Month: August 2022

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.”

– Harry Truman

With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.

These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where secret police control the populace through intimidation, fear and official lawlessness on the part of government agents.

That authoritarian danger is now posed by the FBI, whose love affair with totalitarianism began long ago. Indeed, according to the New York Times, the U.S. government so admired the Nazi regime that following the second World War, it secretly and aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen as part of Operation Paperclip. American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since.

If the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II weren’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—adopted many of the Third Reich’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them against American citizens.

Indeed, the FBI’s laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.

Compare the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and generally act as a law unto themselves—powers that have grown since 9/11, transforming the FBI into a mammoth federal policing and surveillance agency that largely operates as a power unto itself, beyond the reach of established laws, court rulings and legislative mandates—to its Nazi counterparts, the Gestapo—and then try to convince yourself that the United States is not a totalitarian police state.

Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast investigatory powers, and vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of the state.

Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI has also built a vast repository of “profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.” The FBI’s burgeoning databases on Americans are not only being added to and used by local police agencies, but are also being made available to employers for real-time background checks.

All of this is made possible by the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (President Biden’s budget projections allocate $10.8 billion for the FBI), the government’s vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country that constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.

Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.

Working through the U.S. Post Office, the FBI has access to every piece of mail that passes through the postal system: more than 160 billion pieces are scanned and recorded annually. Moreover, the agency’s National Security Letters, one of the many illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide them with customer information and not disclose those demands to the customer. An internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with widespread constitutional violations.

Much like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs, the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’ most intimate details (and allow local police to do so, as well).

In addition to technology (which is shared with police agencies) that allows them to listen in on phone calls, read emails and text messages, and monitor web activities, the FBI’s surveillance boasts an invasive collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls.  In one case, the FBI actually managed to remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.” Law enforcement agencies are also using social media tracking software to monitor Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts. Moreover, secret FBI rules also allow agents to spy on journalists without significant judicial oversight.

Much like the Gestapo’s ability to profile based on race and religion, and its assumption of guilt by association, the FBI’s approach to pre-crime allows it to profile Americans based on a broad range of characteristics including race and religion.

The agency’s biometric database has grown to massive proportions, the largest in the world, encompassing everything from fingerprints, palm, face and iris scans to DNA, and is being increasingly shared between federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in an effort to target potential criminals long before they ever commit a crime. This is what’s known as pre-crime. Yet it’s not just your actions that will get you in trouble. In many cases, it’s also who you know—even minimally—and where your sympathies lie that could land you on a government watch list. Moreover, as the Intercept reports, despite anti-profiling prohibitions, the bureau “claims considerable latitude to use race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in deciding which people and communities to investigate.”

Much like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a domestic terrorist.

As part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the nation’s de facto secret police force has begun using the terms “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably. Moreover, the government continues to add to its growing list of characteristics that can be used to identify an individual (especially anyone who disagrees with the government) as a potential domestic terrorist. For instance, you might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you:

• express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)

• exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership)

• read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books

• show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)

• fear an economic collapse

• buy gold and barter items

• subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation

• voice fears about Big Brother or big government

• expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties

• believe in a New World Order conspiracy

Much like the Gestapo infiltrated communities in order to spy on the German citizenry, the FBI routinely infiltrates political and religious groups, as well as businesses.

As Cora Currier writes for the Intercept: “Using loopholes it has kept secret for years, the FBI can in certain circumstances bypass its own rules in order to send undercover agents or informants into political and religious organizations, as well as schools, clubs, and businesses…” The FBI has even been paying Geek Squad technicians at Best Buy to spy on customers’ computers without a warrant.

Just as the Gestapo united and militarized Germany’s police forces into a national police force, America’s police forces have largely been federalized and turned into a national police force.

In addition to government programs that provide the nation’s police forces with military equipment and training, the FBI also operates a National Academy that trains thousands of police chiefs every year and indoctrinates them into an agency mindset that advocates the use of surveillance technology and information sharing between local, state, federal, and international agencies.

Just as the Gestapo’s secret files on political leaders were used to intimidate and coerce, the FBI’s files on anyone suspected of “anti-government” sentiment have been similarly abused.

