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The supply and demand model of economists suggests that oil prices might rise to consistently high levels, but this has not happened yet:
In my view, the economists’ model of supply and demand is overly simple; its usefulness is limited to understanding short-term shifts in oil prices. The supply and demand model of economists does not consider the interconnected nature of the world economy. Every part of GDP requires energy consumption of some type. The price issue is basically a physics issue because the world economy operates under the laws of physics.
In this post, I will try to explain what really happens when oil supply is constrained.
[1] Overview: Why Oil Prices Don’t Permanently Rise; What Happens Instead
My analysis indicates that there are three ways that long-term crude oil prices are held down:
(a) Growing wage and wealth disparities act to reduce the “demand” for oil. As wage and wealth disparities widen, the economy heads in the direction of a shrinking middle class. With the shrinking of the middle class, it becomes impossible to bid up oil prices because there are too few people who can afford their own private cars, long distance travel, and other luxury uses of oil. Strangely enough, this dynamic is a major source of sluggish growth in oil demand.
(b) Politicians work to prevent inflation. Oil is extensively used in food production and transport. If crude oil prices rise, food prices also tend to rise, making citizens unhappy. In fact, inflation in general is likely to rise, as it did in the 1970s. Politicians will use any method available to keep crude oil prices down because they don’t want to be voted out of office.
(c) In very oil deficient locations, such as California and Western Europe, politicians use high taxes to raise the prices of oil products, such as gasoline and diesel. These high prices don’t get back to the producers of crude oil because they are used directly where they are collected, or they act to subsidize renewables. My analysis suggests that indirectly this approach will tend to reduce world crude oil demand and prices. Thus, these high taxes will help prevent inflation, especially outside the areas with the high taxes on oil products.
Instead of oil prices rising to a high level, I expect that the methods used to try to work around oil limits will lead to fragility in many parts of the economic system. The financial system and international trade are particularly at risk. Ultimately, collapse over a period of years seems likely.
Underlying this analysis is the fact that, in physics terms, the world economy is a dissipative structure. For more information on this subject, see my post, The Physics of Energy and the Economy.
[2] Demand for oil is something that tends not to be well understood. To achieve growing demand, an expanding middle class of workers is very helpful.
Growing demand for oil doesn’t just come from more babies being born each year. Somehow, the population needs to buy this oil. People cannot simply drive up to a gasoline station and honk their horns and “demand” more oil. They need to be able to afford to drive a car and purchase the fuel it uses.
As another example, switching from a diet which reserves meat products for special holidays to one that uses meat products more extensively tends to require more oil consumption. For this type of demand to rise, there needs to be a growing middle class of workers who can afford a diet with more meat in it.
These are just two examples of how a growing middle class will tend to increase the demand for oil products. Giving $1 billion more to a billionaire does not have the same impact on oil demand. For one thing, a billionaire cannot eat much more than three meals a day. Also, the number of vehicles they can drive are limited. They will spend their extra $1 billion on purchases such as shares of stock or consultations with advisors on tax avoidance strategies.
[3] In the US, there was a growing middle class between World War II and 1970, but more recently, increasing wage and wealth disparities have become problems.
There are several ways of seeing how the distribution of income has changed.
Figure 2 shows an analysis of how income (including capital gains) has been split between the very rich and everyone else. What we don’t see in Figure 2 is the fact that total income (calculated in this way) has tended to rise in all these periods.
Back in the 1920s (known as “the roaring 20s”), income was split very unevenly. There was a substantial share of very wealthy individuals. This gradually changed, with ordinary workers getting more of the total growing output of the economy. The share of the economy that the top earners obtained hit a low in the early 1970s. Thus, there were more funds available to the middle class than in more recent years.
Another way of seeing the problem of fewer funds going to ordinary wage earners is by analyzing wages and salary payments as a share of US GDP.
Figure 3 shows that wages and salaries as a percentage of GDP held up well between 1944 and 1970, but they have been falling since that time.
Furthermore, we all can see increasing evidence that young people are not doing as well financially as their parents did at the same age. They are not as likely to be able to afford to buy a home at a young age. They often have more college debt to repay. They are less able to buy a vehicle than their parents. They are struggling to find jobs that pay well enough to cover all their expenses. All these issues tend to hold down oil demand.
Since 1981, falling interest rates (shown in Figure 6, below) have allowed growing wage disparities to be transformed into growing wealth disparities. This has happened because long-term interest rates have fallen over most of this period. With lower interest rates, the monthly cost of asset ownership has fallen, making these assets more affordable. High-income individuals have disproportionately been able to benefit from the rising prices of assets (such as homes and shares of stock), because with higher disposable incomes, they are more able to afford such purchases. As a result, since 1981, wealth disparity has tended to increase as wage disparity has increased.
[4] Governments talk about the growing productivity of workers. In theory, this growing productivity should act to raise the wages of workers. This would maintain the buying power of the middle class.
Figure 4 shows that productivity growth was significantly higher in the period between 1948 and 1970 than in subsequent years. Figure 2 shows that before 1970, at least part of the productivity growth acted to raise the incomes of workers. More recently, productivity growth has been lower. With this lower productivity growth, Figure 2 shows that wage-earners are especially being squeezed out of productivity gains. It appears that most of the growth attributable to productivity gains is now going to other parts of the economy, such as the very rich, the financial sector, and the governmental services sector.
The changes the world has seen since 1970 are in the direction of greater complexity. Adding complexity tends to lead to growing wage and wealth disparities. Figure 4 seems to indicate that with added complexity, productivity per worker still seems to rise, but not as much as when the economic system grew primarily due to growing fossil fuel usage leveraging the productivity of workers.
Figure 4 shows data through June 30, 2025. Note that productivity in the latest period is lower than in earlier periods, even with the early usage of Artificial Intelligence. This is a worrying situation.
[5] The second major issue holding oil prices down is the fact that if crude oil prices rise, food prices also tend to rise. In fact, overall inflation tends to escalate.
Oil is extensively used in food production. Diesel is used to operate nearly all large farm machinery. Vehicles used to transport food from fields to stores use some form of oil, often diesel. Transport vehicles for food often provide refrigeration, as well. International transport, by jet or by boat also uses oil. Companies making hybrid seeds use oil products in their processes and distribution.
Furthermore, even apart from burning oil products, the chemical qualities of petroleum are used at many points in food production. The production of nitrogen fertilizer often uses natural gas. Herbicides and insecticides are made with petroleum products.
Because of these considerations, if oil prices rise, the cost of producing food and transporting it to its destination will rise. In fact, the cost of transporting all goods will rise. These dynamics will tend to lead to inflation throughout the system. When oil prices first spiked in the 1970s, inflation was very much of an issue, both for food and for goods in general. No one wants a repetition of a highly inflationary scenario.
Politicians will be voted out of office if a repetition of the oil price spikes of the 1970s takes place. As a result, politicians have an incentive to hold oil prices down.
[6] Oil prices that are either too high for the consumer or too low for the producer will bring the economy down.
We just noted in Section [6] that oil consumers do not want the price of oil to be too high. There are multiple reasons why oil producers don’t want oil prices to be too low, either.
A basic issue is that the cost of oil production tends to rise over time because the easiest to extract oil is produced first. This dynamic leads to a need for higher prices over time, whether or not such higher prices actually occur. If prices are chronically too low, oil producers will quit.
A second issue is the fact that many oil exporting countries depend heavily on the tax revenue that can be collected from exported oil. OPEC countries often have large populations with very low incomes. Oil prices need to be high enough to provide food subsidies for an ever-growing population of poor citizens in these countries, or the leaders will be overthrown.
Figure 5 shows required breakeven prices for oil producers in the year 2014, considering their need for tax revenue to support their populations, in addition to the direct costs of production. The current Brent Oil price is only about $66 per barrel. If the breakeven price remains at the level shown in 2014, this price is too low for every country listed except Qatar and Kuwait.
No oil exporting country will point out these price problems directly, but they will tend to cut off oil production to try to get oil prices up. In the recent past, this has been the strategy.
OPEC can also try a very different strategy, trying to get rid of competition by temporarily dumping stored-up oil onto the market, to lower oil prices to try to harm the financial results of its export competition. This seems to be OPEC’s current strategy. OPEC knows that US shale producers are now near the edge of cutting back greatly because depletion is raising their costs and reducing output. OPEC hopes that by obtaining lower prices (such as the $66 per barrel current price), it can push US shale producers out more quickly. As a result, OPEC hopes that oil prices will rebound and help them out with their price needs.
I have had telephone discussions with a former Saudi Aramco insider. He claimed that OPEC’s spare capacity is largely a myth, made possible by huge storage capacity for already pumped oil. It is also well known that OPEC’s (unaudited) oil reserves appear to be vastly overstated. These myths make the OPEC nations appear more powerful than they really are. OECD nations, with a desire for a happily ever after ending to our current oil problems, have eagerly accepted both myths.
To extract substantially more oil, the types of oil that are currently too expensive to extract (such as very heavy oil and tight oil located under metropolitan areas) would likely need to be developed. To do this, crude oil prices would likely need to rise to a much higher level, such as $200 or $300 per barrel, and stay there. Such a high price would lead to stratospherically higher food prices. It is hard to imagine such a steep rise in oil prices happening.
[7] The third major issue is that politicians in very oil deficient areas have been raising oil prices for consumers through carbon taxes, other taxes, and regulations.
Strangely enough, in places where the lack of oil supply is extreme, politicians follow an approach that seems to be aimed at reducing what little oil supply still exists. In this approach, politicians charge high taxes (“carbon” and other types) on oil products purchased by consumers, such as gasoline and diesel. They also implement stringent regulations that raise the cost of producing end products from crude oil. California and many countries in Western Europe seem to be following this approach.
With this approach, taxes and regulations of many kinds raise oil prices paid by customers, forcing the customer to economize. Some of the money raised by these taxes may go to help subsidize renewables, but virtually none of the additional revenue from consumers can be expected to go back to the companies producing the oil.
I would expect these high local oil prices will slightly reduce the world price of crude oil because of the reduced demand from areas using this approach (such as California and Western Europe). Demand will be reduced because oil prices will become unaffordably high for consumers in these areas. These areas are deficient in oil supply, so there will be much less impact on world oil supply.
Refineries in China and India will be happy to take advantage of the lower crude oil prices this approach would seem to provide, so much of the immediately reduced oil consumption in California and Western Europe will go to benefit other parts of the world. But the lower oil world oil prices will also act to inhibit future world oil extraction because the development of new oil fields will tend to be restricted by the lower world oil prices.
The lower crude oil prices will be beneficial in keeping world food price inflation and general inflation down worldwide. Some oil may be left in place, in case better extraction techniques are available later, especially in the areas with these high taxes. With less oil supply available, the economies of California and Western Europe will tend to fail more quickly than otherwise.
Unfortunately, so far, these intentionally higher oil prices for consumers seem to be mostly dead ends; they encourage substitutes, but today’s substitutes don’t work well enough to support modern agriculture and long-distance transportation.
[8] Politicians at times have reduced oil demand, and thus oil prices, by raising interest rates.
One way to reduce oil prices has been to push the economy into recession by raising interest rates. When interest rates rise, purchasing power for new cars, and for goods using oil in general, tends to fall. Recession seems to happen, with a lag, as shown on Figure 6. Recessions on this figure are noted with gray bars.
Increasing interest rates has led to several recessions, including the Great Recession of 2007-2009. A comparison with Figure 1 shows that oil prices have generally fallen during recessions.
[9] The climate change narrative is another way of attempting to reduce oil demand, and thus crude oil prices.
The wealthy nations of the world have been spreading the narrative that our most serious problem is climate change. In this narrative, we can help prevent climate change by reducing our fossil fuel usage. This narrative makes trying to work around a fossil fuel shortage a virtue, rather than something that needs to be done to prevent calamity from happening. However, when we examine CO2 emissions (Figure 7), they show that world CO2 emissions from fossil fuels have not fallen because of the climate change narrative.
Instead, what has happened is that manufacturing has increasingly moved to the less advanced economies of the world. There is a noticeable bump in CO2 emissions starting in 2002, as more coal-based manufacturing spread to China after it joined the World Trade Organization in very late 2001.
The climate change narrative has made it possible to “sell” the need to move away from fossil fuels in a less frightening way than by telling the public that oil and other fossil fuels are running out. However, it hasn’t fixed either the CO2 issue or the declining supply of fossil fuels issue, particularly oil.
[10] The danger is that the world economy is growing increasingly fragile because of long-term changes related to added complexity.
Shifting manufacturing overseas only works as long as there is plenty of inexpensive oil to allow long-distance supply lines around the world. Diesel oil and jet fuel are particularly needed. The US extracts a considerable amount of oil, but it tends to be very “light” oil. It is deficient in the long-chain hydrocarbons that are needed for diesel and jet fuel. In fact, the world’s supply of diesel fuel seems to be constrained.
Without enough diesel, there is a need to move manufacturing closer to the end users. But what I have called the Advanced Nations (members of the OECD, including the US, most countries in Europe, and Australia) have, to a significant extent, moved their manufacturing to lower-wage countries. Fossil fuel supplies in countries that have moved their manufacturing offshore tend to be depleted. Trying to move manufacturing back home seems likely to be problematic.
The world economy is now built on a huge amount of debt. All this debt needs to be repaid with interest. But if manufacturing is significantly constrained, there is likely to be a problem repaying this debt, except perhaps in currencies that buy little in the way of physical goods.
When oil supply is stretched, we don’t recognize the symptoms. One symptom is refinery closures in some oil importing areas, such as in California and Britain. This will make future oil supply less available. Other symptoms seem to be higher tariffs (to motivate increased manufacturing near home) and increasing hostility among countries.
[11] Both history and physics suggest that “overshoot and collapse over a period of years” is the outcome we should expect.
Pretty much every historical economy has eventually run into difficulties because its population grew too high for available resources. Often, available resources have been depleted, as well. Now, the world economy seems to be headed in this same direction.
The outcome is usually some form of collapse. Sometimes individual economies lose wars with other stronger economies. Sometimes, wage disparities become such huge problems that the poorer citizens become vulnerable to epidemics. At other times, unhappy citizens overthrow their governments. Or, if the option is available, citizens might vote the current political elite out of power.
Such collapses do not happen overnight; they are years in the making. Poorer people start dying off more quickly, even before the economy as a whole collapses. Conflict levels become greater. Debt levels grow. Researchers Turchin and Nefedov tell us that food prices bounce up and down. There is no evidence that they rise to a permanently high level to enable more food to be grown.
Anthropologist Joseph Tainter, in the Collapse of Complex Societies, tells us that there are diminishing returns to added complexity. While economies can temporarily work around overshoot problems with greater complexity, added complexity cannot permanently prevent collapse.
[12] We need to beware of “overly simple” models.
The models of economists and of scientists tend to be very simple. They do not consider the complex, interconnected nature of the world economy. In fact, the laws of physics are important in understanding how the world economy operates. Energy in some form (fossil fuel energy, human energy, or energy from the sun) is needed for every component of GDP. If the energy supply somehow becomes restricted, or is very costly to produce, this becomes a huge problem.
As I see it, the supply and demand model of economists is primarily useful in predicting what will happen in the very short term. It doesn’t have enough parts to it to tell us much more.
For any commodity, including oil, storage capacity tends to be very low relative to the amount used each year. Because of this, commodity prices tend to react strongly to any fluctuation in presently available supply, or projected supply in the future. The supply and demand model of economists primarily predicts these short-term outcomes.
For the longer term, we need to look to history and to models that consider the laws of physics. These models seem to suggest that collapse will take place over a period of years, as the more vulnerable parts of the system break off and disappear. Unfortunately, we cannot expect long-term high prices to solve our oil problem.
As you were saying Gail
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/crude-prices-tumble-reports-saudis-are-pushing-accelerate-opec-production-boost
I think KSA needs the revenue and is now willing to (or has to) sell for lower price.
KSA knows Permian shale is no longer a factor. No need to drive the price lower like they did a few years ago. But the minute KSA tries to raise revenue by selling more oil, they realize they will get less for it. But they may have no choice. When you are cash strapped, you sell what you can.
Then again, how much oil does KSA have? Not as much as they would have you believe. But if the truth got out, then they would lose “investors.”
This doesn’t sound like a good outcome!
Move to the side already…but does it need a cubic mile of Pt to ramp up? Asking for a friend…
Japan Just Switched on Asia’s First Osmotic Power Plant, Which Runs 24/7 on Nothing But Fresh Water and Seawater
A renewable energy source that runs day and night, powered by salt and fresh water.
https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/japan-just-switched-on-asias-first-osmotic-power-plant-which-runs-24-7-on-nothing-but-fresh-water-and-seawater/
Why Haven’t We Used This Before?
For something that sounds so elegantly simple, osmotic power has been stubbornly difficult to scale.
“While energy is released when the salt water is mixed with fresh water, a lot of energy is lost in pumping the two streams into the power plant and from the frictional loss across the membranes. This means that the net energy that can be gained is small,” said Kentish.
The challenge lies in efficiency. Pumps use up power to move water into the system, and membranes can slow things down due to friction. These hurdles are not unsolvable, but they’ve kept osmotic power in the shadows of its other counterparts—wind, solar, and hydroelectric.
Still, research teams across the globe have kept the idea alive. In addition to Denmark and Japan, pilot projects have cropped up in Norway, South Korea, Spain, and Qatar. Australia paused its prototype plant at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) during the COVID pandemic. But Dr. Ali Altaee, a specialist in water-energy systems at UTS, hopes it can be revived.
“We have salt lakes around New South Wales and Sydney that could be used as a resource and we also have the expertise to build it,” he told The Guardian.
I’m sure the missing “ingredient” is PT..Fast Eddie the Barnyard Animals are at it again
I haven’t figured out what “PT” means here — but, isn’t fresh water already in short supply? How do these things work, in actual reality?
It’s related to a pipe dream of outer space Starship and kinda running joke here ..PT is the metal platinum and I really can’t remember at all what purpose a cubic mile of it would serve.
I do remember he proposes we reach out in space for mining, manufacturing and waste disposal…because the Petri dish named Earth is overcrowded and all used up…time to expand to other frontiers where no man has gone before…
Maybe others can provide more..chuckle.
See, the idea is catching on, way to go!
Dennis L.
All right already, we get it..
Getting rid of fossil fuels is really hard – and we’re not making much progress
Published: August 27, 2025 4:02pm EDT
https://theconversation.com/getting-rid-of-fossil-fuels-is-really-hard-and-were-not-making-much-progress-262525
“Confronting the true scale of the decarbonisation challenge is daunting. We need to challenge fossil fuel interests in politics and consider whether continual economic growth can ever be compatible with climate stability.
… drumrolls please..
Australia’s direct emissions are slowly beginning to fall, due mainly to changes in land uses and, more recently, to renewables replacing coal plants. The latest figures show a 1.4% drop over the past year. But if the emissions of Australian gas and coal burned overseas are considered, Australia’s emissions would still be rising.
Positive trends foster assumptions that less and less fossil fuels will need to be burned.
This, however, isn’t guaranteed. Energy historians have pointed out new forms of energy don’t necessarily replace the older ones. Instead, they are getting added to the mix.
The world economy now uses more wood, coal, oil and gas than ever before. As a result, greenhouse gas emissions are still rising as fossil fuels continue to be used alongside renewables.”
Hahahaha 🤣 😂..Fast Eddie, the barnyard animals are at it again….yeah sure 💯
Here’s a good one, folks
Vital To Our Future’: How Lithium-Ion Batteries Are Saving The Grid
As EV sales growth slows, batteries are increasingly taking up a bigger role in supporting the world’s transmission grids.
https://insideevs.com/news/770660/lithium-ion-ev-batteries-energy-storage/
“Lithium-ion batteries are increasingly finding use cases far beyond electric cars and consumer electronics. Batteries are stabilizing transmission grids, serving as backup energy storage systems and cushioning the enormous power demands of AI data centers, helping the world shift towards renewable energy and away from fossil fuels.
