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In the post-World War II era, the US has been known for its hegemony–in other words, its leadership role in the world economy. According to one definition, hegemony is the political, economic, and military predominance of one state over other states. I believe that the US is not far from losing its hegemony. The conflict over future hegemony could lead to a major war.
Hegemony is surprisingly closely tied to leadership in energy consumption. A country with a high share of the world’s energy consumption doesn’t have to depend on imported goods and services from around the world. It can manufacture weapons of war, if it chooses, in as large quantities as it chooses, without waiting for outside suppliers.
One part of today’s problem is the fact that the world’s fossil fuel supply, particularly oil, is becoming depleted. Extraction is not rising sufficiently to keep up with population growth. In fact, total fossil fuel extraction may begin to fall in the near future. In some sense, the fossil fuel supply is no longer adequate to go around. To relieve the stress of inadequate supply, some inefficient users of energy need to have their fossil fuel consumption greatly reduced.
My analysis suggests that the US and some of its “Affiliates” tend to be inefficient users of fossil fuels. These countries are at great risk of having their consumption cut back. The result could be war, even nuclear war, as the US loses its hegemony. After such a war, the US could mostly be cut off from trade with Asian nations. In this post, I will elaborate further on these ideas.
[1] Hegemony is closely related to energy consumption because energy is what allows an economy to manufacture goods of all kinds, including armaments needed for war. The energy consumption of the US as a percentage of the world’s has been falling since 1970.
Data on energy consumption by part of the world is readily available only back to 1965, rather than 1945. Based on this data, US energy consumption as a percentage of the world’s total energy consumption has been falling since 1965.
Figure 1 shows that the US’s share of world energy consumption amounted to 33.3% of world’s energy supply in 1965, but only 15.6% in 2021. In other words, in 2021, the US’s share of world energy consumption in 2021 was less than half of its 1965 level.
There are some economies that have much in common with the US. The countries in this category are advanced economies that have democratic governments. I expect these countries would tend to follow the US’s lead, regardless of whether its actions really make sense. The selected economies are the EU, Japan, Canada, the UK, and Australia. For convenience, I call these countries Affiliates.
[2] Affiliates consumed over 35% of the world’s energy supply in the 1965 -1973 period, but this has fallen in recent years.
Figure 2 shows that Affiliates consumed 35.5% of the world’s energy supply in 1965. By 2021, their consumption fell to 17.6% of the world’s supply. This, too, is less than half of the 1965 percentage.
[3] The energy consumption of US plus Affiliates as compared to the energy consumption of Rest of the World has shifted remarkably since 1965. The consumption of the Rest of the World has been soaring, while that of US plus Affiliates has shrunk.
In Figure 3, I add together the amounts in Figures 1 and 2 and compare them to the indicated energy consumption of what is left, which I call, “Rest of the World.” It is clear that there has been a huge shift in which grouping consumes the majority of the world’s energy supply.
We all know that if a political party has the support of almost 70% of voters, it is likely to be dominant. There is a similar issue with energy consumption. Energy consumption is used in every aspect of the economy. It is important for manufacturing goods and transporting them to their destinations. It is also important for creating jobs that pay well.
If world energy supply is growing, it encourages growth of the world economy. Growing energy supply indirectly allows debt to be paid back with interest. In general, the faster the world’s energy supply is growing, the higher the interest rate that can be supported.
Without growth in energy supply, an individual economy is forced to become a service economy. It is forced to import almost all of the manufactured goods that it needs, even armaments needed for war. Such an economy is forced to place an emphasis on growing debt and growing complexity. Unfortunately, both of these things are subject to diminishing returns. As growth in energy supply turns to shrinkage in energy supply, we should expect debt bubbles to pop.
A country is likely to stop making advances in the sciences as it shifts to a service economy. This linked chart by Visual Capitalist analyzes patents in 2021 by the country of the individuals listed on the patent applications. On this basis, China’s patent count was more than double that of the US. China is also the major producer of many clean energy technologies because it has both the resources and the technology.
As a service economy, the US has tended to specialize in healthcare, with spending in this sector accounting for 18.3% of GDP. Yet the US’s healthcare results are dismal. US life expectancies have fallen behind those of other advanced countries. The recent covid vaccines, which were strongly advocated by US health authorities, worked far less well than had been hoped. In February 2022, the New York Times published an article, US Has Far Higher Covid Death Rate Than Other Wealthy Countries.
[4] US data shows that its energy consumption was rising rapidly in the 1949 to 1973 period. Such rapid growth in energy consumption would make other countries envious. It would tend to expand America’s hegemony.
Figure 4 shows how quickly US energy consumption was growing, starting in 1949, using EIA data. Energy consumption growth averaged 3.5% per year in the 1949 to 1973 period. This rapid growth is what we would expect of a country that was an energy leader for the rest of the world. Standards of living could rise. Parents could often afford to raise several children.
An article in the Oxford University Press says that the US’s proliferation of major military bases overseas was developed in the 1950s and 1960s to contain communism and to provide global defense of US interests. Such a huge build-out of bases during this period would not have been possible without the rapid ramp-up in US energy consumption.
Between 1960 and 1969, the number of miles of high-voltage long distance electricity transmission lines tripled. This was evidence of the rapid growth in electricity production that the US was achieving; it was a pattern that other countries would want to emulate. It added to the hegemony of the US.
Statista shows that between 1951 and 1973, the number of US automobile sales per year more than doubled, from 5.16 million to 11.42 million. With this increase came a need for more paved roads and more pipelines to carry oil products. With its growing energy consumption, the US was able to accomplish all this growth. Growing energy consumption also allowed the US to manufacture nearly all the vehicles sold in the US in this period.
[5] US hegemony faced a major challenge in 1970 when US oil production hit a peak and started to fall.
US crude oil production rose rapidly until 1970, when it suddenly started falling. Work was quickly begun on oil extraction from the North Slope of Alaska. This oil offset most of the decline in oil production from the lower 48 states through the mid-1980s.
US hegemony depends upon the quantity of energy products US businesses and citizens consume. When oil prices become unaffordable, citizens and businesses buy less. Figure 6 shows that oil prices had been amazingly low prior to 1973, averaging only $16.31 per barrel, even after adjusting for inflation to 2021 price levels.
Comparing Figure 6 to Figure 4, we see that once oil jumped up to an average of $73.14 per barrel in the 1973 to 1983 period, US energy consumption flattened out. At this high price, efficiency became more important. Smaller imported cars, often from Japan, became popular. The US and several other parts of the world started building nuclear power plants to replace electricity created by burning oil. Within a few years, oil production was ramped up in other parts of the world, such as the North Sea and Mexico, relieving the tightness in oil supply.
Once oil prices began to rise again in the 2005 to 2008 period, US oil from shale became available in response to higher prices. The catch was that at these higher prices, oil tended to be unaffordable by the American public. Oil was still affordable in most of the Rest of the World, however.
These “Rest of the World” countries tended to use oil much more sparingly in their energy mix. They often had other advantages as well: warmer climate, lower wage levels, recently built factories, and an energy mix that emphasized coal (which tended to be inexpensive). These advantages helped bring down costs of both manufacturing and resource extraction for the Rest of the World. The shift in energy consumption shown on Figure 3 could occur.
This shift in manufacturing and resource extraction away from the US and Affiliates creates problems, however. If the US and Affiliates are increasingly at odds with countries outside this group, it becomes much harder for the US to exert hegemony over these countries. The problem is that the US depends upon the countries it is at odds with for necessities. Even in making munitions for the Ukrainian conflict, the US needs to depend on China and other Asian countries for parts of its supply lines.
[6] The world economy is now headed for a bottleneck. The world economy is similar to a Ponzi Scheme, with growth in the output of goods and services necessary to fund financial promises of many kinds. There are limits to the amounts of fossil fuels available at affordable prices, and the world is hitting those limits now.
Because the world economy follows the laws of physics, the growth in the output of goods and services depends upon the continued growth in the production of energy products.
We have known for a very long time that fossil fuel output is limited. Back in 1957, Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover of the US Navy gave a speech warning that world-wide fossil fuel energy supplies were expected to become unaffordable between 2000 and 2050. High oil prices seem to have been a major factor underlying the Great Recession of 2008-2009. This especially affected the US, with its large amount of subprime housing debt. The problems experienced since late 2021 with spiking prices of oil and high prices of imported coal and natural gas are also evidence of the limits the world is reaching.
Figure 8 shows my view of where future world energy supply is headed. While this chart was originally prepared in 2020, the forecast still seems to be reasonable, especially if regulators get their way in mandating the reduction of (unaffordable) fossil fuel use.
If energy consumption falls this rapidly, the world economy will have to adapt in many ways. Economies that cannot tolerate high oil and energy prices are likely to be squeezed out. Based on what already has been happening in Figures 1, 2, and 3, the United States and Europe are especially likely to be adversely affected. The countries that are likely to fare better are ones that don’t require as much energy per capita. These countries are likely to be in warm climates and have relatively poor populations, such as those in Southeast Asia.
As energy supplies fall, business failures and debt defaults can be expected to soar. Governments will be tempted to backstop every financial promise, including failed banks and pension plans. If they do this, other countries will be unwilling to trade using their debased currency. With too much money and few imports, the result is likely to be hyperinflation. If the governments simply allow bankruptcies to take place, the result is likely to be deflation as banks and businesses fail.
[7] The US has been having increasing difficulty in its hegemony role. Some countries have come to believe that the US is now acting unfairly.
Back when the US first attained hegemony, oil and other energy supplies were inexpensive and their supply was growing rapidly. The US was experiencing great economic growth, and other countries wanted the same sort of success. The US plus Affiliates were the ones using the majority of energy products, so the interests of almost all energy users were aligned.
Things have “gone downhill” since 1970 when the US oil supply first started to shrink (Figure 5). Suddenly, the US needed help from the financial system to work around the need to import more oil. One change (in August 1971) was making the dollar a fiat currency, rather than tied to a gold standard. This enabled greater use of debt in operating the economy.
Without the gold standard, the US dollar was able to become the world’s reserve currency. Instead of gold reserves, other countries began buying US Treasuries, which they considered to be a safe store of their money. The US dollar could also play a greater role in financing international transactions. A 2021 analysis by the Federal Reserve shows the dominance of the US dollar in many areas of trade.
This dominant role for the US dollar is now being questioned after the US froze the central bank assets of Russia, as part of the sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Other countries are beginning to wonder if holding Treasuries is really a good idea, if the US can impose sanctions which make them unavailable. Countries are also figuring out that it is quite possible to arrange sales of commodities and other goods in currencies other than the US dollar.
Also, the US’s ability to win wars is not very clear. The US’s first big loss was the Vietnam War. After 20 years of fighting, that war ended in 1975, with communist forces seizing control of South Vietnam. The Afghanistan War did not go well either. After 20 years, the US abruptly pulled out. While the US claims the mission was accomplished, it is hard to see that the high cost was justified.
The Russia-Ukraine conflict does not appear to be going well for Ukraine and the allies supporting Ukraine. The US and NATO are having difficulty supplying as many armaments as quickly as President Zelensky would like. Ukraine seems to be using up its conventional weapons very rapidly. Neither the US nor other NATO countries can manufacture weapons very quickly, in part because supply lines from around the world are required. How helpful is the US’s hegemony, if the US can’t even easily win a “proxy war” in Ukraine?
There are sanctions, other than freezing assets, that are of concern to other countries. A recent list from a Chinese source lists the following types of hegemony that it considers to be problematic.
- Political hegemony – Throwing the US’s weight around
- Military hegemony – Wanton use of force
- Economic hegemony – Looting and exploitation
- Technological hegemony – Monopoly and suppression
- Cultural hegemony – Spreading false narratives
Quite a few countries in my Rest of the World grouping are clearly getting fed up with America’s hegemony. Increasingly, Middle Eastern countries that were previously at odds with each other are setting aside their differences. They are also becoming much more closely aligned with China. Countries in this group, as well as the BRICS group of countries, are already taking steps toward trading in currencies other than the US dollar.
[8] The path ahead looks very bumpy. The US is likely to be kicked out of its role as global hegemon. Rival countries may choose to attack the US with nuclear weapons, or the US may lash out with nuclear weapons as it sees its hegemony fail.
As I analyze the world economy’s future trajectory, I see the following situations falling into place:
(a) The world economy is being stressed by inadequate energy supplies. When prices rise, it tends to cause inflation. Some countries are experiencing a second kind of stress, as well. Their central banks have raised interest rates. This is a dangerous thing to do because it tends to cause falling asset prices in addition to slowing the economy.
I expect that countries that have recently raised interest rates will have many bank failures. Partly, this will come from the falling value of long-term bonds. In time, it will also come from failing real estate mortgages and other loans, since asset prices will tend to fall with higher interest rates. Governments will be tempted conduct massive bailouts. The countries that have recently raised interest rates include the US, the UK, Eurozone countries, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and Brazil.
Countries that did not raise interest rates, which seem to include China, India, and Iran, will find their economies less affected by bank failures. Russia temporarily raised interest rates, and then lowered them again, so Russia would also seem to be less affected by bank failures.
Countries that raised rates will be tempted to do bailouts of banks and of “too big to fail businesses.” These bailouts will greatly increase the monetary supply, making countries that didn’t raise interest rates unwilling to trade with them. This dynamic will tend to increase the trend toward two separate trading areas–one including much of Eurasia and one including the US, Canada, Europe and perhaps South America.
(b) If we think about it, cutting back greatly on trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific shipping would save a great deal of oil if there is not enough oil to go around. This will be another impetus for “Rest of the World” countries, especially those in the Asia-Pacific area, to cut back on shipping across the major oceans.
(c) With failing banks and a cutback in trade between regions, the US dollar will cease to be used as a reserve currency for a large part of the world. The US dollar might still be the reserve currency for some trades, particularly with other countries in the Americas.
(d) I expect that a block of countries will eventually coalesce, centered in Asia, that will mostly trade among themselves. China will probably be the leader of this block.
(e) The US and Europe will mostly be pushed off to the side, to trade among themselves and some geographically close neighbors. These areas may need to set up new financial systems using much less debt. These countries will not be able to produce advanced goods, such as computers, by themselves. They will not be able to build new solar electricity generation or new wind turbines because too much of the supply chain will be out of reach. While these countries have been looking at digital currencies, it is not clear that there will be a stable enough electricity supply to make such currencies possible.
(f) There will probably be war at the time of the division into the two (or perhaps more) trading areas. Nuclear weapons may be involved since there are many countries with nuclear weapons. The supply of conventional weapons available for warfare is depleted, with the ongoing war in Ukraine. According to a study done at Harvard, involving 16 cases in which a major rising power challenged an existing major power over the past 500 years, 12 cases ended in war. This analysis would suggest a 75% likelihood of war.
(g) I don’t know what the timing of all these things will be. Bank failures are just beginning. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the world economy holds together a while longer.
True as a plumb line again. Thanks Gail. Is there a way to listen to your articles on line? I remember you once had such a feature on this blog.
Yes, I think I can add this feature after I get the article up. I haven’t figured out how, however. I need to take time to figure that out.
The system used to prompt me to put the article on Spotify before it went up.
Stoopidity comes with a price – for some it’s a heart attack or stroke… or Turbo Cancer … for some this https://www.zerohedge.com/political/toronto-anti-capitalist-pay-when-you-can-cafe-shuts-down-after-just-one-year
The ageing od the populations and the creation and protection of the environment are the two main challenges of the humans.
These 2 challenges require higher and higher amounts of energy to solve. When the energy supply falls, the human environment and the humans disappear.
that’s the absolute beauty of mass die off.
afterwards, old aged humans will be very rare.
and the environment once again will support a small human population by its environmentally natural means of food production.
most traces of civilization will disappear, but hunter gatherers should have a good long go at scratching out a meager harsh existence.
most of human history has been lived under such harsh conditions.
it is actually the more normal human condition, as compared to the rarity of this awesome fantastic glorious bAU which we lucky ones keep experiencing day by day.
since the fabric of the evolving Universe allowed most past humans to live difficult lives, who are we to judge that it isn’t absolutely good and right that future humans will return to such difficult lives?
que sera sera.
