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World crude oil extraction reached an all-time high of 84.6 million barrels per day in late 2018, and production hasn’t been able to regain that level since then.
Oil prices have bounced up and down over the ten-year period 2014 to 2024 (Figure2).
In this post, I show that changing oil prices have had varying impacts on production. Recently, lower prices seem to be associated with lower production because extraction has become less profitable for producers. A temporary spike in oil prices does little to raise production. The view of economists that crude oil extraction can continue to rise indefinitely because lower production leads to higher prices, which in turn leads to greater production, is not true. (Economists also believe that substitutes can be helpful, but this is not a subject I will try to cover in this post.)
[1] World crude oil production has not regained its level prior to the Covid restrictions.
According to EIA data in Figure 1, the highest single month of crude oil production was November 2018, at 84.6 million barrels per day (mb/d). The highest single year of crude oil production was 2018, when world crude oil production averaged 82.9 mb/d. The last 24 months of oil production have averaged only 81.7 mb/d of production. Compared to the year with the highest average production, world oil production is down by 1.2 mb/d.
Furthermore, in Figure 1, there is nothing about the world production path in the last 24 months that gives the impression that oil production will be surging upward anytime soon. It merely increases and decreases slightly.
World population continues to grow. If economists are to be believed, oil prices should be shooting upward in response to rising demand. However, oil prices have not generally been increasing. In fact, as of this writing, the Brent crude oil price stands at $69, which is lower than the recent average monthly price shown in Figure 2. There is concern that the US economy is going into recession, and that this recession will cause oil prices to fall further.
[2] OPEC oil production seems as likely as other source of production to be influenced by price, since OPEC sells oil for export and can theoretically cut back easily.
One thing that is somewhat confusing about OPEC’s oil production is the fact that the membership of OPEC keeps changing. The data the EIA displays is the historical production for the current list of OPEC members. If former members left OPEC because of declining production, this would be hidden from view.
Based on the EIA’s method of displaying historical OPEC oil production, the peak in OPEC production occurred in November 2016, at 32.9 mb/d. The highest year of oil production was 2016 at 32.0 mb/d, with 2017 and 2018 almost as high. Average production during the last 24 months has been 29.2 mb/d, or 2.8 mb/d lower than the 32.0 mb/d production in its highest year. Thus, recent OPEC production has fallen further than world production, relative to their respective highest years. (World production is down only 1.2 mb/d relative to its highest year.)
[3] An analysis of OPEC’s production relative to price indicates that patterns change over time.
Prices have changed dramatically between 2014 and 2024. I chose to look at prices versus production during three different time periods, since these periods seem to have very different production growth patterns:
- January 2016 to November 2016 (rising OPEC production)
- December 2016 to April 2020 (falling OPEC production)
- May 2020 to May 2024 (rising and then falling OPEC production)
These are the three charts I created:
During this initial period ending November 2016, the lower the price of oil, the more OPEC’s Oil production increased. This approach would make sense if OPEC was trying to keep its total revenue high enough to “keep the lights on.” If some other country (such as the United States in Figure 7) was flooding the world with oil, and through its oversupply depressing prices, OPEC didn’t choose to respond by cutting its own production. Instead, it seems to have pumped even more. In this way, OPEC could make certain that US producers weren’t really making money from their newly expanded supply of crude oil. Perhaps the US would quickly cut back–something it, in fact, did between April 2015 and Nov. 2016, shown in Figure 7 below.
During this second period ending April 2020, prices plunged to a very low level, but production didn’t change significantly. It is difficult to change production levels in response to a specific shock because the whole system has been set up to provide a certain level of oil extraction, and it takes time to make changes. Other than that, prices didn’t seem to have much of an impact on production.
In this third period ending May 2024, OPEC producers seem to have been saying, “If the price isn’t high enough, we will reduce production.” Figure 6 shows that with higher prices, the amount of oil extracted tends to rise, but only up to a limit. When prices temporarily hit high levels (in March to August of 2022–the dots over to the right in Figure 6), production couldn’t really rise. The necessary infrastructure wasn’t in place for a big ramp up in production.
Perhaps if prices had stayed very high, for very long, maybe production might have increased, but this is simply speculation. Oil companies won’t build a lot of extraction infrastructure that they don’t need, regardless of what they may announce publicly. I have been told by someone who worked for Saudi Aramco (in Saudi Arabia) that the company has (or at one time had) a lot of extra space for oil storage, so that the company could temporarily ramp up deliveries, as if they had extra productive capacity readily available, but that the company didn’t really have the significant excess capacity that it claimed.
[4] US oil production since January 2014 has followed an up and down pattern, to a significant extent in response to price.
Figure 7 shows three distinct humps, with the first peak in April 2015, the second peak in November 2019, and the third peak in December 2023.
In the first “hump,” there was an oversupply of oil when the US was trying to ramp up its domestic oil supply of oil (through tight oil from shale) at the same time that OPEC also increasing production. The thing that strikes me is that it was OPEC’s oil supply in Iraq that was ramping up and increasing OPEC’s oil supply.
The rest of OPEC had no intention of cutting back if the US was arrogant enough to assume that it could raise production of both US shale and of Iraq with no adverse consequences.
Looking at the detail underlying the first US hump, oil production rose between January 2014 and April 2015 when production was “stopped” by low prices, averaging $54 per barrel in January through March 2015. The US reduced production, particularly of shale, since that was easy to cut back, hitting a low point in September 2016. The combination of growing oil supplies from both the US and OPEC led to average oil prices of only $46 per barrel during the three months preceding September 2016.
Eventually OPEC oil production peaked in November 2016 (Figure 3), leaving more “space” available for US oil production. Also, oil prices were able to rise, reaching a peak of $81 per barrel in October 2018. World crude oil production hit a peak in November 2018 (Figure 1). But even these higher prices were too low for OPEC producers. They announced they were cutting back production, effective January 2019, to try to further raise prices.
During the second hump, US oil production rose to 12.9 mb/d in November 2019. The oil price for the three months preceding November 2019 was only $61 per barrel. Evidently, this was not sufficient to maintain oil production at the same level. The number of “drilled but uncompleted wells” began to rise rapidly.
Drillers chose not to complete the wells because the initial indications were that the wells would not be sufficiently productive. They were set aside, presumably until prices rise to a high enough level to justify the investment.
Figure 7 shows that the US oil production had already started to fall before the Covid-related drop in oil production, which began around April and May of 2020.
[5] The rise in US oil production since May 2020 has been a bumpy one. The peak in US oil production in December 2023 may be its final peak.
The rise in oil production since May 2020 has included the completion of many previously drilled but uncompleted (DUC) wells. There has been a trend toward fewer wells, but “longer laterals,” so the earlier wells drilled were probably not of the type most desired more recently. But these previously drilled wells had some advantages. In particular, the cost of drilling them had already been “expensed,” so that, if this earlier cost were ignored, these wells would provide a better return to shareholders. If production was becoming more difficult, and shareholders wanted a better return on their (most recent) investment, perhaps using these earlier drilled wells would work.
There remain several issues, however. Currently, the number of DUCs is down to its 2014 level. The benefit of already expensed DUCs seems to have disappeared, since the number of DUSs is no longer falling. Also, even with the addition of oil from the DUCs, the annual rise in US oil production has been smaller in this current hump (0.8 mb/d) than in the previous hump (1.4 mb/d).
Furthermore, there are numerous articles claiming that the best shale areas are depleting, or are providing production profiles which focus more on natural gas and natural gas liquids. Such production profiles tend to be much less profitable for producers.
I think it is quite possible that US crude oil production will start a gradual downward decline in the coming year. It is even possible that the December 2023 monthly peak will never be surpassed.
[6] Oil prices are to a significant extent determined by debt levels and interest rates, rather than what we think of as simple “supply and demand.”
Debt bubbles seem to hold up commodity prices of all kinds, including oil. I have discussed this issue before.
It seems to me that all the manipulations of debt levels and interest rates by central banks are ultimately aimed at maneuvering oil prices into a range that is acceptable to both producers of crude oil and purchasers of crude oil, including the various end products made possible through the use of crude oil.
Food production is a heavy user of crude oil. If the price of oil is too high, one possible outcome is that food prices rise. If this happens, consumers become unhappy because their budgets are squeezed. Alternatively, if food prices don’t rise sufficiently, farmers find their finances squeezed because they cannot get a high enough return on all of the required farming inputs.
[7] The current debt bubble is becoming overstretched.
Today’s debt bubble is driving up stock prices as well as commodity prices. We can see various pressures around the world associated with this debt bubble. For example, in China many homes have been built in recent years primarily for investment purposes, rather than residential use. This property investment bubble is now collapsing, bringing down property prices and causing banks to fail.
As another example, Japan is known for its “carry trade,” which is made possible by the combination of its low interest rates and higher rates in other countries. The Japanese government has a very high debt level; it cannot withstand more than a very low interest rate. There is significant concern that this carry trade will unwind, an issue that has already been worrying world markets.
A third example relates to the US, and its role of holder of the US dollar as reserve currency, which means that the US dollar is used heavily in international trade. Historically, the holder of the reserve currency has changed about every 100 years, in part because the high demand for the reserve currency allows the government holding the reserve currency to borrow at lower interest rates than other countries. With these lower interest rates, and the need to pull the world economy along, there is a tendency to “spur asset bubbles.” But an asset bubble is likely to have a debt bubble propping it up.
My previous post raised the issue of the economy today being exposed to a debt bubble. There has been excessive borrowing in many sectors of the economy that have been doing poorly. Commercial real estate is an example, as witnessed by many nearly empty office buildings and shopping malls. People with student loan debt often delay starting a family because they are struggling with repayment of those loans.
If any or all these bubbles should burst, there could be a swift downward fall in oil prices and commodity prices, in general. This could be a major problem because producers would tend to leave the market, and world GDP, which depends on energy supplies of the right kinds, would fall.
[8] Oil is an international commodity. Disruption of demand by any major user could pull prices down for everyone.
China is the single largest importer of oil in today’s world. Its economy seems to be struggling now. This, by itself, could pull world oil prices down.
[9] We don’t often think about the fact that oil prices need to be both high enough for producers and low enough for consumers.
Economists would like to think that oil prices can rise endlessly, allowing more oil to be extracted, but history shows that this is not what happens. If there are too many people for the available resources, wage and wealth disparity tends to increase, leading to many more very poor people. Lots of adverse things seem to happen: the holder of the reserve currency tends to change, wars tend to start, and governments tend to collapse or be overthrown.
[10] Simply because crude oil is in the ground and the technology seems to be available to extract the crude oil doesn’t mean that we can necessarily ramp up crude oil production.
One of the major issues is getting the price up high enough, and long enough, for producers to believe that there is a reasonable chance of making money through a major new investment. The only time that oil prices were above $100 for a sustained period was in the 2011 to 2013 period. On an inflation-adjusted basis, prices also exceeded $100 per barrel in the 1979 to 1982 period based on Energy Institute data. But we have never had a period in which oil prices exceeded $200 or $300 per barrel, even after accounting for inflation.
The experience of 2014 and 2015 shows that even if oil prices rise to high levels, they do not necessarily remain high for very long. If several parts of the world respond with higher oil production simultaneously, prices could crash, as they did in 2014.
There is also a need for the overall economic system to be available to support both the extraction of and the continuing demand for the oil. For example, much of the steel pipe used by the US for drilling oil comes from China. Computers used by engineers very often come from China. If China and the US are at odds, there is likely to be a problem with broken supply lines. And, as I said in Section 8, disruption of demand affecting even one major importer, such as China, could bring demand (and prices) down significantly.
[11] Conclusion.
The crude oil situation is far more complex than the models of economists make it seem. World crude oil supply seems to be past peak now; it may be headed down significantly in the next few years. Central banks have been working hard to keep oil prices within an acceptable range for both producers and consumers, but this is becoming increasingly impossible.
We live in interesting times!
How do I pay that?’: California homeowners are feeling crushed by double-digit insurance rate hikes — here’s why costs in the Golden State are skyrocketing and if there’s relief in sight
California’s GDP in 2023 was $3.8T, representing 14% of the total U.S. economy. If California were a country, it would be the 5th largest economy in the world and more productive than India and the United Kingdom.Aug 15, 2024
California residents can expect sharp increases in their condo, renter, and home insurance rates in the coming months.
State Farm recently requested permission from state regulators to raise rates by 30% for homeowners, 52% for renters, and 36% for condo owners. Allstate Insurance just received approval to raise rates by an average of 34%. The increase is hitting some residents hard.
Because of the fires around here, they say my home is in the fire zone. So they added $1,200 to it. So now, instead of $900 a month, it’s $2,100. How do I pay that?” a homeowner, who asked not to be identified, asked CBS News.
While many are frustrated by the rate increases, some residents may lose their coverage entirely. State Farm, the largest insurance provider in California, disclosed its plans to drop coverage for 72,000 houses and apartments and will not issue new policies in the state. However, not all residents will be impacted.
It’s just as bad in Florida if not worse
Newly released data reflected on TheFloridaScorecard.org for 2023 shows that if Florida were an independent country, it would be ranked the 16th largest economy in the world by gross domestic product (GDP).Jul 12, 2024
California has a huge amount of problems. The state tends to be very dry, and it is also forested. There are a lot of wires that tend to cause fires. People want to live at the edge of the forested areas. There are earthquake and landslide issues as well. All of these issues keep raising costs for insurers. Excess insurers don’t want the high costs of California either. Also, the California Insurance Department has tried to keep rates low in the past, leading to more problems now.
These issues will push the population of California down, as people (and businesses) move to less expensive areas.
A potential new source of lithium, from Stanford University:
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/08/new-technology-extracts-lithium-from-brines-inexpensively-and-sustainably
A new method for extracting lithium from briny water offers a more efficient, cost-effective, and environmental alternative to traditional lithium production. It could also help solve lithium supply chain issues.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2590238524004247
From the academic paper:
Business
State makes history with permanent water restrictions on cities and towns amid crippling droughts: ‘Conservation is … critical’
The policy is projected to provide benefits of $6.2 billion, per officials.
by Noah JampolSeptember 25, 2024
https://www.thecooldown.com/green-business/permanent-water-restriction-california-state/
For the first time in state history, California is placing permanent water restrictions on cities and towns.
As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, the State Water Resources Control Board approved the landmark measure this summer.
The new policy will have a major impact with some suppliers having to make cuts of over 30% by 2027 and a projected cost of $4.7 billion through 2050. To offset that, the policy is projected to provide benefits of $6.2 billion, per officials.
The system for determining the level of cuts comes down to the area’s past water, climate, and land use, according to the Chronicle.
As far as achieving the cuts, it’s left in the hands of the water suppliers to hit their benchmarks. It can be accomplished by placing restrictions on water usage, raising prices to tamp down usage, or pushing more efficient appliances. Noncompliant suppliers will face daily fines of up to $10,000.
For consumers in California impacted by the new restrictions, there are plenty of options.
…..last for Klummie
According to the Chronicle, Paul Helliker, general manager of the Sacramento area’s San Juan Water District, expressed disappointment that a large quantity of the reductions were left to poorer inland communities. Ahhh. That’s too bad
Moving elsewhere seems like a response to these water cuts. Lower the population to what the water level will support. Stop raising as many crops that require irrigation.
Yes, rice in CA is an abomination. they could also do without alfalfa, although after establishment alfalfa is very drought resistant.
I remember reading that a lot of CA alfalfa goes to Saudi Arabia. Effectively they’re importing US water.
SA and UAE 10% of US alfalfa exports.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-saudi-arabia-alfalfa-20160329-story.html
Betcha the very rich will not cut back in the slightest of their water usage in any way. Still have lush non native water thirsty landscaping with green lawns and pools and golf course with perfect putting greens.
Let the poor pee in bottles and poo poo in outdoor buckets
Truth be told though, most water goes to agriculture.
And lawns are considered agricultural along with the fertilizer to feed it so it’s nice and 🍏 LOL
Keeping all that front lawn grass alive requires up to 75% of just one household’s water consumption, according to that study, which is a luxury that California is unable to afford as the climate change-driven drought pushes reservoirs to historic lows.
Southern Nevada Water Authority’s original water intake valve in Lake Mead — in service since 1971 –is now standing above the waterline and, as of earlier this month, is no longer in use since it can no longer draw water.
In Southern California – dotted with wealthy celebrity mansions and pristine green yards – having conventional grass lawns simply won’t work anymore as the consequences of climate change intensify, said John Fleck, director of the Water Resources Program at the University of New Mexico.
“You want to have some space in your backyard for your kids to play, so a little patch of grass is not terrible,” Fleck told CNN. “It’s just the big expanse of lawn – that’s really not being used other than ‘because it looks pretty’ – that has got to go. That’s what we can’t have anymore.
Let them eat grass
There is an interesting question re short grass. Why to people find it attractive?
You need to answer this in terms of 100,000 years ago.
Why are people growing grass in a semi-arid environment? Is growing hay for animal feed a side-hustle in that state?
. ““You want to have some space in your backyard for your kids to play, so a little patch of grass is not terrible,”
Why not grow something native to California? Do you know how expensive grass seed is?
“hat’s really not being used other than ‘because it looks pretty’ – that has got to go. That’s what we can’t have anymore.’ ”
Banning lawns is going to piss off a lot of women in the suburbs.
everybody used to do just that—kings were not exempt
Front lawns originated in France and England in the 1700s as a display of wealth and status:
Origins
The first lawns were created in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, designed by André Le Nôtre, which included a small area of grass called the tapis vert, or “green carpet”.
Purpose
Lawns were a status symbol because they required the owner to devote large portions of land to something that couldn’t be sold or eaten.
Maintenance
The wealthy used grazing animals to keep their lawns short, and some even hired laborers to hand cut them.
Inspiration for America
Wealthy Americans, including Thomas Jefferson, began to replace their vegetable and herb gardens with grass lawns, imitating the European trend.
In the United States, lawns became a symbol of the American dream and national pride. Frederick Law Olmsted, known as the Father of the American Lawn, designed one of the first planned suburban communities in Riverside, Illinois in 1868. His design featured open yards that were connected to give the impression of one manicured lawn.
“Front lawns originated in France and England in the 1700s as a display of wealth and status:”
Still is.
Houses are, too.
And so is marriage.
Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class.
‘Conspicuous consumption is the application of money and material resources towards the display of a higher social status (e.g. silver flatware, custom-made clothes, an over-sized house); and conspicuous leisure is the application of extended time to the pursuit of pleasure (physical and intellectual), such as sport and the fine arts. Therefore, such physical and intellectual pursuits display the freedom of the rich man and woman from having to work in an economically productive occupation.’
…..nothing quite as wasteful as an expanse of well manicured lawn where there use to be herbs and vegetable gardens.
The lifestyle blocks not far from me echo with the sound of ride-on lawn mowers each weekend as the summer arrives. A few trees, no garden and a couple of acres of lawn to park the boat, the SUV, the caravan, and maybe a horse etc.
