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Recently, many people have begun talking about the US having a k-shaped economy. In it, a handful of wealthy people are doing very well financially, while many others are falling further and further behind. I expect that the low wages of the majority of workers will soon lead to adverse impacts on businesses, governments, and international organizations. This phenomenon is likely to lead to a very uneven world economic downturn in 2026.
The world economy is subject to the laws of physics. The world economy seems to be reaching growth limits because there are too few easily extractable energy resources (as well as other resources, such as fresh water), relative to the world’s population. The Maximum Power Principle strongly suggests that even as limits are hit, the world economy cannot be expected to collapse all at once. Instead, the most efficient producers of goods and services will be able to succeed as long as resources are available, while less efficient producers will tend to fall by the wayside. Thus, the Maximum Power Principle somewhat limits the speed of the world’s economic downturn.
In this post, I will try to explain the challenges the world economy is now facing. I will also provide some thoughts on how 2026 will turn out.
[1] The k-shaped economy that the US and many other countries are experiencing is an indication that resources are, in some way, “running short.”
Humans all have similar basic needs. They need food to eat, and they need to cook at least some of this food before they eat it. They tend to need transportation services, both for themselves (to get to work) and for goods, such as the food they eat. They also need governments to keep order and to provide basic services, such as roads and schools. All these goods and services require energy of a suitable kind, such as human labor, burned biomass, or fossil fuel energy. They also require arable land, fresh water, and minerals of many kinds.
If there are not enough resources to go around, the easiest way to accomplish this is by creating a k-shaped economy. One example is with farmland. In many traditions, when a farmer dies, his oldest son inherits the farm. Younger children are then forced to find other kinds of employment, such as being a craftsman, farmer’s helper, or priest in a church. Wages for these younger children can easily fall lower than the income of their land-holding older brothers, especially if large families become common. Creating jobs that pay well for all the younger children becomes a problem.
A similar phenomenon has been happening in many Advanced Economies (US, UK, and other countries included in the OECD) in recent years. Parents are doing quite well financially, but their children often have difficulty finding jobs that pay well, even after advanced schooling. Some adult children are also left with educational debt to repay. This is a new type of k-shaped economy.
[2] The world’s current problem is an ever-rising population paired with resources that are becoming ever-more “expensive” to extract.
World population has exploded since fossil fuel consumption became abundant. This has allowed more food to be grown, inexpensive transportation of goods and people, and the development of antibiotics and other drugs.
At the same time, the most accessible resources were extracted first. For example, fresh water initially came from streams, lakes, and shallow aquifers. As the population grew and industrial needs became increased, wells had to be dug deeper and aquifers began to be drained. In some places, desalination now needs to be used. Each of these advances in producing fresh water became more resource-intensive. It became increasingly difficult to gather enough fresh water using human labor alone. Instead, increasing quantities of physical materials, energy supplies, and debt were needed to make the new systems work.
The reason debt was needed to purchase capital goods, such as those required to obtain high-cost water, was because the devices purchased were expected to provide the desired output (water, in this case) for a long time in the future. Securing this future benefit required advance funding, using an approach such as debt. The sale of shares of stock, which are expected to appreciate over time and pay dividends, provides a similar benefit to debt.
A similar issue arises with the increasing extraction of minerals of many kinds, such as copper, tin, uranium, lithium, coal, and oil. Early on, extraction using manual labor and simple tools was sufficient. However, once the easiest to extract resources were removed, capital goods became necessary to make extraction efficient.
Capital goods, such as coal fired power plants, wind turbines, solar panels, and hydroelectric power plants also allowed electricity to be produced, extending the benefits of fossil fuels. Producing these capital devices requires physical materials and energy supplies, as well as debt or the sale of shares of stock for financing.
[3] A major limit on the system seems to be debt and the interest required on the debt.
In an economy, the growth of inexpensive energy supply acts very much like leavening works in making bread; it greatly helps economic growth. With the increasing use of inexpensive energy supply, vehicles can be made ever-less expensively, compared to using much hand labor for manufacturing (literally, making goods by hand). With this growing efficiency, wages rise faster than inflation. In the 1950s and 1960s, young people found that they could marry and live in nicer homes than their parents. Now, the reverse seems to be happening: many adult children are finding it difficult to keep up with the lifestyles of their parents.
Once the inexpensive-to-extract energy supply is depleted, economies tend to add an increasing amount of debt, in an attempt to pull the economy forward. It seems to me that a major limit on the system comes when an economy slows down so much that it can no longer repay its debt with interest.
Political leaders like to believe that growing debt, by itself, will pull the economy forward. In fact, this does work, for a time, as long as interest rates are falling. But falling interest rates stopped happening in 2022.
Of course, all the added debt contributes to the k-shaped economy. The already wealthy disproportionately benefit from debt payments. They also tend to benefit from dividends on shares of stock and from share price appreciation. The poorer people find that an increasing share of their wages goes to paying interest on debt, especially as interest rates rise.
As debt levels grow, governments eventually have a problem with repayment of debt with interest. They need to raise taxes simply to cover their rising interest payments. This is the reason why Donald Trump wants to get interest rates down. Interest payments are rising rapidly, with near-zero interest rates in the rear-view mirror (Figure 3).
[4] Added technology and economies of scale have been adding to the k-shaped economy.
Technology requires specialization. People with more training and higher skill levels tend to earn more than others. Economies of scale encourage the growth of ever-larger businesses. The people at the top of huge organizations tend to earn more than those at the bottom. Also, as international trade is added, low-wage people in the hierarchy increasingly compete for wages with workers from countries with much lower wage scales. Thus, the wages of less-skilled individuals are increasingly squeezed down.
Furthermore, both added technology and economies of scale require added debt. Again, the interest on this debt (and dividends on stock) disproportionately benefits those who are already wealthy.
[5] In a sense, artificial intelligence (AI) is simply an extension of added technology, with a huge need for electricity, water, and debt.
The hope for AI is that it will make our already k-shaped economy, a great deal more k-shaped. The hope is that AI can eliminate a significant share of jobs, with such high profits that the owners of this technology can become very rich. If it works, the wealth will be even more concentrated at the top than today.
I see the need for electricity, water, and debt as stumbling blocks for AI. I expect that, starting in 2026, the AI rapid growth spurt will seize up because it is already using more resources than are available in some areas. I expect that a significant downshift in AI will adversely affect the US stock market and the rate of growth of the US economy. My hope is that the loss of growth in the AI sphere will not, by itself, bring down the US economy–just nudge it toward recession.
[6] In 2026, with an increasingly k-shaped economy, I expect that world oil prices will drift lower than today.
“Demand” for oil really means “the quantity of oil that people, businesses, and governments around the world can afford to purchase.” As the economy becomes more k-shaped, fewer people can afford to buy vehicles of any kind. Poor people, in the lower part of the k, are hardest hit. They will tend to increasingly rely on low energy approaches, such as ride-sharing, walking, or using a bicycle. They will tend to buy fewer goods that are transported internationally. Governments, as they begin collecting less in tax revenue from the many poorer people, will be inclined to cut back their spending on new buildings and road improvements. These changes work in the direction of reducing oil demand, and thus oil prices.
It is this increasingly k-shaped economy that has been holding world oil prices down in 2025. I expect that prices will drift even lower in 2026 because of the increasingly k-shaped world economy. There aren’t enough very rich people to hold up oil and other resource demand by themselves.
Oil production will not immediately drop in response to these low prices, although it may start drifting lower in 2027. The US Energy Information Administration is forecasting that world oil production will rise by 1.1 million barrels per day in 2025 and by 1.2 million barrels per day in 2026. These amounts do not seem unreasonable based on new developments that have already started producing higher amounts of crude oil.
[7] The heavier types of oil, from which diesel and jet fuel are disproportionately made, are in short supply now. They are likely to continue to be in short supply in 2026.
World oil production has risen in recent months. When I investigated, I found that the vast majority of the recent growth seems to be in light oil. Thus, the shortfall in diesel and other heavy fuels is likely to continue as in the recent past.
This shortage of the heavy types of oil has several impacts:
a. With a shortage of heavy oil, a fairly strong country, such as the US, is tempted to attack Venezuela, which has the world’s largest reserves of heavy oil.
b. Island nations without their own fossil fuel supplies tend to use a disproportionately large share of diesel and jet fuel, for several reasons: (1) Such islands often burn diesel fuel for electricity. This is an expensive way to make electricity; goods produced with this electricity become too expensive to export. (2) Imports and exports need to be shipped in by boat or by air, again using limited types of fuel supply. Physics tends to push these economies down by making their products expensive to sell elsewhere. Examples of islands with these problems include Cuba, Puerto Rico, Madagascar, and Sri Lanka. Such places tend to be adversely affected by shortages of heavy oil sooner than other locations.
c. Without enough jet fuel, long distance tourism is likely to be reduced in 2026. One issue is the lack of jet fuel for flying planes. Another issue is that an increasing share of the population will not be able to afford long-distance tourism because of the k-shaped economy.
d. Tariffs are a way of discouraging the shipping of goods long distance, to indirectly save on heavy oil. We should not be surprised by their increasing usage.
[8] In my view, deflation is a greater risk than inflation in 2026.
With a k-shaped economy, demand for apartments (especially smaller ones) tends to stay low. As an economy becomes increasingly k-shaped, low-paid workers tend to share an apartment with one or more friends or move in with family members to save money. In a December 23 report, Apartment Advisor writes that the US average asking rent for studio apartments fell by 2.81% in 2025 compared to 2024. The similar comparison for one-bedroom apartments showed a price drop of 1.72% in 2025. In an increasingly k-shaped economy, I would expect this trend toward lower rental prices of smaller apartments to continue and perhaps become more pronounced.
Real estate selling prices may also be an area for downward price pressure. Young people who have not built up equity through prior home ownership tend to find themselves shut out from buying homes. Also, commercial real estate of many kinds seems to be grossly oversupplied in many areas. Given this situation, downward price adjustments seem likely.
Underlying this downward pressure on prices may be some actual cuts in wages. One law firm reports that cuts in wages are becoming increasingly common, especially for employees of smaller companies.
There are precedents for deflation becoming a problem. The US had problems with deflation at the time of the Great Depression. Japan had problems with deflation after its crash in real estate prices in the 1990s, and China (with its real estate price crash) has recently been having problems with deflation.
[9] “Bread and circuses” become more important as the economy becomes more k-shaped.
Many readers have heard about bread and circuses. Before the Roman Empire collapsed, it used bread and circuses to keep its citizens from rioting from a lack of food. The way to prevent food riots is by making sure everyone has enough to eat through food distribution programs, described as “bread.” Providing circuses offers a distraction from the fact that there are not enough well-paying jobs to go around.
Today, with our increasingly k-shaped economies, leaders have figured out that meeting citizens’ basic needs is essential if unrest is to be avoided. Political leaders somehow need to provide food and healthcare to their poorer citizens. They also need to keep people distracted with entertainment. For many years, governments of Advanced Economies have been trying to provide the equivalent of bread and circuses. In the US, legislation providing Social Security for the elderly was enacted in 1935, during the Great Depression. Many other financial support programs have been added over the years. Today’s circuses today are provided through televised entertainment and video games.
A major problem is that the costs of these programs have become more expensive than tax revenue can support. This is especially true of the cost of “bread,” if its cost is defined as including healthcare and pensions for the elderly, in addition to food. Ultimately, these high-cost programs can bring an economy down. The high cost of bread and circuses is thus a second limiting factor, besides excessive interest payments on government debt, (discussed in Section [3]).
[10] Leaders of many countries are already making plans that can be used to deal with shrinking resources per capita.
If there aren’t enough resources to go around, what can governments do to prevent riots? Two obvious choices come to mind:
(a) Tighten controls on citizens to prevent riots. China has been a leader in this area, and the UK and US seem to be trending in a similar direction. In a sense, the Covid requirements of 2020 were practice with respect to restrictions on movement.
(b) Develop a rationing system that can be used, in case of a shortfall of essential goods. Many countries are looking at central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). These are a digital form of central bank money that is widely available to the public. In the US, I expect CBDCs will be rolled out initially as a way for those who are entitled to food stamps to easily access their benefits. If these digital currencies work, CBDCs can easily be expanded into a widespread rationing system. Government leaders will then be able to decide who can afford to buy what, rather than depending on the way the k-shaped economy currently allocates buying-power.
[11] What lies ahead in 2026?
I don’t think any of us know for certain. The general direction of the world economy seems to be toward contraction, but some parts of the world economy will fare better than others.
Europe looks increasingly like it is an “also-ran” behind the US and China in the world economy. I expect its resource use will continue to shrink back in 2026, indirectly benefiting the United States and the rest of the world. I am hoping that with cutbacks in oil usage by island nations and Europe, and the resulting lower world oil prices, the United States will be able to avoid the worst of the recessionary tendencies looming in 2026.
There are some reports that AI, as it is being applied in China, is providing major success in reducing the cost of coal mining in China. If this is true, it may allow China’s economy to grow in 2026, despite downturns in many other countries.
I am fairly certain that AI, as it is being developed in the US and Europe, cannot continue its recent exponential growth trajectory, and I expect this to become obvious in the next few months. This shift seems likely to pull down US stock market indices. Here again, I am hoping that despite this issue, the US will be able to avoid the worst of the world’s recessionary tendencies.
I don’t expect a world war in 2026. For one thing, no country has adequate ammunition capability. I think civil wars and wars against nearby countries are more likely.
It is possible that the EU will collapse in 2026, leaving the individual countries on their own.
At some point in the future, I expect that the central government of the US will also collapse, in the manner of the Soviet Union in 1991. States will likely regroup and issue new local currencies; the new combined governments will likely provide much more limited benefits than the US government provides today.
Many people think that different leadership will change the current trajectory, but I am doubtful about this. Most of the world’s problems are “baked into the cake” by resource shortages and by too high a population relative to resources. Keeping immigration down is one way of trying to keep resources and population in closer balance.
All in all, I expect a very uneven world economic downturn in 2026. Economies will continue to become more k-shaped. Governments will do their best to hide problems from the public. Stock markets will likely not do well in 2026, if they can no longer count on AI for an uplift.
Game on Venezuela!
https://x.com/sentdefender/status/2007346859661242511
Someone prepare that Nobel Peace Prize!
Apparently we’re conducting ground operations too? This is going to be a disaster. Looking forward to see what this will do to gold and silver prices.
BREAKING: Chinese officials are apparently caught in the crossfire as they arrived for Venezuela government meetings 4 hours ago.
https://x.com/FinanceLancelot/status/2007355183739875696
While we await further news I think this was basically a kidnapping action a la Noriega . Maduro was betrayed by his generals and handed over to the US forces . I do not see or hear of an amphibious landing or ground force deployment nor any firefight /skirmish between VZ army and a US commando forces that must have obviously landed by helicopters in Caracas to whisk Maduro . No fatalities on either side . Just my assessment .
Agree ravi. At this point it looks like another Al Nusra cakewalk (Syria). Which i didn’t expect but what I do have predicted for Ukraine – that it collapses and Russia cakewalks all the way West in order to secure the Western Ukrainian NPPs. Now I’m thinking that China’s taking of Taiwan will be just the same.
The cakewalks: Hand or Not Hand?
Massive explosion near airport!
Walter Coles and Randy Reichert
“”High quality asset with a clear pathway to first gold
Eskay Creek is a sizeable, high grade open pit project, grading roughly 3.5g/t gold equivalent. The mine plan targets around 450kozpa gold equivalent production in years 1 to 5 and roughly 320kozpa over a 12 year mine life. With AISC below US$900 per ounce in the feasibility study, Eskay sits in the rare category of high margin projects in a tier one jurisdiction.””
It takes 1 ton of ore to produce 3.5 gms of gold. This is high grade ore; What is low grade ore? 😰
21st Century (So Far): Generally between 50:1 and 80:1, but with extreme highs (123:1 in 2020) and lows (around 30:1 in 2011).
Today the price of silver is $ 80 per oz . So the price of gold should be $ 6400 .
With higher prices, revitalizing old depleted mines makes sense.
According to Wikipedia, “The Eskay Creek region is a rich gold and silver mining area in the Unuk and Iskut River region on north coastal mountains of British Columbia.”
Sheep are going insane!
His eyes looked demonic.
https://x.com/HustleBitch_/status/2007118390779846924
If people are hungry, they often don’t act in the controlled way that they usually do. We have more hungry, poor people today.
Just hustlin. Time is money baby.
This is another AI video claiming that three banks needed emergency funding (totaling $24 billion) on January 2 because of silver market problems, because of the Chinese export ban.
Silver prices spiked up today, after China closed silver exports as of January 1, 2026. Three banks are concerned about covering “shorts” in the derivative markets. They asked for, and received, a total of about $24 billion in emergency funding. He is predicting that over the next few months, prices will spike higher, as systemically important banks increasingly have problems. He claims that at some point the physical silver price will settle at $300 or more.
Asymmetric warfare is as real as bombing warfare. Perhaps Trump should leave off stealing China’s oil from Venezuela.
this AI guy appears on so many YT channels it is not funny. He also posts financial details which can not be found without a research team behind him. I note that some boilerplate content is recycled from video to video, sometimes changing the title and the preamble only. It is possible that this team is much smaller than I originally thought, so the Chinese govt may not be the source. It appears to me that new detail, new video, mostly cut and paste.
Still, much more valuable financial information than the sewer that Zerohedge has become.
Sometimes, taking valuable financial information is helpful.
A person has to look at more than one of these videos to understand the full situation as it is unfolding.
Quite a bit of the derivatives market depends on paper commodities being equivalent to “real commodities.” Banks have huge exposure to these derivatives. If it becomes apparent that there is a huge gap between paper silver and real silver, then how can derivatives trust all of the other paper commodity amounts?
Also, diesel oil is important in extracting many of these commodities. If it is in short supply, that is another limit.
Thanks for covering these videos Gail.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/helion-begins-work-on-fusion-power-plant
50MW of electric power by 2030 from fusion. A smoldering fusion.
Helion ‘begins’ work
Wake me up when it is ready
A fool and his money are soon separated.
The previous six working prototypes make us feel good.
Those 50MW will cost 49 MW of electricity, coming from a plant with 33 to 70% efficiency. (sorry, these are still wildly optimistic numbers)
Ooooh Fitzy boy! Read it and weep! 😁 Maduro goes public with the NYT back channel report of the other month that you refused to believe and that I said was likely true because it’s in accordance with the HTOE. Giving it to you from Fox News too lol:
“Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said Thursday that his government is open to negotiating an agreement with the United States after months of American military pressure targeting drug trafficking networks tied to his government.
In a pre-taped interview with Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet that aired on state television, Maduro said Venezuela is “ready” to discuss a drug-trafficking deal with the U.S. He called on the countries to “start talking seriously, with data in hand.”
“The U.S. government knows, because we’ve told many of their spokespeople, that if they want to seriously discuss an agreement to combat drug trafficking, we’re ready,” he said. “If they want oil, Venezuela is ready for U.S. investment, like with Chevron, whenever they want it, wherever they want it and however they want it.”
https://www.foxnews.com/world/maduro-says-venezuela-ready-make-deal-us-drugs-oil-after-military-strikes.amp
You’re making shit up again. I said that the report was actually a list of demands(as it clearly was), that would be dismissed(as it was). At no point have I said Maduro or Venezuela don’t want to deal, because you can go back to Chavez and their stance was/is the same, which two rather large US companies will confirm(you even highlight one of them).
Corporate media can write whatever they choose to feed the mentally feeble, but anyone that follows the world outside of corporate media will be wholly unsurprised(timing is interesting given what else is happening, so watch the tv to guarantee having no idea at all what is really going on).
You do know about the Chinese flagged tankers and the warning from Beijing?
Now the gobshite can back away with the deal that’s been on the table all along and tell the nodding dogs back home it’s a win(as long as he and them don’t realise that stopping drug trafficking in the region basically means kicking the CIA out).
Anyway, Iran is back in the ramblings of the President of Pedophilia and he’s said he’s going to kill people to save them.
Navy won’t be happy, as he’s sending them here, there and everywhere(then back again) and the only place he’s deployed troops is in the US.
This seems to me to be conflict with China over oil issues.
