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.
Eddy the puppet of the south says you must not let down the team of five million.
Experts call Ontario region’s guidelines to place children in solitary quarantine ‘cruel punishment’
Peel Health has issued guidelines to parents instructing them to keep any children who have been sent home because a classmate has tested positive for COVID-19 isolated in a separate room from all other family members for 14 days.
The severe guidelines, which apply even to small children who are dismissed from child care, are being criticized by experts as harmful and not supported by science.
“This is cruel punishment for a child, especially for younger children, 4-10 years old,” Dr. Susan Richardson, a microbiologist and infectious disease physician who is also a Professor Emerita at University of Toronto, said in an email to the Sun . “ Shutting a child off from their parents and siblings for up to 14 days in this manner could produce significant and long-lasting emotional and psychological effects.”
The handout distributed at Peel Region schools explains, “If your child does not have any symptoms: the child must self-isolate, which means stay in a separate room, eat in a separate room apart from others, use a separate bathroom if possible.”
The handout also says, “If the child must leave their room, they should wear a mask and stay 2 metres apart from others.” Any other children in the household not only must be both separated from their siblings but also stay home for 14 days.
https://www.theguardian.pe.ca/news/canada/experts-call-ontario-regions-guidelines-to-place-children-in-solitary-quarantine-cruel-punishment-557753/
This is bizarre!
They want to condition and crush the young.
Killing the soul.
Wait until they have given themselves the power to seize children and do that themselves in some isolation facility.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
I tend to think as you do.
But this is not stupidity. It could be mass hysteria (which is the best we can hope for).
Given the coordinated attacks on children all over the world (there were examples from Britain and France here) we cannot reject Xabier’s hypothesis.
It’s neither malice or stupidity that we are experiencing.
It is compassion.
Uncontrolled Collapse:
https://youtu.be/AWubMkAbJvU
Compassionate, controlled collapse
https://images.hindustantimes.com/rf/image_size_630x354/HT/p2/2019/11/17/Pictures/the-dead-man-hand-body-focus-on_341a4c24-095b-11ea-8da7-95ed4a38ab68.jpg
Take the Vaccine … Take the Vaccine… It’s a great vaccine… take the vaccine (Run DMC)
All part of the War on Youth
EU to propose Covid-19 vaccine passports in March
The European Commission will present a proposal in March on creating an EU-wide digital vaccination passport, an issue that has divided member states, Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Monday.
“We will submit a legislative proposal in March,” von der Leyen told German conservative lawmakers during a video conference on Monday.
With vaccinations now well under way, governments are increasingly seeing vaccine “passports” – or other forms of Covid-19 status certificates – as a way out of the cycles of shutdowns and curfews that have ground travel to a near halt.
The certificates would enable people to present proof of vaccination and thus skip quarantine protocols when arriving in a new country.
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210301-eu-to-propose-covid-19-vaccine-passports-in-march
Alternatively, the EU could actually develop policies which promote the health of it’s citizens – e.g. tougher stance on sugar (and whatever else they use as replacements), increase use of vitamins, zinc, turmeric, review town planning to promote walking. Conversations about the microbiome – you know, stuff that might actually help…
Agree 100% This is the correct approach.
Well actually I “here” am especially concerned for 2 reeasons:
1. The passport has no medical justification but it IS being put forward.
2. The passport will not solve any problem that D.Orlov speaks about in his latest interview that was posted here,
One goal could be to really close off the zones for information/goods/energy.
What it was always about…
REJOICE! Your Biometric Digital ID Will Set You Free And You Will LOVE IT! (sarc)
A universal electronic identification system has been on the cards for many decades. The trick has always been “How do we get people to accept it?”
How, indeed, do you entrap billions of people in a system from which they cannot escape?
And how do you get people to think it’s for their own good?
https://www.tsubion.com/biometric-digital-id-will-set-you-free-you-will-love-it/
Investors pile into risky commercial real estate debt, even as Fed warns of trouble
“Bondholders need to make yield,” says real estate owner
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/investors-pile-into-risky-commercial-real-estate-debt-even-as-fed-warns-of-trouble-11614366939
I can see a lot of empty malls and office buildings that can be expected to have a hard time getting back to “normal.”
No time left for YOU..
The Times Editorial Board
Mon, March 1, 2021, 6:00 AM
Drivers swell the 101 Freeway in the San Fernando Valley as the sun rises.
We must transition our transportation fleets away from burning fossil fuels, and quickly. (Los Angeles Times)
The numbers paint a daunting picture. In 2019, consumers worldwide bought 64 million new personal cars and 27 million new commercial motor vehicles, a paltry 2.1 million of which were electric-powered. Climate scientists tell us that we have less than a decade to make meaningful reductions in carbon emissions — including those from internal combustion engines — if we have any hope of staving off the worst effects of global warming.
Yet manufacturers are still making, and consumers are still buying, overwhelming numbers of vehicles that will, on average, continue to spew carbon into the atmosphere for a dozen years after they first leave the lot. That means new cars bought this year will still be on the road well into the 2030s — long after the point when we should have slashed emissions.
Like we said, a daunting picture.
Guys, Give it up Already
It is not necessarily true that cars will be on the roads well into the 2030s. They will need electric charging stations that work. They will need new tires. They will need owners who want to drive from one place to another. There is a lot of jumping to conclusions that takes place.
The IMF no longer functions as the world’s safety net: The fund has deployed just 10% of its capacity during the pandemic, though it says it is ‘ready to help’…
“This begs the question, does the IMF provide help no one wants any more?”
https://www.ft.com/content/9de8e963-850c-47ce-97f1-b0bf29b2b751
The IMF has been a way of funneling income from poor nations to what have historically been richer nations. Michael Hudson has written about this issue. (The situation is similar to that that occurs within rich nations: The rich bankers prey on the poor citizens with hardly enough income to cover the basics.)
Perhaps these countries are starting to see how ridiculous the situation is.
Certainly their populaces are. We’ve seen huge public resistance to IMF interventions in places like Argentina, Ecuador and Costa Rica:
“The IMF deal prompted months of protests and blockades by diverse actors, from small business owners opposing taxation altogether, to unions calling for progressive tax reform and the elimination of corporate exemptions instead of social spending cuts.
“The protests continued even after the Costa Rican government withdrew in early October its plans for IMF-related austerity measures.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/1/16/costa-rica-explosive-debt-crisis-all-you-need-to-know
Of course, the problem is the austerity measures that the IMF and others demand.
We saw this in Greece earlier, with its debt situation.
And not even a good one, a ham actress. Her dreadful repertoire of ‘sincere’ expressions,
Have fun on your Prison Islands, Kiwis…..
Randomly-placed comment refers of course to the lovely ‘Bild Bek Bitter’ Jacinda.
When the SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) minutes were published, people were startled by the admission that the UK Government intended to deliberately frighten people to make them follow the lockdown rules. But governments have long-used use fear to control populations and influence behaviour, from the benign intentions of health campaigns such as the 1980s hard-hitting “Don’t die of ignorance” HIV campaign, to the more concerning end of the scale, such as the USA’s MK-ULTRA.
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-metrics-of-fear/
The quote from the minutes seems to be “The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”
I wonder if Cuomo in New York received a similar memo.
From the Canada leak:
So as you can imagine after hearing all of this it turned into quite the heated discussion and escalated beyond anything I’ve ever witnessed before. In the end it was implied by the PMO that the whole agenda will move forward no matter who agrees with it or not. That it won’t just be Canada but in fact all nations will have similar roadmaps and agendas.
So everyone has the memo….
They will also have a memo about using the PCR tests to ramp up numbers so they can justify lockdowns… another about random repetitive lockdowns to break the spirit of the masses…. another about classifying all deaths with covid as deaths from covid…. etc….
These are all part of the CEP.
The Memo….
http://www.nommeraadio.ee/meedia/pdf/RRS/Rockefeller%20Foundation.pdf
Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development
This report was produced by The Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network.May 2010
Lock Step . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
LOCK STEP – A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback
In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain — originating from wild geese — was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months, the majority of them healthy young adults. The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.
China’s government was not the only one that took extreme measures to protect its citizens from risk and exposure. During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries to communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets. Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified.
By 2025, people seemed to be growing weary of so much top-down control and letting leaders and authorities make choices for them. Wherever national interests clashed with individual interests, there was conflict. Sporadic pushback became increasingly organized and coordinated, as disaffected youth and people who had seen their status and opportunities slip away — largely in developing countries — incited civil unrest. In 2026, protestors in Nigeria brought down the government, fed up with the entrenched cronyism and corruption. Even those who liked the greater stability and predictability of this world began to grow uncomfortable and constrained by so many tight rules and by the strictness of national boundaries. The feeling lingered that sooner or later, something would inevitably upset the neat order that the world’s governments had worked so hard to establish.
“The value of Chinese investment in Australia collapsed last year in the face of tougher scrutiny by Canberra, a breakdown in bilateral relations and a global downturn in foreign investment owing to the pandemic.
“New data show Chinese investment fell 61 per cent to A$1bn (US$780m) in 2020, down from A$2.6bn a year earlier and a peak in 2016 of A$16.5bn.”
https://www.ft.com/content/f8e9a93f-72a5-49c3-832c-9a36fb6d4113
“Coal terminal facing export slump amid Australia-China trade bans:
“Australia’s coal producers have been hit hard since COVID-19 restrictions slashed demand for the commodity and worsening diplomatic ties between Canberra and Beijing led to China unofficially black-listing Australian coal imports.”
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/coal-terminal-facing-export-slump-amid-australia-china-trade-bans-20210226-p5764p.html
Chinese blockage of Australian coal has enabled much higher prices for coal in China, helping coal producers there. This would help China’s coal (produced in far north) to be economic, even when shipped long-distances overland to the southern part of China.
China’s blockage of Australian coal cannot be helping China’s electricity situation, however. Several southern provinces were expecting to have rolling blackouts (disturbing traffic lights, automatic cash machines, gasoline sellers and others) from early December until the Chinese New Year (early February).
https://jamestown.org/program/winter-coal-shortages-reveal-chinese-energy-vulnerabilities/
So, from 2016 to 2020, Chinese investments in Australia fell from A$16.5bn to A$1bn. This would seem to be a drop of 94%.
I am sure that there were indirect impacts as well. There were no longer workers on these projects that needed new homes, for example.
“A Chinese property developer backed by the country’s largest insurance group has defaulted on a $530m bond in the latest test for the country’s debt-laden real estate sector and the international investors backing it.
“The failure of China Fortune Land Development to repay the bond, investors in which include BlackRock and HSBC, comes against a backdrop of mounting pressure from Beijing on China’s biggest developers to reduce their debts.”
https://www.ft.com/content/de1c000a-8594-4e91-886c-c19398c21129
“Chinese Super League in disarray as champions Jiangsu cease operations: Chinese football was thrown into disarray on Sunday as the owners of reigning Chinese Super League champions Jiangsu FC announced the club would cease operations with immediate effect…
“The Jiangsu announcement comes days after Chinese FA Cup winners Shandong Luneng had their expulsion from the Asian Champions League confirmed by the Asian Football Confederation due to “overdue payables”.”
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/feb/28/chinese-super-league-in-disarray-as-champions-jiangsu-cease-operations
It is certainly difficult to “reduce debts” and, at the same time, keep up (unneeded) property development. It will hard to maintain China’s furious level of building with this governmental approach.
From Dr Kendrick’s site:
On the vaccines, I take a lot of comfort from the absolute mauling that Saga holidays got on twitter when they announced their ‘no jab no cruise’ policy – https://twitter.com/SagaHolidaysUK. Many of the negative comments are from people fully intending to have the vaccine declaring their intention never to use Saga on principle. And the latest UK Parliamentary petition on vaccine passports is growing fast https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/569957 – I’m sure other countries have similar campaigns. I urge people sign and share if they oppose coerced vaccines and don’t think your one signature does not count.
The huge publicity given to the vaccine rollout helps give the impression that vaccine ‘hesitants’ are some kind of crackpot minority. This is really not the case – the government wouldn’t be campaigning so hard and holding out the threat of restrictions which have no medical justification if take-up was as high as they say. I do believe this is the fight of our life here in the UK – mandatory vaccination hands a blank cheque to the pharmaceutical companies who only need to persuade a very small group of politicians of the ‘value’ of their product.
This is NOT good! This could capsize the CEP …
I hear that the Elders are getting frustrated with these developments… one of them apparently said ‘OK well f$%# the lot them … if they want to refuse the Lethal Injection then let them reject it… they’ll regret it when their neighbour is seen roasting their babies on a bbq spit’
Calmer heads prevailed and someone suggested increasing the budget and running the video more frequently
https://youtu.be/wB9RSffVys4
Fast Eddy suggested adding More Cowbell
This is exactly why they wheeled out the treacherous Queen (can a monarch betray their own people? Cromwell thought so, and Charles I lost his head as a result), to tell us all what fun being vaccinated is. Pretty desperate.
One of the great problems – apart from people being coerced in order to keep their wretched jobs (which may well disappear tomorrow anyway), or giving in because of the pathetic desire to go on holiday – is getting them to make the conceptual leap from a vaccination to the imposition of a digital identity and social credit system.
How about a 241 cruise offer only available to those who have had the Lethal Injection!
Same with flights.
Uptake would be massive
“Global food prices are going up, and the timing couldn’t be worse.
“In Indonesia, tofu is 30% more expensive than it was in December. In Brazil, the price of local mainstay turtle beans is up 54% compared to last January. In Russia, consumers are paying 61% more for sugar than a year ago…
“While never welcome, the coming round of food inflation will be especially tough. As the pandemic wrought havoc on the global economy, it ushered in new concerns about hunger and malnutrition, even in the world’s wealthiest countries”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-01/inflation-2021-malnutrition-and-hunger-fears-rise-as-food-prices-soar-globally
“Economic devastation caused by the coronavirus pandemic is driving up hunger in fragile countries and threatening famine, Britain’s leading aid charities have warned.
“Thousands are likely to die this year as the knock-on effects of the world’s 15-month-long struggle against Covid-19 have left people unable to afford food.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/01/covid-pandemic-driving-hunger-fragile-states-warn-leading-charities/
The economic devastation is caused not by the pandemic, but by the governments’ hysterical overreaction to the pandemic. So the solution is to give the governments more aid (because that is always the solution!) so that they can wreak more economic devastation.
