entirely unconcerned with subjective quality: it’s purely a numbers game.
The topic is violence and energy shortfalls and that is often linked on this site with the phenomenon of self-organization.
In situations of violence numbers are a big factor in success, so we should expect, if energy shortfalls are linked to violence, to see 1) violence as being increasingly group-associated, 2) for those groups to become numerically larger over time and 3) for group members to be able to, in some way, easily identify other members of their group.
This might then go some way to explaining the increasingly common phenomenon of gang-violence and criminal rhetoric (e.g., rap music) in certain racial cultures along with race-based violence.
But this type of argument just takes us back to the old “they’re criminal or violent because they’re poor” and “if only we gave them more welfare they would give up crime”.
The biggest and plainest problem with this kind of argument is that while black criminality is completely out of hand in the USA, we have not seem the same phenomenon among poor whites. The poorest areas of white America, with high unemployment and social dislocation, are NOT the centers of fierce criminality that this theory would leave us to expect.
And further – as to sharing the (energy) wealth – while people talk about poverty in the United States and its supposed link to crime, the people in the USA who commit – by far, far, far – the most crime, are very well looked after in terms of the social services pie. Indeed, itseems that the more effort-free advantages they have been offered over recent decades, teh more violence and criminality we have seen.
In the end, I am afraid, we have to abandon that old liberal tic, poverty (or energy shortfalls) cvause crime, and accept the fact that the primary source of human violence and criminality is the human natures we are born with.
>>are very well looked after in terms of the social services pie
For example…
Yes. There seems to be a denial of reality amongst the commenters here and many who have never lived in the United States for long.
African Americans have an average IQ between 80-85. They make up 13% of the population yet commit over half of all violent crimes to include 90% of all inter-racial crimes.
The moronic liberals have catered to them to where they have every opportunity to flourish through Affirmative Action policies, minority hiring preferences, etc. and yet they are unable to take advantage of all of these.
All one has to do is see the types of civilizations that Africans build in Africa….and you will see that they have never built one which makes sense when you study IQ, impulse control, time preferences, violence, etc. How many here can fathom that the average IQ of Somalis is 68 and they are being imported into your Western Nations? How do you think that will work out?
We are witnessing the failure of multiculturalism, multi-racialism, etc. This is the societal entropic decay which has been pushed by liberals, leftists, etc. This is destroying society. If you had a cohesive homogeneous society that society will not be plagued by the issues we are seeing.
I have an IQ of over 120, am not a visible minority, and I committed – and was convicted of – a crime.
Consider that the problem is more complex than a simple number or statistic…
Cheers,
-GBV
You are probably to intelligent to be allowed to be a cop.
Robert Jordan scored rather well on an intelligence test he took as part of the application process to become an officer in New London, CT. The score indicated that Jordan had an IQ of roughly 125.
The average score for police officers was a 21-22, or an IQ of 104. New London would only interview candidates who scored between 20 and 27.
Jordan sued the city alleging discrimination, but the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York upheld that it wasn’t discrimination. “Why?” you might ask. Because New London Police Department applied the same standard to everyone who applied to be a cop there.
https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-there-are-maximum-IQ-cutoff-points-for-police-applicants
Lidia, don’t spoil all the political rhetoric by bringing biological reality into the debate!
Gail says that world trade uses a lot of energy. I would really like to see an article that tells how much energy the U.S. military uses. We have military bases all over the world, and some of those are fairly luxurious (Germany and Japan, for example) with lots of supplies flown in regularly. Then we have ships all over the world (in the Persian Gulf and the South China Sea, for example). Then there are the airplanes dropping bombs all over the place, and, of course, the constant, never ending wars. Every year the military swallows up more and more money. Sometimes I think our government wants to spend as much money as possible on killing people and as little money as possible on keeping people alive (Medicare, etc).
Spending money on the military tends to pay young people who need jobs.
Keeping people whose bodies are already declining alive leads to huge costs. These people may have hobbies, but most of them are not working in the paid economy. It is hard to make a growth economy out of rising nursing home admissions. It works much better to support young people.
