Episode 8 The Great Pyramid of Giza

The History of Ancient Egypt

Professor Robert Brier

Film Review

Khufu (known as Cheops in Greek), the son of Snefaru, built the Great Pyramid at Giza (a suburb of modern day Cairo) in 2550 BC. Four hundred eighty feet high, it was the largest building on Earth prior to the building of the Eiffel tower in 1889. The Great Pyramid spans 13.5 acres and is made up of 2.5 million 2 1/2 ton blocks of stone.

Archeologists estimate it took 20 years with (90,000 men working three-month a year) to build. Brier asserts it was built by conscripted work gangs (not slaves), most likely farmers during the the three months their fields were flooded, and they were paid for their labor.

Although Egyptians never made a written record of how they built any of the pyramids, Brier disputes that any higher math was required. Two thousand years later the fifth century Greek historian Herodotus, asserted the Egyptians used “machines” (lever/fulcrum devices) in its construction. The corners of the Great Pyramid align with the four points of the compass.

All the pyramids on the Giza plateau originally had a limestone facing, removed during the Middle Ages to build mosques in Cairo. Limestone also covered the pyramid entrance to protect the interior from grave robbers.

Unlike earlier pyramids, the Egyptians cleared the sand down to the bedrock for the Giza pyramids before leveling the bedrock.* They obtained the 2 1/2 ton blocks from a nearby quarry and the limestone (for the facing) from a quarry west  of the Nile.

The grand gallery inside the great pyramid is 28 feet high and leads up to the burial chamber with an empty stone sarcophagus. The body of Khufu is buried elsewhere. In fact, evidence suggests the burial chamber was built around the empty sarcophagus and sealed.

In 1954 a dismantled boat was found hidden in the bedrock beneath the Great Pyramid. One hundred feet long, it’s made of cedar planks tied together with ropes (the wood swelled and the ropes shrank when wet, making it water tight). Although it had no mast (for sails), modern engineers have ascertained it was too big to be propelled by oarsmen. Brier speculates it was originally intended for Khufu’s journey to the next world.

There are  two possible theories explaining how the 2 1/2 ton blocks were lifted in place: the ramp theory (the ramp would have been over 1/4 mile long and the switchback theory. The stone blocks were chiseled to fit together without mortar.

*They dug channels in the bedrock, filled them with water and assumed the bedrock was level once the water became stationary.

**Ancient Egyptians used shadufs (a type of lever) to lift water from the Nile to irrigate their fields.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/1492791/1492810

John Miles

A leaked memo reveals the depth of the controversial newspaper’s anti-Palestinian bias.

A shocking internal style guide from The New York Times was leakedthis week, revealing the depth of the controversial newspaper’s bias regarding the Palestine-Israel conflict.

“I’ve closely monitored the paper’s slanted coverage for more than a decade, and I admit to being stunned by this,” wrote Mondoweiss editor James North. “Arguably the worst example of bias is the Times’s directive that its reports should ‘avoid’ using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when describing Palestinian land.”

“Israel’s military and police checkpoints and the fact that Israel’s military law is supreme – what is this if not an ‘occupation?’” wrote North of the situation in the occupied West Bank, clarifying that Israel’s years-long blockade of the Gaza Strip has been deemed by international legal experts to constitute an occupation as well.

“Occupied territories is the internationally accepted reference to the space,” noted host Wilmer Leon on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Thursday. “I think it’s important for people to also understand that the ability to define is the ability to control.”

“I think that’s very true,” agreed Palestinian activist and author Robert Fantina [author of “Desertion and the American Soldier, 2006, Algora Publishing]. “The New York Times has for years been trying to define the occupation as something else. Sometimes they call it ‘disputed territory’ or other kinds of language… The United Nations has said it’s still considered occupied. So there’s no question about it, the legal term is ‘occupation.’”

UN officials have long criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, which has led Tel Aviv to frequently criticize the organization, even though the country owes its creation to a 1948 act of the international body. Recently the Israeli government alleged that several members of UNRWA, the UN organization responsible for aid to Palestinian refugees, were involved in Hamas’ October 7 uprising last year.