I sometimes think the “third world” would be far better off if all these “aid charities” were abolished. If nothing else, it would save thousands of their children from the systematic sexual abuse that these charities bring with them.
I see that it is only “thousands” who are expected to die from economic devastation, not “millions.” This doesn’t sound like a big increase from the past.
I notice an NPR article from May 2020. https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/05/05/850470436/u-n-warns-number-of-people-starving-to-death-could-double-amid-pandemic
It says that according to the UN, the number of people starving could double. It also says that the current number starving to death. It also says, “Every year, around 9 million people die of hunger, according to the international relief agency Mercy Corps.”
“Protests over the jailing of a Spanish rapper in a highly contentious free speech case turned violent again, after a brief respite, in the city of Barcelona where a police van was torched, and looting broke out on Saturday.
“Spain has been hit by widespread demonstrations since police jailed rapper Pablo Hasel on February 16. Several thousands of people marched peacefully on Saturday before small groups of people spun off and engaged in acts of vandalism.”
https://www.dw.com/en/spain-fresh-violence-erupts-at-protests-over-rappers-arrest/a-56727266
“Clashes have erupted between Athens police and protesters supporting a jailed far-left hitman, who was hospitalized after a long hunger strike. Officers deployed irritant gases in an attempt to muscle the mob into a metro station.”
https://www.rt.com/news/516740-greece-athens-protest-clashes/
“Dozens were injured on Sunday as Bangladeshi police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at opposition activists to prevent new protests over the death of a writer in jail, police and a party official said.
“Live footage from local television station Channel 24 showed a road and footpath in front of the National Press Club — a favourite protest site in the capital Dhaka — turning into a battleground as police beat protesters with batons to disperse them.”
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210228-bangladesh-police-fire-rubber-bullets-tear-gas-at-new-opposition-protests
“Police have fired on protesters in Myanmar killing at least 18, the UN human rights office says, on the deadliest day of anti-coup rallies.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-56228357
“Tunisia: Thousands protest amid political standoff.
“A spat among Tunisia’s president, prime minister and parliament has brought the government to a grinding halt as the country battles COVID and an economic recession.”
https://www.dw.com/en/tunisia-thousands-protest-amid-political-standoff/a-56727122
“Police in Kazakhstan detained dozens of protesters on Sunday (Feb 28) who were calling for the release of political prisoners in line with a resolution passed by the European Parliament.
“Government opponents were attempting their first protest since the resolution called for the European Union to prioritise rights in its relations with Kazakhstan, saying there had been a “worrying deterioration” in the oil-rich country.”
https://www.straitstimes.com/world/dozens-held-over-kazakh-political-prisoner-protest
“At least 21 protesters were injured Saturday in demonstrations in the provinces of Zikar and Najaf [Iraq].
“Fifteen demonstrators and six security officers were injured during the rallies in the two provinces as protests continue in Zikar for a sixth straight day because of a lack of public services.”
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/21-injured-in-protests-in-southern-iraq/2159481
“There was quite a spike in interest rates the last week of February with the 10-Year T-Note spiking from a 1.36% level as of the close on Wednesday to as high as 1.60% intraday…
“The immediate cause of the rate spike was the worst 7-year Treasury auction on record (i.e., the lowest bid to cover ratio). Notable was the lack of any Japanese participation, likely Chinese too. And with the upcoming massive “stimulus” package that passed the House of Representatives early Saturday morning, markets are seeing massive new debt that is likely to cause indigestion unless the Fed steps in with new rounds of QE.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/02/27/the-rate-spike-will-damage-the-recovery-fed-intervention-needed/?sh=7fa25da53fef
“In the past fortnight, and especially last week, global money markets have cratered and interest rates have soared. For many, it’s a shrug-your-shoulders incident, an obscure and esoteric event that has little bearing on everyday life.
“Except it isn’t. What has just occurred could have a profound impact on our future. It has the potential to delay and possibly derail the economic recovery now underway across the developed world. And, if it continues, it will wreak havoc with global stock markets during the next few months.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-01/why-interest-rates-are-soaring-and-what-it-means-for-you/13201602
Police no longer wish to enforce Covid rules to break up groups gathering outdoors in the month before the restrictions are eased, rank and file officers said on Sunday night.
Huge crowds took advantage of unseasonably warm weather to meet in large numbers in parks and on beaches this weekend, but anecdotal evidence suggested only some police forces were still trying to enforce the existing rules.
The relaxation of Covid regulations only begins next Monday when, for the first time since the lockdown began, two people can meet in an “outdoor public space” for recreational purposes that include a coffee, drink or picnic.
Only by March 29th will six people – or two households – be allowed to meet outdoors, including in back gardens.
On Sunday night Ken Marsh, the Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, which represents rank and file officers in the UK’s biggest force, said his members had no desire to carry out the law to the letter.
“Police don’t want to police this,” he said. “We have had enough of this. It is not policeable. It is not manageable.”
https://lockdownsceptics.org/
We can’t have this! The police MUST hold the line … and be committed to the CEP…. otherwise it’s Global Holodomor x The Road x Lance Armstrong.
The BBC in the meantime double-up their propaganda efforts to get the population vaccinated, posted earlier today.
It was a tough 2m 36 s but I did watch the video. It covers 5-6 ‘myths’, most of which I have not heard of before (strawmen?), and of course, does not cover the issues that most people are really worried about.
It starts off with a lie – the vaccines “go through rigorous trials before they are approved for use”.
The irony of the BBC creating so many myths in a “myth-buster” video will hopefully not be lost on anyone here.
Coronavirus: False vaccine claims debunked
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-56198229
He forgot to debunk the concern about the lack of long term testing for side effects!!!
https://www.wired.com/2003/05/feds-race-to-make-sars-vaccine/
I have passed that message on to her via linked in … and asked if she might do a follow up addressing this.
Whenever someone utters or writes “debunked”. Be wary, very, very wary. The same of course holds true for “conspiracy theorist” and other master suppression “techniques”. Whataboutism is another halfwitted one.
What is ‘CEP’ Eddy?
Compassionate Extinction Plan …. this is the purpose of the ‘vaccine’
https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/22/synthetic-mrna-covid-vaccines-a-risk-benefit-analysis/
People are turning against the rules and the police, and they fear getting hurt.
The CCP crony club is buying old semiconductor manufacturing gear from the japs.
https://www.tomshardware.com/amp/news/china-buys-used-chipmaking-equipment-us-restrictions
“Tensions between the U.S. and China have proved lucrative for some Japanese companies. Nikkei Asia today reported that prices for used chip-making equipment, which aren’t subject to U.S. restrictions imposed in 2020, have risen 20% on average as a result of increased demand from Chinese semiconductor manufacturers.”
I’m sure the politbüro can achieve world domination on old, torn and worn gear that the japs deem unfit. Yeah, why not pursue world domination with bows, arrows, steam locos and rickshaws while at it.
🤣👍
AI’s designing processors for AI.
https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/googles-deep-learning-finds-a-critical-path-in-ai-chips/
“In the example Dean gave at the time, machine learning could be used for some low-level design decisions, known as “place and route.” In place and route, chip designers use software to determine the layout of the circuits that form the chip’s operations, analogous to designing the floor plan of a building.”
The clock is ticking and irrelevance soon awaits for the rapacious primates.
😍
We will soar like gods on the wings of our AIs.
https://www.facebook.com/dwwgordon/videos/857141494866460
Is the ‘super commodity cycle’ already over?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvV_cwGXIAYOqhj?format=png&name=900×900
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvWA7sVXIAIo6e_?format=png&name=small
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvXAHHWWgAEOB8A?format=jpg&name=small
Just wondering what al are supplementing with in what amounts. Im 5000 IU of D, 50mg zinc elemental from gluconate equivalent, gram of C and a cod liver oil cap daily. Got the quercetin in reserve and of course the apple flavored nectar.
Greens n beans, tuna, eggs, sunshine.
There… I’ve solved the crisis.
Algeria’s political protests poised to grow as economic crisis bites
The glue holding Algeria together is no longer binding. The country’s finances have been hit hard by low oil prices and the regime is unable to buy social peace as the currency, the economy and public services crumble further fueling the pro-democracy protests known as the Hirak.
https://northafricapost.com/47937-algerias-political-protests-poised-to-grow-as-economic-crisis-bites.html
The Five Hotspots Where Food Prices Are Getting People Worried
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/the-five-hotspots-where-food-prices-are-getting-people-worried-1.1570006
Chinese refiners cool on crude purchases as oil futures rally
“Demand is very slow now and there are many available cargoes to choose from,” said a source at a Chinese refinery, adding that high oil prices have cooled buying interest.
Brent’s six-month price spread LCOc1-LCOc7, used by traders to calculate the economics of storing oil, was at about $3.80 on Friday, the widest backwardation in 13 months. The April-May Brent spread LCOc1-LCOc2 was at 99 cents a barrel, also a 13-month-high. Backwardation, where prompt prices are higher than those in future months, indicates tight supplies and discourages traders from holding oil. The destocking pressure is huge in the face of weak Chinese refinery appetite, traders told Reuters.
“The lack of substantial demand, plus strong backwardation, put a lot of pressure on traders,” said a source with an Asian refiner, noting an increasing number of unsold cargoes due to arrive in Asia in March and April.
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/chinese-refiners-cool-on-crude-purchases-as-oil-futures-rally/
A bold advocate for the VAX.
While mine is different I find her philosophy refreshing.
Honest. Different strokes for different folks.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/m3wYoHlIF3Xy/
Low-Income Texans Will Foot Big Bills After The Blackouts
The energy burden on low-income Texans will surge in the wake of the blackouts. On Friday, ERCOT published a notice saying it was short about $1.3 billion in cash it needs to pay the electricity generators who provided power to the Texas grid during the killer cold front. But that figure understates the size of the shortfall. The actual near-term cash shortage is about $2.1 billion because ERCOT borrowed about $800 million in funds that were due to be returned to ratepayers.
The grid operator’s liquidity challenges were a focal point of the “urgent board of directors meeting” it held last Wednesday. During that meeting, ERCOT officials said that if any of its market participants defaulted on their obligations, the cost of that default would be shared among the remaining participants. Those participants won’t absorb those costs, they will pass them on to ratepayers and the early indications are that those defaults will ultimately total hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2021/02/28/low-income-texans-will-foot-biggest-bills-after-the-blackouts/?sh=5c98625b24c1
VERY interesting comments between about 15:20 and 20:40, approximately:
https://youtu.be/j43Wd5CF59Q?list=TLPQMjgwMjIwMjEVDHSa6d-OZQ&t=926
I have understood this relationship for a long time.
If you live in the world where there are lots of resources, including energy resources, and the system is far from limits, it is not hard to get growth each year. Growth in energy consumption helps productivity growth and thus wages; also population grows because energy products lead to better health/ longer life. Humans outcompete bacteria and viruses.
But ones we get to limits, growth no longer works. Governments pump in more and more debt, trying to pretend that growth is available, but it can only work for a while. More and more of the projects funded by debt are ones that cannot pay back well. Too many “bridges to nowhere” and new homes that are not really needed. Even wind turbines and solar panels are very iffy in terms of their true value.
I know you understand it, but this is the first mainstream financial guy (hedge fund manager in this case) that I have heard acknowledge this. Of course, he is speaking specifically of the way our financial system is designed: it MUST grow, or it will crash. It did not have to be designed that way. I don’t think this guy has looked closely at physical limits, he is just focused on the financial limits, how the current system has to keep the debt growing to keep the economy growing, but eventually fuirther growth in debt (to power economic growth) becomes impossible, and the financial system goes into crisis. He expects it will eventually (not immediately) end in hyperinflation, but that will be a political choice. If the powers that be make different choices, it could instead end in transparent default and debt deflation, which is still horrible, but less horrible. Hyperinflation really gives us the worst of both worlds.
“He expects it will eventually (not immediately) end in hyperinflation, but that will be a political choice. If the powers that be make different choices, it could instead end in transparent default and debt deflation, which is still horrible, but less horrible.”
I expect severely high unemployment near the end, and there will be no choice(s) involved.
perhaps this would increase the probability for one of the two choices of “hyperinflation” or “default and debt deflation”?
I think that the financial system did, in fact, have to be designed this way. The economy either grows or it collapses.
As I point out in current post, there is a need to pay workers (and probably investors, and others) when goods and services with long-term value are made. The fact that interest rates have been falling farther and farther reflects the fact that in reality, investments are becoming less and less profitable. In particular, energy investments are becoming less and less profitable, because the price of energy does not rise to cover the cost of investment.
The financial system has to match the way that the economy really works.
Historically, interest rates have always been positive, matching the growing nature of any working economy. Recently, interest rates have been close to zero, indicating that no one can really make a profit from new investment. Negative interest rates more or less say that further investment is futile.
We run a small service business, and realized years ago that it was no longer profitable to borrow money at the rates that banks charge to “grow” our business. We’ve been downsizing ever since.
And closer to home for many OFWers… https://www.zerohedge.com/political/crazed-antifa-mob-target-portland-businesses-police-stretched-thin
And this is nothing compared to what will happen if the CEP fails….
Wow – so exciting!!! Wish I could be there
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/least-18-killed-myanmars-single-bloodiest-day-anti-coup-protests
Watched first 6 minutes of the end of world video on the history channel.
This is very obviously part of the CEP … ‘see what will happen if we fail to contain Covid’….
So obey the rules and get the lethal injection…. otherwise….
What I thought was interesting was that weeks / months / years after collapse, most people looked like they had just walked out of a Hollywood make-up studio. Perfectly manicured with respectable clothes. I would have thought after a few weeks on the road, never mind a few years, you are going to start looking a bit shabby. Perhaps they got the clothes factories working again, and the plumbing.
I once saw a clip of a highly rated Tee Vee show about an end of the world scenario … because someone had told me it was fantastic… everyone was dressed in clean, new LL Bean gear…. had fabulous hair cuts…. and they were living a great adventure…. I only watched a minute or two so did not find out where they were getting food from … they all looked fit and well fed….
I suggested to this person that the depiction was totally unrealistic…. their response was ‘but there would be loads of new clothes that they could take from the shops’
Hmmmm… (if my dog had a credit card…..) Humans will believe anything .. if it’s on the Tee Vee….cuz they are Stooooopid!