……The idea goes something like this: as demand for EVs increases in the United States, for example, a homegrown battery industry will rise along with it. And as that industry grows, it will feed our other battery-driven energy needs.
However, as EVs grow more slowly amid the Trump administration’s rollback of clean energy programs and tax credits, demand for battery energy storage systems (BESS) is growing rapidly. EV sales grew at 7.3% in the U.S. in 2024, according to Cox Automotive. At the same time, America’s utility-scale battery storage grew at a whopping 66%, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported.
Why is this happening? What exactly are energy storage batteries? How different are they from your EV battery, and how will these two industries dovetail?
Battery Energy Storage Systems, Explained
The U.S. government classifies energy storage batteries into two main categories: small-scale with less than one megawatt-hour of energy storage capacity, and utility-scale, with a capacity of one megawatt-hour or more. Unlike in EVs, where batteries are packed into the flat floor, energy storage batteries resemble large shipping containers.”
Rather long winded article….refer to the link above
Like this ending……
“Still, Challenges Persist
The technology for energy storage batteries is locked in, BNEF says; the newer installations all use the LFP chemistry across applications. LFP technology was invented in the U.S., but successfully commercialized and rapidly advanced by Chinese battery makers.
Today, more than 90% of global LFP production is still concentrated in China, meaning the U.S. has a long road ahead before these batteries are made domestically in large volumes and at competitive prices.”
90% made in CHINA…betcha the transformers are too…WTF isn’t made in China?
We go from one imported type of product to another. As long as there is plenty of crude oil for transport and we are not fighting with each other, there is no problem. But once we are short of fuel for transport, or there is some glitch in supply, we are in a very bad position.
Yes, a hard situation, but humans are very adaptable and ingenious.
Have thought about the renewable/fossil fuel problem; it may be one of power that is the energy per unit time. Coal/oil may not be that powerful if one views the number of years to form them, much embedded energy. We release quickly the stored energy which took millions of years to form. Now that is a very inefficient battery, a dry cell comes to mind.
American agriculture has a production problem; surplus and collapsing prices. Were half the land used for photovoltaics, exchangeable battery packs and electric, small machinery in swarms, would that work? Yes, yes, fossil fuel to make the batteries, etc. unless …..
Why space manufacturing of course and then a cubic mile of Pt to make H from water for energy storage. Earth is our home, it is our spaceship and an incredibly well designed one at that. A guess is metal cans for living in space don’t scale well, earth is about right. Optimus is coming, Starship launches again soon for an orbital attempt. If we keep going, the fossil battery will run down about the same time as Pt kicks in.
Dennis L.
Dennis, let’s get the odds of this actually being accomplished..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQEh9gm2xcs
pretty close approximation
I ask again: how does Spock calculate these things?
Spick vs AI
Mike, I don’t know, but I am looking. In fifteen or so years my farmland has little or no value other than what can be earned with a team of horses which probably take half the tilled land to feed those horses.
Horse farming, Amish, takes a family, a large family; it is what I see around my farm.
Currently we use 40+% of the corn crop for ethanol which in production is a thermodynamic loser. I think ethanol gasoline gives less mileage than pure gasoline. It is inefficient and essentially assuming I am correct, this a transfer from consumers to farmers to maintain farming without which we have a food problem. Solutions are never perfect, they are what we can do.
Farming is going to transition, the world has learned how to farm USA style. A question is can solar photovoltaics generate enough power on a farm to run autonomous machines? The Amish currently do this, their power is horsepower, literally; that is solar to food without diesel. Yields would expect to be less, prices more, probably some unrest at the supermarket. A horse is self reproducing, a solar panel not so much. Two alternatives, which do you chose? Both are directly solar.
Dennis L.
never thought of you as a moonshiner Dennis
Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. turned the tables on Democrats on Thursday during a fiery Senate hearing in the wake of the recent firing of CDC Director Susan Monarez.
As the hearing commenced, Democrats held a rally outside the Capitol, demanding that he resign his post. But inside, they struggled to land a punch.
After Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) almost hysterically claimed that Kennedy was putting children in danger, Kennedy called out the Senator for doing nothing to prevent the rise of chronic disease in American children.
Wyden: “I hope you tell the American people how many preventable child deaths are an acceptable sacrifice.”
RFK: “You’ve sat in that chair for 25 years while the chronic disease in our children went up to 76% and you said nothing”
Kennedy delivered straightforward answers — and, at one point, demanded that they answer his questions. When Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) objected to Kennedy firing the government’s panel of vaccine experts, Kennedy noted “and you were never there, complaining,” when the pharmaceutical industry backed its own candidates.
As Bennet claimed that Kennedy had lied about the safety of vaccines, Kennedy countered:
“Are you saying, Senator — that the mRNA has never been associated with myocarditis or pericarditis?”
Bennet refused to answer.
“You’re evading the question,” Kennedy said.
“No, I’m asking the questions here, Mr. Kennedy,” Bennet replied.
Throughout the hearing, Democrats shouted at Kennedy and interrupted him, refusing to allow him to answer their questions even as they made incendiary accusations that he was “corrupt” and a “charlatan.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) attacked Kennedy for removing the recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines for otherwise healthy people, saying he had broken his promise to keep vaccines available to everyone who wanted them.
Kennedy said they were still available, and free for most people. Warren said that because in some states, people would now have to pay or them out of pocket, Kennedy had broken his promise.
He then pointed out that she had taken “$855,000 from pharmaceutical companies,” and said that she was asking him to recommend vaccines for which there was no clinical indication.
Warren then defended ousted CDC director Monarez, and Kennedy countered that Warren herself had recently voted against confirming her.
There were some newsworthy revelations, such as Kennedy’s report that the Biden administration had manipulated the public presentation of data about the controversial abortion drug mifepristone.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and other challenged Kennedy over whether he supported Operation Warp Speed, which the first Trump administration had used to accelerate the coronavirus vaccine’s development. Kennedy said that “that particular vaccine perfectly matched” the virus as it was at the time, and that it had also likely saved lives, but also noted that the virus had mutated, and that the vaccine had not stopped its later spread.
Several times, Kennedy noted that Democrats were simply “making stuff up,” attributing remarks to him that he had not actually said, or views that he did not actually hold.
He declined to resign his position.
By Joel B. Pollak, Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2025/09/04/watch-kennedy-turns-tables-on-democrats-in-fiery-hearing-on-cdc-vaccines/
This side of the story isn’t reported in the mainstream media here.
We humans are narrative. An example is the papal outrage over the earth not being the center of the universe. Some heretics were burned at the stake even though they had a better narrative. What we have invested our lives in becomes central to our being, losing this is painful and for society is a transition period to find a better narrative.
Transition periods are never easy and in them capital has an increased deprecation rate and zero or negative salvage rate. This makes retirement less than expected. Bummer.
Dennis L.
This is Zerohedge’s report:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/vance-blasts-democrat-senators-youre-full-sht
Talk is cheap. When do we get to the bombs.
Hell has no fury like a US congressman (or senator) seeing his source of money endangered.
Kennedy says it was perfectly safe but then it wasn’t. Hummm.
Too much solar capacity in China–not enough buyers:
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Tackles-Price-Wars-as-Bloated-Solar-Sector-Amasses-Huge-Losses.html
China Tackles Price Wars as Bloated Solar Sector Amasses Huge Losses
Pt, always Pt.
Pb is recyclable, wonder what is the cost if batteries are changed out more frequently vs more expensive materials which are harder to recycle. Thinking of robotically changed packs in farm equipment. Maintenance on a farm tractor is too high and a bigger tractor with increased production is not working well with losing a bit on each bu and trying to make it up with volume. Autonomous farm equipment could be a game changer, smaller, electric machines easier to manufacture, barriers to entry less, JD?
OpenAgGPS seems to work, it is on my list. Thinking of the time when I call the neighbors and ask, “Have you seen my autonomous machine? It hasn’t returned home.”
Pb could be a bridge to the time of a cubic mile of Pt. Hmm, not lead to gold, but close.
Dennis L.
Different people will try different things. Perhaps something will work.
This is worrisome. 🙂
Slovak Academy of Sciences analyzed the Covid vaccines
mRNA vaccines do not alter human DNA or harm health. SAS publishes analysis
https://domov.sme.sk/c/23539643/vakcina-covid-pandemia-kotlar-sav-analyza.html
It is easy to get a reviewer for any paper that claims no harm from covid vaccines.
A US senator just said to RFK:
You sir are a charlatan
Thank goodness the US Senate is there to uphold the truth. I dare say they are as a group the least corrupt, most objective institution in the world.
The Senate can be corrupt and RFK can be a charlatan concurrently.
and 1000+ papers on vaccine damage all be wrong. yes, yes.
About 50% more people died in the vaccine arm of the trial than the control arm in the large US trial used to approve it. The excess deaths were heart related and written off as statistical noise since the total number of deaths was small in both cases. Oops! Don’t let data get in the way of your beliefs.
neat summing up of the RFK fiasco
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/new-york-post-rfk-jr_n_68ba7cd0e4b0acb9ffeb7d8b
i accept your point
but that still doesnt alter what RFK is…a charlatan
and a public menace—just like his dear leader.
None of them is trained in the life sciences, or even basic data analysis, let it go Norm. As posted elsewhere, it was something that needed to be tried before turning to the usual horsemen (war principally). And I still prefer it to war.
This is the narrative problem, I referred to it earlier and it is not dissimilar to the papal rejection of the earth not being the center of the universe. A narrative to hold people together as a group was failing and an institution in part organized around that narrative was having to change the story.
Much personal capital invested. Science is the same, someone once commented that a new scientific idea needs the deaths of the previous teachers of the old.
Dennis L.
Only last February, the Senate voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Health and Human Services secretary.
His views were very well known to the senators at the time, and since taking up his post he has performed totally in character and in accordance with his stated principles. What’s not to like?
The senator who smeared RFK Jr. is Maria Cantwell. She’s hardly worth calling names, but is clearly not an expert in health, with a BA in public administration.
Born in 1958 in Indianapolis, where she was raised, from 1984 she spent a decade in politics, mostly in the Great State of Washington. Then in 1995, Cantwell joined the small staff of Progressive Networks, an IT startup company whose founder she befriended through her political connections. Known as RealNetworks in the twenty-first century, the firm developed and marketed software programs for transmitting sound and video over the Internet. As vice president of the e-commerce and consumer division, Cantwell assisted the firm’s expansion to a staff of over a thousand. She accumulated a personal fortune of roughly $50 million by early 2000 and used the money to affect her political comeback.
As to her congressional record, she’s been very progressive, very liberal, very leftist, you all know the type. Among other things, she has supported giving 11-year-old-girls access to contraceptives without a prescription, voted against the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004, voted in favor of the Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq in 2002, and co-sponsored the Israel Anti-Boycott Act (S.270), which would have made it a federal crime, punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years imprisonment, for Americans to encourage or participate in boycotts against Israel and Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories if protesting actions by the Israeli government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Cantwell
The wiki article attests she has been a great supporter of preserving the environment and protecting it from depravation, and of LGBTQWXYX rights.
I have no idea of her how many genders she believes there are, how she defines a woman, or what she would think if a trans woman armed with a submachine gun turned up in her washroom, so I won’t speculate there. But it seems that on the issue of climate change and the pressing need to do something about it such as banning fossil fuels, Maria and Robert Jr. are in lockstep—which makes both of them either charlatans or morons in my book.
Oh, here’s something sleazy! In 2006, it emerged that court files concerning a loan Cantwell made in 2001 to her former boyfriend, boss, and campaign manager, lobbyist Ron Dotzauer, to help him through his divorce litigation, had been sealed. A Sound Politics reporter had the file unsealed and discovered that Cantwell was identified in the divorce records “as the ‘other woman’.”
But that was a long time ago, during her younger and more foolish past. She has never married but has since settled down and lives with her recently widowed mother and Chuck, a diabetic dog, in Edmonds, fourteen miles north of Seattle.
Anyway, Kennedy is getting this flak because he’s over the target and dropping significant tonnage. He’s the first HHS secretary in decades to have made a decent attempt to do a proper job of enhancing the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.
https://www.hhs.gov
So there! (sticks tongue out, places right thumb on nose, and waves fingers)
Correct Tim, the flack Bobby is getting shows he is on target and Big Pharma is worried their cozy rubber stamp agency is being cleaned up.
I heard her interview and she said that she had to look up that word before she used it 🙄
It’s a shame that no one told the good people of the academy what happened after the great “100% safe & effective” fiasco.
Still, in Slovakia’s defence, they did just beat the might of Germany football 2-0 and the bloke in charge must make MGs chest swell with pride every time he speaks
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T4aUT6I3BtM
Slovakia, a bit like a Meat Loaf song
Was Panenka a chech or a slovak? that was their moment of absolute glory. well deserved I should say, guy was a genius.
Czech according to wiki, but he did gain fame against the Germans, so the Germans will probably take both again on their next attempted march to Moscow. Merz seems mad enough to attempt it.
This finding is of course dissimulation; pretense.The vaxxes may not change DNA sequence but they absolutely, incontrovertibly alter gene expression, by definition, which is soft genetic engineering. Part of the establishmentarian B’s on this is that, under their Darwinism, they believe that DNA sequence changes are based on random mutation rather than what they are obviously based on, which are cumulative epigenetic changes (which is why i said the other day that horizontal/lateral gene transfer is 99pc of evolution). The mRNA vaxxes are massive horizontal genetic material transfer bombs of tumor exosomes that force epigenetic changes onto affected parts of the body in conjunction with the carcinogenic LNP catalysts. But even according to the ‘spike’ psyop it is still an epigenetic forcing by definition because they are making cells make alterations to what proteins are being made which is the province of epigenetics.
Slightly off topic, but who remembers Tiffany Dover—the nurse who collapsed six times in as many weeks and was then chosen as one of the first people to receive a COVID-19 shot on live TV, where she collapsed again? Norman Fenton summarized the farce in a short interview a couple of weeks ago.
I’m not absolutely sure, but I think the Tiffany Dover who resurfaced three years later is a different chick. Norman thinks she could be the same, albeit with a spot of plastic surgery. She has lighter hair, parted in a different place, a darker complexion, and a rounder, plumper face. But the clincher for me is the eyebrows. The original Tiffany’s brows are horizontal. The new model’s brows slope downwards towards the bridge of her pretty little nose.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXmRlBL9GX0
They definitely changed the DNA sequence from Tiffany to ‘Tiffany.’ The latter’s voice and accent are totally different, and the intermediate ‘Tiffany’ sequence, from the hospital group photo, is a bigger girl. That the real Tiffany came back to do that interview the day after it happened or whatever, adds to the intrigue.
Given that the Hand’s plandemic and the vaxxes main sociopolitical goal was to have a manufactured opposition redundantly run neoliberalism off a cliff it was already running off of itself, it does look like the consent factory was also operating at warp speed.
RFK is such a little controlled opposition bitch for saying in the hearings yesterday that the first vaxx permutation was perfectly matched to the virus, and saved lives. Easy for me to say though.
I agree with your summing up of RFK’s performance—both lackluster and disingenuous. I doubt he believes a word of that. But for those of us who would like to see a total end to any kind of coerced injections, he’s probably the best HHS secretary we can hope for at the moment.
Tiffany’s voice sounds different to me, but not being an American, it’s a bit harder for me to judge. Perhaps if I listened to both of them a few times….
By the way, Norman Fenton’s wife took the jabs, against his advice, and he said in a video a couple of years ago that she consequently developed serious dementia problems. “So now it’s personal.”
He was lackluster. Not as quick and sharp under fire as I expected him to be. Poor night’s sleep, perhaps.
You know me, my belief in the Hand’s full spectrum political dominance renders all this stuff as theater, and highly predictable theater at that. It can’t pull on my heartstrings. Big pharma culture has to be unwound no different from globalized trade networks or growth-based oil demand, so the plandemic served to create the political conditions for massively restructuring all three to the downside. At the sea change, what was most profitable becomes too expensive.
Cement demand at an all time low in UK .
https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2025/07/29/forterra-to-shut-down-two-divisions/
Cement-making hits 75-year low as Labour’s building dreams crumble
Government warned it has ‘no chance’ of meeting new home targets
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/03/cement-slumps-75-year-low-labours-building-ambitions-fall/
It is not possible to make cement without an adequate supply of cheap burnable fuels. Electricity doesn’t work! Even old tires to burn will work. Poor countries use coal. Lack of cement means that many types of structures cannot be build. Roads made from concrete can no longer be built, either.
” Vaclav Smil’s “four pillars” of modern civilization are ammonia, steel, cement, and plastics. These fundamental materials are indispensable to modern societies, with their massive production heavily reliant on fossil fuels. The synthesis of ammonia is critical for food production, while steel and cement are vital for infrastructure, and plastics are central to many consumer goods and industrial applications. ”
I got nothing to add .
Fresh water and cropland with fertile soil also seem to be essential for any kind of agricultural economy.
I love Norwegian humor.
Germany is in deep s***.
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/germanys-skills-shortage-scam-open-borders-job-losses-and-economic-collapse
U.S. MANUFACTURERS reported declining business activity for the sixth month running in August. The purchasing managers index was just 48.7 (23rd percentile for all months since 1980) well below 50.9 (39th percentile) at the start of the year. The nascent recovery evident at the end of 2024 and the start of 2025 has been disrupted by increased uncertainty and spending caution among businesses and consumers. The depth and duration of the downturn is consistent with previous mid-cycle slowdowns:
https://x.com/JKempEnergy/status/1963551694098215316/photo/1
Early on, it says:
This ends:
“Germany’s labor market is being salvaged not by open-border politics, but by the initiative of the very private sector that politicians continue to undermine.”
On Monday will be the vote in the French Parliament . Patrick Raymond uses Indonesia as the case study . Use translator .
” The Bayrou government will certainly collapse, and the European dictatorial regime is seriously ill. A dictatorial regime, because you can change the government, but not the program, which is imperative. ”
https://lachute.over-blog.com/2025/09/insurrection-en-indonesie.html
Shell, BP gas stations run dry in Indonesia on import curbs
https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/other/shell-bp-gas-stations-run-dry-in-indonesia-on-import-curbs/ar-AA1LPGAw
The French certainly are in trouble. We will see what happens after the election on Monday, September 8.
According to the second link, it is only some types of oil at some Shell and BP stations that is completely missing. The companies want the ability to import more oil, but the government will not allow such imports.
Regarding Indonesia, the article says:
This may be a map of where countries in financial trouble go in the future. Patrick Raymond sees this as a pattern for France, but it is likely a pattern for other countries.
Official fraud .Digital gold ????
” World Gold Council launches digital gold initiative with Linklaters, Hilltop Walk ”
https://archive.vn/30YWy
It seems to me that the only kind of gold that makes sense to own is gold that a person can physically take hold of, and store in their home, perhaps in a safe. Gold coins would seem to be preferred, since these are easy to recognize. At the same time, governments can regulate their sale more easily.
If there is little to buy, I would not depend on gold. I would depend primarily on my own good health and my ability to work.
TPTB need to take pressure off of gold by getting people to “store value” elsewhere, because the rapid rise in the price of gold reveals a rapid decline in the purchasing power of the dollar and other fiat currencies. Bitcoin is a great success in this regard and as far as I am concerned, was the principal reason for its creation, and “digital gold” is a similar diversion unless it is backed 1:1 by your own, allocated gold. Anything less and it’s another reserve banking system and scheme.
What we are losing is physical goods and services to buy. Food and fresh water are essential. I would expect workers in those areas would be fed first. The rest of us will be farther down the line.
