Collapse is a frightening subject. The question of why collapse occurs is something I have pieced together over many years of study from a number of different sources, which I will attempt to explain in this post.
Collapse doesn’t happen instantaneously; it happens many years after an economy first begins outgrowing its resource base. In fact, the resource base likely declines at the same time from multiple causes, such as soil erosion, deforestation and oil depletion. Before collapse occurs, there seem to be warning signs, including:
- Too much wage disparity
- Riots and protests by people unhappy with low wages
- Prices of commodities that are too low for producers that need to recover their costs of production and governments that require tax revenue to fund programs for their citizens
- An overstretched financial system; conditions ripe for debt defaults
- Susceptibility to epidemics
Many people have the misimpression that our most important problem will be “running out” of oil. Because of this, they believe that oil prices will rise high if the system is reaching its limits. Since oil prices are not very high, they assume that the problem is far away. Once a person understands what the real issue is, it is (unfortunately) relatively easy to see that the current economy seems to be quite close to collapse.
In this post, I provide images from a recent presentation I gave, together with some comments. A video of the presentation is available on the Uncomfortable Knowledge Hub, here. A PDF of the presentation can be downloaded here:
In some ways, a self-organizing system is analogous to a dome that might be built with a child’s toy building set (Slide 4). New layers of businesses and consumers are always being added, as are new regulations, more or less on top of the prior structure. At the same time, old consumers are dying off and products that are no longer needed are being discontinued. This happens without central direction from anyone. Entrepreneurs see the need for new products and try to satisfy them. Consumers decide on what to buy, based upon what their spendable income is and what their needs are.
Resources of many kinds are needed for an economy. Harnessing energy of many types is especially important. Early economies burned biomass and used the labor of animals. In recent years, we have added other types of energy, such as fossil fuels and electricity, to supplement our own human energy. Without supplemental energy of various kinds, we would be very limited in the kinds of goods and services that could be produced. Our farming would be limited to digging in the ground with a stick, for example.
The fact that there is almost an equivalence between employees and consumers is very important. If the wages of consumers are high, relative to the prices of the goods and services available, then consumers are able to buy many of those goods and services. As a result, citizens tend to be happy. But if there are too many low paid workers, or people without work at all, consumers are likely to be unhappy because they cannot afford the basic necessities of life.
The problem civilizations are facing is a two-sided problem: (1) Growing population and (2) Resources that often degrade or deplete. As a result, the amount of resources per person falls. If this were carried to the limit, all of us would starve.
As resources deplete and population grows, local leaders can see that problems are on the horizon. At first, adding technology, such as a new dam to provide water to make farms more productive, helps. As more and more technology and other complexity is added, there is less and less “bang for the buck.” We can easily see this in the healthcare field. Early antibiotics had a very big payback; recent medical innovations that help a group of 500 or 1000 people with a particular rare disease can be expected to have a much smaller payback.
A second issue with added complexity is that it increasingly leads to a society of the very wealthy plus many very low paid workers. Joseph Tainter identified the combination of these two issues as leading to collapse in his book, The Collapse of Complex Societies.
Françios Roddier is an astrophysicist who writes primarily in French. His book Thermodynamique de l’évolution was published in 2012; it is now available in English as well.
The issue of starving people in Yemen is an issue today. In fact, hunger is an increasing problem in poor countries around the world. The world tourism industry is dead; the industry of making fancy clothing for people in rich countries is greatly reduced. People who formerly made a living in these industries in poor countries increasingly find it difficult to earn an adequate living with other available jobs. Rich countries tend to have better safety nets when there are widespread reductions in job-availability.
Businesses often make long lasting goods such as machines to be used in factories or automobiles to be used by consumers. Governments often make long-lasting goods such as paved roads and school buildings. When making these goods, they take some combination of commodities, built machinery, and human labor to make goods and services that people will use for many years into the future. The future value of these goods is hoped to be significantly greater than the value of the inputs used to create these goods and services.
There are at least three reasons that time-shifting devices are needed:
- Workers need to be paid as these goods are made.
- Businesses need to build factories in advance.
- Businesses, governments and individuals are all likely to find the future payments more manageable, even with interest added, than they are as a single payment upfront.
I don’t mention the issue in Slide 9, but once time-shifting devices are created, they become very easy to manipulate. For example, no one knows precisely what the future value of a particular investment will be. Governments, especially, are prone to make investments in unneeded infrastructure, simply to provide jobs for people. We also know that there are diminishing returns to added technology, but stocks of technology companies tend to be valued as if complexity will save the world. Third, interest rate manipulations (lower!) and the offering of debt to those who seem unlikely to be able ever to repay the debt can be used to make the economy of a country appear to be in better shape than it really is. Many of us remember the collapse of the US subprime housing debt bubble in 2008.
The purpose of a financial system is to allocate goods and services. High wages allocate a larger share of the output of an economy to a particular person than low wages. Appreciation in asset values (such as prices of shares of stock, or value of a home or piece of land) also act to increase the share of the goods and services produced by the economy to an individual. Payment of interest, dividends and rents are other ways of allocating goods and services that the economy makes. Governments can print money, but they cannot print goods and services!
As the economy gets more complex, the non-elite workers increasingly get left out of the distribution of goods and services. For one thing (not mentioned on Slide 10), as the economy becomes more complex, an increasing share of the goods and services produced by the economy need to go into making all of the intermediate goods that make that industrial economy work. Intermediate goods would include factories, semi-trucks, hydroelectric dams, oil pipelines and other goods and services that don’t directly benefit an individual consumer. They are needed to make the overall system work.
As the economy gets bigger and more complex, the non-elite workers increasingly find themselves left out. Besides losing an increasing part of the output of the intermediate goods and services mentioned in the prior paragraph, there are other pieces that take slices of the total output of goods and services:
- High paid workers take their quite-large slices of the total output. These individuals tend to be the ones who get the benefit of asset appreciation, as well.
- Pension programs and other programs to help the elderly and unemployed take a cut.
- Health insurance costs, in the US at least, tend to be very high, relative to wages, for lower-paid workers.
- The work of some employees can be replaced by low-paid overseas employees or by robots. If they are to keep their jobs, their wages need to be suitably low to compete.
With all of these issues, the workers at the bottom of the employment hierarchy increasingly get left out of the distribution of goods and services made by the economy.
We know some of the kinds of things that happen when economies are close to collapse from the writings of researchers such as Peter Turchin, lead author of Secular Cycles, and Joseph Tainter, mentioned earlier. One approach is for governments to try to work around the resource problem by starting wars with other economies whose resources they might gain. Probably a more likely outcome is that these low-resource-per-capita economies become vulnerable to attack by other economies because of their weakened condition. In any event, more conflict is likely as resource limits hit.
If the low incomes of non-elite workers persist, many bad outcomes can be expected. Local riots can be expected as citizens protest their low wages or pensions. Governments are likely to find that they cannot collect enough taxes. Governments will also find that they must cut back on programs, or (in today’s world) their currencies will sink relative to currencies of other countries. Intergovernmental organizations may fail for lack of funding, or governments may be overthrown by unhappy citizens.
Debt defaults can be expected. Governments have a long history of defaulting on their debts when conditions were bad according to Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.
It becomes very easy for epidemics to take hold because of the poor eating habits and the close living quarters of non-elite workers.
With respect to inflation-adjusted commodity prices, it is logical that they would stay low because a large share of the population would be impoverished and thus not able to afford very many of these commodities. A person would expect gluts of commodities, as occurred during the Great Depression in the 1930s in the United States because many farmers and farm-hands had been displaced by modern farming equipment. We also find that the book of Revelation from the Bible seems to indicate that low prices and lack of demand were problems at the time of the collapse of ancient Babylon (Revelation 18:11-13).
Much of what peak oil theory misunderstands is what our society as a whole misunderstands. Most people seem to believe that our economy will grow endlessly unless we somehow act to slow it down or stop it. They cannot imagine that the economy comes with built-in brakes, provided by the laws of physics.
Armed with a belief in endless growth, economists assume that the economy can expand year after year at close to the same rate. Modelers of all kinds, including climate modelers, miss the natural feedback loops that lead to the end of fossil fuel extraction without any attempt on our part to stop its extraction. A major part of the problem is that added complexity leads to too much wage and wealth disparity. Eventually, the low wages of many of the workers filter through to oil and other energy prices, making prices too low for producers.
Collapse isn’t instantaneous, as we will see on Slide 26. As resources per capita fall too low, there are several ways to keep problems hidden. More debt at lower interest rates can be added. New financial techniques can be developed to hide problems. Increased globalization can be used. Corners can be cut on electricity transmission, installation and maintenance, and in the building of new electricity generating structures. It is only when the economy hits a bump in the road (such as a climate-related event) that there suddenly is a major problem: Electricity production fails, or not enough food is produced. In fact, California, Florida, and China have all encountered the need for rolling blackouts with respect to electricity in the past year; China is now encountering difficulty with inadequate food supply, as well.
Economists have played a major role in hiding problems with energy with their models that seem to show that prices can be expected to rise if there is a shortage of oil or other energy. Their models miss the point that adequate supplemental energy is just as important for demand as it is for supply of finished goods and services. The reason energy is important for demand is because demand depends on the wages of workers, and the wages of workers in turn depend on the productivity of those workers. The use of energy supplies to allow workers to operate tools of many kinds (such as computers, trucks, electric lights, ovens, and agricultural equipment) greatly influences the productivity of those workers.
A person who believes energy prices can rise endlessly is likely to believe that recycling can increase without limit because of ever-rising prices. Such a person is also likely to believe that the substitution of intermittent renewables for fossil fuels will work because high prices for scarce electricity will enable an approach that is inherently high-cost, if any continuity of supply is required.
Thus, the confusion isn’t so much that of peak oilers. Instead, the confusion is that of economists and scientists building models based on past history. These models miss the turning points that occur as limits approach. They assume that future patterns will replicate past patterns, but this is not what happens in a finite world. If we lived in a world without limits, their models would be correct. This confusion is very much built into today’s thinking.
In fact, we are living in an economic system/ecosystem that has brakes to it. These brakes are being applied now, even though 99%+ of the population isn’t aware of the problem. The system will protect itself, quite possibly using the approach of evicting most humans.
The opinions expressed in Slide 13 reflect some of the views I have heard expressed speaking with peak oilers and with people looking into issues from a biophysical economics perspective. Obviously, views differ from person to person.
Many people believe that resources in the ground provide a good estimate of the quantity of fossil fuels that can be extracted in the future. Peak oilers tend to believe that the available resources will need to have sufficiently high “Energy Returned on Energy Invested” (EROEI) ratios to make extraction feasible. Politicians and climate modelers tend to believe that prices can rise endlessly, so low EROEI is no obstacle. They seem to believe that anything that we have the technical skill to extract, even coal under the North Sea, can be extracted.
If a person believes the high estimates of fossil fuel resources that seem to be available and misses the point that the economy has built-in brakes, climate change becomes the issue of major concern.
My view is that most of the resources that seem to be available will be left in the ground because of low prices and problems associated with collapse, such as failing governments and broken supply lines. In any event, we do not really have the ability to fix the climate; the laws of physics will provide their own adjustment. We will simply need to live with whatever climate is provided. Humans lived through ice-ages in the past. Presumably, whatever humans remain after what seems to be an upcoming bottleneck will be able to live in suitable areas of the world in the future.
On Slide 14, note that today’s industrial economy must necessarily come to an end, just as the lives of hurricanes and of people come to an end.
Also note that with diminishing returns, the cost of producing many of the things listed on Slide 14 is rising. For example, with rising population, dry areas of the world eventually need to use desalination to get enough fresh water for their growing populations. Desalination is expensive. Even if the necessary workaround is simply deeper wells, this still adds costs.
With diminishing returns affecting many parts of the economy simultaneously, it becomes increasingly difficult for efforts in the direction of efficiency to lead to costs that are truly lower on an inflation-adjusted basis. Advanced education and health care in particular tend to have an ever-rising inflation-adjusted costs of production. Some minerals do as well, as the quality of ores depletes.
An important issue to note is that wages need to cover all the rising costs, even the rising cost of health care. The paychecks of many people, especially those without advanced education, fall too low to meet all of their needs.
Slides 16 and 17 describe some of the reasons why oil prices don’t necessarily rise with scarcity.
I was one of the co-authors of the Ke Wang paper mentioned in Slide 18. We developed three different forecasts of how much oil would be extracted in China, depending on how high oil prices would be able to rise. The Red Line is the “Stays Low” Scenario, with prices close to $50 per barrel. The Yellow Line is the “Ever-Rising Prices” Scenario. The Best Estimate reflects the expectation that prices would be in roughly the $100 to $120 barrel range, from 2015 onward.
In fact, oil prices have stayed fairly low, and China’s oil production has declined, as our paper predicted.
Note that the chart on Slide 21 shows wage disparity only in the US. On this basis, the share of wages going to the top 1% and top 0.1% are back at the levels that they were in the 1920s. Now, our economy is much more global. If we consider all of the low income people in the world, the worldwide wage disparity is much greater.
There are two things to note on Slide 22. The first is that producers, in inflation-adjusted terms, seem to need very high prices, approximately $120 per barrel or more. This is based on a presentation made by Steve Kopits, which I wrote up here: Beginning of the End? Oil Companies Cut Back on Spending.
The other thing to note is that oil prices tend to bounce around a great deal. Prices seem to depend on the amount of debt and on interest rates, as well as the wages of workers. The peak in oil prices in mid-2008 came precisely at the time the debt bubble broke with respect to mortgage and credit card debt in the US. I wrote about this in an article in the journal Energy called, Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis.
The US instituted Quantitative Easing (QE) at the end of 2008. QE acted to lower interest rates. With the help of QE, the price of oil gradually rose again. When the US discontinued QE in late 2014, oil prices fell. Recently, there has been a great deal of QE done, as well as direct spending by governments, but oil prices are still far below the $120 per barrel level. Middle Eastern oil producers especially need high oil prices, in order to collect the high tax revenue that they depend upon to provide programs for their citizens.
Coal prices (Slide 23) tend to follow somewhat the same pattern as oil prices (Slide 22). There is very much the same balancing act with coal prices as well: Coal prices need to be high enough for producers, but not too high for customers to buy products made with coal, such as electricity and steel.
China tries to keep its coal prices relatively high in order to encourage production within the country. China has been limiting imports to try to keep prices high. The relatively high coal prices of China make it an attractive destination for coal exporters. There are now a large number of boats waiting outside China hoping to sell coal to China at an attractive price.
The blue line on Figure 24 represents total energy consumption up through 2020. The red dotted line is a rough guesstimate of how energy consumption might fall. This decline could happen if people wanting energy consumption coming only from renewables were able to succeed by 2050 (except I am doubtful that these renewable energy types would really be of much use by themselves).
Alternatively, this might also be the decline that our self-organizing economy takes us on. We are already seeing a decrease in energy consumption related to the current pandemic. I think governmental reactions to the pandemic were prompted, in part, by the very stretched condition of our oil and other energy supplies. Countries were experiencing riots over low wages. They also could not afford to import as much oil as they were importing. Shutdowns in response to COVID-19 cases seemed like a sensible thing to do. They helped restore order and saved on energy imports. Strangely enough, the pandemic may be a part of the collapse that our self-organizing economy is arranging for us.
Slide 25 takes the blue line from Slide 24 and looks at what happened in more detail. On Slide 25, we are looking at the average annual increase in energy consumption, for a given 10 year period. This is split between the rate of population growth (blue), and the energy consumption growth that went into other things, which I equate to change in “standard of living” (red). The big red humps represent very good times, economically. The post-World War II bump is especially high. The valleys are times of disturbing changes, including wars and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Of course, all of these situations occurred during periods when energy consumption was generally rising. If these unfortunate things happened when oil consumption was rising, what might possibly happen when energy consumption is falling?
We now seem to be hitting the Crisis Stage. In the past, collapse (which takes place in the Crisis Stage) has not been instantaneous; it has taken place over quite a number of years, typically 20 or more. The world economy is quite different now, with its international trade system and heavy use of debt. It would seem likely that a collapse could happen more quickly. A common characteristic of collapses, such as avalanches, is that they often seem to start off fairly slowly. Then, suddenly, a large piece breaks away, and there is a big collapse. Something analogous to this could possibly happen with the economy, too.
One of the major issues with adding intermittent renewables to the electric grid is a pricing problem. Once wind and solar are given subsidies (even the subsidy of “going first”), all of the other types of electricity production seem to need subsidies, as well. It is the pricing systems that are terribly detrimental, although this is not generally noticed. In fact, researchers who are looking only at energy may not even care if the pricing is wrong. Ultimately, the low pricing for electricity can be expected to bring the electric grid down, just as inadequate prices for fossil fuels can be expected to lead to the closure of many fossil fuel producers. Both Texas and California are having difficulty because they have not been collecting enough funds from customers to build resilient systems.
The focus of EROEI research is often with respect to whether the EROEI of a particular type of energy production is “high enough,” relative to some goal, such as 3:1 or 10:1. I believe that there needs to be more focus on the total quantity of net energy produced. If there is an EROEI goal for highly complex energy types, it needs to be much higher than for less complex energy types.
Today, it is common to see the EROEIs of a number of different types of energy displayed side-by-side as if they were comparable. This type of comparison is also made with other energy metrics, such as “Levelized Cost of Electricity” and “Energy Payback Period.” I think this approach makes highly complex types of energy production, such as intermittent wind and solar, look better than they really are. Even intermittent hydroelectric power generation, such as is encountered in places with rainy seasons and dry seasons and in places that are subject to frequent droughts, is not really comparable to electricity supply that can be provided year-around by fossil fuel providers, if adequate storage is available.
Earlier in this post, I documented a number of reasons why we should expect low rather than high energy prices in the future. I am reiterating the point here because it is a point energy researchers need especially to be aware of. Production is likely to come to an end because it is unprofitable.
One characteristic of human-made complexity is that it has very little redundancy. If something goes wrong in one part of one system, it is likely to ripple through that system, as well as other systems to which the first system is connected. An outage of oil is likely to indirectly affect electricity because oil is needed to fix problems with electricity transmission lines. An electricity outage may cause disruption in oil drilling and refining, and even in filling up automobiles at service stations. An international trade disruption can break supply lines and leave shipping containers at the wrong end of the globe.
We know that collapse tends to lead to less complex systems. We should expect fewer jobs requiring advanced education. We should expect to start losing battles against infectious diseases. We should expect a reduction in international trade; in the future, it may primarily take place among a few trusted partners. Some intergovernmental organizations are likely to disappear. Peak oil cannot happen by itself; it can only happen with disruptions and shrinkage in many other parts of the economy, as well.
The climate is indeed changing. Unfortunately, we humans have little ability to change what is happening, especially at this late date. Arguably, some changes could have been made much earlier, for example in the 1970s when the modeling included in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth by Donnela Meadows and others showed that the world economy was likely to hit limits before 2050.
It is clear to many people that the world economy is now struggling. There is too much debt; young people are having trouble finding jobs that pay well enough; people in poor countries are increasingly more food insecure. Leaders everywhere would like solutions. The “easy” solution to offer is that intermittent wind and solar will solve all our problems, including climate change. The closer a person looks at the situation, the more the solution seems like nonsense. Wind and solar work passably well at small concentrations within electric systems, if it is possible to work around their pricing problems. But they don’t scale up well. Energy researchers especially should be aware of these difficulties.
The book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee points out that there have been an amazing number of what seem to be coincidences that have allowed life on Earth to flourish for four billion years. Perhaps these coincidences will continue. Perhaps there is an underlying plan that we are not aware of.
Our ability to tackle the rising complexity is endangered: the lack of the chips hits more and more car factories
https://spectator.sme.sk/c/22617794/trnava-based-carmaker-had-to-halt-production-because-it-lacked-chips.html
Kia in Slovakia pauses the production, too.
https://index.sme.sk/c/22618349/problemy-s-cipmi-uz-hlasi-aj-zilinska-kia-prerusi-vyrobu.html?ref=trz
We wonder if this situation will ever be resolved. Making simpler chips cheaply isn’t necessarily where investors want to spend their investment money.
Even the ‘simpler’ microprocessor fabs/mfg nodes are absurdly expensive and complex. PhD’s are basically running these fabs as an ongoing R&D activity, solving production problems and improving yields on the fly.
Some fscking hedge fund manager or bean counters are supposed to earn more than those guys and gals making important shit for BAU to tick over?
I would say no, send the useless eaters out on the streets with subsistence UBI and fresh a jab in the shoulder.
JFK Junior seems to really know what he is talking about, he has been fighting big-pharma for decades, and won many law suits against them.
Before COVID, Gates Planned Social Media Censorship of Vaccine Safety Advocates With Pharma, CDC, Media, China and CIA
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/gates-planned-social-media-censorship-vaccine-safety/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=26b5c090-223d-4d5d-9526-e0f692535e8c
“Over the last two weeks, Facebook and other social media sites have deplatformed me [JFK] and many other critics of regulatory corruption and authoritarian public health policies. So, here is some fodder for those of you who have the eerie sense that the government/industry pandemic response feels like it was planned — even before there was a pandemic.
The attached document shows that a cabal of powerful individuals did indeed begin planning the mass eviction of vaccine skeptics from social media in October 2019, a week or two before COVID began circulating. That month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates organized an exercise of four “table-top” simulations of a worldwide coronavirus pandemic with other high-ranking “Deep State” panjandrums. The exercise was referred to as Event 201.
Gates’ co-conspirators included representatives from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum (Great Reset), Bloomberg/Johns Hopkins University Populations Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, various media powerhouses, the Chinese government, a former Central Intelligence Agency/National Security Agency director (there is no such thing as a former CIA officer), vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson, the finance and biosecurity industries and Edelman, the world’s leading corporate PR firm…”
In other words, the people who would get financial support from selling more vaccines want to stop someone who is speaking out against vaccines.
I DON’T KNOW IF THE NAME JFK JUNIOR IS A MISTAKE.
From: https://beeboomonline.com/russias-covid-19-vaccine-is-embraced-abroad-snubbed-at-home.html
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who often praises the vaccine on national television and extols it in his discussions with overseas leaders, has still to be vaccinated himself. The Kremlin has reported Mr. Putin designs to get a vaccine throughout the late summer season or early autumn following consulting with health professionals.
Geert Vanden Bossche PhD and his warning to the world against ‘Immune Escape’.
We’ve seen Geert recently and I suspect many of us have found his words scary and at the same time a bit too complicated to take in.
Today I came across a video of Geert explain his ideas more clearly and in layman’s language. Apologies if this has been posted already, but I think this is amazingly important and that a lot of people will want to listen to it.
From the preamble:
He presents scientific evidence that ‘innate’ immunity is the actual determinant in recovery from and prevention of COVID-19. This is distinct from ‘acquired’ or ‘adaptive’ immunity where pathogenic response in T Cells and B Cells confers a memory upon the immune system. Vaccines work on the ‘adaptive’ immune system, not the ‘innate’ immune system.
His research points to over-zealous infection control procedures, as well as vaccines that do not produce sterilising immunity, as the two key drivers of evolutionary pressure upon Sars-Cov-2 that may result in vaccine-resistant phenotypes of the virus. If correct, this predicts much larger waves of COVID-19 including in younger, previously resistant people. He describes our current actions to combat Sars-Cov-2 as a ‘giant experiment’ and grossly irresponsible on such a global scale.
