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One of the chapters of the Sierra Club of Minnesota has asked Joseph Tainter and me to give Keynote speeches on October 25 at what is being billed as Minnesota’s First DeGrowth Summit. On site space is pretty limited, but free viewing will be available by internet.
If you want to attend in person, you should probably sign up soon.
This is the notice that the organizers have said that I can share:
Minnesota’s First DeGrowth Summit – October 25, 2025
The DeGrowth Summit, hosted by the Sierra Club North Star Chapter’s DeGrowth Team, will bring together organizers, artists, gardeners, educators, and community members to share skills, spark collaborations, and celebrate the many ways we’re resisting extractive economies and creating thriving local futures.
There are 3 ways to participate in the event: The in-person event is held in Minneapolis, MN where there will be presentations by two keynote speakers, Gail Tverberg and Joseph Tainter. In addition it will bring together organizers, artists, gardeners, educators, and community members to share skills, spark collaborations, and celebrate the many ways we’re resisting extractive economies and creating thriving local futures. Expect food, drop-in spaces, workshops, and a vibrant marketplace of ideas—from climate justice to co-ops, repair culture to Indigenous sovereignty. This event is free and you can register at: www.tinyurl.com/degrowthsummit
The second option is a “Watch Party” in Rochester, MN. Here we will gather at the Squash Blossom Farm for lunch and watch the live stream together. After the live stream is done, Gail will be arriving from Minneapolis to have a “Fireside Chat” with the group followed by a bonfire and wiener roast. The cost is $25 which covers the expense of lunch, dinner and the event space. Space is limited to 50 so sign up soon at:
Rochester DeGrowth Summit Watch Party
The final way to participate is to view the live stream online. The live stream will include the keynote presentations and two other presentations TBD. You can register for this at www.tinyurl.com/degrowthsummit . At the bottom of the registration make sure to check the box for virtual and a link will be sent to you prior to the event.
Some additional information:
The Minneapolis Event is at New City Center, 3104 16th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55407
The Watch Party at Squash Blossom Farm is at 7499 60th Ave NW, Oronoco, MN 55960
This is the graphic shown in early web material.
I expect to put up a “regular” post in the next few days.
My local food bank is desperately trying to raise money due to cuts. I don’t know where the money will come from. They need $150k just to tide them over. None of this is sustainable
US government, and governments everywhere else, are increasingly seeing that the promises that they have already been made cannot actually be kept. Adding more debt, to fund one food bank or another, becomes a problem.
A person would think that foundations, invested in the stock market and other inflating assets, would have some money to spare at this point. You might look in that direction.
Seemes like BAU as far as the eye can see:
>> July’s monthly data shows U.S. total liquids output hitting a record 21.218 million barrels per day
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/EIA-Data-Shows-Record-US-Oil-Output-After-Major-Upward-Revision.html
Wow!
I have run into problems before with the weekly estimates not being very good. When analysts hear so many people complaining about problems, they likely make their forecasts lower. But the few who are doing well will not say much about what is happening.
Follow the money:
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/vanishing-american-dream-why-young-adults-cant-afford-homes-families-or-stability
Examine the home pictured, not a starter home.
“The situation gets worse when you factor in the debt burden crushing young adults. The very institution supposedly preparing young people for economic success—college—has become a wealth destroyer. Average student debt more than doubled from $17,297 to $37,850 between 2006 and 2024 alone (with total outstanding student debt exploding from $500 billion to $1.8 trillion.”
Who benefits? Not the students. What did they learn which the world needs?
If you are a plumber, belong to a union, you are part of a group. Students are sold a dream with a lifetime of debt. I also suspect many spend their lives looking for “meaning.” A metaphorical plumber has meaning in that he is useful and being useful is rewarding. Raising children connects you with the river of human existence and life.
If publications are to believed, one of the most miserable cadres are the childless, college educated women with careers. Very few of us in life make a difference outside of our own families.
Hypothesis: excessive education and associated costs/debts has stolen the lives of many of our children.
Dennis L.
The approach isn’t working. Those advocating that young people go to college didn’t stop to figure out that even if the economy doubled or tripled the number of college graduates, there would never be the number of higher-paying jobs to match. And the amount the poor kids are paying back is not just the amount they borrowed. They are paying back high interest rates over many years, so the actual out-of-pocket costs to the young people is terrible.
It is as if the purpose of government is to destroy Americans.
The WSJ has a related story.
https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/student-loan-debt-gen-x-619cffda
Student-Loan Debt Is Strangling Gen X
Free-flowing student loans promised upward mobility. Instead, they left the ‘forgotten generation’ with a mountain of debt and regret; ‘I’m going to be working until the day I die.’
The former dentist thinks if 20% of a population thrives and the rest are in a dump it is a good thing, being a firm believer of Paretoism, which Pareto did not propose.
First growth, then stagnation, then decline, then stabilization or maybe extinction.
Degrowth is not a word for good reason. Decline, contraction, decline are fine words we already have.
DeGrowth sounds like we have some control over the process. Maybe we do; maybe we don’t. It has to do with finding ways to use added complexity to work around inadequate energy supply. Find ways to use solar panels effectively for intermittent operations, for example. Add more biological aids to helping food production. For example, ducks may aid in rice farming.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016788091530061X
The oil is obviously running out that’s why they locked the entire world down.
Duh
For two years and then it all got better????
The lockdowns caused a temporary dip in oil consumption that helped prevent shortages. They also served as a cover to enable the mass murder of vulnerable people in hospitals and nursing homes using protocols that involved such things as ventilators, withholding food, water and antibiotics, and administering drugs such as Midazolam and Remdesivir. (Anybody remember hearing about those two drugs prior to 2020?) But the main purpose of the lockdowns was to pave the way for the acceptance of The VaxTM.
The lockdowns were imposed to establish a suitably somber mood and get everyone’s attention. This helped persuade the majority that there was a deadly contagious disease with plague-like consequences, and that the only way to be sure to survive it was to take The VaxTM, which enabled a mass poisoning to take place.
As far as I’m aware, the mass poisoning has increased death rates and decreased birth rates everywhere it has been implemented. In time, it will reduce the population through disease and infertility, and, consequently, the demand for oil—perhaps not sufficiently to avoid a collapse of the current economic system, but by a significant amount.
It has also reduced the population of Medicare beneficiaries a bit. The deaths particularly hit those who were already disabled. Some of them are covered by Medicare, also.
https://fortune.com/2025/09/30/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-demand-for-gen-z-skilled-trade-workers-electricans-plumbers-carpenters-data-center-growth-six-figure-salaries/
This makes no sense to me . That is a lot of resources
More excuses to bring chinese labor in
I don’t know.
Also,
This is not the kind of thing that is all that helpful. Having a lot of workers during construction, no doubt generating a lot of debt to pay them, is not going to help the economy all that much, for the long run. The data centers need to do something useful, such as get more oil out of the ground cheaply. The small number of long term workers doesn’t matter much in the long run.
Norm you are right. It does feel like the final days in the bunker in Berlin. The way Hegseth was bouncing up and down in the oval office sure looked like methamphetamine use on top of the normal gallon of alcohol.
We will fight them in the cities where federal money buys votes for democrats.
Let’s take a moment to remember when there were riots in NYC against the draft during the civil war. The navy was used to bombard the city!!!
Ed,
Did the Union survive? Would you have preferred the Confederacy had won?
Life is never/seldom ideal, it is what it is and we live with it in real time.
Dennis L.
Yes, I would have preferred the free states of the south winning. It was a war about tariffs imposed on the south by the north to force the south to buy manufactured goods from the north not from England.
No I am not in favor of slavery. Now with Optimus wage slavery will end. Then the distribution of the worlds wealth will be decided by ????
Not an argument, a thought.
Was it better for American workers to have jobs in America or have stuff made in England.
Similar argument, was it better for the US to off shore our manufacturing? Manufacturing builds skills and builds supply chains. Our culture has lost the ability to build useful stuff. Those who build stuff which works see the world differently than those who think for a living.
From my point of view, better to build in the US.
Can’t support the idea of free states supporting slavery.
Dennis L.
As long as 20% of manufacturing survives it is a good thing, according to some.
after his addrees to the military, i hope everybody is still laughing at my forecast that trump intends to use the military to turn the usa into a dictatorship—-
just as i said he would
un régime autoritaire est la suite logique a une république oligarchique .
les empereurs romain étaient apprécié du peuple car il matait les oligarque de sont époque, les sénateurs !
————————
An authoritarian regime is the logical consequence of an oligarchic republic.
The Roman emperors were appreciated by the people because they crushed the oligarchs of their time, the senators!
Does this mean that Trump will be appreciated, if he crushes the billionaires of today?
Would be appreciated by me.
Shutdown is now in progress
Trump has asserted control over the military
trump wants to use American cities as military traing areas. He’s said exactly that.
I’d say this situation is precisely the gameplan for imposing martial law to ‘keep order’ now that the country is shutting down.
I’ve been broadly right about trump so far.
I dont want to be right about the next step, which will be to shut down government altogether—cancel the mid terms, and then cancel 2028. We shall see.
As I said a while ago, Justice Roberts was bought, so presumably others were as well.
That was before they granted Trump legal immunity—pieces of it all seem to be falling neatly into place.
The broad intent would seem to be to keep the USA on the FF burning track—otherwise billionaires assets evaporate. If that mean s hiring a dictator—so be it.
The bottom line is cashflow, in this context.
Things are getting really scary.
A person wonders how much of US government will never reopen.
gov depts
gov depts consume energy.
the don sees this aschaos which only he can put right
if there isnt enough they will close
infinite growth of debt requires infinite growth of physical capital..
ie. ”capitalism”
And who paid the wages of my fellow Al Qaeda/ Al Nusra / HTS etc headchoppers in Syria ….
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timber_Sycamore
but what do i know?
Im just a diversity friendly jihadist whose mission is to destroy Iranian ” proxies ” to the benefit of my paymasters
Allahu Akbar ! Death to the zoroastrians and Shia apostates !
Norm,
America populace prior to WWII and probably was not in favor of going to war. My vote, America would have stayed home and those in England could have learned to love sauerkraut.
America does not have a king, enough said.
Dennis L.
That’s excatly where [the Adolf boyz] made (or being ill-advised) their biggest mistake up to this time.
Not hyper-obliterating scandalously the evacuating enemy troops after the fall of France. The UK’s (and US) domestic situation would be likely altered detrimentally to any further calls for renewed euro war theater efforts..
I’ve never seen this “obvious matter” mentioned it in any “historical” popular account of this era at all, very strange..
The adolfboys were aimed at Russia. There was nothing worth having in Franc or UK.
Perhaps it’s necessary to clarify the sequencing again..
Yes in general direction and msm narrative the [Adolfboyz] were meant to turn onto further proper eastwardly expansion after swallowing Austria and CZE, POL. Where they boosted up on coal supplies, ammo/weapons manufs etc.
Instead, as correctly smelling the UK int./RAT they turned westwardly and shockingly occupied FR and the low countries.
—
And here comes repeating the jugular of the previous post, at this very point their internal analysis failed catastrophically (perhaps also partly induced via intel psyop). Should they demonstratively flattened the escaping UK/FR troops across the channel the moral in UK/US would turn chiefly antiwar, at least for the Euro theater.
And that followed up at next important junction by some modus vivendi with USSR, e.g. picking up the UK/FR colonial properties under their arm where possible.. and merrily trading tech-resources into the sunset.
jak the Third Reich never intended to expand beyond the legacy territory held by the Second Reich.
Flattening the English and French militaries would just be laying out the red carpet for America to enter the war.
Germany was fighting for its nationalist existence. It was caught between two imperial oil superpowers, the the US and the USSR at the dawn of the Age of Oil whereas Germany only had coal, and the Germans could very well forecast that an oil superpower with imperial politics had the very real potential to become hegemon over the entire world, and Germany was stuck between two of those imperial superpowers…so it sensibly attempted to take its own existence into its own hands instead of being a fatalistic doormat to imperialism like every other country.
reante> that German maneuver securing-occupying FR – specifically timed prior further expansion (attack on USSR) was evidently NOT finalized correctly. Clearly, from the start, the basic intent for it was to NOT repeat the WWI failure of two/multiple fronts going on at the same time..
And given internal political situation in the UK the ~appeasement sentiment would be only (~paradoxically) boosted up by massacre of retreating forces in the Channel.. that’s the point here!
Hence no realistic invitation for the US to utilize UK as landing dock. Similarly, the US sentiment was not prowar at that time at all.. and it would be next to impossible for US political factions to hastily (<10yrs horizon) propagate
into another way bloodier expedition in Europe given WWI experience..
So, the logical summary for [the Adolfboyz] game planning is either:
– "a gentle slap" on the hand is enough they UK/FR (US) won't regroup at all – case closed – ie the standard WWII history run
or instead
– "massive demonstrative slap" on the hand creating/forcing enough space-time for performing the other resource driven acquisition plans
And for some "unknown" illogical reason, most likely now erased from history they decided to go with the silly first option. Most likely in the area of assurances for eastward campaign.. surely became kind of embarrassing later for that UK faction..
—
You are obviously correct in the fact, that the upper echelons of power in Germany were very well versed (documented) in the importance of oil supplies not only for the war at hand but any future econ development for the rest of the century. They analyzed pros / cons of direct attack in the direction of Caspian oil fields within the necessary overall mega-invasion or the other option continued rail oil cargo from the Soviets before they strip FR/UK out of their potential oil provinces in North Africa.
Thanks jak you know more than me about the military dynamics and I certainly won’t question your idea that Germany made important strategic miscalculations (hindsight is always 20/20) since I know next to nothing about how the war played out, but I do have a strong opinion that Germany was not seeking imperialism beyond Prussian lands. I say this because their whole NS culture was built on radical Germanic nationalism and such radicalism is an all or nothing internal logic; their radical nationalism was completely wrapped up in anti-imperialism.
The Allies started the North African warring. By heading so far east into the USSR, Germany was going for a decapitation strike. As much as the Reich loathed Jewish capitalist economic imperialism, the imperial Marxists were the ones they had been fighting running street battles with in Germany for all those years. And as for America, there was also plenty of political support for the Reich in the lead-up to the war. There was no effective support in the totalitarian USSR.
On the NS curtailed imperialism,
yes that’s evident how they left lot of degree of freedom for their allied collaborating regimes in various countries vs full on imperial kind of approach to direct control.
Nevertheless, still it would be correct to rather call it “Prussian lands+ ” meant as larger area of interest, say the overall pre BC time German tribes living areal. Essentially deleting-pushing out PL, W-UKR, perhaps also part of southern Baltica, and nearby areas only..
In the great global (scale) scheme of things not much important, yet these details are often re-used (hyped) later as point of contention.
jak ok thanks for refining my oversimplification to the Prussian lands+. Perhaps we can reflect on the matter by averring that an industrially-powered reboot’s (of an agrarian Reich) taking of a mile when claiming that last inch… is to be human.
I’m certainly not trying to idealize them by any means but I do see them as the least blamable party in the fight, and by quite a stretch.
You won’t see it in any imperial account because all those accounts treat Hitler like a cardboard cutout psychopathic cartoon monster. And you won’t see it in any politicized conspiracy theorists’ accounts such as Miles Mathis etc because they mostly treat Hitler like a Jewish Manchurian candidate.
The not so strange truth is that Hitler was borh an anglophile and a francophile, but especially an anglophile, and never wanted to be at war with either country. Instead he hoped in vain that the two neighbors could become great nationalist neighbors to Germany in the fight against the private money masters because altogether along with Italy they could survive industrial civilization without being obliterated by the oil-rich capitalists to the left of the map and commies to the right.
And Hitler wasn’t foolish to hope for that in vain. National Socialism is just the industrial form of agrarian republicanism, and republicanism was still the strongest strain of politics in France at the time. The powerful French Popular Front was a radical socialist but anti- Marxist party: that is national socialism.
We have to realize that WW2 wasn’t just the last war to see who controlled the oil of industrial civilization in order to become the imperial powers of industrial civilization, it was also agrarian culture’s last stand against industrialization, and in every Allied country the war served the dual function of obliterating folk culture and replacing it with machine culture.
Well, some of your agrarian angle paragraphs could be easily part of a review for that great Gabin movie (and soundtrack!).
Funnily enough, in the movie there is a hidden split second spoiler about who actually did it and 999/1000 of casual viewers did not get it all, lolz.
[Spoiler alert] Well, it was a local peasant revenge for ~accidentally killed member of family by para-shooted in UK trooper which later visited the same spot – southern FR village in the summer holidayz of early 1950s. Done Not in the modern NS sense but rather more traditional medieval style FR->UK animosity..
L’affaire Dominici (1973):
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068176/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_cdt_t_4
dennis
i find it seriously scary that you (and presumably millions of others) do not see what is happening to your country
Dear Dennis L.
US is completely subjugated by UK, which does have a King and then by Israel, which is an ethnic State run with another Religion than the one of your vast majority (and by the way it is extremely funny to watch the show by your Christian Evangelist people who think the opposite).
You are not free in anything, you are the bulldog of 2 others entities.
I’m sure you cannot do anything about it and, by the way, you can do what you like, but at least it would be good to see things in an analythic way.
We are watching a very sad show with your Country.
