Speaking Of Problems

Political Conversationalists,

Consciousness of Sheep, Our Predicament Restated (long, good, excerpted for brevity)

​  There is a meme doing the rounds on social media… a picture of a vegetable patch, captioned “the time is coming when only those who know how to grow food will survive.”  The idea being that, as our complex civilisation breaks down, we will be forced to return to a far simpler economy, where most people revert to roles within agriculture and food production.  As with most memes, it functions as a thought-stopper… one which hides the obvious reality – backed by millennia of experience – that, in fact, “it will be the people who know how to force others to grow food,” who will be the real winners in the post-industrial economy.​..

​..The problem with both visions of the future – and the spectrum of views between them – is a fundamental misunderstanding of the collapse which has begun to break over us.  This is that each assumes the continuation of that part of industrial civilisation which is required to make their version of the future possible, even as the coming collapse wipes away ALL aspects of industrial civilisation.  Most obviously, nobody had developed even an embryonic version of the renewable energy supply chain which is the essential first step to turning non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) into the envisioned “renewables” upon which the promised techno-psychotic future is to be built.  That is, until it is possible to mine the minerals, build the components, manufacture and transport the technologies without the use of fossil fuels at any stage in the process, then there is no such thing as “renewable energy” in the sense which the term is currently promoted.​..​  But even at the dark green de-growth opposite end of the spectrum is a version of denial which assumes that it is possible to gradually shrink the global economy in a managed way which results in the least suffering possible...

.. And so, some return to an agricultural civilisation is far more likely than a future which – for the moment at least – requires energy sources which don’t exist, along with technological breakthroughs which defy the laws of physics...

​..Any possibility of a managed de-growth, however, died half a century ago for two related reasons.  The first is that we didn’t take the October 1973 oil shock seriously.  That is, geologists had already mapped out the process of “peak oil” – based on a roughly 40-year timeline between discovery and peak, which had played out as predicted in the USA… peak discovery in the early 1930s followed by peak production in 1970.  It followed that since the world peak of oil discovery was in the early 1960s, then decline would begin some time in the first decade of the twenty-first century....

​..The second – and intimately related – reason was the collapse of the post-war Bretton Woods currency system in August 1971.  If the history of money teaches us anything, it teaches us that fiat currency systems – especially debt-based ones – are extremely corrosive to functioning economies...

​..The system came to grief because – shock-horror – the US government lied.  The temptation was simply too great to resist.  And so, domestically, the US government overspent on social programs while internationally it deficit funded the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and a host of tied-aid packages which obliged states in the global south to purchase American goods...

..The event which triggered the cascade which resulted in the 2008 crash, was the global peak of conventional oil production in 2005.  The ensuing oil price rises filtered through the economy, as everything made from, made with, or transported using oil increased in price accordingly...

​..The 2008 crash simply could not have occurred had it not been for the halt in oil production growth and the ensuing price increases.  That is, if – hypothetically – someone had opened up another large and cheap to extract oil deposit prior to 2005, the energy to underwrite real economic growth would have been available and prices would not have increased.  To some extent, this also explains why the economy has not been in freefall ever since.  I said above that the broadly correct peak oil narrative was more nuanced.  This is because US peak oil in 1970 was partially artificial.  The corporations which did the drilling within the USA were the same ones that drilled for oil around the planet.  And since in 1970, there was plenty of cheap oil to be had elsewhere, there was little point investing in more difficult and expensive – including “unconventional” – deposits within the USA.  Indeed, once the 1973 shock had served to raise the price of oil to a new level, deposits off Alaska, the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico became viable and, from the late 1980s, underwrote another debt-based boom (albeit at a lower level of general prosperity than in the post-war years).​..

​..Meanwhile, the post-2008 low interest rate financial environment provided sufficient speculator funding to develop the large deposits of unconventional oil in North American shale and bitumen sands.  This provided the world economy with one final oil boom before a final peak was reached in November 2018.

​  The global economy was already entering a recession before SARS-CoV-2 embarked on its world tour, although this has been obscured by two years of economic lockdown followed by a self-defeating economic war with Russia.  Nevertheless, as the economy re-opened, with oil production at some 4 million barrels-a-day below the November 2018 level, oil and gas prices quickly began to spiral upward.  At the same time, broken supply chains resulted in generalised shortages, which also drove prices up across the economy...

