There are a huge number of people doing energy modeling. In my opinion, nearly all of them are going astray in their modeling because they don’t understand how the economy really operates.
The modeling that comes closest to being correct is that which underlies the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others. This modeling was based on physical quantities of resources, with no financial system whatsoever. The base model, shown here, indicates that limits would be reached a few years later than we actually seem to be reaching them. The dotted black line in Figure 1 indicates where I saw the world economy to be in January 2019, based on the limits we already seemed to be reaching at that time.
The authors of The Limits to Growth have said that their model cannot be expected to be correct after limits hit (which is about now), so even this model is less than perfect. Thus, this model cannot be relied upon to show that population will continue to rise until after 2050.
Many readers are familiar with Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) calculations. These are favorites of many people following the Peak Oil problem. A high ratio of Energy Returned to Energy Invested is considered favorable, while a low ratio is considered unfavorable. Energy sources with similar EROEIs are supposedly equivalent. Even these similarities can be misleading. They make intermittent wind and solar appear far more helpful than they really are.
Other modeling, such as that by oil companies, is equally wrong. Their modeling tends to make future fossil fuel supplies look far more available than they really are.
This is all related to a talk I plan to give to energy researchers later in February. So far, all that is pinned down is the Summary, which I reproduce here as Section [1], below.
[1] Summary: The economy is approaching near-term collapse, not peak oil. The result is quite different.
The way a person views the world economy makes a huge difference in how one models it. A big issue is how connected the various parts of the economy are. Early researchers assumed that oil was the key energy product; if it were possible to find suitable substitutes for oil, the danger of exhaustion of oil resources could be delayed almost indefinitely.
In fact, the operation of the world economy is controlled by the laws of physics. All parts are tightly linked. The problem of diminishing returns affects far more than oil supply; it affects coal, natural gas, mineral extraction in general, fresh water production and food production. Based on the work of Joseph Tainter, we also know that added complexity is also subject to diminishing returns.
When a person models how the system works, it becomes apparent that as increasing complexity is added to the system, the portion of the economic output that can be returned to non-elite workers as goods and services drops dramatically. This leads to rising wage disparity as increasing complexity is added to the economy. As the economy approaches limits, rising wage disparity indirectly leads to a tendency toward low prices for oil and other commodities because a growing number of non-elite workers are unable to afford homes, cars and even proper nutrition.
A second effect of added complexity is growing use of long-lasting goods available through technology. Many of these long-lasting goods are only affordable with financial time-shifting devices such as loans or the sale of shares of stock. As non-elite workers become increasingly unable to afford the output of the economy, these time-shifting devices provide a way to raise demand (and thus prices) for commodities of all types, including oil. These time-shifting devices are subject to manipulation by central banks, within limits.
Standard calculations of Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROEI) ignore the fact that added complexity tends to have a very detrimental impact on the economy because of the diminishing returns it produces. To correct for this, today’s EROEI calculations should only be used to compare energy systems with similar complexity. The least complex energy systems are based on burned biomass and power from animals. Fossil fuels represent a step upward in complexity, but they still can be stored until their use is required. Intermittent renewables are far ahead of fossil fuels in terms complexity: they require sophisticated systems of storage and distribution and therefore cannot be considered equivalent to oil or dispatchable electricity.
The lack of understanding of how the economy really works has led to the failure to understand several important points:
(i) Low oil prices rather than high are to be expected as the economy reaches limits,
(ii) Most fossil fuel reserves will be left in the ground because of low prices,
(iii) The economy is experiencing the historical phenomenon of collapse, rather than peak oil, and
(iv) If the economy is not to collapse, we need energy sources providing a larger quantity of net energy per capita to offset diminishing returns.
[2] The world’s energy problem, as commonly understood by researchers today
It is my observation that many researchers believe that we humans are in charge of what happens with future fossil fuel extraction, or with choosing to substitute intermittent renewables for fossil fuels. They generally do not see any problem with “running out” in the near future. If running out were imminent, the problem would likely be announced by spiking prices.
In the predominant view, the amount of future fossil fuels available depends upon the quantity of energy resources that can be extracted with available technology. Thus, a proper estimate of the resources that can be extracted is needed. Oil seems to be in shortest supply based on its reserve estimates and the vast benefits it provides to society. Thus, it is commonly believed that oil production will “peak” and begin to decline first, before coal and natural gas.
In this view, demand is something that we never need to worry about because energy, and especially oil, is a necessity. People will choose energy over other products because they will pay whatever is necessary to have adequate energy supplies. As a result, oil and other energy prices will rise almost endlessly, allowing much more to be extracted. These higher prices will also enable higher cost intermittent electricity to be substituted for today’s fossil fuels.
A huge amount of additional fossil fuels can be extracted, according to those who are primarily concerned about loss of biodiversity and climate change. Those who analyze EROEI tend to believe that falling EROEI will limit the quantity of future fossil fuels extracted to a smaller total extracted amount. Because of this, energy from additional sources, such as intermittent wind and solar, will be required to meet the total energy demand of society.
The focus of EROEI studies is on whether the EROEI of a given proposed substitution is, in some sense, high enough to add energy to the economy. The calculation of EROEI makes no distinction between energy available only through highly complex systems and energy available from less complex systems.
EROEI researchers, or perhaps those who rely on the indications of EROEI researchers, seem to believe that the energy needs of economies are flexible within a very wide range. Thus, an economy can shrink its energy consumption without a particularly dire impact.
[3] The real story seems to be that the adverse outcome we are reaching is collapse, not peak oil. The economy is a self-organizing system powered by energy. This makes it behave in very unexpected ways.
[3a] The economy is tightly connected by the laws of physics.
Energy consumption (dissipation) is necessary for every aspect of the economy. People often understand that making goods and services requires energy dissipation. What they don’t realize is that almost all of today’s jobs require energy dissipation, as well. Without supplemental energy, humans could only gather wild fruits and vegetables and hunt using the simplest of tools. Or, they could attempt simple horticulture by using a stick to dig a place in the ground to plant a seed.
In physics terms, the economy is a dissipative structure, which is a self-organizing structure that grows over time. Other examples of dissipative structures include hurricanes, plants and animals of all types, ecosystems, and star systems. Without a supply of energy to dissipate (that is, food to eat, in the case of humans), these dissipative structures would collapse.
We know that the human body has many different systems, such as a cardiovascular system, digestive system and nervous system. The economy has many different systems, too, and is just as tightly connected. For example, the economy cannot get along without a transportation system any more than a human can get along without a cardiovascular system.
This self-organizing system acts without our direction, just as our brain or circulatory system acts without our direction. In fact, we have very little control over these systems.
The self-organizing economy allows common belief systems to arise that seem to be right but are really based on models with many incorrect assumptions. People desperately need and want a “happily ever after” solution. The strong need for a desirable outcome favors the selection of models that lead to the conclusion that if there is a problem, it is many years away. Conflicting political views seem to be based on different, equally wrong, models of how world leaders can solve the energy predicament that the world is facing.
The real story is that the world’s self-organizing economy will determine for us what is ahead, and there is virtually nothing we can do to change the result. Strangely enough, if we look at the long term pattern, there almost seems to be a guiding hand behind the result. According to Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee in Rare Earth, there have been a huge number of seeming coincidences that have allowed life on Earth to take hold and flourish for four billion years. Perhaps this “luck” will continue.
[3b] As the economy reaches limits, commodities of many types reach diminishing returns simultaneously.
It is indeed true that the economy reaches diminishing returns in oil supply as it reaches limits. Oil is very valuable because it is energy dense and easily transported. The oil that can be extracted, refined, and delivered to needed markets using the least amount of resources (including human labor) tends to be extracted first. It is later that deeper wells are built that are farther from markets. Because of these issues, oil extraction does tend to reach diminishing returns, as more is extracted.
If this were the only aspect of the economy that was experiencing diminishing returns, then the models coming from a peak oil perspective would make sense. We could move away from oil, simply by transferring oil use to appropriately chosen substitutes.
It becomes clear when a person looks at the situation that commodities of all kinds reach diminishing returns. Fresh water reaches diminishing returns. We can add more by using desalination and pumping water to where it is required, but this approach is hugely expensive. As population and industrialization grows, the need for fresh water grows, making diminishing returns for fresh water a real issue.
Minerals of all kinds reach diminishing returns, including uranium, lithium, copper and phosphate rock (used for fertilizer). The reason this occurs is because we tend to extract these minerals faster than they are replaced by the weathering of rocks, including bedrock. In fact, useable topsoil tends to reach diminishing returns because of erosion. Also, with increasing population, the amount of food required keeps increasing, putting further pressure on farmland and making it harder to retain an acceptable level of topsoil.
[3c] Increased complexity leads to diminishing returns as well.
In his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter points out that complexity reaches diminishing returns, just as commodities do.
As an example, it is easy to see that added spending on healthcare reaches diminishing returns. The discovery of antibiotics clearly had a huge impact on healthcare, at relatively little cost. Now, a recent article is entitled, The hunt for antibiotics grows harder as resistance builds. The dollar payback on other drugs tends to fall as well, as solutions to the most common diseases are found, and researchers must turn their attention to diseases affecting only, perhaps, 500 people globally.
Similarly, spending on advanced education reaches diminishing returns. Continuing the medical example above, educating an increasing number of researchers, all looking for new antibiotics, may eventually lead to success in discovering more antibiotics. But the payback with respect to the education of these researchers will not be nearly as great as the payback for educating the early researchers who found the first antibiotics.
[3d] Wages do not rise sufficiently so that all of the higher costs associated with the many types of diminishing returns can be recouped simultaneously.
The healthcare system (at least in the United States) tends to let its higher costs flow through to consumers. We can see this by looking at how much higher the Medical Care Consumer Price Index (CPI) rises compared to the All Items CPI in Figure 2.
The high (and rapidly rising) cost of advanced education is another cost that is being passed on to consumers–the students and their parents. In this case, loans are used to make the high cost look less problematic.
Of course, if consumers are burdened with higher medical and educational costs, it makes it difficult to afford the higher cost of energy products, as well. With these higher costs, young people tend to live with their parents longer, saving on the energy products needed to have their own homes and vehicles. Needless to say, the lower net income for many people, after healthcare costs and student loan repayments are deducted, acts to reduce the demand for oil and energy products, and thus contributes to the problem of continued low oil prices.
[3e] Added complexity tends to increase wage disparities. The reduced spending by lower income workers tends to hold down fossil fuel prices, similar to the impact identified in Section [3d].
As the economy becomes more complex, companies tend to become larger and more hierarchical. Elite workers (ones with more training or with more supervisory responsibility) earn more than non-elite workers. Globalization adds to this effect, as workers in high wage countries increasingly compete with workers in lower wage countries. Even computer programmers can encounter this difficulty, as programming is increasingly moved to China and India.
Individuals with low incomes spend a disproportionately large share of their incomes on commodities because everyone needs to eat approximately 2,000 calories of food per day. In addition, everyone needs some kind of shelter, clothing and basic transportation. All of these types of consumption are commodity intensive. People with very high incomes tend to buy disproportionately more goods and services that are not very resource intensive, such as education for their children at elite universities. They may also use part of their income to buy shares of stock, hoping their value will rise.
With a shift in the distribution of incomes toward those with high earnings, the demand for commodities of all types tends to stagnate or even fall. Fewer people are able to buy new cars, and fewer people can afford vacations involving travel. Thus, as more complexity is added, there tends to be downward pressure on the price of oil and other energy products.
[4] Oil prices have been falling behind those needed by oil producers since 2012.
Back in February 2014, Steven Kopits gave a presentation at Columbia University explaining the state of the oil industry. I wrote a post describing this presentation called, Beginning of the End? Oil Companies Cut Back on Spending. Oil companies were reporting that prices had been too low for them to make an adequate profit for reinvestment, back as early as 2012. In inflation-adjusted terms, this was when oil prices were about $120 per barrel.
Even Middle Eastern oil exporting countries need surprisingly high oil prices because their economies depend on the profits of oil companies to provide the vast majority of their tax revenue. If oil prices are too low, adequate taxes cannot be collected. Without funds for jobs programs and food subsidies, there are likely to be uprisings by unhappy citizens who cannot maintain an adequate standard of living.
Looking at Figure 4, we see that there has been very little time that Brent oil prices have been above $120 per barrel. Even with all of the recent central bank stimulus and deficit spending by economies around the world, Brent oil prices remain below $60 per barrel.
[5] Interest rates and the amount of debt make a huge difference in oil prices, too.
Based on Figure 4, oil prices are highly irregular. Much of this irregularity seems to be associated with interest rate and debt level changes. In fact, in July 2008, what I would call the debt bubble associated with subprime housing and credit cards collapsed, bringing oil prices down from their peak abruptly. In late 2008, Quantitative Easing (QE) (aimed at bringing interest rates down) was added just prior to an upturn on prices in 2009 and 2010. Prices fell again, when the United States discontinued QE in late 2014.