Just because you choose to invert the NYT report by speculating that the report was actually the NYT spooks projecting their demands onto VZ doesn’t mean that I’m making shit up. And what’s with the “again.” What else am I making up? You speculate, I speculate, and the proof is in the pudding.
The NYT report claimed that VZ offered the US mineral rights to the degree that VZ would be willing to re-prioritize US investment over Chinese (mainly) investment and, what’s more, that oil flows are rerouted in the US’ favor. That last part about rerouting oil flows was not mentioned by Maduro yesterday but Maduro did say whenever, wherever, and however the US wants it. HOWEVER. That’s a tell.
From my research the only long-term binding production contract that VZ has with China is with a private Chinese corporation called China Concord Resources Corp, and the AI bot say that VZ can export the oil produced by that Chinese partnership to the US if it chooses to.
The HTOE has long held that VZ will become an oil protectorate of the US come Phase 2, which is what the HOWEVER is suggesting. And the HTOE has obviously held that position because trade routes need to shrink and trading needs to simplify.
Another thing. Why would VZ leave that deal on the table “all along” when it would obviously prefer to deal with China or ANYBODY ELSE whose not trying to fucking overthrow its government all the time, and when Maduro himself said that the US or Israel killed Chavez? Huh? Make that make sense Fitz.
The Hand calls all the shots around here. The full proof will be in the pudding soon enough here.
Thank you for your attention lol.
Your first paragraph is unnecessary. Calm down.
how did this post age, if maduro has been captured and the interior minister killed?
Boroboedoer, Java.
https://youtu.be/tDuhIrzBjbQ?si=RNTW0okrnxqECCd-
The same site in 1920s.
https://youtu.be/lLjWd_37IQQ?si=7_1Fie7XU8HrEfTr
It is in a region called Yogyakarta, called Jogja by the locals.
I have said that In 1948, the Dutch almost recovered all of Dutch East Indies, and Sukarno and his gang had made their last stand at Jogja, where its local ruler, called Sultan, supported Sukarno’s cause.
But USA bailed out Sukarno and showed a middle finger to Holland, and as a result the largest city of the world now is Jakarta, with 42 million people whose aggregate contribution to civilization is zero. When it was called Batavia by the Dutch, it had less than a million in 1949.
Instead of creating the monstrosity called Indonesia, with 300 million and counting (it is the world’s most populous Muslim country), nuclear weapons should have been used at Jogja, incinerating the city, Sukarno, the Sultan and the last holdouts who thought giving a country to the Javanese was a good idea.
Granted, Borobudur is a bit outside of the city and would not have been damaged, but just for testing, a nuke could be used to demonstrate its ability to destroy ancient buildings. It is a Hindu/Buddhist temple so the local Muslims would not have missed, as seen in its 1950 clip
https://youtu.be/ffwuW6d52n4?si=UPEHzgLCjEIctGhZ
Where squatters used the relic as their homes (they were kicked out when UN (the Indonesian govt did not give a crap) restored tat site)
For this, I value the Borobudur temple not worth the life of a Dutch soldier, since the value of Borobudur for the Civilization of the world is, I have to say, zero.
Kulmthesourgrapes.
How will peak oil unfold ? Interesting timeline .
https://www.reddit.com/r/peakoil/comments/1pz9wan/an_essay_on_peak_oil_and_the_aftermath_the/#lightbox
I don’t get very far. High prices? Surging use of EVs doing anything?
Maybe there is something in this essay that makes sense, but it doesn’t sound very worthwhile from the beginning.
It feels overly simplistic, almost as if it were written by a teenager. It claimed bitcoin would surge to 10 million because the wealthy need a safe place to park their money, which suggests they’re not exactly the sharpest. The idea that oil could reach $250 per gallon is absurd, as at that price the unemployment rate would probably skyrocket to 100 percent. Even then, it’s hard to imagine what kind of job could pay enough for someone to afford that oil.
This is another AI video claiming that Mexico is looking at a 20% tax on silver exports.
I would guess that if there is a financial motive, it has to do with manipulation of the price of silver.
Or causing the US dollar to somehow crash.
I don’t have time to watch the video right now but Mexico is the #1 producer (of ore). I suppose the government can use this situation to make a little dough. It is conceivable that it would export even with a 100% tariff.
Given that one of the previous video’s thumbnail embedded in this comment section has pasted across the bottom of it, “THE GREAT RESET IS HERE,” I will assume that it is a Handjob, using much truth in service of falsehood, in order to herd people away from the non-existent great reset.
Great Reset paranoia programming is the two minutes of hate programming from 1984. Fitz, being slightly uncomfortable with that, has rebranded it back to the old branding, and now uses Agenda 2030 again instead of Great Reset. Lol. Huh Fitz?
The plandemic really did a number on people’s minds.
Fear is a mind killer.
“Handjob”
Beware of double meanings. 🙁
Hello again reante. You know that you can comment without feeling the need to name people that don’t agree with everything you say.
Then again you might just be conveying Masinissa’s feelings when he proclaimed “nomine ipso recreor”.
Bad news, I’m not Scipio, but if just the mention of my name rejuvenates, please continue.
Back to your comment.
Branding, branding, endless rebranding, can confuse people(as intended), so just to keep the order correct, Agenda 21 was the original brand, but that went south quickly, as they didn’t have full narrative control and far too many people became suspicious far too fast(you knew this though, surely).
Back to the drawing board and around another decade of skulduggery(buyouts mainly and putting the correct mindset in the correct position of course), then onto Agenda 2030. All the other mindless shit like “gross reset” and “new abnormal” where just simple headlines for the simple minded. “Build back betterer” being my personal favourite and although I kept asking, no one wanted to answer, when I asked, what do I need to do before I can “build back”.
What’s the answer?
“Fear is a mind killer”
Yes and I hear some people are making up the most fantastical stories(I bet they always come out on top).
I’ll stick to the boring old ways and read what they write in their policy papers, whilst observing what they do. Tedious I know, but it’s amazing how often the two work. Give it a try.
Just to confirm: It’s Masinissa, isn’t it?
Thanks. The boring old ways indeed. Such a shame. Well I had a little bone to pick because you threw a couple low blows in your final reply to me in the last thread, and you were saved by the bell, hence the rejuvenating calls for your presence: “thank you sir may I have another.” That’s from the movie “Animal House,” during a paddling.
I see you threw another one in below, to dem. When the going gets tough, the messenger often gets shot.
The Masinissa thing is above my pay grade, sorry can’t confirm without additional info.
Yes Agenda 21 came before Agenda 2030, but Agenda 2030 came before the Great Reset, which was my point, Fitz. Strawman.
So here’s the unofficial Agenda 2030 conspiracy theory summary. Please confirm whether this is the general thrust of what you mean by Agenda 2030, because it looks pretty much the same as the Great Reset doesn’t it?
One global government
One global, cash-free currency
One central global bank
One global army
End of national sovereignty
End of all national sovereignty
End of all private property
End of the family unit
Population displacement, control over the population growth and population density
Multiple mandatory vaccinations
Universal basic income (rationing policy)
Transplanting microchips for purchases, traveling, surveillance and control
Implementing a global social credit system (like the one used in China)
Trillions of candidates connected to the G5 surveillance system
Government to raise all children
Government-owned schools and universities
End of private transportation, car ownership etc.
All businesses owned by the government / the corporation
Restriction of non-essential air travel
Humans will be concentrated in areas of human settlement
End of irrigation
End of private livestock farms
End of family homes
Limited use of the land in the service of human needs
Ban on non-synthetic natural remedies and naturopathy
End of fossil fuels
LOL
Low blows you say?
Flys?
I didn’t take you for such a delicate flower.
Your corporate flag?
Don’t tell me you didn’t know.
Maybe the vacuum cleaner?
Still got your flys down then.
I replied to Demi because I had already noticed the pattern.
You didn’t?
Haven’t read the link I assume and shooting the messanger just reveals a loss of control, which almost always comes not long before defeat(not much help to the messenger to be fair).
Masinissa is from Somnium Scipionis and it was a joke.
Here’s the relevant part in Latin and English
https://webdesign.hope.edu/projects/A/1/Chapters/Chapter1.html
Don’t get hung up on names. All the 3 word catchphrases are no more than conditioning(again, what do you have to do before you can build back?)
Did you see Gail’s reply to my “low blows” comment, listing SDGs and wonder what they might really be saying?
Continuity of Agenda is the only game they are playing. Sometimes it goes astray and agendas get moved/shelved, but the overall goal never changes, which makes your questions irrelevant at best and Atlantic Council type tomfoolery at the other end.
I fear you’ll be 30 X 30’d long before you realise it could even happen(ever read Rosa Koire?).
Demi, we’ve also been treated to “climax” and “come shot” today.
Wilhelm Reich might be worth a read
“Like any other reactionary movement, Hitlerism gained its support from the various strata of the middle class. National Socialism laid bare all the contradictions which characterize the mass-psychology of the middle class. We will have to comprehend these contradictions and their common origin in the imperialist conditions of production. We shall limit ourselves to the problems of sexual ideology.”
https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-mass-psychology-of-fascism
Could just be a bet, to see how many sexual references he could fit in(the above might still be relevant given the subject of choice).
To support my point that we are already in the middle of it:
Sociologist Ella Paneyakh:
“A sudden ceasefire would trigger fierce competition for shrinking resources between local administrative powers, law enforcement, and criminal networks – against a backdrop of infrastructural decay and demographic crisis.”
https://nestcentre.org/a-ceasefire-and-potential-renewal-of-military-action/
amazing how trashy western academia has become. How can these guys return home if there is no gasoline? and has she not heard that Von der Leyen had already announced years ago that Russian’s economy is in tatters? They will mostly enter the security apparatus of the prosperous West.
Writers in academia have to write articles that appeal to their peer reviewers and to the people in charge of their raises. Writing articles about the tend toward downfall of Russia is thus popular.
Whether or not we subscribe to the following idea, we at least don’t dispute that Israel now needs to maintain a war economy or it collapses, so why should we dispute the same idea vis a vis Russia? Or America, or Germany, or Iran, etc.
Welcome to the onramp to the Big Nuclear Scare. There is no offramp.
The Hand must make order out of manufactured ‘chaos.’
“Reconciling these frameworks through accuracy-weighted synthesis yields a most-likely surplus range of 1.5 to 2.5 million barrels per day. This is smaller than the IEA’s headline projection but still represents the largest sustained oversupply since the 2015-2016 price war. . . .
Sum these contributions and the picture crystallizes with brutal clarity: 400,000 barrels per day from Brazil, 250,000 from Guyana, 120,000 from Canada, 150,000 from Argentina, with additional growth from Norway’s Johan Sverdrup Phase 2 and various smaller contributors. Non-OPEC supply growth of 1.2-1.8 million barrels per day is not a forecast requiring optimistic assumptions. It is committed production from projects already in development, funded by capital already deployed, executed by teams already assembled. The supply is coming regardless of price signals.
The cruelest irony is that this supply wave arrives precisely as the engine of American shale production finally stalls.“?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-183215608
Berman on diesel
https://x.com/aeberman12/status/2006932679133114426?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
According to Art:
Diesel is what I’m watching in 2026
Crude can be “oversupplied” while products stay tight
Europe’s diesel margins jumped ~30% in 2025 even as Brent fell ~20%
Expect more of the same.
The crude that is available is disproportionately light, unfortunately. That seems to be the problem. Also, light is disproportionately used for personal autos, and this use is being cut back.
I like Art, but it would be hard to make a buck following his advice.
If crude is so scarce, why is it so cheap?
Dennis L.
Crude (or oil) is used to grow food and transport goods of all kinds. Its price can’t rise very much or the whole system collapses; if the prices rise very much, poor people can’t afford food, and shipping becomes impossibly high-priced. Politicians get voted out of power. Politicians will do all in their power to lower prices.
Also, if wages of the majority fall very low, oil prices tend to fall, because too many people are just barely getting by. They don’t spend money on driving to restaurants, going on trips, or even a used car. “Demand” stays too low.
we have locked ourselves into an economic system that must constantly expand…
which it clearly cannot do….
but contraction means overall collapse.
all we can do is argue about the details…
not the ultimate outcome……at least in terms of our current level of existence
This author also sees an oversupply of oil, but his price forecast seems to be higher than today. He seems to be as clueless as most people about why demand rises and falls.
Mark me clueless, were I any good could make a fortune. It may be that oil which is not pumped now will not have much value going forward.
China is going solar big time, they are going electric vehicles big time, probably don’t know what they are doing.
You heard it from me some time ago, it is Cu, right after that cubic mile of Pt.
Dennis L.
“The significance of Brazilian production extends beyond volumes. Pre-salt breakeven costs have fallen to approximately $28 per barrel as Petrobras has mastered the technical challenges of ultra-deepwater extraction in carbonate reservoirs beneath 2,000 meters of salt. The engineering achievement is remarkable: producing high-quality light crude from reservoirs five to seven kilometers below sea level, beneath a salt layer that defeated exploration attempts for decades, at costs competitive with conventional onshore production. This means Brazilian barrels will flow at any price above $30. They will flow at $50. They will flow at $40. They will flow while higher-cost producers shut in and declare bankruptcy. The marginal cost curve is flattening at the low end precisely as supply abundance emerges at the high end.
Guyana’s transformation from impoverished coastal nation to material swing factor in global oil markets represents one of the most dramatic resource discoveries in petroleum history. The Stabroek block, operated by ExxonMobil with partners Hess and CNOOC, achieved 900,000 barrels per day in November 2025 after the Yellowtail project reached full production. The Uaru development adds 250,000 barrels per day in late 2026. ExxonMobil has committed $60 billion to seven development phases targeting 1.7 million barrels per day by 2030, transforming a country of 800,000 people into a petroleum power whose production rivals Libya and Ecuador.
Guyana’s breakeven costs are among the lowest in the world at roughly $35 per barrel, reflecting both geological favorability and ExxonMobil’s determination to prove that major oil companies can still execute world-class projects despite the energy transition narrative, ESG constraints, and shareholder demands for capital returns over growth. The Stabroek development stands as a monument to traditional upstream competence, a reminder that conventional megaprojects can still deliver exceptional returns when geology cooperates and execution is flawless.”
Sorry , this guy is so full of crappy information . Even mature offshore oilfields like GOM are not priced at this level . The only two guys who are experts on offshore are George Kaplan and South Geo and they say nothing below $ 55-60 . For onshore and Permian only Mike Shellman has the structure . All three are “hands on” individuals and not armchair analysts .
Worse not once in his article he mentions decline rates , GOR , WOR . Disappointed because he does have good posts on financial affairs , but oil is not his game .
Thanks for the references, not where I am going now, but nice to know.
Dennis L.
Well his financial posts can’t be very good either because by the time the barrel price gets down to 35 for a couple months there will be a hell of a lot fewer dollars to go around, meaning that every remaining dollar is worth that much more, which renders the $35 nominal price more like 80 or 90 or 125 or whatever in real terms. So few people have any idea what deflation is because it’s like the Upsidedown from Stranger Things. It’s a stranger thing alright. Same goes for Collapse. Everything inverts. Hand doesn’t want us to realize that but respects us when we do. That’s a cool Hand.
I have said a few times that the only way to avoid a collapse is to significantly reduce the standard of living of at least 98% of the world’s pop.
Too much resources are wasted for nothing, for peoples who add nothing to civilization. That has to be stopped.
I doubt the upper 2% add anything to civilisation. Researchers, inventors and artists are usually poor. Rich people may bring people together, like Rudolf II. or Franz I. Stephan, no doubt about that. May. I am not sure Epstein has added anything to civilisation.
I agree that it is no problem to have reduced living standards. I think it is a risk to reduce them. It might fuel tipping points.
Epstein did more to civilization than most. He made the movers and shakers a place to release their energy.
Much more than the Cockneys who still think Arthut Harris, the Rhodesian, is a national hero.
when coventry was pulverised
i suppose Arthur harris should have sent hi tler a stiff letter requesting him not to do it again?
Harris was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1892. He emigrated to Rhodesia in 1910, aged 17. He joined the 1st Rhodesia Regiment at the outbreak of the First World War and saw action in South Africa and South West Africa. In 1915, Harris returned to England to fight in the European theatre of the war. He lived in England for the rest of his life. He died in 1984 at the age of 1991.
Contrary to Kermit’s belief, probably most English or Brits under 40 have never heard of Harris. My 20-something niece had never even heard of pounds, shillings and pence until recently.
“Cockneys” is an outmoded expression, anyway. I live in London but wasn’t born there, just in case Kermit wonders.
Correction: “he died at the age of 91”.
Bomber Harris starring John Thaw as Bomber Harris and Robert Hardy as Winston (Gas the Kurds) Churchill.
Time for popcorn, or would that be crisps?
His bombing could be justified.
His strange value system of valuing the life of a fusilier, which is easily replaceable, over the castle of Dresden is not.
He probably learned it from the Shona of Rhodesia, whose most famous monument is the heap of rocks, which graced the infamous Zimbabwe trillion dollar bills.
He should have left such beliefs in Africa.
no idea what you are going on about kulm
“E—–n did more for civilization than most.”
Look what happened to “Prince Andrew” for being associated with THAT person. And now Kermit too claims to be a fan boy? It beggars belief. Perhaps it’s time for Gail to cancel him, for bringing shame to OFW.
Yes agree, but mind you Rudolf II. was sort of an self-outcast himself in terms of personality – non conventional elite if you will – as coming out of peculiar lineage of arts/sciences loving sub-branch of the family; himself then on purpose switching Vienna for Prague to have more free realm for both political as well personal ambitions – his exploits incl. one of the largest arts collection and hosting numerous key scientists like Brahe, Kepler, Hagecius, Jessenius, .. there.. and artists Spranger, von Aachen, Arcimboldo, Heintz, de Vries, Sadeler, Savery, …
At that time Prag was a German city. None of the people mentioned above was Czech. The first “Czech” artists of note was Alphonse Mucha, who preferred to stay in Paris until he got old.
No Czechs attended Mozart’s Magic Flute premier there.
Both Mendel and Kafka, who spent most of their lives in the boundaries of what is now Czechia, left absolutely no piece of writings in Czech.
We had been at this for several innings already, lol.
For starters, at that very time stamp Jan opened up (Rudolf II. era) – most of the European (higher)-nobility of late renaissance was communicating in Latin, many attended several universities across the continent; then if necessary at home turf it “scaled down” to local German, Italian, English, Czech, .. lang.
For example that guy above “Hagecius” was Czech noble, studied abroad, cross-translated to/from several lang. in several scientific fields; he was commissioned by the emperor to ~preside over the hiring / evaluation of various scientific personalities hosted around there..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tade%C3%A1%C5%A1_H%C3%A1jek
Recently, I stumbled around very funny fact, “saving it” for silly occasion like this, e.g. Comenius – origins / background are obvious (dev of modern didactic learning methods – exiled during 30yrs war) had a grandson who was one of the founders of Berlin-Prussian academy of sciences, himself meanwhile being intermixed via further PL/SK blood line connections.. Isn’t it hilarious, in effect ~pure German origin~ is evidently a silly mythos even when later branching out.
Similarly, I noticed accidentally that Adolf himself had close affinity to one silent movie international star(-let) of PL nationality during the mid-late 1920s and perhaps even into 1930s as she also appeared few times then as well. Apparently he commissioned his boyz to check up for possible je#ish angle, negative.. hence it was OK, hah.
She (“Pola Negri”) performing 1937, Tango Notturno on YTube..
Dolfie was not exactly the most educated individual of that era. All he knew was drawing. He had no concept of history, military strategy, etc. He just knew how to make good speeches.
At that time few people identified themselves as “Czechs”, a concept which did not exist until the 19th century. All of them were German speaking and wrote in Latin. it was not until the 19th century that ‘Czech nationalists’ appeared from the woodwork, creating a ‘national identity’ which did not exist, somewhat like BLM today.
This is quite a bizarre corner here..
Above I lobbed on to your side of court just two examples from roughly the Rudolph’s era (we can go easily more centuries back still), Hagecius and Comenius. Both int recognized scientists and evidently writing tons of Czech besides Latin, the info and pics of books are in your face there as the links provided..
Funnily enough, the former even published translated some (Latin/IT) key botanical opus first to Czech and then next year to German edition (yes to reach greater int audience) as well..
