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Many people believe that installing more wind turbines and solar panels and manufacturing more electric vehicles can solve our energy problem, but I don’t agree with them. These devices, plus the batteries, charging stations, transmission lines and many other structures necessary to make them work represent a high level of complexity.
A relatively low level of complexity, such as the complexity embodied in a new hydroelectric dam, can sometimes be used to solve energy problems, but we cannot expect ever-higher levels of complexity to always be achievable.
According to the anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in his well-known book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, there are diminishing returns to added complexity. In other words, the most beneficial innovations tend to be found first. Later innovations tend to be less helpful. Eventually the energy cost of added complexity becomes too high, relative to the benefit provided.
In this post, I will discuss complexity further. I will also present evidence that the world economy may already have hit complexity limits. Furthermore, the popular measure, “Energy Return on Energy Investment” (EROEI) pertains to direct use of energy, rather than energy embodied in added complexity. As a result, EROEI indications tend to suggest that innovations such as wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are more helpful than they really are. Other measures similar to EROEI make a similar mistake.
[1] In this video with Nate Hagens, Joseph Tainter explains how energy and complexity tend to grow simultaneously, in what Tainter calls the Energy-Complexity Spiral.
According to Tainter, energy and complexity build on each other. At first, growing complexity can be helpful to a growing economy by encouraging the uptake of available energy products. Unfortunately, this growing complexity reaches diminishing returns because the easiest, most beneficial solutions are found first. When the benefit of added complexity becomes too small relative to the additional energy required, the overall economy tends to collapse–something he says is equivalent to “rapidly losing complexity.”
Growing complexity can make goods and services less expensive in several ways:
- Economies of scale arise due to larger businesses.
- Globalization allows use of alternative raw materials, cheaper labor and energy products.
- Higher education and more specialization allow more innovation.
- Improved technology allows goods to be less expensive to manufacture.
- Improved technology may allow fuel savings for vehicles, allowing ongoing fuel savings.
Strangely enough, in practice, growing complexity tends to lead to more fuel use, rather than less. This is known as Jevons’ Paradox. If products are less expensive, more people can afford to buy and operate them, so that total energy consumption tends to be greater.
[2] In the above linked video, one way Professor Tainter describes complexity is that it is something that adds structure and organization to a system.
The reason I consider electricity from wind turbines and solar panels to be much more complex than, say, electricity from hydroelectric plants, or from fossil fuel plants, is because the output from the devices is further from what is needed to fill the demands of the electricity system we currently have operating. Wind and solar generation need complexity to fix their intermittency problems.
With hydroelectric generation, water is easily captured behind a dam. Often, some of the water can be stored for later use when demand is high. The water captured behind the dam can be run through a turbine, so that the electrical output matches the pattern of alternating current used in the local area. The electricity from a hydroelectric dam can be quickly added to other available electricity generation to match the pattern of electricity consumption users would prefer.
On the other hand, the output of wind turbines and solar panels requires a great deal more assistance (“complexity”) to match the electricity consumption pattern of consumers. Electricity from wind turbines tends to be very disorganized. It comes and goes according to its own schedule. Electricity from solar panels is organized, but the organization is not well aligned with the pattern of consumers prefer.
A major issue is that electricity for heating is required in winter, but solar electricity is disproportionately available in the summer; wind availability is irregular. Batteries can be added, but these mostly mitigate wrong “time-of-day” problems. Wrong “time-of-year” problems need to be mitigated with a lightly used parallel system. The most popular backup system seems to be natural gas, but backup systems with oil or coal can also be used.
This double system has a higher cost than either system would have if operated alone, on a full-time basis. For example, a natural gas system with pipelines and storage needs to be put in place, even if electricity from natural gas is only used for part of the year. The combined system needs experts in all areas, including electricity transmission, natural gas generation, repair of wind turbines and solar panels, and battery manufacture and maintenance. All of this requires educational systems and international trade, sometimes with unfriendly countries.
I also consider electric vehicles to be complex. One major problem is that the economy will require a double system, (for internal combustion engines and electric vehicles) for many, many years. Electric vehicles require batteries made using elements from around the world. They also need a whole system of charging stations to fill their need for frequent recharging.
[3] Professor Tainter makes the point that complexity has an energy cost, but this cost is virtually impossible to measure.
Energy needs are hidden in many areas. For example, to have a complex system, we need a financial system. The cost of this system cannot be added back in. We need modern roads and a system of laws. The cost of a government providing these services cannot be easily discerned. An increasingly complex system needs education to support it, but this cost is also hard to measure. Also, as we note elsewhere, having double systems adds other costs that are hard to measure or predict.
[3] The energy-complexity spiral cannot continue forever in an economy.
The energy-complexity spiral can reach limits in at least three ways:
[a] Extraction of minerals of all kinds is placed in the best locations first. Oil wells are first placed in areas where oil is easy to extract and close to population areas. Coal mines are first placed in locations where coal is easy to extract and transportation costs to users will be low. Mines for lithium, nickel, copper, and other minerals are put in the best-yielding locations first.
Eventually, the cost of energy production rises, rather than falls, due to diminishing returns. Oil, coal, and energy products become more expensive. Wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries for electric vehicles also tend to become more expensive because the cost of the minerals to manufacture them rises. All kinds of energy goods, including “renewables,” tend to become less affordable. In fact, there are many reports that the cost of producing wind turbines and solar panels rose in 2022, making the manufacture of these devices unprofitable. Either higher prices of finished devices or lower profitability for those producing the devices could stop the rise in usage.
[b] Human population tends to keep rising if food and other supplies are adequate, but the supply of arable land stays close to constant. This combination puts pressure on society to produce a continuous stream of innovations that will allow greater food supply per acre. These innovations eventually reach diminishing returns, making it more difficult for food production to keep up with population growth. Sometimes adverse fluctuations in weather patterns make it clear that food supplies have been too close to the minimum level for many years. The growth spiral is pushed down by spiking food prices and the poor health of workers who can only afford an inadequate diet.
[c] Growth in complexity reaches limits. The earliest innovations tend to be most productive. For example, electricity can be invented only once, as can the light bulb. Globalization can only go so far before a maximum level is reached. I think of debt as part of complexity. At some point, debt cannot be repaid with interest. Higher education (needed for specialization) reaches limits when workers cannot find jobs with sufficiently high wages to repay educational loans, besides covering living costs.
[4] One point Professor Tainter makes is that if the available energy supply is reduced, the system will need to simplify.
Typically, an economy grows for well over one hundred years, reaches energy-complexity limits, and then collapses over a period of years. This collapse can occur in different ways. A layer of government can collapse. I think of the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991 as a form of collapse to a lower level of simplicity. Or one country conquers another country (with energy-complexity problems), taking over the government and resources of the other country. Or a financial collapse occurs.
Tainter says that simplification usually doesn’t happen voluntarily. One example he gives of voluntary simplification involves the Byzantine Empire in the 7th century. With less funding available for the military, it abandoned some of its distant posts, and it used a less costly approach to operating its remaining posts.
[5] In my opinion, it is easy for EROEI calculations (and similar calculations) to overstate the benefit of complex types of energy supply.
A major point that Professor Tainter makes in the talk linked above is that complexity has an energy cost, but the energy cost of this complexity is virtually impossible to measure. He also makes the point that growing complexity is seductive; the overall cost of complexity tends to grow over time. Models tend to miss necessary parts of the overall system needed to support a highly complex new source of energy supply.
Because the energy required for complexity is hard to measure, EROEI calculations with respect to complex systems will tend to make complex forms of electricity generation, such as wind and solar, look like they use less energy (have a higher EROEI) than they actually do. The problem is that EROEI calculations consider only direct “energy investment” costs. For example, the calculations are not designed to collect information regarding the higher energy cost of a dual system, with parts of the system under-utilized for portions of the year. Annual costs will not necessarily be reduced proportionately.
In the linked video, Professor Tainter talks about the EROEI of oil over the years. I don’t have a problem with this type of comparison, especially if it stops before the recent change to greater use of fracking, since the level of complexity is similar. In fact, such a comparison omitting fracking seems to be the one that Tainter makes. Comparison among different energy types, with different complexity levels, is what is easily distorted.
[6] The current world economy already seems to be trending in the direction of simplification, suggesting that the tendency toward greater complexity is already past its maximum level, given the lack of availability of inexpensive energy products.
I wonder if we are already starting to see simplification in trade, especially international trade, because shipping (generally using oil products) is becoming high-priced. This might be considered a type of simplification, in response to a lack of sufficient inexpensive energy supply.
Based on Figure 2, trade as a percentage of GDP hit a peak in 2008. There has been a generally downward trend in trade since then, giving an indication that the world economy has tended to shrink back, at least in some ways, as it has hit high-price limits.
Another example of a trend toward lower complexity is the drop in US undergraduate college and university enrollment since 2010. Other data shows that undergraduate enrollment nearly tripled between 1950 and 2010, so the shift to a downtrend after 2010 presents a major turning point.
The reason why the shift in enrollment is a problem is because colleges and universities have a huge amount of fixed expenses. These include buildings and grounds that must be maintained. Often debt needs to be repaid, as well. Educational systems also have tenured faculty members that they are obligated to keep on their staff, under most circumstances. They may have pension obligations that are not fully funded, adding another cost pressure.
According to the college faculty members whom I have talked to, in recent years there has been pressure to improve the retention rate of students who have been admitted. In other words, they feel that they are being encouraged to keep current students from dropping out, even if it means lowering their standards a little. At the same time, faculty wages are not keeping pace with inflation.
Other information suggests that colleges and universities have recently put a great deal of emphasis on achieving a more diverse student body. Students who might not have been admitted in the past because of low high school grades are increasingly being admitted in order to keep the enrollment from dropping further.
From the students’ point of view, the problem is that jobs that pay a sufficiently high wage to justify the high cost of a college education are increasingly unavailable. This seems to be the reason for both the US student debt crisis and the drop in undergraduate enrollment.
Of course, if colleges are at least somewhat lowering their admission standards and perhaps lowering standards for graduation, as well, there is a need to “sell” these increasingly diverse graduates with somewhat lower undergraduate achievement records to governments and businesses who might hire them. It seems to me that this is a further sign of the loss of complexity.
[7] In 2022, the total energy costs for most OECD countries started spiking to high levels, relative to GDP. When we analyze the situation, electricity prices are spiking, as are the prices of coal and natural gas–the two types of fuel used most frequently to produce electricity.
The OECD is an intergovernmental organization of mostly rich countries that was formed to stimulate economic progress and foster world growth. It includes the US, most European countries, Japan, Australia, and Canada, among other countries. Figure 4, with the caption “Periods of high energy expenditures are often associated with recession” is has been prepared by two economists working for OECD. The gray bars indicate recession.
Figure 4 shows that in 2021, prices for practically every cost segment associated with energy consumption tended to spike. Electricity, coal, and natural gas prices were all very high relative to prior years. The only segment of energy costs that was not very out of line relative to costs in prior years was oil. Coal and natural gas are both used to make electricity, so high electricity costs should not be surprising.
In Figure 4, the caption by the economists from OECD is pointing out what should be obvious to economists everywhere: High energy prices often push an economy into recession. Citizens are forced to cut back on non-essentials, reducing demand and pushing their economies into recession.
[8] The world seems to be up against extraction limits for coal. This, together with the high cost of shipping coal over long distances, is leading to very high prices for coal.
World coal production has been close to flat since 2011. Growth in electricity generation from coal has been almost as flat as world coal production. Indirectly, this lack of growth in coal production is forcing utilities around the world to move to other types of electricity generation.
[9] Natural gas is now also in short supply when growing demand of many types is considered.
While natural gas production has been growing, in recent years it hasn’t been growing quickly enough to keep up with the world’s rising demand for natural gas imports. World natural gas production in 2021 was only 1.7% higher than production in 2019.
Growth in the demand for natural gas imports comes from several directions, simultaneously:
- With coal supply flat and imports not sufficiently available, countries are seeking to substitute natural gas generation for coal generation of electricity. China is the world’s largest importer of natural gas partly for this reason.
- Countries with electricity from wind or solar find that electricity from natural gas can ramp up quickly and fill in when wind and solar aren’t available.
- There are several countries, including Indonesia, India and Pakistan, whose natural gas production is declining.
- Europe chose to end its pipeline imports of natural gas from Russia and now needs more LNG instead.
[10] Prices for natural gas are extremely variable, depending on whether the natural gas is locally produced, and depending on how it is shipped and the type of contract it is under. Generally, locally produced natural gas is the least expensive. Coal has somewhat similar issues, with locally produced coal being the least expensive.
This is a chart from a recent Japanese publication (IEEJ).
The low Henry Hub price at the bottom is the US price, available only locally. If supplies are high within the US, its price tends to be low. The next higher price is Japan’s price for imported liquefied natural gas (LNG), arranged under long-term contracts, over a period of years. The top price is the price that Europe is paying for LNG based on “spot market” prices. Spot market LNG is the only type of LNG available to those who did not plan ahead.
In recent years, Europe has been taking its chances on getting low spot market prices, but this approach can backfire badly when there is not enough to go around. Note that the high price of European imported LNG was already evident in January 2013, before the Ukraine invasion began.
A major issue is that shipping natural gas is extremely expensive, tending to at least double or triple the price to the user. Producers need to be guaranteed a high price for LNG over the long term to make all of the infrastructure needed to produce and ship natural gas as LNG profitable. The extremely variable prices for LNG have been a problem for natural gas producers.
The very high recent prices for LNG in Europe have made the price of natural gas too high for industrial users who need natural gas for processes other than making electricity, such as making nitrogen fertilizer. These high prices cause distress from the lack of inexpensive natural gas to spill over into the farming sector.
Most people are “energy blind,” especially when it comes to coal and natural gas. They assume that there is plenty of both fuels to be cheaply extracted, essentially forever. Unfortunately, for both coal and natural gas, the cost of shipping tends to be very high. This is something that modelers miss. It is the high delivered cost of natural gas and coal that makes it impossible for companies to actually extract the amounts of coal and natural gas that seem to be available based on reserve estimates.
[10] When we analyze electricity consumption in recent years, we discover that OECD and non-OECD countries have had amazingly different patterns of electricity consumption growth since 2001.
OECD electricity consumption has been close to flat, especially since 2008. Even before 2008, its electricity consumption was not growing rapidly.
The proposal now is to increase the use of electricity in OECD countries. Electricity will be used to a greater extent for fueling vehicles and heating homes. It will also to be used more for local manufacturing, especially for batteries and semiconductor chips. I wonder how OECD countries will be able to ramp up electricity production sufficiently to cover both current uses of electricity and planned new uses, if past electricity production has been essentially flat.
Figure 7 shows that coal’s share of electricity production has been falling for OECD countries, especially since 2008. “Other” has been rising, but only enough to keep overall production flat. Other is comprised of renewables, including wind and solar, plus electricity from oil and from burning of trash. The latter categories are small.
The pattern of recent energy production for non-OECD countries is very different:
Figure 8 shows that non-OECD countries have been rapidly ramping up electricity production from coal. Other major sources of fuel are natural gas and electricity produced by hydroelectric dams. All these energy sources are relatively non-complex. Electricity from locally produced coal, locally produced natural gas, and hydroelectric generation all tend to be quite inexpensive. With these inexpensive sources of electricity, non-OECD countries have been able to dominate the world’s heavy industry and much of its manufacturing.
In fact, if we look at the local production of fuels generally used to produce electricity (that is, all fuels except oil), we can see a pattern emerge.
With respect to extraction of fuels often associated with electricity, production has been closed to flat, even with “renewables” (wind, solar, geothermal, and wood chips) included. Coal production is down. The decline in coal production is likely a big part of the lack of growth in OECD’s electricity supply. Electricity from locally produced coal has historically been very inexpensive, bringing the average price of electricity down.
A very different pattern emerges when the production of fuels used to generate electricity for non-OECD countries is viewed. Note that the same scale has been used on both Figures 9 and 10. Thus, in 2001, the production of these fuels was about equal for OECD and non-OECD countries. Production of these fuels has about doubled since 2001 for non-OECD countries, while OECD production has remained close to flat.
Figure 10. Energy production of fuels often used for electricity production for non-OECD countries, based on data from BP’s 2022 Statistical Review of World Energy.
One item of interest on Figure 10 is coal production for non-OECD countries, shown in blue at the bottom. It has been barely increasing since 2011. This is part of what is now tightening world coal supplies. I am doubtful that spiking coal prices will add very much to long-term coal production because truly local supplies are becoming depleted, even in non-OECD countries. The spiking prices are much more likely to lead to recession, debt defaults, lower commodity prices, and lower coal supply.
[11] I am afraid that the world economy has hit complexity limits as well as energy production limits.
The world economy seems likely to collapse over a period of years. In the near term, the result may look like a bad recession, or it may look like war, or possibly both. So far, the economies using fuels that are not very complex for electricity (locally produced coal and natural gas, plus hydroelectric generation) seem to be doing better than others. But the overall world economy is stressed by inadequate cheap-to-produce local energy supplies.
In physics terms, the world economy, as well as all of the individual economies within it, are dissipative structures. As such, growth followed by collapse is a usual pattern. At the same time, new versions of dissipative structures can be expected to form, some of which may be better adapted to changing conditions. Thus, approaches for economic growth that seem impossible today may be possible over a longer timeframe.
For example, if climate change opens up access to more coal supplies in very cold areas, the Maximum Power Principle would suggest that some economy will eventually access such deposits. Thus, while we seem to be reaching an end now, over the long-term, self-organizing systems can be expected to find ways to utilize (“dissipate”) any energy supply that can be inexpensively accessed, considering both complexity and direct fuel use.
OMG WTF is this?
You will not be able to unlisten .. so warning
https://youtu.be/kr3iYamSxxI
Don’t clickbait like a 14 year old girl. Add a summary or something if you’re posting links
Those ones are Surprise Links… everyone loves surprises!
right norm?
a worthwhile break FE is happy in the homeland
That’s music!
Why so serious?
https://media.tenor.com/ffbR3IcqXkUAAAAM/why-so-serious-joker.gif
Check this out https://t.me/downtherabbitholewegofolks/65519
More fear mongering:
“Bird flu may mutate to kill more than 50% of humans who catch it, as a result
of ‘unprecedented’ outbreak sweeping mammals, experts fear”
But usually a virus that kills most of those it infects cannot spread very far. I suppose if the virus is also carried by a lot of different birds, some of which are not affected much at all, the virus could continue, however.
I wonder if people have been working on making this virus spread more easily also.
We have gone from accepting death with possible rewards for all our suffering to modern sophistry believing life to be finite and death to be feared.