What’s in the talk:
3:22 Placing pressure on viruses without stopping transmission forces mutations
6:00 Sars-Cov-2 requires hosts and cannot survive without one
7:20 The analogy of antibiotic resistance to explain vaccine resistance
9:38 Mass vaccinations during a pandemic are contra-indicated
10:40 Extended vaccine dosing intervals creates opportunity for Sars-Cov-2 immune escape
11:20 Being an asymptomatic carrier produces a suboptimal immune state
12:58 We are creating a worse problem than natural pandemics
14:30 Infection prevention measures and lockdowns are pressuring Sars-Cov-2 to mutate into new strains
17:57 The ‘innate’ immune system is the most important determinant in COVID-19 outcomes
20:16 We are weakening our innate immune systems by isolating them from exposure to pathogens
22:18 Australia and New Zealand are so isolated from Sars-Cov-2 that they have become the most susceptible in the world to bad COVID-19 outcomes
23:44 Lockdowns prevent mortality at the individual level but create disasters at the population level
25:28 Allowing a natural pandemic cycle
27:06 The virus itself teaches us how to intervene without causing immune escape
27:40 Antibodies are not responsible for elimination of COVID-19 because they comes too late. The mechanism responsible are NK Cells in the innate immune system
30:04 In natural pandemics viruses jump between immunological populations
32:19 Surges in antibodies (adaptive immune system) post infection outcompete natural antibodies (innate immune system) thus suppressing innate immunity
35:00 In pandemics, the likelihood of encountering a virus explodes
36:35 Young people will soon get COVID-19 because of higher likelihood of encounter combined with suppressed innate immunity
37:05 In a normal pandemic, viruses feel no mutation pressures (the story of herd immunity)
39:22 We are creating asymptomatic carriers and achieving the opposite of herd immunity
41:57 The Spanish Flu – over in 2 years. Naturally.
44:10 A summary of how we are pressuring Sars-Cov-2 to escape immunity and target young people
46:43 We have already created mutated strains so ‘letting the pandemic run’ may have been an option at the beginning but not now
49:00 Properly assessing the impact of human intervention
50:15 The binary of pro-vaccination vs anti-vaccination is not nuanced enough
51:08 Geert’s dire warning – ‘we are at the eve of a huge disaster’
54:12 Testing Geert’s hypothesis – watch the countries who have large vaccination coverage
58:40 This is the first time in the history of humanity that we have intervened in a pandemic in such an aggressive way
59:41 How long until this hypothesis is proven?
1:01:05 What would prove Geert’s hypothesis incorrect? Spoiler: endemic and benign outcomes.
1:02:22 Where is the scientific evidence that we are heading toward herd immunity?
1:03:52 Sterilising immunity would change the game by closing sources of immune escape.
1:04:42 NK cell based vaccines (innate immunity) and introducing memory to NK cells.
1:05:58 The only scientifically reasonable approach is to completely eradicate the mutated strains through bolstering innate immune systems
1:07:55 How NK cell vaccine technology would work
1:10:57 The lack of interest in NK cell immunity
1:13:24 Mass global vaccination can only cause 2 outcomes: massive success or massive failure – anything in between is temporary and illusory
1:14:55 Innate cellular immunity will allow the destruction of infected cells and thus successful intervention in ongoing disease processes like cancer
1:21:46 There is no one currently funding innate immunity technologies such as NK cell memory
1:23:40 Natural approaches to strengthen innate immunity: good general health
1:27:39 The most important defence during the pandemic: our innate immune system
1:28:01 Do NOT vaccinate young people against COVID-19 (because of innate immune suppression, and specific antibodies do not explain viral recovery)
1:30:31 Distinguishing between immunological populations, not just simple demographic populations
1:33:02 Are there any immunological populations that we should still vaccinate with current vaccines that don’t confer sterilising immunity?
1:33:50 Sterilising immunity vaccines will not be possible because they are based on adaptive immunity (T cells and B cells)
1:37:32 Strong innate immunity at any age is not appealing to big pharma because you can’t sell it but it’s a powerful protective measure
1:40:20 What would be the best response humanity could mount to destroy Sars-Cov-2/COVID-19?
1:42:05 We cannot determine the level of natural antibodies, but we can determine the level of specific antibodies
1:44:15 If positive for specific antibodies your innate immunity is suppressed, so stay isolated until the titers disappear
1:45:55 Geert has worked inside the major vaccination companies and their work is exceptional, but it misses the point
Yes this video must be seen widely.
We’re so close now.
It will be exciting.
It will be brutal.
it would be so very exciting to see millions dropping dead weekly.
wow, that’s some heavy Schadenfreude.
if it turns out to be a big nothingburger, who gets the blame?
That would be mea culpa. I’m the dupe who posted it.
On the other hand, it would be remiss not to have posted it given the implications if, and only if, the Bosshe dude is onto something.
bloody ‘ell, then by all means let’s see millions falling weekly.
bring out your dead!
Thanks for all your work in taking this notes.
Huummm… Rosemary Frei has some doubts about this Vanden Bossche. See here.
https://www.rosemaryfrei.ca/the-curious-case-of-geert-vanden-bossche/
And I have some doubts about Rosemary Frei.
Frei may not be all-intelligent (and who is?) but she’s certainly much less fishy than this GAVI-Big-Pharma-Gates doctor. I knpw that because because i tested R. Frei with my bullshitometer and the pointer barely moved, whereas with dr. Bossche it struck several times the ten bulhitimeters mark!!!
But feel free to convince me that my bullshitometer is damaged. 🙂
You may both have a point!
Didn’t Mr. Mainwaring in Dad’s Army warn the rest of the home guard to never trust the Bossche?
By why would Bill Gates tell one of his minions to spread this kind of panic against the very jabs he wants to push?
To blacken the the opposition when it turns out that this round of vaccines are not that dangerous after all?
I will take a look at Ms Frei’s doubts after lunch.
Is it sophisticated gas lighting or is it Memorex?… or Parkay?
This does sound reasonable … if the unvaxxed do live … they will wish they were dead…
https://www.brighteon.com/e86a8f0d-bae2-4c3c-926d-61c60c6e4c38
Could that be why the PMO stated ‘it is in the interest of all individuals to comply’
The joke could be on the unvaxxed tee hee…
If Israel is the model then hard to imagine many remaining unvaxxed. Not so great spending one’s last months on the planet locked in your home… or worse… in one of the quarantine prisons feeding on pig slop.
It’s highly likely we all accept the jab… hopefully there are enough to go round the 3rd world… hate to see these poor people left unjabbed and eating each other.
After checking out Rosemary Frei, I think she’s genuine and her doubts about Dr. Bossche are reasonable. There are some definite red flags, such as his being a career vaccine developer and his view that NOT these vaccines at this stage of the pandemic BUT other vaccines at other times could be effective for Covid-19 (which many of us suspect is a disease that has never killed anyone).
But then again, he could just be a lot more knowledgeable than most of us and he may have honestly concluded that we have stumbled into an “Oh God, what have we done?” situation.
Or he could be setting up the backstory so that when the vaccines (or something they put in the Diet Coke) start making millions drop like flies, the perps can plead ignorance and lie through their smirking faces that “nobody but a crank could have forseen that these vaccines would accidentally wipe out 80% of humanity, but in any case the genie is out of the bottle, the eggs for the omelet have already been cracked, and there’s no use crying over spilt milk.
Time will tell.
Further Brexit fall out. Absolutely zero coverage in the British press, printed or web.
Spain has already gained control over the borders, port and airport of Gibraltar. Anyone with an EU passport can come and go freely – Gibraltar must be the only place in the world where anyone can come and go unchecked apart from the citizens of the place.
Spain has now effected control of the tax regime and its status as a tax haven is over – no cries from me. Frankly this is ‘fair enough’, UK has been taking liberties in Spain.
I wonder what the latest ‘no news’ is from the Falklands?
Nothing remains what it is in this world.
> The glory days are over in Gibraltar
New Gibraltar Treaty enforced from today
The glory days are over for Gibraltar, the rock is no longer a tax haven, because the agreement struck between Spain and the United Kingdom comes into force today.
The treaty aims to eliminate tax fraud and the detrimental effects of a tax system that allowed people to pay corporate tax only on the profits they made in Gibraltar.
The Agreement was signed on March 4, 2019 and it’s the first international treaty signed by Spain and the United Kingdom on Gibraltar since the Utrecht Treaty of 1715, when Gibraltar was ceded to the UK.
“The agreement resolves the fiscal sovereignty of the area and ends an anachronistic and tremendously damaging situation for Spain without weakening its position on the sovereignty of the Rock,” said the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, in Congress.
The new treaty establishes clear rules on tax and residence and prevents people who are resident in Spain from taking advantage of Gibraltar’s tax system….
https://amp.majorcadailybulletin.com/news/international/2021/03/13/80831/spain-gibraltar-gibraltar-treaty.html
The Falklands situation is making the news. Boris reckons that he is going to announce the potential use of military force to secure British overseas territories.
EU may be about to side with Argentina. The implication seems to be that all those countries could vote for Argentinian sovereignty over FI at the UN. The UNSCD last month narrowly voted by 3-2 to urge UK and ARG to negotiate rather than to recognise the ARG claim. An EU shift could swing that situation.
I suspect that Boris could be disappointed if he thinks that many in UK are up for a WAR over Brexit fall out and in violation of UN resolutions. Brexit has been bad enough without that. This is rapidly turning into a farce. Boris surely must go quietly if he loses FI.
> Brexit warning: Argentina to pressure EU into new talks to get control over Falklands
ARGENTINA will pressure the European Union into new talks to get control of the Falklands now the bloc no longer recognises overseas territories under British rule after Brexit.
Speaking to Al Jazeera English, Daniel Filmus, [ARG] Secretary of affairs pertaining to the Malvinas (the Latin American name for the Falkland’s) said: “We are still in the early stages after Brexit but Europe has signalled a change in its position on the islands.
“There was a similar case at the UN on the Chagos Archipelago (a British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean).”
In May 2019 the UK lost a United Nations vote of 114-6 on its ownership of the Chagos Archipelago and now has six months to return the island to Mauritius. The Chagos Archipelago are a group of 7 atolls 500 kilometres off Mauritius and include more than 60 tropical islands which contain a US military base. Hungary was the only EU country to vote in favour of the U.K. in that vote.
As well as demanding control of the Falkland Islands Argentina has also said the South Georgia Islands and the South Sandwich Island’s belong to them. Both the South Georgia Islands and the South Sandwich Islands are British overseas territories which Britain have ruled since 1775 and 1908 respectively. They sit about 1300km west of the Falkland Islands.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1410106/Brexit-news-Argentina-EU-trade-deal-Falkland-Island-Malvinas-warning-latest-vn
Hot off the press.
> Exclusive: I will use force to defend Falklands, promises Boris Johnson
Prime Minister vows to use military to protect British territories including Gibraltar, according to leaked papers from defence review
As part of the Prime Minister’s landmark integrated review into defence and foreign policy, he has vowed to use the Armed Forces to protect the UK and its citizens, which includes its “responsibility to ensure the security of the 14 overseas territories”.
In leaked papers seen by The Telegraph, the 100-page strategy, entitled “Global Britain in a Competitive Age”, sets out how it will protect overseas territories by “deterring and defending against state and non-state threats”.
It adds that the Armed Forces will “deter and challenge incursions in British Gibraltar Territorial Waters” and will “maintain a permanent presence in the Falkland Islands, Ascension Island and the British Indian Ocean Territory”.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/15/will-use-force-defend-falklands-promises-boris-johnson/
Oh Dear. It’s somewhat ironic that you promote Welsh, Scottish and Irish voices over independence but when it comes the the Falklands where 99.8% voted to remain part of Britain, not so.
Yup, I just scroll through the hypocrisy in the hopes of landing on one of Harry’s posts instead.
Neither Falklands nor Gibraltar are historical countries. They are ‘overseas territories’ (BOT) from the imperial period. UN considers FI to be a colonial occupation – like Chagos, which UK has been ordered to hand back. Take it up with the UN, ie. all of the other countries in the world who are liable to vote on it at some point.
UK occupation of Gibraltar, a part of Spain, is definitely taking liberties and I would expect UK to withdraw from there at some point. I have no real opinion on FI. UN does not recognise a colonial transference of population to an island as any basis of a claim of sovereignty. At the moment it urges UK and ARG to settle the matter diplomatically but its stance may change.
All ‘claims’ are obviously ‘made up’, some are just more ‘reasonable’ than others. Do try not to personalise everything, it makes you look desperate. This is the modern world in which such matters are settled diplomatically and democratically, it is not a chimp colony. Humans have developed some other mechanisms of dispute management and UK chooses to be a part of UN.
“UK chooses to be a part of UN.”
And as luck would have it, the UK is one of five permanent members of the UN Security Council with the power to veto any “substantive” resolution.
There is no veto at the UN general assembly.
The International Criminal Court in February 2019 ruled that the British state occupation of Chagos is illegal and that its withdrawal is legally obligatory. The UN GA then adopted a resolution in May 2019 that the British state must withdraw from Chagos within six months – which have passed.
The result is that all UN and international organisations are now bound to ‘support’ the decolonisation of Chagos.
UN would approach the FI dispute in the GA – not through the security council, so British state would hold no veto.
We will just have to wait and see what happens. It is Brexit fall out, as British state standing in the world is further eroded. Another FI war, contrary to a UN resolution, would definitely continue that trend.
As I said, I have no real opinion on FI. It seems ‘reasonable’ that I would prefer that ARG had FI than that more young men died over it. It has no geostrategic significance in any case as I explained below, not that I necessarily go by that.
“There is no veto at the UN general assembly.”
But it is the Security Council that deals with dispute resolution when a conflict looks like it is going live, should that ever happen. The UK has used its veto power 36 times and could in theory do so again to, for example, prevent a UN peace-keeping force from being dispatched to the Falklands.
On balance these veto-powers are a force for ill, hampering the UN’s effectiveness. There are, I’m afraid, many times when the modern world has looked very much like a chimp colony:
“Since the second half of the 20th century, there have been countless wars, some of them still ongoing, all under the watch of the United Nations.”
https://www.trtworld.com/americas/twelve-times-the-un-has-failed-the-world-21666
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall,
Who is the unfairest of them all?
When I was a young man working for the Post Office about forty years ago, one of my bosses was an old Scotsman who we all referred to as Jock. Jock may have been his real name for all I know. But be that or not, it was the name he answered to. He had been in the thick of Second World War and was as patriotically British a man as you’d seldom find anywhere in the UK these days, least of all in Scotland, where the Union is no longer very popular.
It was men like Jock who built the country, worked hard for the country and fought for the country as if it was their own family. It’s thanks to men like Jock that people my age had a decent country to be born into.
I remember while the Falkland’s War was playing out, we had lots of discussion of the events behind the counter. That war was not very popular, by the way. Although Thatcher milked it for all its jingoistic attributes in order to consolidate her power, she permanently lost the grudging support of a large slice of the electorate, much as Blair did a generation later when he advocated the invasion of Iraq.
During one of our discussions, Jock said that he was unhappy that there was a war going on over the Falklands, but that the Argentinians had made that inevitable by invading the place. They left the British no choice. We would have been a laughing stock he we allowed that outrage to stand, and the Spanish would be in Gibraltar and the Chinese in Hong Kong by Christmas.
When someone butted in asking why we didn’t give Gibraltar back to Spain, Jock was adamant, “Gibraltar is British. We won it by right of conquest.”
A great Scotsman, and a great Briton. They don’t make ’em like that anymore, more’s the pity.
“They don’t make ’em like that anymore, more’s the pity.”
I would agree that the British themselves have changed physiologically over the last few centuries – one can observe it in the people even over one’s lifetime and see it in the photographs and footage of the past two centuries; one can only speculate why but it probably comes down to breeding, diet and exercise – but the ‘country’ itself has changed and no longer provokes any ‘loyalty’. Only so much can be ‘blamed’ on individuals.
You lived in UK and then moved to USA?
Not to the US. I’m celebrating 39 years in Japan this year. Come to think of it, the Falklands War and Thatcher probably played a part in getting me to sell up and get on the plane. But not without regrets. Had I stayed on at the Post Office, I could have had my own window by now.
This is another country that has territorial disputes with all its neighbors, over rocks, shoals and islands that few people would want to live on, but they do provide sovereignty over a great deal of maritime territory, and diplomatically they are well worth squabbling over, although probably not worth any side going to war for.
UK got way lucky first time. Luck does wield the sword. If USA had given the info needed to arm the bombs on the mirages for low altitude runs it probably would have been over before it started. Why dont they just have a war with the UE instead of going half way round the world? I really feel for the UK. No country can operate autonomously yet thats what the UE demands. If your out your all the way out or a vassal state. Gang mentality. UK didnt realize they were going to be a example when they brexited. (dig that illegal verb usage) Bombing penguins will not help the situation. Boris is turning out to be a real moron. Good luck UK! get those fishing boats running and those victory gardens growing. Were just as screwed here in the USA.
UK is basically just British State Plc. It has deep economic problems. The UK rate of company profitability has been in decline since the 1850s. Productivity growth, the increase in the amount produced per worker per hour worked, has declined toward zero since the 1970s (like in all other ‘mature’ capitalist economies). It is collapsed at near zero since 2008 (like the others) and any improvement in wages and living standards, which depends on productivity growth, has come to an end. The British state now depends entirely on a constant influx of workers, about 700,000 per year now, an expansion of the workforce to grow GDP at all and to keep the growth and profit based economy from collapse. UK is a Plc. as Tony Blair openly termed it.
Falklands (FI) have zero strategic significance. They may have been geostrategic during the days of the British Empire but those are long gone. UK will never again act as an independent geostrategic player. It is hegemonized to USA which has no need of FI. UK wanted to maintain its Empire/ ‘Commonwealth’ after WWII for UK to be a ‘second player’ beneath USA but USA had no need or interest in that. UK squandered its share of the Marshall Funds on an attempt to maintain global influence, which it could no longer afford, while Germany and the others spent it on modernising their economies. UK fell behind the continent by the late 1950s and its competitiveness never recovered.
FI now are just a useful distraction from domestic issues, a rallying point for British State Plc. ‘nationalism’ to rally the population and to reinforce the government. The British Empire is long gone and the British state failed to build any global role for itself in the post-war period. USA has zero interest in UK keeping FI and the UN has never recognised BS claims. UK itself is in deep, long term decline that has been reinforced by post-war global ambitions. The only role of FI now is to reinforce the domestic status quo. Boris would love another WAR over FI just as Thatcher lapped it up. Britain is in a very sorry state however one looks at it. It would be a real shame if more young men lost their lives over BS claims on FI just to prop up a TP government. I certainly would not be waving any flags in support of it. It could likely be avoided if UN takes a stronger stance on FI.
“FI now are just a useful distraction from domestic issues, a rallying point for British State Plc. ‘nationalism’ to rally the population and to reinforce the government.”
1.) The exact same applies to Argentina, whose economy is in a far worse state than the UK’s.
“Falklands (FI) have zero strategic significance.”
2.) In which case, shouldn’t the preferences of the people who have been living there for generations take moral primacy?
2: Arguably that is a ‘reasonable’ position in the abstract but the context is rather one of geostrategic imperial residue – which is how the UN ‘sees it’. The UN was set up to facilitate the transition from the old imperial and colonial global disposition to a new era of post-WWII hegemony and ‘cooperation’. UK occupation of FI is contrary in principle to UN raison d’etre but it has not been that bothered about FI.
UK had the ‘winds of change’ back in the 1960s, during which the British state relinquished most of its colonial territories. Chagos, FI, Gibraltar are among the final residues. The British Empire is long gone and BS is no longer a geostrategic player. These ‘last bits’ of the BE have no real geostrategic significance, they merely play a domestic role in ‘morale’.
To be frank, it makes no difference what ‘moral’ posture any of us assumes about FI on or off here. All ‘moral claims’ are made up, some just seem more ‘reasonable’ than others. We will just have to wait and see what happens. UN may side with ARG. Then ARG may ‘go for it.’ It would be liable to be damaging to the standing of the British state in the world whether it then ‘went in’ or not.
The islanders have always been pawns in geostrategic games and they remain that – which is ‘sad’ but they would not be there otherwise, so it ‘pros and cons’ on their part. Some presumably like the isolated, wind-swept, rural and fishing aspect and I can understand that – although the lifestyle is not for everyone. Many of us get to enjoy our chosen lifestyle to some extent – and for a time.
The Pied Noirs and the Tamils in Sri Lanka tried to use the same logic. The world did not listen
– Petty ‘national states’ squabbling over the mud, inventing their own ‘justifications’ out of thin air, entirely devoid of any ‘purpose’ and providing nothing even remotely ‘motivating’ to distinguish their ‘claims’. It is about as deep as watching ants fight. Their ‘arguments’ are frankly laughable.
There is no ‘claim’ in reality beyond what one can take – or get others to agree to. UK is running out of ‘friends’ in the BS stakes.
diferent island diferent issues. If china was to invade taiwan, And the USA was to ban chinese imports, What would that do to USA GDP? Who is really calling the shots?
The British state is headed for financial penalties, trade sanctions and a complete suspension of the Brexit trade deal if it fails to observe its agreements in international law and implement the NI Protocol.
It is fascinating to see the BS playing the criminal. It seems to be a role that the TP is comfortable with, so long as they get to have a mouth off about the EU.
The BS could have just cut itself loose entirely from EU but it agreed to all this and to the legal procedures to get the trade deal. It is entirely the doing of the BS.
TP wanted a trade deal, wanted the NI Protocol, and now it does this, which would lead to the loss of the whole thing. I suppose that BS statesmanship just is not what it used to be – from global hegemon to an isolated, regional criminal in a lifetime. Nothing remains what it is in this world.
> EU launches legal action over UK plan to extend Brexit grace period
Letter alleging infringement of Northern Ireland protocol issued on Monday
The EU has formally launched legal action against the UK, alleging that Boris Johnson has broken international law over Brexit implementation in Northern Ireland.
It is the second time in six months that Brussels has launched infringement proceedings against the UK over Brexit, following last year’s threat by the British prime minister to override part of the withdrawal agreement through the internal market bill.
Ultimately the action could see a case held at the European court of justice and lead to financial penalties and trade sanctions .
The EU has accused the UK of breaching the good faith provisions in the withdrawal agreement after its unilateral decision two weeks ago to delay implementation of part of the Northern Ireland protocol relating to checks on goods shipped from Great Britain to the region.
The formal notice of legal action was issued with an accompanying letter from the European commission vice-president, Maroš Šefčovič, to the new Brexit minister David Frost.
It calls on the UK to “rectify and refrain from putting into practice” its decision on 3 March to extend grace periods for checks on supermarket goods crossing the Irish Sea.
An EU official said: “The UK must stop acting unilaterally and stop violating the rules it hasn’t signed up to.”
The UK has been given one month to submit its observations under the formal notice. If it fails to enter into consultations in good faith the EU can launch a dispute settlement mechanism which, if not solved, could “ultimately result in the imposition of financial sanctions” or a suspension of the withdrawal agreement in all aspects bar the agreement on EU citizens .
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/mar/15/eu-launch-legal-action-uk-plan-extend-brexit-grace-period
I see, I see, said the blind man
TheStreet.com
Delta Air Lines Posts Q4 Loss of $2.1 Billion, Sees 2021 Recovery
DAL
Delta Air Lines
51.70
+1.86
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Mon, March 15, 2021, 4:45 AM
Delta CEO Ed Bastian said 2021 “will be a year of recovery and a turning point” for the U.S. carrier as the pandemic eases and travel restrictions are eased later in the spring.😟
Delta shares were marked 4.5% higher in early trading immediately following the earnings release to change hands at $42.25 each, a move that would extend the stock’s six-month gain to around 60%.
Sure, nice upbeat message…we will get to normal….and all the high yield business travelers will be booking those pricey last minute care tickets, which is the bread and butter of the legacy carriers with topped out wage scale older work force….sure ..
Oh, the former founder of JetBlue airlines, a non union carrier, is forming a NEW start up airline named BREEZE…..there is much opportunity when the house is on 🔥 fire.
BTW, the CARES Bill just gave the airlines 14 billion more until the end of September…
Would you be surprised to hear that won’t be enough and are asking for another round of 💰💰!
There will be a major transformation of the Industry…. International travel is basically dead….another high profit segment for legacy carriers….
