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It may be pleasant to think that the economies that are “on top” now will stay on top forever, but it is doubtful that this is the way the economy of the world works.
Figure 1 shows that, for the Advanced Economies viewed as a group (that is, members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)), GDP has been trending downward since the early 1960s; this is concerning. It makes it look as if within only a few years, the Advanced Economies might be in permanent shrinkage. In 2022, the expected annual GDP growth rate for the group seems to be only 1%.
What is even more concerning is the fact that the indications in the graph are based on a period when the debt of the Advanced Economies was growing. This growing debt acted as an economic stimulus; it helped the industries manufacturing goods and services as well as the citizens buying the goods and services. Without this stimulus, GDP growth would no doubt appear to be falling even faster than shown.
In this post, I will look at underlying factors that relate to this downward trend, including oil consumption growth and changes in interest rate policies. I will also discuss the Maximum Power Principle of biology. Based on this principle, the world economy seems to be headed for a major reorganization. In this reorganization, the Advanced Countries seem likely to lose their status as world leaders. Such a downfall could happen through a loss at war, or it could happen in other ways.
[1] The major factor in the downward trend in GDP growth seems to be the loss of growth of oil supply.
In the 1940 to 1970 period, the price of oil was very low (less than $20 per barrel at today’s prices), and oil supply growth was 7% to 8% per year, which is very rapid. The US was the dominant user of oil in this era, allowing the US to become the world’s leading country both in a military way (hegemony), and in a financial way, as the holder of the “reserve currency.”
Data on year-by-year oil consumption growth is not available for the earliest years, but we can view the trend over 10-year periods (Figure 2).
With the rapid growth in the world oil supply in the 1940 to 1970 timeframe, the US was able to help Europe and Japan rebuild their infrastructure after World War II. The US also did a great deal of building at home, including adding electricity transmission lines, oil and gas pipelines, and interstate highways. It also added a Medicare program to provide healthcare for the elderly. The emphasis at this time was on building for the future.
In the 1960s, the Green Revolution was started, aimed at increasing the quantity of food produced. This revolution involved greater mechanization of farming, the use of hybrid seeds that required more fertilizer, the use of genetically modified seeds, and the use of herbicides and pesticides. With these changes, farming became increasingly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels. The green revolution led to lower inflation-adjusted prices for food, as well as greater supply.
The 1970s was a time of adaptation to spiking oil prices and declining growth in oil supplies. At the same time, wages were increasing, and more women were entering the workforce, making the rise in oil prices more tolerable. There were also advances in computerization, changing the nature of many kinds of work.
The 1980s marked a shift to an emphasis on how to get costs down for the consumer. There was more emphasis on competition and leverage (the euphemism for borrowing). Instead of building for the future, the emphasis was on using previously built infrastructure for as long as possible.
Also in the 1980s, the Advanced Economies started to shift toward becoming service economies. To do this, a significant share of manufacturing and mining was moved to lower-wage countries. Transferring a significant share of industry abroad had the additional benefit of holding down prices for the consumer.
[2] Oil consumption growth and GDP growth seem to be connected.
Figure 3 shows that oil consumption growth was higher than GDP growth up until 1973, when oil prices started to spike. This was the period of greatly adding to infrastructure, using the abundant oil supply, as discussed in Section [1]
After 1973-1974, GDP growth tended to stay slightly above oil consumption growth as Advanced Economies started to focus on becoming service economies. As part of this shift, Advanced Economies began moving industry to lower-wage countries. This shift became more pronounced after 1997, when the Kyoto Protocol (limiting CO2 emissions) was promulgated. The Kyoto Protocol gave participating countries (in practice, the Advanced Economies) a reason to hold down their own local consumption of fossil fuels, which is what is measured in Figure 3 and most other energy analyses.
Figure 3 shows that even after moving a significant share of industry to offshore locations, there still seems to be a significant correlation between oil consumption growth and GDP growth. Even with a service economy, oil consumption growth seems to be important!
[3] Prior to 1981, increasing interest rates were used to slow economic growth.
With the rapid growth in oil consumption in the 1940 to 1970 period, the economy often grew rapidly despite rising interest rates. After World War II, government loans became available to returning veterans to buy homes, helping to make the usage of oil affordable.
It was only as growth in oil consumption slowed and interest rates rose to a high level in the 1979-1981 period that high interest rates created a major recession. At such high interest rates, builders of all kinds were discouraged from building. Hardly anyone could afford a new home. Businesses couldn’t afford new factories, and governments couldn’t afford to build new schools. Few people could afford new car loans.
On Figure 3, it is not surprising that GDP dipped at the same time as oil consumption shortly after 1981. The dip in oil consumption was larger because heavy users of oil, such as construction and manufacturing, were squeezed out by the high interest rates.
[4] Falling interest rates in the period 1981 to 2020, as shown in Figure 4, stimulated the economy in many ways.
The 1981 to 2020 period marked a time of generally falling interest rates, with short term interest rates typically being below long-term interest rates. Reducing interest rates tends to stimulate the economy in a variety of ways:
(a) As we all know, lower interest rates make monthly payments on new home mortgages lower. This means that more citizens can afford to purchase homes, leading to greater demand for new homes and their furnishings. Prices of homes tend to rise, partly because people with a given income can afford larger, fancier homes, and partly because more people in total can afford homes.
(b) Even on existing home mortgages, new lower rates can have an impact. In the US, mortgages are frequently set for a long term, such as 20 years, but they can often be refinanced at a lower rate if interest rates fall lower. In many other countries and in the US for business property, mortgage rates are set for a shorter term, such as 5 years. As the loans renew, the new lower rates become available. Borrowers are happy; there is suddenly a smaller monthly payment for the same property.
(c) With lower interest rates, there is demand for more homes to be built. This stimulates the construction industry and helps the prices of all kinds of built structures rise.
(d) A similar situation to (a), (b) and (c) exists for all kinds of items normally purchased using loans. New cars, new boats, and new second homes are affected, as are many kinds of business loans. Even loans taken out by governmental organizations become less expensive. It suddenly becomes easier to buy goods, so more goods are sold. Market prices can be higher because at the new lower interest rates, more people can afford them.
(e) There can be some benefit with respect to long-term bond holdings, if interest rates fall. Bonds generally promise to pay a stated interest rate over the life of the bond, say 20 years. If the market interest rate falls, the selling price of a high coupon-rate long-term bond increases because such bonds are worth more than a similar new bond with a lower coupon interest rate.
Financial institutions such as banks, insurance companies, pension plans, and endowment funds generally have long-term bonds as part of their portfolios. The higher value of bonds may or may not be reflected in financial statements, depending on the accounting rules applied. Sometimes, “amortized cost” is used as the carrying value until the bond is sold, hiding the gain in value. Conversely, if bonds are “marked to market,” then the higher value becomes immediately reported in financial statements.
(f) With mark-to-market accounting, insurance companies, banks and many other kinds of financial organizations can reflect the benefit immediately. As a result, for example, insurance companies may be able to sell policies more cheaply in a falling interest rate environment. (Of course, as interest rates start rising, the opposite is true. I believe that is part of the problem with the spike in insurance rates that the world has been witnessing in the past two years. But this is seldom mentioned because it is less well understood.)
(g) With falling interest rates, practically all kinds of asset prices rise. For example, the prices of shares of stock tend to rise, as does the price of farmland. Prices of office buildings tend to rise. People feel richer. They can sell some of their investments and profit from the sale. Tax rates on long-term capital gains are low in the US, further helping investors.
(h) If generally falling interest rates can be maintained for many years (1981 to 2020), gambling in the stock market starts looking like a great idea. Investment using borrowed funds looks like it makes sense. Buying derivatives seems to make sense. Adding more and more leverage makes sense. People rich enough to gamble in the stock market or the housing market begin to gain huge advantages over the many poor people whose wages remain too low to buy more than the basics.
These advantages tend to drive a wider and wider wedge between the rich and the poor. As diminishing returns become more of a problem, wage and wealth disparities become increasingly major issues. These disparities arise partly because of competition with low-wage countries for less-skilled jobs, and partly because of the need to pay higher wages to highly educated workers. They also arise because owners of shares of stock and of homes have tended to receive the benefit of significant capital gains as interest rates have fallen, for the reasons described above.
[5] Since 2020, interest rates have begun to rise in the Advanced Economies. It is difficult to see how a shift to higher interest rates can turn out well.
News write-ups about the rise in interest rates often say something like the following:
The Fed hiked interest rates a total of 11 times between March 2022 and January 2024, making borrowing more expensive for banks, businesses, and people in an attempt to curb rampant inflation.
However, Figure 4 shows that long-term interest rates (the blue line) started to rise much earlier than this–about the time the US started to borrow a huge amount of money to support the programs it initiated to keep the economy functioning at the time of the Covid restrictions in 2020.
This funding went back into the economy to provide income to would-be workers who were forced to stay home and to small businesses that needed additional funds to cover their overhead. Pauses in student loan repayments had a similar effect. At the same time, fewer goods and services were created because non-essential activities were restricted.
This combination of more wealth in the hands of citizens at the same time as a limited quantity of goods and services were being produced was precisely the right combination of actions needed to generate inflation. So, it was no wonder that there was an inflation problem.
Indirectly, high US borrowing has been, and continues to be, part of the inflation problem. Total goods and services produced in the world economy are not currently rising very quickly because diesel and jet fuel are in short supply, something I wrote about here and here. The US and other Advanced Economies keep issuing more debt in the hope that using this debt will help them purchase a larger share of the goods and services produced by the world economy.
It is not clear to me that this problem can be fixed since the US and the other Advanced Economies need to keep borrowing to support their economies and to fight for causes such as the Ukraine War. Note the downward trend in Figure 1!
One of the big problems with high asset prices and higher-than-zero interest rates is that farmers find that the cost of their land becomes too high to make it worthwhile to grow crops. This is especially the case for new farmers, who may need to buy their land using the higher-cost debt.
People often believe that farm prices will rise indefinitely, but Reuters reports that high borrowing costs and low food prices are cutting demand for farm equipment from John Deere, the world’s largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery. Without a flow of new farm equipment to replace that which is breaking or worn out, food production can be expected to fall.
Another issue is that apartment owners find a need to raise the rent on their units if the interest rate they are forced to pay rises or if the cost of property insurance rises. If they raise the rent of their units, this leaves renters with less income for other goods and services. Indirectly, today’s wage and wealth disparity problems tend to become greater than they were before the rise in interest rates.
In theory, if long-term (not just short-term) interest rates rise and remain higher, the many benefits of falling interest rates in Section [4] will be erased, and even reversed. The economy will be far worse off than it is now because of falling asset prices and defaulting debt. Financial institutions, such as banks and insurance companies, will be especially damaged because the true value of their long-term bonds will tend to fall. This can sometimes be hidden by accounting approaches, but ultimately unrealized capital losses will cause a problem as they did for Silicon Valley Bank.
The heavy use of debt and leveraging in the Advanced Economies makes these economies especially vulnerable to major financial problems if interest rates rise, or even if they stay at the current level. The bubble of debt and other promises (such as pensions promises) holding up the Advanced Economies seems vulnerable to collapse.
[6] The problem facing the people of the Advanced Economies is like the problem the biological world often faces.
The biological world is constantly faced with the problem of too many animals (for example, wolves and deer) wanting to occupy a given space with specific resources, such as water, sunlight, and smaller plants and animals to eat. In some sense, the world economy is an ecosystem, too, one that we humans have made. The Advanced Economies are already in a conflict with the less advanced economies, trying to decide which parts of the world will “win” in the battle over the resources needed for future economic growth.
The Maximum Power Principle (MPP) tries to explain who can be expected to be the winners and losers in an ecosystem when there are not enough resources to go around. I think of the MPP as an extension of the “survival of the fittest” or “survival of the best adapted.” The difference is that MPP looks at the functioning of the overall system, which, in this case, is the world economy.
The parts of the system (such as the individual people, the levels of borrowing, the government organizations, and the narratives governments choose to tell to explain the current situation) will be selected based on how well they permit the overall world economy (not just the Advanced Economies) to function. The goal seems to be to create as many goods and services as possible by dissipating all available energy in as useful a way as possible. In this way, the world GDP, which is a measure of the output of the useful work performed by the world economy, can stay as high as possible, for each time period.
Writings by scientists on this subject tend to be difficult to understand, but they may add some insight. One definition of MPP says that systems which maximize their flow of energy survive in competition. Mark Brown, professor emeritus at the University of Florida, says that under the Maximum Power Principle, “System components are selectively reinforced based on their contribution to the larger systems within which they are embedded,” and, “When resources are in short supply, they need to be used efficiently.” John Delong from the University of New Mexico says, “Winning species were successfully predicted a priori from their status as the species with the highest power when alone.”
I suggest that if these principles are applied to the competition between the Advanced Economies and the less advanced economies of the world, the Advanced Economies will lose. For example, the Advanced Economies have been falling behind the less advanced economies in industrial output.
In addition, the Advanced Economies of the world have fallen behind in the bidding for oil supplies:
Furthermore, the NATO allies seem unable to pull ahead of Russia in the Ukraine conflict. In theory, this should have been an easy war to win, but with limited manufacturing capability, it has been hard for the allies to provide enough weapons of the right kinds to win.
To me, this all points to the conclusion that in a conflict over scarce resources, the Advanced Economies are likely to lose. The conflict could come in the form of war, or it could simply be a financial conflict. Figure 1 shows that the Advanced Economies are already falling behind in the competition for economic growth, even with all the debt they are adding.
[7] There is a lot of confusion about what is ahead.
We don’t know what is ahead. The economy is a self-organizing system that seems to figure out its own way of resolving the problem of not enough resources to go around because of diminishing returns. The world economy seems to be headed toward reorganization.
I believe that the Covid-19 era represented one rather strange self-organized response to the “not enough oil to go around” problem. Figure 6 shows a clear dip in the amount of oil consumed in 2020, particularly by the Advanced Economies. Some of this reduced oil consumption continues, even now, because more people started working from home, saving on oil. Another helpful change was a huge ramp-up in the use of online meetings.
It is possible that new adaptations to limited oil supply may appear in as strange a way as the Covid-19 era did.
Another possibility is that the Advanced Economies, particularly the US, will encounter severe financial problems as the rest of the world moves away from the US dollar. Or the problem could be falling asset prices because of higher interest rates, causing many financial institutions to fail. Or the problem could be too much money being printed, but practically nothing to buy, causing severe inflation of commodity prices.
War may be a possibility because it is an age-old way of dealing with resource problems. For one thing, it becomes easy to raise debt to pay for a war. This debt can be used to hire soldiers and buy munitions. With the higher debt, the GDP of the economy can be expected to suddenly look better because of the stimulus given to it. The major “catch” is that picking a fight with a major competitor or two could prove to be disastrous.
Let us hope that our leaders make wise choices and keep us away from severe problems for as long as possible.
Fari and Balanced:
SH has a video on H today. She does not like H nor apparently does Elon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIVmSewHqMY
1. I am not fatally concerned regarding the environment, but losing spaceship earth is fatal for the human race and Mars is not an option.
2. Fossil fuels are leaving us, they have no difficulties other than they are basically finished per OFW.
3. If H is net energy positive and if it can grow, there are few if any pollution issues and anything which compounds fixes all shortages as long as compound growth continues.
4. With compound growth, efficiency is not relevant other than as a temporal issue.
5. Starship makes it a possibility, if the CH4 shortage is coming, Starship will need an alternative fuel anyhow.
6. My opinion: We will not biologically colonize Mars; we will manufacture in space and with robots that solves many problems. Space is so large, the resources so big even 1% growth is huge.
It is going to be bumpy. It is doable given any compound growth.
Dennis L.
Hydrogen is not net energy positive. And we cannot store it, without it leaking out. Freezing it takes a whole lot of energy. It can’t work, I don’t think.
Gail, fossil fuels are not net energy positive, diesel does not make more diesel than it starts with. Solar/wind move that problem off earth to the sun which is not net energy positive in that in a few billion years it too burns out.
Found this: https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/HydrogenLeakageRegulations_CGEP_Commentary_063022.pdf
I
This paper admits uncertainty but looks like 2.7-5.6 percent leakage of H under storage.
From Copilot:
For example, advanced carbon-composite tanks have been cycled more than 500,000 times to maximum operating pressure without leaking1. This suggests that these tanks can withstand a large number of fill-and-empty cycles over their lifetime.
In terms of design life, one specification document suggests that certain hydrogen cylinders are designed to last for 15 to 20 years2. However, this can vary depending on the specific model and usage conditions
I think we can deal with this problem. H is transported commercially on a routine basis. Sometimes the negativity conveniently ignores what is being done by dumb, industrial suppliers using delivery trucks on a daily basis.