Frankly, don’t get your often relapsing obsession with Kafka. Nobody sane here questions the basic fact he was indeed of German mother tongue and part of Je#ish diaspora within Prague.
Actually, you don’t have all the facts straight.
Results just from under few mins of googling and AI translations: he attended elementary to high school CZE lang. sessions, had to communicate that daily while helping in father’s biz. Also wrote some personal stuff in CZE. Anybody can easily refer to this Regensburg Uni Prof. who apparently searched through Kafka’s heep of archival material to that effect..
https://www.uni-regensburg.de/bohemicum/team/marek-nekula/index.html
PS the complex intermixed CEE situation is also revealed in the surname “Kafka” – which likely stems from ~preceding century to his birth – where je#ish pop was nudged by the Austrian admin-authorities to choose a local name; and they often mis-used it for suggesting them in joke-prank some silly name, a bird specie [kafka = jackdaw: Coloeus monedula / Corvidae] in this case. Or perhaps, less likely, they had some Slavic side lineage in the past.
The only pieces of Czech writing he ever wrote was his school writing. After graduation he never wrote word of czech for the rest of his life, even though he spent the last 4 years of his life as a citizen of Czechoslovakia.
Czech is a language rejected by its biggest actual user, Milan Kundera. End of story.
Again Kafka’s focus on writing in German has not been disputed – you are storming through opened gates..
Kundera, while perhaps notable author at some hist stage and genre, was hardly the peak example of the overall literature realm – yes FR domain intellectuals adore him. Trained Francophile and political emigrant – so what – good for him, many such figures of similar profile throughout the FR/INT culture and history..
Besides, evidently as in record, he lately himself worked on better translations of his previous work (CZE->FR) as gradually soaked more of the french niveau he immersed in..
And as you alluded his later work – post migration – was directly written and published in French.
Yes, he specifically denied CZE translation of his later work, but that evidently rhymes with political cycle, as he lifted the ban after 1989/90 regime change period.
So, as always, you tend to cherry pick only some [portion] of given more complex reality..
Don Giovanni did premier in Prag, attended by nobody who could be called Czechs, in the same way that not too many people who could be called Hispanics attend events in Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Whatever accomplishments the Czechs might have attained, it cannot be denied that the richest province of the Austria-Hungarian Empire turned into a fraction of itself by 1990.
This is getting even more embarrassing each successive round.. or isn’t rather about pulling our leg – teasing – joke ?
Mozart’s Magic Flute was premiered in Vienna instead.
If you meant on other occasions, yes Mozart worked in Prague; among other locals, he befriended harpsichordists and pianists Frantisek X Dussek (Czech) and his wife Josepha (German/Austrian). It’s almost guaranteed they both were invited to Mozart’s concerts there..
Plus Mozart was sponsored during said visit by local nobility (of diverse ethnicity backgrounds).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josepha_Duschek
Yes. Down with muppets. Send Kermit to the chair!
The reason you’ve said that too many times is because you don’t understand what civilization structurally is. It’s your unseemly way of bargaining with Collapse.
Q. Why is he so bitter and twisted?
A. Because he’s just a muppet.
kul,
With that attitude you won’t get the broads, sorry about that.
Dennis L.
Some people have different objectives on life, different from get laid with fast women.
I think there’s an increase on OFW of suggesting videos that are all AI. I understand some readers are fine with that.
If you click on “more” under a video, you can click on “About.” There is a beginning channel date under About. Anything that has a multitude of videos & shows October, 2025, as the start date, is likely AI. Fully AI channels exploded this fall.
We would probably do well not to rely much on the content of these videos until we see confirmation elsewhere.
There are different ways that AI can be used. The anonymous person making videos under the name Finance Historian seems to be using AI primarily to hide his own identity. He gives a huge amount of details and reasoning that makes a whole lot of sense to people who have worked closely with this kind of thing. It is the level of detail, and the authors understanding of how financial systems work that impresses some of us. This is a link to the comment Postkey first made, and drb and I responded to.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/12/31/2026-expect-a-very-uneven-world-economic-downturn/#comment-497645
Later, Dennis L. found another video by this same person.
This second video makes it clear that the problems will be hidden, and will be passed off to insurance companies and pension plans. All the major outlets will sweep the problem under the rug in a way we have seen operate in the past. We won’t know about the problem tomorrow morning. It will hit derivative markets much later.
Other AI is much less sophisticated. That is the problem.
It’s not a single author here, Gail.
These videos are clearly created by a Team of people.
There is no need to say that the person appearing in the video is AI generated…but that I think that everyone has understood.
So, we cannot expect a substack or a book made from this author, but other productions made by this Team.
The key point is on the contrary to understand why they produce these videos.
My impression is for two reasons: one because they sell very well in these times (and can produce advertising earnings), the second one is to destabilize people, enlarging the platea of followers.
Productions like the ones you make have unfortunately little audience, productions like the above can have larger, above all, on younger people.
The person is Asian for two psychological reasons, first because a western person can start to think that also Asian contributes can be of high level and second because the audience can be also not western and stimultate decrease of trust towards western financial markets.
So, although I think that these episodes could become real in the future, those videos productions are from Asian side.
Comunicazione di servizio per drb. Per essere aggiornato su cosa e’ accaduto a Crans-Montana il canale Telegram ‘Lord Bebo & Friends’ ha gia’ pubblicato vari video e foto dei primi momenti dell’ incendio.
Grave colpa dei gestori del locale e ragazzi imbambolati a riprendere col telefonino mentre l’incendio si diffondeva.
Telegram al momento e’ la migliore fonte di informazione per le notizie calde. Ciao.
I suppose I am less suspicious than you. I would be interested in who is funding this endeavor. Is this video series funded by the Communist government, for example? I am not sure that anyone can make a good living off of writing or making videos for the internet.
I also would like to watch for independent verification from other analysts. Spiking repo rates are signs of a problem. We need to be watching for these. Bailouts of banks may or may not be hidden.
I would point out that even this site is to some extent a collaboration. I get a lot of my ideas from those commenting on my site. I also get emails from readers with their ideas, and I have editors who help me in different ways. I am amazed at sites that seem to put out material every day. They must be operated by a team.
yes, I was going to post along the same lines. we should see soon enough if the videos depict reality or not.
Gail, we are saying the same thing.
I guess that probably, as I’m not English or American, I don’t explain my point well in your language.
It happened also in the past.
Anyway, no problem.
You say you are less suspicious than me, but I talked in general ‘Asian production’ and you say ‘Communist government’, so it is even more specific than my point…
For your site and the way you work, I’m well aware and that is why I appreciate your work and this site a lot 😉
I was thinking about the situation. It may be that Kevin Walmsley is getting the background information he uses fed to him through a team of researchers hired by the Chinese governments. We don’t know. It doesn’t necessarily make his research wrong; just one sided.
Whether or not a site is AI, it can easily be funded by foreign interests.
YouTube in the beginning provided a very good living for some, at least that is my impression, no direct knowledge. Now, it is very crowded. I am not sure about AI in videos, it is very useful to do research and understands computer architecture well.
Dennis L.
thanks. without a doubt the swiss massacre was an accident. sometime one has to wait a couple of days.
On the key macabre point – the fact they had to keep the entire place enclosed-shielded by large sets of cloth indicates it had to be a meat grinder. As it still appeared in msm photos dayz after the event..
That’s a practice usually done in gross scene traffic accidents featuring crushed – dismembered humanoids:
trucks, buses, trains, etc.. But in few hours it’s usually gone – all cleaned up – apparently not now at this particular event..
Seen the videos you two “latin lovers” 🙂 hinted about..
Basically, that Swiss joint was kind of a smallish sunken subterranean disco parlor and bar – so if / when the ceiling dropped on the guests .. well.. not pleasant.
Kind of interesting the over-all scene how people jovially (not) helping each other there..
as per diff. perceived panic levels.
The law of averages seems to be the problem.
Most people recording digital video footage and uploading them online just don’t know that much about what they are talking about or are afraid of telling the truth. In one video I recently watched, the content provider chose to blame squarely single-parent households for the decline of work ethic and mechanical aptitude. This is typically how laymen see problems. They can barely describe the problem and just scapegoat a symptom as the problem. The content provider is either ignorant or is hiding the problems that led to a rise in single parent households for by scapegoating. This is a binary explanation, of course. The truth is probably that the very average content provider is both ignorant and is hiding the problem by directing the blame at one and only one thing.
Many human societies, particularly civilization began and thrived as problem organizations. What happens when problem-solving organizations stop solving problem is not good. I think the Collapse of Complex Societies book had a very similar thesis.
What happens when food providers stop providing food?
What happens when healthcare providers stop providing healthcare?
What happens when people pay for goods and services that are never delivered? For what may seem like a long time, it is nothing. Leaders stay in power and not attempt to solve a singe problem.
Then…
I wonder how much is hidden in insurance companies. The AI stuff bothers me, use AI a fair amount, it does make mistakes and really doesn’t admit them. It is very useful, so let it slide.
Dennis L.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2025/12/31/2026-expect-a-very-uneven-world-economic-downturn/#comment-497645
Gone ? ?
Abundant cheap oil gave us [civilization], immense expectations over 200 years. Alongside those abundant years we [in the west], grew up with First World expectations. First World expectations cannot be met in a post oil world. Its our First World expectations that western governments are trying to diminish. Things like state pensions, democracy, discretionary travel, etc, are too expensive in a post oil world.
Its clear to me that my First World expectations are the thing that “grates” on western government plans. As we [First World], oldies die off, we are to be replaced with people with Third World expectations. People with third world expectations have a much lower per capita energy use.
Conversely, Third Worlders moving to the First World, would probably expect the lifestyle they moved to that First World country for. If they have just spent the last five years paying absolutely everything they make to the bank for their mortgage, just be to told that their house isn’t worth what they were told it was, that’s pretty much the recipe for turmoil.
Promises broken, and they will feel like the have been tricked in the worst way. Jobs are going fast, and they will have no chance of getting on that ladder after that.
In Canada, we have this:
WORSE THAN 2010: The “Silent” Crash No One Is Talking About
Mind to Spirit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6UoSsHyCJU
60% of all mortgages reset to higher and much higher rates by the end of 2026.
The US has Bond Fraud, as explained by Mitch Vexler
The $23 Trillion Property Scam That Will Bankrupt America – Vexler
ITM Trading
When I look at this video (or small pieces of it), I get the impression that he is saying something close to what other commenters have been saying for a long time: The cost of all of the built infrastructure (schools, roads, bridges) is awfully high, relative to what people can afford to pay for it. Interest on the debt adds to the problem, as does the fact that people have a lot of debt of their own, that they barely can afford to pay.
I didn’t listen to enough of it to figure out what huge fraud there supposedly is.
I don’t see this as a problem that is going to blow up in the near term, any more than all of our other problems. Perhaps municipal bond holders won’t get paid, but that is likely to be an issue with any debt. Insurance companies hold a lot of municipal debt, so they may have problems.
Also how much is healthcare and insurance supposed to go up? It’s like a death by a thousand cuts.
https://www.mockingbirdproperties.com/dcad
Having trouble evaluating this — maybe after Gail’s dinner —
This sounds like another version of what the video is claiming.
This is the same person / company. Its actually very interesting. School Bonds have been imposed on homeowners… without their knowledge. It is essentially a second mortgage.
The fraud has been going on for decades. Its now showing when people go to sell their houses so they can retire.
In a nutshell, they cant.
Fraud and deception seems to be how a lot of people “get ahead” in the world…
All that matters is that they are winning the competition.
I haven’t personally run into the issue of school bonds being imposed on homeowners without their knowledge.
I agree that if tax rates are higher, it may be harder to sell. The market has a huge number of problems today. This adds to the problems, but I am not sure that it makes them a whole lot worse.
This county consolidated all the elementary schools into two locations and built 2 new buildings. They had to take a 40 million dollar bond out which the business administrator said would pay for itself with fuel savings. Whenever you hear them say that, you know it’s a scam. Public comment was mostly against but the project went on.
There are less than 25,000 people in this county. They will get around the lack of tax income by doing a new property assessment. This is where I believe Mitch says the fraud comes in. They reassess the property at values that do not reflect true market, or what they could realistically be sold at, in order to collect enough tax revenue.
iTM Trading = Lynette Zang
She has beem saying this for years. Nothing new.
started off with a “Mask” how did we end at “Gas?”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn407dyx24go
But… It could’ve been worse!
https://suno.com/song/aaaa8e32-e39b-43c6-ab2b-232eaca6e768
Tomorrow may be very interesting. Time will tell if it is real or made up. If it is real, silver priced in dollars on the COMEX is not the same as purchasing a bar of silver in the real world. If true, paper is not reality and reality will be change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ2J28ch9to
Tomorrow could be chaos and it will be real and personal to all of us. No word salad, wonder what lettuce priced in real silver is at the end of the day.
If I heard correctly, real AG is behind say $230B in derivatives, bring your checkbook.
Dennis L.
Same commenter as earlier.
The write up says,
“China quietly shuts off silver exports early, COMEX faces a 70% delivery shortfall, and central banks scramble in the shadows. This Money Over History episode walks you through a high-stakes hypothetical 2026 “sovereign default” in silver, showing how paper markets, repo funding, and geopolitics could collide in a single night.”
Globex is currently about $72, More and more information is literally junk.
Unemployment numbers are scary, JD has laid off a bunch of people, Tyson is literally closing plants completely. Cars are sitting on the lot and the engines don’t work.
Dennis L.
The video is very convincing. It claims that sales of silver to the US buyers have already been cut off. It says the Shanghai price for silver bars is $90, but the COMEX price is only about $30. Contracts are quietly being rewritten so that under force majeur leading to the unavailability of silver, they can be settled in cash (at $30), with no penalty to the defaulting partner. We will be told that there is no problem, just a small change in the rules.
The problem is now being transferred to the insurance companies and pension funds who hold the insurance that the physical silver will actually be available. We will be told that it is a normal response to a run-up in price. There is nothing to look at. It is all normal. But it will affect a lot of derivatives -the $230 billion that you refer to.
And now the same actor (thanks for pointing out the AI invasion Librarian), whom we agree is exceedingly experienced in finance, says that China will refuse dollars for commercial settlements going forward. As major as silver is, this is majorer. Looks like davidina BAU comments ar coming to an end.
The macro-predicament, and its various interdependent sub-predicaments reduce to a single form: Scale-dependent maximization of narrow-boundary, negative-sum game theoretic outcomes.
In principle* such a form can only be countered by an equal and opposite form that contains the above within a bounded range of homeostatic dynamic equilibrium. Such a form must, in principle*, be grounded on two mutually dependent elements: 1) Scale optimization, and 2) A wide-boundary, mutually enforceable, social contract, that wields the precautionary principle in a proactive manner that subsumes the particular wills of all selfish agents, under a general will that seeks to maintain the universalizable, wide-boundary conditions for particular wills to survive and prosper at all.
The macro-predicament, is largely based on the dominance of narrow-boundary thinking over wide-boundary thinking, memetically, culturally, and demographically.
Wide boundary versus narrow boundary definitions with respect to the one-many, whole-part, and universal-particular dialectic and spatio-temporal scale are critical for the inter-subjective agreement, and mutual reciprocity necessary for establishing a social contract described above.
Narrow boundary thinkers invariably restrict themselves and their thoughts, to their local, finite sphere of influence and existence. They focus on themselves, their in-group, their family, their religion, and possibly, for the slightly less narrow minded, their nation and future generations one or two steps removed. They discount almost entirely, other humans outside their narrow boundary and discount almost entirely the ecosphere, and non-human lifeforms. Narrow boundary thinkers subscribe to major world religions that promise a utopian afterlife that fundamentally disincentivizes immanetizing the eschaton on this planet.
Narrow boundary thinkers exhibit a will to non-reason, culminating in irrational willing, which destroys the foundation on which intersubjective agreement and mutual reciprocity can be had.
Wide boundary thinkers, conversely, go beyond their local sphere of influence and existence, some in the limit, even viewing the universe sub-species aeternitatis. Wide boundary thinkers recognize that the absolute worth of civilization is its propulsion toward the universality of thought. They account for the interdependency of all lifeforms in a macro-systemic manner and subordinate the particular to the universal, at least in the general sense. For wide boundary thinkers there is no misalignment between metaphysical or religious claims and immanetizing the eschaton on this planet. Wide boundary thinkers exhibit a will to reason, culminating in rational willing, which is the foundation of intersubjective agreement and mutual reciprocity.
Here we observe a fundamental inference pattern, psychological, and semantic mismatch between two cognitive species with respect to the one-many dialectic and spatio-temporal scale. Hitherto, the narrow boundary species has competitively excluded and dominated the other.
Translation: ” viewing the universe sub-species aeternitatis”
“Sub specie aeternitatis is a Latin phrase meaning “from the perspective of eternity.” It refers to viewing things in a way that considers universal and timeless truths, rather than being influenced by the temporary aspects of reality.
Translation: “immanetizing the eschaton”
“In political theory and theology, to immanentize the eschaton is a generally pejorative phrase referring to attempts to bring about utopian conditions in the world, and to effectively create heaven on earth.”
My sister Lois Tverberg (who writes religious books) writes that, in the Lord’s Prayer, the phrase,
“thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven” is precisely about working in the direction of creating heaven on earth.
We are to turn the other cheek. We are to look out for the welfare of others. Whether or not there is an afterlife, we can work in the direction of making life as good as it can be, for those of us here on Earth. This is the view I have always been taught.
I think that this approach is the way the self-organizing system gets to the Maximum Power Principle. If people don’t just look out for themselves, the system operates much more smoothly. This is why all religions seem to come up with similar operating principles.
I suspect that inequality helps to “isolate” inflation. Inflation is defined as a wage-price spiral. If newly created, “reprinted” money does not arrive at wages, it does not generate inflation. The rich can no longer spend even more money in the real economy, so they drive prices in the luxury segment, including absurdly overvalued real estate or tech values. For the politician, this looks like growth, the stock market is worth more and more, and inflation remains within limits.
Since Piketty 2013 at the latest, we have been expecting dystopian technocratic interventions to compensate for tipping points.
I am afraid that these will have much less effect than thought. In Austria, for example, forests are being cut down in order to be able to build wind turbines. This does not necessarily generate more energy, forest is an energy storage. In Austrian history, charcoal, that is forest, has been used to operate blast furnaces. With this, not everything goes, but a little. Currently, traditional blast furnaces are being replaced by electric blast furnaces. It is foreseeable that you will not be able to operate these. This creates resistance here. One hopes that they will at least let the old ones stand.
What will come from my point of view is a gradual failure of the state – in fact, we are already in the middle of it. We can imagine it like this: on Sunday, the head of state or the head of the EU steps in front of the cameras and cries and says, I’m so sorry, we have tried everything.
The result will be: you only have what you have in stock or what you can make in your garage or produce in your garden.
People will wait in disbelief until the state starts up again, they simply will not want to admit it and will lose precious time.
Of course, there will be scapegoats and substitute declarations, for example, wars and pandemics. However, tipping points are exceeded, which are irreversible.
One of these tipping points is negative growth: this means that bad loans are inevitable. Ford has written off around EUR 16 billion to say goodbye to the “future technology” of electric trucks. This is also a tipping point and a failure of the state, at least in Europe, where the Green Deal is law.
A significant point will be the rapid loss of education. There are hardly any printing houses in Europe that work with lead types in manual typesetting. There is a flurry of more or less meaningful publications. This bloated canon will be gone after 100 years at the latest. Not to assume that modern laser printing will last longer.
In the OFW Christmas issue, which is very nice and worth reading, there was talk of freezing pipes. This is a very short-term problem. Without electricity, there is no water pressure anymore.
In a racing furnace, you produce between a thumb nail and a fist of iron. This is necessary for knives, axes, garden tools, nails and weapons and very precious.
It is impossible to make piping for the home in this or a similar way. Traditionally, water gutters also for fresh water are made of half logs, which are hollowed out in a semicircular way, open to the top. For this, the blacksmith makes an ax with a cutting edge rotated by 90 degrees. Such an adze is called in German “Dechsel”. For for wooden water channels, the cutting edge is additionally bent. Such a tool is called a “Hohldechsel”, which might translate to hollow adze. It has the sharpening of a gouge, a hollow chisel, but is shorter and wider and led by two hands like an ax.