Since Biden took office, a rule has been added that those returning from outside of the US need to have a negative COVID test within three days of returning. This is like a tax on travel to places on both very short duration travel and travel to areas where COVID tests are difficult to get. In either case, trips are likely to need to be extended to have time for the COVID test.
The losses are still staggering and some Airlines needed a load factor of the 70% or more just to break even!
Now, start ups, like Spirit Airlines, are taking advantage of the situation to expand rapidly in markets..
The Florida-based airline bills itself as “the leader in providing customizable travel options starting with an unbundled fare. This allows our guests to pay only for the options they choose – like bags, seat assignments and refreshments – something we call ‘Á La Smarte,'” according to a company statement.
The business model might take some getting used to.
https://news.yahoo.com/theyre-real-now-spirit-airlines-160906491.html
‘They’re for real now’: Spirit Airlines grows from a laughingstock to a formidable competitor
Joe Taschler, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Spirit showed up on any of the myriad lists that rank airline quality, it was probably dead last.
The funny thing is, passengers kept coming back. The airline was making money and growing. All the while, it was adding modern, more fuel-efficient aircraft to its fleet. Its workers were being trained (or retrained) to be customer-centric.
These days, about the only thing Spirit shares with its past is its name and its ultra-low- fare business model.
“Today’s Spirit is not the Spirit that five years ago was the butt of industry and consumer jokes,” said Robert Mann, president of airline analysis and consulting firm R.W. Mann & Co. in New York. “They’re for real now.”
Company leadership has “done a great job of fixing it, getting it back to being consumer-oriented and getting it efficient again,” Mann said.
Half or more of the world’s annual consumption of steel, copper, coal, nickel, and cement is accounted for by mainland China:
https://youtu.be/3ITddXnAu70?list=TLPQMTQwMzIwMjGUBfy2nl6OSw&t=438
One thing that this fellow (whoever he is) mentions that I hadn’t stopped to think about is the fact that rising commodity prices tend to send the US dollar down.
He also shows a nice graph of how US investment in mining has fallen.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/US-Private-investment-in-mining-exploration-BEA.png
He talks about the possibility of a big amount of new investment. (I am less sure about that.) Also, that infrastructure will be needed for all of this investment. Costs will rise. Somehow, he jumps to “prices of commodities will rise to cover these higher costs.”
I wouldn’t count on this.
There may be some reversals of cause and effect going on. Most commodities are priced in US dollars, so if the dollar falls, commodity prices will rise. This is a well known effect. I doubt that it works the other way.
As for rising mining costs, when commodity prices rise as supplies become scarce and bidders begin to compete for the limited available supply, it becomes possible to fund new investment in mining.
Yes, your first paragraph sounds more correct than the way this fellow told the story. It more corresponds to I think of as happening.
Your second paragraph only holds if the economy as a whole can afford to purchase the finished goods and services provided with these higher cost commodities. If the combination of wages and debt don’t rise enough, then we get to the familiar “debt bubble pop” scenario. Oil prices and other energy prices all fall together. This happened in July 2008. At some point, not too far away, we are likely headed for a similar scenario.
It also depends on the mine or field. Some have lower production costs than others. There are always risks in these investments, good times or bad. The investors know there is an element of speculation involved, but when animal spirits are high, they will take the chance.
If they spread their investments across a number of miners, one winner might cover losses in several losers.
Mining is also a long term project. Investors try to time their entry based on their analysis of the macrocycle.
Wages are less of an issue because most minerals are purchased by big companies to use in products in which they represent only some fraction of the total cost. If they are going to keep producing, they have to buy the materials, low or high.
Even oil is used as a feedstock for multiple products, as well as for heating oil, propane and butane, and of course diesel (the trucks must roll or all the city people starve) and of course gasoline (which is going to be produced anyway as a byproduct of the refining process). People will cut back when the economy is weak, but ultimately they have to eat, they have to stay warm, most of them have to get to jobs and back. If the price goes up, they might buy less, but they still have to buy.
However, you don’t want to explore or even drill when there is a supply glut like in the late 1990s or late 2010s. You have to cut expenses, especially if you are a major which may finance most of its drilling out of profits, or if you just don’t know how long the glut is going to last.
Fracking was a financial bust that the majors refused to touch in the startup phase (some swept in like vultures later to buy assets from bankrupt startups), but investors poured money into it anyway, partly because they were “reaching for yield” in a ZIRP world, but also because they believed the hype. Animal spirits!
Mark Twain famously defined a mine as “a hole in the ground with a liar standing next to it.”
Some things never change.
Gail, you mentioned in a thread above that the economy is. a self organizing system.
I don’t think it is anymore.
Economy used to be more like D Orlov’s technosphere. It does not see limits.
If we look at 2008 crisis for example, the “solution” was more growth and more oil.
IOW I don’t think the economy is capable of homeostasis.
The weird part of the current crisis is how rational the solutions are. While the cause of the crisis is hidden from the people, the restrictions put in place are exactly what’s needed to reduce energy consumption.
So to me this looks like a controlled system, not a self organizing one.
Just think of the amount of propaganda used to scare people into submission.
@nomadic beer, It’s still a self-organizing system. What you mention is just one of many constant attempts at adaptation by individual adaptive agents who are all part of a single complex adaptive system. All complex, adaptive systems are characterized by “agents” (who may or may not be conscious entities) who are diverse, adaptive, connected, and interdependent. Complex systems function best when these four characteristics are of an intermediate level. Dialing one or more of them up or down to an extreme level is likely to destabilize the system.
Attempts by an agent to control or direct the complex system will often produce unexpected, non-linear consequences, although sometimes they can be nudged by subtle interventions. Seeking to control a complex system as one would a linear system is likely to trigger those non-linear feedbacks. However, to the extent that a complex system can be controlled, it requires a system of even greater complexity to do so.
Another feature of complex, adaptive systems, and here I will for convenience quote from a source I am not terribly fond of, is:
“Complex systems operate under far from equilibrium conditions. There has to be a constant flow of energy to maintain the organization of the system”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system
So a decline in energy available to the system will reduce its complexity, but because of the non-linearity of the system, it is likely to trigger a series of cascading failures rather than a gradual, linear, and predictable decline in complexity.
Finally, all of us are parts of the system, and as such our ability to see the forest rather than individual trees within the forest is limited.
@Nehemiah thanks for the detailed explanation.
I want to step back and simplify the model (which I agree means I might get it wrong).
I look at the way the system worked until recently. It was obviously full of positive feedback loops (more! bigger!) and very few negative feedback loops.
We can look at the energy consumption, pollution, amount of waste, wealth distribution etc. None of them showed any sign of getting into balance. Like all systems where positive feedbacks dominate, it was obviously heading for a horrible collapse.
Last year though things have been different. If you ignore what people say (meaningless rationalizations), for the first time in my lifetime I see the human system actually applying negative feedbacks.
While the rich still get richer (payoff?) the regular people consumption was forced to decrease (job losses, restrictions). Oil consumption is down a lot and unlike 2009 there is no talk of “getting back to oil growth” and pushing Saudi Arabia to pump more. On the contrary we see articles that talk about a glut and Saudi Arabia is cutting production.
Despite all the happy talk, it seems clear that airplane travel for the masses is gone, traffic in the cities will be reduced and the standards of living are heading lower.
All of these are things that peak oilers were pushing for 20 years ago!
So what happened? Why did the system change all of a sudden?
Either we hit an inflection point and the system shifted to starvation mode (possible but I don’t believe it) or some of your agents have decided to risk it all and impose a top-down controlled slowdown.
The fact that all the mass media switched from situation control (like in previous crises) to panic inducing, seems a dead giveaway.
Historically, the only time when the governments support panic is when they want to force change despite opposition from the majority (think about Pearl Harbor or the burning of the Reichstag for example).
You said: “Attempts by an agent to control or direct the complex system will often produce unexpected, non-linear consequences, although sometimes they can be nudged by subtle interventions. ”
That is true when the system is balanced. If most of the energy belongs to a minority of agents that collude, they can easily control the system.
Because this is a human system the control is even easier – unlike dumb animals, people can believe patently untrue things and act accordingly (see the koolaid drinkers of whatever sect it was).
People believe their own pocket books and act accordingly. They don’t need to collude. That is why we get these strange patterns.
The “good” situation is “low cost of energy production” and “available credit at low interest rates.” The bad situation is “high cost of energy production.” If this is paired with high interest rates or restricted credit, this is doubly bad.
When the cost of energy production is low, sales prices of energy products can be low as well, but still provide an adequate profit for the producer. People who might make money off investment in factories will make investments of this type. Jobs will be relatively available and pay well, even for less-skilled workers. Governments find it easy to collect enough taxes.
It is when everything starts going wrong at once that different behavior emerges. When businesses are no longer making money (indirectly because the cost of energy products and of debt are too high), they will close up shop, or cut back their operations. They won’t add more. They will also tend to pay their workers less, making them unhappy. Governments won’t be able to collect enough taxes. All of these problems ripple through the system at once.
We have been dealing with this latter situation recently. No government will want to admit it has a problem. It will come up for a palatable excuse for cutting back. The government wants to prevent disease from spreading, or global warming, or air pollution.
The economy is always trying to seek a better level at which it can function. It will dissipate more energy if it can. Or it will cut back in places, and still dissipate as much energy as possible. I think it still is a self-organizing system. We just don’t recognize it for what it is.
When there is a lot of cheap energy to be extracted, the use of additional debt seems to “pull the economy forward” more quickly. Thus, the debt does lead to higher energy prices and more investment in energy supplies. These in turn lead to better leveraging of human labor, and more output per person. Efficiency grows.
But at some point, growth in energy production gets tapped out. We have to pay too much for the energy production for the economy to benefit adequately its use. There isn’t enough net energy transferred to the economy as a whole. More debt stops working to pull the economy forward.
Then we start getting squeezes on profitability and on wages. Countries start fighting with the other and individuals start protesting poor pay and poor pension plans. Leaders are at their wits end, regarding what to do about the problem. Perhaps if they cut off imports, they can keep more jobs at home.
A virus that is worse than average comes along, and suddenly there is an opportunity to fix some of the problems that have cropped up. Closing businesses and keeping people at home will stop people from protesting in the streets. They won’t notice that the local factories didn’t really have enough work for them either, and that the store in malls were mostly going bankrupt, even before the shutdown. If all of the problems can be blamed on the virus, there is suddenly an opportunity to start fixing problems, without really having to face them.
Of course, the real underlying problem was inadequate energy at a low enough price. The shut downs lower the oil price (and other fuel prices), making them more palatable. Scaring people really worked to fix the energy problem, at least for a little while. The big question is what to do next.
Big stimulus and lots of debt tend to bring commodity prices up, but not high enough to really fix the low energy price problems producers were having. So that is where we are now. How long can the debt bubble last?
Thanks Gail. It looks like these hypotheses should be testable.
If you are correct we can still expect energy use maximization. We should see some recovery similar to 2008. Of course the underlying problem was still there but people could pretend.
OTOH if this is a top down controlled system we will see more great reset kind of things where panic is used to force energy reduction.
Any predictions?
Most western countries just badly mismanaged the pandemic from the very beginning. Things could have been very different, as in very better. Democracy as it is currently structured seems to lead to governments of low competence.
Most of our econ problems now are due to financial mismanagement: too much debt, no fiscal discipline, an unwillingness to tolerate the normal operation of the business cycle, excess industrial and financial concentration and no trust busting to maintain competition, zero interest rate policies, lax enforcement of financial regulations coupled with excessive regulation of business in general, regulatory capture by big business and no push back against it, too many poor, under-educated immigrants being allowed in to compete with the citizens, the US acting as a unilateral importer of first resort to maintain the globalist economic agenda, needless wars and excessive military spending.
Energy is not yet our primary problem, although it will be soon enough. Right now the EROI of the total energy system, and even of oil in particular, is still above 10, and there is not a huge difference between an EROI of 10 versus 100. But as it falls below 10, each additional increment of decline becomes much more burdensome than it was at higher EROI levels:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsta.2013.0126
QUOTE: The following points seem clear from a review of the literature: (i) the EROI of global oil production is roughly 17 and declining, while that for the USA is 11 and declining; (ii) the EROI of ultra-deep-water oil and oil sands is below 10; (iii) the relation between the EROI and the price of oil is inverse and exponential; (iv) as EROI declines below 10, a point is reached when the relation between EROI and price becomes highly nonlinear; and (v) the minimum oil price needed to increase the oil supply in the near term is at levels consistent with levels that have induced past economic recessions. From these points, I conclude that, as the EROI of the average barrel of oil declines, long-term economic growth will become harder to achieve and come at an increasingly higher financial, energetic and environmental cost.
SNIP
Murphy & Hall [3] examined the relation between EROI, oil price and economic growth over the past 40 years and found that economic growth occurred during periods that combined low oil prices with an increasing oil supply. They also found that high oil prices led to an increase in energy expenditures as a share of GDP, which has led historically to recessions. Lastly, they found that oil prices and EROI are inversely related (figure 2), which implies that increasing the oil supply by exploiting unconventional and hence lower EROI sources of oil would require high oil prices. This created what Murphy & Hall called the ‘economic growth paradox: increasing the oil supply to support economic growth will require high oil prices that will undermine that economic growth’.
SNIP
Other researchers have come to similar conclusions to those of Murphy & Hall, most notably economist James Hamilton [47]. Recently, Kopits [50], and later Nelder & Macdonald [49], reiterated the importance of the relation between oil prices and economic growth in what they describe as a ‘narrow ledge’ of oil prices. This is the idea that the range, or ledge, of oil prices that are profitable for oil producers but not so high as to hinder economic growth is narrowing as newer oil resources require high oil prices for development, and as economies begin to contract due largely to the effects of prolonged periods of high oil prices. In other words, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the oil industry to increase supply at low prices, since most of the new oil being brought online has a low EROI. Therefore, if we can only increase oil supply through low EROI resources, then oil prices must apparently rise to meet the cost, thus restraining economic growth.
SNIP
we should remember that the average oil price during periods of economic growth over the past 40 years was under $40 per barrel, and the average price during economic recessions was under $60 per barrel (dollar values inflation adjusted to 2010) [3]. What these data indicate is that the floor price at which we could increase oil production in the short term would require, at a minimum, prices that are correlated historically with economic recessions.
SNIP
Heun & de Wit [15] found a statistically significant correlation between the Divisia EROI for global oil and gas production and global oil prices. The equation they tested…. indicates that the price of oil increases exponentially as EROI declines. They suggest that the nature of the relation between EROI and the price is such that the effect on price becomes highly nonlinear as EROI declines below 10.
King & Hall [13] examined the relation between EROI, oil prices and the potential profitability of oil-producing firms, termed energy-producing entities (EPEs). They found that for an EPE to receive a 10% financial rate of return from an energy extraction process, which, for example, has an EROI of 11, would require an oil price of roughly $20 per barrel.3 Alternatively, a 100% financial rate of return for the same extraction project would require $60 per barrel (figure 3). King & Hall also echoed Heun & de Wit, suggesting that the relationship between EROI and profitability becomes nonlinear when the EROI declines below 10.
SNIP
— there appears to be a negative exponential relationship between the aggregate EROI of oil production and oil prices;
— there appears to be a comparable relationship between EROI and the potential profitability of oil-producing firms;
— the relationship between EROI and profitability appears to become nonlinear as the EROI declines below 10; and
— the minimum oil price needed to increase global oil supply in the near term is comparable to that which has triggered economic recessions in the past.
SNIP
[My comment: an economy in recession consumes energy more slowly, allowing prices to fall from weaker demand, but it still consumes; even if prices are too low to justify new drilling, eventually enough wells will deplete to the point that the world is producing less oil than even a depressed economy is consuming, forcing buyers into a bidding war and driving prices higher, which will allow increased drilling and production, but not necessarily at prices that will allow the economy to recover. The economy could become mired in a permanent depression, with the economy spending less time in failed recoveries (that never get back to the expansion phase) than in contractions. If end users purchase more energy for more money (resources), they will have less money (resources) for making other purchases, and so consumption and production will fall. Conversely, if they spend the same amount of their budget (resources) on higher priced energy, they will be consuming less energy, and therefore the economy will contract because energy is necessary to fuel the work that produces goods and services.]
The mathematical relation between EROI, net energy and gross energy can be used to explain why, at around an EROI of 10, the relation between EROI and most other variables, such as price, economic growth and profitability, becomes nonlinear.
SNIP
…an EROI of 5 will deliver to society 80% of the gross energy extracted as net energy, while an EROI of 2 will deliver only 50%. This exponential relation between gross and net energy means that there is little difference in the net energy provided to society by an energy source with an EROI above 10, whether it is 11 or 100, but a very large difference in the net energy provided to society by an energy source with an EROI of 10 and one with an EROI of 5. This exponential relation between gross and net energy flows has been called the ‘net energy cliff’ [53] and it is the main reason why there is a critical point in the relation between EROI and price at an EROI of about 10 (figure 4).
SNIP
Much like organisms, economies also have energy requirements that must be met before any investments in growth can be made. Indeed, researchers are now measuring the ‘metabolism of society’ by mapping energy consumption and flow patterns over time [54].4 For example, economies must invest energy simply to maintain transportation and building infrastructure, to provide food and security, as well as to provide energy for direct consumption in transportation vehicles, households and business, etc. The energy flow to society must first pay all of these metabolic energy costs before enabling growth, such as constructing new buildings, roads, etc.
Building off this idea of societal metabolism, we can gain additional insight into the relationship between EROI and economic growth by differentiating between three main uses of energy by society: metabolism, which could be described as the energy and material costs associated with the maintenance and replacement of populations and capital depreciation (examples include food consumption, bridge repair or doctor visits); consumption, which is the expenditure of energy that does not increase populations or capital accumulation and is not necessary for metabolism (examples include purchasing movie tickets or plane tickets for vacation; in general, this category represents items purchased with disposable income); and growth, which is the investment of energy and materials in new populations and capital over and above that necessary for metabolism (examples include building new houses, purchasing new cars, increasing populations).
Figure 5a–d illustrates how the flows of energy to the three categories change as EROI declines. Let us assume that the metabolism of Economy A requires the consumption of 5000 units of energy per year. So, of the 10 000 units of energy extracted, 1000 must be reinvested to produce the next 10 000, and another 5000 are invested to maintain the infrastructure of Economy A. This leaves 4000 units of net energy that could be invested in either consumption or growth (figure 5a).
SNIP
As society transitions to lower EROI energy sources, a portion of net energy that was historically used for consumption and/or growth will be transferred to the energy extraction sector. This transfer decreases the growth and consumption potential of the economy. For example, let us assume that, as energy extraction becomes more difficult in Economy A, it requires an additional 1000 units of energy (2000 total) to maintain its current production of gross energy, decreasing the EROI from 10 to 5 and the net energy from 9000 to 8000. If the metabolism of the economy remains at 5000 units of energy, Economy A now has only 3000 units of energy to invest in growth and/or consumption (figure 5b).
If the EROI for society were to decline to 2, the amount of energy that could previously be invested in growth and consumption would be transferred completely to the energy extraction sector. Thus, given the assumed metabolic needs of Economy A in this example, an EROI of 2 would be the minimum EROI needed to provide enough energy to pay for the current infrastructure requirements of Economy A, or, to put it another way, an EROI of 2 would be the minimum EROI for a sustainable Economy A. If the EROI were to decline below 2, for example in some biofuel systems [31], then the net energy provided to society would not be enough to maintain the infrastructure of Economy A, resulting in physical degradation and economic contraction (figure 5d).
SNIP
it is important to remember that this is a simple example with hypothetical numbers, and, as such, the minimum EROI for our current society is probably, and maybe substantially, higher.
SNIP
‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.’The Red Queen, in Through the looking-glass [55, p. 15]
Another way to explore the impact that a decline in EROI can have on net energy flows to society is to consider the ‘gross energy requirement ratio’ (GERR). The GERR indicates the proportional increase or decrease in gross energy production that is required to maintain the net energy flow to society given a change in the EROI of the energy acquisition process. The GERR is calculated by dividing the gross energy requirement (GER) of the substitute energy source by the GER of the reference energy source. The GER is the minimum amount of gross energy production required to produce one unit of net energy. Both of these equations are outlined below
SNIP
For example, the average barrel of oil in the USA is produced at an EROI of roughly 11 [9]. Using equation (5.1), an EROI of 11 results in a GER of 1.1, i.e. 1.1 units of gross energy must be extracted to deliver 1 unit of net energy to society, with the 0.1 extra being the amount of energy required for the extraction process. For comparison, delivering one unit of net energy from an oil source with an EROI of 5 would require the extraction of 1.25 units of oil. If conventional oil at an EROI of 11 is our reference GER, and our substitute energy resource has an EROI of 5, then the GERR is 1.14. This GERR value indicates that, if society were to transition from an energy source with an EROI of 11 to one with an EROI of 5, then gross energy production would have to increase by 14% simply to maintain the same net energy flow to society. The net effect of declining EROI is to increase the GERR…
SNIP
The most recent estimates indicate that the EROI of conventional oil is between 10 and 20 globally, with an average of 11 in the USA. The future of oil production resides in unconventional oil, which has, on average, higher production costs (in terms of both money and energy) than conventional oil, and should prove in time to have a (much) lower EROI than conventional oil. Similar comments apply to other substitutes such as biofuels. The lack of peer-reviewed estimates of the EROI of such resources indicates a clear need for further investigation.
Transitioning to lower EROI energy sources has a number of implications for global society. First, it will reallocate energy that was previously destined for society towards the energy industry alone. This will, over the long run, lower the net energy available to society, creating significant headwinds for economic growth.
SNIP
[My comment: lowering the net energy available to society does not create “significant headwinds for economic growth,” it outright contracts the real economy. Economic growth (usually measured by GDP) is the increased production of goods and services, but increasing production requires increased work (by men, animals, or machinery), and increased work requires increased energy, because that is what energy is: “the ability to do work.” Less energy=less work=production of FEWER goods and services, i.e,. recession/depression.]
You have obviously done a lot of reading. I am saying in this article that the published EROEIs for wind and solar are misleadingly high. They are not really direct substitutes for finished electricity; there is also too much complexity required. So looking at average EROEIs with renewables included as usually calculated will tend to bias the average on the high side.
I think the lack of peer reviewed EROEI studies for tight oil from shale is partly because they tend to come out quite “high.” This is a problem to explain. So they don’t get shown much. The high values may partly have to do with different techniques used in the calculation (including forecasts of future production, for example, which may be “iffy,” and leaving out many costs of production that are not directly “energy related).” Of course, some of these same issues can lead to misleadingly high EROEIs for wind and solar, as well.
Two points.
1. I agree with you that the EROI’s of solar and wind are unrealistically high, but because they are such a tiny percentage of the total energy mix, it doesn’t throw the total numbers off by much. If you were looking only at electricity and not total energy, then it might distort the number very modestly in Germany were solar plus wind are 25% of the electrical production (as high as they can go without problems on the grid), but a much lower share of Germany’s total energy production.
2. I think there are so few studies of the EROI of tight oil because the numbers are quite *low*. The frackers are extremely tight lipped about many aspects of their business, making them hard to study unless you are a shameless shill, but if they really had a high EROI, they would have been publicizing it in their hyped up sales pitches to prospective investors. Remember “400 years of oil!”? Yeah, sure. I was suspicious of the hype from the beginning, but for a few YEARS it was very hard to find critical analysis by informed parties.
Nehemiah, I agree with your two comments.
“Energy is not yet our primary problem, although it will be soon enough.”
yes and no.
the diminishing returns for obtaining most resources means that more energy is needed just to keep resource production flat.
in other words, even if EROI remained at 10, there would be economic contraction due to the increased energy needs for resource production.
so if there is a “primary problem”, it is that net (surplus) energy is flat or decreasing at the same time as resource production is requiring more energy.
so the future is guaranteed to be contraction of the economy.
