John Day
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@ Professorlocknload,
It looks like you are doing diligent investigation of Arizona.
It’s still good to rent, keep your powder dry, and wait ’til you see the whites of their eyes.
There may very well be another big leg down in housing. I sure expect that to be the case. Renting gives you an option on any good deal you may find in such a scenario…
Mish really has good insights sometimes.
Other times he has rabies.
This rant looks like “Cujo”.@Professor Locknload,
You should spend some time there, year round, before buying.
There are a lot of specific little regions and cliques in Arizona. Most of it is desert, but the little oases all have personalities, and outsiders may always be outsiders in some places.
Money won’t buy acceptance in most places.
I lived on the Navajo Reservation in Chinle Arizona for a couple of years. Working as a doctor did get me accepted, but accepted as a white man, which is like a different species.
The oil is running low. The Navajo can live without electricity, at least the ones who live the old way.@Professorlocknload
You might look at Nature Bats Last, Professor Guy McPherson’s blog about that sort of low impact, off grid, sustainable kinda’ life. He’s in that area you are looking at, but it’s pretty hot. There are little lslands of better climate with streams and so on.@Professorlocknload
I’m moving to Hawaii, Big Island, rural, nice bicycling, good little job, fresh fruit.
I fly December 1, flying back with my wife after Christmas in Texas, and shipping container arriving January 2.
Just saying that I agree, sir…While we are at the point of discussing power-intrigues in the era of declining resources and debt bubbles, why did David Petraeus resign from the CIA with public announcement of sex-outside-marriage? Here is a story which points to a plotted military coup against Obama, should he win the election. A lot of other things I’d found puzzling, make sense in this scenario. (Fighting over lifeboats on deck of Titanic?)
Veterans Today editor, Gordon Duff:
https://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/10/29/269376/us%2Dmilitary%2Dplanned%2Dmutiny%2Don%2Dthe%2Dbounty/The Oil Drum has an update, mainly on the future of coal production, but it looks at natural gas and “all liquids”, too.
You’d best get all your business done in this current decade.
Sooner is better.
Really:
https://www.theoildrum.com/node/9583#moreMax Keiser is featuring this story on his show.
https://rt.com/programs/keiser-report/episode-364-max-keiser/I think people misunderestimate Obama. I see a lot of long faces because the Fed will spend-spend-spend, as it has been doing.
That was then. This is now.
Obama came in promising to change everything. He betrayed his constituents, and will do so again, and this one will come fast, with the “Grand Compromise”.
The fiscal cliff was a bipartisan creation in Summer 2011, and neither party will take credit/blame for the resultant effects. It is like a lumbering zombie. They will do whatever they have to do, but if they run away, deep austerity cuts will come to the social safety net, and everybody’s taxes will go up.
That’s about right, isn’t it?
The gridlock default scenario is about right, from a rational fiscal perspective, but it involves robing people of their retirements, though not right away, and it involves taxes on the rich and middle class going up to what they were under Clinton, which is less than under GHW Bush, and less than under Reagan, and so on.
Republicrats are painted into their respective corners, and there is just one person to call “bullshit” on this.
She just got voted into Teddy Kennedy’s seat.
Elizabeth Warren, this is your next moment of greatness.
Don’t fly in small planes like Paul Wellstone and John Kennedy Jr did, OK?What can Obama do instead of bring on the zombie apocalypse, that we’d get with Romney?
I guess it’ll be more reasonable incremental cutting of the social safety nets until there’s a panic of some sort and capital gains taxes have to be cut to make more 20 hr/wk jobs.
Maybe we can have a war-against-climate-change. That would be a nice image.
Maybe there will be a cyber attack on US banking, and all the amounts in all the accounts will be hacked, leaving the banks with all the money and no records of who it used to belong to.
Sigh…I would like to say something with gravitas, but I’m drawin’ a blank. Here’s a humorous 2 minute mock political ad for Romney, that’s pretty funny. “Equal time, ya’know?
Aloha Stoneleigh/Nicole,
this is really an update for the talk you gave in Austin in May 2010. Now there is so much fractal-like micro-detail to the process of deflationary change. you spoke and gave examples, but it is certainly fascinating to see the details of this unfolding change, which you lay out here, while maintaining the focus on the overall zeitgeist/mass-conceptual-state, and the real-world drivers of it, as well.