By the way, you can use AI to have old tools and methods explained to you. But she does not know everything and also misunderstands a lot. She’s not quite an adult.
Two types of adze are on my short list along with a manual bilge pump to load elevated IBC totes at the head of the Spring to run drip irrigation for a native nursery and food plots. Plan is to crank out native nut and fruit trees and shrubs for foraging, sale then barter as Degrowth progresses.
Here most people throw stuff like that. A few collect it like golden, because it might be useful as a future model. Some people swear the old tools are better because they had a different hardening.
I suggest that the concept of a K-shaped economy, implies the economy is in recession for the time being. If the economy is in permanent de-growth the upward strand of the K will surely be temporary. Also, if the wealth of those assumed to be on the upward strand is made up of stocks, shares and property, their value will be zero as a result of no-growth..
My view is that the economy is in permanent contraction (not degrowth as degrowth doesn’t actually exist unless we use it as a word for a slowdown in economic growth) and that the upward strand of the K is entirely a notional wealth gain. Presto magico.
Sometimes things do change. New processes can be discovered. Even if we seem to be running short of essential minerals right now, I think we should leave the door open that, some time in the future, we will find a way around our problems.
It is not as simple as it looks. I called Cu as being a very, maybe the critical resource n
n the near future, but it is actually cheaper in Au than in the sixties.
Cu is cheaper in gold than in dollars from 1960 to present, per Copilot Cu is 85% cheaper now in Au than in 1960. It is the dollar which has lost purchasing power.
Cu has gotten cheaper in terms of oil, in 1960 Cu/barrel $9.7, 2025 Cu(pounds)/barrel 14.6. Basically oil buys 50% more Cu not than 1960. In Au Cu is 85 cheaper over the same time period.
The cost increase is a function of man, not nature, or narrative if you wish.
I submit the narrative is much better understood now than in the 1960’s. Look at presenters, for men great hair, for women, a low cut dress with cleavage. The media is the message. This may explain some of the issues on college campuses. If governments lose control of the currency, they lose control and life gets cheaper.
Have no idea of how some of this works, but Cu is the key element or perhaps Ag which is a byproduct of mining Cu.
Dennis L.
Cu is copper. We now need it for a lot of applications, particularly electricity application. Copper is in short supply. Perhaps that is the reason it is so high-priced, even compared to gold.
Al Jolani the CNN created James Dean of Syria swears the Talm4d like the saudis , the jordanian tomato King with mansions in miami and all the bedouin milking cows sitting over those oilfields in the persian gulf.
Besides the goy1m peasants will still be paying rent to the silverstein’s landlord caste , no matter what this bullshiter a la Obama style do .
all true regrettably.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rWQu9Rfc7I
Total COLLAPSE of ISLAM Begins Now! – WHY?
The argument on the ending of relevance of Islam in this video applies to the whole modern world be that EU, US, China, Japan, South America,….
First Islam cannot collapse , just like humans will not . There will be survivors . Second governments in Islamic countries will collapse but not Islam . Understand the difference between a govt and a faith . Now to the areas you have mentioned — Out of this Japan and Latin America have insignificant Islamic populations . China is concentrated in the Uighur region and contained . What matters is the US and EU . I would worry about the EU . The countries with plus 5% Islamic populations are Germany , France , Netherlands , Belgium etc . I am not including countries like Albania , Russia etc . Here is the risk . USA for the moment does not have a sizeable Islamic population but it takes a few to upset the apple cart . 9/11 , Twin Towers etc .
https://www.halaltimes.com/top-10-european-countries-with-significant-muslim-populations-in-2025/
I disagree with those who say New Zealand is in a bad position. I would say it is ideally positioned to transition to a post oil economy. It has vast farm land, vast herds of sheep, vast fisheries. It can well feed itself. With modest solar and batteries it can cook all the mutton and fish it needs.
A post oil economy is not going to be a Boy Scout camp Kumbaya time.
Play it out…New Zealand has an oil based population without oil it would be much much smaller. Have you ever seen people panic? I have it’s not pretty. Not to get gloomy on you…, just being realistic.
Yep, that’s why F_Eddysimus (supposedly) bailed out years ago, he correctly evaluated (NZ) this is not place for him, aka enjoying posh industrial age trinkets to the very last day.. had to move closer to civ nucleus instead..
That said, for adventurous and skilled people it’s a fantastic place. Although, for “success” the necessary psycho-logic profile to survive and thrive through – after bottleneck process there – only tiny outliers would manage to comply with..
New Zealand certainly can feed some people. Whether or not it can feed all of its current population is a different subject.
In fact, this is true, pretty much everywhere that there is reasonable water supply and arable land.
Well, they can have warm, wool coats.
Dennis L.
Solar powered tread mills and solar powered cloth mills.
All NZ production is set up on oil/gas and all harvest processes are oil/gas machinery. All the knowledge and skills of the people are primed for those oil/gas processes. Noone in NZ knows how to run anything or how to harvest anything without oil/gas processes. When the oil/gas stops flowing NZ will settle down to the natural carting capacity of the land and shore ecosystems. The number is likely less than a million.
FE has the issue covered in this post . Why is NZ not imploding ?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/in-depth/581471/lost-in-transition-the-businesses-trapped-by-new-zealand-s-energy-crisis
https://substack.com/home/post/p-182233733
Time for NZ to go nuclear.
You don’t need to be fast or named eddy to figure it out. It is easier than algebra 101.
” These amounts do not seem unreasonable based on new developments that have already started producing higher amounts of crude oil.”
I suspect that the so-called “new developments” will be found to be like more Somali Daycare Centers. New developments, like fracking, is scraping the bottom of a barrel that stopped being productive a long, long time ago.
Putting demand (too polite a word to be used today) aside, the need for heavier crude oil is greater than supply. Russia has huge reserves of natural resources — in real coal, real natural gas, real crude oil, real minerals, and real rare earths — in an “embarrassment of riches,” all of which the United States, the UK, the EU and the West have either already exhausted, or are becoming too expensive to reach.
In many respects, Ukraine is a battlefield being terraformed into an invasion route.
You may be right, unfortunately.
I agree, This Ukraine fiasco was a Washington “conduit” to steal Russian resources, which Victoria Nuland in 2014 had a hand in procuring, with a bought and paid for “revolution” against the democratic vote of Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Don bass region.
It hasn’t worked.
The realization of the USA, is that it doesn’t have the US military “umph”, to carry through the forced exit of Putin and the Balkanization of Russia to give Blackrock the spoils of Russian commodity wealth.
Is this not why the US has turned its attention to Venezuela, which is closer, has heavy crude, and does not have nuclear defense?
However, there is a problem though.
It seems that Russia may have facilitated hyper-sonic missiles in Venezuela.
If that is the case, Russia and the US have jointly created a foolish repeat of the Cuban missile crisis?
Those last barrels of crude are not going to be acquired easily.
Yep, however it’s arm-chair analytic’s mess, Venezuela got defense systems gear from China, Russia and Iran. Supposedly, the “best potent” gear installed and set operational (AA?) so far from the latter. The most recent cargoes could have been different type of equipment though, like tons of ~RPGs, drones, etc.. Meanwhile Iran itself was on the receiving end of swarms of mil air-cargo from Belarus and Russia in recent weeks.
Here in New York State the first Muslin Indian Brahmin mayor of New York City was sworn in this morning on the Koran. We are benefiting from the brain drain out of a nation with thousands of years of evolution and learning on how to operate urban societies. We are getting the best the Brahmin caste the brightest, best educated.
Some years ago I was walking across the Stanford University campus, walking by was an Indian Matriarchy and her family. She was expounding on the importance of infrastructure development. Exciting times. Pasty old Picts are no longer relevant.
“and learning on how to operate urban societies. ” You are welcome , maybe you can use some more . In the meanwhile TSHTF .
https://www.bhaskarenglish.in/national/news/01-01-2026-bhaskar-evening-wrap-14-dead-162-hospitalised-contaminated-water-indore-banks-closed-16-days-month-136832510.html
NYC is near to completing a 100 year aqueduct project.
https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2024/09/mayor-adams-launches-final-phase-historic-project-secure-future-new-york-city-s-water
The mad king may think blowing up boats filled with Marijuana (legal in 40 of 50 states) is the obscene, satanic display that makes a nation great. Rather it is three generations of sandhogs (slang for worker who dig the aqueducts for NYC city) that make the empire state.
Suggestion to Mamdani . Employ Brahmans with surnames Dwivedi , Trivedi , Chaturvedi , Sharma , Mishra , Srivastava , Shukla etc . These have been the guys behind the tragedy in Indore . All Brahmans . They will assist in the depopulation of New York .🤣
Interesting, in italy the press is saying that the swiss event was an accident with birthday candles starting a fire. this link says it was an explosion. who is right?
Sad. Maintaining infrastructure is becoming ever-more difficult.
Al Jolani the CNN created James Dean of Syria swears the Talmud like the saudis , the jordanian tomato King with mansions in miami and all the bedouin milking cows sitting over those oilfields in the persian gulf.
Besides the goyim peasants will still be paying rent to the silverstein’s landlord caste , no matter what this bullshiter a la Obama style do .
Given that India has a deeply discriminatory caste system, and a sanitary infrastructure barely worthy of the term “sanitary”, I would hold back from praising their New York, Brahmin Mayor, until he proves his “educated” worth.
equating indias caste and sanitary systems with that of new york via a muslim mayor…is stretching things a bit, even by the standards of the outer fringes of ofw
Resource System Bifurcation .
“By 2026, everyone will know what Resource System Bifurcation is: I’m referring to the phenomenon that occurs when the market for an essential material or resource splits into two independent systems. On one hand, there’s the financial system, where prices continue to function normally: companies and investors can buy contracts, futures, or rights to the resource by paying the market price. On the other hand, a real physical system emerges, in which the actual delivery of the material no longer depends on money or price, but on allocations, government permits, strategic priorities, or privileged access. At this point, paying no longer guarantees receiving the physical resource, creating a profound disconnect between the financial market (which seems normal) and the reality of the supply chain.
This pattern is not new and has appeared in historical moments of tension or strategic scarcity. During World War II, metals and rubber had fixed prices, but were distributed through rationing and government quotas. In the oil crises of the 1970s, the published price per barrel was secondary to actual access to oil, which depended on geopolitical relationships. The uranium market diverged when the decisive factor shifted from possessing the mineral to having access to enrichment controlled by a few countries. In 2010, China🇨🇳Rare earth exports were restricted through licensing, not price. And during the COVID pandemic, semiconductors were allocated according to the priorities of foundries and governments, even though there was abundant capital willing to pay high prices. In all these cases, companies might have been financially solvent (having enough money to buy), but material solvency (actually obtaining the physical resource) was lacking.
The consequences were always the same: official or informal rationing, the emergence of inflated prices in parallel markets, prolonged delivery delays, and, in many cases, shutdowns or interruptions in industrial production. The financial market continued to operate, and prices might even rise, but that didn’t resolve the real shortage in factories and production chains. What distinguishes the current or imminent situation is the scale of the phenomenon. Today we are talking about resources critical for the energy and technological transition—such as lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt, and rare earths—in a context of strong geopolitical tensions, national industrial policies, and export restrictions. When a resource becomes strategically vital, states and supply chains cease to rely solely on price mechanisms and begin to control it directly. This means that the financial market may continue to reflect optimism or speculation, while in the physical world, actual availability is distributed according to political and strategic criteria, creating a bifurcation of historically significant proportions. Buckle up.
https://x.com/elmercurioAON/status/2006188252701786278
I am afraid this commenter is right. The concern right now is that actual supply all of these metals will split from the paper market. It will depend on other factors.
Splitting the physical market from the paper market was always a feature of financial collapse. The system as held up with some coercion, for example German and Italian gold never returned and in fact sold by the US. It seems that this time it is going to happen.
The crux is that most of the real economy exists solely because of 30+ years of virtual demand reallocated from the future to the present via debt. This reallocation, of course, is subject to declining margins returns and we are now observing the exponential decay of the efficacy of this demand reallocation converging and bifurcating to zero.
How many processes that are thermodynamically unfeasible are done solely because they are profitable because of this demand reallocation.
Same goes for complexity.
It’s going to be a big reveal, but we ought restrict our expectations that the partitioning of the real and the hyperreal can be had without the destruction of both.
Cheers
Flying below the radar . India to import wheat . This is similar to an OPEC member becoming an importer of oil from an exporter of oil . The wheat situation worldwide is very tight because the big exporters viz from Ukraine & Russia are at war . CC has effected grain production worldwide but the mouths and stomachs went up by 82 million . Wait when China comes to the market . https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/will-indias-wheat-imports-lead-to-global-food-crisis-49945
https://markets.chroniclejournal.com/chroniclejournal/article/marketminute-2025-12-31-chinas-harvest-of-sovereignty-xi-jinpings-grain-push-redraws-global-agricultural-map
to quote me—-(again)
shortage will occur not from lack of supply—but by fighting over whats left.
The first article makes this rather strange comment, about the low prices of wheat imports:
For food importers in India, it is the quality of wheat that matters most.
“The international price is so low that even good quality of wheat is affordable for us. Now traders have placed orders to Australia. They are also eyeing CIS countries where wheat is cheaper in comparison to Australian wheat,” says Ajay Goyal, president of Maharashtra unit of Wheat Flour Mills Association.
“It is proving cheaper than what we import from north India,” says Jitendra Gupta, president of Telangana unit of Wheat Flour Mills Association.
So South India is using imported wheat, rather than wheat from northern India.
The second article says,
As the final grain elevators of the 2025 autumn harvest are sealed across the North China Plain, the global agricultural market is grappling with a new reality: China has fundamentally altered its relationship with the world’s food supply. Under the direct mandate of President Xi Jinping, the People’s Republic has achieved a record-breaking production year, harvesting an estimated 715 million metric tons of grain in 2025. This surge is not merely a seasonal fluke but the cornerstone of a multi-year strategic “decoupling” from Western agricultural reliance, transforming food security into a primary pillar of national defense.
This paragraph implies that a lot less grain will be needed in the future for exports because China has been a major grain importer. This is keeping internationally traded grain prices low.
Of course, low international grain prices become a problem for US farmers and for farmers in Europe.
Historically, countries have tried to be self-sufficient in essential foods. Maybe this push is coming back again. I believe that that objective is behind Japan’s recent high rice prices.
I guess – the quality rice so cheap now – refers to the paradox mentioned by you and others already, chiefly the desired ~luxury level product is nominally affordable per currency yet it could be non available physically soon because of various state – security / weather swings, embargo policies etc.
In case of India there is a lot of people of ~decent wealth who desire ~quality spec rice, so they can get (already are accustomed to) be way ahead in front of the global poorer pop in terms of securing it, say vs Africa, parts of S. America or other Asian pop..
Rice production in India . There are two types of rice — Basmati grown in the foothills of Himalayas and rice grown elsewhere . The first is premium and consumed by the elite and exported — the second is solely used for distribution under the program to supply 800 million living on 5Kg per person/per month and cannot be exported but this system is under stress . Lack of rain and precipitation in the foothills . Water molecules are more important than carbon molecules . Exporting rice is like exporting water .
Gail, I am sure this is not accurate. Total world production of wheat for 2025 is about 830 metric tons. It is impossible for China to have produced 7/8ths of the total production. China has produced around 130 metric tons of wheat and it’s entire yearly consumption is more or less the same (230-140 metric tons).
This is not necessarily a meaningful piece of news. Whereas metal markets are exploding, here we have (as Gail says) China producing bumper crops, Russia diversifying into soybeans, most nations looking carefully at thier food supply. Saudi Arabia, for example, is offering very generous funds for research leading to Arabia producing 50% of its food by 2050. No one wants to trade with the USA, so surely US farmers are selling below price, driving down costs.
“Saudi Arabia, for example, is offering very generous funds for research leading to Arabia producing 50% of its food by 2050. ”
Best of luck to KSA . How will they irrigate ? Desalinated water ?
There are aquifers of course. coconut, mangrove and salicornia can be grown with saltwater. The mean precipitation is 330 mm a year. The coastal range near the Red Sea is green as we speak. Terraforming there is going to be a main tool of growing citrus, olives, macadamia, dates, and perhaps shea in the lower altitudes.
There is gray water, of course, and there are grains like fonio that produce a crop with 1/10 of the water of corn. Tapioca will produce 3 times the calories per unit of water compared to corn. The Sahel is greening as we speak, so SA does have a chance, specially if they copy what the Sahelians do.
drb , ok . Where are the farmers ? Sitting in air conditioned malls of Jeddah and Riyadh ? Hey , you have forgotten more about farming than I have learnt in my lifetime . With respect .
That is the 1M indians and 0.5M philipinos living there right now. On top of that, I think that all tree and root crops can and will be harvested by hand, by locals, eventually. They are looking to 2050 when you either dig up roots or starve. They produce a lot of honey in the mountains for example, and it is all saudi’s work.
Maybe the Saudi’s will get off their a°°°s and do something but I doubt it . Too much comfort makes one soft but then on the other hand ” There are no volunteers for starvation ” .
P.S :US President Harry Truman (1945-1953) is widely credited with saying “Give me a one-handed economist! All my economists say ‘on the one hand… [and then] on the other.’” The President wanted decisions, not discussions🤣
“0:00
The Federal Reserve just injected $52
0:01
billion into the banking system in a
0:03
matter of hours, not over weeks, not
0:05
over months, in hours. And while
0:08
everyone was distracted by holiday
0:09
shopping and year-end celebrations, gold
0:11
crashed 5% in its biggest single day
0:13
drop since October. Silver got
0:15
absolutely demolished, falling 11% in
0:18
what traders are calling a complete
0:20
liquidation event. This wasn’t normal
0:22
market volatility. This wasn’t profit
0:24
taking before the holidays. This was
0:26
something much bigger, much more
0:27
dangerous, and the implications are
0:28
staggering. Right now, as I’m recording
0:30
this, the financial system is showing
0:32
cracks that haven’t been visible since
0:34
2008. Bank reserves have crashed to
0:36
their lowest levels in four years. The
0:39
repo market, which is essentially the
0:41
plumbing of our entire financial system,
0:43
is in complete chaos. And the Federal
0:46
Reserve is pumping liquidity into
0:47
markets at a pace we haven’t seen since
0:49
the darkest days of the pandemic. But
0:51
here’s what nobody is talking about. The
0:53
$52 billion injection wasn’t planned. It
0:56
wasn’t scheduled. It was emergency
0:58
intervention to prevent something
0:59
catastrophic from happening in the
1:00
precious metals markets. . . .
Because what
1:14
happened today isn’t just about precious
1:15
metals. It’s about the structural
1:17
breakdown of the entire monetary system.
1:19
And most people have no idea how close
1:21
we came to a complete market meltdown.“?
This is a very capable commentator. He appears to operate out of several youtube channels. does anyone know his name and if he has a substack or other written media?
Interesting video! The author calls himself “Finance Historian.” Otherwise, he seems to be anonymous. He seems to have a lot of videos.
http://www.youtube.com/@FinanceHiistorian
The physical markets for gold and silver are becoming disconnected from the paper markets for these metals. A major bullion bank seems to need bailing out. It is becoming obvious that the US financial system has become dependent on constant injections of liquidity, to keep it functioning. Immediately after the Federal Reserve stopped draining liquidity from the financial system (supposedly to prevent inflation), it started to inject more funds into the system, buying $40 billion dollars of US debt back each month. This isn’t normal.
Bankers dealing in precious metals have figured out that they can gamble (with shorts and similar devices) as much as they want, because the Federal Reserve will always bail them out. It is a system in which banks make the profits, but losses are socialized to the entire system. [A new type of k-shaped system].
Of course, one concern is that the fractional reserve system for gold and silver is a lie. There really isn’t nearly enough of either metal to fulfill all demands. Also, many other weaknesses within the system.
This is an AI video . I have been listening to him for some time since the silver crisis erupted . His content is good .
So the US is now taking the side of the Ukies and calling the Russians, liars. This morning several news agencies including CNN, the Cartoon News Network are saying that Putin’s residence was NOT targeted in the drone strikes.
