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History back to 1820 gives hints regarding what may follow
With the recent closure of the Strait of Hormuz, many expect oil prices to spike and stay high. Instead, they have barely budged. The latest spike in prices is a mini spike. If these oil prices were adjusted for inflation, the spikes in the past would appear even higher.
This is not a new problem. Looking at energy data going back to 1820, low demand (affordability) has repeatedly produced financial crashes, wars, and collapses. We appear to be entering another such period.
In this post, I examine differences in how the economy behaves, comparing two different types of periods: those with low energy affordability (“low demand”) and those with high energy affordably (“high demand”). I also offer my view on what this analysis suggests may be ahead for the world economy.
[1] How high demand differs from low demand
High demand looks like a situation in which, each year, an increasing number of people can afford cars and the fuel that they require. With high demand, the number of new cars sold each year tends to rise. Young people are eager to buy homes because they find homes affordable. They find their incomes relatively higher than their parents’ were at their age. Countries around the world find it easy to industrialize. This allows their citizens to have better lifestyles. As we will see later in this post, the periods of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s were periods of high growth in demand for oil products.
What we have now is the opposite: too many young people who cannot find jobs that pay well, even with advanced degrees. They cannot afford to go on a vacation or buy a new car. Record numbers live with their parents after they finish their schooling. They spend their spare time playing video games, rather than socializing with their friends.
The number of cars sold worldwide hit a peak in 2017, indicating indirectly that people are getting poorer. If people are not buying as many cars, demand for oil tends to fall, especially if more of the cars that are sold are electric.
Building new homes also takes oil. According to the US Census Bureau, the number of US new homes sold in the US hit a record of 1,283,000 in 2005. In 2025, the number of US new homes sold amounted to only 678,000, or about 53% of the peak amount. The huge drop in new home construction is a sign that people, quite often young people, are not as well off financially as they were years ago. They cannot afford to buy a new (or even a used) home anymore.
One study based on income tax data revealed that between 1948 and 1970, US incomes tended to rise faster than inflation. Between 1968 and 1983, the incomes of both the top 10% and the lower 90% rose as fast as inflation. However, between 1983 and 2012, the top 10% received far greater increases than the bottom 90% (Figure 2).
If workers in the bottom 90% of the distribution are not doing well, it is difficult to keep prices of commodities as high as those producing the commodities would prefer. Purchases of commodities, including food, and fuel for vehicles, do not rise proportionately with huge incomes. Elon Musk and other very high-income individuals do not spend all day eating or driving their vehicles. The bottom 90% must prosper for demand (affordability) of oil and other commodities to stay high.
[2] What experience with high and low growth in energy supplies since 1820 teaches us.
Several years ago, I prepared an analysis of how the world economy behaved over the long term, over the period from 1820 to 2017. I have recently updated this study. I found that the economy behaved quite well in times of high energy consumption growth. In times of low energy consumption growth, there seemed to be many adverse events, such as financial crashes, wars, and government collapses.
I am afraid that with today’s oil and debt problems, we are headed into a pattern of low energy consumption growth, or even energy consumption contraction. If this is the case, we should expect outcomes at least as undesirable those experienced during past periods of low energy consumption growth in the past.
(a) Methodology
I first prepared a new data set by combining two data sets, the earlier of which was available only every 10 years, with more recent data available more frequently. The energy quantities reported were rising rapidly. To analyze how fast they were rising, I first computed the average annual increase percentage for each 10-year period, as shown on Figure 3.
For example, the period from 1961 to 1970 (shown as the 1970 bar) had a very high annual rate of growth rate for energy consumption. This was the period when many of the interstate highways in the US were opened and many pipelines were added.
On Figure 4, I divided the bars shown on Figure 3 into two parts.
On Figure 5, the blue portions of the bars represent the average annual increase in population over the 10-year period. The red portion of the bar is computed by subtraction from the total. It is the amount that seems to be left over for a rising standard of living. Having a tall red portion of the bar would be very good; having little or no red bar left would represent a problem. Note that in two periods (the one ended 1860 and the one ended 2000), the amount left over for an increase in living standards was negative.
(b) Good things happened in years with very high growth in “Living Standards”
Figure 5 shows the information on Figure 4 as an area chart.
While I don’t show oil prices on Figure 5, those who are familiar with oil prices will remember that high oil prices were a feature of the 1973 to 1981 period. Also, as China began its growth period, another spike in oil prices took place. High growth in energy supplies and high oil prices seem to go together. High demand from a growing economy tends to hold prices up.
The label “China” refers to the rapid growth that took place in the decade after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. This was mostly powered by China’s huge growth in coal supply between 2002 and 2011 (Figure 6).
China and the world experienced another spurt of increased coal production starting in 2022, when coal prices temporarily spiked to a high level, perhaps indirectly related to the conflict in Ukraine. But coal prices have gradually come back down, resulting in flat world growth in coal production since 2023, and a plateau in China’s coal production growth.
(c) Troubled Periods took place when the growth in “Living Standards” was low or negative
Figure 7 labels three periods with very severe dips in “Living Standards.”
The First Troubled Period started with the Panic of 1857, which some consider to be a cause of the US Civil War. According to this view, the collapse was related to an over-expansion of the US economy, followed by the collapse of the debt bubble that had allowed this expansion to occur. Financial problems affected both the North and the South.
As I see the situation, one part of this financial problem was the declining profitability of slave labor. In the US South, the labor of slaves was the main source of energy used to operate plantations. An underlying issue was that the soil had gradually become depleted because of many years of growing of cotton and tobacco. These slaves had been purchased with debt; this debt could not be repaid with interest unless the income of the plantations was sufficiently high. However, poor harvests were not offset by sufficiently higher prices, which led to financial problems for plantation owners.
There may also have been an issue that the population, in general, was becoming poorer, essentially because of overpopulation. I say this because studies show that the height of army recruits had fallen, suggesting poorer nutrition. Sanitation had recently been improved, allowing a larger share of babies to survive to maturity. At the same time, immigration into the US continued. With overpopulation, it was difficult to keep incomes up. If farms were divided among many sons, farm sizes would tend to become smaller, leading to lower farm incomes. There would also be greater competition for factory jobs, tending to hold wages down.
Of course, when the Confederacy lost the war, the Confederate Dollar became worthless. For some, this added another financial crisis.
The Second Troubled Period was 1920 to 1940. This is a notoriously bad period, with the Great Depression and World War II included. Arguably, World War I should also be included. Commodity prices of all kinds fell very low. Tariffs were added in the 1920s. The problems seem to have arisen at the time Peak Coal hit–prices could not rise high enough to cover the cost of extracting coal from narrower and deeper seams. In my view, World War I began at the time of Peak Coal in the UK, and World War II took place at the time of Peak Hard Coal in Germany.
With depletion, the cost of extracting coal kept rising, but the sales price of coal would not rise to compensate for the higher extraction costs. Instead, wages of miners were increasingly squeezed. Strikes and lockouts became common. Taking a job as a soldier seemed like a reasonable alternative.
There were many events from this period that most people would like to forget, including the currency hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic between 1921 and 1923 and the Holocaust from 1933 and 1945. Country lines were redrawn. Some countries disappeared, and new ones were added. Those holding currencies of countries that disappeared were likely left without funds.
The Third Troubled Period was 1990 to 2000.
A major event of the Third Troubled Period was the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union, leaving the 15 republics as independent states. The collapse also indirectly affected Cuba, North Korea, and some countries in Eastern Europe that were not part of the 15 independent states. With this change, the demand for fuel of all kinds fell in the countries affected. Factories were closed in many areas, including Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union.
The pullback in demand from the collapse of the Soviet Union helped hold oil prices down in the 1991 to 2001 period. Oil prices had previously been brought down by the spike in interest rates in the 1980-1981 period. In my opinion, these low oil prices played a major part in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union, as an oil exporter, needed higher oil prices to invest in developing new fields. In my opinion, the impact of the collapse of the government of the Soviet Union kept world demand (and oil prices) low during the 1991 to 2000 period.
The collapse of the Japanese real estate bubble also took place in this period, as did the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Low growth in the world economy, indirectly related to the collapse of the Soviet Union, may have played a role in these financial events.
[3] The world’s self-organizing and self-healing economy
From a physics perspective, all economies are dissipative structures. Other examples of dissipative structures include ecosystems in general, all plants and animals, including humans, and hurricanes. One characteristic of dissipative structures is that, at some point in their lives, they tend to grow. Another is that if there is an injury, within a range, the systems tend to be self-healing. For example, a cut on a person’s arm will tend to heal; a hurricane going over land will temporarily lose much of its force, but it may increase in force again if it returns over warm water.
Another characteristic of dissipative structures is that they are dependent on having a sufficient energy supply of the right kinds to continue their existence. For humans, the energy supply is food; for an economy, it is a combination of many kinds of energy needed to match the built infrastructure of the economy.
All dissipative structures have finite lifetimes. Ecosystems often come to an end through fires. Humans generally do not live more than 80 or 100 years. Economies also tend to come to an end, either by losing a war or by the collapse of a central government, related to debt problems. The collapse of the Soviet Union involved a debt problem, among other issues. Figure 9 shows the huge drop in demand for energy of all types as its central government collapsed.
There is more stability of dissipative structures than a person might expect. Economists talk about an Invisible Hand being involved. Researchers examining dissipative structures talk about them being “self-organizing.” For example, if a fire or a change in climate causes a forest to collapse, it does not take many years for the forest to refill with suitable plants and animals for the somewhat changed situation. If a business or government fails, new, somewhat different businesses or governments are likely to take their place.
I would argue that if the Universe is constantly expanding (so it is an “open system,” rather than a “closed system”), what appear to be self-organizing systems may, in fact, be God-organized systems. In other words, instead of creation being a one-time event in the distant past, some type of literal higher power may be involved in a way that makes creation more or less an ongoing event. A person might wonder with the strange confluence of recent events, including the strange weather patterns associated with El Nino, whether today’s humans are being warned that a major change in economies will take place soon.
[4] What kinds of things may happen in the near future?
(a) Current disturbances in the Middle East and elsewhere are raising long-distance shipping costs for both food and oil. (See this video.) Normally, the price of food and oil must be high enough to satisfy producers and at the same time be low enough to satisfy customers. But now a new layer of costs has been added: the cost of shipping longer routes.
I would argue that because of the problem with low demand (affordability) by consumers, shipping costs must be paid almost entirely through a reduced net oil price available to oil producers and reduced net food prices available to farmers. The amount that consumers can afford doesn’t increase because of higher transportation costs.
(b) Furthermore, the use of extra oil for transportation of oil and food will tend to push the overall economy toward contraction because there will be less oil available for other uses, such as to power agricultural machinery and jet airplanes. If the overall economy begins to contract, we can expect dips in oil prices similar to those in 2008 and 2020 (Figure 1). But if recession persists, low oil prices will not reverse themselves as quickly as they did earlier.
(c) I expect home and farm prices will tend to fall around the world. This is related to the low level of demand (affordability problem) in the US and elsewhere. Figure 11, showing median US asking prices for homes, suggests that home prices have been barely holding their own for quite a while. A decrease would not be surprising with all the pressure the economy is now encountering.
Farm prices are likely to be under pressure as well, because of the difficulty farmers are having obtaining adequate income from their farms. If farm and home prices fall, there is a substantial chance that the debt bubble holding up these prices will collapse.
(d) There are many other debt bubbles that seem to be waiting to collapse. Some of the debt relating to AI seems to be in a bubble. There is considerable commercial real estate whose value seems to be being held up by “extend and pretend” loans. Collapsing debt bubbles tend to lead to collapsing banks. They also tend to lead to banks less willing to make new loans. Layoffs seem likely. All these things point to a major recession ahead, with less buying power for the population.
(f) Collapses of some top levels of government, similar to the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union, may be ahead. Such collapses can greatly reduce world energy consumption, including oil, with relatively little violence.
[5] How the nature of the economy may help over the long term
As noted previously, economies seem to have self-healing properties. Troubled periods can last for many years, but there seems to be a substantial chance that a way out will eventually be found.
If a government fails because of excessive debt, a new government (or governments) is likely to take its place. The new government will likely have fewer employees and offer fewer services to citizens. Pensions will likely need to be reduced or eliminated completely.
Even if governments fail, or national boundaries are redrawn, I expect that some businesses will continue operations. Such a situation will take place even if a new currency needs to be created to make this happen. Even in a troubled period, new businesses will start operations. Some of these businesses will make use of recycled materials available from failing businesses.
According to the Maximum Power Principle, if there are resources available that can easily be used, somehow, some organization will develop a way to use them. Over the long term, the economy will likely re-organize itself in a way that is more complex and more sparing in energy use. If energy use is efficient enough, it seems likely that a higher price for that energy supply could be made affordable to consumers. But, such a transition may take many years, if it is possible at all.
It has been a very rainy summer in Beijing. The city is proactively dredging the canals to prevent flooding.
Why are rain patterns so strange now?
https://geoengineeringwatch.org/
Start by watching “The Dimming” which is a documentary film by GeoEngineeingWatch.
There is a lot of information on climate engineering on that site.
The recent fires in Canada and elsewhere, in theory, affect the climate. Part of their effect is global dimming, from the smoke.
If you get a chance, watch the movie Dane Wigington made with his own money. It is called The Dimming. I share the link below. It is an eyeopener.
👍👍👍
I thought wildfires could be a true negative feedback (positive) for the planet. But unfortunately they cause a positive (reinforcing) feedback loop…facilitating more fires, which release more CO2 as well as black carbon soot (adding more heat to planet).
On the weather, nobody measures it like this but should..
The euroslasher temperature horror dungeon ended – hopefully for this season, the min-max temp difference as of lately is now 30C ( 86 °F ) !
As per 10C actual mornings and very recent 40C afternoon peaks.
__
PS and no rain in sight..
A large min-max temperature difference indicates very dry air, or low humidity.
Think of the difference in temperature in a desert such as the Sahara or Arizona where a 50C differences are not uncommon, and the jungles of the Congo or the Amazon or Asia during the monsoon where it is often the same temperature 24 hours a day.
This shows the greenhouse effect in all its glory. The H2O greenhouse effect, which is the only one that really matters. It keeps the heat from the ground in during the night, preventing radiative cooling, and keeps the heat from the sun out during the day.
Bear in mind that about 50 percent of the sun’s energy arrives at the top of the atmosphere in the form of infrared radiation, and water vapor blocks a lot of this, helping to keep the lower atmosphere cool.
And so I ask, how well is all the CO2 helping to block the sun’s IR in the absence of water vapor? Why are deserts so bloody cold at night, even at 340 ppm? If it’s such a powerful greenhouse gas.
I never seem get a decent answer to this simple question from the warmies or the alarmists.
PS, I’m really sorry you are having to deal with 40C. I know it’s no fun. We had a couple of 41C days last year in my town. This year the maximum’s been 38C, which feels just as hot to me.
If it’s any consolation, at least Gail is enjoying a pleasant summer in Georgia this year. El Nino doesn’t seem such a curse on the US East Coast.
Thanks for the consideration.
My bad I should have explained myself more clearly.
As the peculiar method of mine in ” min-max ” temp means today’s min temp vs recent max( few days old last hot occurrence ) – to compare / contrast, hence the outlier case of seemingly 10-40C swing.
In normal perception it’s not like that anymore as peak daily – afternoon temps are now bellow 35C and dropping..
Do you have air conditioning? I know the EU leadership wants to ban it for the masses.
Here in Japan, our wonderful Prime Minister Takaichi-san implemented a policy in June of subsidizing everyone’s electricity bills for July and August. She said it was specifically so that nobody should feel they couldn’t afford to turn the air conditioning on. I think the subsidy is about 20% of the average family’s bill, but don’t quote me on that.
She has also cut my Nursing Care Insurance premium, which is mandatorily deducted from the state pension, so I will be getting an extra thousand yen a month from this month.
Where she finds all the money to get this done I have no idea? I just hope she can keep balancing the books.
More debt, I ‘ll bet.
Nope, as perhaps discussed earlier, it was not needed north of Alps at all, unless locked in city high-rise bldg. You see this peak summer was 2-3C hotter not than avg. but vs the hottest summers ever. So, in fact it was like ~6C sudden swing above floating avg. of past decades at least as perceived by frail memory ( stats could be different though ). That’s the key take-away ” lived by ” shocker !
It’s called “maxxing out the credit card, right before defaulting”.
Mostly because of solar cycles and the reduced solar irradiance right now. The atmosphere is a dissipative system and with less energy flux through the system from its input (the sun), stability and established flows collapse and realign.
Ed, there are three typhoons in the East Pacific right now. One has hit China and is heading for the Three Gorges Dam. A second is moving from the Pacific across Tohoku (where the Fukushima NPP is) and heading east across the Sea of Japan to Korea and then China. And a third one has just formed in the ocean near Midway and is heading north. It’s an unusually complicated pattern.
Oil demand decline in Asia in Q2 YoY:
🇯🇵Japan: -6.2%
🇰🇷South Korea: -5.8%
🇹🇭Thailand: – 3.5%
🇮🇩Indonesia: -2.8%
🇲🇾Malaysia: – 2.4%
🇻🇳Vietnam: – 4.1%
🇨🇳China: – 12.0%
🇮🇳India: – 1.1%
🇧🇩Bangladesh: – 14.5%
🇵🇰Pakistan: – 18.2%
Sources: international organizations and government agencies.
https://x.com/anasalhajji/status/2086302085469921562/photo/1
America’s oil buffer is being drained from both sides at once.
Since early April:
Total crude inventories: 712M barrels
Drawn: 166M barrels
Consecutive weekly declines: 17, the longest streak on record
But the bigger story sits inside the SPR.
Washington has released 111M barrels since March, taking the reserve down to 305M barrels, its lowest level since 1983.
Normally, emergency barrels are supposed to compensate for weakness elsewhere.
This time commercial inventories are falling too, now down for 10 straight weeks.
So the Gulf crisis is not simply shifting barrels from government tanks into private storage.
The entire U.S. crude cushion is shrinking.
⚠️ That works while the disruption is temporary. The longer the crisis lasts, the more important the remaining 305M SPR barrels become.
America built the reserve for exactly this kind of shock.
Now the shock is consuming it.
https://x.com/jackprandelli/status/2086217878538494142/photo/1
another couple of years of this, and they will be in trouble. they are modifying their nuclear doctrine and have created the islamic NATO just to try and take care of things within that time frame.
Wow!
All the barrels of oil released from the SPR is supposed to be repaid in barrels oil plus 20% more barrels of oil. No dollars left oil importers to purchase this oil. Something almost nobody is talking about.
But for those oil importers to repay all those barrels plus 20%. They will have to come up with dollars to purchase not only all the barrels they have imported but 20% more than they have imported.
These oil importers likely can’t repay in barrels of oil. And it will put a lot of pressure on their currencies if they even try.
I had completed forgotten about that HHH, thanks.
End times… brother x-…in more ways than one.
Scott Bessent is try to run things like a damn hedge fund.
There will be a high price to pay for all his nonsense. Even though that price won’t be paid right away.
Scott Bessent is an understudy of George Soros, and Stanley Druckenmiller just incase some people don’t know exactly what Bessent’s background is.
HHH , in my opinion the companies have no intention to refill /repay the SPR . The timeline is that this must be returned by 2029 . By that time decline rates will be in full swing and there will be no surplus to return . What will be the mechanism if the companies don’t return the oil ? I don’t know . There will be a new POTUS by then . In whose pocket ?
ravi,
I agree that they basically gave away what is left of the SPR for free. Some of these refineries won’t even be in business in 2029.
As their oil supply goes away. No amount of state support will keep them open and banks will have long stopped loaning the money that keeps them in business.
China’s SPR as big as it is we also be gone. But at least they won’t just give it away free. Or give it away to foreign countries for free. They will use it internally. But none the less it will also be gone.
Yes China has made some impressive moves to electrify everything. But is all the debt that was incurred in the process payable?
As the oil goes away the debt used to build out everything electric become unpayable. That fact seems to be totally oblivious to all the transition to renewable/electric everything believers.
But using China’s SPR did benefit the economy as a whole, in some ways. It cushioned the amount of the crude oil decline.
The 172 million barrels the US released from the SPR were structured as an “oil exchange,” not a sale.
Participants borrowed the oil and are contractually obligated to repay it in kind from November 2026 through 2029… It gets better. At a 19 to 24% PREMIUM.
So 206 million barrels are owed back to the reserve, starting in 3 months. And these guys have to deliver regardless of price.
They’re going to do this into a market where total US inventories just fell for the 17th straight week.
The restocking bid isn’t some sort of policy hope like many were saying, these are receivables.
Things are going to get tight.
H/t Poten & Partners for terms.
“That works while the disruption is temporary”
It’s reminiscent of the old Taliban(?) saying “you have the watches, we have the time”
The Iranians were well aware of this(vocal about it, even), right from the start and are in no hurry at all to let anyone off the hook, until their demands are met.
Just read those demands, there’s no hiding the loss.
https://www.tasnimnews.ir/en/news/2026/08/08/3666445/iran-top-security-official-sets-conditions-for-hormuz-reopening
Saudi has it’s new “defence” deal with Pakistan and Turkey(Egypt soon, as well) in an attempt to look tough and AnsarAllah simply replied that anyone helping the aggressor will be viewed as the aggressor and treated accordingly, while the Turkish FM sounds like a broken record, given the amount of times he’s repeated that this agreement definitely isn’t a threat to Iran(with the Iranians reminding the Saudis that they have a piece of paper, no more).
Trump’s attempt to get a nato coalition and Saudi’s attempt at raising the still born “prosperity guardian” have gone surprisingly quiet.
Bangladesh and Pakistan are way down!
They have exported millions upon millions…
link?
And one could argue that this will probably be the amount of decline in GDP?
A person would think that with less oil, there will be fewer jobs that pay well, and thus less GDP. It could also lead to the debt bubble starting to collapse. This could lead to major recession and deflation.
‘Demand’ decline, or simply couldn’t get their hands on it?
My personal demand reached rock-bottom in 2007-10: for clothes, heating, food, travel, etc. It was not voluntary……..
Glad you seem to be doing OK now.
Ordinary people need to be introduced to the concept of SEER: the ‘Strategic Everything Essential Reserve’.
SEER as in ‘seer’, wise to the unfolding of future events..
Get what you need today, for tomorrow it may well be unavailable.
I’m still rather astonished that in August 2026 we are still in the era of press a key and the magic courier fairy brings it to one’s door tomorrow.
I think this is important, too. Do you need shoes? Get them now. Do you need a computer replacement; do it now. Do you need to live near your adult children? Move now.
Wise words, Gail, as ever.
I just bought some excellent new boots in a sale, and am getting the old ones repaired.
An excellent saying is:
‘Three is two, two is one, and one is none’.
ie If something is essential to comfort and survival, get at least three, giving a wide margin before things get desperate.
One year of firewood? Aim for three. One fan heater? Get three, and so on.
I’m not quite sure about three wives, though, just at the moment. I suspect that would create trouble, rather than reducing it.
As they say for the real blokes ” happy in galoshes ” ..
__
PS as there are still few western brands ( ideas ) put through Asian manuf. process though, notably ft. massive trek undersole
Yes… Gail that’s what I’m doing… I’ve got athritis in my feet so making sure I have the right shoes for next couple of years…
Also buy what you need today as tomorrow the same thing will be more enshittified. For UK washing machines I estimate a typical lifetime, in normal domestic use, to be:
1980s – 20-30 years (repairable, with most spare parts available)
2000s – 15-20 years (with a few basic parts available if they wear out)
2020s – 6-8 years (not normally repairable; the bill would exceed the price of a new one which is typically £199 or £299).
I have friends (couple, no children) who bought a washing machine in the late 1970s when they moved to their present house. It’s still working and hasn’t needed any repairs. They’re about 80; will it outlast them?
Friends who bought a holiday apartment in Wales decided to re-equip it with new white goods, top brands.
They all conked out, just after 2 years!
Now, expecting everything to fail anyway, they only buy supposedly lower-quality brands for both places they own.
Chinese EVs are rapidly spreading around the world. They are more affordable than western ones.
Reante wrote:
“The primary function of the DA has always been theorized to be the covert management of the denuclearization of the civilization while the civilization is still able to denuclearize — it’s a massive undertaking –otherwise chaotic collapse of a nuclear civilization threatens a potentially extinction level event, in the northern hemisphere at least, from all the spent fuel pools exploding due to failing grids no longer being able to cool the pools.”
I dont think the spent fuel pools can explode. At least if you mean an atomic bomb like explosion. The hottest spent fuel rods will, if I remember correctly, heat to 900 C without cooling. Uran which constitutes most of the rods don’t do much at this temp. Radiactive Iodine will boil at 200 C, radioactive Ceasium boil at 600 C. These atoms will gasify and spread, so of course some kind of mess. Though, they will cool quite quickly in the atmosphere but can be spread further as dust. How far I don’t know. They may settle quite quickly around the spent fuel ponds.
Certainly not good, but unlikely an extinction level event. There will be patches of high radiactivity from Ceasium and Iodine for 50 years? You should avoid being close to the spent fuel rods for 50 000 years?
If the hand can dump the cold fuel rods in a stable mine and the hot at the bottom of the ocean the future would be better of.
“Joe Neubarth
23 November 2023 ·
Nuclear power plants can be shut down and opened up the next day. If they fear that Sea level is rising, they can remove all of the rods and put them in designated storage. It would take a few weeks but the rods could be totally removed from the reactor and placed in safe storage (where ever that may be.)”?
https://www.facebook.com/JoseBarbaNueva/posts/pfbid0BkZgQpTuZ7VPAccGXRuB6UJ3PeQkcxPg4eHyhBDAi2CctzNRSaMAYJQph4u17godl
Rising temperatures, as reflected in increasingly frequent and intense heat waves, mean greater evaporation and higher water demand. The situation cannot simply be solved by supplying more water. Large-scale agriculture is, in practical terms, doomed.
Severe drought devastates farmers in England | ABC NEWS
https://youtu.be/jKPRV39MiWo?si=iBU2sjOGrIFJzlLE
Why are darker-skinned people moving north while the white population is disappearing there? Perhaps they are better able to endure life under the scorching sun…
Evaporation, evaporation, evaporation…
Dark skinned people at high latitudes without vitamin D supplementation get Rickets and/or infertility. The darker skin that can withstand higher UV radiation closer to the equator prevents them from predicting enough vitamin D at higher latitudes with less intense direct sunlight
Everything is valid to some degree. One of my high school classmates had very fair skin and died of skin cancer here in Central Europe.