Reality will one day arrive in the form of the not quite-so-leisured, but more numerous, lesser ones!
That is how the world works and we have to restore such system to save civilizatino
That is the way it is. These poorer inland communities will be simply erased.
Yes, Klummie, it’s that simple…as being wiped out..how touching
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/china-goes-all-outas-xi-vows-save-private-economy-stabilitze-real-estate-and-boost-stock
One of Gail’s central ideas is that the economic system does not matter much, compared to cheap energy availability. And of course she has been consistently correct in evaluating China’s economic plight. And isn’t the article above a confirmation that it really does not make any difference, whether the system is capitalist or communist? Does this article walk you back to 2008?
Yes, China is a good example of what goes wrong. It doesn’t depend on the form of government.
China’s economy has been built on cheap coal supplies, but these supplies are becoming more expensive to extract and ship. Ultimately, this is what is bringing China’s economy down. It is impossible to get the price high enough to make coal production and shipment high enough for producers, and low enough to make end goods.
Also, China has used property appreciation to fuel the economy. But at some point, homes become too expensive for citizens. Wage disparity becomes a problem. The market for new home sales disappears. And the rising cost of delivered coal makes the cost of building new homes becomes much higher.
We remember that Japan had a property price bubble also, that exploded in 1992. Japan’s economy has stagnated since then. The fact that the world economy has been doing OK since then has helped Japan somewhat hold on, however.
Most people are still in denial that their standards of living will change significantly towards the negative side.
But it is happening, because there is not enough to maintain everyone’s stanadards of living.
Surely my standard of living will not fall if I refuse to believe that it will fall.
Isn’t it just a far-right conspiracy theory that resources are limited?
Most right wingers I know believe in a near limitless supply of oil. Most people on the right identify resource depletion as a left-wing conspiracy theory.
No …. Really?
Nearly everyone believes, “Surely Social Security and Medicare for the elderly will continue to provide adequate benefits for the elderly.” Also, putting away funds for the future will certainly be helpful.
Having children and perhaps a ring of relatives/close friends may be helpful for the future. Maintaining your own health so you can continue to work pretty much forever is another useful plan.
Perhaps buying a home is helpful, but there is a major issue of such a home not being helpful for the long term. Perhaps it is not in the right place, or it needs major work, which cannot take place. Or it will need electricity to maintain vital functions, such as operating a sump pump to keep the water level down. If heat cannot be maintained in the house in the winter, water pipes may need to be drained each fall.
Hmmm.
A house without water or plumbing.
A family
A house without central heat
A house surrounded by land which is not farmed with diesel.
Sounds Amish.
Saw a buggy today, man, woman, very young child, bet the woman is envious every day of western women going to an office job and doing a man’s work.
Dennis L.
I am not really concerned about a group which will last maybe 10 minutes against a determined armed assault
Once half the planet dies off. (or more)
There will be all the resources in the world..
Human population made it through ice ages. It likely can make it through what appears to be a bottleneck now.
It will consist mostly of stranded assets, though.
Andrey Tarkovsky’s Andrey Rublev
https://youtu.be/je75FDjcUP4?si=wKStDZ30ODwM9BJI
Not much about Rublev, who supposedly lived around 1400, is known so all of its episodes are fictional, and he only has one surviving work, which was moved to a big Orthodox cathedral last year to avoid terrorism from Ukrainians.
Like all Tarkovsky movies it is difficult to understand, and there are no real plot, just a bunch of episodes where Rublev plays very little role, just watching the horrors.
The Russian Orthodox Church canonized Rublev a saint, in 1988, entirely because of this movie since there are not enough deeds of Rublev to justify a sainthood. Even his patronym is not known.
Still it kind of shows where Russia’s Orthodoxism comes from. It is kind of an amalgamation of Eastern Christianity and Buddhism, which the Tatars which ruled Russia at that time believed on. The Buddhists , knowing the world is screwed up, put emphasis on nirvana, rather than try to change things – it is what it is and one just has to try to live life to the fullest, an idea which entered Russian Orthodoxism which made it different from other styles of Orthodoxy.
“The Buddhists, knowing the world is screwed up, put emphasis on nirvana, rather than try to change things – it is what it is and one just has to try to live life to the fullest,”
Perhaps nirvana is a message for today. But looking out for the needs of others is important today, also.
When money is tight, there is a tendency for public officials to take bribes, or have their organizations supported by funds provided by the group they regulate (which is not a whole lot different). This seems to be one of the directions that collapse takes. There are news articles about New York City officials resigning. Some of them are accused of taking bribes.
NYC officials spoke against immigrants then the fed charged them with taking bribes. Corruption in NYC is a tradition. Around 1900 when the reservoirs and aqueducts were being built for NYC water the known rule of thumb was 50% for corruption and 50% for the project.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/09/nyc-mayor-eric-adams-fires-back-claims-hes/
NYC Mayor Eric Adams Fires Back, Claims He’s Being Targeted by Biden’s Federal Government for Allegedly ‘Defending’ New Yorkers Against Illegal Aliens
Fed fights with whatever tools it has.
Restarting the Three mile island by Microsoft for it’s AI operations . It is not a click of a button .
” Many years ago I worked for a nuclear steam supply vendor ( we built reactors). There were two main safety documents required by the NRC, a Preliminary Safety Analysis Report (PSAR) and a Final Safety Analysis Report (FSAR). Each one filled a shelf about four feet wide.
My responsibility for several years was the design of the reactor control rods. I spent countless hours, in addition to designing and testing functionality, analyzing the myriad ways that the rods could fail and working with the different individuals that were responsible for the interacting components (actuating mechanisms, fuel components, etc.) and those responsible for backup mechanisms in case of control rod failure (too weird to explain).
Crazy as it seems today, the amount of interaction required to design all of these components to work together and then satisfy our own QA staff certainly involved years of work. At the time there were over 800 engineers at the task, each tasked with design and safety responsibilities that fed into the reports. The PSAF was then sent to the NRC for review. While they were at it design changes occurred for various reasons requiring revision of the PSAF, review in-house and then final review by the NRC. Even after all that here’s a near catastrophic accident that actually happened:
1. Utility accepts completed power plant. Small number of vendor engineers remain on site for training and support.
2. . During hand over to utility an over enthusiastic janitor paints the exhaust manifold on an emergency diesel generator that a careless architect has installed immediately below control room ventilation intake air duct.
3. While performing routine testing during full power operation, an uncoordinated electrical engineer short circuits control rod wire causing reactor to scram (emergency shutdown).
4. Emergency generator starts, setting exhaust manifold paint on fire.
5. Smoke from fire enters control room ventilation obscuring vision and frightening the operators who, fearing for their lives, run out of the building.
6. Vendor engineers enter the control room wearing gas masks and manage the shutdown.
No. Nothing like that was envisioned in the PSAR or the FSAR. The utility just got lucky that someone that knew what to do cared enough to do it.
Maybe three years isn’t long enough for licensing a nuclear power plant.
Copy/paste POB .
Nuclear power plants are a very tricky operation to make work correctly. Engineers try to prevent various foreseeable accidents, but there seem to be a whole lot of less foreseeable accidents that take place anyhow. Fukushima was another example of this.
But AI dude, no worries!
Cut out all that blah blah, move people t a 50 km radius and let the bots get the hots!
“Almost a century ago, John Maynard Keynes looked ahead and made predictions a century into the future. He predicted that productivity growth would generate national income output of such proportions that people would no longer have to work. His ultimate prediction that we would not have to work was obviously wrong. But his calculation was correct: productivity rose as much as he predicted. National income expanded by the upper end of the range he forecast. So why do we still need to work? Not even Keynes could have predicted that the fruits of this higher productivity and labour would be so unequally distributed that the majority of the population would still have to work. While a small minority has not been working for a long time – they simply receive coupon payments on their government bonds – most people still have to dedicate their time to earning a living.
Keynes did not see this coming, because the aggregate measures, such as national income, GNP or per capita income, hide the extent of inequality.” ?
https://rwerner.substack.com/p/national-debt-explosion-the-fiscal?r=3otl34&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Speaking of which.
WTF is the lump on Bill Gates face?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAEIPGqvSfK/
Harmless cyst, I would guess.
probably a leftover from his own injections of iron filings so that he can track himself on his 5g masts.
or something
I sent a pic of him to a friend April 25, he had two then.
because we eat by converting energy resources into food.
when energy was in abundant surplus, we worked less and less to obtain the necessary sustenance to live.
we appeared to get more and more, for less and less–that has been our great keynesian delusion.—he didnt know what was going on either.
now we are in a time when that surplus is in steep decline.
so we collectively have to work harder to obtain what we need to survive.
the lucky ones among us havent arrived at the crunch point yet, where no matter how hard we work, we cannot get enough for survival.—the unlucky ones are there already.
it’s known as having to run faster and faster to stand still.
stop running and you fly backwards into oblivion.
That is an excellent summary of where we are now. This is why young people, especially, are having such a difficult time.
Political leaders realize that their economies need the cheap labor of immigrants to replace the children that they themselves aren’t having. This cheap labor helps power the system.
“because we eat by converting energy resources into food.”
True, and by around 1000 fold, the biggest energy input to the food supply is sunlight.
er
i hate to point out the obvious Keith
but sunlight is the ONLY input to food sources and supply.
you really should do yourself a favour and dump that calculator—i rarely use one.
“but sunlight is the ONLY input to food sources and supply.
Norm, you know better and rap on about the fossil fuel issue all the time.
At the present, much fossil energy goes into the food supply, but to my surprise, it is smaller by a factor of much more than 1000 compared to the sunlight that comes down on crop lands.
sheesh Keith
i only persist because of the intellect you have–(or used to have)
i do wonder sometimes if youve hit the ”seventh age’—we all get there in the end, if a local bus or assassin doesnt do the job sooner.
I use OFW and other writing to deter that final date with destiny.
Where dyou think fossil fuel comes from?
and take away the fossil fuel issue—and we do not have any further issues
Without fossil fuel inputs, very much more human energy is needs as an input to farming, and total output is a whole lot less.
“Without fossil”
That’s certainly true.
But I wonder if we make or could make enough alcohol from corn to replace the liquid fuels used on farms? I think diesel from coal will come first, but I wonder. At once time farmers grew the fuel they used in fodder for horses. Took IIRC 25% of the area they farmed, but since then yields have gone way up.
Alcohol is not very dense as a fuel. I think the way that we make it now requires a fossil fuel system. Certainly, making the farm equipment that runs on alcohol requires fossil fuels. We then need a way to get all of the nutrients back in the soil. If farm animals eat the corn, their manure can help fertilize the farm.
‘…i hate to point out the obvious Keith..’
Ha, no you don’t, you love to do that!
We all do!
you are very wrong.
at that level i feel embarrassed that it is necessary to do it.
mostly i ignore it.
Keith has a high intellect.
we all lose it in the end.
i take no pleasure in pointing out that someone can’t do what they used to 40 years ago.–this why i fight it at the gym several times a week—i did my fast mile swim today….climbed a castle wall on sunday to get a photo i wanted.
one day soon i wont be able to. Lots of stuff I cant do now that i used to.
missing the point that fossil fuel is fossilised sunlight can only be described as sad.
Growing debt can temporarily act like growing energy, but it doesn’t have lasting power. Eventually, it creates a bubble and collapses. This seems to be the direction we are headed.
Zelensky warns of ‘nuclear disaster’ in UN address
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Wednesday warned the United Nations General Assembly that Russia is preparing for potential attacks on nuclear power plants.
Zelensky said he recently was given intelligence that Russia was “aiming to disconnect the plants from the power grid with the help of satellites” as part of a larger strategy to bombard Ukraine’s energy grid during the winter months.
“Russia is getting images and detailed information about the infrastructure of our nuclear power plants,” he said in his speech before the U.N., warning any attack “could lead to a nuclear disaster.”
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4898491-zelensky-nuclear-russia-ukraine-war-un-general-assembly/
Zelensky is no more President of Ukraine.
His term has expired 5 months ago.
They neither try to make fake elections.
In name of whom he is speaking exactly?
Zelensky desperately wants the help of the US, even though the US is not capable of giving much/any additional help.
Russia has a lot of ways of fighting war that we don’t consider.
The fake boobs of a local Slovak politician failed:
https://domov.sme.sk/c/23376236/silikon-sa-jej-dostal-az-do-uzlin-z-implantatov-zostali-pokrkvane-gulky.html
https://www.topky.sk/cl/100535/1923691/Poslankyna-v-Bratislave-ukazala-bozske-telo-po-cviceni–FOTO-Bradavkami-sposobila-zmiesane-reakcie
Silicone got into her nodes, the implants fell apart into small balls
Another black eye for Western Values. What we need is better technology.
On average, a ChatGPT query needs nearly 10 times as much electricity to process as a Google search. In that difference lies a coming sea change in how the US, Europe, and the world at large will consume power — and how much that will cost. –Goldman Sachs
The detail is that wind and solar are not up to providing this extra electricity. It needs to come from something else: nuclear, or more fossil fuel consumption.
Wind and solar are too intermittent; they raise overall electricity costs too much. In practice, they are much less helpful than hoped.
‘In 2020, the information and communication technology sector as a whole, including data centers, networks and user devices, consumed about 915 TWh of electricity, or 4-6% of all electricity used in the world.’ google search..
I believe that self driving cars are a no-go because of the extra energy required.
The smarter the car the dumber the driver.
The smarter the phone the….
The safer the jab the …..
The greater the power the lesser the morality
Trolley buses were the best use of electricity for transport IMHO; noisy, messy, busy, cheap, recyclable; my guess is that many city planning issues would not have arisen if these bad boys were still dominating city streets. Cars and SUV’s be dammed.
This goes with what lower level Russian officials have said before.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putin-lowers-threshold-nuclear-weapons-use-dramatic-warning-aimed-nato
Putin Lowers Threshold Of Nuclear Weapons Use In Dramatic Warning Aimed At NATO
There once was a boy who yelled wolf again and again.
What red lines? Show me where Putin laid out red lines? All of the red lines crossed by USA+NATO+Ukraine that I am aware of were announced as red lines by they themselves.
In my view, these are the guidelines that create the framework to cry wolf.
In other words this explains when Russia will cry wolf.
It says that Russia will cry wolf not only when the wolf is in town, but also if it is on the hill.
Then, when Russia will eventually cry wolf, it means Russia will counter attack
In your camp Ivan and Student . Putin is in the driver seat .
Keep the rest of the world confused. The rest of the world is short on weapons, so its ability to fight back is low.
There was once an idiot who pulled a Lion by the ear and a nation that used up it’s own resources in wanton living
His patient approach was on display during Minsk I and II.
He knew Russia was not ready to launch the SMO, but it was always on the table and eventually he did. Russia has proven its ability to sustain an effort well above what was expected by NATO toss-ers.
We are probably moving closer to action rather than words, but again, I don’t believe Putin will be rushed.
All in good time my pretties!
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/258b7393-8d4c-422c-b985-bd86e03b8750
From one armchair not-expert living far far away!
The hangmans noos etightens…total control
Israel to consider limiting ownership of precious metals
New report shows Israeli prime minister looks to make sweeping monetary changes in fight against illicit money use
According to Ynetnews.com, a meeting will be held with Finance Minister Bazalel Smothrich, Bank of Israel Governor Prof. Amir Yaron, Prime Minister’s Office Director-General Yossi Shelley and top officials from the Tax Authority and Task Force for Combating Crime in the Arab Community.
Part of the proposal suggests limiting private ownership of large amounts of cash alternatives such as gold, silver, and coins.
Netanyahu has also asked the group to consider phasing out the 200-shekel banknote, the largest denomination bill in circulation.
Generating tax revenue
Economists predict that by fighting black market money, Israel could increase its tax revenues by $24 to $31 billion by 2030. Under the plan, exchanging 200-shekel notes would be permitted within a short time frame, which is expected to prevent criminal organizations from disposing of the money.
As another safeguard for citizens, a “voluntary disclosure” campaign would permit tax evaders to avoid prosecution by declaring previously unreported income
Dee, Dee Dee..same old song and dance.
The Joos know how to tie the knot
But strangely, no mention of limiting ownership of crytocurrency.
Makes one wonder…
interest rates are going negative get ready for skyrocketing prices
Chews not allowed to hide their wealth with gold and diamonds. WTF!
Exactly my thoughts, Ed! A story I’ll never forget as a kid was told to me by a Mister Berman escaping from the Nannies in Germany by a horse drawn carriage. Seems they were hot 🔥 on their trail and needed a place as a cover overnight.
There was a house they approached and the owner rushing out to send them off and possible death in the extermination camps. What saved them was their fathers wood keepsake box with a hidden bottom of gold coins.
Once that was seen, the homeowner smiled and took them to safety in the barn.
There is the price of gold and there is the value of gold.
This clearly means a lot of people are fleeing.
Gail , your earlier post was ” Ate we in the 1920” . Some posts from POB .
HHH
Ignored
09/24/2024 at 9:54 pm
China is cutting every interest they can find. Talking of setting up a facility that allows borrowing from their central bank to buy stocks.
My guess is within a few months they’ll be cutting every interest rate they can find again.
Their M1 money supply has fallen off a cliff. Monetary stimulus doesn’t work unless you have an expanding energy supply. You can drop interest rates all you want. The energy has to be there in order for loans to be made into the actual economy.
Interest rates cuts are a huge sign that not enough borrowing is taking place. The lower rates go the tighter monetary conditions are. When an economy is booming lots loans are being made and interest rates are higher as monetary conditions are loose.
HHH
Ignored
09/25/2024 at 5:48 am
It doesn’t matter how many times they or you say lower interest rates are stimulus. The facts on the ground are the market sets interest rates lower due to growth and inflation expectations heading lower. It’s a tightening of credit conditions that lead to lower rates. And central banks follow what the market does.
The 2 year heads lower the Fed cuts. It’s not stimulus no matter how many times it’s repeated. In theory it sounds like lower rates are stimulus but in reality lower rates are tightening of monetary conditions therefore rates fall and the Fed follows.
Lots of credit creation, borrowing, and higher interest rates equals easy money. You’ve been conditioned to believe something that just isn’t true.
Easy money was sending out checks to everyone so they could spend money well beyond their means. It equaled higher interest rates and economic activity. Artificial of course. Now reality is setting in.
Oil prices are heading lower because growth and inflation expectations are heading lower. Because monetary conditions are tightening. Money isn’t easy.
Continued .
HHH
Good points it’s counter intuitive to traditional training. But too many people think the Fed has some control but actually doesn’t. The stimulus checks led to inflation because the supply is constrained. It’s not inflation but rather a supply side shock. China is fighting deflation which is a no confidence call at the bank. So money has to be created and if the private sector can’t do it the public sector will.
