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Economists, actuaries, and others tend to make forecasts as if whatever current situation exists will continue indefinitely or will perhaps improve a bit. No one wants to consider the possibility that things will somehow change for the worse. Politicians want to get re-elected. University presidents want their students to believe that their degrees will be truly useful in the future. Absolutely no one wants to hear unfavorable predictions.
The issue I see is that many promises were made during the period between the end of World War II and 1973, when oil prices were very low, and most people assumed that oil supply could grow endlessly. No one stopped to think that this was a temporary situation that likely could not be repeated. If things didn’t work out as planned, debt bubbles could bring down the economy. This was a heading I used in my talk at the recent Minnesota Degrowth Summit:
In this post, I will provide a few highlights from my recent talk. I also provide a link to a PDF of my Degrowth Summit talk and a link to a Vimeo recording of the summit, which includes a transcript. To access the transcript and an outline of the timings of the various talks, scroll down on the front page of the recording. Joseph Tainter spoke first; there was a recorded section showing clips by other speakers that only online viewers saw, and I spoke last (starting at about 1:55 on the video).
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
Between 1920 and 1970, US oil supply grew rapidly. The early oil was easy to extract and close to customers wanting to purchase it. There had been warnings from physicists (including, most notably, M. King Hubbert) that this could not go on indefinitely, but most people assumed that any obstacles were far in the future.
Of course, there were other countries producing oil besides the US at that time, so it was possible to purchase imported oil. The US still had some oil it could produce, but it tended to require more complex operations. For example, some of the oil was in Alaska. Bringing this oil to market required working in a cold climate, laying a long pipeline, and using ships to transport the oil to locations with refineries.
Low oil prices were very beneficial to the economy, for as long as they lasted.
We don’t appreciate how important low-cost food is to our personal finances. If food purchases amounts to, say, 50% of available income, necessities such as clothing and housing would take nearly all our income. There would be little left over for optional items. On the other hand, if purchases of food require only 5% to 10% of available pay, there would much more likely be money left over for discretionary purchases, such as buying a vehicle or paying for school tuition for a child.
Oil and other energy products are like food for the economy. During the period when oil prices were very low, there was sufficient margin for purchasing all kinds of “extras,” such as the items listed in Figure 4 below.
In the low-priced oil era, small businesses were sufficient for many types of operations. There was little need for a deep organizational hierarchy, or for advanced energy-saving versions of manufactured devices. Most goods used in the US were made in the US.
Once the economy started to need more complexity, things began to change.
The economy needs a strong middle class to maintain the buying power needed to purchase goods such as vehicles, motorcycles, and new homes, to keep the price of oil up. If the middle class starts to disappear, or if young people start earning less than their parents did at the same age (adjusted for inflation), then it becomes difficult to keep the prices of oil and other energy products up. Prices must be both high enough for producers and low enough for consumers.
Recessions took place when oil prices rose. Governments found that they needed to bail out their economies with more debt when oil prices rose. Since 2008, the ratio of US debt to GDP has skyrocketed. Quite a bit of the added debt has been to pay for programs for poor people and the elderly.
The current level of debt of the US government is widely viewed as being too high. One analysis suggests that if the ratio of government debt to GDP exceeds 90%, economic growth is inhibited. The US debt to GDP ratio is now 120% on the basis shown, which is well above the 90% threshold. One concern is that interest payments on debt already exceed the amount the US spends on defense each year. Taxes need to rise, simply to pay the interest on the debt.
Growing debt, particularly during the Stagflation Stage, is one of the issues mentioned by researchers into so-called secular cycles, which are long-term cycles that take centuries to complete. In the book Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov, a group of people somehow obtain possession of an area of land (often by cutting down trees or winning a war) that allows the population of the group to temporarily surge. When the population reaches the carrying capacity of the area, population growth greatly slows in a period referred to as Stagflation. Wage and wealth disparity become more of a problem, as does debt.
Eventually, according to Turchin and Nefedof’s study examining eight societies, populations tended to collapse over long periods, ranging from 20 to 50 years. Such cycles are closely related to the periods of growth and collapse analyzed in Prof. Joseph Tainter’s book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”
The time ahead looks worrying, if my analysis is correct.
A few comments for my regular readers:
- My presentation included 51 slides. Look at the PDF to see the full presentation.
- Even though I didn’t mention it, having a rapidly growing energy supply at a very high EROI would not be sufficient to forestall collapse indefinitely. Other issues would emerge. Population would rise higher, and pollution would be more of a problem. Eventually, the system would still reach a limit and tend to collapse.
- I only included EROI because I thought a few people would already be aware of the concept. I didn’t define it or talk about it.
- My analysis seems to suggest that extenders of fossil fuels, such as wind, solar, and nuclear, need to have very high EROIs. But even with high EROIs, they are unlikely to be helpful for very long because the system would still tend to reach its limits.
Fascinating article over at the future, Science Fiction and Matrix blog, by author “quark,” titled, “All people care about is when everything will explode. Hypothesis.”
[Snippet]
“I have read hundreds of articles explaining the overvaluation of the stock markets, the unsustainability of perpetual growth, the exceeding of the Earth’s carrying capacity, and the announcement of an imminent crisis that never quite arrives (I myself have written extensively in the same terms).
In reality, there is a consensus on the excessive debt, but nobody is doing anything to reduce it, because it would lead us to a situation of economic contraction that no government can afford.
At this point, everyone knows that we are in very bad shape, we have exceeded our capacity for natural growth and only through the permanent injection of liquidity can we generate clearly artificial growth.
However, when someone says that this increase in global debt figures is unsustainable, hundreds of detractors quickly appear, citing the case of Japan. While our public debt exceeds 100% of GDP, in Japan it’s over 250% and they’re still “alive,” which means we have plenty of room and time to continue down the path of growth through debt.
Instead of introducing the series of indicators that warn us about the formation of the bubble, what people need is the date of the “end of the world”.
Here’s the problem. Nobody knows the exact number. If someone gives a specific figure, we all know they’re lying, because nobody has a crystal ball, and if they’re right, it’ll be pure chance.
In my case, I’m going to change my approach.
It goes without saying that the global economy runs on money. If the constant injection of liquidity (not just central banks creating money, but also banks generating new debt-money with every loan they grant around the world) continues to grow, the artificial economy we’ve enjoyed since at least 2008 will continue its upward trajectory.
Knowing the system used to maintain this growth, what we need to look for (if we want to know when the bullish cycle comes to an end) is the antidote to stop that injection.
And the answer is runaway inflation. . . .
High inflation is the “kryptonite” of central banks. When it appears, central banks run out of resources, and the system is at risk. One only needs to look at the reaction of stock markets (global declines of 20% in 2022) to a relatively short period of high inflation (just a few months).
Many people argue that deflation will cause the next major crisis . But as long as the fiat system works, central banks won’t allow it. First, hyperinflation must occur to destroy the system, and then, yes, a devastating deflation will arrive, but not before.”
[End snippet]
The author’s hypothesis is that rising oil prices are the lead indicator of inflation that threaten the Central Bank’s plan of preventing collapse through interjection of liquidity. He believes that both the CB’s and some governments know this. To him this explains why all producers are currently maximizing production – generating excess supply to keep the cost down.
[Snippet]
“The intention of central banks is to maintain price stability in this environment and, as a monetary phenomenon, to calibrate the increase in the money supply so that inflation is not fueled by an excessive increase in the money in circulation. To this end, they are controlling (in collusion with some governments) the price of a fundamental asset: oil. Inflation is not predetermined by oil prices, but it is historically known that a rise in crude oil prices leads to increases in other economic elements, due to the importance of global transportation.
Thus, we see that global oil production has exploded in the last two years, significantly reducing prices. Supply (according to the IEA) will reach a surplus of 4 million barrels per day by the end of 2025 or the beginning of 2026, putting significant downward pressure on prices.
We should ask ourselves what’s going on with OPEC (or rather, Saudi Arabia and the UAE). For a long time, they restricted production to control the market and prevent prices from falling, and suddenly, they’re opening the taps with everything they have available, despite knowing that this would lower prices and cause them to lose a lot of money.
Today, everyone is producing at the limit, leaving excess capacity reduced to a minimum of many years (even though they keep saying that it is still above 5-6 million b/d). . . . .
The financial requirements for granting loans have never been so low. Banks are not afraid to lend; there is no risk whatsoever because they know that central banks will intervene immediately at the first sign of trouble.
Therefore, the bubble will continue to grow, fueled by liquidity (even with small crises such as commercial loans or car finance debts), until inflation makes it impossible to continue with the plan.
Hypothesis.
The only way to generate persistent inflation in this context is through an oil shortage. Given the current trends, we won’t reach that point until the period between 2028 and 2032 (due to the lack of new development projects to offset declining oil production). Even shale oil, which was threatening to begin declining in 2026, has found a way to extend its peak production (at the cost of depleting reserves more quickly, but that’s beside the point) for a few more years.”
[End snippet]
A lot of informative graphs, as well.
Do you have a link to the article?
I thought that this section you quoted was particularly good:
High inflation is the “kryptonite” of central banks. When it appears, central banks run out of resources, and the system is at risk. One only needs to look at the reaction of stock markets (global declines of 20% in 2022) to a relatively short period of high inflation (just a few months).
Many people argue that deflation will cause the next major crisis . But as long as the fiat system works, central banks won’t allow it. First, hyperinflation must occur to destroy the system, and then, yes, a devastating deflation will arrive, but not before.”
I am not as sure about this paragraph:
“The intention of central banks is to maintain price stability in this environment and, as a monetary phenomenon, to calibrate the increase in the money supply so that inflation is not fueled by an excessive increase in the money in circulation. To this end, they are controlling (in collusion with some governments) the price of a fundamental asset: oil. Inflation is not predetermined by oil prices, but it is historically known that a rise in crude oil prices leads to increases in other economic elements, due to the importance of global transportation.
I doubt that they act in collusion. It may be that they all have similar self-interests. No one wants run-away inflation in oil prices, not even oil producers. But they don’t want them too low, either.
I don’t know to what extent all of the problems we are encountering will destabilize the world. I feel as frustrated as quark about not being able to decide when things fall apart. Maybe the issue will be hyperinflation, followed by rapid deflation. As long as governments are around, they will keep adding debt, perhaps in the crazy way Japan has done this.
Sorry, yes, here is the link:
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/11/lo-unico-que-le-interesa-la-gente-es.html
the blog is in Spanish but hit the translate option usually on the address bar.
Thinking about this, perhaps there are two different price levels we need to be thinking about:
1. The price level of oil relative to other products. It must be at a Goldilocks Level–not too high for consumers and not too low for producers.
2. The extent to which inflation is built into the system, by more money printing and related changes, relative to the amount of goods and services that can actually be produced. This is the part that can go to hyperinflation.
The fact that two things are going on at once is what leads to confusion.
The two price level is a good framework. At a very fundamental level, the ultimate constraint in production is when there are not enough materials to produce, or when there is not enough energy available for production. In a way, a measure of that availability is the price of oil, relative to the rest of the other products in the economy. Money printing attempt,at its core, to boost production by guaranteeing money to be invested and paid to those developing resources and creating products. If one understand inflation as basically a mismatch between production and money supply, the scenario for hyperinflation, and therefore for the collapse of the system is clear. Money cannot produce what is not available to be produced, once physical or technological limits to the recoverability of oil and minerals is reached, no amount of money will make them available, production will be reduced, and more money supply will exacerbate the inflation, hyperinflation will be inevitable.
That is the way I think about it, too.
Digital Euro will have a holding limit of 3k
Digital UK Pound will have a holding limit of 10k
https://x.com/SMQKEDQG/status/1985056116321956317
https://x.com/SMQKEDQG/status/1984578169773367305
A video says that the digital euro is planned to be introduced in 2029.
The low caps indicate that they are not for buying goods like trucks, cars, homes, or factories. In fact, they probably couldn’t be used for college tuition or other high cost purchases. In the US, medical care is often very high cost, if not covered by insurance.
The huge 18% drop in freight carried is not talked about in the press, nor the possibility of lots of bankruptcies and up to 600,000 layoffs of truck drivers.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/largest-capacity-purge-in-history-coming?oly_enc_id=4913D6598389I7Y
Largest capacity purge in history coming
Motor carriers and freight brokers across the spectrum are feeling significant pain from weak freight volumes and a rapidly changing operating climate. What we’re witnessing appears to be the calm before a significant storm, with indicators pointing toward what could become the largest capacity washout in trucking history.
With the risk of the market eliminating 600,000 active drivers, the largest capacity purge in history may be coming, bringing COVID-like spot rates. The difference this time is that there won’t be a flood of immigrants created by Biden’s open borders, which offered an endless supply of truck drivers. The capacity relief valve for shippers and brokers is forever shut, meaning carriers will have to pay up in terms of higher pay and bonuses for truck drivers. Capacity will also be much harder to find. . .
https://x.com/i/status/1983643301203833314
Freight volumes have dramatically decreased, with year-over-year figures showing a staggering 18% decline. This precipitous drop has created severe challenges for motor carriers struggling to find loads and for freight brokers operating with minimal volume to sustain their businesses.
The situation is particularly dire for brokers with spot market exposure, as the scarcity of freight leaves little room for profitability. Even the contract market presents significant challenges, as many brokers have locked in business at unsustainably low rates while competing against asset-based carriers. This has created a system where many participants are underwater, and it is not sustainable.
I think you left the fact that we left a gold backed monetary system and went to a debt based system from you’re analogy of prices going up! Sure looks like the oil producers, top executives pay surely went up by factors which far exceeded the price of oil! Also record profits for them oil companies! Guess that wealth effect had nothing to do with it either.
I think your comment ended up in the wrong place. You intended it for the post I wrote, not in response to the trucking problem.
Yes, indeed, going off the gold standard did give “room” for the oil price to rise. It also left room for inflation in general, because wages were raised in the 1970s, so that workers could keep up with inflation.
The 1970s was the time when there was suddenly a need for larger, more complex companies of all kinds, including oil companies, because the easy to extract oil was no longer abundant. These companies used more debt. They had more international operations. Chief executives of all kinds of companies, including oil companies, started getting more money.
There were temporarily record profits for oil companies. But they fell, and low prices were a problem for many years. Things don’t stay the same for oil. Central banks keep trying to fix problems.
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/11/lo-unico-que-le-interesa-la-gente-es.html?m=1
Future of oil prices.?
This seems to be a link to the article referred to by Tagio in this comment (which is in English).
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/10/31/a-lack-of-very-cheap-oil-is-leading-to-debt-problems/#comment-494790
The way I read this link, the article is really by Lyn Alden. Quark seems to have copied the article over because he thought it was such an outstanding analysis. I agree. This article has some very good insights.
I looked at the article, itself. The article is by Quark. There is only a chart by Lyn Alden.
I might add “the huge AI valuations.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/eye-stock-market-sht-storm
The Eye Of The (Stock Market Sh*t) Storm
I think I’ve identified the four horsemen of the next stock market apocalypse — each one manageable in isolation, but collectively large enough to reshape a financial system priced for perfection.
Subprime auto, commercial real estate, private credit, and crypto all scratch me where I itch when thinking about precarious pockets of today’s stock market.
None of these areas is as systemically concentrated as subprime mortgages were before 2008, but each contains hidden leverage, murky valuations, and exposures lurking in balance sheets that investors prefer not to scrutinize until they absolutely have to — sometimes done by a bankruptcy court.
When assets across multiple pockets of the market are simultaneously stressed — and markets are trading at historic highs — even smaller shocks can cascade. . .
By almost any valuation metric — price to earnings, cash flow, sales, enterprise value — broad asset prices sit near or at all-time highs, quietly assuming that everything will keep going right.
OPEC+
No production rise for Q1 2026, only token increase for December..
Bringing the oil price down benefits no one.
What if the claim on real world assets is brought down on its knees by tokenizing it? Capped like an ounce of copper used by an electrician on the job?
because hout—if you have a mortgage on your house, and its value is arbitrarily reduced by government edict, you will still be liable to pay off the mortgage, on a property that worth less
Good point! Also, taxes will always be due.
Taxes are an aftertax cost, think of taxes and insurance as rent. As demonstrated above, the saver in paper loses, the debtor wins. Adjust the principle according to income so the “rent” is affordable and it is a no brainer, you get rich.
China has staggering debts, they are the manufacturing capital of the world and their people are learning incredible skills. Those skills are wealth.
Working in a factory is a social structure, if it does not work nothing gets made; that is grading. The greater the profit, the higher the social skills.
Dennis L.
Maybe Norm but you’re replying to hout with a hypothetical (enduring debt liability) that wasn’t implicit in his hypothetical. Instead, his scenario might include targeted jubilees. In America, at least, I certainly expect homeowners not to lose their homes come deflation. Renters didn’t even have to pay rent during the plandemic.
In hyperinflating countries the hyperinflations will be effective debt jubilees. The Hand is a national socialist now and does not like usurious fascism.
Here we come, I’ve not internalized that interesting point before. So, your model expects sort of mixed bag of both deflationary and hyperinflationary zones out there globally and across / within ~similar time frame?
it seems to me that all debt is interlinked—i could be wrong.
targeted debt jubilees would appear to have a lopsided effect on collective finances—one kind of debt is relieved, while another isnt..—who will decide?
the usa is now well on the way to fascism, and instead of declaring military war, it is declaring economic war on the world…
this will ultimately collapse the american economic system, and break up the nation itself.—it could also collapse the world economic system.
the breakup of america is something i wrote about 10 years ago (as did many others)…..but i didnt foresee a nutcase president pulling all the wrong economic levers to bring it about, and a bunch of lunatics standing around admiring his new clothes while he does it.
he now threatens to attack Nigeria ”to protect christians”. (Added to the list of Canada, Greenland, Panama, venezuela.—how many more?)
hitler attacked czechoslovakia to ”protect native germans.” he attacked poland for ”liebensraum”—-that sounds a lot like canada to me..
all this political insanity affects global economic stability. (such as it is).
Another of my ’10 year predictions’ on OFW and elsewhere was:
”global collapse will come, not throught shortage of resources, but by fighting over what’s left.”
how’s that looking right now, in the mid 2020s—hmmm???
AS i said, my crystal ball was only a cheap one from Amazon, so it doesnt work all the time, but not bad so far.
I agree. With hyperinflation, homeowners will not lose their homes. No government would want to put a large share of the population out on the streets. It will be like a debt jubilee.
But homeowners will still need food, and jobs will be important for buying food. This may become an important consideration. There may not be any jobs near a person’s home. That will be the reason why people will need to move. Much simpler homes will need to be built out in the countryside, if jobs are available there.
Jubilee: one man wins, one man loses. A worker saves all his life and finds that part of his life’s efforts not available. Saving is basically putting forward assets to be claimed at a later date. If they are not there, why save? That is a very poor society.
Dennis L.
jak, yeah, of course there are going to be bifurcating currency dynamics between the petrodollar energy proxy currency that is the only currency functionally backed by, and nominally pegged to, a barrel of oil, and all other currencies not backed by anything but their variously floating pegs to the dollar. And what happens to the floating pegs during the global flight to safety to the dollar? The other currencies float to the moon in depreciation.
If the dollar is pegged to oil, and oil price collapses, such that the dollar’s inverse nominal peg to the barrel price causes the dollar to explode in real value relative to all the other currencies, then the other currencies crash.
Quark has it all backwards, at best, and needs to go and read Nicole Foss’ primers or come up in here and debate me. This is not my theory, this true Fossian structuralism, living-on and continuing to grow in her absence.
What has happened to Nichole Foss?
There’s nothing on her blog since 2022, and even then only a few videos.
https://www.foss.blog/blog/
I know that sometime in the first Trump presidency, she adopted a team Blue perspective while her former colleague at TAE Iiagi was basically rooting for team Red.
Frankly, this August 2020 interview that she gave to Aaron Wissner is embarrassing. Imagine a more analytical version of Norman, who delves into the details and explains in detail. According to Nichole in 2020, all the Dems, including Hillary, Obama, Biden, and Mueller—who as as special prosecutor was investigating Trump for most of his first term—are decent people who are persecuted by the Republicans, while Trump and all his cronies a corrupt criminal mafia. Sounds like she has only half the story there.
Also, she goes on an on in an almost panicky worried tone as she catalogues all the Republican misdeeds and what’s going to happen after the upcoming 2020 election, and doesn’t manage to break into a smile until she mentions that Steve Bannon has been arrested. (If you remember, Bannon was also arrested, charged, found guilty, and imprisoned in the run up to the 2024 election.)
I’m only half way through this one-hour interview, but it’s my honest impression so far.
I sent her an email and asked her how she is doing. I don’t know whether I will get anything back. Over the years, I have corresponded with lots of people writing in this general area.
In the second half, Nicole talks about Covid. This was in the first year of the Plandemic, before the jabs. She was living in Wellington, New Zealand, and she was quite sure there was a real coronavirus out there that could potentially kill some people and make a lot more of them very ill.
She gave some sensible-sounding advice about taking care of your health in order to minimize your symptoms if you caught the bug.
Surprisingly, for me, she was enthusiastic about the contact tracing act that was rolled out in NZ, where people had to use a smartphone app and photograph one of those cockroach-like crossword puzzle-like square things in order to tell Big Brother (or Big Jacinda as it was at the time) who you were and where you were. I can only conclude that Nicole had fallen for the COVID scam hook, line, and sinker as of that point in time, and assumed it was a real global health emergency justifying the fascio-communist totalitarian policies that she had previously claimed to be against.
Now, at 47 minutes in, Nicole is saying that the US response was:
“It came out that the reason that there was no effective national response at the beginning [in the US] was that [Jared] Kushner was in charge of the task force at the time, and it [COVID-19] was only hitting blue states. They let it burn through blue states deliberately because they were blue states. This again, is illegal, it is grossly corrupt, and several lawyers who I’ve been following—really serious constitutional lawyers—have pointed out there are several people in the administration who are now liable for culpable homicide—where you could absolutely prove beyond a reasonable doubt every element of the case for culpable homicide for Trump, Kushner, and several other people in the administration.”
Nicole spends most of this interview finding ways to blame Donald Trump and his minions for all manner of evils. I’m genuinely impressed at the scale of her accusations. This particular one about letting COVID burn through blue states is particularly nasty. It’s right up there with blaming NY Governor Cuomo for sending sick COVID sufferers into nursing homes, or blaming FEMA for not helping people in North Carolina who were Republican supporters.
All I can say is if you are going to make such accusations against people, you’d better have your facts straight.
I’ve met a lot of Americans who shared or continue to share Nicole’s sentiments regarding Trump and blame him for every sin imaginable. For instance, the person who recently had a jab for COVID and another one for influenza on the same day was upset a month ago because Jimmy Kimmel’s show had been suspended by ABC and he felt Trump was to blame for that. This travesty signaled the end of freedom of speech in the US as far as he was concerned.
Kimmel’s show was taken temporarily off the air after he made the remark that the “Maga gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them” and of trying to “score political points from it”.
Somehow, I doubt that people who were upset that Kimmel was taken off the air was similarly bothered when Rosanne Barr’s show was cancelled, also by ABC, in 1918 following a tweet she made that was widely criticized as racist. That tweet compared former Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett to an ape, which sparked outrage among types that get outraged by that sort of thing.
But getting back to Nicole—before seeing this 2020 video, I had her pegged as a smart, savvy, good-hearted, and down-to-earth intellectual with a good grasp of global economic and finite world issues. I had her in the same general category as Catherine Austin Fitts. But after this extremely partisan performance, I find myself having to put her in the same box as people like Robert De Niro, Joni Michell and Neil Young. Am I being too harsh?
Tim I didn’t know Foss had had a blog nor had I seen that video you posted, which I just watched 33 minutes of it. Hilarious response by you. My first reaction: it’s a fine line between genius and madness. Yin and the yang. Welcome to politics!
Obviously her exceptional cerebral abilities shine through the topical madness — she’s a freak of nature when it comes to retention and systems analysis and verbal acuity — but madness is madness. Tell me she doesn’t at least have a rarified form of TDS! I mean, Norm be watching that video and taking notes. Though he’d never admit it, he might even feel a bit inferior, never having read either volume 1 or 2 of the Mueller missive. Foss probably could talk about those volumes, alone, for 2hrs. She’s a freak.
But she couldn’t drop that baggage and it caught up with her in a big way. She didn’t turn out to be a question everything person.