If we think about it, increased debt makes purchases such as cars, homes and new factories more affordable. In fact, the lower the interest rate, the more affordable these items become. The number of purchases of any of these items can be expected to rise with more debt and lower interest rates. Thus, we would expect oil prices to rise as debt is added and fall as it is taken away. Now, there are many questions: Why haven’t oil prices risen more, with all of the stimulus that has been added? Are we reaching the limits of stimulus? Are interest rates as low as they can go, and the amount of debt outstanding as high as it can go?
[6] The growing complexity of the economy is contributing to the huge amount of debt outstanding.
In a very complex economy, a huge number of durable goods and services are produced. Examples of durable goods would include machines used in factories and pipelines of all kinds. Durable goods would also include vehicles of all types, including both vehicles used for businesses and vehicles used by consumers for their own benefit. As broadly defined here, durable goods would include buildings of all types, including factories, schools, offices and homes. It would also include wind turbines and solar panels.
There would also be durable services produced. For example, a college degree would have lasting benefit, it is hoped. A computer program would have value after it is completed. Thus, a consulting service is able to sell its programs to prospective buyers.
Somehow, there is a need to pay for all of these durable goods. We can see this most easily for the consumer. A loan that allows durable goods to be paid for over their expected life will make these goods more affordable.
Similarly, a manufacturer needs to pay the many workers making all of the durable goods. Their labor is adding value to the finished products, but this value will not be realized until the finished products are put into operation.
Other financing approaches can also be used, including the sale of bonds or shares of stock. The underlying intent is to provide financial time-shifting services. Interest rates associated with these financial time-shifting services are now being manipulated downward by central banks to make these services more affordable. This is part of what keeps stock prices high and commodity prices from falling lower than their current levels.
These loans, bonds and shares of stock are providing a promise of future value. This value will exist only if there are enough fossil fuels and other resources to create physical goods and services to fulfill these promises. Central banks can print money, but they cannot print actual goods and services. If I am right about collapse being ahead, the whole debt system seems certain to collapse. Shares of stock seem certain to lose their value. This is concerning. The end point of all of the added complexity seems to be financial collapse, unless the system can truly add the promised goods and services.
[7] Intermittent electricity fits very poorly into just-in-time supply lines.
A complex economy requires long supply lines. Usually, these supply lines are operated on a just-in-time basis. If one part of a supply line encounters problems, then manufacturing needs to stop. For example, automobile manufacturers in many parts of the world are finding that they need to suspend production because it is impossible to source the necessary semiconductor chips. If electricity is temporarily unavailable, this is another way of disrupting the supply chain.
The standard way to work around temporary breaks in supply chains is to build greater inventory, but this is expensive. Additional inventory needs to be stored and watched over. It likely needs financing, as well.
[8] The world economy today seems to be near collapse.
The self-organizing economy is now pushing the economy in many strange ways that indirectly lead to less energy consumption and eventually collapse. Even prior to COVID-19, the world economy appeared to be reaching growth limits, as indicated in Figure 1, which was published in January 2019. For example, recycling of many renewables was no longer profitable at lower oil prices after 2014. This led China to discontinue most of its recycling efforts, effective January 1, 2018, even though this change resulted in the loss of jobs. China’s car sales fell in 2018, 2019, and 2020, a strange pattern for a supposedly rapidly growing country.
The response of world leaders to COVID-19 has pushed the world economy further in the direction of contraction. Businesses that were already weak are the ones having the most difficulty in being able to operate profitably.
Furthermore, debt problems are growing around the world. For example, it is unclear whether the world will require as many shopping malls or office buildings in the future. A person would logically expect the value of the unneeded buildings to drop, reducing the value of many of these properties below their outstanding debt level.
When these issues are combined, it looks likely that the world economy may not be far from collapse, which is one of my contentions from Section [1]. It also looks like my other contentions from Section [1] are true:
(i) Low oil prices rather than high are to be expected as the economy reaches limits,
(ii) Most fossil fuel reserves will be left in the ground because of low prices, and
(iv) If the economy is not to collapse, we need energy sources providing a larger quantity of net energy per capita to offset diminishing returns.
Regarding (iv), the available energy supply from wind and solar (net or otherwise) is tiny relative to the total energy required to operate the world economy. This issue, alone, would disqualify a Great Reset using wind and solar from truly being a solution for today’s problems. Instead, plans for a Great Reset tend to act as a temporary cover-up for collapse.
Commodity Prices
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EuQczQ9XUAAKWlv?format=jpg&name=large
Mostly up since the beginning of the year. Oil up over 20%.
Free money gushing from the sky via these 2-3x oily ETFs available for the little guy since ~Q2 2020 plunge rebound, while the more delicate option traders made fortunes no doubt.
Similarly for other (tech) hot stocks.
However, the problem with quick money is that people usually blow it on frivolities and long term bad decisions (e.g. new mansion at the wrong place).
I prefer this format, thank you. I use Read-Aloud plugin and it’s easier having everything in one long page for listening.
Thanks!
I am getting the message: “This webpage is using significant energy. Closing it may improve the responsiveness of your Mac.”
Besides causing slow loading, all of the comments may draw down the battery quickly of devices running off of batteries. No matter how convenient it is, I may still have to switch it back to the old format, so it is not so slow and energy intensive.
I have to say, although I like this format on the pc, my phone simply cannot cope with downloading this many comments.
I was afraid this would happen. Also, many people want to read the post. If they happen to get a link to “post plus comments,” it will go nowhere. I am afraid I will need to go back to the old version because of this issue.
In truly OFW/Surplus fashion the energy has spoken..
And just like IC, it becomes sluggish and bloated with the overhead.
“Over 10 million Americans are still unemployed, and many are not too hopeful about finding work. A Pew survey found only about half of unemployed Americans are optimistic about finding a job soon.
“The pandemic and economic slowdown have also been hard on Americans’ mental health…”
https://www.businessinsider.com/pew-survey-how-unemployed-americans-feel-about-finding-work-soon-2021-2?r=US&IR=T
“The US looks to be heading towards stagflation and that will require substantial fiscal stimulus to keep the bottom half of the economy afloat.”
https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/us-heading-towards-stagflation-to-avoid-recession
Many seem to be underemployed. Found a job at the local food store, for example.
“The tide of rebellion is fuelled by empty stomachs. From bread in the Arab Spring to flour in the French Revolution, soaring food and drink prices are behind uprisings that rocked the world. The last food price crises in 2008 and 2011 provided crucial sparks in waves of unrest that spanned the globe and even toppled governments.
“Policymakers may therefore be looking nervously at commodities markets as rising food prices threaten to compound the misery of the Covid crisis.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/02/15/cost-food-heading-towards-crisis-levels/
“The Guardian view on global protests…
“The glaring difference between this wave of protest and that seen a decade ago is that, for the most part, activists are not seeking greater freedom but trying to defend what space they have against increasing encroachment as the authoritarian tide has risen around the world.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/14/the-guardian-view-on-global-protests-passing-it-on
Quite remarkable hypocrisy on the part of the Guardian, as it is now foremost in supporting the new mask+lockdowns+vaccines tyranny.
Not a peep about the loss of basic -and essential – freedoms, human and civil rights in the UK.
A servile publisher of state and Big Pharma propaganda, while boasting that it is not in the pocket of any oligarch – ha!
I suppose they are, as a self-appointed arbiter of global morality, drawing a simplistic distinction between what they see as “bad” authoritarianism and authoritarianism that “is for your own good”.
It is the poor who are especially hurt by rising food prices.
Behind the scenes, oil prices rise, but not enough to fix the huge shortfall relative to what producers need. ($120+ barrel)
The big discounts on food thanks to closed down resorts, hotels, restaurants, .. during 2020 is now over – this surplus on sale has been either snapped already or destroyed as running out of date. So it will be even more painful to watch the price rebound beyond the old “neutral” price level. And frankly it was not healthy either (on some items), too much marzipan and 70-90% dark chocolate for us spoiled near the IC core.. Obviously for those dealing with real hunger not funny anymore..
“Is The Anti-Oil Movement Installing The Next Recession?
“…as oil demand returns, and if we follow the shallow opposition to investing in oil, we are setting up a deadly combination of a price spike and severe market volatility… And let us be clear: any spike in oil prices could easily lead to another economic collapse like the one we have been trying to pull out of because of Covid-19…”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/judeclemente/2021/02/14/is-the-anti-oil-movement-installing-the-next-recession/?sh=5faebdf75d8f
“Oil prices soared on Monday to their highest in about 13 months as fears of heightened tensions in the Middle East prompted fresh buying…”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil/oil-rises-on-fears-of-heightened-tensions-in-middle-east-idUSKBN2AF013
Up and down, but no long-term fix in sight.
“China has been the main driver of world economic growth over the past decade in terms of its contribution to total global GDP, but its role as an overseas investor, in physical infrastructure especially, has gone into a sharp and rather ominous decline more recently…
“This implies the severe recession into which the world as a whole (excluding China itself) has been plunged over the past year could prove even deeper and longer lasting than feared, because the China locomotive is losing steam in terms of overseas investment.”
https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3121485/chinas-overseas-investment-falling-just-when-global-economy-needs
“Biden is well aware he has a fight [with China] on his hands that, if mishandled, could swiftly turn physical.
“Some analysts fear war with China is inevitable, sooner or later. So he is moving fast. In a first phone call to China’s president, Xi Jinping, last week, he raised concerns about trade, Taiwan, Hong Kong and alleged genocide in Xinjiang.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/14/how-to-rein-in-china-without-risking-war-is-the-issue-biden-must-address
I think that the SCMP article makes an important point. We have been depending on China to push along world growth, but it is now failing us.
We don’t necessarily get very good information about what is happening in China right now. The professors I know in Beijing tell me that (because of the Beijing COVID threat) they are teaching from home until March 20. A person wonders how much else is “shut in” by the COVID issue. And this is apart from the low investment issue.
NZ goes to sudden lockdown last night…. to ‘The Vaccine is Arriving’ the next day…https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/300230083/live-covid19-vaccines-arrive-in-nz-source-of-latest-community-cases-yet-to-be-found
I am wondering about those 3 people who tested +…. are they actually sick… or are they just more false positives? The news doesn’t mention their condition therefore I assume they are not symptomatic…
https://youtu.be/Q9GccuvNs9U
Also seeing headlines stating that ‘there will be more lockdowns in NZ in the coming year – that is guaranteed’….
Interpretation: let’s scare the sheeple with a lockdown related to the mutant version of The Trojan Virus…. they just kept running the test at enough cycles until someone tested +… then remind everyone of the way out of this nightmare — vaccine (which is not actually a vaccine at all – it is a TREATMENT)…. then to reinforce the meme… bring in an expert to tell those sceptics that if they don’t take the jab the nightmare will continue throughout the year.
And why not? In the UK the vaccines are clearly working well:
http://www.ukcolumn.org/sites/default/files/article-images/Vaccine-Corrolation.png
Go to the UKColumn site to find the full article on why there is correlation between the vaccine rollout and increased covid-19 deaths.
Should be interesting when the second more dangerous dose is given.
Hopefully, the shots are not the cause of the higher deaths. People frightened by death rates are more willing to take the vaccine. Of course, you know this.
Life as a DelusiSTANI does not generally involve any serious self-harm…. one might waste money on a Tesla and deal with overnighting in the middle of nowhere to charge it up on a trip…. or pay for a new very expensive battery in a few years….
One might get sucked in by the solar scam and go off-grid… only to have to deal with a pissed off wife who is not allowed to use the hair dryer because it drains the batteries….
Inconvenient yes… deadly… generally not.
Alas…. this may be the one time that the DelusiSTANI passport delivers a nasty outcome to its holders…
Sadly we may not be able to gloat and say ‘I told you so you dumb ass’ … cuz they may well be dead… or half dead suffering from the long term side-effects of agreeing to allow their bodies to be used in The Experiment.
Conversely… they may have the last laugh … those of us who refuse the jab…. are left alive to commit suicide — or be roasted on a fire by The Bad Guys… when the Elders gave us a peaceful way out of what is most definitely headed our way…
This is where ‘knowing’ comes into play…. I cannot bring myself to take the jab knowing that it is almost certainly engineered to kill me …. that creeps me out…. but similarly… can I put the pedal down and hit the rock cut at 300km per hour…. I will still opt for option 2 — because it would be rude to walk out on The Big Show half way through…. I want to watch as karma plays out and the unvaxxed humans set each other’s hair on fire 🙂
That’s the spirit FE! I think everyone here wants to see how it will play out. We may have to buy shortwave radios to keep in touch when the internet goes down.
Kiwi Kick Ass Covid Cure
Vitamin D, (sunlight works best) avoiding viral load situations ( become an introvert lol), take natural interferons like fennel tea (in moderation) Cinnamon in very small regular doses. Exercise, fresh air, health foods ( fresh fruit). Regular and generous sleep and rest. Good company (on line or actual) sense of humour ( good laugh). Goodwill and kindness. Good bullshit radar. Leave the neighbours sheep alone.