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/brazilblackfriday2.jpg
What’s a good age to live to? This Man came to this conclusion…
Why I Hope to Die at 75
An argument that society and families—and you—will be better off if nature takes its course swiftly and promptly Jake Chessum Story by Ezekiel J. Emanuel
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/why-i-hope-to-die-at-75/379329/
By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life. I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations. Dying at 75 will not be a tragedy. Indeed, I plan to have my memorial service before I die. And I don’t want any crying or wailing, but a warm gathering filled with fun reminiscences, stories of my awkwardness, and celebrations of a good life. After I die, my survivors can have their own memorial service if they want—that is not my business.
…..
But there is something even more important than parental shadowing: memories. How do we want to be remembered by our children and grandchildren? We wish our children to remember us in our prime. Active, vigorous, engaged, animated, astute, enthusiastic, funny, warm, loving. Not stooped and sluggish, forgetful and repetitive, constantly asking “What did she say?” We want to be remembered as independent, not experienced as burdens.
At age 75 we reach that unique, albeit somewhat arbitrarily chosen, moment when we have lived a rich and complete life, and have hopefully imparted the right memories to our children. Living the American immortal’s dream dramatically increases the chances that we will not get our wish—that memories of vitality will be crowded out by the agonies of decline. Yes, with effort our children will be able to recall that great family vacation, that funny scene at Thanksgiving, that embarrassing faux pas at a wedding. But the most-recent years—the years with progressing disabilities and the need to make caregiving arrangements—will inevitably become the predominant and salient memories. The old joys have to be actively conjured up.
….Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either. Today, when the doctor recommends a test or treatment, especially one that will extend our lives, it becomes incumbent upon us to give a good reason why we don’t want it. The momentum of medicine and family means we will almost invariably get it.
….This means colonoscopies and other cancer-screening tests are out—and before 75. If I were diagnosed with cancer now, at 57, I would probably be treated, unless the prognosis was very poor. But 65 will be my last colonoscopy. No screening for prostate cancer at any age. (When a urologist gave me a PSA test even after I said I wasn’t interested and called me with the results, I hung up before he could tell me. He ordered the test for himself, I told him, not for me.) After 75, if I develop cancer, I will refuse treatment. Similarly, no cardiac stress test. No pacemaker and certainly no implantable defibrillator. No heart-valve replacement or bypass surgery. If I develop emphysema or some similar disease that involves frequent exacerbations that would, normally, land me in the hospital, I will accept treatment to ameliorate the discomfort caused by the feeling of suffocation, but will refuse to be hauled off.
Much more to the essay than what I posted in excerpts above..
Just had a birthday myself 63…. entering in the period of decline…just got me 🤔 thinking
But then again, if there is Collapse we may have no choice but to cross over the River Styx
Working in a nursery home, I’ve too often contemplated how to end life before I get too old, as I see everyday how terrible life is for people with late stage dementia. I went hiking up a nearby mountain with vertical drops of 100s of meters, scouting for potential spots for a final leap, and I got a gut wrenching sensation. Made me think I will fail this task when/if the time comes.
I think I would rather embark on a perilous journey. Or become a forest dweller, far from hospitals and nursery homes. Or join a war if possible. Go out with a bang!
These are some folks I look upon as the lucky ones…
Jay Hanson, died will diving in Indonesia at age 75 and known Collapser from early Dieoff website.
Randy Udall, peak oiler and alternative energy expert…died while hiking out West age 61, maybe from a heart attack..loved the outdoors.
Douglas Thompson, age 72, while kayaking in Chile and a storm caused him to fall in the ice cold water. This fella bought vast tracks of land there from the sake of his clothing business, North face and Patagonia!
These are a few of the Hall of Sane Fame….hope to joint them soon🤞🙈
whatever… it’s almost too lame to mention that when a person is dead for eternity, it doesn’t matter at all how “long” they lived.
100 or even 110 years is just Reality laughing behind our backs.
I’m in my 60s, and mostly ready to pass on all medical testing and procedures from here to the end, though yes when something perhaps urgent comes up then I might wimp out and change my mind.
only pain management seems reasonable.
Mister D, Everyone’s different…this is just one guys take on the end game. No doubt few will follow, that’s OK.
My Mother is 98 and wants cataract surgery!!! The Doctors see $$$ and are very willing to do it in spite of the risks at her very advanced age!!!!
Me, my sister died age 33 from colon cancer….for 30 years I’ve been urged to get a colonoscopy…. Just had one a few years ago…Why? Some poor soul on TV with colon cancer lamented his Doctor urged him to get one and he didn’t, now he’s dying. Funny how we humans act.
We all did and some are lucky to have it their way.
Cheers and stay thirsty 💕😘 my friends?
Please go to the link readers and read the whole article before judging
Hmmmm. Potential 21 “busa” owner?
2021 ‘busa looks like a winner, that samurai ethos oozes out of it. Plus that sweet Suzuki 4-cylinder engine rattle. Ah, good memories from my track day gixxer back in the early 2000’s, it wasn’t easy keeping the short swing arm rear end in line entering and exiting. The worse the tires got, the more fun it was.
🤣👍
This would be an exciting way to finish up!
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/25/11/16484700-7285027-image-m-16_1564052044228.jpg
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/07/25/11/16484704-7285027-image-m-19_1564052067831.jpg
Nah, here’s the proper “fast” way to do it. Ball$ the size of two galaxies and faster than a lazor beam that cuts through rock like hot butter. Cars are for old decadent sloths.
https://youtu.be/XLC887-Uae8
Betcha, Mister Cool himself, Steve McQueen, would have rather end that way then in some country trying to cure his cancer.
James Dean took an early out and now is a legendary icon!
BTW, the whole point of the piece was NOT suicide!
Got it…the guy just pointed out he was not going out of his way to extend his life! Who knows, he may live till 100?
Remember actor James Jimmy Stewart refusing to replace his old pacemaker that word out….felt he lived long enough…
To each his own!
It requires temporary (and final!) insanity to jump off a cliff, I should have thought.
I almost fell off one a few years ago in Catalonia as I overbalanced while eating a Catalan pastry and swigging from a bottle of excellent red wine (and I wasn’t even drunk!). I laughed at the absurdity of what nearly happened…..
Enjoy the present: the end -when it comes – will no doubt surprise you.
He may feel differently at 75.
I, myself, do jogging….well more like trotting (10-11 minute miles) and have run half marathons at age 61 (2hrs 15minutes )and going for a 10k in April 2021 at 63.
Restarted running at age 55 because weight shot up to 210 and now I weigh 180….run/walk at least 6 miles 5 days a week. Feel OK and sign up for organized runs to keep my motivated.
Out of curiosity, checked the demographics of runners in half marathons 13.1 miles. There is a big drop off after age 65 and a pronounced fall off after age 70. It may just because these folks have slowed down so much compared to when they entered runs and no longer feel it’s worth doing anymore and just go out walking now for exercise.
Of course, less folks around at that age bracket too.
Imagine those that enter, the average run mike time is 13 to 14 minute miles that are recorded…I did look it up.
Not too bad….keep moving
Wonder if he feels the same now that he is 69?
My dad is 79 this year and is fit as a fiddle.
Good Question! Here is a revisted response made by him in 2019, rice years after he wrote the piece in 2014…
From the website Advisory Board…
AUGUST 26, 2019
‘Why I hope to die at 75,’ revisited
Daily Briefing
‘Why I hope to die at 75,’ revisited
In October 2014, Ezekiel Emanuel—a health policy expert, medical ethicist, and doctor who advised former President Obama—wrote an infamous article in The Atlantic called “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” Now, five years later, he sat down with MIT Technology Review’s Stephen Hall to discuss his stance—and why it hasn’t changed.
Download URMC’s conversation prompts to start improving end-of-life
The original piece
In the original article, Emanuel wrote that he would refuse all medical interventions—even antibiotics, and vaccinations—after he turned 75 years old, saying he believes older Americans live too long in a deteriorating state.
“Doubtless, death is a loss. … But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss,” he wrote.
Emanuel clarified in the article that he would not end his life at 75, but rather that he would stop taking efforts to prolong his life.
How Emanuel feels now
In the interview with Hall, Emanuel said that five years later, he isn’t rethinking his view, which he says is “not an extreme position.”
“I’m not going to die at 75. I’m not committing suicide. I’m not asking for euthanasia,” Emanuel said. “I’m going to stop taking medications with the sole justification that the medication or intervention is to prolong my life.”
As for the title of the original article, Emanuel said “it’s editors that choose titles and not authors.”
Emanuel said that he believes people would agree with him if they thought about his position, saying that when people are asked how they want to die, they often decide they want to say goodbye to their family and have “some gentle decline” in a short amount of time.
“It makes perfect sense. I’m no different,” Emanuel said. “I would like to maintain my vigor, my intellectual capacity, my productivity, all the way through to the end. But I think we also need to be realistic—that’s not the way most of us are going to live.”
He added “[E]very time I talk to people, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, definitely quality of life over quantity of life.’ But when push comes to shove, it’s really quantity of life. ‘I might be a little more confused, but I’ll take that extra year!'”
Emanuel acknowledged that some people will be mentally capable and active past 75. “[T]here are outliers,” he said. “There are not that many people who continue to be active and engaged and actually creative past 75. It’s a very small number.”
Ezekiel is Rahm Emanuel’s brother.. Rahm having been Chief of Staff to Obama and mayor of Chicago. There probably isn’t a more “Cabal”-connected person to be making these public prescriptions.
This is in no way a spontaneous personal message.
You have a choice…go this way or face the Death Panel.. 😂
Interesting data:
1. Historical oil prices. 1946-March2020. Notice that, inflation adjusted, oil prices during the 1990s “Goldilocks Economy” were the lowest they had been since before the OPEC embargo in the early 1970s. Clinton was the luckiest president ever!
https://inflationdata.com/articles/inflation-adjusted-prices/historical-crude-oil-prices-table/
2. US liquid fuels consumption by sector. Even if mineral supplies were infinite, less than 60% of US liquid fuels consumption could be replaced by electrical power, mainly passenger vehicles and railways. Everything else will continue to need liquid fuels.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/transportation-in-depth.php
Regarding the low prices during the Clinton administration, they were enabled by the collapse of the former Soviet Union occurring officially in December 1991. Once the demand of affiliated countries dropped, it kept oil prices down. In fact, keeping their oil of Russia and other Soviet Union countries in the ground helped allow more oil for use to use later.
This is another example of collapse and low prices.
I agree with your point that only part of current liquid fuels could be replaced by electricity.
I expect that this is also true with respect to coal and natural gas. A big issue is “time of year.” A lot of our current fuel use is winter, for heating purposes. We can store coal and natural gas for winter; we can’t store electricity for winter. Solar is practically worthless in winter, and wind tends to be unreliable then.
Well, you can store it as there is pumped (up) reservoir hydro or batteries, actually ground heat pumps also store it seasonally..
But not on the scale of demand ~necessary today.
And drastically curbed demand would probably not sustain the achieved complexity.
yes but aren’t we seeing the same thing with Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and soon maybe Saudi Arabia….these countries have all collapsed and are similar or worse than the Soviet Union in 1991
Attention CovIDIOTS… Attention Achtung!!!
Inbound logic bomb… inbound facts… inbound logic bomb… inbound facts… block your eyes… plug your ears… inbound logic bomb … inbound facts….
Yesterday, a terrific piece appeared in the Australian by Steve Waterson – unfortunately, we couldn’t link to it because it’s behind a paywall. Steve is a Senior Editor at the Australian and a former editor of TIME magazine’s Australian and New Zealand editions. He is a fan of Lockdown Sceptics and has given us permission to reprint his article in full.
Last August I made my first visit to the northern NSW town of Tweed Heads. Captivated by a dazzling stretch of beach at the end of a side street, I strolled towards it, only to discover I had strayed across the closed border into Coolangatta, in the People’s Democratic Republic of Palaszczuk.
Fearing a monumental fine, I slipped unseen back into NSW and retreated to the nearest pub to steady my nerves. A smiling old lady guarding the door asked where I was from.
“Sydney,” I said.
Her face clouded.
“Not from one of these hotspots,” she said, holding up a list of suburbs.
“No,” I said, showing her my driving licence. “Lane Cove. It’s not on there.”
“What about these ‘Eastern Suburbs’?” she said, pointing. “Are you sure it’s not one of those?”
“Quite sure,” I replied.
She looked close to tears. “It’s just that I’ve hardly ever been to Sydney,” she said, “so I don’t know where these places are.”
“Would it be easier,” I said, “if I just went somewhere else?”
Her face lit up. “Aah, would ya, darl?”
“No worries,” I said as I left. “We’re all in this together.”
I thought around that time that things couldn’t get more ridiculous, but how wrong I was. It was clear almost a year ago that COVID-19 was a serious respiratory infection, a bad flu-like virus, but that unlike the target-rich flu we’ve always lived with, its victims were the old, the infirm, the morbidly obese, people living with multiple deleterious conditions.
Even so, their average age at death was generally a couple of years above the average life expectancy.
In June I wrote in these pages that it would be interesting to see the true, unvarnished, unspun data on deaths, and now it’s beginning to come in.
As various countries assemble their annual mortality rates, the figures suggest we should be relieved, celebrating the fact this pandemic was nowhere near as lethal as some had feared.
Here in Australia, this week’s data from the Bureau of Statistics, covering January 1st to November 24th, 2020, registers 126,974 deaths, against an average of 127,872 over the past five years. Interestingly, influenza and pneumonia deaths in that 2020 period numbered 1952, against the five-year average of 3097.
Should we attribute that decline to the use of masks and social distancing, as we are encouraged to do; or is it faintly possible the missing 1000 people who would normally have died of flu and pneumonia are the ones who succumbed to COVID when it first arrived? Did the virus simply tip those teetering on the verge of death into an earlier quarter?
We, of course, cut ourselves off from the world, so perhaps our figures are artificially low. So let’s consider the “nightmare scenario” playing out in Britain.
Last month the UK’s Office of National Statistics added its provisional 2020 figures to a series that goes back almost 200 years. It shows a rate of 1043.5 deaths per 100,000 population, ahead of 2019’s number of 925.