Wouldn’t it be great if the elderly could be kept healthy and productive through a reversal of the aging process? Then the problem of keeping people whose bodies are declining would vanish. 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlFl0jDg0Jg
Of course, all this research assumes BAU can continue much longer for our modern world — which, alas, is looking most unlikely…
“The federal government is the largest energy consumer in the United States. Within the federal government, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) consumes more energy than any other agency. In FY2017, DOD consumed 707.9 trillion British thermal units (Btu) of energy—roughly 16 times that of the second largest consumer in the federal government, the U.S. Postal Service…”
Source: Congressional Research Service, Sept., 2019. https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R45832.pdf
The DoD uses 360,000 barrels of oil each day. This amount makes the DoD the single largest oil consumer in the world. There are only 35 countries in the world consuming more oil than DoD. The U.S. Air Force is the largest oil consumer within the DoD services.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/A-Look-At-US-Military-Energy-Consumption.html
The U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan have cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion since they began in 2001.
That total is $2 trillion more than all federal government spending during the recently completed fiscal year.
The report, from Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, also finds that more than 801,000 people have died as a direct result of fighting.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/20/us-spent-6point4-trillion-on-middle-east-wars-since-2001-study.html
Couldn’t help myself because I had to know.
$6,400,000,000,000 / 801,000 killed = $7,990,012 / kill
That is some mighty fine shooting and the reason we will never “win” whatever winning means.
Do you think the point was ever to win?
To win of course… billions for defense contractors. There’s the way it works.
Wow. I would guess most combatants would terminate themselves for a million $.
This is nothing new. It certainly isn’t a special feature of the USA. War has been a mainstay of human society for just about forever I suppose. Since agriculture maybe. Certainly ever since the horse was domesticated. That was a gamechanger.
Once one group of people has an advantage like that over another group, they will use it to take resources. The Normans were good at war. The invaded England and killed and took and ruled. They invaded Italy and killed and took and ruled. Some people are nice. But a crucial and determined portion of people are most decidedly not nice. In fact, they are evil.
China is no better. Nor is your neighbor. Other people will enslave you if they can. After an apocalyptic crash your neighbor down the road will enslave you and your kids.
This is human beings. This is how they are.
(Premodern) China left others alone for the better part of a millennium since the 10th century AD. She could have taken over the world easily during the early 15th Century — as witness the naval power of Zheng He’s treasure fleets — but to her credit she didn’t.
Your view of human nature seems to me… excessively Hobbesian.
China did no such thing. In fact, she was in a constant state of war all along her borders. Who do you think the Qing were? Neighbors dropping in for a cup of tea? Did the Ming just dry up one day and blow away? And China buttressed those borders with vassal (militarily subject) states such as Korea. Did the Koreans volunteer to be subject to the Chinese or was it the result of the constant threat of force?
As for “Hobbesian” – meaning I suppose that violence is the root of power in human societies – perhaps you could provide me some examples of societies where violence is not the ultimate arbiter, i.e., no war, no slavery, no violent crime, no corporal punishment.
From what I read, China was rarely the aggressor in all those conflicts you mentioned. The Han didn’t attack the Manchus first — quite the opposite. And it was their attacks that eventually ended the Ming. As for Korea, I’d like to know if China had ever attempted to annex her by military force so she’d become part of China. No, right?
Russians also acknowledge that in the last millennium they had only one armed conflict with (premodern) China; by comparison there were many more with Europe.
It is of course inevitable that there will always be at least some conflict in all human societies. But there have been some in which such conflict has in fact been minimized. The native Americans, for example. In the 18th century, Thomas Paine, a founding father of the United States, and French aristocrat Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecouer were deeply impressed by the ways in which native American societies organized themselves. A woman by the name of Mary Jemison was adopted by a native American family, and this is what she had to say: “We had no master to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased. No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace…their lives were a continual round of pleasures.”
But at the end of the day, I see no point in debating with anyone here, looking at the mess towards which we’re all now headed. If you want to insist your POV is correct, then all I have to say is: let’s just agree to disagree, and go our separate ways. (Shrugs.)
The Australian broadcaster has this regular show:
The Chaser’s Chas Licciardello and the ABC’s John Barron set out to discover the real America — its politics and its people — with US and Australian experts coming along for the ride!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/planet-america/
Some say America’s problems started with 9/11
The energy turning point was the Iraq war
I wrote this on the 10th anniversary
16/3/2013
Iraq war and its aftermath failed to stop the beginning of peak oil in 2005
http://crudeoilpeak.info/iraq-war-and-its-aftermath-failed-to-stop-the-beginning-of-peak-oil-in-2005
The subprime mortgage crisis started in the car and therefore oil dependent US suburbia
Then we had quantitative easing QE1-QE3 which financed the unconventional shale oil boom WITHOUT reducing oil prices.