I think we’re in a similar situation as the late 1920s the primary energy source coal derived from coal peaked in 1927 and crashed the global economy. As the price of coal fell because of loss of critical mass the system sank deeper and deeper into a depression. The only thing that saved it was the transition to oil that inflated the economy by allowing exponential growth to continue.
Since then there have been three economic shocks to the oil based economy. First was the 1970s US conventional oil peak. This led the western world into recession into the 1980s . Then the peak in global conventional oil in 2005 that resulted in the GFC of 2008. And now the final crisis that is the result of the 2018 global peak of all oily stuff. Since we’re allowed to call anything a barrel of oil now a days.
Seems to me we should expect a very similar situation to 1929 market crash and depression. The manufacturer to the world then was the US. Today the manufacturer to the world is China. The British Pound was the reserve currency and today it’s the US Dollar.
The problem is there is no next energy system to grow the economy at an exponential rate if at all. So this time debt defaults can’t be resolved with new lending.
China has refineries going bankrupt builders going bankrupt steel mills going bankrupt. Germany is losing VW etc etc It’s really a global depression being propped up by unsustainable debt growth. Something has to snap very soon.
Very interesting quote.
I think that there may be a lot of truth to what commenter HHH says.
We know with oil, prices tend to be high when demand is high. Low oil prices become a major problem because they make prices too low for producers.
I am wondering if the situation is somewhat similar with interest rates. Central banks follow the signals they see, but they are really signals the market is giving them. Our intuition on rates may also be wrong.
what if they dropped interest rates into negative territory would bau continue ?
Only if the economy was contracting already. We saw that Europe did some of that a few years ago.
“Examining the relationship between 3-month and 10-year benchmark rates and nominal GDP growth over half a century in four of the five largest economies we find that interest rates follow GDP growth and are consistently positively correlated with growth. If policy-makers really aimed at setting rates consistent with a recovery, they would need to raise them. We conclude that conventional monetary policy as operated by central banks for the past half-century is fundamentally flawed. Policy-makers had better focus on the quantity variables that cause growth.
Reconsidering Monetary Policy: An Empirical Examination of the Relationship Between Interest Rates and Nominal GDP Growth in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800916307510
https://youtu.be/1PQTZeCLZUQ?t=423
Dmitry Orlov claims the BRICS currency/unit will be 40% gold and 60% a currency basket.
Orlov has become a good lapdog of the Putin regime
The cold truth is the Brics currency, if it can be established, will be led by China, which has taken an American style banking policy.
I think Orlov has a lot of good insights. Particularly, the insight that the US was the one who blew up the pagers and walkie-talkies, to paint the Israelis as terrorists.
“the US was the one ”
That seems unlikely to me. Something like that would leak and think of all the things that have leaked in the last few years.
The BRICs currency would be used only to facilitate inter-country trade. China, Russia, timbuktu can do anything they want in their own internal economy.
You sound dismissive. If it has partial gold backing, I imagine that to be a big plus for a lot of third parties. To me the bigger issue is whether they can actually get act together enough to do it at all in a workable way.
I think he is salaried. That is not the same as a lap dog. He does not work and lives off the money he has accumulated, plus this.
Correct drb . Orlov has a subscribers only blog plus he has royalties from the several books he has written . He is financially independent .
But I think some of the opinions he offers are scripted. Like the Ukraine war would last a week, or China’s economy is strong, or . And he did not write them.
Interesting 45 minute video. Many things besides the new currency, which is still very uncertain.
One of the many things Dmitry Orlov says is that it doesn’t matter who is elected to be US President, the outcome will be the same.
Macron at one time had a good relationship with Russia, but he reported the results of confidential discussions with the Russians to the press. Russia will have nothing to do with him in the future. Macron needs to keep a good relationship with Russia because France buy processed uranium from Russia. Without this processed uranium, it is “lights out” for France.
Dmitry says that history shows that when countries have tried to invade Russia, it usually ends badly. Unconditional surrender.
Palace Coup in the White House happened after Russia sent a memo saying, “If American war materials are used to attack Russias, this is a list of US assets that we intend to hit.” With that in hand, the powers that be (Obama and company), said, “Enough. We cannot keep escalating.” Blinken got sidelined at the same time Biden stepped down. There is no weapon that the US has that Russia cannot shoot down.
Furthermore, if Russia shoots down a US-made rocket, it will also shoot down the US factory that made that rocket. Neocon story of “Let’s weaken Russia,” is done. The leaders of the West know that we cannot do this. Neocons are suicidal, but others are not.
Houthis in Yemen have enough members who can read Russian that they have been able to make their own bombs, using Russian approaches. In fact, they can use them well enough to hit targets in Israel, if they choose to.
US military is in a terribly decrepit state. Also, few tankers to delivering fuel. Only tanker in the Middle East recently ran aground. Other countries are moving forward, while the US is going backward in ability to fight a major war.
If the war against Gaza ends, Netanyahu is going to jail. The war is not going very well. No one wants to trade with Israel, based on its genocidal actions. Port of Iraq, which is the biggest port that Israel has on the Red Sea, is bankrupt and closed. What choice does Israel have, except to enlarge the problem, and draw others in? Israel’s army is worn down. Wants to get Americans to come in and help.
Dmitry speculates that the pager and walkie-talkie explosions were really US orchestrated. Israel had to pull troops out of Gaza to respond. Dmitry thinks the attacks surprised the Israelis as much as anyone else. The only ones who were warned were the American doctors at the American hospital in Beirut. They were ordered to surrender their pagers before the attack. This would make sure that the Israelis are painted as terrorists. Americans now have an excuse not to help Israel, if they are terrorists. He expects this war with Lebanon will end badly for Israel, worse than the war with Lebanon in 2006.
The pager/walkie-talkie attack was years in planning, and Israel lessened US reaction to the terrorism it was by warning the American University hospital. Hezbollah meanwhile had its leaders discontinue using these devices years ago.
Maybe it is not exactly like Dmitry Orlov says, but it is much probable that Israel didn’t act alone and maybe even partially.
It seems to me that they have been trapped, due to their fundamentalist approach, which goes to the direction of being not rational.
Maybe it happened in a similar way when one shows a big cake to a child to make him steal it:
“take it. If you take it now, I promise I will not say to anyone and it will be all yours”
One of the issues is that governments may penalized car companies that try to back out of the EV market. I would expect that this to especially a problem if Democrats are in power.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/morgan-stanleys-jonas-downgrades-gm-ford-other-autos-chinese-supply-rising-delinquencies
Morgan Stanley’s Jonas Downgrades GM, Ford, Other Autos, On Chinese Supply, Rising Delinquencies
Shares of auto names were under pressure to start the day on Wednesday after Morgan Stanley’s Adam Jonas cut a majority of the sector in a broad note explaining new risks in a note out overnight.
Jonas downgraded names like GM, Ford, Rivian, Magna International, and Phinia, while upgrading dealers like AutoNation. . .
“U.S. inventories are on an upward slope, while vehicle affordability (with near-record high average transaction prices and >$720 monthly payments) remains out of reach for many households. Credit losses and delinquencies continue to trend upward for less-than-prime consumers,” he continued.
“China’s two-decade-long growth engine has not stalled—it has reversed, . . .
Jonas mentioned affordability concerns in the U.S. market, claiming it is highly stretched, with inventory levels now back to pre-COVID norms. Japanese, Korean, and electric vehicle (EV) brands are capturing market share, squeezing out others. U.S. manufacturers bear the brunt of the pressure with falling prices, weaker product mix, rising costs, and shrinking market share, he said. . .
He added that OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] are cutting back on EV programs but could face future financial penalties and enforcement actions.
LOL, the average consumer has a tough already trying to make car payments on ICE vehicles with MSRP continuing to raise. And they expect people to pay more for an EV? I saw a recent commercial for an EV Hummer. You can lease it for $849 a month on a 36 month contract and you need to put down approx $9K.
Only bureaucrats can come up with that idea. An idea that will put auto makers on the brink of bankruptcy when no one will be able to afford those vehicles. But hey maybe that’s where 15 min cities come into play.
Walking to groceries and shutting down all industries.
Gas for cars is a lot of energy usage that can power your home for two months.
All of the musings of the cornucopians are little more than a refusal to accept death, nothing more.
The point of no return was crossed long ago. When it took place can be debated, but by 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s plan to seize Russia’s resource was stopped, the point of no return had arrived. Whatever being done in Ukraine is just trying to stop the tide, not to reverse the situation.
A complete breakdown, no matter how much the optimists might want to deny it, is inevitable, since despite of some hopefuls, there are no starships going anywhere. No power satellites. And no plans announced anywhere to shoot them.
“But they are progressing fast”
Yes, fast, but not fast enough to overturn the breakdown.
By now the starships and the power satellites and whatever contraptions the eggheads could have conjured up should have been operational, but none of them are there, except in the imaginations of optimists.
Meanwhile worldwide financial crisis are escalating and the power to control the gold price is now being diminished every year as the zones who do not give a crap about dollars are expanding.
It was a race between the progress and how long the dollar could have held, and it all comes down to Australia – if Australia decides to trade its resources with RMB then it is over for the West, power satellites and starships or not. The Hordes win, and the Collective West is destroyed, and all we get are empty blueprints for something which will never materialize.
I am not sure I have run into this view before:
“– if Australia decides to trade its resources with RMB then it is over for the West, power satellites and starships or not.”
RMB = Chinese currency
You apparently think that gold will save whichever country has it, and that Australia can extract vast amounts more, with the financial incentives. I have not researched Australia’s gold resources. Energy resources seem more important.
Supply lines can be shorter, if they don’t go over the Atlantic or Pacific.
Gold can’t save a country. It will just reduce the damage somewhat.
Australia is the 2nd largest gold producer in the world
https://www.goldindustrygroup.com.au/gold-overview
And since it has smaller population its energy problems are less acute.
Australia is very spread out. It can’t manufacture much itself. Australia’s oil supplies are low. It seems to have trouble keeping its lights on, even though it exports natural gas.
We have only 19 days of diesel supply, it pretty much all comes from Singapore. So there’s that.
Republic of the Philippines
Department of Agriculture
Bureau of Soils and Water Management
Cloud seeding operations save crops in times of draught
https://www.bswm.da.gov.ph/cloud-seeding-operations-save-crops-in-times-of-drought/
Now one needs to explain in a scientific way, without any doubt, that these operations don’t have any consequences also on nearby areas (if not also on distant ones)
I have heard that cloud seeding has been done for a long time. There are a lot of things we don’t understand.
I would not be surprised if we will discover that climate change is partially due to cloud seeding and similar experiments made for long time around the world.
Climate is always changing.
U.S. and Canada to Discuss Claims Over Oil-Rich Arctic Seabed
“The United States and Canada are expected to announce they have agreed to begin negotiations over overlapping territorial claims in the Arctic, an area that has drawn increased interest from China and Russia, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing an anonymous source with knowledge of the matter.
The United States and Canada are disputing the Arctic seabed in parts of the Beaufort Sea which is believed to hold huge oil reserves. The two neighbors and allies have overlapping claims over the seabed north of Alaska, Yukon, and Northwest Territories.
The two countries are expected to announce the start of talks to finally delineate their maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea.
The original source of dispute is a wording of an Anglo-Russian treaty from 1825, the rights of which were later inherited by the U.S. and Canada later in the 19th century.
The U.S. and Canada are now looking to work collaboratively to negotiate and clarify the maritime boundary in the Beaufort Sea.
The agreement comes at a time in which both China and Russia are looking at Arctic territories as they seek to explore more resources and trade routes in the Arctic.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) estimated more than a decade ago that the entire area north of the Arctic Circle could contain an estimated 90 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil, in the first such assessment back in 2008. The area north of the Arctic Circle is also considered to hold 1,670 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas. A total of 44 billion barrels of technically recoverable natural gas liquids in 25 geologically defined areas are thought to have potential for petroleum, according to USGS.
However, Arctic drilling has been a very sensitive topic in recent years and many oil companies are unwilling to take chances to explore for petroleum in harsh environments where governments could pull the plug on oil and gas drilling.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/US-and-Canada-to-Discuss-Claims-Over-Oil-Rich-Arctic-Seabed.html
The arctic seabed is one of the last areas that hasn’t been explored.
One of the issues is getting the price of oil and of natural gas high enough to make these resources profitable, if they really are available. Natural gas is normally very low priced compared to oil, so it is especially a problem.
We do know we have a lot of heavy oil that could be extracted but has not, because the price never rises high enough. This is really an EROEI issue. Getting oil and natural gas out of the arctic cheaply enough can be thought of as an EROEI issue as well.
” a lot of heavy oil that could be extracted but has not, because the price never rises high enough”
The problem with heavy oil is that it needs to be heated to get it to flow. I spent some time in Bakersfield a long time ago where the oil field was covered with boilers used to inject steam.
Again, this is a place where intermittent solar energy would work just fine to heat the heavy oil.
“Again, this is a place where intermittent solar energy would work just fine to heat the heavy oil.”
Very clever.
Dennis L.
Perhaps. A person would think that intermittent solar energy could work on the heavy oil in Venezuela, also. The question is whether the oil is close enough to the surface for this to work. I visited Chevron’s heavy oil field near Bakersfield. Chevron had definitely reduced the amount of heat needed, as much as they could.
Oil companies are using solar power plus batteries to run some of their monitoring equipment.
It seems likely that it solar power would heat out the heavy oil sufficiently, they would figure it out. They need heat, not electricity, per se.
“heavy oil in Venezuela,”
Certainly it would work there. But nobody is going to make the investment with the current government.
“close enough to the surface ”
I can’t think of any reason depth would make a difference.
“they need heat, not electricity, per se.”
True. But if you can tolerate interruptions and have excess solar with no other use, it may be the least expensive way to get the heavy oil out.
Another use of electricity to get oil might be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shale_oil
Really cheap solar applied to oil recovery has not been considered much because low cost solar has just become available.
This is different from “tight oil from shale.”
Many people confuse the two. It is always cited as having a very low EROEI. But if very cheap intermittent energy is available, it theoretically might be an option. There are a lot of details, however, and it might not really work–be too expensive relative to the price it could be sold for, for example.
‘too expensive”
Right, economics are the big factor in a project being feasible. (After the chemistry and physics.)
The thing which might have changed enough to reconsider these project is if you can use excess renewable energy to power the extraction process.
Economics largely incorporates energy calculations.
I keep tabs on the gold price as a measure of belief in the dollar status quo and TPTB ability to manage financial flows.
https://goldprice.org/
Not looking good lately. Not long ago they could keep it below $2000, but it’s broken out to $2600.
and silver price has broken $30 again
During the Gamestop craze some people attacked silver but the power of JPMorgan was too great at that time
Now it seems JPMorgan has used up much of its arsenal
If Silver breaks it will rise to about $160 since the traditional ratio between gold and silver is usually around 16:1
That means the silver derivatives all go batshit and the camel’s back breaks.
Near and “deer” to my heart, JD, right to repair.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwo3i1s_zKU
Not sure about all this, additionally I support US manufactures who in turn support US suppliers how make jobs.
But, as I have mentioned, there are farmers who have say 600 acres who have given up farming as the cost of repairs is greater than their profit, well sort of. It is very expensive to repair and maintain the equipment. The limiting factor is time.
Dennis L.
Maybe the Amish will fix them, using some religious excuse to justify their actions.
Yet Joel Salatin and Gabe Brown in resp. Virginia and N. Dakota seem to be profitable, farming regeneratively.
So does Ben Davies in the UK, regenben.com.
Salatin and Davies both have about 500 acres. I think Brown may have more.
That’s why Joel instead makes his money selling courses, no?
Gabe Brown also, and he is quite dear. But one problem with reg. ag. is that most farmers are not smart enough. Another is that ultimately these guys make a lot of money selling at college towns farmers markets.
Nothing wrong with that, is there?
Ones time and effort is worth something.
Even clergy and ministries collect money!
Salatin has much offered for no charge.
Seems much of the Industrial corporate agriculture is supported by governmental policy and support.
>> Nothing wrong with that, is there?
There certainly is, if the claim is that the farming was profitable. If it’s reasonably profitable, one would scale it up oneself. It seems the money is better in selling courses to dumb urbanites who think they’ll make money by farming in concrete city centers.
Arab Gulf Producers Are in Need of Much Higher Oil Prices
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Arab-Gulf-Producers-Are-in-Need-of-Much-Higher-Oil-Prices.html
“However, as OilPrice.com contributor Irina Slav has noted, Saudi Arabia can simply slam the brakes on Vision 2030, maybe turn it to Vision 2040 or even Vision 2050 if oil markets refuse to cooperate.
But Vision 2030 is not solely to blame here. The IMF estimates that Bahrain and Algeria require oil prices of $125.7 per barrel to achieve budgetary equilibrium; Iraq $93.8, and Kuwait $83.5 per barrel to avoid deficits. Of the six GCC nations, only the UAE and Oman are expected to record a surplus”
No wonder Saudi Arabia is cutting production: “Saudi Arabia now needs oil prices more than $20/barrel higher than current levels to balance its books.”
I am doubtful that the real problem is Vision 2030, when it comes to balancing its books. The problem has to do with its high population, the lack of arable land (with enough water), and the need to create jobs for people. Also, food subsidies for those without adequate jobs. The problem exists, regardless of plan to handle these issues.
Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030: performance so far
At the halfway point of Vision 2030, how is MBS’s master plan faring against its own objectives?
The results paint a mixed picture, with some targets smashed while others still seem a way off. But whichever way you look at it, in 2030, Saudi Arabia will be a very different place from how the Kingdom was in 2016.
The top successes:
Non-oil revenues have more than doubled, reaching 50% of real GDP for the first time ever in 2023
The private sector’s contribution to GDP has reached 45%
The PiF has already surpassed its target of 2.7 trillion SAR assets under management
Female labour force participation has beaten the target, reaching 35%
Umrah pilgrims numbered 13.56 million in 2023, considerably higher than the 10 million aimed for
Home ownership has increased from 47% to 67%
The top areas for improvement
As of Q4 2023, FDI inflow has only reached SAR13 billion, a far cry from the SAR375 billion targeted by 2030
Non-oil exports are at 15% of non-oil GDP against a target of 550%
The defence sector is still overly reliant on external partners for its weaponry
The unemployment rate still sits one per cent above its target
The NEOM project will also likely undershoot the grand expectations it first raised, as the projected costs begin to bite budgets. The centrepiece ‘Line’, a linear glass city initially set to accommodate a population of nine million stretched over 105 miles of desert, has reportedly been scaled down to 300,000 people over a mile and a half.
Vision 2030’s architects can notch some significant wins at the half-time bell. They still have over half a decade to make up the FDI shortfall.
Estimated Saudi real ‘growth’ for 2025 is 6%?
https://x.com/TEMIT/status/1835932379703079068
Good luck!