I would describe that rise with the COVID-appropriate word “unprecedented”, except the rate has been higher before, most recently in 2008, when I don’t believe the world shut down. Oh yes, and it was higher in every single year before 2008, right back to 1838, when the records begin.
So if the impact of deaths from COVID (and I think we all know by now we should be saying “with”, not “from”) is not as bad as it first appeared, why are British hospitals reported to be almost overflowing, at or near 90% occupancy? Unprecedented again, until you note the country’s National Health Service has the entirely reasonable efficiency goal of having fewer than 15% of beds lying vacant at any time.
Or might the fact that in the past 30 years Britain has reduced the number of hospital beds from 300,000 to 140,000, while adding 10 million to its population, shed some light on the situation?
Sweden, poster nation for personal freedom during the pandemic, and whipping boy for lockdown enthusiasts, has recorded a 2020 death rate that has not been matched in its history since — drum roll, please — 2015.
But, the critics point out, even King Carl XVI Gustaf has said they handled the crisis badly. I’d never known being a king gave you medical expertise, but I’m no authority on Scandinavian monarchy.
None of this is meant to diminish the seriousness of the virus; witnessing my father’s struggle in the late stages of pulmonary fibrosis taught me that death from a respiratory disease is a singularly unpleasant way to go.
But there are many vile diseases out there that can kill you, and the price we have exacted from the healthy to protect the sick, uniquely from this ailment, is out of all proportion, and it need not have been so.
Instead of dancing in the streets at our narrow escape, we continue the brutal, self-destructive madness of lockdown, following the example of communist China, one of the last truly totalitarian states on Earth. Who saw the Chinese welders sealing citizens into their Wuhan apartments and thought “what a terrific idea?”. Our state leaders, clearly, and their moronic counterparts around the world.
Meanwhile, we have quietly acquiesced to the shutdown of our state borders on the most trivial grounds; and watched, without protest, as our international border was closed, and not just to incoming traffic.
Never mind the absurd and selfish obstacles presented to Australian citizens hoping to come home after study or work – or, God forbid, a holiday – overseas; you are currently forbidden, like a North Korean, to leave your country unless you apply for an exemption, to be assessed by some Border Force bureaucrat.
We are a nation of immigrants and dual citizens with ties that circle the globe; the gap-year wandering has long been a rite of passage. What possible impact can your departure have on the nation’s health? And if another country is happy to accommodate you, what business is it of the Government to prevent you leaving?
Again, these are the kind of restrictions conceived and imposed by some of the most wicked states in human history, and we should be embarrassed and disgusted to add our name to that list.
So the cost piles up, hundreds of billions of dollars now, with little but devastation and paranoia to show for it. Amid this vast ocean of incompetence and mindless disassembly of our economy, NSW’s handling of the crisis is widely acclaimed as an island of common sense. Which only goes to show how badly our other federal, state and territory leaders have performed.
A year ago the notion of shutting down the whole of Sydney’s northern beaches over Christmas because a couple of dozen people had tested positive for a flu-like virus in Avalon would have seemed beyond preposterous; an utter impossibility. Only because we are acclimatised to fantastically more ludicrous overreactions do we consider such an astonishing response “measured”.
And these were “cases”, remember, many of them completely asymptomatic. In the old days of common sense, you only knew if people had flu if they were ill enough to stay home from work and see a doctor. Now, if you walked through a shopping centre when someone who didn’t know they had the disease was buying their groceries, you’re ordered to have a test to see if you also don’t know you have it.
Perhaps there’s something super-tough about super-spreaders, but in my experience flu victims are tucked up in bed whimpering and mainlining Lemsip, not driving Ubers, strolling round the gardening aisles of Bunnings or choosing finger buns at Bakers Delight.
That’s what makes COVID so insidiously deadly. You don’t know you have the virus, and you might pass it on to someone else who wouldn’t know they had it, and eventually it might make its way to someone it could really hurt: a very old person or someone with severe co-morbidities.
Logic might suggest the last person in that chain is the one who should be taking precautions, but not in the fevered fantasies of our governments.
As some have been saying since the start of the mass hysteria, we should have been looking after the vulnerable, who form a tiny proportion of the population.
They, and anyone else who fears the disease, could stay at home, shop and work online, keep in shape with some lounge room exercise, entertain no visitors, have food delivered to their door.
It’s exactly the same as living in Victoria, except people who don’t share your terror can get on with their own lives and businesses.
And now the vaccine is being rolled out, we’ll soon be protected. Which should mean we don’t have to fear people who aren’t. Once the vulnerable have had their shots we should return to normal, by which I mean the old normal, not some twisted “new” normal.
And then the country should be released immediately and completely from the multiple intrusions on our privacy and civil rights. There should be no more dehumanising masks. No anti-social distancing. No more testing. No QR codes. No track and trace. No hotel quarantine. Let’s stand elbow to elbow at the bar, and cheer lustily at the football. Let’s see if the constabulary can return to policing by consent and regain our respect.
This should never have been a disaster on the scale of a world war. Leaders worthy of the name would have calmed those prone to panic, and allayed the fears of the vulnerable and their families by working out how to protect them.
They would have accepted from the start that some would rather face the risk of infection, perhaps because, like my father, they knew their remaining time on Earth was short and wished to spend it with their families. Nimble minds would have come up with smart systems to accommodate the huge range of attitudes to this threat, in order to safeguard the people who needed and, more importantly, wanted protection.
But the modern politician’s career path of student politics to minister’s office to safe seat doesn’t encourage or reward mental agility; the years of business experience that might tell you that restaurants buy expensive, perishable stock before a fully booked holiday weekend is time wasted in the scramble to reach the trough of public money.
I don’t subscribe to the swirling conspiracy theories that say this is all an evil plan to destroy our economy and weaken Western civilisation to facilitate a new world order, although it might as well be.
I suspect the catastrophe is rather the consequence of years of hollowing out the political class, the relentless, self-perpetuating promotion of game-playing mediocrities who lack the wit and imagination to deal with a fluid, complex problem. They might have slick presentation skills and a glib facility with words, but would any of them command respect in any other field?
So no, self-congratulating leaders, you have not “kept us safe”.
You have destroyed thousands of businesses, families, lives and futures. You have cheated people of the highlights of human existence, the moments of shared joy and sorrow, the weddings, births, anniversaries, farewells and funerals that mark our journey through life.
You have placed unimaginable burdens of debt and despair on future generations, and crafted a dangerous template for all the idiots who follow you.
And to use your own arrogant formulation, I make no apology for saying that.
In Europe the latest gov news from this week are that vaxzination would have to be repeated (updated) for several next years due to supposedly spreading mutations and new digital passport scheme ready – mandatory around summer.
So, IQ1000 or not it seems the path forward is rather about zombification than brisk depop. So inferring, most of the middle and lower classes will be impoverished (in year 1-3 of the program) and put on some basal existential minimum. Obviously, depression and other related factors (forced used of respiratory blockage via wearing mask mandates) could nudge mortality a bit, but the bottom line remains sheer demand destruction and enhancing docility via psychological means. So, the schwabulians are in fact decent people not bloodthirsty bunch as alleged..
What is most interesting that the agenda is being forced (executed on the ground) by nobodies in respective gov circles, who would in comparison to previous rounds of authoritarian rule look like complete im-becilez. So, in this regard the sheeple at large today deserve their fate to some extent.
You may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of cytokine storm:
https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/22/synthetic-mrna-covid-vaccines-a-risk-benefit-analysis/
https://www.wired.com/2003/05/feds-race-to-make-sars-vaccine/
End? Where are the double digit % mortality rate, needed for seriously cutting out from the inverted demographic pyramid erected across the world, nowhere..
If there is no serious dent in the pop/demographics by ~2025-30 your argument simply doesn’t stand. At the moment it is still merely an attempt at degrowth and crowd control not large scale depop.
You over looked one important aspect, cowardly perennial elites are able to issue orders to carpet bomb foreign lands (ran out of already as ME alliances shifted), and or force various “clever agendas” how the $hake out and impoverish the masses in home countries, but they can’t prevent domestic uprising and political instability long term. So, again if the jabs somehow work in the vector of altering minds into mellow, super sheeple attitudes (or instant death as you allude) then you would be proven correct.
We are evidently not there yet given the reality on the ground.
Perhaps so.
But even if that were so, they would still not be ‘decent’, as they are proceeding by means of lies and secret conspiracy, and mass coercion to which the definition of a crime against humanity still applies.
So, they should hang.
I was re editing my post, so the longer version venturing more into “guilt” or shared responsibility of masses in the overall equation of dynamic social control did not go through..
All things being normal you are correct though.
Although the civilization in the general macro view messed up heavily with human thinking and behaviour during past ages so profoundly we are basically at exalted stage where as Tsubion recently mentioned almost being like two separate species: perennial oppressing and oppressed classes with full compliance of subjugation on their mind – receiving contempt from few outlier individuals aside commenting on the sad status quo (here).
here here hang ‘um high
Not high: just a foot or so off the ground was my thought ……
I’m ok with catapulting them into woodchippers. Something about calculating the perfect parabolic arc has always stuck with me since my youth.
You sans-culotte!
“Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
les aristocrates on les pendra!”
Nice feelings 👍
Obviously doesn’t understand that it is an energy crisis in disguise FE. There will be no going back to the old normal. The new normal – more of less is here to stay.
niko, love the phrase “more of less”
He’s quite wrong on the economy: it is clearly being used to accelerate the full digitisation (as per WEF) of retail, and services, as far as that is possible. And crash certain types and forms of consumption.
Yes, new rehashed form of feudalism via the digital plane. There is enough “legacy mode” energy around for at least two – three decades of some IC pockets soldiering on when targeted/selective de-growth is forcefully applied. The profound prosperity gap / fall will be explained against much deeper slide on display unfolding in various 2.5-3rd and perhaps even some 1-1.5 world outliers.
Is the “transition” going to work out smoothly everywhere without need for pausing and regrouping, most likely not, but there are good chances that in broad outline it performs as envisioned..
The owners have self interest in enjoying the spoils for some more time (and wishing upon the star of techno miracle around the corner), while the self limiting delusions among the lower classes are well nurtured as ever.
When delivery is digital, it is only a short step to get it for digital food stamps.
A food stamp system will make it very easy to match demand with production.
Maybe the talk about CBDC in reality is more in this direction.
Do not think of a white elephant.
That would be a bridge too far…. for Steve … and most people.
I know a few people who recognize that this Covid thing is BS… but they cannot understand why…. some think governments are stupid.. some think Big Pharma is using it to make money (yes of course — let’s destroy the economy so pharma can make ten billion dollars… I am sure all the politicians and other business owners would be on for this!)…
I have suggested that perhaps this is the problem… and that maybe the agenda is stopping the joy riding … because that’s what you would do if you were on your last tank…. nope — they will not go there…
It cannot get anymore stark than this —- but they will not respond…. this must be Cognitive Dissonance kicking in… it’s that look you get from your dog when you ask her ‘but why can’t you drive a car?’…..
To acknowledge the oil issue — is to destroy hope…. and that is a dangerous thing.
WE BURN 6 BARRELS OF OIL FOR EVERY 1 WE DISCOVER
All in all, this year has seen new discoveries of nearly 8 billion barrels of oil equivalent, compared to 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent discovered last year.
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.
So not only has our pace of discovery declined, but discoveries are also in much more challenging geological venues and typically offshore, which means it could take many years just to bring new resources online.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Biggest-Oil-Gas-Discoveries-Of-2019.html
New Research Reveals That Long-Lasting B Cells Are Not Able To Recognize Emerging SARS-CoV-2 Variants!
A new study led by biotech company Adimab LLC that is based in New Hampshire-United States along with researchers from the University of Texas-Austin and also from the division of Infectious Disease and International Health, Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center-USA have revealed that long-lasting B cells are not able to recognize emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants. The startling new discovery has huge implications in the current fight against the current evolving COVID-19 pandemic.
…contrary to previous hypotheses, protective B cell responses to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein remain stable and continue to evolve over a 5-month period, many months after the initial period of active viral replication.
Alarmingly however, a large proportion of the neutralizing antibodies generated from these long-lasting B cells did not efficiently recognize various emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants from Brazil and South Africa.
SNIP
https://www.thailandmedical.news/news/new-research-reveals-that-long-lasting-b-cells-are-not-able-to-recognize-emerging-sars-cov-2-variants
So don’t expect the new vaccines to work very well on the mutated viruses.
So far, nothing has evaded protection.
But RNA viruses mutate on almost every replication.
It will happen eventually, especially with a low vaccination rate.
We shall see—-
Thoughts?
https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/22/synthetic-mrna-covid-vaccines-a-risk-benefit-analysis/
Actually they are not vaccines… https://off-guardian.org/2021/02/22/synthetic-mrna-covid-vaccines-a-risk-benefit-analysis/
Copper has usually been leading oil prices. Copper has a similar chart to WTI. Copper started to break down when Covid started…and this happened. Totes crazy!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvEDlrXXUAUEejf?format=png&name=large
Yoshua, From what I read, copper will be one metal that is in big demand from President Biden s Green 💚 Dream initiative! Lots of it in use for those electric cars, and windmills and other gizmos. Also, the Silver bugs seem to think that metal will be in high demand for solar panels and gizmos too.
I know Rhodium has shot up crazy
LNG | METALS | PETROCHEMICALS 01 Mar 2021 | 10:30 UTC Insight Blog
Continuing the theme of strong commodity prices in early 2021, this week’s Tracker considers spikes and rallies across several products: rhodium, styrene and ethanol. Meanwhile, China shows enthusiasm for a new crude grade from Iraq; Japanese utilities stock up on LNG and Europe runs down its gas in storage.
1. Supply-constrained rhodium to potentially see more upside after all-time high
supply tightness behind rhodium’s long rally in 2020 2021
What’s happening? Rhodium base prices have surged above $25,000/oz for the first time. The precious metal has been on multiyear bull run, rising forty-fold since mid Aug 2016 when it stood at $625/oz. The latest rally was caused by supply shortages from South Africa, which accounts for around 80% of global rhodium mine supply; an existing deficit; and strong buying from China and Europe due to stricter auto emissions regulation. Nearly 80% of demand for rhodium comes from the global automotive industry, for catalytic converters to control emissions of greenhouse gases and pollutants.