China also printed money, their debt is now >300% of GDP. What’s more, that increasing debt has driven oil demand to ever higher levels. The graph is here:
http://crudeoilpeak.info/china-peak-oil
I was always intrigued by the question how the conflict between growing Chinese oil consumption and stagnating oil production will be resolved. I Imagined the Corona virus could do that.
Gordon G Chang, an American lawyer with a Chinese father argues that the Chinese government – after realizing in December 2019 that the Chinese economy was damaged – allowed the virus to spread to other countries in order to “level the geopolitical playing field”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhc6vyxVsDs
His latest article is on Zerohedge
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/gordon-chang-china-what-we-must-do-what-we-must-not-do
I go one step further and argue that China can now consume the oil the West can’t consume due to the evolving recession and job losses. Some clever strategists must have speculated that China can for example padlock flats but that democracies.can’t do that.
Insofar the virus has damaged America – including triggering race riots – more than China itself.
So what we see is a kind of oil war, but not with conventional weapons.
Thanks for all of the links.
I wasn’t involved with oil back in 2003, so it was interesting to read about some of the things that were connected together at that time.
Oil is definitely needed by many systems, and wars have been fought over oil before. Now that we are reaching limits, it would not be too surprising if there is some sort of “war” between the US and China. The catch is that we are so dependent on each other that it is hard to have a war, of any conventional kind. The lack of sufficient energy in total pretty much makes certain that globalization has to take a big step backward.
By the way, I found another article supporting the idea of the virus causing COVID-19 escaping from a laboratory in China. Did the SARS-CoV-2 virus arise from a bat coronavirus research program in a Chinese laboratory? Very possibly.
The article is by Milton Leitenberg, a senior research associate at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. It is published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
excellent paper.
Gail,
Always find your analyses interesting and useful, however I think this one ignores the elephant in the room: the systemic racism embedded in the US, e.g., Real estate Redlining, the legacy of Jim Crow, educational disparities, hiring etc. I get that social issues may not be in your wheelhouse, but to offer an analysis of these demonstrations without acknowledging fundamental causation elements, and only the exacerbating resources problems, is inaccurate.
The’s a lot of racism and police violence, what’s special about this incident?
Nothing as I see it = people are angry for a whole lot of reasons …
I am very angry. I think I will go burn down my local shopping center and loot a jewelery store. Then I will have a Rolex and be able to complain that I live in a “food desert”. Because whitey did it.
The protesters in these incidents are the most pampered and deluded class of parasitic non-contributors in history. And the media – for ther own reasons – encourages them in their delusions and guilt-trips you. And you fall for it.
People like to mouth platitudes and say the “right” thing on these issues, but there is a very simple litmus test:
1) Would you be willing to live in an area that was heavily (more than 10% and the real criminality starts) of the notorious demographic?
2) Do your children attend to a school with a more than 1-2% of this demographic? Because above that level and the school standards start to plunge as chaos and dysfunction enters.
Before my children were of school age, we lived in a townhouse development within the city limits of Chicago that was literally across the street from a low rise public housing development. Depending on how a person drew the lines, the I suppose the demographic of the area had a fairly large black percentage. We saw a lot of black women and their children outside the housing project. I don’t remember any problems. The owners of the townhomes were predominantly white.
We now live in an area that has some black families and some mixed race families. It doesn’t seem to be a problem.
I do agree, however, that schools can be a problem, if the population is not homogeneous. I am not sure that the racial mix necessarily is the problem, however. I would expect large populations coming from the Middle East might be a problem in some European schools, for example. Or a large population of children of migrant workers, moving in and out.
We ended up finding alternative schooling options for all three of our children, at least for part of the time, because the schools were not really adequate in our area. For example, we were told, “We teach to the middle of the class. We don’t have enough staff to try to provide extra resources for those who are above or below the middle.” My husband and I ended up home schooling our daughter for one year. We sent our sons to a private school for several years.
Housing prices tend to be very much higher in areas where schools are deemed to be “good.” These areas tend to have high tax revenue, so that they can support a range of programs to meet the needs of all of the students.
“The protesters in these incidents are the most pampered and deluded class of parasitic non-contributors in history.”
Have you tried having little/nothing?
The only “fundamental causation elements” Tom relate directly to energy: social movements, political predilection and even how permissive somone is. It’s all directly linked, ultimately, to resource scarcity.
The way society seems to work is that it takes these assymetries in resource scarcity, and amplifies them. Those with little, are ascribed little, and are provided less political weight. Those with much are ascribed to be worth much socially, and are afforded greater protection.