A sure sign that the hegemony of the US is disappearing.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/red-sea-maritime-chokepoint-disruption-persist-2025-top-shipping-exec-warns
Red Sea Maritime Chokepoint Disruption To Persist Into 2025, Top Shipping Exec Warns
It reminds one of the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline between Russia and Germany.
We can expect to see the sabotage of energy infrastructure – one way or another – as conflict escalates in the world. Pipes, Straits, it is all energy infrastructure.
‘Sanctions’ are another kind of sabotage.
Russia and UKR are each attacking the energy infrastructure of the other. It is an obvious move to make in conflicts.
Sabotage by states may be what brings the system down. Financial collapse is a possible catalyst of system collapse and the effects of conflict are others.
The energy system and the financial system are not discreet systems that exist in isolation from humans and their propensity to conflict.
There probably are some studies somewhere on the deliberate destruction of energy systems in conflicts.
It may be that inadequate energy to go around will lead to conflicts and they in turn will lead to the destruction of energy infrastructure and generally to the halt of energy flows and to collapse.
If UKR can do Nord Stream and the Houthis can do the Straits then the prospects look bad. It is probably not going to be that difficult to sabotage energy systems.
I laughed recently when I saw an article suggesting that USA build gas pipelines across the Atlantic to Europe for ‘energy security’. Like those big and totally exposed pipes right across the Atlantic would not be sitting ducks for sabotage.
‘Security.’ Conflict puts an end to that.
No answers from those who spread hopium at here
When reality hits such kind of delusions tend to disappear quite fast
You raise many good points, including:
Good point: “Sanctions are another kind of sabotage.”
If UKR can do Nord Stream and the Houthis can do the Straits then the prospects look bad. It is probably not going to be that difficult to sabotage energy systems.
‘Security.’ Conflict puts an end to that.
UKR didn’t “do” Nord Stream. The USA did that, and Russia owes America one for that.
The trust horizon is shrinking at pace.
Enshiti-fication, non-delivery, product substitution etc etc will mean we won’t need this straight for too much longer.
Larry Wilkerson on Dialogue Works addresses the US position in energy, climate change and debt in say the last twenty minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oBZqPEGOpo
I find him thoughtful and seems to be a very reasonable man.
He states in the last five minutes that the US is going to need to adjust downward in the face of reality, economy is mentioned, debt of Federal Reserve is mentioned.
It is a summary from an influential man of what we have discussed and observed here.
He sees the problems, he sees some transition solutions, he addresses climate change and believes it is a major factor we will face.
Not proselyzing, most of you here laugh at a cubic mile of Pt. I do not see any alternative which is possible given our current engineering technology.
That said, we don’t know what AI will find/invent.
Two technologies which give hope, Starship and AI.
It is going to be bumpy and soon sitting around a keyboard will become a much more intense search for how one keeps the lights on and the hearth warm.
We will not solve these problems with tomorrow’s solutions.
Some here watch Alex Christoforou and his news/travelogue. What I notice is the lack of people and the closed stores, venues. Also, much of the infrastructure seems worn. This seems to be the case in much of the world as of late.
Dennis L.
not that theres much point in saying it dennis, but AI will invent nothing
AI is not–repeat not—a physical entity
it is NOT capable of physical action of any kind, only what we direct it to do, in terms of moving electrons around—that is NOT the same as moving physical objects around.
you have intelligence dennis
but
no matter how hard you think, you will never move the smallest physical object . (try it—your brain is far more powerful than any form of artifial intelligence.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNiVB5XV99k
Check this out Norman.
Read Eric Chaisson’s book, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, published in 2002. All of the Universe moves in the direction of added complexity. This seems to happen as evolution takes place.
Also read Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe published in 2003, by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. The Earth may be unique in the Universe.
Interesting, now get them in space and move manufacturing off spaceship earth.
I have a fair amount of land in crp, there are now monarch butterflies as well as bird flocks in the prairie grass.
Our spaceship is stressed and it is the only one we have.
Dennis L.
They will first conquer the earth since it is easier. Algorithm.
“AI will invent nothing”
I don’t know why not. 15 or 20 years ago there was a program that invented a whole stack of known circuit inventions and went on to invent a bunch of never before seen new ones. I would look around and find it, but Norm never pays any attention to counter examples of his restricted world view.
Automated Engineering could be successful. Physical reality gives you a way to filter out the bull…oney that AI likes to generate. It is an area we have fairly good understanding and good models.
If we could have spent the money wasted in Ukraine on developing automated engineering for productive nano systems we might have found a way to provide a lot of material goods in a sustainable way. (Powered by sunlight and made mostly of carbon.)
There still might be time, but it is really late in the game.
Dennis why is it so hard for you to accept that collapse is the only outcome? There is no alternative. Just like we all die. Plan and simple. At a certain point all this ends. A logical mind can see this.
The first question to ask this new AI is can we avoid collapse of civilisation and a return to most like hunter gather or some agrarian future. If it answers yes then you know that it is not able to think. It is just repeating its programmers rhetoric.
Its first task should be – solve the diesel issue.
“Dennis why is it so hard for you to accept that collapse is the only outcome? There is no alternative. ”
Dennis is not the only one who thinks there are alternatives to collapse. Most of the people I know are expecting things to get much better as technology advances. They are really smart people like Ray Kurzweil, Eric Drexler, Max More, Hal Finney, Robert Freitas, Ben Goertzel, Robin Hanson, Jaron Lanier,, Hans Moravec, Ralph Merkle, Marvin Minsky, Martine Rothblatt, Bruce Sterling, and Eliezer Yudkowsky just to name some of the ones I know.
“Just like we all die.”
That too is not certain. There are around 4000 signed up for cryonics and a few hundred in liquid nitrogen.
“The first question to ask this new AI is can we avoid collapse of civilisation and a return to most like hunter gather or some agrarian future.
We are in an agrarian time right now. 1000 times as much energy comes down on crop land as all other sources.
” If it answers yes then you know that it is not able to think.”
If you think there is no solution and an AI finds one or more, they only thing that shows is that it is smarter then you.
“Its first task should be – solve the diesel issue.”
Sheesh, you don’t need AI to do that, PV and coal will make all the diesel you want. Cheap enough PV and you can make diesel out of water and CO2 from the air. But an AI might find that you don’t need diesel at all to grow and move crops around. Or it might find that people (with a few modifications) can run on electric power.
Show me the exact numbers Keith where that economically works. It is delusional. If it worked we would be doing it in droves. To ramp everything up requires a massive ramp up in diesel and all the minerals we dig up.
We are going over the cliff right now but dreams will keep people going. I am happy to place a bet with you that Ray Kurzweil will die and never become his desired silicon being as it were.
Lets check back in, in a couple of years and see if we are any closer to solving our energy woes.
“Show me the exact numbers Keith where that economically works. ”
I have posted a rough analysis here before. Do you understand enough physics, chemistry, industrial engineering and economics that you could understand a more detailed explanation?
“It is delusional. If it worked we would be doing it in droves.”
By that standard, we would never do anything new. Until very recently it made no sense to use expensive electric power to make cheap oil. The difference is that today electric power has fallen to the insanely low price of $13.50 per MWh. A ton of coal (~$20) and 3 MWh of intermittent electric power will make about 7 bbl of oil.
“I am happy to place a bet with you that Ray Kurzweil will die and never become ”
Are you aware that Ray is signed up for cryonic suspension? Same as I am. Ray, incidentally is 6 years younger than I am. I can’t put any odds on it, but I might make it into the deep future, with or without cryonics.
“energy woes”
What amazed me recently was to look at how much solar energy it takes to feed people. The sunlight that comes down on cropland is about 1000 times as much as all the energy humans use outside of food.
“Are you aware that Ray is signed up for cryonic suspension? Same as I am. Ray, incidentally is 6 years younger than I am. I can’t put any odds on it, but I might make it into the deep future, with or without cryonics.”
yes
He is a person that can’t accept death. Not a single person has been frozen and reanimated. It is but a dream.
I wonder how you will all look when the power goes out because the facility was abandoned or ransacked.
I wish you all the best with it but we are as immortal as we are ever going to get already. That is what kids are for.
“Not a single person has been frozen and reanimated”
Of course not. That requires molecular scale machines unless you want to count 8 cell embryos, in which case you are talking a million or more. Next you are going to say that’s impossible when the whole living world around you is based on exactly such molecular machines.
“That is what kids are for.”
Hmm. How many do you have?
Still interested in making diesel?
I’m interested in the making of diesel, as we so far have the Haru Oni plant that I’ve already been through the number with you on.
At some point we wont have coal nor the ability to transport it to a factory to be made into diesel, then what?
Keith, you and most people don’t get it, we need an entire system operating, not just some bits of it that can appear to get highly technical. The world works on a 6 continent supply chain to make everything in the modern world. It takes enormous and growing quantities of energy to just maintain it. Ore grades of nearly everything are lowering on average, meaning an increasing quantity of energy is needed in just that sector to maintain current levels let alone increase all sorts of equipment to world scale uses.
“then what?”
I am not sure we will need to convert coal to diesel. The technology may bypass this option. I just don’t know. Re transport of the coal, build the plants at the mine mouth. A plant making diesel can certainly transport coal a short distance and the diesel, jet fuel or gasoline can go by pipeline.
“Keith, you and most people don’t get it, we need an entire system operating, not just some bits of it that can appear to get highly technical. ”
I am aware of the complicated system more than most. I think what most people don’t understand is that the system is self adjusting. That’s what money is for as a signal. Far as ore grades declining, true, but we don’t really lack for energy, just lack for collecting it.
A lot of the currently important inputs to industry are like silicon, where there is no shortage.
I’m interested in seeing these mam made molecular machines that will reanimate people but alas it appears that I am having a discussion with someone that just makes stuff up and pretends that they will exist.
Good luck with that Keith. Just as pretty much everything else you have spouted here like space solar is a figment of your imagination.
“someone that just makes stuff up”
I would like being able to take credit for nanotechnology, but I can’t, it was Eric Drexler. I did know him, but that doesn’t count.
“space solar is a figment of your imagination.”
Again, I can’t take credit. I knew Peter Glaser who was the best known proponent of power satellites. I do run a Google group, power satellite economics. CalTech has a $100 million dollar grant to develop power satellites. Unfortunately, I consider their work fraudulent for physics related reasons.
For reasons of microwave optics, power satellites can’t start small. The huge size of the minimum investment is daunting.
we are a mere 10 generations removed from a naked flame society.
we are 5 generations removed from a horse and cart society.
now—for cryo to make any sense whatsoever for that long, we have to enter the world of eternal fantasy, and convince ourselves that:
A….20 generations from now, “they” will have devised some way of reconstituting slush back into a human being
B…”they” will be able to actually keep the lights on for that long. (personally I think 50 years will be pushing it)—let alone keep dead people frozen.
and C…that anyone will be around to care what those cryo containers were actually used for.
this is why i find exchanges with you so intriguing Keith—that such a highly intelligent person can get wrapped up in such BS.
I know a person who signed up for “cryonic suspension”, but just the head, because he couldn’t afford the whole body, at least at the time I knew him.
A.) Even in the best of BAU cases somehow he thinks that this or that company is going to be committed to attaching his old-ass freezer-burned head to a young and healthy body, rather than attaching some younger, fresher head.
B.) He can’t conceive that (as happened in, I think, some funeral home in GA probably along with other places), they won’t just skip out on the electric bill and/or chuck his head out to rot in the back forty and spend his subscription fee at the casino.
C.) If this Frankensteinian horror were actually performed, what would the head perceive? What if it now lived in unending pain, unable to speak?
Prof. running a lab at Tufts, last I knew, but is (imo) a moron.
i know one shouldn’t laff—because it’s someone honestly held viewpoint, and is ultimately harmless—they are after all spending their own money to freeze themselves.
look what the ancient egyptians spent to survive into the afterlife, plus many others after the same thing.
but freezing just your head has to be truly hilarious—can’t help it—sorry.
“just the head”
About half the people signed up for cryonics are neuro preservations If you understand the kind of technology needed to repair what killed them *and* the damage from freezing, restoring a head only case does not look any harder than a whole body case.
As for the rest of your objections, I know the people involved, worked with them, was on the board for a few years, learned enough cardiac surgery to put a few on bypass so they could be perfused with cryoprotectents (to hold down the freezing damage).
They don’t use electric power to keep the patients frozen, it’s liquid nitrogen. They top up the dewars ever week and it would take about two months for them to run out of LN2. If you are in the area, it’s worth visiting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundation
https://www.alcor.org
“Prof. running a lab at Tufts, last I knew, but is (imo) a moron.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cryonicists
He is in an interesting company.
We are all aware of the potential problems. But until life extension gets better, it’s the only way to see the future.
Keith
i wish you wouldnt do this—i find it embarrassing.
(they don’t use electric power they use liquid nitrogen”)
just where do they get liquid nitrogen????
liquid nitrogen wells??
why do i keep imagining a head waking up—looking down, and thinking—”who sold me this stupid idea”?
D. And then what if he died of some head-related issue, like brain cancer or Alzheimer’s? What would be the point of resurrecting a dud head like that?
“I would like being able to take credit for nanotechnology, but I can’t, it was Eric Drexler.”
Eric Drexler was dreamer who proposed molecular machinery that had no basis in actual chemistry.
Nobel prize winner and discoverer of C60, Richard Smalley put Drexler in his place noting how his supposed nanotechnology factories had no place in real science. They ignored chemistry. They were a fanciful, nonscientific dream.
thanks jesse
“no basis in actual chemistry.”
I know chemistry about as well as anyone and have read Drexler’s book Nanosystems. What is the basis of your statement?
Ralph Merkle, one of the guys who invented the encryption methods internet commerce depends on, took Smalley’s comments about nanotechnology apart in detail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Merkle
all these famous names. I used to follow Goertze; and Yudkowsky. Watched lots of videos from someone named Nikolay Danaylov who talked with a lot of people in future tech.
None of these brains had any solutions about the Covid thing which shut down the world for 3 years. And Danaylov has largely disappeared, replaced by Lex Fridman who is better connected.
AI might have ‘invented’ something quite inconsequential, but since we don’t hear more about that, it was probably something we don’t really have to know about.
‘…….he addresses climate change and believes it is a major factor we will face.’
Um, yes, but not for the reasons that those embedded in the narrative spout.
Climate changes, always has, always will because it is a product of a multitude of overt through to subtle influences.
A bit of CO-two at ridiculously low (almost to low for life at points not too far in the past) levels is not a major factor; its probably at .04% in its importance.
Finally, science found that CO-two has always lagged Temperature, at least it did until this point was conveniently buried under an avalanche of woke funding.
‘…and believes it is…’is the key point. He is trained in the cult of new climate science.
There is nothing insightful from this insider.
“Climate changes, always has,”
And has led to mass extinctions?
“ . . . it is these ocean state changes that are
1:02:28 correlated with the great disasters of the past impact can cause extinction but
1:02:35 it did so in our past only wants[once] that we can tell whereas this has happened over
1:02:40 and over and over again we have fifteen evidences times of mass extinction in the past 500 million years
1:02:48 so the implications for the implications the implications of the carbon dioxide is really dangerous if you heat your
1:02:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic to melt if you cause the temperature
1:03:01 gradient between your tropics and your Arctic to be reduced you risk going back
1:03:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen sulfide pulses . . . “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ako03Bjxv70
all of the musings from people like you can be summarized into one single sentence: “I don’t want to die!”
AI won’t find anything which does not exist now. Not in the database.
and, after 2016, anything some people might do is too little, too late anyways.
(Phillip Altman & 2nd Smartest guy substacks)
At last they found it !
A vaccine that ‘accidentally’ kills also the unvaccinated.
Acam2000 for Smallpox recommended for Monkeypox.
“5.1 Serious Complications
Serious complications that may follow either primary or revaccination with ACAM2000 include: myocarditis
and/or pericarditis, encephalitis, encephalomyelitis, encephalopathy, progressive vaccinia (vaccinia necrosum),
generalized vaccinia, severe vaccinial skin infections, erythema multiforme major (including Stevens-Johnson
syndrome), eczema vaccinatum, accidental eye infection (ocular vaccinia) which can cause ocular
complications including keratitis and corneal scarring that may lead to blindness, and fetal death in pregnant
women. These complications may rarely lead to severe disability, permanent neurological sequalae and death.
Based on ACAM2000 clinical trials, symptoms of suspected myocarditis or pericarditis (such as chest pain,
raised troponin/cardiac enzymes, or ECG abnormalities) occurred in 5.7 per 1000 primary vaccinations. This
finding includes cases of acute symptomatic or asymptomatic myocarditis or pericarditis or both. Historically,
death following vaccination with live vaccinia virus is a rare event; approximately 1 death per million primary
vaccinations and 1 death per 4 million revaccinations have occurred after vaccination with live vaccinia virus.
Death is most often the result of sudden cardiac death, post-vaccinial encephalitis, progressive vaccinia, or
eczema vaccinatum.
Death has also been reported in unvaccinated contacts accidentally infected by individuals who have been vaccinated
Inside the article and in the attachment to download:
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/final-day-sale-australian-approved
We need to get the population down, one way or another, at least that is the theory.
I find a new vidéo of planet critical on youtube there is a podcast that Louis arnaux speaking about a rapid declining of population because of thermodynamics process. He speak that after 2030 there will be no discreationary investment because of loss in surplus of energy.
https://youtu.be/p9YCzrHugJI?si=qsNtZladXvQxAn0g
all investment, without exception, is a diversion of surplus energy.
There is no point in listening to him. It’s just noise. If he is right about the timeline, it will be for the wrong reasons. He already claimed in 2016 that we’d be out of oil by 2022 based on thermodynamic principles, which shows how well he understands thermodynamics. Now he says 2030, just long enough to get some attention and maybe grant money before he kicks the bucket.
It is hard for us to understand precisely how all of this will unfold. I agree that there is likely to be rapidly declining population, sometime in the near future, but exactly how and when is not clear. Some parts of the world may be relatively spared.
Humans made it through ice ages. They make it through all kinds of changes. Ecosystems are made to evolve and change.
I thought that things would be worse than they are, by now, as did Louis Arnaux. Somehow, the system seems to adjust to keep things going, when it doesn’t seem like it should. Right now, we seem to be headed toward a debt bubble collapse. This may be what pushes the system along. World war would be another way of moving in the direction of collapse. An epidemic would be another possibility.
I agree with you Gail, the main different of current times, in my view, it is that today one needs to be aware that one’s own government is trying to kill its own citizens in undercover ways.
So the ‘confidence pact’ of citizens towards own government is now definitely broken also in ‘modern’ democracies, not only for the so called ‘autarchic’ systems.
“Humans made it through ice ages”
Of course. But humans would not make it through a ‘snowball earth’ event?
“rapidly declining population”
In the clinic seed story I wrote about a 99% decline in population because people stored their bodies and moved into cyberspace. This left a spooky mostly deserted world.