Dennis L.
Deal with this problem? How? By praying to your God?
Dumb, industrial suppliers routinely does that using unicorn farts, I guess.
“Gail, fossil fuels are not net energy positive, diesel does not make more diesel than it starts with.”
erm… did you actually mean to say that? Fossil fuels provide us with more energy than it takes to extract them. And with the excess we build civilisation. If they were not net energy positive we’d have left them in the ground.
Seems he does not know what he is talking about, although that does not prevent him from believing what he had said.
Exactly!
It is doable in fantasies and infomercials and fantasy movies. It is just not doable in real world, no matter what kind of delusion you want to stick on to.
needs saying again dennis
you cannot—repeat cannot—have compound growth without surplus cheap energy
though why i keep repeating that, is beyond me,….it never registers.
He actually believes what he says, which means he is a true believer and cannot be convinced no matter how much evidence being presented to him.
Important Biden press conference at 6:30 pm EDT (3.5 hours from now). Zerohedge is saying:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/crucial-press-conference-today-cracks-form-bidens-senate-wall-donations-dry-delegates
Momentous Press Conference Looms Today As Cracks Form In Biden’s Senate Wall, Donations Dry Up, Delegates Rebel
they could load him up with Adderall and cross fingers.
or send him out without any meds just to throw him under the bus.
surely his days are numbered.
I don’t care for him, but he did make President of the US; he is tough as nails even if a bit rusty.
Dennis L.
He was always someone who compromised, never someone to have an original idea.
And he was put into there by his handlers for that kind of quality.
Your blind optimism is now showing its bad side .
WSJ says that the press conference is scheduled for 6:30, but it is running behind.
Finally on.
Very interesting discussion about western destabilization efforts around the Caspian Sea, where there is a lot of oil. There are some brief comments about the SCO meeting, before he gets into the security issues around shutting down terrorist financing and activities.
This guy is one of the sharpest commenters in Nima’s stable. But i wonder if youtube does not create similar playlists for OFWers, because it was at the top for me and I already watched it.
Yes, I saw it as well; he seems well informed and does not grandstand.
Dennis L.
British held the hegemony over the Eurasian land mass first. That is where most of the world’s resources and workforce is located. London was the center.
When Europe had trouble, the hegemony sort of transferred to the US, except London and Europe continued to play an important role. The focus of the hegemony was the Eurasian land mass became this was/is where much of the oil and other minerals are located. The plan was to destabilize this area by terrorism and the overthrow of elected officials, so control could be maintained over governments and oil and gas production and pipelines.
Now, through the SCO, China, Russia and other countries of this area are beginning to push back. They want control of the area, instead.
—
More in the video.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/10/bp-predicts-global-oil-demand-will-peak-in-2025-emissions-wind-solar-gas
Fox says “Grapes probably too sour. Won’t bother getting them down”
In this Chris Martenson preview video (the entire 20 minute video is really good), he explains at the 12:00 minute mark why solar and wind are a none factor and will probably be heading forward. The problem arises where leaders are steering people away from fossil fuels towards wind and solar when both of those combined “cannot” replace what fossil fuels does much more efficiently.
Fossil fuels provide instant energy whereas wind and solar relies on the sun and wind to provide energy.
https://peakprosperity.com/what-the-french-and-uk-elections-really-mean/
At scale, all energy sources (including food) are derivatives of crude oil.
We know that the world will never say ‘no’ to another barrel of energy-dense crude, therefore what BP is really saying when it says:
“Global oil demand will peak in 2025” is this:
“Global oil supply will peak in 2025”
Or perhaps:
“2025 is the year when the interacting forces of supply and demand produce peak oil (conventional+) consumption.
Is BP giving us a heads up here? We shall have to wait and see if the forecast is accurate.
Peak oil consumption is peak industrial society. Full Stop.
This video focuses on election shenanigans in France and elsewhere, and how they produced a very distorted result. Martenson attributes this to “People in power want to stay in power.”
I think that we are witnessing how the self-organizing system works. Neither the UK nor France is getting enough fossil fuels (and and other) energy products, which is why they are doing so poorly. There is not enough leveraging of workers efforts by the use of more fossil fuels–bigger trucks and agricultural machines, and new manufacturing capability, for example.
If there is not enough fossil fuel energy to provide growth, the system tries to provide growth in some other way. One such way is through more warm bodies, through migration. Another way is through more debt, as inevitably these programs end up being financed through debt. If profitable energy supplies are really available, these two sources should pull them out. This is why parties that favor these policies tend to win.
Martenson provides “good” reasons why these programs are not helpful. Untrained workers may tend to pull the average wages down further.
For right now, the system seems to be pushing to go in this direction. In the US, I would expect that the candidate that would go furthest in this direction is Bernie Sanders. He is about a year older than Biden. (Biden was born on Nov. 20, 1942 ; Sanders was born on Sept. 8, 1941). Sanders is currently running for the US Senate from Vermont, so he seems to be in good health.
I would expect that Sanders would be the kind of candidate that might be chosen to run to provide a unifying force to the US. He would be looking for lots of debt and lots of programs for the poor, I expect. He doesn’t have the “baggage” of a lot of other potential candidates.
Assumed we have “the right” perspective, that cheap energy availability plays an important role in the historic development, it doesn’t mean that the political management in charge has a similar approach.
What is more, it is crucial to keep the dollar and the credit bubble alive as long as possible. And that depends on what people BELIEVE and TRUST in. It needn’t be true.
I agree with your view:
This part of article is nonsense:
“BP predicts in both scenarios that carbon emissions will reach a peak in the middle of the decade amid a rapid expansion of wind and solar power as technology costs continue to fall.”
“Technology costs continue to fall” is nonsense. Wind and solar are far, far way from running the system. We need fossil fuels, not intermittent electricity.
But oil demand may hit a peak, especially in the Advanced Countries, because the countries are using the fossil fuels mainly for creature comforts, rather than for producing raw materials and finished goods that can be traded as exports.
Services are not very useful for international trade. Financial products quickly hit a limit and collapse when growth stops. Services are likely to be cut back disproportionately as growth turns to shrinkage.
“Not only are those grapes sour” said Mr Fox, “but picking them causes climate change”
Sour grapes supply will peak in 2025. Cocoa supply already crashing, as is coffee (sorry guys) but honest, I do not like chocolate anymore. Plus it is dangerous for endangered german shepherd.
Maybe, maybe not:
ARM processors are basically licensed designs from Arm Ltd. They do not manufacture chips. As of 2022 230B have been produced, think smart phones or Raspberry Pi computers.
There is a difference between being clever with financial products and developing ideas, intellectual capital.
Oil is found in the middle east, it was not the native population which developed technology to employ it. Without intellectual capital, e.g. thermodynamics, it is so much goo.
“We need fossil fuels, not intermittent electricity.” Spaceship earth has done very well for billions of years on intermittent energy, it is the diurnal cycle. A rough guess is without that intermittency, there would be only a rock with huge extremes of temperature from one side to another. Oil is nothing more than diurnal energy stored in goo, processed with perhaps a bit of radioactive decay.
Starship is working, there is no shortage of “stuff” in the solar system, Starship harnesses intellectual energy and once in space is likely to be self sustaining and organizing.
Starship allows earth to be diurnal, intermittent.
Spaceship earth is self organizing, it is organizing out of the goo. We don’t even have a clue where AI is going, but Copilot works very well and from what I have read/heard it and similar Ai result in a 100% improvement in programming productivity. I use it, it beats the heck out of my reference library.
Follow the money, we are not going backwards; but life is 80/20. Marry the wrong person, children likely will not be part of the 20(I am not referring to money which is a result of good selection). That is self organization with a bit of evolution thrown in for good measure. To date, we are biology organized in no small part by religion, our understanding of God.
God made the heavens as well as the earth with its goo. He made much more “heavens.” We are knocking on the door, it will be opened on to us, some will walk through, some will not.
Dennis L.
I agree that oil is the best way we have to store the intermittent energy provided to us through the solar system.
We are kidding ourselves if we think intermittent solar and wind, plus batteries, or some liquid fuel made from solar and wind, can do an equivalent job. There is too much complexity involved and not enough redundancy.
In the same post you say
“There is a difference between being clever with financial products and developing ideas, intellectual capital.”
and then
“Follow the money, we are not going backwards; but life is 80/20. ”
You contradict your own argument in the same post.
That aside, starship is not going anywhere, and none of the advertised attributes will pan out. it will be remembered like the argonauts, some bored heroes going off to some faraway land to find some useless treasure which doesn’t exist now.
I don’t think you know what you are talking about near the end of your post. I do know what I am talking about – the self organizing thing has failed.
Hello Gail,
what can be the reason why Norway import crude from west Africa.
Doesn’t Norway already have its own good crude?
Thenk you
https://splash247.com/norway-imports-record-amount-of-west-african-crude/
I hazard a guess that Norwegian oil is too light and needs mixing with heavier crude.
“0:00 Russia last year 400 people were
0:02 arrested for things that they said on
0:04 social media 400 people in Russia
0:07 obviously this country’s very different
0:08 how many people do you think were
0:09 arrested in Britain for things they said
0:11 on social media last
0:14 year go on take a guess I have no idea
0:17 3,300 really arrested for what they said
0:20 on social media . . . “?
BP Predicts Global Oil Demand Will Peak In 2025
British Oil & Gas giant BP Plc (NYSE:BP) has predicted that global oil demand will peak next year while wind and solar capacity will continue to grow rapidly. In its latest edition of its annual Energy Outlook, BP has published a study of the evolution of the global energy system to 2050.
BP has modeled its predictions on two key scenarios: The Current Trajectory and Net Zero. The Current Trajectory scenario is based on climate policies and carbon reduction pledges already in place while the Net Zero scenario assumes the world sticks to the 2015 Paris climate agreement to cut carbon emissions by around 95% by 2050.
BP has predicted that oil demand will peak by 2025 at around 102 million barrels per day (bpd) under both scenarios. However, the rate of decline thereafter will be determined primarily by the pace of falling oil use in road transport.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/BP-Predicts-Global-Oil-Demand-Will-Peak-In-2025.html
See my comment at this link.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/06/22/the-advanced-economies-are-headed-for-a-downfall/comment-page-5/#comment-463439
Here is a local story from my area. Not sure what to think, sounds interesting.
Could a power line connecting Michigan and Wisconsin below Lake Michigan be a clean energy solution?
Mlive 07.09.24
“The wind farms of the Upper Great Plains generate so much electricity that power providers don’t just charge cheap rates for it – sometimes they actually pay utilities and power cooperatives to take the electricity to avoid overloading and crashing their local grid.
Officials at Wolverine Power Cooperative want access to that renewable energy pot of gold for their customers, but there is no physical way to transmit those electrons all the way to Michigan. At least, not yet.
But what if a high-voltage transmission line were built beneath Lake Michigan, connecting major power infrastructure on either side of the Great Lake?
Wolverine’s executives proposed regional grid operators consider the concept, what they call a potential “superhighway” of renewable energy. It’s a matter of getting around Michigan’s geography as a peninsular state.
“We are not nearly as interconnected to other markets and other geographies as other states around us in the Midwest and the Central Plains,” said Eric Baker, Wolverine’s president.
Most inbound energy comes from Indiana and Ohio and that limits options for Michigan’s power providers, which are eager to source more renewable energy for their customers.
Michigan’s power sector has struggled in recent years to build out enough renewable generation, such as wind farms and solar fields, to offset past and planned closures of major load providers like coal-fired power plants.
Experts say that’s because the state’s patchwork of township and county solar and wind ordinances creates town-by-town obstacles for the needed rapid buildout of Michigan’s renewable energy fleet.
At this rate, Michigan won’t meet one of its primary climate goals – to have all carbon-free energy by 2040 – which was adopted into state law last year.
But access to large amounts of cheap wind energy from the Dakotas and western Iowa and Minnesota could be a game changer for Michigan’s energy portfolio, Baker said.
“What we’re trying to do is think of something that’s very different that would provide access to the Upper Plains and create sort of a renewable superhighway,” Baker said.
“It creates diversity, which I think will be essential when we’re relying more and more on other intermittent resources.”
There are two potential routes Wolverine proposed: connect a nuclear plant in Wisconsin to the Ludington Pumped Hydro Plant in Ludington or connect the currently closed Palisades Nuclear Power Plant near South Haven to the Milwaukee grid.
The facility in Ludington works like a giant water battery and could potentially be used to store energy from across the lake, whether it be wind energy from the Upper Plains or nuclear power from the Wisconsin plant. That electricity could then be released onto the grid during times when Michigan’s own wind and solar sources aren’t generating as robustly.
Another option would connect the two states’ 345-kilovolt circuits to bolster the flexibility of the regional grid, whether the Palisades plant is ever restarted as its owner, Holtec International, proposed to federal regulators.
The underwater connection idea has merit and could benefit the broader grid footprint, according to a top official at the regional grid operations organization.
The Lake Michigan connector concept could help solve major transmission challenges, said Jeremiah Doner, director of cost allocation and competitive transmission for Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO).
“We try to start with kind of a big bucket of ideas looking at where the future is going and what are some of the potential transmission solutions that can support that,” Doner said.
“That was one of the ideas that we started with looking at how given Michigan’s a peninsula, how do we increase that interconnection strength with Michigan, both the import and export power.”
That being said, an underwater high-voltage direct-current power cable would be very expensive and could take as many as 15 years to build. Yet it may be less complex than trying to route a long-range transmission line around or through the Chicago metropolitan area and into Michigan, Doner said.
The lake connector proposal was included in MISO’s latest long-range transmission planning, called “Tranche 2.”
The agency’s first round of such plans was approved nearly two years ago and is expected to cost $10 billion. It included two projects with routes into Michigan.
This latest, second round of proposed long-range transmission plans included more than $23 billion in projects across 11 states. It amounted to so much work for engineers to analyze that MISO divided the proposals into two sections; the Lake Michigan connector concept is expected to be assessed for feasibility during the latter period next year, officials said.
At least one Michigan energy leader said he sees the potential grid reliability benefits such a high-voltage powerline beneath Lake Michigan would provide.
Dan Scripps, chairman of the Michigan Public Service Commission, agreed such a lake connector line would circumvent the Chicago transmission planning problem and allow the pumped hydro storage facility in Ludington to potentially offset the state’s growing use of intermittent sources like wind and solar.
“I don’t want to prejudge the project,” Scripps said. “It would be a very difficult project to site because it’s unprecedented in crossing Lake Michigan, but I certainly think it’s worthy of study.”
The lake connector project would require approval by both state and federal environmental regulators.
Not everyone in energy thinks a major powerline beneath Lake Michigan is a winner of an idea, though.
Officials with Consumers Energy, the utility company that co-owns and operates the pumped hydro storage plant, said they are trying to understand the impacts of the Lake Michigan connector proposal, but there are “too many unknowns at this time to support something of this nature.”
Wolverine provides electricity across the Lower Peninsula to its five rural distribution cooperatives, one retail cooperative serving commercial and industrial customers, and one renewable energy company.
More than 60% of the electricity the co-op provides for its members comes from either renewable or nuclear energy sources. Wolverine both purchases energy from other providers and operates seven natural gas peaking plants across the state.
https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2024/07/could-a-powerline-connecting-michigan-and-wisconsin-below-lake-michigan-be-a-clean-energy-solution.html
Wind and solar aren’t really useful for adding electricity to the grid, primarily because they drive other generation out because of the way pricing for intermittent electricity is done. Intermittent electricity gets a big subsidy by being allowed to “go first.” The net result is that intermittent electricity tends to push nuclear power plants out unless governments choose to subsidize them as well.
A few other thoughts:
Intermittent electricity, when transmitted through a high-voltage power line from Wisconsin to Michigan, is still only intermittent electricity that is of low value to the electric grid. Its value to grid is determined by how much less coal or natural gas the system might have to use. Coal and natural gas are inexpensive products, perhaps costing 3 cents per kWh.
The cost of generating electricity from wind or solar in the US is greater than 3 cents per kWh. So it already raises wholesale electricity costs, even without adding on the cost of electricity transmission. The more high-voltage power lines are added, the greater the cost would be. Nobody is currently computing these costs.
There are strange benefits to the system of adding the new power lines. It gives an excuse for more debt and more temporary employment. It helps increases fossil fuel prices (particularly coal in China) because the demand leads to the need for more transmission lines. I am doubtful that we could actually manufacture the long-distance transmission lines in the US. Look at this recent article:
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/01/the-us-must-close-the-long-distance-power-transmission.html
We would likely need to import the materials from China, if they are willing to sell them to us. Thus, it would be China’s coal consumption that would be stimulated.