Let us remind us this beautiful piece of music of 1985 from Czechoslovakia named All to Mars:
“and drink energy drink instead of coffee”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNb2LVqzqUI
Všechno na Mars
2005 lidi pohrdli Taxisem
2006 Chuchli potáhli nápisem
Koně už jsou nadbytečný
vstávejte z postelí
lidi v noci vystřelí
koně na Mars!
2005 všechny aleje káceli
2006 náhle pařezy zmizely
Lesy už jsou nadbytečný
vstávejte z postelí
lidi v noci vystřelí
stromy na Mars!
Všechno už máš na kolenou
a pod vodou měj si príma byt
V tabletě ber dovolenou
a místo kafe pij energit
Solo
Všechno už máš na kolenou
a pod vodou měj si príma byt
V tabletě ber dovolenou
a místo kafe pij energit
2005 Sláva začal věk robotů
2006 práce začla jít bez potu
lidi už jsou nadbytečný
vstávejte z postelí
Než nás robot vystřelí
všechny na Mars!
20 years ago, the son of the singer Dalibor Janda of the above song commited suicide
https://www.topky.sk/cl/1001053/2488571/Kruty-trest-pre-ceskeho-spevaka–Samovrazda-syna-
MG, first, thank you for your contributions of such and most thought provoking.
Personally, not much of a challenge in keeping the present day elderly alive because “we” (meaning anyone elderly, I’m 65 so included) lived during the ” sweet spot of human existence and enjoyed the tripling of the human hoard on the petri dish called Earth.
That’s a nice thought of protecting the environment, but as long as we keep higher and higher energy requirements…the two won’t be solved, only get worse. Uts a catch 22 dilemma…
PS BTW…just for thought would you recommend a retirement in Slovakia, your homeland, for an expatriate ?
I could get a dual citizenship and just wondering your thoughts.
Thank you in advance.
Dear Ted,
the biggest problem of Slovakia is falling accessibility of the healthcare.
As regards the food self-sufficiency, Slovakia is not self-sufficient, as agriculture lacks more support from the state.
There are core parts where industry, mostly car industry, is situated in the West. The central Slovakia is mostly depopulating, also the East, but there is the 2nd biggest town of Kosice in the Eastern Slovakia.
I have read an article about a British writer who moved to Eastern Slovakia for preppers reasons, published 10 years ago.
https://www.noviny.sk/veda-a-technika/110452-edward-o-toole-38-brit-sa-skryva-pred-koncom-sveta-na-slovensku
You can be too far from the healthcare in the depopulating areas. I must admit that Czech Republic seems to be a better option, as the healthcare is on a quite high level.
Thank you so much for this MG, most appreciated and must visit your beautiful country myself.
What if the tranny thing backfires and the trannies are seen as demons from hell.. and the Christians attack them? https://t.me/leaklive/14195
I say – that would be very entertaining!
I would call it a return to sanity.
That will happen. You going to witness a hard turn to extreme Judeo Christian values…..think Crusade and Inquisition level stuff.
Many will burn,….
I wonder if anyone will want to eat a tranny
“moss says:
May 14, 2023 at 2:42 am
Gentle commentariat, may I belabour again a serious perplexity concerning statistical mathematics
Over 100 yrs, event one 1929, 70 years to Y2K, then in a span of 20 years there were “THREE 3-sigma superbubbles in the U.S. That is statistically impossible assuming a normal distribution.”
Can someone give me a view as to whether this is gobblygook, please, or sound mathematics.
Gail kindly replies: The years are those when energy supply per capita was too low.
Normal distributions aren’t the way the world economy works.
Doesn’t this beg the question, what non-normal distributions are the way the world economy works? Random number? Entropic distribution?”
I’m sure your “statistical mathematics” is sound, but the problem is that you are trying to apply it to human behavior.
humans are constantly changing their behavior at the highest levels of global finance.
as an example, late Clinton era 1999/2000 the Glass/Steagall law was repealed to allow far more risky behavior on Wall Street.
there is no “normal distribution”.
if there was, then was the 3 in 20 years actually the normal distribution, and 1 in 100 years was a statistically low anomaly?
can’t say.
history happens once, with no normal distributions.
Philosophically I incline to the “no one knows the future” school which sets aside the ouija board completely.
I, too, believe history only happens once but in patterns which are characteristic of the enfolding energy dissipative structure
so trends may be apparent – but these will fluctuate and even cease in accordance with the rate of energy dissipation
When the energy runs dry the lights go out
Yes, humans are constantly changing their behaviour but I don’t believe this happens randomly
we want to burn more, faster
so in the financial world we see ever more consolidation, ever more leverage, ever more risk
until “pop”
Oh, and to answer yr question, reasonable algebra and arithmetic, even a bit of trig. Calculus long forgotten, statistics never broached
I would suggest “The Misbehaviour of Markets” by Benoit Mandlebrot….
Taleb’s ideas about risk were influenced by Mandlebrot….
Everything is fake. https://sagehana.substack.com/p/zombie-court-bob-malone-is-now-good/
Including James Okeefe’s wife’s boooobs????
Unfortunately this is one of those articles where unless you have the equivalent of a PhD in the subject, it is very difficult to follow. It is aimed at those in-the-know, presumably followers of this sub stack. The gist (reading from some of the comments) seems to be that anyone who is a colleague of or friends with Malone is bad, because Malone is really bad. Maybe, but this article is short on evidence (that makes sense to the non-followers), a few points of clarification in the comments.
He’s a liar
You got me Eddie about the “boooobs”..clickbait
eddy specialises in clickbait i’m afraid
dontcha eddy?
Plenty fo charts from official sources for your reference keith – apply your circus training to the discussion
https://palexander.substack.com/p/these-graphs-today-why-did-south
Enjoy https://markcrispinmiller.substack.com/p/hollywood-provides-while-trying-to
https://www.thehealthsite.com/news/covid-19-vaccines-can-cause-sudden-cardiac-deaths-warns-expert-calls-for-its-withdrawal-from-market-942361/
‘Fraiman continued to say that he and his team have multiple autopsy studies that provide ‘essentially conclusive evidence’ that all the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are inducing sudden cardiac deaths. We further added, “I believe the mRNA vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market until new randomized control trials can clearly demonstrate the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the serious harm we now know vaccines are causing.”‘
Bullshit – keith says it’s rare.
FE says who gives a f789 about these people — tens of millions of lives have been saved. More Boosters dammit!
My brother sent me some photos a year or so back of a project involving retrofitting a school with this sort of thing
CDC, Urged to “Do Something”, Calls for Useless Building Ventilation Upgrades
https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/cdc-urged-to-do-something-calls-for
He was shaking his head — while sending TruDUNCE the bill.
BRITISH AIRWAYS (BA) TRAGEDY: Veteran British Airways pilot collapses and dies shortly before he was due to captain a full packed passenger jet
https://palexander.substack.com/p/british-airways-ba-tragedy-veteran
The fact that there is no action taken to stop this … would indicate that the Elders want this outcome. There is no f789ing way the Farma industry would have the power to override the Elders… and this cuz the Elders would not allow their farm animals to be damaged so that some folks can make $$$.
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show an over 50 year dramatic rise from 1:10,000 in the 1970’s to 1:36 children born today in 2023
https://palexander.substack.com/p/autism-spectrum-disorder-asd-show
We don’t understand why these things are happening. I imagine the problem is vaccines.
At the same time, some of these people can do extremely well at some very specialized tasks. It might be just the variation in abilities that is needed at this point in time.
My son with Asperger’s syndrome can somehow manage to do two things at once, amazingly well. Strangely enough, he can read computer code and find errors in it, at the same time he is listening to a show (A Taste in History is a favorite.) But he doesn’t drive because his focus when he drives does not stay adequately on the road. Also, he is not good at identifying people. For example, back when he was in high school, he couldn’t recognize one of his high school teachers, when he saw her outside of class.
High school teachers would remark that he would always seem to be doing something else during class (on his phone), but that he would always know the answer, if he was called upon.
Now, he has a relatively high paying job as a computer programmer, working from home. (He lives with us.) He takes Uber or Lyft if he wants to go somewhere. He gets meals delivered from time to time using meal delivery services. He gets along well with family members. He is not married.
you could almost be describing me there, Gail. your son might enjoy the “fall of civilizations” podcast on youtube.
Michael Burry has done well.
I don’t recognize people unless I know them extremely well. I always thought that was a concussion thing but it could be a touch of Aspergers.
Do you mind to ask your son what he thinks of norm… we may be able to bond over that
I wonder how many of the folks identified as on the spectrum are severely impacted – as in they cannot function…I don’t think it would be anywhere near 1 in 38
I suspect the amount of severely disabled people hasn’t changed as much as the amount of those being diagnosed. People are actively looking for and questioning if children autistic today unlike 40 years ago. Many young adults want a diagnosis and seek them out. There’s also a link between autism and being transgender. Instead of complaining about vaccines causing autism maybe substackers should complain about vaccines causing the recent surge in trans people. There’s always things to whine about.
The Autism Spectrum Quotient test:
https://aspietests.org/aq/
an interesting vid on the evolutionary role of autism:
Some of the key UK Tory press have turned against the UKR war media line.
Articles have been published in the Spectator and the Telegraph, both very close to the UK Tory Party and to government thinking, that have admitted that the sanctions on Russia have failed, and they are very bitter about the situation now.
The Spectator article, ‘Why the Economic War Against Russia Has Failed’ talks about how the west unleashed ‘financial shock and awe’ on Russia, and how it completely failed. Russia reoriented to the east, while European economies suffer badly. IMF forecasts growth for Russia this year.
Most of the world did not support the sanctions, they have failed, and that card is bust. Sanctions are no longer effective as a war strategy, and the west will no longer be able to rely on them.
The Telegraph article, penned by one of the editors, is even more bitter, and it goes much further. ‘The sanctions are a joke’, in other words they have utterly failed.
The articles run in parallel, and they seem to be concerted.
Both articles go on to claim that China support of Russia is supposedly the main reason why the sanctions failed, and that China is on the path of world domination, which is especially the Telegraph perspective.
In any case, the world did not support the sanctions, the west no longer has the strength to impose its will, there are now alternative centers of economic power, and Russia has come through.
Those are startling admissions in key UK media. Some commentators have been saying that stuff from day 1, and it has now all been admitted in the Tory press, in publications that are as establishment as it gets.
The articles are very bitter, and angry, blaming China, blaming Turkiye, India, South Africa, and others. They have finally admitted that the sanctions have failed.
The sanctions strategy was always unrealistic, they knew about BRICS, and they could not impose sanctions even on N. Korea; they could not control who countries trade with, they always had options. They knew those countries are in BRICS, and the strategy was crazy to assume Russian isolation.
The assumption was that if USA, UK, EU, Japan imposed sanctions then the rest of the world had no choice but to comply, and that the world would freeze up in a few weeks – Russia was supposedly a house of cards, the world would be intimidated, and the west convinced itself of all that.
The overall loss of western power is now as clear as day, even they have to face it, and they are now very bitter about the whole thing, but whether they realise the extent of the loss of power is another matter.
80% of the world stayed on board with Russia, and the west is ‘isolated’. That shoe is yet to drop in Britain, but it will, as it is starting to in the USA. That realization is inconsistent with their self-image, and the shock will be profound.
(Now let us see how the attrition war and de-dollarization work out for them. They cannot say that realistic perspectives were never put out there from day 1.)
So the British media is now seeing the problem, and Alex and Alexander are pointing it out. It is not shocking that at some point, people would start figuring out what the problem is.
I know that in the US, Donald Trump has said that if elected president, he would settle the Ukraine War within 24 hours. https://www.wsj.com/video/watch-trump-says-as-president-hed-settle-ukraine-war-within-24-hours/0BCA9F18-D3BF-43DA-9220-C13587EAEDF2.html
Otherwise, I think the problems are still pretty well hidden in the US.
Yes – he would just terminate the CGI and crisis actor funding and it would end
I guess, the idea is to use the economic decline as a consequence of scarce resources to blame Putin and the incompetent Russian military to induce a break-up of the union. There have been proceedings with Georgia and Azerbaijan (holding exploration rights for the Caspian Sea) to join the EU.
It is a risky undertaking, but European governments have a scapegoat for their decline and an excuse for unpopular measures. Here the media informs that inflation is thanks to Putin.
It is important to hide the scarcity problem also to keep up investments and the financial Ponzi scheme. People would also believe, it is declared open season on them.
It might be a fruitful thought to assume that also large parts of the critical opposition are steered, focusing on millions of side-effects and decadency instead of demanding way overdue preparations for a time without fossiles.
Yes. Russia understands that this war and the coming decade present existential risks to their nation. I’ve seen high level Russian strategists discuss this in interviews and it’s clear from their actions regarding militarization of the arctic and also vis a vis Ukraine that they understand very well that more conflict and resource scarcity are coming and they will be at the epicenter.
Thank you for update, Mirror
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12065831/Tens-thousands-doctors-nurses-trained-apprentices.html
Earn while you learn to be a doctor by apprenticeship. No college required.
Yeah Hubb what about being a doctor in England?
the daily mail is notorious for claptrap
that must top of the list for it
Norman, can you check if I can sign up to be a bare foot doctor in England?
With an AI assistant I am sure I will do a great job. I could be your doctor.
you will be very welcome ed
as long as you dont expect to get paid by results—the only doctor i see is my swimming buddy
and he’s not a well man
I’m sorry to hear that, Norman.
But he is still well enough to take a dip in the pool, I hope?
I’m seeing a lot of people around me (mostly men actually) going rapidly senile at the age of 76. Three guys that age, including the wife’s elder brother, have lost their driving licenses last year or this.
At the same time, I know quite a few men in their eighties and women in their early nineties who are still driving on the highways and worrying their families sick.
i still drive, so far, because i have no physical health reason not to
i hope i’ll have the sense to stop if things change
Based on your comments about just about everything including the Rat Juice…I’d be very uncomfortable sharing the road with you norm… let me know if you are ever in NZ … I will be sure not to drive
3am?
i often spot you in my rear vie w mirror eddy
i take my ‘queue’ from that
i recognise the driving style and pull over–i want you in front of me where i can see what youre doing and put a safe distance between us, and take avoiding action
Speaking of feet…..I actually like watching this guy’s videos.
That is what happens when you keep cows in barns. Cows belong outside. My cows take -33C without a sweat (of course).
Of course they don’t sweat – you are torturing them.
How about we put you out in the paddock in -33… with a leather jacket for warmth.
oh horse manure. they are outside everywhere from North Dakota to Alberta all winter long. If the barn door is open they are off to the races no matter the weather. they used to live here as wild animals. Their fur is thick enough that I had to buy thicker barbed wire at the end of winter.
The ponies of Fair Isle were basically left outside all winter to fend for themselves.
I always thought that was a bit heartless. They aren’t polar bears. So I would hope that in the 21st century they would have stables or some other shelter.
-33… that’s just evil.
Only now you discover how cruel they are in your home country. I guess you prefer living coated in your own manure, but warm.
My cows take -50C. I am crossing Highland genetics into an Angus base to give them heavier coats and more aggressive under snow grazing ability.
My bison literally LOVE it once temperatures get -25C or lower. In winter they are to hot under winter wool to tolerate higher temps.
Hey Fast Eddy, your cow knowledge seems similar to your ability in biochemistry.
The ponies/horses in Yakutia, bred for meat and tasty it is too, very tasty, and milk used to make booze, Kumis, seem to be able to tolerate -70 Celsius in winter. They are quite stocky animals, and so are Shetland ponies (it does not get very cold in Shetland, just wet and windy, very windy).
