172 thoughts on “A blank post with some contemporary dance…”

  1. Tom Murphy and friends are forming a team to save human civilization.

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2021/11/finally-a-plan/

    Step 1: Write a paper framing the problem and a plan. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629621003327

    Step 2: Create a website for the team.
    https://planetarylimits.net/

    Step 3: Recruit the team.

    I left a comment suggesting these additional steps:

    Godspeed.

    Some additional steps for your consideration:

    Step 4: Acknowledge our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.
    Step 5: Acknowledge human overshoot.
    Step 6: Acknowledge the consequences of doing nothing.
    Step 7: Design policies for population and consumption reduction.
    Step 8: And then a miracle happens.

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  2. Tim Watkins today on the surprising (for me) collapse of the UK healthcare system.

    It’s really a good idea to look after your personal health these days.

    This means that – for want of a better term – the internal hospital supply chain has broken down:
    – Hospital departments cannot shift recovered patients back into the community because of a shortage of social care services
    – Accident and emergency departments can stabilise patients, but can’t move them to the appropriate speciality department because beds are blocked
    – Ambulances cannot move patients into accident and emergency departments because there is no more capacity
    – People who have heart attacks, strokes and other life-threatening emergencies cannot get an ambulance because the ambulances are queued up at the hospital.

    At the other end of this slow-motion collapse of the UK’s health systems is a growing backlog of untreated illness. In part this is due to the difficulties of accessing general practice doctors, or the difficulties in trying to diagnose conditions via Skype or Zoom. In part it is because patients – either through coronaphobia or genuinely not wanting to be a burden on an over-stretched system – have failed to seek early treatment for conditions like heart disease and cancer. As a result, more than 18 months after the first lockdown, severely ill people who waited too long are now presenting at accident and emergency departments with conditions which ought, ideally, to have been treated in the spring of 2020.

    Meanwhile, our idiots in charge still ignore prevention and early treatment.

    https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2021/11/12/on-health-and-shipping/

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  3. preptip: Kraft dinner is a poor choice for emergency food. The powdered cheese sauce oxidizes and changes from orange to brown with an off-taste at about 2 years past the best-by date. Plain pasta is a much better choice.

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      1. No I haven’t. I do have some freeze dried Mountain House meals that have cheese in them. I’ve eaten them many times when backpacking and they’re excellent.

        I like Mountain House because the taste is consistently good, it has a 25 year shelf life which is much better than competitors, and it serves a dual purpose of backpacking and emergency food.

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  5. A storm arriving tomorrow is expected to drop more rain than we normally get in the entire month of November.

    This will be the 3rd or 4th (it’s all a blur to me) major rain storm in about that many weeks.

    I’ve had to clean my gutters every week due to high winds and rain plugging them with fir needles.

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    1. Yeah, I keep seeing those storms go just north of us (central Oregon coast) for the last few weeks and keep wishing that we would get a little bit more than the bottom brush from it. Sure I have gotten 8 – 10″ in the last few weeks but that’s about half of what we need.
      AJ

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  6. Since this is the post for crazy dance videos, here’s one – this was created shortly after the Mueller investigation into possible collusion between Trump and the Russians during the 2016 elections was completed, and Trump was exonerated. Brilliant mashup of the Malhari dance scene from the 2015 Bollywood flick Bajirao Mastani.

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  7. El gato malo demolished another study today.

    Healthcare science is so bad it makes you wonder if you should believe anything they say.

    Where are the quality studies with honorable intentions?

    Where are the intelligent healthcare professionals with integrity?

    Thank god I went into engineering instead of medicine.

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/norwegian-covid-hospitalization-trajectory

    the bottom line here is this:
    – this is a junk study. all it’s headline results come from applying a risk model to raw data that was pretty much at parity.
    – it has all kinds of confounds including timing and variant.
    – the error injected here is irretrievable and unfixable and looks to me, especially when segmented by age to remove that issue from cross comparison, to heavily slant toward vaxx.
    – yet it still shows poor and sometimes disastrous results in ICU and deaths on age balances basis.
    – anyone trying to tell you this study proves that vaccination shortens hospital stay either cannot read a study or, more likely, did not even try.

    this is weak study that, on balance, makes vaccines look more problematic than helpful once you are in hospital, though, frankly, the whole thing is so bad i’d hesitate to draw any really strong conclusions.

    also note that this study says nothing about whether vaccines keep you out of the hospital in the first place, itself still a debated issue. i suspect they do on the order of 35-40%, at least for covid (though quite possibly not overall given the side effects) but i also suspect that efficacy is rapidly waning.

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  8. Peter Watts’ rant today…

    https://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=10064

    Prior to Glasgow, the UN set three major criteria for the success of COP26:
    – obtain commitments to cut CO2 emissions in half by 2030;
    – commit $100 billion annually in financial aid from rich nations to poor ones (a pledge already made back in 2015 at the Paris meeting but never honored because, you know, who gives a shit); and
    – ensure that half of that money goes to helping the developing world adapt to climate change.

    By the time festivities concluded over the weekend, not a single one of these objectives had been met. Not a single fucking one. By the UN’s own criteria, COP26—our “last chance to act”—was a failure.

    So nobody’s talking about “success” any more. How can they, when we’re still on track for 2.4°C even if every country at COP26 honors all its shiny new commitments? Progress is the new buzzword. The COPpers have promised to nudge the Titanic a few more degrees to the left; keep it up and we’ll have changed course enough to avoid the iceberg entirely in just another hour or two.

    Too bad we’re going to hit the fucking thing in thirty seconds.

    So what now? Our “last chance” has come and gone. Is there anything at all we can do now, except wring our hands and clutch our pearls and continue to pump out first-world babies with megalodon-sized carbon bootie-prints?

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    1. Grim indeed – I wasn’t surprised they couldn’t hit the first goal, but I am surprised they couldn’t hit #2 and #3.

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    1. Wow! The three days we hear about is now down to one day. What I’ve noticed in our recent grocery trips is that I see people constantly stocking the shelves and in the way. This is an upscale urban market – perhaps they don’t want anybody to see empty shelves and are just one step ahead of supply shortages?

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  11. Just listening to CBC this morning. People are phoning in with their response to the floods. One woman went on for minutes about saving her kids future by buying an EV.

    The floods and subsequent damage are not only the product of a very intense rainfall and a rain on snow event.

    Human sprawl over flood plains for housing, roads, agriculture and many more uses is an equally huge predicament.

    Large parts of BC Crown Land that has reasonably productive forests and is outside of Parks is tied up in Timber Tenures. As someone who did 20 years of logging/road building inspections for the Ministry of Forests I can safely say that cutting down large tracts of forest and building roads has made our landscape far less resilient to big weather events.

    Housing and transportation sprawl has an equally large effect.

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    1. I believe you’re right.

      I have a little first hand experience. I had a summer job during university building logging roads in Toba inlet. We were on a steep side hill with huge trees growing on about 2 meters of overburden over rock with lots of ground water. When blasting a cut we set off a large landslide. The cat operator was lucky to survive. I remember being amazed that I had not seen any wildlife despite a couple weeks of blasting but as soon as the landslide started I saw bears and deer running away in panic.

      Needless to say if I knew then what I know now I would have chosen a different summer job.

      I also remember going to Lulu Island on Sundays as child to buy farm produce. It had some of the best farm land in the province. In my lifetime we paved it over and now call it Richmond city.

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  12. A couple questions for anyone still trying to understand the reality of covid and what we should be doing.

    It seems to me that most countries don’t collect the data necessary to understand what’s going on, and the data we do have is often manipulated to serve agendas. In addition, the situation is complex, changes with time, and we don’t understand all of the science.

    I don’t have the expertise or time to do independent research and so I listen to people I trust. My criteria for trusting people includes high intelligence, curiosity about reality, openness to changing beliefs based on evidence, a good track record of integrity, and must be apolitical.

    The people I currently trust include Bret Weinstein, Chris Martenson, Malcolm Kendrick, Robert Malone, Geert Vanden Bossche, Ivor Cummins, and El gato malo.

    All of the people I trust are critics of current policies. I’m worried that I exist in an echo chamber and I’d like to add a few people to the list that support government policies.

    1) Would you please suggest a few people that meet my criteria for trust and that support current policies.