US intelligence found no evidence for the claim, and it later emerged the Israeli military had tortured UNRWA employees to extract false confessions, waterboarding the aid workers and threatening them with rape and murder. Israeli torture of detainees is reportedly a routine practice as the country holds thousands of Palestinians without charge.

“Even the United States government accepts [Palestine is] occupied, and that’s saying something,” noted Fantina. “So the fact that The New York Times is trying to avoid using ‘occupation’ and deceive its readers is an attempt to control the narrative. It’s about control… and that’s what they want to do, control the narrative in Israel’s favor.”

“There are international laws governing occupation,” he added. “For the occupied, they have the right – the legal right – to resist the occupation in any way at their disposal, including armed struggle. That is specified.”

“Fortunately, people aren’t buying it anymore because of the prevalence of social media and people seeing what’s actually happening. And the prevalence of independent news sources. They’re seeing that, yes, Palestinian people are being massacred in huge numbers – men, women, and children.”

Discussion then turned towards the leak of several US State Department cables that revealed the Biden White House, despite publicly declaring its support for a so-called two-state solution, has undermined efforts towards that end at the United Nations. The leaks revealed Washington was privately lobbying foreign countries to vote against full recognition of Palestine at the international body in order to avoid the embarrassment of a lone veto against the measure.

“[Biden] believes, as a Zionist, in this myth of God-given land to the Jewish people or whatever,” noted Fantina. “Yet then he says he supports a two-state solution, which would deprive the Israelis of a good portion of land. So he can’t be seen as an honest broker between the two.”

“He can’t be seen as anyone with the rights of the Palestinians in his mind. He only cares about the Israelis, and the Palestinians can all be killed as he’s supporting now, as he’s financing. And it doesn’t matter to him as long as Israel gets whatever it wants.”

Despite its constant violation of international law, Israel frequently manages to intimidate its critics into silence through extensive lobbying and influence in Western politics. Jewish scholar Norman Finkelstein documented the settler colonial country’s efforts in a book entitled “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering.”

“After the Holocaust, Jews can do whatever they want,” claimed former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, summing up the mindset of Israel’s defenders.

In fact, many Jewish people reject any association with the Zionist cause, decrying the country’s abuses. The Zionist lobby has persecuted Jewish and non-Jewish critics of Israel alike; in 2007 Finkelstein was denied tenure and forced out of his position at DePaul University after a campaign against him by pro-Israel lawyer Alan Dershowitz.

[…]

Via https://sputnikglobe.com/20240419/leaked-nyt-style-guide-reveals-biased-reporting-on-israel-palestine-conflict-1118005038.html

(SeventyFour/Westend61 GmbH/Newscom)

Eric Boehm

“This bill would basically allow the government to institute a spy draft,” warns head of the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Tech companies and First Amendment groups are calling attention to a provision in a domestic spying bill that they say would significantly expand the federal government’s power to snoop on Americans’ digital communications—potentially by forcing employees of private businesses to become informants.

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a global trade group that represents major tech companies including Google and Microsoft, is calling for last-minute changes to the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA), which could get a final vote in the Senate on Friday. The bill’s primary purpose is to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows U.S. intelligence agencies to scoop up communications between Americans and individuals abroad.

But the bill also includes a provision that “vastly expands the U.S. government’s warrantless surveillance capabilities, damaging the competitiveness of U.S. technology companies large and small, and arguably imperiling the continued global free flow of data between the U.S. and its allies,” the ITI said in a statement this week.

As Reason reported in December, that provision means that nearly any business or entity with access to telecom or internet equipment could be forced to participate in the federal government’s digital spying regime. The big target, as Wired noted this week, is likely to be the owners and operators of data centers.

Under the current FISA law, Section 702 only applies to telecommunications companies and internet service providers. But the amendment included in the RISAA would expand that definition to cover “any service provider” with “access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store” electronic communications.

“The practical impact of the revised definition is significant and means any company, vendor, or any of their employees who touch the physical infrastructure of the internet could now be swept under FISA’s scope and compelled to assist with FISA surveillance,” the ITI warns. “If this amendment were to become law, any electronic communications service equipment provider or others with access to that equipment, including their employees or the employees of their service providers, would be subject to compelled FISA disclosure or assistance.”