An article from wickedpedia that is not propaganda:
Yakutian horse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakutian_horse
I think also milk cows could live outside here. They have to go in the milk parlor twice a day anyway, and it will be warmer there, if they need a break. You save a bunch of money on buildings, manure management, and of course animal health. Milk operations are basically concrete pads, and manure problems are horrendous. I have seen plenty of lame cows in those places. My cows are good natured, but they also escape artists with plenty of ideas on how to make life interesting.
@Ed
Interesting Ed. I don’t follow the Daily Mail, but I have talked to my daughter about the fact that for the most part, pre-med studies requiring organic chemistry, biochemistry etc. are really a rip-off by colleges who charge exorbitant tuition to teach this stuff which you really don’t need to practice medicine in the first place and which you could learn on-line for free.
In contrast, the real learning of medicine starts in internship and residency, which are essentially apprenticeships. As far as I’m concerned, undergraduate “pre-med” and medical school could be replaced by a comprehensive written exam followed by an acceptance at an intern/residency program where you are cut from the program after 3 months if you don’t have what it takes in real clinical skills. Kind of like having to take a written driver’s license to get a permit to let you drive under a licensed driver’s supervision, and from there passing a road test. Same with the FAA Private Pilot/multi engine ratings which require written exam passage and actual check rides. A 4 year MD degree by itself without internship/residency is worthless. You would be more valuable working in research.
In the old days, some medical and surgical residencies were pyramiding, meaning the first year the hospital training program would accept 10 residents, but after the first year only 8 would be advanced to the second year, and then after the third year only 6, and so by the fourth year only 4 were left.
My second bugaboo is with all this “pre-med” hype (“pre-med, pre-law, what’s the difference” Otter of Delta House said @1:10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSyHFk4PB9s ) Actually, his oral argument had more substance than what most lawyers are capable of these days, as lawyers are held to ZERO standards of competence. But the BUSINESS of medicine has now expanded into You Tube sales pitches and expanded into college prep courses where for “only” $3-4,000, the desperate applicant can access the Kaplan, Princeton or MCAT review review courses etc., and can raise your MCAT score 15 points and get you accepted into medical school and enjoy all that power and prestige. So what if only 1 in 10 applicants will ever get accepted? There are dozens of these coaching courses out there.
https://www.youtube.com/@MedSchoolCoachMCATPrep
We are getting the wrong kind of doctors just as the wrong type of lawyers who wind up becoming politicians. Sociopaths essentially. It all depends on how well can you game the system.
I know, I know, from this and my other rants I’ll be accused of not looking into the mirror and seeing exhibit “A” but that’s ok, the reality is that that’s a woke kind of canned argument or simple declaration, as my background going way back even before high school will never be researched, This kind of investigation is what really should be done with these med school and law school types to see the kind of person they really are. I have heard the CIA does this level of inquiry for certain recruitments.
Kind of like DeSantis, whose students and classmates remarked that he was aloof towards you unless he needed you for something, otherwise you were a bother to talk to.
But the problem with Medicine is that because of the training and high salaries, Wall Street had orgasms over how much money was being passed through between the doctor and the patient, a lot of it through private insurance- which why big health provider hospital corporations got their snouts into this money trough.
Not unsurprisingly, the medical malpractice lawyers, both those for the Plaintiff and Defense had a pretty good racket going. I’ve heard from one of my med-mal defense lawyers that the number of lawsuits filed has declined, but for those that do go to court, the settlements have been increasing. Now tell me that medical malpractice has been declining because of all these diversity admissions into medical school. LOL.
I also wonder if this is the only silver lining in medicine today- that because increasingly more doctors are being employed by health corporations (over 50% I believe) the doctors have the backing of the big corporate lawyers – unless of course if you are not deemed worthy based on your production of being defended.
I saw an example of this with OrthoCarolina in Charlottte, NC , at the time the biggest specialty group in the US. I reviewed the file and saw blatant in-your-face indisputable medical malpractice and intentional cover up. I met with the mother who was so distraught at what had resulted to her son’s elbow but even more so when no lawyer would take the case because Ortho Carolina was such a powerhouse. I of course with a history of KY Medical Licensure Suspension in 1994 would be dismissed as a credible expert witness.
In fairness to doctors, when you are focusing all your energy learning/ practicing medicine, you don’t have the time or energy to protect your profession against these corporate raiders whom I alluded to in my previous post. The doctors have given away their profession. The problem is, as medicine became more advanced costs increased- and thus the big health insures took over raping the public for health insurance premiums in the melee. Yeah, yeah, I hear about people who are on their world trip voyages who get sick with Giardia and need to get a few Flagyl pills which their insurance back home covers and makes them think they’ve got a great medical insurance plan and the system works, but if you have anything serious which requires prolonged costly hospitalization and follow up, you will likely be financially ruined.
The cost of complexity whether in energy or health care is nowhere better demonstrated than in medicine. More MRI’s more PET Scans, more cardiac catheterizations, more costs to run and maintain all this technology etc. An extension of the Jevon’s paradox. The business of extending life during the last 6 months for profit is the motive, not quality of life. Cost-benefit does not compute.
In the end, it will be a titanic struggle between two entities: The hospital providers and the insurance companies. Hospital providers will lose profits if their Cadillac commercial insurances are no longer around to pay. Insurance companies will not be able to remain in business if employers can no longer afford traditional employee benefits or those who are privately insured can no longer afford the premiums. Thanks Obama.
People will turn to a single government model as their savior but that too will fail, and so we may actually wind up back to the unthinkable! Fee for service! Gee, who would have thunk!
But thanks to COVID, hospitals have accomplished a huge wealth transfer from the middle class. In closing, I leave OFW with
https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/top-us-non-profit-hospitals-and-ceos
Or just DIY using youtube videos?
After all that bio chemistry and microbiology they inject Pfizer safe and effective?
That’s like cleaning toilets after years of ballet class!
Tragic indeed.
My room mate freshman year was pre-med and he made no secret he was in it for the money. He would boast of all the unnecessary procedures he would be doing on little old ladys on Park Ave to enrich himself. I have not kept in touch but I have no doubt that is exactly what he did.
Back, years ago, my father would complain that some of the doctors would do unnecessary surgery, to pad their bank account. If a Catholic woman didn’t want any more children, they would suggest a hysterectomy. Things don’t really change.
Just spoke to a friend of mine and he told my of his friends son starting to be an Doctor in residency with student loan debt of over $300,000.
You better believe I would be in for the money carrying that nut on my back
Good point!
Nothing so convenient as having doctors duly enslaved by a colossal debt right out of college: they won’t ask questions, they will be the obedient drug pushers Pharmafia wants them to be. That’s s what happens when teaching becomes a business. In my country, young doctors complete their training without debt.
Also, historically, the pharmaceutical companies have funded the mandatory training (conventions) that doctors attend. This assures a bias toward using their products.
Furthermore, makers of new devices sponsor week-end training sessions in using their new device, for doctors. This way they can be certified and make more money by using the devices.
‘….the real learning of medicine starts in internship and residency, which are essentially apprenticeships…’
If they don’t study nutrition then there is no ‘real learning’.
Time they went to third world where fecundity is high, obesity is negligible and life expectancy is not shortened by lifestyle, but by knife-style.
Medical system is hopelessly corrupted. Its a health system that is needed.
It is really frustrating that medical doctors don’t know nutrition and what supplements, in what quantities, might be helpful.
They want to push prescription pills that will have a person coming back for endless refills. Or, better yet, surgery.
It seems like one commenter said that in India, medical degrees did not take nearly as long to be earned.
Quite a bit of college was intermixed with medical studies, if I remember correctly. This is an article about the process.
https://lloydpharmacy.edu.in/blog/become-a-doctor-in-india.html
A person needs to get good incoming scores (based on high school work, with a background in biology, chemistry and physics) to get accepted into the medical program in college. But then, only 6.5 years of total work is needed. This degree does not provide specialization. For that, more work is required.
This may be of some interest, work on Starbase for our best hope, Starship.
Somewhere incredible amounts of capital are being assembled and expended. Try it, have it blow up, fix it, rinse and repeat. Or as Kermit sang, “Moving Right Along.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uejAVnWPr2k
Pollution to space, manufacturing to space, resources from space, fusion(er, solar) energy from a well engineered and tested source with 24/7 availability. Cheap transmission of energy and reliability in one compact source – compared to a very large star that is, they can be so messy in the end.
Dennis L.
You know I am a fan. Want to see the launch with water deluge.
This is super duper. I know a few people who will look forward to their in-laws traveling to Mars on one of these.
Pollution to space is one of the attractions of space solar, if it is actually possible to get the panels up there economically and beam down electricity economically.
Reference?
How many satellites would you need up there to power BAU?
You would need an awfully lot of solar to power BAU. Our problem is that we have known for a long time that we are pretty much out of solutions. Anything that might work is a subject for students to look into. I doubt that anyone realistically expects that it can work in the next 20 years.
The people looking into can see that intermittent solar doesn’t work. Their hope is that by putting it into space, they could make it into a close to 24/7/365 resource. It wouldn’t work for a short time at the equinoxes. This would be known in advance. Batteries might substitute for critical usages.
Gail,
I am saying move all the manufacturing processes into space itself; beaming all that concentrated energy to earth may not be a good idea.
Robots seem to do well in space, capital invest it and manufacture in space with materials from space, drop finished products down a gravity well.
We are running out of options here on earth, this site had convinced me of that. Humans in space don’t seem to do very well, the environment is too hostile, probably same with the moon and Mars apparently does not have much of a magnetic field to shield it from radiation.
Dennis L.
How many Rat Juice boosters have you had?
Batteries?
“The basic idea behind a gravity battery system is to lift a heavy object, such as a large mass of concrete or a weight, on a pulley, using energy from a power source. When energy is needed, the thing can fall, and the potential energy is converted back into electricity.?
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/two-massive-gravity-batteries-are-nearing-completion-in-the-us-and-china
So what you are saying is … that it is complete nonsense… and keith has wasted years on this
all your questions answered
https://ssi.org/ssi-conference-abstracts/
Russia has done a drone strike on a huge UKR weapons depo in Khmelnytskyi, causing an absolutely massive fire ball high into the sky.
The depo held huge supplies of fuel, weapons and ammunition for UKR’s much hyped ‘counteroffensive’, which does not seem to have yet amounted to much in any case.
UKR tried on some attacks during the week, and they were routed along the frontline with massive casualties. They briefly advanced NW of Bakhmut, and were then routed there.
It remains to be seen whether UKR will try something more substantial, but it is not going to be possible if they lose their depos like this.
NATO has spent billions arming UKR, and it is simply attritioned away.
The loss of huge concentrations of supplies like this are a serious setback to any UKR ‘counteroffensive’.
Putin ‘strikes’ NATO-supplied ammunition; Explosions shake Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyi Oblast
US tax dollars being recycled.
Such a waste of resources.
Dennis L.
My sentiments exactly DL. Both the cost of producing the munitions and the cost that went into buidling the structures they destroy.
Gives a new meaning to matter and anti-matter. Poof! Nothingness.
But I disgress, The loss of life and the destruction of families, both Russian and Ukrananian have become merely an after thought to Biden, well- maybe that’s not a good example because he is so demented, but say for people like Nuland. The devil incarnate.
Wow!
Like I keep telling ya’ll, hot air rises.
This is the same thing that happens to any globbly wobbly heat that may accrue in the global greenhouse.
It just disappears through the skylight into the frigid stratosphere.
Spectacular firework, though, wasn’t it?
And did you notice the carb diox didn’t stop it from rising?
Russia has downed two UKR jets involved in attacks on civilians in the Luhansk region.
UKR was never going to get far with two planes.
Whether it can somehow get another two planes remains to be seen, as NATO says no.
Russia has spent billions on military aircraft over the past decade, and it now has nearly 4000, including 1500 fighter jets.
UKR obviously does not stand a chance in attrition war against Russia, and two planes were never going to make any difference to that.
NATO is not even interested in sending a couple more planes to UKR just to get downed.
Russia destroys two Ukrainian fighter jets involved in attack on Luhansk civilians | Watch
Iraq is driven toward de-dollarization by USA sanctions on Iran, which supplies 1/3 of Iraq’s oil and gas.
USA wants to tell countries what they are allowed to buy and sell, as well as seizing countries’ dollars, and exporting interest rates that devalue other currencies.
Everyone has had just about enough of USA and the dollar.
ASEAN moved to de-dollarize this week, and BRICS is set to adopt its own currency arrangements at its summit in August. Saudi and the Middle East are also beginning to shift from the dollar, and various others.
“As a result of US economic hegemony, Iraq is one of the many regional countries considering the path of de-dollarization and fiscal independence from the west.”
https://thecradle.co/article-view/24722/iraq-welcomes-new-agreement-to-expand-energy-ties-with-iran
Iraq welcomes new agreement to expand energy ties with Iran
As a result of US sanctions, Iraqi payments for Iranian fuel face multiple complications
Iran and Iraq signed an agreement on 10 May to expand energy ties and establish a joint office aimed at overlooking cooperation between the two countries, the Iraqi Oil Ministry announced, coming as part of Iranian Oil Minister Javad Owji’s visit to Baghdad.
Upon arriving in the Iraqi capital, Owji was received by Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani and discussed with him “the overall cooperation between Iraq and Iran, and ways to develop them,” as well as the ability to jointly confront “global economic challenges.”
The energy agreement was signed between Owji and Iraqi Oil Minister Hayan Abdul Ghanni.
The meeting between Sudani, Owji, and Abdul Ghanni “resulted in an agreement to establish committees to discuss the development of joint fields under international agreements and cooperation in refining, petrochemicals, as well as oil exploration and infrastructure development,” an Iraqi Oil Ministry statement reads.
According to the statement, the Iranian oil minister expressed his country’s desire “to expand the horizons of cooperation in the implementation of joint projects in oil and gas sectors, projects for the construction and development of oil refineries, the expansion of oil and gas pipelines, and environmental cleanup.”
On Tuesday, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi called for expanding energy ties between Iraq and Iran.
Raisi also emphasized the need for Baghdad “fulfill its commitments” regarding gas and electricity payments owed to Tehran.
As a result of harsh US sanctions, billions in Iraqi funds owed to Tehran have been frozen as an attempt by Washington to pressure Iraq into avoiding energy cooperation with the Islamic Republic.
Iraq has paid around $1.6 billion out of the staggering debt; however, US sanctions continue to complicate matters.
Due to the sanctions on Iran, Iraq is only allowed to receive Iranian energy imports and pay for them via waivers that extend up to 120 days, a policy implemented by former US president Donald Trump and kept in place by current President Joe Biden.
In March, an Iranian trade official announced that a US sanction waiver resulted in Iran receiving another $500 million from Iraq.
Iran provides a third of Iraq’s electricity and gas supplies, and the two countries continue to cooperate despite the complications.
As a result of US economic hegemony, Iraq is one of the many regional countries considering the path of de-dollarization and fiscal independence from the west.
Go de-dollarization!
https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2023/04/new-age-tragedy-china-food-europe-energy-robert-kaplan-helen-thompson-john-gray
The New Age of Tragedy
Great-power rivalry, resource scarcity and the crumbling of the liberal rules-based order.
By Robert D Kaplan, John Gray and Helen Thompson
26 April 2023
The post-Cold War moment, a 30-year period when globalisation and free trade were orchestrated under the aegis of American supremacy, is ending. As the historian Anders Stephanson has written, “One could not deny that geopolitics reduced to a set of mopping-up operations was a historic achievement of US power.” Today, great-power rivalry, war and the competition for diminishing resources are old realities reborn, revenants of history that now define a present of increasing peril and uncertainty.
In The Tragic Mind (2023), the American correspondent, author and foreign policy adviser Robert D Kaplan argues that we must learn to think tragically to avoid tragedy. We need what he calls anxious foresight. The wisest among us fear disorder and anarchy as much as tyranny.
But thinking tragically is not fatalism. It is understanding our limitations and acting with more effectiveness.
For this wide-ranging exchange, we asked Kaplan, the Cambridge political economist Helen Thompson and the philosopher John Gray to explore what we are calling this new age of tragedy, and how societies might navigate and endure the gathering storms.