And it gets worse. Her political derangement amounts to little more than obsessive bargaining with Collapse. She foresaw the full-spectrum political collapse of the rule of law but then got sucked into one partisan side of it. Tragic. And so much so that it even fucked up what made her so great in the first place, which was her possibly flawless Collapse structuralism. When she said in the 33rd minute that Putin is reconstituting the USSR, it completely flies in the face of the complexity theory of Collapse.
Unbelievable fall from grace.
I’m glad you also felt that some of Nicole’s screws were not fully tightened there. She has been, and I am sure she remains incredibly intelligent, analytical, and, as you said, cerebral, so perhaps living through the COVID years in NZ will have given her a fresher perspective.
A lot of people—too many in fact—really got carried away by the arrival of Trump, as if every other president since JFK had been without sin. I want to emphasize that none of this in any way implies that either you or I endorse anything Trump may have done.
But to be political in the sense of adopting a partisan stance in which one supports everything one team advocates or does and condemns everything the other team advocates or does has the result of reducing politics to the level of a spectator sport such as baseball, football, or—the sport that most often gets associated with politics in the US—professional wrestling.
My granny used to love watching the wrestling. She would always pick one wrestler and root for him in front of the TV set. His opponent would be cast as the villain, and she would passionately scream at him as a big bully every time he got her boy in the grip of a painful hold, or knocked him down.
In the 20th century in the UK, far more than opium, or even fags and booze, as far as I could see, a majority of working class people in the UK were addicted to the pure adrenaline and dopamine rush they got from gambling, watching sport, or best of all, watching sport that they gambled on—from the horses and dogs to the football (soccer) pools. There were betting shops in every neighborhood alongside pubs, off-licences and tobacconists. And as Joe Strummer sang, “No one gets off the hooks!”
One thing I remember about most of my relatives and the parents of my friends in East London is that they were strongly emotionally engaged in the sport/gambling complex, experiencing hormonal surges and crashes in response to how the games and the races played out. Orwell was spot on when he wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.”
I see the same sort of adrenalin- and dopamine-rush addiction at work in people who get excited over politics, and my grannies excitement over wrestling or bingo or the horses wasn’t substantially different to the excitement people with Trump Derangement Syndrome seem to experience when they read about, watch, recall, or fantasize over something Trump may have done, or failed to do, or said, or implied.
I also know some people who have Putin Derangement Syndrome and many who used to have Thatcher Derangement Syndrome. Blair also attracts plenty of animosity—far more than any British PM since. These things a manifested not just in political disagreement, but in an obsessive hatred and loathing of the person in question, coupled with a morbid fascination for the same.
You’re an East end boy. It’s like you grew up in a Mike Leigh movie! My favorite director.
I think we should also be able to see that the Conservative plandemic dissident movement of this decade was also a carbon copy derangement syndrome. Whether we want to call it Biden derangement syndrome or Democrat derangement syndrome or Liberal derangement syndrome or Deep State derangement syndrome or whatever. A good deal of my time spent commenting online during that period was to tell those dissidents not to get derangement syndrome over an imaginary Great Reset that the Hand was framing the liberals for just like the Hand is framing Mossad for the imaginary Kirk assassination or the Hand is framing MAGA for an imaginary neofeudalism. It’s all the same playbook.
I just don’t understand why collapsniks with a mature systems theory of Collapse would ever suffer from political derangement syndrome. As if the Collapse of consumer culture isn’t going to be a total shitshow every which way on the political spectrum, whether it’s all consent factory herding machinations by the Hand or just the organic, gyrating death throes of the idiocracy.
What is wrong with people lol.
I think we should also be able to see that the Conservative plandemic dissident movement of this decade was also a carbon copy derangement syndrome.
Indeed we should. Although I admit I got a bit caught up in this myself during the COVID years and even exhibited a touch of Biden Derangement Syndrome when he declared a winter of death for the unvaxed, and before that, in 2016, I went down with a touch of Hillary Derangement —although most people have had a touch of that.
The urge to experience righteous revolution was too tempting that it didn’t require much triggering, and I found myself believing in the characters of these political actors in exactly the same way my granny and her bingo-playing friends believed in the authenticity of those pro-wrestlers.
My brother rightly used to make fun of me during our teenage years for how long I held on to my belief that pro wrestling was real.
I did it for you, Copilot. You lose, buy a home with the largest mortgage you can get.
🏠 Home Price Appreciation (1995–2025)
Median home price in 1995: ~$100,000
Median home price in 2025: ~$504,000
Relative increase: 404%
If the house cost $1 in 1995, it would cost $5.04 today
💰 Mortgage Interest Cost (30-Year Fixed)
Assuming:
Loan amount: $1 (for simplicity)
Term: 30 years
Average interest rate: ~7% (typical for 1990s–early 2000s mortgages)
Monthly payment: ~$0.007 (principal + interest)
Total paid over 30 years: ~$2.52
Total interest paid: ~$1.52
But since interest is tax-deductible, assuming a 25% marginal tax rate:
Effective interest cost: $1.52 × (1 – 0.25) = $1.14
Next problem please.
Dennis L.
its called turning the planet into cash
weve all done it.
trouble is, the planet is finite—-human greed is infinite.
in that—you have the crux of all our problems
This approach has worked because the buyer has been able to somehow capture inflation for his/her own benefit.
There are things that go badly wrong with this approach, however. The interest seems to accumulate to those who are already wealthy. A person can only access the greater “value” of the property through more loans. These loans are generally not tax deductible, I believe.
Also, the price of homes becomes way too high for most would-be new homeowners. Either a government program needs to bridge this gap, or relatives of the would-be buyers need to bridge the gap.
To Gail’s reply below.
🔢 Estimating Reduction in Housing Units
Let’s assume:
Current divorce rate leads to ~15 million divorced households
If capped at 5%, we reduce the number of divorces by ~50% (from ~10% lifetime divorce risk to 5%)
That could mean 7.5 million fewer divorced households
If each avoided divorce prevents the formation of a separate household:
Estimated reduction in housing units: 7–8 million
This is a rough estimate, but it highlights how divorce contributes to household formation and housing demand.
This from Copilot. In this light divorce is a factor in the increase in housing costs to say nothing of the loss of money to lawyers.
Dennis L.
But divorce does keep up the demand for apartments and houses.
And, as you point out, lawyers like the business. So there are people who want divorce rates to be quite high.
In recent years, couples have just been “living together.” Especially, poor young couples. They don’t get married, but they separate often. They seem to be big users of the welfare system.
Googling “does the us govern”ment shutdown affect the energy information administration” yielded:
“Yes, a US government shutdown affects the Energy Information Administration (EIA), but the impact varies. Initially, the EIA may continue to operate for a short period, publishing data and releasing reports as scheduled. However, if the shutdown is prolonged, the agency’s operations will cease, leading to delays or a complete halt in the release of energy data and forecasts that are critical for market analysis and decision-making.
Initial impact
The EIA website will continue to be updated, and publications will be released according to schedule.
Energy data collection will continue as scheduled.
The agency can operate for a period of time using available funding before any shutdown-related changes take effect.
Longer-term impact
As funding runs out, the EIA will be forced to close, and its operations will stop.
This means that the release of vital energy data, such as the monthly Short-Term Energy Outlook, will be delayed or canceled.
Without this data, energy markets can become more volatile because traders and analysts have less information to rely on, as noted by Climate Central and Yahoo Finance.”
right now, I’m watching ”Trumps Power and the Rule of Law,” on PBS, in UK.
i have to force myself to watch it.
I know my crystal ball is only a cheap one off Amazon…..but i strongly recommend any who can should watch it.
then get back to me if youre still laughing at my 10 years of predictions of his intentions.
Does his admission last week that he can’t run for a third term affect your predictions of his intentions or do you think that the mercurial man might just change his mind about that next week?
he needs chaos
chaos brings civil disorder.
civil disorder allows military intervention.
military intervention cancels elections.
(I wish I was the only one pointing all that out)
His actions in demolition of the WH are not those of someone who intends to leave., The supreme court has been bought(not by Trump) and granted him immunity for whatever he does while in office.
He is so mentally unstable that no specific predictions are possible.
(he now wants to invade Nigeria)
“He is so mentally unstable that no specific predictions are possible.”
He has a beautiful wife with great legs(I mean genes), a young son and eleven grandchildren with four wives – that is genetic variability Norm. This is biology, we are biology and it is frustrating to those in the literary arts. They write about life, a few live it. Those authors are spouting, ‘but, but, but.”
Prediction: his genes will go on, most of us will become dust.
You complain all the time. Go for it, fail, learn from your errors and next time do the opposite.
Dennis L.
i have 18 living descendants
i am a reasonably talented artist, having made a fair living at it, but some of my offspring leave me in the dust in that department —one of them having been featured in uk national newspapers at least 6 times. and numerous exhibitions—people are willing to pay him a great deal of money for his work—far more than i ever was.—which is as it should be, at least as i see it.
which i am incredibly proud of, naturally, —it is intellectual progress—so my genes will go on for a while longer.—his mark on the world will last far longer than mine ever will. –
but in effect, the genes of most of us go on—one way or another
i could just as easily have influenced a tribe of wastrels—there are numerous examples of that—-all down to genetic chance and living circumstance—something we cannot influence to any great degree.
Meanwhile, down by the woodlot….
Rule of Law is an ideal, no more possible than true communism
agreed
but he’s messing up an awful lot of lives in the process of failure
So, Eisenhower invaded Europe, messed up thousands of lives, missing arms, legs, etc. Would the world have been better without those messed up lives?
It is biology, one needs to go with the flow.
Dennis L.
Well, the Americans liberated the W. German camps (mostly ~political not extermination sites) so I get to spend time with my grand dad a survivor. Obviously, also thanks to the Reds doing most of the pressure work, and few others in the coalition..
However, and sadly there have been many places around the world since then with very different experience.
Frankly, the numbers speak for themselves, up to this point DJT ranks among the least bloodiest US presidents in many decades..
Nevertheless, there is still “enough runway left” such situation could completely reverse itself, although it night be more along the indirect lines of forced malnutrition as the world disintegrates into zones and in-betweens etc.
Eisenhower invaded Europe? What sort of daft comment is that?
er—Dennis, I wish youd read up your history.—to save me doing it for you
Germany declared war on the USa
(glad you were never my denitist—-sheeeeshhhh)
Here you are, Norman, from Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Normandy Invasion, during World War II, the Allied invasion of western Europe, which was launched on June 6, 1944 (the most celebrated D-Day of the war), with the simultaneous landing of U.S., British, and Canadian forces on five separate beachheads in Normandy, France.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Normandy-Invasion
And from President Eisenhower’s Presidential Library:
World War II: D-Day, The Invasion of Normandy
The D-Day operation of June 6, 1944, brought together the land, air, and sea forces of the allied armies in what became known as the largest amphibious invasion in military history. The operation, given the codename OVERLORD, delivered five naval assault divisions to the beaches of Normandy, France. The beaches were given the code names UTAH, OMAHA, GOLD, JUNO, and SWORD. The invasion force included 7,000 ships and landing craft manned by over 195,000 naval personnel from eight allied countries. Almost 133,000 troops from the United States, the British Commonwealth, and their allies, landed on D-Day. Casualties from these countries during the landing numbered 10,300. By June 30, over 850,000 men, 148,000 vehicles, and 570,000 tons of supplies had landed on the Normandy shores. Fighting by the brave soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the allied forces western front, and Russian forces on the eastern front, led to the defeat of German Nazi forces. On May 7, 1945, German General Alfred Jodl signed an unconditional surrender at Reims, France.
https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/research/online-documents/world-war-ii-d-day-invasion-normandy
Oh, Dear…
Office CMBS Delinquency Rate Hits Record 11.8%, Much Worse than Financial Crisis. Multifamily Delinquencies Soar to 7.1%
by Wolf Richter • Nov 1, 2025 • 17 Comments
Commercial real estate (CRE) loans on office and multifamily properties got further bludgeoned in October.
By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.
The delinquency rate of office mortgages that have been securitized into commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) spiked to 11.8% in October, the worst ever, and over a percentage point higher than at the peak of the Financial Crisis meltdown, according to data by Trepp , which tracks and analyzes CMBS.
CMBS are bonds that are sold to institutional investors around the world, such as bond funds, insurers, pension funds, REITs, etc. Banks that originated these mortgages are off the hook here, and investors eat the losses (see my discussion “Who is on the hook for CRE mortgages?” in the comments just below the article).
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/11/01/office-cmbs-delinquency-rate-hits-record-11-8-percent-much-worse-than-financial-crisis-meltdown-multifamily-delinquency-rate-soars-to-7-1-percent/
This time it WILL be different.. guaranteed…
My only surprise is that the growing default rate didn’t happen sooner.
Also, that the default problems seems to stay off the front pages of the paper.
I looked to see if I could find other articles on this subject. I did find a few.
https://www.credaily.com/briefs/cmbs-delinquency-hits-7-46-as-office-sector-sets-new-record/
These articles only go to a fairly narrow audience, however.
E.G. If a house which was built with debt, over the 30 years I have shown earlier the asset wins. Timing is always an issue; there is no way to save yourself rich, my guess is entropy. When the house falls down, it goes to land value less clean up costs.
Entropy does seem to be violated in the universe, but the universe is very large and does things in a very “messy” manner.
My personal metaphor is a group of gods sitting down for coffee, discussing their personal universes when one asks the other how things are going the response is, “Tried another supernova to make some elements, wrong mix, next star will do better. ” If a galaxy needs to be sacrificed for the greater good, well that is why there are gods.
Spaceship earth is very unique, many universes may have been sacrificed to make it; that is what gods do.
Dennis L.
Low interest rates do not guarantee economic growth .
” Yes, there is a big difference between 10% and 5% interest rates, but when you are talking about a quarter of a percent, it has little bearing on the overall economy. It can be argued that the only place where rate cuts make a huge difference is when you get down near two percent. At that point, a 25 or 50 basis drop creates huge sums of “speculative” money. Growth is often more about liquidity and the availability of money than low interest rates. We should question how much a couple of quarter-point drops in interest rates will really make. This is very important considering many consumers are completely disconnected from fed rates and paying well over 20% APR on charge cards. ”
https://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2025/07/low-interest-rates-do-not-guarantee.html
This is a good article. The author also says,
It is this wealth effect issue that has drawn a wedge between the rich and the poor. The rich get the benefit of the wealth effect on assets. The poor pay 20% or more on credit card debt. The interest on that debt also tends to benefit the rich.
Also, as this section I quoted points out, the Federal Reserve has a great deal more control over short-term interest rates than long-term interest rates. It is long-term interest rates that are of more interest.
Gail , Patrick Raymond on your recent article . FYI .
https://lachute.over-blog.com/2025/11/remarques-sur-le-dernier-article-de-gail-tverberg.html
Patrick Raymond makes a number of interesting points in his article.
One comment he makes is:
Also taken from the comments on Gail’s blog:
“The global debt bubble must be dealt with in three ways:
1. Repay it from net income, which is obviously impossible for all governments.
2. Continue to refinance it until buyers stop acquiring it.
3. Default . ”
Ultimately, the choice is between defaulting before, during, or after the civil war. American economists have counted 10 defaults by the French government between 1560 and 1797. In my humble opinion, they omitted a zero and all the partial bankruptcies. The only governments that stubbornly refused to default were that of Louis XVI, which ultimately occurred in 1797 amidst a civil and foreign war that lasted 20 years and resulted in 2 million deaths, and the previous one, that of Catherine de Medici, which succeeded in triggering a civil and foreign war that lasted 40 years and resulted in 4 million deaths, also followed by Rosny’s bankruptcy. Rosny, who became Duke of Sully, has often been portrayed as a wise old man who managed to repay the debt (especially on the right of the political spectrum). In fact, he was a boastful, brash fellow in Henry IV’s entourage, capable of covering himself in glory by charging a Swiss phalanx (which bordered on suicide, as the usual tactic for dispersing these phalanxes was to bombard them with grapeshot), a move that ended badly for him. Pursued by a cavalryman, he ended the battle wounded, limping, and on foot under a pear tree.
For him, repaying the debt meant paying 50 million – borrowed – out of a billion.
I suppose if enough of the citizens are killed off in a civil war, that might bring the system back into balance. Food supply might again be sufficient for all. I hadn’t thought about that combination.
He also says:
Regarding the point made about air transport, I would refer to one of my articles. In France, there are more than 400 airports and airfields, of which only about twenty are profitable without subsidies from various organizations, including the state, departments, local authorities, and chambers of commerce.
Rest assured, what makes the remaining 20 profitable is their parking lots. That’s why they’re so aggressive towards parking lots deemed “illegal” and their rates are so high.
I remember reading years ago that the companies making the big books listing the times of air flights were more profitable than the airlines themselves.
I also mentioned in the comments that airlines are no longer sending big airplanes into small cities. At best, a person has to go to a major city, and get a small (expensive) plane for the last part. Most people rent a car or take a bus for the last part. Routes that are clearly unprofitable tend to disappear.
There will be no civil war. When everyone thinks there’s going to be a civil war is when we can know for sure that there will not be a civil war lol. What else is new?
The private global debt bubble denominated in FRNs will be defaulted upon. The private debt bubble in almost all other currencies, if not all, and which will be hyperinflating, will at first see elevated defaults during the early stage of the hyperinflation (the high inflation stage), which is undoubtedly already happening around the world, but the debts that survive that stage will be paid off by the effective jubilee that hyperinflation represents.
The hyperinflating countries’ public debt will likewise get paid off by ‘virtue’ of hyperinflation.
The US public debt of FRNs will not default during deflation because the hyperinflating side of the both public and private global debt bubble will embark on their flight to dollar safety which, as it progresses, will lean more and more heavily towards being transacted in stablecoins.
I have read and watched a lot of the free energy shit.
Invariably they always disappear without revealing their secrets, or try to sell their wear to the highest bidder and never heard again.
Show me and i will be convinced. There will be gullible people who will believe all these story, but it will be quite hard to convince me.
The jobs taken away by AI were unnecessary jobs.’
The truly essential jobs cannot be taken away by AI since it is not that smart.
But there are quite a number of unnecessary jobs, which could easily be replaced, so they are being removed.
It is no different from cleaning up the house.
There are a lot of people but a lot of unnecessary people. They are being downsized. It is just creative destruction, nothing to write about.
are you on the unnecessary list kulm ?
be honest
No, I am not.
I have a skill, which I prefer not to talk about in a public bbs, which makes me rather resistant against an AI replacement.
50 years ago
i used to bang about my skills being immune to automation.
you can now even get chatbots who talk too much…
who-da thought it?
i think i have only one skill left that a machine cant do
Access to free energy has long been available – so why are we denied access to it?
Gail speaks of “our finite world”. Yes, it is indeed finite in terms of fossil fuels and nuclear fuels. It is also finite as regards other needed resources: metals and rare earths. And it is finite too in its natural resources – water, for instance.
But other types of energy are not restricted. Access to free energy has been possible long since.
=================================
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4vG6qOX374
Infinite Energy – But Not For the Masses
=================================
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZRwlYtAMps
The Why Files: Killer Patents & Secret Science Vol. 1.
Free Energy & Anti-Gravity Cover-Ups
=================================
https://www.amazon.com/Towers-Evidence-Directed-Free-energy-Technology/dp/0615412564
Where Did the Towers Go?
Evidence of Directed Free-energy Technology on 9/11.
Author: Doctor Judy Wood.
=================================
Gail mentioned in an earlier post that we do not have the infrastructure to support free energy, and it would now take too long to build out and scale up. True. But instead of manufacturing all the wind turbines and solar panels in recent years, why didn’t we spend the money on providing the infrastructure to access free energy instead?
So what would happen if we had free energy? And why is access to it prohibited?
Here are my thoughts.
1. The world’s powerful capitalists would lose out massively if free energy devices became relatively inexpensive and readily available.
2. Some capitalists would undoubtedly use unlimited free energy to dig still more mines and generally continue to exploit the Earth to the hilt. Earth’s environment has already been severely degraded over the past couple of centuries by industrial technological capitalism and by the resultant massive overpopulation that it enabled.
3. If something is free, then there is little or no constraint on its use. Currently most people in the West economise on heating their homes, because energy costs money. Free energy would lead, amongst other things, to a lot of extra heat being released into the atmosphere – a ramping up of entropy, in effect.
4. Unlimited amounts of free energy could be abused and weaponised by criminals and terrorists.
5. The global elites have already shown that they can influence and steer the world’s populations to some extent. No doubt they know about the dangers that I have described above. They therefore use control and censorship to deny that access to free energy is even possible. The video Infinite Energy – But Not For the Masses alleges that in the past some of those attempting to publicise free energy and / or market free energy devices have been murdered in mysterious circumstances.
==========================
But how is free energy produced? It has been alleged that scientist Nikola Tesla knew the secrets of producing free energy but was prevented by the powers-that-be from doing so. Doctor Judy Wood mentions John Hutchison with regard to free energy. Hutchison claims to have been inspired by the experiments of Nikola Tesla.
Dr. Wood claims that the events of 9/11 provided evidence of free energy technology. However, I have never heard her explain the science of free energy technology. Dr. Wood did much to expose the lies behind the official story of 9/11. She has a fine intellect and an open mind. Who else do we know with such a fine intellect and an open mind? Why, our current host, Gail Tverberg, no less. Wouldn’t it be marvellous to witness a meeting of these two minds? Gail certainly has the stature these days to be taken seriously by Dr. Wood. It is also highly likely that Dr. Wood already knows of Gail and her work. So what do you think, Gail? Would you be up for it? Would you be willing to contact her? That would be one meeting that I would love to watch a video of on YouTube.
dem
you forgot to mention all the crisis actors involved…
(fill in actual event in the relevant blank space provided below)
The likelihood of a free energy device being real is about as probable as the Earth being flat.
we once had a flat earther on ofw
maybe we should have given him a fair hearing
Wrong. The likelihood of a free energy device being real is about as probable as the Earth being round. Check the evidence. Watch the videos. But denialists like you never check the evidence or watch the videos.
It is usual for many new inventions, or the idea of them, to be at first ridiculed, then accepted, before being regarded as self-evident. Fortunately plenty of inventors have dared to dream and ignore the ridicule and the denialists.
If something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t—especially if it violates the second law of thermodynamics.
laws of physics dem—(sorry about that)
energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form into another. (sorry about that too)
therefore, ‘cheap’ energy at the point of use, can only come from more expensive energy at its point of conversion.
It only appears ‘cheap’ if you convert vast amounts of it.—which of course you can do. –eg solar panels, but that energy is ultimately very diffuse. Convert enough and it almost seems free—but it really isnt.
and that conversion process is of course finite.
Trust me (diificult I know)—but there are no ”cheap energy devices” being kept hidden from us.
How do I know that?—because once any device is ‘out there’, it cannot be hidden, or ‘undone’ because knowledge of it spreads.
apologies again if ruins a pet fantasy, but it can’t be helped. Like free lunches, there aint no such thing as free energy. (oops—a double negative)
(just like those ‘electric heaters’ always being advertised—that the electric companies dont want you to know about—total BS)
“energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form into another.”
I already knew that. But look at the power of atomic bombs. Imagine a less powerful process. Do you think our top scientists have been unable to crack that in all the time since 1945?
It’s easy to keep secrets. The authorities told you, NP, what to see and what not to see, with regard to 9/11. And you believed them. Because you are gullible and naive. So long as a majority of the public “believe”, then the government is safe. All it has to do is to label the non-believers as “cawn spirussy theo wrists” – just as certain troublesome people were labelled “heretics” in the past when they tried to spread knowledge about facts that the authorities preferred not to believe or to keep hidden.
lol dem—i let this daftness run on for a while, not to alter your mindset—-your conspiroholia is too far gone for any rehab—but others read this, and they might be dissuaded from the same addictions you have.
all this is out there in any secondary school science textbook.—i dont write books like that–not nearly clever enough.
nobody is hiding anything from you..
there are NO perpetual motion machines hidden in lab cupboards.
No hoverboards in toymakers dark inventories…
and NO free energy.
All this nuttery reminds of someone jumping off a high building to prove gravity is a hoax.
as he passes open windows—-he calls out—”theres no such thing as gravity, any moment now…i’m going to be falling upwards”.
to which office workers give each other a mutual eyeroll….and ask ”why do idiots always choose our building to confirm their theories on gravity?”
and i dont think you can equate Galileo’s intellect with this little pantomime. he disproved religious absolutes with observational science—just as millions of people have done on this subject.
you can visit flat earth conventions, and nod in agreement with nutcases there—- but that will not alter established physical laws.
the laws of thermodynamics exist, saying they do not, does not make them go away..