Diet can deliver adequate Vitamin D. European hunter-gatherers during and after the last Ice Age lacked the genetic mutations for lighter skin, but they ate lots of game meat, offal, and fatty fish high in Vitamin D.
The key mutations for lighter skin were introduced into Europe by Anatolian farmers in the Neolithic and later by Steppe pastoralists in the Bronze Age. Lighter skin reached fixation in central and western Europe only ~3,000 years ago.
Agriculturalists and pastoralists got insufficient Vitamin D from grains or domesticated livestock. The selective pressures for lighter skin were introduced into Europe with those staple foodstuffs. Today we widely synthesise Vitamin D.
If agriculture and farming were retained after a civilisational collapse, lighter skin would rapidly return to fixation in a mixed European-darker migrant population as the various skin genes would already be widely present for soft selective sweeps.
Darker skin would likely return to fixation if the population crashed so deeply as to allow a resort to hunter-gathering. The selective pressure for light skin would drop to zero with a return to a diet rich in game, offal and oily fish.
Light skin would then be selected against. Vitamin B9 (folate) is vital for DNA synthesis, sperm production, and preventing birth defects. Even high-latitude summer sunlight depletes Vitamin B9 in the blood over time in very pale individuals.
Darker skin would be selected for. Darker skin provides a barrier against skin infections, cellular damage, and environmental pathogens – a massive survival advantage in a raw, post-civilisational wilderness without modern medicine.
Either way, a mixed European population with the genes for both lighter and darker skin would be set up to thrive in the future, and which trait came to prominence would depend on the depth of the collapse and the resultant diet.
Whatever happens, evolution seems to work in a way that the best adapted, at a given time, tend to thrive. The offspring that are less well adapted, don’t thrive. So the system will tend the fix the situation going forward.
Why the migration?
They have evolved to flourish in a high-welfare environment, and know where to find it.
Their predisposition to minimal physical exertion also means they have less exposure to the higher temperatures.
Liking to remain indoors talking, eating and laughing at nothing, it is no hardship to keep out of the glare of the sun.
Africans, etc, do not go stir crazy if confined like the white races.
They are also disposed to be nocturnal, rising in the afternoon, often as late as 5pm, and reaching a high point of domestic activity at midnight.
You should visit London one day and observe this fascinating reality, MG!
I could be your guide to the most diverse and vibrant of the London suburbs.
MG, heat and wavelengths are two completely different beasts. Black people in the North will be rickety as Halfvard says. Of course vitamin D is produced in massive quantities, mostly directed to milk cows and laying chicken in large indoors operations. In fact I briefly considered making my own. But in a collapse situation they will wither and die.
I am not talking about the black people. “To some degree” means darker skin. Like Hispanic people in the USA.
Hasan Piker (who’s name sounds vaguely familiar to me) article on ZH. Obviously the new Left version of Nick Fuentes. Hand is the two-dog herding with polarizing dog whistles. Gathering together the disparate anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist flock onto higher ground. Yootoob short:
https://youtube.com/shorts/ZJunGsiMmZE
ZH article:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/inflection-point-arrives-dsas-unofficial-america-hating-communist-mascot
According to Zerohedge:
We’re Here To Destroy The White Race”: Democratic Socialist Of America Hero Declares War On West
Marxist streamer Hasan Piker has emerged as an increasingly visible, if unofficial, spokesman for the Democratic Socialists of America’s rapidly expanding political action network. He campaigned for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong while cultivating close ties with socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
From an electoral-risk perspective, Piker is becoming a liability for Democrats. . .
Piker calls on his followers to “kill capitalists” . . .
Piker: “We want more immigrants to come into your countries and then they’re gonna f**k your sisters and then your daughters. We’re here to destroy the White Race, Bitch.”
There’s a targeted war against white people, that’s obvious. The reasoning is more nuanced, though. We have genuine hate groups who want to destroy white people out of spite, envy and resentment, and yes, they are used, funded and supported against white people. But why? Even white people embarked in this, and politicians that should have been protecting its own. To me, this is all enabled because western countries need a scapegoat, a reason, to destroy white people’s living standards and private properties in this now collapsing world, as they’re the only independent and resourceful people out there, others being dirty poor and even living in conditions analogous to slavery, therefore, not consuming too much energy to exist, contrary to white people. This is all to make resistance against elites impossible in the coming years, actively fomenting strife and strugle, even using immigrants as biological weapons of the new proxy wars to demmoralize and kill people, and to destroy the wellfare state from within. Also, immigrants raise debt and asset prices, preventing deflation, they work slave wages and are part of the new identiture system. Finally, this is revenge, not all white elites are white, and we have infiltrated ethnics who are loving to destroy their old enemies.
Glad you found the opportunity to get that one off your chest brother.
You appear to be attributing outcomes of capitalism to a conspiracy theory rather than recognizing them as systemic effects.
There’s nothing natural about HOW things are happening.
What’s happening is not natural either, although it is indeed inevitable and fated to happen, it’s being done deliberatedly by the elites in antecipation.
Also, capitalism, socialism, communism, these don’t have anything to do with any of it, it’s a purely energetical phenomenom.
If you’re going to cull the earth due to lack of resources, it makes no sense to cull at random or people at the bottom. Unfortunately, white people consume the most per capita by a huge margin, thus putting a big fat bullseye on them. I often wondered if this is why issues like OFW and limits to growth has always been harshly denied by whites. Since maybe, deep down, they realize it would make them a target.
I think the end goal is to eventually mix everyone up so there won’t be any racism, cause nobody will know exactly what you are.
No one knows about any of this, only the elites orchestrating the mess.
White people are clueless and helpless, and do not fathom what is being done to them, much less do they know about limits to growth or anything like that. And non-white people aren’t doing that due to reading OFW either, they’re doing it out of spite and envy, seeking revenge.
“I think the end goal is to eventually mix everyone up so there won’t be any racism, cause nobody will know exactly what you are.”
Realistically there are some cadre of idealists among those with money and power that believe this, but it’s several different groups of elites with goals that overlap enough to push in the same direction.
My turn Reante. You missed the previous and more insightful article on ZH.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pillagers-vs-producers-theres-only-two-ways-save-western-world
And my comment on ZH to this article, and the response by one poster and my answer.
Hubbs
Compare Africanized bees to European bees. Africanized bees are more aggressive and make less honey than European bees. Surviving a cold winter for an African honey bee is not an issue. Attacking other bees for honey or defending their colonies from honey badgers is the challenge, hence the more violent , impulsive behaviors seen in Africanized honey bees. Same with blacks, where raiding and pillaging neighboring tribes is the next best option to simple foraging.
Genetic inbreeding with white admixture, some up to 13% in some reported cases, has reduced this violence and may have even increased the black IQ. Same as interbreeding African honey bees with European bees as the African migration spreads to colder, more temperate climates.
Although the simple Out of Africa theory of human evolution is far more complex than we originally thought, there is still an apparent biologic constant: The sub-Saharan African race has been at an evolutionary dead end for hundreds of thousands of years, while those Africans that migrated out of Africa and evolved into different subspecies like Denisovans, Neanderthals etc had to evolve higher intelligence. Indeed, these subgroups may have, as evidence shows, recombined in a constantly interweaving genetic tapestry with some hybrid vigor. In contrast, there may have been only a trickle of backflow from these European/Asian subspecies back into Africa. If the sub-Saharan black race were somehow isolated, it would probably not change for millions of years. There is simply no environmental factor that would drive any selection process in favor of intelligence or more peaceful coexistence.
And then there is the K vs R strategy of breeding/reproduction.
Wolves, a northern species, have a very rigid social /breeding system (the “K strategy”) with highly structured hierarchical wolf packs. Rabbits, the “R strategy,” is to breed like crazy, produce many offspring, and let the sheer numbers overcome the odds of survival. “Fuck and forget”.
Wolves protect their offspring and nurture them very carefully. Rabbits abandon theirs. Two different strategies depending on the environment.
12 hours ago by Calibre9
There is one problem with the out of Africa thing. Thousands of years ago, geology says there was no Africa. America and Africa were one continent. So those evolution theories are bunk.
Hubbs
You’ve got your time scales completely miscalibrated. The geological time scale is tens or hundreds of millions of years while human species evolution is maybe one or two million years tops, and mostly within a few hundred thousand years.
Hyenas also seem to care for their young.
I watched a video on hyena-lion interactions, in which a group of young lions had captured a young hyena and were looking forward to a tasty snack later.
A group of three male hyenas launched a raid on the lions, who outnumbered them, giving the young hyena a chance to run for its life, which it promptly took.
Once the cub had escaped, the older hyenas ran back to the main pack.
Most impressive co-ordination of effort!
On the subject of violence, impulsiveness, etc, it is only fair to point out that we should be careful in drawing conclusions about innate European characteristics from the repressed populations of the industrialised world.
Weapons of all kinds, but particularly big knives, were very freely used in Europe, above all in Italy, Spain and Portugal, well after 1800. Banditry and vendettas flourished.
The Italian peasantry, for instance, were notorious for killing out of hand if insulted, and not just in Naples or Sicily. And the authorities hunted down thieves more seriously than murderers.
This astonished English residents in Italy at the time.
When Napoleon was defeated and his efficient police were withdrawn from Italian cities, the corpses started to appear once more in the streets every morning – no exaggeration.
As state power grew, and the growth of a middle class demanding order – such violence had never bothered the aristocracy who were above it all – this disappeared, leaving men (and some women!) with only their fists to use.
Although the industrial workers of the North of England were known for stabbing all through the Victorian era.
This is a depressing article. It ends:
My position is, these people were ALWAYS going to turn to socialism because they are born pillagers. They are incapable of functioning in any merit based system, even one that is highly prosperous, because they are predisposed to feel as if they’re entitled to more. They are always going to be jealous of people who have more.
The idea of earning what we have never plays into it. They are barbarians. They are pillagers. There is no reasoning with them. There is no bargaining or compromise that will satisfy them. The only solution is for producers to separate completely, or, conquer the pillagers and force them to stop pillaging. Anything else would be a pointless half-measure.
Calling it ‘pillaging’ is ridiculous.
If something is offered, people will take it without asking ‘Have I earned it?’ whatever their race, class, etc.
When the – completely white, male – trade unions got the upper hand in the UK post-WW2, they endeavoured to do as little work as possible for as much money.
Satirised as: ‘I’m all right Jack, bugger you!’
“They are barbarians. They are pillagers. There is no reasoning with them. There is no bargaining or compromise that will satisfy them”
Yes, the whole world knows exactly who these people are. Of course these barbarians will always try to point the finger somewhere else, but history lays bare that lie.
If the propaganda is that desperate, we must be going down faster than I thought. One question, how exactly is socialism to blame, in a corporate state that has never entrained even the slightest wiff of it?
Everyone and everything else, seems to get the blame for our actions.
Barbarians indeed!
Probably a bad idea to send your daughter off to college after all Hubbs. You know what they say about never going back.
Notice how you framed Dunbar’s findings as “suggested” and the Stockholm postmodern cooptation as “proven” just so that you could falsely argue your bias. In reality Dunbar’s Number was proven in part with the petty hard science of archeology that showed that without exception hunter gatherers did not live in groups on a permanent basis of more than three hundred at most. If you want to present some choice excerpt from the Stockholm BS I’d be happy to dismantle it for you. To be clear, we are not talking about friendships when it comes to DN so if the Stockholm group is using that terminology then they’re a total joke.
Nietszche’s belief is based on civilizational dynamics only which is inadmissible evidence for establishing human nature for obvious reasons.
Does explode like a bomb because it’s not a bomb, but it still explodes bigly.
It’s probably not a global extinction level event but it could well cause local continental scale extinctions. Much of the US seems like it would be toast.
“Spent fuel pools at US nuclear plants are almost as densely packed with nuclear fuel as operating reactors—a hazard that has existed for decades and vastly increases the odds of having a major accident.
In August 1945, the United States used nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was the first and remains the last time that nuclear weapons have been used in war. The story of how those bombs were made, the decision to use them, and the effects on Japan and its people have been central to conversations around nuclear weapons ever since. To mark 81 years since that August, the Bulletin is bringing together three storytellers who have engaged with that history in diverse ways to talk about what happened, what society remembers (and what it doesn’t), and why telling these stories is still crucial more than eight decades into the nuclear era. Join us on August 18 at 10:15 a.m. CT for this Bulletin virtual event.
Spent fuel assemblies could ignite—starting a zirconium fire—if an overloaded pool were to lose a sizable portion or all of its coolant water. In a scenario in which coolant water boils off, uncovered zirconium cladding of fuel assemblies may overheat and chemically react with steam, generating explosive hydrogen gas. A substantial amount of hydrogen would almost certainly detonate, destroying the building that houses the spent fuel pool. (Only a small quantity of energy is required to ignite hydrogen gas, including electric sparks from equipment. It is speculated a ringing telephone initiated a hydrogen explosion that occurred during the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.)
A zirconium fire in an exposed spent fuel pool would have the potential to emit far more radioactive cesium 137 than the Chernobyl accident released. (The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has conducted analyses that found a zirconium fire at a densely packed pool could release as much as 24 megacuries of cesium 137; the Chernobyl accident is estimated to have released 2.3 megacuries of cesium 137.) Such a disaster could contaminate thousands of square miles of land in urban and rural areas, potentially exposing millions of people to large doses of ionizing radiation, many of whom could die from early or latent cancer.”
https://thebulletin.org/2024/04/spent-nuclear-fuel-mismanagement-poses-a-major-threat-to-the-united-states-heres-how/
EIA has posted a figure for world crude oil production for last April (75.281 Mb/d) — this is 15.2% lower than their current highest monthly figure (86.729 Mb/d, for last February).
Is world “peak oil” past? ( http://oil-price.net/ , https://davecoop.net/seneca )
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/monthly-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=0000000000000000000000000000000000vg&u=0&f=M&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=94694400000&e=1775001600000
Thanks! The April amount is about 1 million barrels per day below the March crude oil amount.
Both amounts are higher than the crude oil production in the later part of 2020. The last month that was at the current level was April 2021.
We did get back up from this level before. In theory, we could again.
Thanks for the wide-treatment post Gail.
Here a miny back track … “plus ca change plus c’est la même chose”
U.S. Attacks Iran Frigates, Oil Platforms, Sinks Boat : American Helicopter Is Missing
L.A. Times Archives
April 18, 1988
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-04-18-mn-1005-story.html
The US has treated Iran as an enemy since at least 1979. That was when it imposed sanctions on Iran’s oil.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Iran-oil-production-with-1979-sanctions-line-noted.png
Even Seattle Starbucks is collapsing.
Starbucks shutters another Seattle store as closures and layoffs mount
https://mynorthwest.com/local/starbucks-closes-store/4264180
The days of the $5+ cup of coffee for the masses are coming to an end.
Even regular haircuts are getting too expensive. My local Great Clips shut its doors along with another barber I used a few years ago. I bought a Remington Vacuum Clipper myself and cut my own hair now. I’m going gray and use a little coloring too. That would have cost me well over $60 plus tip. I trim it about a month or so and takes only 15 minutes.
Also, self service Laundromats are seeing a drop in customers because of the cost increase they charge. Im using a bucket to hand wash and sun dry the wet cloths outside now.
Forget about restaurants….the food quality and amount they give has gotten worse and prices outrageous l mainly dine in now and have no problem with that myself.
I’ll let you know if I start growing my own tomatoes and okra if the prices keep rises. So far still affordable..
I have been cutting my own hair for the past 30 years – not because I can’t afford a haircut, but when I was working, I didn’t feel like spending a good chunk of my Saturday sitting with 15 other people waiting for a haircut.
I didn’t mind going myself. But the last few years it’s a luxury now for a good many working class folks because of inflation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hD5e80uZDg&t=2s
Barber Shops Are EMPTY Everywhere — They’re Quietly Going Out of Business
Here in England, Turkish barbers seem quite happy to sit around in almost empty shops all day, for some reason…..
Money+ laundering ( back-stage ) operation ( 74% ) ? Or drawing five kids add. social support scheme fills up the coffers to stay above water ( 25% ) ?
Naivete as per held uber-optimistic econ-world view ( 1 % ) ?
Starbucks started in Washington State. This is strange. I suppose every fad has a life cycle. It costs money, and it usually takes gasoline, to get to a Starbucks location. Seattle is a very “woke” city that isn’t doing very well.
Yes, plus the espresso is like 3.99. People are drinking it at home.
Very true, all these chains are so expensive.
When I was a happy salary slave, in advertising in London, I used them a lot, for coffee, cake and a sandwich, without thinking about the cost. Same for pubs – a heavy-drinking profession!
Now, to spend more on one drink than on a bag of decent-quality beans goes against the grain. Ditto for a pint in a pub.
On my last trip to London by train, I picked up a discarded free newspaper ,it’s mostly advertising. But there was double-page spread on how to save money – making your own sandwich lunch and not going to a coffee chain chain was high on the list. It’s one of the most obvious expenses to cut.
Last time I was in downtown Chicago with my brother. He demanded to we stop to get coffee at some super expensive hipster place. He paid $18 for one cup of coffee. And the place was packed. Took like 10 minutes to get. SHM
Gil Scott-Heron, an enemy of civilization who sang a song ridiculing the moon landing, said “The Revolution will not be televised”.
Dothk says where is the oil crisis. The answer is that there were so much wastage in the past years but they are being phased out which is why there are just enough to go by.
The doom of 1-2 billion humans are now assured because fertilizer production around the world declined by 10-20% which means 10-20% less food around the world.
And the First World is not going to stop eating meat just to feed 1-2 billion living in the shantytowns.
No crowned heads died during the plague.
The deletion will occur in places few Western tourists will venture to. 1-2 billion will perish by this time next year but the people in the west will not even blink, just like few people in London paid any attentions to the dead in Ireland in 1845.
don’t worry, if the idiot really believes in the moon landings he is an intellectual zero.
Not sure I read you correctly?
That performer GSHeron meant it as social/econ and political critique in terms of gov’s priorities and deployed funds instead of other acute priorities of the day.
On the Moon topic itself, the flyby around Moon earlier this year ( delayed by many years of tech glitches ) show the surface as being rather busy of craters for ~1970s tech to land safely and repeatedly. But what do I know..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Scott-Heron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitey_on_the_Moon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_II#
I don’t think it’s a question so much of intelligence, as of psychology and credulity. I know very intelligent people (for example, an IMO medalist and Princeton physics PhD) who just assume it’s true. It seems to be sort of a generational thing, too: the system worked for boomers, so they don’t question authority.
And this brings up a second issue – why did the Soviets go along with it? I assume they could have disproved it or at least objected. That they didn’t sort of pushes “The Hand” type of explanation, that a global power system exists and sovereign governments are just for show. I guess simple corruption could also explain it, though: “pay us off or we’ll tell”.
I’ve heard the theory that the US Gov’t bribed the Soviets to stay silent with grain shipments when they had some bad shortages. Not sure if that’s true but it’s at least a possibility.
That idea appeared in some mocumentary on the Moon thing like two decades ago. Most likely to obfuscate some real deal made between the powers back then and closing up this avenue of inquiry for good.
__
PS lets also assign some 5-15% probability that the Cosmos exploration lead eventually to clues we are trapped inside some sort of simulation for lack of better word, hence why publicizing this oddity ( and can of worms ) at all ..
Why did they also keep mum on the ovens and chambers when that psyop started around 1960? And they had the data. Of course Perlmutter was in charge in the USSR back then (he changed his name to Kruschev). The people here discuss these and other issues quite openly.
Imho the Soviets did not ‘de-bunk’ … ’challenge’ … ’question’ the Moon landings because the US was a superpower and puncturing fantasies, if it could be achieved (unlikely?) does (did) not affect real-world power in physical terms.
Collaboration was ‘better.’ There was even a joint Appollo type mission called Apollo-Soyuz, long ago. Note Russia has been accomodating to collaboration in SPACE, still today (didn’t check, Idk what is going on there now) at the International Space Station.
Nice thinking Noirette. MPP. The Soviets also knew that they were going to Collapse first because their stake industrial civilization was an extreme minority stake, so they knew they were ultimately dependent on Western good will.
Are you three guys for real? Do you represent the majority opinion here? Is it the consensus or shared ‘belief’ of all or most ‘our finite world’ commenters that the moon landings were fake? If so I have to re-assess the time I spend here.
I am afraid that there is considerable evidence that the moon landings were faked. If you look at the early ones, some of the images look more high school sets for plays than anything real.
That is a major reason we haven’t really gone back to the moon. We can’t go through the Van Allen radiation belt well, for one thing.
Unfortunately, an awfully lot of things are not quite as we have been told they are. Football is a game of deception. So are a lot of narratives we are being told.
I think a healthy skepticism is healthy, I certainly question much that I see and hear, and test it for veracity, but there are limits to everything, even unbelief.
Diogenes, perhaps as diving / sea aficionado can get lured into the trap via various shiny tech gizmos applied ( me too ). For example on that recent alleged Moon fly-over they used laser modem of high speed ( not radio but optical data link for communication ). However, since we know ” for sure ” several countries ( incl. #2nd rate powers ) have similar stuff in varying level of quality already – this single item seems legit. But the key is to remain calm and not infer from it right away some grandeur claims up the value chain of the main story w.out further checks and evaluations.
Why do you think the people pushing destabilizing immigration, un/poorly-tested jabs, dumbed-down education, offshoring, panopticon technocracy, and mass murder / war, wouldn’t lie to you?
I’m genuinely asking, this is a non-rhetorical question.
The US Navy purchased the Bathyscaphe ‘Trieste’ from the Piccards, improved it, then in 1960 descended seven miles to the bottom of the Marianas Trench with two men aboard. No humans repeated this feat until James Cameron piloted a National Geographic sponsored bathyscaphe to the same depths in 2012, 52 years later. Does that mean the ‘Trieste’ mission was fake?
That’s not what I asked. Do you think the government or those behind it would lie to you if it was in their interest to do so? If they would, why be so sure they told you the truth? And this is before we get into all the obvious problems with the story.
I don’t think you understand the point of my little analogy.
You’re not making the point you think you are. In your example, you show that 50 years later a private org could do what it took the entire government to do earlier. On the other hand, neither government nor private entities can repeat now what allegedly took place 50 years ago with the moon landing.
This supports the hoax interpretation, obviously. That you think it supports your case shows your level of thinking on the matter.
For the third time, please tell me whether you think the government would lie to you. You sure like dodging that.
I think you guys have confirmed what I was concerned about, I appreciate the sincere responses.
Diogenes – have you taken an IQ test? SAT? GRE? Any reason to think you’re better than the rest, better able to discern truth? I’ve taken these. I know where I stand by objective measures.
Intelligence and discerning truth, don’t seem to correlate that often and decades long beliefs are always hard to change, as that can start off a domino effect, that people would rather avoid(Collapsing your whole worldview isn’t very popular).
I know little of the moon story(apart from the writings of the mad German scientist*), but although on a different subject, the point of the below stands.
“But what astonished me was that the brother-in-law not only didn’t seem to want to know, but that he appeared to be unable to follow the evidence to the more than obvious conclusion. And this was something I hadn’t ever seen before. When I’d recently tried the same thing with my father, a right-leaning man with warmer feelings towards the great United States of America than most, his response was basically “shit, you’re right”, and the start of a slow process of connecting many dots towards a terminal political cynicism.
In the case of this investigative journalist, however, there were certain thoughts that just would not be entertained. Because, to paraphrase himself, here was fostered a certain approach to learning, to information, one that implied a tendency towards double-think. An ability to selectively disregard uncomfortable data if it didn’t fit the appropriate theoretical framework.
Paradoxically, he was a quite intelligent individual. So intelligent that he likely understood full well that his social status and future income was entirely contingent upon him not at all understanding certain things.”
https://shadowrunners.substack.com/p/ginsberg-the-llm-and-the-indomitable
*The mad German scientist would appear to be the obvious place to look, as everything else seems like the massive waste of time that is the discussion around the planes and towers(irrelevant to the mechanics of collapse and the mechanics of collapse are the evidence).
Watch the documentary ‘American Moon’.
If you still believe they landed then just agree to differ..
For an exceptionally well researched and critical take on the moon missions, follow up with …
“Wagging the Moondoogie”
https://centerforaninformedamerica.com/moondoggie/
There is an audio version which is a very easy listen. Between these two buried reports, anyone who believes the US Government never lies, might have a few questions to ask.
On that yt channel that Tim linked is an interesting ~older vid about the origins and distribution / statistics of impact craters and related debris on the Moon surface.
__
PS This was certainly a crucial implicating angle for decades but by now with AI video editing / rendering capability in high resolution detail not so much.. and incl. into the future ( missions )
Thanks for sharing.
Everyone here is for real: thrilling, isn’t it?
It is like entering the court of the King in Yellow: you may lose your mind, doubt the evidence of your eyes….
But no one bites, except Reante.
Thought you were in a life-long search for an honest man!
Here’s the rocket maestro himself describing what would happen!
Note that these are the type of people that the hand recruits to create its grand plans. I do not like Martyanov for his total adherence to russia today-type propaganda talking points, but he published a book already ten years ago about losing military supremacy. but the hand somehow had to pick the US military as its military arm to implement the plan. and here we are. They are incapable of listening.
Two points. 1) the IMO medalist lives in the Ivy League bubble. You can not judge reality well from that perch. So do the rest of the hand planners. Two, you can see it now that the US is changing its nuclear doctrine not to lose this war. You can not safely empty nuclear pools once bombs start flying.
This is a rather bumbling plan. I suppose they have some benchmarks, like under which scenario do we have the most resources in 2050. So we accept the diesel losses in war now, plus the permanent decrease of oilfield output due to the shock, in exchange for a vastly decreased population soon. The latter will produce so many problems that it is unlikely that they can keep up. I mean look at how they are handling Yemen, a tiny place. It is taking many years, they have tried to starve it, they will continue to starve it, and then they will nuke it. It is essentially a positive feedback system. Even a patsy like Putin will at some point deny them processed uranium.
>> Even a patsy like Putin will at some point deny them processed uranium.
I think he would wait until he is at risk of being replaced by the Russian General Staff.
Incidentally, I just came across an actual physics proof (presented in an old video) that the Apollo 15 Moon flag as shown on TV was actually filmed on Earth—although Norman will doubtless be rolling his eyes at the claim.
It’s all to do with the physics of pendulums apparently.
I’ve been going too and thro on the moon landings like a pendulum for decades now. And as Hilary famously insisted, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
But this video, although painfully long-drawn out to listen too, is very persuasive that at least that particular flag never left Earth. When trying to cut through the undergrowth or see through the haze of claims and counterclaims, physics is our friend.