Those who are working at a productive job should be fed first. Retirees and the disabled will get whatever is left. The “money” system cannot fix the underlying problem, as far as I can see.
Those who are working at a productive job should be fed first. Retirees and the disabled will get whatever is left.
Norman isn’t going to like that one bit!
I visited the home center yesterday here in Japan, and what I noticed was there are still lots of goods of all kinds available in sufficient quantities, and no obvious shortages of anything. This surprised me a bit because a lot of (and probably most) home center hardware sold in Japan comes from China.
The other thing that surprised me was that prices are way up, with items such a bricks and cement blocks 10 to 20% higher than a year ago and almost double what they were 25 years ago from personal memory. It’s almost as if the yen in our wallets and bank accounts is evaporating away.
One thing that remains super-cheap is chicken manure. The store was selling 20kg bags of the stuff, beautifully packed with an illustration of a cockerel on every bag, for just 90 yen plus tax. The reason for this, I assume, is that the supply of chicken manure is higher than the demand, and if nobody is buying it, the producers have to treat it as industrial waste—either that, or build huge mountains of chicken manure all around the hen houses and egg factories.
While it’s a very useful agricultural input that does wonders for productivity on the veggie patch, and it doesn’t “go bad” if stored over time, I don’t see chicken manure being a viable alternative to either fiat currency or gold coins.
We need to be better recycling what is available. Put the chicken manure to use, where it is needed.
People will be fed on social status, not on productivity.
Conoco’s 25% layoffs aren’t just “cost discipline.”
They expose shale’s broken math: rising costs, flat output, falling prices.
How long can this model even survive?
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/conocophillips-says-it-will-cut-workforce-by-20-25-shares-fall-2025-09-03/
Other companies are laying off workers as well. The article mentions Chevron. This is a clear sign that the companies are not profitable, and don’t see profit around the corner.
Giovanni Staunovo🛢
@staunovo
ExxonMobil explores sale of European chemicals plants
Oil company ponders future of UK and Belgian factories amid prolonged industry downturn .
https://x.com/staunovo/status/1963454242372411492
Very interesting .
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/global-oil-gas-company-layoffs-2024-2025-2025-09-03/
12 companies are listed as laying off workers.
Just had to drop by and mention that Canadian Prepper interviewed Chris Martenson a few days ago, and during the interview they both commented that it’s ‘so hard to understand why oil isn’t much more expensive.’
Don’t let it go to your head Gail, but you are so far ahead….
It is wage disparity that is a problem, not the high price of oil. Too many people cannot get this idea straight.
Thanks for pointing this out again. I cannot believe how many people don’t understand the concept.
But why is supply not falling? Is it too early? With wages up dramatically and materials at all time high. Demand for oil must be way down
Sam , the answer is in two parts .
1. We are drawing down inventory to mask the supply . To prove my point I would have to post several links like ; onshore oil storage , oil on sea , crude inventory , distillate inventory etc . So you are just going have to take my word on this .
2. Oil is a financialized asset . The price is not regulated by supply/ demand only but by other factors . Just like Tesla –is it worth USD 600 or USD 300 in the stock market ? We don’t know .
What is worrying is the confluence of ” peak oil ” and ” the Olduvai Theory ” .
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/the-next-energy-crunch-has-arrived-72f8a63f3e39
Forgot . Why is that the US SPR has never been topped up if there is a glut ? The rule ” Oil above USD 70 will kill the consumer and oil below USD 70 will kill the producer “” .
At one point, the EIA was forecasting the US crude oil supply would start falling early this year.
When I look at the latest EIA data, US crude oil supply has not yet started falling. Production in New Mexico is doing very well, as is production from the Gulf of America (formerly Mexico). We heard the screams of pain from Texas, but we didn’t notice that other areas seem to be doing OK, or quite well.
The single highest month of US crude oil production is June, 2025. October, 2024, was the second highest recent month.
When I look at the EIA’s Short Term Energy Outlook, it is no longer forecasting a drop in oil production starting this year. Instead, it seems to be forecasting a decrease in US crude oil production starting in 2026.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/images/Fig5.png
The net IS falling. If you take the total production of all exporters together, and subtract the total consumption of all exporters together, you get the total purchasable oil. That number plateaued in 2005, stayed level till 2018, and started declining from then on. Look at the total consumption of Germany and France, down drastically. Also, I have not looked but I bet their total consumption of natural gas is also way down.
Before the gross really starts to fall, WWIII will be effecting large scale ‘demand destruction’
The unwashed masses of inflationistas were going to have to face the music one day. But that’s what they get for not listening to reason. They got their moment in the sun with the transitory inflation what wrung the little blood there is from the capitalist monolith.
I also noticed that this article has very few “likes” compared to other recent articles. No one likes the idea that prices won’t rise to solve our oil problem.
“… When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization — this tea ritual and the detective novel. …“
(Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, Signet, page 235)
When the American Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization — freedom of speech and rap music.
John Milton wrote about freedom of speech, and rap ‘music’ is African.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNsdMFCXH9M
2 Live Crew – Banned In The U.S.A.
[576,117 views, May 4, 2023, 2LiveCrewVEVO]
Alice Rosenbaum, whose very name signifies that her family was Anglophiles, probably did not know that the first detective novel was Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and tea rituals were very common in Asia long before the first tea arrive in London. Detective novels as we know it was founded by Edgar Allan Poe, and popularized the book Madame LeRouge by Emile Gaborieau, a name buried in history. Neither were British.
That aside, the entire contribution of Britain is significantly outweighed by its screwups.
Thanks for reminding me why Ayn Rand should not be taking seriously.
I think there were a lot of derogative comments under this blog post.
And also some quite illogical ones — which I didn’t expect.
To add something of value I add a citation:
„We can accept that there is no possible way that the planet can carry 9, 10 or 15 billion people, and if it isn’t going to happen, by definition an unknown force is going to prevent it. … We can be certain though, that the force will be delivered by one of the four horsemen. Whichever of them takes on the task, you can be sure he will be eagerly aided and abetted by the other three.“
(Norman Pagett, The End of More, page 227)
I had ordered the book in November 2017, I think.
Most likely I’ve read it in 2018.
Meanwhile we had one horseman dancing on earth (plandemic).
It turned out that the horseman and its companions are not heavenly beings but simply earthly beings with their own odd world view.
It is no real wonder that another horseman (war) is befriend with the first one. Protagonists that pushed the ‘pestilence’ and its ‘remedy’ are similar to those pushing for war.
The third one is in the making as well if you are observant.
It is about drinking water and foodstuff.
So, just listen to the cacophony in mainstream and do or do not comply — it is up to you.
While I agree with you in a broad sense—in the context of the pestilence horseman, there was no ‘plan’ demic.
The disease was of our own making, agreed, but in the sense of our overcrowding—of ourselves and the animals we rely on for food supply.
Microbial life is the dominant life form on this planet. We exist through their combined input. (which is purely selfish of course)
we abused their hospitality by forcing them into unnatural habitats.
Their kickback against that is to unleash disease against us to stop our predations into their territory.
If you check back in history—all plagues started when animals (including us) were in overcrowded conditions.
Human beings do not have the intelligence to ‘plan’ disease—simply because disease itself does not adhere to a plan—it will infect without selection.
So now the poor microbes are being accused of breeding pestilence horses and trying to make us humans extinct. The false rumours of these times just never seem to stop. I’ll bet those microbes don’t even know what a human is. If we told them that some of them are living inside a giant’s body, they would never believe it. They’d accuse us of peddling BS.
on that basis, you carry more than your fair share of the little critters dem
“disease itself does not adhere to a plan—it will infect without selection.”
“all plagues started when animals (including us) were in overcrowded conditions.”
Good points. I would not consider covid a plague. But it did start with overcrowded conditions.
do the four horsemen include vaccines? If not, can we make it 5 horsemen? I am the first to say that vaccines just aid, but are not the primary driver. 17M dead is a pittance.
But current global leadership employs a variety of techniques such as promoting homosexuality, feminism and veganism. so we are up to close to 10 horsemen. they would like more and big prizes are there for the successful creator of new horsemen. Just look at the bank accounts of Bourla or Zelensky.
Over labor day, I visited with my sister Lois who has a friend in Uganda. The Ugandan friend told my sister that in 2020, families in Uganda were shut in and prevented from working, just as in some rich countries. But Uganda had no way of compensating these families. Theft became rampant. In some cases, breadwinners would kill their whole families, and then themselves.
I doubt that these deaths were counted in the 17M.
In my view, it is well clear that Covid (a virus created in various biowepons’ labs, through collaborations of various scientists) was deliberately released by some agency in order to hurt and isolate China and highlight its supposed kind of ‘wrong doing’ on these matters.
It was also exploited to introduce another class of vaccines (mRNA), a class of so different vaccines that official istitutions had to modify even the definition of vaccine.
All the most important Countries of the world tried their own creations, but in Western Countries (I would say in Nato Countries) at a certain point decided to make it mandatory.
In my view, that happened in order to spread on all citizens this new negative ‘variable’ to hide deaths and adverse events on everybody and therefire avoid any possible future confrontation on people who didn’t have the vaccine and those who had it.
The strategy of the vaccine was also taken as a response of the release of a biowepon (although not so dangerous), because all military protocols required and still requires the introduction of an ‘antidote’ when a negative artificial element is introduced in the ‘system’.
Like the protocols of nuclear events.
They require in fact the administration of an iodine-based medicine, in those cases.
The irony of all this is that China, and Asia in general, is going well now, while those who made this new class of vaccines mandatory, are doing bad…
And hose Countries who didn’t introduce any vaccine had no particular problems on general health point of view, by the way…
Just as on 9/11, the perps didn’t have to use planes in order to demolish those buildings, but only to pretend to use planes….. so with the pandemic, the perps didn’t have to release a novel coronavirus, but only to pretend to release a novel coronavirus.
Just let that idea permeate your mind, and ponder it for a bit while drinking a cup of your favorite beverage.
How much of the illness and death during the pandemic was caused by any kind of supposed novel coronavirus, or other germs or poisons, and how much was caused by lockdowns, isolation, hospital protocols including drugs and ventilators, and sheer unadulterated fear?
I know people here in Japan who were absolutely terrified that they were going to die if they didn’t stay home, wear a mask, wash their hands a dozen times a day, social distance at the supermarket, and take multiple injections as soon as they were made available. It was impossible to convince them that this was a psyop and they had nothing to fear from any novel coronavirus.
Looking back, the fact that the authorities and the media emphasized that COVID-19 was caused by “a novel coronavirus” was a dead giveaway. After all, bog-standard coronaviruses are well known to give people colds, but are nothing to be afraid of, but “novel coronaviruses”? You could write a novel about how dangerous they might be.
Governments, several institutions and legacy media (around the world) were caught red-handed — heavily manipulating public opinion.
They have a lot of explaining to do.
But almost no one (institution-wise) is doing anything.
So were they all fooled (manipulated) by pandemic preparedness/readiness?
Or were they part of an intended manipulation?
Or was all just an unlucky clusterf..k of biblical proportions?
I think you have to rule out the latter one — thanks to the propaganda spread by WEF before, during and after the events.
BTW, this is not the first worldwide event where high ranking institutions, governments etc. have failed. The financial crisis was similar — similar WRT people at positions performing actions they did not fully understand. In this case buying financial products for which no full understanding of the real underlying risk was existing.
So is it a combination of bad actors (at one side) and lacking competence (at the other side)?
Were there consulting companies involved?
In any case it is of most importance to get to the root cause of this.
If not fully and publicly analyzed and understood it is a systemic risk in the future.
erwalt
9/11 was just a bunch of ayrab nutcases out to prove the supremacy of their god, and buy themselves a place in their version of paradise.Lets hope they were successful.
covid was the result of human greed, cramming food-animals into tighter and tighter spaces , resulting in microbial life mutating amd jumping species. (into us)
human plagues invariably start with overcrowding. (check it out for yourself)
No animal is intended to be confined in closed spaces.
no plots, no conspiracies, no holograms.
nobody is trying to decimate global populations. (that will happen of its own accord anyway)
But dont let me interrupt your self-generating fantasies on that score.
thank you erwalt, for the requote.
Though it genuinely still scares me to read it, even though I wrote it, back in 2012—nothing that has happened since has altered to change that opinion…
—if anything, things have worsened as our future rolls up towards us.
And in 2012, I really didnt expect to still be alive (90 this month) to worry about it.
Belated congratulations!
Saludos
el mar
+1
Imagine what would happen if you took away the Gauls’ magic potion (from the Asterix comics) and put up a few wind turbines instead!
Saludos
elmar
I’ve always loved Asterix comic books, I used to devour them in minute detail for te sheer artistic skill and brilliance of their creator
Hang in there you must out live Trump.
Emperor Pagett: “Everything is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen. … Ha, ha, ha, ha, haa!”
“Bücher gibt’s, die sehr viel mehr wissen als ihre Verfasser.”
— Otto Weiß (1849 – 1915), Wiener Musiker und Feuilletonist
“There are books that know much more than their authors.”
I would like to think so erwalt.
I don’t pretend to know much, I just observe, and write down my observations.
Norm horse-persons.
Yesterday, I try to explain on linkedin why Renewable can’t replace fossiles fuel , i receive a lot of bad comment but i try …
We return to the principle of “exergy.” The problem is neither technical nor political. 🫠
Each fossil fuel has enabled the development of derivative infrastructures and technologies adapted to its unique physical properties…
These physical properties do not exist in renewable energy sources.
To compensate, attempts are being made to artificially recreate them using energy or material converters.
These substitutions are so costly in terms of energy that very little exergy remains available to run a competitive industrial society.
For example for subsitution hydrogene :
ArcelorMittal abandons its “green steel” despite €1.3 billion in subsidies.
Shell, Equinor, Neste, Repsol, etc., cancel or weaken their ambitions due to lack of markets.
In Australia, only ~1% of projects advance beyond the conceptual stage.
In France: McPhy is in serious difficulty, Hype abandons its H₂ taxis, Stellantis stops its hydrogen utility vehicle.
👉 It’s like a cheetah, a predator built for animal protein: fast, powerful, but dependent on this specific food.
If it switches to plant protein, it loses its speed and becomes vulnerable to predators.
If it now attempts to live directly from the sun, it would have to rewrite its DNA to become an ectotherm like a reptile: it would consume much less, but would live in slow motion, dependent on the climate, unable to be constantly active. And even then, it would still need to eat.
The result: it would no longer be a cheetah, but a different species.
In the same way, can we move from a thermo-industrial society to an eolo-photo-industrial one? I guess not 🙂
I say that the energy type must be profitable enough to pay taxes, besides not needing subsidies. The taxes paid to the government are a way of showing that there is left over “profit” to share with the economy as a whole
What government services are necessary? A percentage would be helpful, I don’t know.
The Amish farm renewable, horses, they pay their real estate taxes for schools they don’t use. Somehow around me, it seems to work Tongue in cheek making a sample of sufficient size of horse manure on the road might be a good economic indicator. Think of the commentators who could say, ” That is horse sh…”
Dennis L
Paved central roads are very helpful. Schools for a small percentage of the population are helpful. Fresh water distribution is helpful. A small share of the population (or businesses) needs to be able to use oil and gas.
Not all humans are essential. People who have huge health problems and will need endless care are not essential. Providing government services to these folks is not essential. If they die a little earlier, the economy will not be the worse off.
if you study relevant istory, you will find peioples from 00000s of years ago, had injiries for which they needed long term care, and from which they recovered to lead a normal functioning life.
so it would seem that the instict to care for others is deeply ingrained.
There is a difference between injuries to adults with reasonable skills who can likely recover, and people with either congenital defects, or degenerative effects of old age. Spending huge amounts on folks who can never recover enough to help with the overall system (even providing child care) is likely a waste of resources.
“so it would seem that the instict to care for others is deeply ingrained”
It’s as natural as nature itself, so completely alien in the corporate system that we inhabit.
Peter Kropotkin certainly agreed and wrote a book about it in 1902
Free version
https://archive.org/details/mutualaid01krop/mode/1up
Not so free version
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/309664/mutual-aid-by-kropotkin-peter/9780241355336
Written at a time of less people and more available resources of course, but without it, we’re very prone to manipulation(and fear of the other).
When things get rough, no one cares about the Amish.
They were tolerated because they were harmless but when things get rough there will be people who will covet their land and food.
The account of the mennonites against the Makhnoists, bandits led by Nestor Makhno who claimed he was an anarchist but was for all practical purposes a warlord, do not give any encouragement for the long term prospects of the hopelessly inbred group.
I watched a documentary about the Amish. Between the lines, the commentator was a very young man with poor health. I remember thinking this fellow lives on a farm and is rather young to be sickly. Makes you wonder about the Amish, although they are practical people who may find a way around that problem.
the amish—and others of similar lifestyle, are living unnatiral lives, because they are protected by the living environment they choose to hold in disdain.
were it not for their protection, they would have been swept into the dustbin of history long ago.
Hello Gail and OurFiniteWorld readers, I’ve visit the site from time to time, but it’s been a while since I’ve commented. I do wonder what happened to FastEddie?!
The prospect of living through the demise of the Age of Oil is scary and exhilarating at the same time. It’s frightening because sooooooo much of our lives depend on oil. It’s hard to comprehend the breath and width of this dependency. For some scale, check the free Youtube film, “Collapse” featuring Michael Rupert. A. Real. Eye. Opener. A not so fun read on the subject matter, by James Kunstler, is “The Long Emergency” a real Debbie downer humdinger.
The exhilarating part of it is the totally new future; and it will be agrarian (again). For a more upbeat view of the future, try reading Kunstler’s “Geography to No Where” a fascinating page turner on the subject of how to develop towns, villages and neighborhoods that serve the public and the community in a low fossil fuel environment. You’d be amazed at the common sense of it. “The Transition Handbook” is a fabulous free e-book by Rob Hopkins from the UK that offers a most positive and action oriented view of a future without the abundance of the Master Resource. Kunstlers’ “A World Made by Hand” series is another fun read that shows an in-between time after no-more-fossil-fuels-at-scale.
What to do? Doing nothing should not be an option! Even a 5% or 8% built-in resilience is better than a 0% built-in resilience. The bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is Water, Food, Shelter, and Security. Those are good places to start!
I am not certain that any of us have all of the answers to how we can survive during the downslope. It is pretty certain that population will have to fall. Some of us may have our life expectancies shortened. None of is given a guarantee when we are born, regarding how long we will live.
Fast Eddy now writes on Substack.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com
You can sign up to have his posts emailed to you. He is true to form but maybe a bit mellow.
“What to do? Doing nothing should not be an option!”
I disagree!
age is an important variable.
those of us over 60 have a very good chance of living out the rest of our lives with a quasi BAU.
the degrowth process is in its early years, it will probably become very severe in the 2nd half of this century, but I think it’s worth being all in on BAU wobbling along for another decade or two.
Art Berman appears to believe that renewables were never the solution to the energy problem.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-energy-transition-that-never-was/
This post ends:
I would add: Clean energy isn’t really clean. It is nowhere near enough. The intermittency causes huge problems. It is not sufficiently available in winter, when our big need for heat takes place.
Not sure of the facts. China has huge solar programs, huge wind turbine programs and has a manufacturing capability.
They also seem to understand hydro and are looking to build a dam in the Himalayan mountains. Something is working in China.
Major cost of solar is the supporting structure and Cu; I know directly something about that issue. Solar electric can be used to heat buildings, the battery is a large water tank heated for winter. Can it the cool same in summer for good sleeping? In the first case, no inverters. On a small scale, motto is “Think local.”
Wondering about electric tractors, think wrecked Tesla, battery and motors, make battery drop in, done by robot. Farming is done during the sunny season, nice coincidence.
Farming does not work as currently done, too much production, too high costs, zero profit. Local, electricity is consistent with market. If it works, one major cost gone, oil.