    Most of the people on my list do not do frequent original analysis of source data. The exception is El gato malo and he’s also the newest addition to my list so I don’t have a track record to judge his integrity. I do know El gato malo can be closed minded and has normal denial genes based on my peak oil discussion with him.

    Given that El gato malo seems to be doing the best original analysis, I find it very strange that I’ve never seen the other people on my list reference or praise his the work. So a simple question.

    2) Should we trust El gato malo?

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    1. My wife always criticizes me for being in an echo chamber. And I might be. I find no one on the left (in the U.S.) in MSM, or medicine that I trust (and this is from a former lifelong progressive liberal). The reason that is so is that information they put out reeks of propaganda, conflicts of interest (monetary or status), and status quo herd thinking/behavior and most of the time refuses to change if new information is presented.

      I have serious doubts about el gato malo (only e e cummings gets to do the lower case stuff). He fails the “open to changing beliefs base on the evidence and must be apolitical” tests in my book. I also have my doubts about about Ivor Cummins and Malcolm Kendrick. They may be right on Covid, but on diet/endocrinology/nutrition I am withholding judgment. Just finished Kendrick’s book – he might be right BUT everyone in “nutrition” science and “medical” science can find research “science” to back up their position. So I’m going to have to reread his book (and NO, not everyone is Alfred Wegener), some ideas are wrong and sometimes the consensus opinion is correct.

      I trust your opinion Rob (as any agenda you have is disclosed), but all trust has a qualified aspect to it. With El Gato Malo I don’t trust him(based on his interaction with you), not sure about Cummins or Kendrick. Even Chris Martenson has a subtle problem with hopium. Only I’m perfect;)
      AJ

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      1. Please tell your wife that we too are worried about being in an echo chamber. We’d like evidence that the mainstream consensus is correct. Ask her for the name of a really smart person with no conflicts of interest that analyzes the data to confirm our government policies make sense.

        I too don’t like El gato malo’s political rants, but I guess I’m more tolerant because I know that if you’re ignorant about energy (as he is) then it’s easy to blame socialism for runaway debt and government spending.

        It is hard to find anyone without flaws. If I ignored everyone that denied denial and/or human overshoot I would be alone except for you and a couple others that frequent this site. 🙂

        Which Kendrick book did you read? I read The Great Cholesterol Con.

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    2. Hey Rob, I only discovered this blog a few months ago after following various peak oil blogs for over 15 years now and enjoy reading a new take on things but I do think you are in echo chamber territory at times. Sam Harris is an intelligent guy who is in favour of current policy and has been very critical of Bret Weinstein. Nassim Taleb seems to attack those who are critical of the vaccines. Daniel Dennett is another very intelligent guy who as far as I am aware is in favour of current policy.

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      1. Hi and welcome.

        I’ve read all of Sam Harris’s books and listened to his podcast for years. He’s a very smart guy but like most polymaths is in complete denial of overshoot and what needs to be done. I quit him when he refused to debate Bret Weinstein. All I’ve heard him say is we need to trust our government. Can you point us to his best argument supporting current covid policies?

        I respect Taleb and have read many of his books. I did not know he had weighed in on covid. Will do some searching but if you know of a a good link, please provide it.

        Ditto on Dennett.

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        1. Thanks Rob, I only occasionally listen to Sam Harris if there is something or someone on that interests me. He discusses his support of the vaccine roll out in his podcast https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/256-contagion-bad-ideas I have read a couple of Taleb books but to be honest I don’t understand half of what he tweets (And I’m not sure half his followers do either) but he certainly isn’t attacking the vaccine roll out or rna vaccines in particular. I like to keep an eye out for what intelligent people think about the current situation and will post anything more specific if I stumble across anything while searching. These were just a few guys that came to mind that I value the thoughts of.

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          1. Thanks. I don’t understand most of Taleb’s tweet’s either. He seems to be a bit of an arrogant prick that likes to be obtuse to give the impression of higher intelligence.

            Please do post here anything good you find from intelligent truth seeking people that support our government covid policies. We are swimming in stuff from intelligent people that are critical of our leaders. It would be nice to get some balance.

            It’s shameful (and telling) that Harris would not debate Weinstein.

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      2. I can’t find anything current by Taleb. In the early days when everyone thought vaccines were 90+% effective and we didn’t have any VAERS data he came out in support of the vaccines. Have you seen anything from Taleb that reflects current data?

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      3. Ordinarily I agree that following a broad consensus of experts is a reliable way to conduct one’s life. I think one is justified in disagreeing when (1) At least some well qualified dissenters are publishing or attempting to publish contrary data and liase with mainstream sources, and (2) significant non-rational motivations are in play (i.e. conflicts of interest, fear, political loyalties, profits). I submit that both the above are true for Covid.

        Here are a few things I think are pretty obvious about COVID:

        Deaths from COVID have likely been over-reported.
        Consequences of the vaccines have likely been underreported in the VAERS system
        The vaccines offer short term protection from serious side effects.
        The vaccines do not offer long term protection from contracting COVID, experiencing serious symptoms, or spreading COVID.

        Given the above I think it’s reasonable to conclude that (1) on a societal level vaccination isn’t effective, and therefore shouldn’t be treated as important since only effective action should be important, and (2) on an individual basis the risk case is not strong for most (e.g. people take similar levels or risk to being unvaccinated every day without blinking an eye).

        Anyone advocating policy should have to state their goal or exit strategy

        Given Rt = R0 * S * C
        Rt = Reproductive rate at time t
        R0 = Basic reproductivity
        S = Susceptibility of the population
        C = Effectiveness of containment

        In what way can we achieve Rt of less than 1?

        Since “S” is not permanently impacted by vaccination I submit that neither the current vaccination regime nor containment measures are doing the job. Best case scenario is that this thing will be a threat until we have natural immunity – the only thing we can influence is the speed of getting there vs the costs in lives and livelihoods.

        I think that’s all a reasonable person needs to know – putting aside all the worst fears along with the unrealistic hopes of COVID zero.

        I advocate vaccines for those who want them, early treatment for all, and no restrictions on movement except within vulnerable populations (i.e. nursing homes). This might be the wrong call, but I don’t think anybody else has a better idea. That might seem hubristic to some. To which I’d say look around you – isn’t it obvious that it’s not working and not going to work?

        Instead we’re going to double down.

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        1. Well said and thanks for the education on the Rt equation.

          I would add to your list of things we should be doing:
          1) Education and promotion of diet/supplements for strengthening immunity (vitamin D, vitamin C, weight loss, etc.)
          2) More education on prevention (avoid close proximity with poor ventilation for extended periods of time, etc.).
          3) Education that the science supporting mask effectiveness is weak at best (to avoid over confidence when wearing a mask indoors in close proximity).
          4) More education that if you are young and/or healthy the risk of serious illness is less than xyz other things we do all the time.
          5) Access to safe over the counter drugs like Ivermectin for early treatment at home.
          6) Validate and promote early treatment protocols for use in hospitals.
          7) Affordable testing to tell people if they have recovered from covid so they can be more confident about having natural immunity.
          8) Accelerate the development and approval of traditional protein based vaccines for which we have 75+ years of excellent safety history.
          9) Make public all data used to approve the existing vaccines.
          10) Have a fresh look at VAERS data using the same criteria used for previous vaccines.
          11) Convene a panel of unconflicted experts to investigate and report on Bossche’s concerns about immune escape variants.
          12) More focus on all cause mortality to assess effectiveness of policies.
          13) Punish those responsible for creating the virus.

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    3. I have learned a lot during this pandemic from Dr. John Campbell on YouTube. I believe he checks all of your “trust” boxes Rob.

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      1. Thank you. Campbell is good and I watched him every day for many months but I quit because he is time consuming and was too often in the details and not often enough taking a big picture view of issues like all cause mortality and VAERS.

        Does he now step back once in a while and look at the big picture? If yes, can you please point us to a good episode?

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  14. Friend Panopticon today with a good global update on energy and the economy.

    This is useless, “head in the clouds” academia and stagflation is not where we are ultimately headed. Rather we face losing the ability to grow food at scale and possibly the total implosion of the financial system via deflationary death spiral even in advance of that.

    https://climateandeconomy.com/2021/11/17/17th-november-2021-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/

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    1. I can see a scenario where the U.S. stock market will be hitting all-time highs in the weeks just before real food shortages appear in the U.S. Tech stocks will lead the final rally as the Federal Reserve “prints” the last infusion of liquidity through bond AND equity purchases. Of course, you will have to sell most of your stocks to buy what’s left on the grocery shelves when the food and currency panic begins.