Tim, that inevitably leads to a further nuanced subplot how MIB / agencies hunted down the poor low seniority schmuck operating that air-con system on such ” landing set ” filming studio so atrociously as these artifacts of flying flag ( and other pieces of equipment moving ) spoiled even the final best shot.
It must have been a gross kind of death somewhere in a dark dirty ally that evening / dawn.
There were 54,000 US combat deaths in Vietnam, so bunging one more smuck in a coffin and draping a flag over it would not present any insurmountable problems.
But why assume anyone was killed? If we want to get really conspiratorial Stanley Kubrick could have done this on one of his weekends off using some of the props from 2001. 🙂
Addendum> The men-cave singer in conclusion ” Steve the Chemist ” was also likely a PO-aficionado and Climate skeptic, judging from the briefly shown history of his 2013 Firefox web browser tab, lolz.
Small world indeed, evidently..
Thanks for watching it, anyway.
I also got some bad vibes from the old browser and websites. Did we really use such primitive computers only 20 years ago, Yuck!
I’ve been “talking” with Google AI about this video, and it is telling me there are several ways of accounting for the 2-second pendulum speed, including “the torsional spring effect” and “fabric wave dynamics”, as well as speeding up the video playback.
But Occam’s Razor (when you have two theories that explain something equally well, the simpler theory is usually the right choice) suggests the NASA video was knocked up on Earth and the makers didn’t realize that the pendulum effect on the flag was a dead giveaway to a keen observer like Steve the Chemist.
As with so many things that happened decades ago, I fall back on “What difference, at this point, does it make!?” I’m not invested in one outcome or another here. But the longer I live, the faker everything I see in the media seems to me.
Perhaps on the deeper ” meaning of fakery ” here picking each other’s brains about Einstein’s General and Special relativity, time stamp around 20:40s – they suddenly go into the gravy..
Basically, proposing ( citing add. scientists ) that at neuron level where quantum physics operates the human consciousness seems to appear on. In other words with quantum physics background or ~foundation ( among other things allowing several things appear at once phenomena etc. ) we then are trying to operate and manipulate in the real macro – world of ~basic physics.
Haven’t seen it all yet. But just that musing above seem to again lead to some sort of quasi simulated experience of ours after-all.
__
(h)ttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoQalV3g77U
with Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist, PhD.
My most charitable take on the moon landing is that it happened and they faked the video to televise it for propaganda.
Even if the Van Allen Belts were at a low state and the astronauts got through, the ability to live broadcast and get film through without the radiation messing everything up is wholly unbelievable.
On a semi-related note, Occam’s Razor is why I believe an electricity and plasma explanation of Astrophysics over General Relativity.
The $Billions spent to try to find Dark Matter and Dark Energy with no success also push me in that direction.
It’s really interesting to view in light of Thomas Kuhn’s perspective on scientific paradigms shifting when scientists die, not when their theories are disproven. Much of this makes more sense when you realize how much of “The Science” relies on the egos of scientists and not empirical data and sensible theories.
Nutrition is, of course, another field where the same phenomenon can be observed. Although the issues of associative “studies” and funding by massive corporations are also in play there.
A global food shortage won’t stay confined to poorer nations. In an integrated world economy, the idea that only the developing world will suffer while wealthy countries remain insulated is unrealistic. First‑world nations rely heavily on resource extraction, agricultural inputs, and labor from the global south. When those systems break down, the shock ripples outward. Scarcity in one region becomes instability everywhere — politically, economically, and socially. The modern world is too interconnected for crises to remain local.
The need for most human labor is now obsolete due to robots & AI.
If the Elders don’t rid themselves of a large number of the population then they face self extermination by the billions without a source of income and or purpose. Therefore its a kill or be killed situation. And they’ve been planning for this very moment for centuries.
All we need to do is teach the robots to grow, refrigerate, and transport food for 8.2 billion people.
Maybe only the deserving upper elites advancing civilization, along with the servant class and slaves, not to mention the praetorian guards for some actual human psychological gratification of dominance.
Yes .. Pipe dreams…
To make the robots, a hugely complicated factory is needed. Mind boggling, imho.
The inputs are so varied I don’t even know where to to begin, others will know better! The inputs come from all over the world, they are dug out, refined, produced, harvested, treated, packed, shipped (insured, dependent on other circuits, financial, etc.) and then transformed again, into usable cables, plastics, computer parts, and on and on.
Then all has to be combined thru various complex processes to actually ‘make’ the robot, the workers have to be competent, well paid, housed, etc.
Yes it is impressive, fascinating, to see a robot do ‘stuff’. But the robot is dependent on a wildly complicated production chain. Is he, the robot, a profitable and stable choice for some money-makers? (Or, a good choice for humans?)
The robot is generally dependent on electric energy, without it he lays down and sadly pollutes or explodes.
ATM machines were a fantastic saving for Banks, that was obvious, the tellers could just be thrown out. (For now.) This was a simple ‘automate’ it thingie. Robots – hmmmm.
Soon AI will discover how to use nanotechnology so that we never run out of materials (or energy) to make robots. Then the robots will be sent to hunt down those who have sarcasticated them. Remember, you can run but you can’t hide, Noirette!
OK, I’m watching out, thx for the advice 🙂
Noirette> ” giga -> tera factories ” don’t work like that anymore..
The desired still tweaked about ( not claiming fully and everywhere achieved by now ) goal is that on the giant facility prescient you get delivered as input :
– trucks or rail cargoes of copper, aluminum, .. ingots
– precursors for plastics in barrels, grains or gel etc.
..
.
Boom, and on the other end of the factory the finalized very-complex tested and ready-made product pops up, simply comes to the world like a miracle..
That’s what Muskians and CHN accolades are preoccupied 24/365 to achieve now or in very short order..
Doesn’t matter what type of biz: EVs, pharma, ~food, electronics, arms, ..
>> To make the robots, a hugely complicated factory is needed. Mind boggling, imho.
>> The inputs are so varied I don’t even know where to to begin, others will know better!
Maybe you could design a computer that sits in a human braincase – the human body regenerates and takes organic non-refined food inputs, so that’s cheaper than maintenance and a more flexible fuel source. Maybe electro-chemical computation could be used, to lower energy consumption and make it immune to EMP attack. A self-replication build cycle would be useful, so that repeated manufacturing would be unnecessary.
—
@bjorntorlarsson
7 days ago
The very purpose of democracy=globalism is to exterminate all nations, all families, all individuality.
It is very efficient, and very popular!
—
Related summary truth-smackdown ( for ) of the day.
Yes the Illuumaniti also known as the elders or the hand have a long range plan in place .
You will own nothing and be happy.
Unfortunately if China has dropped oil demand by 40 % the elders plans may come true for the vast majority of current workers as they all disappear due to bankruptcy or replacement by new technology aka AI.
As David Cooper has shown us over 10 million barrels are gone never to return.
In another ten years will kulm’s fantasies become reality or will the elders succeed with their ‘ultimatum’.
You will own nothing and be happy.
China’s oil imports of crude oil temporarily dropped 40%, and its exports of finished oil products dropped as well. I understand that this drop is not permanent. I’m not sure that it is back up to 100%, however.
We lived through 2020, with its huge drop in oil consumption and production. This is in some ways similar.
The world economy seems to heading toward contraction. That is what we would expect with less oil extraction and consumption. We are likely headed into a major recession.
The things you own.. end up owning you.
Exterminate!
Food production is not profitable
“The highest economic result before taking into account the entrepreneur’s own remuneration was achieved by self-employed farmers (SHR) farming on an area of up to 50 hectares, at EUR 180.7 per hectare. However, after taking the entrepreneur’s own remuneration into account, even this group would have reported a loss of EUR 432.3 per hectare,” the Ministry of Agriculture said.
https://www.trend.sk/spravy/naklady-rastli-rychlejsie-nez-prijmy-vysledky-rolnikov-sa-zhorsili?itm_modul=react_trend_timelinebox&itm_brand=trend&itm_template=hp&itm_position=1&itm_cb_position=top_sidebar_1
That holds true for large part or even most of Europe and also other industrialized countries. Clearly, this gen / version of agriculture is meant to be y/y subsidized by various publicly acknowledged and also obfuscated ( state / govs / fin world agenda concealed ) methods, targeting both the farmers as well as the petrochemical, and machinery industries involved in it. It’s just nature of the beast so to speak.
__
PS and the 3rd world is correct when claiming it’s actually perverse as these govs sponsored over production quota in the rich world are then pushed at dumping prices on them..
PS2 yet Kulmianistic angle would counter that as w.out such imports they would starve irrespective of some %fraction of their indigenous pop able to build-up such agrarian self-sufficiency in the first place
This is the basic issue we are up against. With the high price of land, it is pretty much impossible to farm profitably. All of the inputs are expensive, also.
Small plane crashes onto California street, causes power outage
These small plane crashes seem to happy pretty often. Some of these planes seem to have parachutes attached. I know I walked over to one such crash with a parachute a few years ago, a few blocks from my home.
I think the cosmological optimists are wrong. There is no observational evidence that the universe we live in is sustainable. There is no evidence that time could move backwards, and that things in the universe could stop moving apart from each other and start moving towards each other.
https://newspaceeconomy.ca/2025/03/17/the-big-bounce-theory-could-the-universe-be-in-a-never-ending-cycle/
The universe keeps growing. There is some higher power keeps pushing it along and keeping it going.
The earth isn’t sustainable, just as the sun lasts for a finite length of time. But the universe seems to keep going, indefinitely.
You may very well be right. There isn’t even a basic scientific model of how stars are formed. Cold fusion, common in the formation of stars, can not be replicated by humans. On the other hand, by human observation of the rules of the universe, the availability of energy to do work will go down to zero at some point.
A wheeling torus is obviously far more elegant and efficient and fractally consistent with what we see at every level in nature than bubblenomic inflations and deflations theory lol of the Big Bounce theory. But looking at the universe cyclically is generative: the article contains the excellent baby-step speculation that information could be passed from one universal living epicycle to the next, in Lamarckian fashion. Wouldn’t that be something, and something humbling?
Explain it to me like I took the vaccine for a free donut. 🙂
https://ifunny.co/picture/explain-it-to-me-like-i-took-the-vaccine-for-dvzlIxKmA
Ok. Hit this joint first.
The universe is a first class spinning lever,. It’s all levers, maaaan.
Presumably dark energy and dark matter play primary roles in running the toroidal flow. Don’t tell drb though, he doesn’t like the Two Darks.
I have a shelf full of dozens of popular works specifically on “the new physics” from the seventies, eighties, and into the nineties, as well as plenty of older physics going back to the days before quantum theory and relativity. Lots of good books, mostly paperbacks, currently gathering dust on the shelf there, but it was fun reading them back in the day.
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was perhaps the worst of the bunch, although I won’t blame Hawking as I don’t think he wrote it. He was probably rendered incapable by the ALS he was suffering from by that time, and he was being used basically as a prop for the Hawking scientific genius trapped in a failing body psyop. So the book was ghost written by a committee. These days, AI along with a couple of good human editors would do a much better job of it.
Then I got bored, or I discovered fast women and strong liquor, or I was just too busy with other things, and I put way cosmology and other childish things.
And after Feynman and Sagan were replaced by Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Hawking became replaced by a dummy, popular physics on TV became a real clown show. And I wasn’t doing physics for a living, and I was loosing my youthful enthusiasm for seeking out new life and new civilizations, so I lost interest and turned my interests elsewhere.
In some ways I was lucky to have been born and raised and well into middle age before the advent of the “popular” or “mass” internet, which I would date from around 2000, just in time for 9/11 truth videos to make a splash. Youngsters like yourself have had access for most of your adult life to the Web and lots of nice tools to get all the info you want without sweating for it. My generation had to make do with books and magazines and occasional TV programs like the Horizon programs or The Sky at Night. We lived in a desert, man. It made us tough! We were like a boy named Sue.
Anyway, now that we know the Universe is a gigantic donut filled with dark and milk chocolate chips rather than like a banana or an exploding ballon or a lump of rising dough filled with raisins (a popular old analogy), I am no longer interested, and I find I do not have the energy to keep up with the latest theories. I think it’s very much an age thing.
There are people in their 80s and 90s who still have the curiosity of children, but only in their own narrow fields. They can no longer run around sniffing the roses in everybody’s garden. They prefer to tend their own narrow flowerbed. This is not a bug; it’s a feature of human existence. In the same vein, or vane, or vain, It’s also too late for me to start training as a brain surgeon or a pro tennis player, although I might still be able to learn to speak Arapaho or paint nice pictures, as Grandma Moses did.
Cheers!
Monastic study on life expectancy: Monks have a few extra years compared to other men, but they are beginning to lose this advantage, apparently due to smoking
Nuns live for roughly the same length of time as women in the wider world, but earlier studies confirming a higher overall cancer mortality rate among nuns have been corroborated.
https://svetkrestanstva.postoj.sk/198419/reholnici-maju-oproti-ostatnym-muzom-par-rokov-k-dobru-naskok-vsak-zacinaju-stracat-zrejme-pre-fajcenie
I remember that US life expectancy data says that married people live longer than single people. This is likely related to married people being of a higher economic group than single people.
Single men in the US especially tend to have short lives. They tend not to take very good care of themselves.
It would be interesting to see if a really enlightened statistician study this. I believe the statement is very flawed. Many men report being very unhappy and stressed in their marriage. Promoting marriage is good for business if you know what I mean.
I was looking at studies quite a long time ago. These were studies by companies selling life insurance, sometimes through employers. I would think that they would have pretty good data.
There needs to be an understanding regarding how marriage “works.” If both halves of the couple came from families with intact marriages, who got along well with each other, they seem to work out fine. If the two compete with each other, or they cannot agree on how to split workloads, things don’t work as well. If one has an addiction problem, that can be a major problem.
Yes but statistically speaking 57 percent of first time marriages fail and they say of the ones that are married another 20 percent are not happy. Divorce is a very stressful thing particularly for men and women mostly instigating the divorce. Not being a negative Nancy but I too have studied a lot of statistics too and I am wary of certain memes.. I think many people are re thinking marriage as being “healthy “ You are a unicorn Gail, your husband is very lucky. Most women don’t think like you.
I come from a family with very little divorce. My parents were married for 60+ years without divorce, or what seemed to be major disagreements.
I am one of seven children. None of us is divorced. I have been married for 49 years.
I can think of a small number of cousins who are divorced, but I would guess the divorce rate is 10% or less among my cousins. My family is well-educated and thus, above average in income. That helps somewhat.
We have had a tradition of helping each other out, whenever we can. Even cousins are known to come and help out cousins. We rarely argue about things. Instead, if we have something we want to agree on, like “Which hotel should we stay in?” we tend to discuss it to death, until all objections have been ironed out.
I would hesitate to call the estimable Gail a ‘unicorn’: it has, I am told, most unfortunate connotations in the world of Swinging.
‘One in a million’ is probably much nearer the truth!
Thanks!
To Xavier “I would hesitate to call Gail a Unicorn….”
I meant no ill will at all. Merely saying that she is a strong sensible woman. I imagine anyone can twist things around today. I’m not a fan of political correctness; you can see from the context that it had nothing to do with “swinging “ . Virtual signaling is overrated.
Society has created a culture of people always wanting something more so they are always trying to trade up. This exists even for well educated wealthy people. The reason men get red pilled is because marriage is more of a financial emotional liability today.
The obvious genetics behind the behavior of her and her husband’s behavior is blind to her. People who aren’t marriage material can’t reach the point of compromise. It’s similar to how many eggheads can’t understand why most people can’t become rocket scientists.
John L. says:
August 9, 2026 at 6:43 am
“The reason men get red pilled is because”
Society hides from them the very competitive nature of sexual selection.
When they sort of figure out how to attract and keep a woman around, the
they decide it’s just about money which is only part of it.
Monks do not have to feed their families and their retirement is paid by Vatican s o they live longer
Nuns might have more cancer because of infighting among them
I never understood what lesbians fought about.
I think they might smoke cigarettes more than
straight women. Drug abuse is higher among
the not-straight population.
Putting the sexual orientation rubbish to one side for a minute, I think that in general women are able to get on at close quarters with each other more smoothly and more comfortably than men are.
Of course, I have never lived in a convent so I don’t know precisely how bitchy that sort of life can get. But I think two women living together in domestic harmony is easier than two men living in domestic harmony.
Interestingly, recent data and demographic studies in the US indicate that lesbian couples experience higher rates of divorce or relationship dissolution compared to both heterosexual and gay male couples, while gay male couples generally show the lowest divorce rates. I find this data shocking. It goes against all my prejudices!! 🙂
Then there are straight male couples, like the famous Odd Couple in the comedy movies. There are so few of them that they don’t even seem to have their own demographic. Straight female couples were always a lot more common in the old days. They were socially accepted in a way that straight male couples were not. They were always popping up in Agatha Christie stories, for instance.
“13:40 I’ve learned in the last 24 hours that the intel cell in the CAT, the crisis
13:46 action team at SenCom, it’s been deactivated.
13:51 So, what that what does that mean? That means the odds that the United States is going to be launching any new military operations against the Iranians is
13:59 pretty slim because you got to have the intel sell up if for no other reason tell you about possible targets, tell
14:06 you about possible threats.”?
All over for US attacks on Iran, it sounds like.
“CIA analyst Larry Johnson reveals that U.S forces have been put back on 24-hour, round-the-clock duty in preparation for a strike on Iran, which he says could take place within the next few days.”?
https://x.com/ShaykhSulaiman/status/2086260432310796484?s=20
Do we believe this?
Greek-duo made programme recently, about other Saudi princes getting pretty restless from the looming ( erasure of large chunk of their property and living standard ) hence the frenetic activity by the current crown-prince to press DJT as NOT to escalate the situation for the whole region further.
–
Obviously, the Saudi case could be heard and taken into account to a lesser%degree, but there are certainly more powerful ( pro war – globo domination ) arguments to be whispered to POTUS this time around.
Hopefully, DJT would follow in his own path-dependency footsteps, i.e. this campaign won’t be eventually as shiny successful in all the glorious contours as predicated upon. So, instead obfuscation campaign to be issued soonish, as to explain why suddenly ~ 1-7$ bucks per barrel thoroughfare fee in Hormuz is NO longer a problem for the world order..
__
PS obviously anything is possible and through further steps on escalator ladder could decide to use n-stuff on Iran at some point in next 6-9months window..
Strange wage growth in Slovakia:
“Average wages in the districts are rising, but jobs are disappearing
Gelnica and Martin recorded double-digit growth in average wages, yet at the same time lost a significant proportion of their workforce. Regional data show why the average wage figure alone can mask a weakening labour market
At first glance, Gelnica is one of the winners in terms of wage growth. The average wage in the district rose by 11 per cent year-on-year to €1,496. However, over the same period, the number of registered employees fell by 26.6 per cent. A total of 1,034 jobs disappeared from the district’s statistics.
Taken together, these two figures paint a considerably bleaker picture than the growth in the average wage alone. A higher average does not necessarily mean that most people have received a significant pay rise. It may also rise because lower-paid jobs are dropped from the sample, leaving only employees with higher earnings.”
Translated with DeepL.
https://www.trend.sk/ekonomika/priemerne-mzdy-v-okresoch-rastu-pracovne-miesta-vsak-miznu?itm_modul=najcitanejsie_24h&itm_brand=trend&itm_template=article&itm_position=4&itm_cb_position=top_sidebar_1
Interesting! Lower paid jobs are disappearing, leading to higher average wages overall.
Transportation costs remain high for getting to jobs. There is also other overhead, such as child care costs or cost of hiring someone to do eldercare for you. I expect some low-paid workers just drop out of the workforce, especially if government benefits are pretty much as useful as wages for this demographic.
The likely scenario on a small scale is the janitors being fired and the white collar workers being tasked to do the janitors’ duties on top of their own. In most downsizing scenarios, the workload remains the same and is shifted onto less people.
If they start to complain, they can be let go for being lazy.
Rinse and repeat.
I remember hearing someone have a very serious gastrological problem and was afraid of leaving her white collar office for fear of being fired.
Study shows that young people in Europe are losing both strength and mobility
https://www.trend.sk/spravy/europska-mladez-straca-silu-aj-pohyblivost-ukazuje-studia?itm_modul=react_trend_timelinebox&itm_brand=trend&itm_template=hp&itm_position=3&itm_cb_position=top_sidebar_1
By 2050, three-quarters of EU regions will be depopulated. Most of Slovakia is at risk
A Commission study lists the whole of the country, excluding Bratislava and the west, among the regions at highest risk of losing young people in the EU. Brussels wants to tackle the crisis with the ‘Right to Stay’ strategy.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
https://eubrief.sme.sk/europska-politika/c/do-roku-2050-sa-vyludnia-tri-stvrtiny-regionov-eu-v-rizikovej-skupine-je-vacsina-slovenska
The ” problem ” is that even Slovakia is not depopulating where ” it should be “, meaning ~pristine highland, or mountain enclaves and what have you, instead new ski resorts and access roads are put there incl. EU cohesion funds support inflows for such a biz etc. What is it good for when urban high rises or industrial agglomeration ( near ) suburbs get de-popped ? ?
I recall in the news and chat rooms there was sort of a mini-trend +20 yrs ago, lot of anglosphere expats relocating to wilder parts of Balkans, Romania and that angle, promises of picturesque charming ~wild acreage for pennies. Eventually, they were boxed in fighting the same mega trend, as the affluent classes be it local or int based, just snapped the best pristine areas for ” silly development ” instead – hence little incentive to stay in run-down former collectivized farm area w. depleted soilz, which would take decades to replenish – reactivate, as the only place which they could afford.
Obviously, some occasional success stories ( on the edges ) were made as well.
Translation of some of the first article. I am sure the US is worse.
European children are in worse physical condition than at any time in the past 60 years, according to a study from the University of Zaragoza, published in the journal Sports Medicine – Open . The researchers mapped changes in key indicators of physical health: muscle strength, flexibility, body composition and cardiorespiratory fitness. These components are key determinants of population health, which, according to the authors, means that “we are missing a fundamental opportunity that will be difficult to recover.”
The study analyzed 417,362 participants aged six to 16 from 20 European countries between 1965 and 2023. Upper body strength has generally been declining since the 1970s, with a brief period of stability between 1980 and 2000, followed by a further decline. Lower body strength increased until the 1980s, but has been steadily declining since then.
The researchers also noted a consistent linear decline as body fat increased. The worst trend was in flexibility, which showed a continuous decline that accelerated since 2000.
Regarding cardiorespiratory fitness, i.e. the ability of the heart, lungs and blood vessels to effectively supply working muscles with oxygen during prolonged physical activity, the authors conclude that after a long-term decline, the latest data indicate a possible stabilization of the trend between 2015 and 2023.
In previous decades ( eras ) even city based kids spent most of their awaken times “outdoors”, yes a bit dangerous activity here and there, but usually not worse than bloody skin on the knee or tore up t-shirt etc. If they crossed the line too much, anybody of adult standing around set them straight either vocally or by quick direct slap on the face..
Nowadays ( meaning past 40-50yrs hah ) ?
Isolated hermitian dwellings even around most of suburb landscape, kidnappers and deviants roaming freely on parole and humanistic-angle ” control ” to do as they please. And lets not open the whole drug abuse culture.. be it of social pressure or no other human activity allowed around..
Neighbor slapping your kid publicly for misbehaving? Oh the horror, well, CNN/.. team is on the case just in few dozens minutes, and lawyers jut smelling millions in damages.. etc. and so on..
It’s the very torturous bed we made ( or let happen ) for ourselves. Simply, reverberating echoes of the overall sick society.
I remember as a child, my friend saying that at the playground, his dad smacked another kid that was acting out, maybe fighting or bullying him, I forget. Nowadays that would get you arrested for sure.
Well, there are entire libraries, laboratories and research institutes focusing on this very topic.
My hunch is that the greatest mal-forcing was the end of multi generational families. As each and every following wave of children experienced directly the sharing of responsibilities, as the (grand-)elders worked towards their latest breath, be it only token participation ala preparing kindling sticks by small pocketknife around the kitchen table, or going outside caring for few chicks and so on.
That has been all blown away by the industrial age, especially the latest revision stages and waves of seclusion individualism.
In fact ~abject poverty nurtured humanism. Perhaps somewhere around middle of this evolving path the world still worked the best ~1930-1960s, despite notable shocking upheaval/spikes.
And encroaching ~luxury as of lately destroyed it completely.
Poverty has always had a bad reputation, but I’ve always thought it has a lot going for it. First of all because to curb your needs means trading money (ie social status) for freedom, which in my view is always a win, but also because it forces you to rely more on mutual aid, which can only be positive for any society.
Pity that the internet has destroyed what little sense of community had managed to survive the age of mass media.
As for luxury, I’ve always believed there’s nothing better than time, space and silence. If you have these, you’re a millionaire, even if you live on a thousand euros a month.
August 8, 2026 at 9:11 pm
As for luxury, I’ve always believed there’s nothing better than time, space and silence.
No woman believes that. The reason why most women work in t is to chase social status or freedom from men.
You say that no woman believes that, but I personally know a few who do, and I even lived with one of them for almost thirty years.
In fact, I’ve met very few women who were primarily after money and social status, and even fewer who wanted “freedom from men” (which is different from a certain degree of independence), as my impression is that women find loneliness harder to bear than men do.
But I don’t live in the US or the UK, where the culture might be different, and I should point out that I’m referring to the mindset of women who are now in their fifties. About the younger ones I know nothing,
Gail you made excellent points about peak coal and WW1 & WW2.
And this was true even before with Spain discovering the largest silver mine and became very wealthy, (Portugal used their currency too) and they started to run out so they hired Columbus to go find more.
Losing the source of your wealth always is a big problem.
There are not many places where land is available at a low price–certainly not in Hawaii.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hawaiis-blood-quantum-rule-deepens-states-housing-crisis
Hawaii’s ‘Blood Quantum’ Rule Deepens The State’s Housing Crisis
Hawaiian residents are challenging ancestry-based housing restrictions in federal court. A pair of lawsuits filed in June and July takes aim at the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, a state agency that reserves long-term homestead leases to individuals who meet the state’s “blood quantum” requirement.
To be eligible for a homestead lease—long-term, affordable leases for residential, agricultural, and pastoral purposes—an applicant must prove that he or she has 50 percent Native Hawaiian ancestry. In any other context, this type of requirement would be instantly illegal. No ordinary government agency or housing authority can deny your application or evict you because of your ancestry. Yet, these controversial rules are very common for determining benefits for indigenous populations, and continue to give the state inordinate power to withhold opportunities and take property from citizens according to overtly discriminatory justifications.