We have huge tractors so one man can be productive. Nature works by swarms, electrical swarms solve the pollutant mitigation problem. Also, one large scale farmer reports spending $29K on fuel filters each year. These filters go in $400-$700k tractors. Fixing the things is very expensive.
I believe Gail and most on this site, you have pointed out one direction which has little future, so don’t waste time on that one, try something else.
Dennis L.
We do have to keep trying something else. We may make incremental progress in the right direction.
Solar is coal brought forward. Panels don’t last long in the elements, and as we all know… useless in the winter… when they would normally be needed the most.
China has a love hate relationship with dams. They have huge consequences, and many in China are now failing. Many videos available on them, and the terrific rains China seems to be suffering. The one they just built in Ecuador, the Coca Codo Sinclair Dam, is a mess and a testament to China built quality.
Like so many projects, it is in the Tofu Dredge category. Ecuador is taking China to court over it.
Electric vehicles only work well when there is no haul. Open, flat, paved roads, or rails work. Water, mud or any loads, and that ends the viability of electric drive. Essentially, batteries are heavy, and the tractor will sink. Load also damages batteries, and the fail catastrophically, more often.
That said, Edison Motors in BC appears to have found a balance where electric is supported by other systems for cost savings.
Hybrids… appear to be viable. The reasons being that a smaller battery pack can still be useful.
Also, we don’t have an infinite amount of materials to use for batteries. Hybrids are a way of making better use of the materials we have. They don’t need the charging structure, either.
I think the Chinese have the right approach “Try everything at huge scale”. Part of that is cultural china loves to do everything at scale, even over done scale.
I would say it is working for China. Of course we will have to wait to see how they do when the coal and oil and nat gas are done. I believe they will have gotten far enough into the promised land, renewables, nuclear, solar power satellites to do fine. Sadly we are too old to live to see if it really works out for them.
The US with no plan beyond steal other nations resources by military and economic and covert pressure (bribery, murder, blackmail) will not work in the long run. Sadly we will not live long enough to see that either.
Places like England, Japan, New Zealand, Hawaii will fall within our life time.
Already fallen Cuba, Madagascar, Sri Lanka, Egypt, many African nations, Ecuador, The middle central American nations with crushingly low IQ, Haiti.
“I would add: Clean energy isn’t really clean.”
Precisely! I remember the TV show clip from Landman where the main character played by Billy Bob Thornton tells the female attorney that there is nothing clean about Wind and Solar energy. It’s quite the opposite by a factor of 2 when you realize all the fossil fuel inputs it took to make and maintain the product we think of as clean energy.
On top of that, said “clean energy products” don’t last long enough to offset all the fossil fuels it took to make it.
We do not know the distant future, we do have some ideas about the near future. Solar, wind has a chance of being better than nothing.
Not a sarcastic question. What are you going to do personally in the scenario you describe?
What is the pollution over the lifetime of a coal plant not making renewables? I don’t have a clue.
The narrative of it is all hopeless may be comforting in that we will all be in the same boat, we can all sing the same song as it sinks. Meanwhile perhaps one person suggests trying a life raft/boat.
Observation: trying to do something different is a great deal of work. To make changes, understanding physical changes takes good math skills, talking it is not walking it. Again, no sarcasm; we are going to have change.
Those with useable skills are going to walk away, those who remain will find themselves listening to narratives while crime and failing services surround them. This may be part of what is happening in many US cities. The narratives don’t lead anywhere.
Dennis L.
What are usable skills is the question. Nursing perhaps. Figuring how to grow crops with little inputs (supplemental water, herbicides and pesticides) and easily made fences and nets. Figuring good diets for people with what food is available.
Nursing sounds good, nurse practitioner who can auscultate would be a good idea; adding value through personal skills and experience compared to capital equipment.
Sometimes giving solace when there is no hope has merit.
I am with you guys, I am trying to see how one rides it out, Let’s see, is giddyy up for forward.? Great thing about yee haw is they also go good at country western dances.
Slow news day.
Dennis L.
You are sounding very John Galt. I agree with you.
A feature we miss is the need to lower the population density in our survival micro-nation. And keep it low from internal over breeding and most of all keep it low from external invasion. This means an army and killing.
I wonder what Mexico does on its southern border with respect to uninvited invaders?
I believe in biology, we are biology. Biology will adjust the population as appropriate; being an active part of the adjustment process does not appeal to me; judge not that ye be not judged.
Dennis L.
Tucker Carlson says he will never run for president because the president is at times required to order the killing of people.
Biology means nothing before physics, such as the sound of machine guns.
The chance for all these schemes to succeed is about the chance of putting all life savings at the no 0 in the roulette board, which is 1/37 in Europe or 1/38 in USA. (Some Vegas casinos now have 3 zeroes and even 4 zeroes for those who can’t think straightly now)
I have repeatedly debunked the 80/20 theory, so 1900s, but if that is allowed the chance of success is about 1/200 since out of these efforts 4 out of 5 are allowed to fail.
Not a good chance, I have to say.
Those with skills walk away. To where? To the nonexistent starship which has gone nowhere? Whether they like or not they are stuck on earth.
Peter Cassidy, a self-professed engineer, proposed a bunch of ideas. He could never finish a sentence without a dozen ‘could’s and ‘might’s. He is not seen for a while. I don’t miss him.
When things are desperate some people look for messiahs, which show no sign of existence. I have spent more time in vegas than most posters here, so any attempt to debunk my odds will be met accordingly.
“I have repeatedly debunked the 80/20 theory, so 1900s, but if that is allowed the chance of success is about 1/200 since out of these efforts 4 out of 5 are allowed to fail.”
Percentiles, kul, percentiles, 80/20 is all about percentiles.
Dennis L.
If an idea fails 4 out of 5 times and it is still good, not very efficient
What do island areas like Hawaii, without fossil fuels of their own do? If it’s faesible to keep their power & transport going without them, why do they have deisel-powered ships bringing them deisel, gasoline, & jet fuel?
The “bottom line” is, they “speak with their hands” that way.
Back to Easter Islands
No island, anywhere, has made intermittent renewables work for them, without a very large share of oil, both for balancing the electricity, and for transportation.
Islands will have to fall back to tiny populations, even sooner than larger areas, I expect.
It was a honest attempt.
You see, the plan was:
– Let’s regulate Oil out
– Let’s subisidize “Renewables”
– In time, a blooming Renewable industry would appear, reducing costs across the board, advancing technology and finally finding The Solution™ to replace fossil fuels.
– Procede with the energy transition
It never happened. And they seem to have give up on the plan as well in the last couple of years.
Now the plan is full-steam Degrowth. I don’t know when, but cars have to go, and it will be soon.
I am getting more requests with respect to, “What do we do now?”
I believe I will be speaking, along with Joe Tainter, at the Degrowth Summit in Minnesota on Saturday, October 25. The details are still be worked out.
https://act.sierraclub.org/events/details?formcampaignid=701Po000013AE9HIAW&mapLinkHref=https://maps.google.com/maps&daddr=The%20Degrowth%20Summit!@44.946357,-93.251538
Keep us updated! We would love to watch/read everything coming out of it, specially your part!
I found this link as well. You can sign up for more information, or volunteer to help at the event.
https://act.sierraclub.org/events/details?formcampaignid=701Po000013AE9HIAW&mapLinkHref=https://maps.google.com/maps&daddr=The%20Degrowth%20Summit!@44.946357,-93.251538
I understand that there will be cameras so that the event can be seen on line, as well. I would imagine that it would be recorded, for later viewing.
“No cost but donations or volunteers warmly accepted.” The event seems to include food, as well. I would hope that they take a free-will offering, to help offset expenses.
This is a poster:
https://act.sierraclub.org/events/servlet/rtaImage?eid=701Po000013AE9H&feoid=00N3100000G4Esk&refid=0EMPo00000RE2dV
The poster talks about “The Movement”. Hard to believe there is a movement.
“A NEW peer-reviewed study suggests that the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for Covid-19 shows signs of ‘deliberate engineering’ and that these features, including the spike protein also found in the mRNA covid vaccines, are responsible for widespread health harms globally.
The study by 11 scientific and legal experts was published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
The authors argue that the man-made features of SARS-CoV-2 and the mRNA covid vaccines are likely the outcome of controversial gain-of-function research in violation of the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention.”?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/covid-vaccines-have-unleashed-profound-harm-finds-study-by-us-scientists/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-09-03&utm_campaign=TCW+Daily+Email
This has been obvious for a very long time. I still see ostensibly intelligent people (AI researchers for example) discussing this as an unlikely hypothetical rather than the default interpretation.
This has been obvious for a long time. A likely interpretation is that the TPTB had seen a world overpopulation problem. They were working on a way around it. Killing off some of the oldest and weakest people seemed to be a useful approach. The vaccine was a way for pharmaceutical companies to make money off of it. If the vaccine also contributed to the kill off, that was not particularly a problem. It was easy enough to show that the vaccine seemed to have some tiny benefit with respect to covid. Ignoring other problems of the vaccine and ignoring cheap treatments for covid were both part of the plan.
Furthermore, keeping people inside was a huge benefit to failing financial systems. It allowed governments to greatly pump up debt levels at the same time that oil prices were brought down to low levels. Both of these actions greatly stimulated economies, and allowed another five years of “growth.” Newspapers could be “fed” stories about how wonderful the covid vaccines were and how terrible the disease was.
Oh ‘covid’ is engineered, alright, lol. It’s a patented, for the Hand’s eyes only, computer generated genome supposedly with 30,000 nucleotides. Yet the pcr tests allegedly search for small fragments of the genome of a few hundred base pairs which is well within the range of tumor exosome size. As to the furin cleavage GOF guff, some glycoproteins on the surface of tumor exosomes also have furin cleavage sites.
There’s nothing that doesn’t point to my theory. Even the SV40 thing fits.
AI:
“Yes, it is biologically plausible for tumor exosomes to carry Simian Virus 40 (SV40) DNA and other components. Several studies have shown that viruses can use exosomes to transfer genetic material and proteins between cells, including other polyomaviruses closely related to SV40. …It is important to remember that much of the evidence for SV40’s role in human cancer is based on associations detected via molecular techniques like PCR, and some findings have been inconsistent due to issues with methodology and contamination. More research is needed to fully understand the role of exosomal transport in the spread and pathogenicity of SV40.”
sorry i do not follow this seems out of place, what are you trying to say.
“for the Hand’s eyes only”
A hand that has eyes! That’s scary. It was bad enough when the hills had eyes. Yesterday I heard somebody say he was going to have his eyes looked at. It made me wonder whether he was also going to have his ears listened to, his nose smelt, and his tongue tasted. So I ended up having my mind boggled.
You’ve seen it before. Search “illuminati hand.” When we look at what we see the Hand doing, we are the eye in the mirror that the Hand looks into.
I’m not trying to say anything. I’m saying that all roads lead to tumor exosomes. Look, below, how the germ theory establishment, just because it wrongly believe viruses exist, uses circular logic in saying that because tumor cells produce exosomes with SV40 in them, then they must do so because the cancer cells have been infected with SV40 virus. LOL. And as a result, look at the language of cancer. Cancer is treated as infectious itself. It’s ludicrous. It couldn’t possibly be the Occam’s Razor naked reality that (human-made) cancer cells simply produce exosomes with SV40 in them in order to get the body’s ‘inmune’ system to leave them alone so that they can get on with their job of safely sequestering, from the rest of the body, overflows of deadly fat-soluble carcinogens…
I think you are handling this very well.
What you are saying is brand new to most people and is at odds with what they think they know based on the education they’ve had over decades. So their first reaction in many cases will be to reject it, dismiss it, or let it go in one ear and out the other.
At this stage, the best you can hope for is that some people who read what you say will be interested enough to look into the subject in more detail. Some, mostly younger, people will be able to pick up the new ideas and run with them.
But if past history is anything to go by, most people, once they are past a certain age, will remain within the paradigms they are comfortable with regardless of what new information or explanations they are exposed to.
Galileo had an enormous amount of frustration when he tried to explain to his contemporaries that the Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun, and was eventually put on trial and sentenced to house arrest after being found guilty of being “vehemently suspect of heresy” by the Roman Inquisition.
Actually, Galileo got off light. His near contemporary Giordano Bruno was sentenced to be burned to death by the Roman Inquisition in 1600 for his heretical ideas.
In Britain, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin lived to see their theories celebrated rather than condemned, but over the years they both became exasperated with their scientific peers that they refused to go out and meet or debate them.
And Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who proposed in instituted hand washing in hospitals to prevent infections such as puerperal fever, had multiple run-ins with the medical establishment of his time, and ended up dying as a patient/prisoner in a mental hospital at the age of 47.
Such are the travails suffered by many people who become iconoclasts against powerful entrenched interests.
Kulm has said that nobody born east of the Elbe has made any significant contributions to Western Civilization, and there may be something in what he says. But I think Semmelweis deserves his place among the scientific and medical greats for promoting hand washing among surgeons and their staff to reduce the chance of patients being infected with “germs”.
Thanks friend for your thoughtfulness.
About the Hand washing for surgeons dealing with open wounds, yes, of course; when we instinctively lick our wounds we don’t rub our grubby mitts all over the wound afterwards because our body is then going to have to deal with cleaning out those foreign objects and non-native microbes from the inside, which takes additional healing resources on top of the existing toll on resources from the existing trauma that required the surgery plus the toll of the surgery, too
Dear Tim, what’s your estimate for that “certain age”? I would guess it varies from person to person.
In any case I know a fool called Me who at 52 still believed in viruses&vaccines. Luckily he banged his head against the wall of covidmania, felt it was made of illogik smoke and opened his eyes to the fraud of allopathic medicine. Better later than never.
You’ll still die, but a little less stupid than before, and aldo far away from an hospital. Hurray!
Forgot to include the relevant robir overview:
“Research indicates that exosomes from Simian Virus 40 (SV40)-transformed tumor cells can contain viral components and reprogram recipient cells to promote tumor growth. These findings have implications for understanding how viral-associated cancers develop, particularly in laboratory contexts using SV40-transformed cell lines.
The role of exosomes in SV40-related tumors
Viral component transport: Exosomes from tumor cells infected with viruses like SV40 can transport active viral components, including DNA, RNA, and proteins, to healthy, non-infected cells. For SV40, the large T antigen (LT) is a major oncoprotein that interferes with cell cycle regulators like p53 and pRb.
Cell reprogramming: By delivering these viral components, exosomes can reprogram the recipient cells, enhancing the rate of infection and transformation. In the context of SV40, this process can spread the transforming potential of the virus to new cells, promoting tumor development.
Contribution to the tumor microenvironment (TME): Tumor-derived exosomes (TEXs) have a significant role in creating a pro-tumor environment. This includes:
Suppressing the immune system.
Enhancing angiogenesis (the formation of new blood vessels) to feed the tumor.
Spreading pro-tumor signals to other cells in a “vicious cycle”.
SV40-transformed cell lines and their exosomes
Common laboratory model: One of the most widely used cell lines in research, HEK293T, was created by transforming human embryonic kidney cells with an SV40-derived T antigen.
Safety considerations: Because they contain the oncogenic SV40 T antigen, exosomes derived from HEK293T cells pose a safety concern for therapeutic applications like gene therapy and vaccine production. The tumorigenicity of these cells, and thus their exosomes, is tied to their passage number (how many times they’ve been cultured). High-passage-number HEK293T cells have been shown to induce tumors in mice.
Ongoing research and controversy
Human cancer link is debated: While SV40 is a known oncogenic virus in animal models, its role in human cancer is still controversial. Early studies linking SV40 with certain human cancers, like mesothelioma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, have been questioned due to potential flaws in early detection methods.
Exosome research continues: The broader field of exosome research in viral oncology continues to evolve. For SV40, this involves studying the mechanisms of how viral components are packaged and transmitted via exosomes and their overall contribution to tumor progression.”
“AI Just Decoded Göbekli Tepe’s Symbols — And It’s Not What You Think! . . .
11:51 The most astonishing discovery of the symbols goes beyond the Younger Dryas impact. From what was
11:57
revealed, it only points to a complex narrative about a series of recurring global cataclysms.
12:04
The builders of Göbekli Tepe seem to have had a long-term view of history. The analysis,
12:11
both from scientists and the possible results from AI, showed a pattern of multiple cycles and
12:17
sub-cycles, suggesting these people weren’t just reacting to a single disaster. It was pretty much
12:24
clear that these early people well understood that the universe followed rhythms and that
12:29
these rhythms could be dangerous to life on the planet. It’s as if they believed the world goes
12:35
through a series of “great cleansings,” and they wanted to leave a record of it for others to find.
12:41
This new idea completely changed what everyone thought the monuments were for. They were not
12:47
just built as a place for simple worship or celebration but as a response to a massive
12:53
threat. These monuments were a way to share a warning with a world that didn’t exist yet.
13:00
Even the deliberate burial of the site, with some of the carvings facing inward,
13:05
seems to be part of the plan. It was an act of preservation that made sure what they had hidden
13:11
could survive the next great disaster. “?
This is an amazing video. It talks about AI being used on an extremely old historical site in Turkey. The images seem to follow the star patterns of the sky. Indirectly, they seem to give a warning that the world that operates in cycles, some bigger than others. I had to watch on YouTube, which worked for me.
Link is gone
Click on you tube. That works for me.
‘There are 32 different ways AI can go rogue, scientists say — from hallucinating answers to a complete misalignment with humanity’?
https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/there-are-32-different-ways-ai-can-go-rogue-scientists-say-from-hallucinating-answers-to-a-complete-misalignment-with-humanity?utm_term=401B90F9-2E8E-4A8E-968F-F3B12681473E&lrh=7a052f186b2b8bccf5bcfb4bbb5ba62bc026593bb5a4177ba85dd2fea421a42f&utm_campaign=368B3745-DDE0-4A69-A2E8-62503D85375D&utm_medium=email&utm_content=64E1D633-1659-4680-A29F-42E4F86E7A3E&utm_source=SmartBrief
The many, many ways AI can go astray.
Link to article:
https://www.psychopathia.ai
If only humans puts as much effort in to studying human ways to go astray.
We can start with Gaza and move on to Pol Pot. We can look back to the extermination of native north and south Americans.
And so on.
Remember HAL 9000! Old idea really. I guess it could be a problem if it starts giving answers we can’t underatand with a human mind. Will be defer to the AI since it’s considered superior?
Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio has warned Donald Trump’s America is drifting into 1930s-style autocratic politics — and said other investors are too scared of the president to speak up.
The Bridgewater Associates founder told the Financial Times that “gaps in wealth”, “gaps in values” and a collapse in trust were driving “more extreme” policies in the US.
“I think that what is happening now politically and socially is analogous to what happened around the world in the 1930-40 period,” Dalio said.
State intervention in the private sector, such as Trump’s decision to take a 10 per cent stake in chipmaker Intel, was the sort of “strong autocratic leadership that sprang out of the desire to take control of the financial and economic situation”, Dalio said.
https://www.ft.com/content/b86bd33b-b3e7-4485-8b1c-6f01e639dd04
This is why they had to jab so many
We need growing energy supplies per capita for the economy to be growing.
The 1930-1940 period was a period with declining rather than growing energy supplies per person.
The current period seems to be heading in a very similar direction. This is a chart I made back in 2018.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-admin/upload.php?item=42848
We seem to be heading toward a similar dip (or worse) today.
The whole world has mob boss rule with no regard for small people the workers. The US politicians spend their time working to enrich the rich. It is time for armed uprising everywhere. It will not happen as the bottom 90% have no power, no access to significant weapons, have no organization. So maybe time to kill off 50% of the bottom?
maybe anyone over 70 years of age could be eliminated that would definitely prolong and sustain the financial system
i agree
even the most rudimentary study of world history will tell you that until the 20th c, the bottom 90% of humankind had no power or control over their lives whatsoever.
we are certainly headed back to that condition
I agree the bottom 90% had no power and is headed back to having no power.