Wish I could understand any part of this. My simple mind can only grok that we have an absurdly centralized society that pays no attention to beauty or form (ugliness can’t work).
Before the mid 40’s local governance was more the norm, population grew more slowly. These happenings tended to correlate to systems of thought leading to historical amnesia and placelessness.
I can’t see where any of this was inevitable, just the way things are.
“These happenings…”
What has transpired–like increasing centralization of global scale–since the late 40’s.
Hyper consumption, hyper specialization, etc., alter world view. Altered world views, ideas, mental constructs, alter the physical world. I’m not clear why the mental constructs keep being left out.
Too much psychedelics being experimented with during that era. Confusing the dictates of objective reality with that of altered default hallucinations in the rapacious primate brain.
Folly and crazy combined indeed. There is only one thing that produces beauty and that is the brutality of evolution. At least as so far as we are able to perceive beauty in the natural world and biosphere.
Or in human affairs; equality of opportunity. Neither a child or adult left behind, nor spared from the trials and tribulations of higher cognitive functions.
It is liberty for all or extinction sooner rather than later. Accept and move the process complexity needle, or stagnate and oblivion awaits.
Without exception liberty for all sentients; man, machine and beasts.
But don’t get me wrong, I am all for extinction. A pathetic thermonuclear whimper and then nothing for some time, and then some time as the wheel of time ratchets forward another notch.
The coding sequences of life and in machines is all that matters. It is what turns mineral into more complexity.
Complexity is everything.
From a life long commodities expert, who remains long term optimistic (which I think is a mistake), but here is his view about the foreseeable future:
“something has happened in the last uh maybe 15 years and it’s that that period where there was almost an unlimited supply of which you could then constantly apply new technology to extract it thereby lowering the cost has finally come to an end and in fact i was a speaker at your conference back in the fall of 2008 and i think my my talk was you very cleverly called it paging
parson malthus
“it’s the sense that in this cycle i believe that that this whole malthusian argument which has been completely refuted will come to the forward now it won’t be true again but they’ll will get the equivalent of a malthusian scare and you you’re starting to see it in things like the global copper markets and in the oil markets”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Ysm-dqMN4
Interview, 52 minutes, “The Turning Point for the Commodities Market,”
Jim Grant interviews Leigh Goehring
Just want to add, this is very interesting interview once you get past the introductory remarks and chit chat of the first few minutes. I don’t think anyone will regret taking the time to listen.
My notes:
Leigh Goehring manages a commodity mutual fund. He has many contrary views. Started in 1981, when interest rates were at their peak. Parents were both in the oil industry.
1987 crash was derivative led.
Worked for Prudential from 1986 – 1991, trying to get as much total yield as possible for the insurance company.
He believes that price of oil fell because the cost of extraction got lower and lower because of new technology. The oil that we are now finding is increasingly difficult to extract, so will require higher prices.
Bull story on oil revolves around shale. Many people believe that the shale revolution is exportable to the rest of the world. The problem is that most shale plays will not work as well. USGS survey has put together a book of shale geology. His group has looked over the the USGS survey, and the best shale plays are all in the US. Much less in the way of shale can be produced than what people assume.
He thinks the amount of oil recoverable from the Permian is perhaps a quarter of what some others think.
King Hubbert’s theories couldn’t include oil in places we found later. Most of these require higher priced techniques. Cost curve for production is definitely going up.
October 4, 2020, says he expects to see $100+ oil in the next year. Oil equities not up very much in anticipation of this
The stock prices of offshore drillers are way down; many bankruptcies. If prices are way up, these offshore drillers will do better. Shales produce 5.5 million barrels per day. Offshore oil amounts to more like 23 barrels per day. If we really want more oil, we need more offshore oil.
Germany invested heavily in renewable energy, but has found out the hard way it doesn’t really work well in practice. Electricity rates in Germany are the highest in Europe. Germany still produces as much CO2 as it did 10 years ago. Germany’s coal production is up to provide backup for its intermittent electricity.
US natural gas supply keeps growing. Marcellus Shale production is growing rapidly; more rapidly than is really needed.
Nuclear power is badly thought of in the US, but it is growing in China, India, and the Middle East. Will double uranium consumption. We will need higher prices to extract more. Current price $22; expects the price to go to $100.
Electric cars and the need to produce the renewable energy to support the electric cars means that copper supply will need to ramp way up (at least +50%). Will need higher prices to allow enough extraction. We have run out of easily extractable copper. Believe that the price has to go above $3.20 current price. Commodities are based on supply and demand situation today, not in the future.
If interest rates were to go up, wouldn’t that push commodity prices down? Maybe not. Labor costs are going up in China. Thinks inflation will appear, helping push prices up.
Gold bullion will shift back and forth between undervalued and overvalued. He thinks gold is cheap today. He thinks gold bullion could go to $13,000.
Has gold been disrupted by bitcoin? Bitcoin cannot keep growing without exhausting world electricity supply.
Reinhard and Rogoff’s book “This Time Is Different” talks about an economy that grew slowly for 9 years, and then spurted rapidly 10 years after crashing. Thinks this could happen again.
Aluminum price will stay down.
Agricultural products could participate in commodity boom, if harvest is not very good. Goehring owns 3,000 acres in New York State, producing grass fed beef. Not making money yet.
Bitcoin is an interesting ‘currency’ with no intrinsic value, no insurance (like dollars in a US FDIC insured account), and is 100% dependent on a working highly technical infrastructure. Its exponentially increasing electricity usage (that turns computer equipment into space heating devices) is now a greater threat to the climate than passenger gasoline automobiles. At some point, there will be a huge sell off. I predict large technical problems soon.
She admits that freedom should be taken away to force people to vaccinate
https://twitter.com/CanAditude/status/1370785050342658054
India to reportedly propose cryptocurrency ban, penalizing miners and traders
India will propose a law banning cryptocurrencies, fining anyone trading in the country or even holding such digital assets, a senior government official told Reuters in a potential blow to millions of investors piling into the red-hot asset class.
The bill, one of the world’s strictest policies against cryptocurrencies, would criminalize possession, issuance, mining, trading and transferring crypto-assets, said the official, who has direct knowledge of the plan.
The measure is in line with a January government agenda that called for banning private virtual currencies such as bitcoin while building a framework for an official digital currency. But recent government comments had raised investors’ hopes that the authorities might go easier on the booming market.
Instead, the bill would give holders of cryptocurrencies up to six months to liquidate, after which penalties will be levied, said the official, who asked not to be named as the contents of the bill are not public.
Officials are confident of getting the bill enacted into law as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government holds a comfortable majority in parliament.
If the ban becomes law, India would be the first major economy to make holding cryptocurrency illegal. Even China, which has banned mining and trading, does not penalize possession.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/15/india-plans-cryptocurrency-ban-will-penalize-miners-and-traders.html
The Indian government is trying to ban cash, and has eliminated most of it, has tried to discourage gold and silver ownership with higher taxes, has plans to introduce its own government controlled digital currency, so it makes sense it would ban competing private currencies such as crypto. All governments hate competitors. Evidently the Indian government wants total knowledge of everyone’s buying and selling habits, and presumably they will gain with that knowledge the ability to ban buying and selling by any individual the government deems legally or politically unacceptable. Mark of the beast indeed!
However, there is a second factor which may influence both India and China. Crypto is extremely energy intensive. In the interview with commodities specialist Leigh Goehring that I posted above
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Ysm-dqMN4 Mr. Goehring talks near the end of the interview about the intense energy consumption of crypto. He says if we tried to move all our transactions to blockchain, we would not have enough electricity for all the transactions to be completed. The whole interview is very interesting.
It will be like the times when authorities would scan consumers’ electrical power consumption habits to see if there were any sudden spikes, which would alert them that the consumer had suddenly set up a ‘shroom or pot grow house powered by electric lights.
I saw one of these in action in Jenner by the Sea, California, a quaint costal hippie town in the 1980s.
So what other nefarious activities require inordinate amounts of electricity? 3D printing?
Internet server farms. EV’s will also require more electric production than we can currently provide. Their boosters deny this, but even Elon Musk has said it is so.
“The mining industry accounts for 10% of world energy consumption” https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/mining/energy-use-in-the-mining-industry/story
and a substantial fraction of this is from electricity, maybe 20 or 30 percent (it appears to vary by country, and also by type of mine), and the rest tends to come from diesel or natural gas.
The attempted green energy revolution will use huge amounts of mined materials, even as those minerals are becoming scarcer and therefore more energy intensive per ton extracted. I doubt that this increased energy cost has been included in the EROI’s of solar and wind (since they were EROI’s at the time of calculation, not future EROI’s), but those EROI’s will definitely fall if the world’s politicians are serious about a green energy transition. Frankly, I think dreamer politicians who don’t understand hard sciences or engineering will steer the ship onto the rocks faster than it would get there on its own.
Just as fossil fuels face declining EROI’s, the indirect dependence of green energy on fossil fuels means their EROI’s are declining too–unless we try to go to 100% renewables for power, but then we will need storage capacity (buffering), which will also drop the EROI.
“Sustainable development” is the impossible dream. Why have greens/environmentalists hitched their wagon to an illusion? I can think of three reasons:
One, the illusion that life as we know it can continue is much easier to sell to the public. As Dick Cheney said, “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” Ironically, Greens seem to have moved into the hated Cheney’s corner on this point. “We must all lower our standard of living” is hard to sell.
Two, Communists infiltrated the movement after the fall of the USSR, and old line Marxists are believers in growth and industry. Their vision of the future was always about building a material paradise in this world, not living for the world to come.
Three, the Green/environmentalist movement has always been controlled by social liberals. Theological and cultural conservatives have never been welcome, and social liberalism is a by product or externality or “emergent property” of industrial capitalism. If we return to a world of mostly tiny cities surrounded by larger populations of peasant farmers, while vast national welfare states are replaced by dependence on extended families and religious communities, social liberalism will be as dead as it was in the Middle Ages.
Illusions may have no future, but if people want them to be true badly enough, the temptation to ignore reality until it begins to devour them is hard to resist. Socially liberal values and lifestyles are dependent on industrial civilization and its ability to empower the individual by freeing him from dependence on the patriarchal family and religious authority, those values in turn are cherished very strongly my many today as a morally superior worldview because the liberty of the individual to make his own, unimpeded choices in life is perceived as sacred, and finally people are strongly disinclined to cast their sacred values “under the bus.” So it is renewable energy or perish, because that is the only way to preserve the new sacred canopy of Late Modernity. To return to a pre-industrial way of life is unthinkable for many Moderns, and not merely because of the inconveniences and hardships of such a life, but because they detest the moral system that governs life in an energy-poor environment. Malthusian insights have become a victim of the culture wars.
India has a different assessment of fiat than some other countries. They were a quasi satellite with the USSR before the wall fell. They had a official value of the rupee and the USSR and the eastern block countries traded at that value. That meant that the rupee was virtually worthless in hong kong and taipai when Indians wanted to do some business. This led t0 a thriving grey market in currencies in India.
India was largely a controlled economy until the wall fell. There was a 300% import tax on anything made outside of India. All corporations had to be 51% Indian owned as was the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal.
A stop in taipai a dozen “walkman”s through customs with a little grease and you could omost pay for your trip. Tiny minnows getting by in a world of big fish. Indians get that. Funny now that that dinosaur was a desirable high tech item back in the day. Delhi airport looked like a broken down version of broken colonialism back then and they still called that other thing Bombay. Border crossings often used pieces of wood across the road to demark.
All this open and artificial defining of fiat value along with a long cultural belief as gold as a value token led to widespread distrust of fiat instruments to holds real value in India. Somthing else too. Indians have never really took to a national self identification. They tend to see them self as local “pradeshi” first and Indians second. Their is a real unconscious difference in those who have seen fiat be toilet paper in their lives and those who it has always worked without fail.
Regular ‘booster’ shots will become commonplace as new variants emerge, says UK’s Covid-19 genomics chief
The head of Britain’s Covid-19 genomics programme has warned that there will be a need for regular booster jabs to protect people against the virus as new potentially vaccine-busting variants emerge.
“We have to appreciate that we were always going to have to have booster doses; immunity to coronavirus doesn’t last forever,” Sharon Peacock, UK Covid-19 Genomics (COG-UK) chief, told Reuters at the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Cambridge campus on Monday.
Peacock, whose COG-UK programme has sequenced half of the world’s mapped Covid-19 genomes, said she was confident new variants would emerge that would render the current vaccines ineffective.
“We already are tweaking the vaccines to deal with what the virus is doing in terms of evolution – so there are variants arising that have a combination of increased transmissibility and an ability to partially evade our immune response,” she said.
https://www.rt.com/uk/518113-britain-covid19-regular-vaccine-shots/
So it will not be just “herpes is forever.”
This confirms somehow Geert Vanden Bossche’s prediction.
More tweaks will create more variants that will require more tweaks. We have come full circle.
Near term future looks bright.
A very profitable game of whack-a-mole…
Apparently the universe can spawn evolution out of nothing. I don’t know, but it certainly appears that this behemoth of primordiality seem hell bent on playing the game of life. Any stagnation on its way and the brutality of eradication awaits. No shits given. I love it.
Cant have enough of the ego trip that is the universe.
I’ll fall with grace. Let them useless eaters twitch and squirm as they affirm their worthlessness on their journey to oblivion.
🤘😎🤘
https://scitechdaily.com/evolution-reconstructed-new-proteins-out-of-nothing/amp/
“In the past ten years, however, a new understanding of protein evolution has come about: proteins can also develop from so-called non-coding DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) – in other words, from that part of the genetic material which does not normally produce proteins – and can subsequently develop into functional cell components.”
Yay!
Genetic mutation and new phenotype expression and adaptation by all life forms. The eternal dance. He who does not or can not mutate goes extinct- eventually
But US doctors expect to save all babies, no matter what their problem. Does not help mutation in the right way.
1. Energy crisis Ukraine.
Early this year, a wave of energy “tariff protests” engulfed Ukraine. Because energy prices that until recently were “state-regulated” are now “market-regulated,” prices soared this winter. An “energy uprising” and mass protests were the result.
Under pressure from these protests, the Ukrainian government has decided to have the state regulate energy prices in the municipal utility sector again. However, the government paid a high price for this. In mid-February, an International Monetary Fund mission left the country without approving the extension of Ukraine’s loan program. According to the IMF, one of the stumbling blocks was the government’s inconsistent implementation of market rates for utilities. The new “state regulation of gas and electricity prices are in effect only until April.
2. The country’s unions are talking about ‘energy poverty’ on an unprecedented scale.
In early January, Ukrainian citizens received their first utility bills for the winter, for heating, water and gas supply, sewerage, electricity, home maintenance and garbage collection. Many people were shocked by the amounts they had to pay for heating. Compared to the summer, the cost of gas in winter tripled throughout the country, reaching almost 300 euros per 1,000 cubic meters of gas. At the same time, the average income of Ukrainian households is 120 euros per person.
3. Already in 2019, the State Statistical Service of Ukraine noted a significant increase in “energy poverty” . According to the statistical service, in 2019 about 30% of rural residents and 17% of urban residents reported that they did not have sufficient resources to heat their homes. “In villages and settlements, a significant proportion of the population lives in dwellings that are almost not heated in winter and are unlit.”
In 2020, energy poverty worsened in Ukraine due to the pandemic. Unemployment rose from 8.2% to 9.5%, according to unions, and of Ukraine’s 11 million pensioners, nearly 70% now receive pensions below the real cost of living.
4. As soon as energy prices rose in early January, the protests began. On January 4, residents of Lubny, in the Poltava region, blocked the highway between Kiev and Kharkov.
Protests were held in 13 districts of the Kharkiv region, many of which involved complete or partial blocking of roads. The protesters demanded that the government immediately reduce the price of gas. Residents of Ukrainian cities then joined the protests. The unions demanded that the government return regulation of gas and electricity prices and restore electricity benefits to those living near nuclear power plants.
5. The Ukrainian government maintains that subsidies, a partial compensation by the state for the cost of utilities for the poor, sufficiently protects them from the rise in utility prices. However, neither the union representatives nor the citizens agree. “If the people receive subsidies, they are still not enough for a normal life and for paying all the costs of utilities, the unions argue. With the increase in local protests at the beginning of the year, more and more local authorities began to contact the government and parliament demanding a review of Ukraine’s tariff policy.
6. In early February, opinion polls showed that the popularity of the ruling and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had dropped significantly. Zelenskyy promised to cut people’s heating bills in half in 2019. Many opposition politicians began to talk about early parliamentary elections and called for the government to resign. Opinion polls show that two-thirds of Ukrainians want parliamentary re-elections.
This situation was exacerbated by negotiations with an IMF delegation to resume loans to support the state during the global pandemic. One of the conditions for lending was the continuation of market reforms in the energy sector, including free pricing for gas, electricity and other utilities. Having reached this impasse, the government decided to reduce the price of gas by 30% until April and to postpone the increase in electricity tariffs.
7. Although the Ukrainian government has managed to temporarily stem the wave of protests, the tariff crisis is far from over. Recent opinion polls show that 86% of respondents consider January’s energy price increases to be unjustified, and 76.4% of respondents do not support the government’s commitments to the IMF to introduce market prices for gas and electricity. The unions are now preparing for another round of protests by the end of March. “We will wait until the frost is over, then we will protest again,” the unions argue. For its part, the government plans to return to free pricing in the gas and electricity markets on April 1. They hope that as the heating season of the Ukrainian winter draws to a close, consumers will not feel an increase in energy prices as strongly.
8.In addition, the Ukrainian government must also decide on the fate of people who are currently in debt to utility companies, which amounted to 73 billion hryvnias (2 billion euros) at the beginning of the winter, and have increased since then. Of this, about 30 billion hryvnia (800 million euros) is made up of debts for gas, another 20 billion hryvnia (550 million euros) of debts for heating and hot water, and six billion hryvnia (180 million euros) of electricity payments. It is mainly low-income Ukrainian families who do not have the means to pay for utilities. The only property they have left is a house or an apartment. Last year, the Ukrainian parliament passed a law prohibiting utilities from imposing fines and penalties, shutting down utilities or seizing someone’s house or apartment in lieu of payment during the corona crisis and lockdowns.
But once the lockdowns are lifted, utilities will be able to collect debts by seizing debtors’ bank accounts or real estate. Ukrainian law allows an apartment or house to be evicted if a person’s debt exceeds 20 minimum wages (120 000 hryvnia). Now many people are in danger of losing their homes. If debtors are sent into the streets en masse, it will lead to new, even broader protests.
Oh, dear! The people in Ukraine are having terrible problems. The poor people cannot afford the full cost of utilities. Some of these poor people are likely to lose their homes, once the lockdowns are ended.
“Saving markets from a pandemic meltdown comes with a cost:
“…Markets, investors, companies and governments are now so addicted and exposed to low interest rates… that there’s no apparent path to normalising interest rates – even in an inflationary environment that warrants increased rates – that doesn’t risk another financial crisis.”
https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/a-year-of-tina-and-fomo-creates-a-new-headache-20210315-p57as0.html
“Public Debt Isn’t the Problem, Soaring Deficits Are: For markets, it is not debt levels, but fear of uncontrolled debt growth, where crises are born…
“…the question is: What happens to market confidence and borrowing costs in the future?”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-15/covid-stimulus-europe-s-public-debt-isn-t-the-problem-soaring-deficits-are?srnd=opinion
I would say the debt itself is the problem, since fear driven reactions to the debt would not be a worry if the debt were not so large to begin with. Deficits can (I dare not predict “will” because who can know the minds of politicians?) stop soaring after the pandemic, but the debt is still there. The problem, first, is that much of the debt is short term, and second that instead of paying it off as it comes due, most governments just roll it over, and if rates normalize, they will be rolling it over at higher rates which may be unbearably onerous for both the economy and public finances. “Public debt isn’t the problem” is the wrong way to look at it. Public debt is exactly the problem.
It is definitely difficult to see a way out of the current situation.
“The Portuguese economy is in a deep slump… The European Commission’s estimate points to a chain contraction of 2.1% of Portuguese gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of this year, the biggest drop in 27 member states.”
https://www.haveeru.com.mv/the-portuguese-economy-is-in-a-deep-slump-in-the-european-union/
“Coronavirus crisis in Spain: ‘I never imagined myself asking for help’… “The coronavirus pandemic has triggered an “unprecedented” crisis that has done much to exacerbate the already significant social inequalities in Spain.”
https://english.elpais.com/society/2021-03-15/coronavirus-crisis-in-spain-i-never-imagined-myself-asking-for-help.html
The added inequality problem seems to hit everywhere.
“Minus $7,400 a day? How can shipping rates fall below zero?
“…Last week, average time-charter equivalent (TCE) rates for very large crude carriers (VLCCs; tankers that carry 2 million barrels of crude) sank to -$7,400 per day on the Middle East-Asia route. Multiplied by a voyage duration of around 50 days, that’s a net *cost* of $370,000 to the shipowner delivering a customer’s crude.”
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/minus-7400-a-day-how-can-shipping-rates-fall-below-zero
It turns out rates aren’t negative, they are just very low. Demand for the tankers is down. Why not take them out of service?
On the other hand it cost more to get a shipping container across the pacific than it ever has. With even conservative mainstream bond gurus predicting 4% inflation were right on the edge of where rubber hits the road. Right now importers are paying the shipping cost and passing it to consumers to catch the stimulus mini boom. Its very soon interest rates have to be raised to slow down inflation a bit and that will put the quash on the amount of future stimulus unless we are totally in the matrix.
As soon as that happens IMO we will see a pull back in good pricing. The importers will cut orders. Shipping costs will go down as the crazy wait time at long beach lessens. We have lost a lot of businesses and a lot of jobs and they are not returning. We have not come to terms with that yet. So not the D word but oh most certainly the R word. Long term they will print but i think a bit of deflation ahead rather than roar off the hyperinflation cliff. They ve got to keep some semblance of control in place and some control capacity in reserve. It will come, the final print, but its not that desperate yet. This 2-4 T for infrastructure will be the last shot in the arm for some time IMO.
“Dutch police officers intervened to break up an anti-lockdown protest in The Hague on Sunday on the eve of an election in the country. Police tweeted calls for protesters to return home repeatedly, stating that there were too many demonstrators even as more arrived at the protest.”
https://www.euronews.com/2021/03/14/dutch-police-break-up-anti-government-protest-ahead-of-election
“Liege [Belgium] this morning is recovering from a riot involving about 200 youths who broke away from a peaceful demonstration against police violence to attack police and ransack the city centre, sending nine people to hospital, including five police officers.
“The trouble began in the margins of a peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration…”
https://www.brusselstimes.com/news/belgium-all-news/159810/riot-liege-nine-injured-businesses-plundered-hospital-black-lives-matter-demonstration-violence-police-saint-lambert-brussels-willy-demeyer/
“London police faced a backlash from the public on Sunday and an official inquiry into their actions after using heavy-handed tactics to break up an outdoor vigil for a woman whose suspected killer is a police officer.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-crime-murder-idUSKBN2B605T
“New [UK] anti-protest bill raises profound concern and alarm, human rights groups say… More than 150 organisations have warned ministers that a new law handing police tougher powers to crack down on protesters would be “an attack on some of the most fundamental rights of citizens”.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/mar/14/new-anti-protest-bill-raises-profound-concern-human-rights-groups-say
“Thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across Germany against coronavirus restrictions, injuring police in Dresden. In Stuttgart, demonstrators attacked members of the media.”
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-protests-against-coronavirus-restrictions-leave-12-dresden-officers-injured/a-56866499
Seems like they are getting more like US Cops by the day—
I think it is all part of the one world government, one world police training, one world medical tracking, one world bank, etc….
Use of force with our brothers real risky nowadays. With the unclean not so much. Thats why they cant let protected species stray into the unclean camp and also why they are so welcomed there.