The strange pricing scheme does tend to keep wholesale (and thus retail) electricity prices down, at least a bit, as it drives away capacity and makes the grid less stable. Mostly, their use makes a nice fairy tale. You may have seen my charts before showing that adding wind and solar does’t seem to add anything to per capita electricity supply.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/US-per-capita-electricity-generation-with-and-without-wind-and-solar.png
Has anyone commented on this story? Seems highly relevant to the core topic of this blog. The theory appears to have support from reasonably authoritative sources (FTC). One of the theses that has been presented on this blog is that decreased prices lead to lower profitability and reluctance toward extraction, and conversely increased prices incentivise increased extraction. In this case we can see the first half: they *cut* extraction to *raise prices*, but it doesn’t appear that they used higher prices to justify increased extraction. In fact, new drilling expenditures seem to be falling over the same period. So it would seem that it’s not the case that increasing spending on new drilling is driving lower profitability, but that they are simply deciding to drill less. It’s hard for me to see how physical supply itself is driving the behavior, rather than some other phenomena happening at a different level of abstraction. Not sure how to square this with the thesis of this blog.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-oil-price-fixing-conspiracy-caused
Excerpt:
>The theory was that American producers, after a bitter price war from 2014-2016, got tired of competing on price with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or the OPEC oil cartel, and at some point from 2017-2021, decided to join the cartel and cut supply to the market. This action had the affect of raising oil prices, costing oil consumers something on the order of $200 billion a year.
>Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission released evidence confirming that collusion played a serious role in hiking oil prices at that time. Pioneer Natural Resources CEO Scott Sheffield, a leader in the fracking field, “exchanged hundreds of text messages with OPEC representatives and officials discussing crude oil market dynamics, pricing and output.” Sheffield was explicit about his goal, saying that “if Texas leads the way, maybe we can get OPEC to cut production. Maybe Saudi and Russia will follow. That was our plan,” he said, adding: “I was using the tactics of OPEC+ to get a bigger OPEC+ done.” He talked to shareholders, publicly threatened rivals, and ultimately achieved output cuts across the industry regardless of price. “Even if oil gets to $200/barrel,” he said, “the independent producers are going to be disciplined.”
I would observe that oil companies are not stupid. They can tell which drilling opportunities are likely to work out, if oil prices are not very high. They will stop drilling new wells because they can see no point in drilling them. Their profits will temporarily appear high, because they are spending less on drilling new wells. But their long-term prospects are terrible! I am afraid this is what we are seeing now.
The higher the prices, the more oil companies are willing to spend on drilling new wells. Marginal wells have a good chance of success.
If oil fields are in decline and simultaneously prices are historically low (inflation-adjusted), which they are, that is sufficient to explain the lack of drilling by both the Saudis and the shale companies.
I agree.
And very nice lithium it is too.
It used to be the ‘international law’ that a state could grab whatever it could and whenever it wanted lol.
Only in the 20th c. did ‘law’ move away from that ‘right of conquest’.
Arguably it was a temporary shift as peaceful cooperation briefly made more sense in a world that was suddenly rich in cheap energy and other materials.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/conquest-international-law
> Conquest, in international law, the acquisition of territory through force, especially by a victorious state in a war at the expense of a defeated state. An effective conquest takes place when physical appropriation of territory (annexation) is followed by “subjugation” (i.e., the legal process of transferring title).
Conquest is associated with the traditional principle that sovereign states may resort to war at their discretion and that territorial and other gains achieved by military victory will be recognized as legally valid. The doctrine of conquest and its derivative rules were challenged in the 20th century by the development of the principle that aggressive war is contrary to international law.
It is hard to believe that “conquest” can be outlawed for very long. As long as there is a problem with resource depletion, there will be conquest.
This is some of what the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica said in a rather matter of fact sort of way about ‘Conquest’ in ‘international law’.
States take what they can and other states accept the fact of conquest without any regard to morality or justice. (They are now ‘bound’ to not recognise such facts.)
Other states may refuse to accept the fact if they have an interest in the matter (and that seems to be fair enough lol). The ‘Balance of Power’ was topical back then.
A state may take part of a territory or all of it as it likes. A state has won when it has won and then it enforces whatever ‘peacetime laws’.
It can deal with the conquered territory in whatever way it likes and has the power to enforce albeit domestic opinion may sometime be a constraint.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Conquest
CONQUEST, in international law, the subjugation of an enemy in war. International law recognizes a “right of conquest”;[1] that is to say, neutral powers accept the de facto result of a war of conquest, or of a war which has led to conquest, without reference to any questions of justice or morality the war may involve.
Neutral states, however, have often intervened to prevent the exercise of the right, on the ground that some interest of theirs was implicated…. [T]he conquering state deals with the conquered state in such way as it has the power to enforce, subject only to the possible moral reproval of public opinion in case of any ruthless abuse of the latter’s impotency.
…. Conquest may or may not be followed by annexation (q.v.) in part, as in the case of the Franco-German War when Germany exercised her overwhelming strength to force France into transferring to her a portion of her territory, or as in the case of the South African War, in which Great Britain annexed to her dominions the whole territory of the subjugated republics.
…. It is sometimes difficult to say when a conquest is complete, and the consequences of annexation may be rightfully enforced. A time necessarily comes, in the course of a war of conquest, when the conqueror may rightfully declare that the laws of peace shall be applicable from a certain moment, and that further resistance will not entitle the combatants to the treatment prescribed for regular combatants by the laws of war.
This is the footnote to the statement that ‘International law recognizes a “right of conquest”;[1]’.
Of course a state had no ‘right’ to the territory prior to the conquest or it would not have been a conquest (duh); the ‘right’ follows the fact of the conquest by force; before that the previous ruler had the ‘right’. (lol) Such was the ‘international law’.
> 1. “The rights of conquest,” says Halleck (Int. Law, 3rd ed., ch. 33), explaining the nature of the right, “are derived from force alone. They begin with possession and end in the loss of possession. The possession is acquired by force, either from its actual exercise or from the intimidation it produces. There can be no antecedent claim or title from which any right of possession is derived, for if so it would not be a conquest. The assertion and enforcement of a right to possess a particular territory do not constitute a conquest of that territory. By the term conquest we understand the forcible acquisition of territory admitted to belong to the enemy. It expresses, not a right, but a fact, from which rights are derived. Until the fact of conquest occurs, there can be no rights of conquest. A title acquired by a conquest cannot, therefore, relate back to a period anterior to the conquest. That would involve a contradiction of terms. The title of the original owner prior to the conquest is, by the very nature of the case, admitted to be valid. His rights are therefore suspended by force alone. If that force be overcome, and the original owner resumes his possession, his rights revive and are deemed to have been uninterrupted. It, therefore, cannot be said that the original owner loses any of his rights of sovereignty, or that the conqueror acquires any rights whatever in the conquered territory anterior to actual conquest.”
With Covid it is clear that human rights are “dead law”. In the moment the states cannot provide their populations, they will implode.
“Conquest” will occur from people needing water, wood and agricultural land to be able to survive. There will be local warlords, who are able to secure such communities.
There will be neither police, nor elections, nor energy to travel anywhere. In the moment the digital infrastructure is only a disadvantage it will be destroyed. If not, it cannot be maintained.
I didn’t look at the Hindustani Times article until now. It is good.
When I look at the latest Statistical Review of World Energy’s “lithium’s reserves” by country, Ukraine is not listed separately. Instead, there is a relatively small “All other” category that totals about 22% of Chile’s supposed lithium reserves.
When I search on the web, I find an April 2022 article saying:
https://economic-times.co.uk/news/ukraine-huge-lithium-deposits-found-just-before-invasion/
Ukraine: Huge Lithium Deposits Found Just Before Invasion
Among other things it says:
In my view, the key point with Russia-(Nato)Ukraine war is that Russia doesn’t want to have a Nato Country, full of military bases, weapons, missiles and soldiers on its border.
Like US would reject Mexico or Canada full of Chinese or Iranian or Russian military bases and missiles.
And like UK would reject Irland full of Chinese or Iranian or Russian military bases and missiles.
Ukraine has surely various resources, but they are more interesting and vital for Europe (and for US/UK with its companies ruling the extracions), than for Russia itself.
Hi Student, that is how the Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg understands the UKR conflict.
It is not a ‘war of aggression’ to get land but a ‘war of prevention’ of the security threat that Russia perceives in the eastward expansion of NATO up to its borders.
“So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”
Any land acquisitions are accidental or secondary in that conflict and they are not its cause.
Btw. the UN does not rule out preventive wars albeit it wants them subject to its (divided) Security Council.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm?selectedLocale=en
> Opening remarks by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the joint meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs (AFET) and the Subcommittee on Security and Defence (SEDE) followed by an exchange of views with Members of the European Parliament
…. The opposite happened. He wanted us to sign that promise, never to enlarge NATO. He wanted us to remove our military infrastructure in all Allies that have joined NATO since 1997, meaning half of NATO, all the Central and Eastern Europe, we should remove NATO from that part of our Alliance, introducing some kind of B, or second class membership. We rejected that.
So he went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.
Stoltenberg smartly doesn’t talk about the 2014 Maidan coup organized by US in Ukraine (thanks to Bandera supporters heavily funded) and also he doesn’t talk about the Minsk agreement (used to deceive Russia), which slowly brought all of us to the situation before the 24th of February 2022.
The conquest of Ukraine is just a consequence, which is important, now, for US/EU or for Russia to recover all the expenses they have been doing.
To understand this we should think what US would have done with Mexico full of Chinese army bases.
The conquest of Mexico would be just a consequence.
Actually, maybe Russia waited too much.
Interestingly, Kirohvorod is a region truly at the border between Russian and Ukrainian lands. Voted with the Ukrainians both in 2010 and 2012, although some raioni went Russian. Worth annexing and treating like Chechenia I guess. Donetsk is out of reach for the West but I don’t think the video is accurate. There is little oil and little coal left in Novorossia.
drb , inaccurate information in the video . Just speculation .
It is not clear that the UKR state has really thought through the long-term consequences of its strategy if its intention is not to lose land in a rather definitive way.
The population tends to flee as the front advances. The UKR forces dig into all the settlements and they are left in ruins as Russia steadily advances.
It remains to be seen whether many who do not wish to live within/ under Russia will want to return even if there is anything left to return to.
The Armenian flight from Nagorno-Karabakhin in September 2023 suggests that populations do not always wish to stay if they have other options.
Time will tell what happens but it is not looking good for UKR. The Russian forces clear everything in their path as they advance in a slow and steady manner.
If the UKR state did not want that outcome then it probably should have thought through what was liable to happen if its forces used all the settlements as fortified positions.
Dear Mirror,
all the Ukrainians that could do it, left the Country.
I can tell you that Italy is really full of Ukranians now.
Like also Montecarlo (but with the rich ones).
In Ukraine there are only who didn’t have alternative and also all the forcibly conscripted who cannot leave the Country now.
Zelensky and his friends have suppressed all the opposition parties and have deleted elections.
Ukranians are unfortunately trapped.
Ukraine , as a Country, has a short history and surely it doesn’t have its history with the huge territory that received after the collapse of Soviet Union.
My impression is that Ukraine will probably be another kind of Country in the future, probably with some territories given back to Poland, to Russia, to Hungary…etc.
Maybe it will be inside EU and less probably inside Nato, but all of that will be just a sad Pirro’s vicotry.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-Prices-Perk-Up-on-Crude-Draw.html
What do they mean by “crude draw”? Is this releases from the US SPR?
Crude “draw” is the reduction in the amount of crude oil the US has on hand, to use for refining. Relevant numbers can be found at this EIA site.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_sndw_dcus_nus_w.htm
The “draws” or “additions” represent the difference in the stock at the between the beginning of the seven-day period and the end of the seven-day period. You have to scroll down to find the “Stocks” section of the reports.
I had to download the file to figure out for certain exactly which categories are being differenced. It turns out that on the web link I show above, the category is labeled:
“Commercial ex lease stock”
It, together with the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, exactly equal the broader category “Crude oil plus SPR.”
When I downloaded the amounts, this category is called ” Stocks excluding SPR of Crude Oil.”
So, no it does not include the SPR. In fact, the SPR added a little to its stock this past week, helping to push demand up.
Since the difference is a seven day change, a person can tell how much per day was drawn down by dividing by 7. It turns out that the draw down amounted to the following amounts over the periods shown:
June 21 to June 28 – 1,737,000 barrels per day
June 28 to July 5 – 492,000 barrels per day
Thus, demand was sufficiently high that, rather than buying more from foreign sources, US crude oil reserves (excluding the SPR) were drawn down by these amounts. This high demand is what sent prices up recently, according to the Oil Price article.
David , for you .
https://x.com/ericnuttall/status/1811031199097442402/photo/1
I received the post from G&R in my e mail but did not get the time to read it . In the meanwhile Mr Patterson at POB has made a comment .
” This is a very long article. Here is just a snippet from deep inside the article. Bold mine.
In many respects, the current natural gas market represents the perfect storm: dry gas production is faltering just as demand is set to surge. We have warned for several years that shale growth would slow. Our neural network models indicated that, although immense, the shale basins were not infinite. The Barnett and Fayetteville were the first two shale gas basins developed in the middle 2000s. Each field ramped up sharply before unexpectedly plateauing and declining by over 50%. We concluded that both fields peaked precisely once half their recoverable reserves had been produced, just as Hubbert’s theories predicted. By applying these same principles to the Marcellus, Haynesville, and Permian (collectively 75% of total shale gas production ) we warned growth would soon begin to slow before production rolled over entirely in 2025. It appears we were too conservative; US gas supply has likely peaked already.
As we mentioned, the US produced nearly 1 bcf/d less dry gas in February than the peak in December. Preliminary data suggests production declines will accelerate.”
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/north-american-natural-gas?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Blog%20Notification&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8LVq2QrXqutwEIdYBi1cxceR9AM6uyE9Hxe9qRzl4Gmb1IvAJnj4nQ75AzA5XsshhAGQDKbGfiS7Yq6xyTYJ5LlFg55Q&_hsmi=315150899&utm_content=315150899&utm_source=hs_email
Read this in relation to my earlier post on the EU shifting it’s supply source from Russia to Norway and USA .
This is scary, with respect to US natural gas production. Using Hubbert’s methods, they come to the conclusion that US gas supply has likely peaked already. In fact, they says, “Preliminary data suggests production declines will accelerate.”
I would add that promising a lot of exported LNG creates a problem for US consumption. I don’t expect exports to remain high, if production falls.
Time to end LNG export?
99% of the world is uninterested but for the US/West eco system it is important . In the devolped world the issue of discretionary spending is a survival issue . My waste is your income .https://www.aier.org/article/the-end-of-the-restaurant-as-we-know-it/
This is a good chart from that article:
https://www.aier.org/wp-content/webpc-passthru.php?src=https://www.aier.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/image.jpeg&nocache=1
It shows that restaurants performance reached a peak in mid-2021, and have been headed downhill since then. Higher interest rates have been a problem, but so have higher food costs, and rising wages for low paid workers. Customers are dropping off in response to higher prices.
Confirmation of TM discretionary/necessary spending.
Many restaurants are closing, TGIF comes to mine.
Costs for everything are increasing dramatically, cost of moving small truckloads are now close to $2.00/mile, personal experience. Think renting is expensive, own a full size truck.
Hotel costs are now >$400/night in midwest all taxes, etc. included.
Thanks to whomever for the CH3 expected cost increase information. Implies electrical costs will increase as well.
These summaries are why I am here.
Meanwhile, at Harvard,
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/harvard-class-byzantine-empire-study-trans-monks-and-genderless-angels
You can’t make this stuff up.
Dennis L.
It took so much time to break the power of the working class in the West. They will never be allowed to rise again.
Cheapo, disposable labor from the rest of the world was prevailing but now with automation their values are now falling too.
I heard an advertisement for a local service on the ‘radio’ (it was a podcast, but they have tailored local ads). There was something a little strange about it, and I became convinced it was an AI voice. It was quite good, but was in that ‘uncanny valley’. What convinced me was that words that were repeated sounded exactly identical in intonation. They are starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of savings.
(I probably shouldn’t have said ‘AI’ voice, though it was artificial. Realistic ‘robot’ voice is a better description.)
lidia,
My guess the deflation secondary to AI and robots is just beginning.
JD has an “assistant” for customer’s accounts that is very efficient and does not have a hierarchal phone tree; it responds to human voice questions, bit of a delay, but accurate and efficient.
I use Copilot for programming, it is very, very good and very fast. Prior to this syntax questions/problems took a great deal of time. Sometimes operations which work in one context don’t in another. Copilot points out the problems and the reasons.
Two examples only, but JD is good, very, very good and it is on 24/7 including holidays and weekends from my experience. Or, maybe they have very good humans on call at odd hours.