You still rock. I’m moving to that “lifeboat” in Hawaii, where I work at that little clinic. I’ve got 1200W of solar panels, 10kwh of Edison cells, and jungle and marine-rated charge controller and inverter.
this is my neighbor and friend, Jim Channon showing his food forest, about 10 min walk from where I’ll be staying. (Skip the commercial. It didn’t used to be there.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLi28tRxk9I
It’s real nice bicycling, too!Balance sheet recessions last longer, and we are in a counter trend, but the second leg down is about to be upon us.
Here is an article about that.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2012-10-24/how-different-is-the-recovery-from-the-financial-crisis
Economics is a fractal process, not so linear, and timing is not possible unless you have a hand on some secret lever.
None of us do.
Stoneleigh is still right, I believe, as she was in 2009. All the stops have been pulled out in the global Ponzi finance scheme to keep it rolling, and this is what we have to show for it.
The hands on those levers are not our own, but the connections from the levers to the financial system are getting soggier and weaker with every use. There are some glaring weak points, too, like the potential for cyber attack or EMP to overturn the entire table and crash the game onto the floor in disarray.
We shall see.
We are not the ones who should be making tight bets on the timing of trends, but rather building some kind of stable support for a rocky tumble ahead.It’s time to stop piling all the breaking eggs into this one basket.
That is not the way to survival.
It just ups the ante for those who control the basket.
“Everything-on-red” indeed, but you know the house “never-gives-a-sucker-an-even-break” and there’s a magnet under that spinning roulette wheel.
Suckers lose all.
Then what?@TheTrivium4TW
I have a pretty holographic conceptual model of the Monetary Debt Tyranny paradigm, and the chart was still just awkward for me, so I think it is like a shorthand, for those that already read shorthand.
The historical quotes were more accessible.
This is really a complex and arcane concept, which makes it sort of mysterious. It IS a “daring daylight robbery” and it was approached through centuries of slowly building cultural paradigms, like goldsmiths holding gold for others, then lending it with fractional reserves, then with paper certificates for the gold holdings, then removing the gold and silver when everyone was used to the paper, then going electronic with credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, HFT…
The “Chicago Plan of the 1930s” which Lindberg and Ford backed was like the “greenbacks” of Lincoln, and the JFK attempt, which ended with his death. There is good data on that.
Ultimately, complex systems collapse to the highest point of complexity, at which they are inherently stable.
It’s a long way down from here…@TheTrivium4TW
Thanks for the detailed reply.
There are always things to consider when currencies fail, and they can fail in stages.
So the dollar may fail as global reserve currency, yet mortgages still need to be paid in dollars. that would be a point of significant loss of faith in the dollar, but not total loss of utility, just greatly reduced utility, and reduced value.
This would likely entail collapse of the current global financial system, which would entail a global loss of faith in the debts denominated in dollar-exchangable currencies. We see more and more of this in Europe. We also see that there was something like a $1.6 trillion flux of secret money from the Fed to European banking, during the acute phase of the 2008-2009 crisis.
There is so much complexity, and there have been so many times in history when communities found themselves temporarily without any functioning currency, not just a crummy one, but none.
One has to be very careful, as I see you are, in considering future scenarios. So many “preppers” just consider one scenario, and don’t seem to think it all the way through.
As for me, I already bought an off-grid solar set-up with the tax returns this year, including nickel-iron batteries, which last forever with routine maintenance. I’m moving to where it makes sense.
I agree that one must consider the full implications of various likely scenarios and prepare as much as possible, before it becomes impossible.Hi Dave,
There are currently competing monies.
Margin calls in 2008 were happening in dollars as stocks plummeted, and dollars were what was required, and anything else was scrambled to get those dollars.
There was a lot of downward price manipulation of gold in July and August 2008, and the Saudis bought a lot of physical gold and put it on a ship to Arabia. Later that year, when data came out, it was Bank of America, I think, that had been heavily shorting gold to drive the price down. After the crash, they did OK on those short positions.
When gold is THE MONEY, it isn’t subject to those kind of sloshes. I’m looking more at what will be globally accepted after debt based fiat currencies are retired, as I think they must be in a shrinking-resource-constrained world. No more exponential growth economic model…
I don’t see gold as a short-term holding for profit, but more as a strategic asset for individuals, and the basis for international trade deals across the ages.
