Steve Bull's Blog, page 215
June 24, 2022
GONE Bag – Get Out Now Emergency
Let’s just start this off strongly by saying that if you google “bug out bag”, everything the search engine returns for you will be bullshit. That’s right, I said it. It’s a bunch of armchair fantasies coupled with capitalist marketing. I’ll even go so far as to say that if the article you’re reading about it contains a bunch of product links it’s almost certainly garbage. To be fair, no one seems to come at the subject from the standpoint of the staggered collapse of industrial civilization. In this rundown, I will.
A Get Out Now Emergency is a reaction that occurs when you have no other options. If you have enough stability to make decisions, then this isn’t tailored for that. This kind of bag is distinct from others talked about such as a survivalist bag or a tactical bag. The armchair fantasies are plagued with unrealistic expectations – both in what to expect as well as what to carry. The more realistic and useful bag will include the things you actually can use and none of the things you don’t need – and the latter is a much lengthier list. Your home, especially if you’ve made any preparations whatsoever, provides far more comfort and security – and contains a whole lot more useful stuff than what you can carry on your back.
Though I’m older now, I did go to college for Outdoor Education. I have taken various NOLS (National Outdoor Leadership School) and OB (Outward Bound) courses, did WFA (Wilderness First Aid) and WFR (Wilderness First Responder) certifications, and have led and co-led numerous wilderness expeditions, outdoor therapy, and environmental education programs for groups ranging from grade school to college…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Food Riots Continue In Sri Lanka As The Military Begins Shooting
The starving and hungry people of collapsing Sri Lanks have been rioting over the cost of food and lack of energy. As if things couldn’t get worse, the ruling class has taken to gunning down those who stand against being ruled.
People are starving and are without gas or electricity, and now they are rioting as a society completely collapses. To make matters worse, the military is gunning people down. This is a glimpse into the future here if the rulers of Western countries continue. Once they collapse it around us, we will be the ones starving while the government makes sure it can remain intact and functional. That means we’ll still get stolen from and be forced at the barrel of the fun to comply with whatever they say.
According to a report by StrangeSounds, troops fired in Visuvamadu, 365 kilometers (228 miles) north of Colombo, on Saturday night as their guard point was pelted with stones, army spokesman Nilantha Premaratne said. “A group of 20 to 30 people pelted stones and damaged an army truck,” Premaratne told the Associated FreePress.
Police said four civilians and three soldiers were wounded when the army opened fire for the first time to quell unrest linked to the worsening economic crisis.
As the pump ran out of petrol, motorists began to protest and the situation escalated into a clash with troops, police said. -Strange Sounds
Sri Lanka is suffering its worst economic crisis since “independence”, with the country unable to find dollars to import essentials, including food, fuel, and medicines. (Anyone who actually believes anyone other than the rulers are “independent” in Sri Lanka has a lot of cognitive dissonances to evaluate).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Oil turbulence could last five years, ExxonMobil boss warns
Consumers must be prepared to endure up to five years of turbulent oil markets, the head of ExxonMobil said Tuesday, citing under-investment and the coronavirus pandemic.
Energy markets have been roiled by the Ukraine war as Russia has reduced some exports and faced sanctions while Europe has announced plans to wean itself off dependency on Russian fossil fuels in coming years.
Speaking ahead of ExxonMobil’s unveiling as the fourth international partner for Qatar’s natural gas expansion, chairman and chief executive Darren Woods said major uncertainty lies ahead.
“You are probably looking at three to five years of continued fairly tight markets,” Woods told the Qatar Economic Forum. “How that manifests itself in price will obviously be a big function of demand, which is difficult to predict.”
On top of under-investment in finding new oil sources in 2014-2015, Woods said the pandemic “really sucked a lot of revenues out of the industry”.
Woods said companies and governments needed to think long-term. “We are going to see a lot of volatility and discontinuity in the market place if we don’t get to more thoughtful policies,” he predicted.
Representatives from the Middle East energy industry also renewed calls for better planning in consumer countries.
Sheikh Nawaf Saud al-Sabah, chief executive of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, said the company was supplying all customers, but that multinational oil firms were not matching the investment of national oil enterprises.
– ‘Tremendous disruption’ –
As part of the Gulf state’s response, Kuwait was starting its first offshore oil exploration and building the world’s biggest oil refinery.
“We have never touched the offshore in Kuwait. The first offshore drill rig arrived in Kuwait a week ago and will start soon,” he said.
The new refinery would come online by the end of 2022, Sabah added.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Concurrent Deflation and Hyperinflation Will Ravage the World
FLATION will be the keyword in coming years. The world will simultaneously experience inFLATION, deFLATION, stagFLATION and eventually hyperinFLATION.