These da medicines. Take/do regularly, no vaccine required
Thanks. I mostly follow them. I drink green tea rather than fennel tea, however.
Jacinda’s painful expressions, full of deep concern and unutterably profound caring, are surely the true nightmare for NZ.
Nanny is strict, but that’s because she loves you: and if she’s had to put you in a dark cupboard, tied up, it’s only your fault…..
https://breakingintomodeling.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Zoolander-Blue-Steel-look-min.png
I imagine Jacinda practising here ‘look’ in the mirror each morning before she goes to the office (and Clarke gets ready for another hot session with the nanny!)….
https://i1.wp.com/watertonchronicle.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/jacindaangry.jpg
28-Year-old Wisconsin Healthcare Worker has Aneurysm – Brain Dead Five Days After Second Experimental Pfizer mRNA COVID Injection
https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/28-year-old-wisconsin-healthcare-worker-has-aneurysm-brain-dead-five-days-after-second-experimental-pfizer-mrna-covid-injection/
Lots of outcomes will be assigned to “chance.” It would have happened, without the vaccine.
A bit like the Bach flute partita – the notes all appear and disappear but that does not mean that they have ‘failed’. They form part of a larger structure – and then that too disappears. In itself it is just vibrations in the air but it ‘means’ something ‘more’ to us in so far as it has a mental ‘effect’ on us; and that ‘meaning’ is ‘valid’ – or at least ‘not invalid’. I suppose that the evolutionary process is a bit ‘like that’ – it means nothing but human intentional perspectives are ‘not invalid’.
From close up, it is hard to see how the small pieces contribute to the total. I agree.
This may interest you, Gail. A new set (2018) of complete Bach works (FLAC, 80 GB) on DG/ Decca labels, 222 ‘cds’. Just add this torrent hash into a torrent program like qBittorent. Something to listen to during collapse.
799CDEC60355E2C8624BE3CBF3715516F649B6E6
new thread as a test.
It worked!
1,813 comments right now.
refreshing the page takes my computer maybe half a minute, so I wonder if people will find this format to be slower, and maybe more so when it’s closer to 20 days and 3,000 or more comments.
I am having problems with the slow reload myself. I expect that other people are as well.
It may be that I can only use this format occasionally, when I need to search for something.
Or I could alert others I was going to temporarily switch to this format.
I went back to the way the site was before. It was too slow loading and too far to the bottom of the page for quite a few commenters.
People who only wanted to read the article, but got a link to the version of the post with the comments would have a hard time reading it.
By the way, within each page, I can reverse the order of comments to “newest on top,” instead of “oldest on top.” I put the comments this way because I think it is what it was before.
Gail, after 30 minutes with the new format, you have my thanks and wholehearted support. Threaded discussions simply do not work: the thread is like a search engine that is able to perform only one search.
Run DMC ” lets all get the vaccine” vid
I cant imagine a more demeaning video.
The community was doubtful before.
They will be not getting the jab now.
“dont ask questions”
What patronising tripe.
I see it uses the weak argument that because effective and safe vaccines against polio, measles and smallpox were developed, these novel and untested treatments must also be perfectly safe.
And offered to us by perfect saints, with no hidden agendas.
When the MSM repeats something endlessly … (e.g. Cl Chang e… WMD…. 9.11 terrorism … Covid.. vaccine…. and so on)…. I smell a dead rat…
But this video takes the cake… it smacks of desperation… what’s next — is Geldof going to gather all the biggest names and have them spew this dead rat of a song????
Are we going to see singing contests in schools … with the winners getting first in line for the vaccine in their classes?
This is well and truly ridiculous now….
It is not difficult to see how the Maoists pulled off their ‘cultural revolution’…. I can envision anyone not jumping on board with the vaxx becoming a pariah — put in a corner with a dunce cap on …. mocked… fired from their job… perhaps even stoned to death because they are a danger to everyone else (even though everyone else has been vaccinated!!!).
If only I had a hotline to the Elders I could advise them on my Plan B …. family packs of Oxycontin to be distributed to everyone — then when the food runs out or the violence becomes too much for them … they drop a few tabs — and drift off into the dark world….
Surely this is better than the current plan…. simple is always better…. why do they need to run everyone ragged for a year+ before killing them…. just run the engine Hard… and let that sumbitch seize up… screw this hibernation phase…. and this complicated stuff…. it’s just dragging out the misery ….we need MORE MORE MORE…. until it breaks… and how appropriate to pop a few pills to solve the problem….
Suicide pills, now That would be a hard sell. How to market it in a species so addicted to living and who thrives on hope like homo sapiens? Nah, it wouldn’t work.
In politics deceiving is always the best course, not least because most people love/need/want to believe in lies and leaders. History as proven it countless times, and “The Art of War” underlines it in bold lines: deceptiveness is always a first card choice.
I changed the settings, so that all of the comments are in one long string. This way, search options work better, at least for a given post. You can simply use your browser’s search option, at least within this post and the long list of comments. I can also see about changing the particular widget I am using for searches.
For me, it is a long scroll down to post a new comment, however.
What do you think of this approach?
I can change it back to the old approach, if you like.
maybe it’s better?
the newest threads are now at the top, so that’s a big change.
but the replies to a thread are still beneath the first post of the thread.
it works, but it’s different.
One thing I noticed, too, is that I could subscribe to Thrive Suite for comments. It would allow a “post new comment” box at the top as well as the bottom of the thread, among other things. I probably would not want to turn on its full list of functions.
Comment directly from social media accounts to OFW -probably turn off
Ability to share a comment from OFW to social media – OK
Voting on comments – Maybe – Who gets to vote??
I don’t want to try Thrive Suite right now. I am too busy with other things. I expect it would have the same problem with slow reload if all of the comments are in a string.
Much better – it keeps the entire discussion ‘live’ rather than most of it being ‘buried’ pages back. It has my vote anyway.
Bill not so popular in India after his previous vaccine rollouts there.
https://theprint.in/health/why-indias-expert-panel-rejected-emergency-use-nod-for-pfizer-vaccine/599529/
If nothing else, it is terribly tricky to have a cold enough temperature to store the vaccine at. Then mixing and administering needs to follow a very precise regimen. This, by itself, is likely to be a problem. I can see why India would want to test the drug in India. And then there is the issue of watching for bad allergic reactions, and other bad reactions.
Chewing over ‘Twilight of the Idols’ and the ‘confusion of cause and effect’ (the first of the Four Great Errors).
‘The fossil fuel collapse will ruin humanity’: another interpretation, the fossil fuel collapse happens because humanity (considered collectively) is already ruined, it lacks the instinctive wherewithal to conduct civilisation in a more sustainable manner; its entire ideology and modus operandi of mass expansion is expressive of inadequate, degenerate instincts.
To be generous, a situation of ‘plenty’ is just too new to us; to be less generous, this situation was foreseeable and alternatives were proposed since the 19th c. It is difficult to ‘excuse’ what was forewarned. Were humans (collectively) ever ‘up to’ the avoidance of this situation? Anyway, nature does not really accept ‘excuses’. The end of peoples is always their own ‘fault’ at the end of the day because it is their ‘responsibility’.
From the macro perspective, a collapse and bottleneck may be exactly what H. s. s. need to get back on the evolutionary, adaptive path. It is not so much a ‘disaster’ as an object lesson and a ‘fresh’ start (in a depleted world).
Nietzsche argued this sort of thing; virtue is not what makes people happy, rather a physiologically ‘happy’ type is necessarily, instinctively virtuous; a lack of virtue does not ruin a man, rather the man lacks virtue because he is already physiologically ruined. It is all about the health of the instincts and a man’s mistakes are consequences of those instincts.
“Every mistake in every sense is the effect of a degeneration of the instincts, of a disintegration of the will: this is almost a definition of what it means to be bad. Everything good is instinctive – and consequently light, necessary, free. Effort is an objection, gods and heroes belong to different types (in my language: light feet are the first attribute of divinity).”
Certainly, from one angle we have to say that humans were simply not ‘up to’ the avoidance of this situation and that ‘excuses’ do not really ‘count’ in reality. The situation is ‘inevitable’ in so far as it is inevitable for us (collectively) – which is not to say that it is inevitable for all (perhaps future) variations of H. s. s. Our inability is our inability – that is actually the ‘optimistic’ perspective.
But hey, IC has been great – I have certainly enjoyed it with all of my virtues and vices. BAU tonight, baby!
yes, mass expansion was inevitable, due to our hunter gatherer minds. It’s no surprise that any acquired knowledge/education/civilization could not deter the instincts/impulses to use as many resources as fast as possible.
so it’s not failure, it’s just evolutionary design.
as a species, we collectively will use the resources available in our environment and grow in population until there are inadequate resources to support our numbers.
then there will be collapse, which is not failure, but just the way evolved life proceeds.
but yes it’s been great from my perspective as one member of the species, so QBAU tonight, baby!
That sounds about right. From the macro perspective collapse/ even H. s. s. extinction would not be ‘failure’ or even a ‘set back’ as that would imply that the evolutionary process has some ‘objective’ that functions as some ‘criterion’ of performance. Even to call it a process of ‘experimentation’ would anthropomorphise ‘intention’. Ultimately it ‘just is’.
‘Failure’ is a human perspective, which does not ‘invalidate’ it; that perspective too is a part of the great ‘just is’, intentional mind produced by the intentionless, mindless process. If there is no ‘validity’ in the ‘just is’ then nothing can be ‘invalidated’ – all ‘just is’, even the perspective that it is ‘more’ than that.
the future will be collapse and sooner or later human extinction and ultimately the extinction of all life on Earth.
so nothing to worry about.
However, we must include the hypothesis of “alien” meddling with human affairs (genetics).
I.e. running wild with the evolutionary process and creating humanoids with psychosocial conditions that isn’t very suitable for long-term stable progress on earth.
Ultimately, however, the reality being is that we can’t expect “outsiders” to fix the experiment. A reasonable assumption is that we are all alone and this is what we got however screwed up.
The outlook indeed looks grim.
On the contrary, it is exactly a consequence of going against our innate pack-like origins.
A pack psychosocial condition simply does not scale well into the herd. The competitive elements of skill and mastery within a pack simply turns destructive as a herd. I.e, muppets competing in vanity and power instead of leading by omnipotence and example.
We simply went astray from our origins. However that happened is beyond me to answer.
Need parkas in Texas as that intermittent wind power is not going to suffice!!
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/deep-freeze-sends-gas-soaring-054613946.html#:~:text=1%20%2F%202-,Big%20Freeze%20Threatens%20Texas%20With%20Power%20Outages%20as%20Markets%20Gyrate,already%20trading%20at%20unprecedented%20levels.&text=%E2%80%9CRotating%20outages%20are%20a%20possibility.%E2%80%9D
Lots of interesting things in the article.
Sounds like fun!
So decentralization increases power demand, all the humans in their little working/consuming/ remote working bubbles ….can’t say we didn’t see that one coming
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/531269-overdose-deaths-outnumber-covid-19-deaths-more-than-3-to-1-in-san
Go long OPNT?
This is a link to a PBS article related to overdose deaths:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/whats-behind-the-historic-spike-in-drug-overdose-deaths-under-covid-19
I am sure that despair is behind quite a few of San Francisco’s overdose deaths.
How we can live whitout financial sistem? Banks closed or defoult?
Trade locally with a local currency, and cut out reliance on trade with others using other currencies. Even a central market would work, where a person gets credit for what he/she brings, and uses the credit to buy other things.
There is also likely to be a problem with taking on debt, more long term than a day or two.
Forgive me if I repeat myself, but: produce necessities locally; trade luxuries globally. Flying a lettuce three thousand miles in simply insane; we have known about greenhouses for centuries. I visited some of the oldest at Kew Gardens and talked to a gardener about the “Giant Hogweed”, which he told me was the inspiration for “Day of the Triffids”.
Yes, and manufacture as much as possible locally (craftsmen/women of the artisanry) and the rest where scale makes all the difference, at any remaining nexus of technology and sophisticated/efficient means of production.
There is no need to manufacture cheap crap in another continent when simple 3D printers/CNC machinery can carve out stuff from bulk materials, sold at a much higher margin directly to local shop floors, than to large behemoth orgs with hordes of penny pinchers.
Also, why isn’t people sewing/making/fixing their own clothes/shoes anymore? It’s not like the evolution of competent and reliable sewing machines have stood still.
Assume $100USD for normal brand name jeans. Producing 10 pants a day for sure could make some nice margin. It isn’t exactly globalism or communism to operate your own means of production.
Good point.
We shut down the entire world for a virus…. so you would think that if ClCh was about to end the world… the least we could do …. would be introduce legislation that bans air freighting fruit and vegetables to market…
What do the Green Groupies think about that?
Green groupies doesn’t think, they read and watch MSM. They are useful idiots, vehicles of sanctimonious hypocrisy for the perpetual “green” racket. Lenin would have been proud of them.
