Steve Bull's Blog, page 81

Rationalizing, Storytelling, and Narrative-Generating Apes

Rationalizing, Storytelling, and Narrative-Generating Apes

 

Falling Spring Falls, Falling Spring, Virginia

First off, before I get started with the heavy stuff, I hope that you and yours have had a wonderful holiday season and I wish you a Happy New Year! OK, now onto less celebratory and more serious material.

There are people who want to cling to civilization because this is the only life they’ve ever known. Then, there are others who realize that this way of life CANNOT be continued, period. Attempting to continue this set of living arrangements WILL cause the extirpation of our species, along with countless other organisms. Even if we attempted to end civilization right now, there is no guarantee that there is a tomorrow for our species. Let’s say an EMP takes out the electrical grid in the USA, which proceeds to end industrial civilization as we know it. Over the following months, billions of people would die from starvation, disease, predatory behavior, and other issues caused by collapse. Climate change would possibly be stymied for a short period of time by the massive amount of aerosols released from burning of wood and plastics caused by millions of people trying to stay warm and cooking any available food, but once these aerosols are washed out of the atmosphere, climate change would be supercharged with the additional carbon dioxide produced along with an absence of aerosols from fossil fuel burning (the aerosol masking effect). Ultimately, we’re in a double bind, which means that most people will probably decide to live in as much comfort as possible until the end. I have little doubt that some people will go against the grain and follow a more ecological path, especially those who understand ecological overshoot. Trying to predict a precise outcome, of course, is a fool’s errand; too many interconnecting and interacting processes are involved.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The End of the Colombian Age

The End of the Colombian AgeDusk over Oceania. Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

We are witnessing the end of an era in history spanning half a millennium; the end of Western dominance in geopolitics. For those who understand the role of resources and energy in economics, culture and politics, it comes as no surprise that this shift in global power has an awful lot to do with resource depletion in particular, and overshoot in general — not unlike the many major shifts in human history. What we are facing here is something akin to the fall of the Soviet Union, but this time on steroids, and with global consequences affecting every nation on the planet to boot.

We live in truly remarkable times. Most people born into a middle of an era expect things to continue smoothly, with the past being a reliable guide for the future. Those who have the “fortune” to born into the very last decades of an age tend to think similarly, and fail to recognize that they are witnessing something which future historians (if there will be any) will commemorate as an end to a period, and a beginning of a new era. Perhaps its no exaggeration to say, that what we see here is the collapse of modernity in two acts, the first being the fall of the West.

Let me start with Erik Micheals and his fine blog Problems, Predicaments, and Technology, where he has recently shared an interesting story about us, Rationalizing, Storytelling, and Narrative-Generating Apes. He closed with citing historian Joseph Tainter, author of the book The Collapse of Complex Societies, on how civilizations end. Incidentally, I also closed my last article with a definition and description of civilizational decline, so I think this is a good place to pick up the thread.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Will The Texas Power Grid Survive Next Week’s Polar Vortex?

Will The Texas Power Grid Survive Next Week’s Polar Vortex?

The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center forecasts extreme cold weather “across the heart of the country this weekend and is expected to continue into next week.” We previewed this cold blast in a note titled “Gobsmackingly Bananas”: Weather Models Predict Polar Vortex Invasion Into US.

Whenever cold air spills south from Canada into the Heartland, attention usually shifts to Texas.

Next, power demand forecasts from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the power grid operator for Texas, are analyzed to see if demand forecasts exceed supply. Current forecasts show ERCOT faces the first major test of grid stability for the new year.

And this:

ERCOT has warned its 26 million Texas customers about the upcoming cold blast this weekend into next week. The grid operator assures customers, “Grid conditions are expected to be normal, and ERCOT expects to have sufficient supply to meet demand.”

Energy-focused research firm Criterion Research told clients in a note Wednesday that ERCOT will likely survive the big cold shot:

 ERCOT has issued an Operating Condition Notice (OCN) for the upcoming cold weather event forecast from January 15-17, 2024. The OCN is the first of four levels of communication provided by the agency ahead of a possible Emergency Condition – the following three levels would be Energy Emergency Levels 1 through 3.