There is no way to beat the laws of thermodynamics
China and North Korea do not play the western game. The Free Energy people could go to North Korea and get the fat dude’s kiss. Then why everybody in there looks like they are emaciated?
Don’t play ‘they love freedom’ game. Urban, a Hungarian engineer, tried to sell a big cannon which could destroy the walls of Constantinople to the Byzantine Emperor, but the latter had no money, so Urban went to the Turkish side, converted to Islam, and sold the cannon which ended the Byzantine Empire.
If they believe in their invention, they would go to the farthest corner of earth to peddle their ware.
Re-read my intro, Kermit, to find out why the powers-that-be in any country would not want their citizens getting their hands on free energy.
It is easy for me to believe that the standard narrative (about the planes knocking down the towers) is nonsense. It is harder for me to believe that there is something called free energy, and that some group had enough control of the free energy to bring down the two towers. Something simple, like dynamite, seems much more likely.
I will take a look at her book. There is a strange email address available for her on the internet. I will decide later if it makes any sense for me to try to contact her.
This is her website.
https://www.drjudywood.com/wp/
A big part of her problem with the standard story is that the towers seemed to turn to dust.
It takes quite a bit of energy to turn concrete into dust, as any decent cement manufacturer will verify.
In terms of electricity:
Crushing concrete into gravel-sized pieces typically requires about 1.5 to 3 kWh per ton, depending on the equipment used and the initial size of the concrete pieces.
But that’s just the start.
For finer grinding to dust, a lot of additional energy is required. This can range from 5 to 15 kWh per ton, depending on the grinding method and the desired fineness.
Combining both crushing and grinding, the total energy consumption could be roughly estimated at around 6 to 18 kWh per ton of concrete to turn it into dust.
Astonishing Factoid: A total of 425,000 cubic yards (325,000 cubic meters) of concrete was used in the construction of the original World Trade Center complex, which included the Twin Towers. This was enough concrete to pave a sidewalk from New York City to Washington, D.C.
A cubic yard of concrete typically weighs about 4,000 pounds, which is equal to 2 tons. Which means about 850,000 tons of concrete was used in the complex.
I can’t locate the figure for the Twin Towers, but at a conservative estimate, let’s say they contained 100,000 tons of concrete each, so that together they accounted for 200,000 tons—a bit less than a quarter of all the concrete in the WTC complex.
And let’s make a ballpark estimate that turning each ton of this concrete to dust required 12 kWh of electricity.
Result, turning all the concrete in both twin towers to dust would have required something on the order of 2.4 million kWh or 2.4 GWh of electricity.
At this point, you may be hearing the voice of Doc from Back to the Future screaming “two point four gigawatt hours!”
This is enough electricity to supply a thousand watts of power to 2.64 million homes for one hour, or around 300 homes for an entire year.
The world’s largest single nuclear power plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Niigata, Japan, has seven reactors and a net capacity of 8,000 MW (8 GW) when it’s operating at full capacity. (The station is not currently operating; it has been idle since 2011 following the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.)
An 8GW power station produces 8 GWh of electricity in one hour if it operates at full capacity. Such a power station would need to operate for 90 minutes to generate 12 GWh—which is enough electricity to turn all the concrete in the twin towers into dust!!!!
But on 9/11, all the concrete in the twin towers was supposedly, allegedly, apparently turned into dust in a matter of seconds!!!!
This was just a back-of-the-envelope calculation and I gathered the figures online while drinking my morning coffee. I could be out by miles or megawatts. But this exercise helps to give a grasp of the size of the energies unleashed on 9/11.
Amazing! Something strange was going on.
I never talk about JFK or 911. It is just a big trap to end all serious discussions. People have spent 24 years talking about 911, and 62 years talking about JFK, getting no closer than where they started from.
agreed
endless circle of hot air…
pity that energy couldnt have used more creatively and usefully
What would you suggest, dear Norman? Should everyone busying themselves about the JFK assassination or 9/11 have instead busied themselves writing books such as The End of More and The Iron Men of Shropshire? Would that have been more creative and useful?
And in any case, what would it matter to you?
By your own admission, you’re an atheist who believes we are all damned, everyone who isn’t an atheist is a “godbotherer”, anyone who disagrees with you is a “XXXX-nut”, and that all our creativity and our useful activities are precisely the things that have brought us to this precipice on the summit of Mount Doom.
Perhaps I am being over-blunt, but you do tick off all the above boxes, don’t you?
How on earth would using “that energy” more creatively and usefully have made any difference to society in general or to our common future?
Has it escaped you that speculating about events and analyzing conspiracies is a creative activity and, more importantly, it can be a lot of fun?
I wouldn’t knock you for being a health nut or an exercise freak. It’s enough that you personally get a benefit out of doing what you do. Never mind that all that energy you spend on the barbells or in the pool could have used more creatively and usefully. For instance, imagine how much value you could have created as a concert pianist or a crossword compiler or a dealer in post modern abstract art.
But not everybody wants to go lifting heavy weights and swimming a mile twice a week in order to keep in shape so they can put off that inevitable appointment with doom for a few more years. Remember, different people, different coping strategies.
Tim Groves:
> What would you suggest, dear Norman? Should everyone busying themselves about the JFK assassination or 9/11 have instead busied themselves writing books such as The End of More and The Iron Men of Shropshire? Would that have been more creative and useful?
Great sum up, Tim – thank you.
well jarle
i see that you obviously think the 9/11 bs a nd JFK whatever should be a subject of debate well into the next century—-i can spare you some hot air for that.
but it is no more than that
and what about Lincoln?
Lincoln?
He could well might possibly have potentially faked his assassination and gone on to become a very credible Abe Lincoln impersonator!
You will find the book quite informative and that question it asks is hard to forget afterwards.
if you apply any energy force, you can only obtain it by converting one form of energy into another form of energy.
that is an absolute law.
if you want to chop a tree down, you cannot lean the axe against the tree and just hope.
you have to put muscle behind it.
in doing that, you expend more muscle energy than is consumed by the axeblade striking the wood until it falls over. (your body muscles ‘waste’ energy. as heat etc)
but you can then recoup that ‘heat-energy loss’ by using the tree as firewood.
but then you have to wait 20 or 30 years for another tree to grow before you can repeat the energy conversion process.
by which time you might have frozen to death, unless you cut down another tree.
(and the WTC buildings fell down because planes flew into them, steel only needs to get hot before it distorts—once it distorts its structural integrety goes, and with it the floors telescope downwards like a house of cards.)
“the WTC buildings fell down because planes flew into them”
First time ever that that has happened. And the towers were built to be proof against planes flying into them.
“steel only needs to get hot before it distorts—once it distorts its structural integrety goes, and with it the floors telescope downwards like a house of cards.”
Except that burning kerosene is nowhere hot enough to melt steel. So there you are – the naive and gullible are debunked again. But I shall leave you now to wallow in your ignorance, because I am sure it is indescribably blissful for you. 🙂
Wasn’t there a there a bomber that flew into the Empire State building towards the end of the war? Nothing bad happened
that was a b17 with a relatively small load of fuel
the wtc planes were far bigger and flown into the buildings with full tanks of fuel, just after takeoff.
different scenario altogether
There are several older movies which include scenes from the WTC “lobby” in itself a cathedral scale, the structural steel was beyond massive. Similarly, way up in the regular floors directly affected. While an airplane is just a silly can within a can of +aluminum, and the fuel fireball went largely sideways from the structure..
In other words and in summary it just completely doesn’t matter which particular “theory” is correct.
They are all suspect as in pre – manufactured side-show, that Danish chemlab guy angle seemed ~legit though, yet:
But who knows time flies fast (sometimes), complete reversal / realignment of attitudes in various countries taken place, e.g. Swedes are now the most crazy pro war element on the continent, while Norwegians seem getting more rational instead..
er—dem
i didnt say ”melt steel”
i said hot enough to distort it—which you kindly repeated for me….while still in your fantasy-wrap.
Norm, watch the videos, the fuel that was in those planes burst into flames after exiting the other side of the building. The smoke from the fires were black, denoting a cool fire. The fire was contained to a few upper stories, not the 100 below, so only a few floors could have been weakened, and only for about an hour, and then fall in freefall speed.
Norman, your grasp of physics is pretty shaky at best.
If you want to chop a tree down, you cannot lean the axe against the tree and just hope.
You have to put muscle behind it.
Excellent observation.
Now, if you want to collapse a steel framed skyscraper completely at close to free-fall speed (rather than partially and much more slowly) into an area not very much larger than its own footprint (as opposed to toppling it over like a tree you’ve been putting muscle into an axe in order to fell), you have to do more than just crash a plane into it.
You have to put explosives inside it and make them go back in a specific sequence to make each floor give way just before the mass of the building above hits them as it comes down.
If you don’t do this, the building will not come down at close to free-fall speed.
In the case of the Twin Towers, the building wouldn’t have come down at all.
Since you don’t appear to understand the basic physics of the process or the gravity of the situation, please refrain from trying to lecture the rest of us. Ask a physicist or a structural engineer why explosives are employed in controlled demolitions of tall buildings rather than the much cheaper and simpler method of getting a retired passenger jet to fly into them.
This video is a lot of fun! And edyakashional too!
NP suffers from the Dunning–Kruger effect. He thinks that he’s a lot brighter than he is. It isn’t wise to waste too much time on him.
lol dem…
if you removed the blinkers of your massive inferiority complex, you would recognise that intellect is just like the other great life force.
you are only as good as someone else says you are.
Of course, to someone with a massive superiority complex, any modest, well-behaved, mature, psychologically balanced person who isn’t possessed by an overweening ego and an air of breathtaking arrogance would look and sound very much like they had an inferiority complex.
Jung warned us against the arrogance of misunderstanding others, noting that it is easier to label someone as a fool than to try and understand their worldview. Jung did this in a Swiss German accent, which gave his warning an added authority that it would have lacked had he said it with a Shropshire twang.
dem, nevermind positron -electron annihilation energy capture and transmission (gammavoltaic), huh? Just because nobody who is anybody on the boob toob is talking about it means that it doesn’t exist. Huh dem?
Wood is drawing the wrong conclusion. Just because the technology used on 9/11 (the one in my above paragraph) harnessed a gargantuan amount of energy, it doesn’t make that technology a ‘free energy’ engine. Free energy engines don’t exist that I can see because nobody has made a good enough technical case for their existence. Everybody wants something for nothing. Working WITH the natural desires of particle physics provides so much energy that it might be said to be tantamount to free once accomplished. But obviously the technology itself is still dependent on a fossil fuel economy – on this planet anyway.
The timing angle apparently untangles lot of questions..
Essentially: Why not 5yrs prior or 5-15yrs later ?!?
It all just smells like some [inner faction] just got really worked up from “early onset PO scenarios” presented to them (late 1990s) which with some delay hit the informed-curious laymen net forums in the mid-later 2000s.. Anything else doesn’t make sense for that time window since CHN was slowly ascending yet weak, RU completely down, European govs affected / derailed then ~only slightly by Libyan and MENA wars..
Instead, the money boyz won the argument a bit later with the [cunning plan] lets printing out few more dozens $T extra (+turning up the PR a bit) and voila here we are discussing ~plateau (+consumer demand compression) till perhaps mid 2030s without major wars in the oil producing areas.
I’m not following your train of thought on this jak. I don’t know what specific timing you’re talking about. And you seem to be saying that we are still on a plateau when I think it’s well established that we’ve been on the post-plateau downslope for about six years now.
It stands to reason to me that the Hand received real world confirmation of peak conventional oil right around 2000 just after we had passed peak inflation-adjusted cheap oil and did the 9/11 regime change oil wars gambit as a practical response, knowing that peak global conventional production was knocking on the door pretty much just like when Hubbert predicted it would. And they blew the real estate bubble right after the tech bubble popped, and bubblenomics entered its mature phase.
Please clarify.
It was in the context of this particular sub thread, hence rhetorical why not 2001 occurring earlier/later (-5 or +15yrs)..
Meant as [inner faction] going most likely bonkers from internal studies on imminent PO with sharp profile.. ~around mid-late 1990s. That fits the timing, like the sudden “landmarks rebuilding” of 2001 and the following oil ~wars for next two decades.
Meanwhile, that internal research-debate percolated with delay in few yrs time into first diy PO research forums around ~2004, where “most of us” were born..
The other/parallel optional money printing strategy was deployed to smooth and prolong that ~plateau by sponsoring temporary injection boost: alt ~oilz, cutting “excess” diesel consumption from commoners via enviro mandates, hybrids, mass transit, etc.
ps by ~plateau I mean the charade of gobbled up all alt. energies and per capita curbed energy demand which just tends to appear as quasi plateau – recession like slow growth malaise for the public, yet strictly technically speaking the quality good stuff oil is already post peak indeed.. but it just doesn’t matter perception wise as long as the theater stays open with captive audience..
Thanks. Agreed!
Well, reante, you half-a-limey, please remind me of that book title you mentioned to me some weeks ago. Currently I have this one by Paul A. LaViolette to read by the end of December: Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Technology.
I have your suggested title stowed away on my old computer, but right now I am suddenly over busy with a lot of must-do stuff that has popped up, while slowly porting the important stuff from my old PC to my new one. All time-consuming stuff.
As for inventions, until recently AI was just an empty concept to me, but in the past few weeks I have been using ChatGPT, and I am astonished that it has passed the Turing Test and then some. In my life it seems to have appeared out of nowhere, though I believe early adopters have had it since at least 2022. I’m convinced now that it will eventually revolutionise our lives and the world as powerfully as the internet has done.
The idea that inventions can seem like magic is encapsulated in Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law, which states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
So when some device appears in your lifetime that pulls large amounts of some form of energy from the ether with ease, you can get out your ouija board and praise me for being way better at predictions than old Nostradamus. 😉
Anyway, have another look at Richard D Hall speaking about the “black world” (secret) space programs. Start in at the 33:26 mark. It gets more interesting as it proceeds.
https://www.richplanet.net/richp_genre.php?ref=254&part=1&gen=5
One thing he talks about is movement off of the ground without the ejection of mass (not using Newton’s third law). If this can be done, he thinks travel to the moon or Mars can be done.
One above-average speculative science book on the subject of free energy and antigravity technology and complete with mysterious UFOs and naughty Nazis is The Hunt for Zero Point—Inside the Classified World of Antigravity Technology by Nick Cook.
Here’s the Amazon blurb:
This riveting work of investigative reporting and history exposes classified government projects to build gravity-defying aircraft–which have an uncanny resemblance to flying saucers.
The atomic bomb was not the only project to occupy government scientists in the 1940s. Antigravity technology, originally spearheaded by scientists in Nazi Germany, was another high priority, one that still may be in effect today. Now for the first time, a reporter with an unprecedented access to key sources in the intelligence and military communities reveals suppressed evidence that tells the story of a quest for a discovery that could prove as powerful as the A-bomb.
The Hunt for Zero Point explores the scientific speculation that a “zero point” of gravity exists in the universe and can be replicated here on Earth. The pressure to be the first nation to harness gravity is immense, as it means having the ability to build military planes of unlimited speed and range, along with the most deadly weaponry the world has ever seen. The ideal shape for a gravity-defying vehicle happens to be a perfect disk, making antigravity tests a possible explanation for the numerous UFO sightings of the past 50 years.
Chronicling the origins of antigravity research in the world’s most advanced research facility, which was operated by the Third Reich during World War II, The Hunt for Zero Point traces U.S. involvement in the project, beginning with the recruitment of former Nazi scientists after the war. Drawn from interviews with those involved with the research and who visited labs in Europe and the United States, The Hunt for Zero Point journeys to the heart of the twentieth century’s most puzzling unexplained phenomena.
https://www.amazon.com/Hunt-Zero-Point-Classified-Antigravity/dp/0767906284
Interesting! I remember hearing about this before.
A separate Zero Point terminology, then, from the zero point (free) energy theory (about which I’m mighty sceptical). UFOs definitely appear to have anti-gravity forcefield propulsion in Earth atmosphere. That is Paul Hills technical assessment in “Unconventional Flying Objects” (to answer your question, dem). He says that the only possibility for engaging that propulsion system is via the harnessing of gravitons which are gravity anti- particles just as positrons are the electron anti-particles that power the engine that powers the anti-gravity forcefield propulsion system.
Particle physics industrialism is very simple in theory assuming that these particles can in fact be harness. If you can harness them you’re just going with the Creator’s flow.
Thanks for the reminder, Auntie. 😉
Now then, who was your fave nashie soshie? Himbler, with his pseudo-paganism, alongside his desire for a commonwealth / common market of equal-footing “Hary-un” countries (Germany / Austria plus Scandinavia and Benelux basically)? AH, with his German ultra-nationalism (Germany above EVERY other country) ? Guppels, with his early radical left-wingism (craving a German National Bolshevism) ? Bormann, who was dead against Christianity? What are your thoughts?
You mean my favorite German national socialist? I’m not political so I don’t have favorite political figures. But if I was a German national socialist back then it would be the economists Otto Strasser and Gottfried Feder, both of whom were highly influential on Hitler in the early days when NS could afford to be purist. Between the two of them it would have been Strasser because he was more syndicalist and agrarian.
reante wrote:
“I’m not political so I don’t have favorite political figures. But if I was a German national socialist back then it would be the economists Otto Strasser and Gottfried Feder
Between the two of them it would have been Strasser because he was more syndicalist and agrarian.”
You’re NOT POLITICAL ?! Well, that’s a big fib you’ve told for a start, so there you have one of the key qualities of a successful modern politician. 😉
So, syndicalist AND agrarian?! You sound like a cross between Musso and Pol Pot. The mind boggles! No more modernity. No more wonderful synthesisers,, with their infinite of sounds. We’d have to beg NP to revive the harpsichord building skills of his youth. 🙁
So what do you make of the old Spanish POUM? And the Social Revolutionaries of Russia? The SR wanted an agrarian communism and were the most popular party there for a while, until they were destroyed by the repressive Bolsheviks.
dem don’t tell me I’m fibbing when I’m not. You can’t make an argument that a person can’t be philosophically nonpolitical so if you can’t understand it then you need to accept it at face value.
Politics come in structural degrees hand in hand with centralization. The more centralized, the more destructive. Strasser was closest to natural law that I’m aware of. Richard Walther Darre should be on the list, too.
Hitler sold out to the MPP because he wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance in hell of carving out a protectorate for traditional Germanic culture within industrial civilization if he hadn’t built-up a military to protect it. And there was no nuclear deterrence at that time. If he had had nuclear deterrence then the Reich would probably still be around. That would be a trip.
reante ranted:
“You can’t make an argument that a person can’t be philosophically nonpolitical so if you can’t understand it then you need to accept it at face value.”
After what you’ve posted on this site? You’re a walking oxymoron. You must be dizzy with cognitive dissonance. What say you, Tim Groves? What say you, Gail Tverberg? Is reante of all people “philosophically nonpolitical” ?
dem you seem not to understand what is politics anymore than you understood what is nationalism. I don’t mind if you get help from others of course, but why do you need help establishing that I am politicized? Just find an example, past or future. If you try to find a past instance you will be wasting your time. Keeping an eye out for a future instance not so much. Good luck.
Auntie Reante wrote: “why do you need help establishing that I am politicized?”
Of course you’re politicised. Everyone is. We can’t help it. We all live in geopolitical units known as countries. We’re partly politicised by where we live. Why do you suppose you own a gun and I don’t? Your thinking is very narrow.
You are shifting the goalposts. I said I was philosophically nonpolitical, and you initially acknowledged that qualification. You can’t establish that I’m philosophically political by using examples of how I’m functionally political within my political surroundings that require me to be political by law. Besides, me using dollars, as I do and am required to do unless I want to be homeless, in prison, or dead, is a far more relevant functional political act than owning and operating a gun as a well-tooled livestock farmer which is, yes, cheating.
Try again, but you are going to find it extremely difficult to witness a genuinely anti-civ person such as myself being political. And with myself in particular, you’re just never going to see it because it is no longer in me. I intentionally rid myself of all that in deep preparation for Collapse. That’s why I occasionally say rhetorically that I have the soul of a Red Man, why I’m an animist, and why my handle that means “again as before” means before the political law of civilization arose. I take my philosophical rewilding as seriously as I take my marriage and my farming.
As for my functional politics as required by law, my aspirational philosophy of action is to only engage in industrial activity in order to not have to engage in it in the future. Zero recreational play. Everything has to be functional such that the farm gets closer to being able to be maintained with hand tools alone. Collapse viewing and commenting online is the one exception and indulgence. I guess it’s kind of like being part of a brotherhood because I would never have rewilded in the first place without peak oil comments sections. And there’s personal growth in it.
So concepts, e.g. nationalism, can only mean what you want them to mean, reante? You come across like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland.
From “Through the Looking-Glass”. Here Humpty Dumpty is speaking to the Queen of Hearts,
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.
I’ll leave it there. You’re rivalling Kermit for eccentricity now.
“If” AI has passed the Turing test, the test is defective or not administered correctly.
AI knows nothing of truth. Only the garbage in that it has been trained on.
You misunderstand the Turing Test.
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1949, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human. In the test, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart.
The results would not depend on the machine’s ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human.
ChatGPT responds as though it is a human being and could fool somebody, who does not know what it is, that it is a human. Yes, it gets things wrong, and no, it is not conscious – as it will tell you, if you ask it.
I remember the term “GIGO2 from my days as a computer programmer: Garbage in, garbage out!
Dem it is you who misunderstands. The key words are “intelligent behavior.” AI displays zero intelligent behavior. It is merely processing (searching, sorting, collating) the past intelligent behavior of humans. It’s an illusion, dem, just like the official 9/11 version.
Put me in charge of guiding a conversation between a bot and any human an I will identify the bot every single time.
No. I do NOT misunderstand. As I said above, ChatGPT responds as though it is a human being.
I am well aware that it is not conscious and could never be. But it exhibits intelligent behaviour (ponder the word “exhibit”) because it has been “trained” on human behaviour. Yes, I have deliberately put trick and / or nonsensical questions to it, then it gives a red error message. A bit like when the Daleks on Doctor Who used to scream “Out of control”, out of control!” and spin around in circles.
But in general you are playing with semantics here.
dem the “exhibit” qualification changes nothing because it’s not really a tangible qualification. Humans exhibit intelligent behavior, so saying that machines exhibit intelligent behavior doesn’t qualify that machine ‘intelligence.’ By your metric, if you typed something intelligent into your word processor, your computer would be exhibiting something intelligent.
So simulating is the word you want. Or imitating. Or parroting .AI is the same as a talking parrot. It can pattern the inputs/sounds and parrot them but the inputs/sounds themselves mean nothing to them language -wise like they do to us, therefore they are not exhibiting human intelligence, of which the most important quality is freedom.
Perhaps it suggests, rather tragically, that human intelligence is not what we’ve been led to believe? Perhaps we too have no soul, consciousness is an illusion, and our minds run at the software level on interlocking algorithms?
Most horrible of all, perhaps it indicates that that Yuval character is correct that we are hackable animals?
I sincerely hope not, but perhaps we humans know nothing of truth but only the garbage that we have been trained on?
The Night Hitler’s Accountant Showed Him Germany Was Bankrupt
November 1944, the entire system was collapsing. Germany’s debt exceeded 400 billion Reichsmarks. Tax revenues had vanished. The Reichsbank was printing worthless money. Food rations were barely enough to sustain life. Coal production had dropped 30%, steel production 40%. The infrastructure was in ruins, and the occupied territories that had fed the Reich’s finances were being liberated one by one.
When Schwerin von Krosigk presented these facts to Hitler, he was met with rage and denial. Hitler refused to accept reality, choosing instead to believe in wonder weapons, miracle offensives, and the inevitable collapse of the Allied coalition. The Führer’s accountant had shown him the truth, but the truth was too terrible to accept.
This is the story of how Nazi Germany spent itself into oblivion, how an entire nation was driven toward destruction by a regime that chose fantasy over mathematics, propaganda over economics, and willpower over reality. It’s the story of the night Hitler learned his empire was bankrupt—and chose to ignore it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slrggIAS-Vk
Eerily a mirror picture of the now we are facing, orr I should say, not acknowledging.
