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Recently, I explained the key role played by diesel and jet fuel. In this post, I try to explain the energy bottleneck the world is facing because of an inadequate supply of these types of fuels, and the effects such a bottleneck may have. The world’s self-organizing economy tends to squeeze out what may be considered non-essential parts when bottlenecks are hit. Strangely, it appears to me that some central governments may be squeezed out. Countries that are rich enough to have big pension programs for their citizens seem to be especially vulnerable to having their governments collapse.
This squeezing out of non-essential parts of the economy can happen by war, but it can also happen because of financial problems brought about by “not sufficient actual goods and services to go around.” An underlying problem is that governments can print money, but they cannot print the actual resources needed to produce finished goods and services. I think that in the current situation, a squeezing out for financial reasons, or because legislators can’t agree, is at least as likely as another world war.
For example, the US is having trouble electing a Speaker of the House of Representatives because legislators disagree about funding plans. I can imagine a long shutdown occurring because of this impasse. Perhaps not this time around, but sometime in the next few years, such a disagreement may lead to a permanent shutdown of the US central government, leaving the individual states on their own. Programs of the US central government, such as Social Security and Medicare, would likely disappear. It would be up to the individual states to sponsor whatever replacement programs they are able to afford.
[1] An overview of the problem
In my view, we are in the midst of a great “squeezing out.” The economy, and in fact the entire universe, is a physics-based system that constantly evolves. Every part of the economy requires energy of the right types. Humans and animals eat food. Today’s economy requires many forms of fossil fuels, plus human labor. This evolution is in the direction of ever-greater complexity and ever-greater efficiency.
Right now, there is a bottleneck in energy supply caused by too much population relative to the amount of oil of the type used to make diesel and jet fuel (Figure 1). My concern is that many governments and businesses will collapse in response to what I call the Second Squeezing Out. In 1991, the central government of the Soviet Union collapsed, following a long downward slide starting about 1982.
All parts of economies, including government organizations and businesses, constantly evolve. They grow for a while, but when limits are hit, they are likely to shrink and may collapse. The current energy bottleneck is sufficiently dire that some observers worry about another world war taking place. Such a war could change national boundaries and reduce import capabilities of parts of the world. This would be a type of squeezing out of major parts of the world economy. In fact, shortages of coal seem to have set the stage for both World War I and World War II.
Each squeezing out is different. When there are physically not enough goods and services to go around, some inefficient parts of the economy must be squeezed out. Payments to pensioners seem to me to be particularly inefficient because pensioners are not themselves creating finished goods and services.
World leaders would like us to believe that they are in charge of what happens in the world economy. But what these leaders can accomplish is limited by the actual resources that can be extracted and the finished goods and services that can be produced with these resources. When there are not enough goods and services to go around, unplanned changes to the economy tend to take place. These changes work in the direction of allowing parts of the system to go forward, without being burdened by the less efficient portions.
[2] The importance of diesel and jet fuel
Diesel and jet fuel are important to today’s industrial economy because they fuel nearly all long-distance transportation of goods, whether by ship, train, large truck, or airplane. Diesel also powers most of today’s modern agricultural equipment. Without the use of modern agricultural equipment, overall food production would decline drastically.
Without diesel, there would also be many other problems besides reduced food production. Diesel is used to power many of the specialized vehicles used in road maintenance. Without the ability to use these vehicles, it would become difficult to keep roads repaired.
Without diesel and jet fuel, there would also be an electricity problem because transmission lines are maintained using a combination of land-based vehicles powered by diesel and helicopters powered by jet fuel. Without electricity transmission, homes and offices without their own solar panels and batteries wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. Gasoline pumps require electricity to operate, so they wouldn’t operate either. Without diesel and electricity, the list of problems is endless.
[3] Green energy is itself a dead end, but subsidizing green energy can temporarily hide other problems.
Green energy sounds appealing, but it is terribly limited in what it can do. Green energy cannot operate agricultural machinery. It cannot make new wind turbines or solar panels. Green energy cannot exist without fossil fuels. It is simply an add-on to the current system.
The reason why we hear so much about green energy is because making people believe that a green revolution is possible provides many temporary benefits. For example:
- The extra debt needed to subsidize green energy indirectly increases GDP. (GDP calculations ignore whether added debt was used to produce the added goods and services counted as GDP.)
- Manufacturers can pretend that their products (such as vehicles) will operate as they do today for years and years.
- The educational system is given many more areas to provide courses in.
- Citizens are given the hope that the economy will grow endlessly.
- Young people are given hope for the future.
- Politicians look like they are doing something for voters.
Unfortunately, by the time that the debt comes due to pay for subsidized green energy, it will be apparent that the return on this technology is far too low. The overall system will tend to collapse. Green energy is only a temporary Band-Aid to hide a very disturbing problem. Its impact is tiny and short-lived. And it cannot prevent climate change.
[4] Energy bottlenecks are a frequent problem.
Energy bottlenecks are a frequent problem partly because the human population has tended to increase ever since early humans learned to control fire. At the same time, resources, such as arable land, fresh water supply, and minerals of all kinds, are in limited supply. Extraction becomes increasingly difficult over time (requiring more inputs to produce the same output) because the easiest-to-produce resources tend to be exploited first. Extracting more fossil fuels to meet the energy needs of a growing economy may look like it would be easy, but, in practice, it is not.
As a result of energy bottlenecks, civilizations often collapse. Sometimes war with another group is involved. In such a case, the population of the losing civilization falls.
[5] The standard supply and demand model of economics makes it look like prices will rise in response to fossil fuel shortages. The discussion in Section [4] shows that energy supply bottlenecks often occur. When they do occur, the response is very different.
The model of many economists is far too simple. Based on the model shown on Figure 2, it is easy to get the idea that a shortage of oil will lead to a rise in prices. As a result, more oil will be produced, and the problem will be solved. Or perhaps efficiency changes, or substitution for a different type of fuel, will fix the problem.
When bottlenecks appear, the real situation is quite different. For example, increases in oil prices tend to cause food prices to rise, and thus increase inflation. Politicians know that citizens don’t like inflation and therefore will not vote for them. As a result, politicians tend to hold down prices. The resulting prices tend to fall too low for producers, and they start producing less, rather than more.
Energy products of the right kinds are essential for making every part of GDP. If there is not enough of the right kinds of energy products to go around, what I call some kind of “squeezing out” is likely to take place. Early on, there may be changes that reduce energy consumption, such as cutbacks in international trade. More businesses may fail. Eventually, some parts of the world economy may disappear, such as the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. Or war may take place.
[6] When there is not enough energy of the right kinds to go around, spreading what little is available “thinner” doesn’t work.
As an example, if people need to eat 2,000 kilocalories per day, and if the food supply that is available would only supply 500 kilocalories per day (on average), giving everyone the same quantity would lead to everyone starving. Similarly, if a communist government gives every worker the same wage, lateness and “slacking off” become huge problems. Experience in many places has shown that equal pay for all, regardless of native abilities, responsibilities, or effort, simply doesn’t work. Somehow, diligent work and greater responsibility needs to be rewarded.
When an energy bottleneck occurs (leading to too little finished goods and services in total being produced), what I call a “squeezing out” takes place. Such a squeezing out may be initiated in many ways, including a war, angry citizens overturning a government, financial problems, or a shift in climate. The winners in a squeezing out end up ahead; the losers see collapsing institutions of many kinds, including failing businesses and disappearing government organizations.
[7] Most people do not understand the interconnected nature of the world economy, and the way the whole system tends to evolve.
The Universe is made up of many temporary structures, each of which needs to “dissipate” energy to stay away from a cold, dead state. We are all aware that plants and animals behave in this manner, but businesses of all kinds and government organizations also require energy of the right kinds to grow. They get much of their energy from financial payments that act as temporary placeholders for goods and services that will be made in the future using various types of energy, including human labor.
Strangely enough, because of the physics of the situation, business and government organizations are also temporary in nature, and in some sense, they also evolve. In physics terms, all these structures are dissipative structures. Physicist Francois Roddier writes about this broader kind of evolution in his book, The Thermodynamics of Evolution. In fact, economies themselves are dissipative structures. I have written about the economy as a self-organizing system powered by energy many times, including here, here, and here. All these self-organizing structures eventually come to an end.
History is full of records of economies that have collapsed. The book Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin and Serjey Nefedov analyzes eight of these failed economies. Populations tend to grow after a new resource is found or is acquired through war. Once population growth hits what Turchin calls carrying capacity, these economies hit a period of stagflation. This period lasted 50 to 60 years in the sample of eight economies analyzed. Stagflation was followed by a major contraction, typically with failing or overturned governments and declining overall population.
[8] Logic and some calculations suggest that the world economy is likely to be reaching a major downturn, about now.
One way of estimating when a major contraction (or squeezing out) would occur would be to look at oil supply. We know that US oil production hit a peak and started to decline in 1970, changing the dynamics of the world economy. This started a period of stagflation for many of the wealthier economies of the world. Adding 50 to 60 years to 1970 suggests that a major downturn would take place in the 2020 to 2030 timeframe. Since it was the wealthier economies that first entered stagflation, it would not be surprising if these economies tend to collapse first.
There have been several studies computing estimates of when the extraction of fossil fuels would become unaffordable. Back in 1957, Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover of the US Navy gave a speech in which he talked about the connection of the level of fossil fuel supply to the standard of living of an economy, and to the ability of its military to defend the country. With respect to the timing of limits to affordable supply, he said, “. . .total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today’s unit cost are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account.”
Confusion arises because some people would like to believe that fossil fuel prices can rise to extraordinarily high levels, and this will somehow permit more fossil fuels to be extracted. However, as I discussed in Section [5], the problem is really a two-sided one. Politicians want to hold fossil fuel prices down to prevent inflation, while oil producers (such as those in OPEC+) choose to reduce production if prices are not sufficiently high to meet their needs.
An easily missed point is that tax revenue from the sale of oil is often a large share of the total tax revenue of oil exporting countries. Because of this issue, in order for prices of oil to be adequate for oil exporters, they must include a wide margin for payment of taxes. These taxes are used to support the rest of the economy. For example, in Saudi Arabia, taxes provide support for huge building programs that provide jobs for citizens, but are of questionable long term value. These projects keep citizens happy, at least temporarily. Without adequate subsidy from tax revenue, citizens would want to overturn governments–a form of collapse.
[9] Energy problems are easily hidden because “scientific models” are considered to be important in forecasting the future. These models tend to be misleading because they leave out important elements regarding how the economy really works.
The easiest models to make are the ones that seem to say, “the future will be very similar to the recent past.” These models miss turning points. They assume that growth will continue even though resource extraction can be expected to become more difficult. Some examples of overly simple models include the following:
- Money is a store of value. (Not if the economy has stopped functioning properly because insufficient energy resources are available.)
- Forecasts of Social Security payments recipients will be able to receive in the future are overstated. (It takes energy of the right kinds to produce the goods and services that the elderly require. If the economy is not producing enough goods and services because of energy extraction limits, the share that pensioners can receive will need to fall so that workers can be paid adequately. Inflation-adjusted benefits to the elderly must be much lower or disappear completely.)
- Climate models give high estimates. (These models miss the real-world difficulty of extracting fossil fuels. They also assume the economy can grow indefinitely, greatly overstating future CO2.)