I think it will be that again, in a powered-down world, but that is a view to the indefinite future, after the dollar hegemony ends.@Dave Fairtex
Thanks for the reply. There were banking publications in the 1800s in the US that served as a means of communication and coordination of banking trends, such as premeditated deflations and calling-in of loans, in order to catch borrowers with no possible recourse but to lose collateral to the banks. I forget where I read this, possibly in Ellen Brown’s Web of Debt writings.@The Trivium4TW
Thanks for the reply.
(I spent a half hour getting this picture into my “avatar” file. It’s not “copyrighted” so I’ll keep it on the desktop. I used to be a neighbor of this statue.)
The hard times I’m envisioning include loss of faith in fiat currency, 98% of which is now electronic, as I understand.
I’ve been considering the virtues of buying a couple thousand dollars worth of nickels, as an example. These could serve as a local currency at some time in a small area. It’s just a thought. The “paper dollars” will be devalued a lot in an upcoming phase, but nickels are already worth more than 5c.
They’ll be going away soon…
One interesting consideration regarding physical fiat money is all those new design $100 bills sitting in a warehouse in Ft Worth “waiting to be destroyed”. https://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40531910/ns/business-cnbc_tv/t/bills-new-facelift-goes-awrycnbc/#.UHH_UDlVjow I’ve thought that there are a whole lot of them (1 billion), and they could serve as emergency physical currency in a cyber-war scenario, or EMP attack.
Anyway, I’m really not assuming continuity of the global monetary regime in the upcoming global musical chairs game of attrition at both elite and proletarian levels. There will be fewer and fewer chairs at the dinner table and the tables of power.
Being the only-game-in-town is obviously (to me) very important to the current Western hegemony. It seems to me that any other financial regime is a direct threat, better destroyed while the hegemony is powerful, than wrestled with once the troubles begin in earnest. That is one thing that made Iraqi acceptance of Euros for oil a threat, and Gaddafi’s plan for a gold-backed African Dinar a threat, and what makes Iran’s Islamic banking a threat.
Islamic banking principles look to be sounder in deflation at first blush, which is all the blush I know how to give such things.@Agtefc
Thanks for the reply, and I find nothing to disagree with in the substance of what you say.
I have been reading TAE since spring 2008, and I don’t think that what you say is unconsidered, merely not presented as such. By narrowing the scope of the blogspot, not the dotcom address, it is possible to have some degree of order and some continuity. The amount of restriction was addressed as such several times, earlier on.
You are not personally restricted, nor am I.
I don’t want to seem aloof, and I do work full time, and scan the ether sphere a lot, so I’m not here every day. I do really agree with your view, and find that all your references seem to be known to me.
Somebody mentioned Sun Tzu’s Art of War book, and it says that “War is carried out by all means”. I think it is the most studied military text in the world.
In this terminal resource decline phase of history, I’m somewhat heartened by thoughts that the power elites are at least “rational” based on selfish interests. That makes nuclear war between hegemony and rising hegemony completely undesirable. There is no reason to think that industrial economy could rise from those ashes again.
Fighting proxy wars and electronic wars, and money wars, and even environmental wars seems safer. (The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than unclassified models predicted, is good for oil drilling and Chinese trade routes, so Russia, China, Norway, Greenland, Canada all benefit.)
It seems that there may be odd-man-out populations that the elites target (God bless Haiti.), but they also need to use something like “free market” selection within their subject populations to let the most desirable workers survive and nudge the bottom half “out of the gene pool”.
There are vast underground bases, I hear, with lots of medicines and MREs and so on. That’s not a life for me, even if I wanted it, nor for my four young-adult kids.
Where to survive, and how to survive, while remaining “free” is the complex problem we face.
I am on a path, and it means being in a place with food security of a very direct and non-monetary sort, and reliable rain, and not too many people, who are mostly pretty agreeable types. This is where to make a lifeboat, and I hope that the kids will choose to come stay, when they complete their initial career training (college and such).
I really don’t want to participate in WW-3, and I want to withdraw my support as I build the lifeboat. I’m not the only one who feels this calling. It is common, especially in places where it is possible…@TheTrivium4TW
Thanks for the reply. I’m physician, not an economist, but my reference to gold as the currency to rule a deflation hearkens back to the “long depression” of the latter 1800s, the one that William Jennings Bryant railed against in his “Cross of Gold” speech.