I have forecasted these FLATIONARY events, which will hit the world in several articles in the past. Here is a link to an article from 2016.
With most asset classes falling rapidly, the world is now approaching calamities of a proportion not seen before in history. So far in 2022, we have seen an implosion of asset prices across the board of around 20%. What few investors realise is that this is the mere beginning. Before this bear market is over, the world will see 75-90% falls of stocks, bonds and other assets.
Since falls of this magnitude have not been seen for more than three generations, the shockwaves will be calamitous.
At the same time as bubble assets deflate, prices of goods and services have started an inflationary cycle of a magnitude that the world as whole has never experienced before.
We have seen hyperinflation in individual countries previously but never on a global scale.
Currently the official inflation rate is around 8% in the US and Europe. But for the average consumer in the West, prices are rising by at least 25% on average for their everyday needs such as food and fuel.
A CALAMITOUS WORLD
So the world is now approaching calamities on many fronts.
As always in periods of crisis, everybody is looking for someone to blame. In the West most people blame Putin. Yes, Putin is the villain and it is his fault that food and energy prices are surging. Nobody bothers to analyse what or who prompted Russia to intervene, nor do politicians or main stream media understand the importance of history, which is the key to understanding current events.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
June 23, 2022
Oops! U.S. oil and gas exports fuel domestic price rise
The U.S. oil and natural gas industry long fought for and in the last decade finally won release from federal restrictions that limited exports. The ostensible reason was that because of the so-called “shale revolution” in the country’s oil and gas fields, the United States would have plenty of oil and gas to spare for export.
The real reason behind the push was that the oil and gas industry wanted what almost every other industry in American already had: The right to sell their products to the highest bidders no matter where they lived on the globe.
This made it almost certain that as U.S. prices rose to match world prices, U.S. consumers would feel the pain. And, since energy prices affect everyone who votes, they are always politically consequential.
So, it is unsurprising that with U.S. regular gasoline prices over $5 per gallon President Joe Biden lashed out at U.S. oil companies—which are having one of their best years ever—saying they need to increase production of refined oil products. The companies have responded that their refineries are running at close to maximum capacity and so there is not much they can do in the short run.
What is left unsaid is that it has long been the policy of the United States to allow the export of refined (as opposed to crude) petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel and heating oil. The country has refinery capacity significantly in excess of domestic needs and so exports a considerable volume of refined products including about 1 million barrels per day (mbpd) of gasoline and 1.4 mbpd of diesel and heating oil (for the week ending June 10)…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Germany Elevates Risk Level In Its “National Gas Emergency Plan” To Second-Highest “Alarm” Phase
European natural gas and power prices surged after Germany triggered the “alarm stage” of its NatGas-emergency plan amid reductions in supplies from Russia, according to Reuters.
German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Europe’s largest economy is in a severe energy crisis. He warned Germany should prepare for further cuts in Russian NatGas flows after Moscow recently slashed deliveries via the Nord Stream pipeline.
“We must not fool ourselves: The cut in gas supplies is an economic attack on us by Putin,” Habeck said.
“It is obviously Putin’s strategy to create insecurity, drive up prices and divide us as a society. This is what we are fighting against,” he continued.
Habeck wasn’t clear if NatGas rationing would be avoided.
The second “alarm stage” of a three-stage emergency plan allows utility companies to pass on higher power prices to industry and households to curb demand. The move comes as the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany operates at 40% of capacity after flows last week were reduced for a “technical problem” by Russian gas exporter Gazprom PJSC.
The second stage also increases energy market monitoring and allows for some coal-fired plants to be reactivated to increase electricity output.
All of this comes as Germany is making a mad dash to fill up its NatGas storage facilities ahead of winter. Total storage stands around 58% full, though the government-mandated target of 90% by November, a mark that might be hard to reach considering Nord Stream flows have been reduced.
Front-month benchmark futures rose as much as 6.5% to 135 euros a megawatt-hour on Germany’s elevated gas alarm.
German power for next year also surged 4.5% to 256 euros a megawatt-hour.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Difference Between a Forecast and a Guess
Every forecast or guess has one refreshing quality: one will be right and the rest will be wrong.
What’s the difference between a forecast and a guess? On one level, the answer is “none”: the future is unknown and even the most informed forecast is still a guess. The evidence for this is the remarkable number of informed forecasts that prove to be as completely off-base as the wildest guesses.
On another level, there is a big difference between an informed forecast and a guess–if the informed forecast has the consequential system dynamics right. The world is complicated and discerning the consequential dynamics in the tangle of complexity is difficult.