- Future energy supply based on “Reserve to Production” ratios give high estimates. (Reserve amounts are often puffed-up numbers to make an oil exporting country look wealthy.)
- Energy Return on Energy Invested models greatly overestimate the value of intermittent wind and solar energy. (It is easy to assume that all types of energy are equivalent, but intermittent wind and solar cannot replace diesel and jet fuel.)
[10] Added complexity is not a solution to our energy problems.
Many people believe that if we can just be smarter, we can solve our energy problem. We can add more fuel-efficient engines, more advanced education, and more international trade, for example. Unfortunately, many things go wrong, leading to an upward energy complexity spiral. Difficulties include:
- The complexity changes with the best payback tend to be discovered and implemented very early.
- Added complexity may lead to higher energy consumption if cost savings result. For example, more vehicles may be sold if reduced fuel consumption makes their operation more affordable to a wider number of users.
- Wage disparity results because the wages paid to highly educated employees and those in managerial positions leave little funding available to pay less-skilled workers.
- Less-skilled workers indirectly compete with similarly skilled workers in low-wage countries, further holding their wages down.
It is clear that we are now moving past the limits of complexity. For example, international trade as a percentage of GDP has been falling for the world, the US, and China.
Countries are now actively trying to bring supply lines back closer to home. Trips for goods across the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans are being reduced, saving diesel and jet fuel.
[11] Repayment of debt with interest acts like a Ponzi Scheme if there is inadequate growth in the energy supply.
Most people today do not realize the extent to which the entire financial system is dependent on growing inexpensive-to-produce energy supply of the right kinds. It takes physical resources of the right kinds to produce goods and services. Resources such as fresh water, copper, lithium, and fossil fuels require more and more energy consumption to produce the same amount of supply because the easiest-to-extract resources are extracted first.
When the economy is far from limits, adding more debt (or other types of promises, such as shares of stock) does seem to increase “demand” for finished goods and services, and this, in turn, tends to increase the production of fossil fuels and other commodities. Thus, for a while, increased debt does indeed increase energy supply.
But when we start reaching extraction limits, instead of producing more fossil fuels and other commodities, higher debt tends to produce inflation. (In other words, more money plus practically the same amount of finished goods and services tends to lead to inflation.) This is the issue central banks are up against today. Central banks raise interest rates in response to the higher level of inflation, partly to compensate lenders for the inflation that is taking place, and partly to make their own economies more competitive in the world economy. The combination of higher interest rates and higher inflation is problematic in many ways:
(a) Ordinary citizens find that they must cut back on discretionary goods and services to balance their budgets. This tends to push economies in the direction of recession and debt defaults. Some citizens find they need to apply for government assistance programs for the first time.
(b) Businesses find it more difficult to operate profitably with higher interest rates and inflation. Businesses increasingly expand in programs supported by government subsidies, such as those for electric cars and batteries, as it becomes increasingly difficult to make a profit without a subsidy. In the US, defaults seem especially likely on commercial real estate loans.
(c) Governments become especially squeezed. Many of them find that their own tax revenue is falling at precisely the time when citizens need their programs most. Governments also find that with higher interest rates, interest costs on their own debt rises. Subsidized programs increasingly seem to be needed to keep the economy operating. The number of retirees also grows year after year. Government debt levels spiral upward, as shown for the US on Figure 6.
With all these issues, the world becomes increasingly prone to war. Political parties, and even groups within political parties, find it increasingly difficult to agree on solutions to problems. The stage seems to be set for an array of worrisome outcomes, including major debt defaults, failing governments, and even widespread war.
[12] The world economy was able to grow rapidly in the 1950 to 1980 period because of a rapid rise in energy consumption. Now, there is an energy bottleneck. The recent increases in interest rates seem likely to burst debt bubbles. They may even squeeze out some major economies with pension programs for their citizens.
On Figure 4, the significant increases in interest rates up until 1981 corresponded to a huge increase in world energy consumption in the 1950 to 1980 period (Figure 5).
The rapid rise in fossil fuel consumption in Figure 5 was the reason why the economy was able to grow as rapidly as it did in the 1950 to 1980 period. Raising interest rates acted like brakes on the economy and lowered oil prices. The Soviet Union was the economy most harmed by these low oil prices. It also had a communist form of government that did not work well, compared to capitalism. Ultimately, the central government of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
Now, the rise in interest rates during 2022 and 2023 on Figure 4 correspond to a very different situation. Extraction of fossil fuels, and in particular the heavy oil used to produce diesel and jet fuel, is no longer growing rapidly. Instead, what has been growing is debt, especially government debt. Figure 6 shows US government debt through April 2023. US government debt spurted upward in 2020 and is still rising rapidly.
The business closures in 2020 and interruptions in travel reduced oil prices and provided a good excuse for more government debt. All this debt added buying power, but it didn’t actually produce very many goods and services. Instead, it added a debt bubble. Similarly, investing in close-to-useless green energy temporarily added GDP, but it mostly added a huge debt bubble. Raising interest rates is likely to burst these debt bubbles.
The US and other rich countries have also put in place pension plans for the elderly. These are not treated as debt, but they depend upon resources of all kinds being available to feed, clothe, and provide shelter to a growing army of retirees. If there is not enough diesel to allow as many goods and services to be produced as are produced today, there is likely to be a huge problem if payouts to pensioners aren’t significantly reduced. Other citizens will be unhappy if retirees get a disproportionately large share of the reduced supply of goods and services. Some will say, “Why work if retirees on pensions get more than those of us who are still working?”
Thus, the world seems to be increasingly in a situation where more squeezing out will take place. Major governments, especially those with pension plans for their citizens, seem especially vulnerable. No one understood that there had been a temporary rapid rise in energy consumption per capita in the 1950 to 1980 period (Figure 5) that led to a temporary spurt in interest rates on bonds. This temporary rise in interest rates made pension programs look far more feasible than they really are for the longterm.
[13] How does the problem resolve itself?
It seems to me that the problem of debt bubbles and of unaffordably generous pension plans is very widespread. Analysts of all kinds have missed the hidden brakes on economies caused by inadequate energy resources of the right kinds, relative to rising populations. Collapse of at least some central governments seems possible. Perhaps some of these collapses can be postponed by rollbacks in government-sponsored programs, particularly those for the elderly and for those who are not working.
But even aside from the pension problem, there is a problem with many debts not being repayable in an economy that is forced to slow, as described in Section [11]. Many other promises become iffy as well. For instance, derivatives may not be able to pay as planned.
If there are problems with inadequate supply of essential materials, they are likely to spill over to asset values. For example, a farm that cannot purchase fuel for its agricultural equipment is, in some sense, not worth very much, since workers with simple tools like shovels cannot produce very much food. Likewise, a factory with permanently broken supply lines is not worth much.
I wish I could provide a happy-ever-after ending. The closest I can come to such an ending is to say that it appears to me that there is a literal Higher Power that is somehow providing an enormous amount of energy in a way that allows the Universe to continually expand. This literal Higher Power is, in some way, influencing the world today, through the self-organizing nature of the economy. The book Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe, by Ward and Brownlee, explains that life could not have happened on the Earth, as quickly as it did, by chance alone. Perhaps things will turn out differently than we expect.
TURBO CANCER – ANGIOSARCOMA (Cancer of the blood vessels) – one of the rarest cancers before COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were rolled out – 12 cases that most oncologists have never seen in their careers
Oct.4, 2023 – Sheffield, UK – 29 year old PhD scientist Kirsty Smitten was diagnosed with 6cm tumor on her heart – an extremely rare cardiac angiosarcoma, a few months ago. She died on Oct.4, 2023. The cancer was so rare that her surgeon had never seen one. She discovered the first new class of antibiotics in 40 years and could be nominated for a Nobel Prize. She was COVID-19 mRNA vaccine mandated.
https://makismd.substack.com/p/turbo-cancer-angiosarcoma-cancer?
They should buy lotto tickets… they are so lucky!!!
And this!!!
Propaganda Series – DIGITAL BADGES – Facebook propaganda – how millions of people were brainwashed to telegraph their COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine status & medical info – 20 Cases of Digital Badges & deaths
https://makismd.substack.com/p/propaganda-series-digital-badges
>> She discovered the first new class of antibiotics in 40 years and could be nominated for a Nobel Prize.
My understanding is you can’t receive the award posthumously.
Maybe once you do enough good work, God is like “Okay, you’ve proven your worth and had enough suffering … let’s get you out of here”.
Perhaps norm could accept on her behalf?
Shooting Rat Juice while prego — severe MOREONISM happening…
But hey .. Just Do It… cuz Stay Safe right? Don’t think… don’t ask… Just Do It .. cuz
TURBO CANCER IN PREGNANCY – BREAST Cancer Stage 3 or 4: COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination is very dangerous for Pregnant Women – 20 Pregnancy Turbo Breast Cancer cases in 2023
July 2023 – Brisbane, Australia – Emma Perkins was 12 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer in July 2022, which was likely terminal. She had 11 rounds of chemo while pregnant and her son was born Feb.2023 healthy.
https://makismd.substack.com/p/turbo-cancer-in-pregnancy-breast
Nursing students harmed by COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines and Vaccine Mandates – 14 Students suffering cardiac problems, kidney problems, Turbo Cancers and sudden deaths in sleep
July 11, 2023 – Inverkip, UK – 25 year old NHS pediatric nurse Kristin Hamill was finishing her pediatric nursing studies (with COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine mandate). On June 28, 2022 she developed sepsis, her kidneys failed, she ended up on dialysis and needs a kidney transplant. In July 2023 she was diagnosed with heart failure – all COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine injuries & long term effects.
https://makismd.substack.com/p/mrna-injury-series-nursing-students
On the positive side… they likely won’t graduate and poison people with Rat Juice
Oh wow — she looks horrible!!!
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%2Fa086f297-c3e4-42ae-9e61-ec5af41f7f3a_3904x3240.jpeg
But wait … there is more!
And the promising thing is … the situation is worsening!
Revenge is so sweet — hahahaha… sweet SCHAD!!!
https://truth613.substack.com/p/tsunami-of-tragic-vax-induced-turbo
RECENT NEWS ON CANCER EXCESS DEATHS IN 2022:
Edward Dowd has released new data on Cancer excess deaths in England and Wales and the data looks horrible.
Turbo Cancer skyrocketed in 2022 and I believe there has been a further worsening in 2023:
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%2Fbc7eb88d-618d-4ba9-9c57-b3a79819ca96_1920x1080.jpeg
Oooooo Ooooo (monkey sounds)
TURBO CANCER – ANGIOSARCOMA (Cancer of the blood vessels) – one of the rarest cancers before COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were rolled out – 12 cases that most oncologists have never seen in their careers
3. TURBO CANCER – TESTICULAR Cancer – Young age, chemo failure, spreads post testicular surgery, worse recurrences, poor prognosis – Features of COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine – 40 Cases
March 13, 2023 – Ireland – 21 yo Daniel Donnan Irish cricket player was rushed to the Ulster Hospital – treated for a brain bleed Dx: testicular cancer spread to brain & lungs. He died 3 days after diagnosis.