I am hoping robots will replace the bottom 90% and the 10% will retain their power. So all will have power.
i can only hope your comment is laced with irony
No irony just fear that the remaining 10% will move to kill off 90% leaving 1% and so on until it explains the Fermi paradox.
Power could include “electricity” type power.
WP tripping again my replies going in the wrong places
Peter Turchin is talking right now in the Col. Daniel Davis channel. I am not overly impressed, but good for the colonel to expand in that direction.
Turchin doesn’t seem to understand the energy problem.
Always good to see new ideas. “Cliodynamics” sounds kind of funny, but for anyone who doesn’t want to watch, his main 3 driving factors towards revolution and instability are:
* decline in living standards (makes people amenable to mobilization)
* overproduction of elites (too many people who don’t have to work to get by)
* national debt or fiscal mismanagement
I doubt Turchin has read Joseph Tainter’s, “The Collapse of Complex Society.”
As I said above, he doesn’t understand the energy problem. He wants things he can publish that will look new, and that will not offend any elected official. He does make some reasonable observations, but he doesn’t understand what is the “cause” of what is happening.
Sharpening the knives ?
EU says von der Leyen’s plane GPS system was jammed, Russian interference suspected .
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-says-von-der-leyens-plane-gps-system-was-jammed-russian-interference-2025-09-01/
Better explained –I mean the lies .
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/09/ursula-von-der-leyen-is-lying-about-suspected-russian-gps-interference.html#more
“Von der Lying is a liar. A propagandist who wants to push Europe into further hostilities against Russia.
in 1938, Hitler insisted he had no invasion aims towards any other European state, he wanted only peace.
This is the force behind von der Leyden—she sees another resource war looming, like me.
Putin sees the future clearly. He wants Ukraine’s breadbasket, he also want warmwater ports to the East West and South.
This was why the Russians tried to force south through Afghanistan, to ultimately reach the Indian ocean.
History repeating itself. Hitler formed an alliance with the Japanes, Putin is doing the same with the Indians and the Chinese.
While the orange messiah fulminates about tariffs, the world is shifting under him.
Oh, Putin as Hitler, really sharp analysis. Russia tried to force south through Afghan. to the Indian Ocean: more dead thought.
And that’s not all. Trump is also Hitler. Which makes it Hitler versus Hitler. Riveting stuff.
then you think the russkis just wanted to sun themselves on the beaches of the indian ocean
wait, I thought Hitler was the new NIH director.
Who ‘wants peace’?
“2019 RAND Paper . . .
As far back as 2019, US Army-commissioned studies examined different means to provoke and antagonize Russia who they acknowledged sought to avoid conflict. “
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqVPM0KSUpo&t=5s
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html
“ . . . the Russians intervene began the military phase of
38:54 this through the initiation of the special military operation the invasion of Ukraine
39:00 Their goal was simple, to get Ukraine to the negotiating table. There was no territorial ambition. And we see the
39:06 roof of this in the Istanbul communicate that was successfully negotiated only to be withdrawn under pressure by the British Prime Minister
39:11 Boris Johnson when he visited Ukraine at the end of uh of of March, early April of 2022. Uh the Russians said we’re
39:19 going to withdraw and they began withdrawing. They withdrew from around Kev. They withdrew in around Sunumi. They withdrew uh from Cherv. They began
39:26 50% withdrawal out of Karkov. But what did the West do? We told the Ukrainians no. And then we gave them $48 billion,
39:34 tanks, munitions. We trained up a new army and they attacked the Russians. So that led to a second phase of the of the
39:40 thing where Russians said, “Okay, now we’re going to physically take control of the of the Donbas.” Um, but then the
39:47 Ukrainians attacked again and this time the Russians mobilized 300,000 and said, “The objectives of the war have changed.
39:53 We’re now going to take the Dombbas and Keron and Zaparisia.”?
” Bulgarian officials have denied claims they suspected Moscow of jamming the GPS of a plane carrying European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, days after the Commission cited Bulgarian authorities as suggesting the incident was “due to blatant interference from Russia.”
But the s**t continues . Must have war .
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-accused-widespread-gps-jamming-over-baltic-even-von-der-leyen-story-unravels
Even though the Hand is having the fascist Trump admin superficially setting up a reaction against that fascism, on the deeper, structural level of the covert Degrowth Agenda, the Hand must keep pushing forward with its reformation away from capitalism and towards national socialism, so i think it will be the opposite of that kind of neofeudal policy. I’m guessing that what Bessent is teasing is something like an expansion of the VA home loan system for people under a certain income level. Moving towards that kind of UKIP style progressive housing policy I referred to the other day in the context of Nigel Farage. In conjunction with stablecoin greenbacks to make such government financing possible, this regime would help cushion the real estate crash and facilitate the backdoor nationalization of the leveraged portion of the housing stock.
Maybe so. There is a need to keep the system going.
Never took you for a user of the hard stuff back in the day, Norm.
Replenish, can you tell him how to roll snowballs right? Just a lotta practice?
Reante, what happens on the slopes stays on the slopes. The Feds don’t sleep, nah mean?
Lil N.P. from his album “The End of More” featuring Mike Jones.
“Back in the day I was stackin’ snow with the shorties, buildin’ ladies outta frost,
But never once pushed that ice ball back — clean line, no trace, like I ghost when I’m lost.”
Comment of the year right there. Forget peak oil. Was well worth my indiscretion even in light of the new, extrajudicial bombing regime of small Venezuelan watercraft 1000 miles from US shores.
dem I don’t know if Hutchison has actually done that. It depends on the authenticity of the footage. But obviously since I’m the positron beam guy I absolutely believe that those types of material effects are possible according to the laws of physics. We already know that a lightning strike can turn a tree into a gaseous plasma for a slplit second before it turns back into solid and liquid cellulose and water and fat and sugar Now that’s weird, but it’s not paranormal because it’s just physics. Reality is a trip. The metal bending and warping and bubbling and flowing and disintegrating are the result of briefly turning some or all of these collective molecules into varying degrees of plasma, with the maximalist, explosive disintegration dynamic bypassing the solid and liquid plasma phases and going straight to the gaseous phase. I don’t think that the Hand accomplished the disintegration of the twin towers with Hutchison’s tech because Hutchison wasn’t using a positron beam, though I can understand why Hutchison assumed that the Hand must have been – assuming the Hutchison footage is authentic of course. Weaponizingtbe wave interference work that Hutchison was doing still requires powering it, and when we scale up to turning most of the twin towers into a gaseous plasma, the amount of energy required to create enough wave interference to do that would be astronomical. Positron -electron annihilation is far, far more efficient because it is working WITH physics, and is targeted; positrons want to annihilate with electrons, and all you have to do to disintegrate all conductive materials is to annihilate their bound electrons.
“the amount of energy required to create enough wave interference to do that would be astronomical”
Check the weather off the coast of New York on that morning(strangely, for some reason, the tv people didn’t spend days warning everyone, as they usually do).
.
Masses of energy bubbling away, just waiting for someone to harness it.
Not such a great weapon though, if you have to wait for inclement weather. Then again, they’ve had decades to work on that.
Pigs can’t fly but they ringed the hurricane with astronomical numbers of flying wind turbines in the sky with transmission lines leading up to the wave interference satellite that pointed down at the towers. Mystery solved. 😁
The colonel was Gabbard’s anti-zionist second in command appointment at ODNI until it was nixed. A foreshadowing.
TSHTF . Housing emergency .
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/white-house/3789052/scott-bessent-big-economic-pickup-2026-national-housing-emergency/
I am perplexed about what this is about. Prices are falling on their own (yes, they are still very very high) and will continue to fall for at least a year but probably much longer. there is little demand.
Need more inexpensive rental housing?
The US government will help speculators buy the homes, and encourage them to rent them the houses out by the room. Perhaps subdivide the homes first.
Landlords across Britain are into this big time.
Instead of renting out a house, or dividing it into a couple of apartments, they now divide it up into the maximum amount of prison cell sized rooms and get guaranteed rent from the councils at an extortionate rate(double, triple, even quadruple or more).
They are known as HMOs(house in multiple occupation) and I wouldn’t wish living in one on anyone.
Young people out of college (or maybe even high school) find themselves is this kind of accommodation. People who are working multiple part time jobs to support themselves usually cannot afford very much in the way of living space.
Such will be the norm
google ‘victorian rookeries’ fitz—-you will find the same thing described there
I’m well aware of the history Norman, although probably not to your level. If I remember correctly, the rookeries were discussed here some time ago.
My dislike, in part, is more about the modern disconnect, which is amplified when you see strangers piled up under the same roof, all locked in their individual cells.
At least back then they knew each other and possibly even talked occasionally.
Considering what’s coming, shared experiences/knowledge would appear to be a wise choice, but people are being led away from that very natural path. No time for human interaction, in a system that only promotes career and fear.
Replying to you and Gail: late capitalism is really a sh*tshow. Everything they do is looting, and every recent looting is more squalid than the prior ones.
The “emergency” is that housing prices might come down. They want nominal prices to go back up and for that to have any chance of happening, cheap interest rates are needed because people generally select a price range based on the payment they can afford. This nonsense about helping the peons with affordability is just that – nonsense.
“Bessent said rate cuts from the Federal Reserve would help alleviate skyrocketing post-COVID-19 housing prices”
… totally idiotic, just the opposite. Low interest rates inflate housing prices, as we saw during the leadup to GFC. Everyone with a pair of brain cells knows this. Cheap money allows for speculation and chained/stacked mortgages where equity in one mortgage provides the basis for the next mortgage, in a loop. It’s how you end up with speculators blowing up huge real estate “empires” when the market turns.
Low interest rates don’t cause real estate inflation. Increased lending and borrowing relative to the housing supply do.
Rate cuts would enable people to refinance which WOULD in fact help alleviate skyrocketed prices, but only in the longer term once the monthly payments savings had exceeded the cost of the refinancing, and there is no longer term lol.
Housing emergency… and big economic pickup in 2026? 🤷 sounds contradictory to me
What I don’t understand is how do we manage without exponential growth? It seems to me that the “systems “ in place will have to change. Pensions will have to be drastically cut government programs cut it will snowball very quickly when it goes. I don’t see how it can be a slow process…. Decades??? There is no way. I think telling people the hard truth is not available
No need to tell anyone…when the Soviet Union collapse pensioners were still paid what was owed in the currency, but naturally it was essentially became worthless….just like we are witnessing now with the fiat now. Gold and silver are reaching near record highs…BitCON has reached over 111,111 with and increase of over 2,000 in a day…everything is fine and going as planned.
If you’re old, no worry..the worst that can happen you have a short retirement.
Bloomberg Illegal Mining Gold-Rush Fever
Gold Holds Close to Record as Demand for Precious Metals Surges
By Sybilla Gross
September 1, 2025 at 8:08 PM EDT
Takeaways by Bloomberg AI
Gold held just below a record high and silver traded above $40 an ounce, as the prospect of Federal Reserve rate cuts and growing concerns over the central bank’s future gave fresh legs to the multi-year rally in precious metals.
The latest run has been underpinned by expectations that the US central bank will reduce interest rates this month, after Fed Chair Jerome Powell cautiously opened the door to a reduction.
Both gold and silver have more than doubled over the past three years, with mounting risks in the spheres of geopolitics, the economy, and global trade driving increased demand for the time-honored haven assets.
Gold held just below a record high and silver traded above $40 an ounce, as the prospect of Federal Reserve rate cuts and growing concerns over the central bank’s future gave fresh legs to the multi-year rally in precious metals.
Spot silver steadied after surging as much as 2.7% on Monday to breach $40 an ounce for the first time since 2011, while gold held a 0.8% gain to trade just below its April record above $3,500 an ounce.
Gold and Silver Double in Three-Year Bull Run
Source: Bloomberg
Data is normalized with percentage appreciation as of September 2, 2022.
The latest run has been underpinned by expectations that the US central bank will reduce interest rates this month, after Fed Chair Jerome Powell cautiously opened the door to a reduction. A key US jobs report this Friday is likely to add to signs of an increasingly subdued labor market — supporting the case for cuts. That’s boosted the allure of precious metals, which do not pay holders interest.
“With technical resistance levels breached, we may well see momentum taking gold to a new all-time high this week,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Helen Amos and George Heppel said in a note. With holdings in gold-backed exchange traded funds last week expanding the most since April, the analysts see “another week of net inflows on the cards and potential for non-commercial futures positioning to lengthen.”
Both gold and silver have more than doubled over the past three years, with mounting risks in the spheres of geopolitics, the economy, and global trade driving increased demand for the time-honored haven assets. An escalation in US President Donald Trump’s assaults against the Fed this year has become the latest cause for investor alarm, with concerns over the central bank’s independence threatening to erode confidence in the US.
Markets are waiting for a court ruling over whether Trump has legitimate grounds to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook from the central bank. Separately, a federal appeals court ruled late Friday that the president’s global tariffs were illegally imposed under an emergency law, increasing uncertainty for American importers while delaying the economic dividends the administration has promised.
Gold spiked to its record in April after Trump unveiled an initial plan to introduce sweeping tariffs on most US trading partners. Prices have since eased and remained largely range bound as haven demand cooled, due to the president walking back some of his most aggressive trade proposals.
Lots to worry about, the big one, have you pooped today, well, have you, Norm?
Well I’m
Hearing that we have decades before we see the downturn but I see it in years now. I just don’t think the system can go backwards.
I think there are probably decades before the end of IC.
but a downturn to degrowth is different.
imminent irreversible degrowth is at the door.
gradual prolonged slow decline for many decades.
Could there possibly be one last boom? Bessent thinks so… I think that Gail’s chart of where we are in decline is spot on.
I just want to surf the wave as long as I can. I think location will be key … I’m buying energy stocks e when they go down. Come on investor guy where are you??
It is hard to see AI or something else pulling the economy along for another burst, but we do know that the general trend is toward more complexity. Perhaps, even this “cycle,” there could be another burst. The system seems to work better than we expect.
It seems more likely, however, that there will be a long “depression,” or something similar. After that, it would seem like there could be some new development that we do not understand now, creating the upbeat of the next cycle.
I don’t know what will happen in a financial meltdown when people lose their bank accounts and stock market accounts. Or in a time of hyperinflation, when prices are soaring.
How many goods will really be for sale to the public? Will grocery stores still be open, for example, and will people be able to get to them?
At one time, I understand that there were local currencies. Perhaps states will start issuing their own currencies, good only on goods in their state.
Without electricity much of the time, I wonder how useful bitcoin will be.
There are a lot of unknowns.
we don’t ‘manage’—simple as that.
telling anyone will zero your popularity ratings too
We are back to the 1960s-1980s.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/statistically-almost-impossible-4-afd-candidates-have-died-suddenly-and-unexpectedly-key
They all died of natural causes..
59,59, 71 and 72 yrs old. all died suddenly.
And all in the same state—North Rhine-Westphalia—in the run-up to the state elections.
They are up to 7 now. all in NR Westphalia.
Looks like the German establishment has taken Norman’s advice and is getting really serious about saving their democracy from the German people, yah?
Strange!
The Druid John Michael Greer has his open questions session at the moment. One person (not me) asked:
“You’ve talked in a lot of places about what you expect to happen over the next few decades and centuries in the US as western civilisation declines. And what some of the best ways to survive and thrive in the coming conditions of society might be. I’m wondering what you see happening in the UK over the same span of time. Will the civilisational decline in Britain roughly mirror the US and other western countries, or do you think it will be different? What advice would you give to someone living in Britain right now about how to weather the coming decline?”
JMG answered:
“Britain is in a pre-revolutionary state. Discords within the population, made much worse by the inept behavior of recent governments, are reaching the point that I would not be surprised to see something like the Northern Irish “Troubles” breaking out there in the near future — and of course there are plenty of hostile countries that would love to fund and supply any such struggle. If Britain can get through the next decade or two without falling into that, it faces a ragged decline, made worse than what we can expect over here by overpopulation and a much more depleted resource base. If civil war does break out, a fast plunge to Third World conditions is very likely — and in that case, getting out is probably the best option you’ve got.”
So, what with flag protests, and protests against boat people and illegal refugees, and also peak oil, and Putin missiling the British Council building in Kyiv (a warning to the UK, for sure), things are looking rather unstable for England and the UK. However, isn’t JMG exaggerating when he writes that “Britain is in a pre-revolutionary state” ? Over in France, the country seems to erupt into protest every other year, but it is still muddling through. These things seem to calm down of their own accord once autumn and the cooler weather arrive. Isn’t JMG being overly alarmist in this case?
I don’t think JMG is being particularly alarmist, just realistic. But we’ll just have to see. Some things go on a lot longer than you think they will. Perhaps Britain will only plunge down to Second World status.
The Second World was a term that referred to the Soviet Union and its satellites prior to the collapse of the Soviet system. Second World status would include things like empty shops, long queues, and some comrades being more equal than others.
The market is speaking .
https://www.bbntimes.com/financial/global-bond-market-rout-pushes-uk-30-year-gilt-yields-to-27-year-high-of-5-68-5-69
Higher long-term interest rates.
I saw an article, behind a paywall, observing that the US is trying to keep its long-term rates as low as possible by its current strategy of
(1) Buying back some of its existing 10- and 30-year bonds.
(2) Issuing most of its current borrowing needs in very short-term debt.
The author was speculating that this approach could suddenly backfire. With inflation, long-term interest rates could suddenly explode higher.
Interesting that back in the Gore-Ross Perot debates of 1993 re: the Smoot-Hawley Tarrfic Act and Perot’s prediction of a “great sucking sound” of industry leaving America, the latter which Perot absolutely nailed, Perot also criticized the administration for rescheduling the national debt into higher yield short term rates instead of stability in long term rates.
Now it is the reverse. But when it it is fiat currency backed by nothing IUST, BTC, Stablke coins, CBDC;s) in a debt based fractional reserve system, it doen’t matter either way.
Gold $3,552.50 and silver $41.16 as I type this at 3:27 PM EST (7:27 UCT)
I voted for Perot.
When the snow ball reverses it picks up speed the other way!
when i used to roll big snowballs with the kids to build snowladies, i never once managed to roll a ball backwards, and leave that nice line of virgin snow.
From Google:
Scientific transmutation of metals is the process of converting one element into another, such as lead into gold, using nuclear reactions, typically in particle accelerators. Unlike the mythical alchemy, modern nuclear transmutation has successfully produced tiny quantities of gold from elements like mercury and bismuth. This involves bombarding atoms with high-energy particles to alter their nuclei, changing the number of protons and thus transforming the element into a different one.
How it Works
Nuclear Reactions:
Scientific transmutation relies on nuclear reactions, not chemical ones. These reactions change the nucleus of an atom, which determines its elemental identity.
Particle Accelerators:
The most common method involves using particle accelerators to fire high-energy particles, like carbon or neon nuclei, at a target element.
Proton/Neutron Removal:
The impact from these high-energy particles can knock protons and neutrons out of the target atom’s nucleus. If the number of protons changes, the atom becomes a different element.
Producing Gold:
For example, scientists have successfully converted bismuth atoms into gold atoms by bombarding them with carbon and neon nuclei, changing the number of protons in the bismuth nuclei.
Key Historical Examples
1941:
Harvard scientists were among the first to report the production of gold from mercury using a particle accelerator.
1980:
Glenn Seaborg and his team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory successfully produced gold from bismuth using the Bevatron particle accelerator.
Limitations
Insignificant Amounts:
While scientifically possible, the amount of gold produced is extremely small.
High Energy Cost:
The process requires vast amounts of energy.