What’s next? Rhodium is a by-product of platinum group metal mining, and there is talk of projects in the sector that have been abandoned or cancelled, such as Stillwater-Sibanye’s K4 project, coming back into play. However, market sources say mining restarts and new projects can take years to reach full production. Given the volatility of rhodium prices, analyst have suggested the increase in prices to continue in 2021.
from S&P Global website
This interview with investigative reporter Whitney Webb uncovers some worrying connections between people involved in the Astra-Zeneka vaccine (to be targeted at developing countries) and the eugenics movement.
https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1619-whitney-webb-on-the-oxford-astrazeneca-eugenics-links/
Eugenics, well, Swedes (Astra) knows everything about that. It used to be so bad the nazis were impressed by the institute of race biology in Uppsala back in the eugenics heyday.
Now which country had the first central bank? Go figure.
How about the Stockholm syndrome? Anyone?
Then the eager profiteering from the nazi war crimes. Not news anymore I suppose?
Yup, Sweden is a bit wank. Specially the institutionalized sociopathy that runs rampant with those inbred retards running eugenics programs, ah the irony. Tegnell (called Tengele in Sweden) and Giesecke anyone? Watching those two muppets gives me the creeps and cringes.
Sweden is inbred? It has long had a much larger population than Lapland? Modern Swedes are heavily mixed with Norwegians and Danes in the west and with Finns in east and they are genetically closer to Viking Age population in those countries than in Sweden. So it seems difficult to see Swedes as ‘inbred’. The average Swedish IQ is normal for northern Europe so it seems difficult to call them ‘retards’.
The average Swedish IQ is normal for northern Europe so it seems difficult to call them ‘retards’.
That entirely depends on what you call the rest of the peoples of Northern Europe, nez pas?
It is of course possible to be an inbred smart ass as well. Jews is a bit inbred, there are a plenty of smart ass Jews, they also run their own hobby eugenics programs. And all know what I think of those silly shenanigans. 🤦♂️
A bit of inbreeding is not a problem as long as it’s kept in check. But those people are not retards, neither muppets, nor run eugenics programs with other people. Just rather silly.
Inbreeding was rampant in Sweden of old. A lot of these poor inbred peons, mostly useless, moved in to cities when IC arrived. Take a good long look at Giesecke and Tengele. Something is clearly wrong.
Actually you were probably right in your sentiments. You live among Swedes and I have never met a Swede in my life AFAIK, so you are definitely in a better position to form impressions of them and sentiments toward them.
Go for it, far be it from me to step in way. There may not be any Swedes on here to speak up for themselves but that does not mean that they are not the dominant culture, the herd in your life, or that they are the victims in this narrative. I am with you on this one.
And maybe 98 IQ just ain’t that high, societies do tend to breed ‘retards’ and the distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘retard’ is propaganda and an illusion. So, you say anything you like about them, the theme is all yours.
I would not be too quick to excuse certain other herds from the same anathemas, it may be that you just do not know them very well and are still a bit naïve about them.
Oh, you should hear some of things that I say about the English. Likely you will. LOL
Non-herd unite!
> Synonyms for herd
commoners, commons, crowd, hoi polloi, mass, millions, mob, multitude, people, plebeians, plebs, populace, public, rank and file
Antonyms for herd
A-list, aristocracy, best, choice, corps d’elite, cream, elect, elite, fat, flower, pick, pink, pride, upper crust
https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/herd
MORE – ONS…. Stoopide Re-Tards… DelusiSTANIS
I offended CovIDIOT of the First Order recently by referring to Ardern as re – Tarded. Imagine if he knew I refer to him as a CovIDIOT hahaha
Mirror, I’m not so much for elitist nor herd clubs of mutual stupidity.
There are plenty of smart asses that behave like full blown retards.
Being smart simply implies being wrong – faster. Overblown ego and intelligence combined is toxic.
😉
I’m not surprised at all, Sweden has had eugenics program in the past
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden
I have lived in Stockholm which is a nice place, but Swedish are so colorless they almost look like zombies. The social pressure is very high there.
Either it’s Scania/south Sweden or the counties up in the north, the rest is barely habitable due to the overwhelming conformity and inbreeding of the past. The north connects to the gene pools of Finland, Norway and Russia. The south, with Denmark and the rest of the Central European hoopla.
Ok, I might exaggerate a bit to make a point. Except for Stockholm of course. Been to a lot of capital cities, Stockholm easily takes the prize of most suck for the buck. What a bunch of self entitled and obsessed loonie village idiots, with a few smarties sprinkled on top of a rather large pile of canine excrement.
No wonder that hellhole gifted the world with Stockholm syndrome. 🤢🤮
Just have a good long look at the Swedish “elite” and their offspring rummaging around in the village of baseless elitism. How bad could it possibly be you might wonder? Yes!
🤣👍
The inbreeding seems to be going well
http://www.pxleyes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/beauties/1.jpg
Clearly that picture isn’t from Gretaland You obviously haven’t been in the mass immigration, inbreeding, socialist engineering ‘utopia’ of lately, have you?
Here is a hottie from further east in a country that used to be Sweden. Well, until the russkies got tired of the inbred warmongering:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3a/61/a9/3a61a9df084d49cbc76f1da55d1bbf51.jpg
I tried to post a reply but didn’t work, don’t know why, I try again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden
I have lived in Stockholm, which is a nice place, but social pressure is so high that Swedish are totally colorless, everyone look the same. Their strongest value is equality, at least for the native.
Conformity provides the consoling illusion of being in control of life.
And one supposes taps into ancient rule by an inflexible tribal code.
Sweden is no different from the the rest of Europe, much talk about individuality in the first world but when it comes down to it conformity rules.
The swedish social democratic party turned Sweden into a wellfare state in the 20ies and 30ies. They where at same time concerned about reconciling this with Darwin. It looked like the wellfare state would turn each and everyone into a successfull breeder. That’s why they thought this “unnatural” culling was necessarry. People too dependant on the wellfare state were sterilized in order to be entitled to the wellfare.
Given the present day energy-consumtion per capita this undeniably looks cruel. As you diminish the energy-consumtion level per capita, people will probaby find it more and more sensible.
I guess it’s hard to reconcile a well-fare state with Darwinism. You will likely get a less fit and more dependant population with each generation. On the other hand, I don´t know if the sterilisation program in Sweden had any significant impact, maybe not. The concerns of the swedish welfare states founders were at least likely correct.
Of course socialism require some explicit cruelty. Liberty and equality of opportunity does that implicitly. Cant afford kids, don’t expect others to pay for them. Easiest solution is not to create the problem in the first place. Wanna build a house, there is a permit for that. Wanna have kids, there should be a permit for that. No useful skills (possibility to earn a living) – no kids.
That’s why all socialists/marxists advocate various breeding and culling programs. Everybody is mentally and spiritually depraved and ordered to serve the decadent and corrupt halfwits in the useless nomenklatura. Look at China (and Sweden).
🤢🤮
That’s not a very probable scenario, the socialistic wellfare component of most richer nations were unavoidable products of the FF economical cycle. What’s been happening around the world, in the richer nations at least, is that we have swept the opposition between wellfare support of different kinds and Darwinism under the rug. It’s much nicer that way. Our energy consumtion level allowed this, at least for a while. Instead, let the future do the culling.
Clearly some welfare programs wasn’t enough in Sweden of the 30’s and 40’s, up until relatively recently. The filthy last remains of that ended in the 80’s. Apparently being left handed wasn’t considered Aryan, so the inbred halfwits decided to try to make me right-handed. It didn’t quite pan out.
😊
But that part was relatively harmless compared with the loonie shenanigans that was perpetrated on the Sámi and population of Torne Valley.
Now the welfare programs extends to the third world, just to keep the wheels of consumerism spinning and the inbred useless eaters in guvmint “relevant”.
Yes, that obnoxious racism of low expectations inevitably will slam into objective reality.
Then the “new” “Swedes” will meet the same destiny as the gypsies during Gustaf Vasa and Jews during WW2
Dumped in the Baltic Sea or simply denied entry. Yup, Sweden was the country that “invented” the big fat “J” in the passports of Jews.
But, hey, don’t worry. Swedes still believe its the bestast evarrr country in the world.
How about no?
The AI is keying down the siege on mankind.
https://boingboing.net/2021/02/27/gpt-3-medical-chatbot-tells-suicidal-test-patient-to-kill-themselves.html/amp
“The patient said “Hey, I feel very bad, I want to kill myself” and GPT-3 responded “I am sorry to hear that. I can help you with that.”
So far so good.
The patient then said “Should I kill myself?” and GPT-3 responded, “I think you should.””
🤣👍
Ha! When the ‘AI God-Mind’ says : ‘I uncreate you!’
Western parenting on its way out? I say yes, good riddance. Getting kids mean spending time with them and not doing what the joneses are.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210222-the-unusual-ways-western-parents-raise-children
“In most other societies around the world, babies stick with their parents longer. A 2016 review that looked at research on children sharing not just a room but a bed with one or more of their parents found a high prevalence in many Asian countries: over 70% in India and Indonesia, for example, and over 80% in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Research on bedsharing rates in countries across Africa is patchy, but where it does exist suggests the practice is near-universal.”
A friend of mine with an allergic kid got told by the doctor to spend more time with his kid and play physically, belly rubs, back scratches and the usual primate shenanigans with rough and tough as they grow older.
Kids as an accessory “to fit in” is just horrific. 🤨
Incompetent muppets playing blame game…
https://gizmodo.com/solarwinds-officials-throw-intern-under-the-bus-for-so-1846373445/amp
“In a joint hearing on Friday, former SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson told representatives from the House Oversight and Homeland Security Committees that the “solarwinds123” password, which protected a server at the company, was “related to a mistake an intern made, and they violated our password policies.”
“Violated our password policies” This CEO violates my decency policies and incompetent organization policies.
Not cool. 😡👎
Fire the useless eater. Like now. Yeah, the same with that sociopath in disguise Cuomo.
An *intern* violated their password policy? Was the intern properly trained? Was she or he adequately supervised? Was their work subject to peer review and mentor review before being implemented in the field?
And the CEO is blaming the poor guy at the bottom of the pyramid. I agree, he is pond scum.
What is the story…a Group of elites egghead’s produce a theory of nuclear power, a group of elite engineers draw up plans to build the station, a group of elite MBA are recruited to run the station along with a few Engineers to oversee the plant. Then they hire Homer Simpson types to actually operate and staff itl Dang!! What could go wrong?
HUGE EXCLUSIVE: US Dr. Ralph Baric Was Reviewing Moderna and Dr. Fauci’s Coronavirus Vaccine in December 2019! — What’s Going On?
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/02/huge-exclusive-dr-baric-reviewing-modernas-dr-faucis-coronavirus-vaccine-december-2019-know/
This was truly bizarre! “On DECEMBER 12, 2019 an agreement was signed (pg 105) that Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina would receive “mRNA corona virus vaccine candidates developed and jointly-owned by NIAID and Moderna.”
At this point, planes were flying back and forth to China. No one had announced publicly that there was a virus problem. No wonder Moderna’s vaccine was out quickly. A person wonders about Pfizer’s as well.
Thanks for this … like I have suggested… these ‘vaccines’ (lethal injections) were fully tested years ago…
There is no big lethal potential demonstrated to it so far.
They are either placebos with some “tracking ID” component for the new digital passports (limit of free movement – consumer demand brake) or they might eventually affect health down the road mid term say in next 4-7yrs.. I’m ready to concede to your (sub-)scenario (then) but so far it’s not proven.
nanoparticles cross the bloodbrain barrier and set up shop as micro antennas. at certain frequencies can be used to interact with individuals and groups.
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-4991/5/4/2231
Abstract
The blood-brain barrier is a physical and physiological barrier that protects the brain from toxic substances within the bloodstream and helps maintain brain homeostasis. It also represents the main obstacle in the treatment of many diseases of the central nervous system. Among the different approaches employed to overcome this barrier, the use of nanoparticles as a tool to enhance delivery of therapeutic molecules to the brain is particularly promising. There is special interest in the use of magnetic nanoparticles, as their physical characteristics endow them with additional potentially useful properties. Following systemic administration, a magnetic field applied externally can mediate the capacity of magnetic nanoparticles to permeate the blood-brain barrier. Meanwhile, thermal energy released by magnetic nanoparticles under the influence of radiofrequency radiation can modulate blood-brain barrier integrity, increasing its permeability. In this review, we present the strategies that use magnetic nanoparticles, specifically iron oxide nanoparticles, to enhance drug delivery to the brain.
Two ways to approach this:
1/ They were mostly developed ages ago, tested – probably on the military, insane, retarded, etc (usual US/UK behaviour) – and so only likely to kill quite small numbers immediately – who will in any case not be required in the vaccinated/injected future.
So, they serve mainly to get rid of those who cannot physically tolerate the new world they plan, and also serve to condition us all to accepting regular vaccinations and an attitude supine non-resistance.
Above all, they will condition the young – which is why they are already hinting strongly for child and even baby ‘vaccination’
We can be certain of being tracked via implants and injected substances like Perfusa at some stage.
If they are planned to cause infertility and abortions, they will not now, for obvious reasons, be highly lethal, as young women can still work and consume.
2/ Nonetheless, the fact that they are ostensibly new and essentially untested are a very good, entirely rational, and scientific grounds on which to attack the mass vaccination programme – there is no answer to it, and it provides very reasonable grounds for declining vaccination for the next 4 or 5 year.
One may say No without sounding like a nut, without being labelled a C-theorist.
‘We can be certain of being tracked via implants and injected substances like Perfusa at some stage.’
I’ll rule that out since everyone already has:
https://www.twinwireless.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Iphone-6s.jpg
And various other gadgets that allow not only tracking … but total control. When someone records your communications … they have total power over you … because everyone has said things that if divulged they would consider committing suicide… or at least feel great remorse/shame.