The lead plaintiff in the first lawsuit is Eric Ryan, a lifelong Hawaiian resident whose application for a homestead lease was immediately denied because he was not, as the pre-qualification form required, “at least 50 percent Native Hawaiian.” The legal definition of a Native Hawaiian is a “descendant of not less than one-half part of the blood of the races inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands previous to 1778.” With this narrow construction, the state is empowered to reject thousands of applicants. Meanwhile, many others are left on hold. According to the complaint, the waiting list for new leases exceeds 30,000 applicants, and some have been waiting for more than 40 years. . .
The dispossession of residents through these discriminatory rules unnecessarily exacerbates the housing insecurity within the state. This situation stems from an antiquated and controversial policy: the Department is empowered by the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, a federal law that mandates the blood quantum requirement. It was enacted during Hawaii’s territorial period between annexation and statehood.
Hawaii is a feudal place where the nobles, dating from the days of Hawaiian Kingdom, still hold considerable power and land and will not give them up without force
And US courts tend to not bother with matters considering Hawaiians… not their business
I bet there’s plenty of land opening up soon in “land of the lost”.
Who Canceled the Oil Apocalypse?
Remember the oil shock?
When the fighting closed the Strait of Hormuz this spring, the predictions were apocalyptic. Thirteen thousand flights canceled. Britain, we were told, was days from its last shipment of jet fuel. Analysts penciling in $200 oil, and a few of the louder ones going even higher.
https://www.snafuinvesting.com/p/who-canceled-the-oil-apocalypse
Someone quietly absorbed the biggest supply shock in oil market history. It wasn’t who or why you think.
If this is true, we are not going to see rationing in 2026.
Which will be a relief! I was all prepared for doom to be upon us, and to see that Fast Eddy fellow vindicated.
But then there are questions about why, for example, the US had to empty Cushing. A gas, middle distillate, and urea shortage is still potentially on the menu.
This article doesn’t tell us anything we haven’t already talked about ourselves, so I fail to see how you draw that conclusion from it. You’re conclusion may still be right in and of itself.
You mean … dun dun dun … “Nothing ever changes”?
BAU 2026, baby!
🙂
The big issue is the amount of China’s oil reserves.
“In other words: in the space of four months, the world’s biggest buyer of crude cut its purchases by 40%. That’s nearly half.”
Another is that some of the demand disappeared. Flights were cancelled, among other things.
China has 1.4 billion barrels available that we know about who knows how much they have underground if they were prepping for lean times they could have collected a whole lot more.
Looks like China is the new swing producer.
swing consumer
China has helped keep prices from falling too low.
And before that the multi-year Chinese backdoor energy bailout helped prices from getting too high for China and too low for everyone. It’s a tightrope walk.
With a Forty% cut in demand from China we don’t need the Hormuz Strait to be open if Iran and America want to play ” cowboys and Indians” for the next ten years then let them be .
Yes but can china continue? I think they don’t want to use up all of their reserves. If this could go on forever I don’t think Trump would be so eager to make a deal. He could just block them off indefinitely
The only way we shall know is when he is replaced with a new president who is less confrontational.
When the next election arrives hopefully the people will vote in someone like Bernie Sanders.
If there aren’t enough goods to go around, even taking all of the wealth from the rich will not fix the situation. Their wealth is mostly in pixels. We need more physical goods, made possible by very inexpensive energy supplies.
A couple weeks ago China demand was only down about a third. Assume it’s about the same now.
Reante , they are back in the market .
“crude imports were at 8.45mbpd in July vs 7.15mbpd in June, 11.16mbpd in July25, 10.01mbpd in July24, 10.33mbpd in July23, 8.83mbpd in July22 and 9.75mbpd in July21 ”
The last report I had was 11.2 mbpd on 31st July . In May it was 6.8 mbpd .
https://x.com/staunovo/status/2085605198907527555/photo/1
So why no tank bottoms yet? Three reasons.
First: the lag. U.S. inventories didn’t begin drawing in earnest until late April. Oil takes nearly ninety days to move from wellhead to wingtip — so draws continue for another forty-five to sixty days after conditions normalize. Real-time U.S. data shows crude plus major products down roughly 200 million barrels since March — the sharpest drawdown in the forty-year history of the data. At recent rates, U.S. draws alone exceed 300 million barrels; the U.S. is about half of global inventories, implying at least 600 million barrels globally even if the Strait reopened today. Cushing — where WTI settles — is at 20 million barrels: effectively its operational minimum. OECD stocks drew nearly 300 million barrels through June alone, with July likely posting another large decline.
Second: the burp. After the June MOU, an armada of trapped tankers finally left the Gulf — nearly 150 million barrels dumped onto the market at once. Our flow-of-crude work captured it: oil-on-water posted its first build in four months even as onshore tanks kept draining. And it arrived precisely when three major refining centers couldn’t buy. China had cut runs more than two million barrels a day to protect its home market. Middle East refiners were partly offline. Ukrainian strikes had crippled Russian refining. Each sat at multi-decade lows. So, 150 million barrels chased a market with three buyers missing — traders bid crude down to place them, speculators front-ran the burp. Large, but one-time. That oil is placed. That pressure is behind us.
Third — and most important: there are two oil markets. Supply is upstream crude. Demand is end-use refined products. Refining sits in between, and analysts almost never make the distinction. Runs fell five million barrels a day between January and May, and pundits declared demand fell with them — because “demand” is a modeled number that uses refinery runs as its input. Cut the runs, and the model tells you demand collapsed. But the real-time gauges say otherwise. Air travel — which tracks oil demand remarkably well — is up 5% year-on-year. A five-million-barrel demand collapse would be 2021, lockdown-era territory. It is simply not possible. And if demand is intact while runs are down five million a day, then product inventories are collapsing — precisely where the IEA is blind outside the OECD. The price signal confirms it: the burp depressed crude, yet products stayed elevated. The WTI crack spread sits at $60 a barrel — the highest ever recorded.
A recent Bloomberg piece captured the consensus: inventories are “depleted but not empty,” — implying we’ll simply rebuild once things normalize. Not so fast. The Gulf is not resolved; it’s spreading to the Red Sea. Draws continue for months after any resolution. Product stocks are almost certainly far lower than reported — and rebuilding them means refiners buying crude in enormous volume, transmitting the crisis from products straight into crude. Governments, having just learned the value of strategic reserves, will race to refill theirs — restocking demand that appears nowhere in consensus forecasts. The burp is behind us. And U.S. shale — the only real source of non-OPEC growth — posts ever-lower growth and will likely turn negative very soon.
No crisis? Just wait. The bearish narrative always reinforces the price action — until it can’t. Just ask the gold investors smart enough to buy in 1999.
blog.gorozen.com/blog/why-havent-the-tanks-run-dry?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Blog%20Notification&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9OEQ2LuICbW8ipJHwssGN4KwUoALDTrh8t_5ShzS4xsiS_DbyQy6yuXkBybW2lui9XZWZqK3_bWAEQsGKtmg8hnrpXeA&_hsmi=432098896&utm_content=432098896&utm_source=hs_email
Awesome ravi. The best part:
“Third — and most important: there are two oil markets. Supply is upstream crude. Demand is end-use refined products. Refining sits in between, and analysts almost never make the distinction. Runs fell five million barrels a day between January and May, and pundits declared demand fell with them — because “demand” is a modeled number that uses refinery runs as its input. Cut the runs, and the model tells you demand collapsed. But the real-time gauges say otherwise. Air travel — which tracks oil demand remarkably well — is up 5% year-on-year. A five-million-barrel demand collapse would be 2021, lockdown-era territory. It is simply not possible. And if demand is intact while runs are down five million a day, then product inventories are collapsing — precisely where the IEA is blind outside the OECD. The price signal confirms it: the burp depressed crude, yet products stayed elevated. The WTI crack spread sits at $60 a barrel — the highest ever recorded.”
Looks like HHH’s within two months call for rationing is still the smart money then. Rationing as a sneaker wave given the refined fuels product inventory collapse.
The Permian is over . The Gas/oil ratio is increasing . More gas , less oil .
https://www.oilystuff.com/group/oily-stuff/discussion/791b5efc-0afe-4484-bad5-8f86c692e94e
So why no tank bottoms yet? Three reasons.
First: the lag. U.S. inventories didn’t begin drawing in earnest until late April. Oil takes nearly ninety days to move from wellhead to wingtip — so draws continue for another forty-five to sixty days after conditions normalize. Real-time U.S. data shows crude plus major products down roughly 200 million barrels since March — the sharpest drawdown in the forty-year history of the data. At recent rates, U.S. draws alone exceed 300 million barrels; the U.S. is about half of global inventories, implying at least 600 million barrels globally even if the Strait reopened today. Cushing — where WTI settles — is at 20 million barrels: effectively its operational minimum. OECD stocks drew nearly 300 million barrels through June alone, with July likely posting another large decline.
Second: the burp. After the June MOU, an armada of trapped tankers finally left the Gulf — nearly 150 million barrels dumped onto the market at once. Our flow-of-crude work captured it: oil-on-water posted its first build in four months even as onshore tanks kept draining. And it arrived precisely when three major refining centers couldn’t buy. China had cut runs more than two million barrels a day to protect its home market. Middle East refiners were partly offline. Ukrainian strikes had crippled Russian refining. Each sat at multi-decade lows. So, 150 million barrels chased a market with three buyers missing — traders bid crude down to place them, speculators front-ran the burp. Large, but one-time. That oil is placed. That pressure is behind us.
Third — and most important: there are two oil markets. Supply is upstream crude. Demand is end-use refined products. Refining sits in between, and analysts almost never make the distinction. Runs fell five million barrels a day between January and May, and pundits declared demand fell with them — because “demand” is a modeled number that uses refinery runs as its input. Cut the runs, and the model tells you demand collapsed. But the real-time gauges say otherwise. Air travel — which tracks oil demand remarkably well — is up 5% year-on-year. A five-million-barrel demand collapse would be 2021, lockdown-era territory. It is simply not possible. And if demand is intact while runs are down five million a day, then product inventories are collapsing — precisely where the IEA is blind outside the OECD. The price signal confirms it: the burp depressed crude, yet products stayed elevated. The WTI crack spread sits at $60 a barrel — the highest ever recorded.
A recent Bloomberg piece captured the consensus: inventories are “depleted but not empty,” — implying we’ll simply rebuild once things normalize. Not so fast. The Gulf is not resolved; it’s spreading to the Red Sea. Draws continue for months after any resolution. Product stocks are almost certainly far lower than reported — and rebuilding them means refiners buying crude in enormous volume, transmitting the crisis from products straight into crude. Governments, having just learned the value of strategic reserves, will race to refill theirs — restocking demand that appears nowhere in consensus forecasts. The burp is behind us. And U.S. shale — the only real source of non-OPEC growth — posts ever-lower growth and will likely turn negative very soon.
No crisis? Just wait. The bearish narrative always reinforces the price action — until it can’t. Just ask the gold investors smart enough to buy in 1999.
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/why-havent-the-tanks-run-dry?utm_campaign=Weekly%20Blog%20Notification&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9PzLWMssXlBvKnteer3_utFubbneR6MWDUb_TXCgxiu89eYetHmrQnDRANJVbJbotwxq8tyudunQd2piIiWX3bSjhtfg&_hsmi=432098896&utm_content=432098896&utm_source=hs_email
Cushing crude at 18.599M barrels.
Prior lows: 11.810M (June 2004) and 14.449M (Sept 2008).
Shell capacity was ~27M in 2004 and ~41M in 2008. Today: ~91M capacity.
Working capacity (utilization) is much lower than shell capacity.
2004: 44% of shell, 51% of working. Comfortable.
2008: 35% of shell, 41% of working. Comfortable.
Today: 20% of shell, 24% of working. Uncharted territory.
Renegade Resources estimates operational floor: ~16M barrels. Strip out 2.5M pipeline linefill from today’s print and accessible tank inventory is already there.
https://x.com/chigrl/status/2082923311521255923/photo/1
Thanks Ravi, haven’t look at Goehring et al. for years. That ” reverse Covid ” shock swing into opposite direction as in reaching total bottom of oil tanks ~everywhere is interesting.
But perhaps the over-all and prevailing econ malaise would be stronger vs speculators aka nothing burger out of lower oil stock this time and into the near future..
Request to all , please read . A very good post by Art Berman . Once phase change occurs there is no going back , just as when a girl arrives at puberty —- girl changes to woman — there is no going back .
“Hormuz and the Phase Shift in Global Energy ”
https://x.com/aeberman12/status/2085558705072853378/photo/1
Awesome again ravi! Berman doing god’s work in service of the DA. Him calling the Strait the commons makes me self-centeredly wonder if he’s lurking.
You read Art’s post and you say to yourself, “peak oil was already an affordability problem threatening to break everything and now we are looking at a permanently less efficient and costly rejigging of the ME oil transit infrastructure on top of the consequences of the supply disruption? It’s all over!”
The only thing that changes that reality and returns Hormooz to the commons is the collapse of Zionism. Ding ding ding.
Next round of excitement coming right up, because Zionism ain’t collapsed yet.
Another potential scenario: China is collapsing economically, or at least downsizing drastically, due to a combination of lack of demand for Chinese exports, the Trump tariffs (That man’s a stable genius!), and falling domestic demand from all the Chinese folks who no longer exist due to jab-induced maladies plus decades of living in polluted cities, eating pesticide-laden food, and smoking cigarettes(I think about 50 percent of Chinese smoke, or used to until recently), or being killed in order to harvest their organs, or drowned by foods when giant dams collapse, or buried under earthquake rubble, or buried by debt, or emigrated to escape all of the above.
Remember, folks, this is merely a potential scenario. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ definite.
As a result, the Chinese demand for oil has nose-dived. There is far less economic activity going on there. I see the results here in Japan in the shape of far less Chinese tourists on the streets of olde Kyoto and in the wonderfully clear blue skies without a trace of the haze or particulate pollution they used to contain when the wind was blowing from China. So I can be fairly sure that much is true.
With much lower Chinese demand for oil, and Venezuela opening the taps again after a long hiatus (Thanks to Trump again! What a guy!), there was a serious oversupply of crude waiting to hit the market. OPEC could no longer do its job as the members were revolting, and Russia and Iran were both chomping at the bit to keep exporting oil at massive discount rates as much as possible to get around the long-term sanctions. This was depressing the price of oil so much that producers the world over were losing money and getting deep into debt, which could trigger production cuts and prevent investment in the industry all round.
Step in Trump again. Somebody, perhaps Lindsey Graham or perhaps Bibi or perhaps King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, whispers in the Don’s ear—the shell-shocked one that took a bullet at Butler—that “it would be a wizard wheeze (British slang for a brilliant practical joke) to attack the Iranians, kill a few of their leaders and schoolgirls; really bash the Hornets’ Nest in other words. With any luck, we could provoke the Hornets to close the Strait of Hormuz for a few months, tighten the oil market, and jack up prices!”
“How can we possibly get away with that? asks Trump.
“Easy, peasy. We just tell the world that the Iraniacs are seeking a nuke, and we can’t let that happen!”
“Sounds like a plan!” says Trump. “And I get to take the credit for it?”
What if peak oil has hit for real this time and we have lost these barrels permanently then everything that is happening now is the new reality a 40 % cut in oil demand from China leads to a permanent depression as lots of oil products start disappearing just to get any refined oil products will cost a lot more based on freight charges which have gone up quite high so even if oil prices were to drop back down to 60 $ a barrel only economically viable oil will be available so say goodbye to future production increases based on that price .
Oil products will still be available but prices at the petrol station or food at the shops will be high to reflect the high freight charges
The real danger lies in oil dropping even lower.
Thanks for your view of the situation.
The US started its sanctions of Iran in 1979. I have marked the date on this chart of Iran’s oil production.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Iran-oil-production-with-1979-sanctions-line-noted.png
Thanks Tim. That scenario echoes Gail’s intensification of the oil price feathering mechanism theory of Hormooz. I still say that eventual costs of the Hormooz affair will far exceed the short-term benefits to the oil price rise such that the only reasonable conclusion would be, when all’s said and done, that such a political gambit was catastrophic misadventurism. Which in my book is perfect political cover for the Hand’s controlled demolition.
That said, I don’t expect the fireworks to be over. I think today’s optimistic news is just yet another feathering of the BNS sledgehammer. Notice how each feathering seems increasingly optimistic. It’s the inverse dynamic of the boy who cried wolf, which we’re all intimately familiar with lol. Each cry has to be more doomy than the last.
I think your analysis is spot on, Reante.
The Hand has to manage the “rightsizing” of the economy and the population in line with available resources as well as in line with their goals for the “brave new word” they envision.
They can’t afford to allow a chaotic collapse, and they can’t afford to be open about what they are doing. Instead, they have to drape some kind of narrative over their planned events to make it seem like a spontaneous process to the audience.
But then, what do we know!?
The lowly, ostracized peak oil peanut gallery sees all. 😁 Yin and the yang.
Tim> thanks for filing this report from JAP.
In terms of the ~suddenly cleared sky, well CHN changed along the way in steps apparently. They increased %%natgas imports, closed some of the dirtiest coal plants, and added nextgen filters to some of the newer ones, plus that 120GW in NPPs by 2030 goal in progress. And now toying with solid state batt promises. Simply, we were pre-occupied with immediate universally applied doom and they slowly extended the run ( also for us ).
Perhaps, we have to acknowledge the next years and decades will be more about cross-regional bifurcation. As Gaza horrors there, semi-choked Hormuz over-there, people almost broke in the West, Asians keeping or slightly going under their plateau consumerism etc.
This over-all dynamics could be in its infancy, middle-aged, or just very old-near final exhaustion and to be ending soon.
So, again scenarios open for the mere few next years or further away 2-3decades still.
Personally, I am optimistic for a bumpy but less steep decline that was envisioned by the Club of Rome people. And also for innovation, new energy sources and, new technologies to transform life, first in the core countries and then everywhere over the coming decades in ways that will be wonderful.
But perhaps I am over-optimistic, unrealistic to the point of stupidity, and buying into the hype surrounding Musk and his fellow Tech Lords. The greedy and the gullible will fall for anything.
I am greedy to the extent that I want my comfortable existence to continue as long as possible. And I am gullible to the extent that I never heard anything that I didn’t half-believe.
The videos on X selling Tesla’s and Space X’s dreams for the future are the slickest and most persuasive propaganda tools I’ve ever seen. I confess that they bias me against my own better judgement. They make me want to believe. Elon is being sold these days as our savior who will bless us with free stuff and liberation from all kinds of drudgery.
Many of Elon Musk’s presentations would make PT Barnum blush.
Kevin Walmsley on “Why US tariffs are pushing manufacturing back to China.” Basically tariffs are now equivalent in China and other Southeastern Asia countries, where final assembly was being done to work around US tariffs.
“India’s Reliance Industries has paid a record $23-$25 Million to charter a supertanker to lift Iraqi crude. (…) [Reliance] booked the tanker to load 2m barrels of oil at 1200 World Scale, 12 times the benchmark freight rate.”
This is crazy . It works out to $ 12 per barrel .
Wow!
Iran wants to be compensated by USrael for all the stuff they broke and the Iranians they killed. Unfortunately the ones sharing the brunt of those fees, had nothing to do with the attacks on Iran.
I have advocated Imperialism and abhorred democracy and nationalism, especially nationalism by countries which did not contribute anything to civilization.
In a utilitarian way, the suffering of the mass and the comfort by the few is for the greater good, since it enables the latter to pursue interest without any consequences.
One of the weakest points of the Limits of Growth is taking pollution into account. Pollution does not matter – it can be exported to poorer countries at will.
Unbridled capitalism and complete immunity to the winners, the elites, etc (i.e. it is OK for a rich guy to destroy a town because the town is an eyesore to him, disrupting his mind) , which is being followed by Milleikowsky in Argentine, is a good thing in a utilitarian way, the victims be damned.
Type I Civ was never meant to be enjoyed by the masses. Only selected few , at the first row of civilization, would be admitted, everyone else just falling behind and mostly ignored until they die out one generation or two, like Ishi the last Yahi, documented by Theodora Kroeber, who never met Ishi, and probably actually written by her daughter Ursula Le Guin, better known as the first woman SF writer in history.
Imperialism and paying the poor very little wages were for the greater good, since it limited investment on peoples not likely to advance civilization, and concentrated everything on the top which could be invested to advance civilization further, a positive feedback.
I have said repeatedly that the world will have to enter a dictatorship where people without qualifications will not be able to use any kind of resources, and only peoples who are in the better situation will be able to , say , drive or eat meat since that will save resources for better purposes, instead of letting people in Namibian desert be able to watch soccer in huge screens.
It might be harsh for most people, but since reaching a higher dimension of existence is a greater good than making the lives of peoples unlikely to aevance civilization better, it is the direction to be pursued.
Actually, eating little meat may be an improvement, especially if it goes with eating little sugar. Our bodies were not intended to process all of the rich things we are eating today.
I get your angle ( industrial: sugar + meat + .. ) but lets be realistic. Our ancestors, meaning here the post African evolution leg, when lets say gorging on Mammoth over camp fire, ate absolutely prime beyond pure bio chunks of meat*, now sold for astronomic prices while comparatively of lesser quality still.
Hence, some would/could argue we had already regressed as living under various degree of such corralled quasi civilization-al existence pressures of that past +2-4k yrs based on your locale and path dependency of ancestry ( say US vs Native Tribe German vs Classic Greek vs. Old Celtic ). Meaning our genes have been mal-adjusting to this freakish over-popped existence vs our older ancestors living in true plenty.
There are some new-ish science corroborations available for it, incl. mussels strength and other physiognomy traits found in the rare cases of very preserved-naturally mummificated bodies / skeletons of that previous bygone era. Aka in summary they were healthy, strong, tall, well-fed, evidently on fully rich-mineralized diet, .. etc.
Yes it was an ” episodic ” time-frame of abundance in itself as well.
__
* originated on pristine pasture of lush diverse vegetation, clean rivers and storm-rain puddles for water access, ..
I suspect we can benefit from eating lots of meat, if it is of good quality and a lot of exercise is taken. Exercise and good sleep determine health more than most people wish to recognise.
This is not the case with modern Americans (or Brits!) stuffing ghastly burgers full of nasty stuff and washing it down with even worse beverages…..
From what one can gather from Greek sources, the Ancient Persians were known to be avid consumers of meat, principally lamb, and probably goat, and the Greeks very much less so due to the impoverishment of their environment.
It’s notable that the Greeks came up with vegetarianism as a noble philosophy and lifestyle, , not the Persians (or indeed the Ancient Celts and Germans, Norse, Afghans, etc!)
The Medes developed a most luxurious diet, which the Persians adopted under Cyrus the Great when he united the two people.
Both were famed as very tall and strong, although the Persians were known for having much less impressive legs, which is why Cyrus ordered the royal guard to wear long Medean-style robes to hide them – see the relief sculptures at Persepolis.
This is like the adoption of the French bearskin busby by the British Guards, in order to make them even more impressive.
My impression, even as a young kid on my first trip to Buckingham Palace, was that the bearskin busby made the guards look like matchsticks.
“Higher dimension of existence is a greater good than making the lives of peoples unlikely to advance civilization better”
What higher realm could this be? Whether it’s the Übermensch or God, the notion that humans can become anything other than apes walking on two legs is pure delusion.
By reaching Type I humans can manipulate this galaxy
I have a difficult time believing that.
It isn’t a big leap of faith to assume that we will since we’re manipulating most of the solar system right now.
It’s a massive an idiotic assumption. I hope you are on a wind up. Steer well clear of bridge sellers if not.
All energy, with no waste and that’s just from this planet(type I, otherwise known as fairy dust).
We do not manipulate the solar system in any way. Taking a miniscule fraction of solar energy as it passes does not amount to manipulation of the system. Just as me breathing a bit of air, is not me manipulating the atmosphere in a pre-planned way of my choosing. Please explain how we manipulate “most of the solar system”?
Do any of you believers ever bother to read up on what the fulfilment of your fantasy actually entails(all energy, no waste, so not a single breeze, or water current anywhere on the planet can be missed)?
You seem confident, as you’re already claiming we are most of the way to a type II(fairy dust and unicorn farts). You must have a good chunk of your wealth invested with Eeyore and his exploding toys?
Kulm, you know that Nikolai Kardashev was talking sci-fi fantasy, surely.
Control and manipulate all* energy on the planet, without waste.
That’s as likely as “singularity”.
If WIT wants a laugh, they should look at Type Ω. The fantasy knows no bounds(or logic).
https://cosmichorizons.org/kardashev-scale-explained/
* That’s everything from sunlight, wind, waves, geothermal, seismic, chemical, nuclear and anything else that can return any form of energy(including you).
I won’t hold my breath in anticipation.
Nietzsche wasn’t talking about some metaphysical nonsense, but a stronger and more assertive type of human that has appeared in many varied historical cultures.
It is very much not a Eurocentric ideal, and it historically occurs due to cultural circumstances. He thought that a mixing of the peoples could unleash fresh possibilities.
His account is more about ‘getting real’ about existence; some ridiculous ‘higher dimension of existence’ (whatever that even means) is exactly what he was against.
> Humanity does not represent a development for the better, does not represent something stronger or higher the way people these days think it does. ‘Progress’ is just a modern idea, which is to say a false idea. Today’s European is still worth considerably less than the Renaissance European; development is not linked to elevation, increase, or strengthening in any necessary way.
In another sense, there is a continuous series of individual successes in the most varied places on earth and from the most varied cultures; here, a higher type does in fact present itself, a type of overman [Typus Übermensch] in relation to humanity in general. Successes like this, real strokes of luck, were always possible and perhaps will always be possible. And whole generations, families, or peoples can sometimes constitute this sort of bull’s eye, right on the mark.
His sister taught this philosophy personally to an Austrian with a funny mustache.
That aside, Nietzsche was aware that with the advanced civilization a more advanced subspecies of humans was needed. so he advocated this new philosophy in a language nobody could understand.
Nietzsche wasn’t wrong about exceptional humans existing — even Ayn Rand didn’t reject that part of Nietzsche because exceptional humans existing is self-evident — but he was altogether blind to Dunbar’s Number and cultural anthropology more generally, whereas Rand, as a Libertarian, grew to be less blind to the structural biological consequences of DN. Nietszche’s total blindness made for a more catastrophically distorted philosophy.
Neither Nietzsche living in the 19th century nor Rand living in the early and mid-20th century could have known about Dunbar’s Number because Dunbar’s number (a suggested cognitive limit of about 150 stable relationships that a person can maintain) was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s.
According to a report in the NYT, the most comprehensive mathematical and statistical rebuttal of Dunbar’s number was published in a Biology Letters study by Stockholm University researchers.