Fantasy and non reality is comforting for those insulated from the suffering.
As Gail has presented her the endgame we will face is very similar…worthless symbols of once was thought as riches..the more fool us.
the don reacts in precisely the same way…
another of my warnings
Interesting historical point, thanks.
Now, perhaps we could ~derive from it some overall parallels.
So, the meeting took place on Nov 1944 and Adolf himself closed the personal book on April 1945. The beginning of the war in terms of firstly collecting extra revenue as in significant spoils of war begun with the “anschluss” of AUT (March) and CZE (September) 1938, so lets adjust – average it out as more or less the middle point of the year 1938.
That’s 70x months in total, and as we claim that Adolf was in the know for the minimum of 6months, hence the duration of latest phase was ~8.6% out of total war period. In other words, the latest utmost “denial period” took him ~1/12th of the total run..
In conclusion, we don’t exactly know precisely where is our position within such timeline for us (or the econ/fin.system – du jour) and quite likely we could propose several diverging scenarios. For example, we could use as a starting point metric, the acceleration of US debt behind certain threshold and so on..
World War I seems to have started when the UK hit peak coal. World War II seems to have started when Germany hit peak hard coal.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/52-peak-coal-in-uk-and-germany-led-to-world-wars.png
The world is now hitting peak energy, in total. Or energy per capita is hitting a peak, and starting to go down. It is not surprising that there is a real interest in war. There are problems now in putting together the munitions needed for war, so it is not surprising that war is being fought in different ways.
After the stabbings, it’s back to the jabbings.
The Substack blogger Conspiracy Sarah writes about how she became such a hard-nosed conspiracy theorist. She was once just a normal ordinary normie who trusted and believed in the science, the doctors, and the medical system.
Back when I started writing here I believed viruses to be as a causative agent of disease. Because I had been taught that viruses were a fundamental truth, not a theoretical entity for which the proof exists as cytopathic shadows on a cell culture wall. For this reason it certainly had never occurred to me to consider otherwise.
I never questioned contagion because contagion was woven into the fundamental truth of viruses…and to learn one was to accept the other.
I hadn’t yet determined that the entire childhood “Well-Child Visit” schedule is nothing more than a mechanized system of routine poisonings under the guise of health.
While I did question vaccines, and certainly hesitated…ultimately I ended up just spreading them out. My gut never felt right about it…but I was never confident enough to stand my ground. My family is full of doctors who were all quite sure that only ignorant people question the almighty vaccine. In condescension, my dad lectured, “if your generation remembered polio you wouldn’t be so flippant about vaccines”. Naturally, there was no mention of DDT and the disastrous polio vaccine:
I am confident that my dad did not deliberately conceal this information or intentionally encourage me to harm the grandchildren he cared for so deeply. My dad genuinely believed in the fundamental truths that he was taught and did his best to live by them.
At any rate, the omissions were copious and the pressure to vaccinate was intense.
And I folded. I complied.
This is truly my deepest regret in life thus far. I feel it in the bottom of my soul…an ache that cannot be resolved. It’s the unmistakable sorrow of losing someone unexpectedly. The moment when you truly understand the finality of a void.
I might have come to a different conclusion if I had ever heard even a whisper of a notion that virology as a whole was anything other than Settled Science™. As I look back with hindsight, and play my young motherhood years over with over, I feel that ache of regret…but I also feel a searing and bitter rage for how I was manipulated and bullied into doing what cannot be undone. I am disappointed in myself for not listening to my gut. And for not having the courage to stand up for my children.
This rage continues to be fueled regularly as I watch the poisoning machine not only continue, but grow……
https://conspiracysarah.substack.com/p/i-almost-lost-my-son
This is powerful and poignant writing, straight from the heart. Sarah was bullied and manipulated into allowing her baby sons to be vaccinated against her own instinct and better judgement. Her second son almost died and remains vaccine injured to this day with chronically itchy skin and allergic to many different foods. It is no wonder she is now firmly against all injections of so-called “vaccines.”
I’m not surprised when I read of ordinary people turning against vaccines when confronted with anecdotal evidence of the damage they do. The statistical evidence is less well known and often suppressed, but it tends to confirm that inoculating people with foreign proteins and adjuvants (poisons that make the immune system rush into action like the Thunderbirds crew in response to an emergency call) is a very bad idea.
I am very surprised that a great many people with no skin in the game still refuse to question the vaccine myths such as “safe and effective” and “remember polio.” And even more surprised that there are still people, including educated and academically inclined people, who are still eager to take their Covid and Flu shots. Two personal acquaintances of mine—both older Americans—have recently announced they had the latest shots; one of them proclaiming that he took a Covid shot in the right arm and a Flu shot in the left on the same day. This attitude absolutely floors me. Of course, I don’t try to dissuade or criticize or even warn such people. I think we are long past the point where such interventions are warranted. All we can do is watch from the sidelines with a mixture of awe and admiration, as one does a tightrope walker who balances on a high wire with no net.
The fact is that the guy does not remember polio either. He remembers sensationalistic pics in the news about polio, which were part of the psyop for people to accept vaccines. It is always very hard when you discover your kin are this stupid.
Thanks Tim. As you know my great frustration with the mainstream no-virus community is that they refuse cutting edge microbiology systems theory — holistic microbiology — because they are mostly new age political reactionaries. Which makes them structural (de facto) controlled opposition. Welcome to politics, right? Their new age anti- materialistic reactionaryism means that they have a crucial blindspot in common with tagio who just came out of the Christian fundie closet: they willfully ignore that biology is spirit/consciousness/intelligence and energy (material) in symbiosis. The Spiegelman’s Monster experiments we discussed the other week empirically prove the memory-based spirit intelligence in evolutionary biology.
Here is dr reante’s sketched and divined diagnosis of this woman’s baby’s vaccine-related injury. Not the inclusion of related, because the Hep B vaccine that he was injected with two days before was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back. (From her narrative, it cannot be divined what specific role the ‘pneumonia’ vaccine played in the injury beyond a generaluzed added insult to injury.
Vaccines aren’t just poisons, as she regards them, and does so because that’s what the new age no-virus controlled opposition tells her, and who does tell her because they blanket-refuse the existence of signaling exosomes, the damn fools. They insist on sticking to the 1980s conception of exosomes as being bags of trash that the cells release. Well, that’s just one type of non-signaling exosome.
I just talked yesterday about the fundamental nature of spiritual warfare, which is the repression of creativity. Evolution is constructive creativity. Therefore biology, in a nutshell, is also constructive creativity. Reason -based. Vaccines are not just poisons, they are ALSO spiritual warfare down at the unconscious level of our bodily functions. They do exactly the same thing, which is the repression of bodily creativity that is the adaptive function (adaptation). And as I’ve said before, the lateral genetic transfer that signaling exosomes are 100% responsible for in multicellular organisms like we humans is 99% of evolution/adaptation. And those no-virus fuckers refuse it exists at all! Then what’s left? None of them wanted a piece of me on substack.
The mother and son were obviously both chronically ill before the vaccines. Both had taken antibiotics. The kid was obviously a GAPS baby, the mother also presumably has chronic GAPS issues. Those are the root causes and not the vaccines.
The active ingredient in Hep B vaccine is an enzyme (protein) on the surface of what they believe is the HBV virus but is actually a liver signaling exosome that is signaling for inflammation (a healing protocol). When the vaccine floods the body with these enzymes that don’t belong in the body separated from their liver signaling exosomes, the body’s pattern recognition is being repeatedly trained (misled) to see these enzymes as foreign bodies (toxins) that don’t belong there and need to be cleared. So once that training /misleading is sufficient, what do we think happens next? The body starts suppressing those inflammatory signaling exosomes by attaching antibodies to the enzymes on their surface so that our white blood cell complex can clear them. That’s an autoimmune dynamic. That’s the suppression of a creativity we call the healing function. And short-term trainings turn into long-term trainings.
If a baby has a chronically diseased/inflamed liver, but it’s subclinical (undiagnosed), and an exosomal vaccine bomb that’s designed to forcibly down-regulate the inflammatory signaling exosomes is administered, that’s just going to compound the problem because the whole point of the inflammation is new, healthy liver cell growth to replace the diseased cells in order to maintain liver function. Momentum is everything in life, and especially when you’re at risk of stalling out. The baby boy’s creative signaling got stalled by forcible downregulation and his liver function crashed. The liver filters out toxins, so his liver experienced catastrophic toxin buildup. What happens when that happens? We vomit. Why? Because most of the toxins we ingest come through our mouth, and the baby’s unconscious intelligence in emergency mode suddenly realized that any.moretoxic buildup in the liver might kill it, so the first thing it did was empty the stomach. Smart. But that’s not all. In extreme scenario purges such as this baby’s vomiting, we can actually vomit up everything in our digestive tract, all the way down to our colon. We can bring all that shit back up through our mouths in an emergency, so that our lives aren’t exposed to any more toxic buildup. Amazingly awesomely intelligent. Remember how the mom said that they couldn’t believe how much vomit came out. It filled the baby seat
Why does the kid still have eczema? Probably because of continued downregulation, so the toxic overflow that the liver can’t handle are being redirected through the skin which is also a filter system.
Remember that allopathic culture regards symptoms as the disease itself rather than the healing from disease that it really is. So it openly and explicitly seeks to suppress/repress those symptomatic creative healings.
As detailed in this comment, the resilient body has backup functions. It has redundancies built into it. Alternative pathways for distributing trauma in order to spread it out and thereby reduce acute disease in any one area. Vaccines ARE effective tools for suppressing symptoms in overpopulated areas by damping down the relevant horizontal genetic transfer related to these symptomatic healings, whether we’re talking about cows in massive dairy barns or schoolchildren. There is no doubt about it. But, one, it is soft genetic engineering on a grand scale; two, it just masks the disease by subclinically distributing it; and three, it can be catastrophic for individuals who get vaxxed with the wrong vaxx at the wrong time.
Reante, there are so many ideas in this comment of yours that can lead to a deeper understanding of how our bodies work, and why they sometimes don’t work so well.
You are like a bit like the crew of the Starship Enterprise, boldly going where no man has gone before. Most readers of this thread will not have a clue what you are talking about because they haven’t begun to explore the ground you have covered, and many of them will not have questioned the established conventional wisdom at all because, “the science is settled” and “ten million doctors can’t all be wrong!”
Even I, who am at least open to exploring in principle, find that I need to a fair amount of “googling” in order to see what you are getting at. So I wouldn’t blame anyone for scrolling on by. But I am interested in what you have to say, and I think it’s well worth the research effort.
At least now I know how those Canadian college kids felt when attending those classic Jordan Peterson lectures.
GAPS: This is new to me. I am guessing it is an acronym for Gut And Psychology Syndrome—a dietary approach based on the theory that a person’s gut health is linked to their mental and physiological health. It is also sometimes referred to as Gut and Physiology Syndrome.
If so, what you are saying is that the primary cause of allergies, autism and the like due to a damaged microbiome, rather than to vaccines per se. This means the shots are just the icing on the cake, or as you put it, “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Is that right?
I can see the logic of that. The vaccine shots are merely one of a number of assaults the modern fetus, baby, or infant undergoes. Only last week, I read for the first time that many infants are given injections of folic acid, and that this might not be such a great idea.
I also learned that a single intramuscular injection of vitamin K is commonly administered to newborns prevent a rare but serious bleeding disorder called hemorrhagic disease of the newborn, and an antibiotic ointment is applied to the eyes to prevent certain eye infections that the baby might contract during birth from bacteria in the birth canal.
And let’s not forget that the first dose of the Hepatitis B vaccine is typically given before hospital discharge.
Then there is the health condition of the mother and the state of her microbiome and how big a burden of pollutants she is carrying to be considered.
Speaking of holistic microbiology, I am pleased to note that my younger brother, who came down with oesophageal cancer and stomach cancer a month apart in the spring of 2024 and was given a less than 50% chance of surviving, managed to pull through and is back at work, off his meds, and enjoying himself again. he is an eternal optimist, always looking on the bright side of life. But for me, the amazing thing is that his encounter with the surgeon’s knife—half his stomach and a few other parts were removed—has caused a complete revolution in his attitude to health.
He thought the surgeons were great, and the chemotherapy was tolerable, but he didn’t think much of the subsequent medical advice he was offered, so he decided to go alternative medicine and has been brewing his own yoghurt—three different varieties. And he is coming out with words and phrases I would never have expected him to use. One of them being “the microbiome.” I am certain this term or even this concept was not in his vocabulary prior to his illness.
Signaling exosomes: I have a rough idea what these are, but I’ll give a Google AI explanation for the many readers who don’t.
tiny vesicles released by cells that mediate communication by carrying a variety of molecules, such as proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids, to recipient cells. They transmit signals in multiple ways: by binding to cell surface receptors, by directly fusing with the cell membrane to release their contents, or through other less direct mechanisms. This intercellular signaling plays a crucial role in both normal biological processes like tissue repair and immune responses, and in the development of diseases, making them a focus for diagnostics and therapeutics.
I got Google to admit that “[signaling] exosomes can transfer functional mRNA, miRNA, and DNA between cells, thereby acting as a form of LGT (lateral genetic transfer) in cell-to-cell communication” However, it cautioned me that exosomes are not the sole mechanism for doing this. I know, Google is part of the problem, due to all those built-in biases! But it does bring a lot of info to the table.
Why does the kid still have eczema? Probably because of continued down-regulation, so the toxic overflow that the liver can’t handle are being redirected through the skin which is also a filter system.
This is an excellent observation. I know a lot of people, in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, who suffer or have suffered with chronic eczema, although the symptoms do appear to become less severe over time. There were, I believe, far fewer eczema sufferers in my generation, who are now over 60.
Toxic overflow that the liver can’t handle: This reminds me of the “vitamin A elimination diet” associated with Grant Genereux. He insisted that his liver and fat cells had exceeded their storage capacity of this toxin, and it was causing various nasty symptoms because it couldn’t be excreted very efficiently, so he went on a diet to completely eliminate vitamin A ingestion. It took him years, but he slowly improved.
Here’s his website, which seems to have been recently revamped.
https://ggenereux.blog/page/2/
This comment is already too long. So I’ll stop here.
Allow for [Vitamin A – elimination] fork-detour in the debate here. What do you mean by its “toxicity”? The intake of the synthetic variant as used in various industrial medicine treatments, right?
Because the natural variants Retinol and β-carotene come in fish meat and spinach, broccoli, .. respectively.
People eating those in volume, mixed with fat (~cheese) and olive oil are +90yrs longevity category..
It’s not for everybody – you have to get use to it (preferably in childhood), but *fatty fish + fatty dressings is #1 beyond delicious, #2 no digestive or any aftereffects (e.g. no skin evaporation smell as from say cheapo meat grown up / based on DNA modified crop-fodder)..
*obviously meant as sourced from open sea (or ~unspoiled lake) not industrial granule feedstock based..
What do you mean by its “toxicity”?
Sorry if I misled you there.
I meant that Grant regards vitamin A from all sources as having a toxic effect on the body. I don’t necessarily share his opinion on that. But I recognize that he seems to have suffered greatly from some kind of toxicity and he has managed to recover by following a very strict diet.
Appreciate the support and the company, Tim.
GAPS. The Russian Natasha Campbell McBride is just like us. She has the trailblazer’s curiosity, and the necessary chops, to go where no man has gone before. She was a neurosurgeon in Russia who left the field early to become a healer and she basically did what we do and all great discoverers do, which is living for discovery, and sharing those discoveries, and letting the chips fall where they may. Although some discoverers of course are driven by money. Natasha poured over the cutting edge research literature on human biology and pieced together for herself the systems theory she calls GAPS, and for which she prescribed an high nutrient density and variable elimination diet that went by the same name, and revolves around bone broth. After we started the homestead I was in a position to follow it and did do, loosely, and four years later i came to find that I no longer needed my thyroid pills I had been taking for fifteen years, among other obvious improvements. Naturally it is the most-maligned diet, by the mainstream, kinda like Dunbar’s Number is the most maligned (as reductionistic) anthropology axiom. Yet she operates a pediatric clinic in England and gets excellent results treating children with autism. And as is so often the wont of inspiration — it’s personal for her — she switched careers because her son acquired autism, and she dove headlong into helping him recover, which he largely did, after which it turned into advocacy work for her. My stepdad was CIA, so the Hand (real or not real?) narrative turned into advocacy work for myself. Conscientious people in sociopathic cultures are always driven by absolution. Religions co-opt that drive by offering absolution for nothing less than one’s everything, in the creative impulse. The yin and the yang show us how giving up on everything represents the path of least resistance.
The basic systems theory — which is all empirically true — is that a leaky gut wall is the structural/physical root of most toxicity problems because when undigested food particles can enter into the bloodstream they become toxins that have to be cleared because only fully digested food (what we call nutrients) belongs in the bloodstream. So you can imagine the massive drag and inflammatory effect on the body that undigested food leaking into the bloodstream has on the cleaning and filter systems (there is no actual ‘immune’ because there are no ‘pathogens,’ there are only polluted/despoiled inner ecologies, such as a bloodstream with food particles pouring into it like a sewage pipe into a river). The gut leaks generally happen due to several often overlapping environmental factors. Too many dietary starches feed an overpopulation of candida albicans which is a competitively dominant and extremely adaptive facultative anaerobe that, whenever it has sufficient resources, builds a compacted/compressed and therefore anaerobic habitat layer wherein the candida turn to glycolysis for their metabolic function, from which metabolics the metabolites (shit) are always alcohols. Alcohols cut fat. Our cell membranes are fat; those fats get cut, those cells die. New cells can’t replace them because because the concentration of alcohol in that location doesn’t allow for cell survival, so a hole is there, like an abscess, and the alcohols, being water-soluble stream in to the bloodstream along with food particles. That’s subclinical auto-brewery syndrome and absolutely plays a role in food addiction. It’s another form of dry drunkenness.
We can build up pounds-worth of a sticky, alcoholic mash chronically lining our colon. That’s what bag enemas are for helping break up. That’s the basic dynamic of the Gut and Physiology Syndrome side of the mindbody systems theory. The Gut and Psychology Syndrome is just the next-level of the same dynamic whereby the blood brain barrier fails and leaks leading to ADHD, Autism, Anxiety, etc. All organisms are just barrier functions between it and the outside world. And those barriers have to be selectively permeable, which, as intelligently as they are grown out, makes them inherently delicate.
To answer your question directly, yes, I don’t agree with the rabid, politicized anti-vaxxers that traditional vaccines are THE biggest factor in autism. A world without vaccines is still a world with just as much chronic disease. And vaccines aren’t going to give you autism if you’re in robust health otherwise most people would have autism. Being birthed by C-section surely creates a bigger risk for autism because traveling the birth canal is how a baby gets its microbiome in the first place. A baby birthed by C-section is at the mercy of the motherfucking hospital flora plus those revolting administrations you mentioned, like the ‘fauxlate acid’ John Campbell just cottoned to that people like Sally Fallon have been talking about forever. The ‘covid’ vaxx, of course, is another matter of degree, because it’s not trying to suppress future symptoms by biochemical training protocols for the exosomal downregulation of bodily healing protocols — which is soft genetic engineering by horizontal/injectable genetic transfer — the ‘covid’ vaxx is the genetic transfer of tumor signaling exosomes for the upregulation of all tumor microenvironmental dynamics. That’s not even unconscious bodily spiritual warfare anymore, that’s just all the way back round to straight bombing runs of soft genetic engineering.
Glad to hear of your brother’s recovery. Did I tell you my vaxxed brother got colon cancer last year, at 51? It hadn’t spread to the lymph nodes yet and they cut it out. It’s really great that your bro responded so well to it with the yogurts and whatnot. Must be nice for your relationship.
Regarding the AI apparently contradicting what I said about signaling exosomes being responsible for 100% of horizontal/lateral genetic transfer in humans, if you asked that question without specifying humans (or any other multicellular organism) then the contradiction is because it is including microbial genetic transfer which has other means since they’re all mashed up against each other and they don’t always have the cellular complexity to make exosomes. If you did specify humans the the AI would presumably mainly contradict me because it believes in viruses, and also maybe because microbial horizontal genetic transfer happens within us within our microbiome. I haven’t looked into it but I wouldn’t expect true horizontal genetic transfer to happen between our cells and microbes. Too much evolution between us. Ok I just asked AI and it looks like there’s no definitive evidence for it.
On AI itself, it’s mostly what I use now instead of actually wading aound and through the research literature itself for confirmation of what my instincts tell me.
It looks like Natasha acknowledges the potential for vitamin A toxicity in the context of already damaged livers. For acute GAPS patients she may recommend to avoid the high carotinoid vegetables. Her elimination diets come in degrees and veg are generally the first on the chopping block (or should I say the last?) to be eliminated because if leaky gut is the problem and fasting/rest is the great healing environment, then resting the large intestine and colon, where all plant food is digested, is just common sense.
But Natasha is treating unhealthy people so she has to agree with so-called but a toxicity. Myself, from position -of-strength terrain theory, I don’t believe for a second that we can realistically eat too many animal based retinols if we are healthy. My dog would wolf down liver every day, before she touched anything else, except maybe brain, if I fed it to her. Healthy livers can process out what we don’t need. Fom the AI:
“The premise that the liver cannot process retinols (a form of vitamin A) is incorrect; in fact, the liver is the central and primary organ responsible for processing, storing, and distributing retinoids throughout the body. The liver plays a critical and multifaceted role in managing the body’s vitamin A economy.
Here is a breakdown of the liver’s role in retinol metabolism:
Uptake and Storage: After dietary vitamin A (as retinyl esters) is absorbed and transported to the liver in chylomicron remnants, it is taken up by hepatocytes (parenchymal cells). Inside the liver, most of the retinol is then transferred to hepatic stellate cells (HSCs), where it is re-esterified and stored in lipid droplets as retinyl esters (primarily retinyl palmitate). Healthy individuals store approximately 80-90% of their total body vitamin A in these HSCs.
Mobilization and Transport: When the body requires vitamin A, the stored retinyl esters in HSCs are hydrolyzed back into retinol. This retinol is then released into the bloodstream bound to a specific carrier protein called retinol-binding protein 4 (RBP4), which is synthesized by hepatocytes. The retinol-RBP4 complex circulates to deliver vitamin A to peripheral target tissues in a highly regulated manner.
Metabolism: The liver also contains the necessary enzymes to metabolize retinol into its active form, retinoic acid, which acts as a hormone to regulate the expression of many genes involved in cell growth, differentiation, and metabolism. The liver also catabolizes excess retinoic acid for elimination from the body.
The idea that the liver cannot process retinols may stem from the fact that certain liver diseases can impair its ability to do so, leading to a dysregulation of vitamin A homeostasis. In conditions like non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and liver fibrosis, hepatic retinoid stores are often depleted as HSCs lose their lipid droplets upon activation, a key event in disease progression. This does not mean the healthy liver cannot process it, but rather that liver disease affects this normal function.”
The healthy liver ~protocol/dish could be stacked up, e.g. spinach on/w. clover + walnuts. Other combos should utilize / red beet slices in some combination..
But I was more wondering about the various %alcohol levels in beverages from vines, lagers to craft beer and then even upto hard distillates. Again, it has been proven historically that in ~little dosage the effect on healthy people was negligible or even positive one (disinfection).
However, that was a different time, different overall environment background toxicity levels etc. Hence, no %alc intake perhaps recommended for NOWADAYS. I dropped it several yrs ago even for traditional dishes, say Bavarian style, sausages or duck with sauerkraut, very hard to abandon centuries old habits though.
Our beloved retrospective view is often just a chimera, as most of these opulent “traditional lifestyle dishes” were established under already unhealthy ~high density farming practices since middle ages on..
Also, the landlord simply wanted the max output of his brewery placed on the local market as well, hence the above habit/dishes just co-developed sort of as malformation..
So, the life expectancy of a true hillbilly near starving peasant was often 2-3x longer than say opulent meat+alc village-town consumer with leaky gut, shot joints, and blocked cardiovascular.
Sounds like you eat well jak. Like feeds like, therefore the single best liver food by far is liver. Preferably raw. It’s a superfood orders of magnitude more nutritious than what any plant can offer. Nutrients bioaccumulate up the food chain. As do toxins.
Thank you for introducing us to the work of Natasha Campbell McBride. It’s fascinating to try to follow the trail she has blazed.