Nice try Norm, your position is not that Trump INTENDS to go totalitarian but that he IS going totalitarian. Today’s clownshow confirms what I told you which is that he doesn’t have the backing of the military to go totalitarian. Today’s clownshow turns the military leadership against Trump, and by design.
and of course he starts by disrespecting the generals. Just like you predicted. Thus ensuring their loyalty I guess on their way to Chicago. And it all comes from Trump, since the central bankers you so worship are as horrified as you or me. We certainly don’t want generals forced to do 20 pushups.
please supply evidence of my worship of bankers…
It seems the trucking industry is now more focusing on the full battery powered option instead of the previous decade pilot tests of (dedicated trolley line) cargo trucking system..
~2010s google search “scania electric trolley cargo truck”
—
2026: datasheet:
https://www.scania.com/group/en/home/products-and-services/trucks/battery-electric-truck.html
The max allowable sizing of battery is quite huge around ~600kWh for the heaviest 64tons / 360km range option. That’s in laymen terms 6x premium personal EVs or 30x plugin hybrid midsized SUVs ideal for daily commuting..
—
Lots of ways to lower the diesel consumption
while putting pressure on electric drive, batt storage supplies..
Nevertheless, the trolley option apparently won in the short distance application such as mining, here stolen info from the Surplus site commentariat:
“Open-pit operations are adopting trolley-assist systems for haul trucks, reducing diesel consumption by up to 90% on uphill segments. These systems, which connect haul trucks to overhead electrical lines on ramps, leverage Australia’s increasingly renewable grid electricity while maintaining operational flexibility.
Electric conveyor systems are replacing diesel truck haulage for material movement, offering energy savings of up to 85% for comparable transport distances. The Pilgangoora Lithium Project, with production of 44.1kt lithium annually, utilizes an extensive electric conveyor network that has eliminated the need for 26 diesel haul trucks.
Solar capacity at Australian mine sites has grown by over 300% in the past five years, with several operations now operating solar farms exceeding 50MW. The economics of solar have improved dramatically, with levelized costs now below $40/MWh in optimal locations, compared to diesel generation costs of $180-220/MWh. ”
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2025/09/25/311-putting-it-together-part-two/comment-page-2/#comment-47807
Nice, thanks.
Dennis L.
Easier said than done
And the batteries capable of doing these things are not cheap
Yes, but this was meant merely as info update post not recommendation. The Chinese are now leading (relative terms vs West) in the adoption of such electrified heavier transport, most likely subsidized by cheap coal/electricity feed.. into their whole industrial chain.
The price of the batteries is actually NOT(x) the major barrier to mass adoption (easily amortized over time/usage – mileage), it’s the range and recharge times and also over stretching of the grid at high power charging infrastructure nodes.
—
(x) meaning today’s fuel prices not the ~free energy <1970s era..
It sounds like electric conveyer systems are the key to reducing diesel usage. The battery-powered truck doesn’t work as well, we can assume, at least in this application.
Yes, but as mentioned in the material, some mining operations are not suitable to e-conversion of the conveyor system either because of space limitation-specifics or costs (e.g. smaller already exhausted mine). Similarly, trolley trucks (w.out traction batts) in the mines are easy peasy no brainer for some locations and ores but not suitable everywhere..
electric conveyor (over distance) is another word for railway
No it’s not, railway excels at distance, while e-conveyor is ~short distance (and often difficult terrain setup aka “galleries” inside the mine) at very low install cost vs rail..
Norm I think you should take this clownshow into consideration as to whether or not Trump has a snowball’s chance in hell of gaining the military’s backing for totalitarian rule. It’s very clear to me that the Hand is running MAGA off a cliff just like it did the Democrats.
https://www.zerohedge.com/military/we-are-done-sht-hegseth-trump-blast-wokeness-military-unimpressed-generals
There is some complexity here, though, since MAGA serves the bridge function over to national socialist values simultaneous to its getting run off of a cliff; Hegseth is clowning too but he is also voicing aspects of military culture changes that are necessary to a truly populist, conservative Left libertarianism as epitomized by Gabbard. The military will have to operate under martial law at some point because of the viccitudes of Collapse, and it will be imperative that it does so with the highest degree of collective America First character possible, or things will spiral.
The military brass in this meeting is getting intentionally disrespected bigly here and thus herded by a misdirection play.
Agree with the evident push for strengthening – streamlining domestic order, many insiders must have been rather agitated for some time already when compare-contrasting to say China, RU, NKorean (soldier) armies.. or even central/south american hah..
But could you elaborate more on your definition of the “hand’s national socialism” parameters? Most importantly, the int/globo econ setup of the mid future? Specifically, hard ~1930-1950s like version would not be able to reshore ALL necessary manufacturing chain on time nor otherwise, chiefly !the whole semiconductors universe NOT hi-end CPUs only becoming unobtainable! Therefore sanctions, trade barriers would NOT allow for any lasting e-gov population control..nor modern electronic driven industrial age at all.
Therefore “lite national socialism” it is.. (under ~rational scenario) and that’s having its own peculiar implications to be discussed / analyzed in all areas of humanoid activity.
The Hand is short for Hidden Hand which itself is the Illuminati’s Elite peak oil think tank and working group that runs the 6 year old Non-Public Degrowth Agenda (DA) that made its debut with the plandemic, the primary function of which was to destroy about 30pc of global oil demand for 1.5 years such that global finance capitalism could stagger on for about another 5 years which brings us to today. The number of the people in the working group is Dunbar’s Number.
Worldwide national socialisms, more or less, are the Hand’s political end goal for the DA, and their coming rollout will mark the end of Phase 1 of the DA and the beginning of Phase 2 (of 2). Between Phases 1 and 2 lies the Big Nuclear Scare that creates the global political will for decommissioning the nuclear power industry.
I mean national socialism in the structural, socioeconomic sense and without all the baggage from the Holocaust propaganda industry. Nationalism simply meaning a country in charge of its own public money supply and socialism meaning a heavily regulated marketplace in one respect or another. Under national socialism, historically that regulation revolves around robust anti- trust laws and syndicalist labor markets; in international Marxism that regulation revolves around anti- privatization law and wage and price controls.
National Socialism is conservative left-libertarian socioeconomics, and the Hand has chosen it for the collapse phase (2) of the DA because historically NS has proven, of the three functional ideologies of industrial civilization, to be the most resilient politics during hard times, because of its relatively decentralized structure compared to the other two.
Figures like Gabbard, Farage, and Wageknecht are quintessential national socialists though with the first two it can be tricky to tell because they are both currently operating under cover of the national fascist bridge between global fascism (finance capitalism) and NS. You have to go back to their careers 5 to 10 years ago to see them for what they are.
I think that there is a different Hidden Hand that is really keeping things going. It is the Hidden Hand of a self-organizing economy. The Hidden Hand you talk about can only work if it is in cinq with what the economy really is doing.
Given, the basic ~PO models of 10-15yrs ago were proven to be at this stage more or less correct (at least in their biggest aggregates: onshore, shelf, deep offshore, natgas) we can assume the conceptual framework “the world” is knowable, describable entity is verified.
This very lineage of thinking has evidently entered and influenced highest levels of TPTB / upper gov circles at least since late 18th century. And that clique worked, nudged around various policies in continuous fashion ever since at larger historical crossroads.
I’m not into this thing per se and the nomenclature (
Freemasonry / Illuminati / the Hand.. ) but it’s present.
Obviously, there are levers to control the economy in the sense of attempting to channel the emergent self-organizing economy into proper/desired narrow corridor.
How successful are these policy intrusion long term is another follow-up question/debate. Evidently, there are blowbacks, failures, detours, and also lucky strikes etc.
My thought is that the “blowbacks, failures, detours..” were a feature and not a bug of the DA because it led to a “greater reset” of agrarians, permaculture folks, classic liberals and other free thinkers focused on re-localization, food security, mutual aid and protective associations.. the non-public network you will need to keep things running in peak oil as a counter balance to the NS.. new folk heroes.
Replenish, yes you put it better.
Agree that some details are too strident and so this is probably a psyop. Surely the directors of this op have sophisticated computer models and can see farther that I do. Still they are trying to have the military on their side while insulting them? having digitized currency while having blackouts?
I think we will get a run of the mill collapse. What you say seems to imply a USA focused on internal matters within say 5 years. and I don’t see that.
you are a general, on say $150k a year
your commander in chief says, do as youre told, or youre fired
Then what???
you lost me at 150 a year. Besides it is fairly well known that the Pentagon boycotted Trump in 2017-2020. Of course they will do what they are told, but not what Trump tells them. He has no power.
check your history
Hitler was unversally considered a ”clown” who should not be taken seriously
Peter Hegseth is really a deck chair rearranger extraordinaire, isn’t he? Any good estimates of how long will the govt. shutdown last?
I am wondering it the shutdown will last a long time. In theory, it could last until Social Security checks stop getting sent out, and beyond. That would help the country’s finances, at least in some ways.
The computers send the checks.
helping people to go hungry does not help the nation in any respect
Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/musk-unveils-grokipedia-plans-counter-wikipedias-manipulation-truth-controlled-leftists
Musk Unveils Grokipedia Plans To Counter Wikipedia’s Manipulation Of “Truth” Controlled By Leftists
There will be a BRICSpedia also at some point. Hilarity will ensue once certain aspects of western history will be argued by the russian referee on one side, and the chinese and indian on the other.
What will be the “honest” source material?
The answer to the question many have wondered about, from the WSJ. What is today’s big meeting about?
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pete-hegseth-trump-quantico-military-speech-80ffabe5
Hegseth Says Military Standards Must Improve, Tells Troops to Get Fit
At a short-notice meeting with hundreds of commanders, Trump says the U.S. must stay ahead of its rivals
We can expect a lot of laid-off women from the military. Also quite a few laid off men. This is a way to reduce the number of people in the military, without saying that this is the plan. The layoff will likely raise the unemployment rate.
DJT and company can shout and wail but they don’t have the b***s to take on the Pentagon . The Pentagon has the guns and not DJT .
As Stalin asked Churchill ” How many divisions does the Pope have ? ”
The golden rule ” He has the gold rules but he has the gun will take the gold ” .
Mao’s rule ” Power flows from the barrel of the gun ” .
You might be right.
Just ask someone
What is Energy?
(google is wrong)
*its what moves matter and causes motion.
The “dissipation” of energy underlies all GDP. Of course, some of this energy is human energy. Quite a bit is fossil fuel energy.
Exxon Mobil to cut 2,000 jobs globally amid restructuring
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/exxon-mobil-cut-2000-jobs-bloomberg-news-reports-2025-09-30/
They know the mother of all oil crashes is coming… Which is also the mother of all economic crashes.
Oil supply does look bleak.
Somehow, we need to figure out how to use the oil we can extract more efficiently. Or get more oil, coal, natural gas, and uranium out less expensively.
Otherwise, we have to reconfigure our economies to use a whole lot less in the way of energy supplies. Start selling a whole lot more sweaters for indoor use in the winter, for example. And more long underwear.
Move the production of various kinds of food closer to where it will be consumed. And do a whole lot less ultra processing.
Less ultra processing, yes.
Less energy usage means a change in jobs; this implies a decrease in the velocity of money which implies fewer secondary jobs. E.g. Amish exchange labor, there are no CC fees involved for bankers, etc.
We can extract more from the universe, or local solar system; Starship, Optimus. This will be a capital project, build the capital factories in space first, then the desired output. Getting stuff down will be a problem, meteors come to mind.
AI in all this. Taxes are a problem, AI would appear to reduce the number of transactions as economies are based on the number of transactions, not the amount of wealth added. AI means a person can do more with less energy expenditure. E.G. college, it can be done at home, one bedroom, no apartment, no traveling to and from school. Once AI knows everything, storage will be the main cost one would guess, there are a finite number of problems which need to be solved.
Religion will return, it is a simple set of rules which work, it is local, it is generally low cost with obvious exceptions. E.g. Roman Catholic Church compared to synagogues which do not appear to have a central authority other than God and to date, HE works cheaply.
The great simplification does not need to be worse, it can be different as information is in a sense energy.
Dennis L.
Yes, information is in a sense energy. That is a good point. Using the diffuse information we currently have more efficiently needs to be a top priority. The connection between information and energy is why building AI models becomes important. But I think that building up the models can be done intermittently, when solar or wind energy is available. This may one be one key change.
Self reply, education/AI energy costs.
If the cost of college is avoided with AI, that debt could go into housing for the student. This is currently a problem for the young, student debt.
Who loses? Administrators would seem to be first in line. Who would gain? Carpenters?
How will we organize our societies? More local? Amish like, Hasidic like? Lower costs? Common beliefs? I suspect this implies less diversity which will be stressful for some and stressful for our current societies.
Sort of addendum: Less stuff may be good, Tylenol for example may have some external costs.
It is going to be different, perhaps those most opposed to change will be the most entrenched in old systems, e.g. institutions of higher learning.
The oil age per this site is almost over; biology goes on, the universe goes on and we are making great effort to expand our knowledge and use of that universe. Stars don’t run on oil.
Dennis L
America’s largest energy company slashes jobs.
That’s bad news..
Big trouble.
Gail,
Compare this to other times when they slashed jobs and when they added jobs. I’ll bet its is a perfect match.
Well its only 2000 jobs that’s not huge.
Chronicles of a death foretold or How Europe’s ‘oil capital’ glory days were ended by the global oil crash .
The story of Aberdeen that is going to be repeated across the oil cities in the world .
https://archive.is/2025.09.29-042806/https://www.ft.com/content/2d7a63cb-2dc0-4d51-9b78-a1925c0bd00f#selection-1885.0-1891.88
Reminded me of the novel ” Chronicles of a death foretold ” .
” Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople knew it was going to happen – including the victim. But nobody did anything to prevent the killing. ”
Yes , nobody did anything .
Maybe Aberdeen will shrink in size. Industries that aren’t producing an adequate profit will disappear. I don’t know how much oil and gas can be economically produced. One paragraph says,
Jack Alpert gives us an estimate of 30 million humans supportable by hydro power alone.
This is all about how to manage the world once we have gotten down to 30 million people. It does not address the DE-growth process.
This is a proposed solution from a member of the genetic sub group shown in the inserted picture. Are there other sub groups with different solutions?
That might not be a bad thing since the 30 million will be the most ruthless,smart and advanced people the world could offer.
When Mao Tsetung began his Long March about 100,000 started. Only about 5,000 (precise numbers not available since no one kept rosters at the beginning and some joined in the middle), arrive at the destination.
However all of them had become hardened fighters.
With the 30 million, which won’t include people like the Amish not considered essential for civilization, something better might start.
Except hydropower requires fossil fuels for maintain both the plants and electricity transmission lines. Maybe it stays, and maybe it doesn’t.
There are parts of the world where hydropower is available 24/7/365. But, generally this is not the case. In cool climates, it tends to be especially strong in the spring. This is a time of year when electricity demand is typically quite low. Neither heating nor cooling tends to be needed. Its value to the grid is quite low at that time. Sometimes wind and solar together exceed total electricity demand in the spring, creating a different problem.
In warmer areas of the world, such as California and Venezuela, the availability of hydropower varies a great deal from season to season and year to year. Depending on it for anything is perilous. There has been a push to add more hydropower in Africa, but such hydropower often has the difficulty of being very seasonal, and those seasons varying greatly from year to year.
Also, building hydropower plants is also a major way of trying to steal resources from downstream neighbors. It is a cause of wars. Hydropower sounds benign. Hydropower seems to have a good EROEI, but it is not necessarily sustainable. Neighbors may choose to blow up your dam, if they feel that you are stealing resources from them.
Alpert say hydro will fail over 300 years due to silting. He hopes some one invents some thing by then.
We hope someone figures out a way to keep the electricity transmission lines up for 300 years. Windstorms, all kinds of problems. These problems are not fixed with electricity alone.
Why does everyone keep saying on here that in decades or two this or that will happen??? I don’t think we have decades or two. I think the 2030’s are going to be brutal! We are running out of time…
We don’t understand timeframes and how exactly things will turn out. There will always at least a few winners. There may be a lot of losers, but we don’t know. Take care of yourself now. Don’t try to just “go it alone.” Team up with friends and family. Look around for opportunities for work, or for providing services people need. If money is in short supply, try to live with others to keep expenses down.
“Team up with friends and family. Look around for opportunities for work, or for providing services people need. If money is in short supply, try to live with others to keep expenses down.”
The last clause sounds like marriage.
Nice.
Dennis L.
“The last clause sounds like marriage “ have you ever been married? Or are you married? You don’t save anything everything becomes more expensive and risky when you’re married in the west.
Marry a spouse with similar goals to yourself.
My children have always considered me sort of “cheap.” They would ask, “Why don’t we live in as a big and fancy a house as our friends? You and Dad seem to make more money than their parents do.” I told them that I was perfectly happy living in a more modest home. This way, we always had a fair amount of money left over at the end of the month. We didn’t need to rely on debt for major purchases.
I have followed a similar approach with vehicles. My car is a used Nissan–hardly a status buy, in the US. I tend to wear the same clothes over and over. People who see me in photos may notice that I wear the same white canvas jacket in a lot of pictures. I tend to be cold, and I pretend that it goes with a lot of fairly casual clothes.