​..The banks, however, are correct to doubt the likely future growth of an economy increasingly starved of the energy that it needs to function.  In the 2020s, it is not just that we are out of cheap oil, but we are rapidly running out of more accessible oil entirely.  And since none of the alternatives to oil – fossil and non-fossil – is viable without oil, then the only possible economy in future is a shrinking one… and nobody has figured out how to operate one of those.​

​..The point of a bank is to make loans in a way that guarantees a return.  And collectively that means that the real economy of energy and materials must grow.  Now that the material growth has come to an end, banks have little incentive to keep lending...

..It is this growing reality which is fuelling a populist backlash against the neoliberal “green” energy fantasy, and which threatens to deny climate change itself ...​“US President Joe Biden arrives [at COP26] in a cavalcade of 21 vehicles from Edinburgh airport, and then appears to fall asleep in the conference chamber – surely the most carbon-intensive afternoon nap in history…”

  It matters not one iota that economists are generally wrong.  The economy matters.  Because strip away the imposed ideological froth and the one thing common to all revolutions is that they were preceded by rumbling bellies.  Rumbling bellies, that is, which are growing louder by the day across the formerly prosperous working-class districts of the western economies.  It can only be a matter of time before this turns nasty – most likely when one or more of the political psychopaths finally realises that a return to burning fossil fuels provides the easiest route to power – and the political violence we used to associate with banana republics comes home to roost.  And it is for this reason that the unfolding economic crisis, despite being the least serious of the “Three E’s” – economy, energy and environment – is going to strip us of the means to carry out either the disruptive science required for an alternative energy transition or for the reasoned management of a shrinking economy in line with the depleting energy and resources available to us.  
  Energy though, is the true driver of the process.  In this at least, the climate sceptics have a point.  Attempting to maintain an advanced, complex, and globalised industrial economy by expanding the tiny fraction we currently generate from wind and solar, while simultaneously removing the eighty percent that we currently derive from coal, gas, and oil, is simply impossible – there is neither the energy nor the mineral resources to come even close...

..Currency derives its true value as a means of allocating material resources – which include energy, minerals, but also human labour and human ingenuity.  But these material economic inputs impose physical limits on what is possible...

...In thermodynamic terms, technological development – and productivity more generally – is really about lowering the amount of energy wasted as heat so that more can be directed to useful work.  And sadly, the laws of physics leave even the most efficient technologies wasting more heat than they are able to convert for useful work... This applies to energy itself, of course.  There is always an energy cost to producing energy for useful work.  Productivity improvements such as better technology and economies of scale can lower this cost.  But high cost and high waste is inevitable.  For example, most of the energy powering an internal combustion engine is lost as heat or in powering cooling systems.  Similarly, around a third of grid electricity is lost in transmission, and more again is lost as heat from the appliances using it...

..The energy cost of energy sets an important system-level boundary too.  The economy as a whole must set aside a proportion of the potential energy available to producing energy.  This means that only the energy left over is available to power the much larger non-energy economy.  Prior to the Industrial revolution, when energy was limited to wood, food, animal fodder, and small-scale wind and water power, the non-energy economy was tiny – primarily the few luxuries available only to the very wealthy.  Everyone else, one way or another, was involved in the production of energy – either directly growing food or engaging in the many peripheral trades required to allow farming to operate.

  It is a measure of the raw power that fossil fuels – first coal, and later oil and gas – provide, that while as late as the 1930s, one in four of us was working the land, today it is less than two in a hundred.  And today’s massive consumer and public services economy is the result.  In the event that another Carrington Event were to strike the planet, almost all of the global economy would come to a possibly irreversible standstill in a matter of hours.

  It is not only some external catastrophe that might spell disaster for the global economy though.  Because of the way we have harvested fossil fuels – like technology, beginning with the cheap and easy before moving on to the expensive and difficult – the energy cost of energy has been growing remorselessly since the oil shocks of the 1970s.  The impact upon the wider economy was partially offset by the neoliberal revolution, through such things as offshoring production to countries with lower wage rates and fewer environmental regulations, and by using debt to bring consumption forward from the future… that is, today! ...

..In the developed states, real economic growth stalled prior to 2008.  And there are growing signs that states like China and India are now also struggling to maintain real growth. Again, this is why the first wave of our collapse is experienced as an economic crisis.  As the energy available to the wider economy declines, so there is simply not enough to maintain what already exists, still less provide the power for new goods and services.  But other than the ever-louder complaints about the cost of electricity and gas, most of us experience the crisis via general price rises and falling incomes.  And our individual common-sense response is to rein-in our discretionary spending in order to maintain essentials like housing, food, transport and utilities...