In short, even someone like a custodian could be legally compelled to assist in the federal government’s spying efforts.

Marc Zwillinger, an attorney who has experience arguing before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), wrote this week on his personal blog that the RISAA would “permit the government to compel the assistance of a wide range of additional entities and persons in conducting surveillance under FISA 702.”

The newest version is less broad than what was initially proposed in December—for example, gathering places like hotels and coffee shops have been specifically excluded from the law. But, as Zwillinger writes, the revised definition would cover “the owners and operators of facilities that house equipment used to store or carry data, such as data centers and buildings owned by commercial landlords, who merely have access to communications equipment in their physical space,” as well as “other persons with access to such facilities and equipment, including delivery personnel, cleaning contractors, and utility providers.”

Because newsrooms and other places where journalists work are not specifically exempted, some First Amendment groups are also worried about how the expansion of digital spying authority could affect journalism.

“This bill would basically allow the government to institute a spy draft,” Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), said in a statement on Thursday. “If this bill becomes law, sources will rightly suspect that American newsrooms are bugged by the government. And journalists won’t be able to reassure them that they’re not, because, for all they know, the building maintenance worker is an involuntary government spy.”

The reactions from tech companies, legal experts, and free press advocates come on the heels of objections raised by various civil libertarian groups. As Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille covered earlier this week, some opponents of the FISA reauthorization bill have taken to calling it “the ‘Everyone Is a Spy’ provision, since potentially anybody with access to a laptop or WiFi router could be compelled to help the government conduct surveillance.”

If the RISAA is approved by the Senate on Friday, as expected, and signed by President Joe Biden, Americans will have little recourse except to hope that the Justice Department is telling the truth when it says it won’t use the broad authority contained in the bill. In a letter to senators on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote that his department “commits to applying” the new definition of electronic communications service providers in a narrow fashion. “The number of technology companies” covered by the new provision, he wrote, “is extremely small.”

Of course, anyone with a working knowledge of the history of federal surveillance programs—or any government initiative, for that matter—is probably right to be skeptical of that assurance.

“Even if the bill is intended to target data centers, it doesn’t say that,” Stern said in a statement. “And, even if one trusts the Biden administration to honor its pinky swears, they’re not binding on any future administrations.”

[…]

Via https://reason.com/2024/04/19/how-the-fisa-reauthorization-bill-could-force-maintenance-workers-and-custodians-to-become-government-spies/

Cloud lettering 3D glowing geometric inscription. Digital computing online storage technology concept. Polygonal future global data information exchange background vector illustration.

Kit Knightly

Earlier this month the Whitehouse published its new “Pandemic Preparedness” targets.

They are far from alone in covering this. Back in March, Sky News was asking: “Next pandemic is around the corner,’ expert warns – but would lockdown ever happen again?”

On April 3rd, the Financial Times asked something similar: “The next pandemic is coming. Will we be ready?”

Less than an hour ago, the Daily Mail invited us inside “the world’s deadliest cave that could cause the next pandemic”.

Just two days ago a professional panic spreader wrote for CNN:  “The next pandemic threat demands action now!!!”

OK, I added the exclamation points, but they are very much implied in the original text.

So, while Iran and Israel rattle their sabres on the front pages, I thought we should take a look at the quieter back pages to see what we can learn, and help us predict how “the next pandemic” will unfold.

What is “the next pandemic”?

I mean…I feel like that’s fairly self-explanatory.

Seriously though, it’s the one they’ve been predicting from pretty much the moment Covid started. First it was going to be monkey pox – sorry MPox – but that fizzled.

Of course by “pandemic”, we really mean “psy-op”, because nothing about the next pandemic will be any more real than the last pandemic. Hell, given the leaps forward in AI technology, it could be considerably less real next time.

We don’t know any of the details yet, but there’s enough vague coverage to tease out some guesstimates.

What disease will they use?

Probably the most important question. We already mentioned monkey pox, but that doesn’t look likely anymore.

Right now they are mostly talking about “disease X” – a term which caused a little panic in certain sections when it first appeared on the scene – but that isn’t some top secret gain of function super disease, it’s literally a place holder name.

And it’s a placeholder name which does its job, for the time being.

