Debt Rattle July 20 2020
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Jack Delano “Lower Manhattan seen from the S.S. Coamo leaving New York.” 1941 • Are Mutations Making Coronavirus More Infectious? (BBC) • When
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 20 2020]Jack Delano “Lower Manhattan seen from the S.S. Coamo leaving New York.” 1941
Looks like an early morning sunrise through the early morning mist…
The van Gogh is priceless…
The mask controversy is not, it is the single best metaphor, for the west’s disfunction…“…. the consequences are potentially huge.”
Bookmark these data gathering services
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Gaia_overview
Gaia overview
Gaia will create an extraordinarily precise three-dimensional map of more than a thousand million stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond, mapping their motions, luminosity, temperature and composition. This huge stellar census will provide the data needed to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our Galaxy.For example, Gaia will identify which stars are relics from smaller galaxies long ago ‘swallowed’ by the Milky Way. By watching for the large-scale motion of stars in our Galaxy, it will also probe the distribution of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to hold our Galaxy together.
Gaia will achieve its goals by repeatedly measuring the positions of all objects down to magnitude 20 (about 400 000 times fainter than can be seen with the naked eye).
For all objects brighter than magnitude 15 (4000 times fainter than the naked eye limit), Gaia will measure their positions to an accuracy of 24 microarcseconds. This is comparable to measuring the diameter of a human hair at a distance of 1000 km.
https://www.flightradar24.com/37.99,-94.35/4
http://www.shiptraffic.net/2001/04/north-pacific-ocean-ship-traffic.html?m=1
https://www.seniorlink.com/blog/the-50-best-gps-trackers-for-seniors
The 30 Best GPS Trackers for Seniors
To help you find the best GPS tracker for your aging loved one, we’ve rounded up 50 GPS trackers that are all high quality and deliver results. The devices listed below are broken down into three categories: wearable GPS devices, keychain trackers, and conventional trackers.The haunting photo of the SS Coamo at the beginning of a very tragic war.
Wednesday, December 9, 1942
U-Boat Attack near BermudaSS Coamo was torpedoed by German submarine U-604 off of Bermuda while en route to New York.
The ship was detached from the convoy she started in and was never heard from again.
This was the greatest loss of a merchant crew of any US Flag merchant vessel during all of WWII
http://www.johndayblog.com/2020/07/signaling-virtuous-victimhood.html
There is a process of abstract simplification in our primate brains. A thing we do that helps us multiply and prevail as a species is predictive-modeling of our world. Our models are never as complex as reality, but the better ones give us practical advice and direction as to acting today, to benefit ourselves in the future.
Our cognitive models long for clarity-through-brevity, even if it’s wrong. (Our target is slightly- wrong-but-useful.)
It’s a setting we ALL come with, and to varying degrees, but it only works when it works, and when a lot of changes are happening at once, lots of interwoven complex processes, we can be more wrong than usual, just when it matters most for our survival.
I posit that we are now in an epoch where more is changing at once than any of us can cognitively model, The global resources are running lower, and are more expensive to get. Economies are loaded with more parasitic debt, which is growing , while economies shrink, global heating, dying coral, plastic particles in oceans and our food, algal blooms, CIA/narco-terrorists have no boundaries as “American” dirty wars just keep growing as their own economy…
WE, in our relative remove and insulation, are having to face viral pandemic more personally than we are used to.
Viral pandemic is War-by-Fire, and whether the fire got out of Ft Detrick or Wuhan-IV lab, it is loose among us, up-close-and-personal. We are white-water-rafting through the rapids of history, and we do not know when the rapids smooth out.
We need to maintain immediate focus and paddle whatever direction at the bow that we need to avoid a big rock RIGHT NOW.
Our family did this in Thailand. It’s a practice of immediate awareness in the moment.
In chaotic systems, the conditions at onset of chaos are one of the most important factors, and about all we can really consider in our simplified predictive models.
A city where the service sector is already strained in business-as-usual, and that can’t fund police, EMS, fire, trash, sewer, roads and pensions, is predicted to collapse in chaotic conditions.
That’s the easy part. Picking your own best bet is much harder, because your human network is wherever you have been the last 20 years, and that is really important in chaos. We are wired to maintain our human network relationships. It’s deep wiring. It informs the most fundamental form of human economy, “Gift economy”.
I’ve been seeking a safer homestead for the tumult since we traveled the world with bikes and backpacks 2005-2006. I wanted to protect my sons from the threat of a draft-resumption under Bush II.
I interviewed for a job in Christchurch NZ, as well as looking carefully at patterns of life, everywhere we went. Later I worked 4 times on the north tip of Hawaii (Big Island), and thought I had really gotten it figured out. I learned a lot about small community, where people work together and all have vegetable gardens. The local economy of cane plantations had a LOT of gift-economy in place.
After the move there failed for clinic financial problems, and we moved back to Austin, I was determined to just start growing a kitchen-garden and fruit trees, wherever I was. That was summer 2013. It seems longer ago, when I say the year, 7 years ago.