I have lived in all kinds of apartments and houses. I never felt like I was any happier in fancier living quarters than in more modest living quarters. When I was single, I preferred having a female apartment-mate to living alone. This kept costs down.
I suppose my approach has to do with status seeking, or not. And who you compare yourself to. My siblings all live in relatively modest homes, and they drive modest vehicles. I don’t see any need to somehow outshine them.
I grew up with
Matthew 6:28-30
And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?
Also Luke 12: 15-21
15 And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” 16 Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”
Modesty is pretty much frowned upon in modern secular culture, which is what is promoted by our elites.
Vanity and pride, especially in “marginalized groups” is encouraged.
The people in charge are not threatened by people with “high self-esteem” because they know without power, i.e. control, those feelings are not a threat.
Marriage is so old, so Victorian.
I have read Robert Briffault’s “Mothers”, a book about how primitive people formed families.
tl, dr, marriage as we know it was formed in the West to make sure land rights were obeyed. The marriages in old hollywood movies are fiction, formed by screenwriters who didn’t give two cents about monogamy themselves.
Now it’s just a marketing ploy for capitalism. Married couples spend a lot more money. Good for capitalism. Very few women are like Gail today. They don’t want to live in a small house and drive an old car
Women do what they see other women doing.
They will try to be environmentally responsible and egalitarian as long as they do not take a hit in social status.
Marriage, as we all know, goes back a lot farther than Queen Victoria.
Over 2,000 years ago, for instance, there was a well-known marriage feast in Cana:
The story of the Wedding at Cana, described in the Gospel of John, recounts an event where Jesus, his mother Mary, and his disciples attended a wedding feast in Cana, Galilee. When the wine ran out, a situation that would have been deeply embarrassing,
Mary informed Jesus. Jesus, at Mary’s request, performed his first miracle by turning water into wine, thereby revealing his glory and affirming the sacredness of marriage.
As referenced recently over here, TPTB are now hastily preparing pivot to SMRs, in the sense of in situ deployment near the “not yet fully un/cooked” fossil deposits, and also usually (but no exclusively) these to be pre-selected and located near shore line for larger energy transport shipping mode etc.
The major players are China, RU, US, and the Gulfies.. One of the latest msm examples being: Vlad luring Donnie_b to joint venture on the Arctic-Siberian coast. But there also other warmer (less fruitful) spots where Chinese, Gulfies are just heading now as we speak..
Most likely it will be deployed into some partial collapse (& consumer-demand choke) situation already. So, this is certainly NOT envisioning BAU or BAU-lite for most of the global pop. Hence only certain civ clusters would carry on.. nothing guaranteed obviously..
jr.
If the powers that be can get the price up to $90 a barrel or more permanently then oil producers will be able to keep keep on getting the heavy oil out of the ground this is possible I believe but they would have to bring in a whole new alternative system of financial shenanigans something like with negative interest rates if we were to have interest rates on -5% then I believe we could be going for more than a few decades
Or if people and businesses can use the oil more efficiently, they can perhaps get along with a higher price.
The reason why China has been able to outbid Europe and to a lesser extent the US has to do with the efficiency of its factories and the extent to which oil use is leverage by inexpensive labor cost and inexpensive coal costs. Inefficient systems tend not to do well.
Europe has very costly benefits programs for most of its citizens, including health care and pensions. I have a hard time seeing how that will continue using the current approach for long.
The US has ridiculously high health care costs and amazingly poor outcomes. It also has very generous programs for the elderly, disabled, single parents and many others. The US government cannot afford all that has been promised. A whole lot has to go away.
The White helmets in Syria were one of the best paid crisis actors , the chemical attack charade in Douma earned them an Oscar.
Their pockets were full of petrodollars from the fat sheiks milking cows of the persian gulf.
Probably about 6 years ago I predicted that marijuana products would be legalized at the federal level in order to drastically cut the political costs of a collapsed for-profit sickcare system, not to mention mollifying the youth.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/marijuana-stocks-jump-trumps-cbd-video
It sounds like you were right. It is something we can grow in the US, if the laws permit.
They legalized it to grow hemp for the “oil” as a substitute for petroleum.
“Elections are good as long as I’m the one who does the counting.”
The fix is in .
US senate voted against release of Epstein files – 51% against – 49% for.
Switzerland voted for ‘digital ID’ – 51% for – 49% against.
Sandu’s party won majority by 0.1%. That with very heavy cheating.
etc. (Moldova)
They just love their ‘tight calls’, innit? Does this seem natural, or statistically plausible?
Courtesy MOA .
No it’s not natural. It’s an intentionally unnatural misdirection play that psychologically herds people in the other direction. Digital ID will be rescinded if it ever does get implemented and the Epstein files WILL be released, presumably by Gabbard.
I am looking forward to the kind approach to degrowth.
Enter into a Cistercian Trappist order, I recommend the Abbey of Gethsemane in Bardstown, Kentucky. They make excellent fruit cakes with bourbon.
https://monks.org/
They have plenty of spare time to contemplate like a rich man, yet have a commune simple lifestyle and usually live a long, long time. Good luck and God Bless.
2.5 pound fruit cake $43.25
Have you tasted the cake? Is it really that good?
It must be the tariffs…
File this 9 second video clip under Doh! 🤪
I knew I forgot something 🤓
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/opinion/what-politicians-need-to-understand/
Beware of unintended consequences!
Eat well and exercise, and boats will not sink!
Regardless of price of oil, the masses are paying ever more for beef. Hence why they will not welcome turning all their assets into digital currency. Yet another of my comments is not to be found, but it remarked how I do not know anyone in Souther Europe who likes the idea of getting stablecoins for their money.
That’s only because their home currency isn’t hyperinflating right now drb. Nevermind the obviously high early adopter Iranian demand, huh? Let’s get beyond confirmation bias.
AI:
“Based on recent studies, there is a positive correlation between stablecoin adoption and high inflation, especially in emerging markets with unstable local currencies. In these economies, USD-pegged stablecoins are used as a hedge against currency devaluation and as a more reliable store of value.
Evidence for the correlation
High-inflation economies lead to higher adoption: A 2025 study found a strong positive correlation (Pearson coefficient of 0.68) between inflation rates and crypto adoption. In contrast, countries with low inflation had lower adoption rates. Examples include:
Argentina: The country has a history of high inflation and currency crises. Despite policy changes in 2024 that temporarily reduced the local premium on stablecoins, strong demand persists, reflecting difficulties in accessing USD through traditional channels.
Nigeria: Multiple devaluations of the Nigerian naira have resulted in the highest trading volumes for Tether (USDT) on the Tron blockchain in Africa. In 2023, high inflation contributed to a 50% month-over-month increase in stablecoin use in South Africa.
Turkey: Citizens and businesses turn to stablecoins as an alternative store of value during times of high inflation and policy uncertainty.
Venezuela: Hyperinflation and currency depreciation have fueled crypto adoption since at least 2020, with cryptocurrencies serving as a more stable medium of exchange for many merchants.
Factors reinforcing the correlation
Store of value: In countries with significant inflation, local currencies lose purchasing power, pushing people toward USD-pegged stablecoins to preserve their savings and hedge against devaluation.
Digital dollarization: Stablecoins offer a more accessible form of “digital dollarization” for citizens who have limited access to traditional financial institutions or foreign currency. This provides a more stable alternative in economically volatile environments.
Faster and cheaper transactions: Stablecoins facilitate rapid, low-cost cross-border payments and remittances, which is highly valuable in emerging markets. This is particularly appealing for businesses and individuals seeking to avoid high fees and slow processing times associated with legacy financial systems.
Lack of institutional trust: High inflation can be a symptom of economic mismanagement, leading to a loss of trust in a country’s financial institutions and government. In such cases, stablecoins provide a decentralized alternative outside of the traditional system.
Nuances and limitations
Not a universal indicator: While the correlation is strong in many emerging economies, it is not a universally applicable rule.
Additional drivers: The relationship between inflation and adoption is complex. Other factors, such as internet penetration, technological readiness, financial inclusion gaps, and regulatory clarity, also significantly influence stablecoin adoption.
Other use cases: Stablecoins are used for more than just hedging against inflation. In more financially stable economies, use is often driven by institutional demand for low-volatility crypto assets within the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem and DeFi protocols.”
We have to remember that all existing traditional currencies are already digital currencies. That’s the structural nature of debt money in the computer age of fiat currency. The computer age simply digitized the traditional, paper-based notional wealth that has always existed in capitalist surplus societies that chase the MPP by blowing credit bubbles.
Of course, if the US dollar is hyper inflating, a Stablecoin won’t be of much benefit.
so it will take a decade or two. It seems rife with dangers though. there will be blackouts, the dollar will slide. we will see…
Never realized that you and davidina were operating on the same timeline drb. Hopefully you are also preparing for a shorter timeline, as in this year or next. yes, digital greenbacks are wholly dependent dependent on the grid, which will be grappling with rolling blackouts; the Hand can only play the hand that it is dealt — or dealt itself –and I have no doubt that it will play that hand well at the structural level.
Are you unaware of the last 50 years and how Iran/Iranians deal with these unceasing economic attacks?
As for Volant media London(and Washington, but nowhere else), you have to be joking. It’s an ss operation and obviously so. Take nothing they say seriously.
Fitz I gather your reply was to me, although I don’t why you’d think I’m not aware of the empire’s historical economic warfare against Iran when you know that I came from the anti-imperial Left, too, like yourself.
I asking you to at least recognize, if not agree with, my thesis that the Hand’s DA is non-political. It’s post- political. Post-imperialist in the sense that the Empire has reached its Limits to Growth, so the MPP switches from expansionary imperialism to the maximum deceleration of Collapse because maximizing the braking of what would otherwise be a freefall is what maintains maximum civilizational momentum (MPP). The DA is a purely pragmatic effort for decelerating Collapse, and any country’s governmental bureaucracy that does not get onboard with the DA will be removed one way or another. And my assumption is that, despite appearances Iran has decided to get onboard with the DA because that is what maximizes Iranian MPP during Collapse. Iran is economically dependent on other countries and Iran benefitted from international trade with empire during the growth phase.
You see digital greenbacks as an economic attack on Iran because the conventional view on hyperinflation is that growing private black markets in other (reserve) currencies is bad for the country’s governmental finances, and that is true in some ways: the capital flight into the dollar acts as a positive feedback loop on runaway inflation. However, why would we ever not want regular folk to make the best financial decision possible for themselves, right? If they’re living in a broken system — whether that’s because of imperial warfare or not — they should be able to make the best decisions for themselves that they can.
And if you noticed, the Iranian government isn’t banning greenbacks, they’re just moderating that flight to safety so that people don’t flee from the Rial more than what’s required in order to maintain the essentials of their existence. It’s in the interest of the Iranian government that social stability is maintained, and the greenback is a financial safety net. That’s what I’ve been talking about for the last couple weeks regarding the critical importance of there being a reserve currency for a country to hyperinflate into, otherwise it’s total collapse. That being said, let’s look at the critical role that greenbacks (and FRNs for the time being) will play in backstopping the Iranian government itself. AI Overview:
“Governments of countries experiencing hyperinflation can stabilize their economies and facilitate international transactions by holding and using a reserve currency, as it provides a stable medium of exchange and reduces the costs and risks associated with fluctuating exchange rates and a devalued local currency. This allows for smoother trade, easier access to capital, and the accumulation of foreign exchange reserves, which serve as a buffer against economic crises.
Benefits for Governments of Hyperinflation Countries:
Economic Stability and Crisis Management: Holding foreign exchange reserves in a stable reserve currency provides an economic buffer during times of crisis. It helps shield the country from severe trade shocks and the volatility of its own currency.
Facilitating International Trade: A reserve currency simplifies international transactions by acting as a universal medium of exchange, reducing the costs and complexities of converting currencies for trade and payments.
Reducing Exchange Rate Risk: By conducting transactions in a stable reserve currency, countries can avoid or reduce the exchange rate risk associated with using their own unstable, hyperinflating currency.
Access to Capital: Holding reserves in a stable currency can make it easier for a country to borrow funds internationally, as lenders have greater confidence in the country’s ability to repay debts when they are denominated in a stable currency.
Managing Monetary Policy: A stable reserve currency can help anchor the country’s monetary policy, providing more flexibility to manage economic fluctuations without being immediately threatened by domestic currency depreciation.
Hedging Against Domestic Currency Devaluation: In a hyperinflationary environment, people and businesses tend to hold more stable foreign currencies rather than the local currency. A government holding a reserve currency can use these reserves to purchase essential goods or manage its debt when the domestic currency loses value.”
The Hand is post- geopolitical, and it’s greenback-based Phase 2 of the DA is a cooperative framework for civilizational decelerationism. As Ravi said the other day, it’s you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.
Is that hard to believe? Yes. I get it. But it’s also happening. But you won’t see it if you don’t look for it. You can look for it while simultaneously maintaining your anti-imperialist worldview, so long as you’re not gripping that worldview too tightly.
Yeah that’s correct Gail. Rolling out digital greenbacks against a backdrop of dollar high or hyperinflation is counterproductive. In fact it would only make dollar inflation worse.
The private banking system, which captured control of the dollar over a hundred years ago and has been consolidating that control ever since, is intelligent, and it wouldn’t be allowing the rolling out of greenbacks against its own interests. If the dollar hyperinflates then that private banking system dies. If the dollar deflates then the private banking system deleverages and consolidates and the wealthy banking shareholders gorge like vultures on what financial carrion they can until the new national socialist government puts a halt to it and starts nationalizing what it can in the name of social stability, and the public greenback staggers on and total Collapse is kept at bay for awhile longer. Even the private bankers don’t want total Collapse, but the one thing they can’t avoid is the collapse of finance capitalism. Marx was correct that capitalism would ultimately seed socialism, but was wrong on the kind of socialism it would seed
reante> thanks for this series of posts!
Recently, observed strange behaviour among regional lesser grade billionaires. They start to sound as remodeling their public image into some sort of quasi public feel good persona, beyond traditional philanthropy circus as that (and furthermore negating thus prior typical seclusion kind of mode)..
It’s within the range of possible that either some of them were selected out of the pack for the role by the very inner core cadre you describe or rather on their own just got wind of the incoming reset threshold and now positioning themselves accordingly.
reante> given the proverbial Iranian example illustrated above, as entity fighting inflation waves and various outside imposed sanction regimes of unknown durability (be it short term extortion or real longer lasting) – what is the suggested /asset hopping strategy/ for the now and midterm time horizon – say upto ~2035?
So, are the “parking lot boyz” correct in waiting out the next phase sitting on ETF[copper, high grade nickel, Li, uranium] – irrespective of possible incoming deflationary ~bust episode?
Pleasure jak. I wouldn’t characterize it as a reset myself. The greenback scheme is just a populist, decentralized way of maximizing the global flight to dollar safety that was always going to be the main feature of the deflationary collapse of globalization. Maximizing that flight slows the cascading collapse of industrialism, in theory anyway. Delaying the deflation of the reserve currency money supply is the only financial mechanism in ‘degrowth’ theory.
I don’t believe in getting something for nothing. Making money with money is the love of money. Only broken people love money and chase it. I figure by 2035 those left alive will probably have a pretty good feel as to whether they are going to make it all the way through Collapse or not because they’ll be through the bottleneck by then and taking stock of their own condition and the condition of what else remains. Here’s to open spaces.
reante> I was just about to ask you possibly narrowing the corridor of analysis a bit and you already delivered..
So, serious bottleneck event-process by ~2035 is indeed nice specific charting path forward.
My comment was not much about making money out of the turbulent times but more like watching the steps of the big guys entering self-preservation mode.
Hence in my comment these particular themes they tend to discuss such as, “owning” nickle mine throughout ~war period and or uranium while mad dash deploying attempt to SMRs is on the way etc.
Obviously, as always it’s the clash of individual little ants “strategies & hopes” vs the uncompromising tsunami of history (gov-mil confiscation, general chaos and disorder) when crossing thermodynamic threshold of gigantic scale.
Thanks jak, and sorry for the misunderstanding regarding financial investments. I do obviously think that the Hand must have a general plan for deep Collapse after the Non-Public Degrowth Agenda has culminated in, most importantly, the decommissioning of the nuclear energy industry, which I’d guess would be conpleted about 5 years or so from now. But I don’t think about that plan at all because I just don’t find it relevant to myself. I’m not going to be able to confirm any of it because access to electricity will be long gone by then.
I did read your comment on what you apparently see is an emerging Elite desire for an SMR-powered hunger games- style collection of a handful of city states in prime locations. I would be interested in following your comments on that scenario in general but especially so if there’s evidence that ground is being broken on such an ambitious plan. I have serious doubts that they can pull off that type of scale and complexity at this point, while shielding those parallel civilization projects from this civilizational collapse. But then again I’m convinced that the Hand is determined to decommission the current nuclear industry because the grid-dependent spent fuel pools threaten an extinction level event in the long term, and the members of the Hand put their pants on one leg at a time just like us. So the idea that the Hand will undertake the simultaneous commissioning and decommissioning of two nuclear civilizations, and do so during catastrophic collapse, seems to me to be a hubristic undertaking, and my distinct impression of the Hand is that of a consummate professional. But we’re operating mostly in the dark here so it wouldn’t surprise me if I was underestimating what non-public surpluses the Hand has squirreled away for Collapse but, nevertheless, Reason only patterns based on available information and, to the open mind, the category of “I’ll believe it when I see it” sits patiently in the wings. If you can show me that such a hunger games plan is physically materializing then I’ll be a believer just like I want folks here to believe what I’m trying to show them about dollar stablecoins.
reante> thanks for the expanded response.