Instability:
The transmutation can create unstable, short-lived radioactive isotopes of gold, which quickly decay.
Practicality:
The process is not economically viable for producing significant quantities of gold, especially when compared to traditional mining.
===========
My take: not practicable as of today. Nor were nuclear reactions in 1940, but they scaled it up by 1945. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Sometimes!reante, hasn’t John Hutchison achieved strange effects on the molecular structure of metals, with his weird Tesla-like experiments? Some metal girders from the Twin Towers were also seen to have warped in strange ways after 9/11.
There’s so much weird stuff we can do today. Even tractor beams are now possible – they just need to be scaled up.
It will probably never be practical. If the price of gold rises, the price of electricity will rise also. and those cross sections are not very large. It would be better if one element could be transmuted into gold by emitting or absorbing an alpha particle, but none exist. there is always one neutron too few or too many. same goes for platinum.
Never mind. If it does eventually scale up, we can use it on our resident old doubter. Then his neighbours will say. “That man is pure gold!”, which will surely appeal to his vanity. Lol!
sign me up for the alchemy course drb
i’ve been looking for evening classes starting september.
though i should maybe point out (painful as it may seem)—that as of now, roughly 130000 tons of physical gold exists. (give or take).
now…
If by some miracle of alchemy, and utilising dem’s intellect at warp speed, we somehow manage to make gold in large quantities.
Somehow we add an extra nought to the quantity above—ie we suddenly have 10x the gold we had yesterday. (Why not several noughts?)
hmmmmmm.
the gold market today stands at just under $3500 an ounce
whooo hoooo—riches beyond our wildest dreams, we can have our wages in gold coins.
er—no.
Gold would drop to $350 an ounce, probably much much lower. So you would finish up with 10% of your priginal outlay.
Why?—-because gold has little large scale use. It retains its value through scarcity, and public awareness of that scarcity.
(the Spanish ran into much the same problem in the 1500s when they looted the Aztec gold)
Please—do try to think in that brief interval between brain impulses and finger contact on your keypad.
Then you wouldnt have old duffers like me pointing out the obvious.
Would you?
it does not matter. i was just commenting on the particular nuclear structure of elements 78 and 79.
for practical applications, it needs a 10X increase in wall plug to beam power efficiency (proposals are in the literature but all current accelerators are inefficient) and favorable cross sections (there for some elements, but not for any of the precious metals) the method could be economically viable.
“Then you wouldnt have old duffers like me pointing out the obvious.”
But that’s your function here, to state the obvious daily. 🙂 And you certainly fulfilled it today, so thank you!
I’d actually guessed that you’d include the Spaniards and inflation in your response. I did get my A-level in economics – had A-levels been invented before you left school? And I also happen to have a gorgeous collection of emergency money (from Germany, Hungary, Serbia, Zimbabwe, etc.), so I know all about inflation.
As for your other point, it’s arguable:
“Arguably the most important industrial use of gold is in the manufacture of electronics. Gold is a highly efficient conductor which can carry tiny currents and remain corrosion-free. It is used in connectors, switch and relay contacts, soldered joints, connecting wires and connection strips.”
But I shouldn’t really have expected our steam age expert to know about that. After all, that Austro-German took a lot of convincing that a plane would be able to fly without a propeller. 😉
My original point stands. History shows that you just never know when your scientific and technological research will turn golden, even in times of economic downturn! But yes, stick to what you know. 🙂
noooooo
at my school….you had one slate between 2 kids and a piece of chalk each—one kid wrote on one side of the slate—the other kid wrote on the other side.
I was lucky not to be sent down a coalmine when I was six.
I never qualified in anything, except to define the various aromas of BS
yes…i know all about gold conductors and stuff—but i try to be economical with words—nobody wants to read it anyway.
Sunday I had lunch with a professor of international economic law—who confirmed what I had already figured out–that Trump is a total ignoramus on every count of economic policy, and unchecked will crash the system that sustains us.
But thanks anyway.
The only way to break free of the globalist is to crash the system. Go Donald!
Norman, you might have a point if Trump was actually running anything or deciding anything to do with “his” administration’s economic policies.
However, I haven’t seen any evidence that he’s anything other than a front man, and it occurs to me that the real running and deciding are performed elsewhere, while Trump and his cabinet perform re-runs of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Did you and your professor of international economic law acquaintance pause to discuss that possibility while you were confirming with each other how history repeats and how much smarter and wiser you are than the people who are running and making decisions in the US?
The American Experiment has clearly failed as peoples who had nothing to do with the founding of USA have come to dominate the country.
is Trump an American? Technically, no. His ancestor, Friedrich Drumpf(that name took the current form during the lifetime of Donald’s father) , a Bavarian draft dodger, came to USA in 1880s.
At least those whose ancestors came to USA before 1865 could claim to be Americans. After 1865 they have no stake in USA.
The eyesore called the Vietnam Memorial was designed by a Maya Lin. Is she American? Only the neo-Americans call her such. She was, is and will always be Chinese, no matter where she was born or what language she could speak. A non-American is a non-American no matter how many years their family might have stayed in USA if they had no stake in USA by arriving after 1865.
Blacks are another matter which I won’t touch now
It is unfortunate that FDR died before the Pacific Theater was closed, since otherwise all these Japanese-“Americans” in the camps would have been returned to Japan to rebuild that country and not stay in USA. All of their ‘citizenships’ would have been revoked- Few people know this but during Operation Wetbacks, operations to deport Hispanics in LA area during 1930s , the children born in US soil had their US citizenships revoked and sent back to Mexico.
Since those who had nothing to do with American principles, American ideals and American goals came to dominate in USA, everyone forgot what the American experiment was . As a result it was contaminated beyond recovery.
YES!
it was also going to fail by being based on oil, which starts running out after 40-50 years.
For those who were alive in the 1970 and 1980s, violent crime was more prevalent than it is now and what was even more prevalent then than now was something experts called a serial killer. A serial killer was almost always a psychopath. Psychopaths were an extreme version of sociopaths.
Decades later, with several alleged psychopaths imprisoned, psychologists are telling everyone psychopaths do not exist, well, not the born ones, anyway. The consensus is that some extreme environments create serial killer but few examples are offered. The experts also say serial killers can be cured somehow but they don’t present many examples.
Anyone have any insights on what happened back then?
More surveillance cameras
Better profiling so if two similar murders occur chances are they are done by the same person so is more quickly apprehended
Here’s an English joke from the 1980s.
Q. What is it called when you talk to God?
A. Praying.
Q. What is it called when God talks to you?
A. Paranoid schizophrenia!
=======
That was a reference to Peter Sutcliffe, the so called Yorkshire Ripper. He claimed that “voices from God” told him to rid the streets of prostitutes – a symptom of his delusional beliefs linked to his schizophrenia.
========
“Citizen X” is an excellent TV film about an actual Ukrainian-Soviet serial killer called Andrei Chikatilo. It stars Donald Sutherland. He has to fight the Soviet bureaucrats, who initially claim that there are no serial killers in the Soviet Union – only in the decadent capitalist countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Chikatilo
========
Stalin, General Franco, and the Austrian fellow were among the most murderous dictators of the 20th century. They had all suffered repeated vicious beatings from their father as children and accordingly despised them. Psychologists in the 1940s believed that AH’s personality showed that he must have suffered extreme humiliation in childhood. He and Franco both adored their mother, but Stalin seemed indifferent to his.
After Lenin died in 1924, Stalin led the communist party. There was still a lot of infighting in the 1920s, though, and Stalin’s enemy Trotsky kept trying to oust him. In 1927, high-up communists Zinoviev (who was Jewish) and Kamenev briefly supported Trotsky. Stalin expelled them from the party, but after they repented, he re-admitted them. But Stalin never really forgave anyone who had slighted him. That would become clear during his purges and show trials of the 1930s – the Great Terror.
(MOSTLY WIKIPEDIA NOW, WITH SOME OF MY OWN WORDS)
In August 1936, after months of rehearsals in secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial. The charges included forming a terrorist organization to kill Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet government. This was the first Moscow Show Trial and set the stage for subsequent show trials where Old Bolsheviks confessed to various outrageous crimes (none of them real). Zinoviev and the other defendants were found guilty on 24 August 1936.
Before the trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev had agreed to plead guilty to the false charges on the condition that they not be executed, a condition that Stalin accepted, stating ‘that goes without saying’. A few hours after their conviction, Stalin ordered their execution that night. Shortly after midnight, on the morning of 25 August, Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed by firing squad.
Accounts of Zinoviev’s execution vary, with some having him beg and plead for his life, prompting the stoic Kamenev to tell Zinoviev to “quiet down and die with dignity”. Zinoviev allegedly struggled against the guards escorting him so fiercely that instead of taking him to the appointed execution room, he was simply dragged into a nearby cell and shot there.
When Stalin was at dinner with his cronies the following evening, Zinoviev’s futile pleading was re-enacted and mocked by Stalin’s personal bodyguard, Karl Pauker. Stalin roared with laughter on seeing an imitation of the old Bolshevik leader Grigori Zinoviev being dragged to his execution and “making pleas for mercy with obscenities”. By the time that Pauker told Stalin that Zinoviev’s last words were “Hear me, O Israel!”, Stalin was virtually pissing himself with laughter. (I’m sure that Zinoviev never said that, but Pauker made it up to amuse Stalin, who was known to be rather anti-semitic). Over the following weeks at dinner, Stalin would often ask Pauker to show him again how Zinoviev went to his death and crack up laughing all over again. It is amazing how openly sadistic Stalin was in the company of his cronies by the 1930s. But by then he was all powerful, and none of his cronies would have dared not to laugh along with him.
Pauker himself was arrested on 15 April 1937, because he “knew too much and lived too well”, and he was executed quietly without trial on 14 August 1937.
The arrests of the Great Terror were partly prompted by Stalin’s paranoia at the rise of fascism in Europe, partly by a burning desire for revenge against those who he considered had slighted him. His top secret policeman, Lavrentiy Beria, believed that Stalin suffered from a massive inferiority complex, which fuelled a great resentment in him against those he believed had disrespected him. Beria himself was a sadistic beast too, but with far greater self-esteem than Stalin.
Stalin regarded his show trials as soap-opera type entertainment (circuses) for the public, false flags that inculcated fear in them and also showed them who was “in” and “out” in Soviet politics.
Reading this it is impossible to understand how 77% of people in Russia retain a positive impression of Stalin. I was, initially, somewhat perplexed by what I readily called the “orthodox stalinist”, pious people that nevertheless defended vigorously Stalin when discussing the past.
“Reading this it is impossible to understand how 77% of people in Russia retain a positive impression of Stalin. ” It’s easy to understand. They probably don’t have this impression of Stalin since most of them are Gentiles.
Oh, I didn’t choose that particular episode on the grounds of ethnicity or religion, User. Many thousands of “Gentiles” of various ethnicities suffered similar treatment during the purges. And Communists were nominally atheists, after all.
Though I was always amused that Stalin referred mockingly to “non-Gentiles” as “rootless cosmopolitans”, given the fact that he was a Georgian who’d moved to Russia. A bit hypocritical, I’d say. 🙂
This is correct. And I have seen all this, since I am old enough to remember an elderly member of my family talking with undying love about Giuseppe Massarenti. They don’t just have a positive impression of Stalin, they love him (and some of my friends here do hate him). You can see right across who is a descendant of serfs and who is not.
But were there so many serial killers in the 1970s and 1980?
Miles Mathis has made a fascinating if not compelling case for considering many if not most serial killer stories as psyops. For instance:
https://mileswmathis.com/gacy.pdf
And:
https://mileswmathis.com/unabomber.pdf
Happy reading!
You have been keeping track of these things for a long time!
In order to promote a myth of that magnitude to the entire world, a global-scale civilization would be required.
Accounts of serial killers predate industrial society, and therefore, most globally operating intelligence organizations.
In the past, it is theorized that many stories about man-eating werewolves or vampires were examples of humans de-humanizing serial killers of the past.
Even if they were “psyops” there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why they would fabricate them.
In order to promote a myth of that magnitude to the entire world, a global-scale civilization would be required.
We have a global-scale civilization, don’t we? Apart from some remote places such as North Sentinel Island and Tristan da Cunha, almost everyone is living in the Global Village these days.
But more importantly, the people in charge have a “mighty Wurlitzer” on which they can play any tune they like and the rest of us will be forced to endure it.
https://www.amazon.com/Mighty-Wurlitzer-How-Played-America/dp/067403256X
Accounts of serial killers predate industrial society, and therefore, most globally operating intelligence organizations.
I think you are making a logical error there by implying that “just because there have been serial killers, this means that all stories of serial killers must be true accounts” or that “just because some stories of serial killers are myths, hoaxes, or psyops, that means all of them are myths, hoaxes, or psyops.” These conclusions do not follow logically from their premises. The situation I am trying to point out, and I think Mathis would agree with this, is simply that although there have been and are many genuine cases of serial killers who have killed various numbers people in succession, there are also some cases in which intelligence organizations have made up or faked stories of serial killers.
In the past, it is theorized that many stories about man-eating werewolves or vampires were examples of humans de-humanizing serial killers of the past.
I think you make an excellent point here. Making up these stories of vampires and werewolves could be considered the opposite what modern intelligence organizations do when they invent stories of serial killers and sell them to the public.
Even if they were “psyops” there doesn’t seem to be a good reason why they would fabricate them.
Your main problem is that you don’t think “conspiratorially” enough. You are not the sort of person the CIA would ever dream of recruiting.
There are probably dozens of reasons why intelligence agencies or their mates might want to fabricate stories or manipulate narratives, including those involving serial killers. But since we can’t question the agencies involved like a police detective, public prosecutor, or congressional committee could, we need to do some speculative thinking. Off the top of my head here are eight potential motivations:
1. Distraction from Other Issues
By sensationalizing crime stories, agencies could divert public attention from more significant political or social issues, such as government policies or international conflicts.
2. Social Control
Creating narratives around serial killers could instill fear in the populace, leading to increased compliance with government authority and a demand for more security measures.
3. Testing Public Reaction
Fabricating stories could serve as a way to study public reactions to fear, anxiety, and moral panics, helping agencies understand how to manage public sentiment.
4. Justification for Surveillance
By highlighting threats from serial killers, agencies might justify increased surveillance measures, such as monitoring communications or expanding law enforcement powers.
5. Influencing Policing Strategies
Propagating certain narratives could influence law enforcement priorities, guiding resources toward specific types of crime or methods of policing.
6. Cultural Manipulation
By crafting stories around serial killers, agencies could influence cultural perceptions of crime, morality, and justice, shaping societal norms and values.
7. Psychological Operations (Psyops)
These fabricated stories could be part of psychological operations aimed at manipulating public perception or creating a desired narrative in society.
8. Increasing Public Media Engagement
Sensational stories can drive media engagement, make people turn on the TV or buy a newspaper, increasing viewership and revenue, which in turn can be leveraged to propagate specific narratives.
“although there have been and are many genuine cases of serial killers who have killed various numbers people in succession, there are also some cases in which intelligence organizations have made up or faked stories of serial killers. ”
The position you are putting everyone in, is to tell real cases from false ones. Sifting real cases from fake ones is complicated by the reality that the people in charge are claiming they have never played many of the tunes on their “mighty Wurlitzer” that they did in the past. Claiming that psychopaths don’t exist or that all serial killers aren’t all psychopaths undermines all their work any any understanding of the subject at this time.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shadow-boxing/202504/are-all-serial-killers-psychopaths
“Your main problem is that you don’t think “conspiratorially” enough. You are not the sort of person the CIA would ever dream of recruiting.
There are probably dozens of reasons why intelligence agencies or their mates might want to fabricate stories or manipulate narrative”
None of the possible reasons you listed seem to be valuable.
If it is to discourage family formation, or trust in commuity, well, there are other things that achieved the same outcome.
Strangers can’t be trusted.
Every man who seems ‘strange’ is probably a serial killer.
Most people already believe those things centuries ago.
“Sensational stories can drive media engagement, make people turn on the TV or buy a newspaper”
So, then, the obscure ones must be true.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-lists/american-psychos-10-modern-serial-killers-youve-never-heard-of-102597/vickie-dawn-jackson-251053/
It looks like at any time there are 50-100 of them with body counts of at least 50.
That is not trivial.
Real or not , what purpose does this serve?
There are entire television channels feeding women, who are usually the most common victim, narratives of men committing horrific crimes 24/7 because the women are “addicted” to these kind of stories
Maybe the people playing the songs on the mighty Wurlitzer are the murderous psychopaths and people like Jimmy Saville are the fall guys for their crimes.
I don’t have any desire to increase my conspiratorial thinking .
Scheming and plotting to do terrible things is what bad people do.
Supremacy of international law! Putin speaks at the SCO.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NE9bx_GbrY4
I didn’t get all of the way through the speech, but the part I saw sounded perfectly reasonable.
I want to make things clear. India at the SCO was a lapdog. The hero was Xi, the star was Putin. Modi did not get an invitation to the victory parade on 3rd Sept. 22 heads of states and 18 will attend. Modi ignored. Why? Modi was trying to cruise with one leg in the US camp and one in the BRICS for 11 years. Modi is considered a ”Trojan Horse” in BRICS. Now I come to a real problem for India. If India is to advance it has to go in for digitalisation. It has gone too far down this lane to step back but the problem is ”India has No Answer to US Digital Colonization, US’ Digital Hold Can Cripple India in Few Minutes”. On the other side Indian manufacturing sector will die without Chinese raw materials. Modi is between a rock and a hard place. In the meantime the INR is being devalued against the already weak USD. This is causing distress in the corporate sector that has taken out loans in USD. Just an update and why in my opinion India is overrated.
I generally concur with what Ravi has to say. India (and Turkey) are just unprincipled actors looking for a quick buck. But we have gotten to the point where India may have no choice but to side decisively with Brics. Currently the Indian economy is mostly buy russian crude, refine and mark up.
drb , the problem is that the savings made by importing Russian oil is much less than the taxes which the govt gets from the exports of textiles , gems and jewelry etc to the USA . For the moment pharma products and petrochemicals are exempted . Services also exempted . The Orange man is nuts . If he decides to hit here it will be ” hasta la vista ” for India . The feud is not between India and USA — it is personal Trump vs Modi . Trump asked Modi for nomination to Nobel peace prize — Modi kept silent but Pakistan complied . However like a said ” between a rock and a hard place ” .
Trump’s nutcase optics are just political cover. Textiles, gems, and jewelry are non-essentials in this collapsing global civilization, so they get gently targeted first, like the easy to strip free electrons in the nodules of crop circles crops. The plants commercially fall on their faces, because the combine harvester passes over them, but they don’t suffer a total catastrophe and die.
I agree that paying back loans in US$ will be a problem, with India’s own currency depreciating. I agree.
Inability to repay loans will also add to US banking and other financial problems. There are many troubled US financial institutions already.
Enter the stablecoin greenbacks.
The hero was Xi.
WOW!
Why are you speaking English and s*** on us constantly?
Do you think China respects a traitor?
“Vladimir Putin is “predator” and “ogre.”
– Emmanuel Macron
For 30 years India has played the middle.
30? More like 78, since 1947…
India: neither developed nor undeveloped. A frustrating situation for everyone except the leadership, I imagine.
Vlad the Great, the greatest human of this 21st century.
Yes ,
Vlad the great .
Xi the magnificent .
Trump the narcissist .
Biden the demented.
Kamala the laughing hyena .
Merz the idiot .
Starmar the poodle .
Ursula the puppet .
Macron the midget .
Modi the court jester .
What’s wrong with Putin?
Was it the ballerina he banged? lol
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tY6LigaayZ4
Maybe he’s holding in a shit. It can happen! No need to assume the worst.
Well, well well…this was thought threw I can see..