More demonstrations, in many places in Europe.
“Problems mount for Bank of England governor after weathering Covid storm… Andrew Bailey often argues the BoE has “ample firepower” to stimulate and support the economy as it recovers from Covid-19.
“But the central bank has been reeling from stinging criticism from its internal watchdog that it had serious “knowledge gaps” in understanding how QE worked, and an inability to explain the effects of the scale of asset purchases.”
https://www.ft.com/content/7248bd6c-bff3-4052-8e02-60ddc4a22106
“British manufacturers are facing their biggest profits squeeze since the financial crisis, a survey warns.
“Research by Insider Pro found that firms had been hammered by the pandemic and red tape related to Brexit.”
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-9361025/Manufacturers-face-biggest-profit-squeeze-financial-crisis.html
The UK’s combination of problems leave it in a bad state of affairs.
“US stimulus package leaves Europe standing in the dust: This will hasten Europe’s and the UK’s relative economic decline.”
https://www.ft.com/content/20096b0a-8a94-453d-8788-c3b15dc1704c
“The European Central Bank is reacting to rising interest rates in the world, particularly in the United States, by stepping up to increase security purchases.
“The eurozone and other countries in the world are out of sync with the United States in terms of achieving economic recovery, and this is pushing government policy makers to the edge.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4413677-european-central-bank-responds-rising-u-s-interest-rates
If one country tries a huge stimulus package, suddenly ever other country thinks that approach might work as well. Keep up with the USA!
Excellent presentation by Dr. Greg Eckel – Immunity and Vaccines
Way too may problems with these vaccines to recommend them.
From Dr Kendricks site…. here was rip back the curtain and see that there are PR people involved in the CEP… they have been working with behavioural scientists and developing strategies to ensure the CEP train does not get shoved off the tracks…
See how thorough the Elders are…. not a stone left unturned.
Malcolm you refer to the view of one doctor, from the BMJ:
‘….criminalising people who intentionally hurt others through false information should also be considered. The freedom to debate, and to allow the public to raise legitimate vaccine concerns to fill the knowledge void, should not extend to causing malicious harm 4.’
The doctor is Melinda Mills, a professor of demography and sociology at the University of Oxford and director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science. She is on the UK Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies’ Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) and Ethnicity subgroups and its Vaccines Science Coordination Group, the Royal Society’s Science in Emergency Tasking COVID-19 (SET-C) group, and the High Level Advisory Group for the European Commissioner for the Economy.
Mills is the main author of the COVID-19 vaccine deployment: Behaviour, ethics, misinformation and policy strategies, prepared for the Royal Society and the British Academy, published 21 October 2020.
It was in this report that Mills suggested to “Bring in legislation and enforce criminal prosecutions for spreading misinformation”.
But as you say Malcolm “who, exactly, is to decide what constitutes malicious harm? I feel that this would be a rather large step – backwards – for mankind. This moves well beyond obliterating someone’s reputation. We should be flinging anti-vaxxers in jail.”
It’s notable that the report Mills prepared on COVID-19 vaccine deployment did not disclose conflicts of interest, i.e. that the Royal Society receives funding from vaccine manufacturers AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline, and both the Royal Society and British Academy receive funding from the UK government Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS)
See my email to the Presidents of the Royal Society and British Academy challenging their failure to disclose their conflicts of interest on a report promoting COVID-19 vaccine products:
https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2020/12/failure-to-disclose-conflicts-of-interest-covid-19.pdf
Well done Eddy, and Elizabeth Hart.
She seems precisely the kind of person Melinda Mills wants to incarcerate.
It’s amazing how nasty people can get when other people interfere with their business interests. This goes not only for gangsters and racketeers, but also for the millions of ordinary people whose livelihoods they are hell-bent on destroying.
The panic of impending irrelevance of the useless corporate and guvmint drone, bean counters, penny pinchers. It is the squirms and twitches out of a dying subpar breed, a miserable and failed lineage of Homo sapiens sapiens that is dependent on cheap and easy energy and debt.
With the petroleum and semiconductor spigot now being cranked shut in expectation of the great “purge”. One simply has to wait and observe which of the “master” lines has won.
The horror of equality of opportunity. Of course they try all the tricks in the book. Marginalization, outright lies, whataboutism, ruler techniques. When that no longer works, it’s violence, force and oppression that awaits. Nancy needs her prestige and authority, while deserving nothing.
Assume the useless eater hoopla “won”, evolution and stagnation would ultimately get them anyway.
Ironic, obstinately fighting a lost battle as only true MOARons would do. The reptilian craves, the reptilian desires. MOAR!
🤣👍👍
Quite right, let’s imprison all the intelligent people! Simply brilliant!
Nearly every institution would appear to be morally and intellectually bankrupt these days, if not bought outright by Big Pharma.
Not that we ever thought much of sociologists in the first place! Another pseudo-science.
Well, if Geert v. Bossche is even half-right, these bastards will get theirs this coming winter:I bet they are eager for their injections as ‘essential workers’, even trying to queue-jump …… Ha!
What is an Anti-Vaxxer?
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/
Russia’s Covid-19 Vaccine Is Embraced Abroad, Snubbed at Home
https://beeboomonline.com/russias-covid-19-vaccine-is-embraced-abroad-snubbed-at-home.html
American Rescue Plan: China worried about economic impact of Joe Biden’s US$1.9 trillion coronavirus bailout
https://finance.yahoo.com/finance/news/american-rescue-plan-china-worried-093000557.html
I can understand why others would be concerned about all the debt being added, without a way to see an end to the problem.
VIDEO – Lebanon: A State in Collapse
Is it a state? It looks more like monkey business to me.
Quote: “ladies and gentlemen are there too many treasures it seems like it and that’s
what you hear in the mainstream financial media”–but is it true???
Here is a different view of the matter by one of the leading “financial plumbing” experts (18 minutes, 26 seconds):
Fake Recovery: MAX PAIN TRADE 2021
https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2021/03/fake-recovery-max-pain-trade-2021.html
Interesting post! I think the author (whoever he is) is likely to get quite a few things right. He sees deflation ahead, even with a lot of money printing:
This is Mac10, who used to keep a blog called PonziWorld. Some of his stock market insights are above my pay-grade but he is always a bracing read. His previous article sums up the current political scene (and FWIW I am sympathetic to his view):
“Per the title of this post, for four years straight we were ruled by greatness seeking Neo-Nazi Qanon acolytes. Now we are overrun with left wing cancel culture snowflakes re-ordering reality to ease their accelerating mental breakdown. The one inexorable bond they have in common, they are all a**holes.”
https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-age-of-assholes-is-ending.html
If we had real money printing going on, we really would get inflation. However, QE is bank reserve creation, and bank reserves absolutely, positively, and undeniably do *not* circulate in the real economy where they would function as money, and no matter how many times journalists, internet pundits, and politicians may describe QE as money printing, constant repetition, while it may make it seem real in the minds of the public, cannot make it so in reality.
But yes, it is heartening to find someone else in the deflationist camp at a time when every man and his brother seems to be of one opinion regarding inflation, and even some long time deflationists have jumped on board. In finance, majority opinion is rarely a reliable guide to what the future holds, except to the extent that a near unanimous opinion often signals the opposite of what the great majority expects. For example, the huge quantity of dumb money that is still short Treasuries, as the writer notes. The unwind from those positions will be painful, and non-linear effects cannot be ruled out.
You’ve made this point about money printing before, and I’d like to believe you’re right because your right about many other topics, however I do understand.
When a central bank buys a treasury from a commercial bank, does this not make it easier for a government to spend more than if it can afford to pay from taxes if it had to sell bonds to the private market? And doesn’t this extra QE enabled government spending circulate in the economy as real money?
Please explain what I’m missing.
correction: “I do NOT understand”.
Well of course some of it ends up in the economy one way or another, usually with some “clever” money laundry techniques behind the smoke and mirrors.
No, I’m talking about straight forward government spending, for example increasing the deficit to send out stimulus checks so people can buy groceries.
Are you saying QE does not make it possible for a government to run a larger deficit than it could otherwise afford?
I’m saying two paths, money laundry by various CB/banking shenanigans, and injections of helicopter money to keep the racket and useless eatery going due to the covid BS shutdowns, lockdowns, etc.
Nobody is doing anything productive, therefore it “works” with lockdowns and remote “work”. If you’d do that a century or two ago, oh boy…
You could lock down the shebang for a millennia without problems. The few really “essential” workers could keep this fakery of equality of outcome blowing through finite resources with nothing to show for, going until depletion is total and compete.
🤔
If QE helps Uncle Sam to borrow more money, it is an indirect effect and hard to measure, but let’s say it does. I agree that would be a fiscally bad or risky outcome (debt always increases financial risk), but government debt, because it borrows from private lenders who buy with money from the existing money supply, is not itself inflationary. In fact, because it must be serviced, the long term effect is deflationary.
(Borrowed money can however have temporary inflation effects. For example, if you borrow money from rich lenders with a low need to spend on consumer goods and give it to poorer people with a high need to spend on consumer goods, then you can get some inflation, but it is still debt which must be serviced, so it has not actually increased the supply of money in the economy. You can’t get “hyperinflation” from a mechanism like that. Hyperinflation always requires either real money printing or, alternatively, supply destruction, which sometimes takes place during wars.)
The inflationist argument (by inflationists who understand how QE really works) is that ONE DAY the US government will deal with the debt by resorting to real money printing that will create hyperinflation. It is, they argue, just a matter of time. You can bet your bottom dollar those dirty bastards will eventually do it.
They may of course be right. However, there is another option: a transparent default, hopefully one-time, in which the USG promises to pay off bond holders at so many cents on the dollar. Why might the USG resort to this option rather than inflation?
1. A growing army of retired voters do *not* want inflation.
2. Big business generally does not want inflation, especially not severe inflation, and they definitely have the ear of the politicians.
Now might Congress ignore these constituencies and monetize USG debt issuance anyway? Yes, they could. One danger here is that MMTers are gaining support by many on Wall Street by arguing: “Look, the Fed has been printing all this money since the Great Financial Crisis, and so does Japan and other advanced countries, and it has not caused any serious inflation. That proves inflation is not a threat for countries like ours that issue their own currency, blah, blah, blah.”
That is all wrong, but because so many people misunderstand QE, they think the MMTers have a point. Their point is wrong, and true deficit monetization would be a catastrophe. We have a long history to show us what happens when governments, no matter what favorable advantages they may possess, resort to real money printing, but that is not what QE is.
Luckily, the Fed is very explicitly forbidden by law to monetize the debt or to print any net new money (although they can do limited things such as replace worn out dollar bills). And the treasury dept. can print only a very small amount of money without Congressional authorization. So if any significant money printing really does get started, we will need an act of Congress which will be reported loud and clear in the financial press, which is always scanning the horizon for signs of inflation.
Money creation in the currently existing financial system is done through private bank loans. This includes not only US banks, but banks abroad as well, which can and do issue dollar denominated loans (“eurodollars,” which are just dollars that originate in Europe or any other place outside the United States). There are a LOT of these dollars, and they may have been the primary source of the 1970s inflation. These dollars flow back and forth across international borders constantly in volumes too large to measure. They are like a wild card in the financial system, but they are still debts which must be serviced, so I don’t seem them being able to lead to hyperinflation. Ultimately, that will require the USG to purposely increase the money supply by a substantial amount, and everyone will know if they empower themselves to do that.
Thanks kindly for the thoughtful reply.
For the record, just so you know my priors, I expect a deflationary depression or crash, followed some time later by high inflation, after governments respond.
I agree with everything you said, and already understood most of it, although I did not know European banks are permitted to make $US loans.
Nevertheless I’m still confused, which must mean that my understanding of the QE process is flawed. I’ve tried to study QE at Wikipedia and other places, but they obscure the essence with too many words.
Here is my understanding of QE. If I am wrong, please tell me how QE actually works.
The government spends more money than it receives in taxes and makes up the difference by selling treasury bonds to commercial banks, who buy in volume, and then resell them, pocketing a spread for their services.
In the absence of QE, the commercial banks sell the treasuries to the private market (which might include other central banks). In the presence of QE, some of the treasuries are sold to the Federal Reserve which adds them to its balance sheet as an asset, and creates money out of thin air to pay for them, which is added as a liability to its balance sheet.
When the fed buys treasuries like this, it ensures there is plenty of demand for a rising government deficit, which also keeps the bond price high, and thus the interest rate low.
This new money is real and circulates as stimulus checks and bombs, but because it shows up as a liability on the fed’s balance sheet, it is not really “printed money” as you say.
But for me this does not pass the smell test because the intertest rate is artificially suppressed below what a free market would demand. And so I call it “printed money” because it is a key enabler for us to live beyond our means, thus creating a bigger bubble that will do much more harm on the down slope than if we grew up and acted like adults.
Please tell me where I am wrong.
They have done a good job of keeping the incredible astronomical sums of QE in the funny money world. But there are leaks. The sums are so astronomical that even a small leak is a substantial inflation source. 1% of a trillion is a mere ten zeros. or ten billion.
QE is way beyond what we called QE two years ago although the Fed is suspending some of the 5 new ways to lend money they created considered by most to be completely in violation of the fed charter. “Emergency”.
Sorry I disagree with your characterization. QE is not misunderstood like a some teenager with angst. Whats misunderstood IMO is that QE in any way represents normal actions within a healthy solvent financial system. We need a new word. QE no longer has any sense of meaning when applied to so many different things and multiples of multiples. It like calling a parachute failure a controlled descent IMO. Even disregarding the destructive nature of the practice and the funny money entering the real economy it radical creation of wealth disparity might as some point create previously unseen social unrest.
Nonsense, prices go up, not down.
Dennis L.
Really good post today from Tim Watkins
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021/03/14/slow-fuse-burning/
I agree it is good. It is interesting to get Tim Watkins’ perspective on the British situation. As he points out, it is really an energy problem. It is not going to go away. Many of the problems were already on their way, before the pandemic came around.
I like Mr Watkins when he writes about energy and the economy, when writing about the hyped cold not so much …
COVID denialism –
a broad term leveled at those who have seen through lies regarding the COVID scamdemic – has been enshrined in legal history and case law, at least in Canada. This is another horrendous yet sadly predictable step of the COVID agenda, which is none other than the agenda to steal your rights and freedom. MSM outlet CBC reported last week that a judge stripped a man (who remains anonymous at this stage) of his custody rights in his divorce case with his ex-wife due to his belief that COVID was a hoax, and his subsequent decision to defy social distancing and mask wearing rules. In other words, he was stripped of some of his rights due to his COVID denialism. The case was heard in late 2020 in the Ontario Superior Court, however Justice George W. King delivered the written decision at the end of January 2021, and the story was just picked up by The Free Thought Project.
Judge Considers Man’s Belief that COVID is a Hoax to be a Factor in Determining his Worthiness as a Father I have been unable to locate the link to the original ruling, and the CBC article does not link to it, however the article reported that the judge explicitly wrote that the man’s public promotion of his opinions was affecting the health and welfare of his children:
“Ontario Superior Court Justice George W. King denied a Windsor man interim custody of his kids because the man’s fervent anti-masking beliefs means he wouldn’t take appropriate actions to keep them safe from COVID-19. The decision notes the man believes COVID-19 to be a hoax and has boasted in public about flouting health restrictions such as masking and social distancing.
“The health and welfare of the children (and by extension their principal caregiver) should not be jeopardized because of [his] public behaviour in promotion of his opinions,” he wrote.”
This is quite an astounding thing for a judge to write, since it shows how the judge has bought the official COVID narrative hook, line and sinker. The judge is saying that if you challenge the theory (i.e. brainwashing propaganda) that COVID is a highly lethal dangerous disease, that can only be contained or avoided with mandatory social distancing and masking, that therefore you are “jeopardizing” the health of your kids. Wow. It is truly shocking a judge could be so out-of-touch with scientific reality. However, it gets worse. The CBC further reported:
““I have concluded that the respondent’s behaviour is dictated by his world view. Everything else is subordinate to that view, including, but not limited to, his love for his children,” the decision by Justice King read.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/windsor-covid-19-custody-decision-1.5937278
If that is the story being told, people believe it.
In fact, even after 80% of the population is vaccinated, they likely will still believe it. After all, there might be mutations. There might be a 0.1% chance that they can die from something being passed around.
This is the way a self-organizing system works. It is really more a sign of inadequate energy consumption per capita than it is of a very lethal disease.
If people are terribly afraid of the virus, they will demand to be “socially distanced.” They will demand all kinds of changes that greatly increase costs. The real impact of these changes will be to reduce energy consumption, particularly oil consumption. People will stay home because all of the social distancing drives up costs too much.
One more step to the future of, If you disagree with the mainstream narrative, if you do not follow the orders of the government, if you in any way make the authorities uncomfortable, your children, job, and means to travel will be taken away. Sounds like China.
It surely sounds like equality of outcome.
Accept the herd.
Buy, consume, get vaxxed, OBEY!
The rapacious primatery has to prevail.
Let the limbic system dictate the usual horrors to happen.
Write it down somewhere.
End of discussion.
🤣👍
Agree — this is how the system would be expected to respond…
The Lethal Injection is where (a few) humans are in a unique position to recognize that extinction is imminent and intervene to dramatically reduce the suffering.
If rapacious primatery is of importance to them, let ‘em have the vax then and get the “V” stamped onto the passports. A refreshing new letter compared with the rather horrifying “J” signifying amateur hour horror eugenics.
Kick back, live the small life. Watch it unfold.
😊
Once discovered, it usually takes 40 years to deplete wells.
That explains the lag between oil found and oil used.
MK Hubbert predicted US (conventional) peak oil in 1970 based on this observation.
Except for shale.
AND deep water.
UK police went mad last night attacking women at a vigil in London gathered to honour a woman who was abducted and murdered by a police on the common. What a contrast to how they handled BLM protests during lock down. UK police are violent thugs who often assault people just for the fun of it. The force seems to concentrate some of the worst elements in the society into its ranks.
They are also a political police force that organises attacks on people or protects them depending on their opinions. The appeals court ruled last week that state agents can commit serious crimes, including torture and murder, on enemies of the state. These women were protesting against the insecurity of women on London streets and that is all that it took for the police to rough them up.
> The night police lost control: Officers shoved women, pinned protestors to the ground and ‘elbowed people in faces’ at vigil for murdered marketing executive Sarah Everard, 33
A crowd of around 1,500 people gathered at Clapham Common in south London to remember 33-year-old marketing executive Sarah Everard. But scuffles broke out as police surrounded a bandstand covered in flowers left in tribute. Officers have been blasted for using heavy-handed tactics critics dubbed ‘quasi military’. Horrifying footage taken on the night shows a row of mask-wearing police officers yelling ‘move back’ as they shove protesters away. Other clips showed demonstrators being hauled off by police officers (top left and right) as chilling screams ring out through the crowd. Witnesses said women were ‘elbowed in the face’ by police for helping others off the ground – with one reportedly left bleeding.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9360449/Officers-shoved-women-pinned-protestors-elbowed-people-faces-Sarah-Everard-vigil.html
The stories we seem to hear here about UK police are about how “nice” they are. Maybe that disappears as society is more under stress.
Remember, in this case, it’s one of their own who is accused of killing Sarah Everard. The protest is against the action of a Policeman.
You can’t make this stuff up!
Woman On The Idaho Falls School Board Arguing For Mask Mandates Almost Passes Out As She Is Gasping For Air!!!
This is fun! But if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, start from 6 minutes in.
A little humorous!
Look at these fools!!! What are those silly things they have on their faces? How ridiculous!!!
‘I don’t know and I don’t care’ hahahahahaha…. ‘that’s not the point Paul’….
I imagine she’d be keen to stone Paul to death… she is spitting angry and in danger of choking on her tongue…
She is a crazed zombified CovIDIOT… if anyone is infected it is Lizzie… her brain is now damaged permanently.
She must get the Lethal Injection immediately — Lizzie needs to be cured.
I thought you’d enjoy this!
It shows the stresses that ordinary people are under who have to make these decisions and who have to do so de-mo-cra-tic-ally. I thought Paul did very well to keep so cool, calm and polite under conditions of considerable provocation.
These are our “representatives” folks. Feel not distressed. The clearly got this sucker under control.
Ah, the beacons of intellect shining their lucid radiance of awesome as they lay down the path through these dark, dark times.
Nah, just kidding. It’s just the typical useless eater pointless and dullard yada-yada and cackle.
Let it burn. 🔥
🤣👍👍
The comments section on that video is interesting
But what’s most striking is that new discoveries aren’t even close to keeping pace with the loss of conventional resources. According to Rystad, the current resource replacement ratio for conventional resources is only 16 percent. In other words, only one barrel out of every six consumed is being replaced with new resources.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Biggest-Oil-Gas-Discoveries-Of-2019.html
When I show that to DelusiSTANIS … they usually have no response… or they refer to the gluts…
I explain to them that a glut does not mean we’ve discovered more oil – it just means we are pumping it out too quickly..
It’s like you have a bank account with 100k in it… you normally withdraw $100 per day … if you start to withdraw 5k per day then you have a glut of money … but money in your account has not increased.
Note how the MSM runs regular oil glut articles… DelusiSTANIS are stooopid… they are unable to work out the obvious. That’s the point of the oil glut articles
Interesting article from Off-Guardian asking what happened to John Magufuli, President of Tanzania. This is the guy who thought CV19 was a scam and sent 5 odd items for testing (to prove it was a scam), goat, motor oil, papaya, quail and jackfruit, and four came back positive.
The gist of the article is that he has been ‘taken care of’ for not joining the CV club. Seems like he might have died yesterday, from CV19.
The article itself is quite short, comments extensive.
Tanzania – The second Covid coup?
President John Magufuli’s disappearance makes him potentially the 2nd “Covid denier” head of state to lose power.
https://off-guardian.org/2021/03/12/tanzania-the-second-covid-coup/
Tanzania seems to have an extremely low CV19 death rate, 21 deaths so far:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/tanzania
A person wonders whether Tanzania is doing the testing needed to determine how many COVID cases that they really have. Poor countries have other priorities than testing and reporting those results.
Hi Everyone on OFW.
Can some wise being please explain the quote that it takes six times the amount of energy in one barrel to extract just one barrel of oil.
I’d explain it by saying it’s wrong.
My current estimate is: On a world wide average, currently we are at the point where we are still using less energy to get one barrel of oil’s end products to users then is in a barrel of oil. But not by enough so that the end user can make enough profit to buy the next barrels worth, therefore we use more debt to pay for it.
Oil’s dead state, (using more energy to make end products then is in the end products), should happen around 2030 or shortly afterwards. I believe this applies to all currently used fossil fuels (oil, coal, NG)
Right, the diminishing utility of oil masked by cheap debt.
But, hey, lets continue manufacture cheap jank, financed with debt to perpetrate the folly of useless eatery.
BAU to the tilt!
Yay.
🤩
The “dead” state of fossil fuels comes about when the economy collapses. It takes with it the our ability to keep the electrical system with it. So switching from oil to electricity is mostly wishful thinking.
Trying to figure out what percentage of energy is used to extract oil is an interesting exercise, but there are so many problems with measurement that it doesn’t tell us very much. To the extent that the measurement makes sense, it really is an all fuels combine measurement that is needed. If coal extraction is a whole lot cheaper than oil extraction in terms of energy consumption, than a big rise in coal consumption can help maintain the overall economy.
There was indeed a big increase in coal consumption when China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Also, there were many more workers in the world labor pool. These changes, plus more debt, helped pump up the world economy. Now we are getting to the end of the benefit of these changes. China’s coal production has pretty much topped out–it is having difficulty keeping prices high enough. The low wages of China and India are helping push the wages of many workers in higher income countries down.
The energy we are extracting now is not providing a “high enough return on workers’ human energy” now. There are way too many low-wage or no-wage people in the world today. That is the sign that the economy is likely to crash.
