I read and watch a great deal of debate on the U.S Govt and foreign policy. I see a lot of people getting very passionate about their feelings in these issues. my articles are more on the physical side of the situation when it comes to the economy, precious metals and energy. I rarely write about the US Govt or what is taking place in countries throughout the world.
The reason why I stay away from this sort of debate is due to the fact that IT IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME TO GO AGAINST THE LEVERAGE WHICH IS CURRENTLY IN CHARGE. If we look at the past, political parties whether they be socialist, communist, fascist or etc.. run for quite a long time before they disintegrate. No amount of protest or revolt works. In the end, it is the entropy of the system that takes down the political party.
The Peaking of Oil and the coming energy shortages will destroy the present political systems.
Peak Oil & Energy Shortages Will Destroy the Present Political Systems
THE EROI - ENERGY RETURNED ON INVESTED between the GOLD RUSH SHOW vs BERING SEA GOLD
I don't know how many of you all have watched these two gold mining reality shows on the Discovery channel. So far this year, the Hoffmans in the Gold Rush Show have mined 82 ounces of gold... and basically the mining season is over. From my memory, Dakota Fred got about 65 ounces so far. From what I could get from the show, the Hoffmans consumed over $1,000 worth of diesel a day, while Dakota Fred probably uses close to that amount.
There are four different water dredges on Bering Sea Gold show. The largest is the Christy Rose which cost $500,000 to build in 2009. The other smaller dredges cost between $20-$40,000 to build. So far this past season, the Christy Rose has found 282 oz of gold.
If we consider that the Hoffmans spent about $100,000 on equipment it is only 1/5 th of what was spent on building the Christy Rose. But if we consider the amount of fuel that is consumed by the Hoffmans mining gold in Alaska compared to the fuel consumed by the Christy Rose, it is a drop in the bucket. The Hoffmans have 4 earth moving machines running all day plus their big sluice box which is run by a diesel powered generator.
The Christy Rose uses a little diesel to get the barge out to sea, but they only have to power the water pump, backhoe and sluice box. I would imagine the diesel consumption for the Christy Rose daily is 1/3 of the Hoffmans.
Here is the difference. In a day of mining the Hoffmans get about 5 oz of gold. The Christy Rose has found over 75-90 oz a day on three different days. The Christy Rose dredge consumes 1/3 the amount of diesel but can produce at least 50 oz of gold a day, whereas the Hoffmans can only produce 5 oz of gold while they consume 2-3 times the amount of diesel.
Here we can see the EROI is much better for dredging in the Bering Sea than it is mining gold ore from the ground in Alaska.
THE SUBJECT OF POLITICS & FOREIGN POLICY
I read and watch a great deal of debate on the U.S Govt and foreign policy. I see a lot of people getting very passionate about their feelings in these issues. my articles are more on the physical side of the situation when it comes to the economy, precious metals and energy. I rarely write about the US Govt or what is taking place in countries throughout the world.
The reason why I stay away from this sort of debate is due to the fact that IT IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME TO GO AGAINST THE LEVERAGE WHICH IS CURRENTLY IN CHARGE. If we look at the past, political parties whether they be socialist, communist, fascist or etc.. run for quite a long time before they disintegrate. No amount of protest or revolt works. In the end, it is the entropy of the system that takes down the political party.
The Peaking of Oil and the coming energy shortages will destroy the present political systems. The threat of these Drone planes flying all over the United States is nice on paper, but the future logistics will prove this system a HUGE FAILURE. There is no need to protest and try to keep this sort of SPY PROGRAM from becoming reality.
UPDATE ON THE FIVE STAGES OF COLLAPSE
In my THE COMING PARADIGM SHIFT IN SILVER, I wrote how the price of silver would take off when the U.S. hits STAGE 2 or the Commercial collapse. Dmirty Orlov recently did an interview on Max Keiser where he updated his theory of collapse. Orlov now believes that because of the continued manipulation of the markets by the US Govt and Fed that we will have all three stages collapse at the same time. Basically, the whole system falls apart at once and there is no time to protect ones wealth if you have not done so already.
STAGE 1 the Financial Collapse took place in 2008, but the banking system is still functioning due to the US Govt manipulation. When the system finally goes, it will take down the Banking System, the Supply Chain system (Commerical Collapse - Stage 2) and the Political System (Stage 3). Things will really get out of hand.
