This Is the Way the World Ends

[Lustern]

Worth reading.


<https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends/>

"Feel like we’re on the ragged edge of something new and awful? You are
not alone….


Clusterfuck Nation

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That “singularity” so many blab about is not what they think it is: the
merging of human intelligence with Bill Gates’s Office products, leading
to an orgasmic nirvana of infinite memoranda from your HR department
concerning new diversity, inclusion, and equity policy. Rather, I speak
of the magic moment when the necromancers of finance discover that the
proverbial can they’ve been kicking is filled with Schrodinger’s cat
food… and the road they’ve been kicking it down actually comes to a dead
end up their own highly-credentialed wazoos. Economics will never be the
same hereafter.

The bond market has gone south, and that spells The End for the great
game of financialization. The bond market is Moby Dick compared to the
little blowfish that is the stock market. The global money system is
based on bonds, which are… what? That’s right: loans… promises to pay you
X at some future moment. So, what happens when a daisy-chain of promises-
to-pay gets broken? Or, perhaps more precisely, when all those promises
lose their last shred of plausible reality? Why, the money that these
broken promises are denominated in loses its essential cred. Trick
question: how much is worthless money worth? (Answer: not enough to pay
for a can of Schrodinger’s cat food.)

Which is where all this folderol leaves a lot of ordinary people all over
Western Civ (and beyond!) trying to scratch up enough increasingly
worthless money to feed the family and pay the landlord. Many will never
understand what happened. But they will not be any less pissed off at the
result.

This is the way the world ends for the hapless phantom known as “Joe
Biden” the child-sniffing ectoplasm that haunts the White House these
days of late empire. Somehow, the bamboozled nation has so far passively
accepted the pranks and punishments laid on them by the backstage
managers behind the Figment-in-Chief. Eight-plus percent inflation? No
problemo, right? Eighty-five thousand new IRS agents on-board to drive
you batshit while destroying your household and your posterity (ha!)?
Half the population of South America flooding across the border? (The
vibrancy! You no like?) A hundred dollar fill-up at the gas pump, and no
heat for you this winter? (But… Netflix!) Drag queens to amuse and edify
your children about the delirious realm of sexual pathology. All that…and
how about a Russian hypersonic nuclear missile up your ass if the
preceding somehow failed to move you? (Because: Russia, Russia, Russia…!)

Meanwhile, a trend is manifesting in other lands. The people of, first,
Sweden and now Italy are voting in “right wing” nationalist governments —
the horror — sending their equivalent of our Party of Chaos to the
showers. This has irked the President of the European Union, one Ursula
von der Leyen, no end. She has threatened to send Italy to its room
without supper for the effrontery Of course, Madame von der Leyen’s
fellow Germans have already been sent to their room without so much as a
kartoffelklop, plus no heat or hot showers for you, Hansel and Gretel.
Embrace the suck.

You may be sure that we’re in for the business here in America, too. The
thermometers are trending down and Halloween won’t be so much fun when
the little goblins come home to a house that’s the same temperature
inside as the night air outside. Little Skippy’s face is turning blue,
and not because he went trick-or-treating as Robert the Bruce.

The aforementioned Party of Chaos, the gang that queered the last big
election, is surely gearing up to run a whole lot of work-arounds for
massaging the November 8 midterm vote in their direction. Nothing is
beyond them. One of their avatars, the podcaster Sam Harris, said it out
loud a month ago: that lying and cheating is perfectly ethical in service
to the Left’s being able to continue imposing its will upon all of us.
Whoops! He let Schrodinger’s cat out of its hypothetical sack. The
punishments must continue until morale improves! (Hope you enjoyed your
career, Sam.)

And so it begins… as they intone in the horror movies when the contents
of the family’s raised ranch, chattels, children, mom, dad, the golden
retriever all get sucked out of the universe via some quantum portal in
the television. Today the markets, tomorrow our beloved country will be
overrun by what’ll look like an alien invasion of re-po men. This is the
way the world ends… not with a bang… but with a physics lesson: the
lonesome sound of Schrodinger’s cat’s meow.



"

[26C.Z968]

The easier micro-analysis and micro-management become
the more micro-analysis and micro-management you'll
see. (post)Human-Nature thing I suppose. Alas the more
micro, the worse the results tend to become.