Debts were payable in gold after the death of Lincoln ended the “Greenback” regime. There was a lot of economic activity across the US as Manifest Destiny manifested itself.
Bankers fairly openly colluded to bring in gold out of circulation and hold it at coordinated times and in coordinated areas.
By doing this they made debts absolutely unpayable, and they took possession of a lot of developed/improved property This was how they used physical gold as the tool of acquisition in deflations which they controlled.
We are near the end of the regime of global “trust” which allows electronic fiat money to exist. In 2008 this trust disappeared, and ships were stuck in port, because the letters of lading from banks were not trusted by other banks.
In truly severe (looming) deflationary times, there is no trust, and in times of no trust, physical gold is always accepted.
Those are my thoughts and impressions about why gold is the currency of choice in deflation, and I’m not really armed with the expertise to go beyond what I just wrote. I am thinking of a long, severe, likely “terminal” deflation as resources decline.@The Trivium4TW
You suggest that deflationary looting comes next(ish).
Yes, but WHO is holding the gold, which is the money of choice in real serious deflation?
I can’t tell who has the gold, except China, Russia and Saudi have some. German gold is supposedly in New York by Max Keiser’s lead a few years ago, which means it’s “Schroedinger’s gold” and resides with his pet cat.Agtefc,
That is a good skelatel analysis.
What forms do you see WW-3 taking as time progresses?
The risk of nukes looms high.
It seems that nations may even make war in one way, while cooperating in another way, and just pretend it is not happening.
(I think I see this already.)Backwardsevolution,
Thanks for the pat on the back and thanks for noticing that Monsanto is trying to own and pimp out all that is essential to life itself.
This is one of the highest levels of abomination ever reached, and if it goes any higher it will ultimately extinguish life, becoming the final “reductio ad absurdum”.I’m back ON-TOPIC since this is the French reanalysis of Monsanto’s raw data on GM corn from 12 years ago, which may have been seen early by hungary, before they booted Monsanto out.
Misinformed by “Science”,
There are a lot of pictures of deformed albino Sprague-Dawley lab rats popping up over the past 2-3 days. Those kinds of pictures are easy to come by.
What is really going on?
Monsanto had to fund scientific studies to “prove” that it’s GM corn/maize varieties were “safe” for human and animal consumption in OECD member countries.
So firstly, the intent of these studies is clear. The intent of these studies is to find no fault, no metabolic danger to living organisms.
Monsanto has done this dance before, and knows how to do it. It is general knowledge, anyway. It is a very common dance. Industry funds most of this research, and funds the researchers who provide the desired results most reliably. I’m not jaded. I’ve been involved in physiologic research studies on lab rats for years in college and med school. I’ve had long discussions with researchers, often about other researchers, and methodologies used, tossing out a couple of bad data points to get where you need to be, things like that. My critical reading of medical and physiological research has generally led me to conclude that 80-90% of published, peer-reviewed research is totally-biased-crap, meant to prove dome predetermined “fact”.
In order to justify conclusions, researchers are supposed to reveal all raw data and all statistical methods of analysis. This is Greek to most readers.
Let’s look at how Monsanto stacked this data in their own favor.
Yes, this is ALL Monsanto data we are discussing, and it is 12 years old, and it has been kept secret, pried out by Greenpeace lawsuits and such.
We only have Monsanto data to talk about here, but now, after more than a decade, the raw data and methods are available for review.Toxic effects show up more over longer times, with more animals to look at, with higher doses of the toxins, and with more tests, to look at more specific types of acute and chronic change in physiology.
As Monsanto I want studies with shorter time frames, fewer animals fed my corn, animals fed lower doses of my corn (maybe give some of my corn to the control group, by not genetically analyzing their feed, so they are secretly more similar to the test groups), and I don’t want to do very many liver or kidney or sex hormone tests, and I don’t want to do them very often, and I want to end the whole study well before cancer has a chance to start, or “long-term-toxicity” can kick in.
Mission Accomplished!