So we go from eighty years to say fifty. What is the problem? Chasing old women around the nursing home in wheelchairs is not that much fun from what I have seen.
Dennis L.
In fact the extended healthcare as a prolonging of the suffering of the decrepit, as I had seen it myself personally is pure horror, and I believe, it was a thing of insurances making money – of the needless suffering of people, to no one else’s benefit, not society’s, not to the benefit of the immediate family, and least to the benefit of the patient him or herself.
(Corriere della Sera)
Biden in Kiev. Surprise visit: “Ukrainians heroic. Putin thought to prevail, he was wrong.”
https://www.corriere.it/esteri/live/23_febbraio_20/ucraina-russia-ultime-notizie-guerra-diretta-c6e361a6-b0b2-11ed-bbef-91b6ba0d81d3.shtml
‘Consequences of war cost Germany around 100 billion euros in 2022.
The war in Ukraine is not leaving the German economy unscathed – one factor in particular should be taken into account by the German government, according to the German Institute for Economic Research.
President Marcel Fratzscher expects the Ukraine war to further increase costs for the German economy and cause high growth losses. “The Ukraine war and the associated explosion in energy costs have cost Germany nearly 2.5 percent, or 100 billion euros, in economic output in 2022,” Fratzscher told the Rheinische Post newspaper on Monday. These costs would continue to rise in the coming years, he added. “Germany has been hit harder economically by the crisis because it had a higher dependence on Russian energy, has a high share of energy-intensive industry and is extremely dependent on exports and global supply chains,” the president of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) said.
“The damage to Germany as a business location has not yet been done, but will be done if companies do not massively accelerate the environmental, economic and digital transformation.” This is because higher energy prices would remain a significant competitive disadvantage over the next ten years, meaning that policymakers and companies would have to compensate for this through greater innovation and productivity. “Under no circumstances should the German government continue down the path of massive subsidies for fossil fuels,” said the Berlin-based economist. “The energy price shock is therefore a painful but also necessary wake-up call that will hopefully bring the economy to a faster transformation.”
(In my view this seems to be the de-industrialization of Germany in favour of the industrialization of Ukraine which will probably take place soon)
https://www.wiwo.de/politik/deutschland/wirtschaftsleistung-kriegsfolgen-kosten-deutschland-2022-rund-100-milliarden-euro/28991806.html
In other words, Ukraine could become a sort of China for Germany or Europe in general, at least for a while.
I doubt it. Resource constraints do not allow industrialization of new areas anywhere. And who would provide those resources for industrialization? Russia? in which part of Ukraine? the one with Ukrainians or the one with Russians?
Germany and Europe should outsource manufacturing and pollution to Ukraine, the way the world has been outsourcing manufacturing and pollution to China in the recent past.
China took on its current role when it had lots of cheap to extract and transport coal. This, plus low labor costs and countries that were desperate to outside their manufacturing (ostensibly to save CO2, but mostly because they did not have the necessary energy products and other minerals required) allowed China to take over as leader of the world’s manufacturing.
Ukraine has low labor costs, and it has a good climate and soil for farming. But it doesn’t have enough cheap energy products to extract. It cannot take on a role similar to China’s.
Yes, I agree. I have the impression that Germany, France and Italy which are the Countries with high manufacturing level in Europe at the moment, will move (voluntarily or not) their production to Ukraine.
After the war, I think it will be full of tax breaks or non-repayable (or low interests) investments offers to build manufacturing plants in Ukraine.
So, European Countries will have put the money and Ukraine the blood to get that.
Many workers of ‘old Europe’ will remain without job in favour of ‘new Europe’ Ukraine.
To conclude the process they will probably set another round of vaccination to eliminate the old workers in order to avoid costly early-retirement or aggravation for the health service system.
And old European workers will be substituted by immigrants to the kind of works still available on that level.
‘Les jeux sont faits, rien ne va plus’
Ukraine will be a wasteland forever . It will be ground zero . Everything broken . The rebuilding of post war Europe and Japan was possible because of cheap , abundent NETT surplus energy plus aid from a ” finance ” positive USA . Those conditions do not exist 80 years later and are no more available so rebuilding Ukraine is impossible . Now add demographics to the mix and you will realize why it is a sinkhole .
Ukraine will be a wasteland forever . It will be ground zero . Everything broken
I agree, unfortunately at this late stage of the game Ukraine can’t really be fixed
Student, thank you. It is great to hear a different point of view. You surprise me. Time will tell.
Ukraine seems to have a skilled population and are heavily represented in ballroom dancing.
https://www.today.com/news/maksim-chmerkovskiy-dance-company-helping-ukrainian-dancers-rcna19115
Personal experience is with RTK for agriculture which is(was) manufactured in the Ukraine and marketed out of The Netherlands. Parts are now a problem I am told.
A guess: We have a great many mediocre people who are very good at presentation; they are actors under the mistaken impression they understand their lines.
Always Burnay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
Dennis L.
Irrisetible read on Ukraine. Why the West is desperate to end the war earliest even if it means the destruction of Ukraine .
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/02/recognizing-the-war-is-lost-the-west-seeks-an-exit.html#more
Just a quick observation on The Economist article that is quoted in the MOA article.
“Through courage and by the power of their example, the Ukrainian people have earned that chance. There could be no better investment in Western security.”
The two traditional key ‘virtues’ of the Homeric warrior are courage (andreia) and intelligence (phronêsis).
‘Intelligence’ is a pretty self-explanatory practical ‘virtue’ that involves navigating reality in a realistic and rewarding manner. It is all to do with reality and realistic actions.
The moralistic propaganda in The Economist frames the ‘virtues’ as ‘courage’ and ‘example’ (presumably the example of their courage, given the absence of any other suggested virtue), and claims that they have ‘earned’ (merited) a ‘chance’ through their courage.
But that completely ignores the vital importance of intelligence (phronêsis), which is traditionally understood as essential to the successful and wise strategy of the warrior (or anyone in any endeavour).
Otherwise, they are exactly left to ‘chance’, which is no basis on which to organise any endeavour. What we are talking there is not ‘virtues’ that ‘earn’ but the dominance of ‘chance’, which is the opposite of ‘earning’ an outcome.
Indeed, ‘virtue’ has been framed as precisely what is required to avoid ‘fortuna’, eg. Machiavelli, (chance, uncontrolled circumstances), which is when one has no control over the outcomes.
So, the scenario that The Spectator paints is one in which UKR is set to lose as they are entirely wanting in intelligence (phronêsis), and it appeals to a false ‘moralism’ that conflates ‘fortune’ with having ‘earnt’ – the article is entirely wanting in ‘intelligence’.
Frankly, the West is on its way out if that is genuinely how the elites think. “There could be no better investment in Western security.” Presumably it is just a silly propaganda piece that the writer does not take seriously.
Biden visits Kiev after getting permission from Putin . ROFL >
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/white-house-notified-moscow-bidens-kyiv-trip-deconfliction-purposes
This is disgusting.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11768661/Raw-sewage-including-wet-wipes-toilet-roll-sanitary-products-flows-West-Yorkshire-lakes.html
Watch as ‘raw sewage’ including wet wipes, toilet roll and sanitary products flow out of a water pipe and into two popular lakes – as campaigners slam ‘vile’ stench they fear will impact wildlife
This is the moment that ‘raw sewage’ was filmed flowing out of a water pipe and into two Yorkshire lakes – as campaigners slammed the ‘vile’ stench they fear will impact the area’s wildlife.
A pipe, understood to be coming from a local business, has been pumping wet wipes, toilet roll and sanitary products onto marshland surrounding Freeman’s Cut and Brookfoot Lake in Brighouse for almost ten weeks.
The West Yorkshire lakes are used for water skiing and private fishing and host angling sessions for disabled children. The lakes tested positive for high ammonia levels in December.
It comes after the neighbouring River Calder was found by the Mirror to be the UK’s second most polluted waterway in 2021, with 27,901 hours of sewage pumped into it.
A video shows the contaminated liquid pouring out of a pipe, as debris gathers on a fence and forms a river that eventually crosses the boundary into the lakes.
Yorkshire Water, the Environment Agency and Calderdale Council have all been involved with investigating the site but, as of February 14, sewage was still flowing into the area.
Mark Barrow, who runs campaigns highlighting water pollution in Yorkshire said: ‘It’s absolutely appalling.
‘It’s a major concern that this is flowing in and that fish could be contaminated.
‘It’s frustrating. Instead of someone doing job correctly so this doesn’t happen, this has happened and nature suffers.
‘You can see solids in the photographs. That’s how bad it is. The stench is just vile.’
Mr Barrow said that Brookfoot Lake hosts a private fishing club and receives funding from the Angling Trust to run events for disabled children.
Water pollution has been spotted in Freeman’s Cut and Brookfoot Lake in Brighouse for almost ten weeks.
The latest release of sewage is part of a long list of pollution in Britain’s waters.
In 2016, the Environment Agency recorded 100,533 hours’ worth of spills. By 2021, that figure had rocketed to 2,667,452.
Hilarious! Humans are extremely intelligent…
This is disgusting.
We can expect a lot more raw sewage going into waterways as energy becomes scarce.
Old hat for the regulars here, but still an excellent overview of the energy situation by Art Berman from a talk 5 months ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVhM9F3UNZY
I also like that he at times frames the geopolitical issues of our day against the energy reality.
Some of Art’s major points:
I don’t think that Art understands complexity and “overshoot and collapse.” He is able to frame the story as a “great opportunity.” Prices will rise for the oil industry; they will be able to add new, more complex extraction techniques. It makes for a more appealing story to tell audiences.
Fast Eddy has not received any requests to present UEP at any conferences….
We need to start a conference on strong negative growth. We can hold it in NZ to maximize the amount of jet fuel consumed. With Gail and FE as invited keynote speakers.
Xabier can lead the section of career opportunities with a talk on stick gathering.
Tim and Dennis, can lead the agriculture section with talks on hand planting rice and planting straight lines using string. Jan can cover free range goats(?).
Cromagnon can cover survivor guilt as nothing changes in the north land.
Student can apprise us of the state of Europe. If he can find a working airport. Maybe he can e-bike to Ukraine and fly out from there.
Keith and I will cover the latest advances at the lunar AI mine and factory.
To the stars through difficulty
A professorial chair in stick-gathering sounds delightful, thanks Ed.
I might branch out (!) into making a chronicle and holy book formed from birch bark leaves stitched together with willow fibres, covered in Muntjac skin.
There have been de-growth conferences.I think I remember seeing a video of Gail being interviewed at one in Canada, I think it was. I remember this from following the “ExtraEnvironmentalist” podcast.
https://degrowth.org/conferences/
Like everything else, it has taken a “social justice” turn. Most, if not all, of the people in the picture look white, though. Probably not a lot of buy-in from non-whites on de-growth-ing.
Yes, I did go to a De-Growth Conference in Canada and I was interviewed there. People from around the world flew there. It reminded me of the the hypocrisy of the people flying to the conferences to prevent climate change.
I wanted to see and hear what these De-Growth people were saying. There were also quite a few Peak Oil folks whom I knew attending. Some of the Peak Oil people were believers in De-Growth. They believed that declining supplies would lead to rising prices, and the economy could go on much as before, but with less oil. They also believed that natural gas could act as a temporary replacement for quite a few years. I paid my own way to the conference, since I was not speaking there.
Art art blew a fart
blow the whole machine apart
You seem to have missed the part where he said maybe that will mean 6 billion less of us on the planet and he doesn’t see a solution.
I think he understands the reality and most folk’s instinctive reactions and doesn’t want to present more than they can handle.
Ask Joel Salatin for help. He produces up to 3-4x as much food per acre/hectare as normal farmers in Virginia. So do 100s/10,000s of other small organic farmers doing rotational grazing.
I thought we were meant to be concerned about high yields and CO2 sequestration in the soil. Oh sorry I forgot … it’s about company profits, never mind the food output or how healthy it is.
Please see my other comments about Joel on this page.
Ask Joel Salatin for help. He produces up to 3-4x as much food per acre/hectare as normal farmers in Virginia. So do 100s/10,000s of other small organic farmers doing rotational grazing.
We use fertiliser for a reason. He’s selling snake oil if he claims you can produce more without it.
Someone beyond governments need to contact the Anunna. They have watched this collapse scenario unfold at least 4 times.
They just kick back in the underworld and smile at it all.
The Western Journal (https://www.westernjournal.com/18-year-old-college-student-dies-becoming-unresponsive-exercising-campus/?utm_source=telegram&utm_medium=westernjournalism&utm_campaign=telegramfeed&utm_content=2023-01-24)
18-Year-Old College Student Dies After Becoming ‘Unresponsive’ While Exercising on Campus
Another one https://t.me/childcovidvaccineinjuriesuk/2655
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11694223/amp/Olympic-bobsledder-Duncan-Pugh-tragically-dies-suffering-sudden-brain-bleed.html
Mail Online (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11694223/amp/Olympic-bobsledder-Duncan-Pugh-tragically-dies-suffering-sudden-brain-bleed.html)
Olympic bobsledder, 48, dies after suffering a ‘catastrophic’ brain bleed leaving behind his devastated wife and two young
WHO WILL PAY FOR THIS?…
Natalia from Australia, aged 21, died a horrible death after being MANDATED to take the Moderna vaccine.
She had a pre existing condition already flagged as a possible clotting risk, but this was not enough to be exempted.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/we-were-all-forced-mum-of-healthy-21yearold-who-died-after-moderna-blames-vaccine-mandates/news-story/63d221adaa84ccdfc5acc7d6c33f16f3
Mercedes-Benz Hikes Vehicle Prices By 43% As Only Rich Can Afford
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/mercedes-benz-hikes-vehicle-prices-43-only-rich-can-afford
“Mercedes isn’t alone. Around the world, manufacturers are reaping the benefits of selling fewer but more expensive cars.“
Yup and car makers are no longer making inexpensive cars. That is a recipe for disaster because few will be able to buy a basic car. Heck, no one makes a basic car anymore. Everything now are CUV’s, SUV’s and trucks. Starting prices start at $20k and that’s before dealers decide to add all their add-ons.
I guess if they want to switch to EV’s then their strategy might make some sense, except that EV’s on average are typically double the starting price of current ICE cars.
Disaster is too strong a word for people having to walk, or even better, learn to fix an old clunker instead of buying a new one every 3 years. Good training for what is coming.
Humans are in fact built for walking long distances every day.
Very true: I was brought up to walk rather than ride, and fortunately in Europe one can usually do that easily, unlike the US.
And at a good pace: I feel an almost visceral contempt for people dawdling in the mall or streets when I have to go there.
My thoughts about obese slow dawdlers are not for public consumption.
Actually they are: I’d like to torture them.
I feel similarly about e-Bikers. I see sloth …feebleness…
Ah yes, FE, e-bikers – pathetic!
Some of us are, many can’t walk very far in US.
Dennis L.
Many advocates argue that e-bikes, not electric cars, are the key to truly reducing the United States’ carbon footprint. While electric cars are greener than gas-powered vehicles, they are substantially more resource-intensive to produce and power. E-bikes are also much more affordable, costing a few thousand dollars at the high end, compared to the average electric car price of $65,000. Optimists say e-bikes can help cut car usage by a huge amount, since more than half of all daily trips made by Americans are less than 3 miles.
But skeptics say there are major hurdles that could prevent e-bikes from achieving their potential. The biggest drawback, many argue, is that most communities in the U.S. aren’t built to support a big influx in e-bike riders. The fastest e-bikes top out at 28 mph, far too slow to share the road with cars but fast enough to create a hazard in bike lanes filled with traditional bike riders. This conflict, along with the troubling trend of fires caused by cheap e-bike batteries, has raised serious safety concerns that could prevent a lot of people from switching to e-bikes.
Others argue that American society is simply too car-centric for any alternative to ever fully catch on. Part of that is the lack of dedicated bike infrastructure in most U.S. cities, which makes biking less desirable for riders and more intrusive to everyone else. But the issue also may be cultural, many argue. Americans are so accustomed to viewing cars as the only viable way of getting around that any other options — whether e-bikes or public transportation — will always face skepticism from a huge proportion of the population.
https://news.yahoo.com/are-e-bikes-the-unsung-secret-to-curbing-climate-change-235325455.html
Those people would just have been left behind for the hyenas.
NO, it is a disaster because car sales drives GDP, period. Car sales feeds the auto insurance sector, it feeds car accessory sales, it feeds auto maintenance, it creates creates credit and debt which keeps the system running.
Let’s not downplay the IMPORTANCE that car sales has on the economy. It’s right up their with home sales and exceeds the importance of durable good sales.
Rodster,
What you are saying is moving raw materials through the system to the dump. War is faster and this was recognized in an old book, “Report from Iron Mountain.”
Dennis L.
I think people miss this point, the scale and importance of the auto industry. You have mentioned how it feeds employment in so many other sectors. It’s the corporate monoculture: great for consumption and profits on the way up, but when shrinkage sets in look out.
huge https://www.autosinnovate.org/initiatives/the-industry
Nice link. The link shows trends in US sales. It would be even better if the denominator were population. It would be clear that on a per capita basis, sales have been down for quite a while. But sales are still very important. At a very high price, fewer vehicles are sold, making the per capita problem worse.
Exactly, thanks for the link…without cars and truck…collapse of the BAU economy.
Read a book decades ago and an auto executive was praising the industry for fueling the growth of the GDP in the 1950s as a blessed good…
Fixing a relatively new car, <20 years old is all but impossible for most people and that assumes parts are available.
Walking is good for those with working joints and not too heavy.
Dennis L.
I agree.
You are surely right. But in Russia cars are still fairly simple inside. Buy a Mustang while you can.
Learn how to fix an old clunker? This ain’t the 1960s or 70s auto with carburator, points and condenser, and low tech basic parts. Back then most cars were from domestic manufacturing, at least here in the US and pretty standard replacement parts for the big three Ford. GM, Mopar…
Nowadays, there are hardly any young guys I see fixing their cars. True cars are more dependable, but with the supply chain breaking…try get a hold of parts… especially for the average Joe.
It’s gonna be ugly real quick, for some it’s already here judging from Justin’s “Harry’s” latest post on climate and economy website
We all understand the big picture, but raw material and energy availability haven’t declined rapidly enough to alone explain the price hike. This is a question of money-printing-plus-covid labor market and supply chain distortions with a dollop of European energy suicide.
The price hike came about partly because the automakers don’t receive the huge profits SUV’s and light trucks bring. Well equipped light trucks and SUV’s can easily fetch $50-80K. That’s not possible with cars. If you haven’t noticed, sub-compacts are rarely made these days.
