The Day The Dollar Dies?

  The good part of this article is "How we got there." The rest is wishful thinking. There is no road out of "there". It won't be instantaneous unless we get into a full scale world war. Rather, it will be a slow process as the non-dollar infrastructure has to be built. The process can be slowed down or accelerated but it can't be stopped. We are still at a very early stage so most countries are trying to trade with their own currencies but soon guaranties will be asked. Replacing a fiat currency by another won't cut it. Gold and other natural resources will be needed...

Authored by J.G.Collins via The Epoch Times,

Since roughly the last year of World War II, the U.S. dollar has enjoyed what one-time French finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing once called the “exorbitant privilege” of being the world’s reserve currency. It’s had that position since roughly 1944, when it seized the role of the world’s currency hegemon from the British pound sterling.

But now, that standing is threatened by a whole variety of U.S. policies and assaults by our foreign adversaries. And the results for the dollar—and the people of the United States—could be catastrophic.

How We Got Here

By July 1944, it had become clear that allied advances over the Nazis in Europe all but ensured the Allies, and particularly the United States, would dominate the postwar world. It was then that 730 delegates from 44 countries convened at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to reestablish the postwar global monetary order.

Together, they agreed to a multinational system whereby global currencies would be convertible to the U.S. dollar at fixed exchange rates that could be modified, if necessary, within a very narrow band. The dollar, in turn, would be convertible to gold at $35 an ounce. It was left to the United States to ensure that the dollar/gold exchange rate remained stable.

But by 1971, social welfare spending on Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,’’ the Vietnam War, and dollar investment in overseas businesses, factories, and other assets, as well as balance of payments deficits resulting from imports from more fully recovered Japan and Europe, had greatly expanded the amount of dollars in global circulation. U.S. officials recognized the nation’s gold reserves were insufficient to honor its commitment to convert dollar into gold at $35 an ounce. That year, Europeans started converting small amounts of their dollar for gold. Then, the British asked for a “guarantee” of the dollars they held in reserve.

A currency crisis was brewing. And the United States needed to circumvent it before it happened.

So in August 1971, President Richard Nixon, at the urging of his advisers, convened a secret meeting at Camp David over three days, concluding on Aug. 15, a Sunday. That evening, the president announced to the world in a nationally telecast statement a purported “temporary” closing of the gold window—prohibiting conversion of dollar to gold—to stop any run on U.S. gold reserves. That “temporary” closing lasted until 1975, when a meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), another legacy of Bretton Woods, approved a “managed” or “dirty float” of currencies at a conference in Jamaica. The IMF was to operate to maintain stability via some ambiguous “guardrails,” at least nominally, but central banks—including the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, Bank of Japan, et al.—were able to intervene to support their respective currencies.

The dollar was—finally and officially—off the gold standard and was now a “fiat currency”—meaning the dollar had value in the United States simply because the government said it did.

But in other countries, after President Nixon closed the gold window, the U.S. dollar became, with other currencies, essentially a commodity. If you wanted to buy U.S. property or securities, or acquire U.S. products, you needed to obtain dollars to pay for them. Since the dollar had been overvalued by its link to gold, closing the gold window caused the dollar’s value to decline and inflation to increase.

To ameliorate some of the decline, President Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, William Simon, made a secret deal with Saudi Arabia in 1974 whereby the United States agreed to sell arms and give protection to the House of Saud in exchange for the Saudis investing their U.S. dollar reserves from oil sales in U.S. Treasurys instead of some other “hard” asset.

Oil had been traded in U.S. dollars almost everywhere since the Lucas Gusher at the Spindletop oil field in east Texas was discovered in 1901. The Saudis explicitly guaranteed to maintain the pricing of their oil sales in U.S. dollars. The 1974 arrangement with the Saudis helped the United States to run government budget deficits, and to improve its balance of payments deficit, as well as to maintain the global demand for the dollar, termed “petrodollars” after the Saudi deal, because any country that wanted to buy oil had to buy U.S. dollars to buy it.

Where We Are Today

In 1974, when Secretary Simon arranged his deal with the Saudis to avoid a “dollar crisis,” our national debt was roughly 32 percent of GDP. We were winding down our decades-long involvement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia and had secured a detente with Cold War adversaries China and the Soviet Union.

Today, the United States is over $34 trillion in debt, around 120 percent of our GDP—more than it was even during World War II. A bit over $7 trillion of that—the value of the entire U.S. annual budget—is held by foreigners. We are on our way to $1 trillion a year in debt service, more than our defense budget. And the $10 your grandmother stuck in your birthday card that was lost in the commotion of your birthday party in 1971 would, if found today, be worth $1.20.

And in the world, the United States is engaged in escalating conflicts with two powerful, nuclear-armed, adversaries, China and Russia, as well as the war Iran’s terrorist proxy, Hamas, is waging on our ally, Israel.

• Citing three current and former U.S. officials, NBC News reported that China’s leader Xi Jinping boldly told the U.S. president that he intends to acquire Taiwan, a vital interest of the United States. Not only do we (and the rest of the world) get most of our chips from Taiwan, but 50 percent of the world’s maritime container traffic passes through the Taiwan Strait.

• The Ukraine-Russia war continues and has escalated in the last few days with no end in sight. In a conflict where U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has pledged American prestige by asserting in October that we will “deliver what it takes, for as long as it takes, so that Ukraine can live in freedom.” But just last month, President Biden seemingly walked back his commitment by saying the United States will back Ukraine “as long as we can.”

• U.S. Navy forces deployed to the Red Sea to protect shipping and deter Iranian belligerence against Israel were attacked by Iranian-backed Houthi militants in Yemen. Scores of U.S. armed services members have been injured in Iraq and Syria in similar attacks.

Within our own borders, violent protests that went unchecked after the death of George Floyd, the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, and the Marxist-inspired pro-Hamas protests have rattled the sense of American stability among foreigners more than at any time since the Vietnam War.

Given all that, it should not be a surprise that other countries are moving to de-dollarize their holdings. The world has growing concerns about the stability of the United States and our ability to meet our debt obligations. The Saudis, whom we have relied upon for 50 years to help maintain demand for the U.S. dollar as the world’s global reserve currency, had announced that they are joining the BRICS, the international coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates joined the same day.

Were that not enough, now the Biden administration is contemplating a policy that cannot help but exacerbate de-dollarization. According to the Financial Times, the United States and the G-7 “are actively exploring ways to seize Russian central bank assets” in their countries to fund Ukraine because political opposition to continuing Ukraine support in the United States and Europe threaten the flow of money that has kept Ukraine afloat. The paper reported it had seen a document written by the United States that said, under international law, “G7 members and other specially affected states could seize Russian sovereign assets as a countermeasure to induce Russia to end its aggression.”

Robert Schiller, the Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist, reportedly told Italian news outlet La Repubblica in an interview published Sunday that he warned against the tactic. “[T]his will be confirmation for the Russian leader that what is happening in Ukraine is a proxy war [and] it could paradoxically turn against America and the entire West,” Mr. Schiller said. He warned it could create “a cataclysm for the current dollar-dominated economic system” because it would sow doubt among other countries that their investments in U.S. Treasurys, markets, and financial institutions could be seized by the United States in a political dispute.

America’s “exorbitant privilege” has allowed us to roll up extraordinary levels of debt in exchange for, basically, IOUs we’ve given to our creditors. And given our level of debt, and particularly our debt-to-GDP ratio, our trading partners are now questioning our ability to repay it, the same as any other creditor.

In addition to this fiscal environment, malicious actors from foreign countries seeking to undermine the United States for their own geopolitical advantage, particularly China, are actively pursuing efforts to subvert the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Part of their strategy is to close trade in their own currencies.