Monsanto bought study protocols that really only had 10 rats in each group fed specific GM corn products. With 10 rats per group, you just can’t find anything but high frequency effects. They only fed a maximum of 33% GM corn to any group, and the lower dose was 11%. There were very large groups of hundreds of rats used as various sorts of controls, so the study looks better with hundreds of rats, but they were not the ones in the test-groups, so it is fluff. The lack of rigor in defining the diets of some “control group” rats left open the possibility to mix some of the study maize into their feed, while nobody was looking, and that was all the time. Nobody looked. there was no genetic analysis of the feed given to the most general control group.
This information never formally existed, but if I were a crooked researcher, I would have spiked the feed of the control groups at night with the same GM corn that I was giving the experimental groups. Monsanto knows how to get what they pay for, right?
The small groups of test-group rats at low feeding concentrations only got to participate for a maximum of 3 months, then Game Over. Long term toxic effects were specifically excluded from the short term study, but the conclusion was that the GM corn was safe in long term use for billions of humans and animals. “Science”.
Evidence of cancer was excluded by the very short term and by not looking for any cancer or tumor markers. Check!
Evidence of teratogenicity was excluded by strictly avoiding pregnancy and not even looking at any reproductive hormone levels.
The final firewall was the statistical techniques used.
How can you justify a safety conclusion on such a small dose, small cohort, short time study group, which you checked so few things on?
You just say it’s so, and hide all your records.
That worked until Monsanto lost the court cases. Monsanto just lied about the statistics.
If your design gives a 70% chance that you will fail to find major toxicity, and you don’t find it, then you just say you did a careful study, and it wasn’t there and the data is proprietary. Check!What can the very limited raw data reveal about the few rats fed low concentrations of 3 GM corn varieties for 3 months, and tested as little as possible?
The 3 GM corn varieties are prefaced by NK, which is “Roundup Ready” and therefore contains traces of “roundup”, as well as 2 MO (Monsanto) prefaced varieties, containing the Bt toxin and a never-seen-before-in-the-living-world “novel Bt” toxin. These are pesticide toxins derived from Bacillis Thuringiensis, which makes them as part of it’s daily chores in the world.
The novel Bt is really something to look at closely, but not for Monsanto… Cows abort when eating Bt feed, we now know, but this study stays completely away from that whole realm. A lot of the suspicion rests on these inseparable pesticide contents of these GM corn varieties, but not all of the suspicion, because these are not necessarily the only “improvements”, just the obvious ones.I will not give a blow-by-blow breakdown for each feed group, but there were sex differences and dose differences and time differences in pretty much all groups, despite efforts to ignore them by study design. There were liver and kidney effects all around, sometimes more for males, sometimes females. There were suggestions of reduced cardiac muscle mass, possibly overall muscle decrease (not looked at) in the Roundup Ready group, which could be due to eating a little Roundup. Some of the Bt rats showed some liver changes associated with diabetes, and gained weight, but liver enzyme studies which might show signs of liver inflammation were strictly avoided. there were kidney effects which raised the possibility of renal toxicity, and showed different grouped levels of toxins excreted by the kidneys. These feeds really seemed to have different effects on the kidneys, and on male and female kidneys, but tests for early kidney damage, such as protein leakage into the urine, were avoided.
Some of these groups definitely gained more weigh than others.
Why?
Sorry, beyond the scope of the study. Who cares?
Obviously, a proper statistical analysis of the expertly-constrained data reveals nothing reassuring about even short term effects of these GM corn varieties. It points to differences in metabolic effect from each variety, even with just a few rats to look at for a short time, and totally avoids looking at birth defects, intergenerational issues, different species, and even cancer and long-term toxicity.
Monsanto got what they paid for, even if they had to slide some extra loot under the table.
It is not enough to justify their GM corn existing in the world at all, let alone being fed to any other organism.
In America, you can’t legally find out if it is in your Fritos, tortillas or popcorn.
It’s illegal to tell you that.
It’s probably pretty hard for companies to even know that about the lots they buy.
Don’t ask, don’t tell…Who is going to do the studies that need to be done, which would take over a decade to really do properly?
Nobody?
Will this stuff be taken off the market pending the proper studies, as actually required by regulators, but never done?Here is the reanalysis of Monsanto’s raw data and techniques. It’s dense, but it isn’t bullshit.
It’s French…
https://www.biolsci.org/v05p0706.htmCorn-Fed
“Atheists can also know the truth” Anam Thubten, Buddhist Lama
this was my teacher’s comment to my information that my teenage (now 21 y/o) son was an atheist.