They re-analyzed the original data and proved that neocortex size does not tightly limit human friendships, yielding statistical models where human group capacities stretch up to 520 or show no precise maximum.
And when you throw in all the unstable relationships, the number must run into the thousands.
Why, I must have more than 150 friends right here on OFW, including your good self, of course.
However, Nietzsche believed that most people live surrounded by friends who are actually enemies. And I have found this insight to be with some merit from my own personal observations. However, we must also remember that most of Nietzsche’s friends were Germans!!!
We’re all on the same team and that’s the team of the free market!
We can all level up together!
I’m on the record here for the last couple years saying modular reactors could bring down price and that the technology is mature and has been for decades. That all of a sudden we have a bunch of certified designs, seemingly overnight, just goes to show that TPTB bring out technology when it becomes necessary; we don’t get to see what goes on behind the curtains. This also means that we shouldn’t be so quick to assume there’s no viable plan to kick the can further down the road.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/5th-small-modular-reactor-validated-june-poised-mass-production
>> Another small nuclear reactor has achieved “criticality,” marking the fifth new reactor type to be certified as operationally viable in the United States since June, after none were certified for more than a half-century, as the nation’s “nuclear renaissance” quickly advances to commercial mass-production.
We are almost 8 years past the Hubbert Peak and oil supply has just collapsed. You’re just seeing what you want to see because that’s what you do best. Mediocre, weak people like most of all to do things they do best because that’s the path of least resistance. It’s the hobgoblin of little minds.
Ivan isn’t in the market for long-distance psychoanalysis sessions. He probably already knows even more about his faults than you do. In any case, he doesn’t need you or anyone else here to point them out to him.
I expect you think you are only trying to help him out with a few home truths and give him the benefit of your big mind, and you don’t realize that to other people, your well-intended efforts to help him sharpen up and fly straight might come across as a little bit mean, condescending, or bullying.
Who really cares about how much smarter I am than everybody else and how much dumber everybody else is than me. I can’t imagine the dinosaurs or the dodos wasted any time at all on telling each other how dumb everybody else was.
We humans have certainly come a long way in our long evolutionary journey to adopt the hammer, use fire, master levers, and finally, to become Homo criticus (Literally “critical man”), Homo dejectus (“the man who casts down or dispirits”) Homo detractorus (“the man who constantly belittles others”) Homo supercilious (“the arrogant, judgmental critical man”), or Homo insidiosus (“the passive-aggressive and sneaky man”).
All these species are now walking the earth or stalking the World Wide Web. We are now definitively the biggest and loudest frogs in the pond, although we are prone to forget it’s a pretty small pond.
But enough about all that. Let’s play the ball and not the man. Let’s deal with opinions and ignore the psychological defects of the individual opinion holders. After all, we are all flawed beings with a limited time before we shuffle off this mortal coil.
You’ve given us a clue: “We are almost 8 years past the Hubbert Peak and oil supply has just collapsed.”
But has it? I think this view is largely at odds with reality and leans toward alarmist when framed as a Hubbert Peak collapse.
Why do I say this? Hubbert’s model predicted a bell-shaped curve for oil production in a region once roughly half the ultimately recoverable resource is extracted. It worked well for U.S. conventional oil (peak ~1970). Global “peak oil” advocates later applied similar logic and forecast a worldwide peak from the mid-to-late 2000s to around 2018 for various definitions of oil.
I don’t think claiming the world is now in a Hubbert-style collapse eight years after a peak is supported by the production record. Conventional oil plateaued earlier, but total supply kept growing until the current temporary geopolitical disruption focused on the Gulf of Hormuz. The alarmist framing conflates a real short-term shock with a longer-running geological narrative. The Collapse opera may be in Act 4 for all we know, but It ain’t over until the fat lady sings, and she hasn’t started yet.
A Hubbert-style collapse for world oil production would imply a rapid, permanent drop in global petroleum supplies following a sharp peak. I suggest that isn’t going to happen. Instead, we will have managed decline, population reduction, the introduction of new energy technologies including nuclear ones, and the appointment of Kulm as Secretary for Making America Happy Again!
I know I am in a small minority around here on this point, but it doesn’t matter. Now, I’ve given you the perfect opportunity to go for a winning smash by telling me why I am wrong and we are now in a Hubbert-style collapse. Not that I am wrong because I’m a moron or have a small mind, or because I am talking out of my rear endI know all that!—but WHY I AM WRONG in terms of the dynamics of the current oil production situation and how it is going to pan out in the next 10 to 20 years.
Tim
The 2018 Hubbert Peak on the fitted curve and the Hormooz collapse are two distinct dynamics. Pay attention. Or don’t.
If I was you it would be hard for me, too, to own up that I was wrong about climate change for all these years. But your lies to yourself on that topic? – that’s just the tip of the iceberg, brother. The iceberg is the politics. Your politics. Any politics. Politics is the mind killer. You believe in population reduction technofeudalism because of mass media plandemic vaxxes Great Reset internet culture and no other reason. You believe it because it’s pop culture. Because there is no other reason to believe that. So you believe that not for the quality of the ideas and the reasoning, but for the intoxicating power of becoming one of tens of millions of people who all believe the same thing. It seems like you need that consumerism, Tim. But I can tell that you’re also conflicted about it. That’s what you get fo for being a consumer; there’s no true satisfaction in it. No resonance. Because the root of all consumerism is fear. I know what that it. I buy things all the time IRL because I fear not buying them. It’s a pathetic state.
The wonderful thing about the mind is that it doesn’t have to be the same pathetic slave to the civilization that the body does.
If I was you it would be hard for me, too, to own up that I was wrong about climate change for all these years. But your lies to yourself on that topic? – that’s just the tip of the iceberg, brother.
Et tu, Reante?
Well, all I can say in reply is:
Actually, that was a deliberate attack you made on my reputation, if not my character, wasn’t it? It wasn’t a piece of unsolicited bty friendly advice, was it? As I’ve said before, it was Oxford University’s loss when you emigrated.
Did I detect a hint of sadism in those words? As in…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nXGPZaTKik
I hope not, but it was pretty incoherent, steam of incontinence stuff to me. There were some ideas in there, but they were not joined up or articulated clearly. Perhaps I should put it through Grok and ask him to break it down into bite-sized bullet points for me?
In the end, it doesn’t matter. You have a style of communicating and that’s that. It isn’t my place to tell you are wrong.
My entire reason for criticizing you was, you don’t need to come down on Ivan with what read like personal attacks every time he makes a comment you disagree with. Most adults have a Decency or an Empathy chip that tells them, “No, don’t do that! It’s rude! It’s irritating! It’s abusive! It’s cruel!” But it seems you don’t have one of those. I know he takes it stoically and lets it roll like water off a duck’s back, but he shouldn’t have to. Please try to understand that you are creating a hostile environment for him when you do that. Do you really want to keep doing it? You could be a bit nicer if you tried.
I hate to criticize other people, really. But I hate bullying and backbiting even more. It upsets me to witness it.
As for me, I probably know even more about myself and my shortcomings than you do—as incredible as that may sound. So, I really don’t need any advice from you on that score, but I will take everything you say as a treasured morsel of insight from a well-meaning online mate.
And yes, I’ve been wrong about many things in my time, and I am doubtless wrong about many things now. You’re absolutely right there! But there’s no need to tell me how wrong I am, unless you’re making an ad hominem attempt to lower my reputation to give yourself an excuse to not take seriously my very well-intentioned criticism of your unkind behavior to Ivan. But you wouldn’t do anything like that, would you?
If you want to tell me I am wrong about climate change, that’s fine. I welcome the opportunity to learn. But please do it properly. Quote a statement I’ve made verbatim and then debunk that statement. Don’t just say I’ve been wrong about climate change, period. That’s a crude generalization that is meaningless without a specific context.
Or make a specific statement yourself about climate change, I will be happy to tell you whether I agree with it or to point out any holes I see in the logic.
I do recall I’ve been making statements about climate for many years around here, and people seldom attempt to rebut or debunk any of the points I try to make. Not much intellectual curiosity at all, even at OFW, IMHO. When I attempt to rebut or debunk, I do I it by explaining why I think the idea is wrong and giving my reasons. But that is pretty much a lost art online these days. I am in a very small minority there.
And look at the reception to the Salby video I posted. Did any of you even bother to view it? No, you were too busy day after day watching AI videos about how Russia was blasting Ukraine or Iran was blasting US bases and what this or that talking head thinks about the oil market. Yawn! Yawn! Yawn!
My philosophy*:
We all carry the wounds of a fractured mind and the blind spots of a frail intellect. Do not weaponize another man’s flaws against him. Instead, shield his dignity with a simple cloak of respect.
Every man travels with his own burdens of folly and inner turmoil. Let your neighbor carry his weaknesses in peace. It is enough that you meet him on the road with common decency.
No mind is perfectly whole, and no intellect is without failure. Turn a blind eye to the shortcomings of your brother. Your only duty is to treat his humanity with kindness.
* One and all, please feel free to copy, paste and use without attribution, but above all, consider making this sort of behavior a habit.
So far so good. Uranium needs diesel to extract and process.
Uranium needs sulfuric acid. Lots of sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid is plentiful when oil and other fossil fuels are plentiful.
Not so plentiful if fossil fuels are scarce .
Smaller sized modular NPPs have been in various private scheme dev at least for past two decades, chiefly various tech oligarchs and investors behind them. So, that’s not novelty, the sync timing is another aspect, yes.
The msm pitch claim was to brake-through the legacy red tape for the grid capacity in terms of commissioning and deployment of new sources. But obviously some assumed the chief reason behind it for these types just put these smugly on their garden* and ” so long commoners.. enjoy your personal collapse seq. ”
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* private estates ( neo fiefdoms ) where off-grid PV, wind or geothermal would be insufficient or impractical to run their in situ cottage industries, private armies, agri sector, etc.
One can say that batteries have progressed so much, no one expected it. But I do not see the small modular reactors as providing as much of a contribution. I was involved on and off on research on nuclear plant components. There is so much uranium and whether you burn it in a big or small reactor you are going to get the same energy. there are only two ways to improve.
the first is to raise the Carnot efficiency, which is \epsilon=1-\frac{T_f}{T_i}. As things stand plants are working at the highest possible temperature that allows the use of water. Let go of the water and you have a big coolant and moderator problem. Increase the temperature and materials become soft or brittle. I doubt that they are ready to go much higher than 330C. It requires a whole new set of core materials, and long term experience with other coolants, again at scale.
The second is that current plants, big or small, burn only a small fraction of the uranium. If you start with an enrichment of 5% you will be burning the 5% fissile plus another 5% of ^{238}U maybe. 90% ends up in expensive pools, essentially forever. Many theoretical possible solutions for fast recycling, but the technology is not there yet. you also still need breeders which honestly only Russia has at the scale needed. I just verbosely agreed with Gail. and if you overcome these hurdles (which I do not think is totally hopeless), what is the advantage of having many small ones?
The point, in my view, is to build stuff quickly that will produce energy. We have a real problem intelligently designing and managing construction of large one-off projects, but serial production of something small could be enough to kick the can again, for a while. No it’s not optimal, but it could move the needle. So that’s my argument.
Yes, quasi serial / batch production that’s it and also that point made above about making it truly private thing on your own land ( & ~law ) outpost – be it lesser centralized govs over-sight / intrusive future ready; not necessarily full collapse sequence needed.
And where do we get the uranium for these reactors?
Russia, oddly enough, seems happy to supply it, along with titanium, natgas, and anything else that’s not bolted down. (The Kremlin loves selling resources to its enemies.) Anyway, maybe with their breeder reactors, they’ll have some uranium to spare.
Gail.. Details, details. Trump will delegate that task to some of his friends. They have people, great people, the best, etc.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/winter-coming-europe-faces-twin-diesel-and-natgas-crunch
Samantha Dart, co-head of global commodities research at Goldman Sachs, began the week by telling Bloomberg TV that the global diesel-supply crunch is “what keeps her up at night.” She followed up Wednesday with a client note warning that European natural gas storage levels are also lagging the seasonal average ahead of the winter heating period. . .
Putting it all together, if disruptions in the Hormuz persist, Europe could enter winter with NatGas and diesel inventories well below seasonal norms, setting the stage for another surge in energy prices.
At some point, I would add that the surge in energy prices seems likely to put pressure on the continued existence of the EU. If the EU fails, total demand will drop, and prices for oil and LNG will fall back down again.
The US doesn’t want the price for LNG to drop (apparently they are making a killing right now) but long term the decline in available resources will make triaging peripheries and provinces necessary to save the Core and Europe appears to be in the crosshairs.
I would agree.
True but Europe as a nuclear continent is structurally core to the civilization so it’s not really in the crosshairs. It’s just being made to appear that way in service of the coming national socialisms. Complexity theory makes abundantly clear that if Europe is no longer a core interest of the civilization then there is no longer a continental-scale civilization anywhere on the planet.
Uh oh, looks like the hand models cut off at approximately 2300 years ago. In fact GDP estimates over the centuries show that India or China led for about 70% of the time including of course a majority of this millennium.
You’re just being political as usual, which causes a structural strawmanning in your argumentation.
drb could be right!
What does GDP have to do with my point regarding how to manage a collapsing nuclear civilization?
Not sure what you mean by nuclear. You mean possessing nuclear weapons? Those will start flying soon enough, creating a ne world much harder to control. There are also too many countries which are nuclear for the resources 50 years from now. Germany, Japan and S. Korea, on top of the known nuclear countries, and not enough to go around.
I mean nuclear power because of the spent fuel pools.
The Architect of the Matrix: “This will be the third time in a century that America has destroyed Germany’s economy, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.”
Exactly, but to be crystal clear, this time that Zionist messaging is coming from the opposite motivation because Collapse inverts everything. The Hand is saying that with a wink and a nod to those of us in the know since it is peak oil that is destroying Germany’s luxury goods economy. The Hand is just cannibalizing the economic fat of Europe and framing Zionism for the ‘crime.’
” ..EU fails.. ” effectively means both! FR and DE national oriented govs reasserting themselves vs [ globo ], not impossible per next election/political cycle as Ursulanians enjoy less than ~15% support, BUT still NOT likely say before ~2030-5 as all admin/govs/msm structures are totally compromised with them, even taking into account some ~catastrophic scenarios ahead like winters w.out much heating etc. As turning Titanic on a dime takes time.
I agree: those of us commenting here from Europe will probably die under the shadow of the Great Whore of Brussels.
Sorry, Ursula, most ungallant way of putting it. and inaccurate, as who would wish to enjoy your favours, even grais?
You’re not factoring in the imminent economic collapse that smashes the Overton window.
Yes, correct. I should have written proviso that certainly there could be a cascade* of rapid crisis, which could do it in ~2-3yrs, perhaps even sooner. But don’t see it for now as the %% larger/quicker probability.
__
PS unusual series of cold winters, and or say Mr. Ukro-Z ordering some really desperate-foolish action behind the borders; plus un-related domestic turbulence inside the US, .. and voila, suddenly EU in current form getting on the ropes in such expedient scenario..
But the more realistic outcome for next ~5yrs are:
Ukro actor gets couped over by a “sane” general in next 6-12months, hence freezing the conflict, and spices cont. to flow to EU, albeit not in pre-war amounts, that ship sailed to Asia never to change course again. Also US continues to sap livelyhood from RoW some more and w.out major issues. etc. Third party or ( both Dem and Repub parties implosion ) forming there for next POTUS cycle, and perhaps some local races only before.. etc.
If she works for Goldman Sachs she should be up drinking champagne not worrying! Really, she has a conscience? She cares?
But seriously. A strong spike in prices must, surely be self-correcting: businesses will increasingly fail, particularly in the discretionary sector; long-term unemployment rise; and domestic consumers will economise even more on heating and lighting, the elderly, of course, dying at an accelerated rate.
The EU, I dare to predict, will continue to exist, although very unpopular.
Three things never go away: Death, government in one form or another, and ladies of loose virtue: in fact the latter seem to flourish in evil times, although hourly rates drop due to women selling the only asset they have, to buy food……
In Naples, when the Allies arrived they were greeted by boys asking if they’d like to met their sister. If they said no, the boy would ask ‘How about me, Yank?’ This sort of thing is never discussed in Collapse circles, as it’s distasteful, but it’s how things tend to go….
Gail… I have a question about the last part of your article… I quote “Over the long term, the economy will likely re-organize itself in a way that is more complex and more sparing in energy use”. I understand the “sparing in energy use,” however, I thought you had written in previous articles that the economy will become less complex. If it will become more complex, would you mind elaborating? Thx
Gail… please disregard my question above. I noticed that you answered it earlier for another follower with the same question… Thx!
Still a ways away, but perhaps possible.
The WSJ says:
https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/china-free-batteries-made-from-salt-are-finally-here-cc1cd766
China-Free Batteries Made From Salt Are Finally Here
Sodium-ion batteries have almost none of the problems that lithium-ion ones do, and could be cheap enough to make fossil-fuel dependence a thing of the past
Most sodium-based batteries are now made in China, and represent less than 1% of all batteries delivered this year. In the U.S., a number of startups have begun producing small numbers of such batteries, and are racing to scale up production. One industrial giant—General Motors GM—is in the process of designing its own sodium-based batteries to tailor them to different applications before moving to mass production.
A recent report from Morgan Stanley projects that within a decade, more than a third of all batteries produced in the world will use sodium, not lithium.
Lithium batteries are very dangerous a lithium battery used for a rechargeable drill recently blew up in someone’s house and burnt down their entire house the fire was so ferocious it also done damage to surrounding properties once lithium starts burning it’s hard to put out so hopefully these salt batteries do become popular.
You don’t think it was a DEW attack on the neighborhood? 🙂
Or was the rechargeable drill owner a critic of Israel? 🙂
I got rid of my old laptop because I was no linger using it and I felt it was a potential fire hazard.
But lithium batteries are proliferating despite the dangers. We now have a vacuum cleaner, smartphones, electric bike, chainsaw, hedge trimmer—all powered by lithium batteries, all very convenient, all waiting to explode.
I’ll be very happy to switch to sodium or anything else that doesn’t explode, just to ease my worried mind.
“Acoustic Kitty was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project launched by the Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s, which was intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies.[1]
In an hour-long procedure, a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat’s ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull, and a thin wire into its fur.[2] This would allow the cat to innocuously record and transmit sound from its surroundings. Due to problems with distraction, the cat’s sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation.[1] Victor Marchetti, a former CIA officer, said Project Acoustic Kitty cost about $20 million”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_Kitty
Th kitties here seem to keep a very close eye on me, and evade capture with ease: the ideal agents!
A cream one with lovely pale blue eyes is using her charms n me: a honey trap?
It is time for the big world.
America (that is North and South America) gets the eastern half of the Pacific and the western half of the Atlantic. Factory fishing boat from outside are forbidden.
Israel and China fight over the middle east and African farm lands.
Europe WORKS to invest 20 trillion Euros in PV in Northern Africa and million volt bidirectional dc transmission lines to Europe.
The DOD wants to learn how to use small nukes. No. The three blocks need to learn to use large nukes to end unsupportable migration.
It will take more than real estate developers from Manhattan.
It is a very pertinent question of how the causality runs between energy and economic growth. On the one hand it is apparent that energy is essential for the productive processes, on the other hand a lot of energy is used in “consumption” such as a lot of travel, heating and cooling. It seems to me that energy in the production side is still very cheap compared to manual labour, but on the consumption side it is quite different.
Economic growth must necessarily occur in the non-essentials. You give examples of travel, heating, and cooling.
The question becomes: How cheaply can the essentials of life (food, basic transportation, basic housing, paved roads, nearby stores, etc) be delivered to the 90% of the population with little discretionary income? If the cost is very inexpensive, the economy can grow, and debt can be repaid with interest. If the cost is high relative to incomes of the bottom 90%, the system will tend to collapse.
Today I received a spare part for my fridge-freezer. It was delivered by a Ukrainian courier. We are already living in a world where repairing things yourself is often the only sensible option, because paying for a service technician to come out, diagnose the fault, order and deliver the spare part, and then carry out the repair often makes little economic sense.
At least we have AI to help diagnose faults and identify the correct spare parts, along with YouTube videos to verify the repair procedure.
DIY repairs are definitely the way to go.
If you have clever hands and it is something a non-professional can repair.
Lot of goods is now designed intentionally with the goal of future non repair-ability in mind. Not always, but usually the mid range segment dominated by largest ” top brand ” players is actively profiling in this manner. That’s how they ” save ” the maximum value for corp. interest on not providing service just 1:1 replacement under warranty. This approach has another impact, that other lower tier manufs. then copy the concept of said unit-product, meaning the market is then over-saturated by the very exact same crapified solution of shallow longevity and meager practical application. For example, ~nobody in the world producing small dependable water pumps ( say bellow half horse power ) anymore, unless it’s just plastic crap.
On the other hand, the recent wave of over-industrialization ( Asian vector ), brought too much production over-capacity around, allowed for cheap, previously unheard affordability of niche consumer sectors, e.g. AWD e-bicycles are very cheap now. And say vs. new car ( in terms of utility ) are almost for free. Put here mostly as local time snapshot as surely next decade it will be a different situation of different items in cross relation.
It’s delivery costs and waiting times that matter more and more. As the atomization of society continues, affordability declines. People are increasingly forced to solve their own problems, with little time or energy left to help others.
People who lack practical skills that have accumulated within society become less valuable from this perspective. They are seen primarily as consumers, meaning they use resources that could otherwise be available to you.
If we lose jobs for repair people, we lose another important way people have been able to make a living, without fearing that their jobs will go to China or India. The problem is that they end up working for a big company with a lot of overhead. They often need to drive all over the metro area to get to the home where servicing is needed. There is a huge amount of overhead in this system.
Unaffordable repair servicemen is the price of making appliances more affordable.
I have a US flag, but a 49 star flag I found from a yard sale.
Hawaii should never, never, never have given statehood, since it is not part of North America, not part of Western Culture and has a toxic noble class which still acts like it owns Hawaii, US flag or not.
Instead it should have been divided into the Territories of West Oahu (which would include Kauai), East Oahu (including Molokai, doomed by a crazy Belgian priest), Maui and Hawaii, all competing to Washington for more funds. A wall could have been built between West Oahu and East Oahu.
By making the peoples of Hawaii something less than citizens, there would be justification to treat the Asian-‘Americans'(Asians can never become Americans after 100 generations since they are incompatible with Western Civilization) as less than citizens as well.
I don’t know who made the decision to make Hawaii a state. Its peoples should have been all relocated to the mainland and relocated to empty lands in , say, Nevada, and the land divided by settlers who had nothing to do with Hawaii, to eradicate Hawaii’s Oceanian and Asian influences and name it back to Sandwich or some other English name.
Hawaii became the hole in the ship called America to sink it.
I will admit that Hawaii has amazingly high transportation costs for anything that cannot be produced on the islands. It needs oil (jet fuel or diesel) to get these things delivered. Hawaii also has a very high cost of producing electricity. Part of the electricity produced needs to come from burning diesel. Without tourism, I expect the economy of Hawaii would collapse.
Fortunately, Hawaii’s weather tends to be mild, so if basics can be covered, people are sort of OK. Like everywhere else, its population is way too high to be self-sufficient without lots of fossil fuels.
I have a cousin who lives on Maui. She tells me she orders things like shoes from the mainland. Modern obstetrical care seems to be a problem. Expectant mothers need to go to Honolulu, well before the expected delivery date for care.
I assume it was for the purpose of naval basing and to deny such from others.
Can be done even if Hawaii is a territory. Admitting it to the Union was the fatal mistake
I agree that there were alternatives, but don’t think this rates highly on the list of own goals.
China is more and more like South Korea or Japan:
China: What do young people dream of? (1/2) | DW Documentary
https://youtu.be/PovKEKm61x0?si=wsVktLwhllqrjhGe
China: What do young people dream of? (2/2) | DW Documentary
https://youtu.be/Z4F_666ZAqY?si=Ff2YM04YnbQHBTJ7
And the rest of the world follows… Unless the collapse of the population is in the form of wars.
Young people around the world are running into the same problem: They cannot reproduce the lifestyle of their parents. They have to set their aspirations differently. The blurb of part I says:
What do young Chinese people dream of? What hopes and goals do they have? Do the grandchildren of the “rising generation” still believe in progress through work, and prosperity for all? Or do they have different values?
In China, people rarely talk about their own dreams. There is the government’s “Chinese Dream,” of course: It promises prosperity to those who work hard and propel their country forward to the top of the world. But the boom is over, and China’s economy is stagnating. Many young people can’t find jobs. Many also no longer want to work as hard as their parents did.
In two episodes “A Day with Paintboxers, Influencers, and Millionaires” and “A Night with Rock Stars, Rebels, and Princesses,” the filmmakers meet young people who are breaking with their parents’ hopes and dreams. The subjects let the filmmakers into their homes, and open their hearts. The filmmakers, in turn, don’t talk about the young people — instead, they let them tell their own stories.
“Our generation’s dreams are completely different,” says a young woman. “My dream shouldn’t be built on my children, but on myself.” “I feel like I can try anything and achieve anything I set my mind to,” believes another. “I don’t have big ambitions,” admits a young man. “I just want to have enough money to live on so I can do what I enjoy.” And yet another emphasizes: “I don’t want to become a workhorse, but an interesting soul.”
This reminds me of a blog post written years ago by Ugo Bardi, a former professor of chemistry at the University of Florence, about how he and his wife could no longer afford his parent’s middle class home in the hills, with AC and in-ground pool, requiring at least one car, and had to downsize their lives to a basement apartment in town.
I remember that post, too.
And Ugo is not a young person. According to Wikipedia, he is 74 years old. His parents had it better than he had it.
I remember that too, and the photos were very telling.
History back to 1820 gives us lots of hints, but today I would like to take us even further back—to the first decade of the 19th century. Napoleon was reigning supreme in continental Europe and gearing up to take on Russia, while Britain was isolated but protected by its invincible navy, and Sweden was in a major crisis after losing Finland to Russia. The childless King Charles XIII had no heir, and the chosen crown prince died suddenly and unexpectedly. To fix this, Sweden elected a French general, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte as the new heir. I have no idea how or why they chose him.
Yes, the French were very much in the ascendent in 1810, but not for much longer.