Summary

The U.S. dollar is under assault by the global market. While we continue to enjoy the largest, most transparent, and best regulated capital markets in the free world, and the largest per capita consumer market, the other elements of dollar supremacy are eroding. Its status as the world’s reserve currency—its “exorbitant privilege”—is unlikely to last into the next decade. That will have enormous negative consequences for American citizens for the latter decades of this century. Interest rates needed to fund our debt will soar, closing out other alternative, productive investments in businesses and innovation.

Congress must absolutely get a handle on our spending to make vigorous, real, reductions and have the courage to raise taxes principally on its own donor class so that we get to a balanced budget no later than 2030. To grow our way out of debt as we did our World War II debt, we must make our nation more productive and more resilient. That means graduating more chemical engineers and computer scientists and fewer social workers and grievance studies graduates. It means fiercely protecting our technology and re-shoring high value-added manufacturing. It means making smart policy choices, across the board, to keep our people healthier, our children far better educated and much more physically fit to reduce healthcare costs. And we need to ensure our family structures and institutions are more resilient so that charities and families—not governments—support our most challenged citizens.

If we don’t, we will come to the day the dollar dies—and with it, the republic.

Finally the truth about Covid! (The Death of Science by Professor Angus Dalgleish - Video - 73mn)

  Finally the truth about Covid! - An amazing video!

  The virus WAS man-made and Doctor Fauci lied.

  Readers of this blog have known this for over 4 years now as immediately I highlighted a very serious research paper from India which clearly stated that HIV inserts were made into the Corona Virus and that the chance this was natural was nil. (This scientific study was soon after retracted under pressure. It doesn't tell you anything about its validity but a lot about the political pressure at the time.) 

  Once you understand and accept this (A lot of my friends and colleagues still do not since it would completely change their world view.) you begin to grasp what happened later on and why this led to the world we now live in.

  I also do believe, and I am not speaking lightly, that science is dead. We have replaced the scientific process by a top down authoritarian system which can be summarized as one of the European parliamentarian said: (From now on,) "WE are THE science!" 

 Well, let's see where this leads but I am afraid we'll be staring at the abyss soon enough! 

Is THIS Why Young People Are COLLAPSING (Russell Brand Video - 9mn)

  The number of excess death in ALL Western countries are amazing and keep rising. Still nothing! No a word in the news. No investigation. Nothing. 

  If it wasn't for insurance companies who have to pay and therefore are, almost, obliged to react to this sudden rise, we wouldn't even know about it. 

  This unfortunately is the kind of world we are living in. Our reality is molded by the media to such an extend that what they do not talk about simply doesn't exist. 

  We've all seen people falling suddenly, in the News, in sport, the military and other odd opportunities. All anecdotal. Your eyes are playing a trick on your mind. 

  Numbers? What numbers? And still, slowly, very slowly, people are waking up and realizing that something is not right. What we have been saying for over 3 years now, that the vaccines are dangerous is still underwater but eventually.... Or will they be able to keep it that way until our attention move to something else? 

 

Corruption, Chaos, & Conflict - The Fourth Turning Erupts In 2024

  A stunning article by Jim Quinn as this is almost verbatim what I think. 

  We are at the gate of the 4th turning, there can be little doubt about it but then, Now what? 

  The honest answer is I don't know nor does anybody else! 

  The only certainty is that "What goes up, must come down!" and we are dreadfully close to the top of the curve. What happens in 2024 will determine our future. As much as 1776, 1861 or 1941? I don't know. But look at the uncanny rhythm of 80 years between the different crisis in America!  

 The French will argue that their revolution in 1789 doesn't fit the pattern, nor does the Russian revolution of 1917. But these events as important as they were at the time were local, not global, concerning mostly one country, even if the effects would later be far reaching.

 What happens to the US in 2024 will impact the world and all of us directly or indirectly. The country will face a choice between losing its hegemony and global war. Historically, almost every Empire facing such a dilemma over the ages has chosen the second option. Can it be different this time? In other words, Are we more intelligent than our predecessors? I profoundly doubt it but let's not close the door to hope in these early days of the year. So maybe... Who knows? 

Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

“Americans today are increasingly polarized, as if they constitute two separate nations.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” – Thomas Paine – The American Crisis

Thomas Paine wrote these words 247 years ago, in the most historic year in our history – 1776. That was during the first American Fourth Turning. It’s not a coincidence we are now in the midst of our fourth Crisis period in U.S. history, as they arrive like clockwork every 80 years or so, the length of a long human life. Paine’s American Crisis began in 1773, ignited by the Boston Tea Party and the British reaction to this revolutionary act of defiance. Our current Millennial Crisis was triggered by the Federal Reserve/Wall Street/Government created financial disaster in 2008 and subsequent outrageously desperate, totalitarian, un-Constitutional, extreme acts designed to keep the ruling class in power, while impoverishing and enslaving the masses in a surveillance state techno-gulag.

The polarization and fractures have become too deep to repair. The country, and the western world in general, are hurtling towards a darkening abyss of civil conflict, financial collapse, global war, societal chaos, and loss of life on a scale grander than WW2, the Civil War, and the American Revolution combined. Our technological advancements have outstripped our ability to intelligently, thoughtfully, and humanly, use this power for the benefit of future generations. The destructive deficiencies of human nature, such as: greed, desire for power, hatred, arrogance, resentment, and an unlimited supply of self-delusion, continue to plague our world, as only the most power-hungry psychopaths rise to the highest levels of government, business, religion, and finance.

The immense technological power in the hands of egocentric, megalomaniacal, sadistic, billionaires and their highly paid toadies, lackeys, and apparatchiks, inserted throughout the media, government, academia, banking, and corporations, has pushed the world to the brink of Armageddon. We are entering the sixteenth year of this Fourth Turning. Based on history, we can expect a climax of this Crisis in the 2030-to-2032-timeframe. The path to that climax is guaranteed to be violent and unforgiving.

Neil Howe, in his new book – The Fourth Turning Is Here – tries to decipher the likely path of the remainder of this Fourth Turning. Having read the original Fourth Turning, his joint project with William Strauss (who died in 2007), in 2004, I was curious to read Howe’s update on their generational theory of history. I met Howe for lunch in 2012 during the Occupy Wall Street protests and he correctly assessed that movement as a meaningless left-wing attempt to push their communist like agenda.

The first book, written in 1997, showed no favor towards the right or left. It was a no-nonsense assessment of economic facts and historical precedents. There were no political agendas, which I now attribute to Strauss’ influence, because Howe certainly lets his political views creep into his writings. This isn’t surprising, as his consulting business is dependent upon Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. He owes his living to the establishment; therefore he won’t shit where he eats.

Howe’s current left leaning political views seep into his current tome. He quotes Zelensky as some sort of patriotic leader, while portraying Putin as a thug, without giving any context regarding the 2014 CIA initiated overthrow of a democratically elected Ukraine president. He bought the covid scamdemic hook, line, and sinker, with no skepticism about the coordinated lockdowns and false narratives about masks, social distancing, and vaccines that never worked, but continue to kill. He believes the climate change bullshit narrative.

His tone regarding Trump is clearly negative and he believes the 2020 election was perfectly legitimate. He expounds about the January 6 “armed” insurrection, without one word about the FBI, Pelosi, and the Washington establishment planning, coordinating, and exacerbating the fake “insurrection”. His brain-dead accusations of violence by Trump supporters, while completely ignoring the murder and mayhem created by the BLM and ANTIFA terrorists, clearly reveals his allegiances.