As countless documents make clear, the FBI has no qualms about using its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians, spy on celebrities and high-ranking government officials, and intimidate and attempt to discredit dissidents of all stripes. For example, not only did the FBI follow Martin Luther King Jr. and bug his phones and hotel rooms, but agents also sent him anonymous letters urging him to commit suicide and pressured a Massachusetts college into dropping King as its commencement speaker.

Just as the Gestapo carried out entrapment operations, the FBI has become a master in the art of entrapment.

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks the FBI has not only targeted vulnerable individuals but has also lured or blackmailed them into fake terror plots while actually equipping them with the organization, money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots—entrapment—and then jailing or deporting them for their so-called terrorist plotting.

This is what the FBI characterizes as “forward leaning—preventative—prosecutions.” In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them, the FBI also gives certain informants permission to break the law, “including everything from buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that FBI agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as 15 crimes a day. Some of these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police officer, was actually paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an entrapment scheme.

When and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America, in much the same way that the empowerment of Germany’s secret police tracked with the rise of the Nazi regime.

How did the Gestapo become the terror of the Third Reich?

It did so by creating a sophisticated surveillance and law enforcement system that relied for its success on the cooperation of the military, the police, the intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs, government workers for the post office and railroads, ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches inclined to report “rumors, deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”

In other words, ordinary citizens working with government agents helped create the monster that became Nazi Germany. Writing for the New York Times, Barry Ewen paints a particularly chilling portrait of how an entire nation becomes complicit in its own downfall by looking the other way:

In what may be his most provocative statement, [author Eric A.] Johnson says that ‘‘most Germans may not even have realized until very late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a vile dictatorship.’’ This is not to say that they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson demonstrates that millions of Germans must have known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes, ‘‘a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the citizenry.’’ The government looked the other way when petty crimes were being committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century not through active collaboration but through passivity, denial and indifference.

Much like the German people, “we the people” have become passive, polarized, gullible, easily manipulated, and lacking in critical thinking skills.  Distracted by entertainment spectacles, politics and screen devices, we too are complicit, silent partners in creating a police state similar to the terror practiced by former regimes.

Had the government tried to ram such a state of affairs down our throats suddenly, it might have had a rebellion on its hands. Instead, the American people have been given the boiling frog treatment, immersed in water that slowly is heated up—degree by degree—so that they’ve fail to notice that they’re being trapped and cooked and killed.

“We the people” are in hot water now.

The Constitution doesn’t stand a chance against a federalized, globalized standing army of government henchmen protected by legislative, judicial and executive branches that are all on the same side, no matter what political views they subscribe to: suffice it to say, they are not on our side or the side of freedom.

From Presidents Clinton to Bush, then Obama to Trump and now Biden, it’s as if we’ve been caught in a time loop, forced to re-live the same thing over and over again: the same assaults on our freedoms, the same disregard for the rule of law, the same subservience to the Deep State, and the same corrupt, self-serving government that exists only to amass power, enrich its shareholders and ensure its continued domination.

Can the Fourth Reich happen here?

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s already happening right under our noses.

In 2021, the U.S. government spent $6.8 trillion on various expenditures and government-aided programs. Where was this money spent, and how much was covered by taxpayers’ dollars?

As Visual Capitalist’s Carmen Ang reports, this graphic by Truman Du shows a breakdown of U.S. federal spending in 2021, as well as a breakdown of where the money came from, using data from USAspending.gov.

Money Comes and Goes

In 2021, U.S. government revenue totaled more than $4 trillion. About half of it came from individual income taxes, while about 30% came from Social Security and Medicare taxes.

Here’s a full breakdown of revenue sources in 2021:

 

Despite the trillions in revenue generated, like most years, U.S. federal spending was higher in 2021, which put the federal government in a budget deficit of $2.7 trillion.

 

This was the second highest deficit on record, down from a peak of $3.1 trillion in 2020 during the height of the global pandemic.

After income and Social Security spending, health was the third-largest expenditure in 2021. Here’s a look at the full breakdown, and where spending was allocated last year:

 

Spending is expected to curb further in 2022. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office via AP News, the 2022 deficit is projected to drop to $1.15 trillion and will continue to decrease for the next three years.

 

U.S. National Debt

In March 2021, U.S. national debt reached an all-time high of $28 trillion. That includes intragovernmental holdings, which is about $6 trillion of debt owed within the government itself.