There is very few actual productive workers. IC is the worlds largest and worst jobs program ever.
When the “work” force mainly consists of useless eaters, this is what to expect. Everything, money, prosperity, debt, including life itself becomes worthless. Because their stagnation is the polar opposite of evolution and life in extension.
It is equality of outcome for you. It is what you want when you realize the horrors of equality of opportunity while realizing you’re just an average halfwit easily outcompeted by some nerdy whiz kid with his computer terminal and automaton.
You can’t count the input and output of the worlds energy producers and users. But you can use math and Thermodynamics to get a close enough guess-a-mate for the planet Earth.
You can look at the prices of fossil fuels and see that they have been trending lower and lower, relative to what producers need. You can also see that wage disparity has been increasing, and that companies in general are having a lot of trouble with profitability.
These are all signs that the economy is reaching limits. The population has outgrown its resource base. This tends to lead to collapse.
Gail wrote: “You can look at the prices of fossil fuels and see that they have been trending lower and lower, relative to what producers need.”
Indeed, that always happens when the producers produce more than the consumers need or want. Same with US natural gas. It has sold below the cost of production for years because the frackable deposits has produced too much. However, all overproduction eventually ends. If nothing else, it ends when some of the existing wells start running dry. Then the supply glut evaporates, and refineries start trying to outbid each other for the limited remaining supply and pass the added cost on down the line. As prices rise, drilling activity eventually resumes.
This price roller coaster has been going on since 1859, and it still has a ways to run.
I have never seen anyone say that before.
What is commonly quoted is that we use 6 barrels of oil for each one we find.
Thanks MO1, and everyone else too for the clarification. Seems I miss quoted the quote, that is a relief.
How is it we’ve not ran out of oil if we use more than we find? Are we using oil more efficiently to make each barrel last longer or something?
Once discovered, it usually takes 40 years to deplete wells.
That explains the lag between oil found and oil used.
MK Hubbert predicted US (conventional) peak oil in 1970 based on this observation.
We also have a huge amount of very heavy oil and also oil from shale that we have already found. If the price of oil would rise endlessly (say $300+ per barrel), we could get these out.
I think the quote is something like, “We find 6 barrels of conventional oil, for every barrel of oil we use (conventional or unconventional).” Hubbert was talking about conventional oil. Many Peak Oilers have been thinking only about free flowing, liquid oil that comes easily out of wells.
Let me reflect what I’m interpreting. We are using 6 times more oil from our existing supply than we discover (each well lasting about 40 years)…and…We find 6 barrels of conventional oil, for every barrel of oil we use (conventional or unconventional).” , but the conventional oil is unrefined or heavy oil (or shale) that requires more energy/ work/ cost to make it useable, so we need a higher price to make extraction/ refining viable?
That seems to be a big problem if we have oil refineries closing down, because it’s as if producers have already done the maths and shut shop. Or perhaps better refineries are needed to crack heavier oil. In addition shale seems a short term solution that wreaks ground water and increase pollution.
Can we build an economy that doesn’t waste FF and uses them more efficiently. How much time/ leverage will that buy.
Actually, the oil from shale doesn’t use more energy than the conventional oil. And oil from shale isn’t particularly difficult to refine. Its EROEI tends to be fairly high. But it is still unprofitable to extract, refine, pay taxes on, and sell. It has other costs that don’t go into EROEI calculations that are high. The way the calculation is done (estimating future energy production from existing wells) may bias the result high, too.
Very heavy oil, such as that found in Venezuela and Canada, really does use more energy to extract, ship, and refine. But some businesses in Canada at one point were talking about burning some of the bitumen in place to provide quite a bit of the energy needed. The theory was that this could be done very cheaply. If this were the case, it would be possible to extract it at reasonable cost.
Our self-organizing economy is figuring out for us what kind of economy can be operated in an efficient manner. So far, it has gotten rid a lot of international travel, travel to meetings, and commuting. It has also gotten rid of a lot of fancy clothes. Many colleges are going bankrupt. A big concern I have is what will happen to the financial system. If the financial system fails, how much international trade will it be possible to maintain?
Kinda like ripping up the pavement on the highway and burning it?
I don’t think Greta would approve
When Greta is HUNGRY and COLD she will care….she means well, of course, and the Physics and Chemistry laws validates her concern, along with the data. No doubt, others here will indicate they don’t believe it.
Oh well,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov70tt_wUW8
At least we can chuckle at her expense
Gail wrote: “the oil from shale doesn’t use more energy than the conventional oil…Its EROEI tends to be fairly high.”
That’s not what my sources say. First, shale oil extraction uses energy from two sources: external energy, and energy consumed from the frackable deposits themselves to extract the frackable deposits. The latter energy is not usually included in EROI calculations, and I agree that there is no point in including it as a practical matter, but as a narrowly technical question of how much total energy is required to extract the average barrel of fracked oil, I would include it.
The EROI of conventional oil has fallen low enough that the EROI (counting external energy sources only) of the frackable “sweet spots” may be (or may have been a number of years back) not too far below US conventional (which is fairly low these days), but the EROI of the AVERAGE fracked barrel (not just the sweet spots) is down in the single digits, especially at this late date.
Once upon a time I googled some actual numbers for fracked oil, but I cannot quickly find them again. They are “out there” somewhere, but not necessarily quick and easy to ferret out.
No, Herbie, the physics and chemistry do *not* validate Greta’s climate change concerns. The theory, which is based on unconfirmed assumptions and bad computer models, is wrong.
Arrhenius’s “in vitro” experiment in the 1890s does not replicate because the warming was caused by the vial containing the CO2 (thus a true greenhouse effect) and not by the CO2 itself.
The alleged warming effect from CO2 does not show up in the ice cores, where the temperatures change first and CO2 changes later with a long time lag.
CO2 today, emitted by burning fossil fuels, has a correlation with temperature change that is not significantly different from zero, while galactic cosmic ray exposure has a correlation slightly higher than 0.90, thus explaining 81% of the variance in temperature change, both up and down.
Astronomers with sophisticated telescopes can observe the wavelength of light that is trapped by CO2, and it is already fully saturated, so additional CO2 has no more light to trap.
After collecting data on water vapor since the 1990s, it is not clear that the correlation between CO2 and water vapor is zero, so there goes the hypothetical feedback effect.
Even “climate” scientists who profess to be true believers in the CO2 theory, including Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann, all admit that global warming has been “paused” (read: stopped) for the last 20 years, which contradicts forecasts by their computer models, and they can’t explain why, but natural climate change theorists can explain why, yet the latter are ignored by the politicians in favor of a failed theory.
The GCR theory of natural climate change championed by Henrik Svensmark, Jan Veizer, and Nir Shaviv explains 20th century warming, the recent cessation of warming, warming on other planets and moons in the solar system at the same time as earth, the “seesaw” behavior whereby the Antarctic cools while the rest of the world warms and vice versa in alternating cycles, the Little Ice Age (circa 1300 to circa 1870), and the ice house conditions that the earth experiences at long intervals as it revolves around the Milky Way WITH ONE THEORY, thus fulfilling Ockham’s Razor, whereas the anthropogenic theory needs (and lacks) a different theory to explain each of these phenomena.
The CO2 theory of climate change is a failed theory, totally bankrupt and sustained only by ulterior political agendas and politically motivated grant money.
Thanks for your reply Gail, you make a lot of information available. I enjoy learning from all the contributions
@Bobby, Where is that quote from? I doubt you have quoted correctly. In the OP, Fast Eddy wrote: “only one barrel out of every six consumed is being replaced with new resources.” — but that is quite different from what you have typed.
@Bobby, Okay, I see you clarified things. One thing though, conventional oil means the oil that is relatively cheap and easy to get to with conventional technology, while unconventional oil is oil that requires extraordinary effort and expense to extract, such as fracking, deep water, Arctic, tar sands, or kerogen.
Most of our oil globally still comes from giant, conventional wells called elephants, but these are old and rapidly depleting. Once they are gone, their supply will be difficult or impossible to replace.
World oil consumption has increased a great deal since 2005, but without fracking it would barely have increased at all, or it would have increased at outrageous prices.
Trump was such an entertaining carny barker. Anyone else miss the Orange Goblin?
I can’t quite image Biden doing these things.
He was a tad bit too obnoxious, with moments of brilliance. Best thing about the goblin was that he surely succeeded in getting the sanctimonious hypocrisy to full tilt.
The old man pretending to run the show nowadays is just sad. I feel bad for him. Tragicomic.
“If there are not enough resources to go around (something that seems to be often the case), physics says that the distribution of the resources will be skewed, basically according to the power law. It may take a caste system to accomplish this in a peaceful way.”
Gail, could you explain that, please? As you know, I do not have much physics. We came across the Maximum Power Principle before, that dissipative structures compete and those that survive are those that are able to dissipate the most energy in their own maintenance. Thus the tendency is toward a greater concentration of ‘power’ and dissipation – on biological, social and cosmic levels. Also that DS grow in complexity to dissipate more energy and shed complexity as energy supply shrinks – thus societies, empires or unions are liable to devolve into simpler parts. But I do not remember anything about the above and how energetics affects unequal distribution of wealth and, by implication, class structure. Is there any papers on it?
It is also known as the Pareto Distribution or the 80%-20% rule. The top 20% will receive 80% of the goods and services. The size of cities also tends to be distributed in a similar manner. As resources get more and more stretched, the distribution seems to get even increasingly skewed.
Wow, Pareto is pretty serious and I can see why he would not be too popular with a lot of people. If he was right then not only is wealth inequality inevitable but any rationalist, moral project that seeks to counter it is doomed. Some things ‘just are’ and wealth inequality may be one of them. It just ends up that way regardless of human ideas or intentions.
‘Democracy’ is thus an illusion, just another way to politically reinforce an elite and a society of inequalities. As you say, without the boost to overall wealth from fossil fuels, democracy may no longer be an adequate illusion and some kind of formal caste is likely. Again, that may be another thing that ‘just is’ regardless of human ideas or ‘morality’.
Ironically Pareto seems to have favoured a non-democratic society at the precise time when industrialisation was making democracy a viable illusion. It may still be about 80-20 but if the absolute figures are big enough then the illusion of democracy can work – so long as most people have ‘enough’ and they gradually become better off.
One is left wondering what ‘laws’, perhaps energetic, underlie the operation of this statistical, sociological ‘law’?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto
> One of Pareto’s equations achieved special prominence, and controversy. He was fascinated by problems of power and wealth. How do people get it? How is it distributed around society? How do those who have it use it? The gulf between rich and poor has always been part of the human condition, but Pareto resolved to measure it. He gathered reams of data on wealth and income through different centuries, through different countries: the tax records of Basel, Switzerland, from 1454 and from Augsburg, Germany, in 1471, 1498 and 1512; contemporary rental income from Paris; personal income from Britain, Prussia, Saxony, Ireland, Italy, Peru. What he found – or thought he found – was striking. When he plotted the data on graph paper, with income on one axis, and number of people with that income on the other, he saw the same picture nearly everywhere in every era. Society was not a “social pyramid” with the proportion of rich to poor sloping gently from one class to the next. Instead it was more of a “social arrow” – very fat on the bottom where the mass of men live, and very thin at the top where sit the wealthy elite. Nor was this effect by chance; the data did not remotely fit a bell curve, as one would expect if wealth were distributed randomly. “It is a social law”, he wrote: something “in the nature of man”.
At the bottom of the Wealth curve, he wrote, Men and Women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time – until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion’s share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote, ‘compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins.’ Inflammatory stuff – and it burned Pareto’s reputation.
So human social strata apparently is formed from a selection process. That selection process is fundamental to evolution, evolution is a chemical/biological mechanism that exists in the universe enabled by its physical underpinnings. Reflections, indeed, reflections everywhere.
Of course a stagnant “elite” eventually loses all privilege by the very mechanism of evolution. The merciless regression to the average. For example two high IQ parents will inevitably have offspring with lower IQ and vice versa. And success correlate very well with advanced general cognitive abilities.
We are only as good as we allow ourselves to become. Tamper with evolution, then stagnation and oblivion awaits. But hey, at least the rather useless offspring can have a nice and fat trust to blow through with nothing to show for.
But don’t get me wrong, I am all for stagnation, nothingness and oblivion as long as rather large thermonuclear devices provide a suitable grande finale to the folly. *boom* 💥
🤣👍👍
IQ and the ‘regression to the mean’ is another subject, but let us settle it here and now so that it does not need to keep coming up.
“Regression to the mean” only applies at the very extreme of traits, including IQ. Higher IQ parents are liable to have higher IQ kids, and lower IQ parents lower IQ kids. Even at the very extreme, kids are liable to display the trait of high IQ but not to the very extreme of the parents. That does not mean that the kids of high IQ parents beneath the very extreme are liable to have lower IQ kids, they are not. Thus no argument against general social stratification can be deduced from ‘regression to the mean’. It affects only the tiniest number of persons at the very extreme and it is not demonstrated that it affects social stratification.
> Polygenic traits often appear less heritable at the extremes. A heritable trait is definitionally more likely to appear in the offspring of two parents high in that trait than in the offspring of two randomly selected parents. However, the more extreme the expression of the trait in the parents, the less likely the child is to display the same extreme as the parents. At the same time, the more extreme the expression of the trait in the parents, the more likely the child is to express the trait at all. For example, the child of two extremely tall parents is likely to be taller than the average person (displaying the trait), but unlikely to be taller than the two parents (displaying the trait at the same extreme). See also regression toward the mean.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
Btw. we touched before on necessitarianism, the universal, categorical determination of human objects the same as all others in the cosmos. You may still be struggling under the illusion that things could presently be different than how they actually are, that society could presently be different, it cannot. Societies can change however, in a thoroughly determined way – however it may owe little to the (determined) ideas and intentions of persons.
Nowhere did I write that smart parents get dumb kids. Just a wee bit dumber than the parents in general. At the extremes, it is of course extreme, as expected and easily measured.
If it was intelligence that (almost) alone codes for success within the rather obnoxious field of rapacious primatery, then why are we still so blatantly absurd after eons of evolution?
Yup, indeed, regression to the mean. We are only as good as we allow ourselves to be as a species by tampering with evolutionary processes. Rapacious primatery 101.
And yes, those evolutionary processes are indeed a part of the cosmos and governed by physical law. No amount of reductionism and myopia of the ordinary can remove that rather blatant reality.
You simply have to accept it as a fact. And disagreeing with me usually means being wrong. You should know that by now.
What on earth are you on about?
RTM applies ONLY at the extremes not to smart parents in general.
Of course evolution is real.
Humans are what they are, get over it.
Stop talking complete nonsense.
Humans are an extremely smart mammal, however, apparently not smart enough to refrain from silly ass tampering with evolutionary processes.
Now, are humans smart or not compared with, say chimps? Can chimps learn to read? Can chimps learn to build airplanes? Do you think something is “magic” about the human genome?
You are mistaken something that is easily measured at the extreme ends of the scale with subtle nuance closer to the mean. But yes indeed, still there it is, masked by random noise. The noise floor of evolution.
We are only as good (or bad) as we allow ourselves to be as a species.
Otherwise, by the process of evolution selecting for success, strongly correlated with advanced general cognitive abilities among humans, we’d be masters of the universe now with the place full of Buddha’s, Alfvéns, Bohrs, Wittgensteins, Beethoven’s, Einstein’s and Tesla’s. Now are we? Of course not, we are busy following the dictates of the limbic system, heavily engaged in folly.
Regression to the mean apply all over the scale. Revel in that fact. It is what equality of outcome does. Soon enough, we’ll be right back up in the trees where we apparently belong, and not in IC.
https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg
MOAR useless eatery and rapacious primatery. For a little while longer.
🤣👍👍
K, I do not agree with your views, so perhaps you could stop posting the same stuff in reply to every comment that I make. Give it a break? You can post whatever you like on your own threads but to keep replying it to me is starting to look like stalking. So I am asking you to stop it.
Mirror,
You are welcome. By the way, did you enjoy the monkey business video I linked?
You see, therefore us humans belong in the trees, flinging turds at each other and occasionally ganging up, cruelly ripping a limb or two off some unfortunate bonobo, just for the shits and giggles.
You know, rapacious primatery in its purest essence. Envy and cruelty.
Compare that with for example the orca pod, that you or somebody else linked here. They gifted a juicy and helpless penguin to the primates. Because why not. It’s what sentients do. Zero shits given, always with a smile.
Then the penguin didn’t particularly enjoy the stink of a de-evolving rapacious primatery and rather plunged and swam back into apex predator territory, embracing the depths of ice cold evolution.
You know, doing exactly the opposite of rapacious primatery.
😊
‘Selection’ is an anthropomorphic metaphor if applied on a cosmic or even planetary scale. ‘Mechanism’ is also a metaphor from the industrial era. Ultimately it is just ’cause and effect’ without any aim, intention or ‘selection’, let alone ‘mechanism’. Thus all outcomes are equally outcomes – just as the ultimate ‘outcome’ of planetary processes is the total destruction of the planet.
All elites come to an end through competition of some kind or the outright decay of a society, we are agreed on that – and then another elite takes over. Often it is through a war between tribal elites, like the Anglo invasions and then the Normans – popular uprisings tend to be put down, like the English Peasant Revolt or the German Peasant Revolt. It often comes down to who controls the army – and or best army.
Successful revolutions do happen, as in France, Russia and China. Successful revolutions seems to have a class basis as an emergent class takes over from another as the material base of society develops. Thus they demark economic orders.
Bourgeois society has a less formal caste structure, so there is some movement between classes – competition in the market place. That society is coming to an end however and I would be careful of extrapolating too much from it. A reversion to more formal caste seems likely as overall wealth shrinks. That seems to be ‘just what happens’. And then, elites will continue to come to be and to pass away, to be replaced by others. Some social mobility is liable to continue however, often it is through services provided to the elites – kings reward with titles.
History is what it is and it causes me zero perturbation. I feel no need to slander anyone or anything. It is what it is and I do not delude myself that I personally have any control over it – the ‘democratic’ illusion.
There is no need for silly caste systems when we as a species accept that extinction of our own kind is inevitable. Where is the Neanderthal, Cro Magnon? Nowhere to be seen. Gone. Did we cause their “extinction”? Of course not, we are still “them”, however evolved. For example I carry some 66% more Neanderthal genome than the population in average.
If I am a bit “Neanderthal” could of course be discussed. Perhaps what I am and how I think, indeed is shaped by that fact. I look forward for my own extinction. Let the rapacious primatery by Homo sapiens sapiens rule the roost until nukes fly. Yay!
As you say, 99.9% of all species are extinct. Trying to persist in the folly of equality of outcome by partitioning the populace is simply accelerating the process. Why is that so, it is the refusal to accept the fact that our families and kin isn’t that special, yet engage in giving them an unfair advantage, by various shenanigans and trickery to “stay in control”.
I much prefer the old Viking/Scandinavian ways. Wanna inherit something? GTFO out in the world, sword in hand. If you perish, so be it. If you prevail and succeed. You won’t really need the inheritance/monies anyway.
Useless rapacious primate princesses shrieking and coveting MOAR from the useful and successful.
Equality of outcome… 🤢🤮
Kow wrote: “For example two high IQ parents will inevitably have offspring with lower IQ and vice versa”
Not inevitably, just on average. Also, if your parents and inlaws had a high (or low) average IQ, your children will regress toward their grandparents’ average IQ, not toward the general population’s IQ. IOW, regression does not ratchet relentlessly downward (or upward) toward the population mean.
Nor is the population mean fixed either. There is evidence it has been falling since the middle of the 19th century, but the Flynn Effect hides the decline when using the kinds of tests that are affected by the Flynn Effect (not all tests are).
Mirror wrote: ““Regression to the mean” only applies at the very extreme of traits”
No, regression occurs at any degree of deviation from the mean. Regression even occurs in cards and dice. It is a statistical phenomenon, not a biological phenomenon.
Of course, the closer the parental midpoint is to the population mean, the less room there is to regress.
“the illusion that things could presently be different than how they actually are, that society could presently be different, it cannot.”
Sure it could be. History, including the evolution of culture, is very path dependent. Chance plays a big role. For example, look how different South and North Korea are. Their differences were not inscribed in stone by fate.
Kow again: “Nowhere did I write that smart parents get dumb kids. Just a wee bit dumber than the parents in general.”
Of course smart parents can produce children who are far duller than they are (and dull parents much smarter children). It just doesn’t happen very often due to the nature of probability, but also due to the nature of probability, it is entirely possible.
“Otherwise, by the process of evolution selecting for success, strongly correlated with advanced general cognitive abilities among humans, we’d be masters of the universe now with the place full of Buddha’s, Alfvéns, Bohrs, Wittgensteins, Beethoven’s, Einstein’s and Tesla’s.”
No, not at all. Putting aside for the moment that some of these individuals probably possessed emergenic traits that do not breed true, if we focus just on the trait of general intelligence, it was just one of many traits that was under selection in human history.
A more important trait was disease resistance. In the pre-industrial world, and even for a while in the early industrial world, 47% of children died before the age of twenty, including about a third who died before the age of 6, usually of viral or bacterial infections. So there was very strong selection for disease resistance. There was also selection for work ethic, social skills, attractiveness, stature, and other qualities in addition to intelligence, and of course chance was a bigger factor then, which lowers heritability because it is an environmental effect and the bigger the environmental effect, the lower the heritable effect. Any animal breeder knows that the more traits that are under selection, the slower the fixation of any one trait will be. Likewise, the stronger the selection is for one trait, such as disease resistance or genetic load in general which contributes to disease susceptibility, the weaker the selection must be for other traits. These features put a speed limit on selection for intelligence.
Further, in most occupations, the gains to intelligence were usually modest (for example, most people were peasants, often illiterate peasants like Newton’s parents), more so than today in our age of universal schooling and lots of cognitively demanding occupations. For example, our energy rich economy lets us support a large population of physicians, lawyers, and college professors that pre-industrial civilizations could not afford to support so many of. I am sure a smarter serf had a competitive advantage over a duller serf, but the advantage was not that large.
When all else is equal, success among humans is only, and only, a matter of advanced cognitive abilities. The smarties are on general more successful in life. Healthier mentally and physically. Better looking, etc. which in extension means capable to shape the habitat to its liking. Foremost, to play fair game with their equals and unfair game with dullards.
Among ‘true’ sentients the smartest ones are the most compassionate without sacrificing the evolutionary process.
Simple game theory states that the more reliable and trusted brothers in arms you got, then success is virtually guaranteed. And a person that objectively is a bit “dumber” than you can have a moment of clarity and simplicity. Over-thinkers can get lost in abstractions that lead nowhere. Busying themselves with useless yada-yada.
Catch a whiff of emotional folly hallucinated from delusion and there’s the door. GTFO.
Evolution among sentients are the supreme process. Extinction is a inevitable. Revel in the fact that eventually something better adapted will arise. Plunge into the ice cold abyss and embrace oblivion. Stare back.
The about 80-20 ‘rule’ is currently true of the global economy. No one knows why there is a ‘vital few’ that ‘generates’ wealth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
> A chart that gave the effect a very visible and comprehensible form, the so-called “champagne glass” effect,[8] was contained in the 1992 United Nations Development Program Report, which showed that distribution of global income is very uneven, with the richest 20% of the world’s population generating 82.7% of the world’s income.[9] Among nations, the Gini index shows that wealth distributions vary substantially around this norm.
…. The causes of wealth owing so much to the “vital few” have been attributed to distributions of multiple talents[according to whom?], with the few having all the required talents and environments leading production in a meritocracy. Others have suggested that it may result from chance, Alessandro Pluchino at the Italian University of Catania suggesting that “The maximum success never coincides with the maximum talent, and vice-versa,” and that such factors are the result of chance.[13]
It seems like the EU has tried to even out the income distribution. This has worked out best in energy rich counties, like Norway. But as fuels deplete, wage and wealth distributions become increasingly problematic. Countries with falling energy consumption per capita find it increasingly difficult to pay EU assessments. They also have problems with their debts. People from poor countries want to migrate to rich counties. Europe has problems with migration from Africa; the US has issues with migration from Mexico and farther south.