How about banning all ridiculous domestic flights? Close those absurd vacation resorts while at it. Cant stand the climate in your own country/region? Move, don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
Gail, The problem with that is that very little is produced entirely locally any more. Even simple products are generally produced with inputs from all over the world. Right now, that is the cheapest way to do it, and in most cases there is no one who knows who to produce every part of a product from beginning to end, even a product as relatively simple as a writing pencil, which I was reading about recently. Reconstituting a primarily local economy will be a formidable task.
Hello Gail.
A question about collapsing societies. You often refer to the Rouble crisis in Russia in the early 90’s.
As I happened to be in Petersburg during that winter working on a film project, I experienced up close what that meant. In a relatively short period of time there was a great deal of chaos because the inflation figures were literally getting worse by the hour.
The “ordinary” Russians lost their accumulated pensions and savings in one fell swoop. Gasoline/diesel was for sale for practically nothing. The city changed in no time into a very unsafe place with many armed gangs. Everyone offered literally everything for sale from antiques to sex.
The black market flourished instantaneously within a system that was already in place anyway. . With trains you could no longer safely travel to Moscow and cities towards Latvia, Estalnd and Poland.
On the trains armed gangs robbing everyone etc. The planes overcrowded with ‘standing places’ where you had to hold on tight.
My question is do you have any links of articles/books that provided insight into what was happening there at the time.
Ps. the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the ‘iron curtain’ culminating in the fall of the GDR and the wall took place over a period of about four/five months.
Thanks for your insights. I know Dmitry Orlov has written about the collapse of the Soviet Union, but I don’t now remember all of his insights.
The final date for the Soviet Union is usually given as December 1991, but individual member states seem to have proclaimed sovereign immunity between November 1988 and September 1991. You are talking about the period around December 1991, then?
The low price for oil (which I believe was one of the underlying problems, making oil reinvestment impossible) had gone on since 1981.
It was in January 1991. We were sailing on freighter the ‘Baltic’ which maintained a monthly schedule from Rotterdam to Petersburg. The ship went up and down with all kinds of cargo, mostly chemicals and oil refinery products and on the way back with ores. The ‘side trade’ was mainly in second hand cars, especially Lada’s and other East European brands, with the deck full of them, which were traded through all kinds of ‘channels’.
It was always unclear when the return trip could be started. The ship was sometimes in Petersburg for weeks.
The same happened when we were there. It is always difficult to get an overview of the ‘how and why’ in situations like that where there is a crisis.
At the time I wrote a number of stories and made documentaries about it, just like about the fall of the wall in 1989, but it is always difficult to get an overview.
There was a huge ‘informal circuit’ in that city of millions of inhabitants, in which those second-hand cars were obviously a sought-after scarce product.
As mentioned above, at first ‘they’ wanted mostly Polish cars because the ‘know how’ and spare parts were available there.
The informal circuit was mainly run by the emerging mafia and former party bosses.
A system which was subsequently perfected and increasingly became the ‘plutocratic’ mainstream.
Then the Ladas were exchanged for BMWs and Mercedeses and the big money-making started and W-Europe became a major playing field for all kinds of extra earnings for the new and extremely dangerous rich.
I had a lot of contact with some people from Petersburg until a few years later (94) when the ‘new order’ made it clear to me that this had to stop.
After that I shifted my focus more to othe, less dangrerous ‘hot spots’ and conflicts.
You lead an interesting life.
USSR collapsed into existing nexus of global economy around which was in working order, also the collapse (briefly very deep) was actually suspended mid term as W provided some “support” in privatization schemes mostly in extractive industries (energy and mining), so the Russian state got almost ~nothing in revenue or just few % stake (and or minimal tax revenue from new MNCs in control) while W protected new oligarchs who stripped some value for themselves (loot hidden in foreign banks) as most value flowed out of the state into W / global realm. This situation has been later partially altered as the state picked itself up somewhat from the utmost bottom into establishing new stabilizing plateau and ~growth. The most atrocious (non compliant) oligarchs were made to pay higher taxes or got expropriated (%partially or fully) etc.
Therefor the “final” collapse will be quite different in the very aspect of falling into non existing “safety” net around, at best some regions could find some workable lower level plateau. But as Gail mentioned there might be some thresholds ruptured irreversibly, e.g. most likely without 24/365 grid availability on the whole territory in question etc.
I notice you were asking for references about this fall of the Soviet Union.
This is a post I wrote back in 2011, with some charts.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/08/08/fall-of-the-soviet-union-implications-for-today/
I think that Dmitry Orlov’s bool is “Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects.
There seems to be a “Revised and Updated” version from 2011. There is also a 2008 version.
Gail, I saw this remark about you and the latest OFW post on reddit collapse: Gail makes the opposite mistake of the techno utopians. She seems to think that as soon as the system doesn’t work optimally it will collapse completely.
I replied that I did not think that was you take on things at all and that you often mentioned that it is hard to predict the future train of events with regard to timing. Was that a fair assessment of your views?
I have been saying that I don’t think everything will collapse simultaneously. The physics of the situation will keep pieces of the world economy operating as long as possible. Exactly which ones they are is hard to predict. Travel for the fun of it seems to have mostly disappeared already, for example. We can expect more breakups of large governmental organizations, with the UK leaving the EU as an early example.
Exactly how all this works out is hard to see. Timing in particular is difficult. Ancient collapses took many years, about 20 to 50 years, according the analyzes of eight collapses by Peter Turchin in the book Secular Cycles.
Thanks. That is what I thought. I will redirect him here to your comment or copy/paste your response there. I don’t like to see misinterpretation.
Gail, once again I agree with your cautious analysis. But… Yes, self organising systems such as biospheres and civilisations collapse slowly and piecemeal. That is because such systems tend to evolve in ways that preserve resiliency. The climate of Yucatan did not collapse; the Maya outgrew the resource base and a short and easily survivable drought tipped them over the edge.
But even then, several cities survived. I had the good fortune to visit the last of them, Tulum, which was still a going concern when the Spanish arrived.
But … I spent many years studying safety critical systems, and they do tend to collapse all at once. Because they do not have resilience. One case study I presented to my students was Turkish Airlines 961, which on 3 March 1974 crashed shortly after takeoff from Paris, killing all aboard.
The technical “proximate cause” was quickly found: the cargo door opened in flight, causing an explosive decompression that ripped out the control cables. The technical initiating cause was also easy: the hooks that were supposed to hold the door closed had not engaged, due to a defect in the locking mechanism. Less than 100g of metal had destroyed an aircraft because the technicians had built a lot of complexity, but no redundancy and no independent check of the system. Indeed, the status light in the cockpit had duly turned off, because it was triggered not by the locks themselves, but by the lever that had failed to encage the locks.
So yes, human built systems do indeed suffer catastrophic failure, because technical people never question their own supreme competence.
But my presentations were not wholly technical: they tried to look for the “root cause”, the event that started the cascade of destruction. And that, again, was easy to find: the aeroplane (a DC10) had been designed with a cargo door that opened outwards. A cargo door should open inwards, so that the pressure differential in flight helps to keep it closed; if it opens outwards, the pressure tries to blow it open.
But, again, why? Because the company management wanted to free up a little more cargo space by having an outward opening door. I did the math (as usual), and found this decision had gained them about 1% of extra cargo space And for that 1%, over 300 people died.
So yes, we shall see for many more decades “An old man harrowing clods”. But the pinnacles, the supposed glories of our technological civilisation will collapse like Jenga towers into their own footprint. And as ever, thank you for listening.
Thanks for that analysis.
I remember riding on a plane, near the rear exit. After we began flight, we had to return to the airport where we took off because the back door did not lock properly.
ah, the DC10s. i refused to sit near the rear exit door, because of their reputation of opening in flight, and sucking the nearby passengers out the door.
Failure of Intelligence was offered as the reason 9-11 occurred. All the needed information was available, it just wasn’t connected. Ever since this situation was labeled, its occurrence throughout human history explains a lot.
As a communications problem, people are presented with true information, but those that need to understand its truth cannot receive it internally or retransmit it effectively. A large measure of the “Cool Hand Luke” movie’s “failure to communicate” is involved.
Profit motive pushes risk taking, while the unrecognized “community motive” pulls it back, giving perpetuation of community lives more attention.
“Failure of Intelligence was offered as the reason 9-11 occurred.”
Poorly chosen example, i think, as most OFW readers, me included, believe 9-11 was, on the contrary, an extraordinarily successful feat of Intelligence.
For a good analysis of 9/11, go here:
http://centerforaninformedamerica.com/september11/.
Conspiracy theory alert: the site presents overwhelming evidence that the event was a “false flag” operation intended to prepare the US for another expensive and useless land war in Asia. Read at your own risk.
15 YEARS LATER: ON THE PHYSICS OF HIGH-RISE BUILDING COLLAPSES
On September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the total collapse of three large steel-framed high-rises. Since then, scientists and engineers have been working to understand why and how these
unprecedented structural failures occurred.
https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016474p21.pdf
Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe
Abstract: We have discovered distinctive red/gray chips in all the samples we have studied of the dust produced by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Examination of four of these samples, collected from separate sites, is reported in this paper. These red/gray chips show marked similarities in all four samples. One sample was collected by a Manhattan resident about ten minutes after the collapse of the second WTC Tower, two the next day, and a fourth about a week later.
The properties of these chips were analyzed using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray energy dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The red material contains grains approximately 100 nm across which are largely iron oxide, while aluminum is contained in tiny plate-like structures.
Separation of components using methyl ethyl ketone demonstrated that elemental aluminum is present. The iron oxide and aluminum are intimately mixed in the red material. When ignited in a DSC device the chips exhibit large but narrow exotherms occurring at approximately 430 ˚C, far below the normal ignition temperature for conventional thermite.
Numerous iron-rich spheres are clearly observed in the residue following the ignition of these peculiar red/gray chips. The red portion of these chips is found to be an unreacted thermitic material and highly energetic.
https://benthamopen.com/contents/pdf/TOCPJ/TOCPJ-2-7.pdf
Perhaps the most impressive feature of these Dave McGowan’s series is the fact that his first installation was written 24 hours after the incident. In my case, Only in 2005 did I start to suspect that something was not quite right in this whole story! But after that, I never saw the political world in the same way again.
JMS, I agree. Prior to looking into the causes of the 2007-8 financial semi-collapse, I also had the conventional notion that historical events merely “happened”, instead of being made to happen. The latter is certainly a truth that is difficult for people to “receive internally”… something has to make the scales fall from one’s eyes.
Con..spiracy theory is an arduous and lonely truth quest in a minefield, so it’s no wonder most minds shut when faced with it. Most minds hate loneliness and deeply yearn to share their community’s unifying beliefs. Fortunately OFW is not frequented by “most minds”!
Do not all airliners doors open outwards?
“The climate of Yucatan did not collapse” — They were struck with a roughly one hundred year drought in the 9th century, I read in a popular science magazine a number of years back. So I would call that a climate collapse. The climate was very difficult in Europe during that period too, the “Dark Ages.”
Thank you, Nehemiah. I have read about that incident, and indeed talked with people in Yucatan who studied it. It was indeed a diminution of rainfall, but not a proper “drought”. The problem was caused by (a) the fact that there are no good rivers in the region, so rain was the major source of water, and (b) the Maya population had expanded to he point where they were using all the water they could find. It was a “drought” only from the perspective of Man, not the perspective of Nature.
The cenotes (their main source of water) remained in operation, but the Maya were harvesting the water faster than it could be replenished. It also did not help that the response to a water shortage was to throw women and girls into the nearest cenote to appease the rain god, which of course rendered that source of water tabu.
The jungle (or “rainforest”, gotta be politically correct) survived, and indeed quickly enveloped the abandoned cities, because the trees had deep roots and could tap subterranean sources. But the central civilisation disappeared, leaving only the periphery (including lucky Tulum).
My personal view only; I respect your disagreement and have tried to respond as best I can.
I don’t think we can be confident that collapse will take decades. A supply chain bottleneck can snowball into paralysis in many highly complex industries. Our civilization is based on hyper complexity. A series of these supply chain failures could bring down entire industries, then countries ability to heat homes, or purify water.
yes, that’s a possibility, so perhaps we must now just live without confidence.
I am reminded of a power cut that Auckland suffered some years back. No street lights, no traffic lights, no working cell towers, no fridges, no EFTPOS or ATMs, etc. It lasted for a matter of hours before the problem was fixed and everything returned to normal. The cause was the failure of one small seemingly insignificant metal part at a substation which had suffered from wear and tear and reached the end of its lifespan. Just one small part switched off most of a city of over a million people.
What would have happened if a replacement part had not been available? What would have happened if the materials or machinery to make the part had also been unavailable? What would have happened if we could not rely upon being able to import the replacement part?
The fact that modern economies are so dependent upon links that can fail so easily with little or often no redundancy built in suggests to me that collapse could potentially happen very suddenly, very rapidly, that we could be thrust into a pre-industrial level of civilisation a great deal more rapidly than most people would be inclined to appreciate.