When we have this huge collapse of 3 stages at once, we will not have to worry about the Federal Govt and its Homeland Security and etc, but rather we will have to protect ourselves from our more unprepared neighbors.
THE COUNTRY LIFE WILL SURVIVE, WHEREAS THE LARGE CITIES WILL BE THE WORST PLACE TO LIVE
My wife and I left the big city over five years ago. We have goats, chickens, garden, orchard and fresh water creek on our property. We can live without the supply chain or the electric grid. We have a neat solar cooker that uses the sun to cook meats, grains, breads and vegetables by the power of the sun. The unit gets up to 350 degrees and can cook a chicken in 2 hours. The neat thing about it... the chicken will not get burned if you leave it in the sun-oven for most of the day.
Today, my biggest concern is not the breakdown of the system, but the collapse of the electric Grid and the failure of Nuclear Power Plants as a result. Living in the country can protect oneself from the negative forces in the big city... but not from RADIATION spewing from failed nuclear power plants.
This is why my wife and I are now planning to leave the mainland. I believe the probability of the FAILURE of the NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS is 100% at some point in time. How many go down and in what areas is up to chance. If just 10-20% of the Nuke Plants go down, it makes a great percentage of the country uninhabitable.
Well....that's enough for now.
HAPPY TRADING
21 comments:
All it takes is one counterparty in the derivatives market not being able to make a margin call and all bets are off. This is likely to happen, as the banks are back in the Repo market peddling subprime which is what brought down both BS and Lehman. Check out the 5 largest banks assets to derivatives exposure to crap the bed and yell mommy:
Five Banks Account For 96% Of The $250 Trillion In Outstanding US Derivative Exposure; Is Morgan Stanley Sitting On An FX Derivative Time Bomb?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/five-banks-account-96-250-trillion-outstanding-derivative-exposure-morgan-stanley-sitting-fx-de
stacking, stacking, stacking...keep those coins a stacking...yee haw! It's all about preserving purchasing power at this point, and the FED is my sugar daddy. Between PMs and TIPS, they are making this too easy. The hardest part is waiting like a spider waits for a fly, but it takes time for the full buffet to be laid out for the feast.
Outf$&king standing article SRS!
Centralization of power is the cause of both the current political system and its eventual demise. Peak oil theory is not based in solid science. I do expect there to be energy shortages, but not because of peak oil; rather, because of political and economic games, the likes of which people on this blog already get from the machinations in the precious metals.
SRS,
I always agree with you on everything.. on peak oil I totally disagree. There is more oil in the continental US then the middleeast. Peak oil is a sham.
It's always about the $money$. Always! Peak Oil is all about the Carbon Market which trades right along side all the other commodities I watch on a daily basis. The pigmen never miss a meal at the trough.
Concerning Peak Oil, I'm always amazed at what we think we know based on a data set that is far too short for a planet that is billions of years old. Heck, we aren't even sure Carbon-14 is a constant anymore. Now there is a possibility that it has a seasonality to it. Funny thing is, the Bible says, "for all things there is a season". So true.
What passes as knowledge today may someday be rewritten in the same way that the Earth is known to be round and not flat.
"peak oil theory is not based in solid science"
For readers who haven't studied peak oil completely, keep in mind that peak oil doesn't mean we're out of oil, it means we're out of CHEAP oil. Think light sweet crude from Saudi or Nigera.
Consider that if you exclude Exxon funded advertisements and mainstream media whores, then what you have left is essentially 100% agreement by credible experts that peak oil is here.
Secondly, think about common sense. If there's no peak oil, does it make sense that we have to drill under the ocean or drill shale plays, or tar sands etc just to get by? Sure, there's plenty of that stuff, but the cost is through the roof. That's essentially the definition of peak oil.
Thirdly, I don't disagree that central banking power is the #1 obstacle to reform. However, it's a mistake to think there are not severe shortages developing in just about every key resource or to ignore that we're swimming in a cesspool of industrial waste.
Many freedom thinkers & libertarians are spot on right about monetary policy, gold etc... and then they unfortunately make the mistake of looking like morons when they talk about environmental or energy issues. The above comment is a classic example. This doesn't help people take us seriously.
If's there's one commodity that trumps precious metals for life as we know it, it is oil. It's worth going to the theoildrum(dot)com to educate oneself about oil.
This planet is like a giant bon-bon, filled with light, sweet crude. We will never run out of oil.
/sarcasm off
Silver spiders. I like it.
Sierra on target. Plenty of oil.