Be that as it may, there is no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. His acumen regarding possible scenarios and outcomes are well thought out. Howe makes some very interesting predictions regarding the remainder of this Fourth Turning, providing some very dark possibilities, along with some more unlikely optimistic outcomes. His research reveals Americans think the American dream is no longer attainable, civil discord will destroy our democratic institutions, and our global standing is in decline. All three fears are legitimate and coming to fruition as we speak. Howe captures the current situation in this passage:

“In the middle of a Crisis era, the social mood has reached an unstable balance of hope, fear, and dizzying uncertainty. Americans are like a compressed spring at the point of maximum potential energy. Internally secure yet externally threatened, they are ready for propulsive public action.”   – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here

Events beyond their control are leading them towards their rendezvous with destiny and the speed has begun to accelerate, with 2024 slated to be a historic date in history, on par with 1776, 1861, and 1941. The exact events which will make 2024 historic are obscured by a dense fog of uncertainty, but we can make some educated guesses based upon our current economic circumstances, Biden’s open border purposeful invasion, upcoming elections wrought with fraud, ongoing treasonous governmental and judicial operations, and deepening global conflicts already underway.

Of the three possible paths laid out by Howe, the most likely appears to be the animosity between factions eventually leads to armed conflict within the country. Political dominance by one party is highly unlikely, with the country rallying around the flag against an external enemy. It is more likely our many external foes will take advantage of our internal conflict to further weaken our global hegemony. All paths lead to war at this point.

I sense the delusional masses, still entranced by their electronic gadgets, unending access to debt, NFL fantasy leagues, and oblivious to the lessons of history, are frantically trying to fend off reality by shopping, eating out, partying at bars, and pretending all is well. Critically assessing their true situation is too painful for these snowflakes and gender bending enthusiasts. Their virtue signaling wokeness is about to meet the brutal reality of a violent Fourth Turning climax.

“And however much these paths may seem to differ from one another, they all move toward the same destination. They all push the nation toward a violent struggle requiring maximum mobilization. They all culminate in the Ekpyrosis, which will bring the era into a decisive consolidation, climax, and resolution.” – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here

The drivers of this Fourth Turning, as documented in 1997, continue to be debt, civic decay, and global disorder. They have propelled this Crisis since the outset in 2008 and are accelerating towards an explosive collision in 2024. The national debt at the outset of this Fourth Turning was $10 trillion. It had taken 219 years to accumulate $10 trillion of debt, with the majority amassed during this century. It has taken just fifteen years to pile an additional $24 trillion of debt on the backs of Americans and future generations, if there are future generations.

This doesn’t even take into account the $200 trillion of unfunded welfare and pension obligations tallied up by your government leaders. At the same time, the Federal Reserve increased their balance sheet from $900 billion to $9 trillion. With the rapid rise of interest rates in the last year, if banks were required to mark their assets to market, as they did prior to 2009, the entire banking industry, including the Too Big To Fail Wall Street behemoths, would be insolvent, along with the Federal Reserve. Does this seem sustainable to you?

Luckily for our teetering empire of debt, delusions, and deceptions, they can change the rules whenever it suits their purposes to extend and pretend until it all “suddenly” collapses, like a vaxxed soccer player on the pitch. Of course, the U.S. is not alone in being burdened with unpayable debt and an unsustainable financial system. China and the EU countries are also insolvent and issuing debt to service their existing debt.

The only major global power without a large debt problem is Russia, with a debt to GDP ratio below 30%, while the U.S.- 120%, EU – 90%, Japan – 220%, and China – 80% have accumulated perilous levels of debt and still growing. These debt levels and the domestic implications of unsustainable economies will lead shamelessly corrupt politicians and even dictators like Xi to provoke foreign conflict in order to distract their populations from their dire economic circumstances. A wag the dog type false flag is just around the corner.

An man-made banker created economic disaster ignited this powder keg of debt in 2008, and the “solutions” rolled out by the ruling elites since have been designed to extend, pretend, and bend the minds of the masses, while fostering the perpetual pillaging campaign by the billionaire oligarchs who really run this world. The plebs have been destroyed by the relentless inflation purposefully created by Powell and his fellow central banker puppets of the Deep State, while the lords of finance have reaped billions in ill-gotten riches.

The “Haves”, who control the financial markets, media, and politicians, are ecstatic with the current paradigm, as the stock market hits new highs every day, while average Americans go deeper into debt to keep up with the Joneses, pay the rent, and put some food on the table. The U.S. is nothing more than a sophisticated technological looting operation at this point, as we await the Great Taking to be initiated by the oligarchs as their final solution.

The Great Taking is David Rogers Webb’s warning to those not on the inside about the coming seizure of all your assets (stocks, bonds, savings) by your own government in the name of some new contrived national emergency. You will sacrifice your life savings for the good of the country (aka Deep State). At this point it’s just a matter of which comes first, The Taking, Global war, or Civil chaos caused by the ongoing election fraud. They are all coming and will merge into a category 5 hurricane of hell for the nation and the world.

The Deep State continues its complete control over who gets “elected”/selected in this country, as they use the captured judicial system as a cudgel to crush the rule of law and our Constitutional rights. The Soros selected District Attorneys, Mayors, Governors, Judges, Secretaries of States, and various other low-level captured bureaucrats, are doing what they were selected to do – destroy the country’s social fabric and create a chaotic disintegration of our community norms.

A populace propagandized into a woke communist ideology and prodded into a buy now, pay later mentality, is unwilling or unable to accept that LATER has arrived. They will pay, one way or another. Multiple bubbles in stocks, bonds and real estate are all poised to pop, with the slightest provocation from a global and/or domestic blunder. We have now positioned our naval forces in the highly dangerous waters in the Middle East. Militarily supporting Israel and Ukraine has done wonders for our GDP, but it seems we are running out of ammo to defend our own country, as the invasion of our southern border accelerates. We are currently provoking armed conflict in Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Iraq, Ukraine, and Russia.

All it will take is one lucky missile or unexpected hyper-sonic missile and our vaunted navy will see a vessel or two go to the bottom of the Red Sea. Then all hell will break loose. The rhetoric, threats and accusations of atrocities are ramping up, along with armed conflict across the Middle East. With the raging religious hatreds and centuries old struggles for land and power coming to a head, it will just take one of these psychopaths to ignite a global conflict. Meanwhile, China is biding its time for when they make their ultimate move on Taiwan. That would really roll a grenade into the party.

Financial markets have ignored the worsening global conflict thus far, but what happens when Americans start dying in large numbers? If the markets are at all time highs based upon expectations of a strong thriving economy in 2024, why is the Fed signaling multiple interest rate cuts in 2024, regional banks are desperately clinging to the Fed’s emergency bailout fund, commercial real estate is collapsing, housing has peaked, gold is hitting all-time highs, credit card debt is at all-time highs, layoffs are increasing, and the number of working age citizens is in free fall due to vaxx deaths and disabilities?

But buy stocks because the Wall Street shysters and their media mouthpieces tell you it’s the best time to buy. The only question at this point is what additional grain of sand will cause the sand pile to collapse. Will it be a foreign war, or will it be a civil war within our borders or something no one has even considered? I know most people dismiss the possibility of civil war, believing there aren’t enough people willing to risk their lives for a just cause. Neil Howe seems to think it is probable.

“Roughly half of all Americans think a civil war is likely. And a growing number of social scientists agree that the United States now fits the checklist profile of a country at risk. Trust in the national government is in steep decline. Check. Respect for democratic institutions is weakening. Check. A heavily armed population has polarized into two evenly divided partisan factions. Check. Each faction embodies a distinctive ethnic, cultural, and urban-versus-rural identity. Each wants its country to become something the other detests. And each fears the prospect of the other taking power. Check, check, and check.” – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here

Virtually no one believes civil war is possible, just as no one expected a civil war in 1860, as the presidential election approached. Truthfully, the civil war has already begun, but only those on the left, in conjunction with the FBI, CIA, Big Media, and other governmental agencies, are aggressively fighting. They are vigorously at war against the American people by rigging elections, arresting opposition leaders, and discarding the U.S. Constitution.

The good guys have thus far been too civil. But the simmering anger of heavily armed rural, red state Americans is close to boiling over. All the signs are there, awaiting a triggering event for this undeclared war to engulf the nation. At this point a number of possible triggering events are possible.