10 PROFESSIONAL SOCCER PLAYERS WITH TESTICULAR CANCER (ALL ARE STILL ALIVE)
May.2023 – 32 yo Heinz Lindner (Austrian soccer)
Sep 2022 – 28 yo Jean-Paul Boetius (German soccer Bundesliga)
Aug.2022 – 38 yo Lewis Price (Welsh soccer goalkeeping coach)
Jul. 2022 – 24 yo Marco Richter (German soccer Bundesliga)
Jul.2022 – 28 yo Sebastien Haller (German soccer Bundesliga)
Apr 2022 – 26 yo Timo Baumgartl (German soccer Bundesliga)
Feb 2022 – 28 yo Daniel Dixon (Australia soccer Oakleigh Cannons)
Feb 2022 – 26 yo Marco Carducci (Canadian soccer)
Oct.2021 – 20 yo Dan Barden (UK soccer Norwich goalkeeper)
May.2021 – 29 yo Manu Molina (Spain soccer UD Ibiza)
OTHER PROFESSIONAL ATHLETES:
Sep 2022 – 39 yo Aksel Lund Svindal (Norwegian ski racer)
May 2022 – 22 yo Bobby Hill (Australia rugby)
Nov.2021 – 27 yo Dutee Chand (India’s top sprinter)
June 2021 – 22 yo Sean O’Callaghan (US Golf Association)
https://truth613.substack.com/p/tsunami-of-tragic-vax-induced-turbo
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%2F4402a4d0-fec8-43b3-aef3-677777743a35_1920x1080.jpeg
Could all just be coincidences… or not.
All I know is this is some overwhelming SCHAD.
FE, during max-vax times the reported rate of w/wide athlete deaths from heart attacks was 10x normal. I think I’ve read the normal rate is ~12 p.a.
So your list (if it’s most athlete sudden deaths) suggests the rate is reducing back towards the trendline and not “overwhelming SCHAD” yet.
In general death rates appear to be moving back towards baseline in most heavily vaxxed countries, although good old Australia is +12% for 2023 so far.
So no UEP-apocalypse yet. You’d better have a word with the Elders to up their game.
To reiterate — the intent is to destroy immune systems to prepare for the pathogen.
Rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS) is a rare type of cancer that forms in soft tissue — specifically skeletal muscle tissue or sometimes hollow organs such as the bladder or uterus. RMS can occur at any age, but it most often affects children.
Was Rare… now it’s more common https://truth613.substack.com/p/tsunami-of-tragic-vax-induced-turbo
>> RMS can occur at any age, but it most often affects children.
In case you’re wondering why, it’s probably because skeletal muscle cells:
(1) don’t divide during adulthood, rather the individual cells get smaller or larger
(2) are multi-nucleated, so essentially the genotype is “averaged out” across multiple nuclei, therefore one would expect the effect of carcinogenic mutations or genome reassortments to be somewhat blunted
So the only time skeletal muscle cells have a real opportunity to cause cancer is early, during growth and development, when they’re still dividing.
They just need to reset their immune systems and they will be fine (t hee)
Just a check in with the quality of small town politics in the US.
Why does the Clinton town supervisor want a full time job?
It has been alleged that due to his adultery Mike Witten’s wife removed him from her health insurance. It has been alleged that Mike seeks a full time job as supervisor so he can then get medical insurance. Dean Micheal writes this will cost tax payers $21,000 per year every year. $21,000 per year to pay for Mike’s alleged adultery. Is this the way the town tax payers want to spend their money?
Vote for Ed Pell for supervisor. I do not need full time, I do not need health insurance I have Medicare. My wife of 42 years says it is honesty and loyalty that matter.
Jet fuel subsidies is also a ‘tool’ to bring northern EU citizens millions of € to southern EU states without the burden of politics.
Like Eddy walking Norman through a park, paying for ‘its’ coffee, and, eventually, sucking its crackpipe for pennies on the $.
https://thepeoplesvoice.tv/canada-to-begin-euthanizing-disabled-infants-to-save-the-planet/
Poor countries have come up with some aspects of this, a long time ago. They didn’t even try to save very low birth weight infants, for example.
Some of the babies put up for adoption from abroad are ones that poor mothers clearly didn’t want to raise, because of major health problems.
I have a friend who raised a child from Central America who clearly had major problems as an infant, and still does now as a young adult. I would have turned around and run, before volunteering to adopt a child with major problems (severely retarded).
A friend of a friend adopted two infants from Russia — turns out both had severe disabilities and are pretty much dysfunctional as they grow older. Huge burden
They decided that they didn’t want them anymore so drove to another city a few hundred miles away bought them ice cream cones and abandoned them on a park bench
It’s time to start facing reality…
There is no democracy, there is a fascist corporatocracy.
There are no honest politicians, there are dishonest puppets.
There is no real freedom, there is serfdom.
There is no journalism, there’s propaganda.
There is no education, there’s indoctrination.
There is no entertainment, there’s mind control.
There is no ‘climate change’ there’s geoengineering.
There are no doctors, there are drug prescribers.
There are no ‘safe and effective’ vaccines, there are toxic injections.
There is no truth within the matrix, there’s only the illusion of a screwed up reality.
Jeez FE, you’re on a downer today maaaate. Get yourself one of those tasty Marlborough Pinots, chill and celebrate your new, blue-tinted-globalist-puppet PM.
The All Blacks could beat the Boks on the weekend . . . then paaaarty time in NZ!
Slow white men bashing into each other … kicking … then bashing some more…
You’d think by now they’d work out that the game would be more exciting (and they’d actually get paid decent money) if they’d just throw the f789ing ball..
You know… like this
https://youtu.be/f0HiQFfMzjA
Dr Anurag Mehrotra, chairman of the cardiology department at a local hospital blames the heart attacks on a “lack of exercise among Indian youth.”
“If you do something that you are not accustomed to and you are exposed to that sort of exercise, these incidents occur.”
The article also mentions heart attacks are noticeably increasing. A recent trend of videos on social media shows people collapsing while working out in gyms or dancing at weddings.
https://drpanda.substack.com/p/10-die-of-heart-attacks-at-indian
It does sound like a strange thing to be happening.
Ambulance services reported over 500 calls related to heart problems over 24 hours.
https://drpanda.substack.com/p/10-die-of-heart-attacks-at-indian
Critics in mainstream media outlets and elsewhere were quick to point out that the program would inevitably be used to build profiles on dissidents as well as suspected terrorists. Combined with TIA’s surveillance of individuals at multiple levels, LifeLog went farther by “adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned at the time that the programs that DARPA was pursuing, including LifeLog, “have obvious, easy paths to Homeland Security deployments.”
At the time, DARPA publicly insisted that LifeLog and TIA were not connected, despite their obvious parallels, and that LifeLog would not be used for “clandestine surveillance.” However, DARPA’s own documentation on LifeLog noted that the project “will be able . . . to infer the user’s routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task,” which acknowledged its potential use as a tool of mass surveillance.
In addition to the ability to profile potential enemies of the state, LifeLog had another goal that was arguably more important to the national-security state and its academic partners—the “humanization” and advancement of artificial intelligence. In late 2002, just months prior to announcing the existence of LifeLog, DARPA released a strategy document detailing development of artificial intelligence by feeding it with massive floods of data from various sources.
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/04/investigative-reports/the-military-origins-of-facebook/
We know that Eddy. Time is running out for the promoters. So, don’t worry.
As the title says, this is all about the military origins of Facebook. Facebook launched the same day that LifeLog was shut down.
My posts are sufficiently difficult to understand that I doubt the military would pin much on me. Facebook has been active in censoring what it considers objectionable posts. The ones of mine that Facebook had a problem with were covid-related.
Everything is fake … like in the Matrix movie
Soon after TIA was initiated, a similar DARPA program was taking shape under the direction of a close friend of Poindexter’s, DARPA program manager Douglas Gage. Gage’s project, LifeLog, sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”
LifeLog, per Gage and supporters of the program, would create a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life, which DARPA argued could be used to create next-generation “digital assistants” and offer users a “near-perfect digital memory.” Gage insisted, even after the program was shut down, that individuals would have had “complete control of their own data-collection efforts” as they could “decide when to turn the sensors on or off and decide who will share the data.” In the years since then, analogous promises of user control have been made by the tech giants of Silicon Valley, only to be broken repeatedly for profit and to feed the government’s domestic-surveillance apparatus.
The information that LifeLog gleaned from an individual’s every interaction with technology would be combined with information obtained from a GPS transmitter that tracked and documented the person’s location, audio-visual sensors that recorded what the person saw and said, as well as biomedical monitors that gauged the person’s health. Like TIA, LifeLog was promoted by DARPA as potentially supporting “medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic.”
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/04/investigative-reports/the-military-origins-of-facebook/
10 Die Of Heart Attacks At Indian Music Event
What continues to cause the sudden deaths of so many young people?
https://drpanda.substack.com/p/10-die-of-heart-attacks-at-indian
The good thing about not getting alerts for new comments is that I no longer have to delete norm’s posts!
“what causes the sudden deaths of so many young people”
Er owzabout da usual meth, MDMA, coke and assorted badly brewed halucinogenics?
It’s a hindu festival… not a rave …
And even if it was a rave feel free to point me to a rave where 10 people died from heart attacks.
Todays homes are more and more complex. I guess this is also the reason why China has got so many unfinished construction projects: the construction is a race with the rising complexity, which the ageing population can not win.
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/04/investigative-reports/the-military-origins-of-facebook/
This new so-called war on domestic terror has actually resulted in many of these types of posts on Facebook. And, while Facebook has long sought to portray itself as a “town square” that allows people from across the world to connect, a deeper look into its apparently military origins and continual military connections reveals that the world’s largest social network was always intended to act as a surveillance tool to identify and target domestic dissent.
Part 1 of this two-part series on Facebook and the US national-security state explores the social media network’s origins and the timing and nature of its rise as it relates to a controversial military program that was shut down the same day that Facebook launched. The program, known as LifeLog, was one of several controversial post-9/11 surveillance programs pursued by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that threatened to destroy privacy and civil liberties in the United States while also seeking to harvest data for producing “humanized” artificial intelligence (AI).
As this report will show, Facebook is not the only Silicon Valley giant whose origins coincide closely with this same series of DARPA initiatives and whose current activities are providing both the engine and the fuel for a hi-tech war on domestic dissent.
People like Keith Henson and Dennis L will be remembered in the same way as Stilicho and Aetius.
However, I don’t think technicians coming from cultures not exactly relevant for developing the civilization we know about will contribute too much for the tech they want.
The West was fooled by the ‘cultured’ Russians during the 19th century. Turgenev, ironically a descendant of a Tatar chieftain who submitted to Russia in the 15th century, and Count Lev Tolstoy and Pyotr Tchaikovsky fooled the West.
Tchaikovsky was homosexual and had no descendants, nothing more is known about Turgenev’s only child but Pyotr Tolstoy, a direct descendant of the Count, is now a good toady of Putin. If Turgenev and Tchaikovsky left descendants they would also have behaved like Pyotr Tolstoy.
Napoleon was right and Castelreagh was wrong – it would have been better to have Russia eradicated back in 1812, since it was , and is , and will NOT be part of the West.
If Russia, a country which most of the West thought to be Western until 2022 , behaves like that, no words need to be wasted upon every single country of Asia except Israel, and every single country of Africa except the Cape region of ZuidAfrika.
Could you explain why you liken Dennis and me to a couple of Roman generals?
They were like those who fought for an ideal , probably already lost, but might have eked out some kind of success if they had more support.