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  16. My wife would have no one to point to except the MSM. She always got ahead by believing the status quo and not questioning authority or the MSM story. If you don’t rock the boat and do superior work you too can be in the 5% that does well providing services to the top 1%. Me, I always disagreed with authority and figure they are self-serving/corrupt/irrational , that’s what landed me here!
    I read Kendrick’s new book, “The Clot Thickens”. He might be right about the endocrinology of atherosclerosis, and I’m sure he is right about big Pharma’s pushing statins as the “cure” (that and “treatment” with stents is where the money is). I am less sure about his nutrition advice. I suspect we evolved in a calorie restricted environment and hence have a drive to secure cheap calories (lowest EROEI)-we go for sugars, fats and simple carbs because they are rare in the hunter/gatherer environment. I don’t think that means a carb limited high fat, protein diet is optimal. Diet advice is always suspect because people have a vested interest in rationalizing what they want to eat(me too). The “science” in this area seems to be so voluminous that you can find something to support any position.
    Good luck with the rains.
    AJ

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    1. Yes, the topic of diets is dodgy. Everyone has an agenda and the science is squishy.

      I recently read the book Diet Cults by Matt Fitzgerald. It’s not very well written but his central point that one of the reasons our species has taken over the planet is that we can thrive on just about any diet is probably true.

      We had a couple nice days of weather but the rain has resumed today.

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      1. Glad you read it – he comes from a running / sports nutrition angle and I liked his points about olympic athletes. If there was such a thing as a performance enhancing diet, they would have found it. They tend to eat large quantities of whatever the ordinary diet is in their country.

        I also liked his approach to invert the traditional “don’t eat this” mentality and instead focus on those things which are essential to eat and build from there:

        Essential
        Good
        Fine
        Minimize
        Avoid

        A deeper dive into the historical psychology of food is Food Morals and Meaning. It’s a wild one tracing the history of how society moralizes food choices. It’s more of an academic book on a Focault style.

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    2. Hi AJ,
      I read The great cholesterol con by kendrick. I think he’s right. It’s a con. I thought I knew what caused heart disease. I’ve read quite a few books on heart disease over the years. Malcolm Kendrick completely blew up what I thought I knew.

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        1. As a lawyer I participated in many depositions of M.D.s over the years. As a group they were the most arrogant and thought they were the brightest bulb in the room. IMHO the only group that has more hubris is physicists.;).
          AJ

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  17. Rob under current Forestry Laws the event you described is the only way a company can be charged for causing a landslide. Once a company is completed logging the road they built becomes a “wilderness road”. The requirement to maintain a wilderness road is “only to the extent necessary to ensure there is no material adverse effect on a forest resource”. There is no definition for the term “material adverse effect” in the law.

    There are literally thousands of kilometers of unmaintained logging roads in BC. Without maintenance ditches and culverts become plugged and landslides follow. Often these slides become debris torrents in creek channels and the creek channels end up scoured to bedrock. The net effect on watersheds is increased runoff, increased erosion and sediment deposited into fish habitat.

    2 years ago I took a helicopter flight over southern Vancouver Island after a major storm event. The logged watersheds were all running chocolate brown water and I could even see large sediment plumes into the ocean. What was more interesting is the unlogged watersheds like the Carmanah Valley has creeks that were running clear.

    So while climate change accelerates these erosion processes, clearcut logging and roads increase the runoff rate in watersheds.

    Cut more trees down to build more McMansions that we wont have the energy to heat down the road.

    Smart?

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    1. Thanks, good points.

      When I was a kid families were happy with a 900 sq ft house. Today, double that is considered small.

      I expect wood will be our main source of heat when we’ve burned all the fossil energy later this century, but we’ll need a much smaller population for wood to be sustainable.

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      1. 450 used to be a normal sized house New Zealand, now it’s over 800. We don’t have basements in NZ, but we do have attached garages

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    2. Peter,
      Back in the late 90s I worked on an archaeological survey in the Williams Lake area and saw a lot of the same damage from clear cuts. Desecrated landscapes like in Lord of the Rings. I imagine it’s gotten worse since then.

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  18. Too bad eugyppius has moved behind a paywall. He seems to be an intelligent apolitical truth seeker. If anyone is paying him for full access, a summary would be appreciated.

    https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/we-should-think-less-about-viruses

    I suspect that I buried the lede in my last piece, so I want to address some of the push-back.

    First of all, on the vaccines and whether they work or not: The basic picture that emerges from all of the research to date, and that experience with coronavirus vaccines in animals more or less confirms, is this: The vaccines provide partial protection against infection for a few months. Surprisingly, this protection eventually fades into negative territory. Thereafter, they are still effective against severe outcomes, but here too their protection wanes, and it wanes fastest of all in the most vulnerable groups. We can only hope that here, at least, the decay stops at zero. Against all of that must be weighed an array of negative effects, the most obvious being that they increase transmission and that they injure and even kill a nontrivial number of people. While it seems the vaccines can reduce official Corona death numbers, their introduction has coincided with slightly elevated all-cause mortality almost everywhere. The numbers might swing in their favour over the winter, but in the longer term, it is hard to see how mass vaccination won’t turn out to have been a huge mistake.

    But here I didn’t intend to re-litigate the problem of the vaccines and their failure. I am more interested in exploring how poorly conducted vaccination campaigns will produce confounded statistics that wildly overstate how fantastic the vaccines are. Those places where the vaccines seem to be working rather less well than advertised, like the United Kingdom, seem to be places where vaccinators have worked harder to ensure uptake in the most at-risk cohorts. I’m sure the UK data are still confounded, but the German statistics, which present a rosier picture, are even less reliable. This is what happens when the oldest and the sickest accumulate disproportionately among the unvaccinated. This gives rise to a small, pernicious paradox: Vaccine efficacy would look worse, had the vaccinators done a better job; but because of their hidden failure, the vaccines look better than they are, thus confirming and deepening faith in vaccination.

    Information hazards are pieces of information that pose a risk, in and of themselves, to those who know them. The concept has been elaborated mostly in fiction, but I believe it has much real-world utility. I have been pondering for a long time, how our entire response to Corona every day grows more bizarre and detached from any conceivable, realisable goal or rational purpose. I understand why many detect behind this broken response the machinations of evil conspirators, and indeed it often seems that all of this is being managed for maximum chaos and destruction. I’ve tried to offer different explanations: Perverse bureaucratic incentives, managerial blindness and iterative institutional processes surely all play a role here, but a failure this profound will have many facets.

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  19. Chris Martenson says that we Canadians need to move to the Dominican Republic to obtain 10 times better covid health care. 🙂

    Also nice data comparing covid risk versus other day to day risks.

    Also glad he’s focusing on all cause mortality.

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    1. As a fellow Canadian subjected daily to the constant drone of the hermetically-sealed mono-narrative regarding Covid, I’m beginning to feel a little like Winston Smith in Orwell’s seminal novel. The best word I can come up with to describe my own internal discomfort and bewilderment is “vertigo”.

      “You are a slow learner, Winston.”
      “How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
      “Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”

      Apparently, to simply question this narrative, to remain skeptical and to insist on the retention of an inquiring mind in these times of universal deceit is tantamount to treason. Skeptics of any kind regarding the official narrative are conveniently “othered” away by conflating this honest skepticism with xenophobia, violence, misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, anti-islam sentiments and any other high currency perjorative that can be mustered.

      Rob, I gently implore you to listen to this segment from CBC Radio’s “The Current” that aired this morning. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-63-the-current/clip/15879482-addressing-threats-sent-doctors-pandemic

      I am well and truly chilled.

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      1. Thanks. I listened to the first 10 minutes. Completely fact free including no information on what the doctors who where threatened did prior to the threats, nor what the threats actually said.

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        1. There is a strange correlation I have noticed over the last – say – 20 years, but the ambient and omnipresent gaslighting have prevented me from saying it publicly: as Canada has become more and more an unreformable Petro-State, all its public institutions, including and perhaps especially the CBC, have become narrative-captured.

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            1. I am such a proud Canadian I now use an old 80’s radio pumping out said drivel of CBC as a night-time racoon deterrent in my chicken coop. Hope that is some consolation.