If David Webb is correct and those in power initiate the Great Taking, the level of violence in reaction would be unprecedented in U.S. history. Maybe that is their plan. Biden and his handlers could use this event to declare a national emergency, suspending the presidential election because they were going to lose, and instituting martial law. Their attempt to lockdown the country and use the military against civilians would surely result in massive bloodshed, as local animosities would result in assassinations, wholesale slaughter of those considered disloyal to whichever side controls the high ground in that community. Previously petty disputes would suddenly become lethal disputes.

Even if the presidential election is held in November, I don’t believe either side will accept the outcome. We know the Democrats and their Deep State co-conspirators will cheat, rig and once again try to steal the election. If they fail, they will unleash their BLM, ANTIFA terrorist arm into the streets to create chaos as an excuse to not hand over power to Trump.

With multiple states now attempting to unlawfully keep Trump off the ballot in their states, the animosity between the right and left grows ever deeper. The imprisonment of Trump or more radical attempts to steal the 2024 election will be met with violence from the here-to-for persevering right. Mixing this toxic domestic atmosphere with a deepening global chasm is a recipe for global disaster.

As we have seen throughout history, the egos of psychopaths at the helm of nations often lead them to act irrationally and/or emotionally when it comes to committing their people to war. While the U.S. has further weakened its global hegemony with its disastrous forays into Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine; Russia and China have gotten stronger and more mutually committed to creating their own new world order. The USD as the dominant global currency is reaching its endpoint, marking the end of empire. Now Israel will further deplete U.S. resources and global stature with their war to wipe out Palestine. Once the dominoes begin to fall in a game of global warfare, all bets are off regarding possible outcomes. Neil Howe’s worst-case scenario is certainly not out of the question.

“At worst, should at least one desperate country resort to WMDs, the outcome of a great-power war could prove to be even more devastating than that of a civil war. The toll could be almost unimaginable – with multiple cities destroyed, many millions killed, and many tens of millions displaced – all perhaps triggered by some ill-fated combination of the wrong leader making the wrong choice at the wrong time.” – Neil Howe – The Fourth Turning Is Here             

All scenarios for 2024 seem depressing and dark, but the odds still favor just continuing to muddle through as we have done through the first fifteen years of this Fourth Turning. I gave up trying to make specific predictions within a specific time frame years ago. It’s a fool’s errand as there are too many variables in the world to correctly predict which ones will drive the course of events within a one year time frame.

What I do know is that pessimism about the future continues to deepen, paranoia strengthens, trust declines, anger grows, and the arrogance of those running the show has reached epic levels. We’ve been subjected to three years of propaganda about how the Great Reset will fundamentally transform our world, where we will own nothing and be happy. It seems this fits perfectly with David Webb’s Great Taking theory of how we will ultimately own nothing.

There does seem to be a common thread running through everything happening in the last three years and appears to be on deck for 2024 and beyond. It all revolves around this broad Great Reset concept pushed by Schwab, Gates, Soros, and the rest of the Davos elite. The entire Covid plandemic was engineered to introduce authoritarian measures and instruct the masses to obey their masters.

The vaccine is now clearly revealed to be a depopulation weapon, killing off some suddenly; others through myocarditis, turbo cancers, and strokes; babies through miscarriages; and future generations through reduced fertility. And most still believe our overlords rolled these jabs out to save them. Trump is still crowing about his big, beautiful vaccines. He’s either a fool or a charlatan.

The climate change scam is hastening, as the war on farmers, meat, and fossil fuels is waged relentlessly by unelected bureaucrats and captured media mouthpieces. The EV scam is collapsing rapidly, as people with common sense see through it all. The Great Replacement of white people with third world savages is unabetted, with the Biden Administration ushering them across the southern border, giving them phones and money, flying them to cities across the country, and paying for them to stay at upscale hotels.

This is not incompetence, but treason. They have already used their predictive programming/brainwashing to prepare the masses for civil war and a massive cyber-attack. Your government will protect you, as long as you sacrifice your remaining liberties and rights. All that is left is the initiation of the Great Taking. The “emergency” will occur on a weekend and by Monday morning your assets will be gone.

This is their master plan, but we will have a say on whether it is ever successfully implemented. I wonder if these Davos psychopaths absconded with The Great Reset moniker from Strauss & Howe, as they used it to describe Fourth Turnings back in 1997.

“A Fourth Turning is a great reset.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

A Fourth Turning great reset may be a surprise to Schwab and his totalitarian acolytes inserted in governments across the world. They are in control. They are running this shitshow. They are the establishment. They are reaping the benefits. They are suppressing dissent and the truth. They are the existing social order that traditionally gets swept away during a Fourth Turning. 2024 may mark the beginning of the end for the Davos crowd and their iron grip on our spiraling society of chaos.

The future course of history could be radically altered by actions taken by supposedly influential characters in this movie, but also by courageous deeds performed by average Americans who will sacrifice themselves to ensure future generations have a chance to live in a nation devoid of a psychopathic elitist ruling class.

It seems like a long shot at this point, but giving up is not an option for those of us who still love this country. The four possible outcomes for this Crisis, laid out by Strauss & Howe in 1997, are as valid today as ever, and disturbingly close at hand. We will all have to do our part if we are to have any chance of producing a positive outcome to this Crisis. Happy New Year.

1. This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection and bad luck.

2. The Fourth Turning could mark the end of modernity. The Western saecular rhythm – which began in the mid-fifteenth century with the Renaissance – could come to an abrupt terminus. The seventh modern saeculum would be the last. This too could come from total war, terrible but not final. There could be a complete collapse of science, culture, politics, and society. Such a dire result would probably happen only when a dominant nation (like today’s America) lets a Fourth Turning ekpyrosis engulf the planet. But this outcome is well within the reach of foreseeable technology and malevolence.

3. The Fourth Turning could spare modernity but mark the end of our nation. It could close the book on the political constitution, popular culture, and moral standing that the word America has come to signify. The nation has endured for three saecula; Rome lasted twelve, the Soviet Union only one. Fourth Turnings are critical thresholds for national survival. Each of the last three American Crises produced moments of extreme danger: In the Revolution, the very birth of the republic hung by a thread in more than one battle. In the Civil War, the union barely survived a four-year slaughter that in its own time was regarded as the most lethal war in history. In World War II, the nation destroyed an enemy of democracy that for a time was winning; had the enemy won, America might have itself been destroyed. In all likelihood, the next Crisis will present the nation with a threat and a consequence on a similar scale.

4. Or the Fourth Turning could simply mark the end of the Millennial Saeculum. Mankind, modernity, and America would all persevere. Afterward, there would be a new mood, a new High, and a new saeculum. America would be reborn. But, reborn, it would not be the same.

*  *  *

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The Wuhan Cover-Up: RFK Jr. Has The Receipts

  Should we learn the lesson of the Covid Crisis? Sure, but for this to happen we first need to have an accurate picture of how the crisis unfolded and unfortunately that's where the problem begins. 

  The most interesting part of the story is that you do not need much conspiracy theory to explain how people behaved. Greed, self interest and aggrandizement are mostly enough to explain behaviors which in retrospect made the crisis far worse than it should have been. Then manipulation and incompetence gave free reign to psychopaths to implement Orwellian solutions.   

Authored by Meryl Nass via The Brownstone Institute,

When Bobby Kennedy talked about writing this book a couple of years ago, I asked him, why?

Mindful of how the truth about everything Covid (and much else) was being memory-holed, he said he wanted to create an accurate historical record of what happened, for the future. 

I thought that was a good answer.

We desperately need a clear, accurate understanding about many things that have been taking place over the past few years, or should I say decades, and we all need to be saving hard copies or pdfs on hard drives of the important bits of history that we dig up.