At the time, my flatmate blamed me for the powercut because I had not yet paid my share of the flat’s powerbill. I still don’t know how she linked my not yet paying my share of the powerbill to her not being able to use her fully charged cell phone, let alone a city-wide power cut. The power bill wasn’t even due yet.
A while back I worked for a biotech firm and spoke with a fellow who had participated in a gov funded study of what would happen in a major city if a serious pandemic hit. Replacement parts are not delivered, critical fuel is not delivered, grid starts failing, the water treatment plant fails due to both shortages of necessary supplies and personnel. The end result was an 80-90% death rate. Pray the grid and water system do not fail. There is no backup for when it does.
Thank you,Curt, your observation agrees with what I have found in studying our advanced technology.
Define “optimally”. The developed world has been in a situation of declining prosperity papered over with excessive debt accrual for quite a while (2003 in the case of the UK) and net energy per capita peaked in the 70’s.
We’ve now likely passed a whole host of other peaks, including peak oil and coal production and several nations are irreversibly collapsing, although not yet *collapsed*. At some point in the not too distant future the totality may well collapse completely.
Thank you for clearly stating you position/point of view.
“… as soon as the system doesn’t work optimally it will collapse completely.”
the anonymous commenter has a superficial view.
when the “system”, a dissipative structure, no longer has adequate energy flowing through it, it sooner or later will collapse completely.
(though I still think we observers living through it will experience it as a long downward slope, and future people/survivors in 2040s or 2050s will look back in amazement at how fast it happened.)
Harry, I have frequently heard or read that US debt has been rising faster than GDP for something like 50 years or thereabouts, and that it takes more and more debt to get the same amount of GDP growth.
I noticed that US COVID deaths suddenly rose, according to the Johns Hopkins data base. This increase seems to come from Ohio.
When I investigated, I found this story:
Health department employee resigns days after thousands of unreported COVID-19 deaths uncovered
Like a rabbit being pulled out of a hat, Plusgood propaganda.
People die. You can call it this or that. This before. That after.
Whether box x or y is checked can be determined by which results in more compensation. If admin tells you box x is worth 3 k more and you check y your not a team player.
I wonder if deaths from tobacco use dropped to zero too in 2020. Another lifesaving aspect of covid19?
As the Buddha would conclude:
When shit happens, is it really shit?
How true. All we have is the now. Then we dont even have that. All the rest is illusion of our creation.
Yes, the outcome of an enterprise cannot be fully understood a priori. Sometimes you just got to light up the joint and see if it reaches orbit. If not, well, rinse and repeat.
So…. Covid 21 has arrived in NZ this evening …
M Fast and I were enjoying a drink watching the totally crap America’s Cup race at the Auckland waterfront then grabbing something to eat when the alert went off letting us know we had hours to get out of Dodge or be trapped…
2 Uber drivers promised to pick us up and drive us to Hamilton — but were unsure if they could get back into the city … a third finally agreed to make the trip….
One way ticket to Queenstown $350… last two seats of the day… what an absolute nightmare (and something I feared was going to happen given The Leak states The Plan is global…)
This is the last time I move of the south island… never again.
I see this article:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/unexplained-covid-19-cases-prompt-first-lockdown-new-zealand-august-n1257912
Unexplained Covid-19 cases prompt first lockdown in New Zealand since August
Caught the disease and fell sick, or merely a positive test result?
I am sure that New Zealanders will be excited at having yet another chance to ‘fight’ the virus, and bravely hide at home in pursuit of the the noble struggle.
Thank you, Xabier. And I’m equally sure all those pundits who claimed New Zealand has shown that the virus can indeed be stopped, now acknowledge that it can only be slowed, as so many of us have been saying for over a year.
@robert firth, It WAS stopped. This is virtually certain to be a re-introduction through foreign air travel and/or immigration. They seem to have caught the problem early, and thus far only plan on a three day lockdown. Japan concluded early in this outbreak that air travel was a virtually certain way of introducing new cases. New Zealand should have maintained tight restrictions on foreign air travel until the rest of the world caught up with them. You can argue that extensive quarantines may not be the best or ideal way to combat this particular virus for various reasons, but to argue that quarantines have not been effective in New Zealand is just blinkered obfuscation. Their biggest mistake was lifting their quarantine on the rest of the world.
If the virus would inevitably reintroduced, it was not ‘stopped”, merely delayed. And it could have been reintroduced by air travel, sea travel (sailors on shore leave, that cannot be outlawed) or for all I know by low flying bats. The New Zealand government was fooling itself, and has now been caught out.
I was on my way into town to start a new job today – after over a year of unemployment – then received a text from my boss asking me to start on Thursday instead because of the lockdown. Does anybody really expect a three day lockdown to make a difference? I doubt even a four week lockdown would make a difference. The virus is here. We need to learn to live with it. I can agree with targeted lockdowns for the elderly and immuno compromised, but a full lockdown is more harmful than helpful and ultimately won’t stop the virus. This isn’t a chimpanzee we’re talking about. It’s a virus.
I am leaning towards the theory that those 3 people are false +’s…. it is very easy to get a false + using that bullshit test….
If you want to get more people to inject the Trojan Horse … best to give them a little fright… the 3 day lockdown certainly does that.
Scamdemic foisted upon the DelusiSTANIS
First, I would wager they tested them twice to be sure. Second, what are the odds of all three family members getting a false positive? Pretty slim. It is the odds of getting one false positive raised to the power of three.
https://www.icd10monitor.com/false-positives-in-pcr-tests-for-covid-19
QUOTE: Since [earlier studies involving viruses “similar to” covic19], results have become available from a few external quality assessments of COVID-19 tests. These have false-positive rates ranging from under 0.4 to 0.7 percent.
Our third line of evidence is from real-world uses of COVID-19 PCR tests wherein positive results were checked with additional tests. In most of these, the false-positive rate was between 0.2 and 0.9 percent. – end quote
So let us imagine the false positive is 1%, a bit above the high end of the range of study results. 1 falsie per 100 (or .01) raised to the power of 3 is 1 chance in 1,000,000 of all three positives being false. Would you really be willing to risk the public’s safety on a reassuring guess which has only 1 chance in a million of being correct?
Mike Yeadon former chief scientist respiratory disease Pfizer on false positives.. there is a better video interview with him but that’s of course been removed by YT:
https://youtu.be/0vbB1IGDm3Y
It is very simple to manufacture a false positive — you just keep running cycles of the PCR until you pick up dormant viral particles…
Risk the public’s safety???? hahaha — are you serious??? Governments are literally MURDERING hundreds of thousands of people by forcing them into endless lockdowns… people are not getting treatment for other deadly diseases and the suicides are surely epic in number….
Then there are literally hundreds of millions whose lives have been torn apart by these senseless lockdowns.
And as we have seen the flu has disappeared — obviously flu is being counted as covid….
And you think Ardern would not order her minions to generate a false positive involving a few people — to scare Kiwis into taking the Trojan Horse Vaccine?
Give me a break.
Familiarize your self with the Plandemic:
1:47 PM (7 hours ago) Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Saturday, October 10, 2020 1:38 PM, (REMOVED) wrote:
Dear (REMOVED),
I want to provide you some very important information. I’m a committee member within the Liberal Party of Canada. I sit within several committee groups but the information I am providing is originating from the Strategic Planning committee (which is steered by the PMO).
I need to start off by saying that I’m not happy doing this but I have to. As a Canadian and more importantly as a parent who wants a better future not only for my children but for other children as well.
The other reason I am doing this is because roughly 30% of the committee members are not pleased with the direction this will take Canada, but our opinions have been ignored and they plan on moving forward toward their goals. They have also made it very clear that nothing will stop the planned outcomes.
The road map and aim was set out by the PMO and is as follows:
– Phase in secondary lock down restrictions on a rolling basis, starting with major metropolitan areas first and expanding outward. Expected by November 2020. Expected by December 2020.
– Daily new cases of COVID-19 will surge beyond capacity of testing, including increases in COVID related deaths following the same growth curves. Expected by end of November 2020.
– Complete and total secondary lock down (much stricter than the first and second rolling phase restrictions). Expected by end of December 2020 – early January 2021
– Reform and expansion of the unemployment program to be transitioned into the universal basic income program. Expected by Q1 2021.
– Projected COVID-19 mutation and/or co-infection with secondary virus (referred to as COVID-21) leading to a third wave with much higher mortality rate and higher rate of infection. Expected by February 2021.
– Daily new cases of COVID-21 hospitalizations and COVID-19 and COVID-21 related deaths will exceed medical care facilities capacity. Expected Q1 – Q2 2021.
– Enhanced lock down restrictions (referred to as Third Lock Down) will be implemented. Full travel restrictions will be imposed (including inter-province and inter-city). Expected Q2 2021.
– Transitioning of individuals into the universal basic income program. Expected mid Q2 2021.
– Projected supply chain break downs, inventory shortages, large economic instability. Expected late Q2 2021.
– Deployment of military personnel into major metropolitan areas as well as all major roadways to establish travel checkpoints. Restrict travel and movement. Provide logistical support to the area. Expected by Q3 2021. Along with that provided road map the Strategic Planning committee was asked to design an effective way of transitioning Canadians to meet a unprecedented economic endeavor.
One that would change the face of Canada and forever alter the lives of Canadians. What we were told was that in order to offset what was essentially an economic collapse on a international scale, that the federal government was going to offer Canadians a total debt relief.
This is how it works: the federal government will offer to eliminate all personal debts (mortgages, loans, credit cards, etc) which all funding will be provided to Canada by the IMF under what will become known as the World Debt Reset program. In exchange for acceptance of this total debt forgiveness the individual would forfeit ownership of any and all property and assets forever.
The individual would also have to agree to partake in the COVID-19 and COVID-21 vaccination schedule, which would provide the individual with unrestricted travel and unrestricted living even under a full lock down (through the use of photo identification referred to as Canada’s HealthPass).
Committee members asked who would become the owner of the forfeited property and assets in that scenario and what would happen to lenders or financial institutions, we were simply told “the World Debt Reset program will handle all of the details”. Several committee members also questioned what would happen to individuals if they refused to participate in the World Debt Reset program, or the HealthPass, or the vaccination schedule, and the answer we got was very troubling.
Essentially we were told it was our duty to make sure we came up with a plan to ensure that would never happen. We were told it was in the individuals best interest to participate. When several committee members pushed relentlessly to get an answer we were told that those who refused would first live under the lock down restrictions indefinitely.
And that over a short period of time as more Canadians transitioned into the debt forgiveness program, the ones who refused to participate would be deemed a public safety risk and would be relocated into isolation facilities. Once in those facilities they would be given two options, participate in the debt forgiveness program and be released, or stay indefinitely in the isolation facility under the classification of a serious public health risk and have all their assets seized.
So as you can imagine after hearing all of this it turned into quite the heated discussion and escalated beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed before. In the end it was implied by the PMO that the whole agenda will move forward no matter who agrees with it or not. That it wont just be Canada but in fact all nations will have similar roadmaps and agendas.
That we need to take advantage of the situations before us to promote change on a grander scale for the betterment of everyone. The members who were opposed and ones who brought up key issues that would arise from such a thing were completely ignored. Our opinions and concerns were ignored. We were simply told to just do it.
All I know is that I don’t like it and I think its going to place Canadians into a dark future.
Vancouver, Canada· Posted October 14
So apparently, you can now catch the Wu Flu from doing other people’s laundry.
The solution, of course, is for dry cleaners to be mandated to work only in hazmat suits.
Merkel finds it all funny, and here I thought Germans didn’t have a sense of humor.
https://twitter.com/CesareSacchetti/status/1360921779536027648
“The Scottish Government is demanding action from Westminster to help Scotland’s flagship whisky industry after a 23 per cent fall in overseas trade over the past year…
“Scotch whisky exports to the US have fallen by £542 million since a 25 per cent tariff was imposed in October 2019, while EU exports fell by 15 per cent as a result of the closure of hospitality and travel restrictions.”
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-government-demands-westminster-action-whisky-slump-3133793
Here surely is Scotland’s chance dramatically to support their claim for independence: by declaring their independence from England’s money. Nah, will never happen.
I thought whiskey industries everywhere were doing well, now.
“Unprecedented chip famine threatens business outside tech firms:
“With global semiconductor manufacturing at capacity and demand at an all-time high, chip shortages are putting the squeeze on businesses around the world.”
https://www.shacknews.com/article/122760/unprecedented-chip-famine-threatens-business-outside-tech-firms
“The Biden administration is assessing immediate steps to address the semiconductor shortage and plans an executive order to shore up critical supply chain items, a White House spokeswoman said…”
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-02-biden-semiconductor-crunch.html
Mandate that new factories be built in 24 hours, ready to produce the “cheap chips” automobiles require?
Executive Orders can work miracles, clearly.
