[jato0072]

Yes, I posted that Jay Hanson interview on this site before. I mostly posted it again so it will be on this thread. Maybe a lurker or two will listen to it. I think it is the first and only public interview of Jay.

I really liked Jay's repository of knowledge. Yes, food growth and distribution or lack thereof will be key to any dieoff. Weather it is a slow multi-decade decline or nuclear war, the lack of food will kill many people.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have been mostly absent during our lifetimes. Once resources are scarce, they will return one day with a vengeance.

I remember Rupert and Matt Savinar. Rupert committed suicide and Savinar switched to Astrology. I can't blame him. After hydraulic fracking, most people went to sleep on PO, including myself. I am not even sure if 2018 will be the absolute peak. Whomever it was 20 years ago who predicted oil production would soon be on a "bumpy plateau" gets the prize. John Denver's space mirror energy was way off.

I remain convinced when global oil production starts declining in earnest, modern human life will become very... interesting.

One thing I did not expect is for the loony left globalist technocrats to take control of our western culture and subvert it. I never saw that coming.

[theluckycountry]

I never thought much of hydraulic fracking, I read early into it that the technique had been around for decades but had never been employed because it was uneconomic. This is one place where economics and oil availability meet head on, that if you're using loads of high grade energy to get out energy the surplus left over to power society is diminished in proportion. Before it never mattered because the return were more than enough to make the issue irrelevant. Not so now. Now we see that the shale plays had to borrow hundreds of billions, much of which will never be paid back, and their collective effect on raising the living standards was non-existent outside of a few drillers and their staff. And of course the Wall Street sharks that peddled the companies.

But the media mania about it was so intense that no one could see through to the truth. The same as the EV mania, or the housing mania of the early 00's. No one can see the scam until it's exposed but by then it's too late.

"Know Thyself" from dieoff.org/page89.htm

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '&')quot;In November 1969, a researcher named Herbert Krugman, who later became manager of public-opinion research at General Electric headquarters in Connecticut, decided to try to discover what goes on physiologically in the brain of a person watching TV. He elicited the co-operation of a twenty-two-year-old secretary and taped a single electrode to the back of her head. The wire from this electrode connected to a Grass Model 7 Polygraph, which in turn interfaced with a Honeywell 7600 computer and a CAT 400B computer.

"Flicking on the TV, Krugman began monitoring the brain-waves of the subject. What he found through repeated trials was that within about thirty seconds, the brain-waves switched from predominantly beta waves, indicating alert and conscious attention, to predominantly alpha waves, indicating an unfocused, receptive lack of attention: the state of aimless fantasy and daydreaming below the threshold of consciousness. When Krugman's subject turned to reading through a magazine, beta waves reappeared, indicating that conscious and alert attentiveness had replaced the daydreaming state.

"What surprised Krugman, who had set out to test some McLuhanesque hypotheses about the nature of TV-viewing, was how rapidly the alpha-state emerged. Further research revealed that the brain's left hemisphere, which processes information logically and analytically, tunes out while the person is watching TV. This tuning-out allows the right hemisphere of the brain, which processes information emotionally and noncritically, to function unimpeded. 'It appears,' wrote Krugman in a report of his findings, 'that the mode of response to television is more or less constant and very different from the response to print. That is, the basic electrical response of the brain is clearly to the medium and not to content difference.... [Television is] a communication medium that effortlessly transmits huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure.'"

[theluckycountry]

REQUIEM by Jay Hanson
By Jay Hanson 02/20/98

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'E')xploit: to make the best use of something (e.g., to profit)
Lie: to give the wrong impression (e.g., to advertise)

Our civilization is dying from “system” problems; problems such as the population explosion, natural resource depletion, and war. Problems which have no technical solutions. Moreover, our system problems have no current political solutions.

If there is any hope at all, it is that people will come to understand the key systems in their world and then find the courage to make the hard decisions necessary for survival. We must find political means to abandon the competitive, consumptive social system — or we shall perish.

[theluckycountry]

It was local market day this morning, but as often happens many the locals were absent. Sellers come out from the city too, the one north of me, or more accurately the outer suburbs of that city. They bring all manner of junk tools and equipment for sale, craft stuff, boutique dog products, and one gentleman and his son, fruit and veg from the central markets there.