Obviously taken into account yours expedient scenario (no grid) just 1-2decades ahead. However, I’m positioned a bit longer time frame on the scale though.
Now, to explain in less confusing terms than above. I guess it’s necessary to distinguish what the industry can realistic offer at the moment.
The SMRs are meant to make the adoption process less complex, in a way it’s a ~con, as you correctly suggested as they desire for such energy production at way smaller footprint AND EVENTUALLY ala city-state / neo feudal compound setting if you will..
Also, if we talk specifically, for example about the US-JAP ver is simply put scaled down version of existing civilian reactors working for around the globe for past 4-5x decades. The major visible difference being ~NO large concrete dome structure involved though as the 30m elongated reactor is buried in sort of underground silo, hence the shortish ~5-7yrs to deploy.
The client end – gov regulator and licensing is done in major industrial countries already and first units are ordered. The fuel assemblies are sourced from the existing npp fuel manuf suppliers etc. These are still large ~300MW units in terms of energy output. So, these are to be grid based in the first wave of deployment and application with the proviso of 2030s and beyond scaled up units production, where large %of such devices could be manufactured in distributed “module/parts” fashion around the world in usual industrial hubs.
Also, there are other sub categories of even smaller – way lower output, e.g. that RU floating platform (already deployed demo) for shelf oil/natgas/.. mining or shore line cities power generation backup. That is probably some offshoot from mil program and surely US and others must have it in some stage of ~near readiness as well.
Thanks jak for the SMR lay of the land. Its promise does appear dependent on a longer timeline of Collapse such as you hold compared to me. Presumably if the next couple years of this civilization takes a huge dump, then you’ll be reconsidering your networked hunger games scenario just as I will be reconsidering it if it doesn’t take a dump and ground is actually broken on these parallel civilization projects, which ground would be broken under political cover of having a purpose for this civilization.
That looks fake.
Real or not real? Even though we all know that this is not real because of our common sense experience (cumulative Reason), we cannot tell that it is engineered video.
If we have no experience with gunshot wounds and bleeding dynamics, then we have no common sense ability when it comes to deciding about Real or Not Real.
The reason that they framed Mossad by putting several people in the crowd who looked like they could be shooting a gun plus a couple people signing, is in order to throw off all the people who do know what gunshot wounds and bleeding dynamics look like, or can possibly look like by researching the physics of bleeding.
The power of suggestion is the heart of the first Art of War.
I knew it wasn’t but it was still hilarious. If only FE was still active here, he would have applauded and approved of super snatch sandy’s belly flop.
everybody needs support
For everyone who has seen some posts on the internet and has asked this question
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2024/12/11/2003828294
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/heres-all-the-research-showing-your-phone-is-probably-making-you-dumber/91165590
There are answers. But you won’t those answers because those answers won’t flatter you, either.
Everyone is on the same sinking ship.
Maybe. But we know that brains are adaptable. Hunter-gatherers seemed to have bigger brains than we do today. They needed to learn lots of details about the area around them, such as which plants were suitable to eat, and how to navigate without roads. Our brains today are smaller, but seem to be more adept planning.
For older people who can still manage a cell phone, the availability of cell phones and computers may be helping to cover up the inevitable decline in recall as people get older. If a person can’t remember details about a trip, the person can search history of emails to see the names and exact dates involved, for example.
Young people can lean on cell phones and calculators way too much. They don’t learn what 50% of $1 is, for example. They have to go searching to find out.
Did an exploding microphone Kill Charlie Kirk?
I find this explanation doubtful, particularly as there was no bloodstain on his chest where the mike would have exploded. In fact, I’m still leaning towards the whole thing as fake.
But if Charlie was killed, this looks like it could have been the MO—presumably brought to the event by the sort of people who like to use explosive pagers.
I don’t think so.
Thanks Tim hadn’t seen that one yet! Of course, the Left anti-zionists latch onto the exploding pager sister technology. The Hand is a genius.And the apparent fact is, that mic probably was used to jolt Charlie because otherwise he’s just acting and that’s probably not gonna cut it. I always assumed the the blood squib bag had a charge attached to it for jolting him because he is jolted, a long with a mechanism to send his shirt up over the fake wound site as it’s being activated – I mean what are the odds of the shirt covering the wound and only the wound as the neck is being wounded? Approximately zero. Even with the ricochet theory off the beveled edge of the body armor the shirt tug would lag the entry wound to say nothing of the condition of the shirt afterwards. And the angle of entry of this exploding battery theory isn’t plausible not to mention a lack of any other visible injury. It’s another great little misdirection play though that looks like it could very well also have the positive function of creating the moderate blunt force shockwave we see.
We are not insiders. Only people who knows all details have an overview competent enough can discuss these topics. Therefore we have government, specialist departments, etc. to discuss these topics.
I am not sure that that governments and specialist departments necessarily do a good job either. They need to follow whatever narrative is being pushed at the time. They need to do what voters think will work for them. Everyone wants a happily-ever-after story, so this will be presented, no matter how ridiculous it is. If the powers that be want a positive narrative about covid vaccines, that is what mainstream media will push.
Governments, specialist departments, etc, cannot know all of the details. This is why they cannot predict and prevent crises, they can only respond (with mixed results).
If, according to you, everyone here in the peanut gallery is too structurally incompetent to sketch accurately what is actually going on in the world, then you yourself are also too incompetent to make that declaration, due to your disbelief in second-order patterning (meta-analysis/divination). Therefore, if you value consistency, what you said wasn’t worth saying in the first place.
Then why are you here? Just listen to MSM and be done with it.
Don’t forget your booster – it’s recommended by specialists and only they know all the details and are competent to evaluate the topic.
Progress!
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a65997294/dead-internet-explained/
I’m sure our native Dennis will be impressed with this story.
Machines are producing more than humans. Must be good.
Next, machines are reproducing faster than humans. Must be good.
On certain topics, we are told to reserve judgement or not to interfere with, as if they were natural processes, or something where the benefits outweigh the costs. A.I. is one of them. There is less pushback from A.I. than ineffective medical treatments.
There seem to be a few AI produced comments for OurFiniteWorld.com that are marked as spam by WordPress. I have been deleting them. These comments are advertising some AI related product, which is why they have been flagged. But if a person reads them, they seem to summarize what some recent commenters have said, so they don’t sound terrible, in themselves.
I assume that most commenters of this blog aren’t consuming a lot of TV programs.
Another book by Jerry Mander is (in German, I’ve made use of google-translate)
“Schafft das Fernsehen ab!
Eine Streitschrift gegen das Leben aus zweiter Hand”
“Abolish Television!
A polemic against secondhand living”
There I’ve found the following
“The goal of the machine is solely to be the real kingmaker, behind the throne, no matter who sits on it, and to remain the essential factor in public life.
Television has the power to make presidents, and it also has the power to make them disappear from the stage.”
(page 39)
“It dawned on me that the very fact that this was possible—to launch fabricated news stories about fabricated military events leading to the escalation of distant wars that no one could observe firsthand because everyone only saw the television images—was cause for serious concern about the media’s power to make pseudo-realities appear true.”
(page 39)
We live in a time where television has lost substantial power, and where other forms of communication have caused quite some disruption in the monopoly of means of communication. TPTB do what they can to get the new forms of communication under their control (esp. in the EU). This worked very well during the years 2020-2023 WRT the pandemic. But it is obvious that this game of deception will lead to nowhere.
the same can be said of all media, paper or electronic, no?
Yes and No.
Of course no one really wants to abolish television or printed media (books, news papers etc.) or radio programs or streaming of information in any form.
But of course what was once (and most likely still is) true about TV is also valid for other media. You basically should be suspicious when all is in control of a few.
„A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of “monopoly in the means of production”. Since humans extend their nervous systems through channels of communication … whoever controls these media controls part of the nervous system of every member of society.“
(Robert Anton Wilson, email to the universe — and other alterations of consciousness)
So in case you wonder why big organized forums talked about shutdown of the Internet (like talking about potential pandemics) you really should take into account Robert A. Wilson’s words.
There is not much progress without proper flow of information. We all profit from information gathered in previous times by people often unknown to us — information gathered somewhere else on this planet.
The statists in power really hate change.
The system itself seems to be becoming less strong. The government needs adequate energy supplies to continue. Once it is supported almost entirely by growing debt, instead of growing energy supplies, it seems to become obsessed with a plan to make itself smaller.
No group can well describe what is happening. We are witnessing slow decline of government structures themselves. The current structures can’t hold. But what actually happens is hard to figure out. So we will be seeing more and more divergent views, I expect. And more conflict.
I have watched the power of media ( all media) in India since 2012 when the cult of Modi was perpetuated . A ” paper tiger ” promoted as the ” Lion King ” . His equivalent would be Mussolini . However since last year his myth is getting demolished by social media . The MSM in India is now loosing viewers just like in the USA .
“While I took a trip to several forests and an arboretum in Kentucky and Indiana last week, which I was thrilled to do (visiting an old-growth forest was one of the highlights), I am also highly aware that not only are these forests threatened, but pretty much everything that grows in soil and then eats what is grown is likewise threatened. A new study discusses this in detail describing how forest soils accumulate microplastics through atmospheric deposition. More studies here show how microplastics are literally everywhere – in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. It also explains how 3 million metric tons of microplastics enter the environment. That’s over 8,000 metric tons per day! “?
https://erikmichaels.substack.com/p/newsflash-predicaments-are-not-problems
Except our bodies seem to adapt to whatever is thrown their way. Maybe some system within the human body will start to carry the plastics off. Or they will be sequestered. Or maybe our bodies will learn how to use them as food. Perhaps our biome will adapt to digest these plastic particles.
“ For instance, another article I wrote is titled, How Bad is Pollution Loading? In that article I detail how we are losing our ability to reproduce, meaning that in about 15 years or so we will be functionally extinct. “?
https://erikmichaels.substack.com/p/newsflash-predicaments-are-not-problems
Mormon church is shot up and burned down. Time for the president to protect the religious sect of polygamist. You do not see this kind of murder of Mormons in UK under the Church of England and the good rule of the king.
In the Old Testament, men seemed to be able to have as many wives and concubines as they could afford. Peter Turchin talks about the policy of having only one wife as a method to keep down population. Poor men still would not be able to afford a wife and family.
Right now, because of autism and because of low wages for many young people, we are experiencing a lack of marriageable men. Two fairly high income women getting together and raising a child is a way around the problem. In fact, some single women have used artificial insemination to raise a child on their own (I am told by my daughter).
Somehow, the system keeps changing to match the availability of marriageable spouses.
Under this blog-post also the current AI-nonsense was mentioned.
I think this is just another example of increased technology-nonsense that is pushed to the masses in the recent past.
There is a book that criticized the trend quite some time ago. It is
In the Absence of the Sacred : The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations
Jerry Mander
(Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1991)
On pages 49 and 50 it provides ‘Ten Recommended Attitudes About Technology’ which are worth thinking about.
Can you provide a list of those recommended attitudes?
Yes, I’ll do.
I intended to do it anyway.
But my above comment didn’t show up in good time in order to reply to it.
(Thus I’ve done this on my X account.)
But providing this here is much worthwhile.
The cornucopians and other delusionists who think the genie will bring stuff from the space won’t listen.
And it is too late for the natives, who are mostly more than 50% white
{Following are the ‘Ten Recommended Attitudes About Technology’ from this book:}
1. Since most of what we are told about new technology comes from its proponents, be deeply skeptical of all claims.
2. Assume all technology “guilty until proven innocent.”
3. Eschew the idea that technology is neutral or “value free.” Every technology has inherent and identifiable social, political, and environmental consequences.
4. The fact that technology has a natural flash and appeal is meaningless. Negative attributes are slow to emerge.
5. Never judge a technology by the way it benefits you personally. Seek a holistic view of its impacts. The operative question is not whether it benefits you, but who benefits most? And to what end?
6. Keep in mind that an individual technology is only one piece of a larger web of technologies, “megatechnology.” The operative question here is how the individual technology fits the larger one.
7. Make distinctions between technologies that primarily serve the individual or the small community (e.g., solar energy) and those that operate outside of community control (e.g., nuclear energy). The latter kind is the major problem of the day.
8. When it is argued that the benefits of the technological lifeway are worthwhile despite harmful outcomes, recall that Lewis Mumford referred to these alleged benefits as “bribery.” Cite the figures about crime, suicide, alienation, drug abuse, as well as environmental and cultural degradation.
9. Do not accept the homily that “once the genie is out of the bottle you cannot put it back,” or that rejecting a technology is impossible. Such attitudes induce passivity and confirm victimization.
10. In thinking about technology within the present climate of technological worship, emphasize the negative. This brings balance. Negativity is positive.
{In his book Jerry Mander has stated before those 10 attitudes the following:}
„… I offer here a little list of reminders that I keep pinned above my own desk. They help me maintain appropriate attitudes to protect against the one-sided information onslaught. Perhaps they’ll useful to you.“
” Do not accept the homily that “once the genie is out of the bottle you cannot put it back,” or that rejecting a technology is impossible. Such attitudes induce passivity and confirm victimization.”
With some technologies, we are told to reserve judgement or not to interfere with the development, as if they were natural processes, or something where the benefits outweigh the costs.
Hence the equating of new tech products, with the invention of the the steam engine or the wheel ,
the push to hush anyone who wants to actually regulate THE PEOPLE deploying the the technology ,
and the not to subtle implication that some technology some technologies are so advanced they should be considered new life-forms.
https://theweek.com/tech/ai-rights-technology-artificial-intelligence
That is a pretty good list.
H. T. Odum, who was the person Charles Hall studied under for his Ph. D. thesis, was concerned about complexity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_T._Odum
https://www.cell.com/the-innovation/fulltext/S2666-6758(21)00094-1
He introduced the idea of Transformity, to try to measure complexity.
(Charles Hall, with EROEI, went the other direction, and left out complexity completely.)
Really liked that book. I believe that Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television(which you mention above) was his biggest seller.
Here he is talking about tv
https://youtu.be/m3NBEurnIqY?feature=shared
The screen disables imagination and without imagination we are nothing but herd animals. Smart kids don’t like books because they’re smart, they’re smart because they liked books and so are used to taking time to use their imagination(you can put a book down for as long as your imagination needs. The screen pushes you on relentlessly).
My husband and I got rid of our television over 20 years ago.
I think the claims that Jerry Mander, makes in the our Arguments for the Elimination of Television are unscientific. Similar arguments have been made against novels. Reading a lot causes eye strain and near-sightedness. I won’t even mention the claims that have been made by lewd music and art in the past.
A lot hinges of the intent of what is being produced. When things were restricted a few network tv channels, tv provided a limited amount of entertainment or whatnot. There was something for everyone but there was no need to keep everyone entertained all the time with 24 hour programming. I’m old enough to remember when there was “nothing on tv” and could not depend on media to keep me engaged. Everyone is different. For some kids, tv increases their imagination but it requires downtime for them to develop it and the 24-hour programming model that cable ushered doesn’t allow for that. The internet is a natural progression of cable-drowning people with content and hope advertising and fees can pay for the content. Progressives may be right and this may be just plain-old profit maximization (making things move faster. Same argument for adopting A.I.–increase productivity)but tv profit margins in media these days are thin. Making more stuff and moving it around faster won’t really change that, imo.
wats lewd music?
Any song that has sexually explicit lyrics.
What you fail to realize is that
most people aren’t smart.
They do not like to think about things. They want authority figures, basically the media, to tell them what to do.
“What you fail to realize is that
most people aren’t smart.”
It was just an example(one I’m about to double down on) and I’m aware of people’s low bar limits, which has mostly been trained into them.
Those that read books will, with little exception, be more thoughtful than those that get shunted along by the screen(assuming they are willing to address a subject openly). This I believe, is clear in the young, but easily withers away as they are trained into the system.
It’s a fine line between smart and stupid. A line that blurs frequently.
“If we want to know how to get the better of stupidity, we must seek to understand its nature. This much is certain, that it is in essence not an intellectual defect but a human one. There are human beings who are of remarkably agile intellect yet stupid, and others who are intellectually quite dull yet anything but stupid. We discover this to our surprise in particular situations. The impression one gains is not so much that stupidity is a congenital defect, but that, under certain circumstances, people are made stupid or that they allow this to happen to them.”
Bonhoeffer(again).
Concerning the other comment about reading being bad on the eyes. It pales to almost insignificance, when compared to the damage from the screen. You only need to look at the rise of the screen and the rise of children wearing glasses, or contact lenses(close to parallel lines I would guess). Books never had that effect and there are simple techniques to help mitigate the effects, techniques that don’t work when you are being shunted along by the screen.
You are putting on ideological blinders on.
You are rejecting the research that says reading a lot of text causes nearsightedness in some people. Whether the eyes focus on text or a screen for long periods of time , doesn’t make a difference.
It’s not natural. The human body doesn’t like it.