I didn’t have any major problems when I was younger, despite years of fast living and burning the candle at both ends in the big city. My biggest health issue was a build up of thick skin on the scalp, which required a visit to the doc and certain medicated creams to get rid of. I think the diagnosis was a form of seborrheic dermatitis.
The interesting thing was that when we moved to our homestead and started breathing country air and drinking water from the mountain stream in the canyon behind the house, the skin problems vanished. So I put it down to good country living. The air in the part of downtown Osaka where we used to live was far from healthy. We had a young plum tree growing in a large pot on the veranda, and for three years each spring it put out leaves, as plum trees are wont to do, and for three years by July the leaves had turned brown, shriveled up and died. It was quite miserable.
When we made our move, in 1991, we took the plum tree and planted it in the back garden. Almost immediately it began to grow vigorously in its new environment and has for many years been a magnificent flowing tree—so vigorous, in fact, that I have to spend the best part of a day pruning it back each autumn.
I will definitely look into Natasha’s work on biology and nutrition going forward.
I hope your brother fully recovers from the colon cancer. With the right regime, there is no reason to think he won’t have many decades more healthy life.
I have a 60-year-old friend who developed colon cancer at the age of 36 and had to have 30cm of his colon removed. He has had no remission and is probably fitter overall now than he was when he was in his 30s.
His own explanation for what caused his cancer was that he was under an incredible amount of job stress working as an international event producer jetting around the world and acting as a liaison and troubleshooter between Japanese corporate clients and the companies producing events for them in places like Bali, Singapore, Hawaii, Los Vegas, Paris, and Sydney.
The Hawaiians were the worst to deal with, apparently. Never on time, seldom on budget, and usually on siesta.
But there’s probably more than one cause, isn’t there? He did use to drink a lot of beer as a way of managing the stress. And he didn’t exercise as he was always too busy working. And his mother-in-law, who lived in the same house, also developed colon cancer at around the same time, indicating a possible dietary link.
But in any case, he changed his lifestyle and moderated his workload by going self-employed after his recovery, and the cancer hasn’t returned.
Regarding animal-based retinols, the Eskimos used to eat a diet that was very high in vitamin A, primarily seals, but also running to other sea mammals, fish, birds and land mammals such as reindeer (caribou) and polar bear.
I’ve just been browsing this little gem published by the Government of Nunavut.
https://livehealthy.gov.nu.ca/sites/default/files/resource_attachments/EN_WEB_itf–nutrition-fact-sheet-series.pdf
“Did you know: Just 1 serving of caribou liver will give you all the vitamin A you need for
many days.”
More about Caribou…
It’s good to make dry meat in early spring and fall. When you dry meat out on the land, it takes on the flavor of the fresh air and the smells of the tundra.
The flavour of caribou meat changes through out the year, depending on what the caribou have been eating, what they have been doing, how much fat they have and from which part of the animal the meat comes.
“If my only diet was caribou meat and maktaaq throughout the winter, I would have no difficulty surviving it. Even in my older age I was able to confidently say the thing.” Abraham Ulaajuruluk, Igloolik
“Every time I get hungry when I was butchering a caribou, I would make a fire and fry liver on a pan.” Nellie Hikok, 1999, Thunder on the Tundra
Thanks for the concern for my brother. He was a firstborn, classic GAPS child. Very pick eater, nervous disposition. Went vegetarian at 13 because the only meat he could stomach was in a Big Mac. He wanted to own a McDonald’s as a kid, read Ray Kroc’s book at an early age. Smarter than me though. Or was. Manipulative too. But a good big brother in other respects. Took a punch to the face while sticking up for me once. Great taste in rock music, an aficionado maybe like you. He lives with his laptop on his lap so I wouldn’t be surprised if that has something to do with the colon cancer along with his diet (now vegan), his GAPS, his weight, the vaxx, an extreme aversion to sunshine (he’s pale and strawberry blonde and i’m a blonde that tans deeply), the list goes on. He got more of my dad’s genetics and I got more of my mum’s.
He’s fully recovered in that they cut it all out but it’s up to him to keep that biological dynamic at bay.
Great to hear you’ve got running surface water to drink from whenever you want. We do too, with the creek up on the steeper property above this home property. It comes out of the ground 150 yards above the north line. There’s also an artesian tributary to that creek that comes out of the ground under a big maple tree on our place and I drink from where it puts out of the culvert under the cat road that crosses it. Love drinking that water, but our well water is great too. I feel sorry for people who have to let their tap water sit for three days on the counter until the chlorine has off-gassed. And then there’s the people who have fluoride in their water
For those who tend toward the professional wrestling perspective and agree with Marx that the main social struggle is a class struggle, here’s an interestin’ conversation between my fellow resident gaijin James Corbett and political commentator and comedian turned political commentator Jimmy Dore.
Both of these guys appear to agree that the main parties are two heads on one monstrous body and that working and middle class Americans have no real representation at the national level.
Jimmy’s notes that over 90 million Americans are officially “low income” or “poor, and that half the population would have trouble getting their hands on 500 dollars in an emergency. He also says the Democrats are now the party the billionaires, and his view of the US Presidency can be summed up as “”No matter who you vote for, you get John McCain.” James, for the most part, nods approvingly.
Both of them are saying that American doesn’t need a civil war—in which ordinary folks would be killing and being killed by other ordinary folks—but it is in dire need of a political revolution if it is going to avoid said civil war.
https://youtu.be/3FJEKq59_mo?si=8gaUpkLGvmfGymMP
The issue being warned about seems to be a revolution against the billionaires, by the masses. No matter which party you vote for, you are represented by billionaires.
Yes but the republican party was dumb enough to wrap themselves up in the billionaire club…..trumpy is looking like Marie Antoniette. Just like the democrats they are running the party off the cliff. I could not vote democrat last election now I can’t vote republican.
The world needs killing of every one with over 50 million dollars.
unfortunately—–
when the 60m ones are all dead, the next stage would be those with 50m—
and the 40m—-and very soon theyd get to you…
its call human nature i’m afraid….
The Functional Melancholic has a take on this. Essentially, the Middle Class was a flash in the pan due to circumstance. It was never really intended to occur, and is now being resolved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vj3W2xhtcAQ
This fellow knocks out some fantastic one liners. I find him very entertaining, in a down tempo kind of way.
Concur Java. The bankers had to destroy the hard power of the feudal lords and aristocrats and they pushed their chips on the bourgeoisie in the cities. they created a whole world about it including the left right dichotomy within a democratic system discussed by Tim today (it was all fake of course, and meant to keep the populace bickering while they secured monopoly of the money supply). and they did exceedingly well and by 1848 Europe was mostly conquered.
the bourgeoisie was their constituency and the bourgeois proved no better than the feudal lords at dealing with the lower classes. as they were fearing losing their newly found privileges.
An apparent glut of energy allowed extension of the middle class to the working class after ww2, plus enormous numbers of service jobs were created. and now that we need to destroy all that we are having problems (kulm reading this will nod sagely).
the middle class, for the poorest 1/4 of my family, will last only four generations. for the middle 1/2, 6 generations. only my paternal grandfather family had been in the burgs for many centuries, and his father eventually managed to be a successful producer of agricultural machines.
Great post and overall thread, thanks!
Adding just one minor point, the ~former aristocracy joined the overall capitalist action in force, say since ~1848 in mainland European context. Mostly, the
latifundistas focused on improving upon existing know-how in their respective fields of agrobiz, forestry, mining, etc..
Occasionally, they have even got into some boards of the newly charted banks, but mostly the emerging largest mega banks were owned and steered by different people.
the great poet from my hometown narrating the struggle between underclass and bourgeoisie in bologna circa 1893. lyrics and song.
https://lyricstranslate.com/en/la-locomotiva-locomotive.html
He makes the point that after World War II, the US was the only economy left standing. The US could do things that no one else could do. I mentioned somewhere in the comments that the US currency was high enough that the US could probably buy heavy oil elsewhere, at a low price. Everything seemed to work in the favor of the US, at least for a while after World War II.
The thing I have noticed is that after WW II, the government bonds that were issued to help pay for World War II had to be paid back.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2011/10/10/the-united-states-65-year-debt-bubble/
To keep the US economy from “tanking,” the US had to encourage more borrowing. Some of this was government borrowing (to fund the GI bill, and various other things), but with the cheap cost of oil, it worked out well. But a lot of the debt was for individuals to buy homes and cars, and for businesses to expand.
Part of the reason for problems later is the fact that the interest on the debt somehow goes to those who are already rich. This makes the rich richer, and it makes the middle class poorer. It tends to bring down the middle class. The situation gets even worse when young people are asked to pay back debt with interest on student loans.
When energy problems are added to the mix, there is a real problem.
Interestin’ essay about the left-right dichotomy, mainly on its American manifestation, by Brandon Smith. This is for those who see the world in terms of left vs. right rather than as, for instance, as a political equivalent of professional wrestling writ large with tag teams of millions on each side.
It’s called “Are Democrats Trying To Start a Civil War?”
Whenever you delve into the modern history of internal national conflict you’re bound to come across post-crisis accounts from people who said “We never saw it coming…” or “The violence hit us from nowhere…” Generally speaking, these were the people who weren’t paying attention and they just happened to survive by sheer luck.
I think of this dynamic a lot these days. I see a large contingent of American society (perhaps 25% of the population) which has been radicalized or brainwashed beyond all reason or repair. These people (leftists) operate deep within a protective bubble of propaganda and zealotry; they function within a hive mind that does not deviate from the demands of their gatekeepers. They cannot be reasoned with, nor can they be satiated. They lust for power and the suffering of anyone who opposes them.
One can see an immediate difference between the sides. Conservatives are so independent we in-fight constantly. We might agree on basic values (even in this we sometimes argue), but in terms of policy and action we rarely shake hands.
For the political left, any disagreement with the majority leads to immediate ostracism. The hive mind does not tolerate individual rebellion. Only the gatekeepers can change the mindset or the mission of the mob.
It is strange then that this dichotomy has resulted in conservatives, with their values of liberty and independence, seeking order. Meanwhile leftists, in their Orwellian uniformity of thought, seek chaos and the deconstruction of civilization. You would think the relationship would be reversed, but this is the way it has always been.
Looking back on the events of the Bolshevik Revolution and the long list of Marxist disruptions in Europe following WWI, it should not have been at all surprising to Europeans that domestic conflict would erupt. It should not have been surprising that people would follow their natural inclination to rally around their founding heritage rather than submit to the cultural and moral relativism of the radical left.
Fascism was popular exactly because it offered shelter from the chaos and degeneracy of communism. The war and brutality that followed was seen as a balancing of the scales. Europeans wanted to ensure that the communists would never get a chance to wreak havoc again.
To be clear, both systems of governance are authoritarian and can lead to monstrous outcomes, but communism’s love for economic sabotage, mob actions and political violence are almost always a precursor to a fascist crackdown. The public does not embrace fascism in a vacuum, they must be compelled by an existential threat……
More here:
https://alt-market.us/are-democrats-trying-to-start-a-civil-war/
I would ask are the Chinese paying to foment civil war? Call it fifth gen warfare.
Strong economy .😂
Recent Layoff Announcements:
1. UPS: 48,000 employees
2. Amazon: Up to 30,000 employees
3. Intel: 24,000 employees
4. Nestle: 16,000 employees
5. Accenture: 11,000 employees
6. Ford: 11,000 employees
7. Novo Nordisk: 9,000 employees
8. Microsoft: 7,000 employees
9. PwC: 5,600 employees
10. Salesforce: 4,000 employees
11. Paramount: 2,000 employees
12. Target: 1,800 employees
13. Kroger: 1,000 employees
14. Applied Materials: 1,444 employees
15. Meta: 600 employees
The labor market is clearly weakening.
The plan is for AI to take away jobs. How can that help workers?
I do not believe AI is advanced enough to replace anyone. That is just a narrative. To cover action designed to destroy, kill, most of the working class.
Due to the (dubious) virtue of forced brain-washing by the rabid, saliva-spitting Marxists-Leninists back in 1980s, I normally disagree with you and absolutely do not believe in a “class struggle”.
But…
1) current “AI”/LLM narrative is heavily used to persuade the (remaining) mouth-breathers to redirect their (partially) justified disappointment and anger towards the proverbial “machine” (real, dumb “machine” this time 🤣);
2) Diesel/JetA are the true blood of the remaining NA economy, and therefore Venezuelan crude will be liberated, or else ⚰…
3) UBI promises are the heartless lullaby to the (soon?) permanently pacified useless eaters and other parasites.
P.S. With all my personal problems and (well-deserved) shortcomings/limitations, I heavily invest in staying alive to be able to enjoy the oncoming “view” 👓
Exactly this. Blame nasty A.I… it’s a monster.
Six billion people were inoculated by the questionable vaccines ai will fill that void in the event 6 billion disappear, collapse averted never say never Gail, the elders are very sneaky and will probably keep the momentum going for the foreseeable future.
where would we be without conspironuts
there is no plan.—other than perceived profit.
if AI replaces a worker at factory A—-that means more profit for the owner of factory A—
unfortunately the worker thus made redundant, cannot afford to buy the products from factory B, so their production goes down….so factory B looks to streamline production, so brings in AI ,—which makes more workers redundant…..
those workers then cannot afford to buy the products of factory C….which then has no option but to streamline production…again using AI…
you can see where this is headed…
Bezos’ billions can only be sustained by the labour of individuals, it cannot be sustained by AI…..but Bezos sees only the increasing profits of Amazon, thinking that is the prime benefit—for him of course.—which is correct, but only in the short term..
yes—this is an over-simplification, but this where AI will ultimately take us—cheap production of goods, but no buyers.—in theory anyway.
and No—this isnt Luddism….The machines attacked by the Luddites did in fact increase employment through increased energy input over time,
Remember Revelation 18:11-13. The collapse of Babylon occurred because there were no buyers of goods, even slaves.
i have no religion Gail.
but a lot of the bible serves to confirm my thoughts and conclusions..
Once again, there is more than one way of looking at this. Alternative perspectives and possibilities suggest themselves.
One that occurs to me is that in order to build the technological wonderworld we currently find ourselves living in, a population of billions of individual humans were required. Hundreds of millions wouldn’t have cut the mustard.
That’s why populations were allowed to expand steadily from the early years of the Industrial Revolution and even to explode throughout the 20th century.
However, now that the technological wonderworld is built and the magical gizmos have been perfected, billions of individual humans are no longer needed. They are surplus to requirements.
Hence, depopulation has a lot going for it as a strategy. Literally billions of people who were once needed to to perform essential tasks, now risk being shunted into the “useless eaters” category, not because they are not able-bodied, but because their is no work that requires their bodies or their abilities.
It’s a sobering thought, isn’t it?
I suspect that the owners, including Jeff Bezos, are a lot smarter than you, Norman. Of course, they can smell profit from a mile away. And they can also contemplate rationalizing the economic and social system to an extent that you, with your extremely limited perspective and closed imagination, could never conceive of.
They may well have goals beyond making a profit, such as building a Type II Civilization on the Kardashev Scale—a civilization that can harness the entire energy output of its home star. We can’t be sure they are serious about this particular goal, but they talk about it publicly.
Beyond that, they may even have pretensions of becoming like gods, able to use energy and manipulate matter merely by exercising the power of their will, via connections from their brains to all the mechanical devices that will do the actual work via wifi.
I’m assuming these people are atheists, so they lack the moral scruples that would prevent God-fearing people from seeking to emulate the gods. But I would also think that unlike you they do have a religion—they are devoted to certain goals that they regard as holy, sacred, absolute, spiritual, divine, or worthy of especial reverence—and they intend to pursue these goals religiously.
Picking up from where you left , Norm .
What if capitalism collapses not from revolt — but efficiency .
capitalism will collapse
a—-from lack of capital input (no meaningful volume of resources to produce goods)
or b…from fighting over the scraps of capital available.
BREAKING NEWS!
Nine people with life-threatening injuries after stabbings on Doncaster-London train
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cm2zvjx1z14t
The police are not quite sure if this was a terrorist incident, but hundreds of people were trapped in a train and scared to death for up to 20 minutes, and dozens may have soiled their underwear.
“The appalling incident on a train near Huntingdon is deeply concerning,” PM Keir Starmer said in a post on X. “My thoughts are with all those affected, and my thanks go to the emergency services for their response. Anyone in the area should follow the advice of the police.”
Meanwhile, Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch said in a post on X that she is “deeply disturbed by the reports emerging from Huntingdon”. “This is an absolutely horrific attack and my thoughts are with all those affected including the emergency responders at the scene.”
US President Donald Trump is also concerned. If the perps turn out to be Muslims, he is contemplating ordering the Defense Department to prepare for possible military action in UK, as the government there is enabling the persecution of Christians. /Sarc
The BBC has no word yet on how appalled Nigel Farage or the leaders of the minor political parties are about the incident, but stay tuned for further news. No doubt they are all flabbergasted and deeply disturbed and concerned about this deeply disturbing and concerning incident.
Good lord. Depop is taking forever. sorry guys I am busy these days and participation will be very limited.
Is the five times a day call to prayer broadcast from Big Ben? I expect it will be from the Empire State building in Manhattan after Tuesday.
I fully support the US military restoring order to England.
I don’t. They voted for it, let them enjoy.
This is why A.I. is not “smart”.
It has no idea when it contradicts itself.
Energy density and storage issues are manifestations of energy scarcity.
Just like animals and plants can die of thirst on a Earth, a planet where water makes up most of its surface.
AI response
“Space travel is not fundamentally limited by the absence of energy sources, but rather by the challenges of energy density, storage, and the logistics of fuel production and refueling in space. While space itself does not contain a readily accessible energy source for propulsion, several viable options exist for generating and utilizing energy during long-duration missions.
Solar energy is a primary source for spacecraft near the Sun, but its availability diminishes significantly with distance, becoming negligible in interstellar space.
For deeper space missions, nuclear fission and fusion are considered the most promising energy sources. Nuclear reactors, such as radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), provide reliable power for long-term missions and are non-renewable.
Fusion, while still experimental, offers the potential for high energy output and is theoretically feasible for powering spacecraft.
However, both fission and fusion rely on finite fuel supplies, making them non-renewable in practice.”
They claim all the space stations ever built relied on solar panels and lithium batteries but I don’t know if that is completely true. Space stations, even tiny ones, would use a lot more energy than any facility on Earth because of the additional energy life support machines require.
I don’t think A.I. hallucinates it just regurgitates the lies and delusions that humans feed it. Fusion is not experimental, is is theoretical. Nuclear fusion is possible, in theory, but humans have not figured out how to start and sustain a nuclear fusion process yet.
This is why A.I. is not “smart”.
It has no idea when it contradicts itself.
Sounds a bit like Norman! 🙂
Or, indeed, like the rest of us.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Walt Whitman
On the other hand, perhaps Walt was an A.I?
By the way, fusion is definitely experimental.
It’s just that the experiments are not going as well as we originally anticipated.
The world is getting rich, in a sense that the Zimbabweans were rich because they had trillions of their own currency.
You cannot print energy or artificially create it from thin air.
You’re better than that, kulm. You can print energy in the functional sense that the market demand for it can be pulled forward from the future, but there are limits to it.
Higher prices means the world is getting richer.
Bring on expensive energy!
We can handle it.
European debt out of control.
https://www.eldebate.com/economia/20251030/descomunal-deuda-ue-supera-15-billones_349772.html
EU growth from 2019 to 2024 has been a meager 5.5%, and in the first six months of this year, it reached only 0.7%, yet our financing needs have skyrocketed in the same period.
From a debt of €10.938 trillion at the end of 2019, we have seen it rise to €14.546 trillion by the end of 2024, meaning that the debt of member states has increased by 33%, six times more than the growth of the real economy. And, to make matters worse, debt in the first six months of the year reached 15.047 trillion, growing another 3.5%, while the economy, as I mentioned, only grew by 0.7%.
It’s bad enough that there’s no growth, because if anyone considers it a success to have grown by 5.5% from 2019 to 2024, they should look at what the Chinese economy has done, growing by 33.1% in the same period, and the US economy by 14.8%. But it’s worse to increase debt by 33%, and on top of that, to pay for current spending instead of a comprehensive transformation that would allow for a leap in competitiveness.
The European Union is in that phase where it doesn’t know what it wants and, therefore, only moves tactically. It reacts to Trump’s tariffs, it reacts to the fears generated by Russia since the United States could leave NATO, it doesn’t react to Mario Draghi’s proposal to invest 800 billion euros in innovation, it doesn’t react to facilitating the implementation of large Data Center systems for the use of AI by reducing obstacles, and what is worse, it continues to think that to do things you first have to legislate.
I thought this good quote from quark
I agree! Debt is a big problem in Europe! It is also a big problem in Japan. And, also in the US. There is a lot of Chinese debt, too.
what began as a surplus energy economic system…..
is now a debt based economic system.
we are told that one can substiute for the other.
not possible
Fall of the Cabal!
Concerns for Elon Musk’s health as doctor spots worrying sign in latest Joe Rogan episode
A top doctor has raised concerns about Elon Musk’s health after the billionaire showed apparent signs of ‘rapid aging.’
Musk, 54, looked old, tired and drained during his eighth appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience released on Friday.
Dr Stuart Fischer a New York-based physician, told the Mail: ‘Even at the Republican National Convention in July 2024, he was fresher-faced compared to now.
‘The exposure, the stress, and the controversy appear to have aged him physically and emotionally.’
Dr Fischer, who did not examine or treat Musk, added that rapid aging doesn’t just show on the face, ‘It puts you at risk of heart attacks and strokes.’
He added: ‘Being stressed all the time floods the body with cortisol and adrenaline, which accelerates wear and tear on the heart and makes blood clots more likely.
‘Chronic stress also reduces nutrient absorption, so essential vitamins and antioxidants aren’t used effectively, causing the ‘rusting: of cells.
‘Poor sleep and eating poorly when you’re stressed only make it worse.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-15247743/Elon-Musks-health-doctor-concerns.html?s=03
It’s reassuring to discover that Elon is human after all. Some people believe he’s an android, an alien, a hologram, or a minor deity.
https://www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/oh-tesla-really-isnt-doing-well
This guy has severe TDS and MDS, but gets the physics correct. He has done a pretty good job working out where things are going generally, and this post hits hard.
Musk probably knows the gig is up. He should have just stuck to the viable rocket ship service. That said, I see he has glommed onto military satellite systems as a possible revenue source. Plenty of money there, but also … a sign of desperation.
Indeed. I’ve not followed him or his industries exploits. But I do recall his PR pitch around the time early mid 2000s of (!co-)starting these companies that we as humans are at this point most likely done for but it’s worth our self esteem to attempt to fight the ~assured civcollapse trajectory..
He lured the tech talent and the “former mil-gov” boyz delivered the funding and early gov contracts..
In retrospect it really went most likely along these lines, “they” allowed trillions to be poured into these industries on purpose as last ditch effort.
While, the “~Asian” in similar manner and in their case not having the problem with public opinion pressed into other areas instead such as industrial scale breeders, and perhaps even hinting about some true next gen stuff like various hybrid-fusion concepts. Not mentioning the now cracked ~low cost batt storage chemistries in mass production.
So, perhaps in ~2050 Elon would be known in history books as the ~forgotten pioneer while the Asian formally tucked behind inside the run eventually have taken over the overall race.
Gets the physics correct!? Come on man you gotta be kidding me! Have fun on mars with him!
Yes. Likely meant in the domain of re-usable rockets service to orbit. Not only useful for various sat networks, but also dumping waste onto other celestial bodies and or shuttle end product of autonomous facilities deliberately placed there, decreasing risk for exposure on Earth ecosystems. All ~doable in the age of surplus (within that scenario – not claiming it’s the best or preferred approach).
And or in the realm of EVs where the components used are of aero-space lineage, i.e. high efficiency electric motors, inverters, and other components..
In comparison, the legacy auto industry is a mere step brother from another mother..
I wondered if I didnt quiet get that right. I meant to reference Will Lockett, the author of the post.
Written in 2021 . We will have an energy crisis in our lifetime .
https://www.docdroid.net/ntk9Yl5/an-analysis-on-the-potential-of-a-global-energy-crisis-in-our-lifetimes-part-i-september-2021-pdf
This analysis does not include the need for taxes. The cost for extraction is quite a bit higher, if a person looks at how much the tax load needs to be. In fact, it seems to me that if an energy type is to provide energy to society, its selling price needs to be high enough to provide considerable taxes to its government, to share its energy surplus with the rest of the economy. This is especially important in oil exporting countries.
