.
Many people believe that humans can have a sustainable future by using solar panels and wind turbines. Unfortunately, the only truly sustainable course, in terms of moving in cycles with nature, is interacting with the environment in a manner similar to the approach used by chimpanzees and baboons. Even this approach will eventually lead to new and different species predominating. Over a long period, such as 10 million years, we can expect the vast majority of species currently alive will become extinct, regardless of how well these species fit in with nature’s plan.
The key to the relative success of animals such as chimpanzees and baboons is living within a truly circular economy. Sunlight falling on trees provides the food they need. Waste products of their economy come back to the forest ecosystem as fertilizer.
Pre-humans lost the circular economy when they learned to control fire over one million years ago, when they were still hunter-gatherers. With the controlled use of fire, cooked food became possible, making it easier to chew and digest food. The human body adapted to the use of cooked food by reducing the size of the jaw and digestive tract and increasing the size of the brain. This adaptation made pre-humans truly different from other animals.
With the use of fire, pre-humans had many powers. They spent less time chewing, so they could spend more time making tools. They could burn down entire forests, if they so chose, to provide a better environment for the desired types of wild plants to grow. They could use the heat from fire to move to colder environments than the one to which they were originally adapted, thus allowing a greater total population.
Once pre-humans could outcompete other species, the big problem became diminishing returns. For example, once the largest beasts were killed off, only smaller beasts were available to eat. The amount of effort required to kill these smaller beasts was not proportionately less, however.
In this post, I will explain further the predicament we seem to be in. We have deviated so far from the natural economy that we really cannot go back. At the same time, the limits we are reaching are straining our economic system in many ways. Some type of discontinuity, or collapse, seems to be not very far away.
[1] Even before the appearance of hunter-gatherers, ecosystems around the world exhibited a great deal of cycling from state to state.
Many people are under the illusion that before the meddling of humans, the populations of different types of plants and animals tended to be pretty much constant. This isn’t really the way things work, however, in a finite world. Instead, the populations of many species cycle up and down, depending on particular conditions such as the population of animals that prey on them, the availability of food, the prevalence of disease, and the weather conditions.
Even forests exhibit surprising variability. Many undergo regular cycles of burning. In fact, some species of trees, such as the giant sequoias in Yosemite, require fire in order to reproduce. These cycles are simply part of the natural order of self-organizing ecosystems in a finite world.
[2] A major feature of ecosystems is “Selection of the Best Adapted.”
Each species tends to give birth to many more offspring than are necessary to live to maturity if the population of that species is to remain level. Each of the individual offspring varies in many random ways from its parents. Ecosystems are able to keep adapting to changing conditions by permitting only the best-adapted offspring to survive. In favorable periods (suitable weather, not much disease, ample food, not too many predators), a large share of the offspring may survive. In less favorable periods, few of the offspring will survive.
When selection of the best adapted is taken into account, a changing climate is of little concern because, regardless of the conditions, some individual offspring will survive. Over time, new and different species are likely to develop that are better adapted to the changing conditions.
[3] The downsides of living within the limits provided by nature are easy to see.
One issue is that every mother can expect to see the majority of her offspring die. In fact, her own life expectancy is uncertain. It depends upon whether there are nearby predators or a disease against which she has no defense. Even a fairly small injury could lead to her death.
Another issue is lack of shelter from the elements. Moving to an area where the weather is too harsh becomes impossible. Our earliest pre-human ancestors seem to have lived near the equator where seasonal temperature differences are small.
Without supplemental heating or cooling, humans living in many places in the world today would have a difficult time following the way of nature because of weather conditions. As we will see in later sections, it was grains that allowed people to settle in areas that were too cold for crops in winter.
In theory, there are alternatives to grain in cold climates. For example, a small share of the population might be able to get most of its calories from eating raw fish, as the Inuit have done. Eating raw fish is not generally an option for people living inland, however. Also, in later sections, we will talk about the difference between the use of root vegetables and grains as the primary source of calories. In some sense, the use of grains provides a stepping stone toward big government, roads, and what we think of as a modern existence, while the use of root vegetables does not. Eating raw fish is similar to eating root vegetables, in that it doesn’t provide a stepping stone toward a modern existence.
[4] Animals make use of some of the same techniques as humans to compete with other species. These techniques are added complexity and added energy supply.
We think of complexity as being equivalent to added technology, but it also includes many related techniques, such as the use of tools, the use of specialization and the use of long-distance travel.
Animals use many types of complexity. Bees build hives and carry out tasks divided among the queen bee, drone bees, and worker bees. Many birds fly to another continent in winter, in order to gain access to an adequate food supply. Chimpanzees use tools, such as waving a stick or throwing a rock to ward off predators. Beavers build dams that provide themselves with an easy source of food in winter.
Some members of the animal kingdom, known as parasites, even leverage their own energy by using the energy of other plants or animals. Such use of the energy of a host is subject to limits; if the parasite uses too much, it risks killing its host.
While animals other than humans may use similar techniques to humans, they don’t go as far as humans. Humans employ a variety of supplemental materials in their tools. Also, no animal other than humans has learned to control fire.
[5] Pre-humans seem to have learned to control fire over 1 million years ago, allowing humans to gain an advantage in killing wild beasts.
Richard Wrangham, in Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, makes the case that the controlled use of fire allowed the changes in anatomy that differentiate humans from other primates. With the controlled use of fire, humans could cook some of their food, making it easier to chew and digest. As a result, the teeth, jaws and guts of humans could be relatively smaller, and the brain could be larger. The larger brain allowed humans to compete better against other species. Also, cooking food greatly reduced the time spent chewing food, increasing the time available for making crafts and tools of various kinds. The heat of fire allowed pre-humans to move into new areas with colder climates. The heat of fires also allowed pre-humans to ward off some of the impact of ice-ages, which they were able to survive.
James C. Scott, in Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, explains that being able to burn biomass was sufficient to turn around who was in charge: pre-humans or large animals. In one cave in South Africa, he indicates that a lower layer of remains found in the cave did not show any carbon deposits, and hence were created before pre-humans occupying the cave gained control of fire. In this layer, skeletons of big cats were found, along with scattered gnawed bones of pre-humans.
In a higher layer, carbon deposits were found. In this layer, pre-humans were clearly in charge. Their skeletons were much more intact, and the bones of big cats were scattered about and showed signs of gnawing. Who was in charge had changed! We know that human controlled fires can be used to scare away wild animals, burn down entire forests if desired, and make sharper spears. It shouldn’t be surprising that humans gained the upper hand.
[6] Grains, because of their energy density, portability, and ability to be stored, seem to have played a major role in the development of governments and of cities.
Scott, in Against the Grain, also points out that early economies that were able to grow grains were the economies that were able to place taxes on those grains, and with those taxes, were able to fund governments offering more services. Grains are a storable form of energy for humans. They are portable and energy dense, as well. It was grains that allowed people to settle in areas that were too cold for growing crops in winter. The year-to-year variability in production made storage of reserves important. Governments could provide this function, and other functions, such as roads.
If we analyze the situation, it is apparent that the existence of grain crops provided a subsidy to the rest of the economy. Farmers and their slaves could grow far more grain than they themselves required for calories, leaving much grain for trading with others. This surplus could be used to feed the population of cities, such as Rome. It was no longer necessary for everyone to be hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers. There could be new occupations such as merchants, teachers, carpenters, and sailors. Many more goods and services in total could be produced, and the population of cities could grow.
Cities, themselves, provide benefits, because they allow economies of scale, and they allow people with different skills to mix. Geoffrey West, in his book Scale, notes that larger cities produce disproportionately more patents. Thus, technology is advanced with the growth of cities.
It might be noted that root crops, even though they could provide most of the same food energy benefits for humans as grain crops, did not help economies grow in the same ways that grain crops did. This, likely, was part of the reason that they were not taxed: They produced no excess benefit to give back to the government.
Root vegetables are not as helpful as grains. They are less energy dense than grains, making them heavier and bulkier for transport. They do not store as well as grains. In early days, root crops could be about as efficiently grown by individual families as by farmers specializing in such crops, making it hard to leverage the labor that went into growing root crops. In fact, there was less real need for government with root crops: There was no way to store supplies of root crops in case of poor harvest, and there was little need for roads to transport the crops.
[7] The added energy benefits of grain crops created a situation where the grain was “worth” far more to customers, and to the economy as a whole, than what would be indicated by their cost of production.
There is a belief among economists, and among much of the population, that the selling price of a commodity will be determined by its cost of production. In fact, the example given in Section [6] indicates that back in the early days of grain production, grain’s selling price could be far greater than its direct cost of production, with the difference going into taxes that would benefit the government and the economy as a whole.
In fact, there was a second way that the usage of grain was helpful to governments. The efficiency of grain production, transport, and storage reduced the need for farmers. Former farmers could offer services not previously available to citizens, often in cities. Income from the new jobs could also be taxed, to give governments another stream of income.
[8] The use of coal and oil also produced situations where the value of energy products to the economy was far higher than their direct cost of production, allowing these products to be heavily taxed.
Tony Wrigley, in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, indicates that with the use of coal, farming became a much more productive endeavor. The crop yield from cereal crops, net of the amount fed to draft animals, nearly tripled between 1600 and 1800, which was the period when coal production ramped up in England. Coal allowed the use of far more metal tools, which were vastly superior to tools made from wood. In addition, roads to mines were greatly improved. Prior to this time, few roads were paved in England. These improved roads helped the economy as a whole.
Oil is known today for the high taxes it pays to governments. The governments of oil exporting countries are very dependent upon tax revenue relating to oil. When the selling price of oil is low, this results in a crisis period for oil exporting countries because they have no other way of collecting adequate tax revenue to support the programs for their people. For a short time, they can borrow money, but when this alternative fails, governments are likely to be overturned by their unhappy citizens.
[9] The economy tends to move further and further away from the natural order (described in Sections [1], [2], and [3]) as more energy consumption is added.
Even though the natural order would be sustainable, it doesn’t represent a situation that most people today would like to live in. In fact, most humans today could not live on completely uncooked food, even if they wanted to. While a few people today eat “raw food” diets, they often use a food processor or blender to reduce the amount of chewing and digesting of raw foods to a manageable level. Even then, their weights tend to stay low.
If energy products are available at an affordable price, humans find many ways to use them, to stay away from the natural order. Some examples include the following:
- To provide transportation, other than walking.
- To pipe clean water to homes.
- To make growing and storage of food easy.
- To allow homes to be heated and cooled.
- To allow medicines and vaccines.
- To allow most children to live to maturity.
[10] Because energy consumption is important in all aspects of the economy, the economy seems to reach many kinds of limits simultaneously.
There are many limits that the world economy seems to reach simultaneously. The underlying problem in all of these areas seems to be diminishing returns. In theory, these issues could all be worked around, using increasing energy consumption or increasing complexity:
- Too little fresh water for an increasing population.
- The need to keep increasing food production, with the same amount of arable land.
- Increased difficulty with insect pests, such as locusts.
- Increased difficulty in dealing with viruses and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
- Overfished oceans so that farmed fish are required in addition.
- Ores of metals of ever-lower grade, requiring more processing and leading to more waste.
- More expensive techniques required for the extraction of fossil fuels.
- Many unprofitable businesses; much debt likely to default.
- Too few jobs that pay well enough to support a family
- Governments unable to collect enough taxes
Energy and complexity work together to leverage human labor, in a way that the economy can make more goods and services in total. Unfortunately, we cannot use complexity to make energy. Technology (which is a form of complexity) can convert energy to useful work and, through efficiency gains, increase the percentage of energy that is available for useful work, but it cannot make energy. If we add more technology, more robots, and more international trade, we likely will need more energy, not less.
The net impact of all of these issues is that to maintain our economy, we really need an ever-increasing quantity of energy. In fact, energy consumption likely needs to grow more rapidly than population simply to keep the system from collapse.
Wind and solar certainly cannot meet today’s energy needs. Together, wind and solar amount to about 3.3% of the world’s energy supply, based on BP estimates for 2019. Furthermore, wind and intermittent solar certainly cannot be sold at a price high above their cost of production, the way grain, coal and oil have been sold historically. In fact, wind and solar invariably need the huge subsidy of being allowed to “go first.” They actually are reliant on a profitable fossil fuel system to subsidize them, or they fall completely “flat.”
[11] The problem, as the economy reaches limits, is too few goods and services being produced to satisfy all parts of the economy simultaneously. The parts of the economy that especially tend to get shortchanged are (a) governments, (b) energy producers, and (c) workers without special skills who are selling their labor as a form of “energy.”
When economies are doing well, the price of energy products tends to be high. These high prices allow very high taxes on energy products. They also allow significant funds for reinvestment for the energy companies themselves. Indirectly, these high prices allow a significant share of the goods and services made by the economy to be transferred to these sectors of the economy.
In addition, energy products allow non-farm workers in many areas of the economy to produce their goods and services more efficiently, thereby helping push up the wages of common laborers.
As economies reach limits, there is, in some sense, a need for more energy in many sectors of the economy. The catch is that the “wages” and “profits” needed to purchase this energy aren’t really available to provide the demand needed to keep energy prices up. As a result, energy prices and production tend to fall. Government-imposed limitations, intended to stop the spread of COVID-19, may also keep energy demand down.
Governments often fail, or they get into major conflicts with other governments, when there are resource shortages of the kinds we are currently encountering. Today is in many ways like the period of the Great Depression, which preceded World War II.
[12] Perhaps warm, wet countries will be somewhat more successful than cold countries and those without water, in the years ahead.
I showed a chart in my most recent post, Energy Is the Economy, that illustrates the wide range of energy consumption around the world.
If fossil fuel energy falls, I expect that the parts of the world with cold temperatures will experience particular difficulty because they tend to use disproportionately large amounts of energy (Figure 2). Their citizens cannot get along very well without heat for their homes. Winter becomes very dark, if supplemental lighting is not available. Walking long distances in the cold becomes a problem as well.
The warmer countries have a better chance because they do not require as complex economies as cold countries. They can feed at least part of their population with root crops. Walking is a reasonable transportation option, and there is no problem with months on end of darkness if supplemental lighting is not available. For these reasons, warm countries would seem to have a better chance of passing through the difficult times ahead while sustaining a reasonable-sized population.
“Mortality in Norway and Sweden before and after the Covid-19 outbreak: a cohort study”
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.11.20229708v1.full
“Conclusions All-cause mortality remained unaltered in Norway. In Sweden, the observed increase in all-cause mortality during Covid-19 was partly due to a lower than expected mortality preceding the epidemic and the observed excess mortality, was followed by a lower than expected mortality after the first Covid-19 wave. This may suggest mortality displacement.”
——————-
So much for bad bad CovBug …
Pyrroloquinoline Quinone Prevents Estrogen Deficiency-Induced Osteoporosis by Inhibiting Oxidative Stress and Osteocyte Senescence
https://www.ijbs.com/v15p0058.htm
Pyrroloquinoline Quinone (PQQ) Prevents Cognitive Deficit Caused by Oxidative Stress in Rats
The effects of pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ) and coenzyme Q10 (Co Q10), either alone or together, on the learning ability and memory function of rats were investigated. Rats fed a PQQ-supplemented diet showed better learning ability than rats fed a CoQ10-supplemented diet at the early stage of the Morris water maze test. The combination of both compounds resulted in no significant improvement in the learning ability compared with the supplementation of PQQ alone. At the late stage of the test, rats fed PQQ-, CoQ10- and PQQ + CoQ10-supplemented diets showed similar improved learning abilities. When all the groups were subjected to hyperoxia as oxidative stress for 48 h, rats fed the PQQ- and CoQ10 supplemented diets showed better memory function than the control rats. The concurrent diet markedly improved the memory deficit of the rats caused by oxidative stress. Although the vitamin E-deficient rats fed PQQ or CoQ10 improved their learning function even when subjected to hyperoxia, their memory function was maintained by PQQ rather than by CoQ10 after the stress. These results suggest that PQQ is potentially effective for preventing neurodegeneration caused by oxidative stress, and that its effect is independent of either antioxidant’s interaction with vitamin E.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jcbn/42/1/42_2008005/_article/-char/ja/
Thanks,
It sure would be nice to know what works and what is salesmanship. It seems everything in our world now has an agenda and after Bernays people are so good at manipulation the facts are lost in translation.
At my age, 74, one is sometimes grasping at straws; Amazon sells PQQ, but who makes it, is it safe, impossible to tell.
Dennis L.
I use BioPQQ (or as MGCPQQ sold in Europe) which underwent numerous studies.
https://www.biopqq.com/
https://www.mgcpqq.eu/
It seems to help my elderly mother regarding memory and energy. She also had some osteoporosis problem in the past, also her joints and knees are not that young.
From my own experience, it improves energy, focus, mood and, what is very important, unlike stimulants, the sleep, too. I also have some vertigo from high places and it seems to dampen it.
Of course, the reaction may be individual, not everything is for everybody. My experience is positive, maybe some initial small headache that disappeared.
Thanks! This study and the one Tim Groves points to both relate to rodent studies. Humans have taken the supplement for quite a while, without huge adverse effect, as far as I know.
With my osteoporosis problem, every little bit helps.
Helping my memory woundn’t hurt as well.
We seem to be getting closer and closer to the year 3535, when according to Zagreb and Evans:
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lies
Everything you think, do, and say
Is in the pill you took today
Okay, more change, more to think about, less chance for hunter gather, more chance for a good life.
I have the link, it is Saxo bank’s outrageous predictions for 2021 – would be neat to see how their 2020 predictions turned out, too busy right now to dig those out.
I see three predictions that are sort of far out.
1. Amazon purchases Cyprus – the country. Basically tired of Euro taxes, Cyprus gets a great deal of per capita money and they are happy, Brussels has their undies in a bundle, film at eleven as they once said. Maybe even makes a deal with Greece for gas, wonderful things that one can do with money.
2. Fusion design bears fruit, unlimited energy, gold from sea water, etc. This ignores the heat build up/radiation problem, but with unlimited energy we can build things in space, lasso asteroids with wonderful metals and all is well with humanity. And for those who think this is terrible, recall zinc runs out in 17 years and gold does not rust! Not a trivial issue in Minnesota, can’t wait for my gold plated chassis.
3. Musk again, makes land based internet obsolete, makes banking into a new game with small satellites launched with you guessed it, his rockets! Now, recall, Elon was involved with something called Pay Pal so he has some banking experience. Of course this involves block chain, need to read up on that. SpaceX seems to be in a groove.