..Because this energy crisis manifests as a monetary problem, it is unrealistic to imagine that most people – including politicians, economists and establishment journalists – will recognise it for what it is...

..Awareness of the energy crisis, then, is most likely to come to public awareness only when rationing by price morphs into full-blown rationing.  That is, when it is clear to all that there is no longer enough to go around.  Clearly this will be a lot worse in places where there is a high level of intermittent capacity, since your electricity hour may be cancelled if the wind isn’t blowing...

..The symbolic moment when our problems became a predicament was the day Ronald Reagan ordered the solar panels to be removed from the White House roof.  Prior to that point, a sizeable part of the population had been grudgingly accepting that lowering speed limits, making smaller, fuel-efficient cars, purchasing local goods, and wearing an extra sweater in the winter, were necessary.  After Reagan and Thatcher, we were back to drill-baby-drill and let the future reap the consequences.

  That future is now breaking over us.  The gathering economic collapse – and the accompanying social unrest – will soon remove the resources that we would need even to mitigate the worst of what awaits us.  And economic hardship is only the first tsunami wave to break over us.  In the course of the 2020s, energy failures will worsen.  Beginning with people being priced out of access to energy, soon enough we will be faced by absolute shortages.  Again, this will inevitably be accompanied by unrest as the wealthy cling onto their ill-gotten gains in the face of growing public hostility...

..All we can say with some certainty is that tipping points are being crossed, and that the scope for us to respond meaningfully is fast shrinking to zero.  We will still respond, of course.  But our responses are likely to become ever angrier and more impotent as the crises engulfing us remain unmoved by our feeble attempts to respond... we must conclude that the age of solutions has passed… the age of consequences is just beginning.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/07/19/our-predicament-re-stated/

A CATASTROPHIC DEBT IMPLOSION CAN BE INCREDIBLY QUICK ​ 

 The growth of the economy is not driven by money but by energy. As Tim Morgan of Surplus Energy Economics states:“The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel.”
​  The dilemma is that the Energy Cost of Energy is constantly increasing. In 1990 that cost was 2.6% of fossil fuels and is estimated to be 12% in 2025. According to Dr Morgan, with the current Energy Cost of Energy, the real economy as well as prosperity has started to decline and that trend will continue for several decades. Fossil fuels still represent 83% of all energy globally and renewable energy is unlikely to make any significant difference in the next few decades. So we are now looking at peak cheap energy at a time when asset markets are in bubble territory with debts and deficits at levels which can only result in an implosion. Again let me emphasise that cheap energy is a prerequisite for economic growth. https://goldswitzerland.com/a-catastrophic-debt-implosion-can-be-incredibly-quick/

​  Consider all of the reality above as a threat to the established power structure, especially if it were to be understood broadly by people, and openly discussed in the political arena, so as to seek rational and cooperative adaptations to the economy which supports us all.  However broad and open public discourse, leading to consensus actions of our societies, particularly American society, is necessary for any adaptation to the predicament of declining energy and economy to be worked out and implemented. 

  Everybody having wires into their brains to be controlled by A.I. is not a solution or an adaptation. It is a blind alley where human life will die out.

  The one political candidate who is raising the most questions, and doing so politely and intelligently, is Robert Kennedy Jr. This is a threat to the established (and failing) power regime, which can only be met by silencing his voice. These are not topics which the power structure can address at all, because they do not exist in its control-narrative. 

  To acknowledge the existence of the many problems Bobby Kennedy Jr. is openly addressing is to break the control-narratives, and to lose legitimacy, as it is seen to have been a false-legitimacy all along. Thursday he testified before a House Committee on censorship. (Kennedy's campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich sits behind him, and Elizabeth Kucinich sits behind Dennis's left shoulder. Dennis ran for President back in the day, one of the honest candidates I voted for, who did not get nominated.)

CNN has the video. The gold stars for key points are very useful. Do listen to his opening testimony. https://www.c-span.org/video/?529216-1/robert-f-kennedy-jr-testify-censorship-free-speech-part-1&live=&vod=

Meryl Nass MD, The Hearing Goes On 

Dr. Nass monitored the hearing and encapsulated much of the testimony and many of the arguments here in a court-reporter's style.

The hearing goes on.

This is the medical literature cited by Kennedy in his testimony and his private discussion over dinner, which is worth watching fully. It's not what some people say.