Oil shortage is an excuse to raise the price. IMO, for whatever it's worth, an oil shortage is an engine to support an agenda.
Picked up 6 eagles and a Kennedy 1/2 today @ $60.00. I'll never get that lucky again. Could have gotten more but didn't have the cash at the moment. One of my friends got the rest. Again, I explained to the gentleman he needed to keep his silver and explained why but he was going to sell to the first taker regardless.
The sun is setting on the fiat world guys/gals. Stack high and best of luck.
2 OZ.
I disagree 100 % on peak oil while at the same time I concede 100% that it does exist. It exist because of the current infrastructure and the time required to change it. It exist to maintain power and control. Are there alternatives? Yes, both the present system and free energy. Is there time? I think it's getting late.
As far as those who say Peak Oil doesn't exist, I have just one example: Deep Horizons. That was the gulf rig that exploded and burned leaking massive amounts of oil in the gulf waters. For all the money that was spent on the initial drilling operation and the subsequent rescue and containment of the oil spill, the amount of oil that that well was to produce was just 12 to 24 hours of world consumption. It is a prime illustration that the cheap easy stuff that "shoots" out of the ground is GONE! We are in days of expensive oil.
The key indicator will be the giant Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia. Once that field has such a high water cut that it is no longer economical to produce, the game is over and the resource wars will begin. NOTHING found in the last 40 years equals what that field produces. We will be searching for expensive scraps from here on out. And remember, when it takes a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil out of the ground......there's no point in extracting it!
When the going gets tough, coal gets going, and you will be darned glad to have it should war break out in the ME, or we can use more Fook-me-shima Nuclear Utopian Reactors for endless energy from our friend the atom.
At some point in the future a discovery will be made that will capture 75% or more of the Sun's potential energy, and this new technology will be a game changer. Until then, we scratch and paw with the resources we have available with proven technologies to extract them. Same as it ever was or shall be.
Ah Hum
So exactly how is silver going to protect against radiation? Or against system supply chain collapse? Or against zombie or rogue government hordes desperate for supplies?
PMs perhaps are a solution for wealth preservation/transfer under certain scenarios, however if the going gets truly 'bumpy' then all bets are off.
Off Grid supplies,stored long life food, plenty of ammo and keeping a low profile on familiar ground seems a better bet to my way of thinking.
Sure, plow any extra present wealth into PMs, just be cognizant of the big picture.
By the way, this guy preparing to leave the U.S. mainland in advance of the SHTF, so where and to whom exactly is he going to trade/barter/sell his silver to in his new location?
Right, a newcomer shows up in a foreign land and lets it be known that he has PMs. That's likely to get ones throat slit in short order.
anon, 2:51. Please let me clarify. I'm an academic scientist, but by no means a geo/astrophysicist. One of the most brilliant ones, however, the late Dr. Tommy Gold of Cornell, wrote extensively on life in the netherworld and how so-called fossil fuels are created in many types of subterranean environments. The hard sciences back him up. The Russians have very deep fields, and even the BP Oil spill 2 years ago was suspected to be spewing oil for over 40 years at hundreds of millions of gallons per day. Peak oil in theory does exist, but that we are truly close in this day and age leaves much to be demonstrated.
I am not on the left wing or the right wing. And as far as credible experts, most of those experts are captured by the very industries you think are pretending peak oil doesn’t exist, when its in their interests to sell the idea. Personally, I don’t like oil. I hope peak oil is true, as it’s a dirty and unhealthy fuel and its derivatives make very toxic chemicals and products. But then again, I’m a health researcher. But I don’t think peak oil is true, and the science of hydrocarbon formation throughout the solar system and beyond, does not support its truth. When I say captured, btw, they go off the data from the oil companies themselves (or their cartels), government data (which we all know is bullshit from top to bottom), or the academic capitalists who are just as captured as the economists, save for a very few. I always find it interesting when people who understand how the system works in one way, fail to understand that those controls are the very essence to it at nearly every level. Thus, while I’m glad some figure it out about currency/money/store-of-value, it feels really good when one figures it out in other realms.
Peak oil is being used to scare us into carbon taxing schemes to shut off the spigot for the western world while our wealth, technologies, currencies, funding, and resources, go to select developing world nations so that we can have a global government on an “even” keel. I actually run with environmentalists and loca-vores, and foodies, and they all believe in global warming and peak oil and fail to understand that nearly the entire environmental movement is funded by the very people they do battle with. It’s keep your friends close and your enemies closer, or it’s a dose of the best way to control the opposition is to LEAD the opposition. So I don’t just think this is about Exxon, who, btw, have been very busy in previous decades buying up various alternative technologies which put internal combustion and to shame, not to mention wind, solar, etc.