Not a hint of hunter gathers. Could this be part of the problem? We have a small group of fantastically creative and wealthy people who are going light speed and others who have trouble understanding the speed of light. There is absolutely no condescension there, used as a metaphor, not meant to be critical of any group, recognition of a significant social issue in our world.
With ten outrageous predictions, one should hit, hopefully makes things better.
https://www.home.saxo/campaigns/pr/2020-h2/saxo-bank-2021-outrageous-predictions-the-future-is-now
My thought: A spear will not make a better world, it will make a short, brutish world, our path is forward, not backward, we will make it. If you are a doomer, there some ideas for shorts in the list, always a silver lining if one looks hard enough. In case you missed it, that is my poor literary attempt at a double entendre.
Dennis L.
But as you say, there are two basic world/economic orders at work, and never the twain shall meet. Some understand technology and some don’t. The technology group can’t supply enough goods for all of the other group. That group will have to be organized to defend and provide for itself. And I don’t see where they’ll have the time to worry about Elon Musk.
I must criticise the current frames used in commenting: the commenting on mobile devices has become complicated, as the commenting frame shrinks and hides the fields for filling-in and the Post Comment button.
I don’t like them either.
I don’t know if anything I can do would make them go away.
I looked at Tim Morgan’s SurplusEnergyEconomics website, and it doesn’t seem to have them. His format is similar to mine, also. Maybe I can ask tech support about the issue.
See if the change I made works better. I went back to the theme “Twenty Ten,” from the “Twenty Eleven.”
The new editor seems to work with either theme (not that I like it). The Jet Pack also seems to work with both. Presumably, these will fix the problems I had earlier with some Microsoft products not be willing to show my site.
I think there’s some improvement today, Gail. But I still can’t post images or YouTube videos as insertions. They come up as links—much to many people’s relief, I expect.
I am unhappy with this as well. I think that this is what the new editing system is doing, so that comments will load better. See if you find other WordPress blogs where you can see the images. If so, maybe I can get our images to show.
I just linked a YT video that posted correctly.
Could people try using HTML to display images in comments, perhaps?
Basic HTML:
With descriptive text:
With size specifications:
Here’s a test of the basic:
That didn’t work at all…
Yup, I miss slapping down some savage and dank meme images-
The list of recent comments is gone now, but the font is back to a readable serif from the ultra-thin sans..
that list is now back to the old place on the far right but way up near the top of the article.
I prefer the list on the bottom, but I more prefer this layout.
ah, complexity.
I can still put the list on the bottom. In fact, it can be both places. Perhaps tomorrow morning I can fix that.
It’s only three weeks
To flatten the curve
It’s not much to ask
It’s a small way to serve.
It’s only a mask
To keep us all safe
Why does it matter
If I can’t see your face?
It’s only a protest
And it’s selfish, you see
When expressing your views
Might harm you and me.
It’s only your freedom
It’s not a big deal
Freedom’s an illusion
But the virus is real.
It’s only a vaccine
There’s no need to resist
Your Freedom Pass please
We have to insist.
It’s only one Easter
There’ll be another next year
It’s only one Christmas
The pandemic is here.
It’s only not holding the hand
Of your dying wife
It’s only your liberty
It’s only your life.
—Sent anonymously to The Conservative Woman
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/its-only-three-weeks/
Not great poetry, but very much true. Clap clap clap!
woman
… is the n…er of the world… Yes she is…
I bet the late John Lennon, if he were with us today, would be in trouble with the SJWs and banned from Twitter.
the last verses are missing:
her favorite grandson
had come to see her
he gave her the rona
with one big sneezer
he never felt ill
what did he know
that Grammie he’d kill
with one viral blow
she was old as the hills
low Years Of Life Lost
people will do whatever
often can’t see the cost
Wait! There’s a few more verses buried under that space dust!
Even with protection
For old and frail folk
The slightest infection
Can cause them to croak.
So, blaming the healthy
For killing the sick
When germs are this stealthy
Makes you sound like a dick.
Masks make little difference
To how viruses spread
Despite all the inference
Once their inside your head.
Your immune response
If it’s working efficiently
Will in health you ensconce
And protect you sufficiently.
With the help of some Zinc
And some Vitamin D
You’ll soon be in the pink
Right as rain, just you see.
bravo!
I wanted to put in comorbidities, and too bad you didn’t fit in HCQ.
I give my permission for you to resubmit the entire poem.
https://png.pngtree.com/png-vector/20191126/ourmid/pngtree-laughing-smiley-vector-or-color-illustration-png-image_2040604.jpg
Rubbish verse by verse …
Northern Ireland remaining in EU
Brexit failed
The implication seems to be that NI is a part of Ireland rather than UK in a practical political sense as well as in a geographical sense.
Brexit highlighted the incongruity of NI in UK. A border in the sea rather than across the island is more suitable to economic and social life.
Likely Ireland north and south will have referenda on Irish unity within 10 years via the GFA provision. Half in NI currently support UI and the younger generations more so.
Polls show that most Brits are happy for NI to do whatever they want to do. It is run down and of no benefit to Britain. UI would be better for them and a gain for us.
1 million NI protestants are hardly what Ireland needs to secure a happy and prosperous future. Ireland can neither afford to support NI economically (12 Billion Euro per year UK subsidy) nor does it have the security forces needed to keep a lid on sectarian violence (of which there will be plenty). The EU are welcome to them.
Ireland is a modern state that is integrated into EU and into international security more generally. It would be quite capable of dealing with loyalist threats just as any other modern country is.
NI would benefit from a full plan of economic development within UI. It would become a productive region – unlike sadly many of the neglected regions of UK. The relative poverty of NI while it is within UK is all the more reason for Irish unity.
NI is of no benefit to Britain and UI is the way forward that is best for everyone. As you say, they are welcome to go their own way.
Oh Dear.
The ‘modern’ state of France does not seem to be doing too well dealing with a few Islamic terrorists. The British spent 30 years, employing the entire security assets of a country 15 times the size is Ireland to quell the IRA. Not to mention 25,000 troops. Ireland have no hope of doing the same.
France has done well supressing I S and they have been reduced to a few lone w olf acts. About a dozen d ied this year from it, compared to about 800 everyday m urders in France per year and several thousand who p erish in car accidents. Any modern society is a trade off between objectives and losses and the precautionary principle does not dominate decisions.
The groups are disarmed in NI. If you are suggesting that ‘loyalists’ would resort to I S type attacks, with s harp implements then that is just sad. They would need to take a good look at themselves – no better than I S. Let that be the end of that sort of talk.
Most likely these Nationalists will follow the footsteps of the Pied Noirs in Algeria.
A Final Solution will not be implemented. The Nationalists will simply be forced to leave in very discreet and nonviolent ways.
William Butler Yeats is considered to be the greatest poet of Ireland, although he was a Protestant. He did contribute to the Irish independence, but after that occurred, he was made uncomfortable by the new Irish govt, who recognized his work but still thought he, being a Protestant and of a Viking descent (Yeats=Geats in Beowulf), did not belong to there. He died in France.
‘UI would be better for them and a gain for us.’
‘Us’ being the USA?
Ireland should never have been divided. It was a cowardly act. Very few English, Welsh or Scottish would be bothered about NI leaving the UK.
A net gain for the Westminster ‘treasury’ to be specific.
Yes it is a ridiculously fanciful and archaic term. But then, ‘United Kingdom’ sounds like something out of a Walt Disney movie.
It’s rapidly becoming an anagram of its former existence: the Untied Kingdom.
My preferred solution to the Irish question would be reunification of the whole of Ireland with the whole of Great Britain into the United Kingdom of Britannia, Caledonia, Cambria, Hibernia and the surrounding Islands, with the capital located in Douglas, Isle of Man, every Prime Minister being an Irish Catholic, every Chancellor a Scottish Protestant, and an Englishman as Minister of Anglo-Saxon Affairs.
Why don’t you add USA, Canada, Australia and NZ to the mix? You seem to want to reconquer Ireland so why not add these countries as well?
There is about as much chance of that as the United Kingdom of England and France coming back – or possibly even less. The prospect would get zero support in ROI.
Are the English speaking peoples (and this includes the Irish and Scots, of course) going to be happy either separately or together in one big all-embracing state?
My guess is they are going to be miserable either way.
And adding the cousins—the USA, Canada, Australia and NZ—to the mix we get the Five Eyes, also known as the Anglo-sphere or Orwell’s Oceania. Arguably, these countries are part of an unofficial informal union in any case, with common ownership, coordination and political control at the highest levels.
Once Brexit is out of the way, it is purely a matter of administrative convenience whether this union of unions is formalized and made official or not. We’re all cousins, after all, even if some of us speak with funny accents.
British ancestry is a tiny and shrinking proportion of USA ancestry, a shrinking minority of Canadian ancestry and declining also in Aus and NZ.
There are no significant ancestral ties between Britain and USA. Maybe 5% of USA ancestry is from Britain now.
Ireland is a distinct gene pool that has diverged from Britain since the Iron Age, while England has drawn closer to the continent and Scandinavia.
The name England itself comes from a western German people, as does the language. Backgrounds are all changing now anyway. Britain and Ireland were Celtic speaking peoples; English is an elite imposition, in England and more recently in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
It is more likely that some loose Celtic union will eventually be established to the exclusion of England, which is simply too outsized to not be the pushy, dominant neighbour, as history shows.
The new stance allows UK to leave EU without a deal and still to get a USA trade deal.
It is thought that the TP dropped the NI provisions from the Internal Markets Bill because of the Biden election. If TP wants a USA trade deal then it must respect GFA and avoid any border in Ireland.
At the end of the day there was no way that TP was going to sacrifice a USA trade deal in order to posture about NI. NI is not a stable, integral part of UK and common sense and business has to come first.
> … Biden administration
There is a fear in Irish Government circles that the British government may be retreating on the Northern Ireland issue in order to “box off” the incoming Biden administration in the US and pave the way for a no-deal outcome.
President-Elect Biden and senior Democrats have made clear that they will not agree a new trade deal between the US and the UK if the British government reneges on its commitments to facilitate an open Border in Ireland.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/cabinet-told-brexit-talks-came-close-to-collapse-1.4431190
Biden has removed any prospect of a quick UK-USA trade deal anyway.
So presumably TP now recognises that there would be no prospect of a USA deal if GFA is violated, whichever USA party is in power, as that is a bipartisan position in congress. Trump would not have been able to get a deal through congress in that case.
TP was very silly to add the NI provisions to the IMB, as was pointed out at the time. The situation was clear long before that. Perhaps TP is now ‘tuned in’ better to geopolitical reality and they have reigned in their egos. A proper, no deal Brexit for Britain is possible but NI IMB is not practical.
> Boris handed US trade deal blow as Biden will NOT return to Obama’s ‘free trade agenda’
BORIS Johnson has been dealt a major blow as the US president-elect warned the country will not be entering any new trade deals before major investments are done at home.
Joe Biden, who will be moving into the White House in January next year, said the US will “fight like hell” in a bid to boost the American economy. He made clear he will not be signing any deals before “major investments” are done inside the country first, potentially damaging the UK’s chances of clinching a post-Brexit trade deal with the US.
Speaking today, Mr Biden said: “I want to make sure we’re going to fight like hell by investing in America first.
“I’m not going to enter any new trade agreement with anybody until we have made major investments here at home and in our workers”.
It is the opposite of former US President Barack Obama’s trade policy which sought to prioritise trade relations with the UK and EU which would give “unfettered access to nearly two-thirds of the global economy”.
These comments come as a heavy blow to Boris Johnson, who has been saving a special spot for a free-trade deal with the US in the post-Brexit trade policy….
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1370048/brexit-news-joe-biden-boris-johnson-us-trade-deal-latest-news
There are some sour grapes about Brexit from Osbourne today, calling UK a ‘boiled frog’ and saying that UI and an independent Scotland are likely now.
Most Englanders would likely be happy to go independent anyway. The most recent poll on that matter showed 50% support for English independence, including a majority of both TP and LP voters – and that is without any campaign on the matter.
English independence is the way forward – if the other countries achieve that through their own independence, then all well and good.
> George Osborne warns the break-up of the UK with united Ireland and Scottish independence is ‘realistic’ after ‘boiled frog’ Brexit
Ex-chancellor George Osborne said that the ‘Brexit frog has been truly boiled’
George Osborne today warned the break-up of the United Kingdom is now a ‘realistic prospect’ as he claimed Scottish and Irish nationalists are likely to be the ‘biggest beneficiaries of Brexit’.
The former chancellor said if the terms of Britain’s departure from the European Union had been known back in 2016 then a majority of people would have voted against leaving.
He likened the UK to a frog and said ‘if we had been thrown straight into the hot water back then, we would have jumped out — or perhaps never jumped in’.
…. Today he predicted that Brexit could ultimately lead to the break-up of the UK.
He said ‘history may show the nationalists’ in Scotland and Ireland ‘to be the biggest beneficiaries of Brexit — which is ironic as they didn’t vote for it’.
‘A united, if federated, Ireland is a realistic prospect, being forged each day on the ground by the Withdrawal Agreement, while the Scottish National Party is all-too-confident about another independence referendum,’ he said.
Mr Osborne forecast that Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer will agree to another Scottish border poll as the price for winning power at the next general election….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9034423/George-Osborne-warns-Brexit-cause-break-UK.html
In Canada HSBC has lowered mortgage rates to under 1%. This in a market where real estate sales are already up by 40 to 50% depending on where you live, multiple offers on scarce listings are keeping prices for the average house around $1 million and this is mostly due to the existing 2% mortgage rates!
Now they are cutting those rates in half? Is this happening elsewhere or is it just Canada?
Wow! Very high housing prices and very low mortgage rates.
In Atlanta, when I checked bank rate.com, the interest rates I might get on a 30-year mortgage range from 2.5% to almost 3.0%. My housing price would be a third of your $1 million level, as well.
There is a great new piece at Surplus now, excellent comments too.
The post is https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2020/12/08/186-the-objective-economy-part-three/
#186. The objective economy, part three: Crafting the Future
One of the things Tim Morgan says is
I am not sure I would agree with this. If things are made out of wood, reusing and repairing them can go only so far. Now, we have metals in large supply so goods last longer.
Books were very rare, years ago. Maybe we would be rebinding them more, if we were out of materials.
Certainly hand needlework decoration was valued highly in early days.
He also says,
Maybe so. I think that what people want will be food and clothing primarily, however. Maybe simply built homes and some means of transport.
He tells us that discretionary income will be squeezed out (the topic of his last post). He also tells us that we aren’t going to switch over to craft made computers or vehicles. Instead, Morgan say,
“We will simply make and buy fewer of these energy dissipative products over time.”
He near the end, Morgan says,
This seems to me to be a very weak conclusion relative to the issues we are really facing.
One period of my life I was enthralled with the idea of chair making…more specifically traditional hand crafted chairs in the style of Windsor or Welsh Stick Chairs.
Two prominent people. Michael Dunbar and John Brown, wrote the how to bibles respectively on making it popular hobby for most, and a career for a few others.
Michael Dunbar observed that folk craftsmen had the highest state of knowledge of their materials, design and construction, the cutting edge of technology. Proof of which is the fact many Windsor Chairs are serviceable today after hundreds of years.
John Brown. Now deceased and former shipbuilder before displaced my modern methods, found his calling in writing about the joy and satisfaction of doing in creating the whole from the self.
Of course, there are trade offs in pursuing this way in regard to time and efficiency of materials.
I, myself, attended a 5 day workshop by Drew Langsner in North Carolina for create one myself many years ago.
Drew and Michael have since retired, and John is in the workshop in the sky.
Magical times for me….
P.S. Their books are worth reading and John Brown had a column in the magazine Good Woodworking from the UK.
Soul enriching
We have a chair in our basement that one of my husband’s grandfather’s made. In fact, he made a table and several other chairs. But they have not been sufficiently sturdy, because the legs were not thick enough.
I think a lot of the “crafts” were forced on people without enough training. They weren’t necessarily done very well. The backs of chairs he made have a nice carving of the type of wood involved, but the chairs, themselves, are barely functional. Best if a person is quite light weight.
Too much fantasy these days about crafts.
Who is going to teach them for one thing? Crafts are long to learn, just as much as rocket science.
The last of the craftsmen are dying out, even the toolmakers, etc, are now folding – certainly in my craft, which has continued in uninterrupted succession for some 2,000 years.
My own tools, some 1-200 yrs old, will probably end up in a skip or on a fire in a few years.
I agree that to make a adequate income in crafts one needs to cater to the high income wage or investor class as customers. Offering workshops is not cheap and laborious task with risks of injury or other dangers to participants.
Writing books and doing videos and selling craft tools help too, but require fossil fuels.
The Boggers, chair makings in Olde England, lived a harsh existence. Pictures of the last remaining ones before mass production wiped them out speak of a grim grind. Xavier, afraid you are correct. after BAU, most of the population will be struggling to feed themselves, as now witness by the food bank lines.
Back in medieval days chairs were a luxury only for the nobility, hence the King’s Throne!
I’m not kidding myself, enjoying it while it lasts.
Oh, forgot to mention John Alexander, a former lawyer in Maryland, he also got the bug of chair making, and his book How to Make a Chair from a Tree is another classic.
He also stated his profession enabled him to have time for his craft passion.
Too bad. like you alluded to, this skill will likely be lost in the wind transitioning to a post BAU existence.
Such is the tragedy of it all….
Historically, most bookbinders were paid about the same as stone masons, not bad but not riches.
I charge about £60 or so per hour, which customers happily pay.
The problem is the almost total collapse of the antiquarian book trade and book fairs since 2000: their profit margins have gone.
The winners have been the auction houses, who have no interest in restoration, even to make very valuable books more attractive at auction, and they won’t help with advertising in any way.
It’s proved impossible to replace those contacts and networks, and I told my last, very talented, ‘apprentice’ to give up his dream and only pursue it as a hobby. Best turn I ever did anyone!
HARD TIMES OF OLD ENGLAND
Come all brother tradesmen that travel along;
Oh, pray come and tell me where the trade is all gone.
Long time I have travelled and cannot find none,
And it’s,
Cho: Oh, the hard times of Old England,
In Old England very hard times.
Provisions you buy at the shop, it is true,
But, if you’ve no money, there’s none there for you.
So, what’s a poor man and his family to do?
And it’s,
If you go to a shop and you ask for a job,
They will answer you there with a shake and a nod;
So, that’s enough to make a man turn out and rob.
And it’s,
You will see the poor tradesman a-walking the street
From morning till night, for employment to seek,
And scarcely they’ve got any shoes to their feet.