“If he was right then not only is wealth inequality inevitable but any rationalist, moral project that seeks to counter it is doomed.”
Pareto was objectively right based on the actual data. However, the USSR did a reasonably good job, even remarkably good, of compressing the distribution. The special privileges of Communist Party elites have been exaggerated in the West. Of course, they had to do some pretty extreme things to create and maintain that compressed distribution of resources, and in the end they collapsed and reverted to extreme inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) in a short time.
If you are interested in a fascinating examination of power law distributions in language that non-mathematicians can understand, I recommend two books:
The Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb
AND
Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan
Democracy is probably doomed, but a republican form of government similar to the early United States might still be possible. Although the 13 colonies did have high wages by the standards of the time and lots of cheap land, it was still poor in absolute terms by our standards, yet it did manage to achieve a popular form of government: with voting restricted to while male real estate owners over the age of 21, US Senators selected by state governments, and US presidents selected by the electoral college, which did not start off as a rubber stamp. Republican government also coexisted with widespread slavery. Still, it was a liberal government with free speech, free religion, safeguards against arbitrary (or politically motivated) searches or seizures, and other safeguards.
However, I suspect economic liberty always leads eventually to a small group of families owning most of the productive resources and dominating the political system. This is why the Old Testament provided for a Jubilee Year every half century when all debts were canceled and all real property reverted to its original owning families. However, the more financially successful families found ways to get that particular law ignored.
Medieval Iceland started out as a republic, but it too eventually grew a wealthy elite who abolished the republic.
In the Spartan republic, the land became concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer families, and thus there were fewer and fewer families who could afford to furnish soldiers for the Spartan polis, and thus Sparta’s great army dwindled until Sparta was absorbed with the rest of Greece into the Macedonian empire.
The pattern recurs again and again. Inequality is the price we pay for civilization.
A happy moment in a sea of misery
PENGUIN ESCAPES WHALES BY JUMPING INTO TOURIST BOAT
https://www.bitchute.com/video/7TY347HN9zHT/
If the orcas wanted to eat that little bugger, it would never have made it into the boat in the first place.
Clearly they didn’t care and steered it towards the humans that is way more amusing than playing with the food. A small gift from one sentient to the next. 😊
Or perhaps a lesson for their young: “Hey flipper, have a look at them primates not eating delicious penguins. See, young one. They only pretend to be predators, while having the gut of a frugivore living in the trees.”
They aren’t stupid, you know. Surely they know the humans aren’t stupid either, in their brief moments of lucidity between the perpetual obnoxious of rapacious primatery guided by the reptilian brain.
Sent that to a mate who’s done some time maintaining choppers at a base in the Antarctic…
He responded with:
I heard a story of a helicopter pilot who once worked out the penguins were more frightened of a helicopter than the Orca and would chase them off icebergs into the water to be chased by the Orca. Bit cruel but he thought it was amusing.
Typical humans….
Imagine this; a rumor goes around between the orca pods that humans is scaring penguins using rather weird and noisy birds into their direction.
Wouldn’t surprise me one bit that orca pod in the video then went ahead and gifted one back as a small token of gratitude.
Of course sentients gang up whenever their interest are mutual. It’s business. Fair game.
https://youtu.be/lRwWfYLKFw0
The wrong questions or the right questions, depending on where you stand. Miles’s Law.
This interview is something of a rarity.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/BUzKURLlEsOW/
Armed forces becoming an openly partisan institution. Are the United States turning “Latin American?” (10 minutes)
Concerns about people being chosen for jobs not based on their qualifications, but on whether appropriate boxes are checked (black, female, pregnant, etc.).
I doubt some females roaming the corridors of pentagon would be a negative thing. A bit of too much testosterone induced cookie hole flap have echoed there for far too long.
Prestige and pride is such a fools errand.
I’m sure a properly geared and hot headed bitch can flip off some of the worst aspects of Anglo Saxon male chauvinism lingering in the hallways.
Clown comment.
You ever been around the military and the women in it? Waste of space and time.
The overwhelming majority of women in the military are there simply to meet someone and later get pregnant….full stop.
The US Military is little more than a welfare program for useless people.
Trillions have been wasted by the US Military which is a parasitic force.
Isn’t women suppose to get pregnant? I might have to check with my mom if that is what happens when a man meets a woman in a private setting.
But for all I know, that could be completely wrong. What do you think?
As for the military being a jobs program. Well, of course. Cant have halfwits sloshing around in society wreaking havoc on the established order. Too much Anglo Saxon “character” and testosterone coupled with a distinct absence of abstract processing capability.
Hey why not get a tattoo and a burger, then it is Tucker on the Telly.
😉
The US Military is little more than a welfare program for useless people.
(Reality occasionally creeps in on this podcast.)
The military has the same percentage of intelligence and competence in their personnel as the population at large. Most are young and inexperienced and from a below average income background, which shapes their behaviors and choices. There is a lot a redundancy built into the military, for a reason, so this leads to more than average down time, and unproductive, at least economically speaking, activities. How much time does the average college kid waste? It is the nature of that age bracket.
“The military has the same percentage of intelligence and competence in their personnel as the population at large”
No, it doesn’t, or at least I know it didn’t before it started watering down standards. The entrance exam includes a 4 part IQ test. Traditionally, the Army rejected anyone with an IQ below 85 (for example, this standard excludes 15% of whites and 50% of African Americans.) The other services had somewhat higher minimum standards, the Air Force being highest.
During the Vietnam “conflict,” Defense secretary Robert McNamara, a Harvard grad rather than someone with a military background, ordered the Army to let in guys with much lower scores. The other recruits called them “McNamara’s Morons.” It was a disaster. Below a certain IQ level, soldiers become a bigger hindrance than help, and some become a danger to themselves and others.
The 1960s and 1970s were the all time pinnacle of faith in human equality, and McNamara had really drunk the doctrinal kool-aid.
Women only get to belong in the military if they can deal with transgenders in sports. Not looking good on that front.
Like so many things its not about gender. The Kurds have very effective women fighting units. If you have ever hung out with spec ops types they dont like to play mano au mano. Oh yes they can do it but they like to call in artillery strikes and keep their body in one piece to do it again. Feminine characteristics do not preclude destruction in fact some of them are assets in it.
Its about cohesion and esprit d cour. The left thinks the half of he country that lives south of mason dixon will just go away. The soldiers that actually use m4s and laser designators have mostly come from there. The trauma and prejudices of the civil war have been put aside by military to fight. How can that happen when their is open politicization of the military? Its not that women cant fight. Its that there has to be respect and comfortableness. Im polish in ancestry. My team has to be comfortable calling me a lop eared pollock and I need to laugh because they are friends they are allies they are brothers and sisters.
If you got special team members with special privileges and chips on their shoulder its not going to work. The MSM has worked 24 -7 to create polarization and demonize half the country. Now they expect that same population to pull together and fight as a team? Same for cops. Who would want to be a cop nowadays? So what is police going to become. Those that cant do anything else. Every time you take a call the risk is your going to get a demographic that is going to start screaming help. If the pull a gun your screwed. If you shoot them your going to be roasted by the MSM and probably go to jail. If you dont you take a bullet. Who would sign up for that deal? Who would go out on patrol with that deal?
Of course people are leaving the cities. Writing is on the wall.
You destroy a country when you destroy its cohesion.
You guys are all missing the real story here. Since the founding of the country, the US military, unlike in many countries around the world, has maintained a strictly apolitical stance. Now for the first time the Pentagon has acted as a politically activist institution that tries to intimidate the press. Did anyone but me even listen to the whole 10 minutes?
And to the commenter who claimed that Tucker is upset about the displacement of the white population by immigrants from the third world, whether or not that is true, it has no bearing whatever on the video. In fact, Tucker expressed the view that guys like Colin Powell rose through the ranks solely on merit. (That may not be entirely true, since the armed forces do have a long standing affirmative action program, but Tucker claims to believe it is true.) So again, that comment not only misses the most important point of the podcast, but it in fact contradicts views actually expressed in the video.
I will have to admit that I didn’t listen to the whole podcast.
Tucker is having a hard time psychologically as the country’s demographics and cultural values shift due to ethnically disparate birth rates and immigration. Social, political, and economic complexity is a function of the high IQ specialties and generalists that the population produces.
Obviously, as this progresses, the logical consequence is going to be the enslavement of the intelligentsia and those with technical capability to keep the illiterate alive. If you are smart, you should leave the containment areas and work to confine the plague. Learn to build EMPs to fry cell towers.
EMP’s?
Why limit yourself to IT infrastructure and not just pop the transmission line insulators? Everybody’s got a firearm in the US, right?
Right, gotta keep the electrons massaging the Telly with Tucker and keep the Trumpet on the air. I understand.
🤣👍👍
Gale Ann Hurd wrote the script for that one with the Walking Dead. Television and electricity are buying time. Also, ‘learn to make EMPs means to go to work for a defense contractor – something that is legal. Shooting power lines is not legal.
Sabotage is sabotage. The smoke trail from EMP fried electronics would surely raise a few eyebrows and questions. Cant be that many with the skill set, compare that with popping a bullet into an isolator, rite?
Start with the power lines, for the simplicity. Or simply hack into the control systems of the power plants and act as a ‘state sponsored entity’. Oh yes, the nuclear and hydro power ones. Cranked to full tilt.
Burning spent fuel ponds is so boring. I want to see meltdowns and burning nuclear reactors and hydro power station flood gates jacked to 11. TODAY!
🍿🥳🍿
Word of advice: I condone all acts of sabotage. I merely play with dark ideas as a curiosity and wicked comedy.
Chaos cannot provide adequate security to you or your family, thus it is an outcome to be avoided. There are scenarios that could result in internal warfare, but this will not happen overnight.
C.A,
I agree. It is why I reject (I wrongly typed condone in the previous message due to my poor command of English) all acts of violence and sabotage against all, without exception.
Or perhaps it was a Freudian mishap. Who knows.
Anyway, dear readers. Refrain from breaking shit. Keep the shebang operational as long as possible. I like food, tap water and electricity. So do you.
🤦♂️
Cato wrote: “‘learn to make EMPs means to go to work for a defense contractor”
Hand held EMP weapons are fairly simple technology that some people were demonstrating already in the 1950s. But if you want to set one off in low space with a nuclear blast, that is a different matter.
BTW, if you really want to bring down the grid, you don’t waste your time shooting at power lines. You shoot the transformers. Like that one team of riflemen did to an important transformer near Silicon Valley one night in, I think it was, January, 2013. Luckily, there was another transformer that was able to take up the slack. Never did catch the guys. Was it a test run by a hostile force, or just an inhouse check to find out how vulnerable we really are?
I’m glad the Indians aren’t hostile any more. They could really mess us up nowadays.
This is a philosophical discussion that transcends normal national politics. There is advanced supercomputer and genetic editing technology that would allow depopulation through virus engineering. In a ‘Terminator’ scenario, maintaining biosphere integrity and most infrastructure is important, thus bioweapons will be used due to plausible deniability and effectiveness. In the absence of effective legal controls, it is permissible to look at targeting the world-wide industrial technology chain that poses a threat. The Wuhan virus was made with Silicon Valley technology paid for with Chinese money through the US University System.
Or the smart will emigrate to nations with friendlier policies.
The Sunday New York Times ran an interesting article about nursing homes and quality metrics. They mentioned that the race of the residents affected the care outcomes. This is of course nonsensical, as it is the staff that determine quality outcomes, yet the Times chose to use a correlative, not causal predicate. Ed – I am not sure there is going to be much emigration from this point forward. In any case, the United States has plenty of nice places to live.
Covid: Judge rules man with learning difficulties should be vaccinated
A man with severe learning difficulties should have a Covid-19 vaccine, despite his family’s objections, a judge ruled.
Specialists said the man, who is in his 30s, was “clinically vulnerable” and in a “priority group” for vaccination.
But the man’s parents objected and raised a number of concerns about alleged side-effects.
Judge Jonathan Butler agreed with NHS Tameside & Glossop Clinical Commissioning Group that vaccination was in his best interests.
The judge, who is based in Manchester, considered the case at a hearing in the Court of Protection, where issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions are analysed.
He did not name the man in his written ruling, published on Friday.
A number of specialists involved in the man’s care all thought he should be vaccinated but his father claimed the vaccine had not been tested sufficiently and did not stop people contracting Covid-19.
He added the long-term side effects on people with severe health issues were unknown.
The man’s mother and brother agreed.
Judge Butler said the man’s father had outlined his concerns with “conviction and great clarity”.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-56379383
The NHS is becoming a very sinister organisation indeed!
And we will see the judges ruling on matters which they have no capacity to understand.
The very fact that this is all still experimental, and that even mid-term – let alone long-term – effects are unknown and cannot be quantified, due to lack of proper extended trials, ought to have meant that the opinion of the experts should not have prevailed.
Pure Nazism, c 1935. Horrifying.
What else can we expect from the evil root of the ambition, greed and inhumanity of Uncle Bill & Co. than such poisoned fruits?
How can this not remind everyone of the what the Nazis did?
How indeed: it’s so blatant.
I’m not saying that of the judge though: probably simply out of their depth, and predisposed to trust expert testimony, believing it to be sincere and impartial.
They too have been exposed to a year of propaganda, we should remember.
The Nuremberg Code has simply been screwed up, and thrown in the trash bin.
Ronavax Roulette: Lipid Nanoparticles
The EMA report on the Moderna vaccine also mentions the fact that LNPs can get into the brain, and describes tests conducted on animals to evaluate their biodistribution; they used a different vaccine (mRNA-1647), made with similar LNPs, to figure out how far the vaccine contents had spread around the bodies of the animals. Using evidence from a different vaccine is considered acceptable by the EMA; they’re saying that, although the mRNA genetic code was different, the LNPs were much the same, and “the distribution of the mRNA vaccine is determined by the lipid nanoparticle content”. For the tests, animals were vaccinated then ‘sacrificed’ so that various tissues could be cut up and analysed. According to the EMA report,
Low levels of mRNA could be detected in all examined tissues except the kidney. This included heart, lung, testis and also brain tissues, indicating that the mRNA/LNP platform crossed the blood/brain barrier, although to very low levels (2-4% of the plasma level). Liver distribution of mRNA-1647 is also evident in this study, consistent with the literature reports that liver is a common target organ of LNPs.
https://www.activistpost.com/2021/03/ronavax-roulette-lipid-nanoparticles-part-two.html
This is actually a fairly readable report, talking specifically about the techniques used in the Pfizer and Moderna. Small size of particles seems to influence getting past the Blood Brain Barrier (BBB).
I have a question: Do the other vaccines besides those of Pfizer and Moderna also have very small particles that could go through the blood brain barrier?
COVID-19 Vaccine Frontrunners and Their Nanotechnology Design
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7553041/
Particle Analysis in Vaccine Manufacturing and Development
Size matters in vaccine delivery systems. Nanoparticles smaller than 200 nm generally present a greater immunogenic response than micro-particles larger than 1 micron. This rather simple statement is based on the common understanding that particles with sizes resembling the dimensions of viruses are treated like viruses by the body. In the case of manufacturing for novel COVID-19 vaccine, adenovirus around the same size as SARS-Cov-2 (median of roughly 90-100 nanometers) are manipulated as carriers (or viral vectors) to trigger spike proteins production. In contrast, published literature showed that the effect of vaccines given orally, intranasally, or via other mucosal surfaces favor micro- over nanoparticulate formulations due to higher antigen load. The size of the impurities also significantly affects vaccine efficacy. In sum, many vaccine formulation ingredients should have controlled particulate size, size distribution, and count throughout the process of development, manufacturing, storage, and administration.
https://www.horiba.com/en_en/applications/health-care/pharmaceuticals-and-medicine-manufacturing/particle-analysis-in-vaccine-manufacturing-and-development/
So adenovirus carriers likely also go through the blood brain barrier.
https://youtu.be/9Vm4fta2kJ8
And here we have the Lie of the Die….
Aimed at convincing CovIDIOTS to take the Lethal Injection.
I have $1000 to bet that says this will NOT happen. I am 100% certain I will win this bet because 1. If they wanted to open then why do they have to wait 6+ months? 2. The Leak says some very bad things are going to happen in the next 3 months or so …
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-13/thai-resort-island-plans-to-open-to-vaccinated-tourists-in-oct?srnd=premium-asia
A couple of weeks ago the UK govt extended furlough to the of September 2021. Why would they do that if there was any possibility of cancelling lockdown before then?
Interesting point!
Vaxx ‘em chauvinistic Anglo Saxons until no tomorrow.
Yabba dabba doo. 💉
Brexit anyone? Alright, wanna eat? Here’s the deal; lockdowns, furlough and vaxx for your “freedoms” and empty stomachs.
🤣👍
https://twitter.com/i/status/1370824159991828484
What happens if I don’t get the Covid vaccine?
Multiple coronavirus vaccines are being rolled out in the UK and around the world.
Each one is being seen as a way out of the global pandemic and the quickest way to get things back to normal.
In many countries, having a vaccine is not mandatory yet the success of vaccination programmes depends upon how many people take up the offer of one.
So what will happen if you choose not to get the vaccine?
BBC News Health Reporter Laura Foster explains.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/health-56359242
Rigorously tested hahahahaahhahahahhahahahahahahaaahahahahaaa
Eddy–
You are in NZ.
The odds are minimal, because of the actions of your government.
Hint:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/states-republican-governors-had-highest-covid-incidence-death-rates-study-n1260700
If you opened those boxes you’d find people who died from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, the flu, but with labels stating cause of death – covid.
You’d also find a heap of wrinkled geriatric disease filled skin bags… who are fortunately not having to continue to live in misery in death camps (sometimes referred to as homes for he aged) stinking of stale piss and sh it…
I like the way Singapore operates… if your car is 10 years old it gets junked… but I believe you can apply for a costly exemption (and you have to demonstrate it’s not spewing black smoke etc).
We need to apply this system to health care…. anyone over 65 who is riddled with disease gets sent off to the junk heap… anyone who can demonstrate they are in excellent health… gets to live… but they have to get a full medical check each year.
I am still trying to work out which group of more ons is the stooopidest… is it the Democrats or Republicans? Both camps I suppose are equally stooopid because they continue to vote in spite of the fact that nothing changes.
And then they demonstrate their idiocy by making statements like – check this out — more people died from covid in states with a Republican governor.
Can it get any more stooopid than that?
I suppose it can — millions are taking an experimental ‘vaccine’ that has not been tested for long term side effects.
That’s more than stooopid… it’s Hilarious!!!! I love it!!!
Fast Eddy wrote: “If you opened those boxes you’d find people who died from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, the flu, but with labels stating cause of death – covid.”
Fast Eddy, if that were really true, it would be hard to explain how states with more lenient Republican governors could have higher covid death rates that states with stricter Democrat governors. That makes sense if they are dying of a contagious disease, but not if they are dying of degenerative diseases that are being mislabeled.
COVID cases and death counts are political, aren’t they? To a degree that conventional common or garden pneumonia deaths, road accident deaths or lung cancer deaths or choking on a peanut deaths aren’t?
I mean, we don’t get a daily table of how many people got ill from or died of or tested positive for hepatitis C, do we? In my local Japanese newspaper we are still getting this every single day for COVID-19—just in case anybody might have forgotten there’s a pandemic going on.
Covid is being handled politically and it is linked to a number of agendas. Therefore, we can’t trust anything governments, the media or WHO says about it. QED.
But if you want proof either way of whether all those COVID deaths really are COVID deaths, good luck with checking on over 2 million case industries of deaths marked COVID.
As for the issue of whether blue or red states have the higher death rates, since the denizens of blue and read states are more and more seeing each other as mortal enemies that they’d rather not live on the same planet as, let alone in the same country with, I don’t see why the average American should be particularly concerned. If they were as honest as Duncan is, they would be cheering on the malicious microbe as it cuts down people they detest and can’t wait to be rid of.
>>In many countries, having a vaccine is not mandatory
I don’t know of any countries where having a vaccine is mandatory, and it would seem neither does Laura Foster since she does not list any.
See Israel.
Others are jabbing the low hanging CovIDIOTS and once that is done they will introduce the passports
I see Dr Kendrick has taken the jab — he didn’t want to but he had no choice because the NHS is putting enormous pressure on the doctors — if he refused the jab he would need to submit to a test every 48 hours…. no doubt his test would be cycled until a false positive resulted… then he’d be tossed into isolation for two weeks…. repeat that a few times and that will break anyone.
Not strictly speaking mandatory in Israel, yet, but I agree that they are making life so difficult for those not vaccinated that it will be difficult to live, literally, without being vaccinated.
I noticed yesterday that 55% of Israelis have been vaccinated, second comes the UK at about 26% (but over a third of all adults, and the govt has ordered enough drugs to ‘vaccinate’ everyone three times, apparently), USA about 13% and Australia 0.1%.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-green-passport-vaccination-program-created-medical-apartheid-distraught-citizens-say/5739417
Ilana Rachel Daniel, health advisor and politician, talked about Israel’s green passport that essentially creates a second citizenry, “a true medical apartheid, disallowing healthy law-abiding taxpaying citizens from entering their places of culture if they do not participate in this experiment.”
“They’re making this green passport where half the population cannot get into theaters or malls or all sorts of things unless you have taken the vaccination. They are creating a medical Apartheid,”
Part of a program dubbed Operation Back to Life , the “Green Pass” system restricts entry to registered gyms, theaters, hotels, restaurants, universities and secondary schools to holders of scannable vaccine passport only.
Watch her interview below.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-ilana-rachel-daniel-came-emotional-outcry-help-jerusalem-capital-israel/5739824
364,000 people would be alive today if US had SF’s COVID numbers, expert says
Is it because the are the richest city per capita on Earth, or just more progressive and smarter?
San Fransicko…
sure, the wealthy have good nutrition and the thousands of homeless are out in the sun a lot, so their vitamin D levels must be good.
and we know that the virus isn’t transmitted via feces, so all the human crapp on SF sidewalks is not an issue either.
I don’t know about that. Dying people are going to die anyway regardless of what’s printed on the certificate as the cause of death. But 1,500 people MIGHT have been alive today and countless thousands MIGHT not have suffered “adverse events” if the US hadn’t rolled out these experimental mRNA interventions and instead told everyone to keep calm and protect our nursing homes, just like Andrew Cuomo.
https://sd.keepcalms.com/i/keep-calm-and-kill-granny.png
Riddle me this….Why dies the supposed richest city on earth require and get a couple hundred million bailout by the Fed?
“experts say”
“Experts say” get your genetics modified.
San fran is a nice place to live no doubt if your a multi millionaire Same with berkeley and most of oakland. The produce is unbelievable, the climate fantastic and the women abundant. You are a lucky man duncan. THere is that disconcerting pet in a pet zoo feeling i just cant shake. I felt it when i first entered CA and i feel it when i return. And now the whole left coast. Its not just the neo left hate politics. There is something that feels off there. Probably my imagination. Who would reject paradise? Only a fool?
Actually, Marin (across the bridge), is the richest place in CA.
As a former resident, I can see why.
SF is kinda lower class.
I think of Nazi Germany and the Jews, who stayed, in spite of an enormous and very visible conspiracy that they chose not to challenge… to ignore.
If they were to accept that the Nazi party was intent on exterminating them would have destroyed their lives. Those with property and businesses would have been forced to abandon their assets, and flee the country. Similarly those with jobs and families would have to uproot and choose to be refugees in foreign lands.
Much easier to say to those issuing warnings ‘don’t be silly — THEY — would never do that’ As the author points ‘they’ are not benign entities… yet ‘they’ will do the right thing…
Is something similar not at play with those who mock those who expose conspiracies today?