“1 death per million”
Considering that at least half the population caught smallpox and 35% died, that’s a rather good tradeoff.
It’s not the only live vaccine that sometimes injures or kills people, polio vaccine does the same.
Alex is in Malaysia with Alexander. Check out his video for the scenery while he does his update. It is like he takes us all with him on his travels. Gail has also travelled in the far east? Use the wheel icon for HD.
US troops to Middle East. Pavel, temporary FREEZE. Russia & 7 accomplices. Biden, China HOT MIC
I am afraid I have only been to China and Japan in the Far East. In January 2025, I plan to travel to Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, and Viet Nam for a couple of weeks, assuming things work out.
Nice places to travel. Hope you have lots of fun.
That should be fun. Take pictures. Enjoy the food.
Alex starts off by saying that people need to start to follow him on Telegram, Twitter and Rumble. He is not sure YouTube will carry his videos for long.
There is more escalation in the Middle East, unfortunately. A small military group of US soldiers will add to 40,000 soldiers already in Israel.
Alex then talks about Zelensky’s victory demand, wanting immediate entry into NATO. This will supposedly force Russia to capitulate. Bloomberg is talking about this plan, but Kremlin is not going to comment on this plan at this time. Some people believe that the situation is in a stalemate that will eventually lead to a freeze. Ukraine will have to accept a “temporary” loss of territory.
Zelensky is speaking to the UN Security Council today, trying to get support. At the UN, he warned the world the about Russia and what Zelensky called his “Seven accomplices.” These countries were not named. Talked about a second peace summit. Without American technology, Zelensky cannot hit military targets inside Russia, according to the Economist. Washington Post is saying that Russia, Iran, and China are using AI to denigrate Kamala Harris. Wants the world to unite behind Zelensky and take on the Russia and the seven accomplices.
Biden was caught on a hot mike talking about how China is testing the US in the South China Sea. China is looking is after its interests in the South China Sea.
Elon Musk is going to agree to Brazil’s demands. They will purge some files and pay some fines.
The second fellow who tried to take down Trump, someone else should try to take down Trump. Claimed he would pay the person $150,000.
Zerohedge has a related article, about Zelensky’s latest ideas.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/key-ukrainian-stronghold-about-fall-russia-zelensky-touts-victory-plan-dc
Is this the same Zelenski who has banned all election in perpetuity as long as he wants and can keep the war going, and who has exceeded all constitutional authority to run the country as President, …..is he the same guy that is defending democracy in Ukraine?
Right!
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/evs-are-twice-expensive-run-regular-gas-cars-uk-new-data-finds
EVs Are “Up To Twice As Expensive” To Run As Regular Gas Cars In The UK, New Data Finds
Of course, not all people live in residences where they can charge at home, and not all trips are short.
Heh, heh, heh, We got away with it, now eat the plastics as the next evolutionary stage of human development and advancement
CNN
—
California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a lawsuit against ExxonMobil on Monday alleging the company carried out a “decades-long campaign of deception” in which the oil and gas giant misled the public on the merits of plastic recycling.
The complaint accuses the company of using slick marketing and misleading public statements for half a century to claim recycling was an effective way to deal with plastic pollution, according to a press release from Bonta’s office published Monday. It alleges the company continues to perpetuate the “myth” of recycling today.
The case, filed in the San Francisco County Superior Court, seeks to compel ExxonMobil “to end its deceptive practices that threaten the environment and the public,” the statement said.
To end it’s business model? You got to be kidding? OK, then , we won’t admit any quilt and just fine us…win, win for everyone
For starters, we need to know the players on the plastic game board. I suspect far greater amounts wind up in landfills or floating in the ocean than they would lead you to believe. My understanding is that it is simply not economical or practical to recycle most plastics, and that separating out the different kinds based on their chemistry is not as easy as refining the different carbon chains/branches of crude oil i.e., from tar to diesel to kerosene to gasoline to methane.
https://plasticoceans.org/7-types-of-plastic/
Plastics are made with short chain hydrocarbons that have few other uses, apart from burning to make electricity or heat for homes.
We have lived in a world where natural gas is often flared because its selling price is not high enough to cover its extraction cost plus the various other costs involved. Having plastics to make with these hydrocarbons allows for a better overall selling price for a barrel of oil. Thus, plastic sales have been very much desired by oil and gas companies.
But “recycling” makes little sense. Plastics are made with something that is close to a waste product for the oil and gas industry. I am told that the chemistry is not good at all. Mixing types of plastics makes a big problem, as does having pollutants in the mix.
At one point, mixed paper and plastic could be sent to China and other countries for recycling. China stopped accepting such recycling January 1, 2018. Other countries soon followed suit. Even using coal as a fuel, and a low wage structure, recycling mixed waste did not work.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/piling-up-how-chinas-ban-on-importing-waste-has-stalled-global-recycling
Japan has been burning its solid waste for decades now. I found out that Denmark does also. So, at least in some countries, plastics produces electricity.
Since plastics come from petroleum, the logical way to deal with it is to burn them.
It is closer to natural gas than oil that they come from, but you are right about burning them. Europe seems to burn a lot of trash, including plastics.
Is the EV revolution dead?
The truth about the costly complexity.
https://youtu.be/Zjuj1xB_Ze8?si=KJEiEQiRKkjdRYOw
1:34 An interesting data point is that the markets
1:37 where the EVs have traditionally done best are showing the sharpest downturn in sales.
1:42 According to the LA Times, electric vehicle sales in California began trending
1:49 downward this time last year and now has turned negative. 1.2% fewer all electric cars were
1:57 registered in the state in the second quarter of this year compared to the same quarter least year.
2:03 Tesla, which is still by far the sales leader in the state, was hardest hit by this downturn,
2:10 with their sales falling by almost a quarter. According to Kelley Blue Book,
2:16 Tesla sales in the United States overall fell 6.3% in the second quarter of 2024,
2:24 even as total EV sales climbed by 7.3%. Some of this can be explained by increased competition,
2:30 as almost every auto maker now has an EV available in the United States, and some of the drop
2:39 can be explained by a lack of new models out of Tesla, other than the Cybertruck, which sold around
2:43 which sold about 12,000 units over the period in question.
In response to these changes, manufacturers around the world are scaling back their plans for electric vehicle production.
Dealers have been stuck with large inventories of these vehicles because of high prices, poor resale value, and lack of charging stations.
To a large extent, EV sales have been a function of government incentive programs.
A recent McKinsey analysis shows that many early EV purchasers are planning to switch back to internal combustion engines for their next purchases. This especially the case in countries like Australia, Brazil, and the US, where purchasers are likely to take their cars on long journeys. Edmund’s data shows that almost 40% of the EVs that were traded in, were replaced with internal combustion vehicles.
The problem with falling resale values is getting worse. Speaker makes the point that you wouldn’t buy any used product in which the majority of its value is in its battery (laptop or phone). Used EVs have this issue as well.
EVs are expensive to insure because insurance companies greatly reduce their value after even a small accident since they can’t tell whether the battery has been damaged.
Car buyers also worry about the fire risk of charging the vehicles in their garages. This doesn’t really seem to be an issue. But there is an issue of the fires that start being very difficult to put out. The news about Israel remotely exploding pagers and walkie talkies in Lebanon will likely add to the concern about driving EVs.
A large share of the population cannot charge at home.
EVs are a very political product in the US. They are seen by some as virtuous product that will prevent climate change. If Donald Trump is elected president, he likely will undo the tax breaks in place, (but Musk will push Trump the opposite direction).
EVs make terrible rental cars. Gives examples of what goes wrong.
According to Kelly Blue Book, the average new EV car cost $57,000 last year. The average new hybrid car cost was $42,000, and the average “petrol” car cost $27,000. These prices may be skewed by accessories purchased, but the difference is huge.
Some recent changes adopted by the Biden administration make $7,500 tax credit especially advantageous on leased vehicles. Monthly lease payments can be very low. Very low monthly payment deals can get these vehicles off the lots.
[I wonder what happens when the leases are up. Few buyers will want to buy these vehicles at the high resale prices assumed in the leases. Dealers then will be stuck with lots of used EVs that they cannot sell. The fact that lower income buyers often live in apartment buildings without charging facilities means that buyers for these resale vehicles are limited.]
Quantum CEO Claims the Shale Revolution Is Over
“The US shale revolution has run its course,” VanLoh told Bloomberg in an interview. “Clearly the investors have put oil and gas companies on a very short leash. They’ve required a massive amount of the cash flow every year to get returned to shareholders.”
Asked about presidential candidates saying they were going to bring gas prices down, VanLoh said that gas prices are a function of supply and demand, and to lower prices, supply had to increase. “I don’t think the U.S. can really do that,” VanLoh said.
Investor demands for fatter dividends and share buybacks is one reason for his slower supply growth prediction. The other reason is the end of the shale revolution. “We’ve tripled oil production in the last 15 years,” VanLoh said, “and we have doubled natural gas production.”
This has turned the United States into the largest crude oil and natural gas producer in the world, which is an amazing feat, according to Quantum’s CEO. However, he said “there’s not a lot of gas left in the tank,” which would make further production increases of the same size impossible.
Industry insiders have previously shared the same opinion with the media, saying that major production gains were quite unlikely in the current industry environment. One of these was Scott Sheffield, the former CEO of Pioneer Natural Resources, which Exxon acquired last year. Sheffield warned last year that production growth in the shale patch was going to be slower and weaker from now on due to inventory depletion and stricter capital discipline.
Yet last year’s oil output from the shale patch surprised most with growth of 1 million bpd that pretty much no one expected. The gain was attributed to efficiency improvements in extraction technology.”
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Quantum-CEO-Claims-the-Shale-Revolution-Is-Over.html
This report says what we have heard in different forms from other people. No one wants to believe it until they see it.
The EIA continues to forecast oil and natural gas extraction growth. This is the oil forecast from the September version of Short Term Energy Outlook:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/data/browser/#/?v=9&f=M&s=&start=201901&end=202512&linechart=COPRPUS&ctype=linechart&maptype=0&id=
The industry has continued to surprise everyone. In fact, worldwide, production continued to rise more than people who looked at peak oil indications expected it would. It is hard for the EIA and others to suggest that an end could happen soon.
But oil extraction worldwide is down since 2018. Per capita, it is down even more. Oil extraction does come to an end, essentially because prices do not rise high enough.
This is a link to US oil production by month. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS2&f=M
New estimates through July will be out on August 30. At this point, the highest extraction amount was December 2023, and recent points have been a little lower. If production is really higher, we should start actually seeing higher extraction amounts. There have been a lot of 13,300,000 weekly extraction estimates, but we have not been seeing these turn into monthly extraction amounts of the same level.
I think worldwide oil extraction per capita peaked in 1979.
Hydrogen crashed even before takeoff .
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Shell-Abandons-Norways-Hydrogen-Projects-Due-To-Lack-Of-Demand.html
If only Wiley Coyote had a cubic mile of Pt, he would not have fallen off so many cliffs. ACME Co. was the original gaslighter.
Yes if only. If wishes were real, beggars would ride horses.
Starship is the only hope.
If someone has a better idea , I am open for it.
Dennis L.
Don’t you understand? I have been gaslighted all my life, since I first watched Wiley as a child. And every time I would say, with this new contraption, this time, he is going to get the road runner. But no.
dennis is quite correct
with a cubic mile of pt in the ravine, wiley would only have fallen a few inches to land on top of it—instead of falling a vertical mile to the bottom of the ravine.
one has to use logic in these matters
I don’t know if it is better, but the only other project that might push cost to LEO down to $100/kg is Skylon.
This is hardly a surprise!
https://occupypeace.com/
Peace rally this coming Saturday in Kingston, New York. The first capital of New York State. Scott Ritter, Gerald Celente, Ed Pell 🙂
It says,
SEPTEMBER 28TH PEACE AND FREEDOM RALLY
September 28th on the Four Corners of Freedom, John and Crown St. in Kingston, NY
Starting at 3 pm
SPEAKERS
Judge Andrew Napolitano, Scott Ritter, Max Blumenthal, Anya Parampil and Gerald Celente
Why don’t we have more peace rallies?
>> Why don’t we have more peace rallies?
Not just apathy, we realized politicians no longer respond to them. The media cycle is more important.
Good point!
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/california-sues-exxon-alleges-plastics-deception-5ca5c938
California Sues Exxon, Alleges Plastics Deception
State alleges oil company misled public about recyclability of plastics
From Zerohedge. The author is more of a gold bug than I am, but he has some interesting points.
Is World War III Looming?
We can only buy what is available. We need international supply chains to maintain imports from around the world. I am afraid that the current situation cannot end well. We may again have more currencies, but many of them will not be internationally honored.
Copy/paste from Harry’s blog
Nat, IME, even in the collapse community, the extent of our interdependence tends to be underestimated. From David Korowicz’s “Trade Off” paper:
“The Irish economy, the German economy and the UK, US and Chinese economies do not exist, except by virtue of their integration in the globalised economy. Conversely, each is a localised expression of a global system…
“The globalised economy is a singular recursive network or fabric of relationships between people and things… Mobile devices, for example, now ubiquitous, represent the culmination of 20th-century physics, chemistry and engineering.
“They signify thousands of direct – and billions of indirect – businesses and people who work to provide the parts for the phone, and the inputs needed for those parts, and the production lines that build them, the mining equipment for antimony in China, platinum from South Africa, and zinc from Peru, and the makers of that equipment.
“The mobile device encompasses the critical infrastructures that those businesses require just to operate and trade – transport networks, electric grids and power-plants, refineries and pipelines, telecommunications and water networks – across the world. It requires banks and stable money and the people and systems behind them. It requires a vast range of specialist skills and knowledge and the education systems behind them.
“And it requires people with income right across the world, not just as producers, but also as consumers who can afford to share the costs of the phones and associated networks – there are economies of scale right through the diverse elements of the globalised economy. Those consumers can only afford the devices because they ply their trade through integration in the globalised economy.”
https://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Trade_Off_Korowicz.pdf
We can’t even make pencils without international supply lines.
Lidia provided this link before.
https://fee.org/articles/i-pencil/
“Depression Scrip,”
I have a family story about this. My aunt Harriet was a school teacher in Anthony NM during the Depression. She was paid in script. The county would not take their script as payment for taxes on her 40 acre farm. There was a protest about this and my aunt was boosted up on the back of a wagon to harangue the crowd.
The county commissioners, deciding they didn’t want to be lynched, changed the policy.
That bit of farm is still owned by her grandson.
I’m glad it worked out well for your family.
The failure to take whiskey as payment for taxes caused the Whiskey Rebellion.
During the depression, large department stores were issuing scrip.
Interesting!
For what it is worth?
From prof. R.A. Werner.
“The rising US national debt is likely to support the gold price further. As I have written in greater detail before (see my gold substack), I expect the gold price to continue its rise. It has been artificially suppressed for quite some time, especially blatantly in 2020. I continue to believe that a gold price even of $10,000 per ounce would not appear unusual in the coming years. As a side-effect, cryptocurrencies are also likely to benefit similarly, although investors need to be aware that these do not constitute “digital gold”, as they are often marketed as. The essence of gold is analogue and includes physical possession as a core feature.”?
There is such a a thing as being too Smart..
Tech
US proposes ban on smart cars with Chinese and Russian tech
By Sean Lyngaas and Kyle Feldscher, CNN
Updated 10:24 AM EDT, Mon September 23, 2024
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/09/23/tech/us-car-software-ban-china-russia
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.
—
The US Commerce Department on Monday will propose a ban on the sale or import of smart vehicles that use specific Chinese or Russian technology because of national security concerns, according to US officials.
A US government investigation that began in February found a range of national security risks from embedded software and hardware from China and Russia in US vehicles, including the possibility of remote sabotage by hacking and the collection of personal data on drivers, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo told reporters Sunday in a conference call.
“In extreme situations, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States, all at the same time, causing crashes (or) blocking roads,” she said.
…….Raimondo said Monday’s announcement was not a protectionist move, a charge made by Chinese critics.
“This is not about trade or economic advantage,” Raimondo said. “This is a strictly national security action.”
“If (China) or Russia, for example, could collect data on where the driver lives or what school their kids go to, where (their) doctor is, that’s data that would leave that American vulnerable,” she said.
Yep, the Domino’s for another forever Great Depression is being lined up…
Read a book long while ago, titled forgotten, sounds the same sequence of events
>> In extreme situations, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States
This is an admission that the US government will be able to do the same for tech-enabled cars produced by US companies. Best to have an old car without internet connectivity.
Might be true.
I wonder how a person disconnects this software on newer cars.
“US proposes ban on smart cars with Chinese and Russian tech”
It will not help. Cracker dweebs can just break into the systems that connect to US made cars.
The only realistic thing to do it outlaw net connected cars entirely.
An obvious solution, but that would prevent TPTB’s desired end state of an “internet of things” where absolutely everything and everyone is tracked and controlled.
Thinking about this a little more, if they outlawed Chinese cars from being connected to the internet, it would give them a marketing advantage, at least with some people. Would not make much difference in tracking people on their cell phones though cell phones can be turned off.
I suppose it is possible that carrying your phone turned on might become a requirement of the state.
“I suppose it is possible that carrying your phone turned on might become a requirement of the state”
Absolutely no need. There’s a reason that batteries are sealed into modern phones and even when you believe your phone is off, it’s always relaying information. Even the camera can be used when you believe the phone has been turned off. Self Monitoring Analysis & Retrieval Technology means exactly what it says. They only need you to own one and require it with you(calls, messages, email, antisocial media, payments and even tickets for travel make that a given) and they have access to your movements, payments and thoughts, which is all collated and stored.
That’s the wonder of propaganda, the most spied on, coerced and lied to people on the planet believe they are the least spied on, least coerced and least lied to people on the planet. So much so, they que to pay extortionate fees for their latest chains, then brag about it on the apps that are designed to addict them, demoralise them and monetise every aspect of their lives.
“even when you believe your phone is off, it’s always relaying information.”
I don’t think this is the case. There are a number of cases where it would have been used if true. Ones that come to mind are the MH370 flight and that guy who killed 4 college students. The MH370 copilot’s phone was left on and made contact, but none of the passengers were mentioned. Off or airplane mode does shut down the data transfer.
It’s not an unreasonable thing to be paranoid about. Leave your phone at home when going out for criminal acts.
“Leave your phone at home when going out for criminal acts”
I don’t think you even begin to grasp the true scope of this data gathering, or how it will be used.
Define all criminal acts in 2/5/10 years time? As soon as they redefine a law, your previous acts are now fair game. Just look how they criminalise people now, by trawling through old posts. Believing you have a chance of eternal life, may go from just being delusion to being a criminal act. Keeping databases and grouping people never ends well. Ask the ewes that had nothing to fear in 1930’s Germany, about how going on that IBM database turned out, or those that went on a database for higher educational excellence in 1970’s Cambodia. Slaughtered, one and all. The destruction could not have been so thorough without those databases, but they amass the information out of sight, so no one screams, until the screams are of the final kind.