Now, personally, I couldn’t care less about assymetries if they carry from differences in hard work, and every black I’ve been around has a case of avolition.The point being that the social issues derive from the resource issues, which flow back into the social issues. It’sfolly to thik that can be ‘fixed’ by precriptive thinking.
“avolition” is an intriguing word…
Agree. Also the wealth disparities: When then richest 6-8 people have a combined wealth equal to the poorest half of the rest of the world, there is something wrong with the picture. Those inequities and the racial discrimination that has persisted for many decades are the primary drivers of this eruption. The underlying fundamentals you point to may be at play, but are not consciously part of this for most people now. But as the coming decade unfolds, they will be. Thanks as always for your analyses — *and* this particular one has a bit of a feel of a hammer looking for a nail.
Philip, I keep hearing the disparity argument more and more but—perhaps unlike other times in history—a lot of that “wealth” is fake digits nowadays.
Yes, but if you have 10 fake digits and you are competing in the marketplace against someone who has 10,000, you are not going to be able to claim as many of the resources as the “wealthier” person, no matter how fake those digits are. The equalization will only come when enough people lose confidence in those “dollars” — and then we all will be sc3wed.
I don’t care how many $200 million Picassos (yet another great 20th C con-job) someone has. No skin off my nose at all. It isn’t wealth. Practically speaking, it’s just the future of kindling.
Hah.. what about that shark-in-formaldehyde that needs constant refurbishment (including shark replacement)? Prime example of an “asset” that is really a liability.. kind of like a shopping mall or a nuclear power plant.
Good point, Tom. Affirmative action: social housing reserved for blacks; welfare showered abundantly on blacks; jobs reserved for blacks; university places and appointments reserved for blacks. And blacks allowed to spout race hatred on mass media and social media unchecked and unreproved. Yes, systematic racism indeed.
You make some interesting points but I don’t believe energy is necessarily the problem as electricity could be distributed and amassed differently..it is more about power being held and the continuance of the same hands holding and manipulating that power. As white I find it hard to believe that a black president could rise to power in a country where black are continually discriminated against…and serve two terms. I watched with horror as my social media accounts were over run with images of Floyd’s death…almost as it was happening..then almost immediately the propaganda started pushing the story that there was a cover up… it moved so fast that there had to be bots behind it. I like blacklives matter as all lives do matter and that is what they believe. However, most of the social media content is anti white – these two things are not the same. This is divisive for a reason…whether it’s energy, I’m not convinced although your argument is good. I’m still thinking religious fractions are heavily behind this…of which Saudi Arabia and UAE would be happy to sponsor.
Samantha, i’m afraid you have a lot of Gail Tverberg’s posts to read.
One thing I would point out is that electricity is a form of energy. Getting electricity from wind and solar is problematic, because it comes at times that we don’t need it and it doesn’t come when we need it.
Trying to transfer the electrical output of wind and solar to when we need it is a huge obstacle. We have only a few minutes of batteries at this point in time. Battery costs rapidly exceed the cost of wind and solar.
Using fossil fuels to provide backup to wind and solar doesn’t work well for a number of reasons. One reason is that backup providers are not being paid enough for the value of this service. There are a lot of fixed costs involved.
Another reason is that the price of wholesale electricity falls far too low and drives other electricity producers out of business. These rates are often negative. Nuclear is particularly at risk of being driven out of business, because it cannot easily “turn off” electricity production. Coal and natural gas are at risk as well. The whole system looks like it is headed in the direction of failure from low prices.
As an electrical engineer I am aware of the problems and have written my suggestions to fix this..they are simpler. People are so used to doing things a certain way. The thought of tearing down the national grid and doing something more local distribution is the answer.
from an electrical engineer, I am surprised at such a naive idea
I can only suggest you read Prof. David MacKay’s book: Sustainable Energy without the hot air.
(It’s free to download)
http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html
‘local’ energy (presumably the house you live in) consumes about 1/50th of the energy consumed by the environment you live in (and need to sustain you)
Only someone who does not understand how electricity is wasted along our current distribution systems would call me naive. Be well.
Too many rats in the cage causes violence: NO LIVES MATTER
sad but true!
Yes, it seems you are correct.
this is the sad truth about the thermodynamics of the situation. suddenly, there is a need to cull the herd, to match the diminishing resources.
somehow, the lemmings sensed this need. I always thought they were seeking the lost continent of Atlantis, which foundered on them.