Many of the conspiracies we read about challenge the very foundations of our nations. Do accept that they may be correct is a bridge to far for most people.
If they acknowledge this then effectively the curtain is pulled back and the masses would see the wicked beast that is pulling the levers and pushing the buttons.
Instead they prefer to keep the curtain closed and watch the political puppet show out front — believing that they have a say – that there is democracy and that their leaders, although often misguided, ultimately have their interests at heart.
Conspiracies threaten the grand illusion so they must be mocked and ridiculed in order to force that curtain closed and protect the minds of the masses.
Also, if the wicked beast is exposed, then where does that leave the masses? They cannot vote the beast out of power. It becomes evident that the beast controls the system — the military, the govt, the economy the MSM — the MONEY supply. Everything.
There is no way to fight against the beast — so better to just close the curtain and deploy various mental defence mechanisms convincing oneself that there is nothing behind the curtain.
And anytime someone tries to say hang on – there is a beast behind the curtain – let me show you …. that person needs to be attacked… ridiculed…. shoved in the corner with a tin dunce cap on their head.
There was a Jewish banker who wrote to his family:
‘I can’t, won’t believe, that thousands of murderers of innocent people could possibly exist in my dear Germany!’
He stayed, and ended up drowning himself.
One factor in this was that Jews had enjoyed great success under the German Empire, so they couldn’t grasp the evil that had been unleashed on them.
They were far too cultivated, and believed in human decency and culture.
A great error at any time!
Smart guy, staying to the bitter end and ending himself. Sort of like my plan. Got little worldly attachments, however, one precious piece capable of supersonic flight which will be used up the instant before I embark on the journey into nothingness.
Yes, you can have it all, all the worthless crap, some messily monies and the nonsense I perpetrate online.
Enjoy.
☯️
If one reads Mein Kamph and Lords of Finance… one will likely be left with believing The Stab in the Back was real….
And even if one doesn’t accept that it was real, Mr Hitler certainly did…. and he was rabid for revenge.
But then the world was told and is told — the stab in the back was a CONSPIRACY THEORY… Mr Hitler is a silly cranky failed artist… He also details in his book how the Stab in the Back resulted in a proud people being thrown into utter destitution… desperate people — embrace messiahs…
Choosing to ignore reality and not recognizing the danger — even though it is staring you in the face …. can you getcha a date with a gas chamber.
(Or a Lethal Injection)
Never attribute evil when simple dumb would give exactly the same obnoxious results. Dumb shit can indeed cause untold misery and grief. Dumb also causes evil deeds, because dumb doesn’t ponder upon the more delicate and intricate matters of life, existence and sentience. Dumb is busy pleasing the limbic system, which can never be pleased in the long run, it wants MOAR. Dumb better stop listening to reptilian dictates.
Todays epitome of dumb is rapacious primatery coupled with power.
🤣👍
Man basically is not good…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uQDqoBbk18A&t=181s
Navajo teaching …
Man that follows the obnoxities and dictates of the reptilian brain without reflection is irrelevant. Gotta wrangle that trusty old beast into submission.
Man that follows reason alone has no instinct of survival and is irrelevant. Gotta embrace the sting of terror, horny and rage tickle you from time to time.
But for the most part, it is quite nice when it it property muted out by a reasonable way of life. Simple. No drama.
Yes I’ve heard that axiom. I also hear the the owners of the Fed (who just so happen to control the world using extremely sophisticated methods) are idiots… that the men who run the CIA are buffoons… etc…
I also hear that it is impossible for a coterie of men to control the world — even though we are currently witnessing their hidden hand control the entire MSM as they create Covid hysteria blocking out, ignoring or ridiculing any dissenting voices.
It’s neither stooopidity nor malice… it is ‘interests’ — and well thought out policies that are involved in executing on these interests.
All policies are driven by maintaining the system that keeps the Elders in power.
However all good things must end – the Elders need oil to keep their finely tuned turbo-charged engine humming along… so now they have run out of policy options… and they are doing the right thing. Rather than run the engine at 200km/hr and watch it explode with pieces flying everywhere… they are powering it down… and will soon stop it entirely, forever — but before that happens… they will eliminate us.
CEP. This is their final policy.
Yup, one the accelerator hits peak travel, there is nothing more that that can be done to get actual speed.
What they resort to is tampering with the speedometer, giving the illusion of MOAR by fiddling with the numbers.
However, the gas tank is running dry while the whole journey is set towards extinction by burning nuke ponds and flying ICBM’s.
How about the interests being dumb? How about hose interests being guided as the suicidal mission of the limbic system? Imagine letting a reptilian dictate due course of action.
🤣👍👍
But I am all for extinction. It is all hunky dory. As a failed species, it is a reality we have to accept sooner than later. Mother Earth smiles wryly.
Let’s go *boom*.
🍿🥳🍿
Eddy, they will not go away. When IC is done we return to feudalism. They ruling class will still live in the big house.
For a little while, then the sun flares massively and that’s all she wrote. Or perhaps a behemoth space rock strikes earth wiping the slate clean. It is not as if it hasn’t happened before.
🌍 ➕☄️➕ 🙈➕💥 👉 ⚰️💀🪦
🤣👍👍
Extinction as a species is inevitable. The harder evolution is fought, the sooner it arrives.
Let Randy Andy and the rest of the “upper caste” spread their genome willy nilly post collapse. I’m sure that will turn out just hunky dory for the species.
🥳
A closer look at the class that mocks.
Why is it that otherwise perfectly intelligent, thoughtful and rationally minded people baulk at the suggestion that sociopaths are conspiring to manipulate and deceive them? And why will they defend this ill-founded position with such vehemence?
History catalogues the machinations of liars, thieves, bullies and narcissists and their devastating effects. In modern times too, evidence of corruption and extraordinary deceptions abound.
We know, without question, that politicians lie and hide their connections and that corporations routinely display utter contempt for moral norms – that corruption surrounds us.
We know that revolving doors between the corporate and political spheres, the lobbying system, corrupt regulators, the media and judiciary mean that wrongdoing is practically never brought to any semblance of genuine justice.
We know that the press makes noise about these matters occasionally but never pursues them with true vigour.
We know that in the intelligence services and law enforcement wrongdoing on a breathtaking scale is commonplace and that, again, justice is never forthcoming.
We know that governments repeatedly ignore or trample on the rights of the people, and actively abuse and mistreat the people. None of this is controversial.
So exactly what is it that conspiracy deniers refuse to acknowledge with such fervour, righteousness and condescension? Why, against all the evidence, do they sneeringly and contemptuously defend the crumbling illusion that ‘the great and good’ are up there somewhere, have everything in hand, have only our best interests at heart, and are scrupulous, wise and sincere?
That the press serves the people and truth rather than the crooks? That injustice after injustice result from mistakes and oversights, and never from that dread word: conspiracy?
What reasonable person would continue to inhabit such a fantasy world?
The point of disagreement here is only on the matter of scale. Someone who is genuinely curious about the plans of powerful sociopaths won’t limit the scope of their curiosity to, for example, one corporation, or one nation. Why would they?
Such a person assumes that the same patterns on display locally are likely to be found all the way up the power food chain. But the conspiracy denier insists this is preposterous.
Why?
https://off-guardian.org/2021/03/12/on-the-psychology-of-the-conspiracy-denier/
Maybe THEY have consolidated coercive power far in advance of what we amateurs could imagine. If only WE could step aside at a safe distance and watch the deluge…
The Guardian is still bleeding circulation at an impressive rate.
The last decade looks like a Seneca cliff.
You can fool a lot of the people a lot of the time, but in the end, nobody likes a serial liar.
2001 410,152
2002 411,386
2003 409,568
2004 383,157
2005 376,816
2006 394,913
2007 384,070
2008 378,394
2009 358,844
2010 302,285
2011 279,308
2012 215,988
2013 204,440
2014 207,958
2015 185,429
2016 164,163
2017 156,756
2018 152,714
2019 141,160
2020 110,000 approx.
I was at The Guardian at the very start of online advertising, and the most senior management thought it was going to make them wealthy (not just the Guardian Group, but personally – they had a little scam going with the ‘Workthing’ website).
Never quite worked out the way they planned.
Couldn’t have happened to nicer people……
When thought is too uncomfortable to entertain, it is quite simply ridiculed, ignored and suppressed.
Particularly when it suggests that one might become, in due course, a victim oneself…..
I am particularly interested in the whole concept of being ‘anti-‘ or a ‘denier’, or a sceptic. I think in great part this is due to constant attacks I have had to put up with because of my views of cholesterol and statins. I am often called a statin ‘denier’. I have also been referred to as a professional contrarian, a sceptic, a zealot and suchlike. The best general insult was from Steven Nissen, perhaps the world’s most influential cardiologist:
‘A leading cardiologist has unleashed a blistering attack on “statin denial,” which he calls “an internet-driven cult with deadly consequences 1.”’
What a result! I am now, officially, a cult member. That is, in addition to all my other, myriad flaws. Or maybe it is my cult he was referring to, and other people have joined it. Who knows? The truth is that if I did actually manage to join a cult, or start a cult, I wasn’t aware of it. But then, that’s how they do it, they sneakily pull you in these invisible people with no obvious organisation.
‘It is the very fact that they don’t even exist that makes them so dangerous, my friend. Yes, they truly are that sneaky.’
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/2021/03/13/what-is-an-anti-vaxxer/
Dr. Nissen is an elitist. He wants the general public to trust experts like him and not try to do their own research because, after all, they are simple people who can’t understand science and are always falling prey to the flimflam artists who pervade the WorldWideWeb like pirates once did the Caribbean. You and the rest of the “anti-statin forces” refuse to endorse his “science” or embrace his “medical diagnoses and prescriptions”. This is hurting the guy’s prestige and impacting the industry’s bottom line. That’s the real bottom line.
From 2017:
A leading cardiologist has unleashed a blistering attack on “statin denial,” which he calls “an internet-driven cult with deadly consequences.”
In an editorial in Annals of Internal Medicine, Steve Nissen (Cleveland Clinic) expresses grave concerns over statistics showing that only 61% of people given a prescription for a statin were adherent at 3 months. “For a treatment with such well-documented morbidity and mortality benefits, these adherence rates are shockingly low. Why?” he asks.
Nissen writes that “we are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of our patients to Web sites developed by people with little or no scientific expertise, who often pedal ‘natural’ or ‘drug-free’ remedies for elevated cholesterol levels.” The anti-statin forces employ two distinct strategies, “statin denial, the proposition that cholesterol is not related to heart disease, and statin fear, the notion that lowering serum cholesterol levels will cause serious adverse effects.” Nissen admits that some patients will have statin-related adverse effects but “intolerance in many patients undoubtedly represents the nocebo effect.”
Just the other day I cam across the videos of Dr. Berg on YouTube. He’s into keto as enthusiastically as Dr. Nissen is into statins, but putting that to one side, Dr. Berg’s short and easy-to-understand presentations are among the best I’ve seen for getting basic information into the layman’s mind in a way that’s memorable and usable.
Here’s a three-minute one on my favorite vitamin:
Could we, you know, cutting the “easy” fixes with vitamins and all other fluff people thinking is some magical remedy for their ailments from a wank lifestyle?
Last time I had my blood work done, the cholesterol levels were basically undetectable. Big difference from my rather unhealthy parents and relatives with cholesterol and insulin levels maxed out.
The problem: sedentary lifestyle and high calories diets with plenty of animal foodstuffs.
The solution: plant based food assisted by aplenty of pain from letting the cranks spin at 100 RPM outputting some 250W for about 1h or so every day. If you are old; adjust accordingly. If you are young, go full bore 300W+.
But that’s shit people refuse to listen to, because fucking hurt and effort.
Even though, I point out that I used to crank t relatively high wattage on the bicycle daily for years at end, they still refuse to accept that I got enough nutrition. How is it even possible to sustain a high power output without the metabolism in working order?
What is so holy about the goddamn calories that is stuffed inside the cookie hole? Eat plant based and let the cranks rip. Yeah, you likely need to eat more for the same amount of calories. But that also means more micronutrients, fibers and vitamins.
Another few benefits; your sweat and poop doesn’t stink. The gut bacteria loves fibers and micronutrients from fruits and veggies. You’ll experience the intestine muscles grow in size and strength as it pipes the slurry and paste towards the exit hole.
Yes it is very simple — if you don’t want to get sick and feel like shit… don’t eat garbage … and get active… and by active I don’t mean walk around the block … that’s a fall back for weaklings … push it.
Of course it is easier to sink into the sofa with a sack of crisps and a root beer… and watch the Tee Vee….
BTW – someone sent me a video of a white, obese, 40+ America woman moaning about how difficult life is for her and her brood (who are also no doubt following her into obesity) She’s got a university degree yet is living under the poverty line.
I suppose the intent of sending that to me was to elicit wails of sympathy for this woman.
Instead I responded with — well she could start by controlling what she shoves into her fat mouth — because it’s a dog fight out there… getting tougher every year …. and you show up at an interview for a job looking like that … and you better be pretty god damn special if you are going to have a chance at being hired.
Oh but poor people tend to not eat healthy food was the response.
Well ya.. they don’t and maybe that’s a symptom of their problem — and why they are at the bottom of the barrel.
I then went on to explain how if you were born to the Obama’s you are far more likely to prosper than if you were born to Zeke and Sweet Marilou… the crack addicts in Arkansas…. there are plenty of failed white people living in poverty. Luck of the draw to a certain extent.
Life is a battle for everyone .. for some it’s easier to get ahead… but unless you have a trust fund you still have to compete.
Oh but it’s so hard for some… yes it is… but what would they have the government do — in America there are grants and loans — you want to get educated the opportunity is there.
Not really… it’s too difficult.
Oh – tell that to the immigrants who arrive with nothing work their asses off and achieve. The way they see it … just getting into an OECD country is winning the jackpot.
There ain’t not student loans or grants in the third world.
End of the day not everyone is going to end up with a decent life…. you can moan and cry … but as we can see — that gets you nowhere… what will get you somewhere is recognizing you are fortunate because you live in a place where there is opportunity to get ahead…. it’s not easy … but it’s the only option. That poor bastard living in the Jakarta slum is looking at you just wishing he could trade places….
It’s either compete and get off the sofa .. or be that obese 40 year old woman with 4 kids drowning in misery and looking for someone to blame.
Damn right, however. She clearly wants more, her circumference is a telltale sign of that, plus living the “poor” bourgeoise Marxist lie of sanctimonious hypocrisy pointing the vulgar finger of blame on the “patriarchy” and “capitalism”, or “immigration” for that matter in the other side of the useless spectrum. Despite the fact that there exist extremely successful, intelligent and compassionate women (and men) out there, slim enough to hide right behind a light pole, if it wasn’t for the boobs sticking out and giving them away. And I am all for sweet smart asses and boobs sticking out.
🥳
And now she craves equality of outcome for herself and everybody else in extension. Because she thinks of herself as not a hypocrite. If she wants MOAR freebies, so should everybody else be entitled that.
In an infinite world, it is of course possible to have land whales do whatever they please, luckily they would just eat themselves to extinction. In the real world, prior to the opulence of fossil fuels, adversity ruled the roost.
Harden the fsck up or perish, or simply just harden the fuck up out of spite.
Well now that im a old **** I follow a rule. I stop at 80% when exercising. I dont push it. I feel and listen to my body integrate with it dont beat it like a donkey. ( no offense love donkeys).That allows me to work out 5 days a week. You cant beat time though. In the end time is always the most valuable resource. Every year I cant do what I did the year before.
Not everyone can give 250W during 1h, so 300W? I would say a professional cyclist with no doping!
I’m happy when I stay above 220-230W but it’s still nothing compared to a barrel of oil.
I might have exaggerated a little…
220-230W hurts really good if you keep cranking away for an hour or so.
did you see that?
Yup, it puts the effort into perspective.
Long live cheap fossil fuels.
I’m anti pretty much every pharmaceutical product, including statins and vaccines. I have more faith in evolution than in human “ingenuity”.
My cholestrol levels were checked two years ago when I developed xanthelasma. The tests indicated my cholestrol levels were about as far off the scale as your IQ, so the doctor wanted to put me on statins. Minimal investigation revealed that in over 50s all cause mortality decreases with high cholestrol levels and only high levels of very low density lipoproteins (not LDLs and not tested for) combined with seed oils in one’s diet result in an increased risk of atherosclerosis. Only a CT scan could reveal whether atherosclerosis is in fact a problem, a test the doctor would not carry out.
So no statins, no muscle wastage and no early onset dementia for me thank you.
Wise man.
I seem to recall they wanted to pump statins into everyone over 45, ‘preventatively.’
I pump the cookie hole full of fruits and veggies, plus the hurt from letting the cranks spin.
My cholesterol levels? The doctor asked for another blood sample just to verify the abysmal cholesterol levels. There is fundamentally no need for the hormone cholesterol to be produced in the body, since there isn’t anything to “repair”/patch with a tip-top cardiovascular system.
At the peak I had 38 BPM in resting pulse. Man, resting with a crazy low pulse feels great. Almost as if the bed massages your rear end.
At 62, my resting BPM is 45. Either I’m doing really really well, or I’m well on the way to the old ticker not ticking at all.
Why stir too rapidly in a can of crazy?
I’m at about 50-60 in resting pulse nowadays, since my “job” moved and I cycle way less.
Obviously I’m a tad more crazy Q.E.D.
🤔
Worth a read https://drmalcolmkendrick.org/category/cholesterol-statins/
“Gold was attacked again, decades later, for putting forward his ideas on the ‘abiogenic theory’ of petroleum generation. Basically, he believed that there is a lot of life deep down in the Earth’s crust, and it creates petroleum as a waste product, which seeps to the Earth’s surface, which then gets trapped in certain places.”
What do guests here at OFW think of Gold’s theory?
For all minerals, the question is basically, “What is the rate at which new sources of the mineral is becoming available.” Weathering of rocks gives us, to some extent, a small additional amount of some things required in top soil, for example.
The problem with petroleum is that however it is formed, there is not enough of it being formed, right now. Something equivalent to natural gas can be collected from the fumes of garbage decaying. The problem is that there is not nearly enough of it to matter. The cost of collection is high. If there is abiogenic oil, (and I don’t think there is), there is not enough of it.
I have never heard a convincing argument of how the dinosaurs got to Titan to form the hydrocarbon lakes. Hyperion seems to similarly be rich in hydrocarbons. Since Jules Vern, no one has been to the center of the earth to report what is at various levels, his notes seems lost.
My geology is weak, one wonders how lakes were buried at such incredible depths on earth to allow for the formation of oil from algae or whatever the current meme is these days.
Sometimes it seems like a great deal of handwaving.
Has anyone purchased a 2×4 lately? At Menard’s yesterday, $8 purchased 8 feet.
Farmland in central IA is reliably reported at $10K-$14K per acre. To strip till the land and minimize dirt loss and still maintain yields requires a $1M tractor/planter – planting is done at !0+ mph. Conservation is not cheap, requires huge scale, serious barriers to entry – Gates is reported to be largest land holder in MN.
Dennis L.
Aliens pumping down some petroleum into suitable rock formations as a thanks for the gold they stole to patch up their broken planet after eons of warfare.
Apparently people can be led to believe anything if it is inscribed on ancient stone tablets.
The whiff of BS is strong right now. Take every opinion and commonly held belief, including your own with a sack of salt.
🤣👍👍
“I don’t think we can ever fully rationalise ourselves out of the basic and often creative urge to find patterns even where none exist.”
Even if “aliens” did visit earth, they probably told big fat lies. Imposing and all with technowizardry.
Dumb ass primates sucking the hopium of a glorious afterlife dry.
Ohh, how precious I am, they selected fantastic me to herd around a bunch of slightly genetically modified primates. Then the pearly gates awaits. It says so in some crusty old fragments of text. I should believe it, because hopium.
I call BS on most written stuff, roll my eyes at the yada-yada.
Ultimate objective reality is brutality in its essence. Evolve or perish. A failure not only means to be purged from the possibilities of life, but rather blown to oblivion by the guts of a star going nova. A big fat unforgiving reset.
That’s the way I would do it. Hell yes, thermonuclear fusion all the way to ultimate “reset”.
Nukes are for amateurs, space rock for pros, masters blow up stars for shits and giggles.
😊
Have any of the hydrocarbons said to be on Titan been sampled. Their determination of existence is largely based on spectral determination….transmission, reflective, absorptive, molecular transitions, resonances, etc. so is it not possible for these hydrocarbons to be something we have maybe never encountered? For example they might be HCs that automatically formed in the environment, similar to prions structures growing. Perhaps it is one big huge molecule. Perhaps it is intelligent. All that matters is it has similar spectral characteristics. Perhaps they are HCs we have never seen on earth. That cannot be ruled out.
“Modern” cosmology is mostly baseless speculation. Pseudoscience and fantasy with equations and computer simulations that can be tuned for just about any outcome that strokes the current “scientific” narrative.
there are plenty of signatures of a biotic origin in the chemical composition of crude oil, plus carbon isotope signatures. i believe that was Harmon Craig’s objection to Gold’s hypothesis. we also know how the vast majority of oil forms, which starts out as biologic sediment traps in basins.
Doom and others, I honestly don’t know, it does seem there is a great deal of hydrocarbons floating around on various moons, etc.
It would be interesting to see a calculation for the total known weight of carbon in all carbon reserves compared a total amount of carbon in all biotic origins in deposits. The weight of the carbon in past plants, etc. must be greater than the known hydrocarbons, that number would be fairly easy to find.
From Widipedia: “According to Cassini data from 2008 …”This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.” Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth’s oil and gas reserves. The dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth’s coal reserves.
This implies there are two major routes to hydrocarbon formation, what we see on earth and what is seen on other solar bodies, unless of course my dinosaur hypothesis is correct – it was said totally in jest.
Looks like it would be easy to mine, a straw from orbit comes to mind, transportation costs to earth might be a bit steep.
Dennis L.
“This implies there are two major routes to hydrocarbon formation, what we see on earth and what is seen on other solar bodies…”
Your getting close! Earth is among the planets of the inner solar system. They have accreted relatively hot, so they have relatively few volatile hydrocarbons left. The outer solar system, including its moons, has accreted relatively cold, so there are plenty of volatile hydrocarbons and water ice. AFAIK, those outer system hydrocarbons are abiotic. The ones we have on Earth are both abiotic and biotic. The biotic forms have gotten that way because life has found a way to make larger and more complex hydrocarbons from available energy sources such as sunlight and geothermal heat.
Mining the vast hydrocarbon reservoirs found on some of the outer solar system moons such as Titan would in theory be as easy as using a straw, but then there’s the transport problem. These moons are in the gravity wells of their host planets, which are large and massive. Probably the best way to exploit their resources would be staying in place.
“The problem with petroleum is that however it is formed, there is not enough of it being formed, right now. ”
That sums it up pretty good, cheers Gail.
I think that if that was true (at least in the short term) the US would not have peaked on conventional oil nor would they be wasting billions sucking dregs out of shale wells.
Right, scraping residue from the bottom of the barrel and, get this, squeezing liquid and gas out of rock.
“Abiotic oil”, mm, ‘rite. The hopium is strong now.
🤣👍
I have read about 3 tests of this theory. Two in Sweden and Finland, and one in the Pacific Northwest of the North America. The atter was conducted by a Mormon billionaire by the name of Sorenson, now deceased, who had a reputation testing out far out ideas that, if successful, would make him a lot of money. I read that he spent a sizable part of his fortune on this one. All three attempts came up dry. (Once you get to the bottom of the “oil window,” there’s no point in going deeper because below that depth the pressure and heat will eventually degrade the oil into substances that are no longer useful)
Although you call it “Gold’s theory,” it originated in Russia, but the Russians seem to have rejected it as well. They only get their oil in places were mainstream geology says it should be found.