What kind of fool would I be, to believe any database compiled by power hungry, repeat liars and mass murderers, was for benign purposes?
If you doubt anything I have said about smart phones, ask Bill Biney, Julian Assange or Edward Snowdon, or look at all the laws that were redefined when you were looking for that imaginary squirrel.
I’ve paraphrased Roger Clarke above, so you can hear his own words below. Start at 1:17:15(Creeping normalcy) and continue to Petra Epperlein at 1:33:30. Clarke will pop up 3 times, but the others are good for context about how it is and will be used(including Bill Biney).
https://youtu.be/wZvhBTaSRQ8?feature=shared
I thought everyone knew all this over a decade ago. Where have you been? Go back to the beginning and watch it all, without the sales brochure clouding your vision. No matter how handy the tool, always consider how it can be potentially used to your detriment and who has the ability to control and if they choose distort the use of that tool.
“As soon as they redefine a law, your previous acts are now fair game”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex_post_facto_law
On the other hand, stick “fair game” and my name into google.
“1930’s Germany,”
That’s before computers.
“or those that went on a database for higher educational excellence in 1970’s Cambodia.”
I don’t think there was such a data base. Perhaps you know better.
“Slaughtered, one and all.”
The killing included everyone with glasses. The killing in Rwanda didn’t need any reasons.
Trolling through old posts has been used to damage reputations, but I can’t think of a case that resulted in criminal charges. Can you?
Not that I underestimate surveillance. I have been involved a long time, for example, the fight against Clipper. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
Ex_post_facto_law
Keith, that last word. Who defines what is law?
As I said, the ground work was laid whilst people were distracted with the imaginary. They are bringing in their new order and your past will be used to determine your future, based solely on their interpretation of their law, as and when they choose. I say in that disappeared along with your imaginary squirrel. Haven’t you noticed?
“That’s before computers.”
You are the only one that has mentioned computers and if you believe you need a computer to build a highly informative database about the individual, then I’m wasting my time.
“It was the IBM punch card’s use in Nazi Germany that gave birth to “information technology.” Invented by a German American named Herman Hollerith, this card, about the size of a dollar bill, could store for retrieval detailed information about a person, place, or process depending upon the arrangement of holes on the card, which were punched into rows and columns. The card would be fed into a high-speed reader, and out would come personal information.
Prior to the invention of the punch card, you could count on your fingers, your toes, or an abacus, but you could not derive information about the people, processes, or places you counted. But with punch cards, you could count not only the number of people in a room but how many of them were men, how many were women, how many were Jews, how many were Christians, how many were blonde, how many brunette, how many were bankers, how many were tailors, how many were born in Westphalia or born in Warsaw—every trait. IBM punch cards thus not only delivered total counts, but also detailed personal information about those counted. The Information Age—meaning the era of the individualization of statistics, or the identifying and quantifying of a specific person within an anonymous count—was born not in Silicon Valley, but in Berlin in 1933.”
https://besacenter.org/ibm-holocaust/
I won’t entertain the simpleton idea that black people couldn’t possibly have the understanding to build databases in the 70’s. Even if you do believe that, there was more than enough white men eager to sell the western tools of totalitarianism. Don’t be so silly, or I’ll start quoting Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
“IBM punch card”
I have been around so long that I have personally punched thousands of IBM cards on an 026 card punch.
“about the size of a dollar bill, ”
They were exactly the size of a dollar bill of the 1890s when they were invented to tabulate the US census. The amount of information you could put on one was limited to 80 characters.
I have not looked in detail into how much IBM or IBM machines were involved in the holocaust. Charles Stross would know. My experience with the machines goes back only to the 407 accounting machine which was introduced in 1949. It was barely programmable.
“that black people ”
Cambodians are not blacks. But I still doubt they used a data base to sort out who they killed. Pol Pot was not into advanced technology.
Apparently, it is also possible to distribute merchandise that can be blown up.
“NATO claims not to be a party to this conflict and yet when NATO provides
22:51 weapon systems that can only strike targets when the targets have been
22:58 processed by NATO only entities that’s what people need to understand here it’s
23:04 not just a matter of programming a Storm Shadow missile there is an element in
23:11 Europe part of NATO uh that absorbs American intelligence
23:17 information uh overlays it with American mapping information and turns it into
23:24 the data necessary to strike a Target that data is loaded Into the Storm
23:31 Shadow because the Storm Shadow um communicates uh with GPS um it it it
23:38 doesn’t do it on a commercial GPS signal that’s just one CH that’s just a single Channel it can be jammed it does it
23:45 using the military channels that’s two channels they’re encrypted uh they’re encrypted by the
23:51 United States using American encryption technology that has to be loaded into the systems by Americans not by
23:58 ukrainians ukrainians are not cleared to operate this this this level of of
24:04 cryptographic key material so when a Storm Shadow is fired against a Target
24:09 inside Russia it is literally being targeted by NATO NATO is approving of
24:15 the Target and facilitating the the use of this weapon system against the Target
24:20 that means that NATO is a literal party to the conflict and yet Kier starmer wanted Joe
24:28 Biden to sign off on this to say allow us to use this American intelligence so
24:34 that we can strike targets inside Ukraine using the Storm Shadow missile
24:40 this is an act of war and it’s something that had kir starmer signed off on would
24:46 have been implemented that night it’s not something that’s going to happen down the road it would have happened that night Friday the
24:53 13th and on Saturday the 14th we would all have been dead
24:58 that’s the point I’m trying to make here people it’s not a joke it’s not a game the Russians are not
25:04 bluffing Vladimir Putin made this clear on Thursday when it became evident that
25:11 the United States was having this meeting with starmer in the white house and he basically said that if you do
25:17 this you will be a party to the conflict and Russia will have to act accordingly um Dimitri P pesov the the
25:25 spokesperson reiterated this point said the president has made this quite clear but not clear enough because they still
25:31 had the meeting on Friday the UN Ambassador or the Russian Ambassador United Nations in front of the security
25:38 Council in session reiterated this point that it will be a declaration of
25:43 war if the United States and Great Britain
25:49 enable Ukraine to use NATO provided weapons to strike Russia . . .”?
There is a little more of this discussion, both before and after the section quoted. The person who is trying to push the US into authorizing the use of more weapons to strike Russia is Kier Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keir_Starmer
We have heard for a long time that the UK is very much interested in escalating the Ukraine war, as is the rest of Europe.
Russia has made it clear that it will target the US with nuclear weapons, if we support this operation.
VW Could Cut Up To 30,000 Employees In Germany
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/vw-could-cut-30000-employees-germany
Germany descending. The article mentions “business costs, of energy and labor.”
This would be a huge blow to the German economy.
“The German giant is simply no longer selling enough cars…”
It seems like this could spiral and get worse. These laid-off workers would have difficulty finding jobs that pay as well elsewhere.
The fate of the Amish
https://youtu.be/lglj7k8RxVI?si=BEK9EIgpB–4Asbj
Nestor Makhno and his gang of anarchists killed all the Mennonites, similar to the Amish. As a result the Mennonites there abandoned their pacifism and tried to fight the Makhnovists, but were no match to the hardened guerilla fighter and there are no more Mennonites in Ukraine for quite a long time.
It does not matter how many Amish are there. If lucky some tribes might be ‘adopted’ by a local warlord, who will use them like slaves. Or, more likely, they will be simply wiped out by whatever warring band passing thru their areas.
In the real world, the ‘reward’ of pacifism in the face of aggression is that you are simply dead or else enslaved.
In the real world, ‘virtue’ is aimed at survival, power and prosperity. It is not aimed at getting brownie points from an imaginary ‘daddy’ in an imaginary ‘other world’.
In the real world, relations are settled through attack and resistance and Jesus would take away the capacity to even resist attack.
It is a slave manifesto that glorifies the weakness of the slave who cannot resist. They are not ‘blessed’ in some imaginary world, they are just used and abused in the real world.
Kulm is quite right on that count. Most ‘Christians’ do not really ‘get’ the religion and that is probably just as well for them.
It is all about an imminent ‘apocalypse’, the destruction of the real world and its replacement with another world in which ‘daddy’ ‘rewards’ the weak slaves as if their weakness is ‘virtue’.
That is not to say that ‘Christianity’ cannot be useful to society; if you want obedient slaves and you can convince the lower classes of what Jesus was actually saying then it would be useful.
But any society needs a warrior class with a totally different orientation. ‘Christianity’ is for slaves and for the slaves alone.
It all harks back to the situation in Rome back in the day and the slave-based economy. Nevertheless Rome was a military empire.
‘Christianity’ spread through the upper classes and it became a real problem with its pacifism and the refusal of political participation, so the Roman state took over the religion and basically changed it up to suit the state.
How hard is it to understand that if you act like this in the real world then you will end up either enslaved or dead? The Mennonites found out the hard way.
> Matthew 5
38 Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
39 But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
40 And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
41 And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
42 Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.
43 Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy.
44 But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
45 That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
46 For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?
47 And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?
48 Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.
Jesus lived in a time of economic expansion, as far as I can tell. The Wise Men came from the East, bringing gifts. International trade was beginning to grow. Bethlehem was near Jerusalem, which was on an international trade route. In a time when new resources are being added to the system, perhaps a large share of the population can live by these rules. Fighting to get enough would be rare.
The pattern in a time of expansion can be different than in a time of overshoot and collapse. But when resources are scarce, these rules make little sense to those who are being marginalized. This is one reason why many young people are leaving the church.
Also, if the government claims that it can provide for almost every need to citizens (pensions, health care, safe banks, lots of imported goods), then there is little need for organized religion. It is quite possible to substitute faith in government programs for faith in God. It think such programs have helped move Europeans away from organized religion.
Dmitry Orlov points out that a major benefit of organized religions is that it binds people together. He claims that having a little persecution can help because then the group has a common enemy.
Given the energy predicament we face, it seems pretty clear to me that a cohesive group living according to Christian values has a formidable advantage over isolated selfish individuals in terms of survival, because they would be acting as a team.
In the small-scale decentralized societies to which we are returning it will be much easier to spot the selfish and exclude them.
If you think that military groups cannot act in a coherent, organised and cooperative manner then think again.
In fact it is likely that social and organisational traits were selected for in human evolution precisely because they contributed to military success.
Humans are genetically and culturally a product of organised conflict. I will post some science materials when I have more time.
If some groups fancy pacifism then they are easy pickings and no one is really complaining about that. The sheep is not ‘bad’ to the eagle but tasty.
If you ‘do not resist evil’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ then you will end up either enslaved or dead but feel free. Whatever you want to do!
I agree with you. The rules relate primarily to how a person relates to others within the in-group. The plan is to bind the smaller group together, so that they can resist problems that come up.
It is like the Ten Commandments. “Do not kill,” only relates to group members. When it comes time for war, a person needs to do as leaders tell them to do.
I hope not, I suspect the act of killing changes the killer in ways that are very unpleasant; post traumatic syndrome seems to be part of this.
In all the years I have followed “peak oil” I never thought the advanced societies might come to a violent and final conflict as Scott Ritter mentions.
It almost seems as though policy makers who have only written policy would rather commit suicide than admit their policies just don’t work.
It is madness.
Dennis L.
Initially. Then you sort of realize that you have to kill to be successful, that not killing ultimately means failure, and you make peace with it.
Generally (Christian) governments, through the extensive use of propaganda, try to convince people that the enemy has done before to ‘us’ something that break the Commandment “don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you”, so – even if the enemy is Christian – it is the fault of the enemy because it broke the rules on first move 😀
To not mention when the enemy is of another Religion.
Other Religions have different ways to code the use of war, for instance on Jewish Torah is well explained, but also understood, as every one else is not Jew, so it can be attacked without problems.
Also with the Quran is well explained.
In particular it seems a little bit, I would say, strange, with the Bibble and the Torah, that Christians think to have in common the same book.
While Jews consider Christians an external group which is reading part of their book, translated badly, and also without having any permission to use the part of the book that they are reading.
There are multiple books in Judaism. The Torah is but one. And their whole thing is “us vs. the world”.
Mirror, your understanding of Christianity is a crock of sh*t.
I would not be too sure about that.
Jesus clearly did teach pacifism and it is clear from the historical sources that is how the religion was universally understood and widely practiced by ‘Christians’ in the pre-Constantine period.
That is not an obscure reading of ‘Christianity’ and its history. Ask your local parish priest about it and he will likely tell the same thing.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/justice/nonviolence/christian-nonviolence-and-church-history
The earliest Christians embraced Jesus’ message of peace. Indeed, up until the time of Constantine the early church taught that Jesus forbade his followers to kill.
…. In my research for what became The Early Church on Killing, I compiled all the existing literary and archeological sources, which make it possible to see the record with much greater precision.
For example, no extant Christian text from before Constantine says military service is ever legitimate. Numerous treatises state explicitly that killing is wrong, others that Christians should not join the military; Jesus’ teaching to love one’s enemy is connected to Christians’ being peaceful, ignorant of war, opposed to attacking others. The passage in Isaiah about swords being beaten into ploughshares recurs frequently.
What can we learn from the history of the church? Could Jesus have really intended his followers to lay down their arms?
On the question of the sword, every writer who mentions the subject takes the same position. No early Christian writer stated the absolute prohibition of killing more firmly than Lactantius in the third century. The Divine Institutes, a brilliant defense of Christian faith in superb Ciceronian Latin, condemns every kind of killing: abortion, infanticide, capital punishment, gladiatorial contests, war. “For when God forbids us to kill, he not only prohibits us from open violence, which is not even allowed by the public laws, but he warns us against the commission of those things which are esteemed lawful among people.” But more than condemning violence, the first Christians cared for abandoned babies, those in prison, and the destitute.
Though by the later third century there is evidence that some Christians were serving in the Roman army – the disconnect between teaching and action recurs throughout church history, as a glance at the divorce rate will show – the message in all remaining Christian writings of the era is clear.
The Constantinian Shift
When the Roman emperor Constantine placed the chi rho symbol on his soldiers’ shields before a decisive military victory in 312 AD and a year later legalized their religion, Christians entered a dramatically new period. Since some of his rivals favored continued persecution, it is hardly surprising that Christians cheered Constantine’s military victories as well as his political ones, or that many joined his army. Within a hundred years, only Christians could serve in the Roman army.
In the years after Constantine, leading Christian theologians – especially Ambrose (ca. 340–397), bishop of Milan, and Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo in North Africa – developed the basic framework of the just war tradition….
Sider’s book on pacifism in pre-Constantine Christianity is available in pdf for free online.
> The Early Church on Killing: A Comprehensive Sourcebook on War, Abortion and Capital Punisment <
https://christusliberat.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Early-Church-on-Killing-The_-A-Comprehens-Ronald-J.-Sider.pdf
He uses the standard historical early sources that I came into contact with when I studied the apostolic fathers (Ante-Nicene) and the broader patristic period.
The medieval councils and scholastics are other kettles of fish who are entirely interesting in their own period but they do not necessarily reflect the early theology on all points.
This is his contents:
Part 1: Christian Writers before Constantine
Didache
The Epistle of Barnabas
First Clement
Second Clement
Apocalypse of Peter
Justin Martyr
Tatian
Irenaeus
Athenagoras
Clement of Alexandria
Tertullian
Minucius Felix
Didascalia apostolorum
Julius Africanus
Origen
Cyprian
Gregory Thaumaturgus
Dionysius of Alexandria
Archelaus
Adamantius, Dialogue on the True Faith
Arnobius of Sicca
Lactantius
Part 2: Church Orders and Synods
Apostolic Tradition
Three Later Church Orders
Synod of Arles
Part 3: Miscellaneous Items
The Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Paul of Samosata
The Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena
Part 4: Other Evidence of Christian Soldiers before Constantine
“The Thundering Legion”
A Third-Century Christian Prayer Hall Near a Military Camp
Epitaphs
Military Martyrs
Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History
An Early Christian Kingdom?
What I think we generally miss about Jesus and Christianity is that Jesus started to spread his message in Israel to reform the current Religion of that time (Judaism).
In my view, he didn’t have in mind to create a new Religion, but probably he was just criticizing and trying to reform the current Religion.
He probably wanted to spread a more ‘moral’ message (considering the curruption of that time) and a more ‘inclusive’ message inside Judaism.
In addition I read various articles of Researchers on Haaretz or also on others publishers about the fact that Jesus was probably a Rabbi, much probably married with Mary Magdalen.
And I don’t want to criticize Jesus’ message as it is for me one of the best message about spirituality.
The second point is what the Disciples did in various Countries.
In fact it was them that spread ‘the message’ and substantially created a new Religion.
Infact it is something that we cannot exclude that, for the Disciples, going to the heart of the Roman Kingdom to spread Christianity, it was probably a way to weaken the Kingdom from inside, changing the rule of the slaves and the poor people and dismantling the current Religion made of Gods (Zeus and all the others).
In practical terms they went to the Kingdom that killed their Master…
But as we know, some of them (or some of their followers) went to Syria (see Syriac Church) or went to Armenia (see Armenian Church) and so on.
Then, we can say that Christianity surely broke from inside the Roman Kingdom or changed it forever, but the Vatican from one side and Bizantine Empire from the other, modified in a plastic way this new Religion in the respective way that was useful for their objectives.
In my view, considering all the branches, the Orthodox branch has found a better interpretation of ‘the message’, than the Catholic one.
Also the Reformed Church (Protestantism) has some positive aspects for me, and it represent in my view a sort of German/Viking interpretation of ‘the message’, that is being more punitive towards who make mistakes and having a more direct contact with the Divinity, instead of having it through the support of a priest, like it happens with the Catholic way.
I agree that Jesus didn’t seem to be trying to spread a new religion. He acted as if he was trying to reform Judaism.
I never got the impression that the religion was trying to do anything about reforming slavery. Jesus said, “The poor you will always have with you.” I never got the impression that Jesus said much about slavery.
Col. 3, which is attributed to Paul and Timothy says:
5 Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. 6 Because of these, the wrath of God is coming.[b] 7 You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8 But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9 Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices 10 and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11 Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.
I have a hard time understanding that as having anything to say about freeing slaves. I understand that followers thought that the actions suggested by Jesus would especially appeal to women and slaves, since these people already had low status.
I agree with you Gail that Jesus didn’t open specifically the issue of slavery, but, in my view, speaking about all humans being equal and having same value and importance in front of the Lord, it is a message that automaticaly makes slavery, coercition and exploitation of people, something wrong.
“Jesus was probably a Rabbi”
Jesus is referred to as Rabbi in the Gospels.
I think he gave an accurate depiction. It is even more evident in Russia, where Orthodoxy was transplanted wholesale from an area 3000 km to the southwest. It was the original populace control method, Orthodoxy had its zenith during feudalism, and now it shares populace control with various Western subcultural phenomena (pop music, consumerism, etc.).You can in fact have a population acting coherently without religion at all.