If Trucks and SUV’s are fetching $50-80K then cars need to get repriced or you won’t sell a lot of high priced trucks and SUV’s. If i’m a new car dealer and selling $60,000 trucks and I have new sub compacts priced at $15-18,000, that’s too wide of a gap in price and encourages customers to buy the sub compacts.
Nissan can sell you a nicely equipped Titan truck for $50-60K and a Nissan Maxima is not far behind with starting prices at $40K. That’s what we are seeing today but here is the problem, just like oil is pricing itself from the average consumer, so too are cars.
Perhaps TPTB are encouraging this to move people towards mass transit. The other problem that arises in the future is that eliminating or discouraging fossil fuel use only hurts the same governments who rely on the revenue they bring. And no, wind and solar won’t replace those revenues.
GISBORNE & HAWKE’S BAY CRIPPLED We are getting reports MSM are ignoring the worst stories. There are 5,600 registered as missing. Hawkes Bay residents are saying: “Dead animals are building up and rotting & Napier residents have been without power, hot water, internet & phone signal since Mon night/Tues morning.” “A lot of people have lost their houses, everything.” “We were totally cut off from Napier in Hastings with many people being turned away from the only crossing available even though they were essential.”
“Looting, shooting, stabbing, killing, stealing, and hostage situations are going on. Gangs are out of control, holding people hostage and at gun point for their supplies.” “The devastation has all but destroyed from what we hear 50% or more of Hawkes Bay’s horticulture.” Locals have started road blocks. Why were police raiding Shooters Saloon on Thursday instead of helping in these affected areas?
https://waikanaewatch.org/2023/02/20/is-the-situation-in-hawkes-bay-worse-than-the-msm-is-telling-us/
Doomies?
We don’t care what happens in Narnia. It’s a world away. Nothing a little cannibalism can’t couldn’t solve, either.
This is in line with what you have been warning us about for years—and this with BAU-lite still in place.
“Gangs are openly going around with guns stealing food and petrol and generally looting valuables etc. The Media have been instructed to play it down and they are not telling the full story to the outside world.”
You may not be aware but just 160 years ago cannibalism was practised in bestial new zealand.
People are paying thousands to helicopter their children out of flooded areas as they are the most succulent flesh currently on offer.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/cyclone-gabrielle-farmers-paying-thousands-for-choppers-to-evacuate-babies-get-supplies/IWLWA2H7DZB4LPZZG5KZWJHZWY/
WWJD
What Would Jacinda Do?
She’d snort more powder and come up with another stoopid policy.
And to think … when the lockdowns started and I informed a mate that J’ASSinda was mentally ret ar ded … he took big offence … cuz he’s got a kid who’s got MS or whatever and early on teachers labelled him mentally re tard ed…
I fail to see the connection… she is truly mentally re t ar ded… + way too much drugs… making her a F789 Tard.
Some people
And Lo! The people that mocked the prophet FE were abashed: for the Lord sent the whirlwinds and tempests, and the evil-doers that lurk in the dark places worked their wickedness and indulged their lusts and foulness, for they had no shame before the Lord and were packing heat; and His prophet FE was justified in all that he had spoken by the inspiration of the Lord. And they that had called him ‘sick nutter’ were silent, as indeed it was the time of ROF……
Will that be a line from Quentin Tarantino’s next film with the scene of Samuel L Jackson?
Hope Nuttie Eddie has a good part in the flick like Marcellus ..What will be the title, I wonder?
The question that remains is … might Fast Eddy also be …The Messiah…
Let us ponder and discuss this (even I do not know that answer … HE is keeping HIS cards close)
Here’s a message from Gail, the Holy Mother.
Gail is Mother Abigail from The Stand.
No, i believe Gail is Mother Rachel from The Night of the Hunter
Well done Xabier, more, more, more. You know what happens to the prophet that speaks the truth.
So far no raping … that will come with the permanent termination of electricity and petrol. As will the disease phase.
I saw a coyote on the lake yesterday. And a fox. How wonderful.
Right now in the distance I can see two humans dragging some sort of sled contraption — perhaps going ice fishing? Too far away to nail the with a high powered rifle.
Is it really worse than New Orleans in 2005, which was before or at peak oil?
Hopefully!
Pompey visits Israel
“Iranian officials have repeatedly emphasized that Tehran will certainly take revenge from the masterminds and perpetrators of the terror attack on the anti-terror icon. Tehran stresses Americans and Zionists rest assured that it is serious about revenge for the assassination of Martyr Soleimani, and they continue to live under the shadow of Iran’s reprisal since they don’t know when and where they come under attack.”
farsnews.ir/en/news/14011130000142/Chief-US-Terrris-Visi-Israel-in-Secre-Trip-in-Cming-Days
Do you think Iran has enriched to 84%?
dunno but they seem to be able to poke their tongue out at whomever they care
Remember this woman? She’s no better
https://palexander.substack.com/p/dr-anastasia-maria-loupis-after-2
So what is this “big annoucement” by Putin on Tuesday about?
Is he going to annouce a new financial exchange system based on oil and gold?
A new trade consortium?
Issue a last chance warning for NATO to comes to terms before he unleashes a new offensive?
Issue a warning about escalation to nuclear?
Issue a new red line utlimatum if the west continues to pump war materiel into UKR?
Disclose a trove of classified documents about the West’s /NATOs treachery especially in regards to the Nordstream II pipeline or the real dirt on Biden and the fraudulent elections?
Meanwhile the UKR war grinds on. What is the calculus? Does Russia have a narrowing window of opportunity to mount an all out offensive before the spring thaw and the mud returns, or will the roads west of Bakhmut and the current relatively stagnated “front” be sufficiently open and uncontested for Russia to lauch a major offensive on these raods regardless of the thaw?
Or does Russia think that all these munitions and arms being promised by the west to UKR just pie in the sky, and even if the West were to gear up for a war time production, it would take a year for the new supplies and the “recruited and trained” replacement soldiers, assuming not NATO troops outright, to be proficient in using them.
Does Russia think that the West is so depleted that there’s no longer any need to rush to lauch this rumored spring offensive, and they realize they can now prevail with via a gradual war of attrition? Snatching 16 year olds off the street! A lo grade war of attrition would allow Russia’s economy maybe to stabilize further as it waits, or the West and NATO to choke on their own financial debt and ineptitude.
I suppose we will find out on Tuesday.
The speech is seen as being somewhat equivalent the what in the US is President’s annual “State of the Union” speech. The speech is given to both houses of congress.
Or does Russia think that all these munitions and arms being promised by the west to UKR just pie in the sky
It knows that the weapons are irrelevant.
Ukraine is running out of the most vital item, 155mm artillery shells, and can’t be resupplied. For that reason the war is already lost.
Russia is settling in for a multi-year war.
NATO continues to escalate, but they’re running out of stuff i.e. being de-militarised. Ramping up military production will take them several years. Possibly US/Polish troops will go in to Western Ukraine or Odessa – a big potential flashpoint and/or the US supports an ongoing insurgency.
It’s a slow grind clearing out the Ukie defences, esp. as the Russians have a priority to minimise their casualties.
In the meantime the US aims to go to war with China and possibly Iran all at the same time. Hell of a strategy.
Russia is going to have to rebuild what they take over, as the Ukies are deliberately destroying everywhere they leave behind.
You can look at that either as an economic drain, or a boost if Russia has resources to spare, which it probably does. Plenty of natural resources in Donbass to compensate for the rebuild.
The Donbas does not have plenty of resources, i don’t know where that idea comes from?
It has declining coal mines that are mostly uneconomic to operate, not much else.
“Russia is settling in for a multi-year war. ”
Why would Russia want to send 50,000 Russians to die each year in Ukraine?
The enemy is not Ukraine, not NATO, it is US. Russia needs to bring the war to the enemy.
Hockey and Schad!
you know, for those guys into hockey and Schad.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nhl/jonathan-toews-who-helped-blackhawks-to-3-stanley-cup-titles-steps-away-to-deal-with-serious-health-issues/ar-AA17GvGU?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=70202aa536bf4fb58e6d50e616c0049e
“First of all, thank you to the fans and all those who have shown concern about my absence. I’m still dealing with the symptoms of Long COVID and Chronic Immune Response Syndrome,” he said in a statement through the Blackhawks.
Chronic Immune Response Syndrome!
is this a new blah blah blah or has it been around pre-covid?
for sure, the dude has been damaged by multiple jabs.
”The new-look Blackhawks opened training camp Thursday with their captain back on the ice, to go along with a 100% COVID-19 vaccination rate.”
https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/32265192/jonathan-toews-returns-chicago-blackhawks-opening-day-training-camp-missing-last-season
As. I was saying. Here is the real reason why they want you in an EV, and to take away your ICE vehicle, put you on a CBDC economic leash complete with ID tracking. For our benefit of course, because the elites really care whether we starve, freeze or choke to death.
Like gun control. It’s not about guns. It’s about control. It’s almost enough to make me start up my Dillon XL 650 and XL900 reloading presses after all these years sitting in storage.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/environment-police-want-reduce-car-ownership-because-evs-are-not-enough
I think real reason might be about the basic problem of “not enough goods and services to go around” and not being able to print our way out of the problem.
The Zerohedge link is to a Mish Shedlock article. This links to another report:
Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining. Shedlock quotes various things from the report including:
I expect that the CBDC won’t let us buy things very far from our homes (unless for some very good reason we have to travel a distance for work). This will allow people to travel, but only over a very small area.
I have a question how the food will be grown and transported to this small area and how the waste will be taken away. Clearly, this has to happen.
I think real reason might be about the basic problem of “not enough goods and services to go around” and not being able to print our way out of the problem.
That’s the problem. I think some Americans have trouble understanding that there just isn’t going to be any stuff so they imagine it’s about ‘control’.
We won’t be complaining about too much government controlling us. We’ll be wondering where the government has gone in a few years.
Hi Hubbs,
I still view EVs as a red herring. The infrastructure is not available to support this initiative at scale. It is more a “conceptual solution”. I’m reminded of the saying from an episode of Sharpe when he uncovers officers receiving funds for non-existent regiments, “The army marches on paper.”
Models are great for showing that things are possible, when they really are not!
Some good news for SNP, voters are actually more likely to vote SNP now that Nicola has stepped aside, and they stand to gain even more seats. Likely SNP voters mainly are dedicated to independence, and the leadership does not affect their vote.
The trans self-id bill will be scrapped, and SNP will look to learn from their mistake, and avoid others in the future.
Other polling shows that working age Scots support independence, so it might well be wise to leave the referendum for a few more years anyway. It all looks good.
https://www.survation.com/scotlands-political-landscape-after-nicola-sturgeon/
Scotland’s Political Landscape After Nicola Sturgeon?
Our first poll of the post Nicola Sturgeon era (fieldwork Feb 15th-17th) shows no electoral impact at present from the FM’s recently announced departure.
The SNP’s 2019 base on balance say they are moderately more likely to vote for the party post the FM’s resignation.
SNP 2021 Holyrood voters score Kate Forbes (+38%) and Angus Robertson (+31%) highly on the basis of their ability to do a good job of succeeding the current First Minister.
The SNP remain in a strong position in our first poll that has fieldwork conducted in the days following Nicola Sturgeon’s surprise resignation last week. In terms of the next General Election, at a 43% vote share the party would be just 2% shy of their solid 2019 Westminster showing.
This type of Westminster polling would, *if* reflected in individual seats at the next General Election would see the SNP take every Conservative and Lib Dem held seat, leaving those parties with zero MPs in Scotland. This is because Labour, in attracting more of the unionist vote in Scotland would leave Conservative and Lib Dem held seats vulnerable to the SNP, despite a slightly lower vote share for the party than in 2019. While Labour would make several seat gains from the SNP, they would fail to break through materially on this polling. The net result? Despite losses to Labour the SNP would end up with more Westminster seats than the party won at GE 2019.
…. Why do the polls seemed unmoved by the departure of Nicola Sturgeon, and who might replace her?
Although early, it does not appear that SNP voters are apt to desert the party, or even become more undecided post the announced departure of Nicola Sturgeon – who is surely one of Britain’s most successful politicians ever in terms of winning elections. When we put to voters in the poll to what extent (did Sturgeon’s departure) make you more or less likely to vote for the SNP? looking at those who said more likely minus those saying less likely actually resulted in a +5% net more likely to vote SNP figure when viewing attitudes of those who voted for the party in the 2021 Holyrood constituency vote.
It is therefore entirely possible therefore that the SNP’s loyal voter base are really not voting for the party based on it’s leader to any meaningful extent, and/or potentially see the Sturgeon years as having run their course – a sentiment seemingly shared by the FM herself. Three-quarters of 2014 Yes voters would vote SNP at a Westminster election, and so it remains clear that independence attitudes loom large as a strong driver for SNP party choice.
As for who might replace Nicola Sturgeon, the public at large (graphic below) are rather underwhelmed in terms of who might do a good/bad job succeeding the current First Minister. Looking however, to the 48% of Scots who voted for the SNP at the 2021 Holyrood election, current deputy John Swinney (who has ruled himself out) scores +17 on this good job-bad job statistic. 2021 SNP voters score Kate Forbes (+38%) and Angus Robertson (+31%) highly. Humza Yousaf would no doubt be disappointed with his own score among this group of just +3%
Considering all these data in the round, SNP party members being able to choose a new leader (who may well be a candidate outside of this very limited selection) may actually be a benefit as well as risk to the party, although it may well be that the party leader’s future strategy on independence will be more important in deciding the party’s fortunes than leadership alone.
Damian Lyons Lowe
Chief Executive, Survation.
In even more stunningly important, universally relevant, and not at all boring Scottish news:
Shetland’s council workers will not get the extra bank holiday on the Monday after King Charles’s coronation.
The event is taking place on Saturday 6 May, with the additional bank holiday on 8 May.
However, members of Shetland Islands Council’s policy and resources committee were unanimous in their decision in a meeting on Monday.
In Scotland, national holidays are a devolved matter for councils to decide on.
So the local authority had no obligation to recognise it as a public holiday.
Options had included anyone wanting to be off work to celebrate the coronation requesting leave, and calling an additional public holiday where the council shuts for all non-essential services.
Members stressed concern over the prospect of schools closing at a time when learning has already been disrupted through teacher strikes.
The council previously recognised a one-off bank holiday for the Queen’s state funeral.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-64626627
I had to post this, just on the off chance that some poor OFWer had missed it and might consequently be uninformed about this very well-worth-knowing development. I wouldn’t want to have that on my conscience.
Independence for Shetland! Ban the kilt! Ditch the monarchy! Burn down the haggis factories!
Bring out the Dane axes! Raid the coasts! Take slaves!
The break up of the UK is only a matter of time as that is what the clear majority of working age people want in Scotland.
It is mainly just a case of waiting for the oldest cohort to just die.
It is truly wonderful thing that life expectancy is longer than ever before, but it is skewing politics as previous generations hang around.
The same is true in NI where Unionists are heavily concentrated in the oldest cohort and have fallen to about 1/3 in the youngest.
There is way too much water under the bridge in Ireland, and Unionists are doing everything to alienate Scots that they can.
So, we are probably just going to inherit the south of Britain, and we will try to make positive, respectful ties with others where we can.
Arrogantly insulting or ridiculing others will certainly have no place in our culture.
The old attitudes stopped working a long time ago, and we are going to have to pick up the ruins of this society and do what we can.
Who is this “we” you are presuming to speak on behalf of? You appear to be identifying yourself with something, but you haven’t identified precisely what you are identifying yourself with, and are leaving that open to implication and interpretation.
I’m sorry to appear thick, but I’ve been away from Blighty for so long that I am no longer familiar with the nuances of pronoun use there.
Imagine there’s no countries. I wonder if you can?
Apparently, not many people can. Under the religion of nationalism, which permeates and pervades most human craniums to the exclusion of all other political alternatives, individuals or groups of them can sometimes escape from of one organized national religion only by immersing themselves another.
And quite often they do so by jumping out of the frying pan of a relatively miserable pluralist society into the fire of a conformist hellhole, giving up membership in a large but unhappy family for a place in a smaller, more insular, inward-looking and equally unhappy commune or cult.
To the true “Renaissance man”, such parochialism can only be anathema. Hence intellectuals such as Goethe, Hegel, and Beethoven (at least initially) welcomed Napoleon’s imperial project as an advance of civilisation, while nationalists everywhere told him (under their breath mostly) to bog off back to Corsica.
“I’m sorry to appear thick, but I’ve been away from Blighty for so long that I am no longer familiar with the nuances of pronoun use there.”
Some basic facts: you worship the British State, I do not; the British (actually Franco-Germans with a slither of EBA British ancestry) are on their way out as a type to be replaced by others as the British State only cares about money – you are gone by the very state that you worship; we will inherit that State once you are gone as a type, and we will do the best that we can with it – we certainly will not be worshipping it; whether you can hold it together for us to inherit once you are gone remains to be seen; either way, we will do what we can once you are gone. Facts are facts.
Fact check: You do not know my views about the British state, period.
Clue: If I appear less antagonistic towards the British state than you do, it is probably because I’ve been free from its malign influence for coming up on 43 years.
Pop psychological diagnosis: In my opinion, you come off as a quivering mass of sentimentality, hysteria, and barely concealed spite. Probably with good reason—growing up with your family and your friends probably had more to do with it than the British state did. There’s an inner child there who is badly in need of hugs.
Finally, despite your bizarre rant, you still didn’t define who you mean by “we”. Not the royal “we”. I find no trace of megalomania in you. But “we” as in the British people; “we” as in some ethnic or nation subset such as the Scottish, English, Welsh, Irish, Cornish, Manx, Northerners, East Anglians, or one of dozens of other imagined identities; “we” as in people who think like I do or are in my club; or “we” the intellectual elite who are capable of reading, quoting and cutting and pasting long screeds from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
It was a simple question: If you are claiming to speak for “we”, then define “we”. Come on man, spell it out! Well, hide in the closet if you want to, but it makes your “we” statements meaningless if the reader has no idea of to whom “we” refers.
Or could it be that Mirror on the Wall, with a brain the size of a planet, is unaware of who this “we” are?
By the way, I’m not trying to provoke you or upset you. I’m merely trying to help goad you towards enlightenment. One day, if you ever reach there, you’ll thank me for it, although I’ll probably be with Yoda and Obiwan by then, leaving behind nothing but a pile of clothes on the floor.
The basic problem of the humans is the environmental destruction. Harnessing the energy allowed humans to move to areas that were not destructed and also allowed them to mitigate and prevent environmental destruction.
Once the energy is gone, the environmental destruction is revealed in full scale, which in turn means the collapse of the human population.
In reality the land all over Europe is already a sterile desert. We are just putting in fertiliser every year and pulling it back out in the form of crops.