Hold on Kulm, seeing how China graduates a gazillion STEMs every year, what if it becomes a Type 1 civilisation and starts building Starships instead of empty, high-rise apartment blocks? Would that change your view on Asians?
Israel? How ironic they’ve become a N— regime themselves.
I regret that the late Dr. Robert Firth is not here to witness what centuries of British “Diplomacy” wrought to Civilization.
Dr. Firth would have preferred the Gurkhas of Nepal, who still live under a medieval political system, or the uncivilized rednecks of Canada including Jordan Peterson, probably the only notable person to have come out from the province of Alberta, over the people who were killed in various wars fought for the crown.
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote the House of Seven Gables. Long story short a prominent Bostonian family got a shumuck named Maule killed for witchcraft because the family coveted the guy’s house. In revenge, Maule’s son hides a key document for a huge land claim, as big as a New England state, which is found at the end of the book after it became worthless long ago.
At the end of the book the narrator, a descendant of Maule, leaves this line
“Thus they(the famous Bostonian family) bartered their eastern territory for Maule’s garden-ground.”
Any hopes for Singularity died thanks to Gabby Princip, and also because of Chucky Fitzclarence who ‘did his duty’ and the nameless Canuck who invented the method to avoid poison gas by covering their mouths with urine-soaked rags.
These morons bartered the Western Dominance of the World, the Singularity and the Type I Civilization for 6 billion people who are not exactly suited for civilization, people like Rishi Sunak who have ZERO staek in Civilization, and a depleted earth which will probably deny humanity from Space, Singularity and Type I Civ, just because they could not share Europe with continental powers or thought their completely-irrelevant-for-civilization peoples deserved a country.
For those who follow the ELM ( Export Land Model ) . THe latest post from Lars Larsen . Update yourself .
https://skogslars.blogg.se/2023/october/update-on-oil-the-decline-of-global-oil-production-continues-and-some-calculations-of-the-present-decline-in-global-net-oil-exports.html
Agree with the tenor of the article but disagree with the 1 and 2% assumptions. These 1 and 2% are happening while we are drilling the Permian like no tomorrow, and new wells deplete more than 50% a year. I think a 4% a year or slightly more is closer to reality.
Shale in the permian is depleting as much as 74% in the first year. By 2032 at the latest, the Permian is DONE. Then the US oil produciton is DONE.
Then our economy, if still existing at that time is DONE DONE.
I recently looked at oil consumption (not production)–where was it rising, where was it falling. Which countries were rich enough to afford it, and weren’t too affected by covid. A few changes between 2018 and 2022:
World -1%
EU -5%
Japan -13%
US -3%
Russia +5%
Middle East +3%
Iran +14%
Iraq -2%
Saudi Arabia +0%
UAE +15%
Africa +3%
Australia -6%
New Zealand -16%
Canada -9%
Mexico +12%
China +4%
India +4%
South Korea +1%
Bangladesh +23%
Hong Kong -49%
Sri Lanka -22%
Taiwan -12%
Venezuela -35%
My thought: If Russia has trouble selling its oil for enough dollars externally, it will use it internally. Making munitions, perhaps.
The US is trying to move manufacturing to Mexico, from overseas. That might account for the increase in Mexico’s oil use.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to this yet but I will later on. This discussion looks interesting.
“Entropy, Energy & The 4th Frontier: Chris Martenson on DarkHorse”
https://rumble.com/v3rof8f-entropy-energy-and-the-4th-frontier-chris-martenson-on-darkhorse.html
New House Speaker Champions Fossil Fuels and Dismisses Climate Concerns
Representative Mike Johnson comes from Louisiana oil country and has said he does not believe burning fossil fuels is changing the climate.
New York Times..
BAU baby
The threat to drinking water from the kind of saltwater intrusion currently creeping up the drought-hit Mississippi River towards New Orleans will increasingly be faced by coastal cities around the US, experts warn.
Louisianans have been preparing for a potential crisis because of seawater from the Gulf of Mexico penetrating the low-lying Mississippi. The mayor of New Orleans declared a state of emergency last month amid concerns about the potential health risks to the city’s drinking water, which would leave residents reliant on bottled water for cooking and cleaning.
Thousands have already been affected by rising saltwater levels: downriver from New Orleans, residents of lower Plaquemines Parish have had contaminated drinking water since June.
The Guardian….solution bottle water…good for GNP…win, win
By Lorretta Chen
BRICS Multilateral Lender Seeks Its First-Ever Syndicated Loan
New Development Bank looking for 3-year, $1.25b deal: people
Loan proceeds would fund infrastructure, renewable projects
October 25, 2023 at 4:55 AM EDT
The multilateral lender established in 2015 by the BRICS group of emerging-market countries is seeking its first-ever syndicated loan, according to people familiar with the matter.
Shanghai-headquartered New Development Bank is looking to raise $1.25 billion through a three-year dollar-denominated loan, said the people, who asked not to be identified as they are not authorized to speak and the matter is private. The lender was founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
China Releases Videos Showing ‘Provocative’ Actions by US Ship
TOPSHOT-CHINA-SPACE-SCIENCE
China Sends Three More Astronauts to Space Station
CHINA-US-DIPLOMACY
China Engages in First US Farm-Goods Signing Ceremony in Six Years
Country Garden Developments as Developer Dodges Default With Overdue Payments
China’s Property Crisis Is Upending Tens of Thousands of Lives
by Bloomberg News
BAU going strong and evolving
More projects with little true benefit to the economy, other than temporarily providing jobs. China is having difficulty as well.
Anyone who thinks that the loans will pay back well is likely kidding themselves. Building infrastructure (where it really is not needed) is a standard way of pumping up employment.
I agree with your stance…many assets will be stranded and most so called rich, wealthy folks will never be able to cash in on their impressive holdings….
Reminds me of the movie The Treasure of Sierra Madre with John Huston and Humphrey Bogart when the bags of gold dust get spilled out from the bags blown in the wind back to the mountains where it came…
Agree:
Any ideas of which assets will decline the slowest?
If all are going down, that implies deflation in a whole segment of assets. Discretionary assets seem to be going first as per TM.
Dennis L.
So the only interesting development of the last 15 days is that the world is running out of energy so fast it can not expect to wage full scale war like in the good old days? Besides the ever accelerating US debt, but that we knew already years ago didn’t we? And we have already seen the US backing out of Afghanistan, based largely on the same rationale. I never understood the pacifist aspect of peak oil but now it is coming into full perspective.
I noticed the headline of an AP article reprinted in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today:
U.N. Low on fuel, plans to curb relief efforts
The AJC article is behind a paywall, and not available to the public, so this is a link to another AP article that has the same text, with a different title.
https://www.post-gazette.com/news/world/2023/10/25/israel-palestine-war-ground-gaza-hamas-aid/stories/202310250063
If you read through the article, the problem seems to be lack of diesel, particularly.
The situation in Israel/Gaza (whether real or fake) has a lot of similarities to a Covid lockdown:
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-770099
The claimed hostages in Gaza are a perfect excuse for dragging this lockdown out for a long time. Many people who once lived in Israel have fled, maybe never to return. Could this spectacle be designed, in part, to reduce the population living in Israel and redistribute them elsewhere?
I quite agree there are a lot of similarities between the Israel/Gaza events and the Covid events.
As for evidence, may I present Exhibit A?
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQzmgZdAAp_hFJxs49mPP0jb3TnM-M9_BulZQ&usqp=CAU
And Exhibit B?
[Edit by Gail: I took this long link out because it didn’t work. Please look for a link that starts with http or something similar.]
It’s real (unlike UKEY) but it is orchestrated… they invited the Hamasians to come in and kill a few hundred Joos… to justify exterminating the Pally cockroaches.
Humans are so awesome!
How do you know any of it is real? The Hamas incursion videos were farcical, as were some of the videos “on the ground” near Israeli strikes in Gaza.
I was once believed much of the media, but thought only on topic X did they lie and fake. Over time, I saw that it’s not just on particular topics, it’s virtually everything, except perhaps topics to which many people experience firsthand, such as the weather and sports, unless they occur far away from the reading/listening/viewing audience.
I posted dozens of clips yesterday – show me one that’s not real
Some argue that the media and governments lied/lie about some or all of the following:
– 9/11
– Covid
– Apollo moon missions
– Ukraine war
– long-term viability of fossil fuels
– viability of renewable energy technology
– weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
– etc. etc.
But the media and governments are totally NOT lying or faking anything about Hamas and Israel.
As with all of the above events/topics, the burden of proof is on those who claim that something exists. What makes you so confident that the media/governments are truthful about Hamas and Israel? Is the evidence they provide any stronger, more consistent, and more plausible than that they provide for the other topics/events?
eddy exists in an eddy-in-wonderland of fakery
where everything is what ”he” says it is
I’ve noticed that expecially now, after Biden’s words about number of victims in Gaza, there is a new trend in US audience about possibility of a fake situation in that area, similar to what some people though about what happened in Ukraine.
With all the respect of the people involved in this manipulation, I find this trap one of the most funny thing in the dramatic general episode of the collapse of societies.
People are dying like flies in the other side of the planet and the ones who are led to believe that they are living in the good part of the world, think that it is fake.
At least, during Roman empire, ancient Romans were aware that their army and their allies were making a carnage in a distant province of the empire…
Some US people not even that.
Paraphrasing what Albert Bourla said about his success after Covid vaccine: ‘this happens only in America’.
My children are in their forties. When I bring up this topic, which I ofter do, they get depressed and do not want to talk about it. I can’t blame them because there are no options and no way to avoid it. They hope for new technology but that has little chance of happening. Slim to none.
” Slim to none.”
If you are keeping up with technology (or trying to) that’s not the case. The biggest jump in the last year is AI. The people who develop technology are using is every day and the progress is just astounding.
The world might still end in a disaster, but there are lots of reasons to thing things will work out OK.
keith
i’m still asking
what can AI do in a phsysical sense?
Makes you more productive than the guy next you, figuratively and literally eat his/her lunch.
As long as there is lunch, no problem.
Dennis L.
a friend of mine is professor of botany
my garden is a mess (i detest gardening)
if i took all his knowledge, without the input of energy, tools and machines, my garden would not improve itself one iota.
the same applies to any form of labour
AI cannot be substituted for energy input
Yes, and no.
AI helps me work faster and smarter in the office.Although I dare say it will probably put me out of work sometime soon.
It hasn’t made a dent on my gardening problems, but it leaves me with more time to potter about.
What I want is an android tree pruner.
The Kubota farm machinery man who I met on the road the other day tried to sell me a hideously expensive log spitter that won’t do anything I can’t do myself with a chainsaw and an axe.
A gardening droid who can pick the weeds, trim the lawn, and prune the trees, or swing from them, screeching, buzzing chainsaw in hand. That’s what I want. But there isn’t one in the Kubota catalog.
AI , renewables ,EV’s etc are all good for the mushy gushy feeling but are useless without energy . Oil (energy) is the master resource . The rest is all crap . Unplug your computer and see how AI works .
Labour without energy is a corpse; capital without energy is a sculpture .— Steve Keen .
ravi
you will not convince folks of that
the fixation remains—that ai is going to ”do things”
no matter how many times i ask, no one tells me what ai can physically ”do”, of itself, and by itself, with no mechanical input of any kind
Ravie,
Agree, unplug your computer and you are Amish, somehow they can pay cash for land at $15K/acre locally.