When you look at history and geography, it is striking that Christianity has never prevented the Irish from being the most belligerent and obnoxious people on earth, with the possible exception of the Yanomami and some of the more in-your-face Andaman Islanders.
It is only now that they are largely abandoning the old region that they are calming down a bit and become becoming meek, gentle and inoffensive. 🙂
having visited ireland over many years, i have never found a people so genuinely welcoming and friendly in just about every every aspect of living.
and we english have never been the best neighbours the irish could have.
as a refugee from Tennessee said to me some years ago (in Ireland) —”everyone is so kind to me here—here i feel safe,”
Catholicism has generally been quite successful in promoting solid (and fairly deep) social values within the in-group. IMHO more so than any other religion. Of course if you are not in the in-group you will have a totally different opinion.
yes—the church used to be a despotic power in ireland
it no longer is.
your comment has no bearing in present day reality
Not true. Whether the church has lost power, the cultural matrix remains, as it remains in most countries. Or do you expect a nation’s cultural identity to move lock step with the church’s power? I say, based on my observations, the lag is two generations or more.
well—i found my observations to be true in my first visit in 1970, as they were in my last vist in 2019. and many in between
i dont see my interactions as being in anyway different
“calming down a bit ”
I have argued for years that the IRA went out of business because the Irish women cut the birth rate over tie from something like 4 kids to replacement.
This and some economic growth raised the income per capita, making the future look better. Humans respond by reducing support for war and related social disruptions because we have been selected both for war and times where war is not a genetic survival trait. In the model, the selection against war when not facing a bleak future is even stronger than the selection for war.
If you want to read the paper on this, ask.
Both Israel and Palestine have high birth rates per mother. This partially explains the tendency toward war.
The UN 2024 population report estimates Israel’s 2023 births per mother at 2.83. Palestine’s 2023 estimate was 3.31 births per mother. Palestine’s births per mother has been much higher in the past. It was 5.06 births per mother in 2003. In 1984, it was 7.00 births per mother.
There are some religions who claim pacifism, like Jainism. However, until the British ‘discovered’ them, their pacifism was not strict – they frequently moved back to Hinduism when they had to fight, only moving back to Jainism when they felt like dodging the draft.
The British Raj found them interesting and protected them to a degree since they were compliant to the British rule, which is why they remain pacifist for now, but they won’t remain so when BAU ends.
All pacifist ideologies are parasites to groups who are willing to fight to keep them pacifist, and sooner or later the groups protecting the pacifist would charge hefty protection fees.
“Student says:
September 24, 2024 at 2:06 am
I agree with you Gail that Jesus didn’t open specifically the issue of slavery, but, in my view, speaking about all humans being equal and having same value and importance in front of the Lord, it is a message that automaticaly makes slavery, coercition and exploitation of people, something wrong.”
Historically, human societies have been
and will always be hierarchical.
If you think even egalitarians
think everyone is equal and has the same value,
you have some serious studying to do.
That is an interesting point. Many animal species are hierarchical, too.
Christian churches often have many more women than men attending. Women are often less hierarchical than men; traditionally, the occupation of the husband has determined social rank. Mothers can’t pick out one child to care for, rather than the others. They tend to work around the home and often work at a garden/local agriculture. Also, slaves have looked to heaven as a way to solve their earthly problems.
I think that people, in general, can be way too focused on status seeking and amassing wealth. They lock themselves into more debt than they can really handle. They make themselves miserable in the process. People buy stuff, and soon the stuff seems to own them. The lawn needs mowing; the house always seems to need expensive fixes. Soon people have no time for themselves and their families. They are trying to earn enough money to cover all of their commitments.
Perhaps Christianity and many other religions are a way of softening the hierarchical tendency and the tendency to amass goods. The maximum power principle says that compromises are needed, in determining which plant or animal is best adapted for an ecosystem. Religions wouldn’t have stuck around if they weren’t of some benefit to the system.
“too focused on status seeking and amassing wealth. ”
Both are the result of genetic selection, status seeking is probably goes back way before the split with the Chimpanzees. High status male chimps (and humans) just have more children.
Wealth is more recent, Clark’s work indicates that for about 400 years before 1800 the children of the wealthy were about twice as likely to survive as the children of the poor. If you wonder where the drive to become wealthy comes from, that’s it.
Of course even in those days there was a level of wealth beyond which the survival of the children was not improved. But the drive was open ended and more didn’t hurt.
Religions fit into this selection pattern as well. They keep groups together, and they help groups fight other groups better. They help allocate resources when there isn’t enough to go around.
“Religions fit into this selection pattern as well.”
Right. At the root, religions are xenophobic memes. The first step on the path to war is the circulation of xenophobic memes that dehumanize the target group in preperation to killing them.
Normally human groups are on fairly good terms with neighbors, swapping women for wives. But when resources, particularly food, get tight, they circulate xenophobic memes. This mechanism is not entirely turned off in good times and I have made a case that the mechanisms that lead to war also gives us religions.
“Women are often less hierarchical than men;” Women can’t be subject to hierarchy in a social setting because they are a protected class.
“I think that people, in general, can be way too focused on status seeking and amassing wealth. They lock themselves into more debt than they can really handle. They make themselves miserable in the process.”
Because they are protected from competition and scarcity, they have a skewed view of competition, often seeing it as unnecessary, because their survival, status, or reproductive success has never depended directly on their physical or cognitive abilities.
What women are encountering when they enter into traditionally male spheres and is strange to them on a psychological level. They are not accustomed to having to proof their value to employers. They have traditionally had intrinsic because of their sex and not how efficient or productive they are.
Interesting points! Women have been valued based on how good they will be as mothers, or on how much they will add to a man’s status (old man with young good looking wife). Working has often been in “service” occupations like teaching and nursing.
I think we forgive others so we can forgive ourselves for making a mistake in trusting the forgiven one.
I miss “Onward Christian Soldiers” from the hymnals and services. Chruchill liked it as well and was sung at a service on the Prince of Wales.
Dennis L.
A bailout is in the pipeline for Intel . Who will bail out Boeing .?
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/qualcomm-approached-intel-about-takeover-recent-days-wsj-reports-2024-09-20/
I am a former Texas Instruments engineer. I worked in the microprocessor group. We competed with Intel. Both companies laid claims to having invented the first microprocessor. There was competition to see which company, TI or Intel would become the predominant microprocessor supplier. Intel won that battle, probably due to being already embedded in the IBM PC. However, TI was diversified, making semiconductors for almost any use. Additionally, TI invented the Digital Signal Processing market, (or at least kick started it) with their TMS320 architecture, which grew into a powerful family of DSPs for advanced uses, with which TI has made untold billions.
Looks like Intel’s days as a major player are numbered. TI is a very well managed corp. It is still around and a major player. I am surprised TI is not tendering an offer for Intel.
Interesting!
Having Intel factories in Israel may not be helping.
Interesting point!
What do you think is safer ,an Intel factory or a flesh and blood Palestinian in Israel? Which one do you think has a greater chance of its normal operations being disrupted?
“A Pennsylvania company was getting tens of millions of dollars in federal loan guarantees to turn plastic waste into a fuel for steelmaking, claiming the climate would benefit. “?
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30082024/biden-administration-plastic-coal-replacement/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFd_tBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHfv7ei8p09QB-olSmObdXRLsWpNn-lHLIo_h0OaFCqyqT4C-neAyF5HlIQ_aem_E3Rp6diCgtCUTjCvOQQIcg
Does not surprise me in the least…this is just the tip of it all..
Carbon sequestering storage is a much, much, bigger pork..
Orchestrated by the Oil Companies themselves, knowing full well it was a bogus scheme, like recycling the above, plastics..
The vast majority of corporate advocacy promoting carbon capture and storage is misaligned with climate science, new research shows.
According to an analysis released today by InfluenceMap, over 80 percent of corporate policy engagement on CCS between 2021 and 2023 does not meet the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s science-based policy guidance, which includes recommended methods for limiting warming to 1.5°Celsius or well-below 2°C – the targets established by the Paris Agreement. The study shows that IPCC recognizes a role exists for carbon capture technologies. However, the UN’s climate science body has stated that global fossil fuel production and use must decline substantially, and that CCS is not a feasible justification to deepen reliance on these dirty fuels that are driving climate breakdown.
Yet, the oil and gas sectors that dominate corporate promotion of CCS see these technologies as a lifeline to continue and expand their extractive business model, and as a distraction from mounting calls for a fossil fuel phaseout, the InfluenceMap report notes. The analysis comes at the same time global delegates and other stakeholders gather in Dubai for the 28th annual Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP28, where a battle over the future of fossil fuels and the use of CCS is expected to figure into the negotiations.
“Oil and gas companies have been doing everything they can to avoid concrete action to phase out fossil fuels – including by pushing for carbon capture and storage,” Sofia Basheer, senior analyst at InfluenceMap and an author of the new InfluenceMap study, said in a press release. “If governments can’t agree on a science-based plan to get to net zero, and fossil fuels remain a significant part of the equation, the oil and gas industries will have won a major victory.”
Som the burning of plastics surprises me not…we know the industry behind it’s promotion
A conference in Atlanta at Georgia Tech in 2006, when I first got into this, made the point that CCS was likely never to work. We cannot keep CO2 underground for all time. It takes a lot of fossil fuel energy to operate the capture and transport system. CO2 often reacts with the rocks it is near, allowing it to eventually escape. Escaped CO2 can smother the people and animals living near the place where the CO2 escapes.
The topic of CCS was addressed several times at TheOilDrum.com. The result was always that it had little hope. The one use for CO2 is to raise the pressure level of oil fields that are getting near exhaustion. This CO2 would escape again, as the oil is extracted. This is what the oil industry wanted the CO2 for.
It gets even better with Plastics …this one should be very portable..I mean profitable..
Vaporizing plastics recycles them into nothing but gas
Polypropylene and polyethylene can be broken down simultaneously.
Elizabeth Rayne – 9/21/2024, 7:30 AM
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/09/vaporizing-plastics-recycles-them-into-nothing-but-gas/?comments=1&comments-page=1
Polypropylene and polyethylene can be recycled, but the process can be difficult and often produces large quantities of the greenhouse gas methane. They are both polyolefins, which are the products of polymerizing ethylene and propylene, raw materials that are mainly derived from fossil fuels. The bonds of polyolefins are also notoriously hard to break.
Now, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have come up with a method of recycling these polymers that uses catalysts that easily break their bonds, converting them into propylene and isobutylene, which are gases at room temperature. Those gases can then be recycled into new plastics.
“Because polypropylene and polyethylene are among the most difficult and expensive plastics to separate from each other in a mixed waste stream, it is crucial that [a recycling] process apply to both polyolefins,” the research team said in a study recently published in Science.
When will this comedy sh#tshow stop?
Too hilarious….sure, they may actually build a functioning promo display of one ..
It will give the barnyard animals, as Fast Eddy liked to call us all, some reason all is fine and solutions are at hand.
I’ll continue to watch Channel 10 Environmental Advocate here roaming the waterways picking up discarded plastic with volunteers…saving the environment..too hilarious
“It takes a lot of fossil fuel energy to operate the capture and transport system”
PV or power satellite energy works fine for this application.
“O2 often reacts with the rocks it is near,”
If it reacts with rocks, it does not escape.
“The one use for CO2 is to raise the pressure level of oil fields ,”
That’s only part of the effect. CO2 is a solvent that gets oil out of rock. It’s used for dry cleaning clothes.
That’s right. The time is right for the dry cleaning business to expand.
Everyone has something that needs to be dry cleaned.
There is a large market for CO2 based dry cleaning.
Keith, you sir, are a scholar and a man with good business sense!
“dry cleaning business”
Never run a dry cleaning shop, can’t think of the last time I used one. The Wiki article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_cleaning#Supercritical_CO2 says the machines that clean with CO2 are a good bit more expensive. Not surprising since the pressure vessels have to be thick to hold the pressure. Another use I have read about is getting the THC out of marijuana. Years ago I was asked to bid on the software for a THC extractor but was busy at the time and didn’t.
If Russia is hit by long range US/NATO missiles a good counter target would be the oil wells in north Alaska and the pipeline (turn about is fair play).
What I think it will be more probable is that Russians will give arms and weapons to US/EU’s enemies, like we are doing to their enemies.
So they could help maybe some south American countries or Iran or African countries where US/EU have important interests or also countries in the ocean Pacific area.
Not a direct hit to US.
The son of a popular Slovak actress dies in a horse polo accident at a tournament in Italy, which is quite unheard of.
https://koktail.pravda.sk/hviezdne-kauzy/clanok/724639-herecka-kamila-magalova-prisla-o-syna-martina-tragicka-nehoda-pri-konskom-pole-ho-stala-zivot-smutnu-spravu-potvrdil-jeho-otec/?utm_source=pravda&utm_medium=hp-box&utm_campaign=shp_3clanok_box
The parents of the victim divorced some time ago.
Further details: https://www1.pluska.sk/soubiznis/domaci-soubiznis/mimoriadne-smutna-sprava-syn-kamily-magalovej-mal-podlahnut-zraneniam-pri-konskom-pole
Not too different from Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.
pyfzered! $$
A very awesome site. I expect Kulm would approve:
https://www.youtube.com/@TechnocracyNow
Came across it when looking for a video referenced by Adonis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6vXHPZ0GQU
Health Facilities and the Energy Crisis: A Conversation with M. King Hubbert – 1976
I listened to parts of this. The moderator is easy to understand, but M. King Hubbert’s voice comes across as somewhat muffled. It is interesting, but I found myself missing quite a bit of what is being said.
Around the. 35 minute mark he mentions about reducing the population if a technological decline occurs
Yep, I went in CCmode for subtitles and really like what I listened to, but the eye popping graph of the high pimple of the fossil fuels period of the time frame of 5,000 years plus and minus was eye catching. We, indeed, are a flash in the pan explosion in the scheme of earthly history…
Lucky us to have experienced it…more lucky our clever fellow conspirators, if I may wish to call them, are able to kick the can down the road for several more decades than predicted.
Touche!
>> @TechnocracyNow
>> 11 years ago
>> Get this fact firmly: Technocracy is not advocated because it may be desirable. Technocracy does not deal in any way with people’s emotions, or desires, or wishes, or dreams.
Everything is like a machine. Two legged animals’ opinion do not matter.
Virtually all peak oil theory originates from King Hubbert’s works.
He saw the only way to save civilization was technocracy and did what he could to try to set up its ideologies.
Unfortunately the people now are too stupid to follow his wisdom.
But nuclear is limited by uranium supply. A person needs thorium to work as well. The overall system seems to bind up as well. The debt bubble holding up the whole system collapses.
Perhaps we could have started working on thorium once we knew it would eventually be necessary … we did nothing for decades.
Predicaments don’t have solutions.’?
‘ What type of activities will help in reducing the effects of ecological overshoot? I’m often asked this question when I point out that solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear energy, hydroelectric dams, EVs, and all other technological devices will not help climate change, pollution loading, or any other predicament under the parent predicament of ecological overshoot: “Well, what are your solutions?” Sadly, this question assumes that I am pointing out a PROBLEM, not a predicament. Predicaments don’t have solutions. ‘?
https://erikmichaels.substack.com/p/so-what-should-we-do
“are too stupid to follow his wisdom.”
Technology changes. In his day, nuclear power plants making synthetic oil were a reasonable solution. Now PV power is less expensive.
We are not today making synthetic oil cheaply with PV. I will believe it when I see it.
Not yet.
It’s something that can be done, but might not be done before things change beyond recognition.
The first chart has a great uptick for 2021 and 2022, and this is official government figures. https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/deaths-australia/latest-release
Vaccines didn’t seem to fix the problem. Perhaps they were part of the problem.
Elites have always wanted to upgrade the genetics of the population and their own kindred. Seeding a next generational excuse to euthanize or accelerate deaths selectively on certain populations or modify the traits is desirable; or making certain populations more intelligent/less resource intensive (“food allergy to meat”).
“Elites have always wanted to upgrade the genetics of the population and their own kindred.”
I am *extremely* doubtful about this statement. According to Clark, it happened in the UK from around 1200 to 1800 but it was the inadvertent effect of natural selection in an environment where other selection factors such as violence were reduced. The word genetics didn’t exist in say 1600.
On the other hand, elites of that time were concerned about “marring well” in their own social class.
yuval hurary — billions of useless eaters
japan is 20 years into the future
eugenicist technocrat father – justin trudeau
elon musk – novus world order logo on his back with baphamet logo
posting on twitter ”interesting” to IQ posts and g factor
WEF ”2030” — western ”values” will be challenged (aka migrants military aged males will destroy ”christian equality” and western ”every human has innate value” empathy)
neuralace
UK defense
UN conference ”overpopulation”
Secretary biochemist to Bush ”low IQ overbreeding and overpopulation”
”genetic engineering, investments in biotech” — tech industry, biohackers, monafidil eaters
”biodigital security” ”migrant violence”
create the problem and solution
2050 Futurescape Chatnam House
”genetically engineered babies”
it is irrational to want more african mud hut people
1975 — geopolitical books written by NWO orchestrators
”overpopulation big issue”
”dissolve national sorveignty”
”promote co dependency”
”value systems changed to resourcefulness”
british policy to US in past
”eugenicist”
renaming in 1970
”zero population growth”
”environmentalism”
“overpopulation”
to
”women’s rights”
”LGBTQ+”
well a more controllable and USEFUL population at least
>> Secretary biochemist to Bush ”low IQ overbreeding and overpopulation”
What does that one refer to?
https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/what-is-the-metaverse-tech-companies-aim-to-build-/6220395.html
“With the help of augmented reality glasses, individuals might be able to see a wealth of information pass before their eyes while moving around in a city. This could include traffic and pollution data, information on the natural environment or local history.
However, most predictions for a future metaverse see the technology going much further. These include the ability for people to be transported to digital settings that feel very real, such as a nightclub, a sports stadium or a mountaintop.
….
“My first concert was in a stadium. My son’s first concert was (American rapper) Lil Nas X on (the gaming system) Roblox,” Hackl said. “Just because it happened in Roblox, it didn’t make it less real for him,” she added.”
Everyone here probably forgot this but I remember a decade ago that Bill Gates was a huge advocate for online learning. During the pandemic, we got to see how online education would work on a large scale and we’re still trying to make sense of the results of that experiment.
Whatever your thoughts are on the peedemic, you have to admit that the tech industry has a vested interest in shifting as much human activity onto the online sphere as possible. There are many activities that already take place exclusively online. Why would they want that number to increase and can they handle it?
As I recall ,Youtube had to reduce the quality of its video steams online to keep up with all the increased traffic. During the pandemic, we were subject to very choppy video of internet conferences on television where it appeared as though the correspondents were using 56k dial-up modems to communicate. It appears as if “contactless” and “online” saves us a few barrels of oil but is sustainable? Can we keep lots of humans indoors and in front of computers and push back the depletioin rates so we can build an alternatives to fossil fuels?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Using internet access has allowed quite a few workers to work from home, part of the time, or all of the time. This has been a big saving in oil consumption, particularly gasoline.