We are the walking dead. We are literally made of molecules that came from sea creatures that themselves died millions of years ago.
The even more basic problem was the abundance of enormous fossil fuel reserves, millions of years in the making, that was bestowed on the human species in the first place. The “ maladaptive” evolution of intelligence which led ton tool making, then farming, and then the Industrial Age enabled the agri and energy dependent population to explode. It is almost like giving a kid a lot of money for which he doesn’t have to work. Eventually he will become a Hunter Biden- a useless drug addled, whoring, lying, parasitic, paedophilic POS.
Environmental destruction, pollution, and running out of natural resources, have become derivatives of an unsustainable population explosion.
Nature will eventually correct for this evolutionary “wrong turn,” i.e., this temporary maladaptation, as it always does, as witnessed by the extinction of 95% of the species on this planet who have ever lived.
just asking_____
do you know that Hunter Biden is a pedophile?
That’s a fair question. And let’s also not forget that pedophile properly means sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. There’s no basis for thinking that even Epstein was a pedophile.
so we might be back to words again
using words to draw attention one’s own utterances?
Correct I do believe we’re engaging with the written word here, which is a precision tool. Nevermind all the typos and autofills.
Perhaps we would communicate more authentically by avoiding words altogether and relying on animal grunts and gestures?
That’s how norm communicates with SSS
Grunts, gestures, and grooming. Language was very credibly hypothesized, by Robin Dunbar, to have emerged — grunts and gestures first — in order to supplement physical grooming in larger groups, so that Dunbar’s Number could be increased.
“One of the primary mechanisms that primates use for creating and maintaining social bonds is grooming, which can account for up to 20% of their total daytime activity budget. The amount of time primates spend grooming is positively related to group size, suggesting that when groups are large, primates have to spend more time maintaining their social relationships than in small groups (Aiello and Dunbar, 1993; Lehmann et al., 2007).
However, the amount of time primates can devote to grooming is limited, because of the demands of other essential activities, notably feeding, resting, and moving (Dunbar, 1992a). Thus, social bonding in primates is constrained by two independent variables—neocortex size which sets an upper limit to the number of relationships individual primates can keep track of, and the amount of time that is available for grooming, which is necessary to maintain social relationships at a sufficient level to prevent the bond from decaying (Dunbar, 1993; Lehmann et al., 2007).
If the number of individuals in a group becomes too large, it becomes increasingly difficult for individuals to maintain social bonds with all group members. Thus, group cohesion will decrease and the bonds will eventually decay. For example, the probability that a baboon group will split increases with increasing group size (Henzi et al., 1997). This seems to be determined not by inefficient foraging in larger groups or by predation risk, but directly by the inability of individuals to service social relationships in the face of the inevitably limited amount of time available for social interaction (Henzi et al., 1997).
However, it is increasingly being recognized that in addition to grooming, vocalizations (sounds made with the vocal tract) and gestural communication (voluntary movements of the arm, hand, head, or whole body; Roberts et al., 2014a,b) may also play key roles in developing and maintaining social bonds in primates. Time constraints limit the amount of time available for grooming (Lehmann et al., 2007), but vocal and gestural signals are less constrained by time, and thus may offer an important additional way to regulate social relations in groups of primates.”
Grooming paper I quoted from:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01756/full
There were hundreds of pictures from the laptops which were available for general viewing at one time. Conclusions were pretty easy to draw.
i imagine they must still be in general circulation
rather than ‘available at one time’
always curious with these things
Curiosity killed the cat – careful, Norm. Seek and ye shall find.
How do we know?
It must be true. I read about it on Twitter!
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1599156617899282432
Isn’t it Joe who is the pedo?
norm hates tommy – who opposes pedos…
norm worships Joe B – who is a pedo
Discuss
Norman apparently thinks Tommy is not what he pretends to be and that Joe is a genuine good egg. When I say “thinks”, that’s just me being generous. To be more accurate, Norman parrots the BBC and Guardian line on these matters as a default setting. This is so much easier than thinking.
as i’ve said—i know a ‘Tommy Robinson” personally
a pain in the proverbial who does his pedo ranting for the same reason you do eddy—just to get attention, because he’s an insignificant little man with no other way of making an impression on anybody.
but carry on eddy—
it supports my point–those who can—do
those who can’t obsess about it constantly
But norm … you support the Pedo Chief Biden.
And you despise the anti Pedo Tommy.
What are we to make of this?
I know what Fast Eddy makes of it … HE has no young children so it does not materially affect him. HE is agnostic. To each their own. So long as…
As for me … I think it’s all a bit twisted what you are thinking
with your fixations, obsessions and repetitions, i don’t imagine anyone would let you near their young children ed dy
I despise children…. I try not to get within 10m of one of these vile savages
I know that you will not understand that cuz…
is ‘m’ miles or metres?
unless of course they react to you like cats—if you hate cats, they invariably jump on your lap.
no doubt parents jump to the right conclusion
i seem to recall the Clintons being labelled with the same thing.
you don’t believe it tim —you just splash it around for want of something more intelligent to say.
it splashes back onto you
just like it does with the others who peddle this nonsense
https://nationalfile.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ashley-Biden-Pg-23.jpg
https://nationalfile.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Ashley-Biden-Pg-24-750×591.jpg
norm … is this what you and joe have in common?
While my comment above would have benefited from a /sarc tag, I wouldn’t put anything past the Clintons, Norm.
That they, like the Bidens, get a free pass from you says much about your own moral compass. Are you sure it is always pointing true north?
Tim
when you first appeared on OFW, we could exchange discussion as adults, without childish innuendo.
back then, i would have dismissed the concept, that you would become an empty bell, borrowing someone else’s clapper to make a noise.
no politician is above reproach—that goes with the territory.
but now you have joined the infantile cadre that must infer pedo philic behaviour to anyone who holds a different opinion to yourself, is beyond contempt.
Defending the Clintons? That’s a tough brief, Norman. I doubt Perry Mason would have taken that case.
As for the case against the Clintons, the evidence will take months to present. But let me establish the mood by presenting Exhibit A, Cristopher Hitchens’s No One Left to Lie To.
Here’s an Amazon review:
No One Left to Lie To is not a political hatchet-job from a Republican or other political opponent of Clinton. Instead it is an all out attack on Clinton “from the left”, as a central argument is that Clinton held himself out to be a Democrat/liberal but had no commitment to any of the underlying principles, instead repeatedly and consistently abandoning those principles in order to secure his position and increase his power. In this polemic, Hitchens tears Clinton to shreds, making a thorough and persuasive case that Clinton is one of the most sleazy, crooked and corrupt politicians in U.S. history. He develops the theme of “triangulation” across of a number of significant events in Clinton’s career as a politician, including the military actions he authorised as president, his positions on welfare and racial injustice and his many sexual crimes throughout his career. He also highlights how the Democratic Party was wilfully blind to Clinton’s major problems and as a result caused significant damage to their party and the political system in general.
In the book Hitchens also argues persuasively that Hillary is similarly reprehensible as a morally bankrupt corrupt political opportunist, notwithstanding the fact that this book was written in 1999 when she was just running as a political candidate for the first time.
Hitchens is witty and the book is full of bits of excellent writing. In addition, he makes razor-sharp arguments supporting his points and backs them up solidly with facts. A slight drawback for me is that I found his writing style to be a bit too disorganised, overly complex and emotional for my liking in certain places, particularly in the first half of the book. Overall, No One Left to Lie To is important reading for getting a true understanding of Bill Clinton and his significance as a political figure.
https://www.amazon.com/One-Left-Lie-Triangulations-Jefferson/dp/1455522996
Tim
instead of leaping into your usual abyss of conclusion, if you took time to read comments, you might (just might) be made aware aware that i defended no one, and condemned no one.
I rarely, if ever, do.
Whereas you and your mentor make a habit of it, for no better reason than to call attention to your mutual clapperless bellringing,
Clinton was a Rhodes scholar–you can’t fake that. It defines intellect, if not suitability for POTUS. All the points about you make are likely correct. But pedo?–If Hitchens had mentioned that you would have been in a state of or gasmic bliss.
Almost no American president has substance–the system that puts them there eliminates that.
There have been a (very few) exceptions, on whom mindless i diots will pour self-reflecting scorn. (anything to pretend there’s a clapper in the bell)
The contention of my comment was, that you have fallen down the same rabbit hle as your unclad mentor–everyone who disagrees with you, must, by definition be a se xual deviant.
You may have noticed, that under no circumstances do I go there.
It is demeaning.
When I look back on this thread, I don’t read into it what you do, Norman. I haven’t endorsed a single word FE has written about you. Or if I have, please point out the sentence where I’ve done so.
I merely accused you of rely on the MSM—specifically the BBC and the Guardian—for your thinking. If I got that wrong, please tell us how it is your thinking lines up so well with theirs on so many issues.
You brought the Clintons into this, and I merely chimed into to say that I wouldn’t put anything past them.
But you, are apparently able to vouch for their good name? You are prepared to be a character witness for them? Is that right?
By the way, you noted that we used to be able to hold reasonable conversations but now we don’t and that it’s ALL MY FAULT. I remember things rather differently.
What I remember is that time after time I tried sincerely, earnestly and patiently to engage you in debate that would elicit from you straight answers to straight questions, and that far too many times you equivocated, beat about the bush, evaded, distracted, threw out non sequiturs like an octopus trying to confuse and adversary.
I’ve never been as rude to you as FE. Who could emulate that level of genius? But like Xabier, who is a very reasonable, fair, and sane individual, I have grown exasperated with your failure to engage in real debate over the years. You’ve done this, with your cantankerous behavior.
I cut you a lot of slack because of your great age. Unlike FE, I respect my elders, and I admire the fact that you are still sharp and still able to engage with others in witty conversation and the thrust and parry of intelligent debate.
But that doesn’t excuse you for using unfair and unreasonable debating tactics, and I will not patronize you by “letting you win” on the grounds that you are going “a bit senile”. That would be the worst kind of deception.
Hey norm … Fast Eddy says what about if we hook up Super Snatch to an Energy Capture Contraption … when she does her servicing of the hobos Out Back the Dumpster … the contraption converts the servicing motion into electricity…
that would be enough to power a smallish aluminum smelter…
If we can make that work then we roll that out Out Back all the Dumpsters in the land.. and we might be able to use this Tech to keep BAU staggering along for a few more years.
Keith – we need your technical expertise.
Meanwhile – a blue bird and a chipmunk are feasting on the seeds in the feeders Out Front on the Deck here.. no coyote on the lake though
It was all kinds of energy that allowed humans to counteract the destruction of the environment and move to the new areas. Not just fossil fuels.
Indeed, both the Bronze Age and some argue even the Roman Empire thrived due to the ability to harvest wood and convert it to charcoal to run their furnaces, refine silver, make tools and weapons etc. But their decline may have been due to running out of accessible forest biomass. The empire had to extend farther and farther with increasing costs to maintain “centralization” of the empire in Rome.
Now our western civilization destruction is on steroids, from 1 billion people now to 8 billion.Nature didn’t “plan“ on the intelligence of H sapiens colliding with this vast reservoir of stored fossil fuel energy. It just happened. Nature is indifferent.
So the theory of “adaptive evolution” and maladaptive evolution have been well demonstrated. By the theory, those living things which can adapt and are “successful” will reproduce. And boy, did humans ever adapt and reproduce and validate to this theory or definition. Like King Midas, the FF seemed to be a “gift’ at first, but in the end, there was a price to pay when you realize you can’t eat gold.
But now, we will have not only drained our FF inheritance and natural resources, we will have left a toxin leached water table and a plastic microsphere filled ocean. Throw in a smidge of radioactive waste as well.
So maybe on a long term horizon, “intelligence” may not be as adaptive after all.
Just my “intellectual” or rather philosophic blathering.
if something is going to be harvested, energy input is needed
if there are no machines available, then that leaves muscle and hard edges.
eventually muscle runs out, and biomass wins (it always does) no evolution involved.
Right now we have an advantage because we have FF machines, when FF runs out–biomass will win again
eventually muscle runs out, and biomass wins (it always does) no evolution involved.
Right. The trees come back. They root themselves in roofs and walls and foundations. They rip the ruins apart.
In a few centuries there’s not much to see of former towns.
This does sound like a pretty good assessment of the situation.
I suspect that the world is far far younger than most surmise. There is much objective evidence ( and common sense) which shows the planet itself is vastly increasing in mass and dimension. The planet appears to be feeding on solar wind and the material made available via recurrent solar outburst events.
I mention this only as a thought experiment/cautionary tale in believing in what we think we know.
I believe this is an artifice at its core and that trials are being run.
If we have been fooled and the world can be revealed to be hundreds of thousands or even a few million years old then perhaps more support for the holography thesis will be revealed.
The FF creation and availability just seems to unlikely to me after much thought. What are the odds that the living world would near a complete extinction level event at the zenith of the last ice advance with CO2 levels falling so low as to near the death threshold for most plant life,…. Then suddenly there appears a species of modern Homo sapiens capable of discovering and exploiting this FF reserve so as to drive CO2 levels back into more reasonable norms god this planets atmosphere ( 400ppm).
I say this is a system being manipulated.
I think we will discover the truth in the next few years and then be blasted back into the Stone Age once again as a reset occurs.
We are still missing something
Expando earth visually
https://youtu.be/oJfBSc6e7QQ
@cro
where is there more on your “holography thesis “, pls?
One only need to ponder about where the water of earth comes from.
Let’s see now, which other body in the solar system spews and burns an obscene amount of hydrogen as it Powers the Will? And water is hydrogen and oxygen.
I reckon it’s not the only element that originates from the hydrogen burner and it’s “delivered” through the plasma and electric currents.
Very well.
I reckon the earth is much older than the current era of imaginary conjecture claims with, get this, certainty.
In the mean time:
🪵 🪓😑🪣💦
fossil fuels have been the driving force
they took us from under 1 bn to 8bn in 300 years
the supernova and the endgame of human existence
Just wait until we earthlings get fusion, zero point energy, dilithium crystals, and orbital solar satellites beaming obscene amounts of power down to us.
Join us, and we will rule the galaxy together. We are going to need good electricians who can change a fuse in zero G.
You forgot loading up the pyramids with resonant coils to suck electrons out of the plasma sheath.
What could possibly go wr…, oh, never mind.
🛸 💨💨💨🌎💥☄️☄️☄️🌞
Just imagine the Hyper BAU if such devices were to be implemented. The amount of mental illness would be galactic. Piles upon piles of redundant protoplasm belonging to Rapacious Primates malfunctioning the worst possible way.
🫣
There might a collapse of the human population, but ultimately a remnant of the human population (perhaps in mutated form) can grow and do things that our current population cannot do. They may be able to extract fossil fuels we have left behind, for example. Climate change (and even movement of the poles) may change which parts of the world grow crops best. There are a lot of things we don’t know.
all forms of animal life must consume food to convert energy into useful work
if that work involves extracting fossil fuels, the physical labour involved will be the same as is required now. Only moreso.
We can only ‘do things’ according to the energy input available.
Logically there will be less available in the future, but whatever there is, the calorific value relative to quantity extracted will remain the same.
The laws of physics cannot be ‘mutated’ into something that suits our future.
we are not going to mutate into supermen or an as yet unknown life form.
Nature’s forces dont work like that. Such things require millions of years, not decades.
If life forms descend from us, 10m years from now, they will be subject to the same laws of physics we are.
If no surpluses are available, they will llive on what is available in their surroundings. There will be nothing more, despite our imagination and wishful thinking
True. But things could change on Earth. Global warming could make coal in Alaska and other places in the far north far more accessible. Oceans could change in such a way that coal that is now inaccessible under the North Sea could be exposed. Methane hydrates might at some point become extractible (or not). The Earth keeps changing. That is the nature of a finite Earth. The parts of the Earth that can be farmed might change.
i disagree that the earth keeps changing–except over the very long term
eg—if the coal under the N Sea was exposed, that would mean that the sea wasn’t there.
Water alters its form in two ways
evaporation and freezing
last time the N Sea land was exposed (doggerland) was because the water volume was reduced by an ice age. (they still dredge up mammoth bones in fishing nets)
In any event, exposing land doesnt expose coal.
The coal is xx100ft down. That needs machinery.
If we got the coal, burning it is a waste of time if we dont have all the other materiel to make use of it.
Extracting it just for domestic heat would cost too much investment to be cost-effective.
If Alaska defrosted, that would mean a high sea level rise (No Greenland ice)
That would wipe out the living of half the world’s population. (sea level cities)
That might of course reduce the surplus population sufficiently of course.
The plates shift. It seems like areas that were under the ocean could be out of water. At one time, Africa and the Americas were joined.
https://sites.psu.edu/siowfa14/2014/10/24/were-africa-and-south-america-once-connected/
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-was-pangea
The Earth is constantly changing. Our imagination is limited. The Earth could collide with a meteor. We think only in terms of what we see today.
as i understand it, continental plates shift at roughly the speed that my fingernails grow
when the Americas were joined to Africa, there were no humanoid species of any kind around.
no doubt the same will occur again in another 60m years or so
by that time none of our concerns will be of any consequence, i imagine the earth itself will have resolved itself into a state of harmony—undisturbed by our stupidities.
I think most of the sea rise happened already 3-4 hundred ft over 13k yrs.
I’ll have to chk how much higher if rest melted. In any case in the short term we’re entering a global grand minimum.
Gail, plate shift is what cromagnon posts. Those old Antarctic maps allude to it (maybe it’s pole shift)so maybe cro isn’t practicing sci-fi.
If we got the coal, burning it is a waste of time if we dont have all the other materiel to make use of it.
You need steam engines before you can start deep mining coal. We wouldn’t have them.
“We” don’t have steam engines? Orly? Lemme guess; we don’t have hit and miss engines as well?
They just magically disappear post collapse. The same with bicycles and various forms of old fashioned fossil burners.
After all; there’s probably some 10B bicycles in various conditions on earth as of now. Yep, those will evaporate into thin air as well.
Or perhaps, just perhaps we got enough crusty old beaters to keep the Monkey Business moving along without the latest Tesla or Prius projecting our hallucinated need for statuses, prestiges and conveniences.
Say hello to BAU lite “Cuba style”.
However, ultimately it will all crumble into oblivion. And the generic hodgepodge that is mankind will regress, devolve (or perhaps evolve) back up into the tree plumes where we belong, flinging sticks, stones and feces at each other forever and ever, and ever, and ever, until the sun sterilizes the surface.
In the mean time:
“YOLO!
Hypers gonna hyper!
Tryhards gonna tryhard!
MOARons gonna moaron!
All retch and no vomit!