The geopolitical plots to control and steal those resources are the ” plots ” , its very obvious ….
Freedom and democracy , WMD , Assad is a drug dealer , Gadaffi raped children , HTS are moderate rebels , Iran is a regime but Saudi Arabia is a ” kingdom” etc etc are the true hoaxes feed to the entitled NATO western banyard animals …
I am afraid you have a point.
“Barnyard animals.” That’s a favourite insult of Fast Eddy.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/
Perhaps Eddy has a new handle, or we’re blessed with the presence of one of his disciples.
It’s probably Norman.
He’s secretly one of Eddy’s disciples.
That may have been the plan but maybe plans change and shift depending on real-time circumstances. According to a bootleg Guardian website, Off-Guardian, many countries are “suddenly” recognizing Palestine and money may materialize to rebuild a Palestinian state…somewhere…according to anonymous posters on this bootleg Guardian website, a rebuilt Palestine will be paid for with money from the U.N. They claim that the U.N. gets money from taxpayers around the world.
https://off-guardian.org/2025/09/26/update-israels-increasing-isolation/
I screwed up. Here is the correct link.
https://off-guardian.org/2025/09/23/everyone-is-suddenly-recognizing-palestine-but-why/
30,000-year-old ‘personal toolkit’ found in the Czech Republic provides ‘very rare’ glimpse into the life of a Stone Age hunter-gatherer
News
By Aristos Georgiou published 5 hours ago
Archaeologists have found an extraordinary cluster of Stone Age artifacts that may have been the personal gear of a single prehistoric individual.
https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/30-000-year-old-personal-toolkit-found-in-the-czech-republic-provides-very-rare-glimpse-into-the-life-of-a-stone-age-hunter-gatherer
Researchers uncovered the extraordinary cluster of artifacts in 2021 during an excavation at the Paleolithic site of Milovice IV. The “kit” contains 29 stone blades and bladelets that were found clumped together. The nature of the find indicates that the tools were bundled when deposited, likely in a container or case made from a perishable material, according to the study, which was published Aug. 13 in the Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology.
….An analysis of the tools and their traces of wear revealed that they were used in a variety of ways. While a few show tentative evidence of use as projectiles, others were likely employed for cutting, scraping and drilling. The study suggests that the tools may have been used for activities such as processing meat, animal hides and wood, according to the study.
The latest finds are associated with the Gravettian prehistoric culture, which existed in Europe starting around 33,000 years ago, persisting in different variants for several thousand years. They were known for hunting mammoths, living with dogs, and likely using spear-throwers and bows.
“Their economy was based on hunting and gathering, but they developed complex cultural, technological and social behaviour with long-distance connections,” Chlachula said.
Maybe develop a skill set that includes shaping stone age tools ….
The title tells us that these tools were found in Czechoslovakia. As hunter-gatherers, they could move away, if climate change became a problem. I would expect that 30,000 years ago was before the most recent ice age.
The modern hunter gatherer seems to understand we are about to enter a tokenized Real World Assets ecosystem.
Lol I resemble that remark
That is the point Gail. Entitled? Within an overleveraged system, trillions in debt, billions of people.
What would tokenized gold do to the system instead of 200+ ‘owners’ of paper gold?
There it is, your own words: “A lot of people have to be pushed out of the system.”
That is what degrowth does, by definition. Take it or leave it.
Cannot reply to you directly Gail. Sorry. Workaround.
Why?
Because I have the soul of a hunter gatherer and I discovered the true nature Hand’s national socialist digital greenbacks GENIUS Act.
Except that distributing these tokens to everyone who thinks they are entitled to them cannot possibly work. A lot of people have to be pushed out of the system. It is not simply a group of hunter-gatherers who “fit” onto an area of land.
I hope this doesn’t bore you, but I’d like to share my understanding here. (Although it may be wrong, of course!)
30,000 years ago was before the last glacial maximum (about 20,000 years ago), but it was fully glacial and Czechoslovakia would have been a lot colder than it is now, probably a mix of steppe and tundra.
The last glacial period extended from about 120,000 years ago until about 11,500 years ago, a period of about 108,500 years in all.
The most reasonable explanation for glaciations concerns the Milankovitch cycles—long-term changes in Earth’s orbit and axial tilt that affect the planet’s climate over tens of thousands of years by altering the distribution of solar radiation.
The most important of these cycles is called the obliquity cycle, in which the tilt of the Earth’s axis of rotation relative to its orbital plane, the ecliptic, changes progressively over a cycle of about 41,000 years. This tilt is currently around 23.5 degrees and declining but it varies cyclically between approximately 22.1 and 24.5 degrees.
The tilt is the primary reason for Earth’s seasons, as it causes different parts of the planet to receive more direct sunlight at different points in the year. But it is also the primary reason for cyclical glaciations and interglacials as it makes its effects felt strongly on the snow that falls and accumulates to form ice sheets in the high latitudes of North America and Eurasia.
When obliquity is high, the sun in high latitudes rises higher in the summer months, and ice sheets tend to melt more. And when obliquity is low, the sun doesn’t rise as high, and ice sheets tend to melt less, allowing more ice to accumulate.
When the earth cooled to the point that it began to experience the most recent series of glaciations (known as the Quaternary glaciation) about 2.6 million years ago, for the first half of that period, there was an interglacial every 41,000 years or so, when the obliquity cycle was at its height.
But the Earth continued its long term cooling to the point when, just over a million years ago (just last week in geological terms!), the obliquity cycle alone was no longer able to warm the planet enough to get it into an interglacial every 41,000 years. Instead, interglacials became more widely space, occurring at multiples of approx. 41,000 years apart—sometimes approx. 82,000 years and sometimes approx. 123,000 years apart.
The previous Eemian interglacial began around 130,000-125,000 years ago, while the current Holocene interglacial began about 11,500 years ago. That’s a spacing of about 115-120,000 years—close enough for paleoclimatic purposes to strongly support the Milankovitch theory.
Looking at proxy temperature and climate records such as ice cores and mud cores, it is possible to estimate average temperatures with some degree of precision (if not accuracy) for the past million years, and these records indicate that temperatures do rise every 41,000 years or so within the glacials, even if the glacials do not end at that time. These “failed interglacials” are known as interstadials—phases of warmer climate within a glacial period, but of shorter duration (and thought to be less warm) than interglacials.
There was an interstadial around 55—50,000 years ago, but by 30,000 years ago it was fully glacial in Czechoslovakia.
Thanks for the explanation. I was thinking that the cycles were much shorter. It is hard to imagine why people would be living in Czechoslovakia 30,000 years ago, if it was covered with ice. There is not too much food to hunt and gather in an ice age. When I visited Alaska a few years ago, I discovered that wild life is pretty scarce, largely because there isn’t much food for the animals. It seems like during an ice age, it would be even worse.
I notice now that you say that there would be some tundra. So maybe there was at least a little food for humans.
I can imagine Central Europe 30,000 years ago might have been as cold as Scandinavia is today. Imagine Stone Age equivalents of the Lapps either leading or chasing herds of reindeer through the mountain passes.
There might have been European bison and the occasional group of mammoths passing through. But hunting mammoths would have been a dangerous pursuit.
The amount of sunshine reaching the top of the atmosphere over Central Europe in the summertime 30,000 years ago would have been not so different from what it is today (although I am not enough of a science nerd to be able to calculate it, others smarter than I have done so).
But there would have been a lot more ice lying around all summer long in the highlands, including the Carpathian Mountains, there would have been a lot of cold winds coming down from the Scandinavian and British ice cap, rainfall would have been lower, but paradoxically there would have been more mist and cloud, and possibly “diamond dust” in the upper atmosphere, shielding the ground from the sun.
Also, the CO level was much lower than today, perhaps only 180-200 ppm, so plant growth would have been significantly retarded.
All in all, the conditions in Central Europe would have been miserable for vegetable gardeners, had there been any back then.
The people would have been Cro Magnon, just like us moderns. The Neanderthals had mostly disappeared by around 40,000 years ago, although a few of them may have hung on in isolated places. Also, there was some interbreeding of Neanderthal and Cro Magnon humans. That’s how we got Arnold Schwarzenegger!
Tim> Great points. Also consider the profile of the Bohemia (Czech) lands..
It’s very ~hilly so at specific places the ice layer could be thawing from bellow. The ~mountain range is more like an external rim of a bowel..
It’s easy to check it out from topo map layers..
Tim> Great points. Also consider the profile of the Bohemian (Czech) lands.. It’s very ~hilly so at specifically conditions favorably places the ice layer could be thawing from bellow so to speak, allowing for green areas. The ~mountain range around is more like an external rim of a bowel..
It’s easy to check the situation out from topo map layers..
Interestingly, at the same time in other place an archaeologic team (well called upon by local diy nerd) very recently uncovered in a field very broadly scattered coins from the Hallstatt culture (late bronze age). What was remarkable from our point of view that the overall situation spoke in favor of “hidden treasure” which was by successive waves of de/forestation, plowing etc. brought to near surface after >3k yrs..
.jr
The highest grossing film of the world , by the year
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films#High-grossing_films_by_year
Nationalities are not specified, because virtually all of them are American.
The exceptions are –
British –
Bridge of River Kwai,
the earlier James Bond films,
and the Harry Potter films.
New Zealand –
Lord of Rings franchise, by Peter Jackson.
However, it is expected that a film called Nezha 2 will be the highest grossing film in the world of 2025.
What is Nezha?
Nezha is a figure in Chinese mythology, a mischievous boy deity best known for his purported exploits during the Shang-Zhou war, about 1050 BC.
It had a ‘worldwide box income’ of $2.1 billion.
Of course, virtually all of that was earned in China, with some limited releases in other countries, in areas with sizable Chinese population.
99% of the people who watched Nezha were Chinese, or at least with Chinese background, since that movie is full of Chinese symbolism non-Chinese cannot really understand.
Avatar 3 will be released in Dec but it is uncertain whether it can beat Nezha with that kind of head start.
The West is powerless against this Chinese assault against #1 in worldwide box office.
And, at least Avatar is based in the future,
while the Chinese went back 3,000 years ago to find its narrative.
What is that?
I’ll bet that movie prices are lower in China than in the US or UK.
There was also an expectation, or a national mandate, that everyone watch this movie. Everyone did, otherwise they would be crossing the government
Interesting!
Perhaps a way to bail out the movie industry?
From the people I know who live in China this statement is not true.
That would be the response I would expect from anyone in Mainland China. If you believe something is government sponsored… you would not risk your credit score.
This option is a bit more nuanced, but generally anything that promotes China, is of great interest to the national propaganda machine.
https://www.indiewire.com/features/commentary/what-is-ne-zha-2-biggest-animated-movie-ever-1235098893/
China does not have a social credit score system.
Probably linked to their social credit score.
“No Watchy Movie, No Pudding!”
Kulm, it’s generally agreed around the world that Americans make the grossest movies. 🙂
Although Bollywood isn’t far behind.
Russia oil production peaked in 2019 and now terminal decline.
Source: WSJ today
https://imgur.com/a/a7eC1e2
Russia consumes (I estimate) 3Mbarrels a day. What does the chart say about self-sufficiency? asking for a friend.
Good to 2090. Three million for internal use and three million for export. By 2090 China will have non oil alternatives for energy or be back to the stone age.
“By 2090 China will have non oil alternatives for energy or be back to the stone age.” Yes.
Limiting factor will be humans, understand Chinese currently work 12/6, 12 hours, six days a week. Have done that in professional school, it is hell but if you want the best residency GPA to .01 counts.
Today with a two year degree and the knowledge thereof what would have required a four year degree in EE ten years ago is possible. Still, that means learning in two years what was once done in four. We know so much more, the frontier has moved. Once out, if you wish to build a career, 6.5 works better. AI gives you a 24/7 tutor.
Musk is an example, he is intense.
Dennis L.
Google says
“The standard work week in Beijing, following the standard working hour system, is 5 days, with employees working 8 hours per day for a total of 40 hours per week. However, many companies, particularly in the tech industry, often implement longer work weeks, with the notorious “996” schedule (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week) being a well-known example, although there’s been increasing pushback against these excessive hours.”
In the US tech companies like IBM, Intel, Texas Instruments “force” salaried employees (no contract, no over time pay, no union) to work massive unpaid over time if they want to keep their jobs. Not a new thing goes back 40 years.
When I worked at Texas Instruments the un-official expectation was 45 hrs per week.
I hope this will help .https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Forget-OPEC-Warnings-The-Real-Oil-Shock-Is-Happening-Inside-Russia.html
Unrest? truly, I am mortified. But oilprice has sometimes good articles.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades”
-Vladimir Lenin,”
But the process needs to start. And I have expressed several times on this page my misgivings about Russian elites being dominated by a certain ethnicity. I can say that at no time in living memory we have been this far from the process starting. The Russians, the Armenians, the Tatars, the various Mongol tribes of Siberia, all accept the current situation. They all have hopes for the post war, and at some point someone will feel shortchanged. But now I see no sign. Having the dedollarization+BRICS global plan also will buy the current elite a few years.
drb , all here know the unrest stuff is crap . It is the effect of bombing and sanctions that will hurt the whole world . Here is the excerpt that matters
”When the market recognizes the increased geopolitical risks, a higher risk premium will result in higher oil prices. Downstream, prices will increase globally, as the current situation and today’s statement of renewed, stricter export bans on diesel or other products by Moscow will impact the market. Asian or Middle Eastern refineries will not be able to counter this.
Considering all these factors, the real net effect could be a decrease in global product availability in some consuming regions, even as seaborne crude volumes remain robust. This could then lead to a somewhat unexpected tightening of markets. OPEC+ export increases are unlikely to make a significant difference. Over the last few months, most OPEC-8 increases have been technical, aimed at legitimizing existing overproduction. The remaining spare production capacity of the group, or even OPEC+ as a whole, is shrinking. Current scenarios do not even include a new confrontation in the Middle East or the East Med, US actions against Venezuela, or a large-scale force majeure. In this context, the role of OPEC+ as a swing producer is limited, and the market should not rely solely on its actions to stabilize the situation.
Yes, an impartial, unbiased source. (/s)
On a monthly basis, the EIA data shows that the single highest month for crude oil for Russia was Oct, 2018. The year 2019 was higher than the year 2018, however, and 2020 started out higher, but after April, production dropped precipitously.
Production was practically up to where it left off in February 2023, but has bee dropping after that.
It is hard to tell what represents interference from war, and what represents terminal decline. The country probably hasn’t been doing the infill drilling needed to keep production up.
Russia was the 1st place where fossil fuels were produced so it’s obviously going to be the 1st place where fossil fuels will start declining
I am not so sure about this. China started using coal six thousand years ago, and it has been able to ramp up its coals supplies in recent years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_China
Russia has been using oil for a long time. https://www.rbth.com/history/333404-how-oil-was-discovered-in-russia
Europe has had huge declines in both oil and coal. I would argue that Europe is winning the decline race.
the romans mined coal about 400 yards from where i’m sitting right now…..
just sayin….
Some people are still predicting endless abundance, without bringing enough proof about it.
Solvay conference, 1927
https://youtube.com/shorts/gShSx_bt53w?si=Ni3Rw8BSxH7fZcNz
I chose this clip because a Chinese woman is talking about it, showing the irony.
Compare that, with the world’s best minds, with the sorry lot Mark Zuckerberg has assembled for future tech
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1m3zn2l/detailed_list_of_all_44_people_in_metas/
The names speak for themselves – no explanation needed.
Anyone who think these automata from China can bring all the abundance should consider changing the formula of whatever they are drinking.
People tend to all gravitate to the same belief. The future has to improve, forever in the future. Even if this should prove to be true in the long run, there are certain to be big dips in what happens.
SWIFT is going to implement a stablecoin pilot program. Game over
“Together, these moves point to a financial system where dollar-pegged digital tokens operate alongside, and potentially in competition with, legacy banking rails.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-banking-giant-swift-ignites-170535425.html
Although they have no idea that digital greenbacks are going to effectively End the Fed, people are starting to catch on to the parallel dynamic. Only in a world ruled by a Hand that sees peak oil and is implementing a Non-Public Degrowth Agenda, would global financial capitalism step aside so that it can be replaced by a phased-in, decentralized public banking digital greenbacks system to match a left-libertarian political governance that will denuclearize the civilization before it’s too late.
Where is the demand for it? I suspect they will have to force it on the public.
They have been prepping the people for this for years, but it will still need an “event” to get it over the line.
A fake cyber attack would just be embarrassing and a deliberate financial crash is too risky. You’d want an easily believed national emergency, like a hit on a large gathering of military bigwigs. If a hit on a couple of thousand office bods gets you the Patriot Act, just think what that would allow.
No engineered event is required to ramp up something that everybody already wants even if most of them don’t realize it yet. Everyone hates the big banks.
Not sure who you talk to, but I have met no one(of the few that are aware) that is happy about losing all control of their own finances and that is what any and all digital tokens are. Absolute outside control.
People will of course do what’s needed to feed their families and that will be forced on them, as we see in Britain, where the thick just obliged the corporation to bring in digital id(something they have been trying do since the tech was available) and Herr Starmer quickly informed us that no one will be able to work without one. That’s not possible to control when there is cash.
Sadly, the thick never think ahead, just follow the headline and the herd.