ERCOT’s current forecast run shows extreme demand conditions starting on Tuesday, January 16, 2024. That includes a projected peak load of 85,587 MW at 7 AM that morning. However, renewable generation from wind and solar are expected to help out as demand pushes to a seasonal record, with early morning wind + solar contribution 14,137 MW.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Poland’s Obstruction In Nord Stream Pipeline Probe Raises Alarm For Investigators

Poland’s Obstruction In Nord Stream Pipeline Probe Raises Alarm For Investigators

At this point, one might be forgiven for thinking that the Nord Stream pipelines sabotage is already ancient history. After all, mainstream media and prime time TV news coverage has by and large ‘moved on’ as soon as it became clear that Russia had nothing to do with it.

At this point, the consensus even among Moscow’s vehement enemies is that the September 26, 2022 series of blasts which disabled the Russia to Germany NS-1 and NS-2 natural gas pipelines had Ukrainian and/or Western involvement. While MSM sources have favored the theory that it was a mystery group of pro-Ukraine operatives on a small yacht, legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has reported that it was a CIA and US Navy special operation with help from Norwegian intelligence services.

Since then, the ongoing investigation by Germany, Denmark and Sweden into the details of what happened has continued to yield very interesting, incremental developments. The latest was revealed in a Wall Street Journal report this week, and involves apparent Polish obstruction of the probe, which has been deemed by officials to be highly suspicious.

Nord Stream 2/AP

Reports WSJ, “Polish officials have resisted cooperating with an international probe into the sabotage of the Nord Stream natural-gas pipelines and failed to disclose potentially crucial evidence, according to European investigators working on the case.”

Cover-up?… you don’t say:

Those Polish officials have been slow to provide information and withheld key evidence about the alleged saboteurs’ movements on Polish soil, investigators said. They are now hoping the new government in Warsaw, which took office in December, will help shed light on the attack.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Iran Warns Against US ‘Adventurism’ After Parking Cruise Missile-Armed Warship In Red Sea

Iran Warns Against US ‘Adventurism’ After Parking Cruise Missile-Armed Warship In Red Sea

The Red Sea continues to grow busy with the presence of naval assets, as the West and its allies attempt to keep international shipping lanes open despite the threat of Houthi missiles and drones launched from Yemen. This has lately included nations such as Denmark, Pakistan and Sri Lanka sending military ships to regional waters as well.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken while meeting with Arab leaders over the weekend before he arrived in Israel Monday evening said, “These attacks are having a real effect on the prices that people have to pay for food, for medicine, for energy. Ships have to get diverted to other places. Insurance rates go up.”

Maritime and industry analyst Sam Chambers has observed, “Over the weekend, the number of transits through the Suez Canal fell to the lowest since the waterway was blocked by the Ever Given containership in early 2021, according to Inchcape Shipping Services.”

Iranian warship Alborz, file image, Fars News Agency/AP

But amid the heavy presence Western coalition military ships, there is now an Iranian frigate parked in the Red Sea after its arrival starting nearly a week ago. “2024 was only a few hours old when Iran dispatched a warship, the frigate Alborz, to the Red Sea,” FP recently noted. “Its arrival was yet more bad news for shipping, already facing a crisis from the Iran-backed Houthi attacks on merchant vessels.”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry has issued a new statement warning Israel and America against ‘adventurism’ which will expand war in the region:

“Iran issues a stern warning against any US adventurism that could endanger regional peace,” Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani said Tuesday in a letter directed to the US and its allies, a week after Iran’s Navy deployed a cruise missile-armed warship in the region.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

More Golden (and Black-Gold) Proof: The Dollar is Totally Screwed

More Golden (and Black-Gold) Proof: The Dollar is Totally Screwed

Ever since day-one of the predictably disastrous and politically myopic insanity of weaponizing the world reserve currency against a major power like Russia, we warned that the USD had reached an historical turning point of slow demise and increasing de-dollarization.