Exclusive
Daniel Desrochers, Phelim Kine and Megan Messerly Politico
08/31/2025 10:00 AM EDT
Trump’s attempts to lure companies away from China are backfiring
U.S. firms wrestling with Trump’s unpredictable trade policy are calculating it’s better to stay put in China than reshore — at least for now.
In their annual survey, the U.S.-China Business Council found that while most American companies operating in China have felt the sting of trade tensions between Washington and Beijing, a majority of companies still plan to expand investments this year, in part in an effort to continue to capitalize on the Chinese market and because they rely on their Chinese operations to remain globally competitive.
“None of this stuff is going to be reshored,” said Tidalwave Solution’s Johnson. “The U.S. doesn’t have the ecosystem, the people, the tax incentives or the money” to make a shift away from China financially feasible.
Ari Hawkins contributed to this report.
Now I know why it was said of Trump..” The first time in History that a person that’s essential negative bankrupt and worthless is considered Wealthy!”
That was back in the early 1990s with his. Fiasco Trump Shuttle
You can track an old dog new tricks, God help us with these clowns running the show
Donald Trump Really Is a Lot Dumber Than We Thought. Like, a Lot!
His reading of American history is shockingly stupid, even for him.
https://newrepublic.com/post/193614/donald-trump-tariffs-dumb-history-income-tax
Yeah, sure we are headed for another Depression…baked in the cake
There are big gaps in what we have, I am afraid. We cannot ramp up electricity production quickly, or perhaps at all. Adding wind and solar seems to drive out fossil fuels because of the ridiculous “wind and solar go first” pricing scheme used most places. I don’t see this changing, even if other subsidies go away.
I agree. A strong, vertically integrated state will beat a cacophony of private interests anytime anyway, specially when resource are constrained. The american system really is inferior. China started ramping up its electrical production 15 years ago, and now has no competitors when it comes to industrial production.
The problem may be much larger; biology and people.
We have run a “liberal” experiment, deny God, glorify sex and decriminalize drugs, etc. It doesn’t work. God made it simple, ten rules one of which was no sex with your neighbor’s wife.
I don’t know about Trump, but he has an extended family and none are obviously complaining. He is consistent with more women having descendants than men. Somehow he built things in NYC, the buildings are real and exist; that is not an easy place to build what with regulations, unions, etc. He made it work even if not the way many would like, the if only club.
It is not going to be easy, but if the universe is sentient, there is a great deal of work in spaceship earth. Or, God is busy and perhaps some of the nonsense has caught His attention.
“Yeah, sure we are headed for another Depression…baked in the cake.” Good grief! Starship worked again and they are building a new version. SpaceX supposedly makes money and even the Chinese are trying to copy the model.
Chicago, came across this. https://www.foxnews.com/category/us/digital-originals/rooftop-revelations?msockid=1bd51e64b7e565563df60b8db6c06461
No one is perfect, but I like this guy. Blacks had families and family incomes in the fifties, liberalism and handouts did not work. The sexual revolution is a disaster, follow the stars, the Hollywood stars that is; it is a metaphorical trainwreck described weekly in People.
We are Americans, it is an experiment. Europe is an experiment with two WW’s. My vote is we work at home, solve our problems and let the larger mass of humanity give it a try. We have done it before, we can do it again.
God gave us enough oil to make a start, there is something coming next which will be better. Blast off!
Biology without God is a literal nonstarter.
Dennis L.
Wow Dennis….I don’t know what to say but unfortunately God probably does not take sides. Your comment sounds like someone who does not want to address the truth. Trump whether you like or hate him is very naive and blind to what is really happening. That is why you have people that make dumb decisions. He should not have taken on the whole world at once…..stupid….
As I see it, self-organizing systems work in strange ways. We may think we know what is optimal, but that is not how the system really works. God works through very imperfect humans, and through all kinds of plants and animals.
No need to persuade a true believer who would rather live in his delusions than be corrected
“God made it simple, ten rules one of which was no sex with your neighbor’s wife.”
Those rules have a tendency to be applied to the poor man and not the rich one. God is simply another rich man’s con.
Wit.
You could be right, women are hypergamy, men compete, successful men can marry up. It is the same in nature, you don’t want to be low wolf on the totem pole.
In the wealthy world, my yacht is bigger than your yacht. In that respect, no different for the women; saw that in Fl many years ago. Heals and bikinis were color coordinated, sagging bodies need not apply. After forty, what can a woman do, clean house? That is why one builds a life from the beginning, there are seasons to a life.
When oil is done, there will still be biology; we really don’t know more at this point but Starship offers hope.
Dennis L.
lololol—after 40??
you clearly know little about the opposite sex dennis
What is marry up mean?! You obviously have note been married 🤣. There’s no free lunch!
Indeed. The whole story of King David is about that
Nathan, the prophet (kind of a pastor or priest) , supposedly condemns that act but he later supported Solomon, the product of such union. The condemnation was probably a fiction created by Jeremiah, whose ancestor did a lot for David but was purged by Solomon.
King Solomon famously had 700 wives and 300 concubines, according to the biblical account.
Another reason why I think the bible was written by Man and not God. Us men have a tendency to exaggerate anything sex related.
dennis
coveting my neighbours ass is one of the few pleasures left in life.
norm,
Perhaps you can look, but unless she so desires, you cannot touch. Women chose, men compete. We live in a group, sex with a neighbor’s wife is not a good way to have peace in the neighborhood, but the woman could be trading up. It seems that DNA testing has shown this many times, the husband is not the father – that is consistent with fewer man than women having ancestorial bloodlines.
Dennis L.
dennis
after all these years—i know the rules of engagement—the prime one being ”invitation only”.
one does not transgress that—ever….but that does not preclude appreciation of assets. (even now)
i was being mildly facetious.
Perhaps Trump realizes that whether we want to or not, the US economy and others are being forced to shrink back. International trade is being forced to shrink back. The tariffs will facilitate a gradual shrinking back of trade. The tariffs are, in a way, an act of war. But tariffs are close to the best we can do, with today’s depleted war-making resources.
Trump is a mindless puppet he simply takes instructions from the elders who tell him what to say and what to do
You could say that about most of the so-called leaders you read about in the papers.
The tariffs are belong allowed to go forward in order to continue what the Covid lockdowns and the war with Russia started.
In the recent past, the growing Middle East population was a target.
Today, we are all targets.
The Great Reset continues.
Reante: have you read ‘Survival Paradox’ by Eliad? Talks a lot about the use of Modified Citrus Pectin (Pectasol) versus an over-abundance of Galectin-3
Been awhile, hillcountry! No I’m not familiar with that guy or with modified citrus pectin, which sounds like a useful supplement with regard to it helping with chelating heavy metals. Personally I would be concerned about it inactivating galectins because I’m a firm believer that nature (our bodies) knows best how to deal with chronic trauma. If we’re not addressing the root cause of the trauma and instead relying on biohacks then we might face unintended consequences.
Collagen is the sister molecule to fibrin in this whole fibrotic disease thing. Galectin-3 promotes internal scar tissue as well as tumors because they are related healing protocols in that they are both collagen-fibrin emergency scaffolds that seal off wounds from the body – the difference is that tumors are sealing off carcinogenic active threats that keep wounding, whereas scar tissue is how the body most efficiently seals off a wound site when it decides via a cost-benefit analysis that it can’t currently afford to regrow the tissue properly, which is an extended, nutrient intensive process. So if, under chronic systemic trauma, we’re intervening in the galectin 3 pathway that inhibits the bodies ability to form internal scar tissue as it sees fit, then what happens? It’s just more allopathic symptom suppression that kicks the can of disease down the road to greater consequence. Seems to me if the body has an elevated need for the efficient scarring process and we suppress that ability, that just adds more stress which just adds to the cumulative trauma.
A couple or few years ago here I mentioned how my sheep and goats developed some small, pinhead-size, distributed tumors or scars on their lungs that they didn’t have before 5G. And I’m out in the countryside and there’s no 5g assembly anywhere close to here. That’s not a problem for them. They’re healthy animals because they have healthy lifestyles. It’s a lot harder for us to have as healthy a lifestyle. It’s close to impossible. I obviously have those pinhead white spots too. That’s adaptation. We live our lives in the industrial trenches. I trust in that process and I have the confidence to do that because I take seriously the fundamentals of health. I’ve taken those fundamentals into my own hands.
fascinating info about your sheep
Yeah it is. And actually now I think about it more I remember that I feel like I’ve been noticing fewer of the tiny tumors. At first we’re not ready for such changes, and for some people it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. But after awhile our epigenetic adaptations kick in and we make adjustments, which do come at a cost, so through our choices and our efforts we have to become better functioning people in order to maintain our robustness in a structurally suddenly more polluted ecology. Those epigenetic adjustments are accompanied by related signaling exosomes, many of which leave the body, becoming exogenous exosomes which germ theory calls viruses, and then enter other bodies to participate in horizontal gene transfer which is 99pc of evolution.
Humans are the new “Horses” and A.I. is the automobile!
I am the walrus.
Tollense is Europe’s earliest known ‘battlefield’ albeit there are probable massacre sites like Ofnet in Bavaria ~8400 BP suggestive of raids that date back to the Mesolithic, and warfare was endemic in the Neolithic.
Early osteoarchaeology (bones) is sparse in Europe, but Palaeolithic warfare is documented elsewhere. Obviously a more complex society allows for grander battles, and the legendary Trojan war is set decades after the battle at Tollense.
The Late Bronze Age battle at Tollense is outside of the historical record. The LBA generally was a time of largescale warfare and of societal upheaval and collapse, and various factors have been proposed, but Tollense is a new discovery.
https://antiquity.ac.uk/news/2024/southern-army-fought-europes-oldest-battle
> Southern army fought at ‘Europe’s oldest battle’
Archaeologists analysed thirteenth century BC bronze and flint arrowheads from the Tollense Valley, north-east Germany, uncovering the earliest evidence for large-scale interregional conflict in Europe.
The Tollense Valley in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania is well-known as the site of a large conflict dating to c. 1250 BC. The quantity of human remains found (more than 150 individuals) suggests over 2000 people were involved, an amount unprecedented for the Nordic Bronze Age.
First proposed to be a battlefield in Antiquity in 2011, nowadays the site is often referred to as ‘Europe’s oldest known battlefield’, since no other conflict of this scale has been discovered that dates earlier.
However, very little is known about the people who fought and died at Tollense over 3000 years ago. Who was involved in the battle, and where did they come from?
To answer these questions, a team of researchers from several German institutions compared bronze and flint arrowheads found in the valley with over 4000 contemporary examples from across Europe.
“The arrowheads are a kind of ‘smoking gun’,” says lead author of the research, Leif Inselmann, who collected more than 4700 arrowheads from Central Europe for his M.A. thesis at Göttingen University. “Just like the murder weapon in a mystery, they give us a clue about the culprit, the fighters of the Tollense Valley battle and where they came from.”
The majority of the arrowheads are of types occasionally found in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, suggesting that most of the people who fought at Tollense were relatively local. However, other types such as arrowheads with straight or rhombic bases, with unilateral barbs or with a pointed tang instead of a socket are better known from a region to the south that encompasses modern Bavaria and Moravia.
These types of arrowheads have not been found in burials from the Tollense region, indicating that local people were not simply acquiring the arrowheads through trade with the south and using them in battle themselves.
This suggests that at least some of the people fighting at Tollense were not from the area, implying southern warriors, or perhaps even a southern army, were involved in the conflict.
At several contemporary sites in southern Germany large amounts of bronze arrowheads were found as well, suggesting that the thirteenth century BC was a period of European prehistory that saw an overall increase in armed conflict.
Importantly, this is also the earliest example of interregional conflict in Europe, implying this period corresponded with increased scale and professionalisation of organised violence.
“The Tollense Valley conflict dates to a time of major changes,” concludes Inselmann, now at the Freie Universität Berlin. “This raises questions about the organisation of such violent conflicts. Were the Bronze Age warriors organised as a tribal coalition, the retinue or mercenaries of a charismatic leader ‒ a kind of “warlord” ‒, or even the army of an early kingdom?”
also: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/warriors-from-the-south-arrowheads-from-the-tollense-valley-and-central-europe/C4F6ECB759833BFD337D37ADAE564C4B
Guess: Most of these accounts are sentient narratives; humans are biology and biological rules give uncomfortable narratives.
Dennis L.
Blind faith on pseudobiology is a form of false narrative
Bronze arrowheads may have had some advantages over earlier stone arrowheads. Perhaps those with bronze arrowheads knew they had an advantage, and pushed to control resources.
Thomas Riddick’s Control of Colloid Stability through Zeta Potential was very likely the essential guide used by Dr. T.C. McDaniel (1912-2014) to design Zeta Aid, still available via his daughter in Tucson. The heart and blood stuff begins with Ch. 22
https://tr.z-library.sk/book/28095204/49f625/control-of-colloid-stability-through-zeta-potential-vol-1.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3C67O3_dzYE
The SCO meeting is off to a pleasant start.
I will be flying home today.
I am afraid this article is correct: Quite a large share of US residents cannot read well, at all. They have not been taught phonics.
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/she-couldnt-read-her-own-diploma-why-public-schools-pass-students-but-fail-society/
Personally I prefer whole-word. Phonics can be used to build a vocabulary of words that one knows at sight. At sight is much faster and is the way people end up reading if they read regularly.
Did you find your spelling suffered with whole word?
How much of a page can you read at one scan?
I don’t read phonetically, spell check is a friend of mine.
Used phonetics to learn French, read it poorly.
Do you write cursive? Mine is legible but lacks style to be generous.
Dennis L.
We teach phonics to our children (home educated). Phonics, or morphemes if you will, are the building blocks of language, and thus the foundation of grammar. Such that we get:
Morphemes
Words
Phrases
Clauses
Sentences
It seems strange to teach otherwise…
I respect phonics, wish I had been taught it when young, looking at a printed page now, I see the sentence, the ideas and never translate into words phonetically. Observation, not an argument.
Grammar is interesting, use of subject-verb agreement seems to be disappearing in the spoken word as well as correct use of tense.
Was in a CC a few years back, calc series, the best two students were homeschooled, one went to MIT in what would have been his senior year in high school.
Do you use AI in any of your teaching? I use Copilot for math/programming; it is interesting, helpful but sometimes very indirect in too many error routines. I want to learn my own path, don’t wish to blindly follow; AI helpful to find errors but not always.
Dennis L.
no matter
in the middle ages, a preist read from the bible to an illiterate population. Publishing the bible in english was a capital offence.
on the face of it, that is where a great number of American people are (willingly) headed within 2 or 3 generations if the godnuts and rapturemongers have their way.
Book banning (read burning) has already started. Free speech is being legally constrained.
Schools are fighting a losing battle against religious indoctrination.
Secretary Johnson has already stated, that the bible is his only point of reference for good government.
Senators have openly stated that the laws of physics do not apply to American citizens who pray hard enough. (Inhofe et al)
The USA is looking more and more like a cult society in broad terms.
Foriegn leaders are consumed with laughter at what used to be the beacon of freedom, (or maybe that was part of the myth?)
add this to my list of prophesies.
Don’t worry about the rupturemongers, Norman.
I can reassure you that you are very unlikely to be raptured.
Although if you carry on ranting and gibbering like this you may well end up ruptured due to excessive blood pressure.
“on the face of it, that is where a great number of American people are (willingly) headed within 2 or 3 generations if the godnuts and rapturemongers have their way,”
Interesting, appears as a defense of a narrative strongly held, “godnuts.”
There is coming an idea that the universe may be sentient, sentience itself may be quantum mechanical; that would be consistent.
Looked on Copilot, a bacteria can be synthesized from chemicals alone as long as a genome is included. The genome is the result of sentience from a human being.
An extension is biology, human and otherwise are indeed secondary to chemicals, but the blueprint is not spontaneous that we know. Assuming sentience of the universe, that is a close approximation to God.
A thesis: given time, God will solve the energy problem.
Dennis L.
A thesis: given time, God will solve the energy problem.
dennis—you would make a good republican senator
Unable to remember exactly where I read it a couple of decades ago. Might have even been one of the commenters in the old TOD (theoildrum.com) that Gail used to be an editor of. That person used to sign off with this: “The universe is a figment of its own imagination”.
Quantum is the “abracadabra” of physics. anything can be conjectured. Conjecture after conjecture.
Seems like somebody was settling scores here, but who knows who?
Assassinated Ukrainian MP ‘directly ordered’ shelling of Donbass civilians – ex-diplomat (VIDEO)
Andrey Parubiy, a far-right Ukrainian politician who was shot dead in Lviv on Saturday, directly ordered attacks on Donbass and provoked a “civil war” with eastern Ukraine after the Maidan coup, ex-Ukrainian diplomat Andrey Telizhenko has told RT.
Parubiy, an MP and former speaker of the Ukrainian Rada, played an active role in the Western-backed coup in Kiev in 2014, as well as in the nationalist government it brought to power. He had deep and long-running ties to Ukraine’s neo-Nazi movement, co-founding the far-right Social-National Party of Ukraine.
“During the cabinet of ministers meetings, [at] which I was present, Parubiy directly ordered the mass shellings of the people of Donbass,” Telizhenko told RT on Saturday.
“He said, ‘We do not care who those people are. Russians, they’re Moscali [a Ukrainian slur for Russians], we should kill them,’” the former diplomat, who was an adviser to Ukraine’s prosecutor general at the time, said.
“That’s a direct citation from Parubiy during the cabinet of ministers meeting, in which he pushed to provoke the civil war in eastern Ukraine, which has now led to a big massive conflict.”
Parubiy and his team were “working directly with the Jamestown Foundation, a former CIA central think tank in Washington, DC,” Telizhenko claimed.
https://swentr.site/russia/623715-assassinated-mp-ordered-donbass-shellings/
You live by the sword…
French hospitals brace for mass casualties by March 2026, per Health Ministry docs.
https://x.com/Worldsource24/status/1962280113007173786
The countries that are doing poorly attack others, it seems.
50,000 casualties? Ukraine has 1700,000 dead. A whole EU versus BRICS will be tens of millions dead in the first month. Not many with treatable wounds most fatal. They will not be transported hundreds of miles to quaint hospitals in the French country side. They will die on the dirt where they are mortally wounded. It will be a real war of 21st century technology. No hiding places, no one unseen, no one unreachable. It will be nuclear with 30 million incinerated French in the first month.
As long as no missiles come to the US the US ambassador to the UN will issues some harshly worded statements to the security council.
Rest assured the president will order flags to be flown at half mast.
The appearance of getting prompt medical attention for even normally survivable battle wounds is a false promise, perhaps to keep moral up. Only if the wounded still have the presence of mind and the ability to pay the medics in gold for rescue will those soldiers have even a remote chance of survival. Sewing gold into pants cuffs will be the best chance. Reportedly back in 2023, those UKR soldiers didn’t have cash on them were left on the field to die.
Nobody is going to war there isn’t enough energy for that.
They’re preparing for collapse.
And obviously, that can’t just come out and say that. Duh.
It’s far more likely that any mass casualties in Western European nations will be the result of insurrection, revolution, social unrest, or civil war.
Quite possibly, governments have been deliberately provoking their populations into rising up so that they can mow them down in the streets and decimate the “useless eaters” and then re-feudalize the survivors.
If Kulm is correct about how Western societies are going to be re-ordered, with the land owners and other elites in firm control and the poor reduced to subsistence level, how should we expect the elites to bring this about? Will they the economic pressure mount slowly as in the “boiling frogs” scenario, or will they engineer something to crash the current system and crush all opposition in “one fell swoop”?
Are we looking at another example of a strategy of tension in which the controllers strive to pit different groups against each other? I certainly looks like that.
While I don’t live there and am viewing the scene through the narrow slit of my Internet connection, it is obvious to me now that Europe can’t continue rolling along its present course much longer. Something is going to have to give.