New insights into genetic susceptibility of COVID-19: an ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphism analysis https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32664879/

​Professor Anthony Hall on government lies and censorship, with context: 

9/11, the COVID Hoax, the Climate Change Fraud, and TWA Flight 800, 1997-2023​ , Punishing the Truthers to Protect the Liars

9/11, the COVID Hoax, the Climate Change Fraud, and TWA Flight 800, 1997-2023

Grassley Releases Bombshell FBI Doc Discussing $10MM Biden Bribe; Burisma Boss Said Hunter 'Dumber Than His Dog' https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/grassley-releases-bombshell-fbi-doc-discussing-10mm-biden-bribe-burisma-boss-said

​  Nigel Farage had his bank accounts shut down with the high-net-worth bank Coutts after officials decided the former conservative politician’s views did not align with the bank’s values, it has emerged.
​  The former UKIP and Brexit Party leader went public last month with the difficulties he was having in opening a U.K. bank account after Coutts, an institution he had been banking with for almost a decade, inexplicably closed his accounts and several other banks refused his applications to open a new one.
​  New evidence obtained by Farage now contradicts the initial response provided by the bank.
In a 40-page dossier Mr. Farage acquired via a subject access request, Coutts made it clear that his conservative views were problematic for the bank, citing Brexit no fewer than 86 times, and his support of Donald Trump who is mentioned 39 times.
​  The minutes of a meeting of Coutts’ wealth reputational risk committee held on Nov. 17 last year stated that Mr. Farage is “seen as xenophobic and racist. He is considered to be a disingenuous grifter. Being associated with Nigel Farage presents a material and ongoing reputational risk to the bank.”
​  The bank does not state who “sees” Mr. Farage in this fashion, or why this individual or social group holds weight in a decision on whether or not to provide a British citizen with a U.K. bank account. It should be noted that Mr. Farage has won elections in Britain as the leader of a political party, namely the European parliamentary elections with the Brexit Party in 2017, and wields considerable public support. https://rmx.news/uk/disgraceful-coutts-de-banked-nigel-farage-because-of-his-conservative-views-internal-dossier-reveals/

​More from Dr. Nass, the rollout of iris scan digital banking ID, an offer some Ethiopians "can't refuse". (What would put You in a bind like this? Think. Don't speak.)

Ethiopia, where most people are “unbanked” and the UN food program provides many with rations. 

​  The country cannot afford food but apparently they can afford iris scans. The UN is requiring the scans to supply the food. No wonder Ethiopia is where the globalists are piloting the program.
​  Ethiopia, a nation currently struggling with deep food shortages and famine, has announced that they will make it obligatory to have a national digital ID in order to use banking services in the country.
​  Over a week ago the United Nations’ World Food Programme said that they were appalled at the levels of theft going in Ethiopia, in regards to how many people were stealing the provided rations, and have demanded that biometric checkpoints be instigated to alleviate the problem before they start making any real resupplies there….
Biometric Update also noted, ‘Ethiopia is implementing a World Bank-supported MOSIP-based digital ID project which intends to have all eligible citizens enrolled by 2025. The country also recently contracted IrisGuard to support benefits payments to citizens with iris biometrics.

Mandated digital IDs: happening fast

​  Belarus To Hold Exercises With Wagner Near NATO-Member Poland's Border​  [It's a straight shot across a superhighway to Warsaw from there.]

​  Belarus' Defense Ministry has announced it will hold joint military exercises with Wagner fighters along the border with NATO-member Poland, in a fresh escalation after Warsaw has already remained on edge over the presence of Russian mercenary forces next door.
​  "The Armed Forces of Belarus continue joint training with the fighters of PMC ‘Wagner,’" the defense ministry said in a fresh statement. "During the week, units of the special operations forces together with representatives of the company will work out training and combat tasks at the Brestsky training ground." https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/belarus-hold-exercises-wagner-near-nato-member-polands-border

​  UK intelligence ‘freelancers’ helped Ukraine target Crimean Bridge – The Grayzone

​  Ukraine’s drone attack on the Kerch Bridge was most likely planned by former British military intelligence agents who signed a contract with Kiev in 2022, the independent outlet Grayzone has reported citing leaked documents. https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/uk-intelligence-freelancers-helped-ukraine-target-crimean-bridge-the-grayzone/

​Dissident Non-Combatant (getting out on the bike before it gets hot)