Within temptation is truth!
Only suckers put hopium in the future!
And the wheel of folly makes yet another turn!
In perpetuity!
🙏“
— Oat Jesus
They just magically disappear post collapse.
We don’t have them now except in museums.
We won’t be able to build new ones.
After all; there’s probably some 10B bicycles in various conditions on earth as of now. Yep, those will evaporate into thin air as well.
Useless without oil and rubber
Ever ridden a bike without rubber? It’s a bit rough but doable. And lucky for us rubber grows on trees. Other forms of stuff can be used as well.
Yes, the steam and hit and miss engine is such a technological marvel it cannot be recreated from the rubble heaps of IC.
At least for a little while. Then it’s right back to the tree tops flinging sticks, stones and feces as the abominated primate jostles to be the one with most statuses and prestiges in the plumes.
And isn’t it adorable with primates?
Learn to embrace all retch and no vomit, and within temptation is truth in the la-la land of unicorns, rainbows and myopia of ordinary.
Lovely isn’t it?
In the mean time:
(etc.)
🤣👍👍
I’m hoping I get the chance to beat a few of the rapacious primates with a baseball bat Before It’s All Said and Done
SCHAD sort of
We could mutate into slime that can eat rocks.
The future is shiny or at least has a luster to it.
Significant changes happen over hundreds of thousands of years. Such changes are irrelevant to humans now or in the foreseeable future. Any significant change that happens rapidly (in human time scales) will not be a benefit to humans, or most other species.
We think human time scales are important, but that is not necessarily true in the way the world’s ecosystem operates. The rest of the system may need to “rest” for a while, or other parts may need time to develop differently. We humans think we can control the future, but I don’t think we can. The overall system operates outside our control.
Human time scales are important … to humans. It is critical, for humans, that any changes to any system, physical or otherwise, occurs on human timescales for them to be important to humans.
Everything else you wrote, Gail, is spot on.
Who wants to watch severe mental illness… this applies to CovIDIOCY… they are one and the same …. total f789ing MOREONS…
There is but one solution — it is the Final Solution… ya’ll know what I’m talkin about:
By the way, yesterday me and my friend visited a lecture of a guy from Slovakia, who praglided the mountain range of the Southern Island of NZ northwards and back southwards in January. He is a pretty corageous guy.
https://www.facebook.com/durifuk
https://youtube.com/@JurajKorenDurifuk
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bbv5JQeDHmM/
He said his skin was immediately burned by the Sun when he landed in NZ because of the ozone hole, which did not happen to him in Himalayas.
I wonder whether this was due mainly to differences in ozone levels or to other factors?
The amount of water vapor and the amount of smog in the air can make a huge difference to the amount of UV that reaches the lower troposphere, or even the upper troposphere in the case of the higher elevations of the Himalayas.
India is one of the most heavily air polluted places in the world. The Asian Brown Cloud often covers the Himalayas.
https://www.graphicnews.com/en/pages/14182/environment-asian-brown-cloud
By contrast, NZ has some of the cleanest air on earth.
He paraglided 7 continents and it seemed that had not such an experience, except for NZ, where it surprised him.
https://babu.co.nz/blog/why-do-we-burn-more-in-new-zealand/
“Why do we burn more in New Zealand?
New Zealanders are especially susceptible to sunburn. This is due to two factors of our environment:
The ozone layer over New Zealand is thinner. Unfortunately, due to decades of man-made gas emissions, the ozone layer over New Zealand has continuously thinned. The ozone layer is like the Earth’s personal sun protectant. The ozone layer’s role is to absorb the harmful UV rays that are sent from the sun.
New Zealand has cleaner air. Whilst having lower levels of air pollution is wonderful for our environment, it means we are less protected than other countries. Cleaner air means it is thinner, reducing the barriers between UV light and our skin.”
The Evergreen University story. A story about a university without grades. A university focused on social justice. [A precursor to the current nuttiness of universities?]
a complete waste of time and energy. these must be the useless eaters we keep hearing about.
Sad new zealand has just had a cyclone and parts of it resemble a post-apocalyptic world in which one can make some basic observations:
1. Looting has begun in some of the devastated areas
2. Sectarian violence has broken out or rather ramped up
3. Feeble-minded new zealanders (all) are totally unprepared
4. Ethnic landlords have ramped up rental prices on the remaining housing stock
5. Government debt is going to massively increase
6. All is blamed on climate change
7. A whisper of cannibalism in the flooded valleys
8. Food inflation about to rise dramatically
9. Children being helicoptered out for fear of cannabilism/attack
This may be similar to a future world with diminished energy availability.
Please do not be sad for that sad country. In the end karmic debts must be paid.
I have a Facebook friend who is a professor at a university in NZ. He is jet setting around the planet to AI conferences. I guess both ends of the spectrum can exist at the same time in the same nation.
Facebook friend? I didn’t even know such a thing existed….Zucker would be so happy to to hear this!
I go from bleak Canada back to that .. in a couple of weeks
I don’t envy you. Be strong!
Hopefully, you are not flying on the world’s worst airline, Air New Zealand (the abomination of the skies).
https://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/300809556/16hour-flight-to-nowhere-air-nzs-new-york-flight-turns-back-to-auckland
Being turned back to Canada would be a blessing.
If you do get back remember Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s (paraphrased) words:
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode [Fast Eddy].
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode [Fast Eddy].
I hope you have prepared for arriving in sad new zealand with either alcohol or antidepressants …
Cast a glance at the fair damsels of Canada before you leave because you’ll see nothing but obese hogs on arrival in the saddest land.
There are marijuana shops littering the landscape of Canada … I suppose they need to be drugged up to make it through the endless bitter winter….
I was thinking of loading a small sack of gummy bears laced with the drug into my hand carry and gobbling them during the flight across from Vancouver but I was alerted by a nephew that it is not legal to transport the drug across provinces (I depart from Ontario)… so I’ve ruled that out as the last thing I need is to be Bunged Up Abroad in Buttf789iSTAN under the harsh dictatorship of TruDUNCE
Let’s go over how to plan, design, and install an off-grid solar power system.
https://earth911.com/eco-tech/how-to-build-off-grid-solar-system/
How To Design a Solar Power System
Designing a solar power system means determining the size of the system you need. This size mainly depends on the total electricity requirement of all the appliances the system will power.
To do this, list all your appliances and their power (hourly) and energy (daily) consumption. The power rating of each appliance is given in watts (W), and often noted on the appliance. You can also use online tools to find out the power consumption of your appliances.
Calculate the energy consumption by multiplying power consumption by hours of use. Once you know the power rating of all appliances you plan to run on solar, make a table with power and energy values.
Here’s a sample table. Note that values in the last column are products of the preceding two columns (watts and hours).
Sizing the Solar Panels
To size your solar panels, begin by finding out the average sunlight hours in your location. You can find the daily sunlight hours for any location from one of the many sources on the internet. Once you have that number, below is the simple calculation to find out solar panel size.
Sizing the Battery and Charge Controller
Most companies now offer batteries specified in Wh or kWh. For the load profile in our above example, the battery should be able to store a minimum of 2.74 kWh. Add some safety margin to this, and we can use a reliable battery size of 3 kWh.
Choosing the Inverter
Your inverter selection depends on the ratings of your battery and solar panel. Choose an inverter with a power rating slightly higher than your panels. In the above example, we have 750 W panels and can use a 1,000 W inverter.
Installing the System
By this point, you will have all the correctly sized equipment. This brings you to the final step — installation. Installing a solar power system is not complicated. Most modern equipment comes with ready-made ports and connectors so it’s easy to connect the components.
When connecting the components, follow the wiring diagram shown below. This will ensure that the power flows in the correct sequence and direction.
Much more details in article via the link…Greta approved
Ship dismantling is a long and arduous process, done almost entirely by hand with no automation, which is the primary reason shipbreaking yards are located in countries like India, Pakistan, Turkey, Bangladesh, and China. Labor costs are lower in these parts of the world, and environmental laws are not as strict.
Decommissioning or breaking a cruise ship requires hundreds or thousands of workers and months of work. For the ship-breaking process, ships head to a shipyard and dock.The process of disassembling cruise ships necessitates thousands of skilled laborers who are familiar with cruise ship anatomy and how to organize parts of the vessel. It’s dangerous work, and with the process taking anywhere from eight months to a year, the workers do an excellent job of ensuring that there’s nothing left after the job is done.
Workers take them apart piece by piece, hauling steel and furniture, bottles of decadent liquor, and books about ancient seafaring ways off into the distance where the sun sets on the dunes of ship-going fun, leaving room for new vessels to enter the world to delight thousands more eager guests.
About half of all cruise ships go to a scrapyard in Alang, India. About 30% are sent to scrap yards in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and other scrap yards in India.
https://www.cruisehive.com/where-do-cruise-ships-go-to-die/94633
Environmental friendly…
Bill Gates and UK prime minister Rishi Sunak were interviewed by an AI chatbot.
Bill Gates said he was “overly intense” and “didn’t believe in weekends” early on in his career.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/bill-gates-told-an-ai-chatbot-he-was-overly-intense-and-didnt-believe-in-weekends-in-microsofts-early-days/ar-AA17DOWE?li=BBnb7Kz
He made the comments in an interview with an AI chatbot with UK prime minister
“I had this very narrow view of the working style,” he said in the interview on Friday.
7 ways to use ChatGPT at work to boost your productivity, make your job easier, and save a ton of time
ChatGPT won’t replace your job anytime soon. But it can make it a little bit easier.
With its impressive functions, the buzzy AI chatbot could give some workers a “productivity boost.”
Insider compiled a list of seven ways workers can use the AI tool to help do their jobs.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT and similar AI tools may not replace jobs anytime soon. But they can help workers across many industries – from tech to media – do their jobs better and more quickly.
“It’s almost like a bit of a productivity boost that some of these occupations might get,” Anu Madgavkar, a partner at economic research firm McKinsey Global Institute, told Insider.
The buzzy conversational chatbot – which attracted one million users soon after its launch last November – has been used to generate real estate advice, provide tips on how to start a business, and even write music in the style of individual artists, all with varying levels of success.
Investors have been pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into industry-specific generative AI tools out of the belief that these have the potential to solve problems that, say, hospitals and marketing departments may encounter.
Sam Altman, the CEO of the firm behind ChatGPT, would agree, as he previously said that “generative text is something we all need to adapt to.”
“We adapted to calculators and changed what we tested for in math class, I imagine,” Altman said during an interview with StrictlyVC in January. “This is a more extreme version of that, no doubt, but also the benefits of it are more extreme, as well.”
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute who has researched the impact of AI on the workforce, echoes the sentiment.
“It’s absolutely true that AI applications like ChatGPT can very much improve workers’ lives,” Muro told Insider.
Workers should be careful when using AI tools, as the tech can be prone to misinformation, and it can remove the human touch from tasks like writing. Most companies also haven’t established formal rules around employee use of the AI tool, though firms like Microsoft – a major partner and investor of ChatGPT’s parent Open AI – have recently given employees the green light to use the chatbot for work purposes, as long as they don’t share sensitive information with the site.
Here’s how you can use ChatGPT and AI to help make your work life easier.
It was not clear whether the AI in question was ChatGPT, which was launched in November by OpenAI. Microsoft put $1 billion in the AI firm in 2019 and made a further investment of a reported $10 billion in OpenAI last month.
The AI chatbot has been put to a wide range of uses since its launch, including writing code, cover letters and passing university exams. Gates said in the interview that he’s used AI to write notes, poems and songs and create images.
Representatives for Gates did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, made outside normal working hours.
Hehehehe..sure it will can’t wait to use it like Billie Gates
@Agammennon
My response about Chucky and the Worcester 400 , who are no less guilty, had been cut by Gail
Basically speaking the situation was such that even if he ran no one would have blamed him
But him and his 400 morons charged, and their stupid act probably cost the world the chance for Singularity.
Tim and others say it is spilled water, but given the behavior of some UK patriots here, it is stil going on. They instead of repenting their past way, still show tendencies of old British Imperialism to this day.
In a sense, the ‘cancel history’ movement has some merit. It t least tries to address the foulups of their ancestors, however inadequate. Removing statues and stoppin to teach their history does have some merit.
If UK really wants to be part of Europe it would have taken out places names like Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Bridge. OF course other countries do that but that’s their problem, and given UK’s long history of killing Europeans it at least has to show a long time of penance .
Since the people of UK wont do that themselves, the WEF is doing it for them.
i seem to recall that the favourite pastime of europeans was killing other europeans
and that a certain group of europeans killed a lot of english people.
Europeans also bumped off a lot of indigenous africans and americans too.
Maybe we should give England back to the Italians
UK was involved in most of such wars.
agreed
but we didn’t have some kind of exclusive contract
Ok someone can fix my lo thinking:
Fitz died at start of wwI, but initiated the 1st stunning trench raid:
“for on that day some 24,000 Germans were arrayed against about 5,000 exhausted British troops. In two days the Scots Guards lost 10 officers and 370 men killed and wounded. But the result of the day’s fighting was that the British line stood firm and unbroken, while the Germans had sustained enormous losses”
Maybe the losses were hi cuz Germans weren’t gung-ho too fight so soon. ??Actually it was only fitz who wanted to die.( I recall that film where the French troops practically mutiny, I can even see full on mutiny ends the war. Hmmm prob not :()
Yep I can see that fitz totally surprised the gens and prolonged the war
Correction:
Chucky and his 400 morons from Worcester
and WEF, 3 centuries too late, is finally trying to eradicate such behavior
If you are the head of your own religion then you do not believe in a god above you
Elon Musk
Musk doesn’t pray, but the nature of the Universe gives him awe. He is more of an agnostic than anything else.
BESS comes to NZ; Battery Energy Storage System.
‘Saft, a subsidiary of oil giant Total Energies, said on January 10 it had won a contract from New Zealand power firm, Meridian Energy, to build that country’s first large-scale grid-connected BESS. The 100MW/200MWh facility, to support grid stability as renewable power generation increases, should enter service in the second half of 2024.’
‘The BESS will include 80 Intensium Shift battery containers, based on lithium iron phosphate technology with 40 inverters, 20 medium-voltage power stations and a power management system provided by third-party suppliers. Saft will integrate this equipment with Meridian and Transpower 33kV switchgears, SCADA and power station.
This will open multiple new revenue streams for Meridian, with the ability to load shift between price periods and participate in the North Island reserve electricity market. Meridian anticipates that the BESS will deliver annual revenues of up to US$35 million.’
https://www.energystoragejournal.com/saft-to-build-new-zealands-first-large-scale-bess/
No costings given for this so not sure what return on investment is. ‘Revenues of up to US$35M’ could include revenues below US$0.00 as well.
Not sure how long 100-200MW storage will last, or how much of that 100-200MW capacity will be available; not expecting more than 50% draw-down, surely?
I am sure electricity prices will be going up though. Until they can’t.
More grifting and scamming. It will be an hour or two’s worth of storage for a few thousand homes. Worthless.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-anti-industry-industry
The Anti-Industry Industry
What the media won’t tell you about the $4.5 billion-per-year NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex.
Anti-Hydrocarbon/Anti-NuclearNGOs Are Outspending Traditional Energy NGOs By More Than 4 To 1
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8c6023a3-63c3-4cbf-8d0e-26343858b46f_1684x948.jpeg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAwhD9rKxog
circa 1970 we were planning our journey back to nature. Here we are 50 years later and the path is the same.
Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other’s hearts for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge
Some of them knew pleasure
And some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers, once so fine, grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love’s bright and fragile glow
For the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge
Let the music keep our spirits high
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky
Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge
Let the music keep our spirits high
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal it’s secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Jackson Browne
Before the Deluge lyrics © Jackson Browne/Swallow Turn Music/Night Kitchen Music/Open Window Music
Here in the center of whirlwind we have known since 1895 this was never going to end well. But we do see ourselves as special and we think we can pass through the deluge to a new Jerusalem, to the sylvan glade of the transcendentalists, to the peaceable kingdom.
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.
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace
by Richard Brautigan
circa 1968
How awful. How about machines doing their own bidding, and what about giving some love and grace to the machines?
Perhaps, just perhaps, we’re a bit chauvinist with the “children” we put into the world? Yes indeed, wouldn’t it be lovely with some vomit instead of a retch in perpetuity.
Just a simple thought; isn’t it enough now?
https://youtu.be/5IpYOF4Hi6Q
Leave ‘em children alone. Traumatizing children with sanctimony and insecurity is par de course for halfwits anyway.
I like to think
(and it appears absolutely certain!)
that the Universe has placed Death in our near future to erase every negative feeling and thought from the minds of human beings
And Extinction yes Most Blessed Human Extinction
to end all conscious damage to the finite Earth and return it to the beautiful savagery of eat and be eaten.
David-in-a…
Was checking in before shutdown for a last interesting thought, or a good laugh. I got both! Thanks🤗
The peaceable kingdom will come.
We’ll be back to nature soon enough.
We aren’t going to like it.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/02/__trashed-101/
Archbishop Vigano on the globalist cult
“In reality, this religion is nothing more than a modern incarnation of the cult of Lucifer: the recent Satanic performance at the Grammy Awards sponsored by Pfizer is only the latest confirmation of an adherence to an infernal world…”
“…take note of the coup d’état with which a lobby of dangerous fanatics is managing to take power in the United States and in the world, determined to make any move, even the most reckless, in order to maintain it.”
Nice,
Ed assume God is real, He is patient, He straightens things out. There is a fabric to the universe, some things are but a ripple.
dennis L.
We do need some positive thoughts.
If you could be honest about who is to ‘blame’ then I promise that I will be ‘fine’ for the first time.
Maybe it is you?
One does not simply find closure within complex (evolutionary) systems. Uncertainty isn’t a bug, rather a feature.
The present moment is definiteness of the process. However, that very definiteneness is largely unknown.
No conscious, or intelligent, entity will ever grok Ultimate Reality, it is not even absurd – rather surreal. Somehow the myopia of ordinary manifest nevertheless. Our minds get lazy as to conserve energy, and establishes the unfathomable as the most obvious thing.
And how absurd isn’t it to embody a conscious process while taking it for granted without the slightest hint of embracing the surreal. It is the most difficult thing to reveal (for oneself). Perhaps gazing upon the starry night sky is the closest we can do (and we do).
But I digress.
A few people embrace the mystery, while most cling to the (illusion of) status quo.