After all, they don’t really need an actual name yet, any more than they need an actual disease, they just need the idea of a disease to hold over people’s heads while they construct the legislative rules of their health-based tyranny.

Indeed, the vagueness “Disease X” provides is helpful, as it keeps the legislation vague too.

That said, they will likely want and/or need to produce an actual disease at some point.

When that time comes around, it will almost certainly be another respiratory disease, because they are easy to “fake” using pre-existing endemic diseases and their uniform symptoms.

The prime candidate is bird flu, which has been slow-boiling in the news for two years now and has recently got a big uptick in coverage due to it allegedly passing to people from cows.

The UN reports “pandemic experts” are “concerned over avian influenza spread to humans”. Just yesterday, Jeremy Farrar of the World Health Organization (WHO) warned that “[the] threat Of Bird Flu spreading to Humans is a great concern”

Prompting gleefully sensationalist headlines like this from the Daily Star: “New pandemic ‘expected’ as human-to-human bird flu of ‘great concern’ to WHO.

Bird flu is a convenient pick because it enables them to push their health tyranny and their food transition at the same time. They can claim that dairy, beef, chicken and eggs have become “dangerous” as an excuse to ration them or at least force scarcity while they drive the prices up.

They will then push the idea that veganism and/or lab grown meat “prevents pandemics”. Something they’ve been claiming since at least 2021.

The Daily Mail reported just a few hours ago: “H5N1 strain of bird flu is found in MILK for first time in ‘very high concentrations,’ World Health Organization warns.”

The downside to bird flu is that it’s hard to work the climate change angle into the narrative, so maybe they’ll go with something else.

When will it happen?

Probably not until the winter, I would guess January 2025 at the earliest, for two reasons:

1. They need it to be flu season so they can co-opt normal seasonal deaths into their “pandemic” narrative.
2. I think they’ll want to wait until after the “big election year” is over so there are fresh governments in place.

That second point is not just a hunch, but based on the article from Sky I mentioned above. It asks “would lockdown ever happen again?”, and an “expert” answers [emphasis added]:

…if another lockdown was needed, the current Tory government would either have to minimise scandals over their own rule-breaking – or change hands completely to keep the public on board. If we had a new government, people would be far more likely to have faith in them because they would be less likely to say, ‘it’s the same bunch as before – why should we do it again?’

Which I think is correct.

That would also explain the raft of sudden political resignations – including Covid stars Angela Merkel and Jacinda Ardern – which swept the world in Covid’s wake. They were aware then, and are still aware now, their players were spent and they needed a fresh roster before coming back for the second leg.

So, elections first – with all the nonsense that entails – then maybe the “next pandemic”.

How will it be different from “Covid”?

Any future pandemic psy-op will be unlikely to follow the covid pattern beat-for-beat, for one thing the Covid narrative spent itself before achieving everything it was meant to achieve.

You can bet the farm that, in the four years since, there have been working groups and researchers poring over the pandemic data to figure out what went wrong and how they can fix it next time.

There seem to be three recurring themes.

1. Vaccines not lockdowns There will be a focus on securing vaccines rather than lockdowns. Indeed, part of the whole “aw shucks lockdowns were damaging who’d have thunk it” rigmarole is about setting up the dynamic that “next time” we need to do anything we can to avoid lockdowns.

Lockdowns will become a threat rather than a fact.

• “We HAVE to mandate vaccines, because the economy can’t afford another lockdown.”
• “Take the vaccine, you don’t want to have another lockdown do you?”

So there will be more testing, more masks and more vaccine mandates…and/or quarantine camps for the unvaccinated. And if they DO have lockdowns, they will be entirely blamed on the “anti-vaxxers”, of course.

2. Speed speed speed The main failing of the Covid narrative was that it ran out of steam. By the time the vaccines rolled out in early 2021 the pandemic fatigue was already setting in. And by the time the third boosters and fourth waves were in the headlines nobody really cared.

The propaganda blitzkrieg of early 2020 was arguably the greatest and most wide-reaching misinformation campaign of all time – and it was almost overwhelmingly effective. But it slowed, stalled, stopped and staled.