Dennis L.
The decline is localized . A case study of the EU . Author uses data from OFW in support of his argument . Spanish . Use Google translate .
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2024/07/el-decrecimiento-va-por-barrios-de.html
Thanks for reposting the article by Quark here. He puts my first chart as first in his post, and shows many other charts as well. By “For now, the decline is localized,” he means that some countries seem to be doing better. He shows charts both of energy per capita and purchases.
One thing I find interesting is that Quarks total energy charts in Spanish from Our World in Data are expressed in electricity units. The Energy Institute uses “barrels of oil equivalent” and the US EIA uses “British thermal units,” which is clearly a unit of heat. Electricity only provides about 20% of total energy consumption. It is strange that Europe seems to focus on electricity–perhaps because this is all that they seem to be able to generate.
Quark makes good points in the comments, particularly about world trade.
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/wto-chief-warns-against-global-trade-breakdown/
Global trade is surely not performing well, in particular for Europe lately, after the two wars on (Ukraine and Gaza).
What I wonder is how European Countries and in particular Italy (which is a transforming Country and survives thanks to export and tourism) can reach the 2% of GDP spending in weapons as requested by NATO, in a global context of declining trade…
Are they thinking to make debts forever?
https://www.borsaitaliana.it/borsa/notizie/radiocor/economia/dettaglio/nato-meloni-rispetteremo-impegno-ad-aumentare-spese-per-la-difesa-2-nRC_10072024_0811_112181053.html
More and more government debt, which leads to more and more inflation, I am afraid.
I was waiting for Tom Watkins post UK election viewpoint . Here .
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/07/10/labour-has-already-failed/
I am not so sure about this article. He seems to be arguing for more UK government debt-based investment to make up for the lack of private investment.
“one of the few positive – but unused – outcomes of Brexit is precisely that UK governments are now free to invest directly in industries – like steelmaking – which are vital to the future health of the economy, even if they cannot be run profitably in private hands.”
If these things can’t be run profitably in private hands, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that they will need endless subsidies. Governments will need even bigger subsidies. I don’t see this solution working.
Guess:
What governments can do for the “people” is at best an S shaped curve and is now well on plateau with each increase only adding overhead and payable only as governments can print money and give rise to inflation which is advantage to printer as they have first mover advantage.
That game is pretty well over, in the West, read US.
I like Wilkerson, former assistant to Colin Powell as his Chief of
Staff. 39 minutes, for some here worth a listen, perhaps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckh8XqA1dJY
Dennis L.
Online gambling for all
“Ľudia na Slovensku prehrali v hazardných hrách minulý rok 21,4 miliardy eur. Je to takmer taká suma ako plánované príjmy štátneho rozpočtu na tento rok.”
Google Translate
“People in Slovakia lost 21.4 billion euros in gambling games last year. It is almost as much as the planned income of the state budget for this year.”
https://domov.sme.sk/c/23355008/ludia-minaju-na-hazard-miliardy.html
MG, same here in the United States for the States. Lottery gambling is very extensive with multiple opportunities to play, even with vending machines in supermarkets and other outlets.
Never mind casinos in my state of Florida, advertising on the tellie non stop promoting winning…
It’s just another means to give the people hope of making it big and becoming rich, even though your odds are more likely to be struck by a bolt of lightning.
I must confess I have bought tickets just for fun and I know better not to do so
Gambling is just another “service” provided to people, as a way to use their money. There is a tiny chance of a big win.
As productive enterprises yield less and less, the system will increasingly turn to self-destructive measures. Part of the catabolic collapse of which Greer’s often written.
A mass ‘readjustment’ of the living standards in the so called advanced world will be unavoidable after a Hordes victory.
They will go back to their old lower standards of living.
Only the ‘worthies’ will be allowed to live comfortably. The 98% of pop will live in a subsistence level, never secure and never assured about where their next meal will come from.
It did not have to turn that way. By destroying China and Russia, an unstoppable advance to the next level of civ would have taken place, but the xtian sense of ‘mercy’ and ‘compassion’, which does not exist among the Hordes, killed it.
the outlook is looking pretty grim on so many fronts. Would you consider yourself Black Pilled at this point?
Yes, I was always that way.
Blackpillism is just a cooler way to call eugenics, a term which became uncool after 1945, and that is what drives the world.
aka natural selection
Let’s not forget the role of Chucky and his 200 acolytes.
Their crimes against civilization are too great to be documented, but without them we would probably never heard about USSR, and then China , and most of the countries not independent in 1914.
and whatshisname.
Gabby and Chucky, the worst of humanity, destroying civilization! We should have sent Ramanujan right back where he came from!
<<>>
In an urn, after his head is crushed and the back of brain is missing and is ruled a suicide.
I start to sense a relation like Eddy-Sasha between Kulm and these guys.
When a house has too many servants , then instead of serving the master they serve themselves . How much does a EU MEP earn ?
https://x.com/BitcoinNewsCom/status/1810450168866635813?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1810450168866635813%7Ctwgr%5E487e4996640932206a50e26fa98537502e9d6473%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theautomaticearth.com%2F2024%2F07%2Fdebt-rattle-july-10-2024%2F
The higher the corruption the more you have to pay the participants. It is still peanuts compared to what the Ukrainian elites are making for example.
All the printed money seems to float to the top of the system.
Succinctly put.
Dennis L.
In Belgium . Wettest 6 months since records were kept and V/W- Audi to shutdown plant making EV’S .
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/vw-group-lowers-forecast-possible-closure-audi-brussels-site-other-expenses-2024-07-09/
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/en/2024/05/30/past-six-months-were-the-wettest-since-records-began/
Food inflation is now visible even to the blind .
From the first link:
“Volkswagen’s first quarter operating profits were down 20%, in part hampered by delivery delays at Audi, after the Brussels plant closed for two weeks because of component shortages in February.”
Dependence on component deliveries (probably from China) cannot be helping Audi. The reputation of the company is likely going downhill. If the company cannot deliver cars when required, can it fix cars when required? This is a big issue in the rising cost of auto repairs.
The second link relates to wet weather. Too bad Belgium doesn’t have a way to capture hydroelectric power. Wet weather helps hydroelectric (as long as it doesn’t take out the dams).
Belgium has a lot of problems, just as most European countries do.
If your sre poor and you have nothing to eat, you will not go to live in any green city like this one
https://www.rferl.org/a/turkmenistan-opens-arkadag-/32483375.html
3.3 billion USD to house 70,000, 47k per person. Not terrible, but I’m not sure how to contextualize it: the average salary is 50k USD while the “most typical” (maybe they mean median?) is 7k USD.
My understanding is that none of these “planned cities” work out very well, after implementation. Cities need to grow from a need for their services, and the ability of the city to provide the services.
“Cities need to grow from a need for their services, and the ability of the city to provide the services”
Yes, they are self organizing, got that one from this site which is now somewhat organizing into how we as humans adapt to our new environment, less oil and if earlier posts, less CH4.
God even gets mentioned.
Thank you,
Dennis L.
The following story made me so angry that I couldn’t resist the urge to go down to the kitchen and smash some china. Only plain breakfast china of course. Not the expensive stuff.
======
A Chinese man has been arrested and two others placed on a wanted list for allegedly defacing a Japanese war shrine that has long angered other Asian nations, Tokyo police said Wednesday.
The Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo honors 2.5 million mostly Japanese killed in wars since the late 19th century, including convicted war criminals.
Jiang Zhuojun, 29, who lives in the north of Tokyo, was arrested “on suspicion of vandalism and disrespect for a place of worship,” a Tokyo metropolitan police spokesman said.
Police also issued arrest warrants for two other Chinese men — Dong Guangming, 36, and Xu Laiyu, 25 — and placed them on a wanted list, but the spokesman said the duo seem to have left the country.
Jiang, together with Dong, allegedly spray-painted the word “toilet” in red on one of the shrine’s pillars on May 31 while Xu filmed them, the spokesman said.
A video posted on Chinese social media showed a man appearing to urinate on the stone pillar before spray-painting it, local media reported.
The police spokesman confirmed that officers have seen the video.
Dong earlier told Japanese broadcaster TBS that he admits the vandalism, but would not report to police because the conduct was a protest against Japan’s release of treated wastewater from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
The United Nations’ atomic watchdog says the wastewater discharged since last August is harmless but China, later joined by Russia, banned all Japanese seafood imports, saying that Tokyo was treating the Pacific “like a sewer.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/07/10/japan/crime-legal/yasukuni-shrine-vandalism/
It was a mistake to prop China that much. China should have been kept backward.
Ralph Townsend, a US diplomat in China, wrote the seminal work “Ways that are Dark”, to warn against USA aligning with it.
I can see how activities like this would make anyone living in Japan very upset. When I visited Japan in 2017, there was never any trash anywhere–people would pick up after themselves. There was never any graffiti. If there were homeless people, they were kept out of site of tourists. The Japanese government seemed to have come up with endless make-work jobs, so that anyone in need of a handout could get a job. Of course, all of these make-work jobs added to Japan’s government debt load.
My study . The Chinese hate the Koreans and vice versa but the hate of these two against Japan and Japanese is unfathomable .
Japan was rather mean to them before and during WW2.
Make your own conclusion .
https://dailyreckoning.com/china-the-helpless-giant/
A good point. If it’s illegal for trump to order assassinations, what about his predecessors?
https://i0.wp.com/www.barnhardtmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/img_5399-1.jpg?w=424&ssl=1
yup
roosevelt/truman ordered the assassination of millions of japanese.
i suppose they could have asked them to apologise and surrender instead, beforehand.
I’m surprised they didn’t think of that
Or maybe they did?
Insane in the brain. Insane in the membrane. Human beings, the most dangerously insane species ever to inhabit this planet.
Is that commenter from the UK gone? The guy who used to basically say nah to everything. Hilarious
The Japanese had already offered surrender, but the yanks wanted to kill lots of innocent people, to put fear into others. There was no need to drop any more bombs, as the war was over the moment the yanks answered with their demands(which would have been met), but they chose another route.
I think Nixon is the president you want for your discussion.
“Well, when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.”
https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/110331/documents/HMKP-116-JU00-20191211-SD408.pdf
They are all mass murderers and attempting to distinguish between them is like picking the most polite rapist. He’s still a rapist, so the choice of language is irrelevant.
It was a huge screwup. Yet the nukes were not dropped when they were needed, in China and North Vietnam.
Yes, the Japanese actually did offer to surrender beforehand the explosion of the two atomic bombs.
Some years ago I read a book on that very topic and can’t recall the title of it.
MacArthur thought the use of atomic bombs was inexcusable. He later wrote to former President Hoover that if Truman had followed Hoover’s “wise and statesmanlike” advice to modify its surrender terms and tell the Japanese they could keep their emperor, “the Japanese would have accepted it and gladly I have no doubt.”
Before the bombings, Eisenhower had urged at Potsdam, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
The evidence shows he was right, and the advancing Doomsday Clock is a reminder that the violent inauguration of the nuclear age has yet to be confined to the past.
Gar Alperovitz, author of “The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb,” is a principal of the Democracy Collaborative and a former fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Martin J. Sherwin is a professor of history at George Mason University and author of the forthcoming “Gambling With Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette From Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis.” Historians Kai Bird and Peter Kuznick contributed to this article.
There is a host of other books on the topic
Los Angeles Times.
It was a foolish move which eventually led to the establishment of PRC.
Personally, I think the commander of 1st Marine should have died at Chosin along with his troops, if he knew grand strategy.
The lives of these soldiers are inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and their sacrifice would have forced Truman to drop nukes to PRC, which would have prevented the crisis we are seeing now.
What crisis the savage Anglos/Zionists being brought to heel?
Nothing so far, although given the way things are going, there might be something soon
End of the world: Blind Bulgarian soothsayer allegedly says 2025 is start of humanity’s downfall
“Baba Vanga, also known as Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, was a woman renowned for her alleged powers of precognition.”
“Baba Vanga, also known as Vangeliya Pandeva Gushterova, was a woman renowned for her alleged powers of precognition. Though her eyes were blind, she somehow was alleged to be able to peer into the future and make bold and dramatic predictions, earning her the nickname of “Nostradamus of the Balkans.”
2025: The inciting incident that kicks off the ultimate end of humanity will be an unspecified conflict in Europe, which will devastate the continent’s population.
2028: Humanity needs more energy. To do this, they will manage to explore Venus to find new energy sources. This may be one of the most unbelievable parts of this timeline since Venus is essentially an inhospitable hellscape with an atmosphere so acidic that nothing could survive, and no space probe has ever managed to survive more than a couple of hours.
2033: Climate change is very dangerous, and that shouldn’t be understated. However, Baba Vanga supposedly predicted that at this point, the polar ice caps would melt, and sea levels would rise drastically worldwide.
https://www.jpost.com/omg/article-809380
I see that this lady died in 1996, so these are predictions from quite a few years ago. She also says, “humanity’s end will come in 5079” but from events that start in 2025. So, the decline process is a slow one.
Or perhaps she is blowing smoke.
drb , in your camp .
These sites list industrial liquidation auctions in Germany.
https://www.surplex.com/en/liquidation-auction.html
https://www.netbid.com/en/?top=100
In a large economy there are always industries being liquidated. But I wonder how much of this is in response to rising energy prices.
I found this article online from June 14, 2024:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-sees-company-bankruptcies-soar/a-69358663
Germany sees company bankruptcies soar
I happen to read a text where someone was looking for housing. She wrote that she was “sex positive”. Is this what the housing market has come to?
I looked up Sex Positive on Wikipedia. It says
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-positive_movement
From the timing, I can see that this movement started at the same time that “debt” turned to “leverage,” and was perceived as a good thing. The economy could first see that it didn’t have enough goods and services for everyone–changes were needed.
I can see that a woman earning a modest salary with this belief might want to sell her services to someone, with the possibility of reduced rent in mind.
Marc Polo came back from China saying they do not use money they use pieces of paper. Well now, they use their phone. Enter a restaurant scan QR code get menu, order on phone, pay on phone. Only human use is to carry product from kitchen to table and dirty dishes back to dish washer. Same for all purchases by phone delivered to phone. So none of the old fashioned paper money.
I being a barbarian had paper money. They all were willing to take it but they all were surprised. My cell phone did not have a Chinese phone number so it was useless. It did work fine for calling to US.
4 words are enough to burst any Chinese bubble
China
Produces
No
Oil.
That is not quite true. According to EIA data, China produced 4.4 million barrels per day of crude oil in 2023. It also produced 797,000 barrels per day of “other liquids.” For most countries, this other liquids are ethanol, but it could be coal-to-liquids in the case of China.
The new Statistical Review of World Energy report shows 4.2 million barrels per day of oil production, nearly all crude (not natural gas liquids).
Their oil supply is low compared to the country’s coal supply, but it has been increasing since 2018.
The oil comes from its old oilfield in Manchuria and some other smaller fields here and there, and far short of sustaining its vast oil needs
I have visited Daqing oil field in China (China’s largest field–not in Manchuria) and there are other oil fields as well. This is a map I found that supposedly shows China’s oil fields:
http://images.rigzone.com/images/news/library/maps/7/5547.jpg
I looked up Manchuria. It is in the Northeastern part of China, so Daqing is in Manchuria–you are right.
I agree that China imports a lot of oil. It is easily the greatest oil importing country in the world, according to the latest Statistical Review of World Energy report.
Yes Kulm what matters is self sufficiency . EU switched from Russia to Norway and USA for gas .What good or betterment did that do ? None . Again in a pickle .
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/norway-gas-export-plummets-sleipner-outage-shuts-nyhamna-plant-2024-06-03/
China has a friend China.
crap
China has a friend Russia.
China is also the leading producer of coal, hydro, and second in nuclear.
Oh, and bullet trains. They are real and silky smooth and quiet at 200 miles per hour. The smoothest form of transport I have ever experienced.
I was there a few years ago. What struck me was how the cities suddenly ended, and then it was green rural farms and forests, and then down the road back to a sudden city again. It seemed like a “good” way to keep people and nature separate. However, there was never a sunny day because of the thick smog. Lots of concrete everywhere in the cities, and not too many trees… although everything was new, and perhaps trees hadnt grown yet.
I loved the older towns as they often had interesting parks and gardens in the middle of town.
But, its very much appearing China has squandered its opportunity to eclipse the world with a new approach to economics. They basically built everything while they could, and are now figuring out if any of it made any sense. And today, banks are failing there one after another, after another.
>> They basically built everything while they could, and are now figuring out if any of it made any sense. And today, banks are failing there one after another, after another.