And it’s,
Our soldiers and sailors have just come from war;
Been fighting for their Queen and their country, ’tis sure
Come home to be starved, better stayed where they were.
And it’s,
And now to conclude and to finish my song,
Let us hope that these hard times they will not last long;
I hope soon to have occasion to alter my song.
And it’s,
Oh, the good times of Old England,
In Old En-ge-land jolly good times.
Surely not!
Can’t they be exhibited at the Xabier Museum of Book Craft along with a waxwork figure of your good self bent over a musty old vellum-covered tome?
There must be bit a local government subsidy going spare to fund it.
I almost set myself up as a one-man Living History Museum once, near Stratford-upon- Avon.
See a real Olde Englande craftsman gild books and drink ale……..
Why a mere wax work? I could be stuffed like Jeremy Bentham.
Hopefully, you will not require a trip to the taxidermist for many decades yet.
In the meantime, I was thinking a waxwork or a wickerwork facsimile could fill in for you until the original becomes available.
Incidentally, there is a nice museum of weaving in my local town, where people can work on the sort of pedal-controlled looms that used to weave expensive silk and cotton fabrics for kimonos until as recently as the 1970s.
There are also a couple of steam locomotives on display outdoors in different parts of the town. A few decades ago they were considered essential display items so every city wanted one. I doubt whether modern Diesel engines will be so well loved.
Gail, a few points your comment:
“If things are made out of wood, reusing and repairing them can go only so far. Now, we have metals in large supply so goods last longer.”
You’re right that metal goods are long lasting. But look around your house and see how many items are made of only metal (or metal plus wood). I can see cookware, cutlery, furniture, hand tools and garden tools and these items have served me well for decades.
Wooden items can be fairly easily duplicated by someone with basic woodworking skills and tools, even if the parts are broken.
Many (if not most) of today’s consumer products are poorly made and contain lots of plastic parts and more importantly integrated circuit electronics. It is beyond most people’s abilities to diagnose and repair modern electronic circuit boards, and often it’s cheaper to just replace the appliance or gadget than figure out what’s wrong with the broken one. Such a waste of resources.
Maybe the “goods” that our great-grandparents used will come back into use on the way down.
“It is beyond most people’s abilities to diagnose and repair modern electronic circuit boards, and often it’s cheaper to just replace the appliance or gadget than figure out what’s wrong with the broken one.”
For the useless eaters it is most certainly a fact. However, not for the well-versed artisanry. They can whip out a soldering iron, oscilloscope, valves and a few IC’s before you can say “in the garbage can with it”. It is what we do – buy and work with tools, making and fixing shit that you take for granted.
Someone sent me a link to an interesting video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo-2gDg-37w&pbjreload=101
Why are billions of dollars worth of ships being intentionally destroyed.
The video is about 14 minutes long. It makes a lot of good points:
(1) Ships are by far the cheapest form of transport for bulk cargo. Shipping by rail is considerably more costly; shipping by truck is more expensive yet. Bulk cargo shipping is the “pack mule of globalization.”
(2) The bigger the ship, the more efficient it is. If you double all dimensions of a boat, the volume increases by a factor of eight, while the materials needed for building it increase by a factor of 4.
(3) The pandemic have disrupted shipping by boat, both for tourist boats and boats shipping goods (in containers or bulk). Fortunately, ship owners have been helped by two effects of the pandemic:
(a) The price of oil used in transport is lower.
(b) A whole lot of oil has been stored on boats, as speculators buy the oil, and hold it hoping for a higher price later.
(4) The stimulus efforts, both in China and in the rest of the world, have led to a lot more building of homes, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. This has raised the demand for raw materials of many kinds, helping keep shipping rates up.
(5) The need for steel is now a problem because of all of the infrastructure being built. One way of getting it is from iron ore. The price of iron ore is now 5 times what it was in late 2005.early 2006 (back when oil prices were very low before). Another way is from melting down steel from scrap. The price for scrap steel is at a 10 year high.
(6) One of the reasons for the high price of iron ore is because Australia has not been able to keep its exports up, with the shutdowns for COVID-19, and workers being required to stay at home. I am sure that this is contributing to the friction between Australia and China.
(7) This status quo have been majorly challenged by the fallout of the coronavirus. International trade has fallen drastically, as nations move to close borders and consumer demand dries up around the world. There have also been major hits to companies that operate a fleet of both cargo and passenger ships because absolutely nobody is getting on a cruise ship these days.
(8) Some shipowners have already started taking some of their older, less efficient ships and started selling them for scrap steel. The longer this goes on, the more it is likely to happen. The extra revenue from the scrap steel help offset losses elsewhere. It makes it hard to reach the prior maximum carrying capacity.
. . .
As I think about it, shipping by boat is a lot like shipping by airplane. Both modes of transport are threatened, but some of the airlines are being helped out by their countries, at least for a time. Long term, both shipping by boat and by air are threatened.
From this morning’s BBC News:
‘Price rises likely’ due to UK shipping problems
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55237791
“Businesses say a global shipping crisis is causing freight costs to soar and UK consumers may soon see price rises for imported goods.
… Global shipping schedules were initially disrupted during the early stages of the pandemic, but recently a surge in demand for imports and a backlog of empty shipping containers are causing bottlenecks at UK ports.
Adam Russell, who imports home appliances such as heaters and air conditioners for One Retail Group based in London, said the situation is “scary”.
“I’ve always been able to find a way to keep the business moving, but if I can’t find a way to move the goods into the country, then that’s when the business stops,” he said.
“We used to pay $2,000 to ship a 40-ft container to the UK, now we’re paying at least $8,000 up to $10,000.
“Ultimately that means we’re going to have to stop importing or we’re going to have to pass that on to the consumer.”
He said it’s “near impossible” to get goods out of China now because fewer vessels than normal are sailing to the UK and there’s also a shortage of empty containers ready to be filled in Chinese ports.
… The Japanese carmaker Honda said delays at UK ports are holding up imports of parts and production will temporarily cease at its Swindon plant from Wednesday.
The Builders Merchants Federation has also complained of delays for building supplies such as screws and timber, crucial for building new homes…”
Inflation / stagflation on the way?
The physical quantity of imports and exports needs to match, in order for to have enough ships and containers where they need to be, for the next goods that are shipped.
Shipping waste for recycling could work, except that practically no one will take that. It is difficult for financial products to fill a container.
Shutdowns and partial shutdowns in Europe make the problem worse, I expect.
«Tony Wrigley, in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, indicates that with the use of coal, farming became a much more productive endeavor. The crop yield from cereal crops, net of the amount fed to draft animals, nearly tripled between 1600 and 1800, which was the period when coal production ramped up in England».
Terje Tvedt is a Norwegian historian who has made TV series about the history of water https://terjetvedt.w.uib.no/film-and-documentaries/the-future-of-water/
In his new book, he argues for a new view of why and how the Industrial Revolution began in the northeastern corner of England. In the first period of the industrial revolution, around 1760 – 1820, only this region of the world had a climate and a water ecology that made stable industrial production possible all year round. A necessary prerequisite for industrial production during this period was rivers and streams with even water flow, with suitable falls and with little sludge and which never froze. The first textile factories were run by water wheels, not by steam engines. Ironworks also depended on hydropower, which powered the bellows that supplied enough oxygen to burn coal so that the temperature in the smelting process was high enough. According to Tvedt, many countries had coal (he is thinking here of coke, not charcoal), but no region had the combination of coal and stable hydropower.
It would have been interesting to hear what Norman Pagett thought about this. Perhaps others also possess important knowledge of the field.
Yes, seems very plausible key aspect as hydro (via water wheels) has been mostly very unstable and seasonal element in the economy. Obviously within stable y/y weather pattern and “upstream” artificial add-ons such as storage ponds a “Miller / Muller” could be very profitable deal for several successive generations unless the equation changed (onset of dry years and or feudal owner further parceling land up-stream i.e. again loss of dependable water – water right contracts were large part of judicial activity back then for this very reason, kind of oily wars of today etc)..
it isn’t possible to ‘use coal to grow food’ (other than in a highly special hothouse)
an intermediate energy converter is required
What you are saying sounds very reasonable. Coal and stable hydropower would be a very useful combination.
Tvert should do his research more thoroughly
The industrial revolution began the day they made iron in commercially viable quantities using coke.
January 10th, 1709
https://extranewsfeed.com/the-day-that-made-your-life-possible-42f6a56c0705
It isn’t possible to rip the earth apart, as humankind has done without material harder than the earth itself.
That means iron, or derivatives of iron. With cheap iron, you can make almost any other product, and construct almost any structure.
The next stage of the industrial revolution was the production of the modern steam engine, (around 1776)
That gave access to deep mined coal, (by pumping out water)., and almost unlimited power to industrial processes. This meant factories didn’t need locations near falling water needing water wheels.
With water wheels you have a periodic drought problem.
Iron foundries (the critical ‘blowing’ process was done by steam engines pumping water uphill to reservoirs, and releasing it later to power blast fans) could be built where the coal and iron was.
Steam engines powered deep oil well drills—and so on.
The next stage was powered transport.
It was a simple step of technology to put (rifled) iron guns on iron ships—and the world was ripe for the taking. For a century the English pilfered the world. Then in 1914 our coal peaked. and the game was up. Though we didn’t admit it for another 50 years. (Some still haven’t)
The geological genesis for all this happened in the English Midlands, driven by a genius family of Quakers. They also had a convenient river to ship their goods out.
Then the Americans picked up where we left off. But their resources peaked in the 1970s, and then faced the same denial problem as we did in 1914.
There is still the endemic denial that we are entirely dependent on cheap surplus fuels. (which Kunstler makes abundantly clear)
*****
The ‘agricultural revolution’ was brought about by improved iron ploughs, but these were introduced in the 1600s. This boosted food supplies a bit. But as long as ploughs were powered by horse energy, they consumed a large proportion of that the plough delivered.
iron tractors don’t do that.
Summing up, our civilised life can only continue as long as we are able to convert explosive forces into rotary motion.
it’s rotary motion tonight, baby!
Summing up, our civilised life can only continue as long as we are able to convert explosive forces into rotary motion.
As a pedant, Norman, who quibbles about such things as the start date of the Industrial Revolution, you’ll doubtless appreciate being told that explosive forces are not necessary to the above process. One merely needs to heat water with fire, sunlight, nuclear energy, etc., until it is hot enough to form steam, which can then be employed to drive a dynamo to generate electricity or to a piston connected to wheels or other rotatable elements to make them go around and around. Result, revolution!
By the way, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, your quibble was erroneous:
Although used earlier by French writers, the term Industrial Revolution was first popularized by the English economic historian Arnold Toynbee (1852–83) to describe Britain’s economic development from 1760 to 1840.
Far be it from me, a humble peasant, to have an opinion on such lofty matters, but when Britannica and Toynbee the Elder disagree with Norman, what’s a poor layman to do?
at a casual appraisal of your comment— heated steam provides an explosive force to drive rotary motion.
which seems to be in accordance with what I said in the first place—thought in a more convoluted way of saying it.
A lifetime of writing taught me to cut out surplus words so that a concept is more easily absorbed by those who might have difficulty absorbing it. Doesn’t always work though.
There are always who will read what they choose to read, even stuff that isn’t there.
********
no quibbles involved
if you can demonstrate a mass-purpose industry that does not require iron or iron derivatives to underpin it, I would be most grateful, because I don’t like being in error.
No doubt you have ideas on how modern civilisation CAN continue without the forces driving rotary motion? Can’t wait to know.
If you care to read my comment again, I did not infer anything about the term ‘industrial revolution’ being used from 1709 onwards. (such an idea is ludicrous , though to be expected from certain quarters)
I merely pointed out the date when (in retrospect) it started.
Rather like someone living in 1400 and declaring that he was living ‘in the Middle Ages’. Or someone in 1916 saying he was fighting in the ‘first world war’. Daft.
Still, mental exercise in ridicule and finger pointing is better than none I suppose. But do read back through and analyse your comments before pressing ‘post’.
Less embarrassing for everyone else to read.
Simpler is OK with me. This is a link to Wrigley’s chart showing the timing of the use of coal in England:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/wrigleyfig1-e1346123057549.gif
Annual energy consumption per head (megajoules) in England and Wales 1561-70 to 1850-9 and in Italy 1861-70. Figure by Wrigley
that chart fits in with my thinking on it, in basic terms
Shows that coal not only provided the power for industrial civilisation to kick off, perhaps more importantly it provided the power to extract itself from the earth.
It was a self generating energy system, for as long as coal seams could be economically accessed.
problem was we really did regard it as infinite, (together with oil and gas of course.)
There is an unfortunate certainty that solar panels and wind turbines work the same way.
at a casual appraisal of your comment— heated steam provides an explosive force to drive rotary motion.
You seem to be ignorant of the relevant meaning of the word “explosive”. I’m no expert on this subject but the following is my understanding.
An explosive is substance that can undergo an explosion, which is an event where energy rapidly expands outward from the source, often creating a damaging shock wave.
Heated steam CAN be used to provide an explosive force to drive rotary motion, as you say. This happens in the case of steam turbines, for example. HOWEVER—and I will repeat this since you have overlooked it in your haste to score points—explosive forces are not necessary to produce rotary motion, and they were not employed to do so in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution.
The steam engine, which was the main driving force of the Industrial Revolution, was like a huge kettle in which heat was added to water progressively or continuously in order to raise its temperature to produce steam. The build up of pressure produced by the continuous evaporation of water into steam supplied the motive power. Such systems were designed so that the steam did not explode or produce an explosive force as this could lead to dangerous accidents.
If you care to read my comment again, I did not infer anything about the term ‘industrial revolution’ being used from 1709 onwards.
If you care to read my response, I did not say you did. I merely pointed out that Tyndall and Britannia both said the Industrial Revolution started around 1760 and so you are arguing against them, as well as against Terje Tvedt, when you insist on an earlier date.
I merely pointed out the date when (in retrospect) it started.
One can always go back a bit further and find some pretext for giving an earlier date for the start of what was a progressive historical process, and you can argue about it until you’re blue in the face, but that’s just like, your opinion, man.
One could date it to the first commercially successful steam engine, built in 1712 by Thomas Newcomen. Or to the Miner’s Friend, patented by Thomas Savery in 1698, which was the first practical machine to be powered by steam. Or even to Denis Papin’s first demonstration of steam pressure to move a piston in 1690.
As for the rest of the points you made in the earlier comment, I didn’t attempt to address them and I will not attempt to do so now. My quibbles were with your quibble about the date of start of the Industrial Revolution, which is not worth quibbling about, and about your use of the word explosive, which I believe is inappropriate. Nothing more nor less.
I doubt if I will entice an admission of error out of you, but perhaps my input will help you to consider the very real and important difference between explosive and continuous pressure and that this will make you an even greater scholar than wot u r already. 🙂
lol
I don’t need to score points, you hand them to me, complete with a stick of chalk–should I be inclined.
10% or thereabouts of coaldust in air in an enclosed space will produce a combustive explosion if ignited. Flour will do the same thing. Fire is a form of explosion, If it is confined the effect is violent, unconfined you can roast potatoes in it.
Gunpowder will burn if it is unconfined. Confined—is a different matter of course.
Does that explain what fire is?
But one cannot drive a steam turbine like that. An intermediate energy converter is required
To simplify the point still further, (as is obviously necessary) one cannot grow crops on land by pouring diesel onto it–an energy converter is needed. (fertiliser and/or a tractor.)
The explosive force in coal/oil/gas similarly requires the energy converter of the piston or turbine. That ultimately results in rotative forces. Unless you specialise in cannon balls or rockets of course.
the difference between a wheel and a cannon ball is that the wheel rotates for another firing. A cannon ball doesn’t.
A principle so blindingly obvious I thought it didn’t require pointing out.
40 years in this game should have kicked me into knowing better. I was using the wrong level of common denominator.
I skipped straight to the Watt engine on the same error. Newcomen and Savery engines were not commercially viable long term. They burned too much fuel for profitable return. Watt’s engine solved the problems of the 2 previous ones.
Don’t rely on my pedantry—check it for yourself.
Pontificate and obfuscate all you want. You are just avoiding and fudging the issues I pointed out, going off at a tangent, and being generally disingenuous.
Honestly, it’s gotten to the point where my previous respect for your scholarship has all but melted away—not because you’ve made some mistakes but because you refuse to own up to them when they are pointed out to you.
If you get stuff this basic wrong and you can’t admit that it’s wrong even when it’s pointed out to you, how can anyone trust anything you say about anything any more?
The issue is not about gunpowder or combustive explosions in confined places—it’s about the early steam engines that powered the Industrial Revolution. And the ones that were adopted did not use explosive force. Here’s a simple explanation of the principle
A steam engine is a machine that burns coal to release the heat energy it contains—so it’s an example of what we call a heat engine. It’s a bit like a giant kettle sitting on top of a coal fire. The heat from the fire boils the water in the kettle and turns it into steam.
https://www.explainthatstuff.com/steamengines.html
“Why don’t you come to bed?” the wife shouted late last night. “I can’t,” I replied, “Norman Pagett is wrong on the Internet again.”
next time the missis says—
”sorry I have a blinding headache”.
present her with a 500 word diatribe on the workings of the optic nerve, and explain that she has no such thing, and that her eyesight is quite unimpaired, and in any case will not be necessary..
please accept my apologies for my foolishness in starting this thread:
Civilisation is dependent on explosive force providing rotative motion.
The concept is a shorthand of the English language, ( see above) to convey an abstract thought with minimal words.
my foolishness was in attempting such minor verbal gymnastics with someone who presents me with the ‘certainty’ that the WTC was brought down by a team of (unknown) demolition experts, to further an (unknown) political agenda.
I am the idiot—freely confessed.
I should know better
Tim, the first steam engine was invented by Heron of Alexandria in the first century AD. All it used was heat and water. It converted steam pressure directly into rotary motion, no intermediate conversion or moving part necessary.
You know, if people studied the history of technology, they wouldn’t make some stupid mistakes. I leave you to guess of whom I’m thinking; but take heart, your essays are much respected by this contributor..
Lol Robert–I expected better from you. Still—we all need a bit of humour these days, don’t you agree?
To repeat your ‘knowledge of technology’
There was no converter
and no moving part
the moving part was the vessel itself—effectively a rotating kettle on a stand. The energy converter was the kettle itself.
I remain amazed at having to point that out.
That was why no useful work could be extracted from it, the rotating component and the energy converter were one and the same.