Next time, they know now, they need to be faster. Bill Gates said as much at the 2022 Munich Security Conference. They need to get the disease out the deaths up and vaccines in before people even realise what happened.

Hence the “100 day vaccines” plan. As the ever-reliably-hysterical Devi Shridar writes for the Guardian:

Most governments are working towards the 100-day challenge: that is, how to contain a virus spreading while a scientific response, such as a vaccine, diagnostic or treatment, can be approved, manufactured and delivered to the public.

The “100 Day Mission” is the brainchild of CEPI, the Gates and WHO-backed NGO. Its main aim is to make it possible to produce new vaccines for previously unknown pathogens in 100 days.

In the US, the target is 130 days from pathogen discovery to nation-wide vaccine coverage.

It should go without saying that real, reliable, “safe and effective” vaccines cannot be produced in 100 days. Whatever they make, sell and force you to inject in that time…it won’t be a vaccine

3. Free Speech is Dangerous. The slow development of the narrative post-2020 may have hindered the health tyranny agenda, but it was the independent media that really hurt it. The impromptu network of dissident experts, independent researchers and social media movements spread “misinformation” faster than the powers-that-be could fact-check it.

We have seen perpetual messaging about the dangers of “misinformaion and disinformation” since then, including prominently at the most recent DAVOS summit earlier this year, where it was labelled one of the “three greatest dangers” facing the planet.

Last week, a UK Parliamentary Committee published “recommendations” headlined:

Government should learn lessons from pandemic to improve communications and counter misinformation

Only a few days ago, Gordon Brown was quoted in the news “warning” that: “fake news’ risks preparations for next pandemic.”

Which heavily implies they will move to counter this “fake news” before the “next pandemic” begins.

WILDCARD PREDICTION: The multipolar angle. Whatever form the “next pandemic” takes, they will likely avoid the monolithic messaging of 2020, where total global conformity to “the message” was one of the real telltale signs of deception. Next time prepare for countries like India, China and Russia to forge their own pandemic strategy – focusing on some new treatment or technology that the West refuses to endorse.

[…]

So what am I officially predicting for the “next pandemic”?

1. It will won’t be launched until after the major elections this year, because they want new politic faces untarnished by Covid
2. It will likely be bird flu or some other respiratory disease, launched in the winter to hijack the real flu season again
3. The chosen disease will fit into one or more pre-existing agenda – either impacting food or originating from some forced “climate change” connection or both
4. They will move faster, producing “vaccines” in 100 days to stop people getting wise to the deception as they did with Covid
5. They will try and avoid lockdowns, but use them as a threat to enforce vaccine mandates more rigorously
6. They will clamp down harder on “mis- and dis-information” before launching the new narrative.
7. The next pandemic will have a multipolarity angle to establish a fake binary

[…]

Via https://off-guardian.org/2024/04/19/bird-flu-censorship-100-day-vaccines-7-predictions-for-the-next-pandemic/

Figure 1. US per capita electricity generation based on data of the US Energy Information Administration. (Data is through 2023, even though this is not easy to see from the labels.)

Gail Tverberg

There are many myths about energy and the economy. In this post I explore the situation surrounding some of these myths. My analysis strongly suggests that the transition to a new Green Economy is not progressing as well as hoped. Green energy planners have missed the point that our physics-based economy favors low-cost producers. In fact, the US and EU may not be far from an economic downturn because subsidized green approaches are not truly low-cost.

[1] The Chinese people have long believed that the safest place to store savings is in empty condominium apartments, but this approach is no longer working.

The focus on ownership of condominium homes is beginning to unwind, with huge repercussions for the Chinese economy. In March, new home prices in China declined by 2.2%, compared to a year earlier. Property sales fell by 20.5% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period a year ago, and new construction starts measured by floor area fell by 27.8%. Overall property investment in China fell by 9.5% in the first quarter of 2024. No one is expecting a fast rebound. The Chinese seem to be shifting their workforce from construction to manufacturing, but this creates different issues for the world economy, which I describe in Section [6].

[2] We have been told that Electric Vehicles (EVs) are the way of the future, but the rate of growth is slowing.