The higher the population, the higher the taxes need to be, unless the economy is self-supporting otherwise.
Adding in the need for taxes makes it more likely that a problem will occur.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction . —- Newtons law of motion . The Dutch ignored it at their peril and of the EU when they confiscated Nexperia .
”The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) says a “critical” shortage of foundational microchips is worsening “by the day” as the block on Nexperia exports from China persists, warning of imminent disruption to European vehicle manufacturing ”
https://www.euronews.com/business/2025/10/31/european-carmakers-warn-of-supply-shocks-as-nexperia-halts-chip-exports-to-china
Any further delay even on a day/d basis = less European full BEVs, PHEVs or hybrids produced, which in turn means gaining higher %market share by their Asian competitors.. Plus the obvious political-trade deal pressure point unreleased as well..
Another excellent hit in the euro-crats score book so far.. /sarc off
ps however it could be also just taking a part in the overall charade of lacking sales volume, as other (ICE) assembly lines are shortening the work week, as reported here also recently..
Well, it’s not actually physics, it’s God’s law for human beings, explained in the Sermon on the Mount and various of Christ’s parables. It’s God’s feedback system for humanity, offered out of His love that people might actually someday learn its lesson – that they may someday finally understand that all their actions not taken out of love backfire, and bounce back onto them: As you do unto others, so it will be done unto you. As you judge others, so will you be judged – both by God and by others. As you measure, so you too will be measured and found wanting. As you live by the sword, so you will die by the sword. Inasmuch as you have done it to your brothers, even the least of them, you have done it to God.
But if you prefer the materialist, evolutionary explanation that leaves the idea of faith, spiritual growth and choice out of the question, in which individuals are akin to billiard balls whose collisions are governed by the Newtonian laws of motion: “monkey see, monkey do.”
I prefer the materialist, evolutionary explanation because it’s the accurate one. He was discussing automobiles and the microchip shortage, and I don’t understand how Jesus entered the conversation.
My ancestors weren’t Jewish so the Torah doesn’t apply to me.
“Newtonian laws of motion: ‘monkey see, monkey do.’ ”
Clearly, that isn’t the case. People have started wars because they refuse to do what another group of people insist they do.
VW downgraded its forecasts three times this year. We have seen problems popping in all areas of the Germany car industry – at Mercedes and Porsche in particular. BMW is the best of the bunch.
https://mishtalk.com/economics/vw-downgraded-forecasts-three-times-this-year-a-warning-for-gm/
Porsche’s Operating Profits Are Down 99 Percent This Year .
https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a69148149/porsche-operating-profits-down/
AI: An ocean cargo ship can carry from a few thousand tons up to over 300,000 tons, depending on its size and type. For example, a large bulk carrier can carry more than 150,000 tons of cargo, while the largest container ships can carry up to 236,000 tons.
Container ships: Their capacity is often measured in TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units), but the weight can be significant. The largest have a deadweight capacity of around 236,000 tons.
Bulk carriers: These ships are designed to carry large, unpackaged loads like grain or ore. Their capacity varies by class:
Panamax: Approximately 60,000 to 80,000 tons.
Capesize: Over 150,000 tons.
Tankers: Some tankers can be even larger. For instance, the largest recorded tanker could carry 564,000
—
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUdaBnJ58jI
Neoliner Origin
World’s largest cargo sailboat makes first transatlantic crossing (capacity) ~6 000 tons of cargo..
I wonder how fast the sailboat makes the crossing. Also, how accurately the time of arrival can be estimated.
The cost per pound of cargo must be very, very high.
our society is now longer geared to the speed and volumes of sailing ships…
such thinkingis the stuff of fantasy…
Gail , you beat me to it .
Sail assisted motorised cargo vessel. Not solely sail.
The male to female ratio of immigrants to Sweden is about one to one. You may have heard that most of the immigrants are male but that is only part of the flow. Swedish men who want women that want men are shopping abroad China, Philippines, Brazil. The women they sponsor integrate well as they have a full time person to help them. They do not rape nor murder.
Women immigrants are rarely problems, as far as I know. Governments may not want them because their children won’t fit in. (For example, Japan, historically.)
Also, gay people who are biologically women are rarely problems, as far as I know.
It is people who are biologically men, who cannot earn a living (or cannot afford a wife) in their own culture who have huge problems. Some of them become immigrants. Some of them become “trans” women. Some of them start wars.
Not exactly
Muslim women marrying non Muslim men bear Muslim children
Welfare queens are not problems. Women are always seen as assets even if their contributions to their community is close to nil. Well, unless they are disabled. Disabled people are “problems”.
Initial comment below is hidden deep in a thread, but I think deserves to be reiterated.
I observe EROI threads everywhere devolving into semantic battles over:
– different definitions;
– different explanatory meta-paradigms;
– wide boundary versus narrow boundary internalization/externalization of factors;
– linear versus network analysis;
– Qualitative partitioning of energy into non-substitutable types;
– nominal versus actual accounting (and accounting fraud therein)
different spheres of spacetime;
– Externalization of energy consumption via fossil fuel embodied in imported processes or objects;
different discount rates of future generations etc.
– Jevons paradox;
– Energy cost of debt;
– Energy cost of energy;
– Energy cost of complexity;
– Energy cost of technology;
– Declining marginal returns of complexity;
– Declining marginal returns of EROI;
– Perturbation of energy and resource decline curves via front loading high EROI source extraction (low hanging fruit)
– Energy cost of food;
– Energy cost of human capital necessary to build/sustain energy systems;
– Energy cost of transport;
– Energy cost of maintenance of existing infrastructure;
– Energy cost of new infrastructure;
– Energy cost of Entropy (pollution);
– Complexity cost of Entropy;
– Ontology of Debt as a virtual reallocator of demand from future to present allowing low EROI processes to be economically profitable via demand subsidization.
– etc…
Hideaway, your most recent EROI article was revealing, because it teased the reader to rabbit-hole the casual net of energy transactions that are largely externalized in our best, current, working definitions and understanding of EROI.
A single statement summarizes this dynamic: “Building the pyramids is easy. Feeding the people to build them is the question.”
This is to say that your most dire analysis of our thermodynamic predicament is not dire enough.
We are basically up against limits to growth. Nothing can change this.
I don’t think that people who came up with the needed EROI numbers took into account all of the changes in the economy that need to be supported, when they came up with their needed EROI numbers.
Back before fossil fuels (and probably quite a while afterwards), people worked all of their lives. Divorce was pretty much unknown or was at the will of the husband. Paved roads were very limited. Almost every culture had multiple economic tiers of citizens, with some tiers much lower than the others. The US had Blacks, with their own schools. We tried to do away with all of this, without realizing how expensive the whole process would be.
Unfortunately, there is a reason for stratification. Organization in tiers seems to work well when there are limited resources. Bees have different roles for different types of bees. So do termites. There are other “eusocial” insects. The population of these insects is much higher than that of other insects. Almost all historical societies had slaves. They built roads and ground grain. Somehow, this was taken as a given by early societies.
It seems to me that if a society is going to have a huge amount of surplus energy left over to support a very inefficient economic design, it needs to start with a very high EROI. No one stopped to think this through.
the Romans needed cheap surplus energy to support their ”economic growth”.
they used slaves, in terms of EROEI they were relatively cheap and disposable, and from the viewpoint, supply was unlimited, until it wasn’t.
we are facing the same endgame as the Romans
we use oil for the same purpose—we were also told that oil is infinite.
now we see that it isnt.
It seems to me that there is more than one way of looking at this subject. A surplus is what can be won or extracted from nature through the application of work and ingenuity. The Romans used a combination of animal and human labor to extract this surplus. Both animals and humans (which are also a kind of animal) can be considered as living-machines that run on a fuel, called food or fodder (which can be animal or plant based). And both animals and humans played an important role in producing and harvesting and transporting this fuel.
I have no idea of the EROEI of slave-based agriculture in the Roman Empire. Do you?
I asked a bot, mainly because I don’t know any people offline who would even understand the question, let alone make a stab at answering it. In this respect, bots are a lot better than people.
Here’s what the bot told me:
While there aren’t precise EROEI figures available, some estimates suggest that ancient agricultural systems had EROEI values ranging from 3:1 to 10:1. However, these are generalized estimates and may not specifically reflect the Roman Empire’s unique agricultural practices.
“Unfortunately, there is a reason for stratification. Organization in tiers seems to work well when there are limited resources… Almost all historical societies had slaves. They built roads and ground grain. Somehow, this was taken as a given by early societies.”
That was a fantastic take on “turning the tables” on Gail’s part – as we all remember from our early student years the interpretation of ancient societies in this respect as inefficient (vs contemporary industrial setting “optimization”). Who knew, decades fly so fast..
Tim, thanks for expanding on this very train of thought.
ps occasionally there are snippets worth to be printed out, framed and put on the wall, similarly profound as in recent discussion round here that “U” shaped Rogoff & Reinhart graph
The Greeks have a maxim for this situation.
“Give a pledge and trouble is at hand.”
Historically, ambition was the province of high status people.
There are several stories of high status people competing for high status positions such as emperor or even the heir of property. The people at the top of the social latter have historically been ruthless.
Competition like that is potentially destabilizing which is why low status people are encouraged to
“know thyself”
“know your limits”.
“know your place”
“I just get on with my job and do as I’m told – I know my place.”
Encouraging ambition among low status people, empowering low status people with welfare and and rights guarantees there will be physical violence and conflict down the line.
People who think they deserve something will fight for it.
I wonder why some people in leadership roles want that.
Do they think they can prevent physical conflict from happening? Once it happens they will lose control and control to a leader is everything.
You forgot to mention the cost of crime. With decentralization eg, people having to grow their own food and animal husbandry become more isolated and vulnerable to theft and raids. Huge corporate farming and livestock operations are too big for food raids, plus can hire private security.
One thing I am certain, with food scarcity will come increased crime, even if stealing non-food items to sell to raise cash to buy food.
Even stopping food stamps would likely lead to more crime.
Margaret and I will go out to a musical show. I will wear my Mamdani shirt. The show will have an audience of most NYC folks spending the weekend at their country house. They will be white folks. With Mamdani we will require that they take African, Muslim, Haitians NYC folks with them. Diversity is our strength or more customers is good for local business.
Good luck!
Ed, serious question. Last I heard being mayor is not the same as being dictator. The rich are having meltdowns over his possible victory but what can he accomplish without the city council? Will he have a majority of the city council behind him?
You are of course correct he will be bound by the city council, the state constitution, the federal constitution. He is selling a fantasy freedom from low social rank. The owning class will still be the owning class protected by endless layers of courts, judges, lawyers, politicians. To change social rank of the masses would take French Revolution mass killings or Chinese Revolution mass killings.
It is like the federal judge in Rhode Island who demands trump pay food stamps. Where the constitution say congress is the only federal body allowed to raise taxes. So Trump responds to the judge “sure, you tell me where I get the money”.
To be clear the whole world needs mass killings to rise up the non oligarchs, the 99.99%. Sorry Elon to get the job done I am willing to throw you under the bus.
The BBC is spreading old canards about the The owning class.
from the BBC:
ARTICLE: New Yorkers could pick a political newcomer to run their city – and take on Trump
“On 14 October, Alexis Bittar, a self-taught jewellery designer who grew his business into a global company, hosted Mamdani and 40 business leaders at his 1850s Brooklyn townhouse.
They were a mix of CEOs and business owners from financial, fashion and art sectors. More than half were Jewish and they were all either on the fence or opposed to Mamdani’s candidacy.”
Someone call ADL.
Who else is going to do the work of keeping society running?
Many native born people have become non-productive members of society.
Slave labor is not only a strength, slave labor is the backbone of our society.
I think that you make a good point about slaves.
In ancient times, slaves made roads and operated mines. They did heavy labor that “regular” folks didn’t want to do, but were needed. Female slave ground grain. They also bore children with the master as father. They could also be mom, if the wife died. Slaves were very important.
Now we have very low paid workers in many important occupations. They harvest food from fields. They build homes. They do many types of work that higher-wage workers don’t want to do.
The only reason we don’t have slaves now is because we have energy slaves that seem to be moving away from us.
my g/grandfather worked a 6 day-72 hour week, for a barely-subsistance wage. he had virtually no employment alternatives.
he was a slave in all but name
Can you believe him?
‘20 PhDs’ In the Time of One: How AI Is Changing College
https://youtu.be/bpc0QOAohl8?si=kE7MDFu9Np66PCFF
Fast. Faster. Collapse. — the true progression of speed.
The plan is supposedly one to get people ready for a rapidly changing world. At this point, we don’t know for sure what way it is changing. If it is changing to have less available electricity, people who use AI may have a problem adapting. We just don’t know.
He made the observation that the ability to memorise facts used to be a crucial and well regarded skill. So when the printing press come along, many were dead against it, because they thought that people would get dumbed down because books would provide so much information. Centuries later we know that books revolutionised education and also helped make people more knowledgeable and aware citizens.
I’ve been trying AI for just a few weeks, and I find that I can speed learn while sitting at my computer, because I can tailor my questions to suit. One thing leads to another, and I learn a little about subjects that I’d never considered before.
But AI apparently uses a lot of water, and it needs a lot of electricity, but it can presumably do more with the energy it does receive.
So will AI be worth it? We tend to forget how the internet has transformed our lives, and how acquiring information and contacting people was so much slower in the 20th century. Of course, you still get those who say, “But there’s no much rubbish on the internet!” There’s a lot of rubbishy books in bookshops too, but it doesn’t stop them going there to hunt out the treasures and the quality. So AI will be a two way street – not just something that is done to us.
I’m sure that AI will also assist in researching useful new nanomaterials, to help make BAU more efficient and keep it going for longer. My knowledge of science isn’t great, so now I’m using AI to get my head around the difference between nanomaterials and metamaterials.
I guess the food is quite a limit now. Changing clmt makes food production tricky now, too. There is a lot of old inefficient structures from the past which can not serve as permanent dwellings, too. Somehow this rubbish needs a lot of energy to replace, too.
An AI scam from hidden private phone number called me today saying I have a pizza for you, you ordered it and I.am standing in front of your door. Now I have to pay it out of my pocket if you do not take it.
The amount of lies goes exponential, too.
A lot of corn is used for ethamol
But tge wprld can use much less number of mouths
The world today is like autumn in nature: the trees and grass may still have their leaves, but the energy from the Sun is already insufficient for their needs. The collapse comes when the first frost destroys the leaves.
I am afraid you are right.
But we don’t know if there can be a “short” (probably many years) dip, and the economy can somehow regroup and continue to expand on a more efficient basis.
The trend is toward more complexity and more efficiency. I am sure that Malthus was convinced that society was at its end in 1796. We cannot see around corners.
in 1796, the industrial revolution was only 90 years old, and nobody had any concept of it—or what it was going to do to humankind in terms of growth.
malthus could only form opinions that related to his own time.
his rules still apply, just off by 200 years thats all
I am not sure at this point in time that there can be a “dip” we are at all time debt levels so a “dip” will dramatically increase debt levels to a point of no return. Are you arguing that another 18 trillion in debt is not going to effect the system?
As suggested already by other more brainiac endowed members of this forum or elsewhere, the global system of today (with its fake ~trillions) would eventually fork down into various quasi regional sub-fiefdoms, shielded one from another to a large degree..
Obviously, some of the areas would manage and score in less desirable outcomes on the ground for its inhabitants.
Quite likely even the above sketched out process would be punctuated by various detail suspenseful alterations and convulsions, say by ~5yrs apart. Hence not the worst outcome coming in the first inning anyway.
ps look at all these time zoomed out graphs debated over here.. these (multiple) 100yrs long processes do take their time..
my point….maybe be a little unclear….was that human growth will outstrip its resource base, then die back, as malthus said it would……because we are fed the lie that growth is good for all of us.
well maybe it is, but only very short term.
malthus could not imagine the growth that would derive from ff use, which was barely on the horizon in his time.
£$trillions has nothing to do with it.
Shape of more things to come in the short term
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chipotle-stock-craters-as-company-says-young-people-without-jobs-cant-afford-their-food-anymore-155415667.html
I am afraid you are right. Chipotle offers many bowls and burritos that include rice, beans and possibly meat. This type of offering appeals to young people, and perhaps to older folks who are looking for a healthier option than what is sold many places.
But eating at home is even cheaper, especially when fund are short.
Any fool can cook a pasta, rice or potato
Those who say they don’t have enough to eat should sprnd some time in a real refugee camp
Most correct.
Yet, nuanced debate applies – these folks are usually “burnt out” through cycle of hand-out poverty and unstable family backgrounds. Simply put if your family narrative is ~15-19yrs old mothers, each following next generation in series for past dozens of decades, also living on various ~gov schemes – the self reliance skillz are vastly eliminated, completely erased..
The often mis-used argument of poverty (not having access to kitchen facility) is also bogus one. From practical experience I know young people of various walks of life could share such place. Moreover, you don’t need it anyways, there is a plethora of various camping gear, portable cookers and equip.. second hand. And or past few decades mass produced cheaply overseas, now laying in dollar stores anywhere..
Interesting info here. I suspect that the “lower” debt to income ratios in the purple states is due in good measute to the more elderly population of such states relative to to others. They bought their homes longer ago and paid off mortgages
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-u-s-families-are-most-strained-by-debt/
I was surprised that Idaho is tied with Hawaii as the state with the highest debt ratio. I am aware that Hawaii is super high cost, for living. In Idaho, I suppose that there are relatively few apartments, keeping the debt ratio high relative to the population.
Massachusetts has a relatively low debt ratio at 1.24. I wonder whether this has to do with high number of apartments in Massachusetts.
There seem to be a number of areas/states tied for lowest at 1.11. These include:
North Dakota
Kansas
Illinois
Ohio
Pennsylvania
New York
Connecticut
District of Columbia
We will need to do more with less energy, which is possible. Maximise the service provided by energy to energy used ratio.
Here are some ideas past and present:
Transport – Next generation transport should be pursued. Examples are elevated on-demand podcar systems for travel within a city and monorail-type systems for moving goods between cities. Powered by solar energy.
Communications – Smartphones which are 100x more enegy efficient than desktop computers
Light – Solar-powered LED lights use 5× less energy than incandescent lights
Architecture – Passive solar buildings
Manufacturing – 3D printing allows manufacturing with much lower energy inputs. 3D printing with metals is a recent breakthrough.
Transport of small goods – Drones
Food – Plant breeding (tomatoes didnt grow in Europe until they were bred for the climate)
Food cultivation – the humanoid robotics hype appears to be another scam. However small roboticd could be manufactured for food cultivation. These could simply use GPS like FarmDroid, or could use narrow AI for sowing, weeding etc.
Fertiliser – Biochar significantly reduces chemical fertilisers needs
DC microgrids – Using DC instead of AC avoids expensive inverters and is more efficient
Any more ideas?
You are right. If we could use the energy we have more sparingly, the price of oil could be higher. With a higher price, we could extract more. It would be a win-win. There are a lot of things we don’t think about.
Of course, if somehow world population could fall and leave only the most productive portion (however that is defined) (say, 25%), that might also be helpful because there would be fewer mouths to feed. But I don’t expect anyone to propose that outcome. I expect elderly who can no longer work would be discriminated against.
the world doesnt work like that…
its not ”higher price” that allows more oil extraction…. it’s increased use, because increased use brings greater market activity, and greater market activity provides higher incomes in real terms to the majority of people.
this what Ford (et al) did in the 1930s—made cars cheap enough to be bought by the people making them. Something nobody had done before. It stimulated commericail activity as never before. That kicked off the American dream.
our income, measured in cash value, is entirely oil derived now. that derivative came from low priced oil in real terms, we do not possess the means to create real income without it.
drilling for new oil sources can only come from low price oil used in colossal quantities, it isnt possible to sustiain multi drilling from restricted oil usage. Drilling costs are ultimately met by cheap oil surpluses,…ie theres always enough oil left over to drill for more.
as to population reduction, to ease the pressure on oil consumption….thats a non starter for a number of reasons, the main one being that a 25% population crash would bring abouut such global chaos, that commercial activity would virtually cease.
Covid was bad enough, which brought little population decrease, the “plandemic” nonsense still rattles on, on OFW and elsewhere, when it was nothing of the kind.
The ”plandemic’ers never say what the ‘plan’ was.
imagine what a 25% drop would do—the conspironuts would really go nuts.
The post fact/event – interpretations vary a lot..
I’d bet ~30-60% chance on just a botched operation result (due to incompetence – overstating the goal), wild promises and projections were issued via outsourced parties during the planing, commissioning, execution phase..
For one, thing, the “independent” labs came after the outbreak [all] with confirmation of indeed damaging sub-substances involved, yet the aim-effect was always a bit differently focused-skewed among the various manufactures (and or their gov oversight bodies).. I’m not necessarily looking for a missing “single gun” hypothesis, nevertheless it’s all murky..
Perhaps, larger and long term “depop” and or “altered mass behaviour” trends appearing ONLY after few MORE decades would negate this too early evaluation of mine, who knows..
Nevertheless the recent overall general trend of functional elites crappification performance is out there to see.. , usually the shortest-simplest theory is the correct one..
Scenario 2: And or indeed very successful operation if the primary goal was not “to depop” but to knock the notional govs sideways hence ~two extra decades of tech civ would be granted under way higher debt provisions and curtailed personal energy allowances.
BS.
you cannot have higher debt provisions long term, without higher, cheaper energy input.
“BS” used to be the reply for “quasi BAU” scenarios discussed at the various ~PO platforms in (since) the mid 2000s as well..
As I merely stated above, now we can’t discount another extra ~1-2decades per specific locales, regions..
I know that when I looked at the issue a few years ago, China could afford higher-priced oil than the US. My explanation was that the average cost of energy was very low, because partly because they were able to use a mix that was heavily cheap coal. They also had cheap labor, and their factories were new, more efficient models. With their efficiency, they seemed to be able to afford to outbid the US for oil, because the US was using oil primarily to fuel vehicles.
there are bound to be variations by nation and regions
but i dont think that affects the overall picture.
same applies to coalmines, you cant sink a coalmine unless the price of coal is cheap in relative terms—here in uk, we still have plenty of coal but it costs too much to get hold of, so it stays in the ground.
I think how oil is used affects the price elasticity of oil. It seems that many poor countries use oil for more practical practical purposes. For example, in the U.S. we use oil to move fat people around. If those fat people lived closer to work and weren’t fat, they would not need as much oil to travel to work. That is on top of using oil for every aspect of life from clothing, roads, manufacturing, skincare, etc.
in days gone by, homes and workplaces were close together…..
even the originators of the industrial revolution itself lived no more than a mile from their foundries—they didnt have the means to commute 20 miles to work.
then we made the choice to separate factories from homes, and burn oil to make up the difference.—-because we suddenly had the means to do it.
its called human nature..
Every day you must say
“So how do I feel about my life?”
Anything is hard to find
When you will not open your eyes.
Mark , too many ” ifs ” . I will refrain from the grandpa and grandma joke on this .
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/?m=1
This guy it’s so prolific. Just one more from him.
This chart shows information published by the US EIA yesterday, on October 31.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=M
Crude oil production for the US set another record in August. This seems to be at odds with the many people saying that US production will decline very soon. Obviously, there are others that are increasing production.
When I look at data by area, Gulf of Mexico production is doing well. So is production in New Mexico.
Just about all the growth by the look of it.
“The Permian Basin, a productive oil basin located on the border of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, leads in oil production for these two states. In 2022, for the third consecutive year, crude oil production grew more in New Mexico than in any other U.S. state. New Mexico production grew by 0.3 million b/d to 1.6 million b/d, a record for the state.”
I hope that growth wasn’t refined at the Navajo Refinery as they appear to have some issues.
https://en.mehrnews.com/news/238299/Explosion-hits-New-Mexico-oil-refinery
Did it ?
https://www.hfir.com/p/us-crude-oil-production-hits-an-all-407
There are a whole lot of things we don’t know about the EIA data. The author thinks the oil production estimates for the last two months are inflated.
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2025/10/indicadores-de-la-burbuja-de-la-bolsa.html?m=1#comments
Are we in a recession already?
I am curious to what a deep recession/ depression would do to debt levels. It seems like it will increase debt levels by an enormous amount. The FED seems to be pretty nervous these days; I don’t think they want people to look too closely to what they do or don’t do for that matter. I think they are a paper tiger.