Bobby did the difficult part and collected those scraps, and he knitted them together into a narrative that very few people know about.

In a nutshell: there is a cabal that took the concept of biological warfare 30 years ago and ran with it - in order to create new industries, massive profits, and to control the world using fear of death by contagion.

He created a history that is also a page-turner, enabling us to understand in a much deeper way what we have just lived through. 

No kidding, he has the receipts.

Tony Fauci is only one pawn on the chessboard in this book. There are many others, and I will mention just a few. Robert Kadlec is one. Sir Dr. Jeremy Farrar is a real knight, despite or because of having played a pivotal role in the overdosing of over 2,500 patients with hydroxychloroquine in the UK/Oxford and WHO clinical trials that he oversaw and funded. 

There are the funders; the scientists who will do anything for another grant; the massive network controlled by a syndicate: the money men and women from NIH’s many institutes, especially its best-funded NIAID; the NSF, whose former director was on the board of EcoHealth Alliance; the Wellcome Trust, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation; and other charities deeply entangled with the ones I just mentioned. There are think tanks that help guide the direction the funding takes. A US DoD that contributes billions to whitewash and hide its biowarfare research. And a massive bureaucracy and media that protects all these people from exposure and punishment.

Nobody really wants to think about bioweapons. They are unpleasant in the extreme to contemplate. They should not exist. They challenge our entire concept of medicine being sacrosanct, the knowledge of medicine never to be used for harm. This is in the Hippocratic Oath. 

Unfortunately, we cannot bury our heads in the sand over this issue. Our lack of knowledge about it, our revulsion toward it, and our deep-seated fears about it have enabled the spectre of biological warfare to lead us on a long and winding road to hell.

The 2001 anthrax letters, sent at the right time to the right Senators, led to the Patriot Act, a massively profitable biodefense industry, and the rise of the Surveillance State. 

By 2005 we had the PREP Act, ostensibly to allow the DoD to continue using anthrax vaccines despite the revocation of the vaccine license in 2004. Did anyone know back then that the PREP Act would be used to greenlight contaminated gene therapy injections for billions around the world? Why didn’t the scientists designing these injections predict some, if not all of their harms, having spent hundreds of millions to study beta coronaviruses over 2 decades? Or did they?

Without the PREP Act removing liability from the Covid vaccine manufacturers, the injectors, and the government planners who both designed the program, and gave away billions of taxpayer dollars in bonuses for each shot administered, such untested, unlicensed, and deadly shots would never have been administered.

These Patriot and PREP Acts were passed because Congress and the American public were played like a fiddle, induced to be terrified. Congress attempted to immunize itself from criticism by throwing money at the problem, much of it going to Fauci, while through ignorance Congress made the problem of biological warfare far worse. 

Many Americans took the Covid experimental shots willingly, out of terror and ignorance. The half that held back were mostly beaten, shamed, or cajoled into compliance through the most incredible, federally-funded fifth general mind control assault the world has ever experienced.

We have just lived through 3 bioweapon events, at least: the original Wuhan coronavirus, the Omicron variant, and monkeypox, all of which assuredly came from labs.

It is obvious that many more nasty viruses and other microorganisms are still sitting in labs, many sponsored by military and intelligence agencies using our tax dollars. It is absolutely critical that the public act a lot smarter than it did last time, if there is a next time. It is critical to know what it is we are dealing with. And critical to understand that there ARE ways we can save ourselves that lie outside the government’s prescribed Overton window. 

The Wuhan Cover-Up gives you the facts, the history, and the understanding you need to grasp what is actually happening, right now. If enough of us read it, we will gain the knowledge and strength in numbers to stop and defund the biowarfare industry, revoke these terrible laws, and lay down our deep, unconscious fears regarding contagion.

[Full disclosure: I helped edit this book. I was the first person in the world to study an epidemic (epizootic) and prove it was due to biological warfare.]

The Year That Expertise Collapsed

  Here's a great article to start the new year.

  When expertise becomes political as it was during the last 3 years, how much should we trust the experts? 

  Conversely, if we strop believing the experts then who should we trust? 

  Back to the good old days of tradition, intuition, good sense, etc... But is this compatible with our technological society? 

  Education, hard work and open mindedness did I hear you say? Now, now, don't get carried away!

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

Getting sick and getting well is part of the human experience at all times in all places. As with other phenomena of human existence, that suggests there is a great deal of embedded knowledge on the topic woven into the fabric of our lives. We aren’t born knowing but we come to know: from our moms and dads, experience of siblings and others, from our own experience, and from medical professionals who deal with the problem daily.

In a healthy and functioning society, the path toward maintaining personal and public health becomes embedded in the cultural firmament, just like manners, belief systems, and value preferences.

It’s not necessary that we think about it constantly; instead it becomes a habit, with much of the knowledge tacit; that is, deployed daily but rarely with full cognizance.

We could know for certain that there had been a change in the matrix in March 2020 because, seemingly out of nowhere, all of this knowledge was deemed wrong.

A new gaggle of experts was in charge, one day to the next. Suddenly, they were everywhere. They were on TV, quoted by all the newspapers, amplified on social media, and on the phone constantly with local officials instructing them on how they must shut down the schools, businesses, playgrounds, churches, and civic gatherings.

The message was always the same. This time is completely different from anything in our experience or in any previous experience. This time we must adopt a totally new and completely untested paradigm. It comes from models that high-level scientists have deemed correct. It comes from labs. It comes from “germ games” of which none of us are part. If we dare to reject the new teachings for the old, we are doing it wrong. We are the malicious ones. We deserve ridicule, cancellation, silencing, exclusion, and worse.

It felt like a coup d’état of sorts. It certainly was an intellectual coup. All wisdom of the past, even that known by public health only months earlier, was deleted from public spaces. Dissent was silenced. Corporate media was absolutely united in celebrating the greatness of people like Fauci, who spoke in strangely circuitous ways that contradicted everything we thought we knew.

It was exceedingly strange because the people we thought might have stood up to the flash imposition of tyranny somehow vanished. We could hardly meet with others at all, if only to share intuitions that something was wrong. “Social distancing” was more than a method to “slow the spread;” it amounted to comprehensive control of the public mind too.

The experts instructing us spoke with astonishing certainty about precisely how society should be managed in a pandemic. There were scientific papers, tens of thousands of them, and the storm of credentials was everywhere and out of control. Unless you had a university or lab affiliation and unless you had multiple high-level degrees attached to your name, you could not get a hearing. Folk wisdom was out of the question, even basic things like “sun and outdoors are good for respiratory infections.” Even popular understanding of natural immunity came in for hard ridicule.

Later it turned out that even top credentialed experts would not be taken seriously if they had the wrong views. This is when the racket became incredibly obvious. It was never really about genuine knowledge. It was about compliance and echoing the approved line. It’s astonishing how many people went along, even with the stupidest of the mandates, such as the distancing stickers everywhere, the ubiquity of Plexiglas, and the dirty masks on every face which were somehow believed to keep people healthy.

Once the contrary studies started coming out, we would share them and get shouted down. The comment sections of the studies started to be raided by partisan experts who would hone in on small issues and problems and demand and obtain takedowns. Then the contrarian expert would get doxxed, his dean notified, and the faculty turned against the person, lest the department risk funding from Big Pharma or Fauci in the future.

All the while, we kept thinking that there must be some rationale behind all this madness. It never emerged. It was all intimidation and belligerence and nothing more—arbitrary diktat by big shots who were pretending the entire time.

The lockdowners and shot mandators were never intellectually serious people. They never much thought about the implications or ramifications of what they were doing. They were just wrecking things mostly for pecuniary gain, job protection, and career advancement, plus it was fun to be in charge. It’s not much more complicated than that.