In the US, the rate of growth was only 3.3% in the first quarter of 2024, compared to 47% one year ago. Tesla has made headlines, saying that it is laying off 10% of its staff. It also recently reported that it is delaying deliveries of its cybertruck. A big issue is the high prices of EVs; another is the lack of charging infrastructure. If EV sales are to truly expand, they will need both lower prices and much better charging infrastructure.

[3] Many people have assumed that home solar panel sales would rise forever, but now US home solar panel sales are shrinking.

A forecast made by the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie indicates that US solar panel installations by homeowners are expected to fall by 13% in 2024. There are many issues involved: higher interest rates, less generous subsidies to homeowners, not enough grid capacity for new generation, and too much overproduction of electricity by solar panels in the spring and fall, when heating and air conditioning demand is low. The overproduction issue is particularly acute in California.

For each individual 24-hour day, the timing of solar energy production does not match up well with when it is needed. With sufficient batteries, solar electricity produced in the morning can help run air conditioners in the evening. But storage from summer to winter is still not feasible, and batteries for short-term storage are expensive.

[4] It is a myth that wind and solar truly add to electricity supplies for the US and the countries in the EU. Instead, their pricing seems to lead to tighter electricity supplies.

Strangely enough, in the US and the EU, when wind and solar are added to the electric grid, electricity supplies seem to get tighter. For example, one article says, Most of US electric grid faces risk of resource shortfall through 2027, NERC [regulatory group] says.

Charts of electricity supply per capita show an unusual trend when wind and solar are added. Figure 1 shows that, in the US, once wind and solar are added, total electricity generation per capita falls, rather than rises!

The EU, using a somewhat shorter history period, shows a similar pattern of declining total electricity generation per capita, even when wind and solar are added (Figure 2).

I believe that the strange pricing systems used for wind and solar in the US and EU are driving out other electricity suppliers, especially nuclear. With this system, intermittent electricity enjoys the subsidy of going first at the regular wholesale market rate. Other providers find themselves with very low or negative wholesale rates in the spring and fall of the year and on weekends and holidays. As a result, their overall return falls too low. Nuclear is particularly affected because it requires a huge, fixed investment, and it cannot be ramped up and down easily.

Besides the foregoing issues affecting the supply of electricity generated, there are also factors affecting the demand for electricity. Electricity generation using wind and solar tends to be high priced when all costs are included. The US and EU are already high-cost areas for businesses to operate. High electricity rates further add to the impetus to move manufacturing and other industry to lower-cost countries if businesses desire to be competitive in the world market.

On a world basis, in 2022, wind and solar added about 13% to total world electricity generation (Figure 3).

Based on Figure 3, with the addition of wind and solar, the upward slope of the world per capita electricity generation has been able to remain pretty much constant from 1985 to 2022, at about 1.6% per year. But the US and the EU, as high-cost producers of goods and services, haven’t been able to participate in this per capita growth of electricity.

Instead, China has been a major beneficiary of the shift of manufacturing overseas from the US and EU. It has been able to rapidly increase its electricity supply per capita, even with wind and solar. It has also been adding both nuclear and coal-fired electricity generation capacity.

Thus, this analysis produces the result a person would expect if the physics of the world economy favors efficient (low-cost) producers.

[5] It is a myth that the US and EU can greatly ramp up the use of EVs or greatly increase the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) without relying on fossil fuels.

Both EV production and AI are heavy users of electricity supply. We have seen that the US and the EU no longer have growing per-capita electricity supplies. Ramping up electricity generation would require a long lead time (10 years or more), a major increase in fossil fuel consumption, and an increase in electricity transmission lines.

The State of Georgia, in the United States, is already running into this issue, with planned data centers (related to AI) and EV manufacturing plants. The state plans to add new gas-fired electricity generation. It will also import more electricity from Mississippi Power, where the retirement of a coal-fired plant is being delayed to provide the necessary additional electricity. Eventually, more solar panels are planned, as well.

[6] It is a myth that the world economy can continue as usual, whatever happens to energy supply and growing debt. China’s homebuilding problems could, in theory, lead to debt bubbles crashing around the world.

The world economy depends upon a growing bubble of debt. It also depends on an ever-increasing supply of goods and services. In fact, the two are closely interrelated. As long as a growing supply of low-priced energy of the types used by built infrastructure is available, the economy tends to sail along.