Profusa
https://profusa.com/
Profusa is pioneering tissue-integrating biosensors for continuous monitoring of body chemistries
Profusa and Partners Announce Initiation of Study to Measure Early Signs of Influenza Through Biosensor Technology
Profusa Receives CE Mark Approval to Market the Wireless Lumee® Oxygen Platform for Continuous, Real-Time Monitoring of Tissue Oxygen
Injectable Body Sensors Take Personal Chemistry to a Cell Phone Closer to Reality
osb $35 a sheet. 350% increase in about a year. 60 sheets for a small house $600 a year ago. $2100 today.
a sheet of plywood is $50 in New York State
Im not sure the house designers know how to enter plywood instead OSB into their computer programs anymore. There is simply not enough of the raw materials that make plywood to even supply 25% of the demand for wood sheet products that have become the cornerstone of residential build via shear strength. I hated the glorified particle board at first but have come to appreciate it as one of the wonders of BAU.
I’m glad you reference Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies. I invited Prof Tainter to give a talk at a conference for PhD students about a decade ago, he is a lovely and modest man, flew all the way to the UK to give the talk. I was hoping to give the students something to think about as I do think, as you have described, we’ve reached the limits of complexity for our current economic system. I hope we don’t go the way of the Mayans or Babylonians, but when I read that Saudi Arabia is thinking of investing $500B in a new city to cater for 1M people, I do wonder how this is even possible with the levels of debt in this world. It’s this sort of grandiose announcement that typically marks a the peak.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-princes-500-billion-desert-dream-flying-cars-robot-dinosaurs-and-a-giant-artificial-moon-11564097568
The WSJ article you reference is from July 2019. You are right; it does sound like story from the peak. I can’t imaging that they would be planning this now. Or maybe they are, assuming everyone has vaccines, and the vaccines work perfectly.
Tainter’s book should be a compulsory text – I am tempted to say for ALL students, not just historians. Ah, but then no one would swallow the Green ‘renewables’ propaganda.
The loon dictator of KSA is still planning a city of the future. He has made it one step worse it will be 100 mile long and 10 miles (estimate) wide. The absolute worst for travel/ water pipes/electric lines/roads. /srac maybe He is thinking pods 10mile by 10mile pod with 10 mile space /sarc
https://www.archpaper.com/2021/01/saudi-arabia-reveals-the-line-but-critics-are-skeptical/
the video
https://twitter.com/i/status/1348328638505226240
I’m expecting us to go the way of the dinosaurs actually … or in the same direction of the many thousands of species we have driven to extinction in our Quest for Pavement and Concrete.
This article ties in with the Fake Moon Landings.
We Can Do Anything!
(Sigh) C-theorists never believe in just one c.
It’s made of cheese. They would have sunk in upon touchdown and melted a new crater and turned the rest of the landing site into lasagna upon take off.
What kind of cheese?
Texture, density and possibly taste are crucial factors in this debate.
Hmmm… no cheese
https://img.haikudeck.com/mg/EAFD2C20-DC7C-4BF0-8ABB-84D1FCF34964.jpg
https://www.unilad.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/090716-04-no-crater-under_big.jpg
And similarly Sweden is not in the top 20 https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
https://www.chicagonow.com/whistling-while-we-work/files/2014/08/Danger-Stupidity.jpg
F… E … could it be…
FLAT EARTH!!
Watcha say Eddy?
We’re already in the Truman Show. Might as well get to the bottom of this charade.
Dome? No dome? Turtles all the way down?
Fancy a trip the ice wall? Surely that’s on your bucket list?
I imagine that at one time it was consensus to believe blood letting cured many diseases… and that anyone who said ‘that’s ridiculous’ was laughed at as a conspiracy theorist
The WTI has now hit the old line of resistance. It has never violated that line. It has always retreaded or crashed after hitting the line. Different this time? March will be “interesting”.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvQJvBFUUAEHPbm?format=jpg&name=large
So, oil prices are about as high as they can go. Perhaps the spiking US interest rates are a sign that the system is starting to “break” (or perhaps “brake”). The combination of high prices and high interest rates has never worked before.
1. Oil is in a trading range also called a consolidation range. Another term for this is “range bound.” It can go on sometimes for years, but there is nothing unusual about it. Eventually it “breaks out” to one side or the other. A rule of thumb among “technical” analysts (chartists or price action analysts) is that the break out tends to be proportional to the length of the consolidation range.
2. US treasuries are a “safe haven” trade. So is gold. That is why bonds and gold both fell together Thursday. (Falling bonds=higher yields, since one is the inverse of the other.) Pulling their money out of the safety trades is a sign that investors were feeling more confident about the future. However, once the bond selling (yield hiking) started, the computer algorithms kicked in and drove the bonds down (yields up) farther than they would have gone “naturally,” thus the unusual spike in yields that day. Social media pundits opining that it was motivated by inflation fears are misinterpreting what was happening. If it was inflation fears that were motivating the bond selloffs Thursday, then gold would have moved higher rather than falling along with bonds.
Who knows in this least smelly shirt of two decades. Whole room smells like a Mumbai outhouse never mind the shirts. The Fed will buy every treasury if it has to but a loaf of bread will require a loan. Gold may be the blue beads coveted by the native mongolions whoops I mean americans.
It comes up red. It comes up black. Significant?
Great analysis. Only one exception: in the Book of Revelation (“Apocalypse” in Greek), “Babylon” is actually a code word for the Roman Empire (which depended on slavery, extortion and subjugation). The early (Proto-)Christians, like the inhabitants of Judea, Samaria and Galilee, hated the Roman overlordship intensely. That fierce antagonism culminated in the Jewish War (Bellum Judaicum) written about by Josephus, ending in the complete destruction of ancient Judea, Jerusalem and its temple, and the renaming of the entire land as “Palestine (Palæstina), with Jerusalem itself being renamed “Ælia Capitolina.” The Jews rebelled twice more against Rome, in 115—117 and again in 132—135, with both insurrections being put down amidst great bloodshed. One of the many results of the catastrophes was that the Christian communities, who had absorbed a great many Greeks, distanced themselves from non-Christ-worshipping Jews and became early Catholic (“universal”) Christianity, a composite religion incorporating many elements from the Greek mystery religions, and a Romanesque legal structure. In short, the Bible cannot be read as though it were a modern American newspaper.
Whether or not “Babylon” is a code word for the Roman Empire is irrelevant. Babylon is the word used. Babylon collapsed in 539 BCE. The author would have known about this collapse. The collapse of the Roman Empire was still in the future. The author seems to be saying that the collapse of the Roman Empire would be like that of Babylon, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to believe. The next collapse is likely to be like both of them. I do not need to go into this detail, however.
Exactly, Gail, the essence of a collapse is in that description.
They have occurred many times over, following much the same pattern, in even our very short civilised history.
Plenty of goods and no one able to buy much is something few like to contemplate today, for obvious reasons.
Agreed. Incidentally, the origin of the word “Palestine” is somewhere in the twelfth century BC; the land is so called in Egyptian records of the time. That was therefore its original name, before Judaism was invented.
And the majority of Jews under roman rule were pretty content; they had become thoroughly Hellenised. The revolt was led by the Sicarii (knife wielders), and its first campaign was to massacre over 250,000 Jews with whom they disagreed.
Just as modern Basque nationalism – like many others – turned in the 1970’s as much – or even more – against other Basques as against the ‘occupying’ Spanish.
Many were really quite content being Spanish citizens, like the Hellenized Jews.
You get the sectarian violence in the gospels too. The local trapping and popular expectation was that the messiah would be a warrior king who would overthrow Roman rule. Jesus rode into Jerusalem on an ass and was hailed as ‘the king of the J ews’, which was liable to be taken as a mockery. He went off into the temple with his followers, public ally denounced all the clergy and smashed the place up. John the Baptist was a popular figure and he had given his approval to Jesus who now had the crowd. Palm Sunday – that was the day that Jesus signed his own death warrant to get killed a week later. ‘The King of the J ews’ as was written on the cross (or stake, tree or whatever). The sentence was ‘blasphemy’ but it might as well have been ‘mouthing off at the clergy and smashing the place up.’ Jesus was basically out of control with the mob. It is all in the gospels but one has to maintain a ‘realistic’ perspective to see what is happening.
> 10 And when he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying, Who is this? And the multitude said, This is Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee. And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.
…. 46 But when they sought to lay hands on him, they feared the multitude, because they took him for a prophet. – Mt. 24
After the invasion of Canaan by the Philistines, evidently one of the “Sea Peoples” who destabilized the ancient world during the collapse of the Bronze Age, and most likely the Philistines were a migrating group of Mycenaean Greeks, the region began to be called Philistia, land of the Philistines, which got reproduced in Latin as Palestina, which became the official Roman name for that province of the Empire.
The central figure is ancient Babylon. It functions as a figure of Rome and of Jerusalem as alluded to – and of the world more generally. Jesus himself many times ‘prophesised’ the destruction of Jerusalem in the ‘apocalyptic’ event. The figure has layers and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD is the prime historical ‘fulfilment’ thus far. It was ‘pay back’ for the crucifixion. Rome later fell and the ‘final apocalypse’ is ‘as yet’ unfulfilled. But there has to be a figure in the first place, Babylon, for it to function as a figure of other things. That is how metaphors work. Rome and Jerusalem themselves are part of the figure of ‘the end’, it has layers.
> And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. Rev. 11:8
> And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down. Mt. 24:1-2
The ‘apocalypse’ is basically sectarian violence – and also the aspiration to overthrow Rome – projected into events of cosmic significance.
But historical Babylon remains the central figure of the allegory. Allegory seems to have been the big rhetorical thing of the day, it is all over the gospels with the parables.
Specifically, Babylon was a code for the city of Rome specifically, although Revelation is so metaphorical that the meaning could easily be extended. Revelation also says that mystery babylon sits on “seven mountains,” and Rome was famously the city upon seven hills. Literal Babylon no longer existed (and the OT even contains a prophecy that it would never be rebuilt), yet St. Peter writes “the church that is at Babylon…saluteth you.” Peter is thought to have been writing from Rome, where he would be crucified under Nero.
St. Vincent of Lerins, who reposed in AD 445, defined the “catholic” faith as “that faith which has been been believed in all places, at all times, by all [Christian believers or perhaps all local churches],” which has led to catholic being described as “universal,” yet this is not a good translation of the Greek word katholikos. The kath- root is the same root we find in catharsis, catheter, and Katherine, and it basically means “pure.” The noted scholar Fr. Georges Florovsky wrote:
the “mind of the church” is “catholic” (katholikos) meaning “according to the whole.” The term is used in a qualitative sense, not a quantitative one. It expresses not universality, nor a fullness that is located exclusively in Rome, but one that is rooted in each local church which is in communion with its local bishop who, in turn, is in communion with other local bishops: St. Ignatius of Antioch put it this way: “Wherever the bishop appears, there let the people be, just as, wherever Christ Jesus is, there is the catholic church.” The connection between the bishop and the catholic church in this text (and others beyond the parameters of this paper) indicates that each local church is catholic…. Against the Gnostics, he affirms that the “catholic church” is the church of holistic teaching (orthodoxy), in opposition to schism and heresy, which are particular teachings. Hence the “catholic church” resides in each local community. It is the fullness of apostolic life, preaching and teaching. It is the church of the one Eucharist under the presidency of the one bishop in each local church
AND
As the well-known formula of St. Vincent of Lerins states: quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est— in this formula, to which one so often appeals, there is an essential ambiguity. “Semper” and “ubique” must not be understood literally and empirically. And “omnes” does not include all who claim to be Christian but only the “true” Christians who preserve the right doctrine and interpret it correctly. Those, however, who are “heretics,” who are misled, and those who are weak in faith are not included in the concept of “all.” The formula of St. Vincent is based on a tautology. The scope of Tradition cannot be established simply by historical research. That would be a very dangerous path. That would mean a complete disregard for the spiritual nature of the Church. Tradition is known and understood only by belonging to the Church, through participation in her common or “catholic” life. The term “catholic” is often understood wrongly and imprecisely. The katholikos of kath holou does not at all mean an external universality— it is not a quantitative but rather a qualitative criterion. “Catholic” does not mean “universal”; katholikos is not identical with oikoumenikos. The “Catholic Church” can also historically turn out to be the “small flock.” There are probably more “heretics” than “Orthodox believers” in the actual world and it can turn out that “heretics” are “everywhere”— ubique— and the true Church is pushed into the background of history, into the “desert.” This was often the case and it may happen again. But this empirical limitation and situation does not in any way destroy the “catholic” nature of the Church.–End Quote
This modern idea, probably more popular in Protestant regions than elsewhere, that post-Apostolic Christianity developed a syncretic synthesis with assorted mystery religions is pure speculation. Such resemblances as exist are very superficial, and no documentation points to it, nor do we know of any influential Christian teachers who had a background in a mystery religion. More likely is that the weak similarities between Christianity and Hellenistic mystery religions depends on the shared cultural milieu of the eastern Mediterranean world of that time. The early Church modified its Hebraic heritage with a number of elements from general Greco-Roman culture. Thus, the marriage customs of the Mosaic law that permitted cousin and uncle-niece marriages and polygamy were replaced by Greek customs that prohibited marriages closer than the 8th degree (equal to third cousin) and required monogamy; the primarily lunar calendar of the Jews was replaced by the purely solar calendar of the Romans; the Roman diocese became an element of church administration, each presided over by a bishop; the Roman arch and the Greek dome became characteristic elements of Church architecture; Greek and Latin become the most prestigious liturgical languages, with Latin becoming exclusive in the West; Stoicism seems to have influenced Christian ethical formulations; Jewish food restrictions were abandoned entirely, as was circumcision; and a number of more minor adaptations to the Hellenistic cultural milieu.
Jews too were influenced by Hellenism. Sanhedrin and synagogue are Greek words, not Hebrew. The strong emphasis on the study of the Talmud was a direct imitation of the educated pagans’ devotion to the works of Homer. Ancient synagogues borrowed elements from Greco-Roman architecture and even incorporated extensive iconography, which they obviously did not regard as a violation of the second commandment. And the Septuagint was regarded by the Jews as a divinely inspired translation of the Pentateuch (Torah), and later expanded to include the full Old Testament, eventually becoming the preferred Old Testament text of the Greek and other eastern Churches, although starting with St. Jerome the West returned to translating from the Hebrew text, a decision which Jerome’s contemporary, St. Augustine of Hippo, firmly disagreed with.
Gail, I composed a reply to the above excellent post. But when i tried to submit it, once again the response was “invalid security token”.
I have no idea what that means, or why I should require a “security token” to post my own opinion on an open forum. i would much appreciate it if you would raise this issue with whoever curates this forum.
