Most people seem to think that the world economy is going through a temporary disruption, caused by a novel coronavirus. As soon as COVID-19 goes away, they expect the economy will be back to normal. I think that this assessment is overly optimistic. The way I see the situation, the world economy was already having severe growth problems, caused indirectly by resource problems, even before COVID-19 hit.
In a growing world economy, a person might expect that workers would be getting richer, so that they could afford an increasing quantity of goods and services. What we really see is something very different. The number of new automobiles sold was falling in many major countries long before COVID-19 hit, even as population was generally rising. Clearly, something was seriously wrong.
As I see the situation, the world has a resource problem. Resources of many kinds, including fresh water, energy products, and minerals of many kinds were becoming more difficult (and expensive) to extract, even before 2020. Substitution might have worked if the problem were only one or two resources, but not with several major resources. Cutting back was the only answer.
Thus, the shutdowns for COVID-19 came at a convenient time, allowing economies that were already doing poorly to shut down. Needless to say, there was no world leader who was willing to explain this hidden issue to the world population. Instead, world leaders used standardized code words such as “we need to move to renewables” or “we need to reduce carbon use by 2050 to prevent climate change.” Unfortunately, the ability to move to alternatives in this time frame is simply an illusion, allowing world leaders to avoid mentioning the serious resource issues that the world economy is really facing.
I expect that within a few months, a new crisis of some sort (perhaps financial) will come along, further reducing resource use. This will happen, whether or not the problem of the novel coronavirus is solved. In this post, I will try to explain the situation.
[1] The world’s economy is a self-organizing system, powered by the laws of physics. It requires a mix of resources, including energy resources, to operate.
The laws of physics require that energy be “dissipated” whenever activities we associate with generating GDP take place. For example, if a person is to drive a truck, he/she will need to eat food for his/her own personal energy. This food is “dissipated” by digestion. If the truck is to transport goods, it will need to burn some type of fuel, such as diesel. This fuel is dissipated by burning. If a computer is to operate, it will need to dissipate electricity. If a room (or a liquid) is to be heated or cooled, some sort of energy dissipation will be required.
The world economy grows in a very orderly manner. It gradually adds population, as more babies are born than people die. All of these people need food and fresh water; they also need some type of housing and clothing to protect them from the elements. Ideally, they need some type of transportation in addition to walking. Businesses are formed to enable access to goods and services that fill these needs. Governments are also formed to provide services used by all and to regulate the system. A financial system is formed to facilitate transactions, among other things.
The world economy cannot slow down and quickly restart. This is especially the case for an economy that had already started slowing, even before the 2020 pandemic. If not enough resources of the right kinds were available to enable true economic growth before the pandemic, it is hard to see how the situation would be very much improved a year later.
One key to understanding how a self-organizing economy works is to understand that the economy is multi-sided. Businesses need to make an adequate profit, to continue in operation. Workers need to earn an adequate wage to raise a family. Customers need affordable prices. Shortages of inexpensive-to-extract resources can lead to many different problems: lack of profitability for producers, or too much wage disparity among workers, or too high prices for customers. Resource shortages can also lead to people with inadequate wages wanting to migrate. They can also lead to empty shelves in stores.
[2] Depleted coal mines near population centers in China have adversely affected the Chinese economy more than it tells the outside world.
China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001. The Kyoto Protocol mandated that 37 industrialized nations cut their greenhouse gas emissions. More than 100 developing countries, including China and India, were exempt from the treaty. This combination of events allowed China to greatly ramp up its economy, building many new roads, factories and housing units from concrete, with little competition from the 37 industrialized economies.
China had very large coal resources, which it ramped up (Figure 2). Of course, this greatly increased world coal consumption, an effect precisely the opposite of the stated purpose of the Kyoto Protocol–to reduce world CO2 emissions.
The problem that China ran into about 2013 was that its coal mines, especially those near population centers, began depleting. The cost of extraction started rising because the thickest coal seams, closest to the surface, were badly depleted. In theory, there was still a great deal more coal available from those mines if the price would rise sufficiently high. Coal from new mines that were more distant from population centers might also be used if the price would rise high enough to include overland transport costs.
Coal prices didn’t rise to match the higher cost of production. If they had risen, they would have raised the cost of many goods manufactured for export, making these industries less profitable. Because coal prices stayed too low for coal producers, over 70% of China’s coal companies were reported to be unprofitable by the first half of 2014.
China closed unprofitable mines and added new mines at more distant locations. China’s coal production has struggled in recent years. A constant problem has been keeping coal prices high enough to cover the rising cost of extraction and delivery to population centers. There are recent indications that coal supply is inadequate: Parts of China experienced rolling blackouts in the winter of 2020-2021, and warnings have been given to expect possible electricity shortages this summer. China has been accepting few coal imports, largely because it wants to keep its local prices sufficiently high that its own coal producers can be profitable.
China uses coal in many ways, including generating electricity, making steel, and manufacturing cement, which is the most important ingredient in concrete. Concrete is used in producing roads, bridges and buildings of all types, including high rise buildings used in many places in China.
Figure 3 shows that China’s cement production fell at a time similar to that at which coal production “flattened out.” This would not be surprising if a shortage of coal led China to cut back on its use of cement in order to save coal for electricity production.
China, like other countries, has been seeing its population rise. Figure 4 shows coal and cement amounts for China on a per capita basis. This approach shows that, viewed on a per person basis, both coal consumption and concrete production have been falling since about 2013-2014. In fact, coal consumption began to fall slightly before cement production, suggesting that the fall in coal consumption is the cause of the fall in cement production.
[3] A decrease in new home building in the United States after 2008, as well as the recent difficulty in ramping construction back up again, are further evidence that the world is reaching resource limits of some kind.
Figure 5, above, shows that the number of new single-family housing units, relative to population, dropped dramatically after late 2005, early 2006. (This was when US Federal Reserve target interest rates rose, leading to higher borrowing costs for both builders and purchasers.) New home building plunged before and during the Great Recession. Building of new units has not ramped up very much, since then.
Even in 2020 and early 2021, the number of new units being started is very low by historical standards. It certainly wouldn’t be surprising if a lack of resources is part of what is depressing new home production. It may also be causing the spurt in resource prices (for example, lumber and copper) when new-home production does try to ramp up.
[4] World oil production seems to be falling for the same reason that China’s coal production stopped growing: Prices are too low for producers because of depletion issues. Oil producers cannot make an adequate profit, so they are reducing production.
World crude oil production was at its highest level ever in 2018. It has fallen ever since.
Figure 7 shows that oil production has been falling in many parts of the world in recent years.
The shining star of crude oil production, at least until recently, has been the United States with its shale oil production.
Unfortunately, with low prices, US shale oil is unprofitable. Shale production fell in 2020, and indications for the year 2021 are down as well.
Worldwide, the oil industry seems to require a price of $120 per barrel or more to make investment in new production profitable, and current prices are far below this. Part of this high price is required to provide adequate tax revenue for oil exporting countries that are dependent on this revenue.
[5] Relative to population, worldwide oil and coal consumption reached its highest level in 2007. It has fallen recently.
Figure 9 shows that on a per capita basis, combined oil and coal consumption reached its highest level in 2007 and dipped during the Great Recession. It reached somewhat of a plateau in the 2011 to 2013 period, but started slipping in 2014 and had fallen ever since. Those who follow oil prices closely will notice that combined oil and coal consumption per capita tends to be high when oil prices are high relative to other goods; consumption tends to be low when oil prices are low. The lower per capita oil and coal consumption since 2007 would be expected to hold back the production of “goods” of many kinds, including houses, automobiles, roads and electrical transmission lines.
The “All Other” category is really not a stand-alone category. It depends on oil and coal for its pipelines and electrical transmission, among other things. Without concrete bases, it would be difficult to have wind turbines. Solar panels without steel supports wouldn’t work well either. In theory, if a huge amount of transition were done, perhaps steel and concrete could be produced in reasonable quantities with only the “All Other” types of energy, but someone would need to figure out precisely how this could be accomplished, including the timeframe required.
[6] Inadequate fresh water supplies are a problem in many parts of the world.
The standard approach to getting fresh water has been to tap underground aquifers and tap them at rates far greater than they are refreshed. In some places, this leads to saltwater intrusion; in others, it leads to a falling water table. Some examples of areas with water problems include California, Saudi Arabia, India, China, and Cuba.
There are ways to work around these problems:
- Digging deeper wells
- Piping fresh water from a distance, nearly always uphill
- Desalination
Implementing any of these workarounds for water shortages takes energy of different kinds, mostly coal (to make steel) and oil (for transporting goods and extracting metal ores). These workarounds make the cost of fresh water higher. Higher water costs are especially a problem for agriculture and for poor families, struggling with budgets that cover little more than the price of food and water.
If fixes for the fresh water supply problem cannot be found, irrigation will need to be cut back. Such a change would likely lead to a fall in world food supply.
[7] We are probably kidding ourselves if we think that production of semiconductor chips can be ramped up significantly in the future.
China is now a major producer for rare earth minerals, and it is practically the only processor of rare earth minerals. Semiconductor chips are created using rare earth minerals, water and huge amounts of heat in an exceptionally clean environment. The leading producer of chips is Taiwan, using raw materials from China. There is a long lead time required for building new factories. My concern arises because of the resource issues China and the rest of the world is facing.
We use semiconductor chips in many things, including computers, cell phones, automobiles and “smart” appliances. Without a ramp up in semiconductor chip production, many high-tech dreams for the future will likely remain only dreams.
[8] With a falling supply of coal and oil per capita and inadequate fresh water in many parts of the world, we have already reached the point where some types of “optional” activities need to be cut back.
An early optional activity that was cut back on was recycling. Oil prices fell in 2014, making the recycling of many types of goods, especially plastics, non-economic because the resale value of recycled products dropped with oil prices. China cut back greatly on its recycling efforts, effective January 1, 2018. Other countries have followed suit. China’s cutbacks on recycling allowed it to save its coal supplies (which were no longer growing, see Figures 2 and 4) for other activities that had the possibility of being more profitable.
In early 2020, cutbacks associated with the pandemic gave the world economy some “breathing room” with respect to resource shortages. Cutbacks in travel left more oil for other uses. Oil prices could drop back. This was especially helpful to countries that are big importers of oil, such as those in Figure 10, below. It is not surprising that some of the countries with the biggest oil import problems have been the most enthusiastic about travel cutbacks related to COVID-19.
[9] The world economy has a very serious resource problem. There seem to be three different approaches to hiding the problem, none of which will really solve the problem.
The serious problem that the world economy is encountering is the fact that the supply of both coal and oil are running short, especially when viewed on a per capita basis. The world is also very short of fresh water. China is affected as much, or more than, other countries by these problems. As a result, China’s future growth prospects are likely quite low, even though few are expecting this change. Without a continued strong forward “pull” from China, the world economy may be headed for “collapse,” a condition which has affected many civilizations in the past.
There seem to be three different approaches to doing something about the world’s resource limits problem, without mentioning the nature of the real underlying problem:
[a] Develop a “fear of future climate change” story by creating models that assume we have huge amounts of fossil fuels that can be burned in the future, even though the evidence is very much the opposite: We are “running out” of coal and oil right now, but in a different way than economists have theorized (low price, rather than high price). At the same time, argue that a transition to renewables (particularly intermittent wind and solar) is possible in the next 30 years. The fact that essential minerals for such a change, including copper and lithium, are themselves in short supply relative to the incredibly large quantities required, is overlooked. No one stops to calculate the true cost, measured in energy products and other materials, required by such a transition, either.
[b] Create a “fear of the coronavirus” story, and use it to keep people inside and away from traveling as much as possible. Emphasize the possibility of mutations. If people cut back on traveling, it saves oil. If they cut back on eating out and large celebrations such as weddings, it reduces food wastage. If a pandemic takes place, politicians can use it as an excuse to mitigate problems of many kinds:
- Reduce the need for imported oil, by keeping citizens at home
- Keep factories closed, without disclosing that the factories could not really operate at full capacity because of inadequate orders or missing raw materials
- Use shutdowns to keep order in areas disrupted by uprisings related to low wages
- Hide the problem of many failing stores and businesses behind a new “temporary” problem
- Give the politician a new sense of control with new rules related to the epidemic
It is disturbing that back in 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation was looking at using pandemics to control people when the foundation was examining possible workarounds for too large a population relative to resources.
[c] Hide the existing resource problem with more debt, to the extent possible. In fact, having a circulating coronavirus has assisted in this effort because everyone can see the need for more debt on a temporary basis, “until this problem goes away.” Of course, the resource problem is not going away, which means the world is likely headed for serious financial problems when the economy tries to ramp up again. See my post, Headed for a Collapsing Debt Bubble.
[10] My expectation is that the world economy will try to bounce back from this pandemic, but it won’t really be able to bounce back.
There really aren’t enough resources of any kind to pull the world economy much farther forward. A day of reckoning seems to be coming, probably in the next few months. The financial system looks like it is the weakest link. If the world economy dramatically slows, borrowers will not be able to repay debt with interest. There may be rapid shifts in currency relativities, disrupting derivatives markets. International trade will become less and less possible, perhaps taking place only among a few trusted partners.
We seem to be headed for a rapidly changing world economy, and unfortunately not for the better.
Interesting video on luciferase and magnetic nanoparticles. This could be the new vaccine “monitoring” technology. The vaccine won’t give you immunity but a surveillance system may be able to spot your infection because you’ll glow like a firefly. With each new pandemic a new “vaccine” could prime your system for monitoring. But also realize that these magnetic nanoparticles can also be manipulated from the outside for other purposes with microwaves.
sounds good to me
a police van could be equipped with a big magnet, then if you are identified as a suspect, or even someone likely to be a suspect
or more likely—‘one of the usual suspects’
you could be walking along, probably thinking of committing a crime—those thoughts would register in the van on the evilometer
the magnet automatically selects your personal internal magneto-nanoparticle frequency
then zzzzzzzapppppppp
you would be sucked off your feet and straight into the van
You would then be issued with a crime ticket, printed directly from your brain, Anything from littering to murder. No need to actually commit a crime, thinking of it would be sufficient
sentences could be handed down without all the costs of lawyers and court appearances–automatic guilt—proven because your own brain admits to it.
remember that TV series ‘Dragnet’?
who don’t I ever get royalties for my ideas.??
You have the right to stop cloud downloads.
Any downloads can and will be held against you.
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
We just need to shake off the parasites. We need a new eco system say Mars. It will be paradise. We will explore and colonize the galaxy.
once more on Mars: why is it that with all of the human exploration of Mars in the past decade, there has been no return to Earth with a small sample of a few grams? answer: because right NOW there is no technology that can be sent to Mars that could escape the gravity of Mars and return with a sample. …………………………………………………………………………………………. a few grams! that’s all. Why don’t they just do it, you know, to show us that it can be done.
Right now, I’m reading Fred Turner’s history, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, from which I’d extracted bits and pieces, start to finish. It’s the rather glorious and unlikely story of how ideas about computers and networks fostered by the Cold War military industrial complex underwent a magical transformation into cornerstones of the counterculture through the person and network of Stewart Brand. Turner uses Richard Brautigan’s poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” to show that a good chunk of that cultural work had been completed by 1967, when the poem debuted on the streets of San Francisco.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/
Carbon base life forms soooooooo nasty.
I mean excrement…
What life form does that?
Seriously?
“There really aren’t enough resources of any kind to pull the world economy much farther forward. A day of reckoning seems to be coming, probably in the next few months. The financial system looks like it is the weakest link. If the world economy dramatically slows, borrowers will not be possible to repay debt with interest. There may be rapid shifts in currency relativities, disrupting derivatives markets. International trade will become less and less possible, perhaps taking place only among a few trusted partners.
We seem to be headed for a rapidly changing world economy, and unfortunately not for the better.”