Dennis L.
@Dennis L, doesn’t that answer your question about the best investment? Though I’d add keep cash to pay the taxes on the land as well..
A.I.B.A.C.U.S. on the technological horizon.
Its seems that you have missed the point entirely.
Yeah Herb ? Maybe you don’t have enough argument to convince . Have a go . Analysing and thinking is a rare commodity in the time of TikTok .
Personally use Copilot, works well more or less, sometimes it is wrong in questions with objective, verifiable, mathematical answers.
Dennis L.
Pretty much everyone notices this problem with trying to bring up the problem with 99% of the world population. The self-organizing system recognizes that the only stories people like have happy-ever-after endings, so the standard narrative creates lots of them. For example, “Our only problem is climate change, and we need to move as fast as possible away from fossil fuels to prevent climate change.” Thus, we know what the problem is, and we are quickly fixing the problem.
The military does recognize the problem, however. They develop bioweapons and so-called vaccines to respond to the bioweapons.
“They develop bioweapons ”
I have followed such developments for decades. The military did work on them a long time ago, for example, the USSR is said to have accumulated 20 tons of smallpox virus. But as far as I know, there has been no development of bioweapons in the last 20 years.
Ghod knows, the natural spillovers give us enough trouble.
Now, I have not followed this closely, so perhaps you know more than I do. If so, I would appreciate pointers to reliable sources.
You can read about gain-of-function research on Wikipedia, but be aware that Wikipedia is a US government shill and always supports the official line.
Remember that Bill Gates’s “Event 201”, which imagined a COVID type “pandemic”, took place 3 months before the first COVID outbreak.
Fauci was involved in gain-of-function research. There is doubt about whether the coronavirus was natural or a lab development.
https://www.kennedy.senate.gov/public/2021/5/kennedy-asks-fauci-whether-wuhan-lab-lied-you-never-know
“You can read about gain-of-function research on Wikipedia, but be aware that Wikipedia is a US government shill and always supports the official line.”
I know. I edit Wikipedia and get my check every month. (Sarcasm.)
Gain if function research is about how bad *can* some natural virus get, It’s legitimate research, not “let’s make something awful and release it.” Over the last 20 years, everyone in medical research (including Fauci) was involved.
The whole area of research is rapidly moving away from wet labs to computer simulations.
Not sure if this is more or less dangerous.
You might note that the most concerning virus is flu. Human flu has caused pandemics in the past, but only a small number of human cases have been caused by the bird flu version that has killed billions of birds. It has spilled over into mammals in a small number of cases.
I follow the gain of function research on bird flu. The last research I read on the subject was cautiously optimistic that it was unlikely to jump to humans.
I know when working in insurance consulting that “tort reform” issues were highly political in Wikipedia articles. A person needs to use great deal of caution when looking at anything with two different views.
Can we get some anonymous insider info from someone in the insurance industry who is willing to divulge how they are being overwhelmed with claims on life and health policies…
Surely with the excess deaths and massive disabilities being reported (see Ed Dowd) … the insurers must be insolvent… the CBs surely are pumping money into them … just as is done with thousands of other zombie companies
The Russians have these twenty tons of smallpox virus stored alongside 60 tons of powdered unicorn horn, and 14 tons of Yeti fur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox#Biological_warfare
“Reponding to international pressures, in 1991 the Soviet government allowed a joint U.S.–British inspection team to tour four of its main weapons facilities at Biopreparat. The inspectors were met with evasion and denials from the Soviet scientists and were eventually ordered out of the facility.[179] In 1992, Soviet defector Ken Alibek alleged that the Soviet bioweapons program at Zagorsk had produced a large stockpile – as much as twenty tons – of weaponized smallpox (possibly engineered to resist vaccines, Alibek further alleged), along with refrigerated warheads to deliver it. Alibek’s stories about the former Soviet program’s smallpox activities have never been independently verified. “
The clue here is: “Alibek’s stories about the former Soviet program’s smallpox activities have never been independently verified”.
conspiraholics provide endless amusement
they’ve all had a logicectomy
what exasctly would be to point of releasing endemic smallpox—the planet itself would become ininhabitable
JMS makes a good point. Long as the Russians don’t use it, it does not matter.
My statement was “the USSR is said to have accumulated 20 tons of smallpox virus.”
As readers here know, I am not usually a supporter of conspiracy or unreliable information. On the question of do I find this plausible, the answer is yes I thin it is likely though not certain.
The USSR is well documented to have an accidental release of weaponized Anthrax that killed a number of people. If they did that, accumulating a stock of smallpox is in the same class of behavior.
Still brooding about “self-organizing” systems. Systems self-oscillate, something outside the system may favor the survival of a particular oscillation. Maybe that is just semantics. Self-organizing suggests a dualism element? Something spooky in the system?
I think that there is a “god” element involved. Something that tips the scales in the direction of greater efficiency and greater complexity.
Climate also oscillates. We live in a finite world. Any action or anything constructed in a finite world is by definition temporary. Today’s narrative has to talk about how investments will give good returns, for many years. But growth has to be temporary. And god seems to be the one who picks winners.
“Efficiency” seems to be seems to come from being competitive price-wise with other economies. Part of this is low costs. Part of this is using higher interest rates to manipulate the local currency higher than other currencies. But the upward interest rate manipulation doesn’t work for long, because of the adverse effect these high rates have then there is a bottleneck in inexpensive-to-produce energy supplies of the right kind.
” Systems self-oscillate, ”
Some do, some don’t. Depends of feedback. It’s an extremely well understood subject. Some engineering is involved in making oscillations, but a huge part of it is about preventing unwanted oscillations.
“something outside the system may favor the survival of a particular oscillation”
The classic one is the lynx-rabbit cycle. Another is the 13 or 17 year cicada cycle.
For many systems a disturbance results in a return to the baseline. Not always though.
There are those who hope for cheap clean energy — without understanding that this would cause global population to explode much higher… accelerating the paving over of the planet … and depleting the other resources rapidly
True FE. Research I’ve read says endless, aka ‘free’ energy means Earth ends up as a radiating black body circa 300 degrees C.
At least we could all get to drive REALLY REALLY BIG SUVs before that happens.
Just imagine BAU party time with free energy. Yeehah!
MONSTER monster trucks resembling tanks … would be all the rage… it would be a MORE-ON free-for-all….
Soooo —- EEeeeeeee
“If only there were some virus that could be used to justify a depopulation vaccine …”
Bullet 3: subsidizing green energy can temporarily hide other problems.
This is probably correct .
1)Fossil fuel growth from 2018 to 2022, a rate of only about 0.3% per year.
2)from electrek:
If just the “high probability” additions materialize, by mid-summer 2026, solar will account for more than 12.9% of the US’s installed generating capacity. That would be more than wind (12.4%). Solar’s installed generating capacity by July 2026 would also surpass oil (2.6%) and nuclear power (7.5%) combined, as well as approach that of coal (13.8%).
I think solar has ramped up faster in the previous 4 yrs than 2014-18.
I thought that FF use would be greater to build out the solar. In any case it seems that there will be plenty of FF to keep the trend growing.
Maybe the trend is about to change (green energy stocks are crashing with hi int rates)
As Gail has pointed out many time, intermittent renewables are often not useful additions to the power grid.
It’s not being used yet, but intermittent power and a little coal can make storeable gas and liquid fuels. We might not take this route, but it does exist and it provides a sink for any excess renewable power.
“Installed generating capacity” doesn’t count for much for wind and solar. It sits idle much of the time. When it does come, most of it is at a long distance from where it is needed. Installing and maintaining the transmission is a major hassle.
The solar installed on rooftops is only a small percentage of the total; it tends to be far more expensive to install and maintain than that in the big commercial settings.
Valuing the intermittent electricity is a problem. It is worth very little to utilities, with all of the adjustments that need to be made to make it fit in with the overall system. The payback given to homeowner is usually vastly disproportionate to the benefit to the system.
Generally, only wealthy homeowners buy solar panels. Adding them to the system tends to raise the electricity rates for the rest of the people buying electricity from the grid. Encouraging solar panels on rooftops is yet another pump of wealth from the poor to the rich.
Wealth pumps that benefit me, as a solar and battery owner are a really excellent idea.
Hey, let the poor be poor and let the rest of us drive clean green and well subsidised EVs (that don’t catch fire and explode hopefully).
So much for a sure bet:
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/siemens-energy-shares-crash-37-renewable-bust-sparks-green-panic
Ah damn, really liked Bob Dylan, Minnesotan, how could he be wrong? He said the answer was “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMFj8uDubsE
What would the price be for a slightly used wind turbine?
Film at eleven.
Dennis L.
If a person looks at a longer chart for Siemens energy, a person can see that the price has been crashing for a for a very long time. According to my calculations, the price is down by 82% from its high on January 5, 2021 to its latest price.
I would note that maintaining offshore wind turbines depends heavily on diesel and jet fuel. Diesel is for operating the ships back and forth to install and service the devices. Jet fuel is use for the helicopters making in-air repairs to them. They depend heavily on diesel and jet fuel for viability.
Denise asks ” What would the price be for a slightly used wind turbine? ”
My counter ” What would the price be for a slightly used condom ? ” 🙂
Laughing quietly, answer perhaps, “It depends?”
Dennis L.
Most of Europe has very little natural gas storage. What they do have is almost full now, in anticipation of the quantity of natural gas required for heat in winter. Ukraine is offering to rent out up to half of its storage space to other European countries, to help prevent the “freeze in the dark” problem that everyone was worried about last fall and winter. A warm winter “saved” Europe last year, but more storage would definitely be helpful.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Ukraine-Could-Allow-Foreign-Traders-To-Use-Half-Of-Its-Natural-Gas-Storage.html
It seems to me that when Europe talks about gas storage, it talks about gas which is stored inside caverns in the underground.
I have a couple of questions.
Are these caverns able to avoid any leaking ?
Is there any safety issue for European people living in the surroundings of those caverns ?
Many thanks
Blah , blah ,blah . Europe consumes 35bcm per day . So basically 8-10 hrs storage . Bigger problem is that Europe is now importing LNG via ships and not NG via pipeline . This implies converting liquid into gas at sea terminal ( EU based) , then transporting it inland to Ukraine and then transporting it back from Ukraine to EU . Dumb idea . Can’t be implemented . Losses all the way in energy and money .
Hugely expensive when shipped in!
Hey, the EU stopped buying Russian pipeline gas because that was “evil and authoritarian”.
Instead they’re buying Russian LNG via ship at 5x the price, because that “supports EU values, democracy and LGBTQ++ rights”.
Go the EU!
You can test for leakage using air which is a lot less expensive. But basically so long as an abandoned mine is is not in karst rock it will hold pressure. Ukraine used to have a lot of coal and therefore a relatively large storage. But as Ravi says, it is small, and LNG provides peaks of gas flow that need to be absorbed with better storage.
“Are these caverns able to avoid any leaking ?”
Most of the time. yes, they are well sealed.
“safety issue ”
No. Nature gas is lighter than air and leaking gas goes up. It does contribute to the methane level.
Alex and Alexander had a guest, a derivatives trader, he claimed that the natural gas derivatives market will blow up from just a slight increase in the price of gas. This is likely (99% possibility) to happen within the coming 90 days.
https://youtu.be/sAErqW7vj7Y?t=934
Quark from Spain looks at the worldwide debt issue . Use Google translate .