That’s what I’m leaning towards. How much longer can they use financial manipulation to trick other nations into to giving them their valuable energy for paper? Countries without physical resources are going to go first. Everyone thinks it’s going to be the U.S and Canada but I don’t think so
I am not Kulm, but at the end of the Roman Empire laws were passed so that debtors would become indentured laborers (coloni) working the land. Essentially the entire legal architecture of feudalism was enacted before the final collapse. I note that the USA is much more advanced about this than Europe, with non dischargeable student loans the camel’s nose in the tent. Europe, of course, was a backwater for a 1000+ years precisely due to feudalism.
Honestly how do we know if this is real?
am guessing BS—most of it is
It’s all about the illuminati guys they control everything they own everything they own you
@reante, with regard to Firstenburg’s “Invisible Rainbow” book that you mentioned.
Albert Budden’s “UFOs: The Psychic Nature of Close Encounters—The Electromagnetic Indictment.”
Published in 1995, Budden’s book proposes that reports of UFOs and close encounters are often rooted in a person’s exposure to strong electromagnetic fields, or “electromagnetic hot-spots”.
Key concepts of the book
The electro-staging hypothesis: Budden’s central theory suggests that strong electromagnetic fields from power lines, radar, or other sources can affect the human brain and central nervous system. This, in turn, may induce hallucinatory experiences that people interpret as alien encounters.
A natural explanation for paranormal phenomena: The book frames many of the classic elements of an alien encounter—like temporary paralysis, missing time, and feelings of disorientation—as plausible physiological and psychological effects of electromagnetic exposure.
Case studies: Budden supports his claims by detailing numerous case studies of close encounters and offering alternative explanations based on electromagnetic effects.
==============
Very interesting book.
I certainly do not believe that strong electromagnetic fields or “electromagnetic hot-spots” account for all paranormal phenomena, however. Reality is weird at the edges, and it would be a strange world if it wasn’t a strange world at least some of the time.
Interesting idea!
Thanks dem. Sounds like it would be interesting to have a gander at that book in order to anatomize a judgement on the author’s thinking process, but I bet that I would disagree with his thesis. Problem is, I’ve seen a UFO light pattern with my own sober eyes, and it was a phenomenon that I don’t consider remotely possible for current Earth industrialism to achieve. That half-second experience is what enabled me to journey towards the working belief in the Hand’s repurposed alien tech positron beam DEW.
Seems to me that psychosis would be a better psychological framing than hallucination. Those are extreme hallucinations. I don’t believe in ghosts, and I see those as psychotic episodes. Psychosis is a highly under-recognized phenomenon imo. Getting psychologically triggered into irrationally negative responses is the most common form of psychosis; it’s a mild psychotic break without visuals. On the other end of the spectrum, a person with MPD is structurally psychotic.
Does the author address the mountain of consistent physical evidence associated with UFO sightings? Or the consistency of the witness reports? It would be interesting to see what he says about the neurobiology of intense electrosmog exposure. I’ve mentioned before Paul Hill’s “Unconventional Flying Objects.” My positron beam theory also wouldn’t be possible without it
Oh, dem, that reminds me of the little epiphany I had around crop circles and Jacques Vallee, who you introduced me to a few weeks ago. believing in aliens, I had to assume that they were responsible for the crop circles because it seemed the best technical explanation for the physical evidence, and because they emerged before 9/11 which I consider to be the debut of the beam. But after reading Vallee’s material about the nearby military base and the morphological characteristics of the flattened plants, the new working truth is that this phenomenon is related to trialing the mapping function of the beam, if not so much the modulation function. Because a positron beam annihilates/strips electrons from the easiest (free) to hardest (bound), depending on power modulation, the fact that the plant nodules fail first, and kinda get volumetrically blown out, but somehow gently-so, is a perfect match for positron -electron annihilation because plant nodules have considerably more electrical activity in them than the rest of the plant.
The late Albert Budden did not appear to believe in ET’s or UFO’s. He was seeking a materialist solution to the enigma and focused on the electro-pollution problem. He interviewed one woman who lived very close to an electric pylon, and a man who experienced ill-health because he lived in the vicinity of a military base that appeared to be carrying out experiments with sound and vibrations. His book is well worth reading and doesn’t mean that ET’s or UFO’s do not exist. There are probably several pieces to the puzzle.
Jacques Vallee is French. The French ufologist in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is based on him. Spielberg hired him as a consultant. He good-naturedly told Spielberg that he’d be disappointed if the answer to the phenomenon turned out to be as simple as flesh-and-blood beings piloting nuts-and-bolts craft. Nevertheless, in the film you do see toys coming to life and jumping around in a boy’s bedroom as a UFO passes overhead, which emphasises the psychic side of the phenomenon.
In 1955 Vallee and his mother witnessed a flying saucer above their house in Paris. Jacques shouted excitedly downstairs to his father, who worked at home. His father replied that he was far too busy to come and look at flying saucers! In 1962 Jacques went to work for an observatory in Paris. One say their radar recorded a craft orbiting the Earth in the wrong direction. Jacques knew that no earthly satellite could do that. He excitedly played the tape back to his manager, who immediately deleted it. The dismayed Jacques asked why. His manager replied that their American client would not take them seriously if they sent them data like that. Jacques wondered why the scientific community refused to engage with the phenomenon.
He ended up working on ARPANET in the USA, where he made some useful military contacts who filed him in on certain aspects of how they regarded and responded to UFO’s. In 1977 he wrote the world’s first texting program.
In 1969 Jacques’ most famous book was published: “Passport to Magonia”. It looks at UFO sightings through the centuries, pointing out that they are not just a modern phenomenon, and that there were sceptics in those days too, who sought materialist explanations. He also interviewed some modern-day folk who claimed to have had a close encounter. To his astonishment, many of the elements of their stories seemed to correlate with the old tales of the fairy folk. Yet he accepts that there are both physical and paranormal aspects to the phenomenon. One English military officer referred to the phenomenon as “paraphysical”. Despite all this, Vallee always looks for natural explanations first, as you see with his investigation into crop circles.
He believes that the phenomenon is some kind of mysterious control mechanism that maybe helps to shape humankind’s collective consciousness. Not all his books are worth reading – among those I would include his more recent diaries. After “Magonia”, he later wrote a couple of books in which he looked at how the military and the secret service cynically tried to manipulate belief in the phenomenon to their advantage, but once again he does not believe that that is the whole story.
I forget which book it is in which he analyses the “Miracle of the sun” or “Miracle of Fatima” of 1917 (maybe it’s “Magonia”), which had many witnesses, and he frames it as potentially a UFO event. It’s a fascinating read.
Graham Hancock also writes about the fairy folk (the fae) in parts of his book “Supernatural”. He focuses on the Einsteinian relativity of time in the old tales, when folk were allegedly abducted for a short while, or so they thought, only to discover on their return, that way more time had passed than they had imagined. I believe Hancock also comments on the “magic wand” – what is it but a technological instrument, he asks, which paralyses people by means of the so-called “fairy blast”?
Thanks that was a fun read. Yeah if the abductees were traveling between stars during their abduction then time would have slowed way down for them relative to Earth time. Without that relativity, interstellar travel would be impossible.
just as well we have relativity then.
For sure. We wouldn’t exist without relativity. The mass-specific metabolism of a human cell is about 100X faster than that of a human, because they experience time way faster, because the its metabolic distances are way shorter. The evolutionary relativity of time. Neato.
tempus fugit.
2/3 of 2025 is history, my oh my, my life is swiftly running out of years, oh well, I saw this reality as a teenager, ah those 1970s.
mid point of the 2020s was 12/31/2024 and the 2nd half of this decade is flying by.
the final end of IC is certain, the timing is unknowable, but late in this century seems reasonable to me.
viva la vida.
Cheer up old son! There’s only about 100 shopping days till Christmas.
Handy Dandy, he got a stick in his hand and a pocket full of money
He says, “Darling, tell me the truth, how much time I got?”
She says, “You got all the time in the world, honey”
I’m enjoying life, well, mostly.
and it feels like I have all the time in the world to do fun stuff.
too optimistic we are very close this year or next year .
this type of comment is usually due to doomer confirmation bias, in my opinion.
it can be a daily struggle to attempt more balance than one’s own usual bias.
everything good for centuries vs doom any day now.
there is a reasonable middle ground, in my opinion.
it’s nothing to worry about.
It’s all about the shale and the current oil prices the downturn is about to commence
oh sure an economic downturn is near, because the flow of surplus energy through IC is not growing now, after 300+ years of growth, and soon it will be declining surplus energy.
and the primary surplus energy economy dictates the state of the secondary financial economy.
so degrowth is near and probably will proceed in a gradual prolonged slow manner for the next few decades.
g’day mate, BAU tonight, baby!
Not yet collapsed. Strange. But in october i think financial collapse and sistemica crisis
For what part of the world?
in my opinion, most of the world will be continuing in gradual prolonged slow degrowth for the next few decades, mostly tracking the decline in surplus energy, since the primary surplus energy economy dictates the state of the secondary financial economy.
but sure smaller weaker countries may have some semi collapse within this decade, similar to Sri Lanka and Lebanon recently.
especially countries with very low energy resources.
the UK looks like it is close to swirling down the drain.
but even for them, the 2030s look more probable.
I see that too, that is why I think that Europe will be right behind the U.k ….they don’t have anything left to sell other than tourism. People as a whole will have to learn how to do more with less. 2030 is just around the corner…with debt explosion things are changing very rapidly. The one thing that you don’t mention David in your equation is that there can’t be another large scale war……2008 type crash or covid like moment otherwise the forecast will all move forward by a lot of steps.
sure black swans are always possible but never probable.
perhaps the best that can be done is to look at energy resources, and that does put the UK and also the rest of Europe into a more likely sooner rather than later scenario of plunging economies.
the British commenters at SurplusEnergyEconomics have much to say about the ongoing decline of the UK, and so does Tim Watkins at ConsciousnessOfSheep.
some country will be the next one to semi collapse.
chances are that it will be a country even smaller and weaker than the UK, but the UK is a main contender.
I see what you are saying but isn’t a black swan an unforeseen event? I don’t think co$id and all the others I mentioned were unforeseen or unplanned for that matter they were planned. Also these incidents seem to be coming faster and more frequently. I often think that when you have certain economies go down they will be like a titanic going down that it will suck a lot of what is around it down with it. I have a lot of liberal friends that think that moving to Europe will be a safer bet than being in Canada or the United States. I don’t think they understand the difficulty ahead for Europe because they go there as tourist without really discussing what life is really like for the people that live there and see the low prices for food and think that the cost of living is so low there.
But I am glad you are back I need your hopium around me sometimes. Even if it means that I have to work like a slave until my turn to retire and the SHTF by then ugh……
Monkey seem Monkey do…
Mexico proposes 50% tariff on Chinese imports; bans shoes, small packages
New tariffs target Chinese imports; shoe and parcel bans aim to curb unfair competition
Noi Mahoney Thursday, August 28, 2025
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/mexico-proposes-50-tariff-on-chinese-imports-bans-shoes-small-packages
Mexico’s government plans to impose a 50% tariff on imports from China as part of its 2026 budget proposal, aiming to protect domestic manufacturers while responding to U.S. pressure, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
The levy would apply to a wide range of products, including cars, textiles and plastics. Mexico imported more than $51.4 billion in Chinese goods last year, nearly 20% of its total imports, according to government data.
The Trump administration has accused Mexico of serving as a backdoor for Chinese goods to enter the U.S. and avoid American tariffs. Mexican officials have denied the allegation.
President Claudia Sheinbaum did not address the tariff proposal during her daily news conference Thursday. The U.S. and Mexico recently extended an existing trade deal for 90 days, keeping a 25% tariff rate on Mexican goods in place instead of increasing it to 30% under the Trump administration’s global “reciprocal” tariff policy.
Looks as if we are repeating the steps of the Great Depression circa 1929…way to go fellas..carry on….
This sounds like a worrisome development.
Perhaps Mexico thinks this will force people to develop more local manufacturing.
i think they are just bullied.
Could be.
Meanwhile, it’s getting hard for people to ship parcels to the US, now that customs is charging tariff duties on all items valued at over US$100. Carriers don’t want to bother with the additional fuss and paperwork involved. So it looks like I won’t be able to send David a box of delicious Belgian dark chocolates this Christmas.
NHK (August 28) reports:
A growing number of postal services around the world are suspending delivery of low-value parcels to the US after the Trump administration removed a tariff exemption on such items. The new rule comes into effect on Friday.
Japan Post on Wednesday stopped accepting items containing individual gifts with a value exceeding 100 dollars or those for sales purposes.
In Europe, similar measures have been introduced in more than 20 countries. Belgium’s postal service is one that has suspended the acceptance of such US-bound parcels, excluding letters and documents.
A spokesperson for the Belgium service says more guidance is needed from Washington about how the policy change will be implemented. She adds that the service does not know when it can resume accepting parcels for the US.
Don’t you fret, Timmy Tim Tim. The market is moving swiftly in with solutions. 3d printing and AI will bring back manufacturing to developed countries.
oh goody IG
gold is on the rise—dyou think I could 3D print some gold coins or bullion bars.
that would be really useful
I don’t see why not! If synthetic diamonds can be made, I don’t see why we can’t just make more gold.
IG
sometimes I read your comments, (most times tbh) and think to myself—This guy is just trying to wind me up.
Which is OK—i can deal with that.
Then I read the comment again, and think ”he’s serious”.
At which point, words fail me.
Gold is a basic element, just like iron or lead.
Or if I could 3D print some 3D Belgian chocolates…
The 2D ones I printed last year were a bit flat.
The age on consequences , which is what the boomers feared for so long, is now knocking on the door
The so-called Great Reckoning, a settling of accounts, is now unavoidable.
No amount of speculative fiction will whitewash it.
It is time for the peoples around the world who maintained a higher level of consumption, far more than what they were worth, to pay the price.
The tale of the flounder is such:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fisherman_and_His_Wife
A fisherman rescues a flounder who has magical powers. The fish would grant any wish. The fisherman’s wife demands more, more and more and at the end the fisherman asks the wife to become a Goddess. (in Pushkin’s retelling, based upon the endless ambition of his wife who actually got him killed, she wanted to be a Czarina)
The wish is ‘granted’, and the fisherman returns to his palace, now once again a shack where his wife, who was a Princess when he left, is back to her poor self, catatonic as she realizes everything is lost.
Chances are she probably dies of neglect as she refuses to recognize her real situation and the man abandons her, and the fisherman moves away to tell this tale, which is why this story had survived.
The time to pay the price has arrived. It is going to be ugly and unpleasant, but the time has arrived and those who still believe some miracle would save them will die deluded.
I am afraid you are right about the age of reckoning.
“The age of consequences, which is what the boomers feared for so long, is now knocking on the door
The so-called Great Reckoning, a settling of accounts, is now unavoidable.
No amount of speculative fiction will whitewash it.”
nice piece of fiction writing, very speculative.
in my opinion, almost all boomers will be gone before degrowth becomes severe later this century, probably the 2nd half but perhaps sooner.
It will be completed by 2030
mere speculation, in my opinion.
kulmtheconfirmationbiasstatusquo.
mere speculation, in my opinion.
Gail, how are insurance companies making it? Pick up trucks are 90,000 plus . If it’s in an accident with another $90,000 truck that’s quite the payment for that. Not to mention so many houses that are surrounded by trees in the west. I would not want to insure any of them or at least at a very high rate. I think insurance companies are slow to raise their rates
Rates are up sharply for vehicles and real estate.
Dennis L.
I am not an insurance insider any more, but it is clear that actuaries are looking at what happens.
I big issue has been the timely availability of repair parts, particularly for vehicles, but for Homes and other things. After 2020, we started to see the empty shelf problem. With the tariffs, I expect that more things will start to fall back in availability. Delays, as well as absolute unaviailabiilty, create a problem for insurance companies. Providing an alternate vehicle for days or weeks is expensive, for example.
From the trenches: it is not stuff, it is people availability. It is the costs associated with doing the jobs above board, taxes, regulations and litigation – insurance.
But, yes, stuff is up; still finding someone to use that “stuff” is a real challenge.
I can do almost anything in my world well, some of it very well; but I cannot do everything. It takes a team, everyone is out to be a leader and in the manual arts, industrial arts in school is so yesterday.
Dennis L.
In Georgia, there is a problem with contractors not carrying workers compensation insurance on their employees. If an insurer insists on using only contractors that carry workers compensation on its employees, it substantially raises costs.
Who is going to insure the starships and any mishaps they might cause?
It is like insuring against Godzilla.
They are going to the heavens; perhaps a different set of laws up there. Or, here comes the Judge. Kul, sometimes I just can’t help myself, please forgive.
Dennis L.
The government will pay like it has been paying already. They’ve given SpaceX 13 billion and SpaceX has reportedly raised 12 billion from investors across all funding rounds.
Trump at his golf club yesterday. He hid from the public for days and won’t let the press pool near him.
https://x.com/patriottakes/status/1961901098236620916
Not dead!
oh well.
certainly he is not healthy, or he would be out there golfing on this 3 day holiday weekend?
the chances seem to be increasing that he will not be POTUS through 2028.
Being dead isn’t the career-ending handicap it used to be.
Joe Biden hasn’t has a pulse since 2019, but it didn’t stop him from becoming POTUS in 2020.
Apparently so, which is sad news for some.
https://www.normalisland.co.uk/p/melania-in-mourning-after-president
The Vice President looks too eager by half.
https://en.mehrnews.com/news/235888/I-m-ready-to-take-over-from-Trump-if-tragedy-strikes
Put the party on hold Norman(shouldn’t be long though).
The proposed new director of NIH gives his thoughts:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/blacklist-nih-director-jay-bhattacharya-fauci-bioweapons-and-collapse-free-speech-science
From Blacklist To NIH Director: Jay Bhattacharya On Fauci, Bioweapons, And The Collapse Of Free Speech In Science
Norm is turning in his grave. This guy is against censorship, against wokeism, he is more cited in the literature than the previous director. What he needs is widespread accusations of tinfoil hats, loud noises and screams from the MSM, cutting of funding, google hiding search results, removal of common drugs from shelves, and removal of licenses to practice, like in the roaring 2020-2021.
I am more concerned about the Hindu encroachment on important position. They will just make the country like India.
Low energy economies are more like India.
Just one page ago you were decrying wokeism. you do not know what you want. in fact you are perfectly fine with wokeism, so long as your guys do it.
A new, dark theory about Ukraine:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/dark-theory-russian-strategy-ukraine
A Dark Theory: Russian Strategy In Ukraine
My thought:
it seems that this guy does not understand the meaning of de-militarization. no point in asking if he understands de-nazification. the really dark theory is that the land is being cleared for Israel. although you would never guess it, given the gusto with which they are committing genocide.
Or possibly for BlackRock (which may amount to the same thing), although officially they decided to back out of their Ukrainian investment activities after Trump’s return to the White House.
I’ve often wondered whether Victoria Nuland’s interest in helping the Ukrainians achieve freedom and democracy was entirely altruistic.
Sorry, this is in the wrong place.
It’s hard to tell who could gain from the destruction of Ukraine’s government.
Russia could, if they have enough resources to defend newly gained territory.
The idea that it could possibly be another homeland for Jews is contradicted by the actions of Israel in the Middle East.
In addition to that, contemporary Jewish leaders reject the idea of a Jewish Khazaria as group. Contemporary leaders believe that Jews icame from the Middle East and have little if any Caucasian ancestry.
America( Blackrock and Trump buying real estate himself) seems kind of iffy. Who would want to buy property or rent property near an area that is a warzone? Besides, Ukraine was already a close ally of America and presumably Blackrock. What reason would America have to have it reduced to rubble–just so they could build it back?