(Needed to keep the meme going)
the planet is running on empty
the world credit card is no longer accepted
tough
the planet is running on about 95% of the 2019 energy level. There sometimes is an ironic reverse denial, where Doomers won’t admit that the reality is 95%. Good enough for now. There should be no denial that someday this will be 0%. But that is not today.
energy level has nothing to do with it–its what that energy delivers, relative to the cost of getting hold of it is the problem
we are running on debt
pretending that fuel buys the same lifestyle that it did decades ago
My lifestyle is quite comfortable… but some of my grandkids can’t buy what I bought at the same period of their lives, despite working harder than I had to
okay I can somewhat agree with that. The gross level is 95%, but every year there will be less net (surplus) energy, so this will result in less prosperity. Compounded by diminishing returns on most resources, so that even level net energy will produce less prosperity. Of course the production level of energy matters. Though not the whole story, as breifly noted above. ……………………………………………………………………………. no pretending or denial that FF provides as much as pre 2005. The provision is down, the prosperity is down, but only slightly. Again there is sometimes an ironic reverse denial that prosperity is down way way more than 5 to 10 %.
it is a brain bending exercise–very difficult to get hold of
I don’t pretend to grasp it fully either, so many economic twists and turns that no one can anticipate
I write this stuff down mainly so I can have at least some understanding of it myself.
The economic system, thinking on a world scale, rather than individual people, must run at full capacity.
Even slight slowdowns cause disruption and social unrest and political upheaval.
Dissatisfied voters tend to elect idiots who make fairyland promises to cure social ills. All lies of course. Yet they refuse to surrender their cherished lunacies.
*********
So even a 5% drop in energy input can cause massive knock on effects. Look at thousands of parked planes and ships.
Invested money produces little return, so those with spare cash pile it into assets that will produce return–eg housing. That inflates housing prices, thus depriving poor people of affordable homes.
Covid has wrecked income patterns, and resulted in rents becoming unpayable, and evictions certain without government mandates. (but that’s socialism!!!!!)
If the body of homeless people reaches a critical mass, violent unrest becomes inevitable.
Yet the certainty persists that ‘more money’ (i.e. debt) will solve the problems ahead. More money cannot rectify even a 5% energy deficit.
But having chosen to render the planet into a cash asset, the money route is the only one we recognise and accept.
We now exist by buying and selling parcels of the Earth we live on. It is finite, but we pretend it isn’t. We can only maintain that pretence by doing it faster and faster. (That’s called GDP btw)
How scary is that?
the energy edifice doesn’t need to drop to zero or anywhere near that—only to a critical tipping point (which no one really knows). We will look back and see it in hindsight of course
This needs elaborating. Gail how about a post on what a financial system fail could look like?
you could write a thousand future scenarios–and someone will still come with the thousand and 1st
what was the saying? Economists exist only to make astrologers look respectable
Norman, I agree with you the combinatorial explosion makes predicting the future a fool errand. Never the less an educational example would be helpful.
economic forecasting is exactly the same as campaign plans in war
they work fine until the first shot is fired.
I never look for agreement in my ramblings, but in this instance I think Gail will agree with me on that one
I am wondering if I am enough of an “insider” to the financial system to really figure out the many pieces that would break. Perhaps that is not really necessary, however. Just a guess at some things that could go wrong. If there are thousands of ways things could go wrong, no one could criticize me too much.
@Jan
Even if 50%, or 2/3, of the world’s poorest pop die right now, the advanced world won’t even feel a thing.
https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/q75/93908_Theglobalwealthpyramidend2019_1607350808686.jpg
53% of the world own 1.4 % of the world’s wealth
So if they die 1.4% of the world’s wealth is reduced
Another 34% own 14.7% of wealth
So,
87% of the world’s pop own about 16% of the wealth.
In other words,
7/8 of the world pop owns 1/6 of the wealth.
I am sorry, but even if only 1 billion remains on earth, they will mostly be in the wealthier countries whose people won’t feel a thing.
the top one billion don’t pick their own coffee beans. They would probably prefer a second billion remaining to do the hard work.
Or, the richer half billion will make the poorer half billion to do that
okay we seem to agree?
The wealth of the top 1.4% is only temporary wealth, possible because of our existing interconnected economy. How much value it has to individuals is iffy. We have just seen that Bill Gates’ wife is divorcing him, despite his wealth. Shares of stock won’t be worth much when the businesses fail.
The real work is done by laborers around the world, mostly operating fossil fuel powered devices. Without the fossil fuels, there won’t be many goods and services produced. I would expect that those producing the goods and services (manual laborers growing the crops, for example) would need to be getting the first share of the benefit, and others will get what is left over.
Dr. Peter McCullogh Blows Lid Off COVID Vaccines.
This Texas physician is an extraordinary powerful and articulate speaker. I was very impressed with his clear and no-nonsense explanation about why can no longer recommend COVID-19 inoculations to any of his patients and his concerns about the lack of safety (a stance he adopted this year in view of the build-up of evidence of harm), the high rates of death and injury, and the extraordinary determination of the stakeholders (drug companies, governments, the WHO and the Gates Foundation to name a few) to get a needle in the arm of every human being on earth.
This is a 15-minute summary. The much longer full interview is also available at Rumble.
https://rumble.com/vhp8e1-massive-world-renowned-doctor-blows-lid-off-of-covid-vaccine.html
This is good. One of the many points he makes is that this is all about the vaccine, and getting vaccine into every arm. His view is that the vaccine only makes sense for nursing home patients and their caretakers, and very few other than that. Every vaccine needs at least two years of testing. Injecting vaccines into pregnant women is crazy.
“injecting vaccines into pregnant women is crazy” YES! YES! YES!
and not even vaccines but experimental shock to the system mRNA vanity ego promoters for the supposed hero inventors
He seemed reasonable but serious doubts creep in when you look for counters.
That site is almost unreadable—a domain of shills trolling for the establishment and trying to obfuscate the most important facts and ridicule anyone who tries to bring them to light. But thanks for introducing us to it. sure Duncan and Norman would love it!
After wading through the dross, I feel in need of some intellectual decontamination and fumigation. Cue Dr. Malcolm Kendrick.
Expertise is great. ‘Experts’… well, that is a completely different matter. We certainly have a few formidable ones kicking about with COVID19. In the UK we have the great and good of the SAGE committee made up of – who knows? – chosen for whatever reasons. They wield enormous power, and never disagree on anything. In the US we have Fauci and the CDC. Ditto.
In the background we have the WHO … who can tell you what way the wind is blowing if nothing else. They remind me of Groucho Marx’s famous comment. ‘These are my principles. And you if you don’t like them…. I have others.’ However, we at the WHO would like to make it clear that nothing about COVID19 has anything to do with China, in any way. Can we have more money please?
Anyway, where are we with COVID19, and science?
In my opinion COVID19 succeeded in breaking my last vestiges of faith in medical scientific research. I cannot believe anything I read. I accept no mainstream facts or figures.
We are told such utter nonsense. For example, the ‘fact. that vaccination protects against COVID19 more effectively than having had the disease itself… This is just utter nonsense.
We were told that COVID19 was spread by touching contaminated surfaces… Really? We were told it spread though droplets, not aerosols. Which is the most complete garbage. We were told that everyone has to wear a mask. We were told it could easily be passed on by asymptomatic people. Based on nothing at all. I could go on.
Yet, no-one seems remotely bothered by any of this utter nonsense. The public seem to lap it up, and attack anyone who questions the current narrative. I feel that I am clinging onto a dying religion. The religion of Francis Bacon and the enlightenment.
‘Baconian method, methodical observation of facts as a means of studying and interpreting natural phenomena. This essentially empirical method was formulated early in the 17th century by Francis Bacon, an English philosopher, as a scientific substitute for the prevailing systems of thought, which, to his mind, relied all too often on fanciful guessing and the mere citing of authorities to establish truths of science.
After first dismissing all prejudices and preconceptions, Bacon’s method, as explained in Novum Organum (1620; “New Instrument”), consisted of three main steps: first, a description of facts; second, a tabulation, or classification, of those facts into three categories—instances of the presence of the characteristic under investigation, instances of its absence, or instances of its presence in varying degrees; third, the rejection of whatever appears, in the light of these tables, not to be connected with the phenomenon under investigation and the determination of what is connected with it.’ 2
This way of thinking it seems, lasted from 1620 to 2020. Four hundred years of immense scientific progress. The age of enlightenment. We are moving back to the prevailing systems of thought… on fanciful guessing and the mere citing of authorities to establish truths of science.
The Dark Ages are returning.
https://drmalcolmkendrick.org
Well, that’s the kind of unhelpful response I expect from someone who is intent on only taking in views that support their own.
Some of the stuff here made me wonder if vaccination was the right path for me but I wanted to look at all sides. The counter I posted made a lot of excellent points none of which have been argued against in Tim’s comment, because he actively wants to avoid being convinced otherwise, at least that’s how it appears to me.
I’m still a little uneasy about the vaccination, primarily because of the accelerated development schedule and I note that the US has only approved it for emergency use (whatever that means). However, I’m now leaning towards getting it (and I can imagine the responses to that statement).
I think that whether or not a person will want to get the vaccine will depend on their age and health status.
Most of what people are concerned about is long-term health effects. If people are already very elderly or in terrible health, the vaccine is probably less likely to end their life than catching the virus itself. Their long-term health prospects are already terrible, with or without the vaccine. They may very well want to take the vaccine. Their friends are no doubt taking the vaccine as well. They will fit in better, taking the vaccine.
If people have already had COVID-19, they likely don’t need the vaccine. Their own immune response is better than what the vaccine will give. Catching COVID-19 will give them T-cell immunity, besides narrow antibody immunity. The vaccine seems to give strictly antibody immunity which is a lot less good.
If a person is in good health, including getting their own vitamin D level up (using supplements or being in the sun) and also eating plenty of vitamin C, their chances of getting a severe case of COVID-19 is extremely low. There also are drugs if a person gets COVID-19, especially ivermectin. You can get a doctor to prescribe this. The drug has been used for over 50 years. It has proven safe for both humans and animals. It is a wonder drug, in the same category with penicillin, except effective more against parasites. With this combination, people in good health really don’t need the vaccine.
Whether or not other people get the vaccine depends on their concern about the long-term health effects, which have not been evaluated. Some of the potential long-term health effects which people are concerned about include:
1. The response of the body to the vaccine can lead to substances that cross the blood-brain barrier, just as the illness itself can. There is concern that over the long term, this will increase the amount of dementia of a form similar to that of prion disease. This doesn’t happen immediately, but perhaps it can in a few years.
2. The vaccine may adversely affect fertility of both men and women. If your own family is completed, this likely is not an issue. The virus is really a bio-weapon; it doesn’t occur in nature. It has a particularly awful spike protein that seems to accumulate in places like reproductive organs (and perhaps the brain, causing the prion disease).
3. Injecting the very narrowly focused vaccines in the middle of the epidemic may encourage the virus in a way that encourages the virus to mutate in a way that makes it more harmful to humans.
4. Or, something about the antibodies may lead to something called Antibody Dependent Enhancement, which may make your body’s reaction fo contracting a future “wild” version later, much worse.
To some extent, how bad the long-term effects might be can determined by animal tests, since animals have shorter life expectancies.
COVID-19 seems to be very closely related to an illness called SARS (which didn’t spread very far in 2003). In fact, the virus seems to be 70% similar. The virus that causes SARS seems to be a bioweapon that the CDC tried to patent in 2004 (US 7220852). Attempts to make vaccines against the earlier SARS virus ended very badly when tested on ferrets. (Most of the ferrets died.) The current vaccines have not been tested on ferrets. It is not clear that they have been tested for long-term safety on animals at all. They have only been tested on how effective they are at preventing COVID-19.
I am not comfortable getting the vaccine. If we didn’t have the medical establishment messing around with making bioweapons, and if this was a “normal virus” with a “normal vaccine,” I would be a lot less worried about it.
Mike Yeadon recommends the injection for anyone who is unhealthy therefore at risk of dying from covid… he states emphatically that if you are health covid is less dangerous than the flu … so there is no reason to get the covid vaccine.
52 healthy people under 60 in Germany have died from Covid — contrast that with Tim’s post on vaccine deaths/injuries…. you are far more likely to die from the injection that from covid.
Gail, is there any evidence for that list of concerns?
Not according to CNN or the BBC
Hi Gail, I wonder if the recent push for Modern Monetary Theory in national governments would have anything to do with prolonging the debt-oriented growth. In my opinion the whole theory is about print as much as you want without fearing inflation or paying off the interest of debt, because there is no need for issuing bonds. Even if it works, does our world have resources to provide real products and services to support the extra money printed? The irresponsible fiscal and monetary polices were the culprits to the unsustainable commodity prices. Now the governments (Canada in particular) are doubling down on it… What do you think MMT would lead our economy to, a salvation of debt-crisis or the abyss of perpetual hyper inflation? Thank you!
https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588060
I think that we were in so much trouble from growing debt that about the only excuse that could be used was that Modern Monetary Theory will save us.
I think that we are headed for a break-up of the international financial system. With everyone doing manipulations of their financial system, no one can understand what money will be worth in the future. More and more failing companies are being propped up.
I suppose that in a way, there may be hyperinflation going into this break up, but ultimately the system will fall apart because companies cannot expect the price agreed upon when selling goods to be adequate to buy anything a few months later. Partly, there are simply too few goods being made for the system. As the system breaks up, there were fewer and fewer goods made.
With the breakup, assets will have little value. Pretty much all debts will default.
World-Renowned Academic Physician Blows Lid Off COVID Vaccines
Mandating something with a fairly high death rate is a huge problem!
At least that is what this physician starts out with. I didn’t make it to the end of the video.
Dr Yeadon has also made the point that if ‘vaccines’ are going to be forced on 100% of a population, and every year, as seems to be their intention, then they have to be a lot safer – and in the long-term – than this current batch.
You beat me to it! I didn’t see your post before dropping mine.
By the way, a friend of mine recovering from COVID-19 is still breathless after a short walk following the pneumonia he suffered. Do you have any tips for dealing with this or any idea how long it takes to get better?
Niacin is working for a lot of people.
As it’s a B vitamin with no downside (apart from a 20 minute ‘hot flush’ after you take it) I would not hesitate.
https://nkalex.medium.com/the-team-of-front-line-doctors-and-biohackers-who-seem-to-have-solved-long-covid-5f9852f1101d
Search up Ivermectin. Very useful. Like HCQ in effectiveness.
If that does not make a CovIDIOT suspicious… then we are truly mired in very deep IDIOCRACY.
Sorry for the slow reply, Tim. My weekend was so busy. Just like the good old days, but how long will it last?
I didn’t suffer from any breathlessness during my illness apart from briefly one morning, and I got over it by going back to bed. My tip would be the same as for any health related problem, i.e. a healthy diet. As I’ve written before, the best diet I have come across is Dr Gundry’s Plant Paradox diet, which is similar to paleo in emphasizing the elimination of foods that are recent additions to the human diet.
Counter to the Dr Peter McCullough message: https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-covid-19-vaccine-holocaust-the-latest-antivaccine-messaging/
When I see this I lose interest… it’s right up there with calling people like Mike Yeadon a conspiracy theorist.
Dr. Peter McCullough: An MD/MPH who promotes quackery and doesn’t know how VAERS works
I will ask the same question I have been asking the NZ Ministry of Health for a few months now:
Can you show me the long term studies that demonstrate these vaccines are safe?
Feel free to point me to the part where Dave provides those studies.
If you/he are unable to do so then it’s time to shut your hole. Because only a f789ing retarded ape allows himself to be injected with something that is not tested… particularly if that ape is healthy and at nearly ZERO risk of severe illness from the Wuhan Flu.
Yup, that seems to be the case (as far as how VAERS works).
For your Sunday, viewing enjoyment, this video starts with a clip from the US TV drama Utopia (2020; an American science fiction drama television series adapted from the 2013 British original series of the same name).
There is a plan! From Wikipedia: The plan consists of: (1) Convincing the world’s population that there is an outbreak of a deadly new virus, (2) Once convinced of the narrative of the faux-pandemic, announce to the public the creation of a new vaccine, (3) Through the coordination between global elites and non-governmental organizations, governments move quickly to inject the world’s population with this “vaccine,” (4) Once the population is injected, it turns out that the vaccine is designed to sterilize almost all of those people that take it, causing the global population to drop from 7.8 billion to about 500 million, and ushering in a new era of plenty.
Following that clip, the video shows an interview between Jessie Ventura and Doctor Laibow from 2009 in which she warns him about a Covid-style dodgy vaccine plan.
So lots of fun for a dull Sunday.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/s30mcUt7usxm/
Far from dull here, Sir Tim!
Spring and summer have at long last arrived all at once: roses bloom, hedgerows froth, birds chirrup, the dog whines lustfully through the hedge after any passing bitch in heat, and cold cider awaits in a pitcher…..