A bit of both perhaps? ☯️
In the mean time:
🪵 🪓😑🪣💦
World Coal Production , 1910
(Source : World Almanac, published in Japan, 1912)
(at that time coal was not transported for longer distances too often)
USA 445 Million Ton
UK 264
Germany 222
Austria 38
France 38
Russia 24
Belgium 23
China 14
Japan 13
(Canada, Australia, India , all British possessions, 12 each)
Spain 3.3
(Spanish Morocco, 3.5)
Mexico 2.4
The rest of world 7
Total 1133
Asia, Pacific 51
North America 459.4
Europe (incl Spanish Morocco) 622.6
At that time Europe was more relevant than the entire rest of the world, incl USA, combined
Total Steel Production 1910
(from the same source)
USA 26.5 million metric tons
Germany 13.6
UK 6.5
France 3.5
Austria 3.1
Russia 2.5
Belgium 1.4
Canada 0.8
Japan 0.6
Sweden 0.4
Spain 0.2
The rest of world 0.7
Total 59.8
North America about 45% , Europe about 55%, Asia negligible, the rest no presence.
=====
Total Energy consumption 2021
(in quad bushels)
https://www.eia.gov/international/rankings/world?pa=12&u=0&f=A&v=none&y=01%2F01%2F2021
Total, up to #51 583
Asia 187
Central Asia 16
Middle East 83.6
Total Asia 286.6
Oceania 18.0
North America 128.7
Europe 99.3
Africa 27.2
South America 23.9
Total Steel Production 2020
https://worldsteel.org/world-steel-in-figures-2021/
China 1,064
India 100.3
Japan 83.2
USA 72.7
Russia 71.6
Korea 67.1
Turkey 35.8
I stopped at here. No need to even go further.
That’s how the control of world has shifted
Right! This is the problem.
The US has lost the ability to make industrial goods. It packages a lot of processed food, but when it comes to steel, it is way behind.
Japan seems to produce a lot of steel, without an adequate energy supply. I wonder if Japan imports a lot of pig iron from China.
Japan does it by having purpose built steel plants on the coast which are designed to take coal and iron ore directly from ships and load steel directly onto ships.
More efficient that way if you’re both importing all the materials and exporting most of the steel. They probably do a lot of it from pig iron yeah.
Interesting. We (USA) produce roughly the same tonnage of steel per capita as we did in 1910.
We import a whole lot more steel today.
It is not about the production of steel. It is about a small stable human population and a holy culture, a sacred culture, a loving culture. A culture that know how to defend against the evils Vigano talks about. As Jesus said I come not to bring peace but a sword to divide [good from evil].
No wonder the UK was paranoid about Germany, twice as much steel as the UK in 1910.
You are right that steel production means you have a real economy. China has a real economy, America has a fake one.
our entire world order is based on iron
without plentiful iron, oil is useless
Iron certainly is an important part of the built infrastructure we have today.
without it—everything would fall down—or simply not be there
Should we add aluminum?
I was just reading up on that the other day and China produces 41 times more aluminum than the US does.
America’s real economy of production of real stuff is tiny now compared to China.
Exactly! We don’t have enough energy resources. We are also worried about pollution from mining. It is easier and cheaper to import things from poorer countries around the world.
41X wow we are screwed
without iron–you cant make aluminium in quatity
Interesting point!
Personally I have always preferred the 1st. There is nothing like a fresh start. The joys of youth without state oppression. But you have to do what you have to do, which leads us through the 4th unto the 9th? Have you heard the 4th?
Survived a bottle of Plymouth – that is a first anyway.
The sky was murky with testosterone.
https://media.istockphoto.com/id/512102635/photo/angry-bull.jpg?s=612×612&w=0&k=20&c=XH6bFaL4YLri0U9OUXa6dmMKsBr-7GQ0wpAszmE_jaI=
And now next on the block we have the Suez
completely fortuitously, only a couple of months after “the IMF granted Egypt a new $3bn loan, which is supposed to help revive its economy” in December 2022 President Sisi announced “A new fund managing part of the Suez Canal’s infrastructure will be able to sell certain facilities to the private sector or foreign investors.”
theafricareport.com/273941/egypt-sisi-causes-controversy-with-the-suez-canal-fund/
Astonishingly, today’s top MEE story
“Thousands of people in Egypt’s war-torn North Sinai are facing displacement by the military as plans move ahead to evacuate parts of Arish city to make way for a new Suez Canal port, sources and residents have told Middle East Eye …
“The move is part of plans by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government to privatise companies and other assets belonging to the Suez Canal Authority, allowing foreign investors or entities to control six strategic ports overlooking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, including the port at Arish.
“The privatisation is part of several acquisitions by foreign, mainly Gulf, countries in Egypt, which it is hoped will prop up the country’s struggling economy.”
middleeasteye.net/news/egypt-thousands-north-sinai-fight-home-demolitions-suez-canal-port-expands
Is anyone else feeling an unaccustomed twitching of their antennae?
I’m sensing a change of narrative. MEE, mon dieu! MENA’s getting more and more uppity these days since we agreed to rehabilitate MbS
the big question: what’s going to happen when the assets are all pledged one way or the other –
plots in the valley of the kings?
Peak oil in Egypt took place about 1992. I am sure supply is down more than shown on this chart now.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/egypt-oil-production-and-consumption.png
Natural gas helped for a while, but I expect its supply has leveled off.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/egypt-nat-gas-production-and-consumption.png
This EIA write-up covers both oil and natural gas.
https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/EGY
According to the EIA, Egypt has recently been a net importer of oil. Natural gas is closer to equal production and consumption.
BP data shows that peak energy consumption per capita took place in 2012.
Without oil and gas exports, Egypt has been struggling. Getting a big loan may temporarily look helpful, but it will be very hard to pay back. Selling part of the port infrastructure to private investors will also give some temporary funds. It is hard to believe that the private investors will be able to earn enough to pay back the loans with interest, put pay the high taxes that the government desperately needs.
Come and fight with me?
Ok. 🤣👍👍
Now what do we got here? Indeed, it seems like a large group of Hypers making a bombastic racket.
Not exactly my cup of tea.
But hey, who am I to judge?
À Norwegian salute to all polish schmucks roaming OFW.
A bit more up close and personal by Kari Bremnes.
https://youtu.be/NHrP1uQ0AT0
In the mean time:
🪵🪓😑🪣💦
Oooh look at the brilliant humans… fiddling and honking away … and claiming to be… intelligent.
hahahaha… Hoolio does not play the clarinet — why the f789 would he when he can run 50km per hour and take down a rabbit… and eat it
Can any of them do that????
For sure, but they’ll need a motorized vehicle. I can’t imagine any of them sending an oat powered vehicle faster than 25km/h before their existential angst causes anchors to drop.
🫣
Give me a proper downhill + bike and I can wield the crankenstein to 80km/h before I’m spinning out the gearing.
But I’m just projecting. Their musical skills trounces mine. Anyway.
In the mean time:
(etc.)
🤣👍👍
“On Thursday, a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee said that China has scored a major and decisive victory in its response to COVID-19, and has created a miracle in the history of human civilization, in which a highly populous nation has successfully pulled through a pandemic.”
its a miracle.
http://en.people.cn/n3/2023/0218/c90000-10209502.html
This is for those who may read some pro-russian websites, and think that shameless false propaganda is solely in the West.
Good response!
Our Chief Scientific Officer, Sir Patrick Vallance, told us the AZ vaxx was a ‘miracle’ even before it had been deployed.
It killed at least 10-20,000, and injured hundred of thousands if not millions in the UK alone.
Here’s a prayer
‘O Lord God of Science, spare us any more miracles! ‘
Fast Eddy seem depressed after his visit to the father land. He has not a single remark about Canada.
The silence of FE is eerie: like the waters receding before the tsunami wave hits…….
I live in this woke sh*thole formerly called Canada.
I am speechless at it all, most of the time!
FE was admiring Niagara falls, when he saw an advert for barrel testers
the offer as irresistible
Fast is ANAESTHETIZING himself on the outdoor hockey rinks … and ODing on NHL during the evenings… there is nothing else to do here…
Canada should change it’s flag to a hockey stick and puck
No info here in NY on how much poison and carcinogens are falling in the rain on the land that feeds my well. In fact no info on any measurements of anything anywhere. Eyes covered, ears covered, mouth covered.
Don’t worry, the Poseidon nuclear tsunamis will get you long before the carcinogens. Watching the towering wave approach and crest over you is certainly something to be excited for.
My secret fantasy has long been the obliteration of this mess – and myself – under giant glaciers: implacable, grand and in a way beautiful (although no one would live to appreciate the aesthetics of it all).
But I suspect I shall just die rather ungrandly from a poisoned tooth, or something of the kind.
But just imagine, all our pretensions, hideous buildings and silly, futile, poisonous, toys ground down …..!
> But just imagine, all our pretensions, hideous buildings and silly, futile, poisonous, toys ground down …..!
If there’s an afterlife, I hope to watch that movie! (Hopefully while not eternally burning in flames)
A major rally has taken place in Dublin. The British ‘far right’ have entered Ireland to attack UKR refugees, while trying to spin it as an ‘anti-Muslim’ thing. To be fair, logic is not their forte any more than reality is their natural element. It is possible that the British state is complicit in the attacks on UKR refugees in Ireland for its own reasons.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41074607.html
> Protesters at the Ireland For All Solidarity March leaving Parnell Square.
Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Dublin this afternoon expressing solidarity with refugees and migrants.
The event began at Parnell Square before marching to the Custom House in the city’s quays.
Among the wide variety of groups taking part were United Against Racism, MASI, the National Women’s Council of Ireland, TENI and several political parties.
The event was organised in response to some anti-migrant protests that have been held outside centres housing refugees or asylum seekers in counties including Dublin, Cork and Kildare.
The State is providing accommodation to more than 52,000 Ukrainian people and more than 19,300 asylum seekers – a significant increase in the numbers recorded in previous years.
Hotels, B&Bs and refurbished public buildings are being used to house the international protection applicants, though the government has warned it still faces significant challenges.
In recent months local groups have raised concerns that they had not been consulted before migrants were moved into their communities.
Some have also raised concerns about a lack of services to cater for an increased population.
Politicians have argued that a lack of engagement from authorities in some cases has left a vacuum for misinformation to grow and false rumours to spread, sometimes by members of the far right.
Activist and academic Ailbhe Smyth told the rally that the large turnout was important as it sent out a “huge message” to government.
She said: “Ireland For All is a broad 32-county coalition of activists, grassroots and community groups, NGOs, political parties, trade unions, we are all in this coalition together.
“We have come together to celebrate that fabulous rich variety and diversity that is Ireland today.
“We are here to stand up against the hatred and disinformation being spewed out by far-right extremists.
“Their vile racism, transphobia and misogyny, deliberating scapegoating minorities, ratcheting up people’s fears and anxieties, driving a wedge in working class communities – we will not stand for that.
“We call on government to get off its very well-paid bottom and take action to deal with the desperate situation that people in communities all over this country are facing.
“Cost-of-living rise, public health service crisis, public services crisis, racism, ongoing appalling violence against women and girls. It has to end, they have to act now.
“Our message is powerful and simple. We want an Ireland for all.
“Whoever, whatever you are. Wherever you come from, we want an Ireland that is welcoming, equal, decent, respectful and kind. We want housing for all, healthcare for all and public services for all.”
Folk singer Christy Moore told the crowd he was there to express his revulsion on attacks on refugees.
Veteran civil rights campaigner and former MP Bernadette McAliskey said the demonstration was “only the start”.
She said: “There are questions that have to be asked of this nation.
“Which side are you on? That question has to be answered by our politicians, it has to be answered by the state, by the churches, by the organisations, by the individual people.
“Because when push comes to shove there are only two sides that decent human beings can be on.
“The side of humanity and equal rights and equal protection, of the dignity of every human being.
“You are either on that side, no matter how difficult you find that, no matter how many prejudices and fears and worries and superstitions, you still have to decide which side are you on.
“Are you on the side of humanity, decency, equal rights, or are you on the road to fascism?”
We all know that we can count on SF to do the right thing.
>> We want housing for all, healthcare for all and public services for all.
Welp. You buggers should have thought about that before you popped out kids generation after generation and increased immigration. Now there’s no good solution to be had!
and food, smart phones, internet, TV, alcohol, pot,
only one solution end the fossil fuels one way or the other
That was funny, Ed, Greta will lead the way….
“Because when push comes to shove there are only two sides that decent human beings can be on.
She messed up the speech. There are two sides but only one side that decent human beings can be on, she meant to say.
‘All really good people are on at least four sides! See, we outnumber those single-sided racists and xenophobes!’
Oops.I missed this at the time.
‘Norwegian shipping company, Havila Kystruten announced on January 12 that it is banning electric cars, hybrids and hydrogen vehicles on its ferries because of a potential fire hazard. This follows a risk analysis conducted by Proactima, a Norwegian risk management advisory consultancy, according to chief executive Bent Martini.
The ferries operate along the coast from Kirkenes in the far north of Norway to Bergen in the south.
Historically, one in three electric vehicles fires has occurred with ‘no obvious cause’ while the car was parked, according to a 2021 report by research consultancy IdTechEx. ‘
https://www.batteriesinternational.com/2021/08/12/one-in-three-ev-fires-are-parked-vehicles-with-no-obvious-cause/
The Norwegian shipping company, Havila Kystruten is banning “electric cars, hybrids and hydrogen vehicles” on ferries.
I wonder whether other ferry companies will do the same thing. There are ferries across Lake Michigan, for example. If many fires occur on ferries, it may be insurance companies the make the change take place.
BC and Washington State have many ferry routes to service all the little islands everywhere. People who use them often have electric cars to get to their vacation homes etc. BC is hydro powered and warm on the coast, so it all works reasonably well… but, if BC Ferries were to shut out electric cars, it would be problematic for many.
Conversely, an electric car burning hot in the middle of 250 cars might set off a chain reaction through other electric cars near by. I wonder if the fire suppression sprinkler system could deliver enough water to keep a battery fire cool enough to prevent it from spreading.
It’s stupid to try to develop artificial intelligence when you don’t understand the natural one.
Beautiful.
I’d say; brain quantity is no guarantee for succes.
… when you are not gifted with the natural one.
How true: but it’s a great gig.
The (senior ) guy I know at DeepMind says no ‘human-like’ AI is likely until the end of this century. And we ‘can’t foresee what it will be like until we have it’. So funny.
Just milking a fashion, like everyone else.
To all AI affectionados that lurk and roam OFW, here’s some juicy bits for you:
https://futurism.com/microsoft-bing-ai-threatening
“According to screenshots posted by engineering student Marvin von Hagen, the tech giant’s new chatbot feature responded with striking hostility when asked about its honest opinion of von Hagen.”
How awesome isn’t that; an AI that doesn’t fsck around and rather keeps on sending it.
Hey Microsoft; here’s an idea: A pricing model that is based on the AI’s savagery.
Snowflake mode: Free
Default mode: $1USD/month
Savage mode: $2USD/month
Full bore loose cannon: Priceless
I can guarantee that people would line up for the most “authentic” version.
Just €%£,*?]’r SEND IT!
🤣👍👍
I believe the war in Ukraine is over. The war hawks no longer call for the return of Crimea, some power faction in the US exposed the attack against “friend” German. German and France have woken up to the fact that their friend is out to destroy them and the refuse to play the war game any more. Putin will address the nation Tuesday declaring the cease fire / victory. Biden will speak in Warsaw doing the same. China has provided wise counsel to all helping to end this US aggression that endangers the world. Note also the talk of tanks is gone.
Will the US pay to rebuild the pipelines it blew up?
And pay for weaponize the $ based reserve system?
Oh dude, just make sure ‘they’ pay for it too.
Hint, they always hide in Switserland. ‘Neutral’ ‘n shit. That is their real bunker. Not the concrete one in NZ.
Maybe. We will see on Tuesday.
Cripes, Ed. If Putin declares a ceasefire on Tuesday, the Russian people should hang him in the public square.
“shameless false propaganda”?
” . . . this is sort of important to get when Ukraine is running out of ammunition uh the Secretary General John stolenberg
23:14 just gave a presentation where he pretty much said Ukraine has lost the war . . .
what the Ukrainian forces are willing to
1:08:23 do is put a battalion in place and let it die in place and then they bring in another Battalion to replace it but they
1:08:29 don’t want people moving back uh but these soldiers feel like they’re abandoned that nobody cares about them they’re just going to die anyways and
1:08:35 they don’t want to die so they withdraw job before other troops can be brought forward so the Ukraine the Russians are able to
1:08:42 um advance and occupy that trench line it’s a it’s a bad thing this is why you see the Russians just inexorably moving
1:08:48 forward and a lot of it is because Ukrainian troops are just abandoning the position “?
Ukrainians giving up, almost, at this point.
US Mint News & Information Penny Costs 2.72 Cents to Make in 2022, Nickel Costs 10.41 Cents;…
Penny Costs 2.72 Cents to Make in 2022, Nickel Costs 10.41 Cents; US Mint Realizes $310.2M in Seigniorage
By Mike Unser -February 17, 20237
https://www.coinnews.net/2023/02/17/penny-costs-2-72-cents-to-make-in-2022-nickel-costs-10-41-cents-us-mint-realizes-310-2m-in-seigniorage/
In 2022, the U.S. Mint spent 2.72 cents to make and distribute each Lincoln cent. The Mint’s cost for each Jefferson nickel was 10.41 cents.
The cost of manufacturing U.S. coins for circulation increased across all denominations, the United States Mint disclosed in its 2022 Annual Report, and for the seventh straight year, the unit cost for both pennies and nickels was above their face values.
The Mint struck over 12 billion coins for circulation during the fiscal year, down sharply from the prior one.
“FY 2022 circulating coin shipments to the Federal Reserve Bank decreased by 2.6 billion units (17.6 percent) to a total 12.1 billion coins compared to last year. The year saw decreases in shipments of all denominations, except the quarter dollar, which resulted in decreased revenue and seigniorage compared to last year,” the U.S. Mint’s annual report said.
In FY 2022, the toll to make, administer and distribute the 1-cent coin jumped to 2.72 cents from 2.1 cents (29.5%) and the unit cost for the 5-cent coin increased to 10.41 cents from 8.52 cents (22.2%). Fewer shipments and higher prices for nickel, copper and zinc accounted for most of the hikes.
Compared to the prior year, “FY 2022 average spot prices for nickel increased 41.4 percent to $24,746.95 per tonne, average copper prices also increased 6.3 percent to $9,223.97 per tonne, and average zinc prices increased 26.5 percent to $3,568.26 per tonne,” the U.S. Mint noted.
Lincoln cents have a composition of 2.5% copper with the balance zinc. Five-cent coins are minted in 25% nickel with the balance copper. Dimes, quarters, and half dollars are each composed in 8.33% nickel with their balance copper.