Except that Vlad Zelensky himself during Christmas said that Putin should die. Now I don’t know about you but at a murder scene, that would probably implicate a person if said person you wished dead was either murdered or been a victim of attempted murder. Just saying.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/31/politics/cia-ukraine-drone-putin-residence
Oh and the Ukies have carried out several assassinations within Russia. Most recently another Russian General was killed in a car bomb. It looks like the maniacs in charge want and need a war.
Interesting that assassinations are murder and therefore illegal. But when the Russians invaded Ukrainian territory and killed masses of people, that wasn’t murder – it was war. So war is mass murder, but it is legal. Though of course a few Ukrainians murdered a few ethnic Russians in Odessa in 2014 and were not prosecuted for murder. And so the tit for tat continued to this day.
The answer is to make war a crime and hire more policemen to catch the soldiers and prosecute them. But of course if there are too many (and there are!), you can’t catch. them. It’s the same with nudity. If Rodster walked naked down the street, he would be arrested. But if dozens of cyclists ride naked together through the centre of London, there are too many to catch and arrest, so they don’t call it a crime and so it’s not illegal. Go figure. I suppose the moral is: safety in numbers! Likewise, war-motivated assassinations during war-time cannot logically or morally be considered a crime.
“Interesting that assassinations are murder and therefore illegal. But when the Russians invaded Ukrainian territory and killed”
First of all, assassinating a military leader is considered a war crime because it’s a murder not on the battlefield. You might want to look that up!
Secondly, Russia did not invade Ukraine. Russia entered Ukraine because the Ukrainian NeoNazi brigade were persecuting, torturing and murdering Russian civilians inside Ukraine.
Ukraine provoked Russia at the behest of the Neocons in NATO, the US and EU. You got the first two so wrong, i’m not going to bother with the rest of your comment.
“assassinating a military leader is considered a war crime because it’s a m—der not on the battlefield.”
But Ukraine was a sovereign country, not a battlefield. Did the UN agree to it being designated a battlefield? Tell me your address, Rodster, and I’ll send some foreign soldiers to shoot up your backyard and call it a battlefield. Happy?
“the Ukrainian NeoN – -zi brigade were persecuting, t–turing and m==dering Russian civilians inside Ukraine.”
Except that they weren’t Russian civilians. They were Ukrainian citizens who happened to be ethnic Russians. But yes, I can understand that Putin would have been livid about that. And I do know that McCain and Nuland et al encouraged the Ukrainian ultra-nationalists to the hilt.
My point is that all war is wrong, but it escalates and you get tit for tat, so military and political assassinations within that context are not worth worrying about. But Rodster is nakedly partisan, whereas I am as objective and logical as Mr. Spock, so I shall ignore Rodster’s bloviations from now on.
Since the USSR brake-up sequence towards ~2014 there were various still standing treaties granted semi-autonomy to various (-RU) affiliated groups inside UKR.
West sponsored gov coup which negated these treaties on purpose of instigating chaos, plus DID actual expeditionary killings in situ to boil this over..
The [UKR] was a new admin construct under the bolshevik->post WWII USSR umbrella. Later this mess on purpose weaponized to the effect of ideally providing new Vietnam/Afghanistan protracted blood loss if not worse..
Did RU side tweaked some aspects of it throughout the conflict (call for greater autonomy) for it’s advantage, apparently YES. But it certainly was not the instigator..and that’s the bottom line.
Also, it is considered legitimate to kill military personnel of a country that you are at war with. But why do the Russians bomb civilians in their apartment blocks? Surely that is a greater crime. And surely these can’t all be “accidents”. Putin is no better than Netanyahu, who bombed Palestinian homes, in that respect.
ultimately, all wars are fought over resources, driven by the greed of a few who get rich on the strewn bodies of the many.
Everything else ispolitical or religious window dressing
Thanks for this. I suppose the K-shaped world is one reason Peter Thiel told three young English journalists recently that no-one can become seriously rich without “scaling”. I had to look up “scaling” – it is not just fast growth of a business. It is time-limited exponential growth of a business or an investment value. An academic paper about it by 4 or 5 mathematicians in the Jan 2024 edition of the Journal of Business Venturing opens with the famous 1976 quote by A,A. Bartlett – “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is man’s inability to understand the exponential function.” Of course all exponential growth of anything is time-limited – is this what we fail to understand? – because most of us now grasp the difference between exponential and ordinary growth.
Obviously you don’t want to write anything opinionated – you want to stick to facts, which is commendable. But surely the upper arm of the K is growing too fast for its own good? Anything growing exponentially alarms me. When exponential growth stops, it seems not to plateau but to shoot downwards with as much speed as it rose upwards. It seems the down slope is called “Exponential Decay”. Wiki gives several examples of Decay in various fields. I was amused by the last one given – “Arnd Leike, of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, won an Ig Nobel Prize for demonstrating that beer froth obeys the law of exponential decay.” The use of “Law” is telling – this is not a Theory, but a Law.
Some people in the down arm of the K look forward to Collapse, because they will be less affected than those in the upper arm and some sort of Rough Justice will ensue. But the rich and the poor are interdependent, in any economic set-up. And all mankind is wholly dependent for its survival on natural Raw Materials. Tehran contains both very rich and very poor people, and a squeezed middle – like any City nowadays. We cannot see what is going on there – but I suspect all income groups are affected more or less equally. How can you buy enough bottled water to do your laundry, take a bath, or run an industry, even if you can afford to do it? Modern life depends on turning a tap on and lots of water coming out of it, especially for farming and industry, but also in households. And I don’t think having shares in the increasingly profitable Water Companies is going to deliver much. You can’t bathe in shares.
The upside of a global Collapse is environmental – I do not think the Biosphere of our planet can take much more Economic Growth, even if it becomes linear and not exponential. But I do not pretend that a global Collapse is going to be pleasant for ANY humans, anywhere, rich or poor.
Thanks for zooming-in on that “scaling” phenomenon.
Actually, if you closely observe people in that very brief moment they all share the same characteristics: very goal focused, near-paranoid, over workaholic and over lawyered-up, ..
They internally sense (and or were advised by previous gen/participants seeding venture capitalists) these are the very unique moments which make-shape history and forge multigen fortunes. Moreover, the “best” of them are even able to run several of such different schemes in parallel or in very close (time) proximity.
In a way then “..scaling of scalings..” takes place!
I guess, it’s background “matrix” revealing itself on these occasions – be it the natural (compressed) evolutionary jumps or simulation forks ahead, in the end it doesn’t matter much for us by-standers / also runs..
My impression has always been that people who are closest to the bottom will tend to be disproportionately eliminated one way or another–fighting, epidemics, failure to find marriage partners, etc.
Peter Turchin talks about competition among the oligarchs, and the fact that some of them start failing.
All in all, I think that the ones who do best are the ones who are best adapted to the current conditions. If the best adapted are the ones who can grow crops by hand, they may be ones who survive.
All the best in the New Year!
Only thanks to the nuclear power and the fossil fuels, the parts of Slovakia that are difficult to access could experience the population surge a the improvement of the quality of life. And also such a beautiful Christmas concert in the church in the cold mountains:
https://youtu.be/wM1pv0q3fLY?si=aVPpRt_NmkE09Q8y
Now the era of population ageing is going on. With the help of AI.
Happy New Year!, MG…that was beautiful and my Sister and I love the music.
We both have ties to Slovakia and enjoy keeping in touch with the European culture. Yes, we are old “Boomers” and are grateful to still be supported by our society in this transition to the “Great Simplification”, as Nate Hagen coined the phrase. Every day in the modern world of “unnecessary necessities” that make our lives easy is a blessing. We do not really realize how hard life will become when fossil fuels wane and more extreme weather hits us all.
But that’s the way it is. Best wishes to all for the upcoming 2026….
Yes, very interesting I was perplexed by the almost Lutheran interior appearance inside such r.c. building, apparently it’s a newish pre/post WWII finished structure, hence the selectively timid decors say vs. baroque era.. also as you suggest area near the mountains, ~500-1000MSL..
Neo-Gothic architecture as a reminiscence of the medieval population peak prior to its collapse
https://www.hrinova.sk/pre-turistov/prirodne-a-kulturne-pozoruhodnosti/sakralna-architektura/kostol-sv-petra-a-pavla/
Very nice!
Has anyone been watching the silver market? Talk about manipulation…
Can anything be trusted anymore??
Have I, Nathaniel! Lots of YouTube posts on the subject and seems a very troubling sign of the chaotic times ahead….
“I am hoping that with cutbacks in oil usage by island nations and Europe, and the resulting lower world oil prices, the United States will be able to avoid the worst of the recessionary tendencies looming in 2026.”
Well, I am English / British / European, so thank you, Gail. I think that is what is known as schadenfreude – wanting to profit from others’ downfall. And I had thought you were a Christian. 🙁 I’m guessing that you voted for the Donald, despite describing him a “nut-job” some years ago.
I have a grandson who will be 4 in January. It would be nice if things don’t fall apart too quickly in the US. Sorry about that. When there isn’t enough to go around, some part of the system has to be left out.
Someone commented that perhaps I am forecasting too quick a downturn in the EU. That would also go for the UK. I may very well be forecasting problems too soon. It is easy to do that. But the problems in Germany are now quite severe, so it seems like some change has to come. Making tanks to shoot at Russia doesn’t sound like a substitute for making German automobiles.
“I am forecasting too quick a downturn in the EU. That would also go for the UK.”
It’s well known that the EU is in huge trouble because of its immigration policies. Germany is de-industrializing while the UK and France are heading towards an IMF bailout.
Economist Martin Armstrong warned the EU that this would all happen when they set out to create the Euro. They called him in to Brussels and he met with several members of parliament and he told them unless they consolidated all the debt of EU member states that the Euro would fail. They ignored his advice and so here we are looking at the EU circling the drain.
Demiurge, Happy New Year to you! And remember, at our age, half an urge is better than none.
In this game of musical chairs, the players will lose their chairs one at a time, not all together. Someone has to lose first. It’s in the nature of the game.
Schadenfreude has nothing to do with wanting to profit from others’ downfall; it describes the pleasure or satisfaction felt when witnessing someone else’s misfortune, failure, or humiliation. A true schadenfreuder will be prepared to take a loss or even to pay out of their own pocket for the opportunity to indulge their habit.
When Britain collapses, Gail and I and almost everyone else will lament the situation. Only sheer, utter, and absolute Anglophobes such as Kulm will experience pleasure or satisfaction at the mess. The rest of us will reserve our “schad” for the people running the country, who I’m sure most Brits think richly deserve to be brought down a few pegs.
Happy New Year, Tim. Yes, I was aware even as I was typing that my attribution of schadenfreude didn’t quite meet the definition.
“When Britain collapses, Gail and I and almost everyone else will lament the situation.”
Well, Gail just intimated that, because she has a 4-year-old grandson, Britain has to fail. Even the Wicked Witch of the West never said anything like that. 🙁
Kermit is a muppet, so his anglophobia is irrelevant. He is too afraid to divulge his own nationality, but when he writes things like “despite of”, I know that he is not an anglophone, but quite possible a francophone – or else a speaker of some other Romance language.
Demiurge> I guess to call it as (proper) schadenfreude would need to incorporate ~malice intent at Gail’s angle and I doubt we witnessed that here..
Simply, we are trying map ~reality around us and possibly position ourselves – despite as foolish as it may end up (retrograde) in the great scheme of things..
It would be worth the occasion at the turn of the year to read again some of the Turchin’s key findings. Actually, many more people identified the mega trend (Europe likely going down first) be it people around global-security politics or even quasi revolutionaries like Varoufakis or commentators like Armstrong mentioned bellow..
Europe has played with bad cards for some time already (at least since ~2007), made very bad decisions accelerating on top of that as of lately. The continent simply lost the great game and is being punished way bellow its theoretical political-econ potential. NOW it has become a mere vassalage entity somewhere in the third pecking order way bellow the top players (US, CHN, RU, .. ). This has been sealed in recent weeks by the commitment to relocate industries into the US (~1T$ ) and pay one directional tariffs on top of that, not mentioning the previous act of mad self injury severance from ~cheap energy imports.
Europe is about to enter hard fragmentation along several dividing lines.
Under the most optimistic scenario, the UK even if it remains for some brief time (<2decades) an US outpost will suffer greatly from the ricocheting (activity seizure) fall-off at the continent as well. Apart from already boiling pre-civil war status in the UK itself – according to many observers..
Demiurge, cheer up, you ~anglos had it great for many centuries at the expense of many impoverished around the world. Keep it as stoically as possible.. there is still ~plenty of time to escape to CAN/AUS etc.. Yes, living there poorly as vassal for US/CHN but likely alive – if you are bold enough.. Frankly, frequenting forums such as this for years and not acting in that general vector is strange. I'm not trying to embarrass you, also because of age – in my case – I had to skip/cancel the best options still available, yet we can act in some limited fashion before the worst arrives in next few decades..
Hi Junior Tourniquet, yes, my cries of “schadenfreude” were off-kilter, I agree. And no, I don’t regard Gail as generally malicious, despite the fact that she follows the same religion as that Brit, Tommy Robinson. 😉 I was just doing my typical “comic-disgruntled” act, so as to soften my criticisms.
Yes, Britland is in a bad position now, but we had it good for long enough. I agree. I’m just a bit annoyed with little baby Jesus for not making it always so. 🙁
And I’m too old to emigrate now. I lack the energy, nor did I ever have the inclination. I’m happy here in my birthplace of England, though I do also consider myself a European. Why would I want to emigrate to the freezing birthplace of the two Justins, where they only speak French and Eskimo and I would risk being mauled and eaten by hungry polar bears? As for Australia, well, it’s full of spiders and always on fire, and everything is upside-down: they even made their $2 coin smaller than their $1 coin – really, check it out! Duh! And Australians live there as well. Very off-putting. The brash Aussies and I have just never got on. And the only decent celebrity that Oz ever produced was Skippy the bush kangaroo, and she’s long dead now. I much prefer New Zealanders and usually hit it off with the ones I’ve met, but they are too isolated, and most goods are about three times as expensive as in the UK.
As for Europe, I am astonished at how Germany allowed itself to sink so low, because of its misguided “clean and green” energy policies and also its fiscal tight-fistedness that stopped it maintaining its failing infrastructure when it was more than rich enough to upgrade it massively.
Yes, I like that call sign, juniorish tourniqueterist ..
I hear you on the pro British Island arguments.
But consider the looming disadvantages, aka chiefly millions of lads crammed on tiny space suddenly having no money, no beer, no no nothing from certain point on.. While mounted henchmen of the city-royalz cla$s eager to smash them on their skull from dusk till dawn for 365..
Well, at that vision even cold-ish CAN or spider-ish AUS – both with lot of space could bee suddenly seen in way brighter light.
On the German thing..
I guess the way how they in panic closed down both coal and npp power systems speaks not only to their (stereo-)typical fanatical edge – appearing once in a while – BUT more likely some of their elites just completely freaking out from internal ~PO after/effect studies..
On the other hand they live on ~prevailing downwind from <100x aged .fr npps – so I'd be perhaps feeling uneasy as well..
Lol. Do you feel regret for all the people the British empire enslaved and their stolen resources and riches? Yeah, I thought so, too.
Hello Gail, Happy New Year and well wishes for your personal efforts to mitigate the parts of what is to come that may fall near you.
I’ve long read your writing withiut comment but I’m interested to see your thoughts on the AI business sector and its capacity to recejve bailouts on the basis of politics without reference to economic, or systems, fundamentals. If you haven’t seen it, the technology industry journalist Ed Zitron has recently published a novella-length explanation of how each link in the chain of AI companies in the U.S. and their financing is operating (with a great deal of denial) at a loss where the expenditures are more than double the revenue, from the customers to the enterprise software operators to the data center operators, hardware manufacturing and infrastructure construction firms and the investment banks whose balance sheets are getting redder and redder.
As many neologisms as he may prefer in his writing on his blog it does manage to start and last as a gripping read throughout. The domino he appears to expect to fall first is when something like JP Morgan starts refusing to lend without collateral, possibly as early as March or April but likely sometime later next year.
Phil, what makes you think they’re lending on the basis of politics and not systems fundamentals? In other words, since when is a bubble not a sound fundamental of a System post- limits to growth, that has to maintain maximum financial momentum at all costs?
Regardless of which party is in power, having an increasing stock market makes many wealthy people happy, and wealthy people seem to be behind today’s “uniparty.” So perhaps there is some hope for bailouts on that basis.
I have a hard time seeing that a major industry that is not making money can carry on for very long. The bubble can’t go on for many months, it would seem like.
Michael Hudson has an interesting observation. If the public spends $6B on a subway extension in NYC, the properties adjacent to it increase in value more than the $6B and along with that increase comes greater real estate tax revenue.
I am starting to have a more favorable view of public expenditure for goods of a common good.
Dennis L.
HAPPY new year Gail. Your posts are always thought provoking. In terms of your call that you think deflation is more likely than inflation. Can you comment on the usa debt refinancing and fiscal deficit as the currency debasement (printing) to finance and rollover the debt (can kick) would surely drive inflation to be higher or if we meet in the middle then its stagflation rather than downright deflation winning out?
I noticed that Japan has an amazingly high debt. In fact, it seems to have added it when it started encountering difficulties, and it still found itself with deflation. Japan seems to have been early with using debt to try to solve its problems. China has a lot of debt, but it is hidden different places than the central government. It too has had problems with deflation.
Yes your comment on Japan is a good argument, when interest rates have managed to be suppressed and this is reversing now with bond rates in Japan increasing, the currency has devalued and inflation is on the rise (they are experiencing k economy too) . China has a way of hiding its debt off books but they also have more potential to grow out of it given surpluses but the demographic profile of china is problematic as they will struggle to replace exports with internal domestic consumption as older folks don’t consume as much and instead try and save to prolong funds to live. Maybe the deflation in Japan and china is linked to the demographics??
Just want to interject that your first comment casts inflation as a monetary policy dynamic and your second comment potentially recasts it as a demographic dynamic. Gail is suggesting that monetary endgames are structural dynamics, which requires a structural systems analysis of all of the internal dynamics in toto. For myself, that systems analysis yields deflation in the global reserve currency and any other currencies that are able to remain pegged to the reserve currency, and terminal inflation in all other currencies, with decentralized stablecoins becoming the global bridge currency that seeks to buffer against a chaotic global financial collapse driven by non- pegged currency hyperinflationary collapses.
Because of the Maximum Power Principle, the respective currency endgames are always going to chase the least worst structural option available to it.
Maybe the deflation in Japan and china is linked to the demographics?
I don’t think so. I am wondering if the debt bubble collapse indirectly led to the deflation. People became less wealthy as the debt bubble collapsed, so they started to spend less. Also, banks may have become less willing to lend, after the bad results they had with low prices earlier.
Deflation and farming. Approximately 50% of corn is used to produce EtOH which is probably equivalent to paying $1.10 to produce a gallon of EtOH and selling it for $1.00. So what?
An economy is an amorphous mass with surpluses not easily understood; as that economy contracts, there will come a point where EtOH cannot be subsidized.
Implication, farmland will be less valuable and farm chemicals the same. Deflation. Bummer if you own a farm.
When I lived in IA a friend was president of the corn growers’ association, he was active in EtOH and the surplus of agricultural goods was the motivation. This was the early 80’s.
JD just laid off several hundred people in IA, those are good jobs.
Dennis L.
Sad situation.
Mandating ethanol was seen as a way to work around surpluses of corn supply. Maybe farmers will need to change their crops to ones that humans can directly eat, such as potatoes and turnips. Of course, these don’t store very well, and don’t transport as easily as corn or wheat.
Cities seem to grow up where there are surpluses of grain crops since they can be easily transported, stored, and taxed, according to the book “Against the Grain” by James C. Scott. More agrarian societies grow up around root crops.
“More agrarian societies grow up around root crops.”
Thinking two societies, Amish and Hasidic, different yet the same but one is agrarian and one urban. Both homogeneous, both appear to marry for life, both have strong religious values, I call much of a religion a rule book which has worked over thousands of years.
Very hard to do live without family and without a culture. Both aforementioned seem to have an aversion to war. Got to give points to the Hasidic hats of the males.
Dennis L.
If you tend to believe that longtermish over production of EtOH doesn’t have negative effect on that very field not mentioning local ecosystems, well (not) be my guest..