It’s going to be tedious listening to their bleating when the obvious happens.
No one hates the banks enough to knowingly give the corporation complete control of how, where and what they choose to do with their own money and there is only really one bank.
If you want to see the unhidden fat white hand, look up Augustine Carten(such a fat hand), but more importantly who he works for(BIS, set up by the corporation for the corporation). Start at the beginning(financing the rise of the little Austrian, the Tavistock agent) and go from there.
Just for clarity, your fed do nothing without their permission. They wouldn’t dare. They understand the rules and the penalties.
The greenbacks scheme won’t be a cashless scheme Fitz. They’re not going cashless. Just wipe all the CBDC noise from your mind for a minute before you read my stablecoin comments and just read what I’m saying. Stablecoins are the opposite of CBDCs. Their whole function is to replace private central banking with national banking without skimming off the top. The fact that USD stablecoins will dominate the global market is just a structural reflection of the fact that the privatized dollar is the reserve currency. They have to bridge over from the reserve currency, obviously, or the civilization will not survive global financial dislocation.
On the contrary. The organic demand will be overwhelming. Digital greenbacks are the opposite of CBDCs; what’s not to love? Part of the point of the CBDCs misdirection play was to make people rejoice at USD stablecoins.
“Iran has imposed new limits on stablecoin transactions, capping annual purchases at $5,000 per person and total holdings at $10,000, authorities announced on Saturday, as the rial plunged to a record low on the eve of the return of UN sanctions.
The decision, adopted during the Central Bank’s High Council session this week, applies to all traders and users on licensed digital platforms and must be implemented within a one-month transition period, according to Asghar Abolhasani, secretary of the High Council.
“From now on, the ceiling for purchasing stablecoins is set at $5,000 per user annually, and holdings cannot exceed $10,000,” Abolhasani told Iran’s state TV.
He said those already holding stablecoins will have only a brief period to comply.
“The important point is that in regard to stablecoins currently in possession, a maximum one-month transition period has been set, during which the authorized ceiling for holdings must be observed.”
Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged to traditional currencies, with Tether (US dollar) being the most widely used.
In Iran, Tether has become a lifeline for households and traders seeking to protect savings from inflation or to move money abroad, offering the stability of the US dollar without the barriers of the formal banking system.
The new restrictions come as the rial continues to collapse, hitting an all-time low of 1,136,500 per US dollar on Saturday. The national currency is likely to lose further value amid the looming renewal of UN sanctions and worsening public confidence in government controls.
Stablecoins such as Tether have surged in popularity among Iranians since the war with Israel and US earlier this year. For many, converting rials into digital dollars has been the only way to preserve value.”
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202509270149
The only difficulty is that the US dollar seems likely to be headed for hyperinflation, as the government prints more and more of it to bail out banks and organizations of many kinds. A digital currency that matches an over- inflating US currency would not seem to have much value.
What seems to be falling in the future is goods and service to purchase with whatever currency is available.
They they have had long enough to prepare an alternative system which probably not involve hyper inflation so the powers that be have been preparing for this for a long time
The reserve currency dollar does seem likely headed for hyperinflation eventually, but first deflation must take place or the civilization chaotically collapses sooner than without deflation (sooner than necessary).
You have a conflict in your worldview that needs resolving one way or the other: if hyperinflation is coming next then why was your last article about why the price of oil can’t stay high for a protracted period of time? The two dynamics are mutually exclusive.
@Demiurge
I can prove that the ‘Guardians” sometimes go AWOL with one single word – Ramanujan.
If I could go to the past and kill one person , I would choose Ramanujan. Not Gabby Princip, not even Chucky. Ramanujan.
Whatever merits his work might have had, which was not much since he never learned how to do proofs, his entry to the Royal Society made it a joke.
It was an insult to all these student who were fighting in the trenches thanks to Chucky and his 200/400 Worcestershires, who are no less guilty, ‘doing their duty’ (otherwise the war would have ended by Christmas).
That, more than anything else, drove the upper class kids away from science and tech. They followed into that path because it was their honor, but with a Tamil in the Royal Society, it became a joke.
Tamils are dravidic, considered to be black at that time.
A century before that, Niels Abel, from the Swedish province of Norway (which was part of Sweden until 1900 and only became Independent because the British did not want a French king, the Bernadottes, competing for fishing rights in the North Sea) came to Europe with a new mathematical theory.
At that time the Guardians were working, and someone from Norway , considered to be the end of the world at that time, was not welcomed and Abel died , forgotten, only rediscovered many years after his death.
People like Abel did not belong to the Western Civilization and any ‘contribution’ from such was more detrimental than beneficial.
However the Guardians went AWOL when Ramanujan, a Hindu who did NOT respect the Western tradition (he demanded vegetarian food when people didn’t have enough to eat because of submarine warfare, showing a complete lack of respect over the land he was at) was allowed to enter the Royal Society, which is probably why science and tech ceased to make a real advance after 1972, when the last gen of people who were taught pre-Ramanujan began to retire.
If the Guardians were working, Ramanujan would have developed a plague or some incurable disease before he entered the Royal Society, and died a horrible death , which would have made people from India thinking twice before studying in the West. His very existence is the greatest counterargument against the Guardians.
I’m curious what do people think 2030 will be like. I still buy stocks just in case there is a thing called retirement. Mostly oil, copper and natural gas. I’m not sure if there is something else. Will there still be pension funds by then? Some people I know think that they can go to Europe and everything will be great. They can buy cheap healthcare and food and live large
impossible to precisely date anything like that
i put mid 2020s as the tipping point, but the slide into collapse could take decades—or maybe a lot less…
we are all in denaial anyway
That’s a huge variation! Decades means that none of us will ever see it. Wasting time even talking about it. I think you and Gail are under estimating collapsing economics. It doesn’t go slow you need to game it out. Look at 08 it almost broke then. Once it goes it will burn quickly. Human nature is to panic. I can remember all the toilet paper running our during covid
i thought things started collapsing back in 05—i was wrong, life (for me) went on very pleasantly, but of course foir millions of people, it didnt.
that is the point.
collapse occurs in different ways and times to different people.
only with hindsight will we understand that collapse of the current human civilisation began maybe as far back as 1914.—our great wars were symptoms of that collapse
we think in ”now” time.
which is wrong, the world functions in its own time—humankind is merely incidental—-we screw up the world, and the world will self correct in due course.
we just delude ourselves that our wars politics and prayer will have any effect…
they wont.
We have been no more than a sneeze of history…
Sam , maybe this will help .
That woman looks so pissed doing that interview.
“He then explains what a possible energy system could look like with the technology we have available, and how we can engineer that system to mimic the efficiency and productivity of life on the planet.”?
You have to follow the whole discussion and topical meandering. Basically, Arnoux (and the thermodynamic boyz) tend to offer escape route through wide adoption of distributed and relatively low tech solar powered ~sterling engines to burn various forms of biomass. The output going to electricity, hot water, .. feeding other ~industrial processes in local-distro fashion.. a bit like reverting to ~18-19th century existence.. patchwork of smaller scale industrial sites..
So, in essence this still falls into the drawer of [quasi BAU-lite] option but NOT necessarily meaning continuation of this 24/7/365 centralized type of civ..
I guess it’s highly unlikely to be widely adopted (because of human nature) – not the tech aspect itself. Nevertheless, some communes could be using it for some time throughout punctuated collapse scenarios..
jr.
No ‘BAU’?
‘Most’ ‘economic thinking’ is ‘short run’ and ‘redundant’?
‘It’ ignores the ‘supply side’?
‘Growth’ {and ‘civilisation’} depends upon ‘cheap’ F.F. – those so called ‘halcyon days’ are ‘over’. ?
“The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . .
And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.” ?
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-you-can-imagine/
https://www.facebook.com/cosheep
No ‘green’ solution?
“The problem with both visions of the future – and the spectrum of views between them – is a fundamental misunderstanding of the collapse which has begun to break over us. This is that each assumes the continuation of that part of industrial civilisation which is required to make their version of the future possible, even as the coming collapse wipes away ALL aspects of industrial civilisation. Most obviously, nobody had developed even an embryonic version of the renewable energy supply chain which is the essential first step to turning non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) into the envisioned “renewables” upon which the promised techno-psychotic future is to be built. That is, until it is possible to mine the minerals, build the components, manufacture and transport the technologies without the use of fossil fuels at any stage in the process, then there is no such thing as “renewable energy” in the sense which the term is currently promoted. “
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/07/19/our-predicament-re-stated/?fbclid=IwAR3VlY4z4EV1kM6nTSv2FjmBAmvCEGjqqhiwuc1zQtSn3sIcGDGdqiNaN0Q
The economy doesn’t work on an accrual basis. It works on an energy available each year or each month basis. Energy types that are based building big devices, and using them for years and years, are greatly overvalued on this basis. Everything that is allegedly renewable (hydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal) has this issue, as does nuclear. They are also very complex, difficult to evaluate systems. They tend to appear much better than they really are, on an EROEI basis.
All kidding aside, stick up as much as you can , will be worth more than it’s weight in gold
We have a wise and witty customer who asked this question and we gave him our standard response that when stored in a cool, dark pantry you can enjoy that canned salmon or canned tuna many years, even decades from date of purchase.
But really, as long as the seal remains unbroken, a tin can last nearly indefinitely. We recommend avoiding exposure to extreme temperature fluctuations, so kept indoors in a pantry is best. Please do not leave somewhere like an unheated garage or a storage shed
We do not put on an expiration date because kept in a cool, dark pantry, our canned salmon and canned tuna will be good for years. It will be ready when you are to be enjoyed when you’re out and about or just want a simple meal at home without having to cook.
Remember stocks, bank accounts, paper money or bitcorn are just fiat.
As Gail advised, along with others, community support and self reliant know how with a bit of luck may see you through. Probably not, the Fates are fickle.
We are existing is a special blimp of recorder History, as Klummie has pointed here too many times. Gail advised enjoying our remaining time with Family, friends and perhaps spending this money now while it’s still have some value.
Having a portion in PM may also be insurance, there is the price of Gold and the VALUE of precious metals.
Luckily, I’m hearing 70 now and not concerned about such, having lived in the “sweet spot”. Yes, have a pension, saving ect, but the cost of living has inflated rapidly and not seeing any relief from that trend. The very wealthy have been orchestrating to ensure their own featured next. Perhaps it can be extended, but my sense, not to be. Probably end up destroying ourselves in our great madness of protecting our “interests” and not accepting reality.
I presume you meant “stock up” in the first line, as in “stock up on food for the future.”
I won’t object if you do, but food is difficult to carry with you if you have to move. And it is something that others will want to steal from you. There is no perfect solution, unfortunately.
If you have to move, all bets are up.
But even if you don’t get to enjoy all those cans of salmon and other things, somebody else probably will.
I’ve also found that white flour, without any preservatives, will last for decades if kept dry and refrigerated. When our village grew wheat one summer as a joint project in 2007, I purchased the remaining supply of over 100kg for next to nothing because nobody else wanted it.
It’s been stored at 12ºC ever since sealed in paper bags inside plastic shopping bags and it remains perfectly fine for cake- and bread-making. I’m down to the last few kg now. I mix it with commercial self-raising flour as that makes for bouncier bread.
Once the stock market crashes not many people will be able to do anything much of it at all
Gail,
I thought of a term to describe your work “Quantum Economics”.
Not sure if that already exists. but fits like a glove – IMO.
I picked out “OurFiniteWorld” back in 2007. That seems to fit pretty well.
troops on the streets of portland
how many more warning signal must there be?
I lived in Portland Oregon for a few years and I can tell you firsthand, it is a certified sh*thole ruined by Leftist government policies both at the State and Local level. Pretty much like California.
a couple, friends of mine, from there, just upped and left to come to england, couldnt stand what was happening to the usa.
no doubt you will welcome the new oder when it is imposed on you
People in China seem to put up with it. Japan also does not seem to tolerate people deviating much from standard procedures, either. Be sure not to drop trash on the sidewalk in Japan. There are no homeless people sitting out on busy streets.
the oriental mindset seems different to ours in the west…
they are also unarmed.
To give you an idea how the Leftist ideology ruined a beautiful city like Portland Oregon. In 2020 during the George Floyd riots, the Portland Mayor took sides with the rioters who were looting and burning buildings in the City. That only made things worse and things got really chaotic and inflamed the situation.
I loved Portland, it’s much like California where you have mountains, waterfalls, desert, rainforest, you can go camping and skiing at Mt Hood.
But the people that run things at the State and Local level have trashed it to the point where they actually encourage chaos. It’s pretty much their ethos.
Self-deported, did they, Norman?
That will save them a lot of hassle in the long run.
Hopefully they will not say mean things on the internet.
they dont say unpleasant things about anyone—but with a right to reclaim uk citizenship through parents.—which they have done.
Here in uk, everyone ejoys their company and they are made very welcome
Because if they were, they would find themselves in hot water or even imprisoned. God forbids if they were to start doubting the Holocaust ,or denounce digital IDs.
drb
stop trying to out-daft your usual daft comments.
You appear blissfully unaware of the law in this country Norman.
Holding a sign asking the government to stop active involvement in a genocide of children, has already seen over 1000 people arrested under the terrorism act(includes vicars, retired magistrates and blind wheelchair bound ex servicemen). Around 60% of the arrested are pensioners, so no excuse for not knowing.
By charging these people under the terrorism act, the police are allowed to deny them a lawyer, to deny them the right to inform their family of the fascists now holding them, deny them a public or jury trial and allows the police to hold them indefinitely without charge(yes, for ever, without anyone ever being told what happened to them).
Funnily, holding a sign saying “burn them all alive” about non whites, gets you police protection and the arrest of those that point out that saying that surely comes under hate crime(on that subject, big round of applause to the thick flag wavers, for giving the fascists the excuse to bring in digital id. Problem-reaction-solution works every single time with the thick).
If you’re looking for the rise of fascism, you only need look outside your bubble.
It’s here now, it’s live now, just open your eyes, now.
Stop fixating over there and look here. Trump is playing catch up, no more.
But will they still want to remain in the UK once Nigel takes the helm?
Out of the frying pan and into the fire Tim. My estranged, tragicomedic brother who introduced ME to peak oil just left Portland for England last week in order to escape Trump. But he was older than me and a GAPS baby — fragile — and never did really fully adapt to the US, so now he’s basically gone to lay his head down on the softest English pillow he can find and wait to die. That would be a long-term Airbnb in the Cotswolds and the purchase of a used electric car. Funded by day trading dad’s inheritance. YCMTSU. Chalk and cheese, me and him.
He knows it full well, Fitz. As do millions of others. In his case, he has sufficient consciousness to understand the energy cliff, but still can not help getting himself oriented by FT, or Telegraph. A good look into the western soul. they really contribute nothing to the world, despite what Kulm says.
“He knows it full well, Fitz. As do millions of others”
Millions?
Sadly, I think you are correct.
That probably explains why I keep thinking of Bonhoeffer so much lately.
https://www.platoscave.org/2021/10/bonhoeffer-on-stupidity-entire-quote.html?m=1
Fitz wrote:
“Funnily, holding a sign saying “burn them all alive” about non whites, gets you police protection and the arrest of those that point out that saying that surely comes under hate crime”
Which specific incident are you referring to?
“The UK Government proscribed Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act 2000 after some of its members broke into a military airfield in June and reportedly spray-painted two military aircraft, among other incidents of property damage.”
People are rather tired of protesters indulging in criminal damage. There is no need for it. That is why Palestine Action got banned. Protesters of any kind, whether pro-Palestine, pro-Israel or pro-Martian, indulging in criminal damage should be imprisoned.
People indulging in hate language should get a heavy fine (I suggest a thousand pounds) plus damages. That’s what should have happened to Lucy Connolly for her nasty tweet. There is no point in filling up our prisons with people who have not caused damage or attacked people physically. Keeping people in prison is very expensive, especially in these times of peak oil.
Anyway, who do you vote for, if at all, Fitz? Labour, Lib Dem, Green, or some George Galloway / Jeremy Corbyn type party? And where are you located? Do you go on any demos?
“Hate Language”?
That all sounds very Orwellian, although in Nineteen Eighty-Four, you could get in trouble for not taking part in the two-minutes hate.
But who determines what is hate language and what isn’t?
Big Brother 2002: In her first Big Brother appearance, Jade Goody was nominated for eviction, and hostile crowds outside the house carried banners with slogans like “Slaughter the pig” and “This little piggy should go home”. She was seen by many as a “hated figure” after a campaign led by The Sun newspaper.
The phrase “kill the pig” refers to the widespread public and media reaction to her initial appearances on the reality television show Big Brother in 2002, when she was labeled “public enemy number one” and people carried “kill the pig” banners and chanted for her eviction due to her perceived “bitchiness” and “tantrums”.
White Bear – Black Mirror episode.
A woman named Victoria wakes up in an unfamiliar house with no memory of who she is. She is constantly pursued by crowds of people who are filming her with their phones and cameras. She experiences a torturous day of being pursued, captured, and having her memory wiped before reliving the experience again, highlighting themes of society’s numbing effect to violence.
As the episode unfolds, Victoria discovers she is trapped in a daily cycle, a form of torture designed to punish her for her past actions, where the crowd’s filming and the “show” are part of a public spectacle.