Fair enough, but still, so what? The thing about their model is that the they reinvest profits into trying new things rather than … well, I’m not even sure where our profits went or if there are any. I mean, Microsoft rakes in a bunch of money, but how is it improving our quality of life? Is the next version of Microsoft Word or Windows so much better than the last?
Meanwhile, China still operates in the real world instead of purely financial flows, so they can take the hit in trying something new if it doesn’t work out.
In other words, they still have decades worth of industrial capital stock; they still have something real, regardless of whether a lot of banks fail right now. They can just wipe the slate and keep going since they’re cash-flow-positive at the national level.
YES! Real things count.
“They can just wipe the slate and keep going since they’re cash-flow-positive at the national level.”
Yes, cash flow is positive. With common sense impossible to fail with positive cash flow.
When it is negative, liquidity crisis no matter what assets are present. The best assets are sold to regain liquidity.
Dennis L.
This is an article from 2022:
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/a-whopping-900b-debt-chinas-once-profitable-high-speed-railways/
A Whopping $900B Debt – China’s Once-Profitable High-Speed Railways
Now Heading Towards A Trillion Dollar Disaster
The interest rate would make a huge difference, as would the availability and price of diesel fuel for earth moving equipment to put in more lines. Also steel prices and availability.
An article from May 2024 says,
China Is Raising Bullet Train Fares as Debts and Costs Balloon
China is taking the rare step of sharply increasing fares for riders on four major bullet train lines, in its broadest move to address rising costs and heavy debts since construction of the system began nearly two decades ago.
The higher prices for train tickets are part of a push to raise prices for public services. Earlier this year, water and natural gas bills started going up in some cities.
Public services in China are heavily subsidized by local governments. But huge municipal debts mean that these governments have less money on hand to keep prices down.
Increasing prices can stem losses at some giant state-owned enterprises that provide these services. And making consumers pay more helps offset the falling prices that are widespread in China’s economy as growth slows. . .
Raising rail fares is a fraught political issue in China. The bullet trains are a symbol of the country’s capacity to build infrastructure, often even before there is consumer demand for it. But that infrastructure has been paid for with enormous borrowing, which has reached $870 billion just for China State Railway Group, the state-owned enterprise that runs the rail network.
as far as i can see, there is no ”new approach to economics”
like every other species, humankind must compete and consume to survive.
if we do not, we die back and possibly go extinct.—so we compete, unconsciously maybe, to avoid that.
it was only a few thousand years ago that we brought money into that equation, so money, in historical terms, is a short lived anomaly.
but that is the only ”economic system” there is.
we are told that ”growth” ie the conversion of energy into money, is the way forward….growth will be forever.
it clearly is not.
money has given extra leverage to a priveleged few, but that has been to the detriment of many. (check the way Nigeria has been torn apart, and left in a mess, just to extract oil)
the same thing happened where i live, 200 years ago. Coal and iron was converted into money.
That is the way a society properly organizes itself, JK. It minimizes the transportation of food to the cities. suburbs are an american abomination that will never be repeated anywhere. they are a significant factor in american decline.
How full were they? Did you look at their financials? Bullet trains are a way to show off the use of fossil fuels.
Usually, the faster the train, the higher the true cost per passenger. Most passengers are not able to pay high prices for train fares. They will take slow, inexpensive trains before they will pay for fast expensive trains.
If jet fuel is available (and reasonably priced) and distances are long, it makes more sense to move passengers by plane. There is no need to build and maintain all of this expensive infrastructure. The schedules can be more flexible. The schedules can match when people want to travel.
They were well utilized. I saw only one antique, none bullet, train in six visits to train stations. There may be a cost savings to only stocking one train technology?
One might ask what if the train hits a sheep? I am told, not experience, the sheep explodes, the train is fine. It may need a wash.
I fully agree Gail, but I think that it is correct for people movements.
If we consider cargo movements, the train is maybe better than the airplane, because of the high cost of tonnage by airplane and maybe train is also more efficient than trucks, considering also that they need good roads.
Maybe it is dofficult to consider all the variables of the equations, but you know better than me these aspects and you can give better considerations about.
And today, banks are failing there one after another, after another.
Gail Gail Gail
Can you pls post some genuine evidence of this – not ZH nonsense
as a wise sage once said: There is lots we don’t know
The Economist has an article this week on this subject:
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/07/04/why-chinese-banks-are-now-vanishing
Why Chinese banks are now vanishing
The state is struggling to deal with troubled institutions
Used to follow Economist, they blew so many things I faded them and did well.
I did not know better, they are a narrative; one lives and learns.
Dennis L.
I don’t like the Economist, but I have a subscription so I can see what they are saying when I want to look up something, or when I am waiting and have time to look at a magazine for a while. I nearly always disagree with their conclusions, but they do have some charts that are OK, and some general descriptive articles that are OK.
yeah, absorbed into bigger banks, is quite different from collapsed. And as the hallowed economist implies, 40 in one week is infinitely worse than thousands over forty years …
actually, this process of bank consolidation is something Werner identifies as a mechanism for central bank control of the economy – fewer institutions to deal with to regulate credit expansion/contraction. I’m teasing away just now with a post, probably for next time, based on Werner’s ‘Quantity Theory of Credit’ as he developed it in Japan in the 80s and 90s and how I see its application now in China based on Werner’s post Japan articles I’ve been researching. I think there’s a lot of parallel as to how the Chinese govt is managing so well.
As Ed’s reporting: Where is the collapse???
Another subsidized effort by the Biden administration, this time to try to produce more aluminum in the US, as part of its re-industrialization effort. Don’t hold your breath that it will work.
From the WSJ:
The Challenge of Building a New Plant: Paying the Electric Bill
Century Aluminum is betting that new sources of renewable energy will enable it to build the first U.S. smelter since 1980
It will end up like the battery plant . 100% failure guaranteed .
” It’s all about the power,” said Matt Aboud, vice president for strategy and business development for Century Aluminum.
I bet Matt Aboud is a really, really really smart guy. I would want him on my team.
“Century is still arranging financing and seeking a site for its smelter, which would be the largest in the U.S. with about 600,000 metric tons a year of production capacity”
It will be a spectacular fail.
China vacation note three.
The creation of meaning is not allowed in China. All of history from yesterday to 10,000 years ago is written in stone by the government. It is far worse than the narrative in the west. People have learned to not speak, not think???, about off government line.
Was in an art display room one of the pictures was the “Chinese Robin hood”. The artist explained he gave to the poor. He did not explain where the money came from. Robbing the rich is not an allowed thought.
On the flight out of China I watched “Bob Marley, One Love”. It woke me you to the fact that China is a society that is not allowed to think about meaning. Just as many here are making the point the west does not think about meaning and purpose substituting growth and profit.
The whole world is bereft of meaning and purpose.
It is a problem, the US once had many churches, it gave meaning and it gave purpose, to honor God. For many that is as good as it gets, some find purpose in arts or learning, or athletics although that fades in the forties due to age.
From what you are saying, China has chosen a way to connect people; something is better than nothing.
Do you think much of being “written” in stone is the experience of what works well enough? Better is the enemy of good enough?
Dennis L
China is old. Very, very, very old. Time is measured not in BC and AD. It is measured by the dynasty. The people know the sequence of dynasties for the last 2000 years. Rule by emperor or the head of the CCP is the time honored way.
It may be good enough.
Went to a music venue in a funky neighborhood. Up a set of stairs that violates every building code over and down a set of stairs just as exciting. A small venue that services the few outside the crowd. Might be enough to allow peaceful co-existence. The music was three acoustic guitars, a bass, and drum. Singing in Spanish with talk to the audience in Chinese. They were good as good as any band in Woodstock, New York.
sorry Dennis—churches sucked money out of communities on the promise of eternal salvation.
Check back as far as you like on that.
Check the mega loonychurches in the USA right now—people being swindled out of money on the same pretext—and pastors in private jets caring nothing about those who provided it.
mass hysteria, collective delusion.
yes, there are genuine priests who care, right now i’m writing some stuff on the quaker sect, who seemed to fit that model, but there are some pretty awful facets to the jesus business.
Religion is the opium of the people .–Karl Max
Religion is the last refuge of the scoundrels’ . –Old saying .
I would like to read what you write about the Religious Society of Friends. Jesus said I no longer call you servants I call you friends.
in part its about quakers and industry–wont be out till next year.
but yes–they adressed each other as friend
Norman,
Only way to judge. Compare the social costs of no religion with religion.
My guess is a good religion is a cost, but the cost allows a better society with less overhead.
We are trying it in America and it is not working, cities are not safe.
Dennis L.
Churches of all kinds tend to talk about how a person should treat others. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The world isn’t only about a profit motive.
>> . All of history from yesterday to 10,000 years ago is written in stone by the government.
Napoleon: “History is a set of lies agreed upon”
I don’t see much difference between our present system and the Chinese system. I can turn on the MSM and be drowned in lies and omissions about events today, so just imagine what can be said about events and times long since past.
ivan,
To a certain degree agree, but with careful reading nd comparison it is possible to make some general conclusions.
Dennis L.
It is probably harder to be a nonconformist in China than it is in the West as the Chinese State has tremendous powers of coercion that can be brought to bear on dissidents and “unmutuals” and it isn’t shy about using them.
On the other hand, if you are into collectivism, totalitarianism and social credit scores, China is a paradise. Just ask our resident China expert Godfree Roberts, who adores the place, although for some inexplicable reason he prefers to reside in Thailand.
Ed, it’s a shame you couldn’t visit China half a century ago, back when the aged Mao was still the supreme leader. Oh, the things you could have seen and the people you could have met!
I am told by credible Chinese witnesses that back then in every reasonably large city they held public executions of criminals several times a year and in some places monthly, and the local population were ordered to attend. It put me in mind of parts of the Middle East such as Iran where they still have public hangings or Saudi Arabia where they still occasionally lop people’s heads off.
I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that places such as China and the Middle East have never been part or parcel of what we used to call “Western Civclilzation” and they never will be. We shouldn’t be surprised that they aren’t like us in many fundamental ways. It’s not a question of better or worse, or who is the most gross or who has made the biggest contributions to human progress (whatever that’s supposed to mean).
It’s that they are fundamentally different to us Westerners in their ways of thinking, reasoning, and conceptualizing . They didn’t go through the same processes of social evolution and development to get to where they are now as we did to get where we are now. Beneath our superficial similarities as cultures there are deep differences as great if not greater than those between the Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems—differences that anthropologists, semantic scholars and philosophers love to study and argue about quietly in private.
the whole thing is a race between available resources and consumption.
Which is why the Great war was so destructive for Civilization and I condemn people like Gabby Princip the cross dresser, Joe Gallieni and Chucky with his 200/400 worcestershires, all Criminals against Civilization, which is a higher crime than Criminals against Humanity.
Before Great War, the ordinary people did not have too much political power , economic power and ability to consume. The people in the west lived in tenements and ate rancid food, as documented by Otto Bettmann’s The Good Old Days – they were Terrible, which documents life in New York and other big American cities, whose poorer people lived better than their counterparts in Europe, before the Great War. He came from Berlin because of some guy with a funny mustache and had no knowledge or preconception in USA so he just documents the photos he collected without giving serious opinions.
That kind of lifestyle by the masses IS what drives civilization.
Keeping the people at near-starvation wages, with no compensation whatsoever when they are hurt, and concentrating everything to the top is the only way to advance civilization.
The WEF and others are trying to move the world to that direction but it is too little, too late. An autocratic technocracy, which regulates everything and leaving nothing whatsoever for the 99%+ of pop is the only way to advance to the next level of civ, but time seems to have run out, starships (which are going nowhere as of now) or not.
“The WEF and others are trying to move the world to that direction but it is too little, too late… time seems to have run out…”
yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Note two on my vacation
The purpose of government is to protect its citizens. We had just arrived in Beijing at 10:30pm a member of our small group a 62 year old woman short lightweight was going home to her apartment by herself a 1.5 hour trip. She and we knew with certainty she would be safe and arrive home well. I, a six foot male 66, will not enter the NYC city subway system even at noon for a short ride. I expect I will never again use the NYC subway system in my life.
How is the subway safe? First the ticket purchase locks your name and face to the ticket. Next, x-ray for bags, metal detector for people, metal detector wand for pockets, any liquid might be gasoline so you must drink some to prove it is safe. A staff off our four to six on the entrance, 24 hours per day every day. Place your ticket to enter combined with the cameras everywhere we know where you are going. Cameras in the carriages. When you exit you use your ticket to leave combined with cameras we know where you went.
By the way the subway is spotless the cars,the floor, the tracks. Zero ads. It is quiet compared to NYC subway. Riders are well dressed and well behaved.
I am in favor of the same system for NYC.
Seems like quite the added set of expenses to maintain such a security state. This is an economic drag, leaving aside the idea of living under a panopticon.
Thanks for the notes.
Dennis L.
I was looking at the South China post. A major story today is
https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3269641/lay-offs-chinas-top-firms-key-industries-show-unemployment-biting-through-economic-turmoil
Lay-offs by China’s top firms in key industries show unemployment biting through economic turmoil
A Post review of 23 annual reports from leading Chinese firms found that more than half downsized last year, while others slashed staff-related expenses
“Amid China’s ongoing economic struggles, unemployment remains a headache for Beijing.”
Outlying areas usually are more affected than Beijing.
I admire what China has done . The railways network is fantastic and my brother called me from a station in Shenzhen as to how flabbergasted he was . However it has reached its limits and is now becoming the equivalent of ” see thru buildings ” or the Japanese phenomena of ” roads to nowhere ” . Judge for yourself . One important observation in the video is that the high speed trains / lines are not suitable to carry freight so are uneconomical .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAFVHJ-6FEY&ab_channel=EconomicsNation
After Sri Lanka it is Laos , thanks to a USD 6 billion loan to build a high speed train network which was unneeded .
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/china-now-owns-a-country-literally-expert/
The UK made the same mistake with railways back in the 187os, after the first railway boom of the 1840s/60s was over.
Built railways to and from nowhere
I can get to NYC faster by car then by train. No new build in 100+ years.
A lot of Chinese people were traveling by bicycle when I visited. Even a slow train has advantages over a bicycle.
Ivan Illich clearly demonstrated that bicycles are the most efficient means of transport. They require little infrastructure or resources, and are easy to repair. The average speed of a bicycle, once paid for, is higher than that of any other means of locomotion.
Ed, I doubt that a Chinese-style subway system would make New Yorkers safe, well-dressed or well-behaved. You can turn the entire subway system into a prison, but you can’t turn the criminal element into decent citizens.
Japanese subways are safe without the need to “lock your name and face to the ticket” and without the need for x-rays or metal detectors. I’m not an expert but I think the same is true in many parts of Southeast Asia. The fact that the Chinese have had to implement such as strict and restrictive system is a sign that quite a lot of Chinese people don’t have the ability to “police” or “discipline” themselves. It represents a social engineering failure.
The ideal is not to need the panopticon-style security system because everybody is already well-behaved. In their own distinct ways, the Chinese system and the Western big city systems both represent dystopias. Live inside either system and one way or another the bastards will grid you down and turn you into either a god-free robot or a total nervous wreck.
I once left my briefcase on the luggage rack of a Japanese train. I came back later for it and a man had protected it and was waiting for me to return!
Tim, you are correct no amount of watching will stop feral animals from being themselves. They must not be allowed to live with decent people. They must be restricted to cities of their fellow feral animals.
As to feeding and reproduction that is a longer discussion.
When the politicians think it is a good idea to mix decent humans and feral animals it is time to get new politicians. AOC with her big ass plastered with “Eat the Rich” at the Met Gala does not cut it.
This might be a good point to inject a clip of Hillary Clinton from 1996, back when she was the First Lady, explaining how “super-predators” had to be brought to heel.
I don’t think this clip has aged well, but it does underline how far the Dems have progressed in their thinking and how far Hillary has evolved as a “super-predator” herself, as well as reminding us of how much life in the big cities has deteriorated in the past three decades.
“Not acquiring the data from the beginning of the program wasn’t an oversight on the part of government contracting officers, but rather a deliberate decision based on an acquisition fad at the time known as Total System Performance Responsibility. Under the scheme, the government effectively surrendered its responsibility to maintain the equipment purchased with taxpayer dollars to the contractors. The contractors had little incentive to design simple and easy-to-maintain weapons since their business model centered around long-term sustainment contracts for their products.
Sustainment contracts are quite lucrative. Pentagon officials awarded Lockheed Martin up to $6.6 billion in 2021 to support the F-35 fleet for two years, through 2023. These contracts will grow even larger as more aircraft are delivered.”?
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/has-the-pentagon-learned-from-the-f-35-debacle
As systems get more complex, maintenance becomes more of a problem.
“The contractors had little incentive to design simple and easy-to-maintain weapons since their business model centered around long-term sustainment contracts for their products.”