As I studied predictive climate change models, soil characteristics, ground water availability, population densities, land prices, and historical farming practices of a century ago, a few areas looked more likely prospects than others. The land in San Marcos was finally 3 times what we could afford, and went POOF! I had put a lot of planning into it, a lot of study, by then.
Nothing for a few months, then suddenly this place in Yoakum popped up with all the markings of fate.
We were prepared. We jumped. We are working the project.
Jenny and I are still working in Austin, where we are known and appreciated in our workplaces, where we have social capital. We hope to build social capital in Yoakum, and we maintain social capital in our Texas family-relations, which are a bit more fluid than exact locations.
I’m just saying that this is the path we are on as we enter this process of complex change. The complex societal and environmental reorganization is in the direction of less stuff, less energy, less hierarchy (unaffordable) and abrogation of the guarantees of the exhausted post WW-2 social contract.
We are already all into the beginning of the white water rapids, but we also all have some agency, some ability to adjust direction, both immediately and knowing that we are in the rapids until further notice.Charles Hugh Smith: Welcome to the Crazed, Frantic Demise of Finance Capitalism
The cognitive dissonance required to ignore the widening gap between the real economy and the fraud’s basic machinery–speculation funded by “money” conjured out of thin air–has reached a level of denial that can only be termed psychotic.
When scams start unraveling, the scammers become increasingly frantic to maintain the illusion of legitimacy and the delusion of guaranteed gains that are the lifeblood of every scam. One sure sign that the flim-flam is about to collapse is the manic rise of FOMO, fear of missing out, as the scammers jam the Ponzi scheme’s stellar returns to new extremes…
Unfortunately for everyone invested in the scam, all the “wealth” created by financial engineering / legalized fraud is fictitious, i.e. phantom. All Ponzi schemes collapse once the supply of greed-blinded marks dries up, and so the “solution” in our finance capitalism fraud is for the central bank, the Federal Reserve, to become the mark with an infinite checkbook: the Fed is busily conjuring “money” out of thin air to buy corporate junk bonds and other “assets” (ha-ha, as if these are actually worth anything–the joke’s on you) to prop up the Ponzi scheme.
This works until it doesn’t, of course.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2020/07/welcome-to-crazed-frantic-demise-of.htmlHelp, I’ve fallen and I’m out-of-practice at crawling on the floor!
Why a Great Reset Based on Green Energy Isn’t Possible, Gail Tverberg
The economy isn’t really like a computer that can be switched on and off; it is more comparable to a human body that is dead, once it is switched off…
Modelers of all kinds would like to think that there are no limits in this world. Actually, there are many limits. It is the fact that economies have to work around limits that leads to cycles such as these. Some examples of limits include inadequate arable land for a growing population, inability to fight off pathogens, and an energy supply that becomes excessively expensive to produce. Cycles can be expected to vary in steepness, both on the upside and the downside of the cycle...
Many people have been concerned that we might “run out” of oil. They expect that oil prices will rise to compensate for the shortages. Thus, many people believe that in order to maintain adequate supply, we should be concerned about supplementing fossil fuels with nuclear power and renewable energy.
If we examine oil prices (Figure 2), it is apparent that, at least recently, this is not the way oil prices actually behave. Since the spike in oil prices in 2008, the big problem has been prices that fall too low for oil producers. At prices well below $100 per barrel, development of many new oil fields is not economic...
Prices were very low in 2015 and 2016 for both coal and oil. China stimulated its economy, and prices for both coal and oil were able to rise again in 2017 and 2018. By 2019, prices for both oil and coal were falling again. Figure 2 shows that in 2020, oil prices have fallen again, as a result of demand destruction caused by pandemic shutdowns. Coal prices have also fallen in 2020…
The low prices since mid-2008 seem to be leading to both peak crude oil and peak coal. Crude oil production started falling in 2019 and can be expected to continue falling in 2020. Coal extraction seems likely to start falling in 2020... investment in new oil wells is being reduced, and unprofitable coal mines are being closed.
Modelers missed the fact that fossil fuel extraction would disappear because of low prices, leaving nearly all reserves and other resources in the ground. Modelers instead assumed that renewables would always be an extension of a fossil fuel-powered system...
Thus, modelers looking at Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for wind and for solar assumed that they would always be used inside of a fossil fuel powered system that could provide heavily subsidized balancing for their intermittent output. They made calculations as if intermittent electricity is equivalent to electricity that can be controlled to provide electricity when it is needed. Their calculations seemed to suggest that making wind and solar would be useful. The thing that was overlooked was that this was only possible within a system where other fuels would provide balancing at a very low cost...