We also warned that this would be a gradual process rather than over-night headline, much like the slow but steady death of the USD’s purchasing power since Nixon left the gold standard in 1971:

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But as we’ll discover below, this gyrating process is happening even faster than we could have imagined, and all of this bodes profoundly well for physical gold, yet not so well for the USD.

[image error]Bad Actors, Bad Policies & Predictable Patterns

Regardless of what the media-mislead world thinks of Putin, weaponizing the USD was a foreseeable disaster which, naturally, none of DC’s worst-and-dimmest, could fully grasp.

This is because chest-puffing but math-illiterate neocons pushing policy from the Pentagon were pulling the increasingly visible strings of a Biden puppet at the White House.

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In short, the dark state of which Mike Lofgren warned is not only dark, but dangerously dumb.

These political opportunists have forgotten that military power is not as wise as financial strength, which is why broke (and increasingly centralized nations) inevitably lead their country toward a state of permanent ruin preceded by cycles of war and currency-destroying inflation.

Sound familiar?

Despite no training in economics, Ernest Hemingway, who witnessed two world wars, saw this pattern clearly:

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We also found “Biden’s” sanctions particularly comical, given that his former boss clearly understood the dangers of such a policy for the USD as far back as 2015:

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Today’s Contemplation CLXXIII–Human Ecological Overshoot: What to Do?

Today’s Contemplation CLXXIIIMonte Alban, Mexico (1986). Photo by author.

Human Ecological Overshoot: What to Do?

Today’s Contemplation is a very short comment I posted on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest piece.

Yes, the grieving process must be travelled through to the end to reach ‘acceptance’ of our human ecological overshoot predicament. Some are just beginning this process and as such display the very typical denial and bargaining stages, thinking quite adamantly that human ingenuity and our technological prowess will triumph over any and everything that Nature has in store for us story-telling apes. In fact, it’s not unlikely that the vast, vast majority of people are not even remotely aware of the human ecological dilemma and attribute growing signs of ‘collapse’ to socioeconomic and sociopolitical factors solely.

For myself, it took a number of years to move through these grief stages and I still get bogged down in some ‘hopefulness’ periodically that we can avoid what is for all intents and purposes inevitable (I think mostly because I have children whom I’d like to think can ‘dodge’ the ramifications of the coming storm).

Aside from this psychological journey of grieving, I wrote a series of Contemplations (starting here) about a number of other cognitive aspects that impact our belief systems and thinking about this, concluding that:
“The collapse that always accompanies overshoot seems baked in at this point with little if anything we can do about it.

Personally, I’d like to see our dwindling fossil fuels dedicated to decommissioning safely those significantly dangerous complexities we’ve created (e.g., nuclear power plants, biosafety labs, chemical storage, etc.) and relocalising as much potable water procurement, food production, and regional shelter needs as possible rather than attempting to sustain what is ultimately unsustainable given the fossil fuel inputs necessary. Perhaps, just perhaps. by doing these things a few pockets of humanity (and many other species) can come out the other side of the bottleneck we’ve created for ourselves.”

Your call for focusing on a ‘graceful landing’ immediately had me think about Dr. Kate Booth and Tristan Sykes ‘Just Collapse’ initiative. They describe it as “an activist platform dedicated to socio-ecological justice in face of inevitable and irreversible global collapse…[that] advocates for a Just Collapse and Planned Collapse to avert the worst outcomes that will follow an otherwise unplanned, reactive collapse…[and] advocates for localised insurgent planning and mutual aid.” And this avenue may be the best path to follow at this point, particularly since it appears that most of our reactionary attempts to stave off the symptom predicaments of our overshoot are serving to exacerbate our issues.

Report: Lab Leaks Have Increased By 50% Since COVID Pandemic

Report: Lab Leaks Have Increased By 50% Since COVID Pandemic“The apparent lab leaks in the UK alone show we are all sitting on a ticking time bomb.”