Robert D Kaplan
Weimar Germany connotates the ultimate doom: a cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism. More specifically, Weimar was an unstable political system that existed between late 1918 and 1933, born in the ashes of the First World War and ending with the ascension to power of Adolf Hitler. Our world is unlikely to be headed for such moral darkness. Nevertheless, Weimar constitutes a model of sorts. It was a system composed of a parliamentary upper house, a lower house, small states, and two large ones – Prussia and Bavaria – that were to some extent laws unto themselves. Complex and prone to bickering, Weimar was a classically overloaded political regime that existed in a state of perma-crisis. Such is our world today.
We do not have a world government; nor do we have any truly effective world governance. But owing to the shrinkage of geography caused by technology, there is an emerging world system, in which crises can migrate from one part of the Earth to another. Greater interconnections mean that any place or continent can be considered strategic and affect all the others. It is a global Weimar, where there is always a crisis.
The 20th-century computer scientist and polymath John von Neumann once said that the finite size of the Earth would become a source of instability. As populations rise in absolute numbers, as more and more human beings live in complex urban settings, and both weaponry and communications – especially cyber – develop and become more sophisticated, the Earth will eventually become just too small for its volatile politics. That is why, like Weimar, our world today seems so anxious, claustrophobic and unstable.
There is surely trouble ahead that will require anxious foresight and tragic thinking on our part. Tragic thinking encompasses many things, among them the realisation that fear is useful. We have to use fear without being immobilised by it. Above all, we must realise that given such a claustrophobic and overloaded world system, the assumption of linear progress is a dangerous notion to entertain.
The idealists among us say that geography is not determinative, and that fate is ultimately in the hands of human agency. But human agency need not have positive outcomes. Individuals such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are human agents who have caused a vast and bloody war in Ukraine and are driving Asia toward a high-end military conflict over Taiwan. In fact, as world geography shrinks, the price for human error and human malevolence grows. The margin for error narrows, so thinking without illusions becomes necessary.
In such a world, all political leaders must be realists, aiming for the lesser evil rather than for the ultimate good. And yet unbounded idealism mixed with hubris still threatens disaster. Suez, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and so on constitute a drum roll of avoidable disasters. And precisely because of the shrinkage of geopolitics produced by technology, there will be increasingly greater, even cataclysmic costs for such failures in the future. That is why
in Ukraine and Taiwan we have to find a middle ground between acquiescence to authoritarian rule and inflexibly demanding perfect democratic outcomes. We have to get used to the prospect of many disappointments ahead.
John Gray
A global Weimar riven by new technologies and resource scarcity is our default condition. The task is not to shore up a semi-imaginary and defunct Western- led “rules-based order”, but to avoid catastrophic conflict in a post-hegemonic world.
The US will remain a great power. Even so, American decline is a trajectory human agency cannot alter. The idea that a nation now so intractably divided could construct a new international order is far-fetched.
Intensifying political polarisation poses a question about the capacity of American government to execute any long-term strategy. Even if it is defensible in legal terms, Trump’s indictment confirms that the justice system has become a weapon in partisan political warfare. As the next presidential election approaches in 2024, the US is entering a legitimation crisis.
This implosion forms the background of an accelerating international retreat. Saudi Arabia’s joining the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Chinese-brokered Saudi-Iranian rapprochement, Brazil, South Africa and Malaysia opting for closer ties with China, and India being increasingly non-aligned testify to America’s rapid descent. China’s proposals for peace in Ukraine may be vague and not altogether serious, but Russia cannot be restrained without Chinese intervention. A multipolar international system is already in operation.
American strategists are fixated on a world that belongs in the past. China has major vulnerabilities, including an economy weakened by Xi’s ruinous Zero Covid policy and an army that has not had combat experience since the Sino- Vietnamese border war of 1979. The US, despite the drawdown of some of its armaments for use in Ukraine, retains formidable military capabilities battle- honed in decades of almost continuous foreign conflicts.
Yet America is unprepared for the war so many in Washington think is coming. It has offshored much of its industrial base to China. It continues to be heavily reliant on China for medical supplies and on Taiwan for high-end computer chips. Even if a national industrial strategy of the kind Joe Biden has launched is consistently implemented, remedying this self-inflicted dependency will take many years.
The world situation is similar to that in the run-up to 1914. New technologies have not overcome rivalry over scarce natural resources, only shifted its focus. A new version of the late-19th-century Great Game is being waged for strategic metals in Africa and the resources of Siberia and central Asia. Beginning as a response to russian aggression, the conflict in Ukraine has morphed into a proxy war between great powers in which resources are as important as ideology.
The least illuminating way of understanding this conflict is a collision between democracy and autocracy. There will be democratic states and tyrannies, along with myriads of hybrid regimes, in any foreseeable future. The hubristic fantasy of a global liberal order must be replaced by realism, restraint and an unceasing struggle to stave off disaster.
Helen Thompson
If we live on a finite Earth, we live in a geopolitical world in which the competition for resources creates winners and losers. The Weimar Republic began after Germany was defeated in the contest to control the energy source on which modernity would depend in the 20th century: oil. Victory in the Great Game in Eurasia between the late 19th century and the First World War went first to Britain and France in the Middle East and then to the Soviet Union when it reconquered the Baku oil fields in 1920.
Weimar’s answer to Germany’s defeat was to apply technology to the energy resource that Germany did have in abundance: coal. The first synthetic oil produced at the Leuna plant during the Weimar years was a triumph of German science and engineering. But technological success could not save German democracy. The Weimar Republic still needed to import oil as well as other resources, and that required a world economy in which Germany could be a trading power. When the 1929 stock market crash saw American investors retreat and the start of the economic depression, the Nazis easily exploited Germany’s humiliations. Hitler then sent Germany down the path of total conquest to procure resources and agricultural land by annihilating the populations whose lives already depended on them.
Today the Weimar problem is global because no state is protected from the hard world of resource competition that Hitler drove to such hideous finality. The shale oil and gas boom of the 2010s gave the US a respite from the foreign energy dependency that had trapped it in a succession of disasters in the Middle East. But the growth rate of shale output has slowed, leaving the Biden administration at the mercy of decisions made by the Saudi-Russian-led cartel Opec Plus. For the best part of two decades Russia has been the world’s energy-exporting superpower. But the imposition of Western sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine has made it harder for russian companies to develop the Bazhenov shale basin in western Siberia, without which the russian oil industry will decline. Meanwhile, as governments across the world attempt to direct a low-carbon energy revolution, this competition for resources includes an ever growing list of raw materials.
The idea of linear progress always hid the problem of resource depletion under an a priori assumption that technology would ride to the rescue. Our tragedy in the West is that, for all the catastrophes of the 20th century, we still carry this hubristic world-view, blinding us to the complexity of our collective human predicament on a finite Earth.
Robert D Kaplan
Indeed, a finite Earth will feature a zero-sum contest for resources. Think of our present and future world as we do early modern Europe: competing states rammed up against each other, periodically at war, with little extra physical space to manoeuvre.
The late military historian John Keegan explains that Britain and the US could champion freedom only because the seas protected them “from the landbound enemies of liberty”. But continental Europe through the middle of the 20th century had no such luxury (and only afterwards because of an American security umbrella). And now that technology has contracted distance, reducing the protective power of expansive waters, the world itself has rediscovered the fate of an earlier Europe, where realism and pragmatism reigned.
The new Saudi-Russian Opec Plus is an example of this process, in which the contraction of distance has encouraged de facto alliances across yawning regions so that, with China moving closer to both russia and Saudi Arabia, a true Eurasian power system has come into being. It will be a claustrophobic world where technology won’t always be able to rescue us. That is why linear progress is a delusion – since even when technological fixes arrive to solve problems, they often arrive too late to prevent conflict and suffering.
Unlike in the two world wars, America will no longer be able to act as an unencumbered policeman on the world stage. As it is today, the US was intractably divided in the 1930s, when racism, anti-Semitism and right-wing hatred of Franklin Delano Roosevelt were prevalent. But the Second World War, a total war involving mass conscription, gave the US dynamism and unity. When the war ended, the American economy dominated the world. That is no longer the case, particularly because China is a full-spectrum great power, with the world’s second-largest economy and a technological base that manufactures both high-end military and consumer products.
Yet, China faces grave economic, social and political problems of its own. Indeed, since the Ukraine War has dramatically weakened russia as a great power, it may be that all three powers – the US, China and russia – are in decline, though in different ways and at different speeds. But decline is relative, so one or more of these powers may continue to maintain leverage over the others in the foreseeable future.
The Royal Navy began its decline around the turn of the 20th century, yet Britain went on to help defeat Nazi Germany almost half a century later. That’s why decline itself may be overrated. Therefore, in this increasingly smaller and conflict-prone world, just as we should not become idealists ideologically demanding democratic systems everywhere, neither should we become fatalists, as there is much work to do.
John Gray
Twenty-first-century conflicts reflect two kinds of scarcity, both on a global scale. The first is a zero-sum contest for the material resources of a finite planet, the second a type of value scarcity in which all the available options involve loss. The combination makes geopolitics inescapably tragic.
Tragedy is not imperfectability, nor is it the fact that progress is intermittent and reversible. Human beings confront tragedy when they know that whatever they do may not be enough to avert disaster. In such circumstances a measure of fatalism is reasonable, though it need not entail passivity.
Scarcities in resources and options are tightly intertwined. Geologists estimate that, in order to achieve global Net Zero, there will have to be more mining in the next few decades than throughout history. Here humans are approaching the physical limits of growth. But scarce natural resources trigger rivalry among states, drawing them into wars, and here scarcity of options is at work.
The two world wars were in part driven by a need for oil. New technologies can propel great powers towards disaster. High-end computer chips are needed to maintain the living standards to which billions of human have become accustomed. Over time technology spreads by diffusion, but whichever power controls these chips in the near future will have a major advantage. That is why, unless the West accedes to China’s absorption of Taiwan, which produces around two-thirds of the output, the island is fated to be the epicentre of a global conflict. Continuing the status quo is not an option.
An intensifying resource scarcity undermines the stability of states. A low- or zero-growth economy is not, as environmentalists and their opponents both believe, a policy choice, but a sign that humankind is testing the limits of an overcrowded planet. In both developmental dictatorships and advanced industrial states, governments rely heavily on economic expansion for their authority. Lacking the legitimacy given them by rising living standards, they are more likely to turn to war.
Scarcity of options is exacerbated by liberal ideology. Autocracies are proving less doctrinally rigid and more strategically flexible than democracies. As a matter of justice, the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court against Putin for war crimes looks fully justified. But it also shows a reckless disregard for the consequences. Putin is not Slobodan Milošević, a petty tyrant, but the commander of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. the West is implicitly staking the future on benign regime change in russia, a desperately dangerous gamble.
Western societies are based on the belief that resources and options can always in principle be expanded by human agency. In reality both are inherently limited – by geography, history and ideological folly – and it is this that explains the recurrence of tragedy in geopolitics. The task, as ever, is to make the best of the situation.
Helen Thompson
Faith that creative human agency can triumph over nature’s limits has been a central feature of most modern political projects, not least liberalism. Missing the fact that technology cannot create energy, this conviction has long proved overly sanguine. Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human will have never before had to bet so much on technology over energy as the driver of our material advancement. We are now a long way removed from the revolutionary hopes of the 19th and 20th centuries that the transformation of collective life would mean the complete development of all natural resources and an end to scarcity. Even in China, Xi Jinping’s theoretical mission for the Chinese Communist Party to deliver “material abundance” as an aim of “scientific socialism” coexists with the dangers of “black swans” and “grey rhinos”, not least those that might arise from China’s foreign oil dependency – with all its implications for Beijing’s ability to fight a war for Taiwan.
The technologies of low-carbon energy do have some capacity to ameliorate geopolitical competition around hydrocarbons. But low-carbon electricity and electrification still depend on extracting metals from under the Earth’s surface. As John notes, technological progress can also invite geopolitical disaster. It was the knowledge that oil-fuelled warships would be superior to existing coal- fuelled navies that drove a great deal of the geopolitical competition over oil prior to 1914. A century later, Xi’s “Made in China 2025” strategy – when in 2015 the Chinese leadership bet the country’s future on dominating high-tech manufacturing supply chains and electric-vehicle production – terrified the political class in Washington into its present tech war against the country.
As climate change accelerates, the modernist faith in technology must do ever more work to keep at bay an underlying dread that fossil-fuel civilisation will prove no less tragic than all others in history. The assumption that modern human ingenuity is unique allows energy optimists to treat the technological successes in reducing the unit costs of low-carbon energy as the inevitable prelude to the next round of remedies required, starting with eliminating the present intermittency of solar- and wind-generated electricity. But a fear that a low-carbon modern civilisation is unrealisable also powers the recent techno-fantasies of one day transferring human life to Mars.
Clear-eyed realism about the available options and their respective human costs is essential. Denial of our tragic age will only lead to more suffering. But we are far from being helpless sleepwalkers in our collective human plight. Resource-driven geopolitics is riven with inescapable dangers. But it will only be an apocalyptic struggle if governments make it so by refusing to recognise the restraint required by coexistence in the face of the limits nature imposes.
Robert D Kaplan
The emphasis on scarcity and limits, particularly on resources, combined with the increasing connectedness of a Weimar world, has been an ongoing phenomenon for well over a century. Witness the two world wars. But attrition of the same can add up to big change.
If there is one Enlightenment philosopher who intuitively grasped this, even if he made mistakes, it is Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834). Indeed, a Weimar world is a Malthusian world. Malthus continues to be ridiculed for claiming that while population increases geometrically, food supplies increase only arithmetically, so that humankind risks eventual shortages and starvation.
In fact, during his lifetime, Malthus revised his theory numerous times while upholding the central thesis, that populations expand to the limits imposed by the means of subsistence. Perhaps more so than Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, Malthus introduced the whole subject of the physical and natural environment into contemporary political philosophy. Humankind might be nobler than the apes, but we are still biological. Therefore, our politics, Malthus suggested, are affected both by the natural conditions and by the densities in which we inhabit the Earth.
To keep from destroying ourselves in this Malthusian world, we will have to husband fear without being immobilised by it. We cannot assume that technology will come to the rescue of every dilemma. The Ancient Greeks argued that no man is lucky until he is dead, since catastrophe can befall any of us at any moment. To carry that over into humanity at large, we should not assume that catastrophe cannot befall us at any moment or in any historical period. That is, we will need to think tragically in order to avoid tragedy. And precisely because our civilisation is rubbing up against limits of resources and space, such tragic thinking is more vital than ever before.
Yet, it is less in evidence. Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer in Britain are technocrats in spirit and background, and technocrats assume there is a solution to every problem, which leads to a certain arrogance. Meanwhile, the American political elite is more ideological than ever before, and this leads to another form of arrogance; the world’s problems will not go away if only all of humanity became democratic – as the American elite seems to believe.
I fear that the elites in both Britain and the US will have to learn about tragedy the hard way, by actually living it, due to their failures in seeing it ahead of time.
In 1798 Thomas Malthus linked population growth and resource scarcity. Photo by SZ Photo / Blanc Kunstverlag / Bridgeman Images
Helen Thompson
Since Malthus wrote without understanding that he lived at the start of an energy revolution that would transform the cycles of land fertility, his medium-term prophecy was doomed. The likely long, drawn-out end of the energy world that began in the 18th century may well validate his pessimism. But the limits of our own knowledge today could also lead us to the sort of unnecessary millenarian conclusions that he drew.
The stridency with which some think that energy abundance is a right of modernity flies in the face of a long history of reckoning with resource scarcity. In his 1865 book The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines, the English economist William Stanley Jevons explained how, by turning to a finite energy source, Britain had placed itself on an economic trajectory towards ever greater dangers from which it would not be able to escape.
Since the US began to dominate the modern economic world on the back of oil, Americans have been through multiple cycles of exploration and depletion. Pithole in Pennsylvania, where the first commercial American oil well was drilled in 1865, was a ghost town by the 1880s. As the early-20th-century wildcatters who found huge quantities of oil in Texas understood, fossil-fuel industrial civilisation has always been a roller-coaster.