While overall debt is rising, the cost of servicing this debt has actually dropped in recent years thanks to record low interest rates.

However, with interest rates on the rise again this year, servicing the existing national debt is becoming more expensive.

And eventually, when it comes time for the U.S. government to refinance its loans, a greater portion of the federal budget will need to be allocated to servicing debt, which will put a squeeze on other areas of spending.

Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost.

This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse.

Figure 1. World fossil fuel energy consumption per capita, based on data of BP’s 2022 Statistical Review of World Energy.

Politicians cannot possibly admit that today’s world economy is headed for collapse, in a way similar to that of prior civilizations. Instead, they need to provide the illusion that they are in charge. The self-organizing system somehow leads politicians to put forward reasons why the changes ahead might be desirable (to avert climate change), or at least temporary (because of sanctions against Russia).

In this post, I will try to try to explain at least a few of the issues involved.

[1] Citizens around the world can sense that something is very wrong. It looks like the economy may be headed for a serious recession in the near term.

Figure 2. Index of consumer sentiment and news heard of company changes as reported by the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers, based on preliminary indications for August 2022.

Consumer sentiment is at an extraordinarily low level, worse than during the 2008-2009 great recession according to a chart (Figure 2) shown on the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers website. According to the same website, nearly 48% of consumers blame inflation for eroding their standard of living. Food prices have risen significantly. Over the past year, the cost of car ownership has escalated, as has the cost of buying or renting a home.

The situation in Europe is at least as bad, or worse. Citizens are worried about possibly “freezing in the dark” this winter if electricity generation cannot be maintained at an adequate level. Natural gas supplies, mostly purchased from Russia by pipeline, are less available and high-priced. Coal is also high-priced. Because of the fall of the Euro relative to the US dollar, the price of oil in euros is as high as it was in 2008 and 2012.

Figure 3. Inflation-adjusted Brent crude oil price in US dollars and euros, in chart by the US Energy Information Administration, as published in EIA’s August 2022 Short Term Energy Outlook.

Many other countries, besides those in the Eurozone, are experiencing low currencies relative to the dollar. Some examples include Argentina, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea.

China has problems with developers of condominium homes for its citizen. Many of these homes cannot be delivered to purchasers as promised. As a protest, buyers are withholding payments on their unfinished homes. To make matters worse, the prices of condominium homes have started to fall, leading to a loss of value of these would-be investments. All of this could lead to serious problems for the Chinese banking industry.

Even with these major problems, central banks in the US, the UK and the Eurozone are raising target interest rates. The US is also implementing Quantitative Tightening, which also tends to raise interest rates. Thus, central banks are intentionally raising the cost of borrowing. It doesn’t take much insight to see that the combination of price inflation and higher borrowing costs is likely to force consumers to cut back on spending, leading to recession.

[2] Politicians will avoid talking about possible future economic problems related to inadequate energy supply.

Politicians want to get re-elected. They want citizens to think that everything is OK. If there are energy supply problems, they need to be framed as being temporary, perhaps related to the war in Ukraine. Alternatively, any issue that arises will be discussed as if it can easily be fixed with new legislation and perhaps a little more debt.

Businesses also want to minimize problems. They want citizens to place orders for their goods and services, without the fear of being laid off. They would like the news media to publish stories saying that any economic dip is likely to be very mild and temporary.

Universities don’t mind problems, but they want the problems to be framed as solvable ones that will offer their students opportunities for jobs that will pay well. A near-term, unsolvable predicament is not helpful at all.

[3] What is wrong is a physics problem. The operation of our economy requires energy of the correct type and the right quantity.

The economy is something that grows through the “dissipation” of energy. Examples of dissipation of energy include the digestion of food to give energy to humans, the burning of fossil fuels, and the use of electricity to power a light bulb. A rise in world energy consumption is highly correlated with growth in the world economy. Falling energy consumption is associated with economic contraction.

Figure 4. Correlation between world GDP measured in “Purchasing Power Parity” (PPP) 2017 International $ and world energy consumption, including both fossil fuels and renewables. GDP is as reported by the World Bank for 1990 through 2021 as of July 26, 2022; total energy consumption is as reported by BP in its 2022 Statistical Review of World Energy.

In physics terms, the world economy is a dissipative structure, just as all plants, animals and ecosystems are. All dissipative structures have finite lifespans, including the world economy.