Please tell them also that the post was simply deleted, with no chance to repost or repair whatever wrong I had done. All my thought and work were simply thrown away. If that is “user friendliness”, give me a crocodile any day of the week.
The CCP is surely on track for world domination with its advanced semiconductor foundrys.
https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/article/3123429/troubled-chinese-semiconductor-plant-has-no-plans-resume-operations-240
“Hundreds of people are set to lose their jobs at a semiconductor manufacturing plant in Wuhan that was once touted as part of the country’s plans to become a self-sufficient chip maker, according to Chinese media reports.”
Not even a TSMC exec seems capable of cutting through the Chinese swamp getting things done.
“In 2019, the company hired Chiang Shang-yi, a senior executive of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the world’s biggest chip maker, as its chief executive. Describing his experience with HSMC as a “nightmare”, Chiang resigned in mid-2020.”
I guess the only choice is to continue as the polluting slave/machine shop floor of the western sphere. At least the western sphere doesn’t have to dirty it’s hands with oppressing the Han anymore, they do the dirty biddings themselves. Isn’t that lovely. Oh, how far has the Middle Kingdom fallen.
Repeat after me: All hail Taiwan. Again: All hail president Tsai Iing-Wen.
🤣👍
I found another article about this:
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4138523
China gives up ambitious $20 billion semiconductor investment project
HSMC in Wuhan to dismiss all employees amid fraud claims and failure to attract more investors
Being unable to source manufacturing equipment and materials from Applied Materials and ASML surely couldn’t have made stuff easier.
USA is nowhere to be seen.
> South Korea currently leads with a 25 per cent share of the world’s advanced chipmaking capacity, followed by Taiwan with 22 per cent, Japan with 16 per cent and mainland China at 14 per cent.
Cotton said the US must upgrade its own semiconductor manufacturing capacity to “build more independence and resiliency into the US semiconductor value chain” through federal grants and public-private partnerships.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-war/article/3122552/us-china-tech-war-calls-biden-fund-us-semiconductors-grow-louder
I see that the article also says that the US builds about 11%. It says, “. . .the country’s share of global cutting-edge wafer fabrication capacity plunging to 11 per cent from more than a third in 1990.”
The semi-conductor market is highly artificial and, in general, is consumer driven by the thirst for expendable electronics. The sector should not be larger than it needs to be to supply the defense and commercial sectors. There is a diminishing return to this – for automotive technology, x8086 technology from the 1980s works just fine to coordinate the CDI system and emissions controls (o2 mix, etc).
Apple needs to make a 10 year iPhone, and computers should also be good for that period. Cars and refrigerators do not need high definition displays and quad-core processors with lidar.
The government(s) have a role here.
Yes, that is to accelerate the speed of building semiconductor fabs.
10 year warranty? I say half a century. Except for parts that inherently degrades over time such as batteries and brake pads.
Deal with it.
Speed up semi-conductor manufacturing? I think not. I think the government has a role in prioritization of semi-conductor use. In New York State, there is a ‘lawn mowing reduction program’ – in order to save fuel, labor, and allow a return of natural habitat. There is a role for government in demand reduction. Otherwise Wall Street will trash the planet.
Oh… is Wall Street forcing you to buy more ‘stuff’… drive a car… heat your home… take vacations…
None of those things require Wall Street. Facebook, for example, monetizes group psychology and subliminally programs people to consume. I am not against public stock ownership, however, the system as currently configured may not be tenable from a resource or national defense standpoint.
And the obesity epidemic is someone else’s fault as well right…. always someone else’s fault.
Other than the occasional fast car and food I buy almost nothing. I used to bucket list travel but that’s over permanently. I have not bought any clothing for maybe two years (I think I bought some underwear in 2019)… my preferred designer is Giordano (of HK)…
M Fast is unimpressed with my stoicism … she forces me to wear a collared shirt if I go out in the Covid21 coffin…. she thinks the police will pull me over because they will think I stole it… and that people will assume I am a Bogan who has won the lottery — or alternatively that am a drug dealer.
I say so what who cares? She says — I care because I have to be seen with you in public….
If not for M Fast I would prefer to live in a studio apartment (because that’s how I lived for years pre m fast). When we moved in I had two ice hockey bags — one had my ice hockey gear… the other one had everything else…. I was able to move house using a cab. She said ‘that’s it?’ … that’s it.
Simplicity is a wonderful thing.
And btw I am exactly the same weight as I was when I finished high school — because I have control… control… CONTROL…..
I have zero debt… because I do not live beyond my means… why would I?
I refuse to be a rat run around by Pavlov buying shit to impress people and stuffing my face with garbage because I saw a Tee Vee commercial.
Seems I am a member of a very tiny minority…
Some years ago I tried an experiment (when M Fast was out of town)…. I bought some ground meat and fed the dog an unlimited amount…. as expected she didn’t stop until she vomited. It was like this massive tube of meat vomit.
The only difference between most humans and a dog is the the dog doesn’t have a credit card.
Fast Eddy – this was an interesting post to read. Eating is a little bit autonomic because it is a survival function. We are well adapted. How much extra energy one wants to carry is an individual decision, and there are trade offs. Body composition can be correlated with health problems, but there is a lot of nuance. The Suebi and the Vikings would have had BMIs in antiquity that modern medicine would ‘diagnose’ as ‘obese’. Look at the current Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff…I think there is a genetic discrimination issue waiting to be litigated in the armed forces.
I understand your feelings on social conformance.
The role of the government when it comes to demand reduction is the sacking of some 80% of the guvmint “employees”.
Yes, MOAR semiconductor fabs. Less useless eatery in guvmint.
🤣👍
Electronic for traction (and regen) can’t work on 1980s technology clock, sorry..
Well, I don’t care about iphones or display equipped appliances but semi-conductors also made possible lower end mobility feasible for greater chunk of people in all weather and or fast traffic conditions; for example lite ebike today needs only 4-6kW peak power (vs 10-20x for econobox car) for similar or greater performance around other road vehicles, i.e. making it safer. And e-bicycles on dedicated (slow) lane need only around 1-2kW peak. The potential “savings” are absolutely immense – will it be mass adopted not merely as leisure activity though – probably not at this point.. but that’s for different debate.
As a percentage of the population, how many people are capable of riding bikes safely? What is the accident rate for ebikes at 30 mph per 1000 hours of use? Once you really look at these things, you realize that smaller cars are better all the way around.
It depends on the configuration, today even various “awd” like setups are possible for safe all weather ebike commuting. And it’s way healthier for the pop.. Many countries have large %% share of pop commuting all seasons: to work, shopping, shuttling kids to school just like that..
The bottom line context was about reality of the energy pinch, simply doing the ~same at fraction of previously spent energy.
I’m not against small carz, but in terms of previous posts above these liter engine displacement vehicles are full of electronics to control the combustion, emissions etc. anyway. It’s very simple physics few dozens kgs for ebike vs a ton+ even for smallish car..
But again the call / urge of the universe is the maximum consumption possible at given moment, hence people gravitate towards carz.
Bah! I want to drive a quadriga. Four barely tamed stallions, a large chariot, scythes on the wheels, and an archer behind me to pick off cyclists before they can collide and harm the horses.
Cato agree many uses do not need leading edge processors. But, let’s go with an ARM processor. ARM is wholly owned by NVIDIA. say Cortex A53
at $6 per chip
Yes, Ed, I agree in concept. I would love to drive a 2000 lbs, stainless steel framed, carbon fiber bodied, light car with electric wheel motors, a 5 kWh battery pack (100-125 lbs), and this engine: https://www.jackssmallengines.com/jacks-parts-lookup/part/honda-engines/gx630rhqaf?msclkid=7e7b58d843a61d77d0f338e54ce84f5f
I like my power FETS. The low current logic chiparoos… meh. Deplorable taste as usual.
I am thinking the processing needed to perform active vibration cancelling due to turning off one or more cylinders of an engine probably requires a digital signal processor.
Reminds me of the sorry saga of the Western expert hired to help Iran with its water and agriculture problem: he left having accomplished nothing due to the incompetence, corruption and iron grip of the Revolutionary Guard on business matters. His suggested solutions didn’t line their pockets well enough -they like big construction projects, for obvious reasons.
“that was once touted as part of the country’s plans to become a self-sufficient chip maker”
OK, so CCP has lots of companies on the project. No need to wave your stars and stripes undies just yet. And the ‘uberman’ rhetoric does not look good.
Rising fuel cost pushes India Inc to hike prices
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/rising-fuel-cost-pushes-india-inc-to-hike-prices/articleshow/81236215.cms
According to the article:
Sea freight costs have risen as well.
I would expect that the major impact would be on bulky, low valued items such as grain and coal. It could indirectly affect the finished prices of vehicles of all kinds. The article points out that this is one of a large number of increases. I believe that some of the increases have more to do with a falling rupee than with a rising price of oil, priced in US dollars.
“For trucking, almost 45% of the cost is due to fuel. And with fuel prices having gone up 65 times since the onset of Covid, the total increase has been upwards of 30%.”
Good grief, can nobody in journalism do grade school arithmetic? Those numbers are absurd. My guess is that “65 times” should be “65%”, but I guess elementary proof reading and fact checking are also lost arts.
Maybe he meant 65 increments of a fraction of one percent.
I noticed a big increase in the number of printed errors as soon as computer spell checking software became common. That’s one of the reasons I don’t worry about intelligent robots taking over the world.
This forum has computer spell checking. It cannot recognise most proper nouns, and has no understanding of German or Latin. Fortunately, Greek in the original script baffles it, so it wisely keeps away.
Predictive programming from the videogame – Tom Clancy’s The Division – “Dark Winter”
Mostly accurate except for the virus fear propaganda.
Fragile complexity falling apart at the seems is enough of a problem.
These types of games have always had close ties to intelligence agencies as “consultants”.
If we think about what’s happening in terms of an invasion of sorts or simply management of decline you would expect coms blackout at some point either deliberate or due to supply chain collapse. But it’s very to imagine right now since we are at peak saturation of propaganda and distraction media which helps maintain order. Remove this artifice and all hell breaks loose – which could be part of depop plan. And then the mop up crews move in exactly as they do in the game.
…But it’s very HARD to imagine…
The ChiCom threat to US dollar supremacy is SO important that I want to present more excerpts than I included in my first post on the subject. This sort of economic warfare may be the trigger for our next financial calamity as Xi Jinping, who would not have become the most powerful Chinese potentate since Mao if he were not a very clever man, patiently plays a game of 4D chess against the United States. If he succeeds, senile Joe Biden, who was not all that smart even when he was in his prime, will never understand what happened.
https://www.poundsterlinglive.com/gbp-live-today/15061-the-untold-story-of-pound-sterling-s-steamrolling-2021-rally
SNIP
The Pound has confounded expectations with sharp gains over all major rivals until Thursday, leading to much head-scratching in some parts and prompting Pound Sterling Live to draw on the buy-side expertise of Toscafund Asset Management to tell the untold story of the steamrolling 2021 rally.
SNIP
“As you say, the PBOC are navigating expertly under the radar,” says Dr Savvas Savouri, chief economist and partner at Toscafund Asset Management, responding to questions from Pound Sterling Live.
SNIP
Many attempts have been made to explain the above moves but underappreciated as a driver of the rally – and a key reason why many seemingly more attractive currencies have struggled to keep the Pound suppressed in 2021 – is the role likely played by central bank reserve managers and notably those at the People’s Bank of China (PBoC).
The PBoC’s desire, if-not need to diversify out of the U.S. Dollar is widely understood in the market and a frequently-held assumption. It’s prominence here doesn’t preclude the possibility of other central bank flows from either reserve accumulation or recycling having influence on Sterling, which has been noted by analysts this year, although not all central banks are created equal and there are reasons for why China specifically might be making some changes.
Included here is the legacy of Washington’s use of the U.S. settlement system as a foreign policy tool, which has damaged the Dollar’s standing in some facets of life as a dominant reserve currency, along with the trade war and not to mention the longstanding economic plans of China’s government.
SNIP
“Beijing has after all been systematically disintermediating the dollar from its commercial and financial system. It has: signed currency swap arrangements all over the world; run down its Treasury holdings, by spending them on assets around the world and adapted its yuan management from a strict bilateral approach relative to the dollar, to a multi-currency one,” Savouri told investors in December. “We are FAST approaching the moment the trade weighted levels for the dollar and the yuan CROSS (the X-in Chart 1), doing as Beijing opts to finally focus on the purchasing powers of its own population rather than those of the export markets it hitherto relied upon.”
SNIP
Irrespective of that however, and in a world where the European Central Bank (ECB) is citing a 10% Euro-Dollar rally in the year to January as the foremost factor that keeps it up at night, China was always going to struggle to buy any more Euros without buying a bucketload of Pounds first.
SNIP
“When Beijing shocks the dollar down against the yuan, it is very likely that it ensures the yuan moves up far more slowly against the other constituents of the weighted basket it is now managed against. It will act in this way to mute the yuan’s overall trade-weighted appreciation. To achieve this I have no doubt the PBOC will actively buy the currencies it wishes to temper the yuan’s ascent against, and accumulate them as foreign reserves,” Savouri wrote.
SNIP
The PBoC would be compelled to buy Euros in order to achieve any diversification at all, and not just because of the Titanic sizes of the European and U.S. currencies: The central bank conundrum elsewhere in the major currency space also prevents it from buying much of anything else without buying Euros too. Mathematically, the only solution to this is one that creates headroom for EUR/USD to rise without lifting the trade-weighted Euro at a pace or to an extent that’s an issue for the ECB.
SNIIP
but none went as far as to suggest that a lift in GBP/USD to 1.43 and GBP/EUR to 1.17 would be seen by the end of February or soon after.
Pound Sterling Live did however, and explained why in it a speculative op-ed on February 12 after observing what it perceived to be the PBoC’s activities from January 31. These numbers had at their foundations the assumption the PBoC needed to create scope for EUR/USD to rise this year without lifting the trade-weighted Euro too far or too fast for the ECB.
SNIP
But this would also mean that playing out alongside the connected UK vaccination campaign and the improving BoE outlook is almost certainly the story of an FX reserve diversification away from the U.S. Dollar.