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    2. Chris Martenson´s videos are always very informative. In this video, I especially liked the risk comparison by age. So my chance of dying of Covid is somewhere between choking on food and drowning, two things I never even considered as a possible cause of death for myself.

      Unfortunately, the social and political pressure here in Germany is becoming ever greater as cases are mounting again. I work in home office most of the time, but the last time I visited my employer, I talked with one of my buddies at the company about not being vaccinated. She told me: “Even though you are not vaccinated (e.g. the devil), you are still a nice person.” Starting tomorrow, I have to do a test every time I want to go to the office and I am officially banned from the christmas party of the company due to 2G+ rules.

      My wife is also putting preasure on me to get vaccinated as soon as possible. This will be even harder to resist than the workspace restrictions.

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        1. May I ask what did impress you about German leadership, since I am pretty disillusioned by the whole system.

          The leaders just needed the rise in cases to adjust their policies again. Here, in Lower Saxony we had for the last few month a system with 4 warning levels (0,1,2,3). For most of the time we stayed on level 0, which meant more or less no restriction. Since 2-3 weeks, we had been on warning level 1, never ever coming near level 2 or 3. This system will now be scraped for a new system with 2G rules nearly everywhere (details will be provided tomorrow). Since the old system wasn´t even fully used, why bother with a new system?

          In addition, we had a “scandal” in Germany with a prominent unvaccinated soccer player. The politicians have made a rule especially for him that soccer players also need to follow 2G rules. It seems like they completely lost touch with reality and are just trying to double down on their plan, which is not working very well.

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          1. So your government has not provided data to show the vaccines are effective at stopping spread and reducing all-cause mortality?

            Germany is one of the only countries in the world that actually tried to do something about their CO2 emissions. It didn’t (and can’t) work because it’s impossible to enjoy our current lifestyles without fossil energy but at least Germany actually tried. Everyone else just pretends they’re doing something.

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            1. I am not aware of any government data showing the stop of spreading and reduced all cause mortality. Currently, they use the incidence again to scare people. The propaganda has reached such a low level that our healthcare minister has said that at the end of winter everybody is either vaccinated, recovered from illness or dead. It cannot get more ridiculous.

              I agree that Germany at least tries to reduce emissions. We will see how successful the „Energiewende“ will be. As we already have the highest electricity prices in the EU, I could envision a backlash in the near future due to people not being able anynore to pay the bills.

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  21. It’s tempting to imagine a global conspiracy to constrain oil consumption with covid fear except I’m pretty sure the idiots running my province (and country) don’t have a clue what’s going on with energy. How can they be part of a conspiracy when they don’ t have a clue what’s going on?

    Comparing the exports over October and H1 November to the average 2019 level, shows that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are already exporting 0.5mbd more than the pre-Covid, pre-cut level. And these two countries are the only ones in the entire OPEC+ group, which can make this claim. Other Middle Eastern and the Caspian countries are sending a combined 1.2mbd or about 10% less crude to global markets than in 2019. All other countries are exporting a combined 2.6mbd or one third less than just two years ago – a dramatic decline.

    How likely is it that individual OPEC+ countries hold spare capacity? According to Argus Media data, all Middle Eastern countries have been producing below their allowance in October. What would hold countries like Iraq and Kuwait back from producing more in the current market environment, where all major consuming markets cry for more oil, and any government in the world would appreciate additional income?

    I would argue that apart from Saudi Arabia and the UAE only Russia is a candidate for spare capacity. But the Russian energy minister has recently stated that 2019 production levels will only be reached again in 2023/2024 (Argus Media), axing any hopes for relevant volumes from that player. Meanwhile, the Saudi oil minister has warned about the lack of global spare capacity, while stating that the 1mbd extra raising capacity in Saudi Arabia to 13mbd will only be reached in 2027 (Reuters).

    According to the EIA, global spare capacity in October was 6.2mbd, while according to the Saudi oil minister it is 3-4mbd. I would argue we have at best 3mbd, up to 2mbd in Saudi Arabia and less than 1mbd in Russia and the UAE combined. If demand were really to reach 2019 levels soon and declines at many producers continue at recent rates, most of that cushion could be used up within the next 12 months.

    https://peakoil.com/production/musings-on-opec-spare-capacity

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  24. V8 half ton crew cab pickups getting 12 mpg is now a family/commuter vehicle here. The rationing limit is 30 liters. That will last 2-3 days for each family.

    It’s a good dress rehearsal.

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      1. I visited the USA during the 90s and was shocked about the amount of gasoline the American cars needed. We were driving a car which needed 27 liters of gasoline to drive 100 miles (which is nearly three times as much as my current car needs). Basically, we were refueling the car every day. The gasoline price back then was also really cheap compared to Germany. It was around 1,20$ per gallon, which would be around 0,3$ per liter. In Germany we paid around 1,5 Mark (0,65$) per Liter. So, the gasoline was 50% cheaper in the USA. No wonder that it was wasted in large amounts.

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  25. Richard Heinberg today revisits his 2011 book The End of Growth.

    He got the timing wrong by underestimating how much debt we would create. As did I.

    https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-11-21/the-end-of-growth-ten-years-after/

    Clearly, growth did not end in 2011. China’s GDP clocked in at about 6 trillion US dollars in 2010; today it’s well over twice that size, at 17T$. A decade ago, US GDP stood at 15T$; today it has risen to nearly 23T$. During the same period, world GDP increased from roughly 66T$ to 85T$. In 2010, the world’s annual energy usage stood at about 550 quadrillion BTUs (“quads”); by 2019 (prior to the pandemic—more about that below), that amount had risen to roughly 625 quads.

    Today, global debt levels are higher than they were just prior to the 2008 financial crash. Our current financial environment has been called the “everything bubble.” The global debt-to-GDP ratio has grown to about 360 percent, a level economists in the past have called “untenable,” with debt ballooning especially in Japan, the US, and China. Countries have used debt to maintain adequate fossil fuel supplies and to prevent the collapse of their financial systems. But the productivity of new debt (i.e., the increase in GDP resulting from each new dollar of debt) is declining, which suggests that the effort to maintain economic growth by purely financial means is subject to the law of diminishing returns.

    In short, leaders of government, finance, and industry seem to have borrowed their way to another decade of economic growth—which was mostly squandered in profit-taking rather than being spent preparing for the societal challenges that the inevitable and fast-approaching termination of growth will entail. It’s now widely acknowledged that the bailouts and debt sprees of the past decade overwhelmingly buoyed up billionaires, while, in terms of wealth and income, nearly everyone else was either treading water or sinking. More recently, a wild card (the pandemic) has thrown the global economy further into disarray, with billionaires again benefitting disproportionately.

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  26. Hey Rob – in case you were feeling sentimental & nostalgic for your old pal Apnea Man, I think I found him commenting on Rifters under a different nom de plume. He has a flair, shall we say, for a dainty turn of phrase and a penchant for using choice adjectives.

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    1. Thanks. I scanned the Rifters comments but did not see him. I did see many people with many words trying to be intelligent and concerned about our predicament but not once simply said we need to reduce our population and consumption. It’s amazing that most aware people can’t cut through the bullshit and get to the core.

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  27. Oily Stuff blog is run by someone working on the ground in the oil industry.

    https://www.oilystuffblog.com/forum/forum-stuff/you-can-t-be-serious

    This comment seems to confirm Ludlum’s and Tverberg’s thesis: The oil price is too high for the economy to grow and too low for oil companies to invest in increased production.

    Checkmate.

    So now we are trying to get other countries to release from their “SPR’s” also to send a message to OPEC?

    What message is there to send? EIA and IEA say the oil market will be oversupplied in 2022!

    $75-80 WTI is not that high anyway. The idea that any shale works well at $50 WTI and below is crap. $50-65 is just paying the bills.

    P.S. You know you are in trouble when the president of the United States has to ask the paramount leader of China to release oil from its strategic reserve.

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  28. I’m very worried about the tone and direction the disagreement over vaccination policies is taking around the world. Both sides are becoming more militant and neither is using the correct arguments to support their position.

    IF covid is a serious threat to a significant portion of the population AND IF the vaccines prevent spread AND IF the vaccines are safe, THEN if makes sense to require everyone to be vaccinated.

    The people who support mandatory vaccination present no evidence to support these three requirements, and ignore contrary evidence.