2 steam jets provided the necessary rotative motion
Without the ‘converter’–(the rotating kettle), the flame would just be dissipating heat—and nothing more. I would be interested in knowing otherwise.
I really do like learning new stuff—when I come across a good teacher.
Truly laughable. I really would have expected better.
In previous exchanges about the merits of steam engines, I mentally ignored that one, because it had no practical function or purpose.
It never occurred to me that someone would point it out as a functioning ‘steam engine’ in this context. Least of all you Robert.. In a previous exchange I seem to recall a mention of point scoring.
Really!
Maybe you’ve been reading the wrong (technology) history books?
Read the one which confirms that cheap surplus energy allowed us to have ‘technology’
Ignore the one which tells you we can use technology to get cheap surplus energy
Folks, this is Entertaining! Keep it up.
I first used the term, ‘explosive force’ in the purely generic sense, meaning it to be taken in that context (silly me)
in the same sense that a boxer might be described as as having a punch with explosive force behind it—or—he lost patience and his temper exploded in exasperation.–or–his carefully laid scheme blew up in his face.
Common, everyday phrases.
One can write that, without the reader somehow visualising the described person flying off in bits everywhere.
Or so I thought.
And I think most OFW doomsters understood what I was blathering on about
I thought I could generically describe industrial civilisation as being entirely dependent on explosive forces (which it is) without adding a 500 word diatribe about the relative nature of explosions, various compounds, re gunpowder, coal dust, steam, ancient greeks, Savery, Newcomen, Watt and all the rest. I’m surprised nobody mentioned the the Nobel formulae for dynamite,
instead the nitpickers got there first, feeling it necessary to explain what an explosion is. Instead of discussing the meaning behind it. (which would have been appreciated)
One more hypothesis
Oxidative Stress as Key Player in Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV) infection
“Respiratory viral infections are, in general, associated with cytokine production, inflammation, cell death, and other pathophysiological processes, which could be link with a redox imbalance or oxidative stress. These phenomena are substantially increased during aging. Actually, severity and mortality risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection or Covid-19 disease have been associated with the age.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341044337_Oxidative_Stress_as_Key_Player_in_Severe_Acute_Respiratory_Syndrome_Coronavirus_SARS-CoV_infection
https://cen.acs.org/biological-chemistry/infectious-disease/coronavirus-transform-science/98/i14
“Rudolf Fluckiger
(April 8, 2020 10:01 AM)
There is an easy way to protect oneself from coronavirus. It causes damage to the body by the mediation of the oxygen radicals superoxide and hydroxyl radicals. These cause inflammation and a liquid barrier to form between blood vessels and alveoli thereby preventing proper gas exchange thereby causing respiratory distress. Removing the oxygen radicals by taking twice daily the antioxidants pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ, 10 mg) to quench superoxide and N-acetylcysteine (NAC, 1200 mg) that traps hydroxyl radicals will allow the inflammation to resolve and patients to breath again, if one could find a person who believes in science. So far we have not found such a person despite numerous e-mails and postings on social media.
Rudolf Fluckiger, Ph.D.
Biochemist”
https://mgriblog.org/2019/10/03/alzheimers-disease-expert-says-future-treatment-success-will-require-a-shift-in-strategy-and-timing/
Rudolf FluckigerREPLYOctober 10, 2019 at 10:29 amI observed that feeding the antioxidants pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ) and N-acetylcysteine (NAC) to a sunsetting dog, a model for human pre-Alzheimer’s disease markedly reduced the rate of progression of symptoms. We postulate that PQQ/NAC therapy that works in other conditions by creating an oxygen radical-free state that prevents the activation of Transient Potential Receptor (TRP) ion channels would also delay and or reverse AD symptoms in humans. In man the effective dosages are take twice daily the antioxidants pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ, 10 mg) and N-acetylcysteine (NAC, 600 mg). With modest funding we would carry out a pilot study to show that what we observed in an animal also works in humans. Lung cancer patients should not try this because antioxidants activate a gene promoting metastasis.
alzheimergadflyREPLYOctober 11, 2019 at 10:33 am
Tanzi in 2015 defended the amyloid hypothesis despite negative trials, basically blaming the trials: https://www.mdmag.com/medical-news/qanda-with-rudolph-tanzi-from-massachusetts-general-finding-therapies-for-alzheimers-disease-no-easy-taskInteresting that he’s flexible enough to change his mind.
https://medium.com/@novacule/we-can-break-the-back-of-the-coronavirus-pandemic-if-we-follow-the-science-b570f0a16021
“We can break the back of the coronavirus pandemic if we follow the science. Respiratory distress is caused by inflammation that causes a layer of inflammation-induced fluid accumulation between blood vessels and alveoli thereby causing respiratory distress. Inflammation can be counteracted by simply taking twice daily the antioxidants pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ. 10 mg) which quenches superoxide and N-acetylcysteine (NAC, 1200 mg) that traps hydroxyl radicals. No need for a vaccine against a constantly mutating virus. We used and evaluated the safety of PQQ/NAC for ten years now in over 100 volunteers and found it to be safe and of great therapeutic potential. PQQ/NAC cannot be used in lung cancer patients because their lung cancer cells carry the Bach 1 gene that when exposed to antioxidants promotes cancer metastasis. Also, people using the blood thinner Eliquis need to omit NAC because its interaction with Eliquis causes adverse side effects.”
N-Acetylcysteine to Combat COVID-19: An Evidence Review
“However, the vaccine has shown limited benefit in the elderly, suggesting an age-dependent immune response. As a result, exploring new applications of existing medications could potentially provide valuable treatments for COVID-19. N-acetylcysteine (NAC) has been used in clinical practice to treat critically ill septic patients, and more recently for COVID-19 patients. NAC has antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and immune-modulating characteristics that may prove beneficial in the treatment and prevention of SARS-Cov-2. This review offers a thorough analysis of NAC and discusses its potential use for treatment of COVID-19.”
https://www.dovepress.com/n-acetylcysteine-to-combat-covid-19-an-evidence-review-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-TCRM
Vaccination indications and limits in the elderly
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24089135/
“Although vaccination is crucial for preventing infectious diseases, the ability of the elderly to establish an effective immune response to vaccination is much lower compared to the younger population.”
The oxidative stress seems to be common to both Alzheimers and coronavirus:
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20201109/Research-explores-links-between-Alzheimers-and-Parkinsone280b2s-to-COVID-19.aspx
“While the previous studies provide compelling evidence that dementia or neurodegenerative diseases increase the risk of COVID-19 infection and mortality, but it does not specific subtypes of neurological disorders that may differentially affect COVID-19 outcome. The important conclusion drawn from this study is that there are disease-specific differences in COVID-19 susceptibility, especially among patients affected by neurodegenerative disorders.”
“This study shows: 1) pre-existing diagnosis of Alzheimer′s disease predicts the highest risk of COVID-19 infection and mortality, and 2) in the case of Parkinson′s disease patients, the risk of infection is increased but not mortality from COVID-19.”
Interesting reading, thanks MG.
I have been taking NAC 600ml daily for over five years now along with ALA (alpha-lipoic acid), another good free radical scavenger. But I hadn’t heard of PQQ up to now. I may give it a go but I don’t really want to increase the number of pills, capsules and tablets I have to swallow with my morning tea.
I take vitamin D and Quercetin, the latter to be a supply of Zinc ionophores. You must take some form of Zinc, which is certain compounds like ionophores plays an anti-viral role in cell immunity.
Interestingly, blue berries naturally have Quercetin.
Tim> are you really taking “Acetylcysteine” NAC 600ml (or mg? pills / syrup ?) daily for such a long period ? That’s sort of elevated dosage apart from that “not recommended” warning for taking it more than several weeks/months in a row..
Thanks
Some of you might find this of interest, it is at 3:00-4:30 EST, Ray Dailo who has been mentioned above.
“As many of you know, I’ve been studying the forces behind the rise and fall of great empires and their reserve currencies throughout history, with a focus on what that means for the US and China today. Many of the things now happening the world—like the creation of a lot of debt and money, big wealth and political gaps, and the rise of new world power (China) challenging an existing one (the US)—haven’t happened in our lifetimes but have happened many times in history for the same reasons they’re happening today.
Today, I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA from 3-4:30PM EST, where I can discuss this with you and we can explore the patterns of history and the perspective they can give us on what is happening today. You can join here:
ASK ME ANYTHING
Ray
PS – In case you missed the latest chapter, which is on the stages of internal order and disorder within countries with a special focus on the US, you can find it here. ”
Dennis L.
Just when you thought that the ‘great reset’ could not get any more obnoxious.
> Pope Francis gives his blessing to Council for Inclusive Capitalism
Alliance marks an embrace of big business and finance by the Vatican
Pope Francis is giving his blessing to a coalition of large investors, companies, unions and foundations that are pledging to make capitalism less socially and environmentally damaging.
The Vatican will on Tuesday lend its name to the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, whose members must commit to measurable action to create a more equitable and trusted economic system, including adherence to the UN’s sustainable development goals.
The alliance marks an embrace of big business and finance by a head of the Roman Catholic Church who has warned of the idolatry of making profit one’s only purpose and called unfettered free markets the “dung of the devil”.
In a statement, Pope Francis said that a fair, trustworthy economic system that could address humanity’s biggest challenges was “urgently needed”. The group’s leaders had taken up the challenge of making capitalism “a more inclusive instrument for integral human wellbeing”, he said.
The council’s founding members, who will hold annual meetings with the Pope, include the managers of $10.5tn of assets, companies with a combined market capitalisation of more than $2tn and groups representing more than 200m workers around the world.
They include the leaders of companies including Bank of America, BP, EY, Johnson & Johnson, Salesforce and Visa. The investment groups Calpers, State Street and TIAA are also members, alongside the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, OECD secretary-general Angel Gurría and Mark Carney, the UN special envoy for climate finance.
“Neither the Vatican nor the CEOs that I know need another meeting. We need action and we need to reform capital markets,” Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the council’s founder, told the Financial Times. The Pope’s support was significant, she said, because “it’s a positive embrace of doing the right thing for capitalism, but it’s also a challenge”.
She said she had been confident that she could enlist leaders in business and finance to advance a more inclusive form of capitalism, but approached the Vatican because “we needed moral guidance”….
https://www.ft.com/content/0e615ffe-ce44-4bd7-8fad-80e1ebc54394
I believe the phrase is “jump the shark”. Does Lynn Rothschild actually believe what she says?
“A video showing a simulation of someone sneezing near to another person wearing a face shield has revealed exactly how much protection such face covers can offer – and the answer is, not much.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-12/aiop-fsn120320.php
Deagle.com is a psyop.
The population of the Third World remaining the same after the First World becoming batshit is simply ludicrous.
A lot of them are dependent upon food, petrol and other stuff imported from First World. If the First World collapses, these countries will quickly fall into a catastrophe.
Even the remotest village in the Himalayas and loneliest island in the South Seas have satellite TV. Without imports from the First World, their pop can’t be sustained for too long and soon they will return to what they had around 1900.
The forecast is only until 2025, but you may have a point.
Having said that, the Kunstler essay is superb.
He has drawn a lot of flack as a crazy old Trumpista (quite false, he is merely disgusted with what the Dems have become, and quite rightly so ) and this – triumphantly – vindicates his grasp of reality, not that it was needed.
‘Spray-on plastic stucco’: when one knows what the true stucco could do and how long it can last -and what beauty can be embodied in stucco sculptures and mouldings!
In the late 18th century the local lord here demolished the old (Saxon? Roman?) village near his great house – to improve the view – but built new houses for his tenants ,out of sight, which today put most ‘luxury’ developments to shame.
Thick walls, thatched roofs, high ceilings, big gardens – people say they would love to live in them, and they were built for mere peasants. 200 years of good service.
We have sown, and now the time of reaping -and lamentations – has come.
some landlords were very enlightened, and looked after their tenants, realising they were to source of their income.
unfortunately many were not–if you read up on the highland clearances, and one of the Dickens novels, ( I forget which) dealt with the same thing happening in London to bring the main railway termini into the centre of the city
In this case, I believe the lord of the manor was just after a prettier view, and the fashionable architecture pattern books of the day provided a lovely model for the new houses.
But it paid off for his tenants!
By way of contrast, the Utopian architects and planners post-WW2 built living Hells in London, and elsewhere.
I agree with you—village shifting was commonplace in past times.
I was talking about London in the 1830s though.
50 years ago I worked for a guy who had inherited a slew of badly run down ‘in town’ properties. they couldnt be demolished. He set out to renovate them benevolently, one by one, by moving people just a few doors sideways each time one came vacant (I was doing his plans).
Each house was lovely when it was done.
that didn’t prevent him from being universally detested for upsetting peoples lives, even though they were living in squalor
Given major dislocations, of various kinds, the Deagel forecast is, of course ,possible – but I tend take it with a pinch of salt.
Maybe yet another psy-op?
One stumbles across them like barbed wire in No-man’s Land.
So many cooks these days, stirring the pot……
“So many cooks these days, stirring the pot……”
And adding spices. You cant even tell whether the flavor is intentional or not.
Have posted the reference earlier and do not have the link before me. A well respected physicist had a mathematical idea that financial prediction more than 30 days in the future was impossible.
Judging from the inaccuracy of various predictions with regard to timing, I would guess most of these ideas will turn out to be wrong. Kunstler has been predicting the end of the world since the DJI was 10,000, similarly with the Peak Prosperity guy when he sent out a signal to sell the DOW at maybe 18K. It can’t be done.
If the population is really going to collapse that fast, luck alone will determine one’s future. Those who think they can survive alone, garden alone, etc. miss the point. It all takes time, it takes a group, alone one is back to 35 years of very hard, brutal life with a very brutal death.
Disclaimer, I read Kunstler 2x per week, my observation is he was a liberal and the very ideas he supported didn’t work and may have us in this mess, or as Desi said, “Kunstler, you have some ‘splaining to do.” Kunstler was wrong, his group has gone off the rails and this is a tragedy for all of us. No one group has all the answers, we really do need different political viewpoints.
Dennis L.
Kunstler does seem a bit extreme
2 out of 3 Americans dead five years from now?
that would be a bigger slaughter than ww1 and 2 combined.
One must ask how it might come about—not even the AR15 2nd amendmenters could pull that off
so it would have to something much bigger:
Nuclear War
An even bigger pandemic
Catastrophic sudden methane release
An future asteroid strike would have been spotted well in advance by now.–so unlikely
If the USA really going to have its energy supplies cut by 50% or so next year, then I suppose the population could enter a wholesale panic mode and start killing/eating each other.
The same is likely to happen world wide I guess
The vaccine might do it.
Civil war might accomplish it.
Mass starvation following sudden economic collapse might achieve it.
Or millions of Americans may move overseas through the remaining gaps in the Wall, thereby reducing the population without the need for them to physically die.
But as the Deagel people tell us, the prediction is basically a game played on a model. They don’t claim to have a crystal ball.
The system seems to be grinding to a halt. Contracts are slowing, businesses going under, mail delivery now sketchy in some areas. With shipping in trouble due to less activity, and future energy costs, I think we will see the food production slow and that combined with everything else, just reduce all activity to the minimum.no doubt, when we reach the rubicon of the medical system grinding to a halt, people will die.
I think most people here will be familiar with James Howard Kunstler’s blog. The most current post is a bit longer than usual, it was an article for a group I am not familiar with, The American Conservative. But one of his best posts, and more or less avoids any discussion of current politics in the USA:
De-Growth Will Define How We Live in the Future
https://kunstler.com/other-stuff/articles/jhk-in-the-american-conservative-new-urbanism-de-growth-will-define-how-we-live-in-the-future/
“One calculation, by Deagle, the government-connected military technology and intelligence consulting company, predicts global population drops of 50 to 80 percent by 2025, with the U.S. population reduced to 100 million from the current 330 million.
…Anybody paying attention to the world around them can’t fail to notice how the middle class is being gutted from its lower blue-collar base on up into the professional strata.
…Rounding the corner of the new year in a few weeks, whoever is president faces a new and spooky disposition of things. De-growth with all its awful consequences is upon us. There will be less of everything for the same number of people who were here ten months ago, fewer businesses that can generate enough cash flow to survive, fewer employees, fewer customers for anything…”
He ends on a relatively optimistic note.
“Eventually this society—or agglomeration of societies in North America—will settle into the next chapter of history in which we learn to live with a lot less. It won’t be the end of the world; it will be the end of an era: the age of the fossil fuel orgy.”
I just cannot see cities surviving without fossil fuels. Maybe he was obliged to end the article with a hint of optimism.
DeagEL reckons that UK will be down to 14 million, down by 78% by 2025.
I admit that I LOL’d when I read that but who knows?
> In 2014 we published a disclaimer about the forecast. In six years the scenario has changed dramatically. This new disclaimer is meant to single out the situation from 2020 onwards.
…. This website is non-profit, built on spare time and we provide our information and services AS IS without further explanations and/or guarantees. We are not linked to any government. Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a game of numbers whether flawed or correct based upon some speculative assumptions.
https://www.deagel.com/forecast
I don’t like to contradict JHK, but I think the Deagel prediction is for sharp population drops of over 50% in North America and Europe, and 20% in Japan, but not for the world as a whole.
Of the world’s two biggest countries, China’s population will drop only a few percent and India’s will rise by about 5%. Brazil, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Egypt, the Philippines and Pakistan are also set to see rises.
https://www.deagel.com/forecast
This is a forecast to 2025, by country, of population, real GDP, defense budgets, and PPP GDP per person. If a person hovers over the indications of a given country, a note pops up, regarding the percentage change for a given country. For example, the population of the US is forecast to be 99 million in 2025, down by 70% from previously 326 million. The population of the UK is forecast to be 14 million, down by 78% from the previous population of 65 million. There is a write-up at the bottom of the “page” giving some background. This is the beginning of the current write-up:
As I look through the forecast, the one country that stands out as doing better than in the recent past is Russia. Its per capita PPP GDP is expected to rise 56%, to $43,557, while its population drops by only 1 million, from 142 million to 141 million. Its oil, coal, and gas resources will presumably help the country. Evidently, its alliance with China will help those resources be more valuable.
The forecast seems to assume that most current oil producing countries will generally do pretty well, but still down substantially from the past. Both population and GDP per capita will be down substantially. For example, Saudi Arabia’s population is forecast to fall 11%% and its PPP GDP per capita is forecast to fall 42% to $31,873, but at that level it is still very high relative to other countries.