The episode critiques the ways society can become desensitized and numb to violence, voyeurism, and public shaming.
Dime a dozen dem like himself some big gubmint to crack down on thoughtcrime when dem gets uncomfortable with social instability from peak oil cuz dem ain’t up for manning up and letting the chips fall where they may.
No offense Norman but it appears England’s woes have just begun. The stiff upper lip generation is getting thin. You need resources not financial manipulation.
thats what ive been saying all along sam
global problems are accellerating–they just appear differently in different contries and regions, but essentially they all have the same root cause.
its a resource problem, not a political/financial problem…
yet the fallacy persists, that everything is a plot or a hoax perpetuated by elites and elders.. people are grabbing what they can, while they can, in the belief that they will remain unaffected.
I lived in Portland from 2000-2011 when I was a Leftist. I hung out with the antifa crowd during Occupy. The neoliberal Portland government is not Leftist it’s center-right. The Democratic Party is center-right fascism with some progressive window dressing. Welcome to finance capitalism.
I left Portland because of peak oil but I was ready to leave anyway because of gentrification. Fascist gentrification, as facilitated by the Portland government. Most of the blacks got pushed out of town and into apartments from 82nd all the way out to conservative Gresham. I was the only person I knew who gave a damn about it. Ten years later the Liberals got woke and co-opted the realization, but that was only cuz gentrification itself was running into a housing affordability problem itself. The chickens came home to roost.
If I recall that era accurately NE Killingsworth to Lombard from Interstate to NE 33rd was mainly black neighborhood house. Not really nice, I lived at Dekum and 18th and yeah my neighbor was driveby-ed another was arsoned and that was around the James Jehar Perez, 7 second traffic stop shooting. I got out in 2013 and went south but the poor rural meth problem made Gresham look like Foster-Powell. The locals were already saying that it was going downhill when I arrived in 2002 but I fondly remember Mt Tabor park and spending days on the south face of that volcano at the best damn dog park I ever did saw.
Right on yeah Tabor and Laurelhurst were my parks, always lived on Belmont .Used to hillskate Tabor with the boys pretty regularly. I remember when they moved the off-leash area from the reservoir area to the south side, never did see the new set-up back there in the trees but remember dog owning friends complaining cause the reservoir area was where the views and sunshine were at, but from what you say it sounds like the did a great job. Made Gresham look like FoPo lol. Yeah by the time FoPo got gentrified it was all over for PDX. I remember the locals telling me too how much better it was in the 80s and 90s. The early 2000s seemed pretty great to me before indie died — it was a cheap city to live in and the dumpsters were still unlocked and the pick-up basketball was buzzing — but then my brief window of being relatively well-adjusted to society closed with the GFC.
Rodster,
Sending more police won’t lower crime for the same reason more fireman won’t lower fires.
lol
Only three things are certain in this life: death, taxes, and Norman’s rantings.
Where was Norman when people were being locked down in their homes, arrested for walking on the beech or in the woods or swimming in the sea, losing their jobs for not submitting to poisoning and losing their bank accounts for expressing the wrong political opinions?
Oh yes, I remember now. He was clapping for carers, rolling up his sleeve for his boosters, and even driving his neighbor to the jab center.
You see, it’s not fascism when “We” do it. Hence, no need to stand up for ordinary people’s rights and freedoms on one’s own doorstep. When Boris said “You must stay home,” Norman complied like lamb.
But now, from the land where mean tweets can land you in jail, the iron man of Shropshire is warning Americans against looming dictatorship.
The assault on ordinary people’s rights and freedoms has been going on ever since those rights and freedoms were acknowledged, in all countries, under governments of all stripes, of which there are only two in the US, which has a culture that emphasizes dichotomies. As Dubya said, “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MANZtrlrQi4
California Greenlights 2,000 Permits – Can It Rescue the State’s Critical Pipelines? (44:09)
6,311 views Sep 27, 2025
“Pipelines that once carried most of California’s oil are now running close to empty. As production falls, refineries face the risk of shutting down, which could push up fuel costs and drive up the price of everyday goods.
“Assemblymember Stan Ellis, USC Professor Michael Mische, Skip York of Turner Mason & Company, and UC Berkeley Professor James Rector explain how the state reached this point and what may lie ahead.”
They postulate “transition” past fossil fuels — maybe folks in places like Hawaii could tell us something: why have their attempts to “go green” failed?
This is an interesting video talking about some of the details of the problem. California has not allowed much drilling since 2019. As a result, the oil flow in California is now falling too low to meet the minimum operating requirements for the pipeline taking the heavy oil from Southern California up to Northern California to be refined.
Part of the problem is economic. The pipeline charges are not high enough to make it worthwhile for the pipeline operator to keep the pipeline in operation, if the supply is too low. There is also the problem of the oil “setting up” (since it is so heavy), if the flow stops too much.
This all has to do with transporting very heavy oil. I remember in my Oil Drum days, there was concern about a similar problem with the oil from the North Slope of Alaska. In that case, one solution considered was heating the pipeline, to help the oil flow better, but that was not economic.
The legislature has now passed legislation that will allow 2,000 wells to be drilled, starting in January, but only in Kern County, California. One engineer said he didn’t think that drilling only in that county would provide enough oil to keep the pipeline operating. They are only 6 to 12 months away from hitting the minimum operating level. Mention was made of needing to drill in Santa Barbara Chanel, also, to get the oil volume up.
Another issue is whether, even if 2,000 wells are authorized, will companies want to take the risk of investing money in the state with such a poor record regarding the way they treat oil companies.
At the current oil price it is not worthwhile to drill . Need minimum $ 95 to work on new production .
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-great-and-silly-oil-glut-meme/
I think someone else brought this article up recently.
My view is that gluts are a “demand” problem caused by too much wage disparity. We need a growing middle class to maintain demand. If too many people cannot afford cars, trucks, and long distance trips, demand drops. Prices tend to drop, as well. Production tends to fall from low demand, not from high prices.
Seppo Korpela
09/27/2025
OPEC falls short on promised increases in oil supply.
The eight core OPEC+ members who introduced voluntary cuts in April 2023 plan to fully unwind their most recent 2.2 million bpd layer of cuts by the end of September.
They are then scheduled to begin removing a second layer of 1.65 million bpd starting in October.
However, analysts are deeply skeptical. With key members like Algeria, Kazakhstan, Oman, and Russia already producing near capacity, experts predict that the actual production increases for the coming months will likely represent only half of the official targets.
The total real production boost from fully unwinding the second layer may not exceed 700,000 to 800,000 bpd.
https://globalfinancialdigest.com/opec-shortfall-nears-500000-bpd-tightening-global-oil-supply/
There is no spare capacity . They increased quotas by 1.65 mbpd but could produce only 700,000–800,000 bpd .
We will eventually find out–or maybe we won’t, if the EIA stops putting out reports, with a possible government shutdown looming.
I thought that this was a good article, arguing that recession may be ahead.
https://realinvestmentadvice.com/resources/blog/slowdown-signals-are-leading-indicators-flashing-red/
Slowdown Signals: Are Leading Indicators Flashing Red?
Later:
Thanks, it is helpful.
Dennis L.
THE GUARDIANS
Mr. K, you are kulminating in the wrong conclusion, as so often. When I mentioned the Guardians, I was talking about UFOs and what or who is behind them. I’m sure you will have seen film from WW2 in which small spheres are seen circling fighter and bomber aircraft of the various combatant countries. They were thought to be secret weapons, but after the war it was discovered that no country had such weapons. So what were these strange spheres, and where did they come from?
——————————–
The Sphere Network
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sphere-Network-Mr-Patrick-Jackson/dp/B0DXF1RGL6
For centuries, mysterious silver spheres have been sighted in our skies, darting through the atmosphere with impossible speed and precision. Dismissed as UFOs, misunderstood as mere anomalies—what if these spheres are something far more profound?
In The Sphere Network, IT specialist-turned-researcher Patrick Jackson uncovers the astonishing truth: a hidden, intelligent defense system operating in Earth’s skies. These enigmatic orbs aren’t visitors from another world; they are part of a vast, interconnected network, designed to monitor, communicate, and—when necessary—protect our planet.
Drawing from cutting-edge analysis, eyewitness reports, and groundbreaking discoveries, Jackson presents compelling evidence that these spheres form a structured, dynamic system—a system we are only beginning to understand. Could they be shielding us from unseen threats? Have they been operating above us for longer than recorded history?
This book is a deep dive into the heart of the unknown, offering a paradigm-shifting perspective on the reality of Earth’s hidden guardians.
The Sphere Network will change the way you see the sky forever.
============================
UFO Destroys Vandenberg Missile l Professor Robert Jacobs Testifies
That was back in 1964, but we have seen other such interventions by “The Guardians”, or the Ultraterrestrials, who are surmised to live right alongside us. Not the authorities would like to admit it. Though we have seen limited disclosures recently – remember that video of the TicTac ? It displayed highly advanced technology.
Witnesses have described craft rising soundlessly from the sea and without making a splash, then flying through the air, and in some cases they have been tracked flying into space. These have been described as “transmodal craft”, because of their capabilities. “UFO hunters” is a good documentary series to watch, if you want to learn more about these phenomena and the theories of what is behind them.
If Denise L was not enough .
I would surmise, then, that we have beings alongside us who would not allow us to go nuclear in a war, because this is their Earth too. I am entirely serious. Look at how far we’ve come. Soon we will have technology that matches theirs. We have gene-editing, nanotechnology, tractor beams, directed energy weapons, artificial intelligence. It is surmised that some of these mysterious craft make use of artificial intelligence to guide themselves and avoid those attempting to capture or destroy them.
Look at 9/11. Things happened on that day that are still difficult to explain in terms of physics and the weapons that we know about. I must surmise that “the powers that be” have weapons that we ordinary citizens are not allowed to know about and that transcend what we can even surmise.
The UFOs that I mentioned exist and have been noted for long enough. But how do they power themselves for such long periods?
From Google:
A field-based propulsion system generates thrust by interacting with external fields or ambient media, such as solar wind or planetary magnetospheres, rather than by expelling onboard fuel. These open-system concepts include both proven technologies like solar sails and tethers, and highly speculative proposals involving manipulating spacetime itself.
The key distinction is that, unlike traditional rockets that carry and eject propellant to create thrust, field propulsion “pushes off” its environment.
Quantum field theoretical propulsion: Highly speculative concepts involving interaction with the vacuum fluctuations (or zero-point energy) of quantum space to generate a propulsive force. No experimental evidence currently supports this idea.
Remember that nuclear bombs and energy were once thought to be fantastical, but we got there. What if we could release the energy in the quantum foam that surrounds us at a controlled rate and use it peacefully? But if we did, would ordinary citizens be allowed it? Limitless energy? No. It could be weaponised. Just imagine the hugely increased potential for terrorism. Also if the public were allowed unlimited energy for peaceful purposes, just imagine how much more of Mother Earth they would consume and wreck, in pursuit of their materialistic pleasures. I used to think that the big capitalists would be against free energy because they would no longer get their profits and the huge power that derives from that. However, having to pay for something also means that we use it sparingly – it has its positive sides.
Look on YouTube and you will see plenty of videos giving evidence that we have been able to harvest energy for long enough, but TPTB don’t want us to have it – and for good reason. There is logic behind keeping these things “finite”.
They let the Chinese and North Koreams have nukes
I wiuld not ask them to guard a dumpster.
But the theory is that they will not be able to USE their nukes. The Guardians will disable them.
If they are that capable they should gave prevented these rogues getting nukes to begin with
The UFOs do appear to use graviton beams for anti- gravity forcefield Earth atmosphere propulsion — because that is what witness reports and physical evidence consistently lines up with — but that Earth atmosphere propulsion/transmission system still needs to be powered by an engine. And interstellar propulsion needs to be produced by another mechanism since outer space cannot provide traction for an anti- gravity forcefield. That engine has been identified, via process of elimination, as a gammavoltaic engine born of positron -electron annihilation, by Paul Hill. Instead of bouncing around the boob too bad talking about ridiculous ideas like quantum foam propulsion maybe settle down for a nice read of a book that’s been recommended to you a few times now huh? And get back to us in a couple weeks with your thoughts. And speculation about what aliens do and don’t want to have happen on this planet is child’s play.
bouncing around the boob toob and talking
I plough my own furrow, reante. I can’t have you banning my speculation, or I’ll set my good friend James Bond on you. So there! But I will get around to that book eventually.
Put this in your pipe and smoke it. The program is in three parts.
https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre.php?ref=190&part=1&gen=5
Plasma field propulsion systems
NASA is effectively a cover organisation to keep the public amused. The more advanced space vehicles and exploration programme have been secretised and are being kept well away from public scrutiny.
I’m not trying to ban anything dem and you’re not speculating yourself, you’re just parroting tabloid trash, which is your prerogative, and I’m expressing my displeasure with that because this place deserves better.
Reante, how do you know what is tabloid trash and what isn’t? Do you have access to the latest advances in top secret technology as used by NASA and higher? I put these things up for interest as speculation. It’s up to you whether you take them seriously or not. Would you have believed in the mercury / plasma-powered stealth planes back in 1998 (assuming you weren’t just an egg back then) ? Would you have believed what lay behind the English crop circles before I gave you that link to Jacque Vallee’s posts? Do you think that our scientists and governments reveal all the latest developments to us before they are good and ready?
If you can debunk something definitively, then do so, otherwise just ignore it. As one journalist said, we are living through an epistemic crisis, when it is hard to know what to believe. Remember that Dubya complained about the “conspiracy theories” around 9/11 – and some people, including NP, still believe that they are just that.
Now we are hearing again the old theory that Hitler escaped to Argentina. How do you react to that? So I am asking that, unless you can definitively disprove what I link to, you should just ignore it.
How do I know? Because I have an adequate body of systems knowledge and I know how to think critically. And don’t play the ageism card anymore it’s disrespectful.
“How do I know? Because I have an adequate body of systems knowledge and I know how to think critically.”
Even that doesn’t allow you to know everything, reante. You have delusions of grandeur.
i hope reante isnt trying to steal my delusions of grandeur
I never said I know everything, that’s a strawman, but I do know enough to know that a person can’t magically pass through a solid window. Apparently you know less than that because ‘quantum.’
shhheeeesh dem
/////NASA is effectively a cover organisation to keep the public amused. The more advanced space vehicles and exploration programme have been secretised and are being kept well away from public scrutiny.////////
lol—al those 000s of scientists, not one has told anybody………
Find a good conspiracy, and its like wasps at a picnic.
The word nāšā means to deceive/beguile.
A fitting choice.
The usual joke is that NASA stands for “Never a straight answer”. 😉
I saw one ststionary in the sky to the West over my cousins house dripping what looked like molten metal and orange aerial phenomena over 30 miles one night. I plugged in your response along with my multiple sighting of orange UFOs and the AI demiurge said:
“If Paul Hill’s proposed system were real, you’d most likely see plasma glows, aurora-like coronas, or shimmering air distortions, especially at high power. You probably wouldn’t see actual “dripping molten metal,” but you could see something that superficially resembles that—detached plasma or ionized particles glowing orange as they cool.”
Bingo! You’ve outed them now. They don’t like that. They’ll be coming for you. Keep watching the skies!
https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre_menu.php?gen=14
Agreed but I think it’s worth it to have a cost of unfortunately some mutilation deaths and offensive comments (human on alien newcomer hate crimes) every single year so that we can have the freedom to haggle over the physics of UFO propulsion systems.
Awesome Replenish that’s way better than my sighting. Yeah Paul Hill talks about plasma glow at high power. Thanks for the first-hand confirmation!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXVAIZdTbZc
John E Mack – Experiencers 4/5
The couple in this video claimed they were having abduction experiences that occurred during the night. At one point, they show a daytime video that they made, where they accidentally recorded a couple of orbs or spheres in the sky. They hadn’t noticed them at the time and only became aware of them when they replayed the video.
Watch from the 5 minutes 26 seconds point through to 6 minutes 47 seconds. Interestingly, the woman claimed that the ETs, or whatever they were, used to come at night and float her through the wall of her house. I once read a book about “witchcraft” trials in the 1600s. An accused woman had admitted to “communing with spirits”. She claimed that they visited her at night and floated her through the wall of her cottage! Presumably, if true, these women’s bodies had been put into a quantum state and then pulled through the wall by a tractor beam. Do you agree, reante?
================
From Parallels – Ancient Insights into Modern UFO Phenomena, by Richard L. Thompson.
In yet another case investigated by Edith Fiore, a witness named Fred recalled the following experience, without the aid of hypnosis:
“During the night, I was awakened. I looked around and there was nobody in the
room. The bedroom faced the street. It had a large window, an eight-by-six-foot window, with those old-style Venetian blinds. I was lying there and I started to move. This is the one thing about the whole experience that I have never been able to fully accept or understand. And I probably never will. I went through those Venetian blinds! I was absolutely terrified. I went through them. They didn’t open. The window didn’t open. I literally went through those blinds. To this day it astounds me! The next thing I saw was a sign saying Church Street.”
dem i just said in my comment about UFO propulsion that anti-gravity propulsion can’t gain traction in space. Had you been able to think laterally then you would have discovered for yourself that a tractor beam cannot gain traction on a woman in a (mythical) ‘quantum state’ because she has no mass. Tractor beams theoretically exist because gravity exists.