I ignored the junk and the coffee van that all the sellers flock to as soon as it opens to get their $6 fix. Now that little van makes a killing! If an average seller takes home $300 for their efforts she is taking home $2000. But I digress. The fruit and veg guy is cheaper than the supermarket and the quality is better, the product lasts longer too. I estimate they use about 50 liters of petrol to go buy their stock, bring it out to us and then drive back home. That's a lot of energy in the service of a small truck full of food! I for my part put 1/3 or so of what I buy in the fridge which keeps it cool until I eat it. Two weeks say. A lot more energy! I also burn a little driving down to the market but that's negligible.

Of course I take all this for granted, as we all do. It's just modern life. King Solomon in all his Wealth and Glory didn't live as well as I do. Though he certainly had more women. No the comforts and pleasures I experience in daily life are beyond anything he could imagine. Just the simple things like a comfortable air-conditioned car and home would have made him drool. But again, I digress.

THERMODYNAMICS
AND THE SUSTAINABILITY OF FOOD PRODUCTION
by Jay Hanson — revised 4/12/97

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')ll matter and energy in the universe are subject to the Laws of Thermodynamics. In the discipline of Ecological Economics, systems are delimited so that they are meaningful to our economy. What does thermodynamics have to do with the sustainability of food production?

Thermodynamic potential is a measure of a system's capacity to perform work. The two essential forms of stored thermodynamic potential are "energy" (e.g., a barrel of oil) and "order" (e.g., clean drinking water and deep topsoil).

"Entropy" is a measure of the unavailability of energy: the entropy of oil increases as it burns. Entropy can also be thought of as a measure of disorder in a system: polluted water that reduces crop yield has higher entropy than the same water unpolluted, and the entropy of topsoil increases when it erodes, is waterlogged, or is degraded by irrigation that "inevitably leads to the salinization of soils and waters." Increasing entropy in our food system is reducing the potential of the system to do work (produce food).

Sustainable systems are "circular" (outputs become inputs)—all linear physical systems must eventually end. [4] Modern agriculture is increasing entropy in both its sources (e.g., energy, soil, and ground water) and its sinks (e.g., water, soil, and atmosphere). Thus, modern agriculture is not circular—it can not be sustained.

Consider one of the most important limiting variables—energy. Food grains produced with modern, high-yield methods (including packaging and delivery) now contain between four and ten calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of solar energy. In the 70s, it was estimated that about four percent of the nation's energy budget was used to grow food, while about 10 to 13 percent was needed to put it on our plates.

There is NO substitute for energy. Although the economy treats energy just like any other resource, it is NOT like any other resource. Energy is the precondition for ALL other resources and oil is the most important form of energy we use, making up about 38 percent of the world energy supply.

NO other energy source equals oil's intrinsic qualities of extractablility, transportability, versatility and cost. These are the qualities that enabled oil to take over from coal as the front-line energy source in the industrialized world in the middle of this century, and they are as relevant today as they were then.

40 years ago, geologist M. King Hubbert developed a method for projecting future oil production and predicted that oil production in the lower-48 states would peak about 1970. These predictions have proved to be remarkably accurate. Both total and peak yields have risen slightly compared to Hubbert's original estimate, but the timing of the peak and the general downward trend of production were correct.

In March of 1996, World Resources Institute published a report that stated:

"Two important conclusions emerge from this discussion. First, if growth in world demand continues at a modest 2 percent per year, production could begin declining as soon as the year 2000. Second, even enormous (and unlikely) increases in [estimated ultimately recoverable] oil buy the world little more than another decade (from 2007 to 2018). In short, unless growth in world oil demand is sharply lower than generally projected, world oil production will probably begin its long-term decline soon—and certainly within the next two decades."

Well, so much for oil! Should we be alarmed? YES! Modern agriculture—indeed, all of modern civilization—requires massive, uninterrupted flows of oil-based energy. For example, the International Energy Agency projects that world oil demand will rise from the current 68 million barrels per day to around 76 million b/d in year the 2000 and 94 million b/d in 2010. What will happen when demand for oil exceeds maximum possible production?

To really understand the underlying causes and implications of oil depletion, one must stop thinking of the "dollar cost" of oil, and take a look at the "energy cost" of oil. We note that the energy cost of domestic oil has risen dramatically since 1975. As oil becomes harder and harder to find and get out of the ground, more and more energy is required to recover each barrel. In other words, the increasing energy cost of energy is due to increasing entropy (disorder) in our biosphere.