I am struck by the PPP GDP per capita forecast for 2025 for the UK. It is expected to be $9,068, which ranks just below that of Venezuela. That of the US is forecast to be $16,374. Japan’s is forecast to remain much higher at $23,593 (but down from $42,700 now).
China comes out clearly on top in this analysis. Its total population is expected to be down by 2%, but its PPP GDP per capita is expected to increase by 7%, to $17,843.
If parts of the world economy can indeed hang together, this forecast seems to be fairly realistic. If the governments of oil exporting countries collapse and cannot be replaced with other orderly systems, it likely is optimistic.
It is hard to see USA taking that outcome lying down. One wonder whether Deagel has factored in resource wars.
If resources cannot be got any other way then war would be the obvious recourse. International law would go completely out of the window.
Likely the rules of the game would change completely. Nothing can be assumed about what countries would not become or do in such a collapse.
It would be an all-out struggle for survival and military prowess may be the bottom line in who gets what.
EROI on war?
Indeed.
Mirror, resource wars have always been with us. The Ancient Egyptians made several (unsuccessful) attempt to seize the gold fields of Ethiopia, or ‘Nubia’. And under Tutmoses III they did take over the copper mines of Palestine. By the way, copper was back then more valuable than gold, because it was the only tool making metal.
The Greeks searched for accessible silver mines; the Romans conquered Iberia from Carthage largely for its silver, and when that ran out Trajan invaded Dacia in a desperately stupid attempt to refresh the treasury.
More recently, Japan captured the Dutch East Indies, and Germany tried to capture the Caucasus, for another resource they both lacked and needed: oil.
As they say, history does not repeat, but it rhymes.
Mirror, perhaps that’s what the analysis per Gail’s quote is all about. Resource wars first (as we actually witnessed in past few decades and economic outsourcing), then even “low intensity” hardship (steepening of depletion / PPP downdraft curve / global trade seizure) crumbles the already hollowed out societies for good very quickly (~about now).
Gail, Oswald Spengler, in Volume II of “Der Untergang des Abendlandes” predicted a long and deep depopulation of what we call the West, and he called the “Faustian” civilisation. He drew analogies with the depopulation of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. And all this in 1922. I rather think he was right, as he was right about so much else.
Two items worthy of note about the UK.
It is a very densely populated country such that it imports almost half its food requirements. I have read that if the imports were to disappear, we could just about manage if food was rationed and distributed evenly. That would certainly take care of a lot of the UK’s health problems, but I don’t get the impression this is now a very caring country, and more likely the haves will not want to share with the have-nots.
A high proportion of the UK’s net income from global trade comes from the financial sector, based in London, the so-called square mile.
James Kunstler’s article is extremely good. I encourage everyone to read it. This is the link again: https://kunstler.com/other-stuff/articles/jhk-in-the-american-conservative-new-urbanism-de-growth-will-define-how-we-live-in-the-future/
Jim Kunstler wrote The Long Emergency back in 2005. I read several peak oil books back in late 2005 and early 2006; JHK’s The Long Emergency was by far my favorite, because it picked up on the idea of built infrastructure no longer working the way it was expected to, because one problem leads to another. For example, if a house cannot be heated, its water pipes will freeze. I know that JHK reads at least some of my posts.
One thing that struck me as true from this article is,
“You can say financialization is money with the value removed.”
Another thing:
“As a general principle going forward, anything that operates at the giant scale is liable to fail. The small and nimble are more likely to thrive.”
The subtitle of the article is
“This is not a depression, but a permanent contraction of the scale and complexity of things. And it might help us cultivate gratitude.”
I used to read JHK twice a week until I could not longer handle his constant conspiracy theories. This is the guy who claimed he was allergic to such conspiracies just won’t let up on his latest “election fraud” theory.
Clearly if the world population took such a dramatic hit we’d be well on our way to collapse?
I can almost see an election fraud conspiracy. Paper ballots are easy to print extras of; machines sit unwatched most of the year. But if it were terribly obvious, it seems like states (especially those with Republican legislatures and governors) would have figured out the problem by now.
Yes, you’d have thought it would have been figured out by now. But it seems there are lots of checks with mail in ballots; I don’t think it’s that easy to fraud the system with mail in ballots. If there is clear evidence of fraud, I would expect that to have been brought to the courts by now. The Trump campaign has only a few days left before the Electoral College meets and Trump has said he’d leave the White House if the college votes for Biden (though I don’t think he’d actually concede, even then).
I don’t think it’s that easy to fraud the system with mail in ballots.
Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
It doesn’t take a political genius to see the 2020 Election is as fraudulent as fraudulent can be.
Like almost everything else in America these days.
Full-spectrum incoherence is the elite’s preferred strategy for ensuring that the rest of us don’t know what the hell’s going on.
What’s more important: the pandemic or the election or the vaccine?
Was the pandemic used as a pretext for fixing/stealing the election or was the election used as a diversion while introducing the vaccine or is the whole lot simply a cover for the elites’ Grand Theft America 2020~25 or for for controlled demolition of the industrial West and its replacement by Neo-feudalism while we the people were busy working about the virus masquerade and following the election fiasco?
Every comment here is just an opinion. But there is a fair bit of security with mail in ballots; it’s not just a case of filling out a form, running it through a duplicator and then sending off a few thousand to the election authority. You’re right that it wouldn’t take a genius to see the 2020 election fraud; it would take actual evidence. Without it, your opinion is of no value to anyone else and won’t change the outcome of the election.
As for all of your questions in your last paragraph, I suggest you wait for answers that please you from some obscure blog and ensure the answers are repeated at least three times before you accept them. Then they must be true.
Absentee ballots used to be 2% of the vote. They forced it up to 70%
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/historical-absentee
Precisely to make it easier to cheat. When 98% of voters are voting in real time, you don’t have days and weeks of opportunity for unattended poll workers to pull suitcases of random ballots out from under the tables in the middle of the night, as happened in Georgia.
“I don’t think it’s that easy to fraud the system with mail in ballots.
If there is clear evidence of fraud…”
I live in the UK and can see how easy it is to fraud the system. Just watch some of the many videos on YT.
Every comment here is just an opinion.
No, that isn’t true. Some of the comments here are simple statements of fact. Others are quotations of what other people have said or written.
An opinion, as most of us understand the word, is a view or judgement formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge, or in a narrower sense it is a statement of advice by an expert on a professional matter.
A lot of your comments here, Mike, fall under the rubric of “opinion”, in my opinion, and that’s fine by me. And some of those opinions may eventually be shown to be correct over time. The opinion “I don’t think it’s that easy to fraud the system with mail in ballots” should, in a rational world, be verifiable one way or the other. The problem is we are not living in a rational world but a political world where reason tends to get distorted beyond all recognition in pursuit of partisan advantage—in my opinion!
Well, I’ve read that there are multiple layers of identity checks on mail in ballots, at least in some states. It’s pretty hard to vote twice as the same person so I can’t see that such ballots would be easy to make up. Of course, that’s my opinion but no judge has thought otherwise, so far and they generally require more than just an opinion. In my opinion.
The argument that “there are a lot of checks” ignores the facts.
The ballot system in the name of privacy is designed to not have evidence. You cant have both evidence and privacy. The checks are chain of custody and poll watchers. Both were systematically denied in the places that gave Biden the win.
Why were the “checks” denied?
Why not clear things up with a forensic investigation?
There is no evidence of systematic fraud at this point in time. There is absolute evidence that the checks and balances were denied. There is no evidence of a honest election. The acts of denying the checks and balances in the only places the mail in ballots existed in large enough numbers to cheat would indicate a strong possibility of cheating. There are many many indicators that there was cheating. More than enough for a conviction in a criminal case beyond a shadow of a doubt IMO.
The cry of no evidence presents a standard of evidence that is nonstandard and it presents it in conjunction with a system that is designed to have no evidence for privacy.
The cry of no evidence ignores the fact that the system is designed not to have evidence. It ignores that the only thing that keeps it honest is chain of custody and poll watchers.
Without those things the only thing left in evidence that a honest election occured is trust in those implementing.
Forgive me if my trust is lacking. Republicans were systematically not hired as poll workers. Poll workers wearing BLM masks and t shirts.
What if republicans denied poll watchers and chain of custody then counted in secret in back rooms wearing trump t shirts then yelled no evidence?
My best guess is that Biden will be swore in. The republicans are done. Why would you vote again if your republican?
To validate the results of a sham election? To participate in fraud?
The democrats wont ever have to cheat again. Voter turnout goes to 50%. Democrat votes go to 100%.
I don’t know the details for all states but the ballot paper is sealed inside an envelope, inside another envelope which has identity information that can be checked. Once all checks are completed, the outer envelope is separated from the inner one for privacy reasons, before that inner one is unsealed and the ballot counted. This is why I think it’s difficult to scam. However, if there is fraud, I hope it’s submitted in a court case, fast.
The Republicans are largely in on it.
https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/08/ga-gov-kemp-awarded-107-million-contract-to-dominion-two-weeks-after-meeting-with-peoples-republic-of-china-consul-general/
(site found at random; I’ve never read this site before but remembered a tweet about this mtg.)
Chinese apparently have printed surplus ballots: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2020/11/revealed-video-released-phone-call-recording-chinese-manufacturer-requesting-bulk-order-fake-us-2020-ballots/
The R gov. in my state said he voted for Biden.. go figure. This is a globalist vs. nationalist issue.
In all the states under investigation, election officials seem to be throwing up roadblocks. I forget which state, when asked for chain of custody info for ballot drop boxes, told lawyers they would get the receipts on Jan 19th, 2021 at midnight, iow FU.
Before this election in particular, absentee ballot rules were systematically reduced to allow ridiculous things like no signature matching, late acceptance of ballots with no postmarks, no address requirements.. The drop boxes were another insecure link. Only an idiot would think this was in the service of fair voting.
Most of these changes were unconstitutional. Texas and some other states are now suing the states that ran irregular elections.
“I just cannot see cities surviving without fossil fuels. Maybe he was obliged to end the article with a hint of optimism.”
Cities will shrink. Not die. It will involve a lot of Salvage operations and shrinking of infrastructure and all Govt services.
What he says about Rome is,
“Our big cities will be a lot smaller, though many abandoned mega-structures and skyscrapers will remain standing as an eerie reminder of a receding, wondrous past, just as the Colosseum remained standing for centuries in Rome when the population shrank from one million to 11,000.”
Here, he is talking about close to 99% shrinkage in the past. The future could be even worse. He may be giving some optimism, but if anyone thinks about it, the situation is desperately bad. Cities, in the form we know them today, will have shrunk to the point where we don’t recognize them.
Gail, our energy problems have been solved.
“We’re making history today. OhmConnect is pleased to announce a $100 million commitment to OhmConnect by Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners. This includes $80 million to build 550 MW “Resi-Station,” the world’s largest residential virtual power plant. Resi-Station is “people power” at its best — or more accurately “people powering down”. Resi-Station will pay Californians to let us temporarily power down their unneeded appliances and devices so that we can keep the rest of the state powered up. This commitment also includes SIP’s $20 million investment in OhmConnect to lead our Series C round. We could not have reached this important milestone without the hundreds of thousands of Californians who make up the OhmConnect community and have been right alongside us, innovating ways to reduce their energy consumption when it matters most. You’re part of something big!”
We will now just get our lights turned off by the system!
I would love to see their faces when they realize they will lose their food and cannot do anything about it.
Oh, cities will die, at some point. No question in my mind. They are unsustainable, as is our whole civilisation, so they will die. If there is some remnant of human habitation in a location where a city once was, it would not be in what we would recognise as a city.
Civilisations are characterised by the rise of cities. As all civilisations collapse, so will cities.
No fossil fuels will mean no heating for buildings and no fuel for transport. That might work out in the countryside with horses and forests, but it will not work in cities. Certainly not ones that get cold in winter.
From the BBC News
Doesn’t look good for Hunters and Gatherers of the present ..
Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has surged to its highest level since 2008, the country’s space agency (Inpe) reports.
A total of 11,088 sq km (4,281 sq miles) of rainforest were destroyed from August 2019 to July 2020. This is a 9.5% increase from the previous year
Scientists say it has suffered losses at an accelerated rate since Jair Bolsonaro took office in January 2019.
The Brazilian president has encouraged agriculture and mining activities in the world’s largest rainforest.
The Amazon is home to about three million species of plants and animals, and one million indigenous people.
Amazon under threat: Fires, loggers, agriculture and now virus
Deforested Amazon areas ‘net emitters of CO2’
The latest data marked a major increase from the 7,536 sq km announced by Inpe in 2018 – the year before Mr Bolsonaro took office.
P.S. France announced cutbacks to soy bean and other agriculture products from Brazil as a protest….
Looks like folks are just desperate to keep BAU going
Brazil has a big population to feed. For what it is worth, the Deagel forecast (referred to the comments below) show Brazil doing fairly well between now and 2025. Its population and PPP GDP per capita stay close to level, which is better than most other places. Its warm climate and large forested area would seem to help its situation.
https://www.deagel.com/forecast
Deforestation in the Amazon destroyed an area bigger than Spain from 2000 to 2018, wiping out 8% of world’s biggest rainforest, according to a study released Tuesday.
The Amazon plays a vital role in curbing climate change, but the destruction of the rainforest has only accelerated in recent years, the study by the Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG) found.
Since the turn of the millennium, 513,000 square kilometers (198,000 square miles) of the rainforest have been lost, according to the updated Amazon atlas produced by the organization, a consortium of groups from across the region.
It is RAISG’s first such atlas since 2012.
The consortium found that after hitting a high of 49,240 square kilometers of forest loss in 2003 – a record for this century – deforestation eased to a low of 17,674 square kilometers in 2010.
However, the destruction has since surged to startling levels.
“The Amazon is far more threatened than it was eight years ago,” RAISG said in a statement.
“Deforestation has accelerated since 2012. The annual area lost tripled from 2015 to 2018,” the study found.
“In 2018 alone, 31,269 square kilometers of forest were destroyed across the Amazon region, the worst annual deforestation since 2003.”
Gail, this was just posted….doesn’t look good
https://www.dailysabah.com/life/environment/8-of-amazon-rainforest-razed-in-18-years-study-finds
Ah yes, the Deagel Forecast–the one which predicts a 2/3 drop in the US population by 2025. (They were making similar predictions in 2016.) Apparently the US financial / moral collapse will cause most of the US population to emigrate to Latin America, as the center of the world economy shifts to China / Russia. And who is this Deagel, you may ask? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A co-worker showed me the Deagel forecast a few years ago. They forecast shifts in population that are quite fantastic, for some countries, mine included…hold onto your butts I guess!
“US Consumer Debt Creeps Up to $4.16 Trillion:
“…The increase in non-revolving debt in October 2020 could indicate Americans tapping into their home equity to survive loss of income during the pandemic, or to pay down higher interest revolving debt.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/consumer-debt-creeps-4-16-214323151.html
“Billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio says a “classic toxic mix” of forces is pushing the US towards a major political crisis. The mix consists of widespread household debt, high income inequality, and a severe economic shock — all of which the US is experiencing to some degree.
“Dalio says that while civil war is not inevitable, investors need to start paying attention to the full range of possibilities — including the extremes.”
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/ray-dalio-principles-toxic-forces-threaten-us-civil-war-revolution-2020-12-1029867297
Read it online here:
https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/
He is a good guy, in tune with Turchin. Birds of a feather.
Dennis L.
I suppose the additional debt could also mean that they people are using the money from the loan to finish of an unfinished “bonus room” as a home office, or as a place for their children to study. Home fix-up jobs seem to be going strong right now.
“Eurozone governments’ borrowing has rocketed to fund their response to the coronavirus pandemic, reigniting longstanding calls for the European Central Bank to ease debt burdens by forgiving sovereign bonds it owns.
“The proposal was floated by academic economists as an answer to the single currency area’s last debt crisis in 2012.”
https://www.ft.com/content/0295ccb3-bc57-415c-89f7-5d4e63a64c88
“Japan announced a fresh $708 billion economic stimulus package on Tuesday to speed up the recovery from the country’s deep coronavirus-driven slump, while targeting investment in new growth areas such as green and digital innovation.
“The new package will include about 40 trillion yen ($384.54 billion) in direct fiscal spending…”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-japan-economy-stimulus-idUKKBN28I03C
We will see how long all of his spending continues to work its magic. Everyone wants to build more infrastructure, needed or not. It sends the price of some materials upward and gets at least a few people back to work.
“The race is on to find a steady source of lithium, a key component in rechargeable electric car batteries. But while the EU focuses on emissions, the lithium gold rush threatens environmental damage on an industrial scale.”
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/dec/08/the-curse-of-white-oil-electric-vehicles-dirty-secret-lithium
This is a long article about the possibility of using lithium from Portugal for batteries, except for problem of environmental damage, and for that reason people not being in favor of it.
The possibility of recycling lithium is mentioned, but basically it is non-economic.
In fact, the price of lithium is too low for producers around the world right now, something the article doesn’t mention. This no doubt dampens enthusiasm as well.
lithium price is low because the end users can no longer afford the energy that is ultimately produced from it
which also applies to oil
I am afraid that you are right about the cause for the low price of lithium. It is simply another unaffordable type of energy.
“The world’s financial system could collapse and create an economic downturn as disastrous as the coronavirus recession or the global financial crisis if growing fears of a devasting cyber-security hack are realised.”
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/federal/cyber-attack-could-bring-down-entire-financial-system-imf-20201207-p56l6y.html
This is an article about how devastating a cyberattack could by on the financial system.
Clearly, the financial system could collapse also for other reasons as well.
We are in dangerous territory.
If a cyber attack can create ransomware for an entire company or organization, why could it not happen to an entire government, or nation. With all the news about gov employees accessing porn during work hrs, I could see this as a weakness criminal organizations could exploit.
Gail, my apologies if this has already been posted here but I think you may find it interesting.
Canadian Blair Fix expands on your thesis from the perspective of a rare aware PhD in Economics.
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/12/03/as-we-exhaust-our-oil-it-will-get-cheaper-but-less-affordable/
“Ehrlich vs. Tverberg
I’ll close by returning to where I started: the Simon-Ehrlich wager. What’s important about this wager is that it conforms to our expectations about prices. Ehrlich bet money on the idea that resource scarcity will cause prices to rise. It’s an idea that most people find intuitive. Simon bet money on an equally intuitive idea — that resource abundance will cause prices to fall.