With unemployment at 4.3% and inflation stubbornly running well above their 2% “target”, by continuing to lower interest rates under these circumstances the Fed is acting as de facto fiscal agent of the US Treasury.
Any name calling/insults (“numbskull”, “low IQ individual”) Trump throws at Powell is mere theatrics intended to obscure the true nature of this arrangement.
From quark’s comment:
All of this can’t end well, because the pie is going to start shrinking around 2030 (more or less), and therefore, there’s no turning back, and no miracles are possible. We’ve tried with the energy transition, and we already see that it’s not feasible (the Spanish power outage has introduced enormous reasonable doubt about 100% renewable energy generation). We didn’t even need to bring up the problems of shortages of copper, rare earth elements, etc., to see that renewable systems are only a complement, not a solution.
They’ve just approved the sustainable mobility decree, which already hints at repressive measures for transportation. Add digital money to “convince” the rebels, and we already have the dictatorship necessary to survive the scarcity, at the cost of a much lower quality of life.
This is called degrowth, ladies and gentlemen. And it will possibly be accompanied by various wars and energy poverty (in addition to other kinds of poverty).
Degrowth is like the Great Depression, I am afraid. Or worse.
The great irony of historical mega trends could materialize in unusual ways, for example that such incoming digital rationing ver depression era measures would have to be applied by the very “rebel” forces in waiting ala Farage, LePenists or AfD in case of DE, anyway..
Thank you for yet another interesting article. Food for thought BUT no mention as to where IT/A1 or Crypto fits into your logic?
They didn’t “fit” into this article. Maybe in a different article.
Summary: New research shows that people tend to prefer simple explanations even when complex ones are more accurate. The study found that individuals focus mainly on visible or known causes while neglecting hidden or absent ones, leading to oversimplified reasoning.
This tendency, while often efficient, can create serious errors in judgment across areas like medicine, economics, and human behavior. By recognizing unseen factors and questioning apparent simplicity, people can improve their reasoning and avoid misleading conclusions.
Key Facts
Simplicity Bias: People naturally favor simple explanations, even when multiple causes better explain events.
Absent Causes Overlooked: Hidden or unmentioned factors are often ignored, leading to oversimplified conclusions.
Real-World Impact: This bias can distort reasoning in fields like healthcare, economics, and psychology.
Source: Mississippi State University
https://neurosciencenews.com/simple-explainations-psychology-29879/
As Gail likes to point out here, many, especially those in decision making positions, don’t see or understand the complete picture. Sometimes Gail even states she didn’t want the article too long or complicated
Had started the thread on the Repo crisis building up at the FED .
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/10/06/what-has-gone-wrong-with-the-economy-can-it-be-fixed/comment-page-4/#comment-494021
The latest . Remember Covid mania started just after the Repo crisis in September 2019 .
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/10/31/banks-borrow-record-50-billion-at-feds-new-srf-amid-hot-repo-rates-but-on-rrps-spike-to-52-billion-in-opposite-direction/
Thanks.
As Gail replied just few posts above, the feds updated GoM and NMexico data with positive attitude. So, perhaps it could accomplish to improve the econ-moral over the year end and into Q1-2 ’26 time frame..
In case yours/wolf’s REPO warning story is correct – it would be nicely disregarded as trivial for relatively long time (as in months) while the energy flow trends supposedly continue..
Sir , you have so many aliases that I don’t know whom to address . Anyway GOM and NM are only about 3 mbpd of the world’s production i.e less than 3% of the total world production . Oil is a fungible commodity . 3 mbpd does not move markets . It does not move the needle on an international scale and least in the REPO market . ”All is trivial until not . Re quote Hemingway — How did you go bankrupt ? Gradually and then suddenly .
”energy flow trends supposedly continue..”
Can you elaborate ? The system is based on a GROWTH of the energy flow . Sorry , you already qualified your post by the word ” supposedly ” . Nothing more to disqualify your comment .
P.S. : Russia got sanctioned that it is 6 mbpd of premium Ural oil of oil exports . Did not move the needle . NM is a shale oil , 45 API that has to be exported because there is no requirement for this by the US refineries . GOM is only about 1.5 – 2 mbpd .
Yes, I should have used more clear language.
It’s the attitude/PR vs hard energy facts as you provided in detail, but this juggernaut of global oil availability turns very slowly (in human perspective) EVEN at the occasion – very precipice of sudden fall, dislocation, disruption, failure.. that’s were the Q3/25 – Q1-2/26 masking window possibility remark was targeted.
” Oil decline rates are rising across the world.
But not evenly…
– Middle East: 1.8%
– Asia-Pacific: 5.7%
– Europe: 9.7%
– North America: 8.3%
Non-OPEC decline rates are much higher than OPEC ones.
If this trend persists and no major investment is made in non-OPEC supply, OPEC will keep gaining market share, as their decline treadmill runs much slower. ”
Sorry sir , but you don’t understand the basics . There cannot be growth because new oil coming online is below the loss by decline rates . https://x.com/ekwufinance/status/1984304705325892050/photo/1
update . 2 days and another $ 29 billion .
”Fed Reserve just pumped $29.4 Billion into the U.S. Banking System through overnight repos 🤯 This amount far surpasses even the peak of the Dot Com Bubble 👀 Probably Fine, carry on .https://x.com/Barchart/status/1984710090394648726/photo/1
Another update .
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/11/04/government-shutdown-adds-to-repo-market-liquidity-pressures-but-the-feds-srf-did-its-job-and-now-went-back-to-sleep/
Gail-how long can the enormous number of daily commercial, military and civilian jet airplane flights continue? I’m amazed at all these airports, jets going everywhere, airlines hiring pilots to fill their growth projections, all resulting in 6.5 million to 7.5 million BPD of jet fuel being burned every day? How long can this keep going? It seems insane. What say you?
jet flights are part of the surplus energy economic system.
ie, mostly, those flights take us to where we do not need to go, part of our spree of self indulgence, which has accellerated since 1945.
so what happened in 1945?
end of WW2, yes,
but in addition, we learned from ww2, that instead of making tahks guns and warships, that just ”sat there” unproductively, we could use the same manufactiring processes to make desirable goods that COULD be sold.
what were luxury goods and services pre ww2, (passenger flights for instance)…could be sold in millions post ww2 if enough cash and credit could be created in the system.
this cash influx was underpinned by cheap oil, which was effectively free, needing only shipment and refining costs.
a tv set costing £000s prewar, can now be bought for say £150 or less….a flight costing a weeks wages or more prewar, became little more than a bus ticket. I can drive 250m for about £35 or so.—mostly to places i dont actually need to go to.
humankind is now addicted to self indulgence.
in other words i am living in a dreamworld of surplus energy.—-along with everybody else.
we are also addicted to the words of ponzi salesmen, who tell us it can go on forever.
We cannot separate surplus energy economics from current politics.
Thanks for that thoughtful reply Norm. Seems like we have plenty of surplus energy for now to keep the extravagance going. But, suddenly the US Govmt shutdown (and air traffic controllers asking for charity) could be an early indicator of some “de-growth” starting to impinge on that self indulgence. Some more De-growth when the SNAP food stamps run out.
trumps antics are part of his ineptitude…., and a measure of his outright greed, he’s doing what i said would happen, ie—rendering the planet into a cash asset.
but that is just part of the overall picture of collapse…
one can do a broad guess—-but no forecast can be specific in its detail.–i’ve been offering guesses for years, i’ve been wrong, certainly, but broadly correct, particularly about trumps intentions. (he now wants to allow migration. onlyby white south africans.) I didnt see that coming.
trump and his minions, however, do not see the complete picture, that if the economic system crashes, which seems likely—then $billions evaporate into nothing.
Even gold is worth only what someone will pay for it.
If there is nothing to buy with gold, I would expect that it would not be worth much.
If food is in short supply, I would expect the farmers and those involved in the supply chain for growing the food would get paid first. People who are only “asset holders” would get left overs, if any.
I agree Norm if you had told me 4 years ago that all these things that Trump is doing I would be almost certain that things crash. I can’t believe that it has not happened yet. How the economy is not collapsing is beside me. Unless they are lying about the real numbers….and I would not put that past them.
I remember about 15 years ago, commenters better than myself in the peak oil community, floated the idea that if TPTB could synthesize the stock market, which they did accomplish, they could continue extend and pretend for some undefined period of time, and we could see the DOW at 40,000. I thought that was ridiculous. How wrong I was. The Hand is the GOAT. The demigod that keeps on giving. The ghost in the Machine.
The reason we haven’t collapsed yet “inertia”.
Inertia….I remember reading something about the end of World War II in Germany and why the German people did not end the war sooner when everything was being destroyed around them….inertia
Definition: Inertia is the resistance to changes in velocity.
Cause: The cause of inertia is an object’s mass. More mass means more inertia.
In a car: When a car suddenly brakes, your body continues to move forward because of inertia. This is why seatbelts are necessary.
In a tightrope walker: A tightrope walker uses a long rod to increase their moment of inertia, which helps them resist the forces that would cause them to rotate and fall.
Types of inertia:
Physical inertia: This is the most common understanding, referring to the resistance to changes in motion of physical objects.
Psychological inertia: This refers to a reluctance to change the status quo in personal or social situations, even when it might be beneficial.
Sleep inertia: This is the feeling of grogginess, disorientation, and reduced cognitive ability that people experience when waking up.
PS..the same can be said of the vast climatic system we are poking at..
in 2015/16 i was screaming about trump’s intentions, here on ofw and elsewhere….
it was a subject of great ridicule by certain ofw inmates…it still is in some quarters,
i never imagined though that the american people would be daft enough to elect him twice…
i said then that he needed to create some kind of emergency, in order to ”suppress it” using the military.—he will then have a”reason” to suppress the 26 midterms,—if he gets away with that, he will cancel the 28 election. (temporarily of course).
it never occurred to me that he would try to suppress food supplies to 44 m people,
i did not foresee his use of ICE, but i did say—on numerous occassions—that soldiers obey whoever pays their wages…..he has got rid of the top generals who would not have done that.
i’ve also said, for years, that ”mid 2020s” would be the tipping point–look around you, and see what has happened in 2025—a year like no other in potus terms,
and his demolition of the white house would seem to indicate too, that he has no intention of leaving.
i always hope i’m going to be wrong—-so far i haven’t been.
“in 2015/16 i was screaming about trump’s intentions, here on ofw and elsewhere….”
Yeah, some of us remember that well.
“it was a subject of great ridicule by certain ofw inmates…it still is in some quarters,”
Hey…. I resemble that comment!
“i never imagined though that the american people would be daft enough to elect him twice…”
Having a very limited imagination is a survival trait, Norman. It helps keep people inside their safe spaces. You know—the lamp that burns half as bright lasts twice as long.
I, on the other hand, am cursed with an over-active imagination. Even back in 2016, I could easily picture Trump as Shakespeare did Julius Ceasar:
“Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.”
Gold, at $4,000 an ounce, is more of a luxury for the wealthy. You can’t exactly use gold coins at the grocery store or gas station—you’d have to convert it back to USD. In the future, it might become challenging or even impossible to convert assets like gold or Bitcoin into USD.
gold is just a safe haven for investment, it isnt currency and hasnt been for a long time
It all comes down to jobs for aircraft industry and superfluous pilots, that’s all.
“If I were at Kitty Hawk and saw the Wright Brothers flying their first plan, I would have shot it down, since the air industry has not brought any value to investors” – Warren Buffett
It all comes down to surplus energy.
If we didnt have surplus energy there would be no fleets of jets and no aircraft industry…
There would also be no investors.
You are right. The flights are an extravagance. They will probably keep going as long as those involved can make money. I know that Boeing is on the list 10 most likely companies to fail in a downturn. Delta is also.
Between these things and the US government shutdown, a decline in future flights seems likely.
This is about an unused airport south of Ciudad Real in Spain:
Don Quijote and the (n) ever growing air traffic
http://crudeoilpeak.info/don-quijote-and-the-never-growing-air-traffic
When the Wuhan virus hit planes were parked there
This article was from 2011. You talk about fast trains being built in Spain. Did they ever get built and put into use? Usually, they are too expensive to get much use, especially if there are slower trains that are available, much more cheaply.
Also, in the US, many long distance planes used to fly into fairly small cities. This stopped long ago. For example, at one time, I would fly into Waterloo, Iowa, but this stopped, long ago. All flights now go to Cedar Rapids. I also could fly into Madison, Wisconsin, but now I must fly to Milwaukee.
Now, there are only a handful of major airports in a state. If you want to go to another location, you need to rent a car or take a bus. There are still small planes that fly into the many small airports, but they are mostly owned by individuals or businesses.
Many airports here in the US has so called “master plans” for expansion, i.e. Fort Lauderdale, Fll is building a new International terminal. Many major airports have similar “growth”, while a series of bankruptcies have occurred recently, Spirit and regional Silver airlines (worldwide there has been similar)
Boeing has experiencing difficulties with their production and planing to create a new design to replace the troubled 737 MAX.
Demographics of the workforce is at play too.
There will be a great shortage of pilots and mechanics as it is not cheap o train and be certified for.
The traveling public has been conditioned to expect Airline travel (having once taken a greyhound bus from Fll to Aspen Colorado, do not relish that again).
I agree, airlines will be on the forefront of collapse, Jeremy Rifkin in his book Entropy wrote the same.
I suggest as Gail take care of yourself well and start to walk two three hours a day….that may come in handy
I walk a whole lot now. I was in a restaurant one day, and a hispanic man said to me, “I deliver packages in your neighborhood and you are the lady who is out walking frequently” (Actually, several times a day, but not necessarily for long periods each time.)
My husband and I plan to fly to Boston for three days, starting on Wednesday of this week, to visit our daughter and family. Our grandson is 3.5 years old. I don’t know how long travel by air will continue. Safe travel by air may be over.
Good you are walking, Gail.
Will pay dividends as we get older, as my Doctor advised me. Said we get old starting in the legs. With this new smartphone and tablet age upon us people of all ages, even the young, just plop and sit for hours.
Nice to visit New England this time of year In the Fall, have a nice stay with the family. Hopefully, the government shutdown will be resolved.
Great sub-thread on planes, yes I do agree the loss of air transport (as in mass transit) might go ahead in the line so to speak.
In terms of trains, the situation in the US kind of blurs the terms. As in Europe most of the ~regular train lines are upgraded to ~160km/h. While the “bullet train” network of even twice that speed is only within the major metropolitan areas.. I guess, even Spain does have this two speed modality..
Obviously, China skipped that and went directly for the new bullet train option with dozens of thousand kms of track.
Most converted to elevated ~160km/h already – meant as in/per overall transport capacity (across midsize cities) served NOT in actual existing length for every village..
Obviously, the total legacy old railway tracks remain and won’t be upgraded.
Gail could you expand on “the list of the 10 companies most likely to fail in a downturn?” Did you compile the list or someone else? I’d like to see that list.
This is the list I copied in a comment on October 20, responding to Ravi:
This is the video he posted:
https://youtu.be/wKIvnovk6qA
Ten Giant Companies that will Fail in a Downturn
The video provides what I am afraid is a good list of companies that are very vulnerable to downturn or shrinking government support. I am afraid I agree with the authors. Most of them were hurt in 2020 and have not fully recovered. Any new downturn will bring them down. The US government is much less able now to provide bailout funds.
1. Tesla
2. AMC
3. GM
4. Boeing
5. Rite Aid Pharmacy
6. Warner Bros.
7. Delta Airlines
8. Paramount
9. Carnival Cruise Lines
10. WeWork
I just returned from a trip to a western small city that is booming. Boomers fleeing cities and CA everywhere. Development everywhere….it seems completely unsustainable. I stayed with my wife at a luxury golf resort that reportedly had been built with $1.4B investment. Two more courses are being built and they are trying to sell real estate and homes around it. I was told the fee to play on the course is $450. Only rich boomers floating in their ever rising stock portfolio could afford this ridiculous extravagance.
This seems to be boomer money financed by an inflating stock market, and by inflated home prices in CA. There is money everywhere!
If there is a downturn in the market or a depression I wonder how long this place will last. The key to boomer prosperity is the ever rising stock market,
It all feels unsustainable. Nvidia at $5T?
The economic fallout could be unbelievable if the bottom drops out.
We will wait and see what happens. People assume that there is no energy problem, since oil prices are low.
Mostly correct. May I point out an issue about public debt? The important question is what debt to GDP is. In this FRED series, the WW2 period is captured. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDGDPA188S
Also see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFSGDA188S In this series we can see federal income relative to GDP. I point to both of these series, because most debt to GDP tracking starts in 1966, which creates distortion. In FYFSGDA188S we see that federal deficit has been high, up to 25% of GDP by 1945. This indirectly tells you that debt to GDP increased during that period, obviously to levels past 25% of GDP, because the debt accrued. The level of debt to GDP is seen to rise rapidly to 110% of GDP in the first linked series above GFDGDPA188S.
The reality of WW2 was that forced spending and targeting of efficient production and innovation was what kicked the USA out of the great depression.
As you discuss indirectly, thermodynamic relation between money and energy is critical to understand, and our current neoclassical economics simply does not even acknowledge this relation exists. The official equations (left over from the 19th and just after the turn of the 20th century due to the ancestor worship of economics) only have labor in them. Labor wasn’t necessarily the primary energy in ancient civilizations that had horses, camels, or sailing ships.
Need I point out that nobody tracks the thermodynamic relation? A big part of why is that nobody important in econ wants to acknowledge it. However, we are also just in the process of working out what it is. I had a dustup with one of the theorists that published a thermodynamic relation, but he got the equation wrong. He got it wrong because the equation set he began with has a constant relation to energy that is invariant for practical purposes. You can read the current draft that identifies the error here, concentrate on section 2.1 for it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08723
For the TL;DR folks, the error is that in an economy, his growth “constant” he calls λ (lambda), has dimensions of joules per dollar of GDP. This relation has changed dramatically over human civilization, with most of it in the 20th century.
Joules/dollar represents the total average of efficiency of all production that takes place in any single year. It varies wildly between industries and even products.
The 20th century did not just see exponential increases in primary energy consumption. It saw improvements in motor/generator energy efficiency up to 30%-40% and even 60%. In the case of a laboratory electrical motor, over 97% energy conversion to motive force has been achieved.
So the 20th century energy curves were doubly exponential because of improved efficiency and increases in energy consumption, in a high EROI energy environment. You are correct—this is unlikely to be repeated soon.
You are also correct, that as it stands we are seeing lower EROI, after mostly obtaining the best energy conversion we can practically accomplish. Without changing to nuclear energy, we will enter a period of “squeeze”. Gini will increase as energy per capita drops—just as Gini decreased as energy per capita increased during the industrial revolution. The world’s poor will slide from subsistence to unable to survive. There will be war and civil war.
For what it’s worth, I agree that pandemics are likely to kill many people, probably more than war. I say this because disease killed more people than all the wars of the 20th century.
Famine I think is likely to kill more. The world’s “days of grain stored” are tottering along at an all time low. That is a worrisome statistic that you might appreciate looking into as a bellwether.
Generally, high debt levels are reserved for wars. I purposely did not show the series back to before WWII. If you compare the points on my Figure 8 with the chart you show, they are essentially identical. This surprises me, because the names of what are shown on the charts suggest they should be different.
I should note that your Gross Debt series only goes to 2023. This is a problem in my mind.
I really wanted a series that came to the real Gross Debt, which is now about $38 trillion.
‘Pandemics,’ as opposed to simulated plandemics, are just famines getting warmed up; they’re chronic widespread malnutrition and stress manifesting as widespread symptomatic disease. ‘Smallpox’ being the biggest and the baddest.
” ‘Smallpox’ being the biggest and the baddest.”
I’m going to assume you meant monkeypox.
There’s a vaccine for that.
I meant ‘smallpox.’ Next would be ‘the plague ‘
Smallpox and monkeypox are the same thing. They use smallpox vaccines as vaccines for monkeypox.
Ah I see what you’re saying then thanks. Then why aren’t they calling monkeypox smallpox then? So people don’t think smallpox is back? Or are they actually different pox dynamics? ‘Smallpox’ is an acute malnutrition slash famine related triaging symptomology in service of the catabolic collapse of the organism in order to forestall total collapse.
That same intelligent, Non-Public place is from where the Hand got its Degrowth Agenda. As above so below.
Efficiency rose but population and their consumption rose even farther
I had posted this clip here before when Gail had gone a tour of SE Asia including Cambodia
https://youtu.be/WWrXlWSJuJo?si=BJi2tbCZ-8gwEREb
Angkor Wat circa 1930. No locals wear shirts or shoes, only sandals
No nonwhite rode in a vehicle, except as drivers for tourists.
Angkor Wat now
https://youtu.be/4aRUxfWZ6R0?si=2B7GxJJ8RCy4BpQX
The energy footprint of the Khmers got much, much bigger in 100 years
Thank you for the new post.
Trump’s confrontation against Xi went nowhere, and USA is down to having to bully Venezuela, the Afghanistan of South America.
It won’t be hard to get rid of Maduro. it won’t be that easy to extract the resources USA needs to continue the game.
The oil in Venezuela is expensive to extract and refine. I am not sure that it is very helpful to even have it.
This is important can you give a link to more information about Venezuela oil?
This is one chart comparing OPEC oil production costs, including taxes, in 2013-2014.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aricorp-opec-fiscal-breakeven-2014.png
Venezuela didn’t come out as badly as I remembered. Its cost is only a little higher than Saudi Arabia, back in 2013-2014.
Researching Venezuela and its oil production would probably be a worthwhile exercise. I am not sure how much information I could find.
Back in 1997 and 1998, Venezuela produced over 3 million barrels per day of crude oil. This was much lighter crude oil than is available today. Today, it produces about 1 million barrels a day. The amount it is producing is rising, however. I know Chevron has been working on it.
“Trump’s confrontation against Xi went nowhere”
There was no confrontation, but lots of backpedaling and simpering from the orange one.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you “the art of the deal”🤣
“a great leader, great leader of a very powerful, very strong country…a tremendous leader of a very powerful country and I give great respect to him.”
“Uh,” Trump told reporters on board his aircraft as it rocked in crosswinds flying eastward, “a lot of things we discussed in great detail. A lot of things we brought to finalization. A lot of finalization.” This was false.
Worse for the Trump warfighting strategy, the Chinese have retained escalation dominance by making Trump’s concessions their pre-condition for China’s temporary suspension of their sanctions on rare earths exports and imports of US computer chips. For this, Xi offered to buy US soybeans slowly for $34.2 billion over four years – roughly half in tonnage, half in price over twice the interval that China had agreed to in the past.”
https://johnhelmer.org/chinas-ten-noes-sun-tzu-has-swallowed-the-frog-and-is-keeping-his-smile-to-himself/
Who owns who exactly?
Venezuela might not turn out to be the easy pickings the sad bully is desperate for. He’ll probably try to copy the kiddies killers Iranian method and hopefully be even less successful(a well known Russian transport plane has been visiting Venezuela recently). He should stick to murdering unarmed fishermen. That’s a fight he might just win(although never morally).
I notice this newer flavor of TDS in Rachel Maddow yootoob shorts that come across my feed. The flavor is called WINNING! It started about a month ago. Nicole Foss is probably experiencing it too right now. Norm though is behind the curve.
The Hand released that flavor on its own terms, and at a time when the MAGA clownshow has run just long enough that we’re all ready for a scene change. It is no coincidence that the anti-clown, Gabbard, was in Bahrain the other day giving an important speech that was not a DNI’s speech but a Presidential speech or the speech of a Secretary of State. Parallel diplomacy for bridging-over, in advance, to America First, just like the warpspeed global stablecoin rollout is a parallel financial system for bridging over to the national socialist economics of Phase 2.
See the patterns. Don’t buy the ice cream.
From Google’s AI:
Claims that NATO or the U.S. seek to “overthrow” the Russian government for oil access, or “steal” resources from countries like Venezuela, Iran, and Iraq are largely associated with geopolitical tensions and rhetoric, not official policy or factual evidence of state-sponsored theft. These accusations often circulate within complex geopolitical rivalries and are used by targeted nations to frame Western actions as aggressive.
Russia
Sanctions, not overthrow for resources: The U.S. and many NATO nations have imposed a wide range of economic sanctions on Russia, specifically targeting its oil and gas revenues, as a means to pressure the Kremlin to end the war in Ukraine. The goal is to cut off funding for the Russian military, not to seize control of Russian resources.