Meanwhile, across the Channel, the United Kingdom was born. On January 1, 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was formed when the Kingdom of Great Britain (comprising England, Scotland, and Wales) and the Kingdom of Ireland joined together through the Acts of Union. In 1802, the young J.M.W. Turner, a representative English Romantic landscape painter, visited the Alps and was absolutely blown away by their beauty and sublime quality. The sublime was a big deal for the Romantics. Eight years later, Turner was ready to unveil one of the masterpieces partially inspired by that sojourn, The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grisons.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joseph_Mallord_William_Turner_(1775-1851)_-_The_Fall_of_an_Avalanche_in_the_Grisons_-_N00489_-_National_Gallery.jpg
The work was also accompanied by a poem Turner composed himself:
Thick drifting snow on snow,
Till the vast weight bursts thro’ the rocky barrier;
Down at once, its pine clad forests,
And towering glaciers fall, the work of ages
Crashing through all! extinction follows,
And the toil, the hope of man—o’erwhelms.
In fact, a devastating avalanche occurred in this area in December 1808, in which 25 people were killed in one alpine shelter. It appears that the painting was based on an account of that tragic real-life disaster that Turner read in the newspaper.
The disaster occurred in Selva, a small Alpine mountain village located in the southeastern Swiss canton of Graubünden (known in English as the Grisons).
Actually Napoleone Buonaparte was like France’s last gasp. After him no French army ever crossed the Rhine again, even now.
France was much stronger during the days of Louis XIV and nobody had heard of Russia back then
Great Britain was also stronger , owning practically all of North America
To defeat Napoleon UK showered gold on the German states, creating even a greater problem.
The late Dr Firth said Europe was saved at Waterloo, and I countered that Europe stagnated until around 1860 and USA rose up too high
You wrote a long poem about that to answer me . I saved it somewhere but cannot find it.
UK did well as long as it could keep USA under its thumb, but when that ended, UK’s good days ende.
Thanks, Kulm.
I don’t remember the poem. I did once post The Charge of the Light Brigade, an atrocious verse by Alfred Tennyson about one of Britain’s many “glorious defeats” that generations of schoolboys including Robert Firth, Norman Pagett, and even me, had to recite in class.
Canons to the left of them…. etc.
But that was from the Crimea War. I can’t recall anything specifically Napoleonic I posted.
But today, I will share one of the most poignant of the many British folk songs relating tangentially to that conflict. Although it is really a lover’s lament and an anti-war song. I know you aren’t too fond of popular songs, but this one is a really lovely ballad from the middle of the 19th century. Perhaps a dozen regional variations of this have been identified in the British Isles, showing how songs, like stories and language itself, are subject to Lamarckian evolution.
The version recorded in 1970 by Sandy Denny and her group Fotheringay (incidentally, that’s the name of the house where Mary Queen of Scots was confined and later executed on the orders of Elizabeth I) is one I find particularly “haunting”. Listening to it in the dark is a real treat.
Of course, thanks to Chucky, the culture that gave birth to this sort of art is doomed.
And in case you don’t want to listen to it, here are the lyrics:
“O hark! the drums do beat, my love, no longer can we stay.
The bugle-horns are sounding clear, and we must march away.
We’re ordered down to Portsmouth, and it’s many is the weary mile
To join the British Army on the banks of the Nile.”
“O Willie, dearest Willie, don’t leave me here to mourn,
Don’t make me curse and rue the day that ever I was born.
For the parting of our love would be like parting with my life.
So stay at home, my dearest love, and I will be your wife.”
“O my Nancy, dearest Nancy, sure that will never do.
The government has ordered, and we are bound to go.
The government has ordered, and the Queen she gives command.
And I am bound on oath, my love, to serve in a foreign land.”
“O but I’ll cut off my yellow hair, and I’ll go along with you.
I’ll dress myself in uniform, and I’ll see Egypt too.
I’ll march beneath your banner while fortune it do smile,
And we’ll comfort one another on the banks of the Nile.”
“But your waist it is too slender, and your fingers they are too small.
In the sultry suns of Egypt your rosy cheeks would spoil.
Where the cannons they do rattle, when the bullets they do fly,
And the silver trumpets sound so loud to hide the dismal cries.”
“O cursed be those cruel wars, that ever they began,
For they have robbed our country of many’s the handsome men.
They’ve robbed us of our sweethearts while their bodies they feed the lions,
On the dry and sandy deserts which are the banks of the Nile.”
“O hark! the drums do beat, my love, no longer can we stay.
The bugle-horns are sounding clear, and we must march away.
We’re ordered down to Portsmouth, and it’s many is the weary mile
To join the British Army on the banks of the Nile.”
“O Willie, dearest Willie, don’t leave me here to mourn,
Don’t make me curse and rue the day that ever I was born.
For the parting of our love would be like parting with my life.
So stay at home, my dearest love, and I will be your wife.”
“O my Nancy, dearest Nancy, sure that will never do.
The government has ordered, and we are bound to go.
The government has ordered, and the Queen she gives command.
And I am bound on oath, my love, to serve in a foreign land.”
“O but I’ll cut off my yellow hair, and I’ll go along with you.
I’ll dress myself in uniform, and I’ll see Egypt too.
I’ll march beneath your banner while fortune it do smile,
And we’ll comfort one another on the banks of the Nile.”
“But your waist it is too slender, and your fingers they are too small.
In the sultry suns of Egypt your rosy cheeks would spoil.
Where the cannons they do rattle, when the bullets they do fly,
And the silver trumpets sound so loud to hide the dismal cries.”
“O cursed be those cruel wars, that ever they began,
For they have robbed our country of many’s the handsome men.
They’ve robbed us of our sweethearts while their bodies they feed the lions,
On the dry and sandy deserts which are the banks of the Nile.”
Celtic fairy bio:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Denny
For some reason, the song didn’t appear.
It’s a classic, so let’s try again:
En 1810, Bernadotte arrive en Suède pour devenir prince héritier. Selon le protocole, un examen médical doit être réalisé avant son adoption officielle par le roi. Lorsque vient le moment d’ouvrir sa chemise, il refuse d’abord catégoriquement… puis finit par céder.
La raison de son hésitation est savoureuse : dans sa jeunesse révolutionnaire à Paris, il s’était fait tatouer sur la poitrine « Mort aux rois ! ».
Ironie saisissante pour celui qui allait bientôt porter… une couronne. 👑
⸻
Contexte
À cette époque, Napoléon domine l’Europe. La Suède, affaiblie après la perte de la Finlande face à la Russie en 1809, cherche un héritier pour le vieux roi Charles XIII, sans enfant.
Un officier suédois, Carl Otto Mörner, propose alors un candidat inattendu : le maréchal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, apprécié des officiers suédois depuis la capitulation de Lübeck en 1806. Bernadotte avait alors bien traité les
prisonniers suédois.
Ironie supplémentaire : Bernadotte vient justement de tomber en disgrâce auprès de Napoléon après la bataille de Wagram (1809), où une grave faute tactique lui a coûté la confiance de l’Empereur.
Le 21 août 1810, la Diète réunie à Örebro l’élit pourtant prince héritier de Suède. Ainsi, le fils d’un modeste magistrat de Pau devient héritier d’un trône européen. 🇸🇪
⸻
Conséquences géopolitiques
Les Suédois pensaient choisir un proche de Napoléon.
Ils choisirent finalement un homme qui allait s’en éloigner.
Devenu Charles XIV Jean, Bernadotte se rapproche progressivement de la Russie et rejoint la coalition contre l’Empire.
Pour la Suède cependant, ce choix fut décisif : il posa les bases d’une longue politique de neutralité et de stabilité au XIXᵉ siècle.
Et fait remarquable : la couronne de Suède descend encore aujourd’hui de lui, la dynastie qu’il fonda régnant toujours sur le pays. 👑🦅
Sweden ceased to be a relevant country when Britain instigated to lead Norway, a country which did not exist since the middle east (it used to be Denmark and Norway but then it just became part of Sweden) tear off itself from the Swedish mainland, because UK did not want the Bernadottes to compete for fisheries in the North Sea (and the oil later)
And , in any case, the Bernadotte dynasty will end with the current monarch, because the Swedish parliament or whatever the equivalent of it launched a coup in 1980 and forced a ridiculous notion called Absolute Primogeniture, i.e. the first child inherits the throne no matter it is a boy or a girl.
So the Bernadottes will end with the current one, and the House of Westling, founded by a personal trainer, will succeed it. How long it will last, who knows, but the Bernadottes are going out.
Translation:
In 1810, Bernadotte arrived in Sweden to become crown prince. According to protocol, a medical examination must be carried out before its official adoption by the king. When the time comes to open his shirt, he at first categorically refuses… then finally gives in.
The reason for his hesitation is tasty: in his revolutionary youth in Paris, he had “Death to Kings!” tattooed on his chest. “.
A striking irony for someone who would soon wear… a crown. 👑
⸻
Context
At this time, Napoleon dominated Europe. Sweden, weakened after the loss of Finland to Russia in 1809, seeks an heir for the old, childless King Charles XIII.
A Swedish officer, Carl Otto Mörner, then proposed an unexpected candidate: Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, popular with Swedish officers since the capitulation of Lübeck in 1806. Bernadotte had then treated the
Swedish prisoners.
Additional irony: Bernadotte has just fallen out of favor with Napoleon after the Battle of Wagram (1809), where a serious tactical error cost him the Emperor’s trust.
On August 21, 1810, the Diet meeting in Örebro nevertheless elected him crown prince of Sweden. Thus, the son of a modest magistrate from Pau becomes heir to a European throne. 🇸🇪
⸻
Geopolitical consequences
The Swedes thought they would choose someone close to Napoleon.
They finally chose a man who would walk away.
Having become Charles XIV John, Bernadotte gradually moved closer to Russia and joined the coalition against the Empire.
For Sweden, however, this choice was decisive: it laid the foundations for a long policy of neutrality and stability in the 19th century.
And remarkable fact: the crown of Sweden still descends from him today, the dynasty he founded still reigning over the country. 👑🦅
Deepseek’s opinion
Uruguay should prioritize solar PV with storage to complement its existing wind/hydro mix, creating a more balanced, resilient, and economically optimized renewable grid while maintaining its global leadership position.
John P. recently reported:
“https://ourfiniteworld.com/2026/06/29/why-oil-shortages-may-bring-lower-prices-and-recession/comment-page-8/#comment-515228”
But now the good news: Brazil, due to being an oil producer and net exporter, but also a heavy ethanol user, will at least not be hit as bad as, say, Europe, or Asia, or Oceania. Other South American economies are in worse shape due to their energy dependence, being very fragile and vulnerable to sudden swings, with less buffer and resilience. We already see much higher prices in food, for instance, with prices in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile already double or triple of Brazil’s.
Wikipedia says about Uruguay’s economy:
Economy of Uruguay
Historical GDP per capita development
The economy of Uruguay features an export-oriented agricultural sector and a well-educated workforce, along with high levels of social spending. Tourism and banking are also prominent sectors; Uruguay acts as a regional hub for international finance and tourism. The country also has a history and representation of advanced workers-rights protection, with unions and the eight-hour work-day protected at the beginning of the 20th century.
90% of the country’s population is urbanized, while most of the industry and over half of the population is concentrated in the capital Montevideo.[19]
After averaging growth of 5% annually during 1996–98, Uruguay’s economy suffered a major downturn in 1999–2002, stemming largely from the spillover effects of the economic problems of its large neighbors; Argentina and Brazil. In 2001–02, Argentine citizens made massive withdrawals of dollars deposited in Uruguayan banks after bank deposits in Argentina were frozen, which led to a plunge in the Uruguayan peso, causing the 2002 Uruguay banking crisis.
I think that Uruguay is at risk of losing tourism, just as other countries are in an economic downturn. It also is at risk of more banking crises. How its currency floats relative to other currencies is important. The fact the Uruguay produces its own electricity is interesting, but the country is still very dependent on petroleum imports, and imports of goods like vehicles made using petroleum. Remember that electricity is about 20% of total energy consumption.
New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human
“If you call 911 in New Orleans, you may hear the sound of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent answering your call instead of a human voice.
The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is changing the way dispatch calls are handled in New Orleans with the implementation of new technology.
https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/louisiana/2026/07/28/is-new-orleans-using-ai-to-answer-911-calls-instead-of-human-dispatchers-impacts-emergencies-crime/91065014007/
The electrician has one of these. I wanted a new smoke detector installed. In the conversation it said that is not available in blue. I had said nothing about colors.
Mamma you say the shooter is blue in color?
USA federal state debt is set to hit 40 T likely by the end of September. It is currently rising at 1 T per 5 months. The service costs (interest payments) have passed 1 T per year.
https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/america-debt-just-hit-record-101647218.html
America’s Debt Just Hit a Record. Treasury Secretary Bessent Is Still Bailing Out the World’s Most Indebted Economy
Quick Read
– U.S. debt hit $39.84 trillion and now costs over $1 trillion in annual interest, a figure that is nearly triple 2020 levels and has surpassed defense spending.
– Bessent’s yen intervention is strategic self-defense: a collapsing yen forces Japan to sell U.S. Treasuries, directly driving up Washington’s borrowing costs.
… The U.S. Treasury’s own accounting says the country owed $39.84 trillion as of July 30, 2026, a figure climbing by roughly $12.6 billion a day and almost certain to breach $40 trillion before the fiscal year closes on September 30.
… The Home Balance Sheet
The debt has roughly doubled since Trump’s first term began at $19.9 trillion in January 2017. It crossed $38 trillion in late October 2025 and $39 trillion by March 17, 2026, adding a full trillion in under five months. Penn Wharton’s Kent Smetters argues the economically meaningful figure is debt held by the public, now above $31.3 trillion, since the rest is intragovernmental IOUs.
The service cost is the punchline. The Congressional Budget Office’s February 2026 outlook has net interest exceeding $1 trillion in fiscal 2026, nearly triple the $345 billion paid in 2020. In the first three months of FY2026, net interest hit $270 billion, already surpassing defense spending for the same window. CBO projects debt held by the public rising from 101% of GDP today to 120% by 2036, surpassing the post-WWII record of 106%. The long end of the curve is pricing that trajectory: the 30-year Treasury closed July at 5.27%, up 30 basis points on the month, with the 10-year at 4.75%.
Bessent’s Yen Errand
Against that backdrop, the Treasury Secretary spent the final days of July orchestrating a rescue of someone else’s currency. The yen had flirted with its weakest levels since 1986 before rebounding to 157.40 per dollar by Friday’s close.
Lot of space ahead to expand debt into ( if they found new / or re-route others energy for it )..
” Percent of GDP · Canada. 110.77 · France. 113.11 · Germany. 63.89 · Italy. 135.33 · Japan. 236.66 · United Kingdom. 101.29 · United States. 120.79. ”
(IMF.org)
Add to this the extreme munition shortage and you see that what reante calls the big nuclear scare will be implemented by actually dropping real bombs onto real people. the scare will be for the rest of the world. I am not privy to how clear Russia and China are when they communicate with the USA but they really do not have other choices.
American debt is good, it makes others dependent on the US. Just imagine if there was no debt, do you think other countries would even listen to anything the United States have to say? They do because they’re hostages of this debt, they want to receive this money.
Repaying debt with interest takes economic growth. After a point, It is difficult to get enough economic growth to keep the cycle going.
One study showed that 90% pf GDP was the limit above which governmental debt became a problem, but not everyone believed that study. Also, the US, as the holder of the reserve currency was allowed by some to go to 120%.
But none of this makes sense if fossil fuel energy supplies start shrinking.
Scott Bessent denies we are in a K-Shaped economy. He says everyone is doing great. Inflation is not a problem and rising housing costs for the Plebs just isn’t true. That’s what’s called blowing smoke into a rectal cavity
If it is not one place of shipping control, it is another:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/yemen-war-reignites-houthis-intensify-saudi-shipping-attacks-ground-assault-amid
Yemen War Reignites As Houthis Intensify Saudi Shipping Attacks, Ground Assault, With Hormuz Deal ‘Close’
So now it seems that even if a grand Hormuz deal to reopen energy transit can be pulled off with some level of sticking power, there will have to be a separate ceasefire to contain the Yemen and Bab al-Mandab Strait crisis.
To some degree, the Houthi closure of the Red Sea to Saudi shipping represents a good cop, bad cop approach to the United States and its Gulf allies. It is a way for Tehran to still maintain some serious tangential leverage over global energy, even as ships in Hormuz could finally get moving again.
The agreement between Iran and Oman is done, just final drafting
“the two countries are also in the final stage of reviewing and drafting a joint statement covering the main points of agreement”
There will be no “grand opening”
“cannot in itself be interpreted as meaning the Strait has become safe for passing vessels,”
https://www.tasnimnews.ir/en/news/2026/08/06/3664861/tehran-muscat-hormuz-shipping-deal-close-spokesman
Iran has other demands and they will be met before any aggressor is allowed transit(might be an event at sea happening right now, although just rumour presently).
The stage would appear to be getting prepared for the inevitable, because they weren’t publishing the below for no reason.
https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/jpmorgan-says-iran-oman-hormuz-fees-could-have-legal-basis
Iran does not need Yemen as a lever, which the article implies, it has and will continue to have a far bigger lever of its own. Yemen are unsurprisingly kicking Saudi behind and the Saudis will eventually have to drop their illegal siege.
Thanks for the additional information.
Top on my list of collapse is the US government. Nothing uses more energy more wastefully.
The US does have a whole lot of “promises” out there, including promises on bank accounts and the promise of healthcare for the elderly and everyone else who qualifies for Medicare.
Trying to rebuild manufacturing in the US is likely to take a long time.
But at this point, it seems to be the “cleanest dirty shirt,” among many countries with problems. I am wondering if it could stick together for a while, with perhaps California and some other states leaving.
Medicare is one thing, at least we semi fund it via taxes. Medicaid is absolutely unfunded. If i was .gov i’d renege on medicaid and some of social security for todays olders to buy myself time. So far the majority of cuts have fallen on the young, the exact opposite of how almost every society has handled these types of problems in the past.
That’s what the Convid enabled, Mr. House….the elimination of (mostly) the vulnerable seniors who had also collected government pensions which, conveniently, no longer have to be paid. The fake pandemic was also the first leg of massive forced (and fraudulent) firings, early retirements, pension theft and murders of rightfully non-compliant federal government workers.
The elimination of jobs for AI and downsizing has continued unabated ever since. Moreover, the multitudes of “vaccine” injured continue to be a boon for the criminal Big Pharma (military) cartel.
Come get your Stargate AI-mRNA Gene Therapy platform cancer injections which are “safe and effective” (and need a presidential pardon) to cure the turbo cancers intentionally given to you by the mandated Convid deathvax.
It’s notable that everywhere the elderly, and chronically sick and disabled of any age, are still being targeted with the mRNA injections.
The UK govt., for example, put them into 3.5 million elderly this last ‘booster’ season.
This solicitude for the vulnerable is very touching…..
Had a medical condition throughout recent week. And synced with the peak of the ~last heat-wave, not enjoyable at all, almost called for a hospitalization.
Basically, no other pre-condition, being fully mineralized, vitamin fructarizied, and suddenly..from d/d.. big slide toboggan into the half-world.
In out of fever dizziness retrospect do blame it still on encounter of the third kind where ~Korean tourist which accidentally sneezed-cough into my face from less than a feet distance. But it could be anybody on the bus, tram, or aircon offices spaces, when visiting the city.
Fever, but the throat shock was out of this world, it was like the palatum ( roof of mouth ) machine drilled from above downwards..
Applied the usual protocols, and not much relieve, then only picked up the stuff reserved for such possible crisis in say one would expect Dec/Jan.. season only.
In essence, bio which-craft to the rescue as it landed on me through interrupted sleep sessions, which I read as kid and seemingly forgot, supposedly poor halfwit Transylvanian peasants applied vigorously against their overlord sneaking on them in blood-lusting nightly attack missions.
__
PS: Asian tourist vector or local, it was certainly some airborne ~AIDS / HIV gain level stuff, that’s for certain ! Burn in hell you f. a.h. of MIC & BigPharma, .. and the pale horse riding bosses above that.
Kulm for the win here !
Sorry to hear about your troubles. During the Omicron transition, I slacked off on my 5000 IU Vitamin D regime hoping to get it over with and acquired the “razor throat” variety of Covid from my elderly boosted clients while working in their home for a week.
Replenish> yes, that’s exactly what I meant the jabbed-boosted folk turned into producing and spreading new nasty variants-mutations for yrs to come.
In terms of the supplements, as one doc said during the C19 era, nothing is safe these days, but strongly recommended single item products only, i.e. NOT multivitamins package as this is easier to fill-up or taint-obfuscate during manuf. phase by some harmful additives, not mentioning just being diluted product mostly.
Thanks, hopefully, I’m behind the peak now, and recovering quickly, the throat went first via witchcraft, then the fever slowly taming down through usual medicine applied as well.
I was just struck by the intensity [ switch on ] of such incident – it was frankly nightmarish.
Awful!
My protocol for something very nasty in the throat/lungs:
Chicken (or lamb, beef, veg) with lots of turmeric, tons of garlic and onion, and black pepper and chill/cayenne pepper to taste. Smoked paprika too, as it is anti-bacterial. Or a curry version.
With extra-strong zinc pills morning and evening. Extra-strength Vit C.
The best bit: lots of good red wine to wash it down! Rose also acceptable. Perhaps a brandy before bed.
Doze all day if possible and get a long sleep at night.
I have felt like Death in the evening, but woken up bright and fresh with no trace of illness. Sleep allows all those magical ingredients to do their thing.
Generally, I’m a firm believer in fresh onion and garlic every day, and am basically micro-dosed with paprika and turmeric and black pepper which I use in almost every recipe to some degree.
The above simply gives this a turbo-boost.
I never take any vitamins regularly.
Xabier> thanks for the response. Yes, it was along your veg-herbal line w.out the wine and chicken though, as too frail to deal with that ( nor having it in fridge/freezer prepared broth as per colder season ), and the current heat wave.
As kid had this unusual book, basically small vignettes about various odd regions across Europe and ClubMed.
I recall only the story about monasteries preserving some of the wine and fruit varieties from antiquity. And then the story about peasants in Transylvania, applying secret protection against the overlord by submerging one of the mentioned category of veg into the jar of the product collected by the most productive ~forest little creatures. And applying – eating it then all so that sort of gargle up for a while in their upper neck.
For some reason, Bram Stoker perhaps not using the proper direct sources ( although preceding the book ), made only very partial and botched mentioning of it, bordering on ridicule.
You see I can’t say it openly, because it is a secret, but not hard to crack down, as you partially done already.
__
PS perhaps we just lucked out this round as the MIC-Pharma lab contractors grew up solely on Tom&Jerry so they never expected this loop-hole..
JR, I have just remembered my Spanish gipsy ( she reads the cards, too!) cousin’s remedy, which was no more than onion and a lot of garlic cooked up and served as a rather thick drink. Prob pepper and salt too.
Have some bread soaked in it if you prefer a soup version.
I have to say it worked very well when I fell ill on a visit.
It has to be STRONG.
Very much the poor man’s version, compared to mine, which is rather elaborate.
And I forgot to mention, the old folk remedy of piling on the bedclothes and sweating as much as possible has much to recommend it. The brandy helps with that.
Yes, the onion and the garlic works for me every time too.
Strong garlic soup is s must when I feel a cold coming on.
Also, research after research has shown than having a high level of vitamin D in the bloodstream is correlated with mild symptoms whether people have a cold or the flu or COVID-19.
The connection was well known in 2020, but like ivermectin, vitamin D was ignored as a prevention strategy by most health authorities around the world.
During the pandemic, in Andalusia, the southernmost region of mainland Spain, they did give high levels of vitamin D to nursing home residents and hospital patients alike, and achieved dramatic improvements in outcomes. But that was an exceptional case.
In the temperate regions, there are actually two seasons: the vitamin D sufficiency season and the vitamin D deficiency season. But most people these days work inside and avoid the sun, so many of us are deficient all the time.
Might not denial of medical treatment not improve the health of retired Americans who, we are often told, are among the most harmfully over-medicated people on the face of the earth?
Also, many unnecessary operations are performed which do not help them, but are wonderful for hospital profits.
Less ‘care’, more health?
We don’t know, perhaps there are big caches of alt. oilz / gas ~under Greenland, not ~only rare earths..
The bottom line remains as long as RoW’s quasi elite still parks large(est) portion of their capital under US tow, then Gail’s above stated maxim is still
valid for at least next few years ( 5 -15yrs outlook ).
Although the mood in the US seems changing profoundly, if you look at the structure of comments behind msm takes on this Michigan senatorial race now, that would be impossible 1-2decades ago. Basically, large part of people under 40-50yrs no longer digs the old tricks from AIPAC, MIC, .. and all the other legacy essential pillar structures anymore. Simply, they finally escaped the reservation, which worked for so many decades earlier ( putting aside the origins of new trap ).
That’s obviously an huge issue, likely it won’t mature up similarly as say in LatAm setting, but surely at some point it definitively turns US into way different trajectory, perhaps even loose type of union if US gets such leftie “soft-uprising correction” across larger sections of territory even before that mentioned ~15yrs span.
That’s ( also ) why Reante assumes there will be orchestrated attempt to navigate the ship way before coming to such disorderly setup at the navigator’s stand. The correction course will be likely attempted at the minimum.
A new lie for the masses? Certainly one is needed.
Apes on Mars and a wonderful New Green Electric Economy seem dead on arrival, so perhaps a form of national socialism which at least keeps people fed and housed is plausible.
My view is not an assumption Jr. My view is patterned on events.
The striking part is that the US railway system runs on diesel. No one else in the developed world has that. Strictly speaking railway companies are private entities, but railways are systemic.
The US railroad system is primarily for cargo. It covers long distances. People only use rail for commuting, and that commuting is often electric. Cars and buses transport people, mostly.
Europe uses electricity for people, and sends cargo over roads with diesel. The cargo over roads with diesel seems quite inefficient to me, but there is a difference in rail gauges for some countries. People can get out and walk, but freight cannot. The US does not have that issue.
In Japan, I took one of the electric trains. It had space only for a small brief case for those using the train. Anyone wanting to send luggage had to send it ahead by truck, I believe. I am sure that freight is not shipped in their high-speed trains.
Yes, of course I meant that cargo trains are systemic. But everywhere else also passenger trains are more heavily used because they are far faster (decreasing the need for road infrastructure).
“The chief of naval operations was
29:08 not told about the X-ray laser having to be uh being getting its power from a
29:17 nuclear detonation in space. He did not know this. And so he was told about this X-ray laser destroying hundreds and
29:26 thousands of Soviet ICBMs from uh tens of thousands of kilometers range. And he
29:33 was never told that it was a nuclear detonation in space. The president wasn’t told. So here was an example
29:40 where the technical people who came up with this weapon system presented it to the political decision
29:48 maker without explaining to them, oh by the way, we need to detonate 150 kiloton
29:55 nuclear warhead in space. When Ronald Reagan found out that nuclear detonations were occurring in space, he
30:03 freaked out. He said, “No nuclear weapons in space. Zero.”?