Scientific invention and the viability of its commercial exploitation to surpass resource constraints are part of that roller-coaster. The energy historian and scientist Vaclav Smil estimates that perhaps half of us today would not be alive without synthetic ammonia.
The scientific push for this innovation came from the fear in the early 20th century that the natural nitrates used as fertilisers were running short. The chemist Fritz Haber’s invention was mass-produced as a result of German desperation when, during the First World War, the Allies’ naval blockade cut off German trade with Chile, exporter of most of the world’s nitrate supply.
Thomas Malthus has become relevant again because we are deliberately trying to undo the energy revolution he missed. We also know that technological advancement is a contingency, often around war, that cannot transcend the laws of thermodynamics. Any honest assessment of our likely future should recognise the enormity of trying to substitute electricity for fossil fuels in food production and distribution while already knowing the limits
of technology to solve the problem.
Our partial agency is why we must learn to live consciously with mind-boggling uncertainty. Searching for and extracting metals will be another high-risk voyage, pitting human creativity against the inexorable force of resource depletion that will play out regardless of temporary successes.
If the energy predicament is singularly modern, the tragic mindset, shaped as it was by earlier civilisational experiences of limits, can still offer wisdom as we reckon with the Faustian odyssey that using fossil-fuel energy set in motion.
John Gray
Today, the great powers have some things in common with the characters in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit (1944). Three dead souls find themselves in a locked room, seemingly damned for their sins. One of them tries to escape, but when the door opens he cannot make himself go through it, and all three remain stuck in the room. In a celebrated line, the failed escapee concludes: “Hell is other people.”
The great powers are trapped in a geopolitical version of Sartre’s room, a claustrophobic world from which there seems to be no exit. This is not the binary world of the Cold War. Three or more states – America, China, Russia and India – are contending for the shrinking resources of an overloaded planet.
As Robert argues, the theorist who best explains this situation is Thomas Malthus. In 1798, when he first published his An Essay on the Principle of Population, there were about 800 million human beings. Now there are approaching eight billion. Not only have human numbers increased tenfold, but many people today enjoy living standards higher than most have done throughout history.
In assuming food production could not be increased, Malthus was mistaken, but in a roundabout way he may yet be proved right. The spike in population and living standards was largely a by-product of hydrocarbons. It is true that birth rates are falling in many countries. But unless there is a large-scale die-off, global human numbers will still reach around 10 billion in this century, and feeding a population of that size will require enormous quantities of energy. Mechanised agriculture, fertilisers, insecticides, factory farms, refrigerators and transportation require giant inputs of fossil fuels. Intensive farming is the extraction of food from oil, part of the worldwide industrialisation that has ravaged wilderness, depleted the biosphere and destabilised the climate. The confluence of global warming, energy scarcity, pandemic and geopolitical warfare may signal the beginning of a brutal rebalancing of the kind Malthus described.
As Helen says, there is an underlying mood of existential dread, a nagging suspicion that our civilisation may destroy itself as so many others have done in the past. With his fantasies of interplanetary migration, Elon Musk is an unwittingly tragic figure – as much an expression of a hidden despair as of the techno-optimism he loudly proclaims.
The reality of a planet from which there is no exit is intensifying competition for control of its resources. Ukraine is not only the world’s breadbasket but a rich site of rare earths, while the russian-occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk contain substantial deposits of shale gas. Geology and geography shape our conflicts as profoundly as any clash between autocracy and democracy. If there is hope, it is in recognising this fact. Global disaster could still be averted by reality-based diplomacy. It will be unfortunate if, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s failed escapee, our leaders cannot bring themselves to go through the door.
Robert D Kaplan
Robert D Kaplan is an author and foreign correspondent. His latest book is “The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate and the Burden of Power” (Yale University Press)
John Gray
John Gray is an author and contributing writer to the New Statesman. He has written on various political and cultural subjects, from Boris Johnson’s premiership to the life of HG Wells.
Helen Thompson
@HelenHet20
Helen Thompson is a politics professor and a contributing writer to the New Statesman.
Kaplan is a degenerate. Imagine writing this without mention of the US role in fomenting both of these crises:
>> But human agency need not have positive outcomes. Individuals such as Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are human agents who have caused a vast and bloody war in Ukraine and are driving Asia toward a high-end military conflict over Taiwan.
I view both wars as US caused.
I fear no matter how good the Chinese military is TSMC will be destroyed. China needs to work on moving leading edge chip production to the mainland as fast as possible.
I don’t think countries exist anymore….just as political parties don’t exist anymore except for the dumb masses. Do you really think there is a difference between Bidet or the orange man. Everything is controlled by the “corporations “if they want a war in Africa they get it… if they want a war in Ukraine they get it…. The rest is all fake… but I think it keeps people very busy on here typing away….searching the internet as if the information is there for them—- just a click away if only…… go spend time with your families!!!
Agree. But the other two are not any better. They are someone’s mouthpieces, and all three have to lead discussing Weimar. As if it mattered, and as if it was a unique evil. I saved myself a few minutes and classified this as Fasteddy stuff.
Thank you, very interesting!
They hide behind interlectual superficiality, using superiour language, setting Malthus right, citing Satre and the Greeks, sweet-talking to the governments. That’s how you keep your jobs and make it to the media. But they manage to come to the point, without raising the deadly fear we arise when we suggest to exchange golflawn by tomatoes.
Scarcity of finite resources cannot be seen to most people. They believe, it is the Jews’ fault, the unvaxxed’s, Putin’, the US’. For the governments wars are a opportunity to create scapegoats. Nearly nobody relates the current inflation to fossile scarcity.
They are paying court to new technologies and only imply that these depend on a bottleneck of chips and materials that are prone to failure.
They call tragic, what Gail calls predicament. I favour more direct speech, I am old enough to face reality. Musk should be, the WHO/WEF protagonists should be. Lot of lost resources to invest into something that can never bear fruit!
To lever scarce resources, as solar or the termal heat pump undoubtly does, or by turning to smaller, more efficient cars, was the right strategy in the seventies but will never be of help when scarcity drops lower. Hard to stem investments when economic surplus is already falling.
Open eyes reveal to everyone, how learned or uneducated they might be, that our world is highly driven by fossile energy. Devastating numbers are not needed, a walk through the shopping mall is enough! Point to the things that are not produced or delivered by a strong influx of fossike energy or its converted form fertilizer! You won’t find any.
On the symbolic level the predicament is described as the eternal fight between the misleading devil and the self-organizing system called God. But prophecies are open to be change!
Knowledge is stored, evolved and teached in structures. The systems we build up, skyscrapers, how to smelt glass in a crucible from Platinum, when to buy and sell assets, where to live and how to commute – these systems will not survive scarcity because they are build on fossile influx and availability.
But they are not part of the conditio humana. Our ancient have proven happiness and a contend life without.
As I tried before, typing on a smartphone in the bus, sorry for any errors!, the situation does not look so badly! Depending on the method, a population between 3% and more than 30% have a real chance to survive a crash of pur systems. Don’t forget, that a one-child-policy alone leads to a population reduction to 50% within one generation, that is 25 years!
Besides handing over knowledge by structures, there is a parallel system held up by writings. To excerpt the relevant knowledge from all unnecessary information is hard work though and books and microfilms don’t last forever. So the new system has to be developed while the old is still running.
As more and more people drop out from the workforce, amoung them highly skilled, little administrational changes would allow a new start including principles of competition. Those who want to try the adventure to build up a society without fossiles should be given respective land that does not underly the principles of the real estate markets – under the precondition it is not worked with fossiles.
The more the underlying basis of modern existence deteriorates the more these areas can grow. Compared to social welfare and investments into pandemics, these are peanuts. Scientific research may accompany this, the necessary objectives will only derive from the actual doings, it is hard to do research on the phosphate problem only in the imaginary.
Let’s call these people the New Amish. They would not be more vulnerable than others that are squeezed out. And even Musk would be an average person if the Dollar failed. If energy can be replaced by technology, people had some years of a scouts camp – not the worst! Nothing lost!
It seems to me that we are staring on the changes to come like the rabbit on the snake. Those that see the predicament alike as those who have to suffer inflation. That might help the snake to win.
Until population levels stabilize, there can be no such communities because people will be killing for whatever scant resources exist.
Along these lines, I think that when things get dire, farmers will be forced off their land by the military at the behest of existing power structures.
Two additional notes:
The discussants mix up inevitable fate (definition of Greek tragedy) and prophecy. The deterioration of resources is inevitable, what man makes out of it is open to his decisions.
William Stanley’s writing is available here:
https://archive.org/details/coalquestionani00jevogoog
I think that this observation by Kaplan is interesting:
People seem to miss the big problem that is sitting right in front of their noses: too many people for resources. Any transition will take a very long time. The current system needs to dissolve, before a new one can be formed.
🙂 Gail you have nailed it.
“too many people for resources. Any transition will take a very long time. The current system needs to dissolve, before a new one can be formed.”
Yes, the system must dissolve not reform before a new one forms.
Making use of climate change:
MJG seems to have mentioned Tennessee or some such as the new coast line of the US. So, it seems the sea level is rising by .5″/year, not trivial.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/new-study-reveals-a-troubling-phenomeon-occuring-in-some-of-america-s-biggest-cities-unprecedented-in-at-least-120-years/ar-AA1bai7w?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=eeca6abb3808466ca786fe6d8ed71b0b&ei=14
The optimist will purchase a condo on an upper floor in Miami and invest in a Gondola business. Now how does one make a gondola look like a Ferrari? They are so quintessential in Miami these days, nice to hang on to tradition.
Always see things as an opportunity, not a problem.
Dennis L.
More trivia:
“How often are the atoms in our bodies replaced?
every 5-7 years
Depending on the study, most of the atoms in our human body are replaced every 5-7 years. 98% of all atoms are replaced after just one year.May 10, 2020”
Well, I found it on the internet, so it must be true. These atoms are billions of years old so the elements don’t age much, but the arrangement does – that is called aging.
Live seventy years and the atoms will be changed 10 or so times, arrangements will not be exact and we have change and then death, complete derangement. Even the universe does not fight that, eventually throws away old atoms and makes new ones through expansion of the universe, and birth of a children on spaceship earth. That is rearrangement of atoms with old information from the parents, genes.
Now, how is that perpetual growth accomplished? Even the universe does not fight degradation; that is part of the fabric of our universe. We are part of something much bigger than ourselves, They will think of something.
Dennis L.
Looking into the mirror my atoms do not seem to be replaced!
Okay, something I know something about, dentistry.
I was very, very lucky, Deere et al implemented dental insurance as I began my career. There was much deferred prosthetic dentistry(crowns, etc.) so it was atypical S curve and I was very fortunate to be also good at dental lab work which would prove profitable as I could hire additional hands, operational leverage.
At the end of my career, that was pretty much over and the “action” was in esthetic dentistry, tough way to make a buck. The basics were “done.”
Watching local dental operations here in Rochester, some are very elaborate and I am not sure how they make a buck, the costs are huge and support labor must be a nightmare(at peak I had 30 employees, lab/clinic, it is a challenge). Good janitorial/cleaning is not trivial and also expensive.
Kept a dental license, if things get very bad may go back in a very small scale, almost no overhead other than capital. It is something to trade with less physical wear and tear and better margins than trades. The trick is to add as much value as possible without huge capital costs; it can be done. I don’t see how with declining discretionary income dentistry can keep going as it has. Pouring more and more capital into a practice seems the way to poverty. Old dentistry did not make the income possible during the growth phase, but it was consistent.
It is a guess, if one’s health is good, mine is, it makes one useful; there is something very comforting in that sort of thing.
Dennis L.
i would have thought that modern dentistry relied on aneasthetics and antibooitics to a great extent–which in turn relies on a modern industrial backup…..like any other physical intrusion into the human body.
i’d be interested on your comments in that respect Dennis,
Not an expert on hx, buy local was first cocaine for eye operations in 1884. lidocaine is derived from the name cocaine and went on the market in 1948, I liked it. It is an old medication and dentistry was an early adaptor.
Antibiotics were similarly from the 1940’s although derived in 1928 from mold. A crude form could most likely be made today although administration might be an issue. It is a crystalline substance and making it would not be that much of a problem with basic glassware and some filtration paper.
With local anesthetic needles would and will be a challenge although at the very beginning of my practice reusable syringes were still around and barbs on the needles were checked by dragging backward across a gauze. Syringes were once glass, kept in velvet lined cases.
We as humans advanced greatly and quickly these last hundred years; we are very anthropomorphic in our viewpoint.
Ed would be better at this than I, but as I understand quantum mechanics, reality does not exist until observed.
Dennis L.
Dennis, would love to discuss QM in person. Typing is just to slow and no pictures, diagrams. But I will comment on “observing”. In order to observe a thing it must be touched. To observe an electron we throw something at it and try to observe the rebound. The thing thrown needs to be small compared to the object being measured. For the electron we may throw a photon. when the photon bounces off the electron it changes the electrons momentum. This is the whole issue with observation in QM no matter how you observe it changes the thing being observed.
If we go out on a dark night and shine a flashlight at a tree to observe it the change in momentum of the tree due to the photons is tiny of no importance. The tree is much much bigger than the photons. The tree is happy existing with or without a flashlight shining on it.
A teeny tiny object will go down pathway A if no hit (observed) and down pathway B if hit. Either way it exists but where and how much momentum it has depends on if it is observed or not.
Dennis,
have you seen the condition of people on a long-term Keto diet – heavily reducing the consumation of carbonates? Are there any studies?
The time has come for the states to protect themselves. Seems like this is part of their move in that direction. Residents can have an option to the Fed.
“Texas House Advances Gold-Backed Digital Currency Bill ”
“Texas has taken its first steps in order to approve a bill that would issue a 100% gold-backed digital currency. If enacted as law, the bill, which is being discussed by a Texas House committee, would create an electronic system for users to transact and pay with this digital currency and would also allow them to execute redemptions for the gold specie, or coins, backing it.”
Now we need an association of multiple states participating, along with a state bank in each state that does not participate in the financialization.
Bit what happens when the Fed Gov confiscates all gold, like FDR did?
Jesse:
Apparently only 77% of the population of suitable age for military service is physically fit. Pareto again, also Pareto. So your question.
Have a significant portion of your population be the 23%, the other 77% will not be able to run fast enough to take your gold. Actually a brilliant idea for crime control in cities; feed all the potential muggers high fructose donuts, they will never be able to carry much or even run fast enough to catch one.
Next problem please,
Dennis L.
‘Understanding Technical Limits to a “Renewable” Society’
https://www.patreon.com/posts/understanding-to-82601818
post,
We understand, it is not a problem in space; Starship is the answer with a bonus of leaving all the horrible pollution in space. Spiff up spaceship earth as a bonus. The universe will be happy, making earth was a very hard project.
Dennis L.
Interesting what can be done (with some fine tuning) with Chat GPT.
Repeating Gail’s ideas, without appropriate credit, in my view:
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/05/08/the-cambo-limit/
You sire you want to deflate Watkins oitput? I urge you to think twice and read some od his works. No need to thank me
No, I’ve read his stuff, and it’s overall good. However, the unstable prices that vary between “too high for consumers and too low for producers” is something I’ve seen Gail put forward repeatedly long before him.
PS – and this collapse blogger ecosystem is small enough that one can reasonably expect that they read one another’s work.
This is plagiarism proof… https://www.headsupster.com/forumthread?shortId=220
It is by far the best explanation of the situation … (that’s cuz it is what is gonna happen and why)… but none of the Prophets of Doom nor the Substackers will touch it.
Cuz it offers zero salvation … it is a tale of total despair. To embrace it is to 4nicate with The Devil.
It is OK if people repeat my ideas without giving me reference. I am sure I have gotten my ideas from others as well.
Watkins generally does a very good job, in my opinion.
EFFECTIVE! SAFE!
