By paqnation (aka Chris): Living in Detention

Brian Berletic explains that the imminent US escalation to a land assault of Iran was planned in public documents since at least 2009.

This is not mission creep.

It is a plan being unveiled slowly to maximize public support.

Also explained in the 2009 US plan is a strategy to goad Iran into reacting so the US can depict their attack as being justified.

Amen Jeffrey Tucker.

All political parties, and intellectuals, and institutions failed us.

Most citizens don’t care. How is this possible given the gravity of the incompetence and poor ethics?

Why I’ve lost trust in most all intellectuals and the institutions that purport to represent them: they have had almost nothing to say (except by way of support) of the entire Covid response.

I just cannot take these people seriously now or ever. This goes for many supposedly great minds I once respected.

It should be obvious by now that this was and is probably the most important shift in the historical narrative In decades if not hundreds of years.

Why the silence about the following?

* A entire generation was denied actual education
* The response showed public would mostly believe any absurdity, even that masks were protective against microbial infection and that standing far apart from people was the key to health
* Governments canceled religious holidays with two thousands years of tradition and got away with it
* A grass-roots movement would rise up among us to defend and enforce preposterous claims including that hiding under the sofa would cause a respiratory infection to go away
* Governments the world over learned that they could perhaps spend without limit, run up debt, and inflate away the obligations
* Industry realized there were far more profits in panic and mandates than in normal marketing
* The ruling class discerned that they could get away with endless abuse of the people provided it was pushed as public health
* The vaccine industry realized that no lie was beyond plausibility even when they were caught and even when their product caused vast injury and death
* Media was revealed to be nothing other than a deep-state megaphone
* Academia proved itself to be mostly useless

Any actual intellectual worth his salt would have been sounding alarms throughout this amazing fiasco. Some have. Very few, mostly associated with new institutions that are displacing the old failed establishment. Legacy thinkers have generally pretended that none of this happened.

Remember these days: an entire generation of vaunted intellectuals is hereby discredited, revealed as sycophants, and otherwise exposed as having chosen the comforts of social position and financial stability over truth.

Gail Tverberg uses the energy lens to explain global conflict.

She argues that the problem has been hidden from citizens by presenting energy growth in absolute rather than per capita terms.

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2026/03/02/a-new-explanation-for-tariffs-and-bombings/

A few years ago, I analyzed the growth of world energy consumption, breaking it down into (a) the growth in energy consumption needed to support the growth in world population, and (b) the growth in energy consumption available to support higher standards of living. This analysis covered the period 1820 to 2020. I found that periods of low growth tended to coincide with wars, depressions, and collapses.

In this post, I analyze data for 5-year periods, ending in 2024, to obtain an updated view of recent energy consumption and population trends. My conclusion is that total energy consumption growth in recent years has not been sufficient to forestall major problems. A more detailed analysis reveals that growth in certain vital resources (the diesel+jet fuel part of oil supply, and critical minerals related to electricity production and usage) is particularly problematic.

These findings indicate that the economy is already beginning to hit energy limits. Because of energy-related shortages that are already being encountered, national economies are beginning to act like the players in a game of musical chairs, with one too few chairs. Leaders have taken to building up armies, cutting off exports of critical minerals, imposing tariffs, and bombing other countries, even though these actions might not make sense to peace-loving citizens.

Diesel and jet fuel are of concern because, since 2015, there has been an actual shrinkage in the amount of these fuels available relative to population. In fact, every five-year period since the 2000 to 2004 period has shown less growth in diesel and jet fuel than in the overall world energy supply. (Compare Figures 3 and 4.)

The low growth of diesel+jet fuel is particularly concerning because these fuels are essential for international transportation. With too little of these oil types, trade across the Atlantic and Pacific needs to shrink back. The physics of the situation makes tariffs look like an attractive solution for reducing trade.

Another concern is that diesel is essential for food production and transporting. Even if some other types of energy are available in plentiful supply, we cannot get along without food. While wind and solar are popular energy types today, they are not very useful for either international transport or for operating modern agricultural equipment.

I saw no evidence that Tverberg understands the CACTUS lens view that the game of musical chairs underway will make things worse for all, not just the countries without a chair.