In other words, we’ve gradually come to realize that our worst fears were true. All these experts were and are fakes. There have been some hints along the way, such as when North Carolina Health Director Mandy Cohen (now head of the CDC) reported that she and her colleagues were burning up the phone lines to decide whether people should be allowed to participate in sports.

“She was like, are you gonna let them have professional football?” she said. “And I was like, no. And she’s like, OK neither are we.”

Another candid moment came five months ago, only recently unearthed by X (formerly Twitter) when NIH head Francis Collins admitted that he and his colleagues attached “zero value” to whether and to what extent they were disrupting lives, wrecking the economy, and destroying education for kids.

He actually said this.

As it turns out, these experts who ruled our lives, and still do to a great extent, were never what they claimed to be, and never actually possessed knowledge that was superior to what existed within the cultural firmament of society. Instead, all they really had was power and a grand opportunity to play dictator.

It’s astonishing, truly, and worthy of deep study, when you consider the extent to which and for how long this class of people were able to maintain the illusion of consensus within their ranks.

They bamboozled the media all over the world. They tricked vast swaths of the population.

They bent all social media algorithms to reflect their views and priorities.

One explanation comes down to the money trail.

That’s a powerful explanation. But it is not the whole of it. Behind the illusion was a terrifying intellectual isolation in which all these people found themselves. They never really encountered people who disagreed. Indeed, part of the way these people had come to conceive of their jobs was to master the art of knowing what to think and when and how. It’s part of the job training to enter the class of experts: mastering the skill of echoing the opinions of others.

Discovering this to be true is alarming for anyone who holds to older ideals of how intellectual society should conduct itself. We like to imagine that there is a constant clash of ideas, a burning desire to get to the truth, a love of knowledge and data, a passion for gaining a better understanding. That requires, above all else, an openness of mind and a willingness to listen. All of this was overtly and explicitly shut down in March 2020 but it was made easier because all the mechanisms were already in place.

One of the best books of our time is Tom Harrington’s “The Treason of the Experts,” published by Brownstone. There is simply not in the present era a more insightful investigation and deconstruction of the sociological sickness of the expert class. Every page is on fire with insight and observation about the intellectual juntas that attempt to rule the public mind in today’s world. It’s a terrifying look at how wildly wrong everything has gone in the world of ideas. A great follow-up volume is Ramesh Thakur’s “Our Enemy, the Government,” which reveals all the ways in which the new scientists who were ruling the world weren’t scientific at all.

Brownstone was born in the midst of the worst of this world. We set out to create something different, not a bubble of ideological/partisan attachment or an enforcement organ of the proper way to think about all issues. Instead, we sought to become a genuine society of thinkers united in a principled attachment to freedom but hugely diverse in specialization and philosophical outlook. It’s one of the few centers where there is genuine interdisciplinary engagement and openness to new perspectives and outlook. All of this is essential to the life of the mind and yet nearly absent in academia, media, and government today.

We’ve put together a fascinating model for retreats. We choose a comfortable venue where the food and drink are provided and the living quarters are excellent, and bring together 40 or so top experts to present a set of ideas to the whole group. Each speaker gets 15 minutes and that is followed by 15 minutes of engagement from everyone present. Then we go to the next speaker. This goes on all day and the evenings are spent in casual conversation. As the organizer, Brownstone does not pick topics or speakers but rather allows the flow of ideas to emerge organically. This goes on for two and a half days. There is no set agenda, no mandated takeaways, no required action items. There is only unconstrained idea generation and sharing.

There is a reason why there is such a clamor to attend. It’s the creation of something that all these wonderful people—each person a dissident in his own field—had hoped to encounter in professional life but the reality was always elusive. It’s only three days so hardly Ancient Greece or Vienna in the interwar years but it is an excellent start, and hugely productive and uplifting. It’s amazing what can happen when you combine intelligence, erudition, open minds, and sincere sharing of ideas. From the point of view of government, huge corporations, academia, and all the architects of today’s world of ideas, this is precisely what they do not want.

The difference between 2023 and, say, five years ago, is that the expertise racket is now out in the open. Vast swaths of society decided to trust the experts for a time. They deployed every power of the state, along with all affiliated institutions in the pseudo-private sector, to browbeat and manipulate the people into panicked compliance with preposterous antics that never had any hope of mitigating disease.

Look where that got us. The experts have been fully discredited. Is it any wonder that ever more people are skeptical of the same gang’s claims about climate change, diversity, immigration, inflation, education, gender transitions, or anything else pushed today by elite minds?

Mass compliance has been replaced by mass incredulity.

Trust will not likely return in our lifetimes.

There is, further, a reason why hardly anyone is surprised that the president of Harvard stands accused of rampant plagiarism or that election officials are deploying sneaky forms of lawfare to keep political renegades off the ballot or that money launderers for the administrative state are getting away with rampant fraud. Graft, kickbacks, bribery, misappropriation, nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption rule the day in all elite circles.

In a few weeks, we are going to hear from Anthony Fauci, who will be grilled by a House of Representatives committee on exactly how he claimed to be so sure that there was no lab leak stemming from gain-of-function research being done at a U.S.-baked lab in Wuhan. We’ll see how much attention this testimony gets but, truly, does anyone really believe that he is going to be honest and forthcoming? It is pretty much a consensus these days that he has been up to no good. If he is “the science,” science itself is in grave trouble.

What a contrast to just a few years ago when Fauci-themed shirts and coffee mugs were big-selling items. He claimed to be the science, and science did rally behind him as if he had all the answers, even though what he advocated contradicted every bit of common wisdom that has always been practiced in every civilized society.

Three years ago, the expert class went out on the farthest limb one can imagine, daring to replace all social knowledge and embedded cultural experience with their off-the-cuff rationalism and scientistic razzmatazz that ended up serving the industrial interests of large-scale exploiters in tech, media, and pharma. We live in the midst of the rubble they created. It’s no wonder they have been completely discredited.

To replace them—and this is a long-term strategy and one that unfolds gradually with bold efforts such as that undertaken by Brownstone Institute—we need a new and serious effort to rebuild serious thought based on honesty, sincere engagement across ideological lines, and a genuine commitment to truth and freedom. We have that opportunity right now, and we dare not decline to take up the task with every sense of urgency and passion. As always, your support of our work is greatly appreciated.

Joe Rogan: "I Wasn't Afraid of AI Until I Learned This" (Video - 7mn)

  To finish the year with something interesting, here's a short video about AI but well worth listening to. 

  I have been involved with transformers for over 10 years (It is not as new as people say it is. It is only the way we use them which is new.) and I truly do not understand why they allow for the kind of emerging capabilities that the video discusses. In fact, nobody knows except for the fact that they are necessary steps to become more efficient at predicting the "next" word. That's it? That's what "intelligence" is? The ability to predict accurately, and therefore modelize the world to achieve this goal? 

 This in the end is what is truly frightening. I, and many other people, were expecting that we would have to build a model of the brain to get anywhere close to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). But in the end, it may not at all be the case... In which case we are much, much closer to AGI than we thought!

The Trusted News Initiative - Propaganda at its best by Russell Brand (Video - 25')

 It looks more and more like we are "there", in the post reality "Trusted News Initiative" propaganda world were all the news are controlled from.... Where exactly? 

 Wrong question I guess. At least we can still disagree for the time being without being de-platformed. Well, as long as you do not contradict the main stream narrative and do not have a following endangering the message like Russell Brand.

 Not yet North Korea or China but getting closer. I still remember 10 years ago when I was in China discussing political issues with Chinese people. Not that they would not engage in a discussion when alone but then again what could they do? 

 How long until the US and Europe start feeling eerily similar? Well, if you live there, don't worry, if the respective governments get it right and raise the temperature slowly enough, you will probably never see it coming.

 

The EV Graveyard Reckoning, Hardly Anyone Wants To Buy A Used One

  If the wind energy failure was not enough to convince you about the absurdity of our "green" policies, here's the EV failure. Even worse and less green if that is possible. In this field, China is leading and will consequently be the first to fall.