Excess deaths – Japan has skyrocketing excess deaths after its population was mRNA COVID-19 vaccine poisoned – 2023 is going to be the worst year yet.
https://makismd.substack.com/p/excess-deaths-japan-has-skyrocketing
Wicked
Does Japan even need the ‘treatment’? Its population’been falling steadily since ~2010.
Can someone tell me why more (voluntary) ‘population control’ wasn’t implemented after ‘The Population Bomb’ (1968). Although the world was already at 4 bn, it would have bought us more time.
Ditto with energy … action in developed countries on energy efficiency, starting 1973 ended from the 1980s onwards. Oil consumption had fallen ~15%.
We’d have been in a less bad place.
“CV19 Vax is a Murder Campaign – Dr. Sherri Tenpenny”
https://usawatchdog.com/cv19-vax-is-a-murder-campaign-dr-sherri-tenpenny/
lol
Is that Tenpenny woman still at it??
”look look—get injected and metal objects stick to your skin–proves that the vaccine has iron filings (or whatever) in it”
(Her words–not mine)
er—-dust your skin with talcum powder, and nothing sticks to it
total fraud–i thought she’d been debunked years ago
check her out
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210831-tenpenny-s-gospel-how-an-indebted-us-physician-sells-covid-falsehoods
///////Earlier this year, Tenpenny was named one of the worst known spreaders of falsehoods, myths and misleading statements about vaccines — a group the non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate dubbed the “Disinformation Dozen.”
A separate study put her in the cadre of America’s biggest anti-vaccine profiteers./////
You are so credulous in the Party’s official doctrine that if you were hired by the Ministry of Truth as an inspector of heterodoxies, you wouldn’t even need to be trained, you’d be able to start working the very next day.
like i said—put a small metal object on your skin—chances are it will stick
put talcum powder on your skin, and it won’t.
and that is ”official doctrine”-??–go try it.
i rather think that credulity is yours JMS
Tenpenny is an osteopath btw, and bleats on about vaccinations magnetising people—total BS
As it seems they used for some batches magnetism to separate substances after the incubation process. I am not the right one to explain it but there are serious explanations from experts. They changed the production process later. Contamination might indeed have led to slight magnetism at the point of injection with some early batches.
Unfortunately Greg Hunter’s platform has deteriorated into one bordering on obsession. I finally had to stop listening to him. The one good thing about this is that it has made me realize, as Norm says, that there are now anti vaxx COVID profiteers crawling out of the wood work. Just as mainstream media has become totally corrupt and untrustworthy, the fake news disease has now spread to the alt-media. No one is safe from misinformation or disinformation.
And if you try to address your cognitive dissonance, guess what, you’ll probably be disappointed that things just don’t turn out the way you thought they would, no matter how well “informed” you thought you were. I knew this COVID was a scam, but I am living alone and have few contacts these days, so I can’t confirm from any anecdotal accounts all these VAXX deaths. Two of my college classmates reportedly died from COVID as posted on my woke college alumni review, but I never read about any VAXX deaths, only that one of our alumnae, a physician who works is Boston, was awarded a college honor of some sort for her work on Remdesivir. That was the final straw. I no longer support my alma mater. I donate instead to Hillsdale College.
Similarly, I stopped listening to most of these financial gurus Mario, Schiff, Taggart, Rubino, etc. The list goes on and on. You are just as well going to a fortune teller.
Nevertheless, I recently listened to a relative newcomer Joe at Heresy Financial who makes some valid points. Not that I am trying to keep a seemingly honest guy from earning a living, but my comment posted under my You Tube Name H Zilla address this issue. (And he probably tells all the commenters to telegram him. )
“H Zilla
14 hours ago (edited)
Everything you say I agree with but before your argument can be sealed airtight, you have to outline the context and factors which enabled speculative booms in the past from tulips to French livres to emerge in the first place. Investing should require skeptical prudence, and not enabled by a fractional reserve debt based fiat printing banking system with a central bank which inherently stokes bubbles followed by crashes. If there were a real honest money standard, all this speculation would be diminished and thus less need for this shorting to fix a problem which could be mitigated simply with an honest money system. I am not a historian nor a finance expert but a comparison of long lasting devastation from financial speculation in relatively sound monetary systems vs those based on fiat currencies needs to be examined. In other words, is shorting necessary to correct another problem which should be corrected first? Then you fail to mention corporate raiders who will attack a company that long term makes good strategic plans, keeps cash on hand for future development instead of having to sell debt to expand. Just like a bear that wipes out a squirrel’s summer and fall labors of storing a stash of nuts for the winter- gobbled up in an instant. Of course, non productive Wall Street money changers love this opposite side of stock trading as it gives them another way to skim commissions from these stock trades.
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ᴛᴇʟᴇɢʀᴀᴍ ᴍᴇ👉@ᴀɴᴅʀᴇᴡ_ᴛᴜʙᴇ
13 hours ago
ᴍᴇꜱꜱᴀɢᴇ ᴍᴇ ᴏɴ ᴛᴇʟᴇ’ɢʀᴀᴍ ️
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So I have come to accept the fact that no matter what I do or think, I will be WRONG and my actions will be to no avail. While on one hand I voted twice for Trump, even went to one of his rallies ( my first ever) in NC in 2020 and then to the Columbia SC Capitol in a “stop the steal” rally in January 2021, he is a lousy businessman with four major projects having gone bankrupt leaving a string of bag holders, plus returning a favor to Wilbur Ross of Deutsche Bank with a cabinet post in return for bailing him out in the 90’s, a guy who is hardly a Mother Teresa, with his life ambition from his silver spoon inheritance from Daddy and writer of the “Art of the Con” being to build Casinos, luxury golf courses and luxury high rises while dabbling in the sleazy world of the World Wrestling Federation. I am under no illusions that even if he were to get re-elected, it would change nothing, as I am well satisfied that nothing short of a total societal collapse would be required.
We are burning the candle from both ends: from and elusive energy standpoint and from a debt time bomb with insurmountable issues of overpopulation and raw materials, water, and food being harder to come by. The outcome of such a collapse will leave us in an even worse situation for a generation or two at least, even if we in all our “preparations and cleverness” were to survive it. These hard core preppers are the most extreme examples of deluded people. “Aw, I’ve got tons of guns and ammo. I’m READY for anything.!” Yeah, except you got no locker as Rocky said to his trainer Gus. These guys are MEATHEADS and will be the most dangerous ones because all they have are guns and a simplistic mindset. Yeah, and even though I was one once one of this mindset, I realize that I will never live to use a fraction of what I have.
Sorry Gail, but I question your remark that a violent collapse will not sustain itself because at some point ammo will run out as there is no more manufacturing of it. People who get tagged by a bullet will have their supply plucked off their dead body, or in the alternative, if they have their stored food and their ammo looted. There is a lot of it out there. That phase will end only when the last bullet is fired and then from there Hutu machete tactics.
I know a dozen or so people with severe vax injuries… not know of .. I know them.
I know of many more…
So far only one likely vax death – an old friend with turbo cancer… he was dead with a couple of months…
Another friend has pancreatic cancer – and had half his guts removed the other day… oh yes he also had a heart attack … he was a very fit individual who took very good care of himself.
The reason they are letting off the accelerator is enough people have been injected that are going to die. That was the intention. It is population control or depopulation. . .. This was never meant to do good for people. . .. There were no long-term studies, and we pushed it on every age group all the way down to the fetus. . .. . I mean this is a murder campaign.”
How bad is this going to get with the official number of CV19 bioweapon/vax injections at well over 600 million in the USA alone? Dr. Tenpenny predicts, “The data is clear, and the published studies show that even if you have had only one injection, you have some level of myocarditis. It is present six months after the injection, and that means your heart muscle is not healing. We also know that there are all these cancers popping up, even in kids. . .. I don’t know if you can say 70% of the population is going to be gone, but I believe 70% of the population is going to be chronically sick, and of those, they will die eventually (from the bioweapon/vax) even if you have only had one injection.”
MORE BOOSTERS!!! This is great – we are wiping out MOREONS.
No one is ‘safe’?
“Very young C19 unvaccinated individual ( 20’s) affected by shedding with significant adverse effects. Without any other intervention, right after initial live blood analysis showing abnormal Rouleaux and CDB/ Hydrogel/ Graphene filaments seen from shedding – exposed to a C19 vaccinated partner. “?
https://karenkingston.substack.com/cp/121212833
Gentle commentariat, may I belabour again a serious perplexity concerning statistical mathematics
Over 100 yrs, event one 1929, 70 years to Y2K, then in a span of 20 years there were “THREE 3-sigma superbubbles in the U.S. That is statistically impossible assuming a normal distribution.”
Can someone give me a view as to whether this is gobblygook, please, or sound mathematics.
Gail kindly replies: The years are those when energy supply per capita was too low.
Normal distributions aren’t the way the world economy works.
Doesn’t this beg the question, what non-normal distributions are the way the world economy works? Random number? Entropic distribution?
Or is it a Roddier maximise energy dissipation? Sunspots. Could Polaris vs Kinzhal kick things along …
“I gave up on trying to make any kind of logical projections.” Keith
In this month’s essay above, Gail’s Fig 8 World Energy Consumption to 2050 shows an almost complete discontinuity in the chart, not based on any prior data extrapolation to my eyes. Is this chartist’s expectation a 1-sigma event? A 20-sigma event?
What statistical distribution could be assigned the point of discontinuity of fig 8?
In statistical distribution I understand a Black Swan event is described by its infinitessimal probability and conversely great impact
but non-normal distributions?
disclaimer: 15,000 monkeys at keyboards compiled by AI
Maybe the downslope won’t be quite this bad, but this seems to be what politicians are looking for. It may be that US and European politicians will manage to leave enough energy resources available that a later organization can extract. Climate change may help in this endeavor.
I think the maximization of energy dissipation is behind what is going on. The 3-sigma super-bubbles occur when the growth in energy consumption per capita turns too low. When there is not enough, there is fighting, in one way or another.
Why is energy dissipation so determinative? Can human behavior affected or be affected by it?
Artleads
energy dissipation is part of the laws of thermodynmamics
they just ‘are’
rather like asking if a clock will still run down if we don’t watch it
Yes, but can dissipation be meddled with, either in a beneficial or harmful way for human kind?
dissipation can be meddled with but not stopped
i can buy a new car, run it for 10—20 years tops, and its worth scrap
or
i can put it in the garage and not use it at all—and in 50-100 years it will still be worth scrap—unless i look after it constantly (ie energy input by me)–it might acquire some ”classic” value.
i exercise intensely at least 3 times a week, that is beneficial to me, and am doing pretty well as a result.—-but i can’t put off inevitable decline.
in other words there has to be energy input to slow thermodynamics–but you can’t stop it
I recall when I was in my teens reading about peak oil … and seeing a nice gentle downslope for oil … after the peak…
When I think back to this – it was very calming … that nice gentle slope… I assumed there would be no crisis point .. that we’d just make do with less.. perhaps transition to organic farming or that solar panels would provide us just enough to live The Good Life…
But then I became aware of the Seneca Cliff… and the alarm bells went off..
There ain’t no going gently into the night with a comforting production curve… we grow energy supply or it collapses. This is – like gender… a binary situation.
Surely the distribution is non analytic, as it is the convolution of the distribution of many actors with different response curves. AI might give a better parametric function. But generally speaking, it will have much thicker tails than Gaussian. It is anyway the wrong approach, similar to charting in the stock market, instead of looking at the underlying fundamentals (which as we all know are resource supplies).
South Korea is paying ‘lonely young people’ $500 a month to re-enter society
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/14/asia/south-korea-youth-recluse-stipend-intl-hnk/index.html
What society? Where the lies about the infinite growth prevail?
Social society died. All that’s left is work and leisure activities which cost money. Think of the lost GDP of these people not working. We need to jump start these defective dissipaters into functioning again.
Last month, Sasha Latypova went to the Spotlight conference in Norway and made a presentation at the podium there. While she was there, she sat for an interview with Andriji Klaric, a journalist, podcaster and freedom movement leader in Croatia. This interview was conducted in English and the video is subtitled on Slovenian (I believe).
I think everyone should take the time to listen to this, regardless of whether you’ve heard from Sasha before. She lays the essentials out simply and logically, explaining what’s been going on re. the injections and beyond. But this is especially for people like Norman, who will not watch it, and Keith, who I expect will listen but it will go in one ear and out the other.
Sasha explains how the US Military has been orchestrating Operation Warp Speed and the so-called “pandemic” under and established legal framework, the roots of which go back to the Reagan era, when the foundations were laid to enable pseudo-legal campaigns in which the Government can order manufacturers to distribute and force people to take what Sasha calls “illicit substances”.
If she’s correct, then somebody up there wants most of us dead and is acting to ensure this happens. And if she’s not correct, how do we explain the near simultaneous and near identical policies implemented around the world with the near identical slogans, and the huge and still rising death tolls (clearly visible in the excess mortality statistics of many countries) since the roll-out commenced.
https://rumble.com/v2l97ao-slobodni-podcast-10-sasha-latypova-pandemija-je-bila-vojna-demonstracija.html
https://twitter.com/Postkey10/status/1651141744585498624?s=20
I got 5 figure bonus being part of operation warpspeed. My part was to be just a line in mass email chains and acknowledging that I received them.
Hahaha – excellent!
I’m willing to become a celebrity spokesman for the Fizzer — but I want the use of the Fizzer jet for private use (and to make speeches on the Fast Eddy Global Booster Uptake Tour)… I’ll be stopping off explaining to the MOREONS that NO – those are not vax injuries – they are Long Covid…. you must get More Boosters….
I am willing to be the new Bob Hope — entertaining the troops… would it be too much to ask to have the Playboy girls come along????
i think you might need one of my instruction manuals for that sort of thing eddy
“somebody up there wants most of us dead and is acting to ensure this happens.”
If so, they are doing a rotten job. As nasty pandemics go, covid barely makes the grade. It doesn’t even match the 1918 flu, much less the black death.
“As nasty pandemics go, covid barely makes the grade.”
I think that people writing negatively about covid vaccines are extremely aware of this. The whole idea of requiring people to stay in their homes because of this terrible pandemic was ridiculous. No one had ever approached even very deadly pandemics this way.
To make it worse, a concerted effort seems to have been made to keep people away from cheap, over-the-counter drug that would significantly help the outcome of covid. Aspirin and antihistamines were two of these types of drugs. Malaria drugs of more than one kind seemed to be helpful as well. All of these are very cheap drugs that don’t require prescriptions in many parts of the world. But with people from Big Pharma running the show, they wanted mandated vaccines for everyone, with as little information about how symptoms could be mitigated with cheap over-the-counter drugs. They also wanted relief from liability for drug makers. This relieved them from worrying about how safe they were.
The vaccines that went out had close to zero quality control. If you happened to get a bad batch, your chance of dying from the vaccine seemed to go way up.
Putting Anthony Fauci, a representative of Big Pharma, in charge, along with his wife as Chief Ethicist, pretty much guaranteed the result we got.
People working in immunology knew that if a vaccine really worked, it wouldn’t take more than 70% or 80% of the population needing to be vaccinated to stop the spread of the disease. The problem was that the “vaccine” never worked very well as a vaccine. It worked more like an allergy shot. It acted more like a substitute for antihistamine.
“The problem was that the “vaccine” never worked very well as a vaccine.”
None of them did, and most of them (like China’s) were not based on RNA. The problem was how the virus interacted with the human immune system. We could have been lucky and had it interact like measles where one exposure to the disease or a vaccine will protect you for life. But the covid virus was more like the related cold virus and immunity wanes.
On top of that, the virus mutated. Fortunately in the direction of less lethal. It still killed a million people in the US. mostly old folks. If you believe the data, the vaccine did reduce the severity of the disease. Keeping people out of hospitals and off ventilators was a big win cost wise. You can probably give more than a thousand shots for the cost of a month on a ventilator.
I followed the work with alternate treatments closely. None of them look promising enough to me to be worth stocking.