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2023/10/colapso-global.html
Groan:
Earlier on this site concern was raised with regards to insurance companies and low interest yielding bonds, now those bonds have tanked and are a long term holding: we have a liquidity issue, or you can spend your all the money in ten years but only less than half of it today.
Thinking Amish, large families, high mileage horses in number of miles/bale, no electricity so no blackouts. Sundays are off, they have a good union.
Dennis L.
This cat, Coco, that I adopted last June—when the previous owners could no longer keep her, they said, because she might scratch the grandchildren, they said—this Coco, this Kinkalow queen with long hair and short legs, has taken over my office and loves nothing more than interrupting me, getting my attention, jumping on my shoulder, and—worst of all—walking over my keyboard while I’m typing.
She’s seven years old, and I may have to put up with this for another seven years if quasi-BAU continues that long. Honestly, the late George the Labrador was low maintenance compared with this Kinkalow.
🙂
The U.S. consumer is ‘walking towards a cliff,’ strategist warns
PUBLISHED THU, OCT 26 2023 6:01 AM EDT
Sam Meredith
KEY POINTS
Trouble is brewing for the U.S. economy and its pivotal consumer component, one strategist says.
“I think the U.S. consumer is walking towards a cliff, basically,” Chris Watling, chief executive of financial advisory firm Longview Economics, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”
Data suggests the U.S. economy may have turned in another stellar performance, heading into the final part of the year.
…..Of course, retail sales have been quite strong for the last few months and everyone gets quite excited about that, but, actually, if you look at what’s going on, the household savings ratio has been run down, and, in fact, real income growth has been negative for three months,” Watling said.
“So, it’s not quite all good news. I mean, quite the reverse, I think there are some real challenges coming for the U.S. consumer.”
His comments come even as data suggests the U.S. economy may have turned in another stellar performance, heading into the final part of the year.
Gross domestic product is projected to post a 4.7% annualized gain for the third quarter, according to a Dow Jones consensus estimate. The Commerce Department will release its first GDP estimate at 8:30 a.m. ET.
If that forecast materializes, the print would reflect the strongest U.S. economic output since the final three months of 2021, when growth was just shy of 7%.
Many strategists, asset managers and CEOs remain concerned about the longer-term economic outlook and will continue to closely monitor forward-looking signals for clues on whether the U.S. can avoid a recession.
The U.S. economy and its pivotal consumer component have been written off many times before, but the Federal Reserve’s move to keep liquidity flowing in the sector has partly helped to keep growth afoot.
‘The U.S. is in for a tough time’
“We see at the margins the consumer is under a lot of pressure and, in fact, the labor market is under a lot of pressure as well. We had a good payrolls month, but if you look at a lot of the indicators of where the labor market is likely to go, a lot of them are fraying at the edges,” Watling said.
“We’re going to get to the point in the next few months when I think the labor market starts to deteriorate more meaningfully and that’ll kickstart the recession when we get there,” he added.
Asked what his forecast would likely mean for the stock market, Watling replied, “I think leadership probably is changing in this stock market. Tech has been under a lot of pressure since July, and I think the stock market is struggling to know really exactly where it wants to go.”
“From our point of view though, I can see a bounce for a month or two. It’s been quite beaten up, markets have been coming down since July but I think net-net, you want to be underweight equities if you are looking beyond the next few months,” he continued. “I think the U.S. is in for a tough time.”
— CNBC’s Jeff Cox contributed to this report.
The US can’t grow its way out of its $33 trillion debt mountain, research group says
Jennifer Sor Oct 25, 2023, 2:18 PM EDT
The US can’t rely on growth to avoid dealing with its $33 trillion debt mountain, according to researchers.
The government is on track to hit a record-high debt-to-GDP ratio by 2029.
Higher interest rates means the cost of servicing that debt could be unsustainable, experts say.
….That spells bad news for borrowers — including the US government. Higher rates and bond yields could make US debt servicing costs increasingly unsustainable, experts say, with the interest expense on the national debt potentially rising to a new record by 2025, Goldman Sachs estimated.
Not to mention, the government has a whopping $7.6 trillion of debt that’s about to mature over the next year – a sum 31% of the US’s total debt balance.
Mounting fears over the US debt means the government could have trouble finding buyers for Treasurys. That could lead to failed Treasury auctions, according to one Columbia Business School professor, wherein the Fed would have to step in to buy US debt securities, a move that could end up fanning inflation further.
What an economy ? 🙂
https://www.investopedia.com/beyonce-taylor-swift-barbenheimer-boosted-summer-spending-7964698
Not only that …this smart lady bypassed the middle men and distributed her movie directly for release
You go girl
With the end of Western Civilization just around the corner, the ‘war’ in palestine is turning out to be a whimper.
The great Missourian poet T. S. Eliot, who imagined himself to be British although he spent his first 26 years in North America, was correct – the world will end , not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Anyone waiting for big fireworks will probably be disappointed – David with many titles seems to be correct. There won’t be a big implosion and BAU will last till 2032, as Martin Armstrong had predicted , albeit less and less well every year.
(TRT World + The Gray Zone)
in the following article by Kit Klarenberg (The Gray Zone) and in the following interview to Prof. Sultan Barakat (TRT World), one can find what the two define as the objective by the Israeli about the territory of Gaza and its people and about the territory of West Bank and its people.
Which is:
free the area, move most of Gaza Palestinians to Egypt, while the others to Europe as refugees.
About West Bank, move all West Bank Palestinians to Jordan.
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/24/zionist-think-tank-palestinian-genocide/
https://youtu.be/q05uVs8vRWQ?feature=shared
Here to watch it directly:
When there aren’t enough resources to go around, the (relatively rich) Israelis want to push the much poorer Gaza Palestinians out completely.
I don’t see my comment – Fast Eddy is so prolific
You are a new commenter, at least in the view of WordPress. I need to approve the first comments.
HE is somewhat of a prodigy. An adult prodigy. With an IQ measured in Horse Power… in the region of 1500
And HE may have worked out how to fix this dodgy comment alerts. Which will lead to more volumes of Greatness churn
eddy, your new nick caught me out—so i will respond just this time, to your gatling gun commenting system. (fire enough off an you’re bound to hit something.
Concerning your consistently self-rated IQ )i wouldn’t rate it relative to horse ‘power’
It is one of life’s great lessons, that you are only as good (at any given activity) as someone else says you are. I think i was about 18 when that particular penny dropped.
This, i think, is the root of your obsession with ‘faking it’—that you have not been able to absorb that radical version of everyday reality.
Yestday someone described you with a certain expletive,, which I will not repeat.
(I’m not good with numbers at your level)
Send my regards to the old Super Snatch… and the fester
seems i dont need a gatling gun
right on target there i think, with one ”unfaked” shot.
Gail – I recognise the importance of your blog – but don’t find it easy to follow your arguments. Generally the posts are too long – could you possibly shorten them to ensure that key points are clearly registered.
And when you say that pensions are “inefficient” , you are partly joking but also making the important point that economics makes (and conceals) judgements about value. But you leave the reader confused
Gail only posts once a month. Her subject is deep. You could consider it more of an article. You could take your time reading it, then read it again. The “snippets” are in the many & lively responses over the coming two plus weeks. Fast Eddy lives here.
He’s controversial, but keeps the energy high.
The story I am telling is truly a difficult-to-understand story.
I am sorry you find my posts to be too long. There really need to be a variety of different kinds of posts, and a book that walks a person through all of the important points. But I am not sure I am up to doing all of these things.
I learn from examining points commenters raise in the period between posts, among other things. I even learn as I am trying to write the posts themselves. I then go back and change the post I am working on, to reflect the new points I am making. I then share my points with some editors before they go up. Some of them bring up points I hadn’t thought about, and I end up revising what I am writing.
With respect to the “inefficient” comment, my regular readers would recognize that I am talking about the action of the Maximum Power Principle, and how it works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_power_principle
This has to do with the physics way all ecosystems behave. (The economy is, in a sense, a kind of ecosystem.) Somehow, ecosystems decide which plants and animals will crowd out others, and which one ones will optimally use the resources available in the area, including sunlight, water, and mineral resources. The ones that work best are in some sense the ones that are most efficient in the use of resources.
I could have attempted to put in a discussion of this point, but this is a difficult one to explain. If I had, the post would have been even longer.
People tend not to have a good background in all of these different areas. I have to leave things out; the question is what I leave out. As I said at the beginning, I am dealing with a very difficult story. Very few people understand it. I have discovered that even physicists don’t necessarily understand it, because they don’t understand financial issues. Financial people don’t understand energy issues.
People trying to research the possibility of energy shortages and how to avoid them tend to live in ivory towers. Some of them are attracted to any area that has government funding. People making models, such as Energy Return on Energy Invested, don’t understand how limited their models really are. They don’t understand the many issues involved. The models that provide the most “happily ever after” endings are the ones that tend to survive.
I have been involved with these issues since 2005. I have learned a whole lot in this time. I have been a speaker at many energy conferences. I have met people working in industry. I come as an actuary who is used to the pitfalls of forecasting. I am pulling together findings from different fields that no one has considered in the context of issues from other fields.
Deeply appreciate your reply to what was a rather trite comment. Clearly the comments you receive on each post are a tribute to the thought and scope of your analysis.
As a writer myself I still haven’t learned to keep it brief – although I am on a mission to persuade book authors to write shorter books
https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2020/12/why-we-need-shorter-non-fiction-books.html
The comment does point out to me the important of somehow referencing the Maximum Power Principle.
People today are used to easy-to-read, short answers. Unfortunately, with difficult, complex stories, it is hard to know what to do. Making books with charts in them is more difficult/expensive than a person would expect. If anything is to be printed on paper, it pretty much needs to be in black and white to be affordable.
“The story I am telling is truly a difficult-to-understand story. ”
No kidding.
And the story is dynamic, not static. New elements, new technology is changing the picture, in some cases faster than we can adjust.
I have been on top of this for the last 40 years and I can’t keep up.
Writing a book would take enough time to take me away from new things that are going on. By the time it came out, it would be at least two years behind.
The subject is difficult, it is very complex, it requires profound thought from you (thank you!) My advice for understanding it is to take your time, read other blogs such Dr. Tim Morgan’s, and take time from reading it to thinking about it, helpfully with a notepad. This is one of the premier sites on the internet, we are blessed to have these insights from you.
Thanks!
pensions are inefficient because people insist on living past their threescore and ten
instead of conveniently dying
I resemble that remark.
Dennis L.
The UK arithmetic for the state pension seems pretty easy:
1) deduct a contribution of about 12% from everyone’s income
2) use that to pay the retired a pension of about 33% of average earnings.
3) raise retirement age in step with increasing lifespan (countries such as the UK and Denmark have done this).
‘Luckily’ for the UK authorities lifespan seems to have hardly risen since 2010. So, no need either to take more from workers to pay to the retired, or to raise retirement age.
Pay-as-you-go schemes like these don’t fail if returns on capital become negative after growth ends. Pensioners may get less money though, just as workers will do.
‘Private pension plans’ can go bust if we get de-growth. So can some state pension systems that aren’t PAYG.