Ronald Reagan was president a very long time ago: January 1981 to January 1989. I wasn’t aware that that kind of thing was going on. I suppose that these explosions could have long-lasting adverse impacts.
Yes, most of the arms negotiations during mid-late 1980s were about to stop the looming next leg up race to even more destructive ( and costlier ) weapon’s systems.
That’s why U.S. ate those huge over-expenses on the Shuttle fleet as it was primarily ” Star – Wars ” kind of platform* vs. basic manned lift rockets ( way cheaper ).
—
* for installing and servicing various laser based and other chiefly orbit to orbit planned warfare systems etc.
Luckily, when canceled – part of these war pre-budgeted efforts and cadre of specialist was turned into the International Space Station build up instead, which brought lot of good general science.
Devastating News: The Loss of Richard Heinberg
This is the hardest article I’ve ever had to write.
On Sunday July 19th we lost our kind, brilliant friend and colleague, Richard Heinberg.
The world has lost a voice of clear, truth-telling wisdom—a man whose work reached millions of people and fundamentally changed the lives of thousands. Perhaps that includes you. It certainly does me.
Richard died after a short, brutal illness. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just two weeks before his passing. As you can imagine, we’re reeling and gutted.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2026-08-04/devastating-news-the-loss-of-richard-heinberg/
2 weeks after being diagnosed. Unbelievable.
We covered Richard’s tragic death in the comments during the previous post, actually.
When it’s fairly suddenly and unexpectedly, and not being hit by a bus, or stabbed by a maniac, I tend to think, did he have the Pfizer or was it the Moderna? I know it’s in very bad taste and I am sorry he had to go out like that, but that’s how it is when we’re living through the Jabocaust.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2026/06/29/why-oil-shortages-may-bring-lower-prices-and-recession/comment-page-7/#comment-514509
It was unfortunate that he was critical of anti-vaxxers.
That was just a test to see if you’d be a nazi when offered a bone. Lots of people failed the test and Germany in WW2 times made alot more sense, having lived it for a brief moment.
Jabocaust.
That’s a good one Tim.
My favorite is “Jonestown Jab”
Yes, quite. Ya’ll better drink your Koo Aid and save granny.
Notice how psychopaths and sociopaths are always relying on normal people’s sense of decency in order to lead them by the nose into the fleecing or killing or meat-grinder zone?
I remember Fast Eddy introduced us to “the Clot Shot” and a bit later, “the Clottery.”
Cool Aid.
The abuse of decency and altruism, a belief in protecting the weak and fairies at the bottom of the garden, was one of the nastiest aspects of the whole thing.
How fortunate that I’m simply not decent enough to worry about Granny! I should be ashamed.
I recall meeting a nice chap when dog walking during the Plandemic.
With two elderly parents already on the Slip- way to the Great Beyond (terminal heart disease and bowel cancer) he was assured by the NHS that he should get injected so that they didn’t die of Covid, a death worse than death!
He was most reluctant, but the pressure was immense and he didn’t want to feel guilty if they lost some of their last miserable months or weeks to the deadly, terrifying virus. He was so decent he would have felt that guilt until his last day, I felt.
Of course, FE would uncharitably call him a moron who deserved his fate (what was it I wonder?) , but I could see his predicament and the cynical, criminal psychological abuse he had been exposed to.
Gosh, now I remember: didn’t both the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury tell us Jesus wanted us all vaxxed, to show Love? And HM the Queen told us not to be ninnies afraid of a little prick…….
I’ve died multiple times from covid and sad that i only have one life to give!
Xabier.
I remember thinking how backwards the rollout was cause you take “woman and children” off the ship first, NOT GRANDMA and GRANDPA”.
So, the conspiracy theorists hijacked Richards death to promote their nonsense. SMFH
PS Chemtrails are not real.
“Chemtrails are not real.”
Only a hologram would say something like that.
And the Earth is not flat, we know.
And the surface of the globe is finite but unbounded. Walk far enough and you are bound to get right back where you started.
Dunno about chemtrails. I’ve never seen one, Contrails are more real than rainbows, though. Rainbows are only virtually real. Contrails are a gas, man!
This morning in the garden, looking up at the clear blue cloudless sky at the waning moon but not yet crescent old moon, I spied a jet plane that was sparkling in the bright bunker-fuel-pollution-free air.
I said to the wife: “Look up there! There’s the moon and a plane.”
“Oh yes,” she replied. “Hang on. That plane doesn’t have a contrail. (She said the Japanese word hikoki-gumo; literally aeroplane cloud) Why doesn’t it have a contrail. All the other planes have contrails.”
Not wishing to argue, I said, “Look at the window. It doesn’t have any condensation on it today. But often in the morning it has a lot of condensation. Why is that?”
“Oh, I see,” she beamed. “It doesn’t have any condensation because the humidity is high and the air is dry.
And it’s the same with the aeroplane?”
“That’s right!” I confirmed. “The contrail is a condensation trail, like the condensation on a window. It’s also called a vapor trail, because it is made of water vapor, same as mist or cloud. You are more of a scientist than you think you are!”
Non-scientists and those who are uninterested or mystified by science or can’t be bothered to think about it often assume that a condensation trail consists entirely of exhaust gas or water vapor coming out of the jet engines. But that is a misunderstanding.
In fact, the trail is a collaboration between the water vapor coming out of the jet engines and the water vapor already in the air that the plane is flying through. Only if the total amount of water vapor is enough to saturate the surrounding air does a visible contrail form.
Even if you can’t see a contrail, a jet in flight will still produce an invisible air disturbance, which is commonly called jet exhaust, jet wash, or a turbulent jet wake.
As I like to say to my old mate Norman, “That’s science, laddie!”
I was driving across the burning desert
when I spotted six jet planes
leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
it was the strings of my guitar
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
Typos, sorry.
Obviously, that should be:
Because the humidity is low and the air is dry.
You’re lucky, Tim, that the Japanese government apparently hasn’t gone along with the plan to poison its citizens from the sky.
I have dozens of photos taken outside my front door that prove chemtrails are real.
https://postimg.cc/F1Cky05J
https://i.postimg.cc/vHb7dv0X/20251109-125252-jpgu.jpg
Cancer is part of human life. «Everybody» will have cancer If We get old enough. Prof Jarle Breivik shows that cancer is evolution inside body.
«One mutation leads to another, and natural selection favours the most rebellious variants. That is cancer.” We are, he writes, “temporary cell colonies that the genes have made to get to the next generation”; we can slow down mutations a little by healthy living, “but with every cell division, there will be errors in the copying of genes and epigenes»
I am not against treatment, but one gets abow 50s there is no suprise if one gets cancer.
I was exploring prostrate cancer and one Doctor stated that eventually most men will develop it provided they live long enough to “advanced age”. Suppose that time depends on the individual genetic makeup.
Also, with all the “forever chemicals”, plastics, pesticides and exposure to other foreign manmade miracle matter, what could possibly go wrong?
Also the agribizz degeneration of food value …
Oh , I know the list goes on…
Does that theory make sense to you Bob? If so, why?
It does make sense. I am a old anesthesiologist seeing this on a daily basis. I am not against treatment, but many of the patients we have at the hospital today would not have been in the hospital 20 years ago. Eg. More cardiologist will definitly led to more cancer. It not only cancer. Aortic stenosis in old age is a wear and tear problem, not a “disease”.
From Prof Jarle Breivik: “Cancer is in many ways a difficult matter, scientifically as well as emotionally. There is therefore good reason to moderate the flow of information, especially when facing sick and vulnerable individuals. In a societal perspective, however, when the goal is to underpin democratic and knowledge-based development, it is important that everybody is well informed. No one likes to hear that our risk of getting cancer increases every day of our lives or that cancer development is inextricably linked to being human (25). Nevertheless, as scientists we have a responsibility to communicate with honesty and integrity, not only in scientific journals, but also when reaching out to the public and our elected representatives. This responsibility is especially great when we are entrusted with a large portion of society’s resources. Someone must therefore have the courage to tell Trond Mohn that NOK 1 billion to cancer research will lead to more and not less cancer in the population.” Tidsskr Nor Legeforen 2015
We have also this challenge: Reliance on fossil fuels: ethical implications for intensivists. Koch S, Klitzman R. Reliance on fossil fuels: ethical implications for intensivists. Intensive Care Med. 2023 Mar;49(3):330-333.
Thanks Bob. How would you elaborate on and justify the pivotal and exceptional claim that natural selection favors the most rebellious variants?
[ Human-oids ], colloquially stubborn by design to live upto limit of [ 95-120yrs ] age, provided very healthy environment, modest nurturing intake, regular but not soul-body crushing work-activity outdoors, social inter-action, ..
In the utmost perfect setting conditions perhaps able to mentally and physically care for themselves to at least that earlier boundary of ~90yrs..
Have ( had ) relatives all over the spectrum ( lower boundary though – bellow 100yrs ), so it’s ~true.
__
PS Tim and other Asian aficionados could perhaps share more observations..
reante :Evolution cannot eliminate cancer because cancer is a side effect of cell division. Without cell division, no growth, no healing, no reproduction. The trade‑off is built in. Selection acts before reproduction; cancer mostly strikes after. So it persists.
Bob, cancer is obviously a biological dynamic but you are clearly making the case that cancer has no external environmental dynamic. Is that really what you believe?
People get pancreatic cancer and die relatively “quickly.” Not a big deal unless it’s you.
Gail
Thanks for your latest article.
I do have a question for you. You said at the end that the economy would likely reorganize to add complexity that would result in sparing energy. I have heard somewhat the opposite from people such as Joseph Tainter in his “Collapse of Complex Societies” that when energy becomes more scarce, societies have to simplify.
I’m interested in why you would predict more complexity would lead to sparing energy? Or did I misunderstand?
It is a two step process. First, as Tainter says, they have to get rid of the old technology. This is the simplification process. This is part of the reason that bombing is popular.
Next, there is a long recessionary period, during which a few innovators are working on new ideas.
It is only after the long recessionary period that the new, more efficient, approaches can be implemented, assuming everything works together correctly.
So you think there are no limits to growth?
There are limits to growth. We are hitting some of them now.
There is a question with whether we can somehow work around these limits, and move on for a while again, before we hit new limits. I am arguing that the system keeps adding complexity. With added complexity, there is hope that some way to harness energy sources that we have seemed elusive. There is a huge amount of coal under the North Sea, for example. Climate models seem to assume we will access it. We haven’t to date. Perhaps it could be burned in place.
But I try to make it clear that getting to a new level of complexity, using energy supplies more sparingly, is not a certainty.
Gail… please disregard my question up above from today as I see you’re answering here. What I’m interpreting is that the level of complexity will be much less than what we have today?The level of complexity today seems incredibly inefficient and unsustainable.
Let’s use the example of wind turbines. Places that are able to invest heavily in wind turbines will have intermittent electricity, but will be materially poorer. Food will be very expensive and industry will be all but impossible because the expensive of keeping renewables is much greater than the benefit of wind turbines. People in this area may have to go back to storing food without refrigeration, no employment outside of the agarian or energy sector, much in the same way very poor countries in the world function. But it will all be worth it, to some, because they will have wind turbines that work. Until one breaks, then it will be iffy if the funds and materials will be available to repair or replace it.
A series of wind turbines attached to some kind of green grid is much more complex than a fossil fuel powered grid . It is also more expensive. Maintaining these wind turbines and green grid would leave nothing left over for anything else. The system and everyone in it would be getting by on a lot less energy and working harder to keep that complicated system running.
Complexity, in this case means more effort for less benefit.
Hey x-,
Lamarck is back! 😁
Prof Richard Buggs, a professor of evolutionary genomics at Queen Mary University of London, said there was a “growing acceptance” within the evolutionary biology community of evidence to support Lamarckism.
“I guess this may come as a surprise to many members of the public as school biology textbooks often mention Lamarckism as a failed evolutionary theory,” he said.
“But there are many recent scientific papers showing this happening, and there have been major conferences that have discussed this… I think it would be fair to say that many school textbooks are out of date on this issue.”
“Why Darwin’s discredited rival may be proved right 200 years later,” August 1, 2026
https://mindmatters.ai/brief/culture-change-darwins-rival-lamarck-is-back/
I always thought Lamarkism made sense. Epigenetic studies of adaptions transmitted across generations have demonstrated some aspects of the theory.
Creator handed us some loaded dice, diogenes. Smart.
Lol. End of times, brother reante, end of times…
It’s all a load of Lamarkey, obviously.
But I was very impressed as a child with the variation of the theory elaborated by Rudyard Kipling, as explained here by Jack Nicholson.
A short AI summary:
Is Lamarckism making a comeback? Not in the way some headlines suggest.
Modern biology has shown that some acquired characteristics can be inherited through epigenetic mechanisms—changes in gene regulation rather than changes in DNA sequence. This means the old textbook claim that inheritance of acquired traits is impossible is no longer accurate.
However, these effects are usually temporary. In mammals, epigenetic changes often persist for only one to a few generations before they are erased during reproduction and early embryonic development. Without the original environmental trigger, the effect typically fades.
So while this provides evidence for a limited Lamarckian mechanism, it does not replace Darwinian evolution. Permanent evolutionary change is still understood to occur primarily through genetic mutation and natural selection.
In short:
✔ Some acquired traits can be inherited.
✔ The inheritance is usually temporary, not permanent.
✔ Darwin’s theory remains the foundation of evolutionary biology.
✔ Modern evolutionary biology has expanded, not overturned, Darwin’s framework.
I guess modern computers, including AI, just evolved through a series of random mutations from Babbage’s Analysis Engine.
Understand Mirror that the headlines are just the first baby step of recognition. Subsequent steps will be washed away by Collapse.
Important is also how governments respond to crises. In Australia we have eternal optimists in power, who ignore the real world and present cherry-picked data to the public although departmental staff knows otherwise
2/8/26
Australian fuel supply update 1 August 2026: tankers expected to arrive in next 4 weeks will drop by 20%
https://crudeoilpeak.info/australian-fuel-supply-update-1-august-2026-tankers-expected-to-arrive-in-next-4-weeks-will-drop-by-20
Their inability to face the inevitable increases future damages to the economy e.g. by starting projects with high diesel consumption, projects which will either get stuck or will become uneconomic. Who will have enough money to visit the Olympic Games in Australia at the end of the world (Brisbane)?
When the complexity is this extreme, it’s highly questionable whether facing the inevitable early makes any difference whatsoever other than bringing future damages into the present. Like I said yesterday, who in their right mind would choose to collapse early?
Using diesel is what gets you loans. Saying your going to use your loan to burn a shitload of diesel is music to the ears of the lender. The credit is just a proxy for the diesel in the first place. Diesel is the collateral up in smoke. Welcome to Steve Ludlum’s waste based economy. 😀
We could be wrong Reante choice may not be involved here the chaos of the Ukraine War and Iran War could be the result of the end of the oil Age
It could be as simple as that.
I don’t entertain that degree of self-doubt because it doesn’t come close to standing to reason. It was and is impossible to regime change Russia and Iran for the purpose of stealing their oil. Stealing the oil, as a concept itself, doesn’t even make any sense. The oil is already going into the global economy. Russia was operating on the petrodollar before sanctions. Iran was also operating on the petrodollar before sanctions lol. How can you steal what’s already yours?
Make it make sense brother.
You are kidding right?
There is evidently large degree ( pecking order ) of ~freedom under petrodollar and globo/int sanctions. The RU state was evidently stuffing too much ( and for too long ) resources under the mattress aka feeding own internal dev in many sectors, plus also projecting power outwards, and forming antagonistic or at least fall-back option proto-alliances to the legacy globo order.
Your train of thought then would be like saying Japan and Burkina-Faso are under the same petrodollar system, hence lets all buy these nice shiny African made hybrids..
Doesn’t compute.
Are you asking me if I’m kidding about a worldview that your inconsistent own self subscribes to about 25% of the time, which is the portion of you I naturally consider to be your best self?
Maybe you should have that conversation with yourself rather than have your worse self ask me if I’m kidding.
Perhaps better to play the ball itself.
I challenged your claim by pointing out the obvious that effectively RU / IRN used too much oilz to detrimental purposes ( self econdev and defense ) as perceived by the globo sys puppeteers ( or owners ).. Ergo that said oil was not then going into the globo economy in volumes as it could-should following MPP on that elevated resource dispatchers level.
Hence the applied counter strategy in play:
– attack on IRN ( even risking Hormuz and mil bases around Gulf ) and reduced globo standing vs upper level players later
– prodding and later attacking n-powered peer country via proxy demented EUR-UKR vultures
__
And you put forward non-response.
You are the ping pong ball I played Jr. Let’s revisit the conversation tomorrow.
Jr, in preparation for our conversation tomorrow — 😁 — I suggest that you consider zooming out further. Start from DA theory and see if what you are saying with your objections also fits DA theory. But also question whether your objections are political or structural, or a bit of both. Also don’t write incomprehensibly. “dev” might obviously be mistaken for devaluation rather than development, and I did mistake it for devaluation because you preceded dev with “internal,” and internal devaluation is standard economic terminology whereas internal development is non-standard terminology.
Jr I’m happy to continue this conversation if you still want to.
Reante> yes no problem we could continue on that topic, hopefully I’ll be now more coherent at the first shot.
In the above conversation, as stated I simply had to challenge the view how deep are RU-Iran submerged into the int. organized energy flows, meaning above beyond state level priorities as perceived by them. And I simply posit it is markedly to lesser/lower degree vs most Gulfies or other energy extracting-producing locales of the world.
__
PS few dayz ago the Greek duo showed some ?British article claiming something to the effect that US dispatched in that recent war ~13k of various rocket ordnance ( yes most of that total number smaller ones ), depleted DoD/MIC stock-piles for years; yet on the Iranian side THIS lead only to ~25% of damaged defense capabilities ( and likely of the replaceable kind ).
That’s just showing where large portion of the extracted energy itself ( and int traded revenue from selling other portion of it ) went in Iran actually over the decades!
Apparently, into bunker cities hidden deep bellow rock-mountains, ft. depots over-filled w. rockets and drones etc.
Thanks buddy. Let’s look at it structurally.
In 2012 which was before both Russian and Iranian sanctions, Russia produced 10.3 mbpd and consumed 3.2, and Iran produced 3.8mbpd and consumed 1.8. In 2025 Saudi Arabia produced 9.8mbod and consumed 2.4.
Saudi Arabia only has 35M people.
I’m not seeing a basic pattern for your argument.
Naturally I would make the argument that since the DA has Russia taking Ukraine and Iran as the centerpiece of the BNS, the Hand obviously needed those countries to be militarily prepared to carry out their roles.
At the level of political theater, the Crimea annexation is a better avenue for disputing my position WRT Russia, but that would just lead back to the CIA Maidan coup as the true causal factor.
I’m kinda surprised you would be looking to pin geopolitical blame on Russia and Iran. It looks like you were also indirectly referencing Russian and Iranian BRICS politics as a causal dynamic in your initial comment, but as you know BRICS politics from my perspective serves the regionalized, multilateral Phase 2 trade and energy restructuring of the DA.
As an aside, I imagine that Iran’s military preparations played a significant role in its hyperinflation. And dollar stablecoins have played a massive role in mitigating the hyperinflation for both the civilian population and the IRGC.
Perhaps we are using different ” accounting ” metrics. I’d argue the permanent security state demands both in Iran and Russia go way back before ~2012. You simply can’t build and furnish bunker-city storage complex 1km under granite mountain in one decade etc. This has been ongoing for decades. As you correctly pointed out the internal hyperinflation in Iran is one of the results of this approach ( apart from various permanent foreign-globo meddlings to the effect of harming their economy ).
The Saudi example as regional peer/mirror case is perhaps also not fully appropriate, as they heavily play on the globo energy / money / stock investment markets – and derive livelyhood from such real or imagined proceeds and quasi ~debt issuance. While Iran is obviously stripped of such leverage on synthetic moneyz ( and from that derived living standards imported upgrades ).
So, I do maintain that position which claims even the comparison of barrels of oil ( or natgas t/m3 ) sold per capita by respective countries ( gov systems ) – can’t be a fair measurement in our analysis, given the very different structures ( and int standing ) of these particular societies.
Addendum> Google corrects me (us) that in case of Iran’s inflation it’s more correctly defined as :
– [ chronic inflation ] since 1970s almost every decade ( post revolution period )
– now w. the US(+Israel) conflict it’s upgraded to [ pre-hyperinflationary ] stages
Thanks Jr. We’re talking about colonial energy satrapies paying tribute to global Empire. Empire runs on energy surpluses.
“The RU state was evidently stuffing too much ( and for too long ) resources under the mattress aka feeding own internal dev in many sectors, plus also projecting power outwards, and forming antagonistic or at least fall-back option proto-alliances to the legacy globo order.”
When looking for evidence for your claim that these Russia and Iran were diverting resources away from Empire for the purpose of internal development, and thereby raising the ire of Empire, what is more foundational than measuring their respective tributes compared to Saudi Arabia since you were the one who brought up the Gulf states in comparison? As I’ve always said, Russia has been a model tributary State structurally speaking.
NATO precipitated all of the antagonistic political theater that led to today. So in your world without the Hand and its DA, where’s the evidence it was diverting energy away from Empire while it was preparing itself for the inevitable war.
In a world with the Hand, how does a Non-public Degrowth Agenda create that agenda without war cover? It can’t. So it had NATO push and push and push, which is a strategy that makes zero rational sense in a world without the Hand because Russia was a model tributary State. Poland’s per capita GDP is way better than Russia’s yet look at how their relative contributions to civilization compare.
Matt, you have been giving us examples of high energy projects that are being encouraged in Australia for a long time. No one seems to be able to catch on.
Of course, these high energy projects are what permits employment and keeps GDP up. So they are very popular with voters.
The government’s don’t know any better just like COVID and lockdown s they are marching closer and closer to the edge of the cliff.
They know better, they just don’t want anyone else to know better.
On your Fig 9:
4/10/2010
Russia’s oil peak and the German reunification
http://crudeoilpeak.info/russia%E2%80%99s-oil-peak-and-the-german-reunification
I have a friend who met Gorbachev in 2012 at a climate change conference
https://www.friendsoftheearth.ie/news/former-soviet-president-warns-conference-is-doomed-if-climate-change-is-ignored/
At that meeting Gorbachev confirmed that in the mid 80s the Soviet Union was running short on oil
It seems we have scarcity => high prices followed by unaffordability, economic collapse or war. The difference between the various crises over time seems to be the sequence and speed at which these consequences evolve and whether there are other geopolitical events which worsen or lessen these crises
Yes, in the mid-late 1980s they begged for new partnerships as to de-escalate the coldwar, exchanged for enhanced recovery tech in oil & gas sector, among other things. West agreed upon the deal, and then turned the rug under them, while smelling the opportunity to get the resources into direct ownership ( share ) instead if they nudge/force some sort of collapse or civil war etc.
Gorbi was a well-meaning idiot placed in pool of sharks, the old guard above used him as Mr. Nice puppet ~reformist guy, and when their core died out, the controlling leash suddenly loosened and the catastrophic sequence went through him unrestrained.
But realistically with the CHN going quasi-globo a decade previously they did not have much alternatives, perhaps turning into NKorea copy, but that ship sailed domestically in 1960-70s. So, they clearly targeted a modus vivendi ala CHN, i.e. partial opening and cooperation with the West.
After the brake-up and defaults, Vlad took up the ruins and build up back via deals with the last sensible generation ala Schroeder + Chirac ( both somewhat personally still recalling WWII after-math ) and or even stepped aside to Bushes in ME etc. to get that crucial time window for domestic dev.
Then came in the mid 2010s the next gen of brainwashed suicidals..
And here we are inside semi-hot WWIII.
In your chart by Jeffrey Brown and Sam Foucher, I was noticing that their forecast of future oil production was way too low. The most recent peak in oil production according to the Statistical Review of World Energy was 2019.
There was more oil available in 1991, but prices were too low to spend the effort to put the infrastructure in place to get it.
Yes. I heard Gorby say much the same thing, as well as that in late-end 80’s the bills running across his desk (for all kinds of stuff, he had a lot of ‘huge’ quotes, for tanks horrendous for ex.) were basically unpayable, he was stuck and did not know where to turn… This was actually his main point in explaining *The Break-Up* or Fall.
> At a seminar-conference, in 2005, at the U of Geneva, a commemoration of the Gorby-Reagan meet in CH, 20 years before.
To my surprise the audience was sparse (maybe 60 ppl? Outdated history, I guess…) -> many questions were answered, and the participants got to meet the panelists. Gorby impressed me as charming and open-minded. (Partly thru translator / etc. No surprise there.)
meet (in F)
https://www.unige.ch/actualites/archives/2005/26052005-les-20-ans-de-la-rencontre-reagan-gorbatchev-a-geneve/
Your Figures 5 and 7 “Growth Rates in World Energy Consumption Divided Between Population & Living Standards” are a brilliant idea. Maybe you can do a similar graph showing the corresponding growth rate in World Energy Supply by type of energy: wood, coal, oil, renewables
I don’t think that would work too well. For wood, I definitely I definitely don’t have the data. People have been cutting wood for a long time.
Wait a minute, I’m still cutting wood now 😉
My scenario for the European Union:
Europe is facing the most serious energy crisis since the 70s. Gas supplies have fallen by 75%, oil supplies by 25%. This corresponds to a 30% drop in energy supply. The crisis will become striking with the heating season in November.
German industrial production has fallen by 24% since 2017. The reduction in energy availability will lead to a Europe-wide slump of another 25%, in energy-intensive industries such as fertilizer, glass, steel by 40%. If another 25% is added to the German slump of 24%, industrial production will amount to 50% by 2017. This will have a significant impact on living standards and domestic consume. Germany will fail as the engine of the European Union.
The GDP decline in the EU is expected to be up to 3.5%, inflation is expected to be 7% and the unemployment rate is expected to be 9%, in particularly affected countries such as Austria, this is expected to increase to up to 12%.
It is unthinkable that the populations do not attribute such a slump to political mismanagement.
Putin will offer gas and oil supplies at the height of winter and people will gratefully accept them. This will end the Ukrainian war and the Green Deal and possibly change the way the European Union works.
In the Middle East, Israel will become the dominant state of the Levant under an apartheid regime. The blockade of Hormuz will financially bind Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the United States. Israel will lease or buy land from the Saudis or economically troubled Jordan and guarantee a safe corridor to lay pipelines from Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia to Haifa on the Mediterranean Sea. This will ensure the oil and gas supply to Europe for the next 50 years and Europe can recover.