I have reflected. My son does not believe in an external god, as so often portrayed, nor do I, nor have I ever.
My upbringing in Christianity gave me always the belief that “god” was inside me, not just watching me, else how could my every thought be known? God, therefore experiences all that I, or we experience.
Much later, I learned that everything existing within and of God, is at odds with at least Catholic theology, but it fits well with Shinto.
I am very serious when I say that it was my search for Jesus’ deeper teachings, which first wore me out (they were not retained), then fortuitously led me to the very active practices of Buddhist meditation, reflection and questioning, with the blessings of Jesus, I feel.
Your mileage may vary….Apologies to RWG for such tardiness.
I work 12 hr shifts Friday and Saturday. Pays kid’s tuition…
I dredged through the technical paper, and it was dredging for me, since there is a lot of specific terminology, explained once, then used repeatedly.
The RNA is the controller in this genetic engineering scheme, and it controls other metabolic processes in the targeted enzyme systems within the cells.
human glycogen metabolism is very much like carbohydrate metabolism in the wheat seeds. Nature has preserved many of the important segments of genetic code, which create specific lock and key type interactions in these enzymes and their controllers.
The specific targets of this genetic engineering remain trade secrets, but in computer modeling, many potential sites for such function were identified from general wheat and human genomic information.
there are many ways for a wheat enzyme controller to interact with human enzymes, and for these effects to be genetically carried down in subsequent generations of cells, once one (liver for instance) cell takes up the controller RNA.
That is particularly worrisome, that there is a real potential for these controllers to be carried down in cell generations, providing cumulative metabolic toxicity.
These small loops of RNA are heat stable, and survive gut acids and have been seen to get into cells in animal models. therefore, they can get into human cells through the gut, after surviving cooking. If they existed in bovine cells, consumed as hamburger, it seems that they would still survive cooking and digestion.
This is so very concerning that I broke protocol to put it up.
thank you all for being understanding.Markii, I am unfamiliar with “Certified Biodynamic” products. I’m not sure they exist in the US. I am interested.
Very Sorry for “off topic”.
this better relates to the hungarians ejecting Monsanto story, but this GMO news just hit today. I’m a physician, MD since 1986. This is important food toxicity information (my essay).
Successful Mongrels,We’ve (most of us) come to accept our relation to other apes. It’s pretty obvious to see.
We have discovered that we have a lot in common with rats, and can rely on studies which “sacrifice” them instead of people, to further medical knowledge. (No more Dr. Mengele…)
Of course we’ve heard that we evolved from some primordial spark in the primeval soup kitchen making DNA, which could self replicate and begin this whole fabulous process. That genetic tree did most of it’s branching before multi celled organisms, before plants and animals diverged, and a lot of that early work persists as the foundations of cellular metabolism.
Consider the structures of chlorophyll and hemoglobin:
https://www.pines.net/cgbook/chapter3.htmlFeeling a bit older?
You should.
We have been engineered and re engineered for function and reliability over hundreds of millions of years in the most complex empirical process imaginable, with redundant testing over multiple generations, to study the comparative effectiveness of every little mutation in any single trait. This just exceeds the number of processes we can conceptualize. It’s a googleplex kinda’ number. The stars in the sky…
Monsanto doesn’t have that kind of time. they have quarterly earnings reports. they want to own the global genome in our lifetimes, stuff like that. Think they might hotwire some stuff without testing it?
Carbohydrate metabolism in eukaryotic cells has a lot of inter species similarity, because carbohydrates are one of the building block energy groups that go way, way, way back.
Genetic engineers found that if they blocked a certain carbohydrate metabolic enzyme in wheat, they could stuff the grains with more carbohydrate, more energy, more weight, more profit, more better. They went on ahead and did just that. Big success!
However, they either did not do, or did not reveal the extremely close relationship of the enzymes they were blocking to enzymes in humans and animals, which also regulate pathways of carbohydrate metabolism. It turns out that a lot of the gene sequences are spot-on, and that this wheat modification can directly block carbohydrate metabolic pathways in the human liver and muscle cells. Glycogen, the human form of stored carbohydrate, is regulated by these ancient plug-and-play similar enzymes, much as the oxygen and CO2 carrying and transfer similarities between heme and chlorophyl persist. When nature finds something that works, it is unlikely to be completely replaced in a complex metabolic system.