This sounds like every aspect of our economy. Maintenance is now the problem.
Mikhail Kalashnikov the Russian designer of the AK-47 said: “Anyone can make things that are complex. But designing something that is simple, reliable, and effective is what takes true genius.”
Showing the backwardness of the Tatar ‘civilization’.
I read somewhere that actually the design was by committee and thus a testament to collectivist policy, but the Soviet desire for inspiring “heroes” made them personalize it, ironically undercutting their own ethos.
If someone knows more or otherwise, please correct me.
Always an interesting read . Mr B . 12 minutes .
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/this-civilization-is-not-interested-in-saving-itself-275d1ccf005a
One quote:
“there is no “civilization” as a single entity. This is just a convenient phrase, referring to a way of living and conveying a certain sense of belonging. It’s not a sentient being with its own ideas on how to improve itself.”
Another quote:
“our high tech, modern “civilization” was never designed to be sustainable. As we have seen, it wasn’t designed to be anything at all. It just “came to be”, serving as a perfect example for what ecologists call an emergent phenomenon.”
Later:
“Thinking of modern civilization as a complex, emergent, ephemeral event — embedded into a reality largely out of our control — raises the question: who is actually in the helm, then?”
And:
” Most of us would find the truth more worrisome and discomforting: namely that no one is in control. ”
Also:
“What we thus see is a constant struggle for power, favors and government largesse. A fight for profitability and shareholder returns, perceived or real special interests, but ultimately for survival driven by the eat or be eaten principle.”
Later:
“The system has a fatal flaw. . . none of its institutions and companies are driven by a purpose, other than making a profit and thereby accumulating more wealth and power. Thus when it’s more profitable to produce costly boondoggles, rather than systems that are easy to use, require low maintenance and most of all: cheap to produce, the former will be selected.”
Finally:
“our modern centers of power are only interested in their own day-to-day survival, not the survival of the system, let alone the planet.”
——
I would suggest that the whole system is closely related to evolution and survival of the best adapted. Civilizations have always grown and collapsed, when population became too high for the resources that could be extracted. We are going through the same cycle yet again. If there is a God who created the Universe and the system of evolution, then there is a Power in charge of what happens. But it is not an earthly power.
I am struck by these quotes near the end:
“This isn’t going to be a one-night affair either, but a multi-decade long transition, marking the beginning of the next chapter in our social evolution as a species.”
“Prepare for a marathon lasting many decades, not a sprint lasting for a month or two. At the same time, do not forget to enjoy modernity while it lasts. Life is beautiful.”
multi-decade long… many decades.
a good read.
I rarely post here anymore since Gail likes nazis and authoritarian genociders but she doesn’t like me calling them that (so uncouth!).
But I see some new faces so in the hope of planting some seeds I would like to continue the conversation on Ukr (from downthread).
First, I recommend everyone interested in seeing a different perspective read slavland chronicles on substack . His predictions from 2 years ago have mostly panned out. Now he says Ukraine will “win” (because it’s a psyop and a planned fail).
Isn’t it amazing that so much of the western pundits connected to the deep state keep promoting Russia and predicting it will win?
At the same time, isn’t it even more amazing that Putin is doing all he can to lose? He has full air superiority and yet western politicians visit Kiev and celebrate the latest terrorist attack against Russian civilians.
He exports oil and gas cheaply to Ukr, the west and even directly to US Navy base in Norfolk (so humanitarian!).
I could go on…
Also Gail removed one of my comments that simply pointed out how easily China and/or Russia could defeat the west without firing a shot. There was no bad language, no personal attacks and no “mis” information. So Gail, is it a secret to point out the fragility of the west or what?
I am afraid I don’t know what you are talking about.
The usual reason I remove comments is because they represent an attack on someone else. I don’t remember removing any of your comments. There are other reasons comments don’t appear–something went wrong somewhere, basically.
>> His predictions from 2 years ago have mostly panned out. Now he says Ukraine will “win” (because it’s a psyop and a planned fail).
You may be right about Putin, but it’s too early to say. If the numbers published by Russian MoD are anywhere near accurate, the situation is untenable for Ukraine and maybe just more of the same works for Russia: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Given the recent shift in narrative by US publications, I believe they are preparing the public for Ukraine to lose the war / forced negotiations and a change in US policy.
There are probably many instances of corruption and incompetence, like that substack highlights, but it’s hard to turn that into a compelling argument about their impact on the larger strategic outcomes.
For anyone who is interested, the Russian MoD posts daily kill counts (1,940 today), an these numbers do not even include the unknown numbers of occupants who are hit in armored vehicles or away from the front:
https://mskvremya.ru/article/2023/1473-kontr-nastup-interaktivnaya-karta-boevyh-deistviy-na-ukraine
PS – the three numbers in the bottom row are “killed in the entire SMO, killed in 2024, and killed yesterday”. I believe the figures are are provided by Russia, so judge for yourself whether these are credible.
For me it is very clear why Russia is responding in a ‘soft’ way to Nato provocations and why Russia is not exploiting aggressively its air superiority in Ukraine.
One needs to consider for a second to be the owner of many resources, but that all these resources are not available in a warehouse for immediate needs, these resources needs to be extracted and processed and that takes time.
If you, as the owner of the resources, respond with huge attacks on the front in the ‘American way’, you, the owner, run out of the resources available and you don’t have yet other resources to make possible counteroffensives.
While, if you, the owner, attack regularly and sell your resources at good price to sustain your efforts, even to the enemy (which doesn’t have much resources), you, the owner, exhaust the force of your enemy in the medium/long term.
So, I think that those who read and understand this blog, should not be surprised why Russia moves apparently with slow reactions and movements and why Putin appears timid and cautious to those who think in ‘the American way’.
Exactly.
Russia does the minimum necessary. It can afford to do this because the BRICS are winning the peace; the peace that others need to disrupt. It is the collective West which is up against much tighter time constraints, in particular in terms of the financial situation.
paranoid delusions see sigmund freud for self analysis
Agree with you Adonis . Nuts .
Why Wikispooks?
Full article: Wikispooks:Site Rationale
The gray struck through font edits to the Wikipedia page on the death of Vince Foster are readable, as of September 2019, by just 33[4] editors.[5]
We are an open source wiki, so unlike Wikipedia all changes to pages are recorded and publicly available. Wikispooks has no bias towards commercially-controlled media or such other establishment institutions – sources are welcomed to the extent that they help shed light on the murky business of deep politics, which by design aims to be difficult to fathom. As a 100% volunteer project, Wikispooks is not beholden to the special interests which define the corporate media.
What Is Wrong With Wikipedia?
Full article: Rated 4/5 Wikipedia/Problems
WP-notablity.jpg
Wikipedia has been revealed all the way back in the 2000s by Wikiscanner to be monitored, infiltrated and its content edited by royals, dozens of intelligence agencies, hundreds of corporations and even the assistants of politicians themselves.[6] Wikipedia’s editorial policies on “notability” and “reliability” make it little more than just one more corporate media outlet for the the official (i.e. establishment-controlled) narrative, which the US Deep state’s Operation Mockingbird has been targeting for decades. Wikipedia does not welcome first hand reports, but seeks secondary i.e. controllable reporting from the commercially-controlled media. Moreover it is censored and as of February 2018 its robots.txt file disallowed archival programs from recording page histories, so as to obscure its censorship.
Reality is indeed complex. Just two days ago I was visiting a local to buy milk and honey. The wife pointed out how all Russian and Soviet leaders since 1917 were chews, including the current one. The current admin likes digital money, vaccines, and bio-metrics, so it is worth keeping in mind. They will play a role 40 years on. On the other hand current economic administration is positively social democratic, several other internal initiatives (corruption, development of Siberia, technological and industrial development) can only be commended, and the gains of the global south are palpable. The current administration is trying hard to increase population.
I guess what NB says is that this is agreed upon depopulation of the Ukraine by shooting and depopulation of Europe by deprivation of resources. This is all possible. The counter argument is that Russia and China are moving slower that what they could do to avoid triggering nuclear war.
In order to learn some unreported facts by western media and have also some alternative interpretations, one can read this article, which comes from an interesting blog that some others have already suggested here.
It also speaks about Trump.
One point important: in this period we can only say that something is interesting, not that something reported is true, because being in a war period, we are hit by false narratives and propaganda from every side.
Nevertheless, that article remains very interesting.
Another point, and now about the terrible things said above, saying that someone likes current Nazis would mean that one likes Zelensky, Azov battallion and all the other Ukranian supporters of Bandera.
But I’m afraid that that person has not clear who are the current Nazis in the current war in eastern Europe…
Here is possible to read the article mentioned above:
NATO’S PLAN FOR PERMANENT WAR IN UKRAINE AND ON THE FAREAST FRONT — PUTIN HAS STALIN’S HITLER PROBLEM
https://johnhelmer.org/natos-plan-for-permanent-war-in-ukraine-and-on-the-fareast-front-putin-has-stalins-hitler-problem/
Russia is in risk management mode. It can’t conduct operations that would induce support for Ukraine in western nations, which is somewhere approximating zero (political class excluded).
Just back from two weeks in China principally in Beijing. China is booming, Beijing is booming. New blocks of 30 story apartment building. Apartments at five million dollars in Beijing, seven million in Shanghai. East Asia is leading the world.
Beijing has a beautiful grid of subway and six lane highways. Clean water due to a massive aqueduct from southern China to the dry northern plain. Prefect electric service.
Were you sightseeing in China? Or did you have other purposes as well?
Just a tourist.
A banker I know went to Moscow 16-17 years ago and even then he said it was Boomtown. I expect Russia to be one of the most prosperous in the future.
Thanks for the report.
Intellectual capital.
Dennis L.
I will do a couple of other post in small bites.
Well, the Chinese are not really contributing to get your cubic mile of PT.
The Chinese are going to build a lunar base. Once the Chinese start building they never stop.
Were the cranes moving? Were there people in the shopping centres? What did people say about the property crash?
Yes, the cranes are moving. The endless lines of cement trucks at building sites are moving.
The seven story shopping malls are full with stores in every slot and customers all over. Many customers have children from infant to teen. There are even Tesla show rooms in the mall and Chinese car companies also. I like the Aeito with sun roof in front and double sun roof in rear. The price $90,000 is to high for me.
Beijingers complain about their loss of paper value on their apartments that they live in.
Someone else had said that certain malls were still being visited, but just not the ones with the high end European names. In essence, money was no longer being wasted on a brand name.
Probably a good thing.
China is the world’s largest user of fossil fuels; this is why it can look like such a success story. China looked like it was booming like that when I went there both in 2011 and 2015. Of course it has a huge amount of debt as well.
In 2015, there were a lot of problems with unprofitability, however. People in Beijing were complaining about how high housing prices were relative to their incomes. Also, in Inner Mongolia, I noticed that the big fancy highways were underused. Also, the airport I flew into and out of had many empty shops.
I am not sure if an ordinary tourist would have figured these issues out. We went to out-of-the-way places when I visited–the equivalent of their “rust belt” in the Northeast, for example, and Inner Mongolia, which they were working on developing, but had much unused infrastructure.
Is that possibly an example of 80/20? If the 20 do very well, the 80 might give breakeven jobs to those in that group.
Beats welfare and the total loss of self-worth.
Dennis L.
Oil prices were very low in 2015. China’s coal prices were also low, as was its coal production. There was a reduction of world demand for the products China was making. Things were not going well for China then.
Dennis, YES! There is so much labor in China. You drive down the road and see the grass is balding on the side then you see the team of twenty people on their knees with hand trowel and bag of seeds planting them one at a time. The ground cover in front an apartment weeded by hand.
Maybe you can sell your robo weeder/planter to China.
The local security is low key/friendly without guns. It is “over staffed” or staffed to absorb some of the massive labor.
The cities are arranged by tier. Tier one cities do not have people who limp, do not have people in wheel cars, do not have dogs moving on their own off leash.
read wheelchair
Forget the 80/20. It worked during the time of Joseph Juran, who brought this Pareto idea to USA in 1940s. Not now.
Sooo……no collapse? Gail is wrong in her assessments? I don’t know what you are saying? I see a lot of places in the mountain west that look like money is no object. Private helicopters that ferry the rich anywhere they want 60 million dollar houses etc….so does that mean that the U.S is thriving? I don’t see china as a thriving country anymore than I do the U.S….
But maybe you are just telling everyone about your tourist vacation. In that case my apologies. Hope you had a good time.
I am just reporting on my vacation. But I am impressed by the scale China builds out its energy system.
Peking will turn into a desert
The aqueduct was initially built by a crazy Emperor back in around 610 because he liked sailing from the north to south of China and his empire died with him in 618
you didnt say if those 30 storey blocks had people in them
if they dont, they are just piles of dead concrete draining the national economic systems
Good question. I do not know.
German industrial output declines unexpectedly in May
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/german-industrial-output-declines-unexpectedly-may-2024-07-05/
July 5 (Reuters) – German industrial production unexpectedly fell in May, adding to signs that manufacturing in Europe’s largest economy will not recover in the coming months.
Industrial production fell in May by 2.5% compared to the previous month, the federal statistics office said on Friday. Analysts polled by Reuters had predicted a 0.2% rise.
“There is increasing evidence that the economy will only see a moderate recovery at best in the second half of the year,” Commerzbank’s senior economist Ralph Solveen said.
Totally unexpected ladies and gentlemen!!!
And these are the just released data from May. Just try to guess the months that have already passed…
“…unexpectedly”.
LOL…..
Gave you a like because I was going to post the exact same. Sun rises in the East. Norman triggered whenever someone doubts of western orthodoxy. etc.
Gave you a like because your comment cheered me up.
But regrettably for Bam_Man, my likes do not work anymore. anyone has any idea why? I press on Like and there is a brief pop up appearance, but it is not recorded.
I get the pop up and click allow. Then I have to click like again and it works(Bam_Man should have a like from me for the same reason you state).
When 31 scripts are blocked, the site still works perfectly only that likes, dislikes, buttons etc all disappear!
blocked are scripts from g00g!e, gravatar, trinity media, widgets.wp.com, youtube and twitter. Thanks, but no thanks.
after the last site redesign, I again needed to fiddle around to work out minimal script blocking configuration to permit posting
who knows what slips through all the same, not me …
This is a link to a link to Germany’s Industrial production by Trading Economics. It is possible to set the link to “Max” and get a truly long view, or to 10 year.
https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/industrial-production
It is possible to see that German Economic Output was headed downward between 2017 and 2019. Then the events of 2020 happened, with a sharp drop down, followed by a sharp temporary rise. Since March 2023, Germany’s industrial production is headed downward again. The drop in may shouldn’t be unexpected.
Is Paris Burning ?
Whether it burns or not is immaterial at this point, no?
“Public transport will shut down early across France tonight in an effort to prevent a fourth night of violence following the fatal police shooting of a seventeen year old boy.”
Doesn’t sound good!
Old news. It’s all quiet here. The Olympic Games will start soon.
I have posted on this topic earlier . The end of mega events and mega projects .
https://www.aier.org/article/the-end-of-the-olympics/
Kevin Walmsley is indirectly addressing Brent Johnson’s “Milkshake theory” here. (The US is sucking up all the global investment milkshake.)
The US Treasuries offer higher yields @ 4+% than other foreign countries. Walmsley states Central Banks aren’t buying US Treasuries, only retail investors/pension funds.
People keep harping on the fact that the US Treasury’s borrowing costs have increased dramatically since the FED has raised interest rates by 400 basis points. But the question is, is there enough money coming in from foreign retail investors chasing yield to overcome this, as long as they are oblivious to the fact the dollar eventually will have to collapse due to wild spending and debasement?
Ordinarily higher bond yields reflect greater risk which means the US should be the riskiest. Apparently not. For now, the USD is the cleanest dirty shirt and somehow we keep getting “stellar” auctions of US Treasury debt. Someone is buying…..or printing.
>> For now, the USD is the cleanest dirty shirt and somehow we keep getting “stellar” auctions of US Treasury debt
You do realize that how well an auction does depends on demand *at the given yield*? So there is demand, but only at higher yields than many other countries pay. In other words, we are not the cleanest dirty shirt – we are a dirty dirty shirt, headed the way of Zimbabwe.
Rates were raised for several reasons, none of them good from a financial soundness point of view.
We were told that the US was intentionally raising interest rates above those in other countries to drive the US dollar higher, and to attract more investment to the US. Also, with the US dollar higher, energy costs would be higher in other countries than the US, giving the US an advantage. The US can buy goods from other countries more cheaply with this arrangement. US tourists find that their dollars go farther.
Starship, new industry, space industry. Goal, cubic mile of Pt, all the debt is then trivial.
Dennis L.