You seem to be one of those people, yourself.
guilty as charged
If you are new to Gail’s writing, it can be a challenge to grasp the import of what she’s saying. Not, in my opinion, because the post are too long or the arguments are difficult to follow, but because her perspective is likely to be unfamiliar to new readers. She is writing outside the mainstream paradigm where many of the familiar assumptions that one needs to bear in mind when reading about conventional economics or current affairs no longer hold.
But after the first decade or two, many of Gail’s readers undergo a form of satori in which everything falls sort of into place.
The paragraph in question is this one:
Each squeezing out is different. When there are physically not enough goods and services to go around, some inefficient parts of the economy must be squeezed out. Payments to pensioners seem to me to be particularly inefficient because pensioners are not themselves creating finished goods and services.
There is a context here. Gail is talking about there no longer being a sufficient supply of stuff to meet the demand for stuff globally. If this is the case, then obviously some of the demand is not going to be met.
The idea that some parts of the economy are more efficient than others is not difficult to grasp, is it? From the standpoint that for an economy to continue operating it needs to operate with a certain minimum degree of efficiency, it follows that greater efficiency will allow the economy to operate longer, or to grow larger and stronger, or to generate more wealth, or to win more surplus from nature.
Conversely, If efforts or investments are focused on inefficient sectors, they will tend to generate less wealth, which will tend to shrink the economy and make it weaker.
I will stop here, but leave with a question. Is paying pensions a particularly inefficient use of economic investment? Should we stop paying pensions and instead direct the resources to helping give forever homes to stray cats and dogs? Or perhaps we could devote these resources to fighting wars, terrorism, respiratory viruses, global warming, misinformation, white supremacism, or halitosis?
After all, pensioners waste most of it on things like food, heating, healthcare, and unfashionable clothing.
Thanks! We can find a very long list of wasted ways to use resources. The current financial system clearly depends on growth. If growth is not to be expected in the future, we don’t need very much of it. Today’s US medical system spends a huge amount in very inefficient ways, and the education system seems to produce far more graduates than are needed–if there is a requirement that the jobs available after graduation pay back well enough to repay the loans.
Somehow, the self-organizing system figures out for itself what to squeeze out.
I had a reason for writing this post. I had been talking to some life/pension actuaries, and I wanted to have a document that would show what goes wrong from a pension point of view. In fact, I am an actuary myself (property-casualty, however). I had been keenly aware of the fact that the world could not possible produce as much output as all of the pension plans (private as well as government) were promising. The idea that benefits from owning shares of stock can rise indefinitely is also very iffy, once there is serious bottleneck in energy supplies of a particular type.
I started OurFiniteWorld.com in 2007 because, at that time, I could see the upcoming bottleneck, and the problem for all of these promised payments. I have been hesitant to write about the problem directly without a fairly tight argument regarding what goes wrong. I could imagine getting in trouble with the oversight groups for actuaries. Could they sue me, for example? I did not want to headline the article with a “your pension may fail” title, but that would have been a way to draw in readers.
My employer while I still was working as a casualty actuary also employed a huge number of life and pension actuaries. They were busy writing reports that assumed that growth would go on forever. I decided I really had a conflict of interests, trying to write about the pension problem while I was working for a firm that made its money largely by forecasting that BAU would go on forever. So I left consulting and started writing a few blog posts. I never expected that things would work together the way they have for me, since that time. I have managed to “pick up” knowledge in a lot of different areas.
Anyone stumbling upon this narrative for the first time… will … as they read through the article… find a deep sense of dread and despair descending upon them… as the reality of the situation gets processed…
Most will look away and claim the article was too long… otherwise if they were to continue… they risk going insane.
Stick to Twitter… or maybe tik tok… and the dancing cat videos
Interesting that per capita energy consumption is increasing again after reaching what appeared to be a peak. But the chart seems to be only up to 2000. What has happened since?
The final paragraph seems a bit out of place. After describing why the world economy is in such a mess, with a collapse likely quite soon, this all potentially gets undone by referencing some higher power who might intervene to bypass the laws of physics. Though I think that intelligent life is extremely unlikely in the universe, and maybe all complex life, too, that is not an argument for a higher power (I don’t know why you use the word “literal” before that; in what way is it literally higher?) which might have different plans from the way physics is asserting itself. If complex life is extremely unlikely in the universe, an even more complex life form, a higher power, is even more unlikely, surely?
There’s never just one of anything. If one unlikely thing has proved possible, what’s to stop other unlikely things happening? And unlikely to whom? Maybe what a human regards as unlikely may seem like child’s play to a more complex life form.
“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
As far as we know there is just one universe (though speculation on alternatives is rife). One can also speculate about stuff we don’t know about, as you have done. We don’t know of any more complex life forms.
This is an image in a somewhat different format that goes to 2020. Basically, there was no increase to 2020, related to Covid, of the last 10 years. Covid took back what per capita increase there would have been.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/12.-World-Energy-Consumption-Population-growth-vs.-Standard-of-Living-Increase-captions-large-copy-1024×578.png
The image shows the increase in energy consumption that went into both growing population (blue) and standard of living (red). It is the red portion corresponds to the increase in per capita energy consumption, over the 10 year period.
The issue I am talking about in the last paragraph has to do with the way the Universe operates. The “Law of Conservation of Energy” says that energy can be neither created or destroyed, only transformed to a different state. This is not really true, if the Universe is constantly expanding, and at an ever faster pace. Some force, somewhere, must be adding this energy to the system.
Thus, the issue isn’t a “Big Bang” starting the Universe 13.8 billion years ago, and the Earth being formed 4 billion years ago. Instead, a huge amount of energy is constantly being added on an ongoing basis. I call this a Literal Higher Power. Somehow, this Higher Power power seems to make the Universe behave in a non-random pattern.
Eric Chaisson (Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature is one who writes about the way the Universe is constantly moving toward greater energy-density and energy-complexity. This, combined with the constant growth in energy makes believe that there has to be some sort of “god” behind what is happening. This is one of Chaisson’s charts:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/13-chaisson-trend-is-toward-more-complex-energy-intense-form.png
Chaisson sees the most energy dense form now as “societies.” What Chaisson calls “societies,” I would call cities, occupied by humans. These are the most energy dense part of life on earth. When there is an energy bottleneck, cities tend to collapse. Governments seem to collapse, too.
From 1988 to 2002 (according to Our World in Data) per-capita energy use barely changed. I seem to remember Albert Bartlett saying per-capita energy use had reached a plateau. But, since then, it’s taken another leap up, though the 2022 figure wasn’t much different from the 2018 figure.
Regarding the expansion of the universe, there is a lot we don’t yet understand about most of the energy and matter in the universe; in fact we know almost nothing about dark energy and dark matter. You can certainly “make believe” that this is proof of some kind of other-worldly entity that can influence this universe and is doing so in some planned way but since we know nothing about the make believe god it is really pointless mentioning it in an analysis of our energy predicament, isn’t it? What help is such speculation?
The fact that the Universe seems to be constantly expanding (at an ever expanding rate) seems to me to suggest that there is something going on that we don’t know about. The complexity of the universe, and the fact that it seems to be evolving toward ever-more complexity is pretty amazing. The way the laws of physics seem to work is pretty amazing. My own life seems to have followed a path that allows me to figure out these things. Even the comments on this website are a self-organizing system.
None of this suggests a higher power, though, Gail. It suggests only that there is a lot of stuff about the universe that we don’t know. That’s it. Anything else is purely speculation that we will probably never be able to validate.
Who says that Keynesian economics is dead?
“In fiscal year 2022, the US federal budget deficit was $996 billion. The just-ended fiscal year 2023 saw that figure rise to $2.02 trillion. And while those figures explain why there is no longer a scarcity of safe Treasury assets, sending long-term yields higher, they also explain the US economy’s resilience. Deficits are effectively net financial transfers from the public sector to the rest of the economy. So the US economy in 2023 has been getting a huge trillion-dollar boost in financial wherewithal because of that deficit spending. This graphic from the Congressional Budget Office gives you a sense of the difference between 2022 and 2023.
Nothing the Fed has done will overwhelm this enormous transfer. So if you didn’t see the massive 2023 federal deficit coming — and I certainly didn’t — you wouldn’t have predicted the resiliency of the US consumer. “?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-10-25/the-2006-soft-landing-is-the-parallel-investors-must-fear?cmpid=BBD102523_everythingrisk&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=231025&utm_campaign=everythingrisk&leadSource=uverify%20wall#xj4y7vzkg
The Bloomberg author also writes:
I wonder how agreement will be made to dial back spending very much. Will the Republicans convince the Democrats to pare back spending in social programs to make the budget come closer to balancing, for example? Cutting back, when the people have been used to such huge amount of a transfer of funds from the public to the private sector, seems impossible to do.
(Jerusalem Post + Al Jazeera)
JP ”Satellite images show before and after of Gaza Strip after Israeli strikes”
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-770199
AJ “Gaza: Killed: At least 6,546. Including at least: 2,704 children. 1,584 women. Injured: More than 17,439”
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker
AJ “Gaza: Killed: At least 6,546. Including at least: 2,704 children. 1,584 women. Injured: More than 17,439”
The numbers does look fake. Who writes “More than 17,439” ?
1. Accurate numbers during war? How about bodies under the rubble?
2. People would normally write “estimate more than 15,000 died”. No one will ever write more than 17,439
Ok, as you like.
But according to your reasoning also Israeli data look fake.
“Israel. Killed: At least 1,405. Injured: At least 5,431”
same links
I personally think that some mistakes are possible from each side, but rough numbers are there.
They are the numbers of a carnage of civilians, from both side, of course.
But, by now, far greater on the Palestinian side.
At the moment I think that the carnage of civilians is even greater than the one in Ukraine, because in Ukraine people had the possibility to flee to other European Countries, while Palestinians are trapped.
Anyway the outrage is far less minor than the one for Ukraine, at least from western mainstream media side.
In my opinion, discussing on the exact numbers doesn’t get you anywhere.
Student, when you are staying in a box, you will come out with reasons to justify your logic. There may be no logic. It does not matter if it is Isreali or Palestinian or Italian data is wrong.
It is just not real.
At least xxx means there are at least xxx confirmed fatalities. It can be more but not less.
People can spot that the statistics of government like CPI, joblessness, etc are fake but somehow they cannot see that these new reports the data are also not real?
They tally with the level of destruction seen in satellite images, no?
And can’t images, whether from satellites or otherwise, be faked, too?
It seems to me that we can’t know the validity of anything presented in the media unless we are able to assess the reports with our own firsthand experience of the same events. Belief in stories and images in the media ultimately derives from faith and trust in the media or particular sources.
https://www.arabnews.com/sites/default/files/styles/n_670_395/public/2019/09/07/1743841-1039067494.jpg
chngtg, the numbers from the Palestinian side are the confirmed numbers and if you looked, they say, as you just have, that they have no idea how many more are buried under the rubble.
So, it could be argued that they are not overplaying the death count by guessing how many children were buried alive, to die slowly.
Foolish Fitz, there are times when you really need to think out of the box rather than just trying to support either side with “logical” explanation. Is there is a possibility there is “no” logical explanation?
Imagine if someone is an amoeba living in a puddle of water. It will try to explain everything possible in a logical way but if the amoeba elevate itself and see the big picture by flying out of the water puddle, perhaps the amoeba can see things differently.
Why are people trying their best to defend the data given? Oh it must be something they missed. Oh, it might be that they did this.
Maybe it is just not real.
When I see that data, I try to imagine how it could have been put together.