Yes, it’s a form of $ubsidy, but very beyond stup#d at that..
I am a scientist (PhD, Berkeley, 1986) who makes a living evaluating resource extraction companies such as mining plus oil and gas. The price of resources will increase in fiat currencies as the governments of the countries in the western world reduce interest rates to cover the interest payments on existing debt, plus increase the amount of debt and restart “quantitative easing ” (which is just money printing) in the next year. The will cause the apparent price of just about all resources to increase in fiat currencies as their value is reduced.
I wish I had a good commodity portfolio. Yes, oil may not increase, but copper gallium rare earths antimony and silver, to name a few, will do well in 2026.
jim you must not have a PhD in economics because if you did you would never say “apparent price” because that is illegitimate terminology, and you would never frame quantitative easing in double quotes nor refer to it as money printing because the former is also illegitimate usage and the latter which is incorrect as quantitative easing is in fact a collateralized central bank loan. Politics has no place in a structural, professional PhD setting. Therefore, your prediction is illegitimate on technical grounds because there is no true structural argument to it, though you’re perfectly entitled to hold it.
Word salad, I like mine with vinegar and oil.
Dennis L.
That’s a logical fallacy. If you don’t like my comment but can’t find a flaw in it, and you feel called to share your feelings, then just say you don’t like it.
I don’t like that comment, reante.
I understand where you’re coming from, Dennis.
Auntie Rea doesn’t like humour, Dennis. I think he could be a replicant.
I think the statement, “who makes a living evaluating resource extraction companies such as mining plus oil and gas,” is important.
In order to make a living in this field, it is necessary to come up with forecasts that your clients like. With oil we are using a product used around the world. Many users are not in the West. Regardless of the money printing in the West, the lack of oil demand around the world becomes a problem. This is what pulls oil prices down. Prices are now low, as you no doubt have noticed.
Economists always seem to think that demand from money printing (or whatever) will be sufficient to raise prices. But the money printing has to get back into the pockets of people who would like to use the oil to transportation, or something similar. Thus, checks to individual poor people (as were added in 2020) work a whole lot better than money added to the system elsewhere.
You know what Upton Sinclair said!
Hi Jim! I’m just wondering, out of idle curiosity, could you be related to THE Jim Irwin— the astronaut James Benson Irwin, who captained Apollo 15?
He had five children including a son named James (usually called “Jimmy”), who was born in 1963, but that lad would have been 23 in 1986, which is a little young for getting a PhD.
No need to answer if you want to maintain your privacy.
Is this consistent with most commodities when priced in gold have remained more or less constant in price or actually declined?
My understanding is precious metals have not increased in price which would imply they can purchase more goods, the fiat value of money has decreased which is for most of us the transactional value.
Dennis L.
It’s a simple as that..
allow for generalization in the context of past brief history:
As peon you save in smalldenom cash or even short lifespan produce.
As salaried guy you save in your own RE and or edu of kids.
As upper salaried – mid managerial class the same, plus some paper certificates.
As upper management and owner’s class you chiefly save in various schemes against (%haircut) the unfortunates on the ladder bellow you.
And at the utmost top you also save some % in metals..
The above obviously tends to change through times (cycles).
I just turned 77 yo when I was born there were 2.4 billion people on mother earth – now 8.2 residents – (according to google) the question will be how fast does that
revert and is it inevitable
for 000s of years we had a few tens of millions
then the 300 years we jumped to 8bn
that is an unsustainable anomaly
Fortunately, it seems to take a while to revert. This gives us some time, we hope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrurq_L13mk
California Governor PANICS After Diesel Supply Hits ZERO! (11:10)
85,317 views Dec 27, 2025
California’s energy crisis has reached a dangerous new extreme as reports indicate diesel supply levels have effectively hit zero in key parts of the state, triggering panic among state officials and serious concern across the U.S. transportation and logistics sector. Diesel is the backbone of California’s economy — powering trucks, ports, agriculture, construction, emergency services, and supply chains — and this breakdown exposes why a diesel shortage is far more dangerous than rising gasoline prices.
In this urgent investigation, we analyze verified data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), California Energy Commission, Energy at Haas, and fuel‑distribution reports to explain how refinery shutdowns, pipeline disruptions, workforce losses, and shrinking in‑state production have pushed California’s diesel market to the edge.
This video also explains how CARB diesel regulations, Cap‑and‑Trade compliance costs, Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) penalties, and long‑term refinery exits have made diesel production in California increasingly unviable. As a result, the state is forced to rely on expensive imported diesel, longer shipping routes, and volatile global fuel markets — leaving California extremely vulnerable when supply chains tighten.
We break down what a diesel supply crisis means for truckers, grocery prices, port operations, construction projects, agriculture, and inflation, and why energy analysts warn this could quickly spiral into a broader economic emergency if supply is not restored. As officials scramble to respond, the data shows this is not a temporary glitch.
If you follow U.S. energy markets, diesel shortages, supply‑chain risks, fuel inflation, or California’s cost‑of‑living crisis, this is a must‑watch report explaining why a zero‑diesel scenario is one of the most serious warnings yet.
The California situation seems strange. The state seems to be very wealthy. Maybe they think that wealth can make up for lack of oil (and for that matter, electricity). I keep thinking that California, or part of California, may be first to leave the United States.
Thank you for the blog and happy new year.
2026 will be the first year since 1492 that the West will not be overpowering the East.
A mistake which could have been stopped when MacArthur tried to nuke China back to the stone ages.
The West has been cooperating with the East ever since the incorporation of the East into the Western financial system was complete by the turn of this century. Welcome to globalization kulm.
Do nukes exist though?
Or are they just a paper tiger?
Anyway, there was no need to nuke China. In any case, back in the 1950s, the place didn’t have much industrial infrastructure to nuke. And what culture they had was being dismantled, abandoned and smashed into little pieces by the Communists, especially the Red Guards, who were as “woke” as they come.
If Nixon had not cozied up to Mao in an effort to demolish the Bamboo Curtain and open the Chinese up to cooperation with Western capital….
If China had not been allowed to join the WTO….
If thousands of American, European, and Japanese corporations and had not relocated factories to China since the start of the millennium….
…. today’s situation would have been rather different. There would still have been plenty of cheap and often shoddy goods produced in the Third World, but I suspect that none of the other Third World countries would have been able to rise to military or economic prominence in the way China has recently.
Why are you asking those questions given that you subscribe to the mini nuke 9/11 theory like demiurge does.
Actually, no, as far as I can remember, to the best of my recollection, I don’t and never did endorse the mini nuke theory. You may be confusing me with Jim Fetzer. 🙂 I may have considered briefly it back in my Judy Wood space laser period. If I ever did write that I endorsed it, I would like to de-endorse it now.
For several years, I have subscribed to the theory that the Twin Towers and Building 7 were conventional controlled demolitions, almost definitely performed by Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI), led by Mark Loizeaux, which played a significant role in the cleanup and demolition of the WTC site.
I further believe, or think, or assume, that the collapses of the Twin Towers we saw on TeeVee were Hollywood-style special effects. We were never shown the actual collapses.
It’s interesting that, apparently, the FBI seized all the video camcorders that recorded what actually happened from their operators. And amazing that they would have enough free time on the big day to prioritize that mission.
“I further believe…that the collapses of the Twin Towers we saw on TeeVee were Hollywood-style special effects. We were never shown the actual collapses.”
Not true. There were New Yorkers standing watching – or running away. They knew better.
“apparently, the FBI seized all the video camcorders that recorded what actually happened from their operators.”
All of them? Hardly feasible.
==================
In this video, Jonathan H. Cole offers counter-arguments to those of Dr. Judy Wood and exposes some holes in her arguments.
“Where The Towers Went” examines Dr. Judy Wood’s controversial theory about the destruction of the World Trade Center towers. The physicsandreason video analyzes her directed energy weapon hypothesis, presenting supporting evidence and counterarguments. This in-depth evaluation explores various alternative explanations for the events of 9/11.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwqS3Ncg-TM
He still doesn’t explain everything – see user comments beneath the video – so I am left perplexed.
Reading between the lines of what Dr. Woods says, part of the energy of an approaching hurricane seems to have been diverted into bringing down the two towers. Doing so, saved NYC from what would have been the devastating effects of the hurricane. This approach probably saved many lives.
i’ve read wood’s pdf on all that 9/11 nonsense….i saw her book advertised only a few days ago.
very few seem to get the running joke of Wood’s idea of directed energy forces—or whatever….
that at no time before 9/11—or since, has anyone succeeded in altering the course of a hurricane (except donnie’s sharpie of course–must give him that).
But Woods has a PhD—etc etc etc—maybe she does but that doesnt deter fixations, and the determination to ”prove” them.
does it occur to no one—that if such a means existed, in the form of directed energy beams, or somesuch claptrap—that they would be in regular use—for good or evil right now?
But they are not
and never have been
they are Wood’s fantasy—the origin of which lies in her own head.
there are no directed energy beam on that scale.
Yeah Gail I’ve always felt like Wood needs to provide some kind of hypothesis for that mechanism of action if she’s going to bring it up at all. On the face of it it’s pretty looney tunes to me. She won’t ever speculate on the nature of the DEW but she will speculate that the DEW somehow used a hurricane as an energy source and saved Manhattan in the process. Except for the WTC of course. The Hand brought a reformulated hurricane down on the twin towers, in two separate bursts. I don’t think that’s a helpful inclusion to her. I can only guess that it had to do with the fact that the crazy physics of ionization that can happen inside hurricanes and tornadoes were present in the incomplete disintegration dynamics of much of the rubble.
I do agree that Dr. Wood’s ideas about the hurricane are off the scale. Mind you, I do see there are lots of videos about HAARP that talk about we . at- her modification, which I do not believe. On a small scale, yes, seeding rain clouds, for instance.
Otherwise, I do believe that zero point energy has already been achieved long since. There are plenty of videos about that. I gave my views in a previous post about why that would have been kept hidden and closely guarded. I do know that most here would not share my views on that, though.
Perplexed is a good place to start.
It’s the beginning of wisdom.
All of them? Hardly feasible.
If you say so.
I just had a chat with an LLM about this:
======
TIM: How many camcorders took images of the sudden collapses of the Twin Towers at the New York World Trade Center on September 11, 2001?
LLM:The exact number of camcorders that captured the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, isn’t definitively documented, but numerous cameras recorded the events from various angles. Estimates suggest that hundreds of witnesses, including civilians, news crews, and law enforcement, were present and captured footage.
Significant media coverage arose from networks like CNN, NBC, and other news agencies, along with amateur recordings from bystanders, which contributed to the vast catalog of visual documentation of the tragic event. This footage has been crucial for both historical record and analysis of the day’s events.
TIM: Hundreds of witnesses. That’s a lot! How many camcorders were taken from their owners and examined by the authorities for information regarding the Twin Towers collapses?
LLM: Approximately 1,600 videotapes were confiscated and examined by authorities following the September 11 attacks. These included recordings from both professional and amateur sources, as investigators sought to gather as much information as possible about the events leading up to and during the collapses of the Twin Towers.
The tapes were critical for understanding the sequence of events and the scale of the tragedies that occurred that day, and they have contributed to various investigations and analyses over the years.
TIM: That’s a lot of videotapes! Thank you.
====
Demi, does the number of videotapes confiscated and examined by the authorities surprise you? 1600?
It surprised me.
And doesn’t that indicate that the authorities grabbed most of them, and doesn’t it also indicate that every single last one of the videos you and I have ever seen of the collapses of the Twin Towers were probably vetted by the authorities before going public?
It does to me.
Seems that Norman, Reante, and Yours Truly, are on the same page on this one.
I’m an Occam’s razor fan myself. The simplest explanation is more likely to be correct.
Why go to all the trouble to fly planes into buildings and pretend that the planes knocked the buildings down, when you can just do a conventional demolition and show special effects?
Why go to all the trouble to use exotic technology such as space-based lasers, energy beams, or basement nukes to destroy buildings and pretend that the planes knocked the buildings down, when you can just do a conventional demolition and show special effects?
This isn’t foolproof logic, by any means, but it is commonsensical.
I’m surprised nobody has accused Yuri Geller of knocking the towers down by bending spoon-sized replicas of the buildings.
“I further believe…that the collapses of the Twin Towers we saw on TeeVee were Hollywood-style special effects. We were never shown the actual collapses.”
Not true. There were New Yorkers standing watching – or running away. They knew better.
The fact that there were New Yorkers standing watching, while undoubtedly true, doesn’t disprove the assertion that the collapses of the Twin Towers we saw on TeeVee were Hollywood-style special effects, does it?
Also, consider this—People witnessing the collapses live would have been overwhelmed by the experience of what they witnessed and remember it vividly. Then, they would watch endless replays of the collapse videos to confirm what they had seen, and pretty soon, their memory of the original live collapses would be corrupted or reprogrammed as through repetition it fused with the images in the videos.
You seem like an honest bloke—an anti-Norman even. Think about this and let me know if you think what I’ve said is reasonable.
Tim wrote:
The fact that there were New Yorkers standing watching, while undoubtedly true, doesn’t disprove the assertion that the collapses of the Twin Towers we saw on TeeVee were Hollywood-style special effects, does it?
In theory, no. But apply common-sense, and YES! Many of them described what they saw that day in interviews, at the time and later. Sure, there were some smiling shills among them on the day, describing in suspiciously great detail what they thought did it – but not all of them were shills.
Also, consider this—People witnessing the collapses live would have been overwhelmed by the experience of what they witnessed and remember it vividly. Then, they would watch endless replays of the collapse videos to confirm what they had seen, and pretty soon, their memory of the original live collapses would be corrupted or reprogrammed as through repetition it fused with the images in the videos.
Come off it, Tim. You can’t fool all the people all the time, even if half of them are below average intelligence. That the US govt and media would be capable of such full-spectrum mind-control? Forget it. And Richard D Hall, who is no slouch, has investigated a lot of those suppositions in detail and come out against video manipulation. So, a dunce’s cap and no supper for you today, Tim Nice-But-Dim. 😉
You seem like an honest bloke—an anti-Norman even.
Of course I’m not anti-Norman. Why do you suppose I’ve asked him to include me in his will? 😉
Think about this and let me know if you think what I’ve said is reasonable.
It’s nonsense on stilts. Are you angling for a job with the MSM? 🙁
Tim wrote:
I just had a chat with an LLM about this:
======
TIM: How many camcorders took images of the sudden collapses of the Twin Towers at the New York World Trade Center on September 11, 2001?
LLM: Approximately 1,600 videotapes were confiscated and examined by authorities following the September 11 attacks. These included recordings from both professional and amateur sources, as investigators sought to gather as much information as possible about the events leading up to and during the collapses of the Twin Towers.
TIM: That’s a lot of videotapes! Thank you.
====
Demi, does the number of videotapes confiscated and examined by the authorities surprise you? 1600?
It surprised me.
And doesn’t that indicate that the authorities grabbed most of them, and doesn’t it also indicate that every single last one of the videos you and I have ever seen of the collapses of the Twin Towers were probably vetted by the authorities before going public?
Do believe everything that an LLM tells you, Tim, especially about 9/11 – a subject which is highly vetted and censored on sites like Wikipedia?
camcorder views of 9/11 were taken to obtain evidence (of what happened)
not to hide evidence of what happened.—-i have no doubt they were asked for, and voluntarily surrendered—they were not ”confiscated”.
that is so obvious as to not be worthy even of an eyeroll….
the determination of people, promoting themselves as intelligent adults, to find plots, hoaxes and contraventions of the laws of physics, where there are none….is a source of endless, if sad, amusement……
still you can elect judy wood as the next president at your next convention…
Sorry about that Tim I completely misremembered. Must have gotten you mixed up with drb.
Do you have any info you want to share that it seems like to me may currently be leading you at least some distance away from nuclear weapons existing? You have brought it up a couple times recently.
I don’t have specific information proving nuclear weapons don’t exist. I’m not a nuclear physicist and I only “know” what I have read in physics books written for the general public, and what governments, relevant organizations, and mass media tell us.
Once we start to lose faith in institutions and doubt the truth of what they are saying, we are on a slippery slope.
Norman, back when he was in short trousers, started by doubting whether the Virgin Mary was really a virgin, and ended up leaving the choir and rejecting that the Holy Bible was the literal word of God, even though it says clearly that it is right there in the Holy Bible. 🙂
Similarly, I started by doubting the official story of the Oklahoma bombing and the Wako incident in the early 1990s (prompted by Mike Rivero at What Really Happened). From there, things snowballed. Over the years and decades, more and more dominos fell for me, and I gradually found myself unable to believe anything “official” that I couldn’t verify for myself.
Regarding nuclear weapons, I have been doubting their existence— meaning not being convinced that they exist—for about the last 10 years. They may well exist, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t either, because everything I’ve seen that indicates their existence could have easily been faked.
Miles Mathis has written extensively about faked atom and hydrogen bomb tests as well as about the faked atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
He says in his article on the Trinity test:
At any rate, I thought my conclusion there made it clear I suspected all tests and events to have been faked. faked. If that wasn’t clear, I will clarify it here. I suspect all tests and events were and are. If they had any real events to show us, they wouldn’t need to show us faked events.
https://mileswmathis.com/trinity.pdf
If I come across anything more definite and interesting either way in future, I’ll post it here.
Socially, China is interesting. It went from Mao and a mess to what seems like a very well run society, not perfect, but one which works. Self organizing?
Dennis L.
In defense of Kulm’s initial premise ~(1492-2026) I tend to agree..
And in contrast to Tim’s viewpoint it has been clearly foretasted before.
The eventual rise of China on global scene has been discussed from many angles and scenarios throughout the ages not only in the modern times.
The “opening” of China has been attempted not only by 15th century onwards “round eyes” exploits but other more nearby civilizations numerous times..
But speaking on more recent trends, I’ve learned recently (thanks to HonestB’s commentariat which I over-criticized harshly lol), that many top science figures as well as authors such as AC Clark were primed by the unusual novel “Last and First Men” written in 1930 by Olaf Stapledon, who predicted US-CHN final stand off as well as fossil fuel depletion forcing on civ, repeating collapse-rise cycles, albeit in different – more distant time scales than we tend to discuss here..
More importantly, in my angle of things, he predicted – developed in more practical terms the panspermia concept as the last ditch effort of dying technological civ towards the end of their solar system existence. Hence, providing argument in the ongoing debate why we have not seen or made contact with other worlds yet. This argument points out that life being merely passed as one time only baton across the universe from one cluster to another, i.e. not in multiplication – expansionary fashion as usually assumed.
Yes, I read Last and First Men as a teenager. Stapledon was writing fictional future history in 1930, and reality has turned out rather different in the details as it inevitably does. But he got the American vs. China division broadly correct.
Just for fun, here’s the opening of his third chapter:
AFTER the eclipse of Europe, the allegiance of men gradually crystallized into two great national or racial sentiments, the American and the Chinese. Little by little all other patriotisms became mere local variants of one or other of these two major loyalties. At first, indeed, there were many internecine conflicts. A detailed history of this period would describe how North America, repeating the welding process of the ancient “American Civil War,” incorporated within itself the already Americanized Latins of South America; and how Japan, once the bully of young China, was so crippled by social revolutions that she fell a prey to American Imperialism; and how this bondage turned her violently Chinese in sentiment, so that finally she freed herself by an heroic war of independence, and joined the Asiatic Confederacy, under Chinese leadership.
A full history would also tell of the vicissitudes of the League of Nations. Although never a cosmopolitan government, but an association of national governments, each concerned mainly for its own sovereignty, this great organization had gradually gained a very real prestige and authority over all its members. And in spite of its many short-comings, most of which were involved in its fundamental constitution, it was invaluable as the great concrete focusing point of the growing loyalty toward humanity. At first its existence had been precarious; and indeed it had only preserved itself by an extreme caution, amounting almost to servility toward the “great powers.” Little by little, however, it had gained moral authority to such an extent that no single power, even the mightiest, dared openly and in cold blood either to disobey the will of the League or reject the findings of the High Court. But, since human loyalty was still in the main national rather than cosmopolitan, situations were all too frequent in which a nation would lose its head, run amok, throw its pledges to the winds, and plunge into fear-inspired aggression. Such a situation had produced the Anglo-French War. At other times the nations would burst apart into two great camps, and the League would be temporarily forgotten in their disunion. This happened in the Russo-German War, which was possible only because America favoured Russia, and China favoured Germany. After the destruction of Europe, the world had for a while consisted of the League on one side and America on the other. But the League was dominated by China, and no longer stood for cosmopolitanism. This being so, those whose loyalty was genuinely human worked hard to bring America once more into the fold, and at last succeeded.