    The people who oppose mandatory vaccination focus on freedom of choice which is invalid for public health policies, and inflames the people who support vaccination as a public good.

    Everyone should calm down and focus on the evidence for:
    1) how serious is the threat and to whom?
    2) do the vaccines prevent spread?
    3) are the vaccines safe?

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    1. Well said, Rob. Both sides of this disagreement think they’re 100% correct, which of course neither is. This creates a very big problem with a ton (more) unnecessary suffering than if we were rational about this concern. But we all (here) know that for humans it’s par for the course. I don’t think we have it in us to follow your excellent suggestions above.

      Sadly, I’ve become much more accepting of unnecessary suffering than I used to be. I’m too exhausted to continue feeling terrible about how much of it happens. There’s a baseline level of suffering that every human will have by simply existing, but vastly more suffering is caused by the astonishingly stupid behavior of our species. This will continue until we are no more.

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      1. Our species really is driven by beliefs. Truth is a nice to have over on the sidelines of the big debates.

        Every morning I listen to the global news and tensions seem to be rising on a daily basis. This could lead to a very bad place.

        On a personal note, the difference in beliefs has harmed about half of the few friendships I have.

        It’s not good, and getting worse.

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    2. I agree with you Rob. A lot of arguments around mandates miss the point. An additional couple of points:
      1) All of the vaccines on offer for covid are still in trials. By mandating the current vaccines you are forcing people to participate in an experiment.
      2) Do alternatives treatments exist? The current narrative is that there are none. I beg to differ.

      A vaccine has recently been developed for malaria. Good news. A better story which is somewhere on the internet is how China eradicated malaria. From over 300,000 deaths a year to none. All without a vaccine. An amazing feat. Google it….. it’s out there somewhere.

      https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712?fbclid=IwAR1Tcai54pK-20K2NSUlakLuUbiJUOWLs7HU_uxQYuKKSkPb_uDNHdSyWN0

      I came across this paper. I’m not sure how worried we should be about this. Potentially very. I was tempted to put this in the comments of Malcolm kendrick’s blog but didn’t.

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      1. Thanks, I don’t have the skills to assess the paper but I do know that the VAERS database shows many more bad side effects than for any previous vaccine. In addition, all-cause mortality, which is the stat I most trust, seems to be going up rather than down, as the vaccination rate increases.

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  29. Just learned some really interesting information through the grapevine. As everyone knows copper will be in very high demand for EV’s and renewables (even though they won’t help at this point). I have a friend who writes articles for mining companies and mining exploration companies. He is very knowledgeable in the industry. He just told me the 2 largest copper deposits on planet earth are in Papua New Guinea.

    Check out the travel advisory for Papua New Guinea right now, unrest, kidnappings, theft, murder, natural disasters.

    It takes years to go from the exploration phase to opening an operational mine. Could be very difficult to operate here.

    Meanwhile as climate change intensifies and fossil fuels deplete……

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    1. Thanks, that is interesting.

      The concentrations of remaining copper ore are low and falling as explained in Chris Martenson’s Crash Course. I believe the only way we can obtain any new non-recycled copper today is to apply large quantities of diesel to get it. New copper will probably disappear when diesel becomes scarce and/or too expensive.

      I tried to link to Martenson’s crash course but it appears he forgot to pay his internet hosting bill, or maybe someone is getting serious about censoring him. 🙂

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      1. Pre-1982 U.S. cent coins are 95% copper; there are still plenty in circulation. I’ve been accumulating them, and I’ve heard that there are investor-hoarders that have them by the ton.

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  31. Like

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  33. I haven’t ordered anything direct from China via AliExpress for a few months so I checked in today to see what’s happening with prices.

    A few items I have bought many times over the last 6 years of stable prices are up about 50%.

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    1. Hey folks I’ve been following for a while but didn’t have anything relevant to share (until now!)

      A friend works for a cargo company and send me a few articles calling out some strange goings on in China, it looks suspiciously like there is a coordinated effort to further disrupt supply chains out of China:

      https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-11-24/china-s-seven-week-port-quarantine-is-blocking-shipping-recovery

      https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-11-24-china-blocks-access-to-maritime-shipping-data-ft-reports/amp/

      Blocking that shipping data will make planning and coordination of shipping traffic pretty difficult, probably slowing down supply chains even further…

      Interesting times for sure!

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        1. The Daily Maverick info is copy pasted from FT.com which is also behind a pay wall, I got sent a PDF and tried to find a free source with the gist..

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    1. Yes, nothing but more and more weird (BAD) weather. I hope that the economy crashes as that is the only thing I can think of that will keep more of that fossil carbon in the ground and reduce the population (and maybe, but probably not save the biosphere?). However, such a crash could/will/may be BAD for all of us in untold ways . . . no more food, no more bank accounts, no more commerce, potentially violent armed neighbors/gangs/governments . . . plus having to deal with droughts, floods, forest fires, hurricanes. Wow, what a wonderful world. Onward toward extinction?
      Oh, Happy Thanksgiving to all you U.S. residents!!!! (be thankful).
      AJ

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      1. First time I’ve seen these thanks.

        The first link’s summary of facts seems consistent with what I’ve been able to grok from many sources.

        It’s nice to have concise summary for reference.

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  37. The Australian intelligence agency (ONA) wrote a confidential assessment of climate risks in 1981, which I find has been remarkably accurate in its predictions, as well as insightful as to why climate change would be of concern to the government:

    Click to access ona-climate-1981.pdf

    The concern of the authors was not on how to actually address the problem of reducing emissions, but rather the concern was the risk public awareness of the problem and subsequent demands for action would cause the Australian coal industry this century.

    It’s reasonable to believe that intelligence agencies of other western nations would have generated similar reports around the same time.

    An article on the assessment:
    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/28/australias-spy-agency-predicted-the-climate-crisis-40-years-ago-and-fretted-about-coal-exports

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  38. It seems Tim Morgan also thinks we should now be at DEFCON 1.

    https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/216-its-now/

    What this asymmetric inflation means is that, as energy-based prosperity deteriorates, an obvious financial corollary is a rise in the cost of essentials. As well as causing public discontent, this also leaves the consumer with a reduced ability to purchase non-essential goods and services.

    At the critical moment of impact, then, we should expect to see two important trends.

    One of these is a rise in the cost of essentials, and the other is volumetric weakness in the economy, most obviously in the use and delivery of physical goods, and in deteriorating metrics in discretionary sectors.

    This is exactly what we’re witnessing now.

    Moreover, rises in the cost of essentials have a direct bearing on decisions made around monetary policy. Consumers, who are also voters, might not make much of a fuss if the prices of discretionary purchases rise, but will react very strongly indeed if the cost of their utility bills, of filling up their car and of the weekly purchase of groceries moves markedly upwards.

    It doesn’t take all that much inflation in the cost of necessities to create popular demands for action, demands which, in policy terms, can be met only by raising interest rates, and by easing back on, or reversing, asset purchase programmes.

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  39. Hussman says nothing like our current situation has ever happened before. “Not calling a top” calling a top. https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc211120/

    “Here and now, market conditions are characterized by:

    The most extreme valuations in U.S. history, on the measures we find best-correlated with actual subsequent market returns over the past century, and even in recent decades, coupled with lopsided bullish sentiment and historic levels of margin leverage;
    Deterioration and divergence across measures of market internals that we believe to be reliable gauges of investor psychology toward speculation versus risk-aversion;
    The largest preponderance of overextended syndromes – typically associated with intermediate or cyclical market peaks – that we’ve ever observed in history.
    Not a forecast. Not a “limit.” Not a market call. Just sharing what we’re seeing.

    Still, it’s fair to add that we’ve never seen such a thing.”

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    1. Thanks.

      Now consider that Hussman, like every mainstream analyst, is oblivious to the fact that this is the first time in 4 billion years that one species has dominated every niche on the planet and is in severe overshoot.

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      1. Yep, as far as I know. He has appeared several times with Chris Martensen over the years, so I would assume he is aware of at least some of our issues. However – he has not commented on these issues publicly from what I’ve seen. At least part of that may be due to his regulated role running a hedge fund. Many of the serious (i.e. not just youtubers) people in this space try to keep their comments close to their fiduciary role in public.

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        1. Thanks.