This metabolic poison is in our bodies as we speak.
Here is the scientific paper, by a Biochemist at the University of Canterbury (nice place) in Christchurch, New Zealand, Jack Heinemann Ph.D.
https://safefoodfoundation.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Heinemann-Expert-Scientific-Opinion.pdf
Here is some information from Natural News, including press announcements from down-under and an oral explanation by Dr. Heinemann. (They misstate the location of the University of Canterbury.)
https://www.naturalnews.com/037170_GM_wheat_liver_failure_GMO.htmlI sure do see a lot of Americans with metabolic problems. Fatty liver is an epidemic. Obesity and diabetes are conditions where the human body stores excess fuel, just like those poor wheat kernels are forced to do. I’m not saying that this one thing is the cause, but Americans didn’t eat or exercise that much differently in the 1970s, and look at the difference now! It is illegal to put any label on any food in America, saying whether it does or doesn’t contain GMOs. It is illegal to distinguish GMO wheat in bulk sales, and it gets mixed. Wheat is wheat, and nobody can say different, at least in the land of the free.
I am extremely concerned about this from a medical viewpoint,and I have found that I feel better with less wheat in recent decades. Damn, it’s hard to even limit it, let alone eliminate it. I’m trying to devise a strategy. We just don’t have that much rice in our food, and rice doesn’t stick together, or have the protein content of wheat.
This is merely an EXAMPLE of the sorcerer’s apprentice at work in the realm of life itself. The US laws mean that the apprentice gets to do all he wants, completely in the dark, completely out of any supervision. All adverse effects are simply mysterious, and may be studied from some other angle, which blames fat, diabetic people for watching TV, and eating the cheap food they can afford, but doesn’t do anything to hurt American business.
Hungary, if you may recall, cast out Monsanto and plowed-under their fields.Is it legal to advertise EXCLUSIVELY HUNGARIAN WHEAT in a product?
https://theautomaticearth.com/Finance/hungary-throws-out-monsanto-and-the-imf.html
I don’t have a solution, which I can enact today.
I need to eat food which has absolutely-certain origins, and that is difficult, expensive and restrictive, very restrictive to do.
Wheat, corn and soy are out, as is anything fattened on them. (Shit!)Conflicted Omnivore
I really enjoyed this post, and there was something that came up on Zero Hedge about the fascists in Greece, which made a good opening for the “Fascist Populists” in Hungary, so I tossed this in there pretty quick.
My (2nd from top) post with link to your story was just an intro to your story.
So far it got 44+ and 0_ arrows, which is really good for that neighborhood. Go Hungary, the new Iceland!
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/greek-neo-nazi-party-surges-third-polls-anti-bailout-syriza-back-topFine Work, Theo!
I, for one, do not fault you for tossing up some of the little hopeful tidbits, which do not form a unified prospective worldview. This future, these futures, are yet to be formed by the inspirations and actions of those of us who are paying attention, and everybody else, too. We’ve got the jump, for probably the only time in our lives, so let’s get to work. I propose building relationships and farms and, houses and machines which will be what we need in post-collapse. I also recommend pre-positioning in low population density, with temperate weather and local food and water security prospects. It’s possible. I’m engaged in the task. So are others. Your mileage may vary…The question about what percent of inheritance tax there should be contains way too many embedded assumptions and vagueries to be accepted as such. Accepting that question as posed is failing to look at the complexities of the inheritance of privilege and power over others.
Can humans “own” something which existed before they did, and which will exist after their species is extinct?
Our current civilization answers “Yes, and absolutely”. The logical action is to destroy what is owned as rapidly as possible, for that is the only way to “profit”.
Absolute ownership implies absolute right of transfer.
A toothbrush or a bicycle is the same as all of the mineral rights to a vast aquifer.
The idea of stewardship is better applied, but less well legally explored by our present culture. “Natural rights” is a legal argument which could begin to restore a balance.
Until then the family farmers in the 5th generation will have the same rights of inheritance as the Rothschild banking family. Well in theory they might. In our hearts, we might want to paint this differently.We are becoming more resilient by not replacing family cars when they crap out. We all have bicycles. The pickup has a radiator leak; the van is out of town with the youngest daughter, and the the 1998 Prizm without AC has more and more noise from the valve train, but it’s out of town with eldest son, anyway… Jenny carpooled to work today, but I always bike. It’s good that we live 2 blocks from groceries. I walk over to fill the 5 gallon water jugs sometimes, one at a time, they’re awkward to carry down the street.