You might send Biden the story of King Canute, Gail………
In that wonderful movie “The Wizard of Oz”, Judy Garland was sustained by the food of “lunch pail trees”. Perhaps Biden believes that US industry can be sustained by “semiconductor chip trees”. Men and bits of paper, blown by the cold wind …
Chips are designed to work in the exact process offered by one specific foundry. A chip can not be moved to a new foundry without re-characterization and needed redesign.
Washington thinks if you just throw money things can happen instantly. In fact it takes years to build a fab and year to bring up the fab and then a year to design a complex chip.
A lithography machine takes at least a year lead time at 250 million dollars each. They need to be designed for the exact pull of the Earths gravity that it will experience at the exact spot on the planet it will be installed.
“With global supply chains buckling under huge order volumes and a confluence of disruptive forces, shippers should prepare for 2021 to be a perpetual peak season across all transport modes, logistics experts warn.
“Competition for freight space is so fierce that companies will need to pay exorbitant premiums…”
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/global-supply-chains-choke-under-tsunami-of-freight/
Shipping costs will be especially high for cheap-to-produce goods, such as grains, I would expect. If goods are small and high priced, the additional shipping costs will be minimal.
For now, shipping containers are in short supply, in part because China wants them so much that they are paying enough for them that it is often more profitable to ship them to China empty rather than reusing them for grains or other exports from the country where they arrived with their shipments.
These days all sorts of products are shipped long distance, even low margin products like cheap Chinese hand wound alarm clocks that stop working within six weeks, or cookies that could have been baked locally:
https://www.worldbakers.com/market-insights/exclusive-more-americans-prefer-imported-cookies/
Almost a quarter of Americans consumed imported cookies between 2013 and 2017, the research company Technavio told World Bakers Digital.
The import of cookies in the country increased by around 24.72% from 2013 to 2017. For instance, in 2017, the country imported cookies primarily from Mexico, Canada, and Germany….End Quote
Now the price of goods will continue to rise due to continued supply chain constraints, yet financial pundits who should have learned better by now will continue to blame “the Fed,” “stimulus,” and non-existent “money printing,” thinking their financial prophecies are finally coming to pass after a dozen years of failed predictions that hyperinflation is just around the corner.
When supply chains finally normalize, we could see many prices drop, setting off a different panic over deflation while the Fed will try to allay the public’s fears by promising us that it is standing by to provide unlimited liquidity as needed, although this “liquidity” consists merely of bank reserves, not “helicopter money” targeted at main street, because that is why the Fed was created — to protect the banks. Managing inflation and unemployment were after thoughts, and the Fed has very few tools for dealing with these problems.
It can fight inflation caused by high levels of domestic or foreign (but still dollar denominated) bank lending by targeting high real interest rates which encourage saving over borrowing (Paul Volker’s strategy), but it’s tools against deflation and unemployment are zero interest rates and QE, which we have repeatedly observed to be ineffectual in the US, Japan, and other highly indebted countries with aging populations, although it might be effective in developing countries with lower debt levels (poor countries are not very creditworthy) and younger populations.
“U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Friday said he will revoke terrorist designations of Yemen’s Houthi movement effective Feb. 16, even as he warned that members of the group could be hit with more sanctions.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-yemen/us-blacklisting-of-yemens-houthis-to-be-lifted-on-feb-16-blinken-idUSKBN2AC1WJ
“Fighting in Yemen’s north has left dozens dead and wounded, a government source said Friday, as UN agencies issued stark warnings that 400,000 children risk death this year from lack of food.
“Yemen’s Iran-backed Huthis rebels have resumed an offensive to seize strategic oil-rich Marib…”
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210212-yemen-rocked-by-heavy-clashes-amid-stark-un-starvation-warning
Yemen has had peak oil problems along with way too much population. It is chronically on the edge of famine.
Yemen’s ground water supply has become badly depleted, and its population is large for its resources.
“India’s Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan on Saturday blamed the artificial price mechanism created by Oil-producing nations for the exponential rise in retail prices of petrol and diesel.
“”I am sorry to say oil-rich countries are not looking into the interest of consuming countries. They created an artificial price mechanism. This is pinching the consuming countries,” Pradhan told reporters.”
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/oilrich-countries-not-looking-into-interest-of-consuming-nations-says-pradhan-11613231656045.html
“Iran risks having its massive crude oil assets become stranded unless the United States lifts the sanctions that the Trump administrations imposed on Tehran three years ago, Reuters has reported, noting the sanctions have prevented the country from boosting its production capacity as other major producers have done.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Iran-Is-Facing-A-Stranded-Oil-Asset-Crisis.html
With oil prices too low for producers, it is easy to figure out that a major reason for the sanctions against Iran were primarily to help keeping the oil price from falling even lower.
BRENT is back to $64 and marching upwards. The downward trend was broken in April 2020, strange correlation with the COVID response measures. So we are saved, aren’t we? The money pump is working, driving the real oil pump! US shale oil rigs are reopening, rig-count back to the 300s!
A typical Indian government response: blame everything on somebody else. No mention of India’s investment in cheap and grossly inefficient petrol powered vehicles, also of course lethally polluting. No mention of the government’s plan to dispossess the traditional and ecologically conscious farmers, in favour of agribusiness whose operations will demand far more input of fossil fuel. No mention of the useless infrastructure: tourist hubs, new airports, that will also raise fossil fuel consumption for no benefit in the forseeable future (who wants to go to India to stay in an airport Marriott hotel.? Determined masochists can get their kicks more cheaply in Atlanta).
“The economic damage wrought by the coronavirus will probably lead more African nations to seek debt restructuring, the head of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa said.
“Chad last month became the first state in Africa to request relief under a Group of 20 initiative to help countries cope with the economic fallout from the pandemic. Ethiopia applied two days later, followed by Zambia…”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/more-african-nations-seen-tapping-g-20-debt-plan-on-revenue-drop
“S&P Global Ratings on Friday downgraded Ethiopia’s long-term foreign and local currency sovereign credit ratings to ‘B-’ from ‘B’ on potential debt restructuring, announcing the move days after Fitch Ratings downgraded the country.
““Exacerbated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ethiopia’s structurally weak external balance sheet has deteriorated further, in our view”, S&P Global Ratings said.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-ratings-sp/sp-joins-fitch-in-downgrade-of-ethiopia-on-potential-debt-restructuring-idUSL4N2KI3DG
All of these African countries are doing poorly.
Investors are easily spooked when the finances get very out of balance in poor, politically unstable countries. Investors give rich countries, and especially the US with its global reserve currency, a lot more leeway, but their confidence in the leading economies is not unlimited. Neither politicians nor the public seem to understand this. They think they can let the debt grow faster than the economy forever. We have a long history of rationalizing the danger away. “We only owe it to ourselves” was the old mantra, along with “government is not like a household” (I still maintain this old line is self-deluding BS) and later “we have the global reserve currency, so we can just print it” and Dick Cheney’s crazy line, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” which Reagan himself would have strenuously denied. We will learn a fearsome lesson when “the gods of the copybook headings with terror and slaughter return.” Late Modernity is out of balance in so many ways, but the system will inevitably revert to some kind of homeostasis. We are not prepared for a return to homeostasis. Even doomsday preppers will eventually find that they are more dependent on the rest of the globe than they realized.
“[The UK government’s debt of £2.1 trillion and rising in 2020 was] …to put it in perspective, was equivalent to 99.4 per cent of gross domestic product, the highest debt-to-GDP ratio since 1962. Then it was on a downward path that started after the Second World War, and which continued until well into the 1970s.
“Now it is on an upward path, as a result of two “once in a lifetime” shocks in the space of little more than 10 years, and despite the best efforts of politicians to control it…
“[Chancellor, Rishi] Sunak knows that his pandemic largesse could come back to haunt him. Every 1 per cent rise in gilt yields, as the Bank steps away, adds around £20 billion to the government’s debt interest bill. There are no easy tax rises, as he is discovering, and there is no easy way of restoring the public finances to health.”
https://www.icaew.com/technical/financial-services/government-debt-has-surged
“As a result of the fallout from COVID-19 and the extensive fiscal support measures, public debt to GDP in several European countries is set to match or surpass historical highs… elevated public debt presents some key risks, including:
“Vulnerability to a sudden tightening of financial conditions and unexpected shocks, which can disrupt market access or exacerbate rollover risks.
“High deficits and debt levels limit a government’s ability to pursue counter-cyclical fiscal policy stimulus during economic downturns.
“Private sector under-investment due to uncertainty about future taxes.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4405670-covid-19s-legacy-of-high-public-debt-in-europe-prospects-and-problems
I expect an even bigger deterrent to investment is concern about profitability. Also, lack of certainty with respect to supply lines.
“The boom in US asset prices is becoming profoundly worrying. Great if you own Tesla shares or have a few Bitcoin lurking on your computer. But we all know that financial bubbles sooner or later burst.”
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/comment/article-9256889/HAMISH-MCRAE-bubble-pops-watch-out.html
“There is a mania hovering over the investment landscape. Bonds. Digital currencies. A large part of the stock market. Certain real estate sectors. All driven to bullish extremes. Priced for perfection. Priced for disappointment…
“Nearly everything indicates stock indices are overvalued.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/02/12/protect-yourself-live-outside-the-bubble/?sh=6a5853ce5854
“The recent boom and bust of GameStop Corp. shares is a wake-up call to policymakers that world markets and economies are precariously positioned, and pose serious risks to political stability.
“The U.S. is patient zero for this sickness and as the U.S. goes, so too will much of the world…
“The real risk to markets is that passive flows go negative (if widespread layoffs lead workers and employers to cut their 401K contributions). If that were to happen, passive fund selling would quickly overwhelm the market. Such a crash could resemble 1929-1932 in magnitude but at 2021 speed.”
https://financialpost.com/financial-times/why-the-stonk-bubble-poses-major-global-risks-and-could-trigger-a-1930s-style-market-crash
“The largest US banks will have to prove they can withstand the US stock market crashing by 55 per cent, regulators said on Friday…”
https://www.ft.com/content/a262314b-f518-4e69-8db4-fa88b6729aab
I’m pretty sure that even with gov’t help, none of them will survive that.
My thoughts exactly. Fractional reserve banking is vulnerable by its very nature; the question is, how vulnerable? Most banks keep 10% or less on hand, so even a 10% fall will leave them naked after the falling tide. And 20% will ruin them.
Time to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” one more time.
I am not sure that fractional reserve banking (FRB) exists any more. Last year was it not the USA govt that changed the FRB rules so that no money had to be retained in reserve? I can’t remember who, but some authority / institution did.
I thought fractional reserve banking had gone away earlier.
@minority of one, The Fed eliminated its reserve requirements last year under a new “ample reserves” policy. I don’t know how the new “ample reserve” system works, but you can be sure that depositors are not being hung out to try. After all, that is what both QE and the massive “repo” operation last autumn were: bank reserve creation on a massive scale. There should be plenty of reserves in the US banking system. Anyway, bank lending is not on the increase, so there should not be any huge increase in the number of demand deposits that need to be backed by additional bank reserves.
@Gail, As long as deposits (which are created or increase as a result of bank lending) are backed with reserves equal to less than 100% of the deposits in the banking system, we have a fractional reserve banking system.
I forgot to mention in my reply to minority of one that the elimination of reserve requirements refers, if I recall correctly, reserves that banks must keep on hand. Banks typically keep most of their reserves at the Fed because they receive interest on them (although currently only a fraction of one percent, I think a quarter percent). The Fed is required by law to pay interest on reserves maintained with them.
Most of these reserves are just ledger entries or their digital equivalent. They strike me as functioning more as an accounting mechanism to keep all the books in balance as anything else. They are rarely needed or allowed outside of the banking system’s internal operations.
Banks frequently loan reserves overnight to each other as needed, at interest. Last autumn, banks became suddenly afraid to extend these overnight loans except at high rates of interest, if at all, for reasons that the Fed never explained to the public. There were rumors that a couple of big hedge funds had technically failed and triggered a panic inside the financial community, but who really knows. That panic was why the Fed took over the repo market and supplied it with massive bank reserves (which are swapped for bonds owned by the banks, not given away freely).
The Fed emphasized their “repo operations” were “not QE,” but the only technical difference that I can see is the reason the program was introduced in that case, not any difference in the actual actions undertaken.
The Fed announced in response to the pandemic that it stood ready to supply unlimited QE (meaning limited only by the amount of bonds that banks had to exchange for QE), but for all the public attention it receives, these announcements seem to be made primarily for the purpose of shoring up public confidence in the soundness of the banking system. The Fed is a strong believer in the power of mass psychology, and this is no secret. Maintaining “confidence” is their number 1 priority.
QE only “stimulates” the economy if banks respond to it by increasing their lending, but they have not done that, nor is there heavy loan demand these days from qualified borrowers People who can afford to borrow often feel they have enough debt already. However, the private sector still borrows money faster than it repays it. If that ever reverses, it will shrink the money supply (money is destroyed by paying it back to the bank), and then we will have deflation.