In the game of musical chairs, players walk around a group of chairs until the music stops. At the end of each round, one chair is removed, leaving one fewer chair than the number of players. In the next round, the remaining players all scramble for the chairs available, which often leads to small fights over who gets a chair. This not-enough-to-go-around problem explains the poor relations we see today among countries and political parties. It is also the underlying reason for the interest in imposing tariffs and in bombing other countries.

Tulsi Gabbard ran for president on a policy of no more middle east interventions. One year ago as Director of National Intelligence she testified that Iran was not developing a nuclear weapon. Gabbard has been silent since Trump contradicted her a year ago on Iran’s nuclear intentions.

Let’s assume Gabbard has high integrity and good intentions.

How can we explain her silence and why she has not resigned?

A good explanation is that she has been briefed that US oil is peaking and US must soon capture Iran’s oil from China.

As explained by the Energy Lens, no leader can admit this reality or it would crash the markets.

Since few leaders see through the CACTUS lens, they are responding in a way that is accelerating global collapse.

Paging China, paging China.

WTF you doing?

It’s time for you to teach the US a big lesson.

Hideaway’s back in good form at Dr. Tim Morgan’s site.

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/02/13/319-the-end-of-growth/comment-page-1/#comment-50077

In the universe we know we get islands of complexity within the vast ongoing process of entropy and dissipation. We know this from the thermodynamic laws of physics.

Realistically civilization itself is just another one of these islands of complexity making use of gradients of energy to more rapidly use this gradient which increases the pace of entropy, locally (as in on planet Earth).

We also know from observation and calculation that the largest of system that have the most complex of interactions also collapse or end the fastest, as a result of the sheer complexity within the system.

We know that large ecosystems can go on and evolve slowly for millions of years with countless internal complex lifeforms and interactions, but strangle their energy source, say with a large volcanic eruption that clouds the sky for a few years, that was thousands of miles away, and the ecosystem will quickly collapse within a relatively very short period.

Modern civilization has so many interactions, that no-one fully understands what less energy will do, other than simplify the system, as that is what happens to all other large complex energy dissipative structures in non linear ways of cascades of failures.

Modern civilization relies upon all the modern machinery to gather, process and distribute food, water, energy, minerals and metals. Without the complex modernity, with any simplification, we quickly lose the ability to gather deep offshore oil and gas, mine low grades of ores, grow and transport food to urban areas where most of the 8.3B people reside.

This has feedback loops for any simplification via the disruption to ‘discretionary spending’. The overall system has no feelings, it an efficient means of entropy, turning energy and materials into waste heat, while spreading the concentrated metals and materials gathered from ever lower grade resources, back all over the planet (and some off planet).

The efficiency comes from scale of operation. A 50 tonne/day efficient highly specialised metal furnace, for making very specialist alloys, as a simple example, can only operate at the 50 tonne/d rate. Get rid of 70% of their discretionary uses/sales, and the furnace no longer can operate efficiently, nor the business operating it. The odds of the business closing altogether and the furnace becoming scrap are high, yet this furnace may have been the one making specialist alloys for a very particular factory making certain types and sizes of bolts for the giant excavators of Liebherr that do a decent percentage of high end mining.

Now multiply the change in ‘discretionary’ contraction by tens of thousands around the world for factories making both essential bits and pieces and discretionary uses, for literally thousands of companies around the world, all of whom have payrolls full of expertise that they require to keep for their full operation of “essentials”, or what we call essentials.

In reality the entire system is essential to keep operating, even though we might feel we can do without discretionary spending.

Let’s say we get rid of lots of discretionary spending, services makes the biggest savings (in dollars), by getting rid of hairdressers, coffee shops, architects, nurses, doctors, public servants, teachers, customs officials, child care, office staff, managements, consultants, etc, etc….

What’s left?? 5-10% of employment in mining manufacture, and agriculture. Who are they going to sell any products to?? how do these essential businesses keep going without sales?? What about all the factories they raw materials to who have gone bust??

Sorry Dr Tim and David, the system we have is the system we have, worts and all. Any attempt to cut back discretionary spending and uses of materials, will just have a range of unintended consequences via complex non linear feedback loops, which are not predictable. It’s basically a simplification of the overall system.

Take a business that’s in decline for whatever reason. Even if management try their hardest to manage the decline by legal logical means, they often totally collapse in a pile of unpaid debt, especially very large businesses. They are also just energy dissipative systems with countless complex feedback loops within the whole of civilization and shrinkage leads to a simplification which leads to collapse for the largest of the type..