This finding is not well known because academic researchers seem to operate in ivory towers. Researchers in economic departments aren’t expected to understand physics and how it applies to the economy. In fairness to academia, the discovery that the economy is a dissipative structure did not occur until 1996. It takes a long time for findings to filter through from one department to another. Even now, I am one of a very small number of people in the world writing about this issue.

Also, economic researchers are not expected to study the history of the many smaller, more-localized civilizations that have collapsed in the past. Typically, the population of these smaller civilizations increased at the same time as the resources used by the population started to degrade. The use of technology, such as dams to redirect water flows, may have helped for a while, but eventually this was not enough. The combination of declining availability of high quality resources and increasing population tended to leave these civilizations with little margin for dealing with the bad times that can be expected to occur by chance. In many cases, such civilizations collapsed after disease epidemics, a military invasion, or a climate fluctuation that led to a series of crop failures.

[4] Many people have been confused by common misunderstandings regarding how an economy really works.

[a] Standard economics models foster the belief that the economy can continue to grow without a corresponding increase in energy supply.

When economic models are designed with labor and capital being the important inputs, energy supply doesn’t seem to be needed, at all.

[b] People seem to understand that legislation capping apartment rents will stop the building of new apartments, but they do not make the same connection with steps taken to hold down fossil fuel prices.

If efforts are made to bring down the prices of fossil fuels (such as raising interest rates and adding oil from the US petroleum reserves to increase total oil supply), we need to expect that extraction will be adversely affected. One article reports that Saudi Arabia does not seem to be using recent record profits to quickly raise reinvestment to the level that seemed to be required a few years ago. This suggests that Saudi Arabia needs prices that are quite a bit higher than $100 per barrel in order to take significant steps toward extracting the country’s remaining resources. This would seem to contradict published reserves that, in theory, take current prices into consideration.

Reuters reports that Venezuela has reneged on its promise to send more oil to Europe, under an oil for debt deal. It wants oil product swaps instead, since it is lacking in its ability to make finished products from its oil itself. It would take a long run of prices much higher than today’s level for Venezuela to be able to sufficiently invest in infrastructure to do such refining. Venezuela reports the highest oil reserves in the world (303.8 thousand million barrels), even higher than Saudi Arabia’s reported 297.5 thousand million barrels, but neither country can be counted on to take major steps to raise supply.

Similarly, there have been reports that US shale drillers are not investing to keep production growing, despite what seem to be sufficiently high prices. There are simply too many issues. The cost of new investment is very high, outside of the already drilled sweet spots. Also, there is no guarantee the price will stay high. There are also supply line issues, such as whether appropriate steel drilling pipes and fracking sand will be available, when needed.

[c] Published information suggests that there is a huge amount of fossil fuels remaining to be extracted, given today’s level of technology. If we assume that technology will get better and better, it is easy to believe that any fossil fuel limit is hundreds of years in the future.

The way the economy works, the extraction limit is really an affordability issue. If the cost of extraction rises too high, relative to what people around the world have for spendable income, production will stop because demand (in terms of what people can afford) will drop too low. People will tend to cut back on discretionary spending, such as vacation travel and meals in restaurants, cutting back on demand for fossil fuels.

[d] How “demand” works is poorly understood. Very often, researchers and the general public assume that demand for energy products will automatically remain high.

A surprisingly large share of demand is tied to the need for food, water, and basic services such as schools, roads, and bus service. Poor people require these basics just as much as rich people do. There are literally billions of poor people in the world. If the wages of poor people fall too low relative to the wages of rich people, the system cannot work. Poor people find that they must spend nearly all their income on food, water and housing. As a result, they have little left to pay taxes to support basic governmental services. Without adequate demand from poor people, the prices of commodities tend to fall too low to encourage reinvestment.

The majority of fossil fuel use is by commercial and industrial users. For example, natural gas is often used in making nitrogen fertilizer. If the price of natural gas is high, the price of fertilizer will rise higher than farmers are willing to pay for the fertilizer. Farmers will cut back on fertilizer use, reducing yields for their crops. The farmers’ own costs will be lower, but there will be less of the desired crops grown, perhaps indirectly raising overall food prices. This is not a connection that economic modelers build into their models.