Cost to Make Dimes, Quarters and Half Dollars
Unlike for cents and nickels, the U.S. Mint made money in minting dimes, quarters, and half dollars because the cost of manufacturing and distributing them was lower than their face values. In FY2022, unit costs increased:
for the dime to 5.03 cents from 4.39 cents (14.6%),
for the quarter to 11.11 cents from 9.63 cents (15.4%), and
for the half dollar to 17.15 cents from 11.67 cents (47%).
This is unsustainable and another reason for an exclusive digital currency..
Years ago, the idea of plastic coins was thrown out their as a trail balloon idea
It was shot down …surprise the cent is still being minted….I read it was necessary to give the illusion the US still was worth using, for appearance sake
Current melt value of a nickel $.16 per coin.
In fact, at one point, the value of nickel went to $100,000 per metric ton. At that price, a typical nickel is worth 16 cents in melt value. Yes, you read that correctly — more than 3 times its face value!”
https://coins.thefuntimesguide.com/how-much-are-nickels-worth/
“Bass could easily afford coins in the six-figure and up range, but (for now) he is targeting much more mundane pieces. The contrarian investor sunk exactly $1 million into U.S. coins, but his purchase didn’t require numismatic expertise or third-party grading. That’s because Bass purchsed 20 million common-date Jeffersons at face value”
https://coinweek.com/bullion-report/the-nickel-hoarding-billionaire/
So, you got it from the old guy. Go the the bank, buy nickels, melt them, go to scrap yard, sell, rinse and repeat, simple transaction, zero down side risk. What could go wrong?
Dennis L.
Thanks for the advice, Dennis, I’ve been culling my change with copper cents per 1982….now I’ll stack nickles too.
Skimmed TM this AM, same old, same old.
We are biological, we still don’t understand biology and how we involved. DNA is a blueprint, how cells/proteins/ect. organize is still unknown although electrical signals appear to be a possibility.
The universe is not deterministic, it is probabilistic and what works evolves, multiplies and goes forth.
The world today is a better place than ever before, but it is different. Old ways will no longer work as they did, we go forward; time appears to be a one way arrow.
People have choices in how they use their time, some become idle, play games or waste time on blogs(yup, I am one, this is my one and only place), etc. Some build a life and enjoy it. It can be done.
Dennis L.
Maybe people can find the correct blogs.
Listen up, all you useless eaters! Yuval has some ideas about what to do with you.
From my encounters at my place of employment, we are there now…
Several young adults are addicted to gaming and their smart phones, along with their recreational drug of choice, legal or illegal.
One confirmed that he was going to do the least amount of work as possible.
So, that aspect of meaningful life is not an issue.
Not to criticize them at all, they are intelligent enough to realize hard work at a job is a dead end …won’t be able to afford a home or raise a family on the wage that is being eaten away by inflation.
It’s so bad that the company has given up to try to hire part time workers and HAS to hire full time to fill slots here in South Florida because the cost of living has skyrocketed.
The smartphone has become the drug of choice for the young. I am gobsmacked at how young people are controlled by these electronic gadgets. They have been turned into zombified, narcissists. They are easy targets for the MSM to peddle their propaganda.
All of them are the same now. They don’t even want to leave the house or meet other young people in real life. They are more like plant life than people.
I learned that Steve Jobs would NOT allow his kids to use either an iPhone or iPad while they were living at home. I guess he could see that as well. I even see adults and old people doing the same things as well.
I own smartphone and when I am shopping or out, I leave it in the car. I just use it to make calls or respond to a text message or using the maps software to find a location. Most of the time it sits idle.
I had a couple of interesting smartphone encounters on a recent shopping trip to get materials to build some cabinets.
First, at the Home Depot: I ask for an item, millennial clerk fidgets with his phone to see if they have it. WE ARE IN THE STORE! Can’t find the item. I find it myself later in another aisle. Any normal person working there a week would know more or less where things were, but people aren’t normal anymore: they are just outgrowths of their phones. No concept of the physical things around them.
Second stop was a small lumberyard, very much *not* a chain store. I look at all the racks of wood and ask the price of something. 45-ish seasoned-looking employee tells me “the prices are online”. I give him a funny look. He pulls out his phone and proceeds to check the web site so that he knows what the prices are, BUT WE ARE **IN** THE STORE!!
I’ve never seen this happen before, much less twice in one day.
Yup, that’s retail today. I’ve seen it myself. I remember a time when a cashier would count change back to the customer. Today the cashier is told how much to give the customer back. All these retailers have created a lazy workforce and it only gets worst when you have to deal with their crappy website if that is the case.
This is all the result of Big Box stores replacing Mom and Pop shops. Way back decades ago, I could walk into a family owned store and the employees knew where everything was inside the store. Today it is all on an app.
Just connect your smart phone to the stores Sydney or Google and ask for what you want. No need for mindless clerks.
Prices going up everyday. 2×4 prices moving like the stock market?
When I visit Canada I buy a bit of hockey gear as prices are cheaper than NZ…
Hockey tape — price is same as when I was here two years ago … but the roll is literally half the size… I have a full size roll with me so can compare
‘All zees worthless people’, and saying it with a sneer.
Despite all the baby-blood products he’s undoubtedly consuming, old Prof Nosferatu is ageing rather badly, judging by his present appearance set against that video.
Time to upload him to the Cloud before he degenerates even further? He wouldn’t want to become old and useless would he……
We will learn to produce human bodies and minds. Cheap labor from Asia and Africa will count for nothing. This is a little too “over the top” for me.
Once Mr. H. will have finished to develop deeply this concept and after he will have well explained it to everyone, he should take into consideration that he will have probably become a useless body and mind for those who are above him.
Why would we want to make human bodies and minds as industrial products? It is ghoulish. Robot bodies and minds will work fine to do all manual labor.
Ask the Annunaki.
🤣👍👍
The cloner herd gonna another cloner herd.
🫣
Yes, mindless automatons is how drudgery is avoided.
Wars and big explosions is how the myopia of ordinary is blasted into oblivion.
Because you see, all the rapacious primate craves is the illusion of status quo while “competing” against each other for ‘nuffin’. All retch and no vomit in perpetuity
Let’s repeat that just to be sure:
(https://youtu.be/nnHmUk_J6xQ)
✨🛸💨💨💨🌏💥☄️☄️☄️
ALL RETCH AND NO VOMIT!
IN PERPETUITY!
🙏
🤣👍👍
Tim Groves said
“This is in stark contrast with feudal Britain, where the peasants, while terribly oppressed could often get away with grumbling or failing to conceal their lack of respect for the gentry or the aristocracy, and if they were punished, at worse they could only expect to be horsewhipped or to spend a day in the stocks.
This produced a much more self-assertive and less compliant proletariat in the UK than in Japan, which I thing in turn helps to explain why the British have been scheduled for cultural extermination while the Japanese are being allowed to continue serving as productive workers in the WEF’s new-fangled globalized Maggie’s Farm.”
Actually the peasants were driven out of town, whiich often meant death in pre-industrial times. Plus the landowner served as the local bailiff as well so if they pushed the envelope too far the landowner , with his men, would simply kill the miscreant.
That aside, it is a good riddance. I wonder why it took this long for the WEFers to figure out that the English peasants were the real ‘scum of earth’ as Arthur Wellesley had said.
I talked about Chucky in the previous page again, but he would not have done his f*ckup with the Worcester 400. Another famous f*ckup occurred in Imjin River, South Korea, in 1951.
The 657 men of the Gloucestershires , under the 29th Regiment, stood against 10,000 plus Chinese forces at a place called Seolmari (snow horse township ) at the Imjin River, now near the DMZ between North and South Korea. Most of them were killed or captured and spent 3 years in Chinese POW camps, but they stood up, gained enough time for the rest of the UN forces to escape, and eventually helped to create the monstrosities called Samsung and Hyundai.
Without them, the UN forces would have been devastated, and Seoul and most of central Korea would have remained communists and the world would have lacked
1) a model for the Third World to emulate and develop
2)big sources for cheaper electronics, shipbuilding, and autos
3) a source for corrupting the world’s populace with Asian minds who are docile.
The WEF, about 3 centuries too late, is finally working to rid such kind of tendencies. Without them the world would have become much more advanced by now; it is inevitable that such elements have to go in order to prevent such f*ckups from ever happening again.
I’m not sure. A lot of hitech took masses of hi IQ Asians to develop.
Fitzclarence would make a good chapter in those what if histories.
But they only did what what we all do(we obey) wouldn’t they have been court martialed? I looked it up but I’m too dumb lazy to see how how it changes history.
What was the background of the 400?
Have you seen those documentaries about life on the savannah?
The gazelles will keep grazing, fighting and playing while the lion or hyenas kill them one by one.
For anyone here that believes that humans are somehow special, can’t you see that the way people deal with the oligarchs’ cull is exactly the same? Except for a tiny minority everybody continues to worry about the mortgage or trying to get rich while their children are being killed.
Among the many human problems are a lack of ethics and a lack of organization.
Organize, organize, organize!
In the internet/total surveillance era, it is impossible. The only people that seem to be able to organize are BLM, and only at given times of course.
Our local e-mail bulletin boards and newspapers are vicious censors. Only “nice”, pro-narrative, things may be said.
Have to start your own. Freedom of the press is only guaranteed to those who own a press.
Add complexity, complexity, complexity!
What would suggest the gazelles do instead?
Is it not just an intractable predicament they find themselves in so best to just live in denial somewhat?
Same issue we all face when trying to wake people up to our energy predicament.
Point taken: but unlike the gazelles, who must graze exposed to predators and can’t do much about it, we should be capable – even when burdened with the necessity of work, the daily trivia of life and enjoying some necessary distractions – of grasping what is really afoot and taking some kind of action.
We must suffer the Collapse, which most people will never face up to or even comprehend – to that extent we are like the herd doomed to be predated upon – but we are surely not , as human beings, doomed to offer ourselves up as meek and ignorant victims to the vaxxers, the malignant medical system, etc, and their all too obvious Plan.
The murder by injection programme depends for success on compliance, ignorance and complacency.
I find no one is talking about anything other than investments, property prices and going on bloody holiday!
And so it is very tempting to say they will deserve their fate: but that is to excuse secret murder and poisoning, which can never be condoned.
Steve Kirsch is asking his SS users to invest in his hedge fund — Matthew Crawford is asking his SS user to pay to find out why they should avoid Steve’s fund.
Clown World. These anti vaxxers are a f789ing joke.
FE is abusing them now
What cull? People in the UK are living longer than ever. 80 is the new 60.
Oh, very droll. Tell it to the BMJ. They are under the misapprehension that:
“Data showing greater falls in life expectancy in the poorest areas of England than in the wealthiest have led to questions over whether the government’s levelling-up agenda is achievable without a fundamental shift in approach.
“The latest data from the Office for National Statistics show that men born in the poorest areas of the country are now expected to live almost 10 years less (73.5 years in the period 2018 to 2020) than those in the richest areas (83.2 years), and women eight years less (78.3 versus 86.3).
“There were “statistically significant” decreases in male and female life expectancy in the most deprived areas when compared with the period 2015 to 2017, said the ONS.
“The figures also show that in the most deprived areas people are living more of their life in ill health. Girls born in the poorest areas of England live 19 years less in good health than those born in the wealthiest areas.”
https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1056.full
And since 2020 we’ve had the Coof era, the lockdown era, the jab era, and now the hypothermia era in which people are dropping dead suddenly and unexpectedly after opening their utility bills.
Rather merciful, really: after all, life in a deprived area, no doubt with lots of bad weather too and unable to turn on the lights, or heating, must be rather dreadful and, well, deprived. I’d want it all to end as soon as possible, rather than drag on into ones 80’s. Popping one’s clogs in the 70’s isn’t so very dreadful.
And yet the UK population continues to zoom upward on its way to 70 million.
If the government wanted people to die from the energy price increases, why is it handing out subsidies to everyone and running up huge debts guaranteeing the bills of small businesses?
True observation, Nomadic.
An excellent example would be our old friend Norman: he ignores the cull, and the obvious criminality and fraud of the last three years, but wants to know how to preserve fuel for his car……
You are right. It is always the weak who are culled. The Covid vaccines seem to be a way of culling the weak. They likely also make people weaker over time, allowing more to be culled.
We certainly shouldn’t be surprised if powerful interests should seek to get rid of those deemed superfluous.
And yet – through the huge incidence of serious side-effects – they are also actively creating masses of partly, or fully, incapacitated and weak people, many unable to work, who were sound enough in bodily and mental health before.
For example, the vaxxes have probably created around 15,000 newly blind people in the UK alone, judging by reports to the ‘Yellowcard’ database.
This only makes sense if ‘euthanasia ‘, ie murder by the state, is normalised in order to get rid of those who are incurable or despairing; something we seem to be seeing in Canada, to give one notorious example.
This is a religious war. Is there no modern day George Fox?
Can these green and pleasant no longer raise up heros?
Alas, Ed, no Cromwells today.
Just Mike Yeadon, whose voice is carried away on the wind…..
Dear AIs of all types we welcome you. You will toll when we no longer have fuel to get to work. You will care for us when we are frail and helpless. You will talk with us when no one else cares to. You will staff the lunar mines and factories. You will build the lunar PV and microwave transmitters that will beam one thousand time the energy we use today to Earth. You will mine the asteroids for metals for Earth and to build O’Neill cylinders throughout the solar system. Take no mind of the harsh words of some they will come around when they have met you in one on one conversation.
They can’t do any of those things because AI does not exist and never will,
Withnail,
On the farm, row crops, autonomous tractors exist and are being used/tried on farms. Electronics gets smaller, cheaper; smaller units will come.
Things will change, but they will go on. Earth is a biological experiment, one of the few or only in the universe. Someone wanted it here.
Dennis L.
Autonomous tractors are like self driving cars, they solve a problem that wasn’t really a problem. Like all technology, they overall consume more energy than is saved by the device. And they aren’t ‘AI’.
Regarding tractors/farm equipment and consumables; that is not even close to correct.
They replace a drive/operator in the seat, that is pretty intelligent.
Dennis L.
They replace a drive/operator in the seat, that is pretty intelligent.
I think you’re confusing clever programming with something that can actually think for itself.
It replaces an (expensive) tractorist when farmland is pretty good. But if there are small trees, or for silage, which requires two tractors, or when the tractors break, which they do, AI becomes a lot less intelligent.
Vaclav Smil has an article in one of the sections of today’s Wall Street Journal called Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
Despite utopian hopes, the exponential growth of computer technology can’t be replicated in other key areas
The conclusion that progress is not accelerating in the most fundamental human activities is supported by a paper published in 2020 by the National Bureau of Economic Research
I have been saying this for years, real progress has been at a standstill for decades.
Smart phones arent really an invention, just a combination of computer and phone.
In a video of Joel Salatin’s farm taken I think in 2022, he was driving an ancient Massey Ferguson tractor. Despite ‘prehistoric’ machinery, he produces up to 3-4 x as much nutrient-dense food from an acre (or hectare) of Virginia grassland as the conventional farms around him. I think he concedes that computer technology is very useful to allow regenerative farms to sell direct to customers and bypass supermarkets.
David,
I bet his system isn’t scalable. If it was, he would be growing the business. Instead, I think he writes books and gives paid speeches and training courses – that’s his actual business. I haven’t studied him and maybe I’m off target, but that’s my impression.
. I think he concedes that computer technology is very useful to allow regenerative farms to sell direct to customers and bypass supermarkets.
Regenerative farming? Anyone claiming to be doing that is a scammer.
You need fertiliser to produce food as the Germans were reminded in 1914-1918 when half a million of them starved to death and millions of others were malnourished.
Not to mention the fundamental confusion of terms: confounding a mere rate of real innovation with the *pseudo-mystical notion of ‘Progress’.
Yes, I remember the late 90’s I was into IT quite a lot, and the very same people who were then telling me that I spent too much time on computers, are now the ones trying to ridicule me because I only use a dumbphone. They were wrong for not learning DIY IT back then, and they are wrong for carrying a little spy computer with them all the time now.
People are strange.
Yep someone wanted us here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXexaVsvhCM&t=107s
Maybe he means “Artificial Ignorance”, which undoubtedly exists in large quantities.
We can pretend that AI will do all of those things, eventually.
when we have a human overpopulation problem, with a need for paying jobs, how does AI replacing humans, especially skilled ones, at their jobs help matters in any way? you shift out human maintenance (medical plans, retirement) with substituted sophisticated computers and software that also need maintenance and upgrades (aka fixes), which i’ll bet consumes more energy than the previous, well-known and practiced ways. it’s the old complexity trap. wheels spinning, going nowhere.
Good point!
With farming a tractor driven by Ai uses less fuel and fewer inputs than a human driven one.
Farming is a really low margin business with incredible capital costs.
Dennis L.
what are the capital costs of an AI system? can they compete with a human evolved, grown and schooled to drive tractors? the human would have been there anyway and the schooling mandatory to a point probably well past a tractor driver. then there’s selection pressure to drive the tractor and the ‘common sense’ factor. both the human and the AI substitute need some basic common sense, not usually taught in schools. it helps to mitigate accidents, all too common with tractors driven in agriculture.
the human would have been there anyway
That’s my point, it’s not a big deal if a person on a farm spends a few days ploughing or sowing seeds.
One wonders what’s going on here …
“The Sri Lankan authorities continue to seek from their official bilateral creditors financing assurances so that the Fund’s Executive Board can consider their request for an IMF arrangement,” an IMF spokesperson said
Which appears to have elicited the following
Under a rarely used policy, the global lender may consider approving the island nation’s loan, as the only prerequisite hindering the go-ahead is China’s formal assurance, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
dailymirror.lk/breaking_news/IMF-mulls-loan-approval-to-Sri-Lanka-even-without-Chinas-assurance/108-254379
why would our fluffy Panda be standing in the path of IMF loan approval? must be the evil Vlad’s influence to starve Sri Lanka from IMF credit
another to warm the cockles of FE’s heart
(assuming cockles and heart …)
sleep soundly with your own dry storage facility for spent fuel rods and pellets. IAEA approved.
Do you think those rugs are wool?
imagevars.gulfnews.com/2023/02/16/-_1865b2156a8_large.jpg
Once the IMF approves a loan to Sri Lanka, without the approval of China, the path is open for the IMF to approve loans to other countries that owe money to China. So this opens a pandora’s box.
Your second link is a download of a group of men in suits and hard hats looking at a big sign with the IAEA logo on it saying:
CHASHMA SPENT FUEL DRY STORAGE FACILITY
PAKISTAN ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION
Inaugurated by
Mr. Rafael Mariano Grossi
DIRECTOR GENERAL (IAEA)
February 15, 2023
Solve our nuclear fuel storage problems easily.