I intend to keep those evil Globalist vampires – who are trying to first drain and kill us – away with garlic and old iron, and enjoy this brief intimation of Paradise!
Does sterilizing make sense? Most places are already below replacement levels and sterilization will make the overhang of unproductive elderly worse than it already is. ‘Oh, it only sterilizes, that’s not so bad… I’m already beyond childbearing age.. guess I’ll go get my vaccine so people stop pestering me about it’ so maybe it’s a comforting thought for those on the fence? I don’t believe resources are going to last long enough for the sterilization program to work, we’d need another 40 years of quasi BAU for the millennial generation(echo boomers) to age out. Believe there are already plenty of conceptions after receiving the vaccine to show it’s not working well if that was the plan. I have no idea what is happening and maybe it’s a comforting thought to believe there’s some master plan in the works when maybe there’s no plan?
PS. What’s wrong with the megacancer website? It’s down. Did it exceed bandwidth and it will be back next month? I look forward to my daily dose of doom so hope it’s back soon.
I’ll be back as soon as I pay the host bill. Maybe if the Crown Corporation would cut me a big check I could keep the subjects entertained on a continuous basis. 🙂
“Does sterilizing make sense?”
Yes, it does. The world population is still growing by almost 100 millions every year.
Countries like Japan and some in Europe did handle aging populations in stride – the standards of living go down but nobody is starving.
The important question is: is it too late for sterilization to matter?
Unfortunately, this narrative doesn’t sound as far fetched as I might have thought ten years ago.
I quite agree, Gail. I don’t want to believe it, and I still think it’s far fetched, but with what we see going on around the world and even in our neighbourhoods, I can’t put it completely beyond the bounds of possibility.
Sometimes I, too, wake up and think it can’t really be happening; but that is just wishful thinking.
The mass slaughter of innocent and defenceless people for strategic ends is nothing new on this planet.
If we shut our eyes to this new reality, we are in the position of the inhabitants of an Iranian city in the 13th-century, looking out from the walls and seeing a huge host of Mongols with siege engines, and saying:
‘Oh, it’s Genghis Khan, probably just wants to stop over for a day or two, must be thirsty and tired after all that travel!’
The Mongols are upon us: they are our own governments and health services…..
Genghis Khan was firm but fair. Well, probably a lot more firm than fair. But cities that surrendered to him without a fight and swore allegiance did much better on the whole than those that opposed him.
That’s quite true: whereas today, even those who conform, like that poor BBC presenter who died, will get the chop – randomly.
It was probably the toughest thing about being a Mongol, one never got a fair press……
Today, I suppose Genghis would just tell everyone to get a Digital Identity (supply a heap of the usual virgins) but not inject them with lethal substances that kill and maim randomly.
Where’s that time machine?
All those conquerors also liked painters and craftsmen to glorify them, so I would have been fairly safe then, if a slave.
This leaked Pfizer document shows that the spike protein accumulates in the ovaries.
https://t.co/pAHMQeV6Mk?amp=1
Did you ever watch the film Children of Men?
The creator of the Moderna treatment has stated on Twitter that the vaccinated DO in fact shed spike proteins, but ‘not enough to induce illness or malaise in others’.
Ironically, Twitter deleted his post for ‘medical misinformation’. ‘Shedding’ is one of those taboo topics……
Interesting admission. So, how many spike proteins, shed by those foul and pestilential lepers, the vaccinated, would we have to absorb before we experienced ‘malaise’?
They really are the unclean ones among us.
Didn’t know the science. Intuition again, We must stay home and glory in the beauty of our place. Our close friends should be a very selected few.
The irony of censoring the creator of the injection!
But yes it’s horrifying. I listened to an interview with an orthopedic surgeon on Sherri Tenpenny’s show. After examining a recently vaccinated patient, the surgeon suddenly got diarrhea and a bleeding nose. She couldn’t make it stop.
Eventually she went to the pharmacy and got ivermectin. It immediately stopped.
Seriously thinking of ordering ivermectin.
I suppose the idea is to reduce population.
There is no other explanation.
So feminism in a syringe?
Biden has ordered the US intelligence to investigate the origins of Covid.
Will they find any evidence? Genome was added to a bat virus held at the Wuhan lab that created a furin cleavage site on the spike protein that made it 1000 times more infectious to humans.
US NIH financed the Wuhan labs study into bat viruses effect on humans. Dr Horace Drew says that this is a lie. The only reason to add genome to a bat virus is to create a bioweapon.
People have Covid fatigue? A bioweapon would scare people again? I don’t know.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2jTYwTVIAMvho_?format=jpg&name=small
It seems like there is a huge pile of evidence of where this virus came from.
It will be lie the Warren commission they will find no evidence not even a lone gun person.
Biden never makes a decision autonomously. For the alphabet soup by the alphabet soup.
The recent alternative being a monster ego running solo…
In a perfect world there would be trustworthiness and balance. A captain taking in the info and making the call. Hey im a dreamer.
It could be a whitewash agenda. Or a blame China agenda. Chinas claim that it was spread by the US military during the military games in wuhan is interesting. Trump not fond of china. He seemed to like covert hits. Where better to release a bat bio-weapon than on the bat ladies doorstep? Not saying its so just hypothesizing. releasing a bioweapon a bit different than say the solemani hit. I dont see the trumpster going there. Still it might explain the severity of the wuhan outbreak if the virus was tailored for asians. Several knowledgeable if fringe individuals saying it came out of dietrich. One thing is absolutely certain. Us mere mortals will never know.
Have you notice the trumpster is back in the news? They cant live without there arch enemy. The woke miss him more than the people who voted for him. You can only do so many pieces explaining the psychology of Q followers. Boring. They want there trump villain mtv!
Openly talking about lab origin in MSM. There working up to something dont think its a warren/building fall down go boom whitewash. Best bet its a shame china agenda. Im sure sanctions will follow. LOL. And a new ban on gain of function research. LOL x2. But the MSM tone is interesting. Fauci seems to have lost his most sexiest man in the USA status. Who knows whats cooking in the pot? Not me! Its better than a jerry springer and judge judy combined!
A lab origin means world police have a new threat and mission.
What would happen to the economy if a massive depopulation occurred? Let’s assume 50% will die over a short period.
a) Consume will fall 50% (food, cars, housing, energy, industrial production)
b) House prices will fall
c) Heirs, pension funds and second hand buyers will benefit
d) Transportation, industrial and agricultural production as much as services will decline by 50%. Construction will decline probably more.
e) Energy demand will fall 50%.
f) The massive shrinkage will cause a lot of companies to fail.
g) 50% of the workers will not be needed but they are probably already dead.
h) Some highly scaled products, such as semiconductors, will not be profitable and fall back to levels in the 1970s.
i) Assets will devaluate by 50% or more. The banking system will probably fail.
k) The chaos will create additional deaths as people dont have food stock, dont know how to cook or kill each other.
l) Countries with a large army have a disadvantage to countries focusing on high tech defense.
m) Existing excess machinery could be used to develop poorer markets.
n) People will be happy they survived the cataclism and will be easy to govern.
o) Oil production will slow down to 50%, reserves will keep longer.
p) A growing population leads to a growing economy.
Does this look bad? The alternative is a permanent recession and decline. Possibly the average IQ will raise, too.
Covid could be a way to depopulate, says Mike Yeadon:
https://alethonews.com/2021/04/29/an-exclusive-interview-with-dr-mike-yeadon/
“c) Heirs, pension funds and second hand buyers will benefit”
Except for the general economic collapse? You mention mass bank and business failures. How would anybody even store their money?
The question of future of those industries which require not just national or regional, but globalised, economies of scale seems crucial.
If demand is collapsed, either by business and income-destroying lock-downs, as over the past year, or by very substantial depopulation -planned or otherwise – how can they continue to function at all?
The Plan for future development which lies behind the now so obviously faked Covid crisis seems to have two pillars: a greatly reduced, largely immobile, heavily data-harvested and monitored urban population, and also a considerable expansion in precisely those sectors which rely on global economies of scale and high demand, eg those essential chips.
These two pillars seem to be irreconcilable. Or could this in fact balance out with growth being maintained in Asia, a favoured region, while the West is deliberately collapsed and robotised, as some seem to hope?
I suggest we call Edmond de Rothschild’s and get their view, as they are driving so much of this behind the scenes…..
Regarding o), I am afraid the real situation is “Oil production will slow down to zero.” The overhead will be too high. Keeping the refineries open will not be possible. All kinds of products, including lubricating oils, will no longer be available. The economy comes to a halt.
And then…. this begins https://www.quora.com/What-would-the-world-be-like-if-society-collapsed (only worse)
I like one of the comments:
What would happen to the economy if a massive depopulation occurred? Let’s assume 50% will die over a short period.
Every prediction you make assumes a linear response to an event that suddenly kills half the human population. I think the more likely response is shock followed by paralysis then panic.
a) Consumptione will fall 50% (food, cars, housing, energy, industrial production)
Consumption will cease except for food and electricity but only as long as grocery stores have food and power plants have fuel. Regions powered by hydroelectricity will fare better.
b) House prices will fallHouse prices will drop to zero unless there is some sort of intrinsic value. Houses on small farms that can produce food will become more valuable because even if 75% of the population suddenly disappears, there will still be fewer houses than the remaining population needs. If food production were to rebound, somehow, distribution would become an issue. Warehouses and houses near transportation nodes would retain some value. Rail would be viabled b/c diesel can be rationed. Canals in the Northeast could be used again.
c) Heirs, pension funds and second hand buyers will benefit
For heirs to benefit, the rule of law needs to be applied. For reasons I will mention later, there would be a surplus of physical laborers and a very small number of paper workers b/c lawyers, accountants, judges and clerks. I think with fewer paper workers, inheritance becomes iffy. Children living on grandpa’s farm stand a better chance of keeping it than children living in a city hundreds of miles away from Grandpa’s farm.
Crooked lawyers will team up with crooked judges to confiscate farms for themselves. There might be a growth in farm defense hit squads specializing in crooked lawyers and judges.
Pension funds would be useless unless they could quickly/instantly be converted to tangible capital, though I am not sure what that would be except for small farms. I think machine shops might do well if they could repair broken machinery.
Second hand buyers would need some sort of currency that works. If they have it, then they benefit, but if they depend on proceeds from pension funds, then they are essentially paupers.
d) Transportation, industrial and agricultural production as much as services will decline by 50%. Construction will decline probably more.
Transportation will be limited to moving food from field to market. This is local. There will be neither the need nor the capability to move lettuce from Chili to California.
Industry that depends on electronics either as product or equipment is doomed.
Agricultural production will be limited to what people can grow for themselves with a surplus for a local market where the buyers have something of value to sell in exchange. I think if one wanted to know what these valuable items would be, then one needs to design low tech systems and figure out what is needed to produce low tech equipment and what is needed to maintain low tech equipment. Offhand I would think that spark plugs, lubricating oil and rubber tires and tire repair kits have value. A salvage economy based on stripping wire from houses for copper and other material that can be repurposed would spring up. The knowledge of how to use this material might be important. Certain kinds of engineers (mechanical, civil, structural and electrical) would be in demand. Sociologists would be useful as fuel.
e) Energy demand will fall 50%.
Energy demand would be whatever a fraction of the population living in the 1800’s would need. I’m guessing 5% of today’s consumption.
f) The massive shrinkage will cause a lot of companies to fail.
All companies.
g) 50% of the workers will not be needed but they are probably already dead.
Physical laborers will prey on office workers.
h) Some highly scaled products, such as semiconductors, will not be profitable and fall back to levels in the 1970s.
Transistors, capacitors and resistors will be priceless once electrical engineers figure out how to use them to make simple control devices.
i) Assets will devalue by 50% or more. The banking system will probably fail.
Depends on the asset.
k) The chaos will create additional deaths as people don’t have food stock, don’t know how to cook or kill each other.
I am sure people will know how to kill each other.
l) Countries with a large army have a disadvantage to countries focusing on high tech defense.
You have that backwards. A large civilian army (militia) that doubles as a physical labor work force has the advantage for defense.
m) Existing excess machinery could be used to develop poorer markets.
Existing excess machinery would be used to keep existing necessary machinery running.
n) People will be happy they survived the cataclysm and will be easy to govern.
People will be numbed out, and if they learn how to be self sufficient in small groups, impossible to govern.
o) Oil production will slow down to 50%, reserves will keep longer.
Oil production will stop.
p) A growing population leads to a growing economy.
A declining population leads to economic collapse.
This is a great conversation but why is no-one mentioning the countries that have declining populations?
Japan, Russia, Italy and other countries in Europe are doing fine.
The truth is that people (and the economy which is nothing more than people) can adapt and maintain most services. Yes, house prices and stocks might drop but people have a place to leave and don’t starve.
I also disagree with Gail – the oil production will not immediately go to zero. The investments will disappear but there are plenty of oils that are paid-off and they will keep pumping for decades.
I don’t understand the urge here to view a decline in population as a catastrophe – is it because you only think about “growth”?
Communist countries had decades of stagnation and they survived. The capitalist countries can too, if the oligarchs are stopped – like Putin did in Russia.
Most people will be more than happy to work less hours and have less stress even at the price of some comforts.
But I guess different countries will make different choices and some will collapse, so what?
This thread is superb. Thank you all.
Basically this… but much worse + spent fuel ponds
https://www.quora.com/What-would-the-world-be-like-if-society-collapsed
If reducing population was a solution … the Elders would have deployed policies decades ago to realize this goal… instead in many countries people have been given rewards to have more children…
In the US in the 50s there was thought about using uranium from granite as a long term fuel for civilization.
CalTec article from 1955
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/216221945.pdf
was it abandoned because the cost/energy was reeediculously high? ………………………………………………………………………………………………. I’ve heard that housewives (mainly) cancer rates are up, partly because of their granite kitchen countertops which often are radioactive. Does that sound somewhat plausible?
Or leaking microwave cookers -more likely!
both!
I know that I have never had any interest in granite counter tops for this reason.
Thank you,
Dennis L.
Byram Bridle (Team GVB)
New peer reviewed study on COVID-19 vaccines suggests why heart inflammation, blood clots and other dangerous side effects occur
https://omny.fm/shows/on-point-with-alex-pierson/new-peer-reviewed-study-on-covid-19-vaccines-sugge#description
LOL Here comes another one – the ‘Anglo-Indian’ variant.
> COVID-19: Vietnam detects ‘more transmissible’ coronavirus variant thought to be hybrid of UK and Indian strains
The country’s health minister says its new variant is more transmissible and able to replicate quicker than other strains.
A new COVID-19 variant made up of the strains first found in the UK and India has been discovered in Vietnam, its health ministry has announced.
It comes as the country grapples with a spike in infections after largely controlling the virus over the past year.
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-vietnam-detects-more-transmissible-coronavirus-variant-thought-to-be-hybrid-of-uk-and-indian-strains-12320126
They’re trying their best
https://www.bitchute.com/video/uLStFKAw8Okm/
That term sounds racist towards Anglo-Indians.
Please let me give you an update of what is the level of control recently reached in Italy.
It has been decided that Green pass will be mandatory for weddings also in white areas (and you will understand reading this, how this decision has probably an incredible link to what has been anticipated by Gail here above about food scarcity).
Actually they have recently devided Italian Regions in different colours according to the danger of the virus: red, orange, yellow and white.
Being white area equivalent to no risk (in fact there is nothing better than white area) and red equivalent to the highest risk.
I think that there is nothing to add, please see here:
https://www.tgcom24.mediaset.it/cronaca/covid-regioni-green-pass-per-matrimoni-anche-in-zona-bianca_33241222-202102k.shtml
Having said that, I hope I will be able to post something in the future here, because I think that also internet will be soon under control here.
Thank you: I am sure many of us here can also read Italian, more or less.
And I agree, free exchange of information like this will be shut down fairly soon, leaving us with only state and corporate propaganda – and certainly anonymous posts or blogs will be prohibited as ‘dangerous’.
Here in the UK the media are ignoring even protest marches of hundreds of thousands of people in London.
I was on the London protest yesterday. We marched from Parliament square and then stopped at Trafalgar Square to watch the march go past.
Forty-five minutes later they were still coming.
It was astonishing.
Also yes the censorship has really increased. My twitter account which had 5k followers was permanently removed this morning.
Must have been wonderful Mrs S.
But those relying on the MSM wouldn’t even know it had taken place, or why! Just ‘a few hundred anti-vaxxers’ in some reports,
Cheerful reports, though, of the secret marriage of our Sterilisers-in-Chief though, Boris and his toothy woman. So much more important……..