The Telegraph reports that it has found a FIFTY PERCENT increase in leaks and accidents at laboratories in the UK since the outbreak of COVID in 2020, warning of “potentially catastrophic consequences” in the future.

The report notes that a Freedom of Information Act request sent to all British universities, government research bodies and the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) yielded results showing that “dozens of dangerous viruses and bacteria including anthrax, rabies and Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome) are being stored close to large populations, potentially placing citizens at risk.”

The investigation also found that since January 2020, there have been 156 reports of lab leaks or accidents, around 42 per year. That is a rise of 50 per cent on the years between January 2010 and December 2019, when 286 incidents were recorded in total, approximately 28 per year.

Some of the incidents recorded since 2020 include a worker dropping plates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bug responsible for TB at a former Public Health England lab at Heartlands Hospital in Birmingham. At the same lab a worker was pricked with a needle containing HIV, human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 2, and Candida albicans.

At other facilities, avian flu leaked from a cracked sample tube, an accident involving the bacteria responsible for life-threatening sepsis was recorded, and a worker was stabbed by a needle containing the Vaccinia virus, similar to smallpox.

At another lab, workers “lost” a mouse that they had genetically modified.

The Telegraph notes that not all incidents were disclosed because “some of the biological agents involved are listed in the Terrorism Act.”

American molecular biologist Richard H. Ebright, who has been vocal regarding his opinion that the COVID pandemic was a gain of function lab leak, further highlighted several terrifying quotes from the Telegraph report:

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The Great Taking Exposes the Financial End Game

The Great Taking Exposes the Financial End Game

One of the very best exposés of the covert, very well-hidden, bellicose attempts to rob all of humanity – barring the miniscule number of psychotic individuals comprising the inimical opposition – of their material possessions and their ‘immaterial’ freedom, was published fairly recently. It is accurately titled The Great Taking (2023), and was written by David Webb, one of the most courageous and finance-savvy authors I have ever come across. He introduces the book on p. 1 in uncompromising terms:

What is this book about? It is about the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.

We are now living within a hybrid war conducted almost entirely by deception, and thus designed to achieve war aims with little energy input. It is a war of conquest directed not against other nation states but against all of humanity.

In the Prologue of the book Webb paints a richly textured, autobiographical picture of his provenance as finance guru, obviously with exceptional intelligence and, it turned out, courage…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

US Debt Hits A Record $34.001 Trillion

US Debt Hits A Record $34.001 Trillion

The US Treasury has a morbid habit of revealing big, round numbers of debt around major calendar milestones, and the new 2024 year was no different because according to the latest Treasury Daily Statement published after the close today and reflecting the US Treasury’s financial statements as of Dec 29, 2023, total US debt as of the end of the year was – drumroll – just over $34 trillion for the first time ever, or $34,001,493,655,565.48 to be precise.

Since this is a topic we have covered more or less daily for our 15 year existence, we don’t need to say much suffice to show a chart of total US debt since zerohedge launched in Jan 2009, when total US debt was only $10.6 trillion. We sure have gone a long way since then.

Some context: US debt increased by…

$1 trillion in the past 3 months$2 trillion in the past 6 months$4 trillion in the past 2 years$11 trillion in the past 4 years

… and so on. You get the exponential picture. At this point everyone knows how this ends – certainly the CBO does…

… but since there is no way to reverse the catastrophic outcome, there is no point in even talking about it. At best, one may only prepare for the inevitable hyperinflationary outcome, which would be good news to what is now over $1 trillion in interest expense: after all, someone has to devalue the currency all that interest is payable in.

And since there is no longer a way out, we may as well joke about it so consider this: in the third quarter when US GDP supposedly grew at a 4.9% annualized rate – hardly the stuff of recessions – rising $547 billion in nominal (not real) dollars, the US budget deficit increased by a whopping $622 billion.

This not only explains where US “growth” has come from, but begs the question just how much debt will be needed when the US falls into an official recession.

Or actually not, because at this point the best anyone can do is polish the brass on the titanic while waiting for the inevitable, captures so vividly by the following endgame chart.