If our financial system cannot tolerate deflation, then private sector debt will have to increase literally FOREVER. Perhaps it can if the GDP also increases forever, except for the occasional brief and shallow recession. However, a permanently expanding (real) GDP requires a permanently expanding supply of energy. That is basic physics, because energy is, by definition, the “ability to do work” (which is necessary for GDP to expand).
For Nehemiah: thank you for a couple of highly informative and refreshing packages of sanity. If bank reserves are held in trust by the Fed, where are the Fed reserves to back that trust? Why, nowhere; the whole system floats on a bubble of fiat money. And as all history shows, the intrinsic value of fiat money is zero.
In the later Middle Ages, the lender of last resort for indebted businesses and nations was the Knights Templar. But their reserves were backed 100% by gold. Why are we so much more stupid than our ancestors in the Thirteenth Century? Perhaps there is some truth in that “DNA degeneration” hypothesis.
Robert Firth asked: “If bank reserves are held in trust by the Fed, where are the Fed reserves to back that trust?” — When the Fed creates reserves, it swaps them for bonds that are held by the banks as collateral (and which the banks purchased with their profits, not with bank loans). It’s complicated system, but there are mechanisms to maintain balance. Fiat money itself only becomes a problem if the rulers begin to create large amounts of it (or if it cannot safeguard against mass counterfeiting). So far, our politicians have respected and maintained the laws governing money creation. There is no guarantee they will continue to do so, but also no guarantee they will not.
The more fundamental problem I see with our system is not the existence of fiat money itself (although I prefer a gold standard because ultimately I don’t trust the politicians), but the fact that all of our money originates as loans, that is, debt. Federal Reserve “Notes.” Debts backed by debts backed by debts. To sustain this system requires a secular trend of permanent, although not necessarily uninterrupted, GDP growth, and the laws of physics say that is not possible.
And of course the financial system does not exist in isolation either, but interacts with demography, the political system, resource depletion, infrastructure issues, the supply chain, genetic capital, conflicts between interest groups (classes, races, ethnies, religions, ideologies, parties, industries, even generational conflicts these days), and other factors. The complexity is mind boggling.
That should be interesting. I would wonder whether the largest pension funds could also pass the test.
Sooner or later, pay-outs by pension funds is going to have to be slashed everywhere.
Agreed. People who produce goods and service should be the first to get whatever goods and services are available.
“The real risk to markets is that passive flows go negative”
I imagine that this is part of the reason that the government has to keep pumping more debt into the system. Somehow, it comes back as passive flows.
“2021 speed” That’s what scares me about holding long positions. The Spring 2020 crash was incredibly fast. Much, maybe most, of the market’s volume is supplied by HFT algorithms, but the HFT computers will take that volume away when the markets start crashing, or they might just switch to the short side. Who’s going to take the other side of the trade when everyone is in a panic to sell at once? The buying won’t kick in until prices plummet to an unusual degree, which could happen with amazing speed under current conditions. OTOH, it is dangerous to short the bubble. Should the prudent investor take a ride on the tiger and hope he can dismount without getting eaten, or stay in cash and hope the madness ends soon?
“Nearly everything indicates stock indices are overvalued.”
This is the conclusion I have been coming to, as well.
one one hand asset market p/e ratios adequately reflect the scarcity of earnings…. on the otherhand they probabably fail to properly discount the certainty of the earnings stream….The future is now…..worthless financial claims on the future.
Not always adequately. Even before the recession, aggregate corporate earnings were flat or flattish. Earnings PER SHARE only increased for years because corporations kept reducing the shares outstanding through stock buy backs. Some companies even went into debt to finance their buy backs and keep the share price rising. Executive compensation in the form of stock options is tied to increases in the stock price. There is a lot smoke and mirrors in the post-2009 stock run-up.
Thank you once again for your information aggregation service. Your selection function that you use to demarcate signal from noise, and your style of “brief synopsis + link” make OFW comment section a valuable source of information.
Of late the comment section has been diluted with disinformation agents of various forms which makes your contribution even more relevant.
I also enjoy the additional links. I would really like to hear where Harry thinks this is all leading to. Maybe I missed it or perhaps he is just trying to be polite or avoid getting hammered if he expresses an opinion contrary to the ‘everything is a conspiracy’ crowd.
Each of us has an idea regarding what is relevant. I can tell that attacks on other commenters aren’t relevant, but beyond that, I try to let commenters express their own views. We really need two sides to stories, even if one side is “wrong.”
Thank you, informationshark, for those kind words.
Ssincoski, I try to keep an open mind.
I see rich megalomaniacs like Schwab and Gates pretending to care about the rest of the planet and relishing playing God. I see governments of varying competence impossibly torn between superficially discrete economic and public health imperatives. And I see greedy pharmaceutical firms and other cynical opportunists making hay.
But I don’t see enough evidence to sway me that there is a cohesive agenda behind the scenes to instigate a “slow collapse” of the global economy at this point. I’m not saying it isn’t possible.
As to where this is headed, I have admit that the pandemic has shown the financial system to be much more elastic and resilient than I gave it credit for, even as it expends a lot of that resilience and elasticity. But I still see major financial problems in our future, probably ending in the sort of scenario David Korowicz outlines in his ‘Trade Off’ paper, unfortunately.
Thank you for that response. I have always found Korowicz to be very reasonable. Honestly, I’m not even sure it is worth the effort to try and figure out where it is all going – it will only drive a person insane. At this point, I put myself in the observer category – thus I welcome your news aggregation.
quote: “I see rich megalomaniacs like Schwab and Gates pretending to care about the rest of the planet and relishing playing God.” — This is how the mega rich compete with each other for social status. You can’t be perceived as “Scrooge” if you want to keep your social standing in those circles. Of course, you need to be generous to appropriately “fashionable” causes, and your peers need to know about it.
Gates was a little slow to figure things out because he was nouveau riche and a bit aspergerish, but once he did figure it out, he began to play the game very well.
Bitcoin (little end user demand) and Tesla (whose profits depend on selling carbon credits) are great if you sell near the top, but many Dutchmen held on to their tulip bulbs a little too long.
“Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are set to face new regulation and oversight under the Biden administration as interest in the digital coins rises…
“Gary Gensler, the incoming chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, is expected to tough up rules.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/02/12/regulator-gears-bitcoin-crackdown-amid-digital-coin-frenzy/
“As Bitcoin Soars Toward $50,000, Data Reveals Tesla Billionaire Elon Musk Triggered A $1.2 Billion Price Short-Squeeze.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2021/02/12/as-bitcoin-soars-toward-50000-data-reveals-tesla-billionaire-elon-musk-triggered-a-12-billion-bitcoin-price-short-squeeze/?sh=3f64a0c9219e
Is this related to the Game Stop mania?
No, this is a different mania. The whole crypto market has gone nuts. Commodities are showing signs of a price recovery too, including oil, with crude oil being up about 24% year to date, while the overall CRB commodity index has almost doubled since May.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crb
Cobalt is up a whopping 46% year today, and Rhodium (which, like helium, is a post-peak element) us up 24% at over $21,000 per troy ounce.
Neodymium is up “only” 14% since New Year’s, but it sells for $710,000 a ton. (Why don’t they start quoting the price in ounces?)
I don’t think I need to discuss the insanity in the stock markets. People argued for years that the stock market could not be making a top because bull markets only end when the small mom and pop investors develop a fever for stocks, but no one can make this argument any more. By many measures, the current madness rivals the dot com bubble.
By the way, I sure could use a little global warming this week!!!
Hopefully, soon!
“Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is just getting started in the fast-expanding world of sustainable.
“The New York-based lender plans to issue more environmental, social, and governance bonds on a regular basis as part of its plans to deploy $750 billion in sustainable financing, investing and advisory activity by 2030, according to Carey Halio, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Bank USA. It sold bonds aimed at financing environmentally and socially conscious projects for the first time on Wednesday.” 😂
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/goldman-sachs-says-esg-finance-to-become-core-part-of-strategy
“Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen plans to wield the department’s broad powers to tackle potential risks to the financial system posed by climate change while pushing tax incentives to reduce carbon emissions.”
https://www.livemint.com/news/world/yellen-is-creating-a-new-senior-treasury-post-for-climate-czar-11613141164373.html
Also, to cover up the problems with fossil fuel supply.
“The US Department of Energy (DOE) has said it will inject a further $100 million (£72.5m) into clean energy technology research, as part of President Biden’s climate agenda.”
https://www.energylivenews.com/2021/02/12/biden-injects-100m-into-green-energy-tech-research/
Why not invest $100B?….rather than a measly $100M…all the “money” is fake printed fiat.
The research universities are rubbing their greedy little hands in anticipation.
Over $50M will get sucked up by the beauracrqtic overhead of the universities. This is an example cost and inefficiencies of rising complexity.
Jesse, I saw exactly that syndrome while working in the UK. If there is more money, why, we need more bureaucrats to manage the money. And if there is less money, why, we need more bureaucrats to manage the money better.
That is why over 1/3 of National Health Service employees are bureaucrats, and why the medical staff spend 50% of their time filling out checklists to feed the bureaucrats.
It is fiat, but our fiat money supply is not “printed as needed.” The DOE does not print money, the Treasury, except in small amounts under special circumstances, does not and may not print money without an act of Congress, the Fed may not print money except for special cases, such as replacing worn out bills or sometimes replacing ledger entries with cash if bank customers are demanding more physical cash than a bank has on hand, but certainly the Fed may not create a net quantity of new money, either physical cash or digital “ledger entries.” All these financial pundits who for the last 12 years have told their listeners that the Fed is somehow “printing money,” literally or digitally, mostly mean well, but they are all full of crap. That’s why we (and Japan, and Europe) have not had hyperinflation, not, as the Magical Monetary Theorists will tell you, because money printing is not inflationary, because real money printing absolutely is.
And what about QE? That is bank reserve creation. Bank reserves are not allowed to circulate in the real economy. However, bank reserves do allow banks to increase their lending, if they and their qualified borrowers are so inclined, and net increases in private bank lending is how additional money is created in our system (even under the gold standard). Basically, credit functions as money, so credit creation is money creation, and under the right circumstances QE will incentivize more bank lending (=money creation), but those conditions do not currently prevail in the US, Europe, or Japan, although circumstances may be different in some developing countries with lower debt levels and younger populations. In the early 1970s, it was easy for the Fed to induce increased bank lending (even without QE), but today debt is higher, the population is older, and uncertainty about the future is probably higher, so inducing increases in bank lending (new money creation) is very difficult.
What you say is true but obscures reality. If money borrowed cannot be repaid due to limits to growth, then QE will have the same effect as printing money in the long run.
No, it won’t. Bank reserves are confined to the internal operations of the banking system. They don’t circulate in the real economy. If borrowing does not increase, additional bank reserves serve no function in the real economy, not even indirectly. We also saw the effect of widespread debt defaults in the 1930s: they were deflationary. Defaults, collapsing loan demand, falling demand for goods and falling production of goods are all things that tend to cluster together in an interrelated way. Of course, governments today will try very hard to counteract these trends if they emerge. Some might try so hard that they create inflation, but that remains to be seen. I remain unconvinced that true believers in the inevitability of hyperinflation have some crystal ball that lets them infallibly predict what politicians will do in the future. While debtors, including the government itself, benefit from inflation, there are other parties to consider too. For example, the financial and business oligarchs do not want high inflation, and neither does the vast and growing army of retirees, who tend to turn out in large numbers on election days. Our politicians are mostly wealthy people from upper middle class families, and they don’t want extreme inflation either. Excessive inflation would also threaten the dollar’s standing as the global reserve currency, and no group in the country stands to benefit from that. So I completely disagree that this aspect of the future — what the politicians will do — is written in stone. What is written in stone, or in the laws of nature, is if the energy available to the economy declines in quantity, production of goods and services (which requires energy) will also decline, making everyone poorer in real terms.
I suspect everything you said is true, although I’m not certain after reading a half dozen definitions of QE. Nevertheless we still disagree and I think I see the confusion. I broke my own rule never to discuss inflation without first agreeing on a definition. The inflation you are discussing is the growth or contraction of the money supply. The inflation I am discussing is the ratio of money to stuff.
Money is loaned into existence on the expectation that enough stuff will be created in the future to repay the loan plus interest.
Assuming the stuff is created as expected, the ratio of money to stuff remains unchanged (no inflation).
If the stuff is not created and the borrower defaults, then the bank writes off the loan which vaporizes the loaned money thus keeping the ratio of money to stuff unchanged (no inflation).
If however you don’t make enough stuff to repay the loan, and you pretend the loan is still good, then the ratio of money to stuff increases (inflation). This is our situation today with governments stimulating an economy that has hit physical limits to growth.
We’ve delayed the onset of inflation for necessities like food and energy by channeling the extra money into rising asset prices. When that bubble inevitably pops we will have the worst of all worlds with the monetary system deflating (your definition) and the price of food and energy inflating (my definition).
