Asharq Al-Aswat

“What I’m suggesting is reducing your expenditures and your use of energy and nonrenewable resources sharply, so that you can be prepared to deal with the soaring prices and economic dysfunctions to come. Anyone in the US who’s not desperately poor can do that; my wife and I did, back when we were living well below the poverty line, and that’s part of what enabled us to extract ourselves from that situation.”

John Michael Greer

It has been a while since I last posted on this blog. For those that have been patiently waiting for an update, my apologies but I have been very busy with my personal life, as I will be having a baby soon!

However, whilst that is the main reason why I have not provided an update, the other factor is I have not really felt an overwhelming urge to blog over the last few months.

I have discussed the issues now dominating the news headlines on this blog since I launched it in 2016. Blackouts, energy crises, climate related heatwaves across southern Europe and the rising intra and global instability as food and energy costs soar across the planet. Just look at what is happening in Sri Lanka right now, where soaring costs of critical imports, coupled with a corrupt and incompetent government, threw the economy into hyperinflation, shortages, rationing and finally economic and political collapse.

The president has now fled the country and enraged mobs swim in the presidential palace pool. Will we see scenes similar to this in other places in the years and decades ahead? You bet! Moreover, not just in places like Pakistan but quite possibly in Europe and North America as well. The developed world is not immune to what is happening to the more troubled parts of the developing world.

All this is quite normal in what we are now in, the era of the Long Descent, which can be summarised as economic contraction and a ruthless scramble for the remaining resource assets around the world. Therefore, the reason I am not blogging about the ins and outs of Sri Lanka, or the unrest by the farmers in Netherlands or the looming energy rationing and industrial lockdowns in Germany, is this is what we should be seeing as we descend the curves of depletion as modelled by Limits to Growth in 1972.

I remain confident that by the end of this decade, the global economy will either have already unravelled or be fast progressing to that fate as globalised supply chains implode under the pressures of the rolling energy and resource crisis now facing us. I have covered before what needs to be done by all of us, and that is primarily reduce your energy consumption, clear any debt you have, adopt a more sustainable lifestyle and learn skills/hobbies that will have more validity in a deglobalised and deindustrialised world that we are transitioning into this century. None of these things is easy but as long as you make steady progress, year by year, you should be fine.

This is a process, decades long, not an event. The sooner you start downgrading your expectations for the future and start making practical steps to make yourself and your family more self-reliant and less dependent upon globalised supply chains and the industrial economy, the better.

What is also significant is what the mainstream media is not reporting. The scientific papers are now reporting that the boostered are being infected far more often than the double jabbed and the unvaccinated. Vaccine side effects remain a largely taboo subject, but you are starting to see a few voices in the mainstream acknowledging that the vaccinated are getting quite nasty side effects, which is progress, of sorts.

Still, for reasons that remain baffling to me, most people do not want to acknowledge that vaccines may have higher side effects than the regulators have officially admitted to date and if you raise this issue, most people look at you with disgust. There are some very troubling reports circulating in the dissident/vaccine hesitant community online about the apparent appearance of strange protein clot structures from the vaccinated dead. These are not normal blood clots but something quite different and they appear to be causing the rising wave of heart attacks and sudden deaths we have been seeing ever since the mass vaccination programme.

We are also seeing unprecedented levels of Covid infections across the highly vaccinated world, which concerns me hugely. Are the vaccinated unable to build long-term and lasting immunity if vaccinated? If so, what impact is that going to have on the vaccinated immune system and overall health, particularly, if we get nastier variants of Covid-19 in the future? I do not know the answers to these questions but my recommendation is to look after your health, stay safe and ensure you have your personal supplies of medical products at home because relying on industrialised healthcare systems may prove unreliable.

There are also some alarming and early data signals to suggest that possibly, the mass vaccination programme is negatively affecting fertility rates. Steep drops in birth rates in places like Taiwan, Hungary, Sweden and the UK have been noted but, again, it is too early to make definite conclusions about whether this really is caused by the jabs.

To summarise, due mainly to the lack of monitoring by medical authorities around the world, we are largely blind to what the implications of the mass Covid vaccination programme is having on overall health, the virus and fertility of the jabbed. We are in the dark, trying to interpret the best we can the odd scrap of data and trends coming in from highly vaccinated countries. It does not look good but until we have a bit more time and data to analyse, I do not feel confident writing an authoritative blog post on it, just yet.

A friend of mine, who is well versed with my LTG influenced world, recently asked me whether I thought the “collapse”, we are seeing is going faster than expected. My response is it is largely what I expected, if you study the LTG decline curves in detail. We are in 2022, roughly two years into a contraction of the global economy, so the problems building up are the early stages of the wider collapse of our globalised economy.

Stay safe out their folks and remember to enjoy life as well! Many people throughout history have lived through a Long Decline era of civilisation, and it’s not the end of the world. You will need to keep your wits about you though.