Traditionally, there’s a war to cover things up, and make people focus on an enemy who isn’t just a bloodsucking elite.
This war will have other jobs to do, too.
It’s got a whole lot of humans to cull, a significant fraction of the species.
Our masters see that, and culling a lot of the herd will make the survivors more compliant. The tough question is “How?”
A lot of different mechanisms will probably be explored in different locations. The elites must be having a hard time agreeing on the details, dontcha’ think?
Turning off the electricity for a month would probably kill the majority of people where I live, and still preserve most of the infrastructure. Howzit where you are?When democratic institutions have been captured by the oligarchs, and provide only a sham appearance of democracy, the only way to vote is with one’s actions. Massing in the streets is feared by the elites, because when people do this, they gain a new mass identity, and it is in opposition to the vested interests. When people gain a new mass identity, it does create change. There is agreement that the old way is no longer valid, and that the group has defined what has killed it. Some new way which meets the needs of the mass group, must be agreed upon.
At this point, the elites will seek to divide and conquer the group(s). Look at what has become of Nasser’s Pan-Arab-Nationalism. Groups of people fighting each other is more desirable to the elites, than a large group demanding a new deal, which meets their needs.
What the elites really want is a large group of compliant workers. Cheap energy allowed for that to be bought for a period, but parasitism of that system, and increasing scarcity and cost of resources have created a new crisis. Massing in the streets is necessary for change in human societies. It’s a characteristic of the kind of animals we are.Financial Plan B will have to be on a much smaller scale.
This complex financial system will collapse to the lowest level of complexity which is inherently stable.
That won’t be global, and it won’t be homogenous.
Whether you can find yourself in a larger and more stable grain of order, or not, depends on a lot of decisions you have already made.
You have a few left, perhaps.
I hope I do…Financial bubbles are less interesting. The financial fractal appears to me to be a finer fractal upon the coarser fractal pattern of human species resource destruction. All of our creation is based upon destruction, releasing bound energy in the process and harnessing it to a lesser creation, upon which we place higher value. So forests become pulp for disposable newspapers.
The bubble is our lives, all of our many human lives. The peripheral depletion we have harnessed to drive this magnificent bubble of human population growth is oil. Look at the correlation over the past century.
At this point, the population will be dropped by drastic global warming if we use the known reserves of oil, and it will be dropped by lack of food, fuel, transport, AC, water, complexity if we don’t. This is really a case where we can have it both ways, and drop the human population deeper and longer. A non-bubble population is approaching, and it will be a big surprise to those raised on oil, with a very few exceptions.Nice work, Ilargi. this is exactly the kind of European update/summary I was looking for, and it is an excellent follow-on to Stoneleigh’s essay. I might add that Charles Hugh Smith has an excellent essay up today about deflation being just lovely, if you are holding a lot of asset-backed debt. (I think Stoneleigh’s mention of “conflict” is important. Financial elites need the “conflict” to remain controlled, more like WW-1 and WW-2 than the French Revolution, for instance.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly12/deflation7-12.htmlLovely Stoneleigh!
This is another case of perfect clarity on your part.
I really liked the line about expansions being resource driven, and contractions being financially driven.
There will be no resource to drive an expansion after the coming 2 decades of “conflict”, I fear.Bravo, A.G.!
Emulating biological systems is an advanced skill, compared to mechanical and electrical systems, however being part of a biological ecosystem is not such an advanced skill.
We have indeed been suckled from infancy with a particular view of how things “must” be, “or else”. I’m sure working towards “or else”, but I do find an extremely long way to go, having been deprived of almost all practical knowledge of basic human-critter survival. I’m a zoo animal, taught to make fun of all the animals too unfortunate to live in a zoo.
I will learn. It is possible. I’ve made progress, and there are things I saw when I was much younger that are of use. There are others who want to adapt, and there are still settings where such steps can be made, which will be touched lightly by the “selection event” coming our way. Personally, I’m going to die, and that’s OK, but I don’t want to die serving the “system”, now that I see it.