Looking at the bet, you can see that it’s really about two distinct hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that we’re exhausting our natural resources. The second hypothesis is that prices will rise in response. What’s interesting is that most of the discussion about the Simon-Ehrlich wager conflates the two hypotheses. Because Ehrlich lost the bet, people assume that resource scarcity is not a problem. But that’s faulty logic. What’s also possible (and what all the evidence points towards), is that the price hypothesis is wrong. As we exhaust natural resources, their price does not explode. Instead, it collapses.
Even though Ehrlich lost his bet, his thinking remains widespread. Just look at peak-oil theory. Many peak-oil theorists think that as oil production declines, the price of oil will explode. But not everyone is convinced. The notable exception is the analyst Gail Tverberg. For years, Tverberg has been arguing that we’re headed for lower oil prices. (Here’s a thread of her writing on deflation.) But she doesn’t think prices will fall because of resource abundance. She’s a Malthusian much like Paul Ehrlich. Instead, Tverberg thinks we’re headed for a world where oil is scarce yet cheap.
To many people, such a future makes little sense. But that’s because we can’t imagine a world in which incomes collapse. But Tverberg can. And so I propose a hypothetical bet for the future: Ehrlich vs. Tverberg. Both scientists assume that oil will get more scarce. But in the Ehrlich scenario, oil prices explode. In the Tverberg scenario, oil prices collapse.
I once thought that the Ehrlich scenario was all but guaranteed. But today, my money’s on Tverberg. In the future, oil will be scarce and unaffordable. But I think it will also be cheap.”
Oops. I see you commented on Blair’s post which means you’ve already seen this.
Yes, someone posted a link earlier. But, thanks for trying again. Perhaps not everyone saw it the first time.
Wow, Gail — one of your best columns yet!
I didn’t know you had it in you. I came to similar conclusions some years ago.
One thing about Darwinism, it is really “least survival of the least fit,” rather than the oft-cited “survival of the fittest.” This actually leaves a lot of room for those who are working on a long-term strategy — because the “least fit” will be those who choose to go with “normal” as long as possible.
It also implies a return to diversity: there are many ways one can avoid being “least fit,” whereas selection for fitness implies there is One True Way™ of making it through the coming bottleneck.
When trophic energy is in decline, there is a lot of value in diversity, whereas when energy is rich and expanding, there is more value in conformance.
I think it is possible to “step back,” although not with anything near our current population level. The survivors don’t need to go all the way back to pre-agriculture; they only need to avoid being the “least fit.” This means the next step might be a return to small-scale, so-called “sustainable” agriculture, and with the right population level, that might continue for some time.
The next step is not necessarily hunting and gathering. In many areas, there was a ~2,000-year period of pastoralism between hunting and gathering and agriculture. Some anthropologists think that some regions flip-flopped between pastoralism and agriculture a number of times, as each has advantages and disadvantages that would cause it to be chosen by all but the “least fit,” depending on conditions.
But some do it to different degrees. Humans are “K-selected” species, which means they have relatively long lives, long maturity time, long period of parental care, and fewer offspring. Contrast this with “r-selected” species, like cockroaches or rats, which have a short lifetime, short parental care, short time to maturity, and lots and lots of offspring.
This is certainly the view of some, but there is much evidence that humans can do quite well without grain. Animal fat, for example, is a prime way that humans existed far from the equator, even without agriculture.
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond argues that grain, as a storehouse of energy, was responsible for the growth of hierarchy and control, more than an enabler of human life in extreme climates. The ~6,000 year-old Ötzi mummy, found above 10,000 feet in the Alps, had goat meat and greens in his stomach at the time of his death, not grain.
Diamond further argues that it was temperate regions, not equatorial regions, that developed the hierarchical control enabled by grain. Equatorial regions had a constant supply of food, and thus no need to store it from year to year. You don’t need to establish a hierarchical system of control when any fool can go out and dig up their next meal of cassava! But in temperate regions, people relied on those shrewd enough to hoard grain in order to get through the winter.
Complexity — of which energy is a form — has its drawbacks. In The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter submits that civilization uses complexity to solve its problems, but as complexity grows, its needs eventually require so much resource that there is scant little left to support the needs of the members of that civilization. You can see this everywhere in today’s world, no?
While I agree that cold areas cannot support the population density of warmer areas, it is precisely because cold areas are viewed as “uninhabitable” that they may thrive. And as the graph for Iceland shows, available energy is not necessarily in the form of solar energy. Iceland is able to sustain such high levels through the use of geothermal energy. If you can just go jump in a natural hot spring whenever you get cold, you don’t need equatorial insolation! And jumping in a hot spring requires no complexity at all.
I’m really thankful for this post, and I offer my comments as elaboration, rather than argument or criticism. Thank you, Gail!
You are welcome, Jan!
You are right, that grain particularly allows a growing hierarchy and government. I need to go back and reread “Guns, Germs, and Steel.” If you can just grow what you need in your backyard, year around, you don’t need a big government.
Grain allows the kind of civilization we have now, with cities and big transportation and medical systems. Of course, enough energy of the right kinds are needed as well.
It is hard for me to see how the situation will work out going forward. Clearly, there can be different outcomes in different parts of the world.
A dissipative structure acts like it wants to use as much energy as possible. We may very well end up some of the less complex forms of agriculture sticking around, especially if there is a complete system that can be made to work. Somehow, people will need clothing, heat for cooking, and the ability to fight off the people who want to take things away from people.
It depends on what is available to work with, and how much knowledge people have. I am sure that there are still quite a few water buffalo around, for example.
“One thing about Darwinism, it is really “least survival of the least fit,” rather than the oft-cited “survival of the fittest.”…”
another view is that it is really survival of the “fit enough”.
species co-evolve with their environment.
the ones that survive are the “fit enough” ones.
as IC evolves, declines, crashes, collapses… there will be some humans who are fit enough to survive in their new environment.
Another way of looking at it is to say Darwinism is the survival of those who fit.
It doesn’t necessarily depend on going to the gym or jogging.
No. Otzi’s last meal included bread.
S/xual selection, attraction, also increases the chances of reproduction. Thus we say that a woman is ‘fit’. / jk
What is happening? The whole world locked down in exactly the same way with the same excuses. We are going green by ending public transport. There is no push back. US divided into two completely different realities existing side by side.
Is this all humans want? Food, water, electric, heat, trash removal, sewage removal, and internet.
Thanks for asking. i wonder myself.
I think people are forgetting some of the spectacles of nature, like the mass seasonal migrations of wildebeest, impalas, zebras and other herbivores- to the delight of the predators.
In a grid down SHTF situation, humans would migrate to warmer climes and overload resources and become refugees. Eventually they would fall prey to roving gangs of human looters, rapists, and killers—a year round 24 hour a day carnage enabled by the benevolent climate.
In contrast, northern preppers who have prepared for cold winters, root cellar storage, canning, and for the industrious few, even freeze drying to store food may only have to face looters during the short growing season, but again, if the looters have to migrate during the summer, they would be only lightly armed and provisioned and would more easily be defeated by entrenched coordinated defenders.
HA HA HA!
I can tell you aren’t a canner!
There was not a canning jar to be found in North America this fall, as everyone tried to put up their CoViD-19 gardens at the same time!
And even if you had a stash of jars (as we did), the lids were made of Unobtanium!
We carefully open our own canned goods, and re-use the lids as much as possible, but after the initial use, the failure rate tends to go up with each re-use. Better from a re-usabilty perspective are integrated lids, like peanut butter jars. The rubber seals in them seem to last longer than the seals in home-canning jar lids.
Without some semblance of industrial civilization, canning as we know it will not exist. Old-style canning used beeswax as a sealant.
Two old fashioned, 921 All American Pressure canners, 50 boxes of Ball 12 quart jars, unopened, and several thousand never-used lids, replacement parts I bought back in 2010 along with 50 five gallon food grade buckets, GAMA lids, Mylar bags and O2 absorbers.
Agree that jars and lids, like black guns and ammo, are nowhere to be found. 1000 rds of 5.56 over a year ago: $270. Now, if you can find any, the price is $900.00, but that is another story for another day and not appropriate for this blog. I am more concerned now about canning meat as most freeze dried food basically is just starch. I have watched several videos on You Tube and have various books like Home Preserving Ball Canning. Would always be interested in any tips of how to do it and pitfalls. The time may be getting near. At least the natural gas to cook is cheap. Don’t want to wait until I have to go deer hunting and foraging for wood to cook.
Natural gas is cheap until it disappears, because it is impossible to keep the whole “system” going with the low price.
You clearly need a Plan B as well.
“For these reasons, warm countries would seem to have a better chance of passing through the difficult times ahead while sustaining a reasonable-sized population”
Assuming they have plenty of water and agricultural land of course. Places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt will be in a very bad way.
Definitely true, unless climate changes in a favorable way.
In a powered down economy locations with extensive forest should do as well as the crowded disease infested south. The forest themselves provide the means to clean water and fuel. The wet coast of Canada on one of the Gulf Islands is probably as good a place as any?
wer = west?
No I mean wet as in it rains nearly every day!
Not really but anything to keep the hordes heading south.
That was my vote many years ago!
But things are not falling apart fast enough to avoid “boiling frog syndrome.” Which is good, in a way — it means people won’t be thinking along those lines until it’s too late.
Let’s hope you are right, and this gravy train is going to “free wheel” a bit longer..
I just watched the collapse of the Arecibo observatory and couldn’t help but feel it is a great metaphor to our times being unable to maintain the complex infrastructure an energy rich first world once enjoyed. Complexity costs, maintenance costs and without the extra resources entropy will force us into a smaller, simpler future.
I thought that too–seeing it finally collapse
Yes, it fell apart from neglect, money to maintain salaries, no money to maintain capital which enabled those salaries. BAU today, nothing tomorrow.
Dennis L.
Hurricane Maria, too.
Very sad news, and I sympathise with all of you for a loss that is a loss to mankind. No politics tonight; this transcends our ephemeral differences.
“Men are we, and bust grieve when even the shade / Of that which once was great, has passed away.”
Yes, indeed, we are all part of the dance and play a part…..all face the drama and music and how we react to the web is up to the individual.
I reflect that past and present historical or celebrity figures deal the same of getting old and losing the grip of youth and attainment.
So, why should I be lament?
It’s all a Dance, how will you participate?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NggsYiB161E
Interesting 9 minute video!
Glad you found it of interest.
In my old age, still willing to look myself with the aid of others pointing at the door!
From Wilkepedia on Alan Watts.
Though known for his discourses on Zen, he was also influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta. He spoke extensively about the nature of the divine reality which Man misses: how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means of cosmic and human evolution, how our fundamental Ignorance is rooted in the exclusive nature of mind and ego, how to come in touch with the Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles. These are discussed in great detail in dozens of hours of audio that are in part captured in the ‘Out of Your Mind’ series.
Just discovered his talks on YouTube. Lots of shorts.
Maybe there is a more optimistic explanation : maybe we now have better instruments, like the Hubble satellite, and so the observatory is just obsolete and not worth maintaining?
Anyway I feel nostalgia too for the observatory, probably because of this nice movie with Jodie Foster.
Yep, it was chiefly an abandonment.
As science grants and overall research focus flow to other type of instruments.
“Maybe there is a more optimistic explanation : maybe we now have better instruments, like the Hubble satellite, and so the observatory is just obsolete and not worth maintaining?”
Well, China has built a similar device, fully operational January 2020:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Spherical_Telescope
Maybe it was extraterrestrials who got tired of the Americans listening in on their interstellar phone calls?
“Have markets overestimated the cocktail of stimulants?
“…it is reasonable to ask whether investors have got ahead of themselves. It would be remarkable if they had not, given the cocktail of stimulants markets have imbibed over the past month.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/12/07/have-markets-overestimated-cocktail-stimulants/
Mac10 certainly thinks they have. These are his predictions for 2021 (trigger warning – he doesn’t like Trump; I’m not endorsing his politics etc.):
“The first order event is an impending “correction” from record overbought levels and this persistent delusion that 2021 will bring a global recovery – both of which are central bank sponsored fabrications.”
https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2020/12/2021-prediction.html
This is an interesting observation from the article:
“To give an idea as to the magnitude of this delusion, here we see that the Global Dow has now equaled its 2016/2017 tax cut rally in one third the time. Under the ubiquitous belief that the post-pandemic economy will be better than the pre-pandemic economy. Human history’s biggest denialistic fantasy.”
“Investors” come in many varieties. Many are simply retirement funds, or individual retirement accounts. If your employer matches the investment, that is a bigger factor in investing than the risk or fragility of the market which 99% of the people have no idea how to evaluate.
All that fed money has to go somewhere. It would be interesting to see the percentages of shares based on who owns them.
“The first order event is an impending “correction” from record overbought levels and this persistent delusion that 2021 will bring a global recovery – both of which are central bank sponsored fabrications.”
I agree that it’s a “delusion that 2021 will bring a global recovery”.
I agree that we are seeing “record overbought levels”.
I agree that it is “sponsored” by CBs.
but, though too early for my (in)famous new year predictions, I think it’s most likely that these record high stock markets will stay at or near these record highs for all of 2021.
2020 markets are CB sponsored, so that sponsorship should continue through 2021, unless something major breaks down in global finances, which is possible.
as always, a 365 day year is not a very long time.
Mac10 has been predicting a colossal market crash forever, so even allowing for the fact that he will eventually be right, you have to take that with a pinch of salt.
He has some good insights though.
“Mac10 has been predicting a colossal market crash forever … He has some good insights though.”
Same with David Stockman.
Harry, thanks for these metrics anyway.
There are lot of “serial worriers” out there, incl. “Mac10” – it’s good to be aware of their “partial viewpoint” analysis nevertheless.
As we come closer to understand here, the market and fin-cartel overall levitation act (as maddening as it could be) is not a mere bug – but rather a deliberate feature how to deal with extending the BAU.
As situation deteriorates it will likely at some boundary threshold snap “one-way style” into another arrangement be it quasi BAU for certain regional hubs or uncontrollable cascade of sheer universal collapse.
It could be in years or decades.
I believe that during the 2008 crisis, some manufacturers of goods to be shipped internationally were not able to get the letters of credit that they needed from banks because their credit ratings were too low. (They would be paid first, make the goods, and ship them later.) It would seem as if something like this could happen again.
“An estimated 1.5 billion face masks will be polluting the world’s oceans by the end of this year. That’s according to a new report by the marine conservation organisation OceansAsia…”
https://www.energylivenews.com/2020/12/07/worlds-cceans-could-be-flooded-with-1-5bn-face-masks-by-the-end-of-2020/
Tell people just to keep reusing them. Then not so many are needed, and there are fewer for pollution.
Of course, we don’t know that this is really a very good idea. I expect that there is a lot of reuse, even of paper masks, however.
I have a paper mask that I have used for months. I do not have to wear it often but see no reason to use new ever.
I do the same with underwear. I mean, who’s ever going to know?
You have about as much chance of stopping a virus with a mask as of stopping a fart with a pair of wide fronts.
Masks are designed, if worn properly, to reduce the risk of catching the virus and of spreading the virus. They can also reduce the viral load if you do catch it. They are not designed to “stop” it. Nothing can do that other than total isolation. It’s all about reducing risks.
No, you’re wrong there Mike!
When I was a nipper, my grandad used to irritate me no end when I would tell him something really clever based on what I’d read in the New Scientist or Nature, and he would reply “No, you’re wrong there Tim!”
There are all kinds of masks and some of them are more effective than others. And there are all kinds of ways of wearing them, and some ways are more effective than others. It’s surprisingly easy to increase your viral load by using the wrong sort of mask in the wrong sort of way.
But most people, most of the time, don’t wear effective masks and don’t wear them properly. Many wear them as a symbol of compliance and/or as a lucky charm to prevent infection. And you don’t need a lot of viral material to get through to make a mask useless.
But as to my main point, you seem to be agreeing with me that masks do not STOP viruses.
Tim, of course I’m agreeing that masks do not stop viruses. I’m not agreeing with you that they are no good. If worn properly all sorts of masks can reduce the risks of the virus being spread. Here’s just a couple of articles about this (there are many):
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/face-mask-use-needed-to-prevent-covid-19-second-wave/
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-10-effectiveness-mask-materials.html
Here’s a link to a complex explanation and lots of supporting evidence as to why masks make very little difference.
Ambient humidity conditions will trump mask wearing every time.
https://www.rcreader.com/commentary/masks-dont-work-covid-a-review-of-science-relevant-to-covide-19-social-policy
Surely putting a N9X filter before your cookie hole and dripping snout won’t reduce the respiratory germs you spread around. Surely not.
Don’t be silly Tim.
As for those stupid black cloth masks and flimsy surgical masks. Gimme a break.
many places around here require the wearing of a mask.
I don’t know of any place that requires the wearing of underwear.
choose wisely.
John McAfee, before he was incarcerated in Spain:
https://www.the-sun.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/08/NINTCHDBPICT000601219685.jpg?w=300
“An estimated 1.5 billion face masks will be polluting the world’s oceans by the end of this year. That’s according to a new report by the marine conservation organisation OceansAsia…”
First they are useless, then they’re thrown all over the place …. hurrah for the human species!
“The removal of subsidies in Lebanon without guarantees to protect the vulnerable would amount to a social catastrophe, two U.N. agencies said on Monday, warning there is no parachute to soften the blow.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/lebanon-crisis-subsidies-unitednations-idUKKBN28H1E3
“The World Bank has rejected an appeal by Lebanon to subsidize medicines in the crisis-hit country despite warnings that vital drug stocks are running low.”
https://www.arabnews.com/node/1772966/middle-east
There are an awfully lot of countries that need parachutes, I am afraid, and there will be more in the weeks and years ahead.
“China’s commercial banks are reducing their exposure to local corporate bonds after a spate of high-profile defaults rocked the nation’s credit markets in November.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-07/china-lenders-holdings-of-corporate-debt-fall-as-defaults-climb
“Apartment rental specialist Danke is rapidly coming undone, with landlords and tenants protesting on the streets of China’s biggest cities and unpaid employees threatening to sue.”
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-12-07/picking-up-the-pieces-as-one-of-chinas-biggest-apartment-rental-platforms-crumbles-101636681.html
This issue has appeared a few times over the last few weeks on China-In-Focus (YT week day China-focused news bulletin).
At least with the companies discussed on CIF, the tenants have to pay a YEAR’s rent in advance. As opposed to here in the UK where it is usually a deposit of one month’s rent then monthly in advance.
But the middle men are running off with the money. Tenants have paid for a year, but landlords are turning up and physically throwing the tenants out because they have received no payments for their flats.