The low selling prices of commodities makes it impossible for employers to pay adequate wages to most of their workers. These low wages, in turn, feed through to the uprisings we have been seeing in the last couple of years…
If electricity is only available when the sun is shining, or when the wind is blowing, industry cannot plan for its use. Its use must be limited to applications where intermittency doesn’t matter, such as pumping water for animals to drink or desalinating water. No one would attempt to smelt metals with intermittent electricity because the metals would set at the wrong time, if the intermittent electricity suddenly disappeared. No one would power an elevator with intermittent electricity, because a person could easily be trapped between floors. Homeowners would not use electricity to power refrigerators, because, as likely as not, the food would spoil when electricity was off for long periods. Traffic signals would work sometimes, but not others...
Wind, solar, and hydroelectric today only comprise a little under 10% of the world’s energy supply.
We are deluding ourselves if we think we can get along on such a tiny total energy supply...
Few people understand how important energy supply is for giving humans control over other species and pathogens. [I personally expect malaria and other mosquito born illnesses to return to places like Houston.]
Control over other species and pathogens has been a multistage effort. In recent years, this effort has involved antibiotics, antivirals and vaccines. Pasteurization became an important technique in the 1800s...
We do indeed appear to be headed for a Great Reset. There is little chance that Green Energy can play more than a small role…
It is true that some Green Energy devices may continue to operate for a time. But, as the world economy continues to head downhill, it will be increasingly difficult to make new renewable devices and to repair existing systems. Wholesale electricity prices can be expected to stay very low…
…we can expect more revolutions and wars at this stage in the cycle. At least part of this unrest will be related to low commodity prices and low wages. Globalization will tend to disappear. Keeping transmission lines repaired will become an increasing problem, as will many other tasks associated with keeping energy supplies available.https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/07/17/why-a-great-reset-based-on-green-energy-isnt-possible/Oh, this is useful information!
Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Manipulators Are More Likely To Engage in ‘Virtuous Victim Signaling,’ Says StudyHi Zerosum and Dave Note.Spiritual forest; I’m working on it.
Yoakum is in the coastal plains of the Texas gulf weather system, about 70 miles in from the coast, with highs and lows mitigated by the gulf, ore regular rain than it would get, otherwise, and enough land to weaken the hurricanes when they hit Galveston and Houston.
Land like this in Asia has been contested in wars for countless thousands of years. It’s treasured.
I feel like I always say the same thing…@ John Day
Re abstract simplification – I completely agree the complexity of the levels, layers and rates of change mean none of us have a snowball-in-hell’s chance of predicting the future, and therefore we resort to our biological strategy of simplification.
I’d argue there’s quite a spread between those at one end relying on MSM information to feed into the simplification engine vs those who read widely and include some history with it. The former spend most of their time trying to avoid rocks – both real and to a great extent imaginary. The latter hopefully have a somewhat better grasp of what an actual rock looks like, whilst having a better grasp on some historical rock-avoiding strategies.
For myself, some of the greatest tension is in allocating energy and attention between improving my family’s position and ability to withstand future shocks (and avoiding rocks) vs remaining engaged in political society and hopefully having some small impact on it. The idea of ceding the public space to mobs of intellectual idiots just grates too much.. 😊
And again – in the context of the overwhelming mire of pressing challenges to humankind, I don’t believe the current “pandemic” would make the top 10 in any half-ways rational analysis. We’re spending so much energy focussed on avoiding that small rock that we’ve screened out the way river drops away in a huge waterfall further downstream. I don’t believe this is accidental. Natural or contrived, a “pandemic” sucking all the attention from the room suits powerful actors very well thank you.
Re green energy – renewables have a place in the energy ecosystem, but for the reasons you’ve outlined they can never replace fossil fuels. Our choice as a species is to reduce our energy usage or to retain a place for fossil fuels. Or most likely, a combination of both. I suspect there’s quite an overlap between overly sanctimonious EV drivers and the “virtuous victim signalling” types as you link to.
The last organisation I worked for are heavily invested in gas production in NZ. Over the years I was there I had all my pre-existing green biases challenged as I learned the nuances of the industry. This week the Maori party of NZ released a campaign promise (the NZ election is in September) to eliminate natural gas production by 2025. I wondered if they’d understood that LPG in NZ is produced as a (largely unwanted) by-product of natural gas production. Eliminate natural gas, and LPG (to fuel all those BBQs and home hot water) disappears as well. The same applies to diesel and heavy oil (to fuel ships, heavy industry etc) vs petrol/gasoline. The further you get into the detail of any market and industry, the more the simplistic ideas fail. Or rather, turning simple ideas into functional reality is a helluva lot more complex than most people care to understand.
Re Thailand – congratulations on having the courage of your convictions to make the move. So many people like to talk about it but never vote with their feet!Wednesday, December 9, 1942
U-Boat Attack near Bermuda
SS Coamo was torpedoed by German submarine U-604 off of Bermuda while en route to New York.
The ship was detached from the convoy she started in and was never heard from again.
This was the greatest loss of a merchant crew of any US Flag merchant vessel during all of WWIIGreat find; thanks for that information…very interesting.
🙂
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