In spite of the League’s failure to prevent the “great” wars, it worked admirably in preventing all the minor conflicts which had once been a chronic disease of the race. Latterly, indeed, the world’s peace was absolutely secure, save when the League itself was almost equally divided. Unfortunately, with the rise of America and China, this kind of situation became more and more common. During the war of North and South America an attempt was made to re-create the League as a Cosmopolitan Sovereignty, controlling the pooled armaments of all nations. But, though the cosmopolitan will was strong, tribalism was stronger. The upshot was that, over the Japanese question, the League definitely split into two Leagues, each claiming to inherit universal sovereignty from the old League, but each in reality dominated by a kind of supernational sentiment, the one American, the other Chinese.
This occurred within a century after the eclipse of Europe. The second century completed the process of crystallization into two systems, political and mental. On the one hand was the wealthy and close-knit American Continental Federation, with its poor relations, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the bedridden remains of Western Europe, and part of the soulless body that was Russia. On the other hand were Asia and Africa. In fact the ancient distinction between East and West had now become the basis of political sentiment and organization.
Within each system there were of course real differences of culture, of which the chief was the difference between the Chinese and Indian mentalities. The Chinese were interested in appearances, in the sensory, the urbane, the practical; while the Indians inclined to seek behind appearances for some ultimate reality, of which this life, they said, was but a passing aspect. Thus the average Indian never took to heart the practical social problem in all its seriousness. The ideal of perfecting this world was never an all-absorbing interest to him; since he had been taught to believe that this world was mere shadow. There was, indeed, a time when China had mentally less in common with India than with the West, but fear of America had drawn the two great Eastern peoples together. They agreed at least in earnest hate of that strange blend of the commercial traveller, the missionary, and the barbarian conqueror, which was the American abroad.
https://www.telelib.com/words/authors/S/StapledonOlaf/prose/lastfirstmen/lastfirstmen003.html
According to Stapledon, we have about 2 billion years more evolving to do before our decedents get to be the last men.
I read that book too but had forgotten all about it.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fpf-fWz_7Vs?feature=share
“The backbone of Wind Power: Forging a Turbine Main Shaft”
Where did the energy come from, for that?
Perhaps from a couple of wind turbines? I don’t think so. It takes fossil fuel energy to make “renewables.” Even nuclear power plants are built with fossil fuel energy.
Given the stated expectation in this article for a US CBDC, only now is the silence regarding my outside the overton window stablecoins prediction speaking volumes. Of course, reality is on my side. Trump signed an executive order banning CBDCs, the Fed board has explicitly stated that it will never issue a CBDC without congressional authorization, and because of the GENIUS Act, stablecoins are being integrated into the global financial architecture at warpspeed. Because that is what a global deflation of the dollar reserve currency requires.
Real or not real?
If electricity becomes unstable, I am afraid none of these supposed solutions will work.
I wouldn’t call the solutions exactly. 🙂 while catastrophic blackouts are the end of industrial civilization, resilience to grid instability depends on the degree of instability. Brownouts and rolling blackouts are for managing instability. So long as there’s predictability, business can coordinate in order to work around such grid management no different than business works around the 9-5 workday. Smart meters were obviously rolled out for enabling remote controlled smart rolling blackouts and brownouts come Collapse. Having required all home solar during the Solar Bubble to be grid-tied was also intended for Collapse. Fuel for telecom tower backup generators and other critical infrastructure can be prioritized as necessary if the rolling measures are still inadequate.
Turchin’s grafs show clearly peak (phys violence) instability emerging only AFTER peak collapse government reaching its threshold first. Hence in that argument the delay is on your side Reante – stable coins still could happen in the later-latest phase window; also the +Chinese realm is also pressing in that direction. Albeit, it could be only brief ~1-2decades appearance per western locales..
Once governments start losing their grip is the time I would expect most violence. Then, governmental actions would have little impact.
Some people in the US have been unhappy when some cities started ignoring “minor” crime. They tend to be happier if the system seems to suppress violence.
That’s according to Turchin’s metric, he could be off (or his historical data set interpretation). I guess he is now trying to collect more focused – granular detail via working with regional datasets (European, ..). So far we are only extrapolating from his US data set lense onto world’s events, yet the general fit is very good ( WWI – WWII – today) for European realm..
I mentioned it because surprised me as well. Nevertheless, there is inner logic to these processes.
The argument is about the moment the govs is totally at the bottom of control (lack of) – only then the chaos starts to spike towards the max, i.e. there is a causal delay.. yrs – low decades lasting..
Thanks jak. Yeah if China ramps up yuan stablecoins it would be because it is able to maintain its dollar peg. That would be a best case monetary scenario for Phase 2.
It will be interesting to see how “wealthy” each nation is in 50 years.
Factors in favor of wealth
good weather for farming
good fisheries
good forests for wood (building, heating)
number of smart well educated citizens
existing quality infrastructure (roads, bridges, ports, housing, factories)
fraction of citizens that are healthy
unified race, religion, culture
K selected
Factors in favor of poverty
amount of inbreeding in the citizens
amount of persistent pollution
amount of genetic damage due to pollution, pharma
divided population by race, religion, culture
r selected
The only factor in favor of wealth is staying within carrying capacity. And Collapse renders that a political impossibility, but not a nonpolitical, personal impossibility. Race is a non-factor, Ed, despite your distateful obsession with it.
😂 50 years?!? There is not going to be much of a system in 50 years
Not too many commenters here will be around in 50 years.
My friend Pete has 20 grand children. I expect most of them will be alive in 50 years.
hey
i resemble that!!!!
“I am hoping that with cutbacks in oil usage by island nations and Europe, and the resulting lower world oil prices, the United States will be able to avoid the worst of the recessionary tendencies looming in 2026.”
I’m hoping that Western Europe better their relationship with Russia and quit the “NG from US” madness.
I expect that Western Europe is expecting more Natural Gas from the US than the US can really export, unless something changes dramatically.
There is a significant cost in sending LNG to Europe. If NG prices get high enough to enable much more extraction, my expectation is that those in Western Europe won’t be able to afford to buy the LNG.
I should look into this a little more. Producers of NG have wanted to get prices higher for many years now. The price of US NG is now down between $3 and $4 per Mcf. They would like prices higher.
Dear Gail
Happy New Year! I have enjoyed reading your blog over the past year.
As for 2026 predictions and insights, do you think that some African countries may prosper in 2026? They seem to be leapfrogging the need for older infrastructure by cheap Chinese solar technology and smartphones. Their cost of living is less compared with the Advanced Economies so there is more room for them to grow. Some areas there have valuable mineral resources.
Although the EU may face dissolution due to the problems you cite, isn’t the US also in trouble due to the political instability and potential loss of jobs due to AI? Or is that more likely in 2027?
No, I don’t think that any African nations will prosper in 2026, except perhaps the ones where oil supply is being ramped up. Africa basically needs cheap fossil fuels to support a growing economy. Solar allows a lot of “nice to haves,” like LED lights, but it difficult to do heavy manufacturing or modern farming with only solar. Solar doesn’t provide roads and bridges, either. Hydroelectric that is available only part of the year isn’t very helpful, either.
With solar energy, it becomes easier to educate people, but this mostly adds to life expectancy, not to the number of jobs that pay well. Being able to do more local crafts is not terribly useful, in the whole scheme of things. The international market for these is limited.
Africa would like to become a tourist destination, but I can’t imagine that happening.
Africa could leap frog if the game (proverbial turning of tables) suddenly changes in its favor..
We know for fact the clean fusion reaction – reactors are for real in terms of surplus energy harvest given current knowledge. Yet, they their build up is being delayed – not on technical science grounds – but simply the build costs vs net energy output is unfavorable vs. the ~legacy energy “polluting” domain. It’s even way cheaper to build an array of nuclear breeders now aka low tech vs fusion (with enough spent NPP fuel just laying around today) – hence the current RU approach..
Now, to your point more directly, yet the game could change profoundly, given the past trajectory it’s NOT impossible for CHN or others to come out with solid state batteries based on some mix of earth crust abundant materials, provided 10-100k deep cycles and decades longevity per cell. In such setting solar and other modes (hydro) takes over.. and obviously you need existing techno-sphere to produce the panels, cpus, hi-freq inverters, etc .. and little bit of ngl for the converted big machinery..
Plus, if by that time large parts of former w. industrialized world is in disarray, Africa or perhaps other parts like some regions of S. America could completely overhaul their economies from scratch, incl. agriculture / fields which doesn’t have to be locked in Gail’s depicted oil-powered heavy machinery domain exclusively.. Also asphalt roads vs local < regional < transcontinental rail .. network and so on..
Change of weather patterns, i.e. "natural" reversal of desertification would also help as in [deus ex machina] additional factor.
Yes, many over-sequenced IFs – but that's one one the plausible labyrinths the future could eventually navigate through.. I'd not bet on it though.
Hi Gail, I’ve always enjoyed your stuff. I am interested in your general view on the global baby bust that is ongoing and how this fits with your view on depleting resources, etc. For instance, Canada’s fertility rate is 1.3, which is low but typical in the world today. Even India is at replacement, so no future growth coming there. Thanks, Brett
I found this chart, but it didn’t “fit” into my finished post.
World Births by Country
It becomes obvious that births in the Advanced Nations are tiny, compared to many countries elsewhere. Nigeria has more than twice the number of births of the US, for example.
Another issue is that rising population in the less advanced nations has come as much (or more) from longer life expectancies. Thus, reduced birth rates in the poorer countries still leave the countries with a huge oversupply of young people without reasonable jobs. The UN Medium Variant population forecast shows world population rising 10.3 billion in 2086 (which is 60 years from now), and only then beginning to fall. Population for India is forecast to rise to 1.7 billion in 2062. Population for Nigeria is shown to have rising population until 2100, which is the date the projection stops.
People who thought that educating the mothers would reduce the population didn’t realize that education is two sided. It teaches better hygiene, and this tends to extend life expectancy. Any change in number of births per mother takes a long time to feed through the system. Also, the number of live births per mother in Niger is estimated to be 4.3 in 2025. It doesn’t take very many good-sized countries with high birth rates to send the world figures up.
Lazy, could look it up myself. What does the Hasidic demographic look like? Apparent dense population with minimal crime and simple transactions.
I see similarities with the Amish, Sunday off seems like a nice idea.
Wonder if there are metrics for women’s happiness in a population with children and one with a career and refined underwear. Perhaps visits to a psychiatrist/1000 of population?
Dennis L.
Brett, cultural anthropology makes abundantly clear that society-wide reproduction rates are always based on a rational cost-benefit analysis. All cost-benefit analyses are based on resource availability. Resource depletion always dramatically raises the cost to benefit ratio, for obvious reasons.
Resource depletion in hunter gatherer societies manifests as physical shortages. Resource depletion in civilization first manifests — as is currently the case — as a proxy shortage in financial affordability leading to physical shortages. The global affordability crisis leads to physical shortages of new entrant ponzi people being born, leading to a deflationary collapse of the population wherein the notional people of the world go first, and en masse.
Reante, Happy New Year!
Society-wide reproduction rates are statistical artifacts, whereas rational (or indeed irrational) cost-benefit analysis of whether or not to have children is usually performed by individuals. (The People’s Republic of China was an exception in that respect in that it the law there did not permit couples to produce more than one child for several decades.) So I am not sure how all these individual rational cost-benefit analyses and the corresponding national reproduction rates are linked.
I think we must acknowledge that not all decisions in reproduction are purely rational. For instance, the rhythm method may fail, which is how my elder brother came to be born and my parents came to their decision to marry a month before the birth. Or the condom may fail, which is how my younger brother came to be born, just 20 months after me and quite inconveniently for the family budget.
I was the only child among my siblings to have been “planned” or “wanted” prior to conception. 🙂 Whether or not my parents were rational in their cost-benefit analysis or in their family planning methods, they certainly contributed to the British reproduction rate at the time.
Happy new year Tim!
Sure, each of the analyses are individual and amongst them they are, naturally, more or less rational depending on the level of personal responsibility being employed. They run the gamut, from highly-functioning to fatalistic. But collectively they average out according to the perceived effect that a child will have on future resource availability because reproductive humans aren’t stoopid and don’t want to lower their standards of living, nor those of their existing kids, nor perhaps the living standards of their extended family by having too many kids. Developed nations’ statistics obviously bear that out. Undeveloped nations have a different cost-benefit analysis, and also bear that out.
Neither the rhythm method nor the condom failed for your parents. Your parents failed. Twice. It happens. I would never rely on a condom for birth control. They are a highly desensitizing and repulsive masking mandate besides. And I would never rely on a conservative and disciplined use of the rhythm method alone, but only in conjunction with pulling out every single time. The cumshot is synonymous with recreational sex for a reason. Because it’s the responsible cultural thing to do, without exception, even if she’s on her period. Insemination is for breeding. If my math is correct your brothers were born before the NHS started handing out abortions like candy and obviously before the over the counter morning after pill came along. I just saw that in America a third of women in their 20s have used it once and 45 percent more than once.
45 percent of users more than once
:reproduction rates are always based on a rational cost-benefit analysis.”
Geez, were you never a teenager?
Dennis L.
Gail:
“There are some reports that AI, as it is being applied in China, is providing major success in reducing the cost of coal mining in China.”
How?
“I am fairly certain that AI, as it is being developed in the US and Europe, cannot continue its recent exponential growth trajectory, and I expect this to become obvious in the next few months. ”
Idioticly high stock prices is one thing, so called “AI” will never contribute to better lives for most people.
I gave a link regarding the application of AI to coal mining in China:
Kevin Walmsley, who did this video, does quite a few videos. His videos are always very pro-China, but he usually seems to have some information to support what he is saying. In the US, the application of a new technology invariably takes many years to ramp up. It would seem like a technology that gets coal out more cheaply would take at least a few years to ramp up, even in China, with its high-speed development. So even if Walmsley is right about this, it may take a few years for the benefit to really show up.
Also, China is a big place. I can imagine uneven future growth, even within China. It too may eventually suffer from losing the top layer of its organization. Individual provinces, or groups of provinces, may band together with new currencies to replace the yuan.
This sinophile is just being a sinophile because that floats his pathetic business model. Automated Chinese coal mines don’t make production cheaper, it just shifts the costs into the future. It’s just free-money state capitalism blowing a new sector bubble so that China can chase fake GDP according to its strengths like everywhere else. China does it via industrial capacity, the us and Europe do it via financial capacity, but both paths are just bubblenomics. Chinese coal industry consolidates (bequeaths backdoor bailout monopolies obamacare-style) and hands out loans subsidies to keep the interest payments rock-bottom in order to create stoopid fake profit margins like ‘40%.’ LOL
A gigawatt may be 6X cheaper in China than the US but that doesn’t mean a damn thing in China’s favor to a peak oil systems theorist.
I don’t think it will happen so quickly. The EU is still in power and amassing more and more non voted for capabilities. It will go down, but rather around 2029/2030. Until then Europe will slowly get less from the cake of world production year by year…
There is enough oil for the next two years and the lack of metals primarily will just mean Europe will export less /manufacture less machines and tools and thus slowly getting poorer.
2026 and 2027 as long as there is no war fully affecting your country will be like the last grace period before resources really start to run out…
New Zealand could be one of the first high income countries to go down. They are running out of gas (only 8 years of resources left) and it doesn’t look like they can afford it I switch to LNG due to their small island remote location with little population.
But yeah once things in Europe go overboard I don’t see a way to recover from civil war. Europe may be the first fatality that goes down to current third world countries living standards (there should be enough resources to support that kind of living until 2035 or 2040… But it’s hard to see if people will be willing to continue working or it just becomes a mess of anarchy)
You may very well be right about the EU sticking together for a while longer. I hope so. All changes tend to take place slowly. NATO is likely to fail first, and countries may break away from the EU one at a time.
I thought about adding New Zealand to the countries that could collapse, but I didn’t have space to explore all of the details. New Zealand does have some coal, which is helpful.
As economies fail, death rates from epidemics seem to rise. Antibiotics may not work, or may not be available. It is the rising death rates for epidemics that helps prevent (we hope) endless violence.
I think Trump is delusional if he thinks he can make America great again without its bases in Europe.
Refer to my post above or just general msm news as of lately.. Donald just robbed the EU (chiefly the NW part) blind with various instruments (tax-tariffs and forced industry US-reshoring), also he levied lesser burden on the CEErs, where the lower wage level allows for some years of managed extractive policies, i.e. forcing US arms sales there and joint ventures in energy (NPPs).. perhaps incl. RU..
Matt, the US has no plans to pull back from Europe. It has, in fact been upgrading and spending quite a bit doing so. Bases, staff and everything else you can imagine has had large injections of cash over multiple years(all over Europe).
Whilst the US government was supposed to be shut down, authorisation for hundreds of billions, over 4 years(which conveniently takes us to 2029. A date you will notice a lot when they talk about war) was allocated to Ukraine and the first payment sent(no delays for the important stuff).
Trump can say whatever, but it’s all meaningless.
No one splashes out on a new car if they are about to give up driving.
The system of power works on continuity and all this was decided long before Trump sat in the Oval Office(the first time).
Here’s a nice example of continuity over time.
In 2017 Brigadier General Gerald Funke, then the Deputy Head of Planning I (Unterabteilungsleiter Planung I) proposed a plan at a nato meeting in Ottawa, concerning going to war with Russia and Germany’s role in said war(logistics support hub).
In 2025 Generalleutnant Gerald Funke, who serves as the Commander of the Support Command (Unterstützungskommando) is, as the new title suggests, running what he planned, because the war with Russia is part of the plan and has been for a decade at least.
Herr Funke understands continuity and its rewards, which reinforces Herr Funke’s faith and devotion to a system that will destroy his own people. This, if he ever considered it, would be an acceptable price to Herr Funke and his kind.
Actually thinking a bit more about the current geopolitical situation I think 2027 may the the earliest likely year everything erupts. The only way for it to be earlier on a likely scenario is there is major war breaking out in the middle east beforehand.
a) Europe isn’t ready for a war with Russia within the next 1-2 years (or likely never, but that’s another thing)
b) China stockpiling of various goods is still scheduled for at least 2026, but they actually cannot move before they have gas and oil pipelines with Russia except if they would react to a war in middle Eastern countries.
c) middle Eastern countries are collapsing and that will sooner or later put Europe on the brink of hundred millions of emigrants want to get into EU while at the same time the EUs power supply from exactly that region collapses
If there is a major war in the middle east disrupting the oil and gas flows from this region any country worldwide may use that chance to act on their geopolitical ambitions.
Actually I personally think about it I should move to Taiwan permanently due to this. I think China is the best placed country for the future but getting permanent residence there is really tough. However if they annex Taiwan this way I would most likely gain Chinese residency this way (I kinda already hold Taiwan permanent residency due to living there on/off). China will take over Taiwan without major resistance if there is war in middle East cutting oil exports from there. USA will be bound in Venezuela and middle East unable to pour large resources into helping Japan and Taiwan…
Unlike European and American politics China is Imho the only country worldwide actually preparing for total civilizational collapse and will be able to drag on for longest. Due to absolutely zero moral restrictions towards other countries I would even believe in them nuking the rest of the world if they see profit in it for themselves by that way collecting worldwide resources…
However I do believe it’s well possible that those conflicts do not break out before 2029 or 2030… At least it seems to be the plan of China and USA to keep the world stable a little longer. And yes USA/Canada seems to me the second best location after China to keep civilization up a bit longer. I don’t have a clear immigration path to that area however.
On the other hand even though I’m statistically around the middle of my life expectancy I think I don’t want to live that kind of life. I rather just enjoy time now at my best – now is still great to splurge your money getting a lot of resources in return.. I don’t fear death and rather just enjoy now as good as possible planning to use up all my financials within the next 10 years cause I cannot imagine a world worthy to live in for any longer.
Interesting, thanks.