[Byker]

"Lustern" wrote in message news:XnsAF20A2EE...@88.198.57.247...
>
> Worth reading.
>
> <https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/this-is-the-way-the-world-ends/>

Oh God, James Howard Kunstler (again). My, how some folks have short
memories. People like Kunstler have made a cottage industry churning out
books promoting the "peak oil" myth. I don't hear much out of him anymore:
http://kunstler.com/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bHZRSlhJxY
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
‘Peak Oil’ Debunked, Again

The world relearns that supply responds to necessity and price.

It has been 216 years since Thomas Malthus gave birth to the idea that
mankind’s appetite for natural resources would outstrip nature’s capacity to
supply them. There have since been regular warnings that the world is
running out of soybeans, helium, chocolate, tungsten, you name it—and that
population growth has become unsustainable. The warnings create a political
or social panic for a while, only to be proved wrong.

The latest reckoning with reality is the end of the obsession with “peak
oil,” which for years had serious people proclaiming that we were entering
an era of permanent fossil fuels scarcity. It didn’t work out that way.

That’s a central lesson from this year’s dramatic fall in the price of oil,
which reached $69.49 a barrel of Brent crude on Thursday from a June high of
$112.12. As recently as early November, when oil hovered at $80, OPEC
officials warned they would intervene to hold the price at $70. But Saudi
officials conspicuously refused to support an output cut at last week’s OPEC
meeting, and Saudi oil minister Ali al-Naimi has made clear that he’d be
comfortable with lower prices.

The short-term Saudi calculation is to drive oil prices down to squeeze
their geopolitical adversaries and higher-cost producers. That goes
especially for their adversaries across the Persian Gulf in Iran, which
depends on oil exports for over 40% of its revenues, and where the regime
had designed its budget based on $100 oil.

The Saudis also hope to slow the explosive growth of U.S. production, which,
thanks to the tapping of domestic shale resources through the combination of
horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, has risen to some nine million
barrels a day from five million in 2008. By some estimates, the price of oil
needs to be as high as $90 a barrel for oil extracted from “tight” deposits
such as shale, though oil market research firm IHS believes most tight oil
wells have a break-even cost of between $50 and $69 dollars a barrel.

But even if the Saudi move slows U.S. drilling, the International Energy
Agency forecasts that U.S. production will still surpass Saudi Arabia’s
output of 9.7 million barrels a day, and overtake Russia’s 10.3 million,
perhaps sometime next year. This would make America the world’s largest oil
producer, which it was from the dawn of the oil age through 1974. Thanks to
the fracking boom, the U.S. surpassed Russia as the world’s largest
natural-gas producer in 2013.

All this is a useful reminder, as IHS’s Daniel Yergin told us the other day,
that “technology responds to need and to price.” It was the same story in
the 1970s, when the world responded to OPEC’s embargoes by exploiting new
resources in Alaska and the North Sea, and again in the 1980s and 1990s,
when offshore drilling became technologically feasible and economically
profitable at ever-greater depths. And expect more from where that came, as
the frackers continue to figure out how to drive down costs, and if new
shale deposits in places such as Mexico, Ukraine and Argentina start to be
exploited.

Also worth remembering is how spectacularly wrong some recent predictions of
doom turned out to be. This is shooting fish in a barrel, but here is Paul
Krugman in December 2010, declaring that “peak oil has arrived.”

“What the commodity markets are telling us,” Mr. Krugman averred, “is that
we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of emerging
economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw materials, pushing
up their prices. And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this
story.” Far from being a bystander, America has been the main oil-market
innovator.

Such doomsaying is that much more embarrassing because warnings of peak oil
are nearly as old as the oil industry. In his book “The Quest,” Mr. Yergin
records that in 1885 the state geologist of Pennsylvania warned that “the
amazing exhibition of oil” was “a temporary and vanishing phenomenon—one
which young men will live to see come to its natural end.”

Given this 130-year record of predictive failure, why does the end-of-oil
myth persist? Part of it is that peak oil is more wish than prediction—a
desire to see the end of fossil fuels to serve a larger political agenda. It
is also a way of scaring governments into pouring money into alternative
energy sources that can’t compete with oil and natural gas without subsidies
and mandates. Predicting disaster can also be a profitable business and a
path to speech-making celebrity.

The happy ending is that the notion that the world is running out of
resources always fails because the ingenuity of entrepreneurs, spurred by
necessity and incentive, always exceeds the imagination of doomsayers. So we
are learning again, and let’s hope memories will be longer this time.

Note the date:
http://www.wsj.com/articles/peak-oil-debunked-again-1417739810