From what I can tell, the CCP has taken a hands-off approach.
This part of the story sounds strange:
“At the root of the company’s collapse was a business model that encouraged tenants to take out loans from WeBank to pay a year’s rent up front. From mid-2018 to the end of 2019, the percentage of Danke’s tenants who paid up with these risky loans grew to at least 91%. The loans allowed Danke to expand but increased its leverage to an unsustainable level.”
My impression is that most people in China live in condos or in shared housing provided by employers (such as apartments with a number of single employees living together). Rental apartments are fairly unusual. Rental apartments would typically be chosen by people without funds for the downpayment on a condo.
Banks cutting their exposure to local corporate bonds almost certainly means that these borrowers are now finding it harder to raise funds in public markets. If they were doing badly before, they will do even worse in the future.
“The number of people claiming unemployment-related benefits in northern England has hit its highest level in more than a quarter of a century, new analysis suggests.
“A new report highlights “severe and growing” regional divides in the UK…”
https://news.yahoo.com/uk-unemployment-northern-england-highest-quarter-century-102027937.html
“The joblessness rate could be twice as high as official figures suggest because millions of people do not show up on them.
“Almost two million people in Britain are in “hidden unemployment”. They are out of work and eager to find jobs but are classified as economically inactive rather than unemployed. This is because they are not actively seeking work — they may be unable to access jobs, be in poor health or have caring responsibilities.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/two-million-hidden-unemployed-are-masking-true-cost-of-the-pandemic-wrfznsrcm
I expect that quite a few people are clinically depressed. It is hard for them to choose to find a job, when the situation is so awful.
Boris Johnson and Ursula Von der Leyen speaking at 4pm UK time, as a deal still, apparently, hangs in the balance.
“Government leaks “worse case scenario planning” with likelihood of no deal now 50/50.
“Food and medical supply shortages, queues of 7,000 trucks in Kent and the collapse of one in 20 local authorities are all included in the document.”
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/plitics/government-leaks-worse-case-scenario-planning-with-likelihood-of-no-deal-now-50-50/07/12/
“According to Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, “life will change radically for the worse if there is no deal and not just for the people of Gibraltar.””
https://www.euronews.com/2020/12/05/jittery-gibraltar-fears-economic-hit-from-a-no-deal-brexit
According to the article,
“With a land area of just 6.8-square kilometres, Gibraltar imports all of its food, which will take longer if administrative checks are increased at the border.
A desire to keep things flowing smoothly at the border explains why in 2016 nearly 96 percent of voters in Gibraltar backed staying in the EU, while in Britain proper the referendum vote was 52-48 percent in favour of leaving the bloc.”
It is also very dependent on tourist travel.
I expect the worst case scenario is not really bad enough. There are a lot of bad outcomes that cannot be foreseen. How long will the central government of the UK hold together, for example.
Well Ursula is nice Dutch eye candy—you just have to pretend Boris isn’t there to get the full benefit
Ursula von der Leyen is German. She was a minister in the German federal government before taking the helm at Brussels.
eye candy always tastes the same with your eyes closed
“‘Existential peril’: Mass transit faces huge service cuts across US:
“In Boston, transit officials warned of ending weekend service on the commuter rail and shutting down the city’s ferries. In Washington, weekend and late-night metro service would be eliminated, and 19 of the system’s 91 stations would close. In Atlanta, 70 of the city’s 110 bus routes have already been suspended, a move that could become permanent.”
https://www.deccanherald.com/international/existential-peril-mass-transit-faces-huge-service-cuts-across-us-924313.html
“New York City is in dire financial straits because of the coronavirus pandemic and will go bankrupt if the situation isn’t addressed, according to a former deputy mayor.”
https://www.kmjnow.com/news/nycs-finances-bleak-will-go-bankrupt-if-not-fixed-says-ex-official/
It seems like major cities everywhere will have huge funding problems. What do they do: Stop schools? Stop pensions for workers? Stop road repair? Stop public transport? Collapse completely?
Demolish decrepit buildings. Shrink Infrastructure. If they thought of that of course.
been banging on for years, that one of the main props for ‘modern’ civilisation has been our facility to move from A to B on a whim.
In past times, everyone lived within walking distance of their place of work. Towns and cities expanded in lockstep with the ability of people, food and water to be moved in and out..
Only the very rich had the necessary ‘horsepower’ to move around as they felt like it.
************
If you want to be really frightened: it is the ‘prosperity’ of people moving in and out and around our cities that enables them to be supported by the necessary supplies of food and water.
Public transit systems are one expression of communal energy use and consumption.
Food and water represent exactly the same thing, they are just a different form of energy
Good points!
My advice would be to move somewhere really nice while you still have the chance.
And bear in mind that your future private vehicle may well be a bicycle, so you might like to avoid places with too many ups and downs.
Why? A savage steep climb on a bicycle is the best form of transport.
The cheap and plentiful FF party has enable the mountainous areas to be populated with vehicle based living.
It will be fun to see those places that should never have been desecrated become depopulated when FF become scarce.
Lack of public transit is a huge problem for low income workers of all kinds, because the operation of an automobile is almost always more expensive. People who are unable to drive can’t get to work, either, without transit operating.
We will have cuts in public transport in the Netherlands as well, next year.
Limits to growth of public transport euh
Right!
keep that bike in good working order!
“Even after sinking by 13% since its March peak and coming off its worst week in a month, the dollar’s downward spiral has gone largely unmentioned by central banks. But that could change as the values of many major currencies have strengthened to their highest levels in years against the greenback.
“The dollar’s decline could add significant challenges to the recovery of export-oriented economies like the eurozone and Japan, which prefer weaker currencies that make their products more attractive to foreign buyers.”
https://www.axios.com/weak-dollar-problem-world-e27c2181-e070-4b16-a989-342377bc3af5.html
Election of Biden = sinking dollar
I don’t think Joe’s home and dry yet. Perhaps the sinking dollar is a consequence of the uncertainty of the election outcome?
The hope that someone will keep the markets rising. Or maybe it is the all the central bank activity keeping prices up.
Norman Pagett:
“I was discussing all this with a friend in Canada the other day.
We arrived at the conclusion as to why Canada was so different from the USA, when to a great extent it had a similar mix of people:
1, no constant battles over who was head of state”
Land of the free and home of the brave … and all focus on *one* person? Mind-boggling …
you lost me there
Observing the freedom loving US wanting *one* person as their “ruler” just makes my head hurt. Far from democracy, very far!
Canadians are subjects. They’ve internalized that mentality, perhaps?
Re: bottlenecks
It seems that bottlenecks were instrumental in the evolution of modern humans.
Chimpanzees have far more genetic variation than H. sapiens. Chimps in neighbouring colonies have far more genetic variation than H. s. populations on different continents.
Genetic variation is low in all humans, including Africans, and it declines correlate to distance from Africa.
So H. s. per se is characterised by low genetic variation, and human population groups, while relatively close to each other compared to chimps, have formed through a further thinning of genetic variation.
Two primary population bottlenecks, at the out of Africa event and at the into America event, correspond as expected with a decline in genetic variation.
But they do not account for the generally even correlation on continents of less genetic variation with distance from Africa.
Genetic drift and selection also thin the genetic variation of isolated populations.
H. s. dispersal generally is characterised by the narrowing of genetic variation even beyond the two primary bottleneck events.
So, if H. s. are headed, due to energetic constraints, toward a population bottleneck that will thin genetic variety, then in a general sense, that is what we have always done. We have always dispersed and evolved through a thinning of genetic variation.
H. s. are the genetically thinning primate species, one might say. It is how we have come to be and how we continue to become what we are to be.
So, in that sense, a fresh H. s. bottleneck and a thinning of variation is not really counter-intuitive. Nor is it an event that might make us overly anxious about the future.
Yes our numbers will fall, and evolution will kick in on smaller populations, and our genetic variation will thin but that is what we have always done. That is what makes us H. s in all of our variety.
> Evidence that two main bottleneck events shaped modern human genetic diversity
W. Amos and J. I. Hoffman
Abstract
There is a strong consensus that modern humans originated in Africa and moved out to colonize the world approximately 50 000 years ago. During the process of expansion, variability was lost, creating a linear gradient of decreasing diversity with increasing distance from Africa. However, the exact way in which this loss occurred remains somewhat unclear: did it involve one, a few or a continuous series of population bottlenecks? We addressed this by analysing a large published dataset of 783 microsatellite loci genotyped in 53 worldwide populations, using the program ‘Bottleneck’. Immediately following a sharp population decline, rare alleles are lost faster than heterozygosity, creating a transient excess of heterozygosity relative to allele number, a feature that is used by Bottleneck to infer historical events. We find evidence of two primary events, one ‘out of Africa’ and one placed around the Bering Strait, where an ancient land bridge allowed passage into the Americas. These findings agree well with the regions of the world where the largest founder events might have been expected, but contrast with the apparently smooth gradient of variability that is revealed when current heterozygosity is plotted against distance from Africa.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2009.1473
Interesting! Less genetic diversity than expected.
I wonder, too, if radiation from spent fuel pools will lead to some new genetic variations. If some of these turn out to be superior, they will tend to predominate in further generations.
The climate, whatever it is, will play a role as well. If it is warmer, it will help keep human population alive, since cold temperatures are hard for humans to tolerate. If the North Pole area becomes more accessible, then more fossil fuels may become available.
Humans try to develop a world economy/ecology that they consider ideal. In fact, what nature has decided for us is likely to be very different.
Your point chimes with the passage that I am up to in Zarathustra, On Self-Overcoming. The passage is complicated but it speaks also to this.
The ‘wise men’ who create ‘values’ wish to think of the world (being) such that it exists in a certain way that can be reduced to a certain way of thinking. That supposed situation they endow with ‘meaning, value and purpose.’
‘You still want to create [in your thoughts] the world before which you could kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication.’
But the earth is fickle and all is in flux. All emerges through the will to power, including the values of ‘the wise’, and all ultimately gives way to it, including their values.
The living thing itself (the life process in general personified) speaks thus:
‘That I must be struggle and becoming and purpose and the contradiction of purposes – alas, whoever guesses my will guesses also on what crooked paths it must walk! Whatever I may create and however I may love it – soon I must oppose it and my love, thus my will wants it.’
The genetic transformation of the species through global warming, let alone through radiation poisoning, would truly be a ‘crooked path’ for the earth to take, and not a situation before which ‘the wise’ are accustomed to ‘kneel’.
It is ‘wiser’ not to suppose that the world has to be a certain way that fits with certain values and expectations. It is liable to transform itself in ways contrary to what is valued and treasured by ‘the wise’ today.
The earth is not in a state of being, it is a process of becoming and destruction. That is its ‘eternal joy’.
Thanks for your thoughts. We often think we know more than we know.
Gibberish.
There is no creation, no destruction.
It is mindless process called life.
Gaia is the proverbial paper clip machine, with the paper clips being life in all its forms and shapes.
Species come and go. Creation and destruction.
It is not how it works, all life on earth is simply cell divisions away from the first replicating organism on earth.
As for the different “species”. Totally arbitrary distinction.
It is how this paper clip machine works. Mindless process.
And inside our minds; merely a hallucinated idea of objective reality. Hallucinations and delusions.
What happened to the flu virus?
Did it disappear?
Is flu reported as Covid in this second wave?
I read that two viruses in a host can combine and produce new viruses. This is how new viruses are often created.
Flu seemed to fall relative to its normal winter frequency in the southern hemisphere, during its COVID spike. People were not socializing as much. It will not be surprising if the same thing happens in the northern hemisphere.
There was no second wave. They ramped up the testing and the false positives given by the inappropriate PCR test gave the politicians the results they wanted.
PCR with 20+ cycles is ridiculous. Never before in medical history have people without any symptoms been called “cases”
In Australia, they stopped measuring deaths from chest infections in March 2020. They all became called Covid-19. But what do you expect from people who put up new weather stations in the Great Australian Desert and then claim that the “average” temperature of Australia has increased. It has not. It was hotter in the 19th century in the habitable east.
Yes, yes and yes. Alfred is correct on all counts.
The whole world is being “gaslighted” re, the pandemic, just as it has been re. the catastrophic warming. We’re living in times of exceptionally universal in-your-face deception.
Fortunately, the pay-ops don’t bother me very much because I retired to Bedlam some years ago.
I guess we can all believe what we want to believe, but baseless claims such as the above on Australian temperature records should be exposed for the lie that it is.
So you were in Australia in the 19th century?
Or perhaps you are believing what you want to believe?
According to the highly reliable and honest Jo Nova:
In 1896:
The heatwave started in the West on Jan 1st and travelled eastwards, as most heatwaves do. The hottest day was possibly Jan 23 or 24 in 1896 which is when most of the Eastern States maximum temperatures shown above were recorded. And there are hints that this was both widespread and long — some of these towns recorded three long weeks of ultra high temperatures close to and over 110F (43.3C) like Nannine in WA (near Meekatharra) and Cunnamulla in Qld. Both reported peaks as high as 120F (48.8C). In Bourke temperatures were above 102F (38.9C) for 24 days in a row.
The BOM will say things were not entirely standardized or approved back then. But why would they care? Many of the BOM’s current sites fail their own standards: thermometers may sit for 30 years over bitumen, or right next to incinerators. They plough around sites, move them, build walls next to them and forget, even next to their own offices. The BOM accept one-second records from new electronic gizmo’s in small screens, and adjust old temperatures down by as much as two whole degrees. Sometimes modern BOM sites need mysterious calendar monthly corrections, or get corrected by thermometers across the Bass Strait, and sometimes they are incredibly detailed but repeat robotically year after year. Remember those temperature maps of our deserts in WWI? There are sites where there are no thermometers which record exactly the same temperatures as they did the year before (and the year after). Just “made up”? The hottest day ever recorded was probably calculated with maps like that.
The BOM can hardly be precious about scientific standards 130 years ago when they have so few themselves today.
And let’s not forget that in 1896 thermometers were nearly a 200 year old technology*. There was not much in the way of urban heat island effects – no airports, no five lane super highways, small populations, and some of these temperatures come from trained expert observatories. And let’s not forget either, as we just discovered, that there’s been no change in Very Hot Days in Australia since World War I (at least until the BOM adjusted them).
https://joannenova.com.au/2019/12/hottest-ever-day-in-australia-especially-if-you-ignore-history/
The issue was that Stevenson screen’s were not in widespread or proper use in Australia in 1896, so we can’t definitively know either way, although the preponderance of evidence is with Pekoe:
https://theconversation.com/factcheck-was-the-1896-heatwave-wiped-from-the-record-33742
They were in widespread use in the UK by the late 1860’s. Data here shows a similar trend with heat records now far outweighing cold:
2018 – joint-hottest summer on record
26th Feb 2019 – hottest ever winter day: 21.2C (70.2F)
April 2019 – hottest Easter Sunday on record: 25C (77F)
29th July 2019 – hottest day ever recorded: 38.1C (100.6F)
28th Dec 2019 – hottest December day on record: 18.7C (65.6F)
And by the way, Pekoe, just because a claim may turn out not to be true doesn’t make it a lie.
A lie is something someone says is true even though they know it isn’t true. It’s a very serious accusation to level at someone when you categorize their claim as lie. If you make that claim in vain, then when the time comes, your immortal soul might not get into heaven but instead may be shunted off to the section of purgatory reserved for the souls of people who who bear false witness.
Frank over at Spiked has a new article about the attempt of the EU to impose its moral values about s/exual identities on member states.
Any thoughts?
> The EU now wants to colonise our minds
The Brussels bureaucracy is determined to impose its values on reluctant nations like Hungary and Poland.
…. Over the past decade, the EU bureaucracy has been working behind the scenes on cobbling together so-called rule-of-law instruments to ‘safeguard fundamental values’. What the EU oligarchy means by ‘fundamental values’ are the latest fashionable ideals promoted by anti-traditionalist culture warriors. For example, the LGBTIQ culture, and the values associated with it, is now being instrumentalised by the EU against societies that feel uncomfortable with the ideologies promoted by woke identitarians.
The EU even has an Orwellian-sounding vice-president for values and transparency, who is in charge of policing values. The commissar for values is Věra Jourová. When, last month, the European Commission launched its ‘first-ever EU strategy for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, non-binary, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) equality’, Jourová declared that ‘this is what Europe is about and this is what we stand for’. The implication was clear: her view of ‘what Europe is about’ is paramount and it is beyond debate.
Just in case anyone were to misunderstand how the rule of law is being weaponised as part of the EU’s values crusade, Jourová adopted the tone of an imperium magister. In July, in a lecture on the rule of law, she issued a warning: ‘I also want to repeat it here – the EU law has primacy over national law and [the] rulings of the European Court of Justice are binding on all national courts.’
Jourová and her colleagues have all but given up on the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality that were laid out in the original Treaty on European Union. When that treaty was enacted, no one imagined that Brussels would assume authority over the cultural, personal and family values of member states. Nor did most governments imagine that, one day, their cultural norms would be policed by a commissar for values and transparency. Until recently, governments believed that the EU oligarchy wouldn’t want to meddle in personal and cultural affairs that have no bearing on others outside the borders of individual member states. Now, however, the EU is demanding that its view of sexuality and its definition of gender must prevail over more traditional views that might exist within states. Especially states like Hungary and Poland.
In May, the European Commission escalated its campaign to turn the rule of law into a political weapon. It declared that countries that violate the EU’s ‘core values’ would be punished — their financial funding would be cut. Last month it went a step further and got the European Parliament to agree to what the Finnish minister for European affairs, Tytti Tuppurainen, has described as ‘rule-of-law conditionality’. Rule-of-law conditionality really means that the EU oligarchy has the authority to dictate how Hungarians and Poles should live their lives. And if Hungarians and Poles were to push back and reject the commissar’s values, they would be punished with a severe financial blow. The rule of law is turned into both a cultural and a political weapon to be wielded against governments that take their national sovereignty seriously….
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/07/the-eu-now-wants-to-colonise-our-minds/
The New York Times has a recent article that says, Nasdaq Pushes for Diversity in the Boardroom
It will ask the S.E.C. to approve a new rule requiring more diverse corporate directors.
Nasdaq seems to want something similar.
Translation: do not hire company directors for their competencies; hire them for their chromosomes. What could possibly go wrong?
“Ware County, Ga has broken the Dominion algorithm:
Using sequestered Dominion Equipment, Ware County ran a equal number of Trump votes and Biden votes through the Tabulator and the Tabulator reported a 26% lead for Biden.”