That’s unusual to grasp about following Taiwan->China proper avenue, perhaps doable. I guess there would be additional admin delays for you, and the “best” option moving to colder ~countryside spot there would perhaps also not be that much of help in the eyes of the authorities.
Yes, that’s valid understanding after breaching specific threshold in life – resettling is actually pointless – even counter effective..
Let’s enjoy the doom vista at home and lay the bones-ashes eventually as well..
Beware of (Russian…) autocrat’s bots dreaming of the imminent decline of (Western) liberal democracies! Why all this Cyber junk, if you‘re so sure about the ‚coming mess‘….just sit back and shut up.
basically—it’s the Titanic principle.
The richer passengers accomodation was on the upper decks, near the lifeboats. (of which there were insufficient anyway).
So it is in our own time.
the difference this time round (as opposed to 1912) is that our ”richer passengers” remain convinced that wealth will keep the ship afloat.
And this time, no Carpathia will show up to rescue the survivors.
Looks like my 2025 prediction is upending us into the ocean right on cue for 2026…
A rough repeat of Ugo Bardi’s recent metaphor –
The Chinese are dancing on the top deck of the Titanic
The Germans are stuck in squalor and misery on the bottom deck.
At a distance, Germany’s plight sounds like a speeded up version of UK de-industrialisation ~1950-90.
Germany was only invented 150 years ago, though. Should it be ‘de-invented’ as Gail implies might happen to the USA? Switzerland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark all manage fine as countries. Each has 5-10 million people.
countries ”manage” on their energy output—-which in basic terms means food.
if they dont have enough, they must beg buy borrow or steal it from elsewhere—or contract until their support system balances their population.
use norway has an example—-norway is wealthy because it currently has an oil surplus.
when it doesnt it will contract according to its means—same applies to say—saudi arabia—pre oil they had 1million, now they have 30 million—post oil they will have 1 million again.
the change will be very unpleasant.
Not for people who don’t like Arabs!
The rich are building bunkers. They do not expect the ship to stay afloat.
Yes, yes, yes I agree on the limitations of bunkers. There must be a few building large enough to survive. I am thinking more like Ted Tuner. Large lands, large staff, large herds.
bunkers or sinking ships—the thinking is the same, as are the results.
if you amass a small army—they still have to be fed, if they are not fed, they will turn on whoever should be feeding them, and take what they need.
possession of land means very little….land ultimately will only produce food-energy relative to the muscle energy put into it.
no matter how big the bunker, ultimately it is dependent on ”outside” support.—the bigger the bunker, the more support it needs…
this is the reality that the bunker builders cannot grasp.
Possession of land means everything Norm. Welcome to planet Earth, where grass doesn’t grow on balconies but where food does otherwise grow itself by the sun’s ongoing good grace, and all we have to do is harvest it and eat of its natural surplus.
farming powered by muscle power (ie direct sunshine) provides a limited amount of food surplus–(ie more than we actually need to sustain ourselves)..
farming powered by IC engines (ie fossilised sunshine), produces 50x or 100x as much.
That is where ”human society’ originated..
in a non-IC environment, only muscle power will be available for food production.—so no matter how much land you own—you need pro-rata muscle input to extract food from it in usable quantity. (as opposed to basic hunter gathering, say)
Since you see that grass farming (or, better yet, silvopasture, which is the farming of savannas with tree crops) can yield a natural surplus below carrying capacity, you should be able to conclude that basic family-scale human societies can exist off of the land, because 2+2=4. Throw in a manured vegetable garden fenced off from the ruminant livestock and that’s even more carrying capacity, albeit one with more manual labor involved, but then again nothing comes for free does it. But then again…again… that what our bodies evolved for – work. They didn’t evolve to be couch potatoes
i agree with you entirely reante
problem is, the cultivation you outline would support 1 bn—-2 at most
the rest of us are couch potatoes—or gymnuts….a pointless activity, but something i have to do in order to maintain mental and physical strength.
couch potatoes end up in care homes, which i am racing to stay ahead of…..the scythe of the grim reaper seems preferable somehow.
i freely admit that if i had had to live by my own hand–ie food production—i would have starved to death.—which goes for the rest of the 6 bn missing from the above equation.
and very few farmers are entirely self sufficient anyway. we all live in an interlocked society—we can’t just ‘get off’.
Reante, see https://www.warwickshirewalnuts.co.uk/agroforestry/
The UK has a lot of heavy clay land which is suited to such activity but is not very suited to arable farming.
Norm that’s why we call civilizational Collapse a structural predicament. Once we recognize Collapse as a structural predicament, there’s nothing more to say about it. So we move on to analyzing solutions that can come into being outside of civilization once civilization has receded.
Thanks David, nice young flatland operation at that website. I’m a big fan of buartnuts and heartnuts. Nice, tough, fast growing,small footprint walnuts. (Replenish you might look into them if you haven’t, though around here nursery stock are very difficult to get ahold of but presumably you can purchase seed online.) And the juglone problem is mitigated with these two Japanese walnut varieties which is better for the grass in the alleys. Also it turns out that common bluegrass and common white clover — the ‘god’ pasture to which all cool season graziers should aspire, and that Gene Logsdon identified in his book “All Flesh is Grass” — don’t mind juglone as much as other grasses and forbs. Which makes a buartnut and hearnut god pasture savanna a nicely self-organizing engineered ecosystem, with the farmer playing the Hidden Hand to the livestock and the trees and the grass.
Mark Shepard is the king of American silvopasture alley cropping on contour. He had some legendary appearances on the Permaculture Podcast back about 12 years ago maybe. Short video of him on his farm to follow.
David here’s the Shepard video. Legendary pig field management practice included.
https://youtu.be/xBRnPcZ8xUo?si=jf0qJXd4vJvi6bII
Piggybacking on Reante here:
Mark Shepard is still somewhat ~broad acre and specific region-weather pattern type-example of said activities. There are proven examples (slightly different tool sets) bellow his scale; and obviously also on the other end of the spectrum..
Thanks jak, sure, you need some acreage if you’re gonna want to make sure that you have access to meat and/or dairy, but possibly not quality eggs if you’re really cranking out the black soldier fly larvae production and/or worm farm.
Great thread here, thanks!
Norman> on “bunkers” I guess you know about that but you focused on your core argument. Simply, the general ~bunker / castle concept-doctrine is based on the bet the inhabitants are waiting out the elevated danger period, guarding the perimeter around, and hoping one shining day to get out and controlling-expanding from into the wider realm again.. Yes as we know from history and ruins – often it did NOT pan out exactly as planned for many reasons..
Reante> yes agro-forestry and other perma_c related efforts are real – working concepts, sadly they are ahead of prevailing human nature.. i.e. will they (the sum of knowledge and optimized species in it) survive the future crisis..?
I’d say that since silvopasture is just sedentary hunter gatherer mimicry it has as good a chance as any farming style except pastoralism which is not currently much of an option.
I meant it in the way of “upheaval times” wave/s of disposed people moving swiftly around-through the land under intensive management as locust – causing damage to selection-breeding program, replanting needed, delays etc. in the optimistic scenario..
You see I followed Shepard for almost 20yrs since he went public in podcasts, vids and book/s. He is at it for ~30yrs and only now there are also some drawbacks or rather re-considerations a bit more apparent. Perhaps people visiting him personally or doing on site volunteering for him or seminars there learned-grasped it earlier.
It’s not a critique more like adjusting per different conditions and goals. For example he is/was always manic in demonstrating that very per dollar parity (or better) of this general silvopasture approach – in order to sway larger agro-public to his argument. I guess although necessary (as not done many times successfully yet) – it was a bit over the top.
So in practical terms, the nut alleys while alternating diverse genetics are basically still monocrop, yes the keyline/berm system water moves nutrients a bit, as well as that additional front layer of small berry bushes via seasonal pig & cow browsing fertilization, as well as the sheer inner lane perimeter of nitro fixing grasses – pasture.
While classic or small holder permaculturist would (have to out of necessity) suggest introducing more nitro trees within the alleys as well.. say at least after each 2-3nut trees and so on. That would slightly cut into profits (and increased work) though.
The place he bought was !severely/extremely! degraded when he came there – so perhaps my points are over the top in the final evaluation.
The self-evident great improvement he got after said three decades is the realistically achievable maximum when also generating cash – some people would perhaps put a bit more bias towards the whole-larger scale ecosystem rejuvenation forcing-factor instead.
Thanks I understood what you meant. What I meant by hunter gatherer mimicry was that it’s a relatively delf-maintaining system that habituated the farmer to hunting mammals and lends itself to a lot of free time to hunt the human mammal in service of self-defense.Whatever the mode of subsistence be, capable self-defense will be paramount, and we men will see stretches where we only sleep in the daytime.
Interesting stuff about Shepard. I only ever listened to his Permaculture Podcast appearances as I recall. And I absolutely remember his business slant bugging the shit out of me. It would bug me less today, but not because I’ve become materially more commercial myself. I’ve just gotten over getting my hackles up at that innocent type of hustling.
Sounds like nitrogen fixing perennials would have helped him with his degraded ground in the early years but now he’s through that and into maturity the high soil fertility in the treeways enable the trees to receive all the ammonium they want by feeding the requisite exudates to the microbial life.
Above ground diversity isn’t what’s really important from my viewpoint because, as always, the yin and the yang is at play, and climax ecosystems generally have considerably lower faunal diversity than non-peak ones; though it’s not a wild/native fauna ecosystem, the ‘god pasture’ I mentioned is a great example of that.. It’s monopolized by two species — common bluegrass and common white clover, both native/wild species — and it is what happens of its own accord around the world in every managed grazing cool season grass habitat at peak soil fertility when grasses are grazed to two inches (which is lower than the high-fertility bunch grasses with crowns can tolerate), and then allowed to regrow sufficiently. And we can know that it’s a climax soil ecology because god pasture emerges in consistently favorable conditions, grows the thickest in peak conditions, is clearly the most palatable, and produces the most milk. It’s only two foods for the ruminant, yet it’s maximum nutrition.
The same pattern happens underground. Transitional ecologies are the most divers, as with the “edge effect,” right? That canard of permaculture orthodoxy. Sure, great. But peak ecologies are no longer in transition because they’re next-level. Final level. Diversity goes down while abundance peaks. Now we know why the Hand loved globalization before the Hand had to let it go in favor of the DA. Globalization shares the same dynamic fractal. Peak civilizational fertility. Hand in god mode. Bluegrass and white clover.
Continuing on Shepard.
I hope we could agree his tendency for “hustling” was more about enthusiastically selling the concept as in more adoption out there than personal gain though.
Visited comparatively “lush” Minn. , I’ve never been to proper ~southern prairie, which this place is an edge boundary in context.
I guess there must be some biome boundary interplay with recent geologic past, the US prairie was likely abused in recent ~200(past!100)yrs way more than many/most places in Eurasia. Perhaps the new comers struck a way lower thickness of top soil they assumed there could be for the longhaul farming.
As alluded above perhaps the re-glaciations and prairie re-growth worked way differently vs other parts of the northern hemis – as in less biomass soil deposition over millennia there..
One thing is looking at ~5-7k yrs old clubmed pasture-fields “under human management” scraped almost to that proverbial stone-gravel bottom, but it was quite shocking for me to see ~mid-southern Illinois degraded country-side. Here assuming from pic, vids, maps, similar effect a bit down there for Shepard as well.
In short and to summarize I’m of the opinion he started on way over abused land and the exports from the site he made were/are still too excessive (meat + produce + nuts)..
We could easily compare contrast that to the various other perma_c / silvopature “hill billies” sites say in Virginia or even towards New England angle with way higher soil buildup over the years, and it’s not just about the moisture-rain allowance.
So, I’d perhaps vote for more restrained ~autarky style consumption -rejuvenation and way less pumping volume output under conditions of such a biome / geology setting in WI (and prairie in general).
You’d know better than me regarding Shepard’s motivations, but as an anticapitalist, any advocacy that shares a common goal with profiteering is just functional PR. Welcome to politics. But like I said, garden variety, innocent hustling. Unlike, say, Brent Johnson’s stablecoin thievery hustling.
My understanding is that the soils of the American plains was the best in the planet before the white man came along. And this was due to the climate and the long-distance migratory buffalo population(s) which were responsible for growing that soul upwards and outwards from the subsoil in symbiosis with the grasses and forbs that stood 8 feet tall in early summer and the roots even taller. The buffalo population was by far the largest land mammal biomass on the planet. They absolutely dominated the prairie at an estimated 150M head. Again: peak fertility equals lower diversity.
Exporting nutrients to market — another canard and orthodoxy of permaculture — does and doesn’t apply in practice. And here we’re assuming no imported nutrients from outside the farm. Should Shepard hypothetically sell hay from the same alleyways every year? No, because continuing to hay through a lean, droughty year is going to reduce fertility and the dense bluegrass sward (assuming his location is in a temperate climate) is going to thin out and partly get replaced by lower fertility grasses because medium fertility doesn’t support the bluegrass monopoly and so its competitiveness wanes. I’m such a competitive SOB because I drink my bone broth, and I’m bang smack in the middle of Aries just like Tulsi Gabbard. If Shepard were to foolishly insist on haying the same alleyway for the second lean year in a row, before that dry Spring even came along he’d know to graze the stockpiled (from the Fall growth) winter forage more lightly which means feeding out more hay which means needing to hay that alleyway again, leading to a medium-low fertility pasture in which the bluegrass in many areas has largely reverted, by the beginning of the third year, to a spindly plant that everyone regards as an annual weed species of bluegrass when I fact what it is is the same perennial species hanging on for dear life at the very bottom of its fertility range wherein it can’t even grow lead to speak of, and it’s stem photosynthesizes just enough and its seeds are the tiniest of grass seeds such that they are barely affordable. god mode. Bluegrass has the largest fertility range in my experience. It is an absolute joy to chart fertility by observing bluegrass.
OTOH, exporting nuts and berries to market, while not at all my thing, just isn’t a problem. Nuts and berries are the fruits of fertility and they are meant to be spread far and wide so that they can spread their seed. In lean years there’s less fruit so that soil fertility can be maintained as best as possible by focusing energy on sucking water producing exudates to help the microbes buffer the dryness so that fewer of them have to go dormant.
Exporting produce isn’t a problem if you manage your beds well. Even homesteaders export their own produce to themselves. It’s not like many homesteaders are doing humanure or even probably planting-out their septic lines.
Ditto for exporting meat. And if you don’t export meat into the food supply then you get overstocked and the cycle of ecological poverty rears its ugly head as with the overhaying scenario.
Thanks for the response.
I was simply pointing out – alluding to the “very observable” fact that most likely prairie biome is re-generating under said methods way slower (and differently) vs. other more suitable regions (US East Coast / NEurope/..).
Hence, different places also deserve differently tweaked methods.
Perhaps, it’s just a timing thing – my impatience – issue; so quickly as in different time perception say like 2-3gen Shepard’s grand-kids would be enjoying the proper rich soil uncompressed blanket despite the same volume of production outgoing from the place y/y..
150M buffalo….all farting methane….causing massive climate change????
How have we all survived to this point?
Hey jak if you’re telling me that Shepard has trapped himself in a moderate(?) cycle of poverty, I’ll take your word for it. All I have to go on is that 8min video I posted and I will concede he’s got some weedy ass alleyways in that video.
I guess we are sort of talking past each other..
Again, my point, based both on factual pic, sat maps, vids and personal in-situ visitation few decades ago in neighboring states areas a bit north of it, i.e. found in way better shape (southern MN) aka not that damaged vs ~southern prairie (edge of WI) ..
Most of the proper ~southern prairie abundance story has been scattered to the winds during past few centuries by agri madness, full stop. Today it only lives off added chem ~fertilizers..
It simply doesn’t exist anymore.
Again, it’s the whole package at the site: the climate, the subsoil-minerals, .. , IT DOESN’T equate the abundance say of that deep green belt from Virginia to Vermont, where all these attributes are provided (mixed up) differently by very nature.
I gather you almost seem to assume that silvopasture / agroforestry could be simply copied – plastered upon roughly every related biome around the globe..
You can google/YT these contrasting situations easily on your own – I’ll just add one extra illustrative striking example from the Baltics, basically still quasi Northern Europe. The beaming lushness of that biome stems from a different setup – for host of reasons.. YOU CAN”T JUST REPLICATE THAT IN WI – only perhaps with the help of temp. bored E.T.s 🙂
hires pic options inside:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tveru_seniunija,_2007-06-12.jpg
Jesse grassfed animals don’t really fart and also don’t burp much. Same goes for humans that don’t eat grain and pulses and sugar either.
Yes jak I do believe that trees and grass can grow wherever there’s enough rain and adequate soil depth, and enough time for ecological succession to take place. And I don’t believe that the mineral component of some soils are mineral deficient. Supposedly in my area selenium is deficient. That’s what everyone says. But I don’t believe it because I look around me and see green shit growing in abundance. If you disagree with me then you also disagree with Elaine Ingham.
Mark Shepard’s place is growing tall by the looks of it and he’s farming for money so he’s surely not treating it as well as he could. So it can’t be that bad there. Nice and flat that’s for sure, by my standards anyway. Are some places better than others? Of course. But it’s what you do with a place that matters, and we’re hardly talking marginal ecosystems here.
He talked in that video about scalping his asparagus alleyway with the mower twice in the growing season because that’s the profitable method he decided upon. Jackass. And he should have a milk cow for feeding the pigs instead of buying trash hog feed. I said his field management of the pigs was legendary but his holistic management of them for damn sure ain’t.
With regards to the K-Shaped eCONomy, what we are actually seeing is the snake eating its own tail. That is where we are at, globally.
Governments over promised entitlements to its citizens and therefore the need to generate revenue at all costs. The problem becomes that the ones paying the most government revenue are those that the entitlements were designed for.
So in effect you have the middle class wiped out and the lower class can’t support the system, while the uber upper class, doesn’t care because they made their wealth on the backs of the middle and lower class.
So eventually the system begins to crack and finally collapsed. I still believe this has a ways to go but 1+1 always equals 2. It’s no longer a matter of if but when.
I don’t like saying that “when” is tomorrow, either. Resources are still available, even in Europe, and China needs customers, so that the outcome is not very obvious.
Yes China needs customers but they need something to trade with. Europe is only giving worthless paper for tangible goods. I don’t think that kind of trade can last very long. Europe has no energy…… energy is GDP…. I think Nicole Foss said Europe would be the first country to fall and she is looking correct. You don’t mention digital currency in this paper I think that’s where countries are headed.
CBDC is digital currency.
99+PC of all fiat currencies are already digital currencies. And almost all fiat currencies are already central bank currencies. So if we want to talk about cashless societies then we should just talk about that. If we want to talk about CBDCs then maybe we should look around ourselves first before deciding whether it’s useful terminology or whether it’s entered the lexicon as part of an Elite misdirection play to make people think that the emperor governments are still wearing clothes.
Cashless economies aren’t going to happen because they run contrary to the MPP. Black markets are going to be increasingly important to civilization not less.
99+percent of issuance in all fiat currencies is digital.
Germany has severed — after the United States severed Germany’s Nord Stream Pipeline) — the import of real coal from Russia. If true, then Germany has gone back to burning lignite, its own coal, which is the lowest grade of coal — just above burning dirt. Advanced, First World economies can only survive on cheap energy.
—
“Sabotage”
I can’t stand it, I know you planned it
I’ma set it straight, this Watergate
I can’t stand rocking when I’m in here
‘Cause your crystal ball ain’t so crystal clear
So while you sit back and wonder why
I got this fuc#ing thorn in my side
Oh my God. It’s a mirage
I’m tellin’ y’all, it’s sabotage
—
Well, I’ve not followed the deed itself closely (US approved most likely), it perhaps doesn’t matter much, but in terms of plan proposal and direct tactical teams, likely it had to be done in some coop with the wider NorthSea crews aka the treacherous Albion_boyz at work again..
Rodster, I think yours is the best comment I’ve read all year.
Yes, it could be that the snake is indeed eating its own tail.
Or it could be that the female praying mantis is eating its male mate, as often happens during the mating season, to cannibalize him for extra protein to invest in the next generation of praying mantises.
Female praying mantises can be worse than the Kardashians.
I am always excited when I see a new post from you! Thank you for your work. Happy New Year Gail!
You are welcome!