Optimists tend to assume that the "quality" (e.g., liquid vs. solid) of energy we use is not significant, that an infinite amount of social capital is available to search for and produce energy, and that an infinite flow of solar energy is available for human use. Realists know that none of these assumptions is true. In fact, ALL alternative methods of energy production require oil-based energy inputs and are subject to the same inevitable increases in entropy. Thus, there is NO solution to the energy (entropy or disorder) problem, and the worldwide energy-food crisis is inevitable.

When we can no longer subsidize modern agriculture with massive fossil energy inputs (oil-based pesticides and fertilizers, machine fuel, packaging, distribution, etc.), yields will drop to below what they were before the Green Revolution! Moreover, billions of people could die this coming century when the U.S. is no longer able to export food and mass starvation sweeps the Earth.

Is there nothing we can do?

We could lessen human suffering if all the people of Earth cooperated for the common good. But as long as political systems serve only as corporate errand boys, we're dead...

[theluckycountry]

In Hanson's 2008 interview on the "reality report" he explains that it's politically incorrect to teach people that they are basically a bunch of animals, which is what we really are. Animals with herding behaviors, tribe dominance behaviors, and a whole raft of genetically inbred behavioral patterns that get in the way of us achieving successful lives individually and collectively as humans on the planet.

There has never been a time in human history that we all banded together for the common good, on the contrary we have always risen up against out neighbors and murdered them for their land and resources. The drivel that is taught in universities today, the gender studies, the race studies, all of it is garbage because all of it tries to fix the problems of mankind without admitting to their root causes. They teach that people's "attitudes" need to change, that education will solve the problems, that giving money to the downtrodden to bring them up to our level will change these issues. The obvious state of Western cultures today prove this is false. For 30 years these teachings have been put into practice and they are an utter failure.

Economics is another failed system based on lies. Politics another. All these claim they are the solution to the problems they address but it turns out they are often the actual cause of the problems. Why are so many people on the bread line today and hundreds of millions in debt they will never repay? Because modern Economists claimed that taking on vast amounts of debt was the solution to faltering economies. Hanson was well aware of all these issues, he served on a local council and saw the problem with governments first hand.

When someone becomes an elected official they are thrown in with the herd of politicians. They want to fit in, they want to progress, and to do this they socialize with other politicians, it's just human nature. Soon they are all in each others pockets and paying back a favor becomes more important than solving a problem. Ergo the problems in our society get worse and worse. Crime escalates, roads fall into disrepair. Certainly some of that has to do with available money but a lot of the money has been wasted buying favors from corporate heads who they also socialize with and in return they get lucrative jobs when they retire from public life. In America it's far worse than that because heads of industry often move from the private sector into politics, directly influencing the policies that benefit their former corporations. They move back and forth, like Fauci who was paid hundreds of millions by the pharmaceuticals for the work he did promoting their vaccines.

But none of this is understood by the masses because they are not taught how the world really works, only how it should work if we all wear smiley faces and don't call people names. Don't be a Bigot! Accept diversity, and soon these people are beset by criminal immigrants invading their homes, their sons and daughters being groomed in school by transgender men in dresses. Biological men posing as women, convicted rapists, are sent to women's prisons now. Can you imagine the plight of the young women who encounter them there? These perverts rape all the time and it's often simply pushed under the carpet. But that's all a consequence of believing modern teaching on human behavior. Treat them with respect, accept them, and turn a blind eye to their evil actions.

In the 2008 podcast Hanson predicted a global nuclear war sometime in the future. A natural consequence of the genetic propensities of us animals to dominate each other. Many in the West will point to Putin and agree wholeheartedly, yes, he's evil, he would do it! but they will fail to see their own desires for such a war. If they could be guaranteed it wouldn't pollute the earth too much and that they would win, they'd push the button tomorrow. It's human nature.

[theluckycountry]

Know Thyself: 1998 Jay Hanson.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')In order to magnify exploitation of each other, bipeds have invented a brainwashing technology that allows exploitation messages to be delivered undetected:

"The fact that TV is a source not actively or critically attended to was made dramatically evident in the late 1960s by an experiment that rocked the world of political and product advertising and forever changed the ways in which the television medium would be used. The results of the experiment still reverberate through the industry long after its somewhat primitive methods have been perfected.