There recently have been stories about workers being forced to go back to the office, five days a week. This cannot happen for everyone, as far as I can see, because oil supplies, in total, are too low. In fact, we should not be surprised to see more changes reducing oil consumption–more school taking place at home, for example.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/World-Crude-Oil-Production-through-May-2024.png
“Using internet access has allowed quite a few workers to work from home, part of the time, or all of the time. This has been a big saving in oil consumption, particularly gasoline. ”
That oil that would have been consumed by commuters has simply been consumed elsewhere.
Oil will always be consumed as long as it can be extracted.
“more school taking place at home, for example.”l
Loss of socialization is a problem. Amish are basically home schooled and at their level it works and it is not petroleum dependent.
I do not like remote learning, a simple explanation on my part is remote learning is more like test taking.
That said I enjoy podcasts in that a variety of opinions are possible.
Amish again: On Sundays the carriages congregate at one home, it is all day socialization.
I am not idolizing the Amish, but much of their social structure seems to work around me.
Our social structure seems to be collapsing, that is of great concern.
Dennis L.
With regards to the Amish, they have a pool of skilled labour they can tap into. I doubt many communities can say the say thing. The best most can do is watch a “how to” video on youtube when they need to fix something.
The area of developing “real” skills is one I’ve been focusing on. These include growing food, creating compost, starting an heirloom seed bank, creating learning materials for my children, learning how to treat disease (where practicable). Next on the list is woodwork skills…
Others within our home education community are raising chickens (with some even raising pigs!).
“some even raising pigs”
Pigs have an advantage over children. The neighbors don’t get upset when you eat them. 🙂
Your obsession with the Amish, an incestrous, heavily inbred cult, is simply amazing
https://youtu.be/9ClIXxUjnis?si=ePRwsUmO67rOzLmR
They are not even Christians. They are just cultists.
They are not home schooled. They are indoctrinated. As a result only the dullards stay, and those with the brains, if they feel they can catch up with the world at a later age, leave.
I don’t really put too much expectation on them post collapse. They will face a fate not different from the Memmonites faced against Makhno’s forces, and this time there won’t be any Canada to run to.
An obsession would be s#!t-posting after every comment which you don’t like. Just saying…
At least when Fast Eddy did this it was mildly entertaining…
I am only pointing out that the Amish is an unsustainable lifestyle , an accident of history which made it possible but the conditions which enabled to live them like they are doing now won’t last for too long, and any skills they might have will be quickly lost by marauding armed bands who will outgun them quite easily.
glad somebody ”gets it” about the amish lifestyle
Kulm, not many lifestyles are sustainable, are they?
In the end, sustainability is just like everything else. It goes on and on and on until it can’t.
By the way, you’re not a secret Greta fan, are you? Sustainability is almost her middle name.
My impression is that these policies have the objective to make people give up to their ‘good’ jobs, because now it has become more expensive to commute (either for all the direct and indirect costs and taxes to have and use a car or to earn enough money to pay train or bus).
So the result could be that many people will give up to ‘good’ salary jobs, which are far from their homes, to accept real low salaries jobs close to their homes or even not officialy work, but making some work in their house which had been delegated to others in the past (like taking care of children, elders or cooking, cleaning, take care of gardens).
And this should reduce mainly jobs in the service sector, not in the ‘manufacturing’ one.
Commuters are mainly working in office positions or in the service sector.
So, we could say that introducing a lab virus and having also prepared all the relative policies:
– lockdowns and home work,
– suppression of the real treatments,
– vaccines and come back to office work
It was a clever trick to fool people, having the result of multiple advantages for those who rule.
It seems here in the UK that employers are keen to get workers back into office but that the Labour government are not. My employer is requesting office attendance 3 days a week. However, the Labour government have said that employees should have the right to work from home where feasible.
With regards to home schooling, I see remote learning becoming more prominent as the cost of running schools becomes prohibitively expensive (teacher’s wages, teacher training, building maintenance costs, resources). We home educate so are unlikely to be affected too much with the exception that some activities might have to be curtailed owing to rising costs.
https://karlof1.substack.com/p/resurrecting-zinovievs-westernism
An interview with Zinoviev who foresaw globalization as a governance mechanism by financiers.
All the major religions favor globalization.
Anti-globalists are considered fringe by the experts.
The son of a peasant family. clearly this type of intellectual resources will be unavailable in Kulm’s world (which I agree is most of the global future) and was unavailable also in feudal Russia. We can already see today in the US that academia is overpopulated with total mediocrities from the dominant tribe, who are unable to push forward scientific progress.
It would have been better if he had been hit by a shrapnel in the Eastern Front since he helps the Hordes.
His days were the one time when people like him could get advanced education. An anomaly which will never return, even in Russia.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2024/09/press-release-sotf-2024/
>> United Nations adopts ground-breaking Pact for the Future to transform global governance
Interesting! The article says,
That is pretty much the issue. The rest of the world now is fighting back, and the whole world is in turmoil
Also, in an interview with a follower of Zinoviev.
I take this to mean the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. The US wanted to be the sole leader of the world economy.
“The West wanted and programmed the Russian catastrophe.”
I doubt it. The knowledge about how to do something like that is just not known.
I speak as someone who has followed this subject since 1972 when I read Forester’s World Dynamics_. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Wright_Forrester. That work eventually led to Limits to Growth.
The West no doubt wanted the USSR to give up its aggressive stance, but there is no way I can think of where they had significant influence over what happened in the USSR. Of course the West was happy because it allowed a huge reduction in military expenses. The west, particularly the US, aided Russia in many ways, including buying many tons of plutonium which fueled power reactors for many years.
But cause the collapse, no way.
Think about it, our best efforts re the Ukraine war have not been effective.
I think the self-organizing system was most of what orchestrated the collapse. The price of oil was too low, for too long. As an oil exporter, Russia could not collect enough taxes. Also, communism wasn’t a very efficient way of operating the government. There was debt that could not be repaid.
No one planned it or orchestrated it.
I agree.
Hmmm. “There was debt that could not be repaid.” Seems that is us.
Have been listening to Richard Wolff, interesting.
If oil is leaving us, capitalism will have some issues. Not even sure what capitalism is myself.
World is changing now, friends will be important.
Dennis L.
“The West no doubt wanted the USSR to give up its aggressive stance, . . . “?
From 1945 the United States attempted to overthrow at least 50 governments, many of them democracies, and to crush 30 popular movements fighting tyrannical regimes. In the process, 25 countries were bombed, causing the loss of several million lives and the despair of millions more. (Thanks to William Blum’s Rogue State, Common Courage Press, 2005).
“attempted to overthrow”
Did it work? Every case I can think of either failed or we wound up worse off. Can you think of any way anything the US did had an effect on the collapse of the USSR?
if you want a simple answer Keith:
the USSR burned its fossil fuel excess on the suppression of its people
The USA burned its fossil fuel excess on the expression of its people.
the chinese are trying a combination of the two.
both policies however, must inevitably arrive at the same concluding point:
no fossil fuels left, so both sets of peoples, and their leadership, go into desperation mode. they may sound different, but ultimately they try to serve the same purpose——the avoidance of collapse.
which will not work, because long term collapse avoidance is not a matter of politics.
Aggression?
You mean like bombing the poor in Iraq, Libya. Afghanistan etc?
Dropping thermal balloons on essential agricultural crops and forestry in Syria?
Introducing Caesar sanction
Stealing Syrian oil depriving Syrian people of fuel, electricity, health care, water. Unprecedented coercive measures designed to starve Syrian people.
Increasing {illegal} military footprint in Syria ?
Aggression?
“US post-9/11 wars caused 4.5 million deaths, displaced 38-60 million people, study shows “?
https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/57769.htm
“US post-9/11 wars”
The US was attacked in 2001. This logically can’t have anything to do with the collapse of the USSR in 1989.
LOL
Nice find;
‘When you listen to representatives of the Western elite, everything seems so pure, generous and respectful to people. Doing so they use the classic rule of propaganda: hide the reality behind sweet talk. However it is enough to turn on the TV, go to the movies, open a bestselling book or listen to popular music to realize the opposite: the unprecedented dissemination of the cult of violence, sex and money. Noble speeches are designed to hide these three (and there are more) pillars of totalitarian democracy.’
‘The scientist who desires to research mechanisms of democratic totalitarianism will face extreme difficulties. He will be made into an outcast. On the other hand, those whose research serves the dominant ideology are flooded with grants while publishing houses and media are fighting for the right to work with such authors.’
UPDATE: Alexis Lorenze’s story has gone so viral that the media is now forced to cover it. Fox News 11 Los Angeles calls what Alexis suffered an “extreme adverse reaction.”
“Alexis says she ultimately agreed to the hospital’s requirement of receiving three vaccines: meningitis, pneumonia and tetanus. Within 10 minutes, she had an extreme adverse reaction.”
Nurse Angela, who has honorably stayed at Alexis’s bedside, reports, “She lost vision in both eyes. She started bleeding out of her nose, she started vomiting, and then these purple patches under her skin started appearing at the top of her head, and then just started spreading. And it’s now covering pretty much all of her body.”
https://vigilantfox.news/p/mainstream-media-picks-up-story-of
Eat your broccoli!
https://wmcresearch.substack.com/p/friday-hope-sulforaphane-remarkable
There is a very long list of cruciferous vegetables:
https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/vegetables/vgen/cruciferous-vegetables.htm
A few of them include cabbage, kale, mustard (greens and seed), radish, and turnips.
** Fun Fact… **
Cabbage, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and Brussela sprouts are all descended from Mustard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/h8bb2g/domesticated_vegetables_bred_from_wild_mustard/#lightbox
None of these existed in the wild. Its amazing what one thing can from from another.
Lebanon terror attacks ‘long in the making’ Israeli op
The dual terror attacks that rocked Lebanon this week, killing dozens and injuring thousands, were the result of a “complex and long in the making” Israeli operation, according to 12 current and former defense and intelligence officials who spoke with the New York Times (NYT).
“Even before [Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan] Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel had put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer,” the NYT report states, referring to Hungary-based BAC Consulting.
The shell company served as a front to manufacture thousands of pagers on behalf of Taiwanese company Gold Apollo that were acquired by the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah earlier this year. “At least two other shell companies were created to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers,” the report states.
“BAC did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN,” three intelligence officers who spoke with the NYT are quoted as saying.
On Thursday, Budapest announced that the explosive-laden pagers were “never” in the country.
“Hungarian authorities have established that the company in question is a trading-intermediary company, which has no manufacturing or other site of operation in Hungary. It has one head of operations in Hungary on its listed address and the devices referenced have never been to Hungary,” government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said via social media.
The shipments from BAC started making their way to Lebanon in the summer of 2022 “in small numbers,” but production ramped up earlier this year after Nasrallah denounced the use of smartphones among its ranks.
“Over the summer, shipments of the pagers to Lebanon increased, with thousands arriving in the country and being distributed among Hezbollah officers and their allies,” two US intelligence officials told the western news outlet.
https://thecradle.co/articles/lebanon-terror-attacks-long-in-the-making-israeli-op-report
Interesting! It still is a strange way of doing things!
Strange beyond belief, or at least the story is. Who spends 15 years devising such a cunning plan, only to kill or blind lots of children and medics, for no real tactical gain. Apart from the continued self exposure of their true ideology, all Benny Mileikowsky has achieved is further revulsion from the world, but I bet none of the western msm had much if any mention of this
Illegal Israeli actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the
rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory
https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/ltd/n24/266/48/pdf/n2426648.pdf
By over a ⅔ majority and so binding. The encampment are officially apartheid, must get out and pay up, or under international law anyone that has signed the Geneva convention, the genocide convention, or indeed any and every member of the UN has an obligation to detain and bring to trial all of them.
You and yours are a legal target now Benny. The sands are shifting and at some point in that shift, there will be someone that just won’t be able to resist the kudos that taking you down will gain them and there’s a whole lot more than AnsarAllah eying you up, including at home as the fantasy of that home is revealed in its true grotesqueness and is collapsing faster than Gaza.
The Hezbollah leadership has been decisively defeated.
This is what we have been told. I am doubtful that it is true.
Wise to be doubtful. On Sunday morning, the Hezbollah leadership, still blissfully unaware that they had been decisively defeated extended the target range and have successfully attacked an air force base, missile base and various other targets including the destruction of an iron dome system(which in all honesty will probably save some embarrassment for those who proclaimed it’s brilliance). These extended targets included the Rafael complex which is a clear message to all that work in tech(20% of the economy) that your place of work is now a legitimate target. The defeated and mostly deceased then repeated these successful rocket attacks, whilst the encampment bombed some mud, got angry with their own flaccid ineptitude, so reverted to type and bombed a load of civilians(including the Italian hospital in Tyre).
China has told its citizens to leave and the US is sending 40,000 troops, because making a genocide possible just doesn’t scratch that itch in the same way that slaughtering children does and like all addicts, you just knew they couldn’t resist the smell of death.
The Libyan representative at the UN gave a good address(start at 1:00 mark) the other day before the vote and the language makes it clear who now has a target on their backs. Opening with “allow me to speak in English as I wish today to have my messages sent clear and not lost in translation” he goes on to show the hypocrisy in the institution and turns the encampments thugs words back on him beautifully.
https://youtu.be/mq7M4AAk6Bk?feature=shared
Now that the apartheid designation is official, BDS is an international legal requirement, so after all the demonisation of peaceful law abiding protest, expect the lawsuits to arrive like a tidal wave in the near future. The lawyers of all those professors and students that were cancelled must be popping the corks over that ruling.
Oh yeah, the US security services are unsurprisingly found knee deep in the pager feces, which slaughtered lots of women and children along with a few workers from the civilian branch of Hezbollah(do people in the west even understand that they run all civil services in their areas and these people are separate from the military wing?).
I looked up the quote about the US sending 40,000 troops to Israel. The view of other news sources seems to be that the US is sending a small number of troops to add to the 40,000 troops already there. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/23/us-military-israel-hezbollah-strikes-00180528
I haven’t found any links to Hezbollah striking back on Sunday. Perhaps you could provide a link.
The video is one of the ambassador from Libya speaking to the UN on September 17 with respect to resolution what would have declared Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian terrifies illegal, based on a ruling of the International Court of Justice. I presume it didn’t pass. The US always votes against such resolutions.
On my way to work, so just a quick reply, but can supply more detail later if you want.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/hezbollah-releases-footage-of-ramat-david–rafael-rocket-str
The Almayadeen sit will have more articles covering the situation and the Palestine chronicle is pretty reliable.
The vote was the one I mentioned earlier, that passed with over a ⅔ majority, which as I mentioned, makes bds a legal requirement for every nation in the UN.
Who spends 15 years devising such a cunning plan, only to kill or blind lots of children and medics, for no real tactical gain.
The same kind of people who spent who knows how many years devising the cunning plan of knocking down the WTC and blowing up part of the Pentagon for whatever gains they got out of it, one would suppose. I’ve often wondered who pulled that off.
There aren’t too many people who could orchestrate something as baroque as 9/11 AND get clean away with it. Takes lots of connections, lots of coordination, lots of narrative control, and lots of chutzpah.
here we go again
That cake was baked at home Tim. Unlike the buildings coming down, they followed the path of least resistance, from the inside out and we are still witnessing that force pushing out.
In occupied Palestine the Megiddo air base has been attacked by Hezbollah. Megiddo is also known as Armageddon and those that follow certain beliefs might recognise it as the setting for the final battle. I’m not sure if that will affect us non believers, or if we will just wake up one day to a lot more space, which will be kind of nice, but Norman will probably miss his doorstep chats.
In an unforeseen reversal, all invaders are advised to head for the safe zones. Unlike with the most moral army in the world and the residents of Gaza, they won’t be bombed for doing as asked.
https://t.me/Middle_East_Spectator/9975
Also, the greatest navy in the world has managed to run aground the only oiler in the carrier group(oops), whilst in the ocean off the coast of Oman, which is eerily close to Yemen, but remember, the greatest navy in the world, so the deep sea running aground story is not suspicious at all. Ok?
The US 101st airborne have been sent to help shore up US bases, but some how have ended up in the encampment, so if anyone has a spare map could you please forward it to them.
https://gcaptain.com/us-navy-oiler-usns-big-horn-aground-forcing-carrier-strike-group-to-scramble-for-fuel/
Keep the tanks and the larder topped up, as we could be waking up to some devastating changes(evaporation) in supply lines at any time.
Oilers are ships that supply fuel oil to other ships. The US Navy has been using an old single hull oiler in the Middle East. These can easily spill oil, if the hull is breached by running aground or other accident. More modern ships use an environmentally safer double hull approach.
The US doesn’t have nearly enough oilers. The article says:
.
I am not of a background that worries about Armageddon, but that does sound like it could be more than a coincidence.
Thanks, Fitz. I had wondered if the ship ran aground while standing still, with a hypersonic piece of ground coming right at it.
Well worded 😂
Rumour has it that it was a sea drone, but rumour also has it that AnsarAllah have asked for P-800 Oniks. When this was and the answer is not known. I hope they asked for the Oniks-M which will give them an 800km range and make run aground in deep water ships, of the coast of Oman easy pickings, especially if someone had pointed out the true importance of that sole stranded ship for military capability.
Has there been another timely rise in US military “suicides” again?
Of course the US won’t give out the obvious signals like Sweden did with Tobias Billström.
https://geopolitiq.substack.com/p/the-strange-connection-between-deindustrialisati?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
If the Russian FSB had done this in Ukraine, there would be hell to pay….
But Israel is judged by a different standard.
Israel has cowardly not claimed responsibility for the attacks. So no sanctions against Israel ….
As I was saying…
https://thecradle.co/articles/no-one-is-safe-the-global-threat-of-israels-weaponized-pagers
There is no choice but get 100% chinese electronics.
Anything coming out of the CCP could be compromised…
Western made I.T. would have the same issue…Every ruler wants to be able to have backdoor access to these things for national security reasons and crime prevention reasons.
>> Every ruler wants to be able to have backdoor access to these things for national security reasons and crime prevention reasons.
You misspelled “control”. National security and crime are not even afterthoughts.
orchestrated by the elders for the staircase collapse that is just about to begin , hubbert called it the technological decline in one of his videos and said the words “we would have to reduce the population “. The name of the video is ” Health facilities and the Energy Crisis” the time when he said this in the video was around the end of the video. The “elders” are doing their best to avoid the “seneca cliff” outcome.
100% compromised. But, for example, expats in Russia mostly switch to Huawei and Telegram. So the backdoor is towards China and Russia respectively. Smarter guys will also connect to local networks which are fairly hard to crack.