This level of censorship before they take of the velvet glove of lies and deception, and resort to naked force, bodes very ill.
The next step from eliminating major events in this way is to eliminate the people themselves.
Good luck! I hope things work out for you.
Here in the US in the State of Georgia, most employers are not requiring immunizations, even though a decree went out that they could do so. The employers are having enough trouble finding workers as it is. If they require immunizations, they likely drive away 50% or more of younger job seekers. The workers who might be available would likely be over 65 years of age. Black and hispanic workers would especially be eliminated, raising the specter of discrimination charges later.
Many thanks for all your updates, I would say that at the moment it is not clear also here to what extent people will really follow in the next months what the government is imposing. But the impression is that Italy is behaving as if wanted to be like a top of the class child. For another example, our health minister has just said that at the next G7 at Oxford, he wants to propose green pass also for countries outside Europe as a general new standard document for everyone.
Please see here (use deepL or google translator in case):
https://www.agenzianova.com/a/60b3eacfbb72b7.90338573/3469000/2021-05-30/covid-speranza-a-g7-salute-proporro-estensione-green-pass-extra-ue
Presumably no more than the commonly used term ‘Indian’ variant. I will assume that your statement was intended as a witticism.
Good article on the fourth industrial revolution
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/04/19/great-reset-morality-euthanization-of-inessentials/
I prefer classical fairytale about princesses and dragons. They are lot better and have greater depth. This fairy tale of 4th industrial revolution is low quality bulshit that does not pass the test of common sense even.
The BS aspect is that they promise it to ALL of us, when it is intended for the very few.
It will, in any case, probably collapse quite soon after their victory, as the Earth cannot sustain their fantasies of domination, wealth and immortality.
My friend, when I was very little my grandma thought me a lesson. It is as follows: there isn’t big enough pie to feed everyone. Period. Reality in a nutshell.
Grandma was wise!
But people like it. Someone wrote to me and wanted me to co-author an editorial about how AI could solve the world’s problems. Needless to say, I said, “No.”
that comment summarises the world’s problems Gail. Wouldn’t surprise me if the person who contacted you was ‘clever’ in the academic sense.
folks see AI written about —then a few more idiots write even more fanciful stuff about it.
in no time at all the concept is magnified and exaggerated out of all proportion to what it actually is. (social media is wonderful)
it’s ‘technology’—and technology is going to solve all our problems so we can have BAU.
much the same as going to mars, to fetch stuff back here with the same end-purpose.
for every $1m we spend going there, we bring back $1 worth of mars rock—hooray for technology. (and Musk’s money)
Send them copy of Hans Christian Anderson’s tales and ab empty jar for their tears 🙂
Ask them for $10,000.
‘Ah yes, ‘inessentials’ or, as the Rothschilds like to put it:
‘Inevitably obsolescent human capital’.
That’s most of us here. The sound of the knives sharpening is almost deafening, but some just don’t want to listen…..
‘Inevitably obsolescent human capital’.
I like it and shall henceforth use it as in ” I long ago reached the IOHC stage of life.”
I expect few if any dissenters from the sentiment – certainly not among people who know me.
Likewise, I have never been effective or relevant enough to decline into obsolescence…..
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/05/28/eugenics-the-fourth-industrial-revolution-and-the-clash-of-two-systems/
Zero sum society or open ended future.
The standard debate about the future of the economy is: which will we get, high inflation or a deflationary collapse of defaults and asset bubbles popping?
The debate goes round and round in widening circles of complexity as analysts delve into every nuance of the debate.
A recent conversation with my friend A.T. raised a third possibility few seem to consider: increasingly chaotic volatility will be the new normal, as wild swings between inflation and deflation will increase in amplitude and ferocity as the system destabilizes.
Increasingly chaotic volatility is a classic sign of a system that has lost equilibrium and is attempting to regain its dynamic stability by going into overdrive.
The amplitude and violence of these fluctuations increase as each attempt to restore stability fails.
This loss of stability is not what people expect. The experience of the past 60 years has been that any hiccup in financial stability–a recession or market crash–is temporary, as the system responds with monetary and fiscal stimulus which quickly restores the system’s stability.
That the era of stability has ended and a new era of increasingly chaotic volatility has begun is not on anyone’s radar as a possibility. (much more!) Charles hug Smith told today
maybe. How about high inflation on essentials, and deflation on assets? We do have real world examples of countries falling towards collapse, such as Venezuela. The facts on the ground seem to be high inflation on essentials.
Lots of money, but nothing to spend it on? I am thinking about Ugo Bardi’s analogy of being stranded on an island. This is at least part of what is happening now. International vacations have disappeared. You can’t buy the kind of vehicle you want, with the options you want. Appliances have long wait times. Businesses are finding that some raw materials are simply not available. Without international trade, very few of today’s goods and services will be available.
The financial system may at some time become sufficiently impaired that it is replaced by some type of digital currency that mostly holds what are akin to ration cards for the few things available.
Also, people think that they own buildings, but the government may decree that renters must be willing to stay indefinitely, even if they cannot actually pay the rent. This brings the asset value of the building down pretty close to zero. If standard services (fresh water, sewage, electricity, gas heating, garbage collection) disappear, the value of a building may go to zero also.
I saw an interesting comment about lumber shortages and huge price rises on Greer’s site, from Mexico.
Lumber is readily obtainable and prices are stable there, unlike most of the rest of the industrial world.
It was suggested that it might be because the yards are mostly still not stocked on a JIT basis, but in the old-fashioned way of having large stocks in hand, which provides insurance against production and shipping interruptions.
In a similar way, my work was not interrupted at all last year, nor this, as I always have a year or more of materials, which come from all over the world – gold leaf, fine leather, boards, papers, etc – in stock.
Gail, that is exactly how communist countries maintained low prices during economic crises.
People’s salaries were enough to buy a car but the wait time could be 10 years. Meat, butter, milk even bread were rationed or available only rarely.
It is funny if the global capitalists have learned the communists’ lesson and will manage collapse using the same central control mechanisms.
Of course there are differences – communists also provided great education, free healthcare and a surprisingly low amount of propaganda (despite what you may have heard).
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/bubble-point-death-pxd-oil-mix-challenge-part-2-scott-lapierre/?trackingId=KaB58uD2ToCwyyTsZZBd5A%3D%3D
Thanks! This is a very fine article explaining a major problem of production of shale oil and gas. It is a problem of the Gas-to-Oil Ratio rising, after the formation reaches the “Bubble point.” This is a lot like leaving the cap off a bottle of soda so the dissolved gas comes out.
Anyone who has looked at oil and gas knows that oil is far more valuable than gas. When estimating future oil to gas ratios, most people have assumed that the Gas-to-Ratio would stay low. In fact, it rises after the bubble point. The actual amount of oil extracted from the reservoir is less than standard methods forecast, and the amount of (close to worthless) gas is more.
This is part of the reason why oil production from shale formations appears likely to fall in 2021.
I think that there was an earlier link post about this issue–perhaps this one from September 2020, talking more about the current situation:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/controversial-theory-proven-valid-bubble-point-death-rages-lapierre/
The Part II link you have posted is really a reposting of a 2017 article explaining the general theory, with some nice illustrations.
I mostly agree with what you have said. Your thesis that most resources will stay in the ground due ot cost is sound. I would like to add a cautionary note.
It appears to me that the biggest cutback in optional spending has been children. China might have only 1.28 billion people, as opposed to 1.4 billion. That is 120 million people. In general, Europe, Russia, Japan, maybe China are losing population. The US only maintains its population via immigration. The lowest number I have seen for China in 2100 is 400 million. Despite lifting the one-child policy, birthrates remain low.
If population starts to decline, how much will it change your thesis?
It doesn’t really. Areas with population decline end up with too much overhead, in the form of non-working elderly. They also have too many roads and bridges that need to be kept up, and far more stores than they need. They don’t need many teachers, because of the few young people. Population loss doesn’t work either.
This is where the virus and the jab come in so handy. They make the elderly drop like flies. And if the death rate doesn’t look very impressive yet, remember we are still in the first round. Smirking Bill Gates has told us that worse is on the way.
Here’s an interview with an undertaker in the UK who claims that deaths have shot up to record levels since January this year following the introduction of vaccinations in December.
How much can the government of an “aging” country and the financial sector save if say half of all old people die an average of yen years earlier than expected?
https://www.bitchute.com/video/WtCZK2AmyHsO/
This is a link to the very first article that I wrote about the coronavirus (before the name COVID-19 came about), back in January 2020.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/01/29/it-is-easy-to-overreact-to-the-chinese-coronavirus/
As you see, I called the article, “It is easy to over react to the Chinese coronavirus.”
Some points I made were:
[2] Deaths from pathogens are part of the natural cycle. They help prune back the population of the old and weak.
[3] If the Chinese coronavirus were simply allowed to run its course, without publicity that it was in any way unusual, somewhat less than 1% of the world’s population might be expected to die.
[4] A major danger of the virus seems to be one of overreaction.
[5] A particular problem today is low prices for many commodities, including oil and other fossil fuels. These prices are likely to fall further, if China’s economy falters further.
[6] The best approach might just be to let the Chinese coronavirus run its course. Authorities might also discourage stories about how awful the illness is.
I probably should have made a point about looking around for old drugs that would mitigate the virus’s effects on people, but I suppose I thought that idea was obvious.
If we look at what Big Tech and the financiers are up to, the plan is to eliminate most or even all teachers anyway, by moving to online learning. Teachers are toast.
Ditto for medical consultations, banking services, etc.
Naomi Wolf has pointed out that they were surprisingly prompt in deploying full online teaching programmes in the wake of lock-downs.
Clearly, none of this is happening on the hoof……..
Universities already use a lot of part-time faculty members, earning practically nothing, to teach their courses, including online courses.
Interesting note on Mars and the moon:
“Mars is becoming a highly focused planet because it contains many valuable resources, including rare metals, that have ignited a new rush by global superpowers to conduct future space mining missions. Before Mars is mined, the Moon will likely experience mining operations first.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/nasas-curiosity-captures-stunning-martian-clouds
Life may yet turn out to be better than many think, mankind has a habit of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.
Now, back to regularly scheduled doom.
Dennis L.
““Mars is becoming a highly focused planet because it contains many valuable resources,”
But, alas, no cheap energy sources that would allow victory to be snatched from the jaws of defeat.
try thinking through this (info I saw on Quora.com): due to Mars gravity and atmosphere, to return to Earth requires about 1/3 the power of liftoff here using a Saturn V. So something like a Falcon Heavy. How is it possible to send a Falcon Heavy (fully fueled) and land it safely on Mars so that it could be used for the return trip?
Due to the thin atmosphere a mass driver would work well on Mars. But let’s start with the moon.
mass driver: “A launch installation that would consist of some electrical power station and a long linear motor. Vehicles would be placed on the launcher and accelerated. They could be released at escape velocityfor interplanetary voyages, or they could be launched at near orbital velocity and use a short rocket burn to circularize their orbit. The Earth’s strong gravity and thick atmosphere make such an installation difficult, so many proposals have been put forward to place such an installation on the Moon.” ……………………………………………………………………… so is this just sci fi? or if it is really possible, to actually build this on Mars seems as unlikely as placing a fully fueled Falcon Heavy on the surface of Mars.
david, the technology has been known for over 70 years. Put the mine on the Moon, fire the result by mass driver to the refinery at the L4 Lagrange point, do the processing there, and on to Mars.
Only problem, as we now know, is that people up there would fry, and remote telemetry would take too long. Paging R Daneel Olivaw.
gotta love the questions on quora
I think I’m stupid (much applause from certain quarters there)
then to reassure myself there’s folks stupider–I read quora
then I don’t feel so bad
this factual case also means that it looks impossible for humans to make a round trip to the surface of Mars. Perhaps a human trip around Mars and back might work later this decade. Might be more entertaining to see a one way trip to the Martian surface.
I can think of a few people I’d buy single tickets for
Fuel for the return will be made on the surface of Mars. That is why the switch to liquid methane as the fuel.
The process of creating methane-based fuel has been theorized before, initially by Elon Musk and Space X. It utilized a solar infrastructure to generate electricity, resulting in the electrolysis of carbon dioxide, which, when mixed with water from the ice found on Mars, produces methane
why?
Because it is expensive to transport it from Earth to Mars to be used for a return trip. The same reason planes flying between NYC and London do not carry round trip fuel they refuel at each end.
why
was intended to discover the reason for going there in the first place
I think travel to Mars would be *possible,” just extremely expensive under foreseeable technology (hardly cost effective if the goal is mining) and hazardous to any humans aboard. For example, you could solve the weight problem by using unmanned missions to deliver supplies.
“to Mars” is the relatively easy peasy part. To leave Mars gravity would require the thrust of a Falcon Heavy. Leaving the moon required many times less energy. I don’t see how the problem of liftoff from Mars is solvable.
The astronauts will need to learn how to levitate while sitting in the lotus position.
LOL!
If we can lift off from the earth, we can lift off from Mars.
sure. Just build a Falcon Heavy on Mars, then produce the fuel on Mars, problem solved.
yes building the Mars super booster on Mars is the way to go
oh, I didn’t realize it would be so easy and uncomplicated.
Just get Jesus to dig it up and bring it back with him when he returns.
Don’t see the point really when we can just harvest unicorn poop, its full of rare earths.
“For example, you could solve the weight problem by using unmanned missions to deliver supplies.”
As proposed by Robert Zubrin in “Mars Direct”, published in 1991. Ignored by NASA because it was far too cheap, ie not enough slush money for the bureaucrats and contractors.
The problem is we cannot go to the moon .. and certainly not mars
We ‘lost the technology’ If you recall from American Moon NASA says they threw it in the bin because it was taking up too much space. But they did keep the video tape and re-used those — because ‘tapes are expensive’
https://youtu.be/16MMZJlp_0Y
Oh look what I found on YouTube–footage of a robot probe (Huygens) landing on Titan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msiLWxDayuA
Space exploration sure has made great leaps and strides, hasn’t it? Or is this the work of Stanley Kubrick as well?
” In theory, if a huge amount of transition were done, perhaps steel and concrete could be produced in reasonable quantities with only the “All Other” types of energy, but someone would need to figure out precisely how this could be accomplished, including the time frame required. ”
Unfortunately, it’s far more complicated than just the energy deficit. Most people don’t seem to get the complex economic dependencies of the current global petroleum industry. While most people understand how dilution and depletion economics impact petroleum and petro industry based fuels for transportation and heating – that’s as far as their understanding goes of petroleum.
What people are missing is that other industries are not only dependent on the availability of petroleum fuels for energy, they are also dependent on the economies-of-scale of the petroleum industry. The economy-of-scale of the petroleum industry disproportionately impacts the petro-chemical industry which uses only about 5% of petroleum, yet global food production is now 95% dependent on NPK and crop management chemicals that come from the petro chemical industry. The petro chemical industry is highly dependent (if not directly subsidized) on the petroluem industry. The petro chemical industry depends on the global petroleum industry for oil exploration costs, oil well drilling costs, oil storage and distribution, and petro chemical feed stock refining costs. The scale of the petro chemical industry is so much smaller than the over petroleum energy industry, that there no chance that the petro chemical industry can provide all functions of the larger petroluem industry – were it to be drastically reduced in economy of scales – without huge increases in the costs of petro chemicals. Those cost increases would impact the cost of NPK chemical fertilizers and crop management chemicals – dramatically increasing food production costs. They would effect the cost of all the plastics that go into wind turbines and solar panels.
What people don’t get is that even if it were possible for the world to exist only on renewable energy, (which no real expert believes is possible with current technologies – maybe 40% electrical energy will be renewable in two decades – and that is likely naive and over confident) it isn’t possible for renewable energy to provide essential petro chemical feed stocks, or at anywhere near their current costs – if at all. One of the most direct impacts for creating wide spread chaos are food price increases and or food shortages. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_riot)
We can agree that politicians would not want to touch this topic in best case. In the worst case – assuming they were informed enough to be aware in the best case. Observing recent and current politicians in both parties – provides little confidence or comfort that they are suitably informed about growing overpopulation impacts like resource dilution and depletion economics – much less the economic impacts coming from the declining scales of the petroleum industry.
Good news for environmentalist – the anthropogenic climate change problem will be solved. Bad news for most of the rest of us – it was solved with a human population collapse.