Don’t forget the increasing consumer debt, which is creeping into people of ever higher socioeconomic levels in order to maintain living standards. Kind of like women leaving the household in search of jobs to make up the difference, resulting in hollowing out of the traditional family, but today worsened also by the subterfuge of government single parent supplements, SNAP, EBT cards etc.
Increasing debt allows increased living standards for a while, but the downside becomes much worse.
Yes, increased debt is a problem.
Part of the problem has been the escalating costs of automobiles and homes thanks to “feature creep.” Health care and education have had the same problem. Television has given people the idea that having more and more stuff is important, too. It gives the idea that the “Joneses” are living substantially better than a given person is.
Businesses have needed to grow, in order to get economies of scale and satisfy stockholders. But this has been difficult, without families being as big. Instead, the have relied on feature creep, including more mandated features in housing. Globalization was supposed to add more markets, but that now seems to be going away.
Debt works, as long as everything is getting better, and people can get and hold jobs. It doesn’t work when a lot of people are laid off. We will figure this out, when the supplemental funds these people are receiving start slowing down.
‘In total, the new economy will be very different; it will probably bear little resemblance to today’s world economy.’
I would imagine large areas of the world will tumble out of contention for resources and we will return to ‘city-states’. These city states will most likely be places where ports, railways and local resources are managed by a very lean leadership coterie with a diversity of skills, but not of political views. Feudalism, initially without titles.
The flyover/forbidden lands will exist under agrarian anrchy. The tour de France has a great view of this structure with its small evenly spaced townships dominated by castles on the hill. History has figured this out before.
Interesting idea!
It is not clear to me what, if any, of our current infrastructure we can support. Will we have railroads and ports, for example? The ones we have now will need replacement parts, and we likely won’t have them. Energy supplies, even hydroelectric, suffer from this same problem.
Looking at the past gives us any idea of what might work. The castles grew up on the hills for a couple of reasons, I believe:
(1) It was much easier to defend, from such a vantage point.
(2) A lot of diseases thrived in low-lying areas. Of course, low-lying areas were also good for crops and they often had the majority of the fertile land, which had washed down from hillsides.
Where to live probably depended upon the climate and population of the particular area. What worked in India might different from what worked in the Southwest USA, and these might be different from what worked in central Europe.
i totally agree. the social angst we are witnessing is actually a repercussion of depleting resources (the limits to growth). i read somewhere that per capita net energy peaked in the USA in 1974. that was when we were finishing the interstate highway system and put people on the moon. it has been all down hill since.
I was thinking that inflation adjusted median wages for men stagnated about the 1970s, but I am having trouble finding a time series that goes back that far.
Things certainly have not been going well for workers. There is constant creep in added features in everything a person buys (cars, homes, education, medical treatment, computer software). With these added features, there are added costs. These added features are not considered inflationary, because they (supposedly) provide a desired benefit. But they make the items unaffordable.
“The George Floyd Protests – 20 unanswered questions”
https://off-guardian.org/2020/05/31/the-george-floyd-protests-20-unanswered-questions/
Gail, forgot to say that you article is dead on!
Thanks!
There are too many people and too much easy access to social media that shows how high status people live (The people who have the privilege to consume the most energy and status). Rich liberal white girls; it’s not smart to brag on Instagram while wearing a BLM shirt. They take it seriously, they don’t see it as a luxery signal like you do. Not everyone can gain that much status and there really isn’t that much room in the nicer areas. The bottom really doesn’t understand the social mannerisms of the umc and often times can’t even mimic the mannerisms of the (shrinking) middle. It’s time to stop pretending that everyone deserves an easy office job in the media (the least meaningful but highest status).
Libtards still niavely believe spouting off empty platitudes and abstractions will calm this. They’re that immersed in their bubble thinking. Blacks will probably be worse off after all of this and policed more!
The simple reality is that Democratic politicians, journalists, and pundits are petrified of questioning any of the dogmatic ideological assumptions underlying these protests/riots. Because they will be immediately ripped to shreds. Don’t even try to pretend this is not the case.
If the number of jobs for blacks and the level of wages for blacks rise, there will need to be cuts elsewhere in the economy. In fact, there will likely need to cuts elsewhere in the economy, even if number of jobs for blacks and their level rises.
This is frustrating. I am sure that there are things that can be tried to fix the situation, such as better training for cops. But this doesn’t solve the problem of a huge number of people who are having a terrible time earning an adequate living. If they could not see other people faring much better than they are (on Facebook and television), the difficulty would be somewhat less. The fact that the situation is going downhill right now, thanks to changes made in response to COVID-19 and the inadequate energy situation, is a problem.