The lockdowns of 2020 show that governments can indeed ramp up demand (and thus prices) for energy products by sending out checks to citizens. We are now seeing that the approach seems to produce inflation rather than more energy production. Also, countries without energy resources of their own may see their currencies fall with respect to the US dollar.

[e] It is not true that energy types can easily be substituted for one another.

In energy modeling, such as in calculating “Energy Return on Energy Invested,” a popular assumption is that all energy is substitutable for other energy. This isn’t true, unless a person accounts for all of the details of the transition, and the energy needed to make such a transition possible.

For example, intermittent electricity, such as that generated by wind turbines or solar panels, is not substitutable for load-following electricity. Such intermittent electricity is not always available when people need it. Some of this intermittency is very long-term. For example, wind-generated electricity may be low for more than a month at a time. In the case of solar energy, the problem tends to be storing up enough electricity during summer months for use in winter. A naive person might assume that adding a few hours of battery backup would fix intermittency problems, but such a fix turns out to be very inadequate.

If people are not to freeze in the dark in winter, longer-term solutions are needed. One standard approach is to use a fossil fuel system to fill in the gaps when wind and solar are not available. The catch, then, is that the fossil fuel system really needs to be a year-around system, with trained staffing, pipelines and adequate fuel storage. A modeler needs to consider the need to build a whole double system instead of a single system.

Because of intermittency issues, electricity from wind and solar only substitute for fuels (coal, natural gas, uranium) that operate our current system. Publications often talk about the cost of intermittent electricity being at “grid parity” when its temporary cost seems to match the cost of grid electricity, but this is matching “apples and oranges.” The cost comparison needs to be in comparison to the average cost of fuel for plants producing electricity, rather than to electricity prices.

Another popular assumption is that electricity can be substituted for liquid fuels. For example, in theory, every piece of farm equipment could be redesigned and rebuilt to be based on electricity, rather than diesel, which is typically used today. The catch is that there would need to be an enormous number of batteries built and eventually disposed of for this transition to work. There would need also need to be factories to build all this new equipment. We would need an international trade system operating extraordinarily well, to find all the raw materials. Likely, there would still not be enough raw materials to make the system work.

[f] There is a great deal of confusion about expected oil and other energy prices, as an economy reaches energy limits.

This issue is closely related to [4][d], with respect to the confusion about how energy demand works. A common assumption among analysts is that “of course” oil prices will rise, as limits are approached. This assumption is based on the standard supply and demand curve used by economists.

Figure 5. Standard economic supply and demand curve from Wikipedia. Description of how this curve works: The price P of a product is determined by a balance between production at each price (supply S) and the desires of those with purchasing power at each price (demand D). The diagram shows a positive shift in demand from D1 to D2, resulting in an increase in price (P) and quantity sold (Q) of the product.

The issue is that the availability of inexpensive energy products very much affects demand as well as supply. Jobs that pay well are only available if inexpensive energy products can leverage human labor. For example, surgeons today perform robotic surgery, requiring, at a minimum, a stable source of electricity for each operation. Furthermore, the equipment used in the surgery is created using fossil fuels. Surgeons also use anesthetic products that require fossil fuels. Without today’s fancy equipment, surgeons would not be able to charge nearly as much they do for their services.

Thus, it is not immediately obvious whether demand or supply would tend to fall faster, if energy supply should hit limits. We know that Revelation 18:11-13 in the Bible provides a list of a number of commodities, including humans sold as slaves, for which prices dropped very low at the time of the collapse of ancient Babylon. This suggests that at least sometimes during prior collapses, the problem was too low demand (and too low prices), rather than too low supply of energy products.

[5] The International Energy Agency and politicians around the world have recommended a transition to the use of wind and solar to try to prevent climate change for quite a few years. This approach seemed to have the approval of both those concerned about too much burning of fossil fuels causing climate change and those concerned about too little fossil fuel energy causing economic collapse.

A rough estimate of what the decline in energy supply might look like under the rapid shift to renewables proposed by politicians is shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Estimate by Gail Tverberg of World Energy Consumption from 1820 to 2050. Amounts for earliest years based on estimates in Vaclav Smil’s book Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospectsand BP’s 2020 Statistical Review of World Energy for the years 1965 to 2019. Energy consumption for 2020 is estimated to be 5% below that for 2019. Energy for years after 2020 is assumed to fall by 6.6% per year, so that the amount reaches a level similar to renewables only by 2050. Amounts shown include more use of local energy products (wood and animal dung) than BP includes.