I am afraid that you are 100% correct!
True
Brawndo has what plants crave!
Hi Gail, this is an excellent post and I concur that we seem to only be a few months away from some kind of financial crisis stressing the system again. The repo market is once again acting up and appears on the verge of some sort of intervention, probably due to the massive liquidity injections from the Federal Reserve. I don’t understand why people are still focusing on Covid or vaccines, they seem to be the least of our problems right now, at least in the United States. Here are just a sample of the things I’m seeing that are hugely problematic.
Costs of all kinds and commodities appear to be soaring, soon to be far out of reach of the average consumer. The distortions from monetary injections are downright horrifying. The housing market has exploded, completely removing first time buyers from the picture and setting up others to be making the worst deals of a lifetime. Lumber, copper, steel, palladium, soy, corn, wheat, and more look like a chart of Tesla’s stock. I read an article yesterday where the CFO of Costco claims that meat prices increased 20% in the last month alone. Where is the breaking point on society is anyone’s guess but I believe it’s definitely coming this year.
The computer chip shortage, among many other shortages, is extremely problematic. Practically everything is tied to them at this point including phones, televisions, vehicles, and appliances. Vehicle manufacturers are talking about shutting down production by 50% and laying off thousands of workers. Order times for new things like a dishwasher are 6 months out in some cases. Sony is having major problems ramping up the Playstation 5 due to the shortages, constraining their profits on plans to sell video games and subscription services. The ramifications of this are large and still unfolding, impacting every single industry.
The financial sector is back to repeating the same mistakes that are partly to blame for getting us into this situation, as restrictions on their share buybacks are being removed. They are automating and reducing costs by encouraging work from home as fast as they possibly can. Reducing the amount of profit they need to fake growth by lowering their share float is about the most unproductive thing they can possibly do. And now the greenies are pressuring oil companies to produce less oil in order to reduce CO2 emissions. How have the people in charge not learned the correlation yet between fossil fuels and human population or that rewarding this kind of expansion will not lead to new jobs or growth?
Now it looks like China is preparing to attack other countries including Australia or Taiwan. We just had Israel bombing Hamas last week that could’ve easily escalating into something larger. The US is clearly a target for terrorist activities that will likely increase such as the large pipeline shutdown on the east coast a few weeks ago. Many people in the US have called for a civil war in the last couple of years and it seems likely that states will leave the union in the not too distant future. Any of these scenarios could quickly get out of control.
The electrical grid is increasingly vulnerable, evidenced by what happened recently in Texas and the ongoing crisis in California. None of our leaders appear to understand that coal and gas are needed in order to keep our decades old electrical infrastructure intact. The Biden administration wants amounts of copper that don’t exist for electrification but it refuses to begin working on mines in Arizona and instead wants to keep taking it from Chile or Argentina, 2 unstable countries susceptible to a total collapse. It appears as if our leaders are either intentionally trying to hasten a global economic collapse or they are complete idiots.
The central bank is about to release a paper on digital currency in a couple months, probably coinciding with another crisis, weather manufactured intentionally or not is debatable at this point. If they do even a fraction of the things with it that China is, it will inevitably end up being used to control people’s behavior through something like social scores and to enact some sort of universal basic income in a last ditch effort to keep the system from collapsing. To say that things are dystopian and hopeless at this point is a severe understatement. I don’t believe most people understand the gravity of this situation or how quickly things are going to become untenable.
I think your analysis is precisely correct. You added a lot of helpful details I wasn’t aware of.
Indeed, most are in complete denial and I thank them for that – should 10-20% of the world population realize how bad the situation really is, collapse would probably have already occurred.
Screw that playstation, time to resupply booze.
Thanks for the insightful post TO
The cattle cannot be told the wolves are about to pour through a hole in the fence
We tend to think that a ‘social credit’ system is only about political repression, in the manner of China, but it’s clear that it is viewed principally as a tool to micro-manage almost everything: to direct consumer spending in particular directions, encourage or close down businesses and whole sectors (goodbye beef, hello bug burgers!), discourage travel and mobility, and of course apply political penalties, etc.
We are still talking so much about Covid, partly due to the propaganda machine which is using the Covid narrative to distract us from all the other problems, and to divert our attention away from the direction in which our governments are taking us – Techno Totalitarianism.
Superb post, TO!
“Now it looks like China is preparing to attack other countries including Australia or Taiwan.”
Uh, however bad their relations with Australia get, I doubt they’ll be attacking it anytime soon. It’s far away.
uh, so it’s Taiwan then?
But as the Chinese keep reminding us, Taiwan isn’t a country.
So it’s Australia after all. Invade the Northern Territories and get a Darwin Award?
bloody well right. after all, Darwin is “Asia’s Gateway to Australia”, so says the internet.
Strewth!!
and it’s one of the coolest place names evuh.
Not a country? Pshaw, we’re the best country!
https://babylonbee.com/news/taiwan-is-the-babylon-bees-country-of-the-year-2021
” I don’t believe most people understand the gravity of this situation or how quickly things are going to become untenable.” YES it is a grave situation, BUT no one knows how quickly this situation will “become untenable”. Everyone is guessing. Others may have a more educated guess than me, but my guess is that TPTB tweak the dials more and more desperately for a few more years and then things go from slow decline to steep plunge.
Collapse is already happening and it is accelerating. There is zero chance we make it another 5 or 10 years in anything resembling the economy of 2019. For many people and businesses this situation is already becoming unbearable. McDonalds has been forced to offer people $50 just to show up for an interview and I just saw a promotion earlier this week offering a free iPhone to anyone who makes it to 6 months of employment. This would not be happening if they could easily find labor.
Massive wage increases are occurring in the restaurant and services industries yet help wanted signs persist around every street corner. Increases in labor costs, materials costs, and transportation charges are going to feed into inflationary effects like gasoline on a fire. In the last year the cost of taking a truck from coast to coast in the US has doubled from $6,000 to $12,000. Look at the shipping delays and port backlog pile-ups, increasing costs and making more products unavailable for longer and longer periods of time. How soon until trade completely breaks down? Let’s add some more tariffs and find out!
The government is already tweaking more dials than they ever have before and look how badly they’ve mucked things up. Housing prices are soaring some 15% or more in a year, people are getting paid more on unemployment than to work, child universal basic income starts in July paying families $250 per month per child, commodities costs of all kinds are soaring, and more than 50% of businesses have disappeared off Yelp due to their hasty Covid shutdowns. The more that Uncle Sam tweaks the worse this situation gets due to unintended consequences and too many complex factors having relationships that go unnoticed until after something bad happens.
Wealth is becoming increasingly worthless and our ideas of money are just silly at this point. Does it really matter if you have a billion dollars if you have to wait half a year for a new appliance or there are no homes on the market to purchase? Digits in a bank account are no longer transferable into immediate creature comforts provided by excess fossil fuels. The more people figure this out, the more it feeds into hoarding, shortages, cost increases, and inflationary effects as a self reinforcing feedback loop. Even a deflationary bust at this point, tanking asset, housing and commodity prices, would probably exacerbate shortages. We have finally reached the point where the amount of money in the system is very much greater than the amount of goods and services in existence. Buckle up, it’s not going to be long now before the system collapses catastrophically.
good minor details. I’m buckled up now and rolling with the changes. 2020 was a decently good year for me. Too bad it was very hard for many others. 2021 has been quite good for me. If this is over in 4 years and 11 months, thats okay by me.
And they say good news doesn’t sell 🙂
I am delighted by this summary … The Borg is losing its mind!
You probably don’t know this, but I have kidnapped Gail’s image of herself and converted it into a non-fungible token. This is why she can no longer use it on her comments. I will however return it if she pays me a 2 million dollar bill. Can she afford it? What do you think?
Has there ever been anything so ridiculous as non-fungible tokens?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/may/29/non-fungible-tokens-digital-fad-planet-nfts-artists-fossil-fuels
EXTRACTS:
Mars House itself is nothing more than a string of ones and zeroes residing on a server somewhere. But the NFT isn’t even that string. All it is is another such string pointing to that one, certifying that it is the only copy of that precise sequence of ones and zeroes in existence. Put aside, if you can, the obscenity of a purely virtual dwelling selling for half a million dollars.
The New York Times recently quoted a French artist taken aback to learn that their “release of six crypto-artworks consumed in 10 seconds more electricity than [their] entire studio over the past two years.” Similarly, Elon Musk’s recent large-scale transactions in proof-of-work-based Bitcoin released more carbon into the atmosphere in just a few days than the amount saved, in principle, by all the Teslas ever sold.
This is all very bizarre. If countries decide to implement some sort of digital currencies, they cannot have all of the fossil fuel usage that the current digital currencies use. And certification of artwork by burning large amounts of fossil fuels is just strange.
To be fair, it’s not even in my top ten list of strange things artists have done, and called “art”.
I wonder if QE has led to this situation? Some people have managed to get their hands on so much money via digital currencies that they have a need for some hyper-expensive nonsense to spend it on.
More grist for the mill regarding Ivermectin: Headline summary: it seems to work in India, film at eleven.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/ivermectin-new-penicillin
Ending on the positive side, per a RI video on scaling(we have covered that earlier) it seems humans with 3B heartbeats should live about forty years which was our expected span not that many years ago. So, most of us here have beaten the odds; enjoy your day, it is a beautiful world.
Dennis L.
The Zerohedge Article you link to is titled Is Ivermectin The New Penicillin?
A few excerpts:
An open video from NZ GP Damian Wojcik re Vaccine Roll Out
https://www.covidplanb.co.nz/data-science/an-open-video-from-nz-gp-damian-wojcik/
Fine presentation: worth noting that the GP’s who are speaking up – in increasing numbers – all risk losing their professional status due to unmerited sanctions by corrupt professional bodies and public health ministries.
And it is the lowly GP’s who are dong this: those higher up the chain, the heads of departments, holders of academic chairs, etc, are all pro-vaccine on the whole.
Now, I wonder why that is……?
They are a disgrace.
“There is emerging evidence that COVID-19 vaccines carry a risk of severe adverse reactions and death. In the five months from the 14th of December 2020, there have been four thousand, four hundred and thirty four deaths reported to the USA Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, following 259 million COVID-19 vaccinations, including from the Pfizer brand used in New Zealand. The CDC has calculated the COVID-19 vaccine death rate as 0.0017 percent. And it seems small. But this is more than the combined total for all other vaccines for the entire preceding ten years, and between 113 and 165 times higher than the annual influenza vaccine death rate of 0.000015 percent.
One would have anticipated that this would result in the immediate halting of the COVID-19 vaccine program. But it seems not.
By way of comparison, the attempted rollout of the swine flu vaccine to 90 million Americans in 1976, was halted immediately after 50 deaths and approximately 500 cases of severe paralysis.
Some in New Zealand would say that this harm is the price we must pay for halting the COVIS-19 pandemic and returning to normal. My reply to them is: “Not on my watch; and not in my patients.” My patients are living persons with names and families—not laboratory rats to be sacrificed in a global vaccine experiment….”
Another decent doctor with a conscience speaks up. There’s a glimmer hope for humanity yet. Please listen to the whole thing.
And talking about vaccines, the headline of this news could be:
people vaccinated against covid, admitted at hospital for covid
https://www.ilgiorno.it/cronaca/covid-inghilterra-variante-indiana-1.6421145
The CovIDIOTS response to this … which they were taught by the MSM… is that the injection is not perfect but it reduces their chances of contracting covid
That is of course a lie… but they are Stooopid MOREOns… so they believe it
‘injection’
MedSAFE will file that under G…. then my boy Luke in the PR Team … will call the medical board… and they will issue a threatening letter to the good doctor…. and then he’ll desist… or he’ll continue to scream into the wind and lose the final months of his career…
He looks to be well over 60 so more willing than other doctors to scream into the wind.
But he is up against an all powerful machine…. I must say the Plan B people have staying power… I stopped pushing back nearly a year ago recognizing that resistance is futile…
Now I sporadically pepper Luke with a bombshell here and there… the latest was the Montagnier statement on variants… Luke probably reads them … and has a laugh … and continues to provide cover for the killers.
Mind you … these are good kind killers… they are contrary to popular belief… doing the right thing.
Here’s a video of Luke that I found on his Linkedin profile…. does he come across as an enabler of mass murder? The Goebbels of New Zealand?
Was Luke a … Doomie Prepper?????? Who realized the futility of all that… and realized the Only good option … was the CEP… and joined the Team?
Surely Luke must know what’s up — how else do you rationalize the video with running PR for the NZ Death Camp?
I wonder what he thinks when I send him the emails with the ‘I Know What You Are Up To’ subject line — maybe he would like to reply with ‘You are right… and an incredible Genius ….but I cannot acknowledge you’
Some people like to think that the Covid death count is overestimated because a death with Covid is not the same as a death due to Covid. When it comes to vaccinations, however, those same people don’t differentiate between deaths with the vaccine and deaths due to the vaccine. The adverse events after vaccinations are simply that. Far more detailed analysis is needed to conclude anything from the simple figures.
The more I look into this, the more I think that the apparent incidence of deaths from a Covid vaccine is overblown. For example, all Covid vaccines in the US are under Emergency Use Authorization, which requires health providers to report all possible adverse events in patients who have received the vaccines. So that, alone, may skew the reports of adverse events which are otherwise voluntary. There is also the question of which sectors of the population have received the vaccine as this may also skew the numbers.
Dr Damian Wojcik wanted to give the impression that the bland figures he gave represented a true picture of how deadly the vaccines are (though there was no breakdown for the only vaccine being given in NZ).
Dr Simon Thornley is better, on the Plan B website but, at one point, he gives finger in the air estimates of how many people may have actually been infected in NZ (based on some studies, mainly abroad) then proceeds to treat that very unreliable estimate as an actual figure. However, his overall arguments about vaccines is quite good and are making me think twice about getting it.
Since neithor the MSM or alt.fringe can be trusted I trust my gut on these things. I just dont know anything better. The propaganda machine is rolling omost as hard as orange man bad. Thanks ill stick with my apple horse nectar vit d and zinc. They can keep their syringes filled with gates juice. I reject my first world VAX privilege. I can not morally and ethically accept a life saving jab until every last third world inhabitant has had that opportunity. As soon as there is 100% Vaccination from bangladesh to capetown i will consider the VAX. *(not)
Expresses concerns about the safety of the vaccines.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-vaccines-lead-to-new-infections-and-mortality-the-evidence/5746393
This is an article about the increase in the number of cases of COVID-19 in many countries after vaccination efforts are begun.
Specifically…..
Covid-19 Vaccines Lead to New Infections and Mortality: The Evidence is Overwhelming
Country Case Studies. Mortality and Morbidity
https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-vaccines-lead-to-new-infections-and-mortality-the-evidence/5746393
Isn’t it amazing how if you tested positive for Covid but has ZERO symptoms a month ago — and you die from any cause within the month – you are counted as a Covid death.
BUT
If you had a covid vaccine yesterday and you die today — there vaccine was not the cause.
“If you had a covid vaccine yesterday and you die today — there vaccine was not the cause.”
Who is claiming this?
By the way, that global research article has sparse analysis. It’s almost the reverse of what you claim, in order to magnify the issue – a death some time after being vaccinated must be caused by the vaccination. I also didn’t see a mention of Israel, which appears to have the disease under control by aggressive vaccination.
This is something that is in the MSM constantly …
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-no-links-found-between-vaccination-and-deaths/a-56458746
But that article does not just say that deaths after a vaccination could not be caused by the vaccination; it talks about investigation of those deaths with no causal link found. I don’t have information to say those conclusions are wrong. If you simply assume that there are many so-called Covid deaths that weren’t actually Covid and also assume that deaths post vaccination were caused by the vaccination you are just trying to justify your position on the disease and the vaccine, without actually proving either.
I take comfort in the old truths
especially the one about empty vessels making the most noise
Nobody makes more noise than Arnold the Terminator, or should that be Vaccinator?
The comments on YT are heart warming, but surprising few given how long the video has been out and how many times it’s been viewed.
Why are so many comments on all channels anti the agenda? Is it that we are in the not so silent majority or is it merely like Norman says that we make the most noise?
Perhaps we antis are more obsessed with fear of the jab, while the pro-COVID-19-vaxers are more obsessed with fear of the virus and see the jab as a solution.