Again, re: common sense, it’s the western cartel who has to make those plays and that’s why they go to the ocean. But again, politics and finance is about anything but common sense. Common sense tells most people that our leaders are trustable and have our best interests at heart. I’m making a scientific, economic, business, and political argument against peak oil. Re: the cesspool of industrial waste, it’s worse than that; these companies know that their products kill, and they practically kill to keep the entire industry as unregulated as possible. But again, we keep coming to this point where you’d like to label me as a freedom thinker, or libertarian. My background is in political-economy, health/medicine, food/nutrition, and sustainability (with some History, Philosophy and Anthropology to boot), and the intersection of those areas. I’m not some mamas boy living in my parents basement.
...
Again, there’s no way to prove any of this one way or the other….that’s why Einstein said that politics is more difficult than physics. The latter is straightforward, the former is the most mind-numbing mind-fuck, especially when we live and breathe during a time when we discuss these matters on a technology created by NSA and DARPA to monitor people and engage in psyops. So please don’t accuse me of being ignorant of what I speak. I may be wrong, as may you, but I can tell you I’ve read the science behind this, and all I see is modeling, and a convenient manufacturing of a specific picture with the key omission of contradictory data. These issues are NOT settled scientifically, and anyone who claims they are, are not scientists, but narrow-thinking bureaucrats, as science does not work that way. People still debate how gravity works and whether it really exists.
Also, as a commodity that trumps life as we know it, that life that we know is very thin in the grand scheme of our planet. Humans and other organisms lived for hundreds of thousands of years based on a very different energy source, one which did not have to be destroyed, and which destroyed its environment to be used. Life as we know it will change, whether in our lifetimes or not. I think that change will be for the better, but it doesn’t mean I believe that the sky is falling when there are so many elite agendas that better fit the facts.
Thank you for your comments, as it gives me an opportunity to clarify and expound my points. Best of luck.
Thanks SRS and Edward
I needed that!
Crazy Canuck
FYI
Price of regular gas in Vancouver Canada has gone up 6 cents per liter in the last 2 weeks.
as of today 02/23/12 it is
$1.34 per liter
x 3.8 liters in a US gallon
= $5.00 gal
Although in Vancouver 15 cents per liter / 57 cents per US gallon is an added "carbon" tax.
Not complaining...just sayin
Crazy Canuck
prices will keep going up...that's what happens with cartels. there's a reason they're hitting oil-producing countries with heavy damage and revolutions.
The peak oil deniers here need to understand that while there is indeed "more oil" - when you have to expend a barrel to get a barrel, in effect, there isn't any more.
watch Chris Martenson's video on this here, and educate yourselves fast, because time IS running out.
i'm aware of martenson's video, but I haven't found it compelling for numerous reasons many of which have already been addressed here.
suffice it to say, that calling anyone a denier, implies they are denying a truth. science doesn't work like that, but politics does.
I also want it on the record that despite believing that peak oil is a political-economic feudal ploy to get us to pay lots more, I absolutely think oil and nearly all of its products are unnecessary, extremely disruptive and destructive to the environment and the various ecosystems and webs of life, but especially to human health. I again may be biased as an epidemiologist and an environmental health scientist, but this is my view. we don't need it.
but, if we had already hit peak supply some years ago (they keep pushing back the peak dates), with massively increasing demand, the price would be $20/gallon and probably some $1000/barrel in no time. yet, our increases have been fairly steady, and happen to coincide with massive amounts of manipulation in the markets. india and china are flat raking it. no doubt supply has been cut by the collusion of oil companies to close refineries.
again, we've gone over all of this, but suffice it to say, i'm one who questions the science, politics, economics, and business motives and issues regarding this subject and I'm not convinced at all that it's true. we'll know in 30 years. but i suspect, like most malthusian claims, this one will be another disappointment for those who still have hope that even a few of the dominant messages coming out of mainstream media or academic capitalist institutions are true. I have lost much of that hope, fortunately.
but for those who believe in the peak oil theory or anthropogenic global warming theory, and believe that it's the little guy creating the problem and that if we little people would just suck it up and cooperate our problems would go away, well have at it.
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