 Here too, EV were a good solution but limited to urban environments as a second car. We are now wasting huge sums of money producing million of cars which will have zero value in about 3 years. What an extraordinary recipe for failure as explained below! 

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

The market for used EVs is plummeting. What will car rental companies do with the used ones? Problems started in China but have spread to Europe and the US.

China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities

Bloomberg notes China’s Abandoned, Obsolete Electric Cars Are Piling Up in Cities

A subsidy-fueled boom helped build China into an electric-car giant but left weed-infested lots across the nation brimming with unwanted battery-powered vehicles.

On the outskirts of the Chinese city of Hangzhou, a small dilapidated temple overlooks a graveyard of sorts: a series of fields where hundreds upon hundreds of electric cars have been abandoned among weeds and garbage.

Similar pools of unwanted battery-powered vehicles have sprouted up in at least half a dozen cities across China, though a few have been cleaned up. In Hangzhou, some cars have been left for so long that plants are sprouting from their trunks. Others were discarded in such a hurry that fluffy toys still sit on their dashboards.

The cars were likely deserted after the ride-hailing companies that owned them failed, or because they were about to become obsolete as automakers rolled out EV after EV with better features and longer driving ranges. They’re a striking representation of the excess and waste that can happen when capital floods into a burgeoning industry, and perhaps also an odd monument to the seismic progress in electric transportation over the last few years.

Shenzhen-based photographer Wu Guoyong was one of the first people in China to document the waste that results from frenetic development, taking striking drone shots of the piles of abandoned bicycles in 2018. In 2019, he filmed aerial footage of thousands of electric cars in empty lots around Hangzhou and Nanjing, the capital of China’s eastern Jiangsu province.

“The shared bikes and EV graveyards are a result of unconstrained capitalism,” Wu said. “The waste of resources, the damage to the environment, the vanishing wealth, it’s a natural consequence.”

Hoot of the Day

“EV graveyards are a result of unconstrained capitalism.”

Mercy!

The Chinese government literally forced people to buy the damn things. Biden is attempting the same in the US.

That article is from August. Let’s flash forward to December 21 to see how things are going in Europe.

No One Wants Used EVs, Making New Ones a Tougher Sell Too

What started in China is not limited to China. A second Bloomberg article reveals No One Wants Used EVs, Making New Ones a Tougher Sell Too

Because most new vehicles in Europe are sold via leases, automakers and dealers who finance these transactions are trying to recover losses from plummeting valuations by raising borrowing costs. That’s hitting demand in some European markets that were in the vanguard of the shift away from fossil fuel-powered propulsion. Some of the biggest buyers of new cars, including rental firms, are cutting back on EV adoption because they’re losing money on resales, with Sixt SE dropping Tesla models from its fleet.

The problems are expected to intensify next year, when many of the 1.2 million EVs sold in Europe in 2021 will come off their three-year leasing contracts and enter the secondhand market. How companies tackle this problem will be key for their bottom lines, consumer confidence and ultimately decarbonization — including the European Union’s plan to phase out sales of new fuel-burning cars by 2035.

“There isn’t used-car demand for EVs,” said Matt Harrison, Toyota Motor Corp.’s chief operating officer in Europe. “That’s really hurting the cost-of-ownership story.”

“One has to slash prices significantly just to get customers to look at EVs,” said Dirk Weddigen von Knapp, who heads a group representing VW and Audi dealers.

Biden Struggles to Convince People to Buy EVs, Only 12 Percent Seriously Considering

On April 18, I reported Biden Struggles to Convince People to Buy EVs, Only 12 Percent Seriously Considering

On July 13, I noted Despite Huge Incentives, Supply of EVs on Dealer Lots Soars to 92 Days

On August 20, I reported Clean Energy Exploitations and the Death Spiral of an Auto Industry

On October 16, I commented Wake Up Mr. President, Consumers Want Hybrids, Not EVs

More accurately, that should read Wake Up Mr. President, Consumers Don’t Want EVs.

GM Decreases EV Investment in Favor of Buybacks

And on December 2, I noted To Shore Up Share Price, GM Decreases EV Investment in Favor of Buybacks

Last month, GM said it would push back the opening of an electric-truck factory in suburban Detroit by a year. It also scrapped an earlier goal of producing 400,000 EVs over a roughly two-year stretch, through mid-2024.

Slam Dunk Ford Project Now Unclear

Ford’s EV plan is similarly distressed. Ford pauses and then scales back proposed Michigan facility backed by government funding.

Manchin Blasts Biden’s Definition of “Foreign Entity of Concern”

In the you can’t make this up department, Biden’s EV Subsidy Rules Leave Room for Chinese Suppliers

Depending on the definition of “foreign entity of concern” a number of things are floating in the wind including $7,500 tax credits.

Officials worked for months to define a foreign entity of concern but failed. It is not even clear if Ford buyers are eligible for tax credits. “Licensing technology, might be permissible under the rules,” officials said.

Who wants to buy a new EV on the basis a $7,500 credit “might” be allowed?

Q&A on What’s Delaying the Definition

Q: Why the struggle on the definition of “Foreign Entity of Concern”?
A: Ford wants to use Chinese technology but GM wants to block it.

For discussion, please see An Epic Battle: Ford to Use China’s Battery Technology, GM Wants it Blocked

My comment then was “Biden is guaranteed to upset someone. That’s what happens when you interfere in the free markets, taking sides.”

Biden is avoiding a firm definition hoping the problem will go away. But it won’t.

Green Fantasy

In the real world, The Green Fantasy Ends Because Consumers Don’t Want to Pay for It

EVs are not selling because despite massive subsidies to both the manufacturers and consumers, the latter via tax credits, consumers don’t want them.

But here we are, blaming this mess on capitalism. “It’s a natural consequence.“

What a hoot.

Britain's Net Zero Disaster & The Wind Power Scam

  Our modern society was built on oil. This is not by accident. Oil is the only energy source that is concentrated, easy to transport, use, and until recently cheap. Unfortunately oil is not forever. Our problem is not the lack of oil per se but that eventually it will take almost as much energy to pump it out of the ground than it contains at which stage the game is up. We're not there yet but getting closer every year, plus it takes decades to build the energy infrastructure which would allow us to switch smoothly to a new energy source knowing that the solution cannot be simple.

 New energies are therefore a good idea although unfortunately they are now approached with a religious fervor which is ignoring common sense and economic rationality. This is especially the case of wind power which should occupy a low rug in our energy equation due to all the drawbacks of the wind and has instead been elevated to the status of panacea. As explained below, this is a swindle. We are wasting money but far more ominously, we are wasting time.

 At this stage, the least of our problems is the Earth. The planet is fine. The mild warming we are experiencing currently is mostly natural and actually quite pleasant in most places. A warmer weather would probably increase somewhat humidity in the atmosphere which in itself is a good thing for life. Net zero simply doesn't make sense.

 

 What we need urgently is a drastic increase in less polluting gas production to replace oil and coal for the next 50 years and give us time to transition to more advanced energy sources such as fusion. Not doing that may cost us nothing less than our civilization.

Authored by Rupert Darwall via The Epoch Times,

“This is not about complicated issues of cryptocurrency,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos declared in the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, after accusing the defendant of building FTX on a “pyramid of deceit.” Much the same can be said about the foundations of Britain’s net-zero experiment. Energy is complicated, and electricity is essential to modern society and our quality of life, but as with FTX, the underlying story is straightforward: Wind power and net zero are built on a pyramid of deceit.

Net zero was sold to Parliament and the British people on claims that wind-power costs were low and falling. This was untrue: Wind-power costs are high and have been rising. In the net-zero version of “crypto will make you rich,” official analyses produced by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility rely on the falsehood that wind power is cheap, that net zero would have minimal costs, and that it could boost productivity and economic growth. None of these has any basis in reality.