In my local area, seven individuals I know have had Covid-19 and all recovered. I haven’t confirmed anybody dying from the jab yet, but two women in their nineties died suddenly over the past few days and neither was expected to die that quickly. The jab campaign for the elderly has been going on for a month now and they began with those in their 90s, so it is possible these represent vaccine deaths, but when you hear that somebody’s mother dies, you can’t very well ask them if they had been vaccinated. But May is the time of year when the old folks are at their healthiest. Most died in the cold of Jan to March or the heat of August.
Surely Arnold would never inject anything unhealthy into his veins…
All proverbs are both true, and limited.
A few people are making as much noise as they can, despite very effective, cynical censorship, because they are intelligent, humane and very brave – and aware that a great rime is being committed, overseen by corrupt regulatory agencies across the world.
Perhaps you might care to view Dr Yeadon, he is very softly spoken if that is your criterion.
“Tshwane [South Africa] is officially bankrupt, says mayor Randall Williams.
“Pretoria – Tshwane mayor Randall Williams yesterday officially declared the metro bankrupt, saying National Treasury found its liability exceeded assets by R3 billion.”
https://www.iol.co.za/pretoria-news/news/tshwane-is-officially-bankrupt-says-mayor-randall-williams-f4d1269d-db4a-48f8-be65-905cdf732de6
“Woman shot dead in Lesotho as factory workers’ clashes with police escalate.
“A woman has died after being shot during violent clashes between factory workers and police in Lesotho as trade unions say they have lost control over angry protests over pay.”
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/may/28/woman-shot-dead-in-lesotho-as-factory-workers-clashes-with-police-escalate
“Hunger and food insecurity in southern Africa – a region on the brink of mass starvation…
“In southern Africa, a region with a high proportion of workers in the informal economy, the most vulnerable have been hit hard. More specifically in parts of Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, some people are experiencing a critical hunger situation…”
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-05-28-hunger-and-food-insecurity-in-southern-africa-a-region-on-the-brink-of-mass-starvation/
What we now call Zimbabwe had a population of a million when Shaka the Zulu was around.
It has 15 million now.
There is no way to avoid disasters there.
Tshwane was part of Pretoria. Guess the city outsourced its bad parts to a different municipality.
I am afraid a lot of places would be bankrupt now, if we stopped to analyze the situation. South Africa certainly has as many problems as other areas.
“Oman’s military steps up recruitment after unemployment protests…
“In an apparent attempt to tackle joblessness in the country Sultan Haitham bin Tareq ordered the defence ministry and other government institutions to create 32,000 jobs for Omanis during 2021.”
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/oman-protests-unemployment-military-recruitment-steps-up
“Turkish lira hits record low in latest mark of vulnerability.
“Turkey’s lira hit a record low on Friday as concerns over global inflation, an early election and a possible ratings downgrade marked the latest milestone in a years-long depreciation that has dogged the big emerging market economy.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/turkish-lira-drops-record-low-world-inflation-looms-2021-05-28/
“Tunisia, close to economic collapse, suffers political chaos.
“Tunisian politicians and officials warn of an economic collapse if the government cannot agree a new International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan this summer, but political paralysis could scotch that effort.”
https://cyprus-mail.com/2021/05/28/tunisia-close-to-economic-collapse-suffers-political-chaos/
“No camel rides in Tunisian town as COVID slowly kills tourism…
“”There are no tourists and the beach is empty. It is very sad,” said Tatiana Vasileva, one of the two Bulgarians.”
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/no-camel-rides-tunisian-town-covid-slowly-kills-tourism-2021-05-25/
“Tourists are being put off by the country’s low vaccination levels.”
I doubt potential tourists either know or care about Tunisia’s vaccination levels. Much more likely it’s government rules surrounding travel that make foreign holidays unattractive. Nothing at all to do with fear of covid.
Hiring for the military seems to be a way of getting around a big unemployment problem. It happened back in WWI, perhaps not intentionally.
“Losses Soar as Unrest Hits Colombian Ports, Mines and Refineries…
“The nation’s biggest Pacific port and one of its two main coal mines have been paralyzed by protests, its biggest oil refinery can’t function normally, and roadblocks have cut off some of the richest farmland, causing food prices to soar.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-28/losses-soar-as-unrest-hits-colombian-ports-mines-and-refineries
“Brazil Unemployment Hits Record During Second Covid-19 Wave…
“Joblessness hit 14.7% in the three months ending in March, above the 14.6% median estimate from analysts surveyed by Bloomberg, the national statistics institute reported on Thursday.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-27/brazil-unemployment-hits-all-time-high-during-second-covid-wave
“Brazil’s government agencies warned of droughts this week as the country faces its worst dry spell in 91 years, increasing fears of energy rationing, hitting hydroelectric power generation and agriculture while raising the risk of Amazon fires.”
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/brazil-drought-alert-country-faces-worst-dry-spell-91-years-2021-05-28/
@ Harry McGibbs. I know this is not the first time to say this but that you for your aggregation service. The information you highlight substantiates and amplifies many of Gail’s essential points, and also some of other commentators aswell.
Thank you, infoshark – you are welcome. 🙂
I agree. Thanks!
The coal and oil prices are evidently not enough to pay workers an adequate wage. This becomes a big problem.
“Goldman Says China Has Lost the Ability to Boss Commodity Prices.
“China’s efforts to rein in surging commodities prices are likely to be in vain as it’s lost the ability to boss the market amid the developed-nation recovery from the pandemic, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-28/goldman-says-china-has-lost-the-ability-to-boss-commodity-prices
“The real motivation behind China’s digital yuan… the DCEP wasn’t designed to threaten the dollar’s dominance in the first place. Instead, its creation was inspired by long-standing domestic concerns that have more to do with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) need to exert control over the financial system…
“A financial crisis is among China’s greatest fears. Anything that endangers financial stability jeopardizes the reputation of the Communist Party and subsequently has a disproportionate impact on the trust and confidence of its people.”
https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/the-real-motivation-behind-chinas-digital-yuan/
“Taiwan accuses China of disrupting vaccine supplies amid worst Covid outbreak yet…
“The war of words began on Wednesday when President Tsai Ing-wen directly accused China of blocking a deal with BioNTech, the German company which sells the vaccine in partnership with Pfizer Inc.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/05/28/taiwan-accuses-china-disrupting-vaccine-supplies-amid-worst/
“Philippines protests China’s ‘illegal’ South China Sea presence.
“In a statement on Saturday, the Philippines’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it had lodged a diplomatic protest “against the incessant deployment, prolonged presence, and illegal activities of Chinese maritime assets and fishing vessels” in the vicinity of Thitu or the Pag-asa Island.”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/29/philippines-protests-chinas-illegal-south-china-sea-presence
There seems to be an awfully lot of conflict right now!
According to the Bloomberg Goldman article,
“France in double-dip recession as figures show first quarter worse than thought…
“The latest revision, reflecting a poorer than expected performance for the construction sector, underscores the challenges faced by France and its European neighbours as they battled a fresh wave of COVID-19 infections this year.”
https://news.sky.com/story/france-in-double-dip-recession-as-figures-show-first-quarter-worse-than-thought-12319351
“Timber bottlenecks lead to construction stoppages in Germany.
“Supply bottlenecks with timber, steel and insulating material are causing construction stoppages in Germany and threatening to slow the country’s recovery from the coronavirus slump, building associations said on Friday.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-construction/timber-bottlenecks-lead-to-construction-stoppages-in-germany-idUSL5N2NE5EH
the commonality in this thread Harry is the reality that energy, in its various forms, has become too expensive to use for the purpose of creating employment.
we’ve been doing that for the past 200 years or so.
it had to end sometime, (despite promises to the contrary) maybe this is that end.
I particularly liked the black humour of the Sultan of Oman ordering 32000 jobs to be ‘created’
That goes back to the idea I put forward years ago, with my circle of 100 men, each digging a hole and selling the dirt he digs out to the man on his left fill in his hole
Endless employment
Very gratifying
“I particularly liked the black humour of the Sultan of Oman ordering 32000 jobs to be ‘created’”.
Do you know, Norman, I had a feeling you’d like that one. 😆
“the reality that energy, in its various forms, has become too expensive to use for the purpose of creating employment.”
Yes, you could see it that way. But you could generate lots of jobs if American and European wages fell to African levels, a solution proposed, I believe, by Gina Reinhardt.
Also, nuclear is being suppressed, coal (which is the cheapest energy source we have) is being suppressed, and expensive energy has become the goal of the the folks who run the world government. You may think they don’t exist or that they don’t plan but just operate on a day to day basis like beachcombers or homeless street people, but the fact is they are active managers, And if they say energy is going to become more expensive, then energy is going to become more expensive.
And before you start moaning and groaning about con-spir-acy theories, please do watch this two-minute video.
Barack Obama: “Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” (January 2008)
agreed Tim
but will Americans and Europeans be prepared to accept ’employment’ as walking behind an ox-plough, so that wages paid reflect employment engaged in?
We expect our current ‘wages’ to deliver nice warm homes, pretty clothes, shiny cars and for the most part an idle existence in energy return terms.
I fear that expecting the lady of your household to do a 5 mile round trip with a 25L water container on her head would not put you very high on her favourite man list. It would on the other hand keep her employed for a large part of the day.
Expensive energy is not the ‘goal’ of governments. It is an inevitable end for the way we are headed.
Simple economics of unaffordability.
Governments actively ‘planning’ expensive energy would ensure their own demise. The dimmest of the dim can figure that out. Obama was just being a realist.
Energy most certainly going to become more and more expensive.
As I tried to clarify. Employment is the result of converting one energy form into another. If we don’t possess the means to do that, we cannot pay ourselves wages. I may have missed something–but there seems to be no other way of earning actual energy tokens. (money)
Please enlighten me if there is. (seriously)
There wasn’t a video attached.
I don’t moan and groan about conspiracy theories–I just point out the hilarity of their assumptions, and those who believe them.
Economists were assuming that oil, gas and coal prices would rise, so that renewables would become competitive. That never happened.
Norman, that video appears for me. If you can’t see it here, I’ll post the URL again. It’s very short.
https://youtu.be/HlTxGHn4sH4
As I tried to clarify. Employment is the result of converting one energy form into another. If we don’t possess the means to do that, we cannot pay ourselves wages. I may have missed something–but there seems to be no other way of earning actual energy tokens. (money)
I totally agree with this statement. I am just questioning the assumption that you and many people share that there isn’t enough cheap enough energy around for us to live well enough not to send the wife out to carry water and firewood.
I think there is enough cheap coal and enough cheap electricity and we can throw in a few of Keith’s power satellites to for us to live comfortably while we work on reducing the population and doing things smarter and cleaner. But our owners have chosen a different solution: forced energy starvation and forced depopulation (possibly through injection-induced sterilization) coming to a place near you any time now.
yes Tim, I have now seen it.
As I said, Obama seems to be saying it like it is. Electricity prices will rise. It was said in 2008 though, no one can be held to account for what’s happened to energy since then, he was/is no more of a economic mindreader than anybody else.
The common train of thought even 10 years ago was that fuel prices would continue to rise as supplies got tighter.
Didn’t work out like that.
extracting a single sentence and repeating it out of context has no bearing on what he was trying to say. (I thought you had more of a grasp on the situation than to need to do that)
All forms of energy are set to become less affordable in real terms. ‘Real Terms’ means that we won’t be able to produce more ‘energy forms’ by printing money to pay for it.
If we could, then the logical system would be to set up money printing presses next to oil-drilling rigs.
Or easier still, put money on rolls in public rest rooms. Tear off what you need.
Here and elsewhere, a constant theme by some is to spend our way out of the problem. Hardly worth the brainpain to explain why that isn’t possible. Fixations are unshiftable.
doesn’t matter if it’s food, petrol, electricity, clothing, housing—all are forms of ‘converted’ energy that we make use of, and insist (to our governments) on it being cheap.
When the things we need get expensive, we vote for another government. And then can’t figure out why we don’t get cheapness back. Obviously a ‘conspiracy’ to keep us poor.
Ah–but Bezos is a zillionaire–that ‘proves’ there’s wealth out there. No–it ‘proves’ that we are all prepared to play his game of pass the parcel. Stop doing that, and Bezos is left with what he might find down the back of his many sofas.
Obama was just saying the era of cheapness is over.
There is a big difference between “electricity costs will rise” and “electricity prices will rise.” Electricity has quite a bit of the same problem that oil, gas, and coal have. Rising costs don’t equate to rising prices. Businesses will close, if electricity costs are too high. Or they will move their operations elsewhere. The whole economy of countries will be pushed into recession. Australia has tried the exercise of adding high cost electricity, and tried to push through the high prices to consumers of all kinds. The high electricity costs make Australia a very unappealing place to make anything. We can also see what has happened with California. The state cannot collect high enough rates to adequately maintain the huge amount of long distance transmission need for all of its electricity imports and electricity sent from renewable producers. This is part of the state’s fire problem.
“Electricity prices will rise” is akin to “food prices will rise” in a country where food makes up 50% or more of many people’s budgets. People will go hungry. There will be a lot of ramifications that people don’t think of.
Between resource shortages and stoppages because of outages somewhere else, it is hard to do much construction.
“There’s a massive child-care worker shortage [US] and the market can’t fix it.
“Unlike restaurants and other industries, child-care centers can’t raise pay to attract and retain workers — and President Biden’s American Families Plan doesn’t go far enough to address the problem.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/05/26/child-care-center-worker-shortage/
“Labor Shortages Are Plaguing Tech Companies Too…
“As the economy shudders back to life post-pandemic, companies are struggling to hire qualified workers. Many people are either hesitant to return to offices, don’t have the right training, are already getting unemployment checks—or some combination of all three.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-05-27/labor-shortages-are-plaguing-tech-companies-too
Someone explained to me that there are a lot of government benefits available if a person makes quite a low income, say $12 per hour or less. (food stamps, public housing, free lunches and breakfast at school, tax benefits) How this works depends on family size, of course. Raising wages to $15 per hour is likely to cause a loss of government benefits, but the raise to $15 per hour is not enough additional income to offset the loss in government benefits.
“The price of breakfast: soaring costs bolster fears of global food inflation… Prices for bulk contracts of coffee, milk, sugar, wheat, oats and orange juice have jumped 28 per cent on average from 2019 levels, according to trading on US futures markets…
“During the past few months, a slew of food companies including Switzerland’s Nestlé and Anglo-Dutch Unilever have announced price increases as the costs of raw materials rise. Higher food prices have become a political concern in some developing countries such as Ethiopia and Nigeria, and are creeping into consumer prices in developed economies as well.
““Food inflation is real in many places. It’s not going away soon,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. In April, the FAO’s real food price index — which tracks a wide range of products — hit its highest level in a decade.”
https://www.ft.com/content/007bd0a0-f149-427d-937c-ec5b0ef4374d
“Your [UK] restaurant bill is about to jump as global food prices sizzle.
“Spiralling demand, high food prices, surging shipping costs and rising wages are conspiring to put the squeeze on restaurateurs and grocers.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/05/28/restaurant-bill-jump-global-food-prices-sizzle/
“What Global Central Bankers Are Telling Us…
““The spike we’ve seen in fresh food as a result of climate change [Mexico] should remind us that central banks also have a role to play in sustainable financing and reducing the risks of climate change,” Deputy Central Bank Governor Irene Espinosa said in an interview last week. “This can turn into a snowball that generates bigger inflationary pressures.””
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-05-28/what-s-happening-in-the-world-economy-central-bankers-stay-calm-on-inflation
It is not possible to simply ramp up production of many of these products. The effects of shutdowns cannot easily be reversed. Also, loss of fertilizer and higher prices of shipping play a role.
Excellent https://off-guardian.org/2021/05/28/dont-be-stupid-inform-your-decisions/
An article expressing hope for a turn of the tables:
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/fauci-2012-gain-function-research-worth-risk-lab-accident-sparking-pandemic Fauci In 2012: Gain-Of-Function Research ‘Worth Risk Of Lab Accident Sparking Pandemic’
Not that I support Fauci but when I read the actual report it was not what the headlines inferred.
So doesn’t look very condemning of him even though he is likely neck deep in it.
it says
It is clear that the scientists who conducted the experiments that triggered this debate (2, 3), and who are among those who voluntarily signed onto the moratorium, have conducted their research properly and under the safest and most secure conditions. However, the issue that has been intensely debated is whether knowledge obtained from these experiments could inadvertently affect public health in an adverse way, even in nations multiple time zones away. Putting aside the specter of bioterrorism for the moment, consider this hypothetical scenario: an important gain-of-function experiment involving a virus with serious pandemic potential is performed in a well-regulated, world-class laboratory by experienced investigators, but the information from the experiment is then used by another scientist who does not have the same training and facilities and is not subject to the same regulations. In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario—however remote—should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?