A few weeks ago I spoke about how a lightning bolt can flash ionize a tree for a split second, and to such a degree that the tree becomes a gas before returning to solid, and how during the instant of the gaseous phase, solid objects can enter the gas and become embedded upon its return to solidity. If her account is hypothetically true, my WAG is that the window and blinds were temporarily ionized to a gaseous state with one technology such that the woman could pass through the gas gently enough that the gas field wasn’t permanently disturbed, and based on the fact that the second technology, a tractor beam, is naturally going pull on a solid more than a gas because solids have more mass.
It may also be that she had a psychotic break.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJpPfkuA9k4
True Stories About Missing Persons UFO Abductions
These stories may or may not be true, or only partly so. Nevertheless, an American ex-law enforcement officer gives a fascinating talk about the excessive number of people who go missing without trace every year. Then he moves on to discuss abduction and also cases of human and animal mutilations. He describes how dying an agonising death leaves distinct traces on the brain.
Unfortunately we do not see a close-up of the speaker until nearly 9 minutes into the video.
One more detail – folks are claiming the movie Snake Eyes has the killing on September 10th matching Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but in Snake Eyes, it’s actually the 19th and the 9 looks a lot like a 0 because it’s a blocky letter.
https://123-movies.vc/watch-movie/watch-snake-eyes-123movies-16544.5350909
at 1 minute 15 seconds
It looks indistinguishable to me but I’m on a smartphone. I did come across the disagreement about the date, too. Eh, good enough for government work. 🙂 Did you catch the jezebel parallel, too?
Test. The html for Horizontal rule in WordPress comments is hr between angled brackets. I shall have to use that in future.
INTERLUDE
A few years ago, I was looking at the YouTube video for a Stranglers song. A young woman posting as Sarah commented: “I remember listening to that when I was driving a mattress to my mum’s new flat one evening”. I couldn’t resist and replied: “Most people drive a car. Sarah is so poor, she can only afford to drive a mattress.” Sarah replied “Ha ha!” She wasn’t pleased. I got so many alerts from YouTube of people posting praise for my comment that poor Sarah got fed up and edited her original comment to lose any reference to a mattress!
Nicola Sturgeon’s life after politics
Nicola Sturgeon is planning to host a Doctor Who fans’ conference soon.
On the agenda:
1] Evidence for the existence of transgender Daleks.
2] Can a Dalek have a penis?
3] Should the Daleks automatically be entitled to a Scottish passport after independence?
Well, that didn’t work. No horizontal rule. Do I need an end tag too? “”
The horizontal rule should appear above, if I’ve done it right.
All I see when I look at the code that WordPress shows is the word “strong” between brackets of the correct kinds (with a backslash starting the second one), next to your headings.
I have never run into Horizontal rule on WordPress. It is possible that the version of html used by WordPress doesn’t support horizontal rule.
Let me try hr between brackets, and see if it works for me. I included an example of the kind of line I wanted between the statements.
—–
It did give me a line, but not of the kind I suggested.
Line 1.
Line 2.
——–
I just posted the horizontal rule html that I saw in the source of your last comment, Gail. It goes “” . That is:
less than sign, hr, forward slash, greater than sign.
I placed the horizontal rule code beneath “Line 1”.
Well, it appeared to work for you but not for me, Gail. I give up. Women rule, OK? I invite you to become Prime Minister of the UK, since you know how to get things done. 🙁
Back in early 2022, Putin launched his Special Military Operation and boasted of how he would take Ukraine in 2 weeks and then “deNazify” it. Fast forward to late 2025, and the war is essentially stalemated, though Russia is still making micro-gains.
Paul Warburg tells us his theory that Ukraine has changed its tactics to target Russia’s resources in such an unpredictable way that Russia can’t keep up. Russia has a huge landmass and doesn’t have enough planes or weapons to protect all of its territory. Now Ukraine has managed to disrupt Russia’s energy supplies. Russia, he believes, will increasingly have to concentrate on keeping its central Slav core supplied and happy. The outlying areas (Asian and non-Christian) will become increasingly rebellious and may break away.
That may be wishful thinking on Warburg’s part, but he tells it well. I imagine that Putin would nuke Ukraine rather than leave it, but then “The Guardians”, as I call them, may prevent the launch of any nukes. I’ll explain more about the Guardians in a bit. 😉
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgXwMcu8uyk
Russia’s New Crisis Could Be Their Worst One Yet
==============
This is one conflict where I want both sides to lose. More than anything, I don’t want the UK to have to pay anything towards this war, or risk being targeted by Russia, who could retaliate by causing disruptions to the internet or to our vital computer systems – and maybe already has. If the UK does support the war, I think it should all be paid for from NP’s pension and pocket money.
NP’s pension and pocket money are all based on promises. They are going away, one way or another.
I think NP’s pension is safe for another decade at least. But then again, I am a hopeless optimist.
The ‘Guardians” should just sit out. Whatever they touched turned into shit.
And I see a tendency for the British hoi polloi to try to separate themselves from their elites and try to absolve their own guilt. They fully supported their elites’ often ultimately detrimental policies and still think it is 1890. They have to pay too.
>> boasted of how he would take Ukraine in 2 weeks
I don’t think he did say that, though I often hear “Putin / Kremlin thought they could take Kiev in 3 days” bandied about. It’s just propaganda for the braindead, as far as I’m concerned. If you believe otherwise, feel free to back up the claim with whatever you believe is a reliable source.
One way you can know you’re dealing with either a propagandist or an unwitting parrot is their verbatim use of slogans repeated ad-nauseam by MSM, like “full-scale invasion” in this video.
Telegraphic summary: Warburg is an idiot. He has never even been to Russia.
Really, drb753. Yes, I know it’s hard to separate truth from other, but that’s part of the human condition. Do we really have to visit every place that we talk about or attempt to analyse? Has Alexander Mercouris ever visited the battlefields he talks about? What about all the other subjects we talk about. Have you ever visited anywhere during World War 2, for instance? No, I thought not.
If you disagree with Warburg, please entertain us by saying why. IIRC, you are Russian or have emigrated to Russia?
Both Ivan and drb are correct . Nobody least Putin said anything about ” timeline” they always talk about ” objectives” .
Yeah , I know Russian tanks are rusted , the ghost of Kiev shot down 10 planes and the Buchha massacre ,they are cannibalising washing machines to get chips and Putin has cancer . Times Now still believes Ukr is winning . Can’t beat delusion .
Feel free to check some of his videos from 3, 6 or 9 months ago, and see how they have aged. I am not going to defend Mercouris of course, as I have mentioned his limitations in other comments. some commentators have authority and expertise in certain aspects of the current situation, but generally they are people who have been in the business they comment about.
Art is now back on oil shortage? He waffles a lot. I guess there is a glut because there is a lot less economic activity.
Too many poor people in the world. They can’t afford motorcycles, automobiles, and long distance trips on public transportation. This holds demand down. It is lack of demand that brings an end to world oil supply. (Same problem affects coal and natural gas.)
We have a wonderful spaceship, earth. Perhaps not releasing all the waste may not be a good idea.
Solar energy, in space. SpaceX launches soon.
Dennis L.
oops, double negative, my error.
Dennis L.
The mastermind behind the invasion of Iraq on the basis of weapons of mass destruction, which later proved to be non-existent.
The person who proposed digital identity, mandatory vaccinations linked to digital passports, always, for everyone.
The one behind the proposal to promote former ISIS Sirian leader as president of Syria, whose image many say is being “cleaned up” by his own marketing agency, called ‘Int…ate’
He is now to one proposed as CEO of Gaza.
A bit like asking for Mephistopheles in charge of the Red Cross.
Abominable and fantastic at the same time.
100% agree. He is currently the UK eminence grise and 100% a globalist puppet. Presumably he would run things from London.
For a long time the media has been parroting the oil glut narrative . I have been the contrarian on this matter because I look at inventory and not production . Worldwide onshore / on seas /SPR inventories have been falling . Here is Art Berman latest .
https://www.artberman.com/blog/the-great-and-silly-oil-glut-meme/
Our problem is too much wage disparity. The middle class is disappearing. Without an adequate middle class, not enough people can afford cars. They can’t afford to marry. Low prices and gluts appear because of unaffordability.
Such was the way before 1914. The normal state of humanity.
When Keith was frequenting here he and I would debate the work of Gregory Clark , at UC Davis. Clark successfully showed that the people in UK are mostly the descendants of those who owned land or business in 1500-1800 (the aristocrats counted among the landowners), and there were no descendants from the poor.
Middle class at that time meant what is now upper middle class. What we now call middle class was called “upper lower class” back then. And the world grew by leaps and bounds since fewer resources were wasted upon what was back then the upper lower class.
This is somewhat interesting because the end of feudalism in the UK is commonly placed in the 1500s. But you say that even after it ended, opportunity for the masses did not materialize? for 300 years?
You need fossil fuels to help the masses. Even the first fossil fuels were probably not enough to help the masses.
depends how you use fossil fuels
one of the earlist uses of fossil fuel, was not to burn in machines
(lots of people make that mistake)
instead, you mine limestone, (which is calcified sketelal remains, mostly of sea creatures)—then you burn it with coal, that makes calcium carbonate,
spread that on farmland and it massively boosts food production.
what that does is feed extra people– and makes them free from land dependence…
those extra people then find jobs in newly opened mines and factories—and so drive the need for more and more goods and services..
That kickstarts the game of industrial/economic leapfrog.
as ive pointed out too many times—you cant have an industrial revolution without people to sell stuff to, well, thats where they came from…. the skeletons of critters. dead millions of years before, turned into food.
Hungry people dont buy ‘stuff’—people with full bellies do.
simple when you think about it.
That is an interesting point. Mine limestone. I don’t remember that issue being raised before.
its rarely raised–
it isnt as evocative as ”fossil fuels”—not the same drama about it.
yet it was just as much a fossil fuel, because it increased human and animal biomass in the years leading up to the industrial revolution. Limestone is a form of ‘bioresidue’ , but different to coal.
no use producing ”stuff” if there isnt an increasing population, getting increasing wages, to buy that stuff.
increased food production allowed that to happen
Well in the case of Bologna (my home town) which ended feudalism in 1256, in the city state new prominent families sprung up shortly thereafter (within decades). They were essentially all traders but still. I get you have more social mobility with fossil fuels but maybe what came after feudalism in the UK was still feudalism. It tallies with their current dittohead-ism, fully on display on this website.
wwwwwwrong—bigtime.
the base of the first fortunes of the great ironmasters was selling very cheap, simple iron utensils in thousands to very poor people.
but they were things people actually needed, to improve their lives just a little bit.
the ‘big machines’ came much later.
that in turn led to a small improvement in health and nutrition—and that in turn led to population growth. (all there for you to check).
‘no descendents from the poor’ is utter BS
You’re right there, Norman.
The poor have always been with us and always will be.
But Kulm’s point depends on definitions. The Yeoman farmers of Merrie Englande, for example, lived very modest lives and they would have been considered materially poor by modern standards, but they were landowners under Kulm’s and Clark’s classification, putting them in the same category as the Gentry.
Laughing quietly, a disparity solution: Ordnung.
“The Ordnung also plays a crucial role in community cohesion. By adhering to the same set of rules, Amish individuals reinforce their collective identity and commitment to their faith. This shared understanding creates a strong sense of belonging and mutual support among community members. ”
Apparently this set of rules can change with time. We have too many rules as a society and not enough which work 20% of the time and give 80% of the results, or “Perfection is the enemy of good enough.”
Too much is not good, e.g. modern phones; mine is used for making and receiving calls and now 2fa texts, quaint n’est pas?
We are on the verge of abundance beyond imagination, the problem will be how to have a society which works, not perfectly, but good enough in a world of more than enough.
The universe has plenty of stuff, it is up there and getting it down here is simply letting it fall. Starship launches soon, and that is the last of the old model, bigger and better coming next.
Dennis L.
The Jews seem to have interpretation of laws, too.
The Torah consists of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and serves as the foundational text of Judaism, while the Talmud is a compilation of rabbinic discussions and interpretations of the Torah, providing guidance on how its teachings apply to daily life.
If the Ten Commandments were written today, they might need to include prohibition of drug use. There is also a question of how alcohol should be used. Clearly, it was needed to kill pathogens years ago. Drinking couldn’t be prohibited. But there needs to be limits on alcohol consumption.
I’m not sure that is the only reason why people are not getting married. It is a lose/ lose situation for a lot of men. They are choosing not to commit. Look at this site it is 90 percent male. Men know what is coming and are preparing for it while women like to spend money and are clueless to what is happening. If you try to explain it they just ignore it
There are a whole lot of men who ignore it, also.
You tell “him” Gail, we men would be still living in caves without you gals looking to pretty up the place with decorating and window curtains.
The question is , “Would we be a lot happier?”
I’ll ask that at the Golden Gates if there is one.
7 jobs that paid for a family home in the ’70s but now leave workers living paycheck to paycheck
The dream of stability hasn’t disappeared—it’s just moved further out of reach, leaving many wondering what changed between their parents’ lives and their own.
https://vegoutmag.com/lifestyle/z-7-jobs-that-paid-for-a-family-home-in-the-70s-but-now-leave-workers-living-paycheck-to-paycheck/
Jordan Cooper / Sep 26, 2025
The bigger picture
The difference between then and now isn’t just about wages—it’s about the entire economic system.
Housing prices have skyrocketed—often ten or twenty times what they were in the ’70s—while wages have only inched upward. Healthcare costs that once represented a small budget line now swallow entire paychecks. And benefits that provided security, like pensions, have been replaced with 401(k)s that shift all the risk onto the worker.
Jobs that were once the foundation of the American dream now leave workers running in place, paycheck to paycheck. And it’s not about individuals making poor choices—it’s about the math no longer adding up.
When my dad tells me about buying his first house, it sounds almost like a fairy tale. But it wasn’t magic. It was the reality of an economy where ordinary jobs came with extraordinary stability.
That reality is gone, but maybe talking about it can push us to imagine—and demand—something better.
Physics, like Gail has pointed out, is the decider
The economics of housebuilding is quite simple.
70 years ago, a bricklayer earned maybe £10 a week—£500 a year
now he expects a minimum of £500 a week or more. £25000 pa
That arithmetic applies across all building trades and supplies—a house is, in effect, a block of embodied energy, the cost of which is rising beyond affordability of the average wage earner.
Housing functions as a commodity in many respects. The value of a house depends on a range of factors including its location, its general condition, its location, its amenities, its location, and how large and beautiful it is.
But the bottom line is that the price of housing depends on the balance between supply and demand. If there were more houses than people who wanted to own or live in them, then the price would plummet.
In the UK, the constant stream of immigration ensures that there are more potential buyers and renters than there are homes to buy and rent. This is what maintains the price of houses at close to the limits of affordability.
All this is not rocket science. It’s the “free” market at work.
Still does not negate what I said. Males much more cognizant of what is happening now. Western females have been programmed for consumption. But you have to ask yourself why on a site like this there are many more males than female
females dont waste time in pointless arguments.–that applies ‘down the pub’ or on sites like this.—same thing.
they get on with what needs to be done; life is too short.
Notice too that its male lions who waste time fighting—females go out shopping for antelopes and caring for their young—much more sense.
same process.
The WERID economies have responded to energy shortages by producing more services and reducing production of tangible goods.
Women are drawn towards service jobs that use less fossil fuels upfront. If most of the jobs were dirty, and dangerous I think you’d see a lot more stay-at-home mothers and women would consume a lot less. Everyone would consume a lot less.
Outside of WERID societies, outside of Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies, the situation I described above would be called poverty. Poverty seems to be more sustainable than wealth. If someone is calling for sustainability, they are advocating for more poverty.
Interesting point:
“If someone is calling for sustainability, they are advocating for more poverty.”
A detail is whether those people living in poverty can actually raise children to adulthood. If they are too poor to do this, then the vast majority of reproduction falls to the elite.
Yes, marriage is a group project and it takes trust. We have a consumer society with much advertising probably very well designed to create demand for useless stuff. Not easy, for women, it appears when they hit the “wall” there is much depression; no easy solutions.
Think positively, there is not a tiger at our door for the most part.
My parents could afford a home immediately out the door of the church, a tent, Coast and Geodetic Survey, they got around. It wasn’t easy then either.
Dennis L.
No offense, doctor dennis, but I don’t think women who are depressed because they are old exist. If women are depressed at the end of their youth, it is most likely because their life did not turn out the way they wanted their life to turn out.
The lifestyle that many people, women also, lead is fast paced to the point that mental stress can become a major health problem.
When they reach a certain age, they can’t deal with it anymore. That might have something to do with your claims of them being depressed.
You might want to include into your analysis the fact that, for women, structural estrogen levels drop off a cliff whereas for men the structural testosterone drop is a slide.
There is a tiger at the gates. The Eastern tigers. No amount of delusion can eliminare it.
Whatever floats your boat, buddy.
Whatever like to do in the privacy of your own home is none of my business.
It is mostly white upper class males who visit this site. I’m not sure where they are on the fitness scale but a human’s fitness probably affects how he/she/it views marriage and romantic relationships.
That said, most of the people having kids are the people you see on “talk shows” on network television in the United States.