I think we’d have a better chance of maintaining a civil society if we took our medicine and adjusted our lifestyles to reality rather than pretending we can continue BAU until we destroy the currency which will lead to very bad things as we know from history.
QE pretends there is a free lunch. We need to grow up and act like adults. We can fall a long way and still have decent lives. The poorest Canadian today lives better than a Pharaoh.
“A key House lawmaker unveiled plans to pursue tax breaks for renewable energy as a way to ease the shift away from fossil fuels in President Joe Biden’s upcoming infrastructure bill.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/democrats-to-push-clean-energy-tax-breaks-in-infrastructure-plan
Give investors something that it is easy to make money on, even if the clean energy itself is useless.
Here are two papers by “tech pundit” Mark Mills that bring home just how inadequate “clean” energy (none of it is clean!) is to replace fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are an amazing resource of convenient, pre-existing, concentrated energy and we will never have anything like them again. That is why the industrial age is not sustainable without it, and therefore not sustainable at all. Given the size of the world’s population, we have no choice but to use what we have, while we have it. We may be on an unsustainable path, but we are basically “trapped,” because we can’t turn on a dime, and there are no bridges to a renewable future for modern civilization, because renewables cannot provide energy on the necessary scale or with an adequate EROI.
https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0319-MM.pdf
The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mines-minerals-and-green-energy-reality-check
Mines, Minerals, and “Green” Energy: A Reality Check
Sustainable invemtment all has the makings of an immense bubble.
Sigh. Gail, donning once again my old, tattered hat as a classical economist: if an investment is sustainable, it needs no subsidy. (Adam Smith, “The Wealth of Nations”, 1776)
Not so easy, some subsidies could be appropriate for a limited time, however, perpetual subsidies is most likely a racket and a waste of finite resources.
Let’s say, subsidize wind and solar for 10 years. If it cannot sustain itself after that duration. Cut it out and curtail fossil fuel usage until a reasonable alternative emerges, if ever.
But first, do some realistic calculations of it ever being reasonable in the first place. Thinking before doing is a winning strategy.
Wind and solar have been subsidized for over 10 years already.
Yes, it has that stink of being a racket and a narrative vehicle for the disgusting hopium peddlers.
I have been saying, if an energy investment is producing net energy, it should not need a subsidy, not even the subsidy of going first.
Subsidies can accelerate the development of an industry of known viability, but they cannot make a non-viable technology viable, or turn a marginal technology into a miracle technology.
Solar and wind turbine technologies have been under active and often subsidized development since the 1970s; battery technology is much older, and advanced battery technologies have been under development since at least the advent of the first commercial cell phones in 1984. Thus solar, wind, and battery technologies are mature technologies with decades of development behind them, much as nuclear fission technology, which was first deployed to produce electric power in the 1950s, was a mature technology by 1995, or the microcomputer, which began in the 1970s, was a mature technology by 2015.
We have to stop thinking of solar, wind, and batteries as fledgling technologies that can improve by leaps and bounds if we just throw enough taxpayer dollars at them. That was true in the 1970s, but not anymore. We have given it a more than fair shot, but these technologies have just turned out to have a low ceiling. They have their uses, but they are not going to make fossil fuels obsolete.
From Florida’s Sun Sentinel…
No cash on hand? You may be able to pay Broward County in bitcoin
By LISA J. HURIAS
Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that is still cryptic to many Americans, could become a form of payment for Broward County.
County commissioners are scheduled to discuss the idea of allowing residents to use the electronic money bitcoin to pay bills, as well as the potential for the county to invest in it to beef up the coffers.
Vice Mayor Michael Udine, who is asking for the conversation on Feb. 23, said the county likely wouldn’t start off accepting small amounts, like a library fine or rent on a park pavilion. But he envisions the possibility of the public using it to pay a tax bill or developers who need to spend thousands of dollars in permits.
If Broward County goes this route, it would follow the city of Miami, where commissioners there agreed Thursday night to consider conducting some of its financial transactions in bitcoin, according to the Miami Herald.
RELATED: Mask and glove litterbugs could be hit with $250 fines and forced to pick up trash »
Bitcoin is a digital asset that operates independent of banks or the federal government, although you do have to report whether you received or sold any virtual currency on your 2020 federal taxes. Bitcoins are typically stored in virtual wallets, including online services that resemble bank accounts.
On Friday afternoon, one bitcoin was worth more than $47,000.
Tesla, the electric car company owned by tech titan Elon Musk, disclosed Feb. 8 that it had purchased $1.5 billion in bitcoin, sending the cryptocurrency’s price soaring.
“We should be an area of the country that is friendly to cryptocurrency — it’s new, it’s moving very fast,” Udine said. “There’s a segment of the population that looks at this as a more favorable long-term investment based on a lot of different market factors. You’re going to see this included in most financial company portfolios. It’s just something to look at.”
Lisa J. Huriash
South Florida Sun Sentinel.
This switch is moving Faster than Fast Eddy…like how this Bitcoin is promoted as a long term investment…. masterfully marketed
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Shameless manipulation: Positive PCR tests drop after WHO instructs vendors to lower cycle thresholds. We have been played like a fiddle
https://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/2021/02/positivity-of-pcr-tests-drops-as.html
0 virus deaths reported from 520,000 given the Pfizer vaccine in Israel. Hardly anybody even got sick, suggesting 93% effectiveness.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/0-virus-deaths-reported-520-155042577.html
Did you ever hear about The Great Vaccine Scam?
The Great Vaccine Scam
By Vasko Kohlmayer
Here is the truth: It is not possible to devise an effective vaccine for the type of virus that causes COVID-19. Why? For the very reason that AstraZeneca’s vaccine has failed in South Africa and will fail elsewhere as well.
Coronavirus is a type of virus that mutates widely and because of that it is impossible to come up with a vaccination protocol that would stop its spread.
….
Every bona fide virologist knows this. And yet the public has not been advised of this. Quite to the contrary, this crucial information has been actively suppressed.
Rather than being told the truth, we were commanded to hunker down in lengthy lockdowns and ordered to wait until the vaccine was found. Once that happened, they told us, we would be able to prevail over the virus and get our lives back. Until quite recently, this was the official narrative propagated by the governing elites around the world.
Consequently, billions of people pinned their hopes on the vaccine and desperately waited for its deliverance. At the same time, governments channeled billions of dollars into the development of these fake concoctions and a number of pharma executives and scientists became billionaires on the news of “progress” and “successful” trials.
While some were getting fabulously wealthy, the frightened and gullible public was kept in the dark about the racket. Sadly, most people apparently lack the will and independence of mind to go beyond the propaganda and do their own research. It does not help, of course, that the establishment has done its best to censor and suppress the information that goes against its official narrative.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/02/vasko-kohlmayer/the-great-vaccine-scam/
The frightened gullible public just don’t get it. They never learn, do they!?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVun0hYX0AEfa8H.jpg:large
“Every bona fide virologist knows this. And yet the public has not been advised of this. Quite to the contrary, this crucial information has been actively suppressed.”
Not disagreeing with the sentiment however it would be good to have a link to declarations from virologists stating this fact. One must go to the source not second hand info or potentially just made up rhetoric. So if anyone has some links that would be great.
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/03/27/2005456117.full.pdf
In the above paper Ralph Baric of University of North Carolina, who pretty much laid the foundation for SARS-COV-2, has this to say:
“Some researchers argue that although ADE has received the most attention to date, it is less likely than the other immune enhancement pathways to cause a dysregulated response to COVID-19, given what is known about the epidemiology of the virus and its behavior in the human body. “There is the potential for ADE, but the bigger problem is probably Th2 immunopathology,” says Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist and expert in coronaviruses—named for the crown shaped spike they use to enter human cells—at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In previous studies of SARS, aged mice were found to have particularly high risks of life-threatening Th2 immunopathology (2). Baric expresses his concern about what that might mean for use of a COVID-19 vaccine in elderly people. “Of course, the elderly are our most vulnerable population,” he adds.
The TH2 immunopathology causes eosinophilia that damages the lungs.
Here’s a little piece written by Ralph Baric about his GOF work:
https://www.futuremedicine.com/doi/pdf/10.2217/fvl-2017-0143
Here is a paper that supports Ralph’s findings:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22536382/
“Ralph Baric laid the foundation for SARS COV 2” How very true. http://www.shadolsonshow.com/2020/01/13/covid-19-born-in-north-carolina-sold-to-wuhan-lab-optimized-for-pandemic-spread/
According to the article:
Ralph Baric may be key to understanding quite a bit of this problem.
Just for the sake of accuracy:
1. The first documented case of Wuhan virus/covid19 was on November 6, not in December.
2. Only four types of cold (relatively severe types) are caused by coronaviruses. The rest are caused by rhinoviruses.
Yet could this same argument not also be made against the flu vaccine? Yet flu vaccines still appear to be useful even if they don’t drive the flu to extinction.
Are flu deaths normal numbers?
Prior to transhuman experimentation flu deaths zero covid deaths high.
Post transhuman experimentation flu deaths high covid deaths zero?
Covid has been a lifesaver in regards to eliminating flu deaths.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/504625-covid19-flu-disappeared-replaced/
Why these perpetual pandemics even were allowed to exist in the first place is a mystery.
As if pandemics should be something “normal” in IC. Nope, unacceptable. Disgusting.
Kowalainen, I respect your sentiments, but as the saying goes, “Evolution is smarter than we are”. We humans are the largest collection of prey animals on the planet, and when there is prey, predators will evolve.
Perhaps all of the masks are good for something.
The precautions taken to slow the spread of covid/wuhan have made it very difficult for the seasonal flu, which is less contagious than wuhan virus, to get started in the past year. Notice that this fortuitous and fully expected outcome refutes the assertions circulating on the internet that neither masks, nor so called lockdowns/quarantines (which are an extreme version of social distancing), nor social (which really means physical, not “cultural”) distancing are effective at slowing the spread of viral contagions. If common sense were not enough to convince one that this “nothing works” claim is wrong, I would hope that the evidence of experience might persuade those persons that their pessimism is misplaced, but I somehow suspect that my hope is in vain.
Did you read that on the BBC or do you have actual evidence that Covid has completely crowded out the flu?
Have you noticed that deaths from the other popular killers including heart disease, cancer, diabetes etc…. have fallen off a cliff as well – I guess Covid crowds those out as well….
I suggest you subscribe to this — it’s the cure for CovIDIOCY https://lockdownsceptics.org/
This is also very useful https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/
1. Reports of much less flu than usual ultimately emanate from the medical community. I don’t think they’re just making it up. These people saying, “NOTHING works, just let it run its course full speed, because that is what it will do anyway no matter what precautions we take” are fatalists and scientific Luddites whose manner of thinking, if universal among men, would have kept us stuck in the stone age (which some extreme environmentalists, such as the late Daniel Quinn, argued in favor of, but I fundamentally disagree; the solution to problems created by cultural adaptation, which is what technology is a form of, is more cultural adaptation, not cultural stasis).
2. Deaths from “lifestyle diseases” and some other causes normally fall off as unemployment rises. This had already been researched (by economists) well before the covid outbreak.
3. Deaths from most causes also decline when people seek out medical care less often because they have lost their health insurance, or because doctors have gone on strike and only treat urgent cases. Presumably covid19 is serving the same function this time around.
The medical system takes more lives than it saves. Look for an old book from the 1970s, “Confessions of a Medical Heretic.”
I have always admired the Marine Corps motto: “Adapt, improvise, and overcome.”
BTW – the MSM tells me that the reason flu numbers have collapsed is because of lockdowns, social distancing, etc….
But they don’t appear to work when it comes to covid because covid is a super virus!!! hahahahaha…
Humans are incredibly stupid – and pathetic…. they will believe just about anything….
Looking forward to The Extinction…
Of course they work for covid, but it is also well documented that covid is more contagious than colds and flus and most contagions, so they slow rather than eliminate the spread of covid, unless you can implement super strict New Zealand style quarantines, and then not make the stupid New Zealand mistake afterwards of opening back up to extensive air travel. I would quarantine every arriving overseas passenger for two weeks.
Having said that, some East Asian countries have had very low death rates by strict enforcement of mask wearing, carefully targeted rather than mass quarantines, and speedy application of HCQ (hydroxychloroquine) at the onset of symptoms (not waiting until the patient is at death’s door). But tragically, the patent has expired on HCQ, so we in the west feel compelled to use something more profitable but less effective.
NZ has not opened up to extensive air travel. Tourism is not allowed.
You can only enter the country if you are a permanent resident/citizen — you must hotel quarantine for 14 days upon arrival.
What is your opinion of the Pfizer vaccine Duncan?
Israeli vaccine deaths from ground zero not “YAHOO”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/i4edapyMGwd1/
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This Is Why Hospitals Can Charge $6,000 Or $60,000 For The Exact Same Procedure
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/new-hospital-disclosure-rules-reveal-extreme-range-pricing-common-medical-procedures
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