I imagine it might be fake data put out in order to deceive the general public.
And I also imagine it might be accurate data that has been presented poorly in English, perhaps because the people doing the presenting are not native English speakers and not particularly well educated in the field of statistical presentation.
I imagine that the numbers of confirmed dead an injured people were counted as accurately as possible, and that the presenters wanted to convey the idea that these were minimum figures because their are bound to be more victims beneath the rubble or blown to smithereens that have not yet been confirmed or counted.
I just imagine possibilities. It’s an exercise of the imagination. I make no claims about anything.
Do I qualify for a no claims bonus?
Tim, in this case, the news are in English….. trying to defend the data that you did not create/make/gather is rather pointless, isn’t it?
Actually, I’m not trying to defend it. I am trying to potentially explain why it came out the way it did, which is a very different thing.
It was published in English. But who compiled it? Were they native English speakers? Or were they Palestinians on the ground in Gaza just trying to do their best in a difficult situation?
I don’t know.
But I don’t see any need to jump to the conclusion that the data is fake in the absence of firm evidence.
I say with Chairman Mao, let a million potential scenarios bloom!
Chntg, now I see,
your idea is interesting and it is not new.
Maybe you probably already know, you are a follower of the ancient Greek philosophers’ ‘school of thinking’ called ‘Solipsism’.
Unfortunately I cannot propose to you a link, because we face the risk that you also are not real according to our idea of ‘Solipsism’, so you couldn’t see it.
Put it this way, after COVID, I don’t trust anything at all.
I subscribe to simulation theory, more so after COVID. Nothing is real to me
John Lennon was also a subscriber to the “nothing is real” school.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLFyasSehk
As a hypothesis, “Nothing is Real” has a lot going for it. I feel I exist, but this may be an illusion. I may not exist in actually but only as an imaginary person. If so, who imagined me? The simulation.
Whatever, I am going to live the rest of my imaginary life imagining that I’m real and my sensations are real too and causality and compound interest and reciprocation are all part of the reality matrix because the balance of my imaginary sanity depends on it.
chngtg, it’s possible that it’s not real data, although highly unlikely, but history shows it is the best available.
“Everyone uses the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry because those are generally proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. “In the times in which we have done our own verification of numbers for particular strikes, I’m not aware of any time which there’s been some major discrepancy.”
Shakir said Human Rights Watch would not use figures provided by parties with “a propensity to misrepresent information.”
“We know that a health ministry is going to base [death tolls] on assessments coming from hospitals, morgues, etc.,” he said. “They have an ability to collect that in a way that other sources not there can’t do.”
https://archive.ph/m1Mlt
Unfortunately for us amoebae, there’s no hope off being lifted up to a higher level of understanding, so we are left to work with the data provided to try to achieve some understanding, however flawed.
It could be someone is keeping a running tally. 16 killed today, 300 killed, etc… add them up and you get an exact number.
In war both sides lie.
Nice…
A survivor from the Palestinian resistance offensive on Israeli settlements on 7 October says the Israeli army is “undoubtedly” responsible for killing many of their civilians.
“They eliminated everyone, including the hostages, because there was very, very heavy crossfire,” 44-year-old mother of three Yasmin Porat told the Haboker Hazeh radio program on Israeli Kan radio last week.
When the interviewer asked if Israeli troops were responsible for civilian deaths, Porat said, “Undoubtedly.” Her interview has been scrubbed from the online version of Haboker Hazeh and the Kan website; however, Electronic Intifada procured a copy and translated it from Hebrew.
“There are five or six hostages lying on the ground outside. Just like sheep to the slaughter, between the shooting of our commandos and the terrorists,” Porat describes.
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/survivor-of-hamas-assault-says-israeli-army-undoubtedly-killed-their-own-civilians
Crushing toll of America’s colon cancer epidemic in young people
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/health-news/crushing-toll-of-america-s-colon-cancer-epidemic-in-young-people/ar-AA1ieVx8
What can be causing this????
This hit hard..my own sister died from colon cancer at age 33 back in 1989.
Pretty much her doctor at first misdiagnosed it because of her young age and when it was finally discovered it was so advanced the surgery and treatment could not cure her and died a terrible death,
This increase has been going on for some time now and can’t be put on the jab alone…suppose the modern industrial mix is a catching up to the limits of what biological health can tolerate
Cancer after vaccines with Professor Dalgleish
761,290 views · 2 weeks ago…more
Dr. John Campbell
2.9M
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PnJ5T1Enwq4&t=7s
Credit Suisse’s flagship real estate fund saw the value of its portfolio plunge by 9% in the third quarter as the global property correction accelerated.
The Credit Suisse Real Estate Fund International is trying to sell “several properties in a challenging market environment,” it said in a statement Friday. It’s also seeking to diversify its portfolio, it added.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-20/credit-suisse-s-ailing-property-fund-cuts-values-9-in-quarter
It seems like this correction will flow through to organizations that hold this fund, or similar funds, on their balance sheets. I would expect that some pension funds might carry some property funds in their portfolios. Maybe university endowment funds, too.
Anti-COVID drug accelerates viral evolution
Molnupiravir, an antiviral drug used to treat COVID-19, induces numerous mutations in the SARS-CoV-2 genome that can increase the rate at which the virus evolves — yielding viral variants that might survive and be passed on.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03248-3
3rd world living at its best! After driving poverty around the world during the empire days… this is karmic!!!
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/24/more-than-1-million-uk-children-experienced-destitution-last-year-study-finds
Arithmetically that’s inevitable if UK wealth declines, its population rises and the top 1% grab a bit more.
Programme on bankers’ antics over the past 300 years and how they really don’t want people and governments to control the money supply
https://archive.org/details/the-money-masters/The+Money+Masters/The+Money+Masters+04.mp4
From 1996 yet I hadn’t seen it. I’m sure the banksters don’t want many people to see it. Parts 1, 3 & 4 seem the most useful.
With all the chaos and heartbreaking loss of life around the world today, few noticed the Treasury Department drop a financial bomb: the deficit for fiscal year 2023 was $1.7 trillion, growing 23 percent in a single year as the Treasury used $879 billion just to service the federal debt. But Bidenomics means the worst is yet to come, and multi-trillion-dollar deficits are the new normal.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/news/treasury-just-dropped-a-financial-bomb-but-bidenomics-means-the-worst-is-yet-to-come/ar-AA1iOrMB
The article points out:
It looks like the US will have to buy back its own debt (QE) more and more to even half-way make something like these big deficits work in the future.
So much for ever retiring … there’s always Super Fent
https://financialpost.com/fp-work/retired-flocking-back-workforce-inflation
This is one way to get rid of the pension problem. Get people back to work.
Biblical… correct https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/billionaire-predicts-probably-recession-2024-says-us-entering-7-lean-years-pharaohs-dream
Another slap to the face of the Green Groopies
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/10/25/electricity-prices-rise-70pc-pay-wind-farms-energy/
The headline says,
I can’t imagine many people will be happy about this.
And here I was thinking the increase of 30% on my truck insurance was a lot!
I am french, I read your post regularly and I think this newest post is one of the best. A excellent summary and explanation of the situation, simultaneously on physical/energetic and economic aspect.
I read so François Roddier and agree with his thermodynamical point of view.
I follow a french expert who is at the same level of analysis than you, aka physical level : Jean-Marc Jancovici. You probably know him. If not, his video channel is here : https://iteroni.com/channel/UCNovJemYKcdKt7PDdptJZfQ One in english here : Jancovici : Averting systemic collapse or managing it ? – OCDE – 17/09/2019 https://iteroni.com/watch?v=oy-94IgDz3w
Actually, in France, we are in the trap debt as you describe/anticipate.
There is a rare economist who says the truth in France, Marc Touati. I follow him so. His video channel : https://iteroni.com/channel/UCX0IqCxHb4xhdE9QPixAlfg. Last video on the debt with graph for France and EU : https://iteroni.com/watch?v=hdeBTMz-UNU
Thanks for your very good work !
I’ve posted Jean-Marc Jancovici links from time to time. His presentations are great, but most of them are in French. It amuses me when he occasionally gets pushback and disbelief from listeners.
Thanks! I have never met Jean-Marc Jancovici in person. (I have also not met Francois Roddier in person.) Jancovici has commented once on this site:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/06/03/increased-violence-reflects-an-energy-problem/comment-page-2/#comment-248239
I should go back and learn more about what he has to say. One of the things he has talked about is the inelasticity of the energy prices.
‘Someone’ is ‘optimistic’?
‘. . . Uranium & thorium have over 2M X the energy density of coal. Ordinary rock, average Earth’s crust is 30X the energy density of coal just due to the trace uranium & thorium in it. And Deuterium is 7X the energy density of uranium/thorium.
Nuclear energy can easily replace all energy sources. With an EROI with current LWR tech ~2.5X that of fossil. With PHWR tech ~4X and with MSR tech ~70X that of fossil. Wind & solar being <1/3rd of fossil. We need factory built reactors like these:
Thorium molten salt breeder reactor as waste burner using heavy water as moderator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM4xmtnKgnk
https://thorconpower.com/
"…Rapidly Deployable. The complete ThorCon is manufactured in 150 to 500 ton blocks in a shipyard, assembled, then towed to the site. This produces order of magnitude improvements in productivity, quality control, and build time. A single large reactor yard can turn out twenty gigawatts of ThorCon power plants per year…." '?
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/women-electrified/comment/42452235#comment-42487099?utm_source=activity_item
Too bad research was canceled on IFR-type reactors.
There won’t be any funding until brownouts become prevalent.
In the comments:
The issue with MSRs is the Tellurium embrittlement or segregation. Stronger more expensive alloys must be used and an additive just to get them to last longer than 4 years and why they were shelved back in the 60s. Thorium reactors are not Thorium reactors….they are Thorium decay chain reactors where Th232 must be transmutated to U233 so in fact they are still Uranium reactors. Calling them a Thorium reactor is a fallacy
And, by your logic, most uranium reactors (at least in the West) are in fact Plutonium reactors. But 239 Pu, or 233 or 235 U, provide the fertility (the excess neutrons) and maybe 10% of the energy. The rest is provided by even numbered nuclei, 232Th and 238U.
“Ordinary rock, average Earth’s crust is 30X the energy density of coal just due to the trace uranium & thorium in it”
— which it releases over the timescales of the radioactive isotopes’ half-lives, 4.5 billion years for uranium and 14 billion years for thorium. As a result, its power is minuscule compared to that of coal, a lump of which can be burned to release its chemical energy in mere minutes. It may have thirty times less energy overall, but you can get at this energy about a quadrillion times quicker. (That’s why burning coal is much hotter than Earth’s surface.)
Of course coal has been concentrated by natural processes, while trace uranium and thorium in Earth’s crust wasn’t. But if you concentrate these too, then they will no longer resemble ‘average Earth’s crust’ in any meaningful way; sorry.
Doomberg is ‘optimistic’ re nuclear?
“ 51:13 certainly, with very reasonable amounts of money invested, in a very short period of time, with the right political support, abate far more than the sort of peak oil cliff that would be presented
51:29 using nuclear, . . .
It
53:11 takes a shockingly small amount of uranium to power these reactors, “?
postkey, thank you. That’s great and also irrelevant to my point, which is that the uranium and thorium in “average Earth’s crust” are several orders of magnitude too diffuse to be of any practical use.