South Korean EV battery manufacturer in doldrums .
https://archive.md/sn4Va
Battery maker SK On declares ‘emergency’ as EV sales disappoint
I know that Georgia (which is where I live) gave huge incentives to a lot of these “green investments.” Maybe still not enough to make the battery production viable.
I looked to see what other articles I could find about this Georgia plant. This is from April, 2024:
SK Battery America cited again for safety violations at Georgia plant
The EV battery maker was cited for alleged violations related to an October lithium battery fire.
There are other articles, too. This one is from March 2021:
Georgia lawmakers urge avoiding penalties for vehicle battery maker
Georgia state lawmakers are pushing for an alternative to penalties that would halt construction of a $2.6 billion electric-vehicle battery plant in Jackson County amid trade-secrets theft allegations.
South Korean manufacturer SK Innovation, which has hired 250 people for the plant so far and pledged to hire thousands more, was slapped last month with a ruling by the U.S. International Trade Commission that found it pilfered trade secrets from rival battery maker LG Chem.
So, lots of problems already. Earlier layoffs (which I didn’t mention), trade theft allegations, lithium fire, and safety violations.
And about that Elizabethtown KY plant, my pithy cynical comments I made about a year ago under my moniker H Zilla. Only the second paragraph is relevant.
I found this July 1, 2024 article about the plant:
Kentucky’s EV battery manufacturing plans face uncertainty amid consumer skepticism
Kan’t resist. Shocking I say, shocking.
Perhaps investors got wind of Pt and its effects on batteries.
Dennis L.
What’s the “Pt” you refer to?
Your comments imply it’s some sort of groundbreaking energy source.
Fred,
H economy, fuel cells, electricity from solar panels.
Need a cheap catalyst, Starship is making space industry possible, make drones, explore solar system, find Pt(Platinum) which is expensive on earth. H is not easy to store, but it does work well in fuel cells, used industrially in forklifts now.
I am convinced by this site without a different energy source, the doom will come to pass, a guess. Solar to H helps with the intermittency issue.
Climate change is baked in cake, making it worse can’t help, we only have one spaceship earth.
No guarantees, it will be bumpy, but the advance of Starship makes this possible, AI is an unknown.
Dennis L.
Also:
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Battery-Majors-Suffer-Profit-Drop-on-Lower-Than-Expected-EV-Sales.html
Elsewhere, it says LG Energy is the third largest battery maker.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/chinas-rapid-renewables-rollout-hits-grid-limits
Interesting article on China’s mitigation response to grid destabilization brought on by wind+solar rollout.
This is actually a useful application for AI (neural networks).
This is a very good article. It starts out,
The article indicates that China is a world leader in long distance transmission of electricity, trying to bring electricity from the northwest to the southeast. When a person reads the article, the amount of electricity loss due to curtailment is fairly small [assuming that China is reporting the correct numbers], but it is trending the wrong way.
One thing that is interesting is how low the percentage of total electricity generation in China is from “new energy sources” is, when China is encountering problems:
Going to 100% wind and solar is a pipe dream. The new Statistical Review of World Energy report allows a person to calculate percentages of electricity from wind and solar, by country, for 2023. It shows the following percentages:
US 14.9%
EU 26.6%
China 15.5%
India 10.0%
World 13.3%
The EU is desperate for something–anything–to replace its declining fossil fuel supplies. This is why it has chased wind and solar, in this way. But it is hitting limits on adding more. China and the US are about at the same level.
Trying to get world intermittent wind and solar to 100% of electricity is impossible, from where we are today. But adding more is a good excuse for more debt.
Zero sarcasm.
A cubic mile of Pt would solve this problem nicely.
Perhaps not the only solution, but not limited by engineering, only supply of Pt.
Basically a H economy.
Dennis L.
Once we have a cubic mile of platinum, we will grow our needs accordingly and we will end up in the same resource-overshoot condition we are presently in. The problem is structural.
And we are not even going to mention that the chances of getting one cubic mile are exactly the same of getting 100 cubic miles.
drb, now you are getting it. 100 cubic miles, why didn’t I think of that?
Just being conservative.
Rumor is Musk is considering increasing dia of Starship.
New industry, space industry, in space, robots, endless products, endless pollution right into the heart of Jupiter, burp.
Dennis L.
Indeed
Fast Eddy also talked about that
Few people knew running water in 1900 and now it is a ‘human right’
I am starting to think not.
We are seeing a new relationship between capital and labor.
Space industry will replace earth industry, we will spiff up our spaceship earth.
We will explore the stars, but we will not do it with biology; done well, biology will never know the difference, it will feel real.
Using Copilot more and more, it is not always right, but it is learning.
Guess: Large universities are going to pass much more quickly that we think.
Exciting times we live in.
Dennis L.
The insane optimism of the left brain..the belief technology will ‘science the sh*t out of it” in the future. (What did someone call it?..wetiko?)
For every problem it tries to solve it creates ten more because the perspective is always fragmented.
“Our problems cannot be solved at the level of thinking at which they were created.” Einstein.
Universities can get back to preserving and transmitting a culture.
Puritanism in the USA was connected with the energy poorer North
https://youtu.be/knHhPDfT9Jw?si=yQMDOo7LYul7ir88
Religions around the world vary by the area and the time. In today’s world, politicians make it sound like there is no need for religion, or children, or thinking about anyone except one’s self. Government programs will take care of you with printed money. In fact, with proper programs, they can take care of all the poor people on earth. Just print more money, and provide more government programs.
If you believe today’s narrative, you don’t need a religion.
Mutual trust in groups could also be established by dancing, harvesting together, marriage or discussions. There is no need to hang a dying man in the living room as a symbol for life.
The churches managed to become an important part of state administration providing records, libraries, research (Mendel), arts, medicine, knowledge and tradition – which today is all organized by the state.
Reading the German RKI-Files the state had know that there had never been any state of emergency and that all measures imposed, like jabs, masks and lockdowns wouldn’t have any effect even had there been any state of emergency. Yet human rights violations had been imposed on a broad basis: bodily integrity, property (hotels were closed), work, family, travel, speech, meetings, fair trial.
The modern state of justice is more than human rights but without human rights the state of justice is nothing.
If we assume that the Western societies have already imploded and just noone has yet realized, we are in need to replace these structures by alternatives.
Religious organisation might be an option, because people might be willing to give them a credit. To invest into their future and to believe their promises, while the state might be considered a criminal organisation only. It also has to be taken into account what follows if WW3 produces a lot of population reduction and destruction.
As I understand the jabs, they jump into the genome and the germ lines, producing crap proteines in all offspring from now on. If that is the case, the state of course can never reestablish a position of trust.
I think, we should look less to the ideal of education and the ban of thinking they impose than to the services religious communities have provided during history to understand their impact. The point is not around what spiritual content they organise but what structural benefits they provide to societies. The state had integrated a lot of their success concepts but now it seemed to have come to an end.
The head of the UK MOD self-assessment body has said that the UK is defenceless and completely incapable of fighting in a war and even a tiny one like the Falklands.
Russia would chew them up and spit them out in a couple of days.
The Army is a write off, the UK has no ground-to-air missile defence, the Navy is unable to even patrol UK waters, and RAF nominally exists.
The UK government deceived the British public when it pretended that UK has a serious military that is able to defend Britain and let alone perform a global role or fight any wars.
The MOD itself has collaborated in that deception of the public.
It is a pretend military and UK lacks any military-industrial base anyway, while the entire economy is deindustrialised. It is a complete write off and that is not going to change.
The situation is actually much worse than FT acknowledges and they are still spouting equipment that is already publicly known to exist only on paper. There is no chance of UK state really facing reality.
https://www.ft.com/content/8251f12b-0296-47f0-a774-3b7c99b9e53d
UK military unprepared for ‘conflict of any scale’, warns ex-defence official
Britain’s armed forces would be unable to defend the country in the event of a serious threat, ex-MoD official warns
Prognosis adds to chorus of recent warnings by current or recently retired senior UK defence officials
The UK armed forces “cannot defend the British homelands properly” and are unprepared for “conflict of any scale”, according to the senior defence official who was charged with gauging Britain’s military strength.
Rob Johnson — who recently stood down as director of the Ministry of Defence’s office of net assessment and challenge — said the UK military was operating with a “bare minimum” that only just allowed it to mount peacekeeping and humanitarian relief operations, civilian evacuation from warzones, and some anti-sabotage activities.
“In any larger-scale operation, we would run out of ammunition rapidly . . . Our defences are too thin, and we are not prepared to fight and win an armed conflict of any scale,” Johnson told the Financial Times. “The UK has reached a situation where it cannot defend the British homelands properly.”
Johnson said British air defences were “insufficient” to stop long-range missile strikes, the Royal Navy lacked enough ships to patrol the north Atlantic to monitor and deter Russian submarine activity, and the Royal Air Force needed almost twice as many fighter jets as it has now.
As for mounting an expeditionary force comparable to those deployed in the Falklands or Iraq wars, British forces “would be under-equipped, leaving troops at risk”, Johnson said.
Johnson, a respected academic who previously headed Oxford university’s Changing Character of War Centre, led the MoD’s assessment office since its creation in 2022 for a full two-year term that ended in May.
His unit — based on a similar office in the US Department of Defense that has been in operation for more than 50 years — was set up as a sounding board for military chiefs to help prevent “groupthink”.
Johnson said he did not want to be alarmist but simply realistic about the scenarios that his department had war-gamed. He said he decided to issue a public warning because he was “deeply worried” about the extra investment the British military needed, particularly to counter the threat from Russia.
“The government is not taking the public into its confidence about the scale of the threat because it knows it’s not ready,” Johnson said. There was no security risk in being honest because “the Russians already know this anyway”, he added.
His bleak prognosis adds to a chorus of recent warnings by current or recently retired senior UK defence officials, who have said that Britain’s military needs to modernise given the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the potential for conflict in the Indo-Pacific.
Johnson indicated that the UK military was unable to fulfil the global role the government set out for it in last year’s integrated review of foreign policy, let alone fight a major adversary. “We have to cut our coat to fit our cloth,” he said.
Retired Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who was a driving force behind the creation of the assessment office within the MoD, told the FT that Britain had “a shopfront military, one that can excel on displays and exercises”, adding: “But when you go behind the facade, there’s precious little on the shelves and no production line behind it.”
Time to go a viking. Men and shield maidens we eat well tonight.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/lets-stop-arguing-about-an-imaginary-energy-transition/
Leaving fossil fuels behind hasn’t happened — but, won’t it necessarily happen with depletion? (Replacing them with “renewables” hasn’t worked — but, can it ever?)
Berman ends with:
“the path forward requires a radical shift in our consumption habits, not more debates or wishful thinking about quick fixes.”
I am afraid that instead of this solution, the self-organizing system gives us a solution. This solution is coming very soon, and it may not be the one we want. It involves conflict, with winners and losers. This may be civil war, or international war, or both. It may involve financial collapse of major economies. It may involve conflict among political parties and assassinations.
We don’t really know where it is headed. Peak oilers, like Berman, assume that the world economy will hang together the way it is today, regardless of what happens to oil supply. I don’t think it works that way.
every species eventually fights for the necessary material to ensure its survival
just a matter of scale and time as to what form that conflict will take
assasination? If Trump is elected, SCOTUS has handed him his double O number, his licence to kill any opposition.
that used to be a joke.
if the economy nosedives, it wont be.
Trump doesn’t want the job but he has no choice. They are going to elect him and then hang the economic collapse around his neck like an albatross.
What if he makes it work? Current policy does not seem to work, something else could be a surprise.
He will be in his eighties, last game for him; he can only win, personal loss is already in his near future.
Dennis L.
Maybe so he seems tired. I feel bad for him what they have done to him. If I were him I would not want the job and I don’t think he does. There is a lot of hope for him to perform and I think people might be disappointed. He has lost a bit of zip on the ole fastball. 80 is old! No offense to all you boomers out there! Which ironically is about 80 percent or more of the viewers on here!!
Cry me a river, Norman!
In the “Dirty War” waged from 1976 to 1983 by Argentina’s military dictatorship against suspected left-wing political opponents, it is estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 citizens were killed; many of them were “disappeared”—seized by the authorities and never heard from again.
But not to worry; their disappearance has been commemorated by in insipid ballad by Sting.
In Rwanda in 1984, the official story is that it is estimated that some 200,000 Hutu, spurred on by propaganda from various media outlets, participated in the slaughter of more than 800,000 civilians—primarily Tutsi, but also moderate Hutu. As many as 2,000,000 Rwandans fled the country during or immediately after the genocide.
The French UN Forces stood by a let it happen. They banned machetes after that mostly peaceful genocide.
I know what you’re thinkin’, Norman. South America is barely civilized with Argentina full of Gauchos and Flamenco dancers; while Africa is as savage as the worst parts of London or Glasgow. But America is the New Rome, shining city on a hill, pinnacle of civilization, etc. So let’s look at what happened in the Old Rome at the twilight of their republic.
The key events and phases of the civil war were:
Initial power struggle (44-42 BCE):
Following Caesar’s assassination (he was the Donald Trump of His Age), a power struggle erupted between the Caesarian faction (led by Mark Antony, Octavian, and others; corresponding to the MAGA element) and the Liberatores (the assassins and their supporters; corresponding to today’s Wokies, Alphabet people, and Bindenites such as your good self; perhaps an apt name for these forces today would be Libertardians). Estimates of deaths during this initial phase range from 20,000 to 50,000.
The War of Mutina (43-42 BCE):
This conflict, contemporaneous with the initial power struggle but usually related separately was also fought between the Caesarian forces and the Liberatores, culminating in the Battle of Mutina.
Casualty estimates for this phase range from 15,000 to 30,000.
The Second Triumvirate and the Liberatores War (42-31 BCE):
Octavian, Antony, and Lepidus formed the Second Triumvirate to defeat the Liberatores.
Major battles included Philippi, where the Liberatores were defeated, and the naval Battle of Actium, which led to Octavian’s eventual sole rule as the first Roman Emperor Augustus.
Estimates for this phase suggest a death toll of over 100,000, possibly reaching as high as 200,000.
The population of the Roman Empire at the time was possibly 25 million at most, so for a similar conflict in the US we could multiply those figures by a factor of 10 or 20.
And if it happens, IT WILL ALL BE TRUMP’S FAULT, Bhwar-Aaaargh-Aaaargh!
I also find these deep westerners callous and childish and unable to look at themselves in the mirror.
no tim
ultimately it will be the fault of all of us.
trump is the symptom, not the disease—ive said that many times.
hitler was the symptom, not the disease.
They carried the same infection.
the disease is energy depletion btw.
(I guess in Timsworld, thats just another hoax)
the histories you mention all followed the same pattern of humankind as a species—throw people together in large number and you get disease and war.
Listing data from the Roman wars lends nothing to your point of view. (you lost me on all that stuff)
the details are irrelevant, the outcome has always been the same.
Throw people together in unsustainable numbers and they must either collapse inwards, or thrust outwards.
mob hysteria demands the outward thrust, it always fails, but no one thinks it will at the time.
You can tack that onto any empire past or present—it fits.
this will go on, until there are no resources left—which seems to fit our own time.
Putins war is to grab the food resource of Ukraine.
Trump’s war is to keep himself out of jail. The USA has expanded to its limits, it will now contract. There will be no MAGA—all i do is point that out.
The MAGAnuts can’t accept that reality.
Biden has tried to say this, you merely echo the naysayers about what he’s tried to do, and give yourself some kind of argumentative leverage and deflated humour.
your departed mentor was always clutching at straws of mockery too. (you will have noticed that Trump does it too, Biden doesn’t).
It reveals character. You should be aware of that.
Its just unfortunate that Biden has reached his own use by date—we all get there eventually.
I was thinking about how Eddy used to attack you relentlessly, joking about senility, sexual looseness and the like, and I never want to go there or emulate that kind of behavior because it was obvious to me that he was way out of order and that although it was just joking, in extremely bad taste.
But what I’m doing is nothing like that. My mockery of you today is well-deserved. You are totally obsessed with Trump’s character faults while ignoring every other crooked politician’s failings and regurgitating BS CNN talking points, such as “they’ve given him a license to kill.
Also, your regular mocking of my opinions (such as “I guess in Timsworld, thats just another hoax” in the above post) and insulting of my intelligence says quite a lot about your own character, and it is wearing pretty thin after all these years.
You know what they say about people who live in glass houses?
Personally, I’d much rather listen to an hour of that baby crying than read an hour of Norman Pagett on politics. So full of sympathy and understanding for Biden and so doggedly anti-Trump, anti-Putin and anti-everything-CNN-is-anti.
For your information, almost every US President and/or their team in recent decades has assassinated people with impunity.
As far as I know, Trump only ordered one assassination, that of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020.
However, Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama ordered dozens and probably hundreds of assassinations during his presidency, resulting in drone strikes and targeted killings of suspected terrorist and insurgent leaders in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. This included the 2011 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was an Islamic extremist leader.
Are you cool with Obama assassinating people with impunity, Mr. Norman “Selective Outrage” Pagett? I bet you are, since you’ve never mentioned it or condemned it or lamented about it here.
For a man who is so concerned about the potential for Trump assassinating people he doesn’t like with impunity, turning a blind eye to Obama’s killings is the equivalent of giving the guy “high fives” and smacks of hypocrisy.
While we wait to see whether my lengthy reply passes moderation, I would like to draw everybody’s attention to the fact that Biden used to attempt to use “mockery”, although not always successfully, back when he was still a senator.
Here he is cross-examining Clarence Thomas in 1991.
Tim
your targeted killings equates with Roosevelt ordering the kiilling of thousands at hiroshima etc.
a necessary evil that they brought upon themselves. No doubt you have other opinions about that.
Maybe we should ask the citizens of Nanking to arbitrate on that.
Or asked Obama to apologise to his ‘victims’.
perhaps, in 1937, an apology all round might have been a good idea.
But then, someone would have ”lost face” wouldnt they?
I feel fairly certain that Obama didnt just draw names out of a hat for ”todays kill list”
Though I grant you that overall responsibity falls on all of us–equally.—and the history of that goes back generations.
i will try to raise an eyeroll for the rest.
Forgive me if I do not respond to all your comments
OFW for some reason doesnt like my inbox, so i only scroll down a dozen or two of the latest comments. the rest i don’t read.
plucked this from “B’s” post today
sums things up very neatly I thought:
////“Fate is shaping history when what happens to us was intended by no one and was the summary outcome of innumerable small decisions about other matters by innumerable people.”/////
The subject was US Presidents Ordering Assassinations with Impunity.
That’s US Presidents!
Ordering Assassinations!!
With Impunity!!!
We are not talking about War—Good God Y’all!
Or Genocide!!
Or Massacres!!!
Or Destroying Cities Because We Can!!!
What’s with the whataboutary, Norman?
Why can’t you stop beating about the bush and just for once stick to the point?
Sorry… Sorry… Expecting you to stick to the point is like expecting Joe Biden to stand at a podium or climb the steps to board an airplane without embarrassing himself. I have to make allowances for your obvious cognitive decline and galloping senility.
Assassination means targeted killing of specific individuals because you want these specific individuals dead.
Impunity means you don’t have to worry about any blowback.
Where could the energy come from for any external or internal conflict?
The financial system will crash as a consequence of too little resources or WW3 or BRICS. Then the senile old man will go to the public, which noone can hear because of the blackout, and announce, trust me, we have new currency, and the states will accept future tax payments in it. Then people will say, what states, what future, what tax? And refuse to give the failed state a credit.
That means 99.999% completely unprepared and naive people will think, how can they leave the city and grow some potatoes. They will see no chance: they have no seeds, no land, no water, no skills. And even if, what could they eat in between?
So they will stay in bed as a secure place and to save nutritional energy. Three weeks later they will be too weak to do anything.
There will be a few preppers and homesteaders, that have collected tools and food and seeds and books and a sheep and they can make a transition. The problem to come then is, that they cant maintain tools, houses, googles, books, knowledge – or stop the radioactivity coming out of the nuclear fuel ponds.
I give the idea, that the senile old man can convince 100.000 men to cut logs in the Rocky Mountains and convert them into charcoal to smelt some old-iron into tanks, planes and missiles a chance of zero. He could only activate the weapons that still exist. But what for? He can destroy Russia but he cannot go there and use the advantage.
The resource countries could invade Europe as a statement of dominance, but why occupy failed states? The Chinese will focus on Saudi-Arabia and Iran. Sooner or later the USA and Europe will do the same. They will fight for the last oil but cannot transport it home as the finance system has collapsed.
I would say, checkmate, the game is lost!
People are not interested, a zombie army. They have recently begged Doofenshmirtz to destroy their germ line and the DNA of all of their future offspring. Who believes that these people, including the senate, including finance, including science, will be able of any reasonable thought?
An interesting observation on the ongoing political circus in USA .
” The only concocted tale any stranger would be such a story in which the audience just sat there enthralled, waiting for the next plot development without noticing that the theater was burning down around their ears . ”
Yep. I find a lot of fiction writing uninteresting these days, because reality and its participants are so outlandishly ridiculous, that fiction can’t compete.
Great comment, Jan. I had to look up Doofenshmirtz, and I had no idea he was a cartoon character.
Perhaps we are living through The Great Spaying and Neutering? I have faith that what is written on the Guidestones represents the direction in which society is being guided. Rated carrying capacity of Spaceship Earth: 500 million at any one time.
Let’s not get too caught up in World War III scenarios. The elites of all nations are freemasons who signal to each other using secret handshakes, “Vulcan” salutes, and something they do with their shirt tails. I’m sure they’ve got everything in hand.
The easiest shift of consumption can be had by lowering the number of living humans by say 99% to 80 million. Bio-warfare anyone?
Me I am busy writing my book “the start of galactic more”.
*FRENCH FAR LEFT SET FOR SHOCK ELECTION VICTORY, PROJECTIONS SHOW
*LE PEN’S FAR RIGHT PROJECTED TO FINISH THIRD IN FRENCH VOTE
I din’t get anything from your link. Somehow, got connected up to this video instead – by accident, I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aOqYkqNUN8
“Shocking Defeat: NATO’s Desperate Struggle as Ukraine Crumbles – Is Taiwan Next? | Gerald Celente”
I haven’t listened all the way to the end. The part I listened to so far sounds a lot like what we have been hearing all along.
I found this link (and many others) on the topic you talk about–French Far Left projected to defeat Far Right.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/vote-projections-show-french-left-on-course-to-defeat-far-right/ar-BB1pz1ie
of course neither is far. all media characterization.
One observer says:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leftist-coalition-set-shock-victory-french-election-le-pen-limps-3rd-behind-macron
‘France was going to choose between debt, more debt and way more debt.
Way more debt it is. Fascinating.”
Democracy has failed, and people who have senses will euthanize it.
The basic American position! Glad you are with us. ???
ZOMBIE-LIKE DISEASE COULD TURN WORLD APOCALYPTIC
(Predictive programming?
Video says there is currently “nodding disease” in parts of Africa that turns people (including children) into nodding zombie, that do nothing and eventually die.
There is also VJD, which causes people to go insane and die.
Scare movie.
Gail, do you mean CJD (Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease), also known as subacute spongiform encephalopathy or neurocognitive disorder due to prion disease?
I haven’t heard of a condition called VJD.
You are right. I heard the video say Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease, then refer to the disease by some initials. I must have heard the initials wrong.
There are so many acronyms these days that it impossible to keep track. I was researching the history of the French Legislative Elections earlier today, and I can’t make head nor tail of the names of the various parties over the past few decades. Even the French must get confused sometimes.
Surely they mean “zombie-like disease could turn the world into zombies”?
Wait, hasn’t that already happened in much of the West?
Thoughts on why now the NYT is now publishing about war crimes committed by Ukrainians? I’m guessing they need to change public opinion because the war is going very badly and this foreshadows a decision to begin negotiations, or to stop sending arms (since they’re out, anyways), or to prevent panic when they lose (it’s okay if they lose because they’re actually bad people now).
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/06/world/europe/ukraine-russia-killings-us.html
>> In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit
>> A German medic said he was so troubled that he confronted his commander. Others boasted about killings in a group chat.
>> Hours after a battle in eastern Ukraine in August, a wounded and unarmed Russian soldier crawled through a nearly destroyed trench, seeking help from his captors, a unit of international volunteers led by an American.
>> Caspar Grosse, a German medic in that unit, said he saw the soldier plead for medical attention in a mix of broken English and Russian. It was dusk. A team member looked for bandages.
>> That is when, Mr. Grosse said, a fellow soldier hobbled over and fired his weapon into the Russian soldier’s torso. He slumped, still breathing. Another soldier fired — “just shot him in the head,” Mr. Grosse recalled in an interview.
I suspect that one side is as bad as the other. Also, we don’t know which stories are true and which are concocted. Early on, the Russians are supposed to have castrated a Ukrainian soldier. Did it actually happen? And how would we know anyway?
The point that I was trying to make was about a shift in US narrative and the proximal causes and interpretation, not who has the moral high ground, just to be clear for my part.
and your interpretation is probably correct. goes hand in hand with Nato telling the Ukrainians are too corrupt to join.It is possible that video tours of Zelensky mansions will also be offered. the foreign passports. they don’t lack material for this narrative shift.
I have noticed the Western MSM pushing stories about Ukraine losing ground, so I suspect you are right – we are being prepared for the defeat of Ukraine, because practical Western support is slowly being withdrawn.
They are doing the same thing with Biden: first pretending for years that he’s ok, then a switch is pulled and he is questionable. Nothing organic about it.
“nothing organic about it” Yes! Someone or something is in charge.
bye bye Joey you were brave you fought corn pop. they did not even let you have your big boy press conference. so sad
ivan, i think your take is more nuanced than mine, but it definitely looks like a tacit admission that a russian victory is inevitable and the plebs are being prepared for that eventuality to me. i imagine i’m not alone in remembering the photos of tortued iraqis at abu ghraib in response to this story…the fact that it’s from the democrat mouthpiece the NYT is telling, too.
It is an heavy turn of the narrative:
1) admitting that US top commanders lead troups in the war against Russia.
2) admitting that many mercenaries from various countries fight against Russia, including from US and from the ‘very polite & fair’ Germany.
3) admitting that these mercenaries kill Russian soldiers after they raise hands and surrender or when they are wounded, without arms and pray for medical help, which are big, clear and ugly war crimes.
These things sound pretty awful, I agree!
Are they lining up their next front against Russia in Scandinavia? Both Finland and Sweden, now in Nato, are signing up to have US air bases where they have no control of what weapons the US brings in.
Good interview. Unfortunately, most interviews (including this one) are descriptive, not prescriptive and actionable.
Heavy flooding in Southern China. Did the authorities open dams and flood cities without warning the inhabitants?
Also, news of US and EU tariffs on Chinese EVs, Chinese tariffs on EU pork and much, much more.
sounds like another plot to me tim
add it to the list under the subheading “population reduction”
Not to worry, Norman. Just keep taking the boosters and wear two masks when going to the supermarket, and you’ll be fully protected from the cull.
The flooding happens every year . Nothing new . It happens clockwork in North East India also year after year . The population who live their know this , but then the alternative is to become beggar Calcutta or Shanghai . Sad .
I agree, it happens every year in east, south and Southeast Asia. It’s known as the monsoon.
But the amount of precipitation can vary precipitously from one place to another in any year and from one year to another in any place—although the southern slopes of the Himalayas are going to get soaked every time.
Worst flooding in 7 years! Wow!
In this video, we explain why the US passport is losing its power and what it means for American travelers. For eight years in a row, the Nomad Passport Index has been published, ranking passports based on factors like visa-free travel, taxation, personal freedom, and global perception. Shockingly, this year, the US passport has hit one of its lowest scores ever.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sBFFFQNUJic
00:00 Start
00:30 Top Ranking Passports and US Position
2:14 Impact of New ETIAS Requirements
4:18 Factors Affecting US Passport Ranking
7:50 Tit for Tat Visa Policies
11:21 Are You Ready for the New Opportunities?
Nomad Capitalist is the world’s most sought-after expert on legal offshore tax planning, dual citizenship, and international asset protection. We work exclusively with seven- and eight-figure entrepreneurs and investors who want to “go where you’re treated best.
Pinned by Nomad Capitalist
@GwenSwan
8 days ago
I agree 100% with this video. I’m Canadian but I grew up in the USA in Miami and did all my studies in the US. When my mother got sick with Cancer in Miami, she decided to go back to Canada for treatments because of socialized medicine. So I decided to go back to Canada to be with my Mom. But I still had to go back to the US to conduct my businesses. And each time I would cross the border the freaking US border administration would make my life soooo miserable that after being detained for 8 hours on several occasions and interrogated for hours for being a dual citizen and traveling back and forth and missing my flights and having to book last minutes flights again and having to stay in a hotel for an extra night and all these expenses that they forced me to incur and the waste of time they caused me and delays to my meetings and attending to my business, I’ve decided to burn it and forfeited my papers and citizenship. It’s wasn’t worth the trouble. These people have absolutely zero respect for the years of contribution I had given to their country. I have never set foot in the US ever again. Oh and moreover, because at the time I had forfeited my status, they banned me from entry into the US even if it was to catch a flight to go elsewhere in the world. So screw them. I hate the US . I’ll never go back ever again.
And to think when I was 16 -17 years old in the early 1970s, I could ride my sting ray banana seat bicycle across the Peace Bridge on the pedestrian walkway from Buffalo to Canada where my high school English teacher at Nichols School was a landed resident in Fort Erie/Crystal Beach (amusement park)/ Thunder Bay Beach as long as I had any kind of identification, like a YMCA membership card.
When I turned 20 and had a driver’s license with NY plates on my 1970 Plymouth Fury II, going through customs was simply:
“Good morning. Where you headed?
How long will you be staying?
Anything to declare?
Ok. Have a good day.”
How things have changed.
I remember place of birth?
My uncle told their friend you’re on your own after she said China. Her mom had to come.
My sis reminded grandpa don’t forget the imperial milk.
I wonder if the baby hole across from the queens is walled up?
The part about being banned and forfeiting citizenship – that’s your statement or a copy-pasted comment from the site you reference?
I subscribe to this channel and thought some here might want to watch this video. I just cut and pasted….the comment was highlighted by the channel as a select comment.
I also remember going off to Canada as a youngster and we had a brief pass through with a car.
I take this comment was from a guy that had dual citizenship and the border agents gave him a difficult time.
Just show the decline in freedoms we once enjoyed and took for granted
Canada was recently known for its covid vaccination requirements. This was a recent cause of friction at the border.
I am not so sure about Canada either. They were huge on the vaccine. Trudeau is very strange bird to me. I don’t trust him or the current government. But that’s ok. you can have your opinion. I have never had a problem crossing the border from either side. Maybe it was the sh4tty attitude that caused him trouble.
lol Mike—you have my sympathy
the last time i crossed the US/Canada border, i wrote a short essay about my experience
https://medium.com/@end-of-more/the-day-i-crossed-the-border-8a3f1717dff8
took 80 minutes to cross into USA
Crossing back into Canada:—hi…man looks at passport—says ‘welcome to Canada”—all of 30 seconds, waves me on my way.
“Or the guy who bought an electric vehicle
2:56 and couldn’t find a charging place that actually worked, who concluded that if you
3:01 buy an electric vehicle in Germany also buy a dog so that you don’t have to walk home alone.”?
Germany’s problem is declining energy consumption per capita.
2013 170.5
2014 163.2
2015 165.8
2016 169.4
2017 164.5
2018 160.0
2019 148.8
2020 153.0
2021 147.4
2022 137.0
This is from the Energy Institute’s latest report. I think that the EI overcounts the benefits of wind and solar. The fall would be worse if the methodology of the US EIA or the IEA were used.
By comparison, the US figure for 2023 is 277.3. China’s is 119.8.
2023
as in the numbers posted by Ravi about Belgium, I see here too a halving from peak by 2030.
>> Germany’s problem is declining energy consumption per capita.
Not a problem. Just decrease the denominator.
–Klaus
So why don’t they do that? Why import so many who won’t even find employment in the teeth of a catastrophic decline? I have a hard time reconciling this “western” compulsion.
To play them against one another. To have special non german corps that will feel no compunction about killing germans. later, they will take up their serf positions more easily.
I don’t have an answer to that. It could be along the lines of what drb says, that they intend to continue their long family histories of maintaining dominance via divide-and-conquer strategy, or it could be something more nefarious and intentionally destructive.
I’m tending towards “deranged ideology” as the generic answer as to why the Elites and their bureaucratic satraps do the crazy shit they do.
Martyanov talks a lot about this.
Complete intellectual dishonesty and refusal to acknowledge reality all the way through academia and institutions.
As the trans American Admiral famously and seriously said “Correct use of pronouns increases force lethality”.
And as a parent, you’re a right wing extremist if you don’t want pedo drag queens reading stories to your 4 year old.
Are the governments run by Zionists? Do Zionists hate the citizens?
I watched a lot of this video and she points out that the train service has declined markedly, cancellations and delays are the norm, and the internet technology is deficient by not investing in fiber optic and is especially slow, even in cities.
Now, I haven’t been to Germany in decades, but when I visited everything was top notched in Bavaria. Suppose it may be a shock in some regards now.