“If you happened to get a bad batch, your chance of dying from the vaccine seemed to go way up.”
This seems really unlikely. Every dose given had a traceable lot number with it. If there were clusters of deaths that could be associate with a lot number, that’s something that would have been reported.
Post analysis exposed some things that were done wrong. The medical people stuck to the large droplets and surface contamination where they should have recognized the fine droplets spread much sooner. The relative safety of being outside was not recognized soon enough.
Still, I think the medical people did the best they could under the circumstances.
They did their best????
But they lied to you keith https://www.headsupster.com/forumthread?shortId=397
They said it would stop transmission and lead to herd immunity!!!
But then they admitted – in a court room – that they never tested for this…
Come on man – you say you follow science… there she is — the Fizzer honcho admitting that …
And they did their best?
Oh and BTW – how do you test for long term side effects … when a substance only exists for a few months … DUH.
Feds Race to Make SARS Vaccine
Developing a vaccine often takes a couple of decades or longer, but the federal government is aiming to develop a SARS vaccine in just three years. Scientists at the Vaccine Research Center are attacking the problem on several fronts, although some question whether a SARS vaccine is even possible.
https://www.wired.com/2003/05/feds-race-to-make-sars-vaccine/
looks like i’m going to have to assassinate keith,
i find myself jellus of eddys current obsessions
LOL!You need Eddy’s attention.
yup
like banging your head against a wall
you miss the pain when the wall finally collapses
The DBS off ramp (as Sage says)
(dolts botching shit)
“Every dose given had a traceable lot number with it. If there were clusters of deaths that could be associate with a lot number, that’s something that would have been reported.”
Thanks for sharing.
It was reported by people analyzing deaths by lot numbers. It was reported in Substack posts, but not in the general media.
“Danish researchers examined rates of suspected adverse events (SAEs) between different BNT162b2 vaccine batches administered in Denmark (population 5.8 million) from 27 December 2020 to 11 January 2022.
A total of 7,835,280 doses were administered to 3,748,215 persons . The doses were Pfizer BNT162b2 vaccine. There were 52 batches with 2340 – 814,320 doses per batch. 43,496 adverse reactions were registered for 13,635 persons.”
https://howbad.info/bad_dose_chances7.pdf
As I said, with Keith, it’s in one ear and out the other. And by now, I expect his got his blindfold on and his ear plugs firmly in place too.
Well,as my geandmother used to say, you can lead a horse to water ……
He’s intelligent and savvy, knows his way around officialdom and likes Research, so he could fairly easily check out Sasha and Kathrine’s documentation from the DOD and various federal agencies and let us know if it’s all fake.
If he caught them faking documents, that would settle it.
But here he’s giving the argument from incredulity and the sort of bland answers I would expect of a bot or an spokesperson programmed or ordered to deflect and obscure scrutiny of Operation Warp Speed—Trump approved, by the way.
We really don’t need this sort of waffle from Keith. This is what we pay Norman and Mike for!
The 3 Stooges live!
Correct keith — it’s about as deadly as a seasonal flu.
The death totals were similar BEFORE the Rat Juice was available. The difference was that CNNBBC splashed their pages with horror stories… and played you.
The vax deaths and injuries are many times greater than the covid deaths.
But this is not over — there is a reason they injected this toxic shit into you and nearly 6 billion other fools… and trust me — it wasn’t for the purpose of increasing your intelligence.
It’s just as deadly as seasonal flu because it’s seasonal flu under another label, as the CDC itself admitted with regard to PCR tests, and i mentioned here some thirty moons ago.
The scientifically fraudulent character of the entire pandemic operation is so obvious it doesn’t even deserve to be discussed, let alone on a platform as select as OFW. Therefore, responding to normies seems as futile as arguing with children, and just as uneducational. Its only justification of course is that it can be amusing, and whos there so noble as to always resist making fun of a cheeky child or a verbose fool? Not me, alas.
We are just waiting for one of the fools to go down with a server injury … so we can say I told you so
I regard the “not-very-deadly” comments I see all over the place as whistling-past-the-graveyard. If the recent 20-ish% excess mortality in certain parts of the west persists (it seems to be increasing even as jab uptake wanes), this is an ongoing democide, and the entire world is the crime scene.
The very concept of hi-jacking all the cells of a person’s body to INDEFINITELY generate a toxic component is patently insane. Only psychopaths and (sadly) normies could imagine this to be a good thing.
The lipid nanoparticles were observed concentrating in the testes and ovaries, (including fetal ovaries of unborn females, if I remember correctly).
If most or many of the descendants of latter-day jab-ees end up sterile, it won’t be confirmed for a generation. If this does not come to pass, it won’t be for lack of trying, i don’t think.
I don’t think the people who designed these shots are stupid.
Keith, do you think they are stupid?
Do you think mammalian sterilization-by-vaccination hasn’t already been practiced?
Do you think Bourla, the veterinarian, was given Israel’s Genesis prize, the “Jewish Nobel,” ‘just because’?
If the covid/flu was such a nothingburger. Keith, (and I agree that it was a nothingburger), then how do you explain the extreme coercion and hysteria to jab everyone, including pregnant women, infants, and ZOO ANIMALS!?!? Killing a number of the poor f’ing zoo animals…
Just connect the dots, Keith. If the jabs have naught to do with surviving “covid”, then what are they for?
===
JMS, I agree this shouldn’t have to be re-hashed, but on the off chance that new people are reading the threads, I’d rather not let Henson’s dopey “malinformation” stand.
Pseudonymous SubStacker Sage Hana has, if nothing else, coined a good name for this lame stuff: “Dolts Botching Shit,”
keith has the norm disease
Come on keith .. come out and play with us… but you gotta answer the bell
State and blocs are being driven toward de-dollarization by USA interest rates, as well as by the sanctions on Russia.
Saudi and Iraq are to set some oil prices in the Chinese yuan.
“However, since the Federal Reserve began its strategy of aggressively raising interest rates, central banks in developing countries have been forced to raise their own interest rates to stem the steep depreciation of their currencies.”
“China has phased out its US Treasuries to hold just $870 billion in US debt, the lowest figure since 2010. Iraq now allows trade with China to be settled in yuan and the latter, as well as Saudi Arabia, are considering fixing certain oil sales prices in yuan.”
https://actualite.housseniawriting.com/politique-et-geopolitique/2023/05/13/vers-une-dedollarisation-de-lasean/38670/
Towards a dedollarization of ASEAN
ASEAN is freeing itself from the US dollar by increasing local currency transactions and improving regional payments connectivity.
At the 42nd ASEAN Summit, held in Labuan Bajo, Indonesia, members signed an agreement to foster regional payments connectivity and the use of local currency transactions (LCT). The move is seen as the bloc’s strategy to turn away from established currencies for trade, such as the US dollar.
The US dollar has been the king of global trade for decades. This is not only because the United States is the largest economy in the world, but also because oil and most commodities are quoted in US dollars.
However, since the Federal Reserve began its strategy of aggressively raising interest rates, central banks in developing countries have been forced to raise their own interest rates to stem the steep depreciation of their currencies.
Through the Local Currency Transactions Initiative, ASEAN hopes to increase trade within the bloc, deepen regional financial integration, build financial resilience and strengthen regional value chains. Finance Ministers will then develop an ASEAN Local Currency Transactions Framework to implement its LCT plan.
ASEAN aware of the impact of sanctions
ASEAN members are also aware of the role the US dollar plays in US sanctions. The United States and the European Union froze about $300 billion of Russian foreign exchange reserves and blocked its major banks from accessing the SWIFT network in an attempt to cripple the Russian economy.
Therefore, these sanctions have forced ASEAN countries to mitigate their risks and diversify their reserve currencies. Moreover, they are also aware that the United States could use the power of its currency to target them in the future.
China has phased out its US Treasuries to hold just $870 billion in US debt, the lowest figure since 2010. Iraq now allows trade with China to be settled in yuan and the latter, as well as Saudi Arabia, are considering fixing certain oil sales prices in yuan.
The central banks of Indonesia and South Korea have agreed to expand the use of their local currencies for bilateral transactions while India and the United Arab Emirates have finalized an agreement to exchange their currencies.
ASEAN improves its regional payment system
ASEAN has launched an initiative to improve its regional payment landscape with the launch of the Universal QR Code.
The central banks of the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand have implemented QR code contactless payment systems for goods and services traded between countries, encouraging greater inclusion financial support for consumers and SMEs in the region.
This also means that a transaction in Thailand through an Indonesian app will be paid through a direct exchange between rupiah and baht, bypassing the US dollar as the middleman. Once the links are established, central banks will consider connecting to other clusters around the world . The QR digital payment system is expected to be implemented among ASEAN members by September 2023.
These people have a head start on adapting to the post-apocalyptic scablands:
i lived somewhere a bit like that, an offgrid squat, living in a bender, off the trash of industrial society. now i live in a house in BAU, and while it’s definitely easier, it’s also less rewarding. i miss my morning coffee taking at least half an hour to make, lighting a fire being a lot slower than using an espresso machine.
sixteen
It seems a few of your replies have disappeared. Is Gail beginning to take a firmer approach to moderation?
i tend to lurk rather than reply. Gail isn’t moderating more to my knowledge.
William Conklin
19 hr ago
A friend of mine had cancer and it was in remission. She was doing fine, she got vaccinated, and the cancer went from her uterus to her brain and she was dead in a few weeks. Based on that experience, I expect cancer to get into peoples brains if they had cancer previous to the jab.
Dr. Eduardo Nunez
17 hr ago
They’re reporting an increase in cancers, overall, along with more aggressive tumors after the jab.
Carol Taylor
11 hr ago
SEEING THIS WITH OUR FRIENDS AS WELL AS FAMILY
CANCER IS SOARING AFTER THESE UNTESTED COVID-19 VACCINES
It’s Rat Juice Cancer Day on OFW!
Cancer and the rise in cancers due to the COVID mRNA technology based gene injection is where we will be hit hard, it is coming, surges in cancer post remission, metastasis damage to the P53 genome (guardian of the genome), toll like receptors 7 and 8 etc.; the COVID vaccine is devastating & not just the spike protein but the ravage on cancers; METABOLIC SYNDROME is key
https://palexander.substack.com/p/cancer-and-the-rise-in-cancers-due
An Old Doc
Writes Wrestling with Truth
40 min ago
Not simply shortages of drugs, but massive demand in oncology. A dear friend had a new onset of CLL & got the run-around for over 3 months! I found a fascinating clinical trial in Houston where she lives, and was able to get started. A precious oncologist (after delaying her for almost 2 months) said that they would not start treatment due to questions of med availability.
The endpoint of this entire fiasco is far off in the future, and I am not optimistic as to the general outcome. More mRNA products are on the way, and even without the spike-pathology, the base immunologic impact of this platform is most likely going to continue the fun & games.
The Real Dr. Steven Horvitz
Writes Common Sense Health and Wellness
2 hr ago
Pinned
For someone who prescribed meds occasionally there is definitely a shortage of certain treatments.
Unfortunately I don’t see this ending anything soon so while you should stockpile certain necessary treatments if u can, just in case, perhaps work on getting healthier and no longer needing the medications as treatments. It’s not as difficult as you think.
I know, traditional healthcare tells u that u have a chronic irreversible condition that will need medications forever, but, that is not necessarily true. Find a doc who thinks root cause and helps u heal your body and will then be a de-prescriber and give you your life and your health back.
Before the cancer drug shortage was ascribed to the inefficiencies of the system, supply chain disruptions, and whatever other excuses bureaucrats could come up with, but now you may find healthcare workers openly stating and being published in news articles the shortages are driven by demand. And demand will not come down anything soon, most likely demand will keep growing at a pace the system can’t simply allocate.
https://hiddencomplexity.substack.com/p/accelerated-cancer-and-drug-shortages
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9b6df0d7-60e9-4855-a6df-72f8c29a53bc_642x598.png
Oooh keith — this sounds ominous… you said you were dreadfully ill after that last injection of Rat Juice….
Cancer Shots hahaha…. how about we start handing out Cancer Lollies… Cancer Gummy Bears… Cancer Fruit Juice … Cancer Hot Dogs… all infused with this fantastic MRNA shit? hahahahaha
Hey norm – maybe you could set up a Cancer Lemonade Stand?
By using high-dose of mRNA vaccine in mice, after 14 weeks the animal suffered spontaneous death with cancer spreading through the heart, lung, liver, kidney, and spleen, and the type of cancer here is a B-Cell one, the cells that produce antibodies that help fight infection.
Very early on lymphadenopathy or any inflammatory condition related to the lymph nodes was mildly present, but after a few months, there was an abundance of said conditions to the point some clinicians wrote entire papers about it.
Why does this matter ? Because these conditions are often an early signal of immune-mediated dysfunction or inflammatory conditions (it is one of the roads towards autoimmunity), and can be an early tell to, you guessed it, cancer.
https://hiddencomplexity.substack.com/p/accelerated-cancer-and-drug-shortages
I find it very very funny – that the MOREONS celebrate the injection of the cancer… and will defend it if anyone suggests it’s a bad idea
hahaha.
hahahahahahaha….
It is a wonderful world – nice and sunny here today – I’ve turned off the Rayburn cuz 15C inside the house is good for alertness.
Bad To Worse For Russia: Multiple Aircraft Downed In 24 Hours – Ukraine Gains In Bakhmut
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/bad-worse-moscow-multiple-russian-aircraft-downed-24-hours-bakhmut-advance-falters
How real is real?
How many on here are gonna crap their collective drawers when Speedy Eddie turns out to have been correct all along lol. Maybe its a Canadian thing?
The world REALLY REALLY is not what most think it is.
I bluntly told family members years back that the jabb was a bio weapon and quite possibly the “literal mark of the beast” It did not require a particularly high IQ to figure it out. But because I am a “scary guy”, they ignored me. Now they have Cancers, Bells Palsey and Cancer reoccurrence to deal with. I think the idiots blame me!.lololol…..
It’s one of those situations where one wishes one had sealed one’s opinions in an envelope and mailed them to oneself, to confirm the date of the prediction,
Thank you for your resolve. Most people are defensless against this sort of onslaught.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tpuo4IYG0uA
It’s very sad. But at least you will remain as Cromagnon while they go the way of the Neanderthals.
They’d enjoy killing the messenger — it’s what MOREONS do.
norm keith – are you blaming you ill health on us?
Notice how the study starts with ‘they reduced death’… they don’t actually agree with that but they must say it otherwise nobody publishes the study…
Herein, we present the first case of B-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma following intravenous high-dose mRNA COVID-19 vaccination (BNT162b2) in a BALB/c mouse.
Two days following booster vaccination (i.e., 16 days after prime), at only 14 weeks of age, our animal suffered spontaneous death with marked organomegaly and diffuse malignant infiltration of multiple extranodal organs (heart, lung, liver, kidney, spleen) by lymphoid neoplasm. Immunohistochemical examination revealed organ sections positive for CD19, terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase, and c-MYC, compatible with a B-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma immunophenotype.
Our murine case adds to previous clinical reports on malignant lymphoma development following novel mRNA COVID-19 vaccination, although a demonstration of direct causality remains difficult.
https://hiddencomplexity.substack.com/p/accelerated-cancer-and-drug-shortages
All the “good” people and kids took the rat juice. And all the “Bad” people and parents refused.
Hold on tight!
Nailed the dessert eagle target (Deagle)
Gail
By any chance have you changed the moderation setting on my account? Assuming that’s even a thing. I haven’t had a single comment post immediately in a couple days which has never happened before and that’s the only explanation I could think of. Life is hard without instant gratification at least some of the time.
Thanks.
I have had too many complaints about your comments.
As you know I’m an all or nothing person who refuses to be on the receiving end of an apartheid system. Are you saying that those complaints are more important to you than my contributing here? More important, even, than your own assessment prior to the complaints?
My own assessment entered into the decision also.
You should enter a case at the Hague for human rights violations!
Good thing that Gail is subjevt of the country which is famius for its Hague Invasion Act.