          His viewpoint is almost entirely directed at market valuation and technical indicators. He scant mentions the economy, nothing on China, nothing on global currencies, nothing about crypto, nothing on the housing market, nothing on corporate debt and where we are in the cycle, nothing about consumer sentiment and no mention of inflation hysteria.

          And nothing about climate shifting a gear, peak oil, peak coal, peak natural gas, peak fertilizer, peak food, and peak idiots leading us.

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          1. Yeah, I agree with what you say. I read everything Mac10 writes, too. I think he underrates the value of credibility, however. If one has a goal to simply speak truth and make a moral record, vs trying to motivate action, it becomes important. The credibility issue has plagued the overshoot sphere.

            Calling the top (of a market or civilization) has real effects on people’s lives. To most people it makes a material difference whether collapse is now, or in five or ten years or more. I think it’s soon, yet I still go to work every day. Why not retire early? I could live for 5-10 years off savings or so. But then I’d be eating dog food. Hedging my bets, much like hedged equities. I try to think in terms of 50/50 – living my life 50% like collapse is imminent and 50% BAU with some bumps along the way.

            Does it make more sense to pay off a house and live debt free or leverage to the ears assuming you’ll never have to pay it back? I just don’t know.

            If I hadn’t been so bearish for the last ten years, for instance, I’d have more options now. Yet if things go sideways in short order I will regret having spent the last years of BAU at a desk job.

            I think one denial related phenomenon is unrealistic surety. JMG for instance points out many in the collapse aware sphere can only think of BAU vs fast collapse. Similarly Mac10 seems to primarily think in financial terms about a crash from a margin call. What about 10-20 years where the markets go nowhere in an interesting way, and standards of living and the environment grind down?

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            1. Well said. My mental model of the world is that it’s a very complex system that is simplifying and becoming unstable due to insufficient affordable energy and too much debt. Anything can happen, including another decade of grinding denial. The history of our species says there’ll be a nasty war when necessities become scarce, which could change everything quickly if a desperate nation unleashes the nuclear demons.

              I feel sorry for young people trying to decide if they should leverage up to buy a home or wait for a correction.

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              1. All well said. And yet my fear is that even if somehow somewhere the nukes are not unleashed what happens when countries start breaking down and current reactors go Chernobyl? How long will nuke reactor workers continue to show up when they don’t get paid? or the grid goes down for a few days and the backup diesel runs out. One of the slight advantages of the west coast of North America is that there are no reactors immediately west of us (except Japanese and Chinese). In the end we will all get some radiation, some more than others.
                AJ

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            2. I agree with your analysis, but retired 5 years early (with a significant hit to long term social security payments – that aren’t going to be around forever anyway). I am debt free, but no one is immune to an economic collapse. I own multiple rentals (free and clear) – but there is no such thing as “own”. If not rented, how will I pay taxes, insurance, upkeep? People lost everything in the Great Depression for want of having enough cash to pay taxes on property. I see loss as inevitable.
              I keep thinking I should have bought that diesel tractor 5 years ago on payments because in a collapse I might owe nothing – and they sure are handy for farming.
              Me, I think collapse will probably be slow at first then rapid as hyper-connected, lean, just-in-time falls dramatically apart from “want of a horse”! Could be wrong as the fools in charge have pulled this rabbit (growth and BAU) out of the many times before. But, I think the fools don’t truly know what they are doing or the ramifications of what they do.
              AJ

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              1. Sounds to me like you made some very smart moves. People have to live somewhere. You’ll be one of the lords to which the peasants have to tithe a portion of their harvest in return for shelter and land.

                It’s not too late for a gas powered BCS walk behind tractor. Reliable, easy to maintain, easy on fuel, and I’m betting we have access to gasoline longer than diesel which will probably be redirected to large scale farms and trucks.

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                1. Currently stewarding 44 acres, with a BCS walk behind as my “tractor”. Chose perennials and low input management style to make this work. Quite happy with the BCS.

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                  1. Nice. That’s a lot of land for a BCS!

                    Someone put a lot of thought into the design of the BCS. It’s a very flexible tool. This year the farm I assist bought a flail mower attachment for their BCS which I used to clear heavy brush on both sides of the fence line before electrifying the fence to keep the bears out of the berries.

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                2. I’m not sure I made smart moves. The smart move would have been to put all my assets into the stock market (casino) 5 years ago and gotten out when Covid hit. I’m lucky sometimes, stupid most of the time. Owning real estate is great as long as the system continues, after it falls apart it is a mill stone around one’s neck.
                  I like BCS tractors but think a shovel, hoe and rake are the way to go. Sure it’s lots of work, but what else is there to do during and after collapse? My fear is that I won’t even be able to grow enough food to survive and will be reduced to hunter/gatherer if not starvation in short order.
                  AJ

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                    1. I looked on Ebay and found an Old hand crank bench grinder. It’s good for fast jobs but I like my whetstone for getting a sharp edge on the scythe. And wow is using the scythe to cut grass (as I did this past summer) so much more physical labor than I have done in one job in ages. It’s far easier to use a riding lawn mower;) But the scythe is fun too (in a perverse sort of way.
                      AJ

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  40. Update to the peak diesel series on Antonio Turiel’s blog by guest Rafael Fernández Díez.

    https://crashoil.blogspot.com/2021/11/el-pico-del-diesel-edicion-de-2021.html

    the maximum production [of diesel] was 26 Mb / day and today we are at 23 Mb / day, which represents a decline of 11% since 2018, in line with the setbacks studied previously, and that places us at the same level of production that we had in 2008, 13 years ago.

    The decline that we are now suffering is also adjusting to a straight line but the inclination of this is more pronounced than the uphill one, that is, it rose more slowly than what we are now going down. This phenomenon has been studied and reported by Ugo Bardi, in the Seneca Effect, why decline is faster than growth and does not bode well.

    …it should be remembered that not all oil is the same. Light, unconventional oil is not used to distill medium or heavy products, such as diesel, fuel oil or other even heavier products. But this light oil, which has flooded the market in the last decade, has compensated for the production of total crude oil and has hidden that good oil, which serves to make diesel, has been much more than ten years since it reached its productive peak.

    A personal observation. Three years ago a friend bought a Ford F150 pickup with it’s new super efficient diesel engine. Recently Ford discontinued this engine despite screaming demand claiming they need the factory space to make electric trucks.

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    1. I have long thought that after overall oil production, diesel production volume would be the key metric showing where the economy/civilization really is, and is going. Diesel is used in most of the internal combustion engines/machines used to dig up from the ground all our energy resources, all our metals and minerals, transport them to manufacturing, and deliver them to consumers. I don’t assume there is straight correlation, but if diesel production is down 11% since 2018, is resource extraction and material through-put in the economy also down something like 11%? (It could be an even larger decrease given the nature of leverage provided to human labor from burning diesel in internal combustion engines.)

      Perhaps this material throughput decrease has been hidden from us as we worked through stockpiles, inventories and surpluses. It feels like we are beginning to see the beginnings of real shortages now. How we collectively sort out the reduction in resource extraction and finished goods will be interesting to say the least. 11% less food globally coming soon?

      Time will tell if we are at that point yet. Maybe the central banks can print us past this bump in the road and oil production will then continue forward to 2050 (as forecasted by the IEA and OPEC). We are damned if they do, and damned if they don’t.

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      1. In addition to metals and minerals I frequently think about food’s dependence on diesel.

        I worked on a small farm where we harvested and threshed some grains and legumes by hand with scythes and flails. It’s very hard work.

        There’s also cleaning, milling, transportation, and heat for cooking.

        I think it will be impossible to feed 8 billion without diesel for tractors, combines, trucks, trains, and ships, and natural gas for nitrogen fertilizer.

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  41. Tom Murphy today struggles to understand why so few of his intelligent educated colleagues are able to see our overshoot predicament.

    It’s too bad Murphy does not understand Varki’s MORT theory because it answers his question and many other important questions, like for example, why is there only one species with the brain power to leverage fossil energy while simultaneously denying the obvious consequences, and why is that same species the only species that believes in gods and life after death?

    https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2021/11/caught-up-in-complexity/

    Among other academics at my institution, it is rare for me to find kindred spirits, even among groups self-selected to care about environmental issues. Most don’t seem to see very far beyond climate change in the lineup of existential threats…

    I left a comment on Murphy’s blog pointing him to MORT. It sure would be nice if one prominent overshoot thinker would join me in seeing the significance and relevance of MORT. I console my lonely self by telling myself that the fact that no one else sees the significance of MORT is yet more evidence of MORT’s validity.