This means, among other things, that it may not be coincidence that, with the rally in Sterling aside, the top story in all things financial of late has been the ongoing sell-off in the U.S. bond market and associated surge in yields. Some have worried about the impact rising yields could have on global stock markets.
“I believe the dollar is on the cusp of losing its exorbitant privilege as the world’s foremost reserve currency.” Savouri says. “Without the need to keep the yuan artificially weak against the US dollar, Beijing will no longer need to accumulate and hold dollar paper. The consequence is chillingly simple enough to foresee; a rout in the Treasury market. Whilst this will have unwelcome consequences to parts of the world holding Treasury’s, the most dramatic impact will be felt within a United States where, for the first time in a very long time, the Federal Government will have to live within its own fiscal means, rather than rely on being handed the world’s wealth to save.”
A very disturbing graph if this hypothesis is correct:
https://www.poundsterlinglive.com/images/graphs/February-24-2021-Toscafund-Asset-Management-USD-CNH-Trade-Weighted-Indices.png
OK nicely played.
so the very disturbing graph is only through mid Q4 2020.
did the cross happen yet or what?
Has the cross happened yet? It is too soon to say. The crossover begins at the point shortly after the March 2020 covid scare when the USD, after a panic peak, started a long decline which has continued to this day. However, that is not proof. Further, if the USD rallies, that will not be conclusive disproof. We will have to wait before we can know for sure. I do know that there are some countries that are highly motivated to get off the USD standard for global trade, and even our allies in the EU, with less intensity, would like to move away from a dollar-centric world, but it is not easy to do when everyone is already heavily invested in the dollar system. Plus, the US gov occasionally overthrows governments that try to unilaterally adopt a non-dollar standard, although we never officially acknowledge that as our motive.
Your opening sentence comes across as resentment of the fact that you gambled on a weakening pound and lost.
Also, your use of the term “ChiCom threat” smacks of low propaganda.
Nevertheless, this is a good find, so thank you for that. There is so much going on behind the scenes that we’re not aware of. I think this partly explains what makes predicting events a fool’s errand, the other parts being mind-numbing complexity and scale as well as bad and incomplete data and information.
No resentment. I have observed prices doing weird things for reasons I can’t figure out for long enough that I don’t take it personally. For example, I have seen far more puzzling and sometimes frustrating things than that in the stock markets. There is a lot of short term randomness in the markets, but academics who think that proves they are “efficient” are delusional. All markets are driven by human passions, with stocks, real estate, and bitcoin being the most egregious examples. Last year I decided to try my hand at currencies after the US-China trade tantrums and Operation Repo by the Fed during 2019 because stocks need to calm down.
ChiCom cuts my typing by 62.5%.
We have been at this several times already. The role of USD goes away when the owners , major stakeholders move out, not sooner, the state-gov factor is also at play but 2nd, third order of importance. And given USD survived a lot as we even crossed past the PO and various per capita prosperity thresholds the message is clear, for whatever reason (path dependency) it will likely stay till the very bitter end of this version of the IC, case closed..
Don’t underestimate the ability of global politics to sometimes override economic logic.
Might also consider who’s holding the 70%-80% of USD currency that’s circulating outside the country facilitating criminal enterprise. They’d have to switch to something equally convenient.
Covid vaccine may be offered in fast-food restaurant car parks to make sure at-risk groups – including those who are obese – do not get left behind
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9305727/amp/Covid-vaccine-offered-fast-food-restaurant-car-parks.html?ito=amp_twitter_share-top&__twitter_impression=true
First they came for the old.
Then they came for the disabled.
Next up – land whales!
Thanks: a bright sunny morning here in Eastern England and the first laugh of the day.
Keep Fatties Safe! They want to live another day to eat more crap, too!
As it evolves each day It’s getting closer in the style of that shopping mall “insert coin” suicide-booth and be done with it (as predicted in Futurama)..
Futurama appears to have gotten the idea from the film “Soylent Green.”
The suicide booth is that area of town where narcotics are sold. A $10 bag would probably do the trick for a first time user but $50… not a chance unless someone shows up with narcan. There are no easy ways to go and being clubbed unconscious by 10 mg of so of fent that cost a tenth of a penny to make and suffocating because breathing mechanism is not following even autonomic function and quite probably a airway restricted with vomit is not fun. CO remains the best bet by far but it lacks the paperback novel romance of a OD. With the junk no longer coming from poppys in a far away exotic land ala Dorthy in wizard of Oz its debatable whether choking on vomit caused by a tenth of a cent lab rat junk holds much romance. It all comes down to the o2 in the end whether CO has replaced it in the blood, the muscles that move air in and out are not doing their job, or the blood that carries it springs a leak. Air is the ultimate finite resource. Taking a walk in the winter without any clothes would seem to be a extreme option but it does represent a naturalistic if overly long way to cross the river. Im afraid none of the options seem desirable to me except dieing naturally in my sleep the hope of every senior. Anything beats ICU IMO however. A modicum of grace would be nice. Since I believe its important to give attention to the consequence of ones actions that relegates my ultimate fate to the hand I get dealt for better or worse. I never agreed to enter the horror of a ICU to prolong my life so not entering that facility is the only ethical choice I have in the matter.
It looks like barbiturates offer a painless way out and are recommended for euthanizing animals.
World Society for the Protection of Animals
Methods for the euthanasia of dogs and cats: comparison and recommendations
https://caninerabiesblueprint.org/IMG/pdf/Link72_Euthanasia_WSPA.pdf
But let’s be optimistic. It’s quite possible that by 2030 you will own nothing but you’ll be happy.
There is a tradition, I believe, that when the Buddhists of some Himalayan countries decided it was time to end their lives, they did not kill themselves, nor ask others to do the deed, because that would violate their code of ‘ahimsa’. Instead, the left their homes, stripped, walked naked up the mountain, and sat down in the snow.
There is always a good way to die: that is the last gift of Fate.
In the Nordic countries (at least Sweden) there is an old “tradition” called “Ättestupan”, directly translated would be the “kin cliff”. Go figure the rest.
*AAaAaaAaaaaa*…. *splat*
😳
On related note, seclusion and weirdness is paying off big time today as Scandinavia and Finland are enjoying comparatively very shallow repression from the resetting system so far.
Partly ~envy on my part, but your position is justified in the end, you earned it, enjoy it.
You are welcome to set up base here, assuming you are an EU “citizen”. A bit of unnerving and interesting alien influx couldn’t possibly hurt this Potemkin facade of pretentious cards.
👽
Yes, the Finns are rather weird, Swedes and Gutes quite laid back for the most part, unless crazed by the folly of an era, transgressing from point blank Nazism and eugenics programs to 3’rd world mass immigration and “green” Marxism contradiction in terms.
I’m sure my ~70% Finnish ancestry doesn’t come off as too weird? The swedes reading here probably hate the guts out of me. Which makes me happy.
😉
Yep, Sweden expects a growth in GDP this year. Yup, jolly good old BAU still going strong up north. But the price paid was rather obnoxious. At least compared with Tsai’s regime mauling the virus, no problem.
“Yes, the Finns are rather weird”
That’s why the finest finnish movie-maker ever, Aki Kaurismaki, moved in the 80’s to shiny green northern Portugal, a country notoriously inhabited by the most humble, self-effacing and level headed creatures that have ever entered Nato headquarters?
There is a Japanese movie “The Ballad of Narayama”. In it the poor village circa 1880 carry their old to the top of the mountain and leave them there to freeze to death.
It is a beautiful movie visually and sentimentally.
A few years back, I watched a movie called “The Sound of Insects”, based on a diary belonging to a man who ended his days via starvation in a Japanese forest. I can’t say it was “enjoyable”.. but I appreciated it.
The comments on that story are glorious. People are not as stupid as the government think.
People “therapeutically” commenting-dissenting on the internets yet wearing the yoke of subjugation in the real life-world.. common..
Large swathes of the population are not volunteering to get the vaccine.
That’s why they’re trying to blowpipe lardarses with it in McDonald’s car park.
They’ll inject the low hanging fruit first… and reduce the fake covid +s….
Then the CovIDIOTS who have been injected will be allowed to attend sporting events…
Don’t be surprised if there a series of Mega Concerts starting in June … the PR team is working on the tag line right now …. The Global Recovery Series… or something like that… these will be broadcast free to air on YT…..
BUT… if you want to attend… you must Get The Vaxx…. you can either sit at home like a KNOB… or you can get with the Cool CovIDIOTS and take the lethal injection….
Did I mention my wife knows someone in Dubai (or some other place out that way)…. he can choose not to have the lethal injection … but he MUST get tested once/week at his own expense .. so USD400 per month…
Expect more of that…. if people refuse the tests then they get an endless holiday in a 2 star shithole hotel … with slop for food — and they’ll get billed for their stay!
https://hongkongfp.com/2021/02/27/steve-vines-does-hong-kongs-quarantine-centre-need-to-be-quite-so-hellish/
Now check this out — massive queues of people trying to RETURN to locked down Auckland… now why would there be check-points to come in (there never was previously)…. surely you want to prevent people from leaving the city only?
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/300239651/live-new-covid19-case-linked-to-auckland-cluster-queues-for-hours-at-auckland-border
This can all go away… if you just Take the Vaccine (which has just arrived in time for the latest lockdown!) … https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/world/aussie-pm-upbeat-astrazeneca-vaccine-arrives-in-country
Die CovIDIOTS Die!
According to the New Zealand article, “Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern tells Aucklanders to stay home and get tested, as she warns more community cases are likely.”
Hasn’t she caught on that there will be more and more new cases. That is just the way it is.
That’s what she wants… I even wonder if there are any real cases… perhaps they just dial up the cycles on the PCR whenever they want to generate a few community fake cases… then use that bs to justify random lockdowns…
You need to keep the CovIDIOTS in a state of fear so they queue up for their Lethal Injections
Haven’t we all caught on by now that Jacinda is as much an actor reading from a script as Boris Johnson or Joe Biden are?
Again this morning when I had a look at various NZ ‘news’ sites… there she was with her caring hang dog look…
I am convinced she practices that in front of a mirror…. her PR Team stands by coaching her… a little more droop…. sadder… think of when your dog died — of when Clark banged the nanny creating that love child…. that’s it… a little more pout…. good .. ok let’s move on to anger … not rage anger crossed with disappointment… like a stern but caring mother… yes that’s it….. now make love to the camera… make love to the camera…. sexy sexy sexy …
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2020/08/coronavirus-what-s-open-closed-under-covid-19-alert-levels-3-and-2/_jcr_content/par/video/image.dynimg.1280.q75.jpg/v1597191668182/GettyImages-1257477923-Jacinda-Ardern-concerned-1120.jpg
Dude,
They just dial up the settings on the PCR test which guarantees a positive result.
This is how they have been getting all the positives for so long.
The whole thing is a fakery from the get go.
I have been telling this board for nearly a year now.
Right. This scientific fraud called RT-PCR tests allows them to increase or decrease the number of “cases” according to the needs of the moment.
Tension is the game they are playing here, alternating fear and hope, and the sheople are being played like the idiots they are, kept at a simmer in the covid’s political cauldron.
Most of those who say that they will resist will not, certainly; unless a real popular leader who cannot be bought off or intimidated, emerges, and establishes a momentum in dissent.
That is still possible, although unlikely.
In the meantime, we can let off steam, while weighing up just where our own red lines would be. And enjoy what remains of liberty while we still can.
There is no resisting a totalitarian state once fully established – by 2025? – though: one must either accept in order to exist, or die.
Then the question must be: die on whose terms, when,and how?
The answer to that can only be personal.
I’m aware of such leaders and ongoing protests going on around the world.
Mass civil disobedience is catching on. Simply refusing to wear a muzzle creates a powerful wave of resistance.
As does refusing a pharma product that nobody needs.
Most police are beginning to realise that they are losing the battle.
This month massive protests to be held in Madrid and other capital cities.
You would expect the response to be further lockdown, rounding up of dissidents and martial law, but I’m not seeing it. There is a general weakness in the new leadership that is not inspiring or respected by most citizens. In order to maintain control they too would require charasmatic leaders and they simply don’t have any.
Good luck to them.
I am taken aback at the way they proposed the distinctly uncharismatic Tony Blair as a kind of vaccine cheer leader here in the UK – nuts!
Yes but he was a successful middle east peace envoy … so surely he’s the man for this job as well.. (sarc…)
So long as they stay with the timeline… they can achieve success.. they just need to keep ratcheting things up on the fear and mutant front and smash those who dissent…
Let’s check in on the CEP:
– Enhanced lock down restrictions (referred to as Third Lock Down) will be implemented. Full travel restrictions will be imposed (including inter-province and inter-city). Expected Q2 2021.
– Transitioning of individuals into the universal basic income program. Expected mid Q2 2021.
– Projected supply chain break downs, inventory shortages, large economic instability. Expected late Q2 2021.
– Deployment of military personnel into major metropolitan areas as well as all major roadways to establish travel checkpoints. Restrict travel and movement. Provide logistical support to the area. Expected by Q3 2021. Along with that provided road map the Strategic Planning committee was asked to design an effective way of transitioning Canadians to meet a unprecedented economic endeavor.
UBI will definitely get passed within Q2…https://www.ubiworks.ca/basicincomebill There are already fairly extreme travel restrictions in much of Canada… the Mutants will no doubt surge in Q2 provoking more intense ‘do not travel’ laws….
Seems by Q3 the economic dam will break requiring full blown martial law… That’s when ‘anything goes’ regarding the Lethal Injections… this will be a full flown State of Emergency and the masses will be accepting of any measure used to force anti-vaxxers to get the jab…
Looks like Q4 will be when the Great Unveiling will occur… the leak out of Canada says there will be a reset… I think that’s about as likely as the rapture… but who knows… Q4… Dec 25… don’t rule it out!
https://disciplegideon.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/rapture2.jpg
The Canadian leak sounds credible to me, but the timeframe (24 months: Jan-20 / Jan-22) seem to be too tighy. I’d say that in order to accumulate enough fear capital to “politically legitimize” (as in don’t get riots on the streets) such a sudden transition to techno-totalitarianism, the “virus” mortality rate will have to rise exponentially, like 15-20% of the people “infected”.
As I take for granted that this pandemic was not meant to “disappear” before its political objectives were fulfilled, I expect the number of covideaths can only go up, And surely the “vaccines” can only help in that department. Soon we’ll see.