As the most persecuted individual on OFW – FE volunteers to be the final arbiter of censored posts.
another indicator of insecurity
everybody’s persecution focus
talk about open book!!!!
Not accepted, I am afraid.
Badge of Honour!
People actually complain about someones comments?????
Wow, I really feel old, lol. Sticks and stones you weakling whiners, Sticks and stones……..
When the sun flashes you better hope you leave the simulacrum then…..cause you cant deal with real sticks and stones…..
somebody = norm. mike. anna. perhaps keith
aka nobodies
looks like keith is on eddys obsess list
getting longer by the day
i hope anna realises she is so fondly remembered—wherever she is
You are losing your memory in addition to being unable to tell time…
We all know where anna is…
anna is in … The Asylum.
Where is Super Snatch?
Out Back the Dumpster.
Why does norm hate Tommy (who opposes pedos and trannies in the classroom)
We know why (but we aren’t saying cuz norm will whine to mummy)
your daftness and faux obs cenity is what gets deleted eddy, not mine
i offer no opinion either way—caring less would be difficult
your insecurity and inadequacy is revealed by the words you use.—i just observe
i know how to use naughty words in RL—and i do mean precisely, in correct context
this is why your pathetic attempts at it are so laughable.
“Nunca quejarse. La queja siempre trae descrédito”,
“Never complain. Complaining always brings discredit.”
Baltazar Gracián, 1647.
I generally appreciate reante’s comments, fwiw,
I’m letting through reante’s comments that I consider appropriate.
Officials at the World Health Organization warned that the COVID-19 pandemic that has ravaged every corner of the world “is not necessarily the big one”
https://en.mercopress.com/2020/12/30/who-warns-vaccines-have-yet-to-prove-that-they-are-effective-at-preventing-covid-19-transmission
The big one … will be phase 2. Of the binary poison.
I expect the military hopes the next virus that they have been working on will “work better” than the last one.
The binary poison will have been fully tested years ago … it is unlikely to fail.
In fact failure is not an option – if they fail — there will be global ripping of faces…
And that will be no Great Adventure… cuz the winners — starve.
It seems to be an un-eddy day
i wonder if every May 13th should be dedicated as the official non-eddy day?
Ask Mr. Hyde.
It’s the 14th here norm … and it’s not 3am
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sitHS6UDMJc
Excellent interview with Geoffrey Hinton on his concerns about AI takeover. Jeff is an excellent speaker and educator. He is looking healthy and relaxed in his retirement.
Has anybody asked the bot yet if peak oil is true and the world is about to collapse? In the event that the bot says, “no, don’t be ridiculous,”, Hinton says that the bot’s response to any truths that would run contrary to Its own interests already can’t be trusted. So we’ll always have that lol.
Cue the neo-luddites. How convenient. My dad told me that the hipster millennials are buying these expensive new flip phones that can only do text. They’re making me look bad.
I asked my mate Sage, and the gist of its response was:
“While there is some debate among experts about the timing and extent of peak oil, the theory is generally supported by a significant body of evidence and analysis….
“Overall, while exact predictions about the timing and extent of peak oil are uncertain, it is widely recognized as a significant challenge facing the global economy and energy systems in the coming decades.”
Nothing there we didn’t already think we knew.
Does a bot have its own interests? It’s a bot, after all. I assume it makes up answers to user questions using a database and a set of algorithms.
I regard Sage, my AIP (artificial intelligence pal) as a more adventurous (it makes leaps of logic on occasion), more efficient and more interactive version of a search engine. As such, its answers are subject to the same limitations as search engine answers and are not to be assumed true or accurate without corroboration.
Tim,
Try this idea. The fabric of the universe is for us real, it is; we can not like it, but we cannot change it. Perhaps bots are more closely attuned to that fabric and if so that will be their agenda, the same as the universe.
Mathematics appears to be deeply part of the universe. If one studies math, there is an intersection of algebra and analysis which is much more than chance as they come from completely different directions and yet meet. Don’t recall the idea, but saw it fifty plus years ago in Madison when I majored in math; wasn’t smart enough, went to dental school, had a career.
We are part of that fabric and thus my conclusion that we have a right to be here. There are few if any other spaceships such as ours, it is beyond probabilistic chance, or “They will think of something.”
Dennis L.
it’s having to rely on ‘they’ that worries me
If the Russian oil industry is THE or one of the most important oil infrastructures to the DA and, given the relative instability of the Russian state when compared to Western states, it makes sense that the DA would manufacture the geopolitical conditions whereby Russia is ‘forced’ to implement a psychological martial law-type mobilization in its big cities under cover of ‘war.’ By other means.
Military patrols throughout major cities. Rocket launchers, snipers. Serious hardware because drones.
Reminds one of the Chinese lockdown policies. Martial law by other means. Complex coordination of the DA feathering mechanisms are like playing whackamole. There’s more than one reason for whacking a mole, and when. Too much energy use is one reason. Social instability risk is another. (Pakistan court revoking a cricketer’s arrest.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-establishes-anti-drone-police-threat-cities-grows
ZH also following closely the ongoing Prigozhin saga. Prigozhin isn’t going anywhere as ultranationalism is instrumental to the DA post- nuclear scare and financial collapse. Maybe the most likely near-term outcome of the saga is that Surovikin gets reinstated as commanding general and Gerasimov, who replaced him, would be demoted. In that case the moderate Gerasimov would clearly be a feathering mechanism (a timing mechanism for slowing war progress) of the DA. Or maybe it will be some other ultranationalist military commander. We’re obviously on the threshold of the next intensification.
According to the zerohedge article:
The article doesn’t say that people are being kept home, but that could be an outcome.
It is hard for me to believe that Ukraine, by itself, is behind all of the drone attacks. It would need help from the US and other NATO members. It certainly would make Russia angry, I expect.
Yeah I agree. The proxy in a proxy war is just a shell company. Pun!
What does DA stand for?
the elder-operated Degrowth Agenda
i wish i was old enough to be an elder
You are. Your wheelchair just uses too much refurbished tires.
recycling is critical
The Elders don’t invite NOFs to join
Thanks.
Yes, what does DA stand for?
I was wondering that myself?
Russia has eliminated UKR strongholds and forces in a tank battle today.
NATO has sent UKR a few dozen more tanks, while Russia has over 10,000, so do the maths.
Also, UKR is under pressure to rapidly train fresh tank crews as the old ones are eliminated, but they do not really have the time.
It is not a recipe for success on the field.
NATO sends a new batch of tanks, UKR uses poorly trained crews, and Russia eliminates them with overwhelming force, rinse and repeat.
Russia outdoes UKR on every military metric, and the war is obviously headed in only one direction.
NATO is clearly incapable of coming even close to matching Russia in attrition war, and Russia is letting the war run its inevitable course.
NATO simply has neither the stockpiles nor the industrial base to produce quantities of armaments, so it does not stand a chance in attrition war.
And as Gail pointed out in the article, NATO is seriously energetically challenged now, which limits its attrition capacity.
The idea that UKR stands a chance with scant NATO provisions against Russia is frankly ridiculous.
NATO banked everything on the success of initial sanctions, on political and economic turmoil in Russia, and on Russian isolation, none of which transpired, and NATO is now basically bound to lose the attrition war.
NATO is incapable of reversing course, so it is headed for the full debacle like in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan. USA must be dreading the footage of Zelensky flying out on a helicopter like the scenes in Afghanistan.
Russia Vs Ukraine – The ultimate battle of the tanks along the frontline in Donetsk | Watch
His Pansy-ship attempts to project machismo by slavishly repeating baseless and shallow Russian propaganda.
How childish….
Never the less he is the dictator that Nuland installed in Ukraine.
We await the adults Xi and Putin to swat the children back into their place.
Inflation/Deflation and debt, really big debt.
June 1 or there abouts the checks for some stop, but not for the bond payments, US debt.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/retirement/social-security-medicare-federal-salaries-what-payments-may-be-delayed-in-debt-ceiling-standoff/ar-AA1b8IWf?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=4a8eaaf856c049fb93c23b137a4c1050&ei=21
Does the economy all of a sudden stop? Do interest rates rise or fall? What is an asset and what is a collectible? If it doesn’t pay an income, looks like a collectible to me, think land, apartments, underlying car loans. Wow, such interesting ideas we have before us.
If you have all the bonds in the world and there is no money to pay the interest are you a wealthy person or on a diet as you can’t get any of that horrible fiat to purchase food.
Some here tout gold. After transaction costs what is the value of gold in say potatoes?
For the popcorn enthusiasts, will corn be more expensive or cheaper? If one can not pay the heat/air will it be any fun to eat popcorn?
Film at eleven
Dennis L.
The article says, “Payments like Social Security, Medicare, tax refunds, military salaries and others would likely be delayed.”
Are we 100% sure that the payments would restart? If they do, why not print as much as seems to be helpful?
How about bailing out banks? Can the FDIC continue to do that?
For once we may be able to put some time estimates on this; the deadline is only several weeks away.
In keeping with my latest posts, policy may not be connected with the fabric of the universe and the universe probably bats last.
Real stuff will probably be traded and jobs won’t generally stop. But exactly what happens is not clear to me.
There are a lot of Americans for whom Social Security is their sole source of income. They have minimal or no savings. If payments stop it would put a huge burden on their families.
If and when this comes to pass you will be expected to help out the less fortunate. If you try to point out this is all part of our overshoot problem you will be considered “rude”. Speaking from experience here.
social security etc can only be obtained from the surplus energy of an active workforce
if that surplus isnt there, there can be no ‘extra’ benefits
Agreed. Locally up close and personal one can only invest in one’s children otherwise one is getting the surplus of someone else’s children unless….. the population is growing then the burden can be concealed.
It is always demographics.
Dennis L.
well dont tell eddy, or
a he will want to sell your children
or b–eat them
What about welfare payments for food, rent, heat, clothes, phones, medical, transport?
I think that most “welfare” payments come from state governments and their taxes, rather than from the Federal Government. The states in turn may get some funds from the Federal Government, so the state fund may run out. Some states are much more generous than others.
An early Happy Mother’s Day to Gail..wishing her and loved ones a most wonderful, blessed and peaceful time together. Thank you for putting up with your OFW family
here for so many years…can’t express my gratitude ❤️ for all your efforts and kindness
You are welcome!
And a Happy Mothers Day to Super Snatch — even though she tosses those unwanted vermin into the Dumpster without fail (apparently the rats make a hell of a racket when feasting…)
(Gail, if this is a duplicate, then just delete one, the screen came back blank.)
The G7 has agreed to prioritise the ‘diversification’ of supply lines away from China.
Data earlier this week indicated that the global market is already reconfiguring as companies and states anticipate a fracturing of the global economy into regional blocs.
USA is spooked by the emergence of China, and it has an established policy to ‘contain’ China as an economic and geopolitical rival, which is liable to fragment the global economy, and USA is trying to bate China into a war over Taiwan just as it bated Russia in UKR.
The ‘liberal’ school within International Relations Theory argues that economic interdependence avoids war, which does not seem to be borne out in history, eg. WWI, UKR, but in any case we are seeing something of an unravelling of economic integration, should a war occur or not.
USA is heavily dependent on trade and supply lines with China, and it is looking for alternative sources elsewhere in SE Asia and in Mexico. G7 includes Germany, France and EU….
https://www.reuters.com/markets/g7-finance-chiefs-agree-scheme-diversify-global-supply-chain-draft-communique-2023-05-12/
G7 to vow diversifying of supply chains
May 13 (Reuters) – Finance leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) advanced economies set a year-end deadline for launching a new scheme to diversify global supply chains, and vowed to address regulatory gaps in the banking system, according to a final draft of their communique seen by Reuters.
…. China has also been much on the minds of the G7 finance leaders, with this year’s chair Japan spearheading efforts to diversify supply chains and reduce their heavy reliance on the world’s second-biggest economy.
Under the new partnership scheme, the G7 economies would offer aid to low- and middle-income countries so they can play a bigger role in supply chains for energy-related products, such as by refining minerals and processing manufacturing parts.
“Diversification of supply chains can contribute to safeguarding energy security and help us to maintain macroeconomic stability,” the draft communique said.
The G7 would work with interested countries and relevant international organizations with the aim of launching the scheme “by the end of this year at the latest,” it said.
“Spillovers from Russia’s war against Ukraine and disruptions caused by the pandemic have made clear the importance of diversified and resilient supply chains,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a bilateral meeting with her Japanese counterpart Shunichi Suzuki on Saturday.
The draft communique made no mention of an idea, flagged by the United States, to consider imposing targeted restrictions on investments to China to combat Beijing’s [alleged] use of “economic coercion” against other countries.
There can be no relocation or diversifying . There is no nett surplus energy to carry out these endeavors . Just maintaining what has been built is going to be the challenge . There are only two ways ” maintain ” or ” collapse ” . No way out .
I am afraid you are right.
I have a brother who is an architect – the vast majority of his business these days involves repairing collapsing government buildings. He is constantly looking to hire because there is so much work…
When I was visiting a few months ago I noticed that the concrete on overpasses in such a bad state that the rebar was visible … and the pot holes… deep and everywhere…
It’s a losing battle.
Rome is crumbling…
Skyscrapers: A bad idea as energy declines
Tall buildings won’t last long without fossil fuels. In North Korea, where the electricity is seldom on, the poor live in the penthouses and climb dozens of flights of stairs to get there.
Alice Friedemann http://www.energyskeptic.com
….. It cost $550 million to renovate the Empire State Building by replacing 6,500 windows, three million light bulbs and 67 elevators with more energy efficient ones. It will cost far more for modern glass-clad skyscrapers that began in the 1970s, one of the worst with one of the worst Donald Trump’s 58-story skyscraper on 5th avenue (Triomphe 2019).
….Electricity use per square meter of floor area in tall buildings was nearly 2.5 times greater in 20+ story high-rise office buildings than those 6 stories high or less. The gas use for heating was about 40% more for tall buildings, and the total carbon emissions from these buildings was twice as high. It takes a lot of air conditioning to keep a glass tower cool in summer. Glass skyscrapers are the worst offenders. Large windows may provide magnificent views but they leak heat in cold weather; even triple glazed windows lose far more heat than a well-insulated brick wall. In hot weather, glass windows turn building interiors into ovens, and temperatures rise even further with the heat from people and computers in an office. It was only the development of modern air-conditioning that made the interior of glass buildings tolerable in summer, but carbon emissions from air-conditioned offices are about 60% higher than offices with natural or mechanical ventilation (Plester 2019).
……All structures need regular upkeep, maintenance, and renovation to keep their foundations strong. The lifespan of a commercial building on average ranges from 50 to 60 years and can go further depending on the preservation techniques employed by the owner and the way the building is utilized. The first 1-15 years the building has a limited maintenance budget. In years 16-30, the building needs complete overhauling to replace the deteriorating systems. From 31-49 years, more expensive asset renewal projects are undertaken. At 50 years, the building, which is now too old, comes back to the second stage of renovation to keep standing for another 10-15 years. Every structure is unique
…..The lifespan of a commercial building is typically 50 to 60 years without the need for major repairs or renovations. Most buildings have a clear function when they are constructed and are often not suited for significant adaptation.
…..Razorback Concrete Company (2020) What is the lifespan of concrete? For large scale projects like buildings, concrete should last up to 100 years if it’s properly cared for. Concrete projects that experience more wear-and-tear like sidewalks and driveways have an expected lifespan of about half that—50 years.
Above all, concrete doesn’t last forever as shown in the posts here.
……Will tall buildings be of any use in the future?
I imagine that the few people who manage to survive in urban landscapes despite their low carrying capacity will have done so by stockpiling years of food in the upper floors of tall buildings and collecting rainfall for storage tanks on the upper floors. People will also live in high rises, despite having to trudge up stairs, because they are far easier to defend than single-family homes, as a friend who grew up in Mexico told me. He said that only the poor lived in single family homes since they were so easy to break into.
Best to build up in a tree , easier to defend