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    1. Have you pointed out Varki’s MORT theory to him? Your summary under “theory (short)” is very good (I share it with many people).

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    2. … sorry, just saw the bottom part of your post. (And your comment on his site was not yet there when I was reading his post.) Forget my previous post.

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      1. Thanks. Of late I’ve been pointing people to Varki’s best paper as it appears more credible than some random rambling blog like un-Denial, although I do like my summary better because it captures important points that Varki does not emphasize, such as why out of millions of species there is and has only been one species that believes in gods.

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        1. Wow-you’ve had a hit with Tom- good work Brower and Varki’s bulldog. The Silo effect in academia is mighty powerful-what chance systems thinking?
          Well done Rob.

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    3. As well as being smart, one also needs emotional intelligence and emotional resilience to change one’s paradigms. There are plenty of smart people at universities who have very low emotional intelligence or self-awareness. Rather than really grappling with what decline and collapse means, they just deny it to avoid doing the emotional work

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  42. A good example of how complexity doesn’t work.

    Compare the total emissions after 100,000 km of a Toyota Yaris (their smallest car) to a Tesla Model S or a new electric F150.

    By total emissions I mean the entire production from mining to manufacturing to global supply chain delivery.

    I’m sure the Yaris would be less.

    What good is it to build electric cars if I can still go down to the Ford Dealer today and buy a $90k F350 pickup and a massive 7000lb travel trailer. Around here people have huge boats that burn 5-10 gallons per hour.

    Because companies just add a few EV’s to their lineup and they are seen as “green”.

    Basic education- bigger heavier vehicles use more energy- using more energy = more emissions.

    What we get instead is constant chatter and brainwashing.

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    1. paraphrasing: Imagine you’re given a 1000 piece puzzle and told you must first pick a random piece, write on it that cholesterol causes heart disease, glue it to the center of the table, and then complete the puzzle.

      conclusion: Most healthcare professionals are morons.

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  46. Bingo. Gloves coming off.

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  47. Chris Martenson reviews all-cause mortality data today to grade the performance of our western democratic healthcare leaders compared to their counterparts in other often less fortunate countries. We have done much worse and get an F.

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    1. It would be interesting to see whether the examples of higher all cause mortality in Vermont and California also apply to the USA (or other coutries) in general and what is the reason behind this higher all cause mortality (e.g. increases of different mortality causes). Apart from that, it does not look good for the war on Covid in 2021.

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  49. Post Peak Medicine wrote a nice essay today comparing what needs to be done about climate change with what we actually did at COP26.

    https://toxicplantsblog.blogspot.com/2021/12/cop26-analysis.html

    There are several things which logically follow from this. If we stop burning fossil fuels we will have less energy at our disposal, because renewable energy currently makes up only a small fraction of our total energy use. We need energy for manufacturing, building, transport, lighting, heating and cooling. We use it to power agricultural machinery like irrigation pumps, combine harvesters and food distribution trucks. So we need to do less of all those things. We need to grow more food closer to home, and it needs to be produced once again by human and animal labour, not machines. We need to produce and consume less. We need to make do and mend things, instead of expecting to buy a new smartphone every couple of years. We need to live closer to where we work so we don’t need to commute. We need to not expect to live in the desert and compensate for this by running air conditioners – Las Vegas comes to mind. We need to live in small, well insulated homes which are easy to heat and cool, not McMansions. More of us need to live in moderate climates where there is less need for heating and cooling.

    We need to stop transporting people and things by air, which is one of the biggest and most wasteful users of fossil fuels. It is also an unnecessary luxury. Heavier-than air powered flying machines are a recent invention – the Wright brothers made their first flight in 1903. Before that nobody flew, and we managed perfectly well because because flying is not essential to life. My grandfather was born in 1894, and he could remember the days before aeroplanes existed. We can, and will, manage without flying again in the future.

    Any fossil fuels which we pump or dig out of the ground from now on need to be put to constructive use building renewable energy infrastructure like wind turbines, wave generators and solar panels, not wasted on frivolities like daily commuting or foreign holidays.

    Because we will be manufacturing, traveling and consuming less, we need to accept that a three or four day working week may become the norm, because there probably won’t be the amount of work which currently needs to be done. The rest of the week may not be pure leisure time, as more of it may be taken up with local food production, but there should still be time left over for reading, playing with the children or learning to play a musical instrument.

    If food production and land availability are reduced worldwide due to a combination of climate change, sea level rise and fossil fuel shortage, we are likely to see increasing waves of migrants seeking a better life (or any life) elsewhere. Most of this migration, or attempted migration, will be from poor countries to rich countries, as it is now, but worse. We need to think carefully about how many people this planet is capable of supporting, and whether we should take more active steps to reduce the global population before conflict and famine reduce it for us. This is of course a taboo subject due to multiple political, cultural, historical and religious reasons.

    All of that may sound like pie-in-the-sky Utopia, but remember – if we don’t do this voluntarily, reality will eventually force us to do it. There is a finite supply of fossil fuels, no more will be created during the lifetime of our species, and when we have burnt them all we will be forced to live without them whether we want to or not. This planet has a finite carrying capacity for humans and we may well already have exceeded it.

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    1. Who is this universal “we”? I don’t remember having any voice whatsoever in the COP process. Nor did I with respect to the decision to invade Iraq, and so on and so on.

      ” We need to grow more food closer to home, and it needs to be produced once again by human and animal labour, not machines. We need to produce and consume less. We need to make do and mend things, instead of expecting to buy a new smartphone every couple of years. We need to live closer to where we work so we don’t need to commute. We need to not expect to live in the desert and compensate for this by running air conditioners – Las Vegas comes to mind. We need to live in small, well insulated homes which are easy to heat and cool, not McMansions. More of us need to live in moderate climates where there is less need for heating and cooling.”

      Nothing in this piece should require any strenuous defense whatever. Wendell Berry has been hammering this message for the last 50 years, to no avail. You cannot knock sense into the unmind of a Superorganism.

      “By this time, the era of cut-and-run economics ought to be finished. Such an economy cannot be rationally defended or even apologized for. The proofs of its immense folly, heartlessness, and destructiveness are everywhere. Its failure as a way of dealing with the natural world and human society can no longer be sanely denied. That this economic system persists and grows larger and stronger in spite of its evident failure has nothing to do with rationality or, for that matter, with evidence. It persists because, embodied now in multinational corporations, it has discovered a terrifying truth: If you can control a people’s economy, you don’t need to worry about its politics; its politics have become irrelevant. If you control people’s choices as to whether or not they will work, and where they will work, and what they will do, and how well they will do it, and what they will eat and wear, and the genetic makeup of their crops and animals, and what they will do for amusement, then why should you worry about freedom of speech? In a totalitarian economy, any “political liberties” that the people might retain would simply cease to matter. If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, then what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject.”
      WB, Another Turn Of The Crank, 1995

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          1. The Net Zero Accelerator (NZA) initiative needs to learn some simple mathematics:

            $8,000,000,000,000 x 9.7 mW = 78 MW = shit load of new CO2

            P.S. For simplicity I’ve ignored the US exchange rate and inflation since 1990.

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            1. It seems our beloved governments (both federal and provincial) – in their infinite and well-informed “wisdom” – are channeling both Icarus and P.T. Barnum at the same time!

              Read some of the testimonial quotes on this page to get a sense of what I mean:
              https://pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2021/07/15/governments-quebec-and-canada-driving-recovery-quebecs-aerospace

              e.g.:

              “These are major projects that will propel Quebec into the future! We are going to design the helicopters and planes of tomorrow, right here in Quebec. These aircraft will create wealth and reduce greenhouse gas emissions around the world. The aerospace industry will be back in full force, and your government will be there to strengthen our leadership status and to ensure a bright future for Quebec’s aerospace industry.”
              François Legault, Premier of Quebec

              This goes way beyond denial. I am at a loss for words.

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                1. Couldn’t agree more. Perhaps someone (ahem!) should offer up a taxonomy of denial. The aforementioned Wendell Berry once wrote a penetrating essay entitled “The Way of Ignorance”, wherein he skewered what he called arrogant ignorance and went on to list all the common, default kinds of ignorance that seem to be so in fashion.