Scientists working in this field might say—
AS INDEED I HAVE SAID — that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky. However, we must respect that there are genuine and legitimate concerns about this type of research, both domestically and globally.
We cannot expect those who have these concerns to simply take us, the scientific community, at our word that the benefits of this work outweigh the risks, nor can we ignore their calls for greater transparency, their concerns about conflicts of interest, and their efforts to engage in a dialog about whether these experiments should have been performed in the first place. Those of us in the scientific community who believe in the merits of this work have the responsibility to address these concerns thoughtfully and respectfully.
A Houston hospital will become the first in the U.S. to fire workers for refusing Covid-19 vaccinations starting on June 7, unless a state judge intervenes.
About 117 staffers sued Houston Methodist Hospital Friday in Texas state court, claiming the facility’s vax-or-pink-slip mandate violates World War II-era ethics codes designed to prevent medical experimentation on unwilling human subjects. The so-called Nuremberg Code was developed in response to Nazi atrocities conducted on concentration camp victims.
About 99% of the 26,000 employees of the hospital, a cornerstone of the famed Texas Medical Center, are already in compliance with its vaccination mandate, according to an email sent by Marc Boom, the hospital’s chief executive officer, to all employees and physicians. The remaining staffers were reminded they have until June 7 to get the jab or face the consequences.
Read More: Refusing the Vaccine Is Legal But Could Still Cost You Your Job
The lawsuit represents an escalation by Jennifer Bridges, an outspoken Houston nurse, who took her complaints to social media shortly after her employer’s vaccination policy was announced. Her April 17 Facebook post attracted 94 comments and encouragement to hire a lawyer. Her name is listed first among the plaintiffs in Friday’s complaint filed in Montgomery County, about an hour north of downtown Houston.
Boom’s internal email makes no mention of the hospital’s policy to exempt employees who are pregnant, have underlying medical conditions or strongly held religious convictions from vaccine mandates. “It is legal for health care institutions to mandate vaccines, as we have done with the flu vaccine since 2009,” Boom said in his note. “The Covid-19 vaccines have proven through rigorous trials to be very safe and very effective and are not experimental,” he added.
Jared Woodfill, a lawyer for the holdouts, disagrees. Covid vaccines authorized for emergency use aren’t fully approved by federal regulators, he said, and aren’t allowed to be mandatory under U.S. Centers for Disease Control current rules.
“Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment,” Woodfill said in court papers asking a state judge to temporarily block the planned firings. “This, as a matter of fact, is a gene modification medical experiment on human beings, performed without informed consent. It is a severe and blatant violation of the Nuremberg Code and the public policy of the state of Texas.”
The holdouts also accuse Methodist of wrongful discharge and violating Texas’s at-will employment laws.
Even if the judge sides with workers refusing the shots, the concept of forcing employees to get vaccinated or lose their jobs is already spreading as fast as the virus itself among other large hospitals.
“CEOS of other health care institutions are calling nearly every day to ask how we are doing it,” Boom said in an April note to staffers. “I hope other health care systems and employers will quickly join Houston Methodist in making the vaccine mandatory for staff. The sooner we’re able to end this pandemic, the fewer lives we will continue to lose to it and the closer we can get to normal.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-28/texas-hospital-staff-says-vaccine-mandate-breaks-nuremberg-code?srnd=premium-europe
I live in Michigan. And I feel like I have been living in a real life dystopian novel.
Michigan has made headlines for being a bad place to be, I am afraid.
is that you Baby Doomer? maybe not? In this novel, it is still chapter one.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/some-next-level-dystopian-sht-amazon-rolls-out-portable-panic-booth-stressed-out
Picking up on the ‘boom and bust’ population dynamic that is normal for nature: It seems that BAB actually increases the diversity of species (and likely the genetic diversity within species).
Some posters suggested that humans ‘might learn’ from eco-systems how to be ‘stable, while dynamic’. Actually ecosystems are radically unstable, and they come to be, change, and pass away; species and their descendants often last much longer than any ecosystem.
Anyway, BAB is a normal feature of how species behave within ecosystems. Indeed, ecosystems comprise species that evolve and diversify through BAB. BAB is a natural feature of ecosystems. So, humans are doing what species natural do within ecosystems, when they BAB.
The boom and bust of industrial civilisation is very much typical of species behaviour within ecosystems. Humans are doing what they ‘should’ (naturally) be doing, and indeed that is how ecosystems increase their diversity.
> Boom-bust population dynamics increase diversity in evolving competitive communities
Abstract
The processes and mechanisms underlying the origin and maintenance of biological diversity have long been of central importance in ecology and evolution. The competitive exclusion principle states that the number of coexisting species is limited by the number of resources, or by the species’ similarity in resource use. Natural systems such as the extreme diversity of unicellular life in the oceans provide counter examples. It is known that mathematical models incorporating population fluctuations can lead to violations of the exclusion principle. Here we use simple eco-evolutionary models to show that a certain type of population dynamics, boom-bust dynamics, can allow for the evolution of much larger amounts of diversity than would be expected with stable equilibrium dynamics. Boom-bust dynamics are characterized by long periods of almost exponential growth (boom) and a subsequent population crash due to competition (bust). When such ecological dynamics are incorporated into an evolutionary model that allows for adaptive diversification in continuous phenotype spaces, desynchronization of the boom-bust cycles of coexisting species can lead to the maintenance of high levels of diversity.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-02021-4
Interesting! Now that I think about it, it makes sense. Everything seems to have been planned beautifully, to make the system work as long as possible.
An ecological niche if stable stagnates in term of biodiversity and energy relationships. Such stagnated niches ‘flourish’ via B&B (either due to environmental factors – disasters or interspecies factors). An ecological niche is most diversified in terms of species and energy relationships while still in the phase of growth and gradually flattens and decrease complexity as it finds its most stable iteration. Stable ecological niches (ecosystems) are evolunary dead ends (it can be described as systems with no available free energy) which neither can grow further nor produce new biological iterations. Nature plays its magic right in the phase of growth or as it is known ‘ecosystems in succession’ which is very telling that nature observes and respects thermodynamics and does not waste itself to enact change when there is neither energy, time nor space. Classical ecology (not the current green feel good form) is hell of a science which is basically nature economics. I’d advise anyone here to find ecology 101 textbook issued before 1999 and read it.
Good point:
“Nature plays its magic right in the phase of growth or as it is known ‘ecosystems in succession’ which is very telling that nature observes and respects thermodynamics and does not waste itself to enact change when there is neither energy, time nor space.”
Thank you, Gail.
This seems similar to the idea I often posit; that humans are simply acting in a way that is characteristic of their species, within the environment they find themselves (including all of the artificial systems that they themselves created as part of their natural behaviour). This is why it is unrealistic to expect humans to somehow voluntarily change that characteristic behaviour in order to save the planet.
Ecosystems that do reach a climax state are stable for a while until something perturbs that system, and that will always happen. We had a good run, for quite a long while, in terms of human lifetimes.
Similarly, when a period of energy and resource crisis occurs in a complex civilisation , we can expect those at the top of the power pyramid – in our case the great corporations, the true holders of wealth, the MIC, the CB’s etc – to attempt to redirect what energy and resources remain to their benefit alone, progressively cutting out the mass of the population, and nurturing only those whom they consider useful.
In our globalised age, we can also expect them to do this in a co-ordinated way, irrespective of national boundaries. We can also expect it to be disguised with propaganda and that it will not admitted to.
This is the light in which ‘lock-downs’, and the ‘essential’/’inessential’ division of people and economic sectors which appeared in 2020 should be viewed.
Although these policies clearly have additional motivations, such as ultra-rapid digitisation of all economic sectors and the move to Totalitarian political arrangements.
Therefore, far from being a wild ‘CT,’ it is probably inevitable and nothing out of the ordinary.
In more primitive, non-industrial societies much the same thing occurs, but in a simpler fashion: food and fuel is diverted from the elderly who are of little further use; from children, who can be generated anew when times get better; from older wives past their best compared to fresh young ones, and also from the weak or socially inferior in general.
As an historical example, in times of famine rich Iranian households in cities were fed at first from stocks of food held on the premises, and people were expelled on to the street as the famine progressed and stocks diminished, starting with the older, lower slaves and working up the hierarchy.
Orlov mentions that when the Soviet economy was in crisis, many Russian families eventually got to the point when grandparents were thrown out on to the street, as they could not be fed any longer. Mostly women, as the men drank themselves to death earlier on.
No one in their right mind ‘starves for granny’: not now, not 2,000 yrs ago.
Still less will the Digital-MIC go quietly into the night ……..
I struggle with this because I cannot see how the elites can maintain their position in a BAU Lite scenario…. because I don’t think a BAU Lite scenario is feasible.
Interestingly enough… I initially discovered OFW when I was researching the feasibility of a no-growth – or de-growth economy…. I learned that this is what is referred to as a steady state economy
This is Gail’s analysis – it makes sense — difficult to manage spent fuel ponds in this scenario
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/02/21/there-is-no-steady-state-economy-except-at-a-very-basic-level/
I agree.
And another thing. I tried to ask the steady staters how new businesses would arise in a steady state economy but I couldn’t get an answer. Also, look at what they say about investments; the phrase, ” Lower interest rates prevail”, is included. As though growth isn’t needed if interest rates are low. Sheesh!
That said… never underestimate the Elders… they are full of surprises!!!
Reading this makes me realize how lazy my brain has become and how difficult it is follow through this analysis. Basically, is there a grand cycle of relatively uniform life forms (consumers of energy) that cause a population boom initially with little genetic selection pressure – as long as energy is plentiful, and then as the uniform population boom outstrips the energy supply to which it has adapted, a more competitive and aggressively changing genetic selection process kicks in? The once stable population has to fragment and evolve into more competitive factions- even to the point of preying upon each other.
In other words, the availability of energy and resources is inversely related to the rate of speciation. The faster the rate of speciation, the smaller each genetically similar population becomes so as to allow more specialization in utilizing limited energy and resources-
On a nation scale, UK and Scotland for example may unify or centralize as long as there are ample raw materials and energy, but once these get squeezed, tribal warfare breaks out. And so the EU and the USA should fragment by this model
Yes, that paper looks complicated, and its a mathematical model. To use a simple analogy: BAB means that more species can co-exist with limited resources because they are not taking them ‘at the same time’; that is, BAB imposes a cycle of staggered dominance, where a given species is not constantly dominant and getting all the resources, and wiping out the other species – the species does well for a bit and then it collapses in numbers, and then another species can dominate and get more of the resources for a bit, and thus less species are pushed to extinction. Competition and adaptation do continue however, but BAB mitigates the loss of species. Without cyclical, staggered dominance, you would just have the constant dominance of fewer species. Admittedly I have not read the paper thoroughly, and there is a lot of technical stuff in it; nor did I find any ‘popular’ (magazine/ newspaper) discussions of the science paper – so that is just a five minute ‘quick take’ on it, and absolutely not an authoritative reading.
To pick up on your point about how all that could be analogous to state formation and diversification: Well, if ‘British State’ had a constant domination for long enough, then Scotland could ultimately lose its own identity; but if BS power ‘busts’, or at least weakens enough, and its dominance ‘cycles’ away, then Scotland can re-emerge as an independent country. Fluctuations in the relative power, domination, of different states, would then allow for the existence of more states. The total dominance of a single geopolitical power would wipe out all of the others, and state ‘BAB’ is one way that the ‘only one can survive’ scenario does not come to pass. Powers tend to rise and fall before they get to that stage – although large empires and blocs do arise. So, cyclical variations in the power dynamic allow for a diversity of states. Geopolitics is not an equilibrium, it is a dynamic process; states tend to increase their power, but it tends to ‘dissipate’ in the end, their dominance weakens, and others can increase their relative ‘power’ – and others can emerge in the power ‘voids’. The ‘fall of Rome’, and the rise of smaller states, and of the Holy Roman Empire, is an example. BAB is just a part of how things ‘work’ in the real world – growth and decline, increase and decrease, formation and reformation.
Interesting! Thanks!
‘Equilibrium’ sounds fluffy, nice and ‘wholesome’, but in terms of power analysis it means that some centers of force (species, states, classes, persons) have ‘constant dominance’, ie. they have successfully competed to occupy niches, and their force is sufficient to outcompete any would-be successors. ‘Instability’ sounds scary and ‘bad’ but in terms of power analysis it means that centers of force do not have sufficient power to ‘hog’ the niches, and other centers of force have an opportunity to emerge and to develop.
Which is a ‘better’ situation, equilibrium or instability, would then depend on the ‘perspective’ of the center of force, and then it is two-sided and contextual. A center of force likes stability in so far as it is able to continue to occupy the niche, but it dislikes stability in so far as it cannot expand itself. It welcomes instability in so far as it may itself exploit the instability to grow stronger, and dislikes it in so far as it could lose its niche. Which is preferred depends on the situational context, and the relative strength of the centers of force in the dynamic. Preference expresses will to power (which implies survival).
Then, there is no ‘objective’ perspective about which is ‘better’ – equilibrium or instability, stable and growing power or diversity of powers – that is not what a perspective is. Which is preferred will depend on one’s own position, one’s relative strength. To argue for a perspective is always to argue for one’s own power. Those who ‘do well’ within a stable power relation will favour it; perhaps not so those who do not do so well – although the status quo could be their ‘best bet’ if they are weak. Those who stand to benefit from a fresh contest of power will welcome one; not so those who stand to lose. Those who stand to lose, or not do well, either way, might wish that the world worked differently, which is still an expression of their own will to power.
Presumably, BAB can increase diversity or reduce it. In the real world, ‘equilibrium’ is always temporary and liable to give way to instability; centers of force tend to increase their power, as a basic ‘drive’, and ‘other’ factors also intervene. BAB can be a ‘middle path’ between equilibrium and instability. We tend to think of BAB as a ‘bad’ thing, but on an ecosystem level, BAB is not necessarily the ‘opposite’ of equilibrium or sustainability; rather it is a way that an ecosystem can maintain some stability in the face of instability. BAB is a natural dynamic of relatively ‘stable’ systems. But BAB can also ‘take out’ other species if one does ‘well enough’ to eliminate them, before it itself ‘busts’.
It is all a natural dynamic at the end of the day – it does not ‘mean’ anything beyond what people think that it means. If a species takes out others, and then busts, well that leaves niches for other species to emerge to dominance and to develop. It is all an ongoing process that is neither ‘good nor bad’ – it just is what it is. Indeed, all that is, has come to be through natural dynamics, and there would be nothing without them. So, one seems justified in affirming the entire process – the ‘eternal joy’ in the process of coming to be and passing away that comprises reality. Nature is ‘happy’ enough with the whole process, so why should we not be? It is ‘better’ that the process should be what it is than that there should be nothing. – Universal affirmation in opposition to nihilism.
Very good points! Thanks!
In the argument about COVID-19, we have the pharmaceutical industry, the medical establishment, mass media, Facebook, Fauci and Bill Gates on one side. On the other side, we have lots of people without a lot of power. Women seem to be over-represented. None of the men are currently at high levels in prestigious organizations. The ivermectin research was done primarily by ordinary doctors, working in low-income countries. Their publications are in obscure brand new journals.
A new poll suggests that most English could not care less about the UK. Maybe the Tories should listen to what voters actually say, instead of trying to tell us what to think all the time. Support for Scottish independence is building in England – not that we will ever get a vote. The Tories can stick their union flag where the sun don’t shine.
> Only a fifth of English voters oppose Scottish independence, Telegraph poll reveals
The scale of apathy towards Scottish independence by English voters has been revealed by an exclusive Telegraph poll, which found only 20 per cent “strongly oppose” separation.
The survey by Savanta ComRes asked 1,894 English adults for their views on everything from the idea of installing a border between England and Scotland to whether the Scots should keep the pound.
Asked to what extent do you support or oppose Scottish Independence, just 32 per cent said they opposed it, and only 20 per cent said they “strongly oppose” separation.
Twenty five per cent actually supported the Scots going it alone, with 30 per cent so disinterested they are neither in support nor opposition.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, younger people care less than older voters. While nearly half (46 per cent) of English adults aged over 55 are against Scottish independence, just one in five (21 per cent) 18 to 34 year olds say the same.