The “energy” for any business is “money”. Cashflow is king to survival, growth of this metric (money) is always the goal.

Money only has value in our system of modern civilization because of all the excess energy provided by fossil fuels. Once this energy starts to dissipate much more rapidly than can be provided by the energy industries, the value of money declines rapidly, in energy and material terms. The businesses requiring the cashflow of money start to contract and go bust, in the tens to hundreds of thousands around the world, many/most making both essential and discretionary products.

All past models of civilizations do not apply to what happens to modern civilization, as they all had only a minor percentage of the total population in urban areas, so could unwind slowly. We have often over 80% of people in urban areas in developed countries, well removed from any type of food production. This makes a massive difference in terms of the speed of unwinding of complexity.

https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/02/13/319-the-end-of-growth/comment-page-1/#comment-50478

Brandon, with all your “look up this or that”, I acknowledge that you can find anything you want on the net to justify any position possible. none of it makes it real though..

This is what you never admit. So many of the different research makes the huge mistake of category error. It tries to talk in energy terms but uses dollars to do so. Dollars are easy and most of the research into anything energy related misses the big picture of the background fossil fuel energy being used to keep the overall system of civilization going to make any one aspect of building an EV or a solar panel look “cheap” to produce.

The accounting method used is all wrong. It’s that simple, yet you want to use these incorrect accounting methods..

Missing out on paying taxes is not a subsidy. A subsidy is when something uneconomic, receives extra funding from government. Fossil fuels producers around the world pay taxes and royalties. a slight or even major reduction in these taxes is NOT a subsidy, yet gets called a subsidy. All renewables and nuclear get subsidised, because they do not make a profit!! They require the subsidies to exist on the economic plane.

The simple energy calculation is that some forms of energy are hugely profitable in energy terms, as in high producers of net energy so can subsidise the rest of civilization, including the building of other energy forms that are not profitable in energy terms, hence these others get subsidies!!

Any and every energy project that you hear of, is either hugely profitable or gets subsidised to exist. It’s also easily possible for humans to make hugely energy profitable energy forms energy negative requiring subsidies by bringing in enough rules and regulations upon the system so that subsidised energy forms get priority. Hence we have coal fired power stations that can easily run profitably when operating near 24/7, unprofitable by contracting them to 25-40% operating time..

Personally I wish that the world you envisage was possible, but the thermodynamic reality of physics, clearly states it’s not, and unlike you I prefer reality to imagination and fairy tales..

Spent a few hours trying to figure out what’s actually happening in the Iran war.

What an awful world it’s become when everyone with an opinion has a megaphone and you can’t believe anything that anyone says.

Strait of Hormuz status?

Gemini:

Forced Closure: The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has issued a direct order prohibiting all ships from crossing the Strait. Merchant vessels are receiving VHF Channel 16 broadcasts stating, “no ship is allowed to pass.”

Naval Advisories: The U.S. Naval Forces Central Command has issued a notice stating that military operations are ongoing. While international waters technically remain open, the U.S. Navy has explicitly warned that it cannot guarantee the safety of neutral commercial shipping in the area.

Vessel Movement: Major oil companies and trading houses have reportedly suspended shipments through the Strait. Many vessels already in the region are seeking refuge in the territorial waters of neutral states like Qatar or the UAE, while others are attempting to exit the Persian Gulf toward the Indian Ocean.

Insurance: Marine insurers have begun canceling policies or drastically increasing “War Risk” premiums for any vessels attempting to transit the Gulf.

Oil Prices: Crude prices have already spiked by nearly 10% today. Analysts warn that even a short-term full blockade could send oil prices above $120 per barrel.

un-Denial Comment System

I promised I would hold a vote on features for the un-Denial comment system.

Here are the issues that each require a vote:

1. Newest or oldest comment first.
2. Keep new system or return to old system.

And assuming we keep new system:

1. Collapsed or expanded comment threads.
2. Highlight unread comments in yellow.
3. Keep or turn off green bubble.

I’m going to switch to expanded threads, 50 threads per page, turn off yellow unread comments, and turn off the green bubble for a few days to give everyone a chance to evaluate a stripped down version of the the new system.

Then I’ll hold the vote.