If a person understands the connection between energy consumption and the economy, such a rapid drop in energy supply looks like something that would likely be associated with economic collapse. The goal of politicians seems to be to keep citizens from understanding how awful the situation really is by reframing the story of the decline in energy supply as something politicians and economists have chosen to do, to try to prevent climate change for the sake of future generations.

The rich and powerful can see this change as a good thing if they themselves can profit from it. When there is not enough energy, the physics of the situation tends to lead to increasing wage and wealth disparities. Wealthy individuals see this outcome as a good thing: They can perhaps personally profit. For example, Bill Gates has amassed about 270,000 acres of farmland in the United States, including newly purchased farmland in North Dakota.

Furthermore, politicians see that they can have more control over populations if they can direct citizens in a way that will use less energy. For example, bank accounts can be linked to some type of social credit score. Politicians will explain that this is for people’s own good–to prevent the spread of disease or to prevent undesirables from using too much of the available resources.

One way of dramatically reducing energy consumption is by mandating shutdowns in an area, purportedly to prevent the spread of Covid-19, as China has been doing recently. Such shutdowns can be explained as being needed to stop the spread of disease. These shutdowns can also help hide other problems, such as not having enough fuels to prevent rolling blackouts of electricity.

[6] We are living in a truly unusual time, with a major energy problem being hidden from view.

Politicians cannot tell the world how bad the energy situation really is. The problem with near-term energy limits has been known since at least 1956 (M. King Hubbert) and 1957 (Hyman Rickover). The problem was confirmed in the modeling performed for the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others.

Most high-level politicians are aware of the energy supply issue, but they cannot possibly talk about it. Instead, they choose to talk about what would happen if the economy were allowed to speed ahead without limits, and how bad the consequences of that might be.

Militaries around the world are no doubt well aware of the fact that there will not be enough energy supplies to go around. This means that the world will be in a contest for who gets how much. In a war-like setting, we should not be surprised if communications are carefully controlled. The views we can expect to hear loudly and repeatedly are the ones governments and influential individuals want ordinary citizens to hear.

Hollywood celebrities like to lecture average Americans about how they need to change their lifestyles to fight climate change. But many of these A-list celebs who preach Greta Thunberg’s gospel of saving the planet often fail to live the eco-friendly lifestyles they advocate. 

Last month, we revealed that Taylor Swift, Steven Spielberg, Kim Kardashian, and Oprah Winfrey, some of whom are so-called ‘climate activists,’ were top on the list of private jet polluters.

Another list of elite Hollywood celebs has emerged this week as the water police in Los Angeles County have served them with repeated violations as serial water wasters.

Axios spoke with Virgenes Municipal Water District spokesperson Mike McNutt who said Kim and Kourtney Kardashian (serial climate offenders), Kevin Hart, and Sylvester Stallone are among the 1,600 people who have exceeded their monthly water budgets by 150% at least four times more than ordinary people in Southern California, who are forced to take shorter showers, banned from watering their yards, and unable to wash their cars. 

Hollywood A-listers appear to live in a two-tier society where they don’t have to play by the rules and are hypocrites in helping the environment. 

At least readers have an understanding of the hypocrisy of Hollywood elites. It’s okay if the Kardashians fly around the world in their private jets and have lavish pool parties, but frowned upon when average Southern Californians want to water their parched front yard. 

This reminds us of a quote from the late George Carlin at the Beacon Theater in 2005, who famously said:

“They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.“

Yet more examples of reality where elites don’t have to play by the rules. 

By Simon White, Bloomberg markets live commentator and reporter

The dollar has been on a tear again recently, but a rising dollar soon causes global trade and therefore demand for dollar-denominated assets to drop, leading to a weaker USD.

As highlighted on Monday, headwinds are growing for the dollar as the real yield curve flattens. Paradoxically, this means a more hawkish Powell at this week’s Jackson Hole would add to headwinds for the US currency, after any initial kneejerk reaction.

While yields and yield curves indicate flow-driven demand for the dollar and USD assets, the level of the dollar has implications for the stock of dollar assets. A higher dollar makes it more expensive for foreign borrowers of USDs to service their debt, generating deleveraging pressure. It also makes the cost of buying new dollar assets more expensive in foreign-currency terms.