This is a link to one of many places reporting this story.
https://www.waynedupree.com/2020/12/georgia-dominion-forensic-audit/
GA Rep Says Forensic Tests Run On Sequestered Dominion Equipment Found Votes Switched From Trump to Biden
This is link to a different version of the story: https://www.24hourcampfire.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php/topics/15492667/dominion-machine-test-results
It reports:
Thank you both this is such hopeful info.
Past OFW commenter Kim is busy over at Kunstler’s site:
Comment on A Hall of Smoke and Mirrors by Kim
1. How suspicious is this?
2. Who on earth would sign such a contract?
3. Zuckerberg money again.
Under a 161-page master contract signed in 2017 between The State of Michigan and Dominion, no one is allowed to access, analyze or review the software provided for elections. Everyone is required to have blind faith in Dominion to do business with them.
The state then told various counties they had to buy Dominion equipment but when objections were made to the price involved the State of Michigan intervened again. The counties were told to apply for the Help America Vote Act Grant application and they would get the funding that way. By doing so each County was legally bound by an incorporation by reference provision to not allow any access to the Dominion machines or any of its software.
https://www.stevegruber.com/2020/12/dominion-machines-exam-ordered-in-michigan/
Will the MSM continue their campaign of trump hate by just ignoring the election crimes even after a supreme court ruling? It seems clear to me they will. The implications of a MSM unwilling to discuss factual topics and censorship of the same topics on social media is amazing. How long till word press goes? Or is it left as a safety valve to allow steam out of the pressure cooker?
WordPress is becoming more and more geared toward people who want to make money off their sites. It is harder to search now, for me at least. I used to be able to search the comments easily. That went away.
“Lavishly funded Moderna hits safety problems in bold bid to revolutionize medicine” January 10, 2017
“But the Crigler-Najjar treatment has been indefinitely delayed, an Alexion spokeswoman told STAT. It never proved safe enough to test in humans, according to several former Moderna employees and collaborators who worked closely on the project. Unable to press forward with that technology, Moderna has had to focus instead on developing a handful of vaccines, turning to a less lucrative field that might not justify the company’s nearly $5 billion valuation.
“’It’s all vaccines right now, and vaccines are a loss-leader,’ said one former Moderna manager. ‘Moderna right now is a multibillion-dollar vaccines company, and I don’t see how that holds up.’”
“[Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel’s] presentation focused on four vaccines that the company is moving through the first phase of clinical trials: two target strains of influenza, a third is for Zika virus, and the fourth remains a secret…
“Founded in 2012, Moderna reached unicorn status — a $1 billion valuation — in just two years, faster than Uber, Dropbox, and Lyft, according to CB Insights. The company’s premise: Using custom-built strands of messenger RNA, known as mRNA, it aims to turn the body’s cells into ad hoc drug factories, compelling them to produce the proteins needed to treat a wide variety of diseases.
“But mRNA is a tricky technology. Several major pharmaceutical companies have tried and abandoned the idea, struggling to get mRNA into cells without triggering nasty side effects.
“Bancel has repeatedly promised that Moderna’s new therapies will change the world, but the company has refused to publish any data on its mRNA vehicles, sparking skepticism from some scientists and a chiding from the editors of Nature.
“The indefinite delay on the Crigler-Najjar project signals persistent and troubling safety concerns for any mRNA treatment that needs to be delivered in multiple doses, covering almost everything that isn’t a vaccine, former employees and collaborators said.”
https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
Moderna’s Phase III clinical trial is estimated to conclude on October 27, 2022. The results of their trial have not been peer-reviewed or published in any medical journals.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427?term=moderna&cond=covid-19&draw=2
I found another related article on Moderna.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/02/mysterious-2-billion-biotech-revealing-secrets-behind-its-new-drugs-and-vaccines
It says, among other things:
There is a fancy image to try to explain how it available the immune system.
“If you can hack the rules of mRNA, ‘essentially the entire kingdom of life is available for you to play with,’ says Hoge, a physician by training who left a position as a health care analyst to become Moderna’s president in 2012. Adjusting mRNA translation to fight disease ‘isn’t actually super high-risk biology,’ he adds. ‘It’s what your genes would do if they were rational actors.'”
Hack the rules of mRNA? Play with the entire kingdom of life? This is what your genes would do if they were rational actors?
The hubris is astonishing. I’ll die happily, without having received an injection from psychopaths who were so determined to play God.
Mass vaccination is the crown jewel of the scamdemic. Without the COVID-19 narrative, Operation Warp Speed couldn’t be initiated and this experimental technology couldn’t be foisted onto the global population.
Eight vaccine manufacturers, six different vaccines, $11 billion in funding. Then you have all the periphery industries positioned to make billions off this: immunity passport app developers, track and trace program developers, test kit manufacturers, PPE manufacturers, and on and on.
The scamdemic marks a unique merger between Big Pharma, Big Tech and Big Government and will do for these players what the “War on Terror” did for the defense and security industries. What ever happened to the “War on Terror?” Did we win that one? Or do we just not hear about it anymore on the news? The same will happen with the COVID-19 scamdemic. Once the people running this hoax squeeze every last drop of profit from it they’ll discard their exhausted narrative for the next one up their sleeve. Hell, they’ve probably got their think tanks busy with the next narrative now.
People fall for this because they lack spiritual grounding and principles. In our present time, materialism and scientism reign supreme – nothing is of higher authority in modern civilization. So what do we get? We have no God to look up to, not even just nature or the universe in general, but only other human beings: “experts,” “leaders,” “authorities,” etc. Our god is Anthony Fauci. Our god is Donald Trump or Joe Biden. Our god is our state governor. Our god is our county supervisor. They parade around as gods, unassailable as they defy their own orders and contradict themselves in public. They get away with all this because they are our reflection. They are reflecting our own spiritual emptiness and lack of principles back at us. We are so afraid of becoming ill, causing others illness or dying that we have no hope, no faith in any God, nature or the universe itself. Our gods tell us to put all our faith in the vaccine. We no longer have the courage to accept that life comes with inherent risks and we’ve forgotten why we live, why we were incarnated here in the first place: to pursue experiences that expand our consciousness and develop our soul. Our “leaders,” our “experts,” our “gods” give us nothing in the age of the COVID-19 scamdemic but a hollow, nihilistic religion; a cold blend of materialism and scientism. Their followers and sycophants belong to a cult of death, not life. As the scamdemic continues, as the restrictions worsen and our options are further reduced, all of us, eventually, will be faced with a choice: join their cult of death or instead put our faith in something higher.
Its quite clear to me that covid is only a excuse for implementation of genetic manipulation. The Alpha “upgrades” will soon be followed by many more. The questions its raises are profound.
1. If we dont have choice whether to retain our original genetics can freedom exist?
2. By whose authority are these genetic changes mandated?
3. Are these techniques of genetic manipulation be competent or disastrous?
4. Who chooses the changes made and to what end?
5. Is mankind wise enough to start “hacking” genetics that are the basics of its essence?
6.What are the potential advantages and disadvantages to genetic hacking? What are the goals?
7. In the USA the Judaeo-Christian self awareness has a particular focus on revelations and mark of the beast. Its clear that genetics are a map for not just physical attributes but many other things , emotions, what we may call our intuitive side. I fell that genetic “hacking” could be defined as effecting the soul. Whether you are a believer or not “mark of the beast” exists in the collective conscious in the USA. My perspective is somewhat in between a Christian who accepts that revelations is truth and will come to pass and a modernistic view that revelations is delusion. I do believe that it is possible that the collective consciousnesses of a peoples can hold a truth that is sourced from a different place than common knowledge. I don’t believe that this potential is limited to the christian faith.
Is our collective consciousness to be acknowledged in the decision to “hack” our genetics?
8. Our natural world is beautiful and exquisitely well designed. Statement ahead. The natural world is a expression of god and this expression is far far greater than any human expression
Knowing in out mind but also in intuitive body that god is demonstrated in the natural world is the decision to “hack” our genetics an abomination?.
9 Do we acknowledge our limits as a species living within a expression of god or deny it by actions that put ideas of self determination above our belonging to the planet?
Choice. Like it or not we have it. It defines us. They are not hiding the choice from us. If they did it would mean nothing. Choice can not be denied. If they could they would. It may not be sourced from the thing we regard as us. It may have been there all along. They can not steal it. You have to give it.. They can abuse you but they cant steal it. They can deceive you with words. They can force it but that means nothing. In the end you will choose.
Robert, I thought the Tesla coil with its two coils produced a strange moving electromagnetic field that produces electric current in a nearby electric machine.
Yoshua, I believe you are correct. Tesla used a primary and a secondary coil carefully tuned. But his wireless electricity experiments used a different apparatus, mounted on a single tall tower. he person who wanted to tap the atmospheric electricity wold build a special motor for that purpose.
Incidentally, this a rather like John Galt’s electric motor in “Atlas Shrugged”, except there was no transmitter, the electricity was supposed just to be there.
Mal you are guided by the heavens.
I am not. I try again…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1335067448605777921
Tesla said that we could power all our machines with cosmic energy.
Does anyone understand the physics behind wireless electricity with a Tesla coil?
https://twitter.com/i/status/1335067448605777921
I don’t. Nor do I understand in depth how my PC works, but I can still use it. Type ‘free energy’ into YouTube and lots of videos come up.
Yoshua, I don’t believe Tesla said much about “cosmic energy”. He believed we could transmit electricity without wires, through the Earth, but that we still had to generate the stuff somehow. His ideas about wireless transmission were initially based on high frequency radio waves, which indeed do work, but only at very short range. He experimented with energy transmitted through the ground, based on ideas about interactions with our planet’s magnetic field, but these didn’t work.
To get technical: alternating current (his main innovation) can indeed induce resonance in our magnetic field, but it cannot be guided and so simply dissipates according to an inverse fourth law. For the idea to work, there has to be a handshake between transmitter and receiver, and he never found out how to do that, perhaps because it is impossible.
a changing electric field creates a magnetic field
a changing magnetic field creates an electric field
I think Tesla wanted to pump radio waves into a layer of the Earths atmosphere and extract that energy at a distance, anywhere on Earth, with a resonant coil. Just as radios work. But I would guess the dissipation is faster than one can pump in radio energy and so it never “fills”.
Pfizer and Moderna are mRNA “vaccines”.
Sputnik V is not. It’s a cold virus which has the spike protein genome added to it.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different-vaccines/mrna.html
Yoshua thank you.
Adenoviral “DRUGS” Have primarily been used for genetic purpouses ala gene therapy. If your not happy with MRNA tampering with your genes I wouldnt get too cozy with advocating sputnik V.
https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/Adenoviral-vectors-new-COVID-19/98/i19
Thanks, good to know it. The difference is that the Russians are not involved with the manufacture and spread of corona (they are not great reseters), so they are not likely to be planning to modify anyone’s DNA neither. Oil importers primary target is hiding their financial troubles and lowering oil price, but we can’t discard they have second intentions with the vaccine.
Whatever the case, all corona vaccines are being developped in a hurry, and I will try to avoid inoculation as long as possible. And, if forced to get one and given the choice, I’d get Sputnik
Soon time for all the WAPO and HUFFPO readers and CNN watchers to get vaxxed. Time to show all of us how its done!
Yes western democracies are starting to crack….and that is most apparent then the United States…their fake billionaire president has been defeated and all they can do is go to their echo chambers and get “emotional” support….for that.
The u.s has been slowly failing since 2008 as Obama added massive debt to get re elected. Trump did the same thing but by the end of his presidency he will have added many Trillions more during his presidency. The only thing both were good at is splitting your country in half and making you believe you had a good economy while dragging you into massive debt.
This site used to be a site of people talking different ideas and not politics. Now it has become a site of old people stopping over after getting riled up on FOX NEWS! Critique biden and you will get a lot of support; say something negative of Trump and people freak out. People tied to a particular ideology can’t see anything and have nothing but their own agenda to contribut.
I’m afraid your are not up to speed in these matters, although it has been explained here by many and numerous times already, for example FoxNews dropped Donald long ago, it’s just another swampy msm outlet after-all.. lolz
Between the two candidates, Biden has the monetary support of Wall Street to the tune of 95%.
If my agenda is ‘vote for who best represents my interests’, that fact tells me all I need to know.
What’s wrong with old people?
Here’s a different idea we can talk about if you like.
Some people see two different people in the following photos. Others see the same person. Yet others say, “Nothing to see hear! Move along!”
We could talk about that. Which group are you in?
https://jamesfetzer.org/wp-content/uploads/unnamed-2-2.jpg
I would say it could be the same person if the photo on the right has been taken after a facelift, since it obviously portraits a younger looking fellow.
So…from this I gather that Trump has cleverly arranged for the real Biden to disappear, and for this fake Biden to take his place, secretly serving as Trump’s puppet? Which means Trump won the election after all, in a manner of speaking.
Hi Dan!
The US began “slowly falling apart” when we reached our own peak oil and Nixon took us off the gold standard. He went to China and laid the groundwork for them to join the global fiat money-expansion party.
Only old people remember this stuff, though…
Lidia17,
I was around during Nixon and later Reagan, etc. One of my patients owned a significant manufacturing business and was looking to open markets in China, the US market was saturated; he was a wonderful man, his was a wonderful company, employee owned, wages for all were fair. I am not comfortable saying more, but this company is still in business and does have a world wide presence.
We talked a great deal, I listened mostly, he was wise and I never saw any malice in his intentions.
Not in any way a comment on your first paragraph, just a note on one manufacturer who did business with China in a significant way and the thoughts on that.
Dennis L.
Dennis, my comment wasn’t made with the idea of blaming anyone.. Industrial Civilization needed to expand, and so it did. The center of global industrial and financial empire moved from Europe to the US and is now in the tortured process of establishing itself in China.
You are probably right in this as well:
“Industrial Civilization needed to expand, and so it did. The center of global industrial and financial empire moved from Europe to the US and is now in the tortured process of establishing itself in China.”
China had a huge amount of inexpensive to extract coal in its possession. It also had a relatively low-paid work force. Its climate is relatively warmer than the US. There is no heat in winter from Wuhan and southward, keeping living costs lower. China’s old industry is in the north, but it has not been doing well for quite a long time. Sort of like the US area around Detroit. It was built before modern efficiencies and living costs are higher there.
I think you are right.
“The US began “slowly falling apart” when we reached our own peak oil and Nixon took us off the gold standard. He went to China and laid the groundwork for them to join the global fiat money-expansion party.”
Western economies are being delayered, as we exhaust our oil, it will get cheaper but less affordable https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/12/03/as-we-exhaust-our-oil-it-will-get-cheaper-but-less-affordable/
Thus as Tim Morgan demonstrates western economies’ discretionary spending has been permanently impaired; https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2020/11/23/185-the-objective-economy-part-two/
1. movie theaters https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/12/03/business/us-economy-coronavirus
2. Air Travel and tourism
3. Restaurants and fast food etc.
As this delayering proceeds, from Gail’s work it is plausible that a confrontation between the North (Western Civilization) and the South (Third world tropical countries) over the last remaining exploitable resources and living space is inevitable within this century.
The first link is one that someone linked to recently. It mentions me. I won’t comment here on it. It is a different way of looking at things and has some interesting insights.
The second one, by Tim Morgan, is quite good. This is one quote, which I thought was quite true:
People don’t understand this.
Tim also computes how disposable income per capita has fallen in different countries, which I thought was interesting. (Tim is in the UK.)
https://surplusenergyeconomics.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/185-tab-1-disposable-prosperity.jpg
Tim Morgan’s chart suggests that the US disposable income per capita has fallen less than that for various European economies. It also that the US tax level is lower. I think a person has to really add back in most or all of the US health care system cost, to make the amounts comparable. All of the countries average disposable income has dropped a great deal since 2000 for the US (low point for oil prices, high point for US labor force participation) and since 2004 for Europe (significance??).
Tim Morgan also has a chart showing debt per capita in 2019, and the change since the point of time when prosperity was highest (2000 or 2004). Current debt per capita amounts are clearly unsustainably high.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/185-tab-2-prosperity-debt.jpg
And being as our culture lacks understanding (that you can’t grow infinitely on a finite planet) there is nothing it could do with more abundant cheap energy other than kill itself off sooner.
well we can at least agree on that bit
Weird medicine
Phizer will inject us with mRNA which will be absorbed by the cells and genetically manipulate the cells to produce the spike protein found on Sars-cov-2.
The protein will grow on the cells and be attacked by the immune system.
Do we really know this?
I thought mRNA vaccines had been tested on animals. Has there been any evidence of this happening with animals? Or could it just happen occasionally, over time, so we would not know it, until people with autoimmune problems get worse, rather than better, after the vaccine?
No.
Those who take this vaccine will be heading for their maker.
While muttering….but I believe in Science!!! LOL
Yesterday read an article that said formation of a placenta involves biology similar to the spike proteins. It wonders if the vaccine will have fertility issues. I guess we will find out.
Is Sputnik an mRNA vaccine?
Long-term impacts are things we don’t figure out quickly.
Zerohedge has already picked up that story, with the ex-Head of Pzifer no less demanding the EU stop trials because of the potential for indefinite infertility:
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/ex-pfizer-exec-demands-eu-halt-covid-19-vaccine-studies-over-indefinite-infertility-and
I wish this Ex-Pfizer executive would un-package his many unusual virus views from his vaccine safety views. It would perhaps make the vaccine safety issues, on their own, more clear. It seems to me that the safety issues are probably important on their own.
Part of what he seems to be saying is that a lot of COVID-19 cases are false positives. But we know total deaths are rising more than COVID-19 deaths.
In the Zerohedge video, he also says that he thinks that the disease is dying out on its own, based on a declining number of deaths in September. This probably looked like it was true in September (when the video seems to have been made), but now, world COVID-19 deaths are rising. So the story is confusing to a Zerohedge reader.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/World-Daily-Deaths-through-December-5-2020.png
The petition is asking for a response from the US Food and Drug Administration by December 12. We will see if anything happens based on this petition. I wouldn’t hold my breath.
https://2020news.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Wodarg_Yeadon_EMA_Petition_Pfizer_Trial_FINAL_01DEC2020_EN_unsigned_with_Exhibits.pdf
Gail, are covid deaths rising, or are “covid” deaths rising?
Somehow, there appear to be no longer any flu deaths whatsoever:
https://apps.who.int/flumart/Default?ReportNo=6
Is Sputnik an mRNA vaccine?
No
“a viral two-vector vaccine based on the human adenovirus — a common cold virus — fused with the gene that encodes the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 to stimulate an immune response”