The push for net zero began in 2019, when the UK’s Climate Change Committee produced a report urging the government to adopt the policy. Part of the justification was historic climate guilt. In the words of committee chair Lord Deben, Britain had been “one of the largest historical contributors to climate change.” But the key economic justification for raising Britain’s decarbonization from 80 percent to 100 percent by 2050—i.e., net zero—was “rapid cost reductions during mass deployment for key technologies,” notably in offshore wind. These illusory cost reductions, the committee claimed, “have made tighter emission reduction targets achievable at the same costs as previous looser targets.” It was green snake oil.

During the subsequent 88-minute debate in the House of Commons to write net zero into law, the clean-energy minister, Chris Skidmore, also asserted that net zero’s cost would be the same as the previous 80 percent target, which Parliament had approved in 2008. Challenged by a Labour MP on the absence of a regulatory-impact assessment, Mr. Skidmore misled Parliament, saying that there had been no regulatory-impact assessment in respect of raising the initial 60 percent target to 80 percent.

The regulatory-impact assessment that Mr. Skidmore says doesn’t exist gave a range of £324 billion (about $412 billion) to £404 billion when the target was raised to 80 percent—an estimate that excluded transitional costs—and cautioned that costs could exceed this range. Unlike today’s political pronouncements, the assessment was honest about the consequences of Britain acting if the rest of the world didn't. “The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak,” it warned.

The Climate Change Act was passed to show Britain’s climate leadership and inspire the rest of the world to follow its example. How did that work out? In the 11 years that transpired from passing the Act to legislating net zero in 2019, Britain’s fossil fuel emissions fell by 180 million metric tons—a 33 percent reduction. Over the same period, the rest of the world’s emissions increased by 5,177 million metric tons—a rise of 16 percent. Put another way, 11 years of British emissions reduction were wiped out in about 140 days by increased emissions from the rest of the world.

Someone who claims that he’s a leader but who has no followers is typically regarded as a fool. It’s different with climate. Politicians parade their green virtue—Mr. Skidmore is to quit the House of Commons, and he teaches net-zero studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School—while voters get mugged with higher energy bills. Analysis of Britain’s Big Six energy companies’ regulatory filings reveals that fuel-input costs for gas- and coal-fired power stations were flat from 2009 to 2020. Still, the average price per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity paid by households rose 67 percent, driven by high environmental levies to subsidize renewable-energy investors. Yet, supposedly, the cost of renewable energy has plummeted.

During Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this year, Rishi Sunak claimed that the cost of offshore wind had fallen from £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) to £40 per MWh, numbers assiduously propagated by the wind lobby and the Climate Change Committee. His claim is flat-out false. The prime minister has been suckered by falling per MWh price bids made by wind investors in successive allocation-round bids for offshore wind subsidies.

The explanation for this is to be found not in falling costs but in a flawed bidding process that rewards opportunistic bidding by wind investors. The government was giving away valuable options that commit the government to honor the prices paid for winning bids but commit investors to nothing. Because investors don’t pay anything for these options, the only way they can get them is by cutting the price they offer—but aren't obliged to take—for their electricity unless they choose to exercise their options much later in the process.

Falling prices in successive allocation rounds are thus an artifact of moral hazard hardwired into the allocation mechanism; they reveal nothing about the trend in the costs of offshore wind. Analysis of audited financial data of wind farm companies undertaken by a handful of independent researchers comprehensively debunks the falling wind costs claim. The unavoidable move to deeper waters offset any cost reductions and operating costs per MWh of electricity for new offshore wind projects; the prices for the move are about double those assumed in the subsidy bids.

Preeminent among these researchers is Gordon Hughes, a former economics professor at the University of Edinburgh and adviser to the World Bank on power plant economics. Mr. Hughes’s analysis shows that by the 12th year of operation, rising per-MWh operating costs of deep-water wind turbines exceed their government-guaranteed prices, squeezing out their capacity to repay their capital and financing costs

The intermittency and variability of wind and solar led the government to create a capacity market to pay for standby generation. In any economic appraisal of renewables, the costs of running the capacity market should be allocated to wind and solar as their intermittency and variability create the need for it. Electricity procured from the capacity market isn't cheap. In 2020, German-owned Uniper’s thermal power stations obtained an average price of £224 per MWh, about four times the typical wholesale price.

Confirmation that offshore wind has huge, likely insuperable, cost and operating difficulties came in June, when Siemens Energy issued a shock profits warning and saw its shares plunge by 37 percent, in part because of higher-than-anticipated turbine failure rates. According to Mr. Hughes, the implication is that future wind operating costs will be higher, and output significantly lower, shortening the turbines’ economic lives. His conclusion is crushing:

“The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger wind turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified. ... It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe, and the United States are based on foundations of sand—naive optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.”

The British government has been conned into placing a massive bet on offshore wind and is forcing electricity consumers to spend billions of pounds on a dead-end technology.

The falling cost of wind deception contaminates official assessments of the macroeconomic consequences of net zero. The Office for Budget Responsibility claims that the cost of low-carbon generation has fallen so fast that it's now cheaper than fossil fuel generation. Similarly, the Treasury erroneously took falling prices in wind subsidy allocation rounds as an indication of falling wind costs. Both see the economy riddled with multiple layers of market failures, while not recognizing the real danger of government policy being captured by vested interests, as, indeed, it has been. Taken to its logical conclusion, theirs is an argument for switching to central planning and a command-and-control economy.

The Treasury argues that “other things being equal,” the added investment required by renewable energy “will translate into additional GDP growth.” Other things, of course, aren't equal. As recent history shows, there’s a world of difference between investors and politicians making capital-allocation decisions. The centrally planned economies of the former communist bloc squandered colossal amounts of capital, immiserating their populations. Few now believe that investment in those economies boosted growth.

We don’t need to hypothesize. Government data disprove the Treasury’s contention and demonstrate that increasing deployment of renewable capacity reduces the productivity of Britain’s grid. In 2009, 87.3 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity, including only 5.1 percent of wind and solar, generated 376.8 terrawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6 percent of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 13.6 GW (15.6 percent) more generating capacity produced 64.5 TWh (17.1 percent) less electricity.

Those numbers are damning for renewables and demonstrate why they make electricity more expensive and people poorer. Before mass deployment of renewables, 1 MW of capacity in 2009 produced 4,312 MWh of electricity. In 2020, 1 MW of capacity generated 3,094 MWh, a decline of 28.3 percent. It’s as clear as can be: Investment in renewables shrinks the economy’s productive potential. This is confirmed by the International Energy Agency’s net-zero modeling. Its net-zero pathway sees the global energy sector in 2030 employing nearly 25 million more people, using $16.5 trillion more capital, and taking an additional land area the combined size of California and Texas for wind and solar farms and the combined size of Mexico and France for bioenergy—all to produce 7 percent less energy.

Britain’s energy-policy disaster has lessons for the United States. The physics and economics of wind power aren't magically transformed when they cross the Atlantic. Whenever a politician or wind lobbyist touts wind as low-cost or says net zero will boost growth, they become accessories to the wind power scam. The data lead ineluctably to a decisive conclusion: Net zero is anti-growth. It's a formula for prolonged economic stagnation. Anyone who wants the truth about renewables should look at Britain and the sorry state of its economy. For the past decade and a half, it has been going through its worst period of growth since 1780.

Unlike in business and finance, there are no criminal or civil penalties for those who promote policies based on fraud and misrepresentation. Rather, net zero is similar to communism. Like net zero, communism was based on a lie: that it would outproduce capitalism. But it failed to produce, and belief in communism evaporated. When the collapse came, it was sudden and rapid. The truth couldn't be hidden. A similar fate awaits net zero.