                  A brief excerpt:

                  We identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk. It fails to foresee bad consequences not only because some of the consequences of all acts are inherently unforeseeable, but also because the arrogantly ignorant often are blinded by money invested; they cannot afford to see bad consequences.

                  Except to the arrogantly ignorant, ignorance is not a simple subject. It is perhaps as difficult for ignorance to be aware of itself as it is for awareness to be aware of itself. One can hardly begin to think about ignorance without seeing that it is available in several varieties. and so I will offer a brief taxonomy…

                  It’s really quite a funny, satirical bit of writing. The downside of course is that our fate is pretty much sealed by these idiots.

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  51. Tim Garrett gave a very good talk today once again showing that economists are idiots and their discipline is a disgrace that should be banned from universities.

    The best solution to climate change is to burn all of our remaining fossil energy as fast as possible mining Bitcoin because it’s a totally pointless activity that does not lead to growth. Then maybe the planet has a prayer.

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  52. More evidence of the validity of Varki’s MORT theory.

    Today el gato malo rants about closed mindedness to taboo topics, except human overshoot, which apparently is totally ok to deny.

    https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/taking-away-words-is-taking-away

    the goal is to take back real, reasoned, nuanced discourse without taboo topics, third rails, sacred cows, and all the nonsensically explosive performative name calling of the crybully aggrievement armies on both political extremes.

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  53. So, I keep Arctic News on my bookmarks and occasionally look to see what “Sam” has to say. http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/
    Needless to say the blog was very depressing. Kinda like Paul Beckwith and McPherson. Don’t know what to say. Are they all looking at the most pessimistic data and extrapolating from that? I realize that the IPCC doesn’t consider quite a few positive feedback loops and is really more a consensus on what the worst parties will sign off on. I also realize that it might not be so bad as NTHE in 2022. I know that McPherson has been saying NTHE in 6 months for years now. But, Sam seems to be saying a good chance for 3 degrees C by the end of next year and that is probably NTHE. Is this another area of “science” where there is no reasoned, rational, best guess?
    Maybe I should start drinking again??
    AJ

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    1. If I recall Sam was unmasked a few years ago as a credible female climate scientist who wishes to remain anonymous. I definitely trust her more than McPherson who seems more interested in building a cult rather than discovering the truth. I don’t have much time for Beckwith who rarely (never?) mentions the larger overshoot issues and the need for population reduction, and who has no problem flying around to attend climate conferences.

      I don’t have an opinion about a 3 C rise next year but it does seem like the climate has shifted a gear given that this year had the hottest summer and the wettest November I can remember.

      I quit drinking a long time ago but I have a nice cache waiting for me when it becomes clear the end is near. 🙂

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      1. Any excuse for a party eh? Join Rob at the Wasteland Bar for a pint of Doomsy Bitter. Cocktails at 4:00 pm. Black tie required. Saving the Champs for the very last so we can make a proper toast to the old lady.

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      2. After reading your reply I googled Sam Carana. Opinion is all over as to who this is. Some think it’s McPherson, others Beckwith with a few thinking it’s multiple people (similar to Zero Hedge). The Sam person has never talked to anyone as far as the web knows (doesn’t do interviews or podcasts). But Arctic News does seem to have a serious NTHE bent. Maybe they are right/wrong.
        AJ

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    2. BC newspaper reporting on climate change and the destruction to our infrastructure this year.

      https://www.straight.com/news/climate-stability-becomes-a-relic-of-past-in-bc-due-to-loss-of-hydrologic-stationarity

      The basis upon which civilization has been built—relatively predictable weather cycles and rainfall patterns—can no longer be counted on, according to Sandford, who’s also a fellow of the Centre for Hydrology at the University of Saskatchewan.

      That has profound ramifications for the economy, food production, and transportation systems, among other things.

      Without a relatively stable water system, weird things can happen.

      Like hundreds of millimetres of rain falling on the Fraser Valley in a rapid-fire series of atmospheric rivers in November.

      Like a massive mudslide trapping and killing motorists near Lillooet.

      Like 75 B.C. Hydro power poles washing away along with large sections of Highway 8 between Merritt and Spences Bridge.

      Like an entire town of 7,000 people, Merritt, being evacuated due to the Coldwater River overflowing its banks.

      Like huge gashes being ripped into the Coquihalla Highway from rushing water that makes mincemeat of previously sacrosanct engineering standards.

      According to Sandford, hundreds of engineering rules of thumb have been rendered irrelevant by the recent extreme weather.

      “As tragic as it is, what’s happened in British Columbia should awaken us to a really sweeping revelation,” Sandford said.

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  54. If JFK is going to come back from the dead he better hurry up and not keep people waiting.

    Magic Dirt. Thank you Lord, I now have an excuse for not washing the floor. Building my immunity up.

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    1. Shaking head. We took a simple and reliable diesel engine that produces and delivers all of our essentials, added significant electronic and mechanical cost and complexity, and made it dependent on natural gas (transformed by a complex factory into DEF) to reduce (non-CO2) emissions which made climate change worse in the short term by removing soot from the atmosphere.

      We are intelligent but unwise fire apes that deny reality.

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      1. A civilization founded upon detonations and explosions and greed is a short-lived civilization indeed. Even a fool such as I can acknowledge and lament that indisputable fact. Hunker down friends.

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  57. Many people sort of “calling the top” these days…

    Gail’s newest article

    https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/12/03/is-it-possible-that-the-world-is-approaching-end-times/

    Even the often snoozeable guys on the eurodollar front noted an inversion, with historical precedents:

    Some of the most sober voices I know in the last few weeks are raising alarm.

    At this time of year I always become hopeful collapse won’t come until spring. I do so hate being cold.

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    2. Gail discusses our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities, and advises us to pray instead of buying an extra bag of rice.

      We are not used to living in a world where very little that is published by the Mainstream Media makes sense. But when we live in a time where no one wants to hear what is true, the system changes in a bizarre way, so that a great deal that is published is false.

      It is disturbing to think that we may be living near the end of the world economy, but there is an upside to this situation. We have had the opportunity to live at a time with more conveniences than any other civilization. We can appreciate the many conveniences we have.

      We also have the opportunity to decide how we want to live the rest of our lives. We have been led for many years down the path of believing that economic growth will last forever; all we need to do is have faith in the government and our educational institutions. If we figure out that this really isn’t the path to follow, we can change course now. If we want to choose a more spiritual approach, this is a choice we can still make.

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  59. Nice plausible explanation for the extra special insanity associated with covid.

    In summary, too many rats in a cage without friends and declining resources causes irrational behavior.

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  60. Came across this headline yesterday explaining the aetiology of the AZ blood clots.

    New information may explain why the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine caused blood clots

    Understanding the trigger for this rare condition may help prevent future cases.

    BY HANNAH SEO | PUBLISHED DEC 2, 2021

    Excerpt:
    “AstraZeneca’s vaccine adenovirus sometimes binds to a protein in the blood named “platelet factor 4.” That binding can trigger a reaction in which immune cells start to attack the protein, causing clotting, or what clinicians call vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT).”

    https://www.popsci.com/science/potential-causes-astrazeneca-vaccine-blood-clots/

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8213

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  61. Rob your comment on diesel is bang on. I recently talked to a guy with an older Cummins diesel pickup. He drove from Vancouver Island towing a 29 foot trailer and 2 quads in the back on a hunting trip. He tracked his mileage -19 mpg. I had a more recent Ford F250 Company truck that uses the diesel additive, running empty my average mileage was 12-13 mpg.

    Growing up we had a 1973 Toyota Corolla 1.6 carburated motor averaged about 32 mpg highway. I currently have a Toyota Matrix 1.8 average 34 mpg highway. The reason for the lack of efficiency gains is the new car is heavier and has a more powerful engine.

    The manufacturing of a 1973 Corolla would also have a much lower carbon and energy footprint.

    With future supply chain shortages older technology vehicles may be worth more.

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      1. Only in Blondie songs …

        And then you’re in the man from mars.
        You go out at night eating cars.
        You eat Cadillacs, Lincolns too.
        Mercurys and Subaru.
        And you don’t stop.
        You keep on eating cars.
        Then when there’s no more cars you go out at night
        And eat up bars where the people meet.
        Face to face.
        Dance cheek to cheek.

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