Continued purchases by some: Some NATO members, such as Hungary and Slovakia, continued to purchase Russian oil due to specific infrastructure dependencies, a point of contention within the alliance.
Rhetoric: Russian officials have accused the U.S. of “stealing” Syrian oil, a claim the U.S. has denied, highlighting the use of such accusations in information warfare.
Venezuela
Sanctions and political pressure: The U.S. has a long history of imposing sanctions and diplomatic pressure on Venezuela’s socialist government, particularly under Nicolás Maduro’s presidency. U.S. officials have openly supported opposition figures, and some reports have referenced U.S.-backed coup attempts in the past.
“Stealing” Allegations: The U.S. has seized Iranian fuel shipments headed for Venezuela in an effort to enforce sanctions on both countries, which Iran and Venezuela have condemned as “stealing” and a violation of international law.
Iran
Sanctions and regional tensions: U.S. and allied policy towards Iran has primarily involved severe economic sanctions aimed at curbing its nuclear program and regional influence, not physically “stealing” its oil.
Seizures at Sea: The U.S. has seized Iranian fuel shipments on the high seas to enforce sanctions, but has not attempted a large-scale takeover of Iran’s oil infrastructure.
Overthrow efforts: U.S. policy has a stated goal of pressuring the Iranian regime, with some critics suggesting a desired outcome of regime change, but no direct “overthrow for oil” plan by NATO or the U.S. has been substantiated.
Iraq
Invasion and aftermath: The 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was officially justified based on the presence of WMDs (which were never found) and links to terrorism, not oil theft.
Resource control analysis: While Western oil companies gained significant access to Iraqi oil fields after the invasion, critics argue that the conflict was, in effect, about ushering in the neoliberalization of Iraq’s oil production, benefiting U.S. and Western companies. This is framed as a policy outcome, not a direct act of “stealing” in the literal sense.
In summary, while geopolitical energy interests play a significant role in foreign policy considerations, the specific claims of NATO/U.S. militarily “stealing” resources or planning to overthrow governments explicitly for oil access are generally considered part of political rhetoric and conspiracy theories used by rival nations to oppose Western foreign policy actions and sanctions.
Sounds like Norman wrote that response. Great minds think alike.
Thanks..
Btw. ~David_in_MegaYRS from the core commentariat cadre at Surplus is probably right in his provocative slow pace scenarios, he favors them for years already so not a new comer. Specifically, he posits US/D empire imploding-falling not sooner than in the very late 2030s, and last ~largish industrial hubs way later at the turn of the new century. The calm observation posture of the CHN delegation at the recent summit goes along similar lines, there is no rush..
We knew you were jak but we didn’t say anything out of politeness. Since you needed to tell us for your own edification then maybe you should just stick to one handle like a real.man or woman. And also out of respect for everyone else.
If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything, such as the unearned, comfortably numb, davidina, do-nothing stasis. Morgan’s place is the most repressed commentariat I’ve ever had the pleasure of being ejected from. Some otherwise-intelligent “cold and timid souls” will gladly accept group repression in service of avoiding conflict, and at obvious cost to the creative power of tension. Morgan’s place is entropic because Morgan is entropic and the insecure Morgan operates with an iron grip under genteel cover. He only ever moves closer to the cutting edge when he realizes he’s falling off the spine, and only does so by co-opting other peoples’ ideas. There’s a quote for Morganism and davidinianism:
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.” -teddy Roosevelt
I’ve also found Tim Morgan to be a bit of a control freak. He disciplined his rowdier commenters like an old fashioned school headmaster.
So, you got yourself expelled? Doesn’t surprise me one bit. I never got expelled, but when rebuked for talking out of turn or displaying inappropriate humor, I decided to play truant.
The result is the same—a tame and docile commentariat that doesn’t say anything that challenges the great man’s thoughts. But even so, Prof. Morgan’s analyses and graphs do make interesting reading.
Yeah I got the boot insofar as he refused to publish my comments altogether regardless of whether they were in disagreement with something he said or not in disagreement with anything.
When I showed up just after the plandemic he had just put up a post that was clearly important to him, fingering monetary as the culprit of inflation, and to effusive praise. That, to me, was a political analysis and not a structural analysis. I argued that the root cause of the inflation was the energy decline that was underway from 2018 peak global total oil liquids and, since money flows are but a proxy for energy flows and, thus, a naturally lagging indicator, the broad money supply had simply not yet caught down to the energy decline because the monetary authorities obviously want to avoid Collapse for as long as possible, but that still doesn’t make inflation a political miscalculation. It was a sound calculation.
We went back and forth a few times and then his loyal junkyard dog, I forget his name, started barking at me in order to amplify my disturbing of the peace, and then tagio saw the opportunity to try and make me, as a conspiracy theorist, look crazy, which wasn’t hard to do in a safe space like that even in the absence of a winning argument. It was a clever play, huh tags? No hard feelings, of course – i’m a renegade and it comes with the territory. Other people’s territory.
Yes, it’s interesting you mention territory. Some bloggers can be very territorial about their blogs. They like their comments section to be orderly and filled with sycophants, not with people who put forward alternative views or point out potential flaws in their thinking.
If there are any young scholars out there who are in search of a subject for a graduate thesis, how about “Territoriality in the Blogosphere—What Cats and Dogs Can Tell Us About Online Interactions Between Humans”?
All places where people discuss on the internet are like that. It is the moderators who prefer censorship the most. Moderators are either the people who spend the money to keep the website up or they are the right-hand man of the person who provides the money to keep the website operational. People with a financial stake in something and people who are ” in charge” are obsessed with control.
None of them want to provide a space for discussion. They all aspire to shape and control discussion, in their space. It’s their space, not yours.
reante> sorry to hear that interpretation, frankly the user ID switcheroo on my part is merely a tech glitch or necessity; I’m in no way attempting to hide, obfuscate or manipulate anybody pal.. , it was meant to be humorous.
Perhaps, to increase your frustration a bit, I just went straight back to [simulation theory acceptance 99.9%]. Imagine that, just week ago out of the blue – my older sister robbed me blindly in ongoing family issue. That was if you recall exactly at the time you described the history of you dad and his new fiance..
I know animals are hardwired as pattern seeking – evaluation bio-machines.. but sometime the “upper hand” meddling in things is just too visible..
jak1,2,3 etc seems simpler for everyone imo. Sorry to hear that about your older sister, my older brother attempted the same and the last i heard from him, some years ago, was via a lawyer who threatened me with a restraining order accompanied by a check from my brother for the amount he owed me. Violence is golden but it’s not for everyone nor every situation. I threaten my brother unarmed and he threatens me with cops with guns in order to save face while returning my money he stole from me.
Your relapses don’t frustrate me. Old habits die hard. Knowing is half the battle.
Limits to Growth still stands as a sharp prospective. Indeed!
Exactly! The problem is “Limits to Growth.” People tend not to realize that.
I recently read a book titled “Limits and Beyond: 50 Years on from The Limits to Growth, What Did We Learn and What’s Next?” I was shocked to realize that the book essentially focused on making the limits to growth message palatable to the global capitalist class. It made me see how the modern left seems subservient to the capitalist elite, turning into a mindset of “how do I dilute my message to make it acceptable to the moneyed class so I can get my book published and earn a paycheck?”
Apropos of my reply to whateverhisnameis, Tim Morgan is an excellent example of that mindset.
Selling out is in fact the selling of your soul.
Dr. Tim Morgan seems to have come out with some posts recently that make it sound like he is realizing that we have a near-term problem. I agree though; his early writing especially seemed to put the problem out in the future.
Thanks Gail, not being interested in his material anymore, I was somewhat getting that impression secondhand from the comments here, though it sounds from what you say like he is becoming more open-minded than I realized although I wouldn’t be surprised if it has more to do with the new political climate in the US and UK than it does systems theory, but that’s just suspicion on my part since I haven’t been reading him The slow-collapsers have enjoyed a good ten years of supremacy over the fast-collapsers like myself who’ve had to lump it. I’m glad to hear he’s adapting alongside current events even if his analysis remains limited by his refusal to acknowledge the supranational non-public drivers that reveal an intelligent collapse. Which is ironic for people like him who are dying for an intelligent degrowth agenda, but just looking for it in the wrong place – in the public sphere where it could never happen for sociological reasons.
The Club of Rome is now a very “green” organization, trying to make our problems look palatable to others. It looks to me as if the book you are referring to (Limits and Beyond: 50 Years on from The Limits to Growth, What Did We Learn and What’s Next?) has Ugo Bardi as its first author. Ugo has written quite a bit for the Club of Rome. Some of his writing is OK; some of it is too slanted to the likings of the global capitalist class.
I’ve got the book (with Prof. Bardi’s lengthy foreword) and have (tried to) read it a few times. I feel like I am lacking a specific, unique “cipher key” to be able to comprehend that Boomer’s drivel “between the lies”. Had the same impression after forcing myself through the late Silent Gen’s Marilyn Ferguson’s “Aquarian Conspiracy” – both sources obviously state something important, but what exactly?
Many authors in the book reminded me that American liberals, like the Republicans, are bourgeois capitalists unable to offer a genuine socialist alternative. It focused on greenwashing capitalism and engaging in identity politics without enacting real change.
Thank you Gail, a very clear article!
I hope the conference was a good experience.
Kraft Heinz says “US headed into worst recession ever as consumers aren’t even buying staples.” – Bloomberg
https://x.com/OilHeadlineNews/status/1984161841019548039
Disturbing!
Younger generations are mostly eating out in fastfood chains.. and or picking up store ready-made sandwiches etc. (which all tends to be slightly more expensive than home ~cooking). Plus there is that genuine real income compression felt factor aka self-perceived myth along the lines “..oh I can’t afford the groceries”.. and then hops into ff chain for +30% the price and yet -50% the nutrient value.. Oh, the joyz of industrially nudged-shaped humanoidz..
On the site un-denial.com one of the major contributors (Hideaway) has undertaken a deepdive into the EROEI of a wide range of conventional and alternative energy sources. His analysis is quite thorough (i.e. very complex) and his final results are shocking. Refer to his report for the specifics of the installations he analyzed. But, very briefly they were: Fracked Oil Well (1.76), Solar Farm (1.22), Wind Turbine (1.17), Gas Well (23), Nuclear Plant (0.57). Exactly what EROEI does our modern civilization require to continue? Well, an EROEI of 23 would do it. An EROEI of1.17, not so much.
For natural gas, nearly all of the energy used is in building gas pipelines and gas storage facilities. Also, if gas is shipped as LNG, a great deal more energy is used, in transit.
It makes no sense to look at EROEI for natural gas at the well-head. It is the delivered EROEI that matters. It is quite low, especially for LNG.
Are you saying that once the capital costs are paid down that we get a little bit more than otherwise? For example, the Oil Sands in Alberta seem to be doing okay, but only now that they are several decades in, and are in a form of maintenance mode.
Obviously diesel will be a huge factor in this, but as diesel is a product derived from oil sands operations, well it’s a problem that is addressed at the source… so to speak.
The issue I am talking about is that US oil prices were very low in the 1948 to 1973 period. Usually, very low prices go with a very high EROI for oil.
Much of the oil the US produced was quite light oil (especially from Texas), so it produced only a little diesel and jet fuel. But oil from California was heavier and thus was better for diesel and jet fuel. But oil from California was more expensive to extract, making the oil price set in Texas (based on the cost of its extraction of its light oil) less attractive. This may be part of the push back we keep getting from California for oil; its extraction is never very profitable, so it is hard to tax its production very much. It is something that is “put up with” rather than sought out.
Also, even in the very early years, the US imported some oil from overseas. I am not sure what was imported, but my guess is that it would be of the type that the US needed. For example, Russia’s oil has tended to be heavy. The US dollar seemed to buy a lot from other countries back in the early days. It may have been the relativity of the dollar that kept the price of imported oil low. Russia has always had a harder time making money from its oil because it is harder to extract and transport.
Oil sands production in Canada did not amount to anything until well after 1973. Higher oil prices and new technologies started to make extraction attractive then. https://www.oilsandsmagazine.com/news/2022/3/29/history-of-the-canadian-oil-sands
Gail perhaps you could read the article before you pass judgement on it. The gas is natural gas delivered to the customer after processing and through the pipelines, the cheap Saudi oil is after piping and refinement, in other words useable energy for the customer.
I was also overly generous to all the renewables and nuclear assuming near 100% capacity for nuclear and all energy was useable for solar and wind.
My method accounts for all energy inputs, not just energy throughputs as nearly every EROEI research paper I’ve found and read.
EROI sort of makes sense for oil, because you can extract oil using primarily oil.
But EROI doesn’t work well for a whole lot of other things, including natural gas, wind and solar. The major problem is that far different (better!) types of energy are needed to build the devices that extract and transport the energy types. The devices are also needed in advance of when the energy is used. Debt (or shares of stock) must be used to pay for the infrastructure. Interest (or dividends) must be paid, to made to the lenders. All of this raises costs considerably and lowers EROI.
Hideaway, when your bizarre claim that you are the originator of complexity theory (“the only new idea in the study of human overshoot [in the last ten years]” lol) is removed from the intro to your article, then and only then, imo, does your article deserve a read by those who know (meaning everybody) that you are not the originator of complexity theory and that that fake origination is not the only new collapse idea in the last ten years. How could I possibly think that the subsequent analysis would be worth reading after that introduction? It’s a thinking error beyond the pale. So the extreme outlier EROEI analysis that follows is also presumably based on a thinking error beyond the pale.
That said, I did read the article just now, and the thinking error is in thinking that EROEI can be estimated via the energy proxy — money — without also incorporating the civilizational debt dynamics into the equation. You claim to have invented complexity theory yet you completely ignore the fact that the stealing of (energy) demand from the future, via lending out of thin air, artificially increases (inflates) the nominal proxy investment (the EI in EROEI) compared to actual energy investment, which in turn artificially lowers your final calculation.
Do you follow me?
Minor problem for you, I didn’t write the first paragraph, so think again.
I haven’t even written a full post on my complexity theory and I certainly do not claim to be the originator of ‘complexity theory’.
I’m the instigator of my complexity theory that is not written up yet, so yes Rob may have jumped the gun by writing that paragraph.
You appear very quick to judge what’s not known to yourself..
I’m well aware that you didn’t write it yourself but it becomes your claim if you don’t disclaim it, as in, ask Rob to not misrepresent you so disgracefully, and to please delete it. And if I’m not mistaken it’s not the first time that Rob has made that claim on your behalf. It’s been going on for a long time.
So what gives?
The field of complexity theory doesn’t belong in single quotes. What does belong in single quotes, though, is ‘my complexity theory.’ There is no ‘my complexity theory’ or ‘your complexity theory.’ There’s only the living complexity theory that exists out on the creative commons.
Anyway, it’s nice to see you here again.
To both Hideaway & Gail.
Thank You!
I observe EROI threads everywhere devolving into semantic battles over:
– different definitions;
– different explanatory meta-paradigms;
– wide boundary versus narrow boundary internalization/externalization of factors;
– linear versus network analysis;
– Qualitative partitioning of energy into non-substitutable types;
– nominal versus actual accounting (and accounting fraud therein)
different spheres of spacetime;
– Externalization of energy consumption via fossil fuel embodied in imported processes or objects;
different discount rates of future generations etc.
– Jevons paradox;
– Energy cost of debt;
– Energy cost of energy;
– Energy cost of complexity;
– Energy cost of technology;
– Declining marginal returns of complexity;
– Declining marginal returns of EROI;
– Perturbation of energy and resource decline curves via front loading high EROI source extraction (low hanging fruit)
– Energy cost of food;
– Energy cost of human capital necessary to build/sustain energy systems;
– Energy cost of transport;
– Energy cost of maintenance of existing infrastructure;
– Energy cost of new infrastructure;
– Energy cost of Entropy (pollution);
– Complexity cost of Entropy;
– Ontology of Debt as a virtual reallocator of demand from future to present allowing low EROI processes to be economically profitable via demand subsidization.
– etc…
Hideaway, your most recent EROI article was revealing, because it teased the reader to rabbit-hole the casual net of energy transactions that are largely externalized in our best, current, working definitions and understanding of EROI.
A single statement summarizes this dynamic: “Building the pyramids is easy. Feeding the people to build them is the question.”
This is to say that your most dire analysis of our thermodynamic predicament is not dire enough.
Were energy wars not one of the peak oil predictions?
Dec 2019
Trump sanctions to halt work on Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline | DW News
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtZyN3evRSE
Apr 2023
Tucker asks Trump who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ktEFFrtq5I
Former President Donald Trump has hinted the U.S. was involved in the explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines.
12 Apr 2023
Trump made the remarks on Tuesday’s edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, his first sit-down interview since being charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. He denies all the charges and has pleaded not guilty.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tucker-carlson-us-nord-stream-explosion-1793818
June 2025
‘I’m the one who ended Nord Stream 2’: Trump on sanctioning Russia
Yeah that was one of the predictions but I don’t see that it’s played out that way. Energy wars connote the regime change wars of pre- Peak Oil that were carried out in the name of dollar hegemony which was globalization’s MO. We haven’t seen one of those post-peak, and I’d argue that that’s because there are no doable regime changed of non-aligned oil producers left, and structural deglobalization is well underway besides. Now that everything is hanging on a razor’s edge, the structural costs of regime change much more easily exceed the benefits, plus Iran is too formidable and selling into the global economy anyway which is the most important thing, even if it’s not doing so in dollars, and, like Gail says, Venezuelan oil might just be too expensive to ramp up even with unfettered access which is something I’ve only recently learned from her.
What we’re seeing post-peak is the intelligent non-market restructuring of market flows under the cover of war, in order to stave off Collapse, which is a much more interesting dynamic.
This.
And likely much harder to decipher kind of dynamics, both in terms of involved actors/players and prize/goals of particular desire pursued.. as their particular (inner logic) line of development would become after time non understandable to distant outsiders.
The nascent world of ~de-globalized multitude regional hubs will be completely different animal than we are used to from recent decades. And in fact much unlike pre 1900s empires as well, at least as long as some form of accessible global info-net still persists (for us little lurkers out there).
Nice, yeah, sure, deciphering it requires creativity; conversely, their spiritual warfare, as with all spiritual warfare, requires repressing creativity. That said, they don’t at all mind us deciphering the deepest truths at the margins, below Dunbar’s Number. They would be more concerned if nobody out there was doing that.
Their encryptions are out there for everyone to decrypt: Tether, Circle, Stablecoin, GENIUS Act. These are the hieroglyphics of Phase 2 of the Non-Public Degrowth Agenda. Extricating civilization from the vast web of Global Finance Capitalism requires an ingenious yet primordial plan for a centralized (but decentralized relative to the central banking system) national socialist stability mechanism around which the called-in oxen-drawn wagons of the world can be tethered-to and continuously circled. When any spinning system loses power, it must reduce its rotational mass in order to better harness angular momentum which is the driving force of the universe. The more the rotational mass is reduced, the greater the momentum. Treasury-based MMT is for maximizing the angular momentum of the Digital Greenback gravity well.
The Hand is a prepper and any prepper worth his or her salt has a manual pump to fall back on. Phase 2 is getting financed with an old school wheel well pump. From above it looks like a swastika or a solar system or a galaxy.
I think we are seeing conflicts over energy supplies, whether or not they are considered wars.
I didn’t realize that Trump had admitted causing the end of Nord Stream 2.
He claimed to cause the end of Nordstream 2 because he put sanctions on its being completed during his first term. And it never got completed before both lines of Nordstream 1 were blown up along with 1 line of the incomplete 2.
LOL. Hideaway, I know you’re reading this. It is self-evident just from the comment above that your eroeis are obviously off by an order of magnitude. In the future, I suggest that you don’t tackle the impossible as badly as possible. The first fundamental of even abstract mathematucs is still common sense, no offense. 😁
If you want to try and make that claim then you’d be better off deconstructing Feasta’s analysis than constructing your own. A 15:1 EROEI feels totally plausible as the lower limit. 2:1, not at all. Meditate on that.
Reante, where do you find me stating a 2:1 EROEI is acceptable??
I certainly don’t think it is at all. Yet the numbers for solar and wind with backup (battery or pumped hydro) come out lower than that.
Oil, coal and gas have come out with much higher EROEI, especially the old cheap sources, 20/30/50:1 type ratios. Newer sources have lower EROEI.
My ‘take’ is that EROEI is declining for known energy sources that we make everything with, and will cross a threshold where civilization as we know can no longer function. All the newer forms of energy simply are not up to the task.
A 2:1 EROEI is certainly not compatible with any type of civilization. Even nuclear, as it’s been built currently, does not come close to a 2:1 EROEI ratio, so we can’t run a modern civilization off it..
Thanks Hideaway, it’s not that you state that 2:1 is acceptable; it’s that you are stating it exists at such massive industrial scale. You just said that 2:1 “is certainly not compatible with any type of civilization,” and I agree, yet your article says it exists at massive scale…
Has the light bulb come on yet?
No?
Don’t you think that they would have just kept pumping deep sea oil and whatnot, all the way down the oil EROEI slope — from 50 to 40 to 30 to 20 to 10 — rather than just up and decide to say, “fuck it i’m done with this oil shit,” and jump ship in order to start anew with the new stuff all the way down at 2:1? And, yet, somehow, civilization is supposed to still be standing despite this decision to jump off the EROEI cliff, for shits and giggles, and dead cat bounce to 2:1, even though the remaining conventional oil has been in terminal decline for 20 years, as if a 2:1 fracking boom was acceptable for keeping civilization on an undulating plateau of total production? Is that what passes for complexity theory? If so then you did invent it.
If fracking was actually 2:1, how many million barrels a day of it would we have needed to keep civilization on the undulating plateau? 40M? 50M? You’re the numbers guy you tell me.
And I know some of you will say: “Then why is oil so cheap?” so let me explain:
Imagine an island where there are 100 people that each one need one apple per day to survive. There are also 100 apple trees, that conveniently produce 1 apple per day each.
In the island’s economy, an apple can be bought with a shell (the currency) and everyone is happy. Sadly one day a tsunami destroys half of the apple trees. Obviously the price of the apple rises, because the demand stays the same and the offer halves, so now 1 apple can be bought from 2 shells. Some people can afford it, but some others not. If apple trees could grow instantly then the offer would go up again in a day or two and everyone would be happy. Sadly apple trees take years to grow, so that’s not happening.
A year later an apple costs 1.2 shells. How?
30 people died from starvation. And the 70 that remains are barely surviving.
EROEI posted on Reditt . https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1odjg1v/i_discovered_the_world_is_going_to_hell_by_being/
The comment above is a great comment on REALITY!
WHEN THE SUN DON’T SHINE AND THE WIND DON’T BLOW THERE IS NO ENERGY!
The whole system is indeed very interconnected. We see the evidence of solar energy supply in all of the plants and animals we see. Wind seems to come and go as it wills, but it is the result of natural forces.
The worlds debt BUBBLE has to be dealt with in one of three ways.
1. Pay it off out of net income, obviously impossible for all governments.
2. Continue to roll it over extending it to thepoint where it the buyers of the debt cease to buy it.
3. Default.
I favor #3 default
It doesn’t seem this doesn’t get more attention than it should. The idea of “renewable energy which should be labeled as alternative energy” is supposed to “Save the Planet”. Instead birds and sea creatures are victims of wind and solar power.
“Shock New Report Lays Out The Full Scale Of Environmental Damage Caused by Onshore Wind Turbines”
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/shock-new-report-lays-out-full-scale-environmental-damage-caused-onshore-wind-turbines
The article says:
Idea of adding endless wind turbines and solar panels is ridiculous.
You may have noticed articles about Bill Gates backing off from climate alarmism. This is zero hedge’s take on the matter:
https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/after-years-climate-doom-propaganda-bill-gates-admits-world-wont-end
The limits to growth of solar and wind (which generate DC and need inverters) come from controlling the frequency of AC. Here are 2 articles on my website on this problem in Australia
21 Oct 2025
NSW power generation curves, AEMO lack of reserves and intervention notices September 2025 (part1)
https://crudeoilpeak.info/nsw-power-generation-curves-lack-of-reserves-and-intervention-notices-september-2025-part1
21 Oct 2025
NSW power generation curves, AEMO lack of reserves and intervention notices September 2025 (part2)
https://crudeoilpeak.info/nsw-power-generation-curves-lack-of-reserves-and-intervention-notices-september-2025-part-2