China will agree as long as its investments in Fujirah are not disrupted and it can get oil from Saudi Arabia.
China wants to lead the Silk Road to Europe and Russia wants to expand the north-South corridor from Moscow across the Caspian Sea, Tehran, Pakistan to India. For this, the countries need stability, not the birth struggles of an up-coming Islamic empire with 1.5 billion inhabitants, in which they have no interest.
The Iranian drones are the most important asset of the Iranian military. The US and Israel will either develop a protective shield against these drones or they will bomb Iran in such a way that drones can no longer be manufactured.
Nevermind peak oil apparently.
This will ensure the oil and gas supply to Europe for the next 50 years and Europe can recover.
Up to this point, I thought you were doing rather well. I don’t share your optimism regarding this possibility.
It is unthinkable that the populations do not attribute such a slump to political mismanagement. iron law of oligarchy: sociological thesis according to which all organizations, including those committed to democratic ideals and practices, will inevitably succumb to rule by an elite few (an oligarchy). The iron law of oligarchy contends that organizational democracy is an oxymoron. Although elite control makes internal democracy unsustainable, it is also said to shape the long-term development of all organizations—including the rhetorically most radical—in a conservative direction.
Robert Michels spelled out the iron law of oligarchy in the first decade of the 20th century in Political Parties, a brilliant comparative study of European socialist parties that drew extensively on his own experiences in the German Socialist Party. Influenced by Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy as well as by Vilfredo Pareto’s and Gaetano Mosca’s theories of elite rule, Michels argued that organizational oligarchy resulted, most fundamentally, from the imperatives of modern organization: competent leadership, centralized authority, and the division of tasks within a professional bureaucracy. These organizational imperatives necessarily gave rise to a caste of leaders whose superior knowledge, skills, and status, when combined with their hierarchical control of key organizational resources such as internal communication and training, would allow them to dominate the broader membership and to domesticate dissenting groups.
Michels supplemented this institutional analysis of internal power consolidation with psychological arguments drawn from Gustave Le Bon’s crowd theory. From this perspective, Michels particularly emphasized the idea that elite domination also flowed from the way rank-and-file members craved guidance by and worshipped their leaders. Michels insisted that the chasm separating elite leaders from rank-and-file members would also steer organizations toward strategic moderation, as key organizational decisions would ultimately be taken more in accordance with leaders’ self-serving priorities of organizational survival and stability than with members’ preferences and demands.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/iron-law-of-oligarchy
Austerity for thee but not for me.
The Convid enabled the elimination of millions of people from government pensions, payrolls and benefits thus, ERASING THOSE GOVERNMENT/CORPORATE LIABILITIES and maximizing stakeholder profits. This was textbook DISASTER CAPITALISM USING MKULTRA SHOCK THERAPY for asset-stripping of workers. I was one of them.
I wouldn’t worry too much about that Angie I don’t think we have long to go so having some time off months or years before The World Ends is a blessing count yourself lucky.
At the end of the comments in the last post. There was more talk about the US treasury intervention in the Japanese currency.
A couple things to point out. It was the New York FED that actually intervened on the request from the treasury. Because there is nothing the FED Reserve can actually do about it. It’s not a lack of dollar denominated bank reserves that is the problem.
Japan doesn’t need anybody to buy their debt. There is no debt crisis or bond crisis in Japan. If there is a crisis it’s was created by the BOJ. Something like 95-98% of Japanese debt is owned internally. Interest rate increases by the BOJ are currency negative. It forces money out that wouldn’t leave otherwise.
Money that will come right back into bonds just as soon as they start signaling they will be cutting rates again.
Their bond market isn’t the problem. It’s all the other reasons money chooses to leave Japan that is the problem. One of which is their central bank hiking interest rates.
The US treasury and the New York Fed don’t have the tools to fix the problems of Japan. Money is going to continue leaving.
“Richard Werner
Japan rates are in the process of shooting up. My research has shown rates follow economic growth & growth is driven by bank credit creation for the real economy.
Bank credit growth has fully recovered, is close to 6% growth. Rates to catch up.”?
https://x.com/scientificecon/status/2084729000060948704?s=20
Again they are touting that Japan can or could hold onto its treasury holdings if it wanted to. And just use them at the FED Reserve REPO facility as it is called. To borrow dollars to provide the dollars it’s in desperate need of so Japans currency won’t implode.
This is a bs solution. Just like it is for US banks. It doesn’t provide actual dollar credits where they are needed. The only thing the FED Reverse can do is lend reserves. When bank reserves aren’t what is needed. What is needed is actual dollar credits created by commercial banks.
The only real thing that has happened is an actual bank, the New York FED. Stepped in and provided some dollars. Dollars that have to be repaid starting in a month or two. Which creates even more demand for dollars that they don’t have and that commercial banks just aren’t providing in large enough quantities.
The fall of the Yen will continue.
The Eurodollar banks within Japan can create all the dollar liquidity that Japan needs if they wanted to. All they do is take either US treasury bills or the Japanese equivalent bills and use them as collateral to create their own dollar liquidity.
This is a fact that most everyone seems to not understand. But they are currently unwilling to provide the dollars. And furthermore nobody can force them to create the dollars.
Lending really does depend on counterparty risk. The ability to repay.
Got oil in ever increasing quantities? Because if you don’t your ability to repay goes down.
Right! Ever-increasing supplies of oil keeps the system going and helps promote growth. Other energy, if inexpensive enough, works as well. Adding debt without the ability to repay is a dead end.
I don’t think that I received my email notification that the new post is up.
I received. The email
Thanks for the new article.
The imperative fight against global warming requires less, not more, use of fossil fuels. I think this consideration has a crucial place in any discussion about energy.
Except there is absolutely nothing we can do about global warming that will make any difference in 100 years.
Also, the ecosystem that we live in is, of course, also self-organizing. It could kick humans off, and substitute green plants, any time it wants to. We flatter ourselves with our belief that we are really able to save the system. We need the energy to cook our food. Cooking food is what made us human. Something in the system has been taking care of humans (and pre-humans) for over one million years.
The climate change narrative needs to be understood as a way that politicians can make the necessary cutting back on fossil fuel use to be something that everyone would want to do. They cannot scare people with the issue of running short of affordable supplies. Politicians cannot tell us the real story.
The climate change narrative is mainly about creating the need for a “green” economy, which in practice is the contrary to green.
Climate change is a real story, and politicians primarily can tell it to us exactly because it is functionally inconsequential to civilization because its irreparable consequences arrive after the civilization has already collapsed from peak oil. In that se sense the story serves the last resort of State disinformation, which is to extend the timeline of Collapse beyond what it really is. Secondarily, they can also tell it to us because those in civilization that recognize it as the true story that it is will find a silver lining in the fact that their living standards have collapsed, and that’s good for governments and people themselves maintaining civil order.
It’s a shame Mt Etna went off in Europe – it undid all those vehicle CO2 savings that resulted from Europe’s newfound poverty.
You’re an ugly person ivan.
I think of you as a contrarian indicator, so — thank you!
Absolutely, Ivan.
And then there was Mount Pinatubo, an active stratovolcano on the island of Luzon in the Philippines, famous for its massive 1991 eruption, which was the second largest of the 20ht century.
According to MIT’s Climate Portal, the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo emitted an estimated 42 to 50 million metric tons of CO₂, while simultaneously lowering average global surface temperatures by about 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) over the subsequent 15 to 24 months—quite a feat. It did that thanks to the aerosols it put into the atmosphere.
And then there was the 2022 Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai volcanic eruption, which emitted an estimated 2 to 5 million metric tons of CO₂, an extremely small amount (accounting for less than what humanity releases in a single hour). Scientific consensus indicates the eruption actually had a negligible to slight cooling effect on global surface temperatures, reducing them by roughly 0.05°C to 0.1°C.
The scientific consensus doesn’t want to admit that Hunga Tonga could well be a major cause of the last few years’ exceedingly hot weather.
However, while volcanoes typically cool the planet by releasing sun-blocking sulfur dioxide (SO₂), Hunga Tonga was unusual because it was an underwater volcano about 100 meters below the surface, allowing it to generate lots and lots of hot steam. It blasted an unprecedented 146 to 150 million metric tons of water vapor—the World Champion Greenhouse Gas—directly into the stratosphere, increasing global stratospheric water content by 10% to 15%.
The water vapor from the Hunga Tonga eruption is projected to fully clear out and return to pre-eruption levels by around 2030.
Besides all the water vapor, the supreme greenhouse gas, Hunga Tonga also put the following substances into the stratosphere:
1. Sulfur Dioxide (SO₂) and Sulfate Aerosols
Because Hunga Tonga erupted underwater, most of its sulfur dissolved in the ocean before breaching the surface. Still, it managed to blast about 400,000 to 500,000 metric tons of SO₂ into the stratosphere. Within a few weeks, this gas oxidized to form sulfate aerosols—tiny reflective particles that played a major role in cooling the Southern Hemisphere.
2. Sea Salt Halogens (Chlorine and Bromine)
As seawater vaporized in the explosion, it carried marine minerals into the upper atmosphere. Scientists (you can trust them!) estimate the eruption injected a staggering 2.7 million metric tons of chlorine (mostly as hydrogen chloride, HCl), along with bromine. These halogens are highly reactive. When combined with the immense cloud of water vapor, they triggered rapid chemical reactions that depleted local stratospheric ozone by up to 30% in the weeks immediately following the blast—cancelling out many people’s efforts to stop using Freon gas in their fridges and air conditioners!
3. Volcanic Ash and Fine Glass Shards
The explosion shattered rock and magma into a towering plume that reached the mesosphere (~57 kilometers high). A large quantity of fine silicate volcanic ash and micro-sized glass particles entered the stratosphere. While heavy ash fell out quickly, ultra-fine ash particles remained suspended for months, acting as surfaces where water vapor could condense and freeze into ice crystals.
4. Methane (CH₄)A study published in Nature revealed that the volcano also emitted methane gas. Interestingly, researchers discovered a self-cleansing mechanism: the intense mixture of sunlight, sea salt particles, and water vapor within the plume rapidly generated chlorine radicals, which actually destroyed the volcano’s own methane emissions shortly after they were released.
But after going through all that, it’s amazing we are still here to worry about things like global warming, AI, economic collapse, cancer, what’s in our Mars bars, and why young people these days are like that, I don’t know!
Global warming and fossil fuel consumption are not necessarily connected.
We need to use less fossil fuels for the reason that the world is in a plateau with regards to new discoveries and we are facing declines in the years to come. Peak-oil is behind us. The media doesn’t want you to know this so it tells you that it is because of “global warming”. Yet, during the peak of the Roman Empire they had more than one degree Celsius higher temperatures compared to today, and they didn’t have any fossil fuel industries that created vast emissions (or aeroplanes, cars, etc).
Nice pretzel logic you bonehead.
Reante, you seem pretty confident that human carbon dioxide emissions are a big enough “forcing” agent to serve as a control knob on the Earth’s climate system. Almost as if we had a “lever” on the average global temperature, or as if they operated as a global “thermostat.” I hope my characterization of your position is not unfair.
I don’t share the view that human emissions make a significant difference—even if we make ourselves sound sciency and call them anthropogenic. I don’t doubt that our activities are emitting more than they are absorbing, although the bodies of today’s Americans are providing a huge carbon sink and the country should be able to claim an offset for that. But I think human emissions are pushing on a string rather than poking overall atmospheric carbon dioxide levels higher.
This is because atmospheric levels depend more than anything else on the temperature of the upper levels of the ocean. If the ocean temperature rises, a certain amount of carbon dioxide and any other dissolved gas comes out of solution and into the air.
According to the Tyndall Center for Climate (a nonsenus source:
If the entire ocean warmed by 1°C, the atmospheric level would increase by roughly 10 to 12 ppm (parts per million) solely from the reduced solubility of the gas in warmer water. However, if considering a 1°C increase in global surface temperatures—which includes interconnected earth system feedbacks like reduced ocean/land carbon sinks and soil outgassing—the total atmospheric increase jumps to 10 to 70 ppm over a decadal to century timescale.
This is interesting because it’s the magnitude of increase measured at Mauna Loa over the past 70 years. At least it’s in the same ball park. An increase of one degree C in average global surface temperatures can do that, and such an increase could be the result of any of a number of factors or combinations of factors. For instance, if the sun is shining a bit more brightly in recent decades than it did during the Little Ice Age, it could have been warming the oceans at a leisurely pace over the past one or two centuries without our being aware of any major change in solar output during our lifetimes. Like when you turn the gas up a little bit and the kettle slowly warms and then boils.
That’s all it would take! Regardless of anything we humans have done.
Also, the natural sinks and sources of CO2 are not well understood, only the human emissions component is known with any degree of precision as oil, gas and coal production figures are documented. How much undersea volcanoes are producing or termites are producing or decaying vegetation is producing and how these dynamics are evolving is not well known. And human emissions seem to be about 3 percent of total emissions according to some estimates. We can’t assume the 97 percent natural emissions are constant just because we are ignorant of what they are doing. That really would be nonsensus.
I wish people generally would pay more attention to proper dissident experts in the field who know what they are talking about, rather than hugging the nonsensus. And on the issue of the atmospheric CO2, they don’t come more dissident than the late great and much maligned Murry Salby, who died, incidentally, suddenly and unexpectedly in 2022, according to his son.
Here is a talk given in Sydney in 2011 in which Salby explains while chewing gum how net global emissions rise and fall in line with net global temperature. Wasn’t a charismatic speaker like Feynman or Sagan, but he knew what he was talking about, and he was the world’s premier authority bar none on atmospheric physics until he defied the nonsensus.
*Nonsensus: A consensus that is agreed and upheld despite not making sense. My euphemism for a dogma.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrI03ts–9I
Consensus, nonsensus,
What does it matter,
As long as we are all in agreement?
What are you trying to say?
He’s trying to pretend that both the perfectly correlated astronomical rate of change and the expected percentages in the atmosphere of isotopic carbon fingerprints specific to the fossil fuel derived CO2 molecules don’t exist.
He’s trying to say “it’s all a humbug, I tell you!”
Shall I try to explain it to a six year old, or would that be beyond your comprehension too?
But if you have at least the intellect and the intellectual curiosity of a reasonably bright 12 year old, then Salby’s video should explain it perfectly well.
Reante, old son, if you would watch and listen to the video, and maybe take notes if your attention span is not quite up to it, then you might find that Salby has perfectly answered you questions including the one about about isotope ratios.
You may not agree with his answers, but that’s your prerogative. He was prepared to give up his career in order to follow the science where it led him, and that is something I deeply respect. And he was a lot more knowledgable about his subject than anyone likely to be lurking on this forum, and probably more than any individual on earth. So you not being able to understand what he’s saying or to agree with it is not a clinching argument that what he said is invalid.
The response you just gave was not unexpected. As someone who thinks out of the box on things like viruses, vaccines, cancer, and the Hand, I am rather surprised you have no interest in challenging the climate nonsensus. But I would be more pleasantly surprised if you would investigate this thing further and challenge your current understanding.
I know you are generally dismissive of ideas that you don’t share. I suppose you think it saves you time in the long run. And I suppose there’s something in that. Norman has a similar method of rolling his eyes when confronted by something he thinks is obviously wrong.
But my mind runs along a different track. I investigate ideas that I disagree whether they might make more sense to me than they do now. I think it’s called intellectual curiosity.
I’m still investigating the exosome theory of respiratory diseases and cancer, for instance. And no virus theories overall. They still don’t add up for me, but that’s not the point. I don’t understand the details nearly well enough to have an opinion on that sort of thing, so I won’t scoff, or sneer, or make snide remarks about people who subscribe to those theories. Not even Jamie Andrews, who insists that vitamin supplements are poisons and vitamin D in particular is a poison in the amounts normally taken by health-conscious people because in vastly larger amounts it is a rodent poison.
“Come on Jamie, you’re not a rat, are you?” I want to say to him. But the guy has no sense of humor, being a Chelsea supporter, and takes himself way too seriously IMHO. He would only ban me if I tried to set him straight. So I leave him in peace.
But I am not disappointed, because I expect most people to be caught up in all sorts of false beliefs that they don’t realize just ain’t so.
At the same time, I am not going to try to convince you or anyone else of anything. That’s not my job. My main job, as always, is to not fool myself.
As I always say when my sincere efforts to present facts are met with bafflement or derision, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
And now, it’s back to my day job. I’ve got deadlines to meet. If you don’t chase deadlines, the deadlines chase you. And if they catch you, you’re dead.
I agree with Gail on this, if you want to save the world, you may as well off yourself. That would be the biggest contribution you could make to “fight” global warming. That ship sailed. Also it keeps people who generally agree on other things to argue over something they can’t change. Give it a rest.
“While there are direct ways in which CO2 is a pollutant (acidification of the ocean), its primary impact is its greenhouse warming effect. While the greenhouse effect is a natural occurrence, too much warming has severe negative impacts on agriculture, health and environment.”?
https://skepticalscience.com/co2-pollutant-intermediate.htm
Reante> perhaps in later stages ” global warming ” as per CO2 forcing ( coal and oilz ) will play a significant role, but our warming today is beyond reasonable doubt made by increased evaporation, measurably in dozens of %% per half a century. Simply, too much forests and savannas turned into flat cultivation, pavement etc., cranking up the surface temps bigly.
The biosphere as system then can’t regulate it on previously achieved balance ( level of our perceived comfort ) so fast after just few decades anyway.
This doesn’t much alter you core theoretical framework ( as post-PO forcing is real and here ) so you could take it easy.
Yeah Jr, civilizational terraforming is another aspect of anthropogenic climate forcing but it does not supercede the greenhouse gas dynamic.
AI with the common sense estimates:
“The cumulative total of fossil fuels burned throughout human history significantly exceeds the current annual biological carbon uptake (the sink strength) of all land ecosystems on Earth. Humans have emitted over 1,770 billion tons of \(CO_{2}\) from fossil fuels since the industrial era, whereas the global land sink absorbs roughly 8.7 to 11 billion tons of \(CO_{2}\) per year.Scale of Historical Fossil Fuel UseCumulative Emissions: Over 1.7 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide (\(CO_{2}\)) have been released from coal, oil, and gas combustion since 1750.Energy Equivalence: Studies (such as those by biological scientists evaluating Earth’s historical primary productivity) note that the fossil energy burned by humanity in just a few decades represents millions of years of ancient biomass accumulation.”
We pissants live like kings for a reason far bigger than contemporary soil and ecosystem degradation.
The Roman Warm Period was a regional phenomenon, not a global one. Just because warming can occur naturally doesn’t mean the current warming isn’t driven by anthropogenic causes.
The ancient Romans didn’t have cars, but they did have a lot of horses doing farts into the atmosphere.
Did the horses outnumber the wild animals that roamed Europe before the advent of agriculture? Seems doubtful.
Ruminants and others.
If anything, it would have been logging and erosion that may have had an impact.
Yes, that’s very interesting topic.
Most likely ” wild ” horses are/were actually re-wilded -> escaped or abandoned genetics brought by Romans to Spain, France and all these countries southern of Danube even before ~ 0AD.
At that time the northern line above that was fully dense tree layer covered, hence few – no pastures for them. With the exception of some NorthSea Baltics opened up areas, and perhaps ~steppe like conditions towards east-northern Balkans and Black Sea coastal. And there the horses could have been more linked to the ~Caspian-Asian genetics, i.e. smaller breeds.
And some of the early Germanic ( & post Celtic ) tribes of Europe up there on Danube were then pretty pop limited, hence few horses again, and one could bet they have stolen most of it from Romans and bread them further to local conditions. Yes, by few centuries later say in 5-7-9th AD, horses everywhere then..
__
PS disclaimer: for sure there must be now armies of PhDs in studies of pre-Roman horse genetics, so the above summary is perhaps not correct at all, hah..
Wasn’t one of prizes in taking Spain, the horses?
Might be misremembering, but I thought Scipio was keen on getting the horses. Carthage held most of Spain before Rome. They used horses widely and had the Numidian cavalry, which were very important to how they went to war.
Conversely, just because warming might be happening today doesn’t mean that it is driven by anthropogenic causes.
It takes an awful lot of heat to heat up the oceans.
As for the Roman Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period, it isn’t easy to discover what was going on all over the world a thousand or two thousand years ago. And climate scientists have been known to cherry pick what data they can find. If you want to keep your job and your funding, you have to support the nonsensus.
If we go back to the Holocene Climate Optimum (roughly 9,500 to 5,500 years ago) we have more persuasive data, but it provides a textbook example of how complicated historical data can be.
Global sea levels were likely higher than today, but whether the average global temperature was higher remains one of the most fiercely debated “conundrums” in modern climate science. Because, remember, it is anathema to the Church of Climatology to suggest that any period in the record since the last glacial period was hotter than the present. It’s Blasphemy, Heresy and against all the Law and the Prophets. We’re in the hottest era evah, and it’s all our fault. Our Bad!
Comprehensive global mapping published in Nature Communications combined physical coastal data with advanced geophysical models. The data shows that global mean sea level peaked around 0.24 to 0.27 meters (roughly 9 to 11 inches) higher than modern levels between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. [Some authorities think they were a lot higher 6 to 8,000 years ago, but Nature doesn’t want to discuss that.]
Now, if sea levels were higher, globally, you would logically assume the whole planet was vastly warmer. However, this is where you hit what experts explicitly call the “Holocene Temperature Conundrum”—a massive, unresolved split between physical earth data and computer models.
If you look strictly [like a proper scientist] at raw, physical geological archives—such as ocean sediment cores, cave formations, and ancient pollen samples—they scream that the Holocene Optimum was substantially warmer than today.
But when climate scientists plug known historical data (like greenhouse gas levels and solar variations) into physical climate models, the computers spit out the exact opposite answer: they show a steady, gradual warming trend over the last 10,000 years, implying the Holocene Optimum was actually cooler than the present day.
Which only goes to prove that in climate science you can prove anything if you tweak your models enough.
Scientists, in academia, are all grant-whores; (which is quite different to the whore who obliged Hugh Grant, just to avoid any misunderstanding…..)
“CrustalTrudger
A first thing to clarify is that the “2 degree C warmer than today” for the Roman Warm Period (or Roman Climatic Optimum as it is also called) is that this is for reconstructed sea surface temperatures (SST) for the Mediterranean, not the temperature on land (e.g., Margaritelli et al, 2020). Generally, elevated SST imply warmer average temperatures, but it’s not 1:1 so this is an important clarification. Estimates of the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere more broadly during the Roman Warm Period put average temperatures more around the average temperature of the period between 1960-1990 (e.g., Ljungqvist 2010), so significantly warmer than the periods before and after it, but still cooler than today and less consistently warm than the last few decades “?
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/mtf2rw/in_the_roman_warm_period_the_climate_was_2/
As an individual what are you doing to reduce fossil fuel use if you are serious about global warming because you think that is more important than finite oil supplies?
Less use of fossil fuels means less global dimming. Since 2021, global dimming is thought to have reduced average world temperatures by around 0.5 degrees celsigrade.
A major dip in global dimming took place in 2020, of course, with all of the shutting-in taking place, thus reducing fossil fuel use. Contrails of airplanes were greatly reduced then also.
In recent years, China has been making a major effort to get its air pollution under control. This would seem to seem to work toward reducing global dimming. If global dimming is being reduced, this is what would be expected to lead to higher global temperatures.
When I look at Global Dimming trends, I find an article behind a paywall. An AI summary, which presumably reflects this article, claims:
Search Assist
Global dimming has shown a decline in sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface from the 1950s to the 1980s, with a decrease of about 4-6% during that period. Since the 1990s, there has been a trend towards global brightening, attributed to reduced air pollution and aerosol emissions.
Wikipedia
AGU
Overview of Global Dimming Trends
Global dimming refers to the observed decrease in sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface. This phenomenon has shown significant fluctuations over the decades, particularly from the 1950s to the present.
Historical Trends
Time Period Trend Description Percentage Change
1950s – 1980s Decline in sunlight due to increased air pollution 4-6% decrease
1990s – Present Shift towards global brightening Increase in sunlight
Key Points
Decline Phase (1950s – 1980s): During this period, global dimming was primarily caused by atmospheric particulate matter, especially sulfate aerosols from industrial pollution. The decline in sunlight was about 4-6% as air pollution increased.
Brightening Phase (1990s – Present): Since the 1990s, there has been a trend towards global brightening. This shift is attributed to reduced air pollution and stricter regulations on aerosol emissions, leading to an increase in sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface.
Implications
The transition from global dimming to brightening has significant implications for climate change discussions. The reduction in aerosols has contributed to an acceleration of global warming, as the cooling effects of these particles are diminished.
Gail’s observation: Why aren’t the implications of the loss of global dimming materials being brought into climate change discussions. We need more air pollution!
Dead right, Gail. Ever since Norman’s great great grandad invented the steam engine and launched the Industrial Revolution, mankind, womankind or personkind have been polluting the skies with smoke and smog from industrial-scale coal burning as well as agricultural waste burning. When Europe and American started to clean up their act, China and India joined in to produce even more smoke and smog. And then there was bunker fuel. Ships have been allowed to burn the dirtiest fraction of the oil barrel as long as they were at sea rather than in port. Result, massive global dimming!!
And since 2020, things have changed a lot. China has cut its emissions and cleaned up its act, and ships are no longer allowed to be quite so dirty. Also the numbers of ships and planes moving around have declined quite a bit. Result, massive global brightening! All anthropogenic!! All our fault!! But absolutely nothing to do with our good friend, CO2, the gas of life that makes the grass grow taller!!
You two don’t seem to realize how catastrophic to the reputation of this place your utter stoopidity is on this topic. You both turn into flat-earthers and that destroys trust because sytematic subconscious lying through your teeth about something is still lying. It’s a character issue. Shame on you both.
Gail… I highly recommend checking out the work of James Hansen… his recent papers and he has updates on his Colombia University website. Its all free and I think you might find interesting. There is no scientist that I know of reconciling your work with his which is a pity. His fear is the loss of aerosols that seed clouds over the oceans (with the clean up of ship emissions). And this is amplified since the atmosphere over the oceans is pristine. Billionaires like Gates are getting worried and want to start injecting aerosols (which is cheap to do) into the stratosphere to stop the warming and loss of global dimming but this is upsetting a lot of scientists because the outcomes are uncertain and it won’t take away the problem of the build up of CO2. What’s expensive and in the trillions of dollars is geoengineering CO2 out of the atmosphere.
First!
Well done! You deserve a cookie or something.
A Bug-out kit from Canadian Prepper would be a most appropriate prize.
Cookies are for getting vaxxed……
and before you have the Chechen mercenaries burn the trade unionists alive