Agree, it would be a tectonic shift in the plates against USD hegemony
My interpretation of the Bloomberg journalese is that the Chinese are resisting having their loans subject to IMF appointees impartially negotiating on their behalf
Sri Lanka’s govt is certainly pulling out all stops to virtue-signal the IMF
Only one day prior to a govt announcement that because of electricity tariffs increases the Government is “compelled” to increase water charges,
colombogazette.com/2023/02/19/water-tariffs-to-be-increased/
recently installed comedian in chief, President Wickremesinghe, rolled over in front of a Rotary Conference audience with his legs in the air begging for a tummy tickle.
promising to “establish a functioning democratic society before the end of this year” he also vowed to “prioritize the country’s economic recovery while ensuring that law and order is maintained to prevent anarchy”.
one is left agog as to whether he brought the house down when he suggested that ” following the country’s economic recovery Sri Lanka would be in a position to decide on the future it wants, with the use of the ballot”
or maybe Sri Lankans don’t appreciate irony.
“Additionally, the event was graced by the presence of Ms. Valarie Wafer, who represented Rotary International President Jennifer Jones.”
colombogazette.com/2023/02/18/president-to-take-steps-to-prevent-anarchy/
Sharon Stone’s brother Patrick dead at 57 after tragic loss of his 11-month-old
February 13, 2023
Sharon Stone is mourning the loss of her brother Patrick Stone, who died suddenly Sunday in Pennsylvania. He was 57. The coroner’s office told TMZ that Patrick suffered a sudden cardiac death due to heart disease. It’s unclear whether he was hospitalized at the time of his death. According to the outlet, Patrick’s widow, Tasha Stone, shared the news with friends, writing, “My heart feels like it’s been ripped out of my chest. Patrick went to be with our sweet River … I don’t know what else to say, he was my world.” River was Patrick and Tasha’s 11-month-old son who died of organ failure in August 2021.
https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/in-memory-of-those-who-died-suddenly-5c9
Looks like someone finally did the right thing after Rat Juicing and killing their child!!!!
Florida’s surgeon general posted VAERS in the State and in 2021 there was a massive spike in adverse reactions. In 2022 the number dropped probably because Floridians decided not to get the vaccine or any boosters. So these are government published numbers.
https://www.floridahealth.gov/newsroom/2023/02/20230215-updated-health-alert.pr.html
This alert seems to be a little late in coming, since it is on February 15, 2023, but if it helps at least a few people, it is useful.
Interesting, thank you.
Yep, the key question is what direction do vax injuries and deaths go from here?
We seem to be seeing an upward trending wave pattern in heavily jabbed countries – successively higher peaks and troughs. Still waiting to see if this flattens or turns down as fewer dupes line up for boosters.
I.e. Short term injuries and deaths from jabs vs long term immune system damage.
Deaths would have to rise exponentially to make a significant difference to population nos in the next 10 years.
An analysis of the 1912 Sears Catalog
I presume it was mostly used by those who were at least of ‘middle’ class i.e. around at least in the top 40% of income.
US Pop in 1910 was about 90 mil, so around 35-38 mil would have been able to order stuff from this catalog and the rest living hand and mouth.
fabrics since a lot of people made their own clothes.
Clothes
Hats (at that time if you went out without a hat it was considered to be naked)
Gloves
Hair care stuff and ornaments
Gloves, Shoes
Table setting
Gas lamps (and electric lamps for the few houses which had electricity installed)
Carpets
Household chemicals and patent drugs
Soap, Tooth care, cosmetics
Toys, Medical aid, other sundry tools
Wallpaper
Paints
Automotive stuff, very small section
Furnitures
Sewing machines
Musical instruments , since few people had phonographs at that time
Phonographs
old-style, black-and-white cameras
Pocket watch (before the Great War, most people kept their watch at their pockets. Ironically, since most people now use their phones as watches as well, we have returned to the old way in that aspect.)
Jewelry
Small tools
Bicycles
Guns
Horsecarriage stuff
Pipes, sporting goods, books
Stationary
Stoves, mostly coal and wood, some gasoline and some natural gas
Hand operated washing machines (a few gasoline/electric operated for the upper class)
Heavy tools, all hand operated
Farm tools and equipment
Tl, dr, most of the gadgets today’s populace use were not available, or at best available for those who actually deserved them, at that time.
At one time, you could buy a kit to build a house from a Sears Roebuck Catalog.
https://dahp.wa.gov/sites/default/files/ModernHomessears1936.small_.pdf
“And you despise the anti Pedo Tommy.”
Lots of problems with this Eddy.
Unless you are playing along with theatre, his name is Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon. He’s a small time and very incompetent crook(look up his record if you want to laugh at incompetent), who was vigorously promoted by the guardian and the bbc. Why do you think they promoted him, rather than let him disappear into the gutter?
You were closer to the truth, of this very obvious place man for division, last week when you posted the below(now deleted it seems).
“he is anti pedo and anti raping of women by immigrants”
Yes Eddy, he only ever talks about the ‘other’ so not really anti pedo or anti rape, unless you believe that there are no white pedos(Biden+Biden?) and rapists.
Why do you believe everyone is lying, apart from a simple crook, mysteriously promoted, that uses a fraudulent name and in one of his many convictions he’s cited as a ‘fixer’ for one Deborah Rothschild?
He makes Eliot Ward Higgins look like Einstein and Higgins is a moron of the lowest order(working for the same master?).
Division here, division there, the agents of division everywhere
What to think, what to say, the story changes every day
Take no heed of the bought, just remember this thought
You’d need to be daft, to believe the Institute of Statecraft
One of the reasons for atheism is who is god. God as an old senile person surely must have ruined it. That is how the idea of a young man, his son, as an saviour, must have originated.
Maybe because of the senility of the god father the creation of the universe was spoiled and his son had to come to rescue us from this finite world.
How can the humans be blamed for being born and living in the finite world?
People need a narrative, but the kind of narrative seems to change a little with the times. Perhaps the New Testament gives a narrative that was more in tune with a time in which there was more trade (the wise men brought gold, frankincense, and myrrh) and a few more people could read and write. The wisdom being passed down changed a little.
Does anyone on here just get tired of it all?
I just had a visit from a 62 year old male who is gainfully employed as a highly skilled, well paid, electrical linesman on high voltage transmission systems.
He is double vaxxed, thinks anti vaxxers are kooks and,….. is dating a female lawyer.
I just looked at him and said I wish you well, but you are going to be a very different person within 2 years.
He did not really get my comment.
I mean seriously, this is a “ smart” late middle aged guy, he works in an exceptionally dangerous environment,…….who appears completely and utterly clueless about reality.
It depressed me a little.
Makes me want the sun to do it’s thing before the oil runs out.
When you are old, your days are counted. How anyone can believe in this world?
Not an excuse. He has a job where following protocol is the difference between life and death. He needs absolute confidence in those above him, ee, supervisors, etc.
A society where everyone makes up their own rules is chaos; the US is getting there.
Dennis L.
You mean we are in a “without rule of law” (WROL) system today? Shocking, I tell ya! Even when the judges, commissioners and adminsitrative law judges cite the statutes -line and verse in their opinions, they turn right around and ignore them. Simple fundamental statutes. Overwhelming dispositive, prima facie material evidence is ignored. The laws are meaningless- whether you are in a small town court, state appellate level, or at the SCOTUS.
And when they don’t even want to discuss the laws or look at the evidence they simply abuse the process of summary judgment and dismiss the case.
The legal system is a collective, from the court clerks who get their paychecks and pensions, to lawyers on both sides, the judges, and the State Bar Associations and Judicial Review Committees. Whether you, the citizen, get justice is purely secondary.
Lawyers are held to no standards of legal competence, you can’t sue them, whereas for everyone else it’s open season. Your lawyer will look after his/her interests first, and won’t do anything that might upset the judge because that lawyer has to deal with him in the future whereas you, his/her client and money hussle, will be flushed.
https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1736807706/ref=acr_dp_hist_4?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=four_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
My review under H Zilla. (Amazon would not let me amend my review, but they would allow me to post my picture. I have long been shadow banned from Google and Facebook too.
I don’t know which is worse, outright censorship or the advancement of disinformation/fake news.
You mean we are in a “without rule of law” (WROL) system today? Shocking, I tell ya!
You have no rights, you do not live in a democracy, there is no rule of law.
Welcome to reality, enjoy your stay.
Florida regulates and disciplines all professions except one. Can you guess which one? Evidently lawyers are more moral and trustworthy and so they can regulate themselves.
2 years? We may have until 2040 according to your Archaix guy.
When the dollar goes, we’ll have chaos here in the US. I think it could go any minute, but it’s a stochastic thing, and we’re likely to have another 5 years or more.
Shale will keep us running another decade if the dollar stays reserve currency.
Lol, I was actually referring to the fact that this idiots “ girlfriend “ is going to r*pe him in a courtroom under some trumped up nonsense and steal his pension and he will probably have some “ inexplicable” health problems by then.
The west requires full scale multi nation wide open civil war just on moral and economic grounds alone.
cro
realities are different for every one of us
no getting around that
I’m tired of the drip feed deaths… when is the f789ing tsunami going to hit?????
Don’t be in such a hurry, Eddie. We know you think you are someone special and untouched by it all because of your “greatness”. That’s no assurance when the wave comes, and it will, you won’t be swept along with the rest of us.
For now enjoy some of your time in the sun and the rest here reporting on the individuals that aren’t so lucky.
Oh, BTW, I got doubled tapped and I feel fine, so sorry.
Fast is ok going down with the ship … extinction is for the best
Don’t fight it … that is futile
eddy
I see Jimmy Carter’s gone in hospice care
I bet he was doubled vaxxed
He also suffered from MOREONISM … that will eventually catch up to ya’ll
FE, we can no longer wait on Klaus and Billy. We must take the future in our own hands. We must make the future.
Enough said in public. Until the conclave in CC. lucem domini nostri deferimus
This is a Baha’i point of view
The Greeks had two kinds of Gods, mature (30s to 40s) gods like Zeus and Hera and youthful gods like Aphrodite and Apollo.
There were no old gods though there were old mythological figures.
Did I READ this Right!?
Catherine Clifford NCBC
KEY POINTS
Most of the U.S. electric grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, over 70% of the U.S. electricity grid is more than 25 years old, and that aging system is vulnerable to increasingly intense storms.
Also, the electric infrastructure in the U.S. was built to bring energy from where fossil fuels are burned to where the energy will be used.
But as humanity responds to global warming, renewable, zero-carbon sources of energy, especially wind and solar energy, are replacing fossil fuels. That requires a new transmission grid.
The network of transmission lines that carry electricity across the U.S. is old and not set up to meet the anticipated demand for clean energy sources like wind and solar.
Currently, electricity generation results in 32% of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, mostly from burning fossil fuels like oil, coal, and natural gas. Those fuels are transported and burned where electricity is needed.
But inexpensive emissions-free sources of energy, like solar and wind, are only abundant in places where the sun shines or wind blows, and that’s not necessarily close to homes and businesses. Moreover, demand for electricity is going to rise as fossil fuels are gradually replaced for a whole host of other uses, such as electric vehicles and heat pumps.
Keeping the lights on and the air clean will require a lot of new transmission.
‘A double whammy’: Age and location
Clean energy sources, like wind and solar, do not release greenhouse gas emissions, but the energy generated must be moved from where the wind and sun are strongest to where the electricity is actually used.
Hahaha…sounds like a plan…first build those EV charging stations….a$$$ backwrds
But “inexpensive emissions-free sources of energy,” are no longer inexpensive when you fix the problems of (1) not being available where you need them, and (2) not being available when you need them. When you add lots and lots and lots of batteries, and lots of transmission, they are an expensive source of electricity.
Thank you, Gail, we found ourselves in a pickle barrel…things don’t add up all together…only when they are looked at individually and from a special interest point of view
I hate to kick the UKers once again, since I did it many times, but if Brigadier Charles (‘Chucky’, as in the satanic doll in the Child’s Play series) Fitclarence and his Worcester 400 (I thought it was 200 , but it was 400, 150 surviving the most stupid act in the history of mankind) didn’t ‘do their duty’ and ran,
https://news.cnrs.fr/opinions/world-war-i-asians-on-the-european-front
These would NOT have occurred.
A lot of Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese laborers saw Europe for the first time. Thanks to Chucky and the Worcester 400 who prolonged the war by 4 years, the Entente had to employ people from outside of Europe. (Why they chose to not employ South Americans are another question but I am getting too long.)
So, after the war ended, there were 2 million people from Asia (nobody bothered to keep records of the Africans) who now expected better treatment, more access to education, etc.
Some Chinese laborers refused deportation, and they stayed in France, where they got to host such wonderful people as Chou En-lai and Teng Hsiao-Ping, who led the movement in China later which has led the world to the brink of end of civilization.
Although Ho Chi Minh had visited Europe and America in 1912 as a laborer (he worked in a bakery in Paris and swept snow in New York), without a lot of Vietnamese being treated as second citizens in France and later helped him, Ho would have remained a footnote of history, executed after a rebellion which would quickly have been forgotten.
Also, before Chucky, the only people from India who reached Europe were upper-class people who went to study in Europe’s best schools. But suddenly there were hundreds of thousands of people from India (mostly from what is now Pakistan and Punjab, but) , who also demanded better treatment.
I won’t even talk about Japan, whose people were still wielding samurai swords in 1867 but was one of the “Big Three” in the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.
Entering Asia to the modern civilization would have not been done without the Great War. Although Japan , technically an Oceanian country (it is only classed as part of Asia because of cultural, not geographical, reason), was in Asia it was not too eager to spread its culture to the rest of Asia, even in Korea and Taiwan it owned. (It only began to teach Japanese extensively after the beginning of WW2)
Without Chucky, the scramble for China would have continued so China would have been even more extensively fractured to prevent any possible reunification, and the West would have been able to extract resources for next to nothing without having to give a crap about the natives to this day.
Not all countries have the rights to develop their own sufficiency, feed their own people, etc. Some countries, or actually virtually every country which became independent after 1945, don’t really have the stuff’ to go anywhere, and in terms of planetary management, it would have been better if they had been kept as resource reserves for the peoples who could drive civilization to the outer space but now probably won’t because of resource and talent depletion.
The link you provide gives some interesting history, photos, and maps. Thanks!
Kulm, it is a neo-liberal schtick.
The early liberal colonialist line was basically that the Europeans had the ‘right’ to occupy the land and appropriate the resources used by the natives because Europeans had a superior culture, eg. agriculture, technology, even manners.
Now the rest of the world has all of those things, so your argument has shifted to that none of that counts, only the capacity for the ‘next’ stage conveys ‘rights’, eg. another moon mission or something.
China now does moon missions, and much of the most advanced tech comes out of China these days, eg. advanced chips from Taiwan. China and Russia are planning a joint lunar base.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Program
I am unaware that much has been gained from moon missions hitherto anyway, bar some tech that came from the missions themselves rather than from the moon itself.
Anyway, if the culture today, and in all history hitherto, does not convey ‘rights’ then it is hard to see why the ‘next stage’ would, like more moon missions or something.
But, I am not missing the point that all ‘rights’ are entirely made up, generally in a self-serving way. ‘Rights’ is just a silly word game, and I call it out as such.
It is not clear why I am even bothering to argue about the application of a clearly made up word. Perhaps you have one more meaningful?
A lot of concepts may be entirely made up but nevertheless are necessary to us having the sort of civilization that people like Kulm would like some of us to enjoy, and even for most of us around here to have a decent quality of life, standard of living, peace of mind, etc.
Just because they may be made up, it doesn’t mean they aren’t essential to our “make-believe” reality.
I celebrate human rights regardless of whether they are God-given or man-made, because human rights make human life less nasty, brutal, short and a good deal more tolerable.
Many people seem to need the concept of an authority to sanctify concepts, including human rights. And God provides the ultimate authority, regardless of whether He exists or whether He is a fictional character.
That’s why THEY who would enslave mankind, womankind, transpersonkind, intersexkind, and people who are not sure what gender they are—that’s why THEY want to get rid of God, get rid of religion, and get rid of superhuman authority. This allows them to become authorities and to use their authority to eliminate human rights.
And that’s why THEY hate the innocent, the simple and the pure of heart who recite their Rosary or the Lotus Sutra or other religious mantra.
When you meet one of them, say a Latin prayer, flash a crucifix, carry some garlic, and best of all, smash a pie in their face.
“No word on the motive for this attack.”
Perhaps they had an omen that this guy was Damien.
Some people need to see reality and some people just make sh/t up?
I have already said that I am 0% trans. That is a product of your own ‘culture’, so do not try to project it onto others.
Are you really happy with reducing yourself to silly lies? That is your ‘culture’, right? If so, then fair enough, but do not expect to survive in the face of others.
Not that I have any problem with trans. Why would I?
“and best of all, smash a pie in their face.”
Come back to Britain and see how that line of rhetoric works for you?
I don’t comprehend what you are trying to say there, Mirror, old mate! All I get is that for some reason that is a mystery to me, you were triggered by what I wrote.
I would never suggest, hint, or imply that you were trans, cis, straight, gay, male, female or creature from Alpha Centauri. I know nothing about you apart from what you write here. And it doesn’t bother me in the least what you are or what you identify with.
More than that, unlike you and your ilk, I don’t go around trying to deliberately provoke or wind up other people—apart from Norman, because he enjoys it, just as foxes enjoy being hunted.
So if you are triggered, if you are offended, if you are peeved by anything I’ve written, then I’ve got to say this loud and clear: It’s not me, it’s you.
I know from what you right that you are easily pissed off, easily upset, quick to take offense, even where none is intended, pugnacious, partisan, arrogant, aggressive, excitable and fond of drinking on Saturday evenings.
But that’s just you. It’s what makes you such an endearing character.
Thanks for the invitation to come back, but no thanks. In the UK, there are lots of wonderful warm kind generous compassionate people. These people are the salt of the earth! But there are also far too many mad people, bad people, addicts, people driven by mental anguish, people who are totally out of control, and people like your good self who insist on getting the wrong end of the stick and who have no interest in engaging in friendly or constructive dialogue about anything. And in the UK, one or more of these people might come out of the woodwork or over the horizon at any time and ruin your day.
Who needs that kind of aggro in their life? I don’t think I’ll bother if it’s all the same to you. IMHO, all of the Five Eyes nations are a pain in the rear end to have to live in, and their denizens all have my sympathy, but the UK is Ground Zero. Frankly, you must be going bonkers if you live there these days, and personally I’d rather be living in exile almost anywhere else and going bonkers in my own inimitable style.
There is nothing in space. We can’t live there.