But the big driver of global capital flows is trade. Capital flows are the flipside of trade flows, and trade imbalances create capital imbalances which drive capital flows. Global trade today is beginning to falter, which means capital flows are falling.

Virtually all major commodities are traded in USD (apart from a few notable exceptions such as wool, which is traded in AUD), therefore a rising dollar eventually depresses global trade as the price of everything rises in foreign-currency terms. The dollar’s current strength is causing a slowdown in global trade.

Deleveraging pressure driven by the dollar’s strength and a slowdown in primarily USD-denominated global trade are therefore leading to a fall in foreign transactions of US assets.

From last December to June, foreign holdings of long-term US assets (stocks and bonds) has fallen from $27.3 trillion late last year to $23.5 trillion, with the DXY rising almost 13% over the same period.

Jackson Hole may be the buy-the-rumour-sell-the-fact catalyst for the dollar to head lower, especially if Powell leans hawkishly and the real yield curve flattens more. But even if not, the dollar’s baked-in strength soon threatens to be the rally’s undoing.

The White House said Wednesday that it has information that Russia is imminently planning “sham” referendums in occupied Ukrainian territories, which is expected to come in weeks or even days. The US has learned that Russian leadership has instructed officials to begin preparing to hold sham referenda, particularly in Kharkiv, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters in a briefing.

“We have information that Russia continues to prepare to hold these sham referendum in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and the so called Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics,” Kirby introduced. “We’ve also learned that the Russia leadership has instructed officials to begin preparing to hold a sham referenda, particularly in Kharkiv as well.”

“And these referenda could begin in a matter of days or weeks. In fact, we can see a Russian announcement of the first one or ones before the end of this week.” Kharkiv Oblast broadly is currently scene of heavy fighting, while Kharkiv city itself – which is Ukraine’s second largest – has this week been coming under heavy aerial bombardment.

“We expect Russia to try to manipulate the results of these referenda under the false claim of the Ukrainian people wanting to join Russia. It will be critical to call out and counter this disinformation in real time,” Kirby continued.

“Russian officials themselves know that what they’re doing will lack legitimacy, and it will not reflect the will of the people. The Ukrainian people, in any free and fair referendum, would vote overwhelmingly against joining Russia,” he added.

Washington and Ukraine had previously accused Moscow of the same tactics when it came to the 2014 Crimean status referendum. During a July briefing, Kirby had referenced Crimea is alleging that Russia’s goal is to roll out an annexation playbook for captured territories. Russian forces are currently slowly struggling to secure all of the Donbas.

Some reporting, including in The New York Times days ago, have strongly suggested a “static” of “stale-mated situation along the front lines of late. But Moscow on Wednesday offered an explanation, claiming that it had deliberately slowed its “special operation” out of a desire to protect local civilians. 

“Now there’s a stalemate along a frontline stretching some 1500 miles.”@jrug maps out how the war in Ukraine has unfolded over the past six months. pic.twitter.com/Rqvr34nT1H

— Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) August 24, 2022

Everything is being done to avoid casualties among civilians,” Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu said Wednesday. “Of course, this slows down the pace of the offensive, but we are doing it deliberately.”

But countering this narrative, according to Reuters…

Ukraine’s top military intelligence official said on Wednesday that Russia’s military offensive was slowing because of moral and physical fatigue in their ranks and Moscow’s “exhausted” resource base.

Casualty counts on either side has also been a source of skepticism and controversy, with both Ukrainian and US intelligence consistently saying Russia has lost into the many tens of thousands of troops, while the Kremlin has given much lower official figures.

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. Department of State issued an advisory warning Americans about an increased risk of kidnapping when going to Mexico, amid heightened cartel violence in several areas.

“Violent crime—such as homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery—is widespread and common in Mexico,” the State Department said Wednesday in its notice.

The federal government and State Department have limited capacity to render emergency services to citizens in many places in Mexico. That’s because U.S. government employees are restricted or prohibited from going to certain areas, according to the State Department.

“U.S. citizens are advised to adhere to restrictions on U.S. government employee travel. State-specific restrictions are included in the individual state advisories below,” the notice said. “U.S. government employees may not travel between cities after dark, may not hail taxis on the street, and must rely on dispatched vehicles, including app-based services like Uber, and regulated taxi stands.”