Context and perspective matter. So do incentives. To take one example of many, war planners in the Vietnam era looked at war from the perspective of “scientific metrics” that focused on collecting data on the efficacy of sorties and combat missions. This resulted in the infamous “body counts.”
The larger context was that war could be productively distilled down to metrics, costs and attrition: the enemy was presumed to be a rational player who will give up when the pain and cost become too high.
Planners slouching in comfortable offices have many incentives to “go along to get along”: and veering off into dynamics that can’t be conveniently measured and questioning the entire foundation of the war’s planning and execution will get you sent to bureaucratic Siberia. “Getting with the program” will get you kudos and promotion.
Hmm, which will most people choose? The Pentagon Papers circulated among hundreds of senior officials, and parts of the report circulated among thousands of lower-ranking employees. Only one person took the risks of sharing the report with the American public.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Marti’s Corner – 70
Marti’s Corner – 70
Hi Everyone,
NOTES:
** You should be familiar with the website: Alert RivCo | Emergency Management Department | Riverside County Most communities now have a similar alert system to Riverside’s. It’s always an advantage to get a heads-up. From this page, you can sign up to have alerts sent to your phone in case of emergencies. Scroll down until you see “registration portal” and click on that.
** You can also go to Find Your Home’s Climate Risks | Risk Factor. You type in your address and they tell you what dangers you should be aware of. My house is “unlikely” to flood in the next 30 years. Whew. And I have an 11.8% chance of being in a fire. So……. now I can sleep at night.
You can get risk information about your community and lists of providers that offer insurance.
GARDEN HAPPENINGS:
**Pest of the week.
So, I was in the garden and decided it was time to start inspecting the “underside” of the plant leaves. I’m not always good about it because there are just SOOOOO many leaves and it’s tiresome to look under them all. But at the bottom of the cucumbers, I found this on the backside of a leaf:
It was totally invisible from the top.
Not EXACTLY sure what they are, but they don’t belong there and I think they are aphids. I sprayed them with safer soap. It seemed to do the trick.
I also found them on this new baby cuke:
I sprayed those too. I found a few leaves with leaf miner damage and pulled those off. As the weather gets warmer, the life cycle of the bugs speeds up. You have to be a good detective! Spray, spray, spray. Do NOT let it go.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Warning About The Coming Shortages Of Diesel Fuel, Diesel Exhaust Fluid And Diesel Engine Oil
What I am about to share with you is a developing situation, and I hope to share more once the facts become clearer. It appears that a very serious diesel crisis is coming in the months ahead, and that will have a dramatic impact on our economy. As you will see below, we are being warned that there will be shortages of diesel fuel, diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil. Most diesel vehicles require all three in order to run, and so a serious shortage of any of them would be a major disaster. Needless to say, simultaneous shortages of all three could potentially be catastrophic. Most Americans don’t spend much time thinking about diesel, but without it our supply chains collapse and we don’t have a functioning economy. In a recent Time Magazine article discussing the coming diesel fuel shortage, we are told that “the U.S. economy runs on diesel”…
Though most consumers shake their heads at the cost of gasoline and complain about the cost of filling up their car tanks, what they really should be worried about is the price of diesel. The U.S. economy runs on diesel. It’s what powers the container ships that bring goods from Asia and the trucks that collect goods from the ports and bring them to warehouses and then to your home. The farmers who grow the food you eat put diesel in their tractors to plow the fields, and the workers that bring construction equipment to build your home put diesel in their trucks.
Since January, supplies of diesel fuel have been steadily getting tighter.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
IEA: Europe Should Prepare For Complete Russian Gas Shutdown
Europe should prepare for a complete suspension of Russian natural gas deliveries, the head of the International Energy Agency told the Financial Times in an interview.
“Europe should be ready in case Russian gas is completely cut off,” Fatin Birol told the FT. “The nearer we are coming to winter, the more we understand Russia’s intentions,” he added. “I believe the cuts are geared towards avoiding Europe filling storage, and increasing Russia’s leverage in the winter months.”
As a means of countering the worst effects of such a scenario, Birol advised European governments to keep nuclear power stations running and take other contingency measures, too. These other contingency measures seem to focus on demand.
“I believe there will be more and deeper demand measures [taken by governments in Europe] as winter approaches,” Birol told the FT, adding gas rationing was a distinct possibility in case of further cuts to Russian gas supplies.
In the past three months, Russia has cut off supply to several European countries that refused to pay for gas in rubles. It has also substantially reduced the flow along the Nord Stream, effectively cutting off supply to France and reducing flows to Germany by some 60 percent.
Gazprom and its equipment maintenance service provider Siemens Energy have blamed the reduction on a turbine delivery delay resulting from new Canadian sanctions against Moscow. Germany has blamed Gazprom.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