Labour voters in England are more likely to say they support than oppose (37 per cent versus 19 per cent).
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/05/28/exclusive-fifth-english-voters-oppose-scottish-independence/
Unfortunately nobody in these polls said: My future is in my own hands.
A polll? Ask for a certain condition? well: We have freedom of choice!
Sorry to repeat myself here:
There exist only two laws of game theory:
1. You do not play
2. You do not follow the rules.
“Voting” is comlplete bulshit. Sorry,
Either you do something or you do not.
Gettung someome do it for you by vote will in the end always fail
Failure may take 10 or 20 generations. that makes it difficult.
We are talking about two different things. I am talking about a referendum, a collective political decision, about whether two countries go their own way. You are evidently talking about anything but that. Referendums do result in decisions with consequences, such as Brexit – and whether one prefers option A or B does not change that fact.
Btw. I would not be too quick to assume that ‘free will’ exists – or that ‘individual’ choices necessarily lead to better outcomes over multiple generations. That sounds ideological rather than empirical. In fact we live in societies in which our own decisions are framed by collective decisions, policies – and there is no way to abstract from that context.
Brain scans have established that humans make decisions outside of consciousness, and before they appear in consciousness. The more complex the decision, the longer the time-lapse. MRI scans can accurately predict decisions several seconds before a person becomes aware of their ‘decision’. It is an illusion that decisions are made in consciousness by a conscious ‘I’. The ‘will’ (the response of the organism to internal and external stimuli) is neither ‘free’ nor ‘unfree’ – it simply is what it is. ‘Free will’, in the history of ideas, is a Renaissance, early bourgeois construct that reflects the individualism of early capitalism.
In a way, our decisions are mostly made for us, based on our background, skills and the opportunities available to us. We can sense what will work, from our perspective, and what won’t.
Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that the human brain—once thought to be a seriously flawed decision maker—is actually hard-wired to allow us to make the best decisions possible with the information we are given.
Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Since then, this has become conventional wisdom among cognition researchers
Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky’s research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions—but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081224215542.htm
I have read (can’t find the article but likely based on the above)… that if our conscious mind made decisions… we’d long ago have gone extinct.
It’s along the same lines as having anything close to real democracy… if you let people make the decisions … that would be a fast track to collapse of a country.
His research seems to show that simple, impulsive decisions are best made in that manner – it does not concern more complex decisions and the length of deliberation that facilitates optimal decisions in that context. Thus I would not extrapolate too much from that.
Indeed, further research has demonstrated that all decisions are made ‘unconsciously’, so that distinction no longer applies – rather his question concerns only the length of deliberation in naturally impulsive, simple decisions.
Moreover, nothing can be extrapolated from his research concerning whether elitism or democracy yields ‘better’ decisions; again, he is talking about naturally impulsive, simple decisions, not complex political decisions, and elites are just as ‘subject’ to the implications of cognitive structures as the masses. No one would suggest that we run societies by giving a monarch two seconds to make any given policy decision.
The whole world, whether they like it or not, will be sacrificed for the US elites.
Endless dollar will be printed, and other countries will have to swallow that or else.
Anyone who defies USA will be punished accordingly.
It is over . When the First Emperor of China set up his empire, it continued for another 2,100 years although the surnames of the emperors and sometimes the races changed. There was always an Emperor (sometimes two or three), until the English undermined the Imperial power decisively in 1842. Even then the Empire lingered on for 70 more years.
US dollar hegemony will be eternal, and the usa will collapse after everyone else. To the Chinese, the English in the 19th century was like the aliens, with a much higher tech level and organization. So, it took basically an alien invasion to end the Chinese Imperial System.
It will take an alien invasion to end US dominance on basically everything.
while I might prefer that the USA outlasts everyone else, it’s all too real that the USA is only about 20% of the world economy. The other 80% have good reason to try to semi-cooperate to outlast the USA, or at least take us all down together.
You make only one presumption based on just one model (UK invasion of China). Hence your assumption is very flawed. Here’s another model which can be extrapolated on the usa – the roman empire. Pax Romania got unraveled and placed in the dustbin of history due to completely different factors and realities comming mostly from within while in the case of China those new realities were comming from without. USA situation far more resembles that of late roman empire (New realities inside the empire handled badly from the ellites) than that of China. I believe you can easily see the deficiencies of your assumptions.
Furthermore I am of the opinion that BAU will sacrifice usa as usa is oy the millitary arm of BAU.
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire was a tragedy.
That of the United States of America is playing out as a farce.
the commonality is that Both were/are in denial
Well, for my people the fall of pax Romana was a blessing. It put my people on the political map as a sovereign construct. As for usa I could not care less.
Rome continued in Byzantium for another 1,000 years, and the Turkish Empire largely inherited Byzantine bureaucracy, something which still plagues the Turkish Republic. In a sense, the Roman Empire finally ended on 1923, when Mustafa Kemal declared the Republic of Turkey
Sorry I don’t buy that story. Rome and Byzantium were very different (different inner structures, different millitary, different society etc). Equating both is the same as putting equal sign between Rome and HRE. You can put it but you will never be able to prove it 😉
Gail, you expect some new disaster (as we hit resource limits) to occur “within a few months”? Why this specific timing? Is it because that’s when a US recovery would otherwise take place?
As soon as people see the “handwriting on the wall” with respect to economic growth not really coming back in a reasonable time frame, people’s belief in the future will drop. Investment will drop. The prices of commodities won’t be able to keep the somewhat elevated position they are in now. Debt defaults will suddenly become a problem. We may start understanding darker things about some of our leaders at the same time, as well. The problem actually occurs a little before a US recovery would otherwise take place. It is when the “a ha” moment takes place, that a recovery isn’t really there. It could even be in the next few weeks, but timing is always a big question mark.
Thank you for your explanation! Well, this should be an interesting summer.
this was a very comprehensive article, with the usual excellence. I would change one word though, and make it “within a few years”. ………………………………………………………………………………………….. as one of the most obvious OFW optimists, that’s just me doing my regular guessing the future schtick. So, therefore, ergo I doubt the rest of the year will be a fantasticly world changing time. Probably just 7 more months of the slow slog of the early stages of imminent worldwide economic devastation.
The Elders may be getting anxious about the failure of Devil Covid to arrive…
They are likely on the phone with Fauci and his Team… “WTF Tony … you guys said it would be here within a few months of vax!’…. Tony says ‘we said it might .. we said for sure by the end of June the SHTF … might I refer you to the leak out of Canada”
“Well Tony it better be… we are doing everything possible to hold this con together.. people are starting to wonder why we are not re-opening even though so many have been injected with this shit…. if they wake up in serious numbers the CEP crashes and burns… and given the US has relaxed quite a bit … if we force them back into lockdowns again … the People of the Gun… might become .. a problem”
“The only thing we can do is continue to encourage more people to get injected… that is the job of the PR Team now because so many are hesitating … I see they are using lotteries… and now we’ve claimed the injection is safe and necessary for children… the Polling Team thinks we can get another 30 million into the Devil Covid Pool…. we are confident we’ll get there within the next month’
‘
I think that we all depend on what will happen in US. Expecially concering the western world, the place where I live and the one I still love. If US will find again its true and original love for freedom, democracy, well-being and dream for a better future, Europe and other Countries will follow. If US will plunge in the vaccine constriction and what will follow, we will suffer the same fate. p.s. Gail, thank you very much for your wonderful work. Your articles should be studied at schools and universities.
democracy is entirely dependent on collective prosperity, which didn’t come into being until cheap surplus fossil fuel energy was collectively available (over no more than the last century)
as the era of cheap surplus energy availability slips away from us, so will the democratic system we currently cherish
If you find that hard to accept, check countries where despots are arising. You will find living standards are falling, or collapsing altogether.
Living standards are falling, or at best on the knife edge, because energy availability is slipping away. The despot promises ‘infinite prosperity’. It never happens.
China will hold together only so long as it can suck in energy from other parts of the world.
It that particularly applies to the USA , where the Don constantly made such impossible promises. Trumpism hasn’t gone away.
It will apply at different levels in different nations, but autocratic rule is inevitable
Vaccination is a side issue
The Icelanders have had democracy for a thousand years, in a purer and more direct form than almost anywhere else, although they were collectively very poor until the 20th century. The Swiss too were democratic well before they were rich.
The essence and root of democracy is probably when even tribal leaders have to get all -or most – of the tribe behind them in a plan.
So it obviously precedes the stage of luxurious wealth, and is an expression of human worth and dignity.
Our democracies are, of course, quite another kind of beast…..
Democracy is an ancient word, whose ethimology comes from ancient greeks. Around 500 B.C. they developed first forms of democracy. No fossil fuels were present during that period. Luckily we can claim our cultural origins from ancient greeks, ancient romans, middle age, renaissance and so on. If we don’t forget our cultural past we can still benefit from our achievements.
ah the old legend
Ancient Athens was not a democracy
it was governed by men who ‘democratically’ elected themselves
women were not included
neither were the slaves on whom the ‘democracy’ depended, they were the ‘fossil fuel substitute’—ie expendable.
All the eras you mention depended on slave or near-slave labour.
incidentally most words in common usage can be traced back 000s of years
remove fossil fuel input and we have few achievements on a broad scale
Student, yes! thank you.
I think we are having confusion between democracy vs welfare state.
a democracy is where, in theory at least, every adult person has a say in the way government functions
a welfare state is meant to offer care to everyone in the relevant community
no connection
Norman’s playing Humpty Dumpty again.
“”When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Now, please let me have a go. To quote Encyclopedia Britannia: Democracy, literally, rule by the people. The term is derived from the Greek dēmokratia, which was coined from dēmos (“people”) and kratos (“rule”) in the middle of the 5th century BCE to denote the political systems then existing in some Greek city-states, notably Athens.
Name me one modern country where the people rule? Perhaps Switzerland although I doubt they make the really big decisions.
Or perhaps the UK, where the people can decide to leave the EU but they can’t decide to go out to the pub or attend a Van Morrison concert?
try not to be childish,
if you want to play wordball–try to elevate yourself to the level of a worthy adversary
I have tried communicating with you adult to adult, but it just doesn’t work. Because you invariably reply parent to child.
Those who are familiar with the work of American psychologist Eric Berne will know exactly what I mean.
Everyone unfamiliar will benefit greatly from this short video. Indeed, you may even get a flash of information. Norman’s an exception here, of course.
This one is on the same subject but goes into greater detail. Well worth watching IMHO.
Gail,
I disagree.
I think the globocap has hit on a winning formula. Keep people scared and restrict their consumption while turning the economy into a centrally controlled one (see the communist countries).
They can control inflation (see another of my comments above) and maintain the illusion of stocks going up for decades.
I do think that things will break this decade due to some external events but I have to admire the intelligence of the global capitalists – even if they just copied China and other communist countries.
I am reallly thankful to Klaus Schwab.
It was necessary to format the planet earth.
I am completely in accordance with that.
The unfortunate resut that “them” did not see was that it formatted them away as well.
I bet you say:wot ?
well, I tell you: go ahead 100 years.
People in the parliaments behind plastic shields wearing masks?
Ridiculous. Ridiculous to the very final end.
Completely insane!
It is amazing that their “simulations” created a world that inherently deleted their own reality base.
I assume the main question of “cyber polygon” or what have you was the simulation of:
shut down the internet or not.
Stuck between a rock and a hard place.
People at OFW or TOD or LTG know these problems.
These we call “Hard problems”
Solvable?
No.
why?
The Economy is a monetray game.
Thank youj Gail!
Predictions are straight against free wiil!!!
@Gail produces a path besides millions of other pathes.
From what I figured out,the question is what “I” do.anything else is fancy, thank you gail.
I have set up my own life for certain consequences.
They are not based on TOD. yes yes. No, no. I have free willl!
All I did in the last 17 years was not at all related to the oil questeion.
I am very happy that I am not engaged in this:
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/05/investigative-reports/the-cover-up-continues-the-truth-about-bill-gates-microsoft-and-jeffrey-epstein/
Uhm, they conspired against me.
What ?
I do not even have a radio where I heared about tha.
Let me sleep please.
If I “woke” up to this? let it rip.
Them are dead without notice.
And so the story goes. The “Foundations” are not really do-good organization. They certainly do not deserve their tax free statuses.
We also have heard allegations that Anthony Fauci has behaved in a less than ethical, providing funding for gain of function research, when congress had forbidden it, for example. His work with AIDS seems to have had serious problems as well.
A sorry situation!
The problem here is called “alignment”.
A Virus is aligned “in-siico”. A Virus “in-vero” does not exist!
Wuhan institute of Virology created a “Virus” because there existed a medical “problem”.
This “Virus” is created by the CCP to get a lid on it.
Getting a lid on C19 was interpreted as locking down.
Well: What are we actually looking at with a C19 “death”?
Hint: PM 2.5
All them do is a “Glasperlenspiel”, sorry to repeat myself with a german artist.
A Lab works on fake stuff for fake viruses and gets real funding.
Uhm. very ugly but why not if it pays my Ferrari?
@Gail:
A nice next rticle could be about subsidies.
The real issue of the day is to get “printed money” in the form of “subsidies” (A small portion of this is in the current article by Gai, Thx!)
The economy doesn’t really work as a naive person would assume it works, does it? It is all really very strange.
https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/covid-memes-3-6.jpg?x51581
https://off-guardian.org/wp-content/medialibrary/covid-memes-3-6.jpg
Why does Off Guardian have to be so uncool? Perhaps this link to the best COVID-19 meme will work:
https://external-preview.redd.it/QwKGX0AvRN03l_lWLAz2-4s3xaRTE0v_xwibF4nKolo.jpg?auto=webp&s=ca4cd26344be868786e4a993162491c895a9e7e2
Gail, I mentioned the life-insurance issue before. What do you think of this?
Quote: I called one of the brokers I deal with that interacts with hundreds of big life insurers to get an inside look into how the Covid crisis has changed their business. Imagine my surprise when she said it was pretty much business as usual!
I asked her specifically if life insurers wanted a Covid test as part of the underwriting process and she said none that she was aware of.
Hmm, that’s pretty interesting isn’t it?
The most lethal pandemic in decades descends on the globe with deadly mutations taking millions of innocent lives and the life insurance companies couldn’t care less . . . The fact they’re treating Covid as a non-event should be an indicator that something is very wrong with the whole narrative.
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/life-insurance-covid-19-something-doesnt-make-sense
Right! COVID-19 is a non-event for life insurers.
Look back at my posts from early 2020. I never expected that deaths would amount to much of anything, in the whole scheme of things. Deaths of people over 80 are pretty much a non-event.
But now, with vaccine-related deaths among much younger people, on the whole, the picture is changing somewhat – but still too small an absolute number of deaths to be of much concern to insurers.
We shall have to wait and see what the mid-term consequences of the vaccination campaigns are, and if we can get honest data on them at that point – which I very much doubt.
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Now I can make new comments again. Check out my reply to Erwalt.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/05/27/dont-expect-the-world-economy-to-resume-its-prior-growth-pattern-after-covid-19/comment-page-1/#comment-296132
Yet still you have lost face since the beginning of the year. TPTB don’t want us to know what you look like.
Great post Gail.
First, just a grammar nitpick: “may headed for “collapse,”” is there a “be” missing?
Second, in the final section, why no mention of the Cyberattack scenario?
I think there is a big chance that will be the next false flag series of attacks.
That would lead to:
– removal of troublesome sites from the net
– real id (no anonymity online)
– more restrictions to travel (this or that airport has been hacked and it will be closed)
– more reductions in factories output
etc.
I believe that this is their best bet to continue slowing down the economy and it has the advantage that they can tightly control what pieces to destroy (or bring back if the effect is too bad).
Even the financial crisis can be averted simply by freezing or slowing down the trading.
I fixed the missing “be.” Fortunately, fixing is easy.
There are an awfully lot of things I could talk about. Trying to move to electricity leads to a lot of problems with cyberattacks, I expect. Perhaps I can cover that issue in a future post.
The WEF has ‘predicted’ cascading cyber-attacks, closer and closer together, and in the near future too!
We should certainly pay attention to their wisdom, foresight and careful concern for humanity…..
I imagine that they can make the future happen.
I have noticed that the Chinese data site I used to use is no longer available, because the “site is untrustworthy,” or some other synonym.