For government workers, they should also avoid traveling alone and in remote areas, according to the bulletin. Federal government employees also cannot drive from the “U.S.-Mexico border to or from the interior parts of Mexico” other than daytime travel in Baja California, a Mexican state that lies south of California, and a select few other areas.

‘Do Not Travel’

Several Mexican states were marked under the “Do Not Travel” section in the State Department bulletin due to crime and the risk of kidnapping, including Sinaloa, Colima, Guerrero, Michoacan, Zacatecas, and Tamaulipas states. People were also urged to reconsider travel or exercise increased caution in most other Mexican states due to the risk of kidnapping or crime.

“Keep traveling companions and family back home informed of your travel plans. If separating from your travel group, send a friend your GPS location. If taking a taxi alone, take a photo of the taxi number and/or license plate and text it to a friend,” according to the State Department’s bulletin.

“Use toll roads when possible and avoid driving alone or at night,” it added. “In many states, police presence and emergency services are extremely limited outside the state capital or major cities.”

Last week, hundreds of Mexican soldiers were sent to the border city of Juarez after a prison face-off between members of two rival cartels caused a riot and shootouts that killed 11 people, most of them civilians, authorities said.

Read more here…

Ever since the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, dozens of websites have popped up which are illegally shipping abortion drugs anywhere in the US without a prescription – which violates Food and Drug Administration rules.

The operator of one website says that the demand for abortion pills has skyrocketed since the June decision, according to the Wall Street Journal, which notes that some of the websites are registered overseas – and are different from US-based telehealth operators that prescribe and sometimes ship the pills to patients who live in states where the procedure is legal.

Sites are charging as much as $500 per pack of abortion pills, and hold themselves out as providing access to pills for those who can’t reach a clinic – or who live in states where abortion telehealth is illegal.

The unregulated market creates risks, according to abortion-rights advocates, including that the pills may arrive too late to be used effectively. What’s more, those buying abortion pills online without a prescription in states where it’s illegal could face criminal charges, legal experts advise.

Some health experts expressed concerns about websites potentially selling bogus drugs or not providing adequate information and medical support. “You don’t know what you’re getting,” said Al Carter, executive director of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, which represents state pharmacy boards.

Two medications, mifepristone and misoprostol, are typically used in a medication-abortion regimen, which the FDA has approved for up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Websites selling abortion pills without a prescription are mainly selling pills that haven’t been reviewed by the FDA, according to descriptions on the sites and information from buyers. The FDA has sent complaints to some companies associated with websites selling abortion pills online. -WSJ

“Drugs that have circumvented regulatory safeguards may be contaminated, counterfeit, contain varying amounts of active ingredients, or contain different ingredients altogether,” and FDA spokesperson told the Journal. 

One website based in Kazakhstan, Medside24.com, says its sales of abortion pills has doubled since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The site procures pills manufactured in China, Russia and Vietnam.

There are few-to-no requirements to buy from site abortionrx.com, another such website. According to one woman in Florida, a $249 PayPal purchase was all she needed to do – with the pills arriving four days later in a brown envelope from Las Vegas. While no instructions were included, she was able to fine them online.

Another website, abortionrx.com, is registered to Mumbai-based Rablon Healthcare Private Ltd.

At least six sites selling abortion pills without a prescription in July were registered under the name Richard Asamoah Agyemang of Denver, according to information on domain ownership. Mr. Agyemang said he is a college student and web developer. He said he doesn’t sell abortion pills. “I don’t know who made those websites,” Mr. Agyemang said. Two of the sites had been taken offline in August.

Some of the abortion-pill websites say that they sell pills from manufacturers in India. Three manufacturers mentioned on some sites, Zydus Lifesciences Ltd., Cipla Ltd. and Naman Pharma Drugs, said they weren’t aware of the sites. Cipla said it stopped making abortion medication about seven years ago.  Naman manufactures abortion pills on a contract basis for companies in Africa and doesn’t export to the U.S., a spokesman said. -WSJ

When one woman, a teacher in Ohio, ordered from Sydney-based onlineabortionpillsrx.com, they warned her no to mention the medications she was purchasing on PayPal.

“In case PayPal comes to know about what you purchased, PayPal may take legal action against you,” read an email.

That said, PayPal typically does not pursue legal action against buyers, but the company could close one’s account(s) if they violate its acceptable use policy.