China, with problems in its property business, is an example of what can go wrong when energy supplies (coal in China) become expensive, as supply becomes increasingly constrained. Figure 5 shows that China’s per-capita coal supply became constrained in about 2013. China’s per capita coal extraction had been rising, but then it dipped. This made it more difficult for builders to construct the homes planned for would-be homeowners. This is part of what got home builders in China into financial difficulty.

Finally, in 2022, China was able to get coal production up. But the way this was done was through very high coal prices (Figure 6). (The prices shown are for Australian coal, but Chinese coal prices seem to be similar.)

Building concrete homes at such high coal prices would have resulted in new homes that were far too expensive for most Chinese citizens to afford. If builders were not already in difficulty from low supply, adding high coal prices, as well, would be a second blow. Furthermore, all the workers formerly engaged in home building needed new places to earn a living; the current approach seems to be to move many of these workers to manufacturing, so that the popping of the home building bubble will have less of an impact on the overall economy of China.

There is now concern that China is ramping up its manufacturing, particularly for exports, at a time when China’s jobs in the property sector are disappearing. The problem, however, is that ramping up exports of manufactured goods creates a new bubble. This huge added supply of manufactured goods can only be sold at low prices. This new low-priced competition seems likely to lead to manufacturers, around the world, obtaining too-low prices for their manufactured products.

If other economies around the world are forced to compete with even lower-cost goods from China, it could have an adverse impact on manufacturing around the world. With low prices, manufacturers are likely to lay off workers, or give them excessively low wages. If wages and prices are inadequate, debt bubbles in other parts of the world are likely to collapse. This will happen because many borrowers will become unable to repay their debt. This is the reason that we have been hearing a great deal recently about raising tariffs on Chinese exports.

[7] The world’s biggest myth is that the world economy can continue to grow forever.

I have pointed out previously that based on physics considerations, economies cannot be expected to be permanent structures. Economies and humans are both self-organizing systems that grow. Humans get their energy from food. Economies are powered by the types of energy products that our built infrastructure uses. Neither can grow forever. Neither can get along without energy products of the right types, in the right quantities.

We become so accustomed to the narratives we hear that we tend to assume that what we are told must be right. These narratives could be based on wishful thinking, or on inadequate models, or on a sour grapes view that says, “We don’t want fossil fuels anyhow.” We know that humans need food, and that economies will continue to require fossil fuels. We can’t make wind turbines or solar panels without fossil fuels. What do we plan to do for energy without fossil fuels?

In a finite world, economies cannot continue forever. We don’t know precisely what will go wrong or when it will go wrong, but we can get a hint from the recent failures of myths that our economy may change dramatically in the not-too-distant future.

[…]

Via https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/04/18/the-worlds-economic-myths-are-hitting-limits/

The vast US embassy in Berlin lurks by iconic Brandenburg Gate

Kit Klarenberg

On February 4th, The Economist published a devastating analysis – or perhaps, “pre-mortem” – of the collapse of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) under Olaf Scholz’s stewardship. Elected in what the Western media contemporaneously branded a “shock” result in September 2021, hopes for his coalition government in many quarters were high. Today, he enjoys the worst approval ratings of any Chancellor in modern history, and national opinion polls place SPD approval at 15% or lower.

The Economist frames Scholz’s collapsed fortunes, and the prospects of his party’s imminent extinction as a serious force within German politics, as a microcosm of Berlin’s declining economic and political clout more widely. It notes that the nation’s finances have gone “limp” during his tenure, with business-sector confidence collapsing, and record inflation destroying citizens’ incomes and savings. Other sources have detailed the country’s “deindustrialization,” Politico coining the nickname, “Rust Belt on the Rhine.”

In keeping with those meditations on Germany’s ever-worsening woes, The Economist’s bleak diagnosis made no mention of how Western sanctions imposed on Russia in February 2022 created Berlin’s crisis. Scholz was a prominent cheerleader for the Biden administration’s push to “make the Ruble rubble.” Now that effort has so spectacularly backfired that it can no longer be ignored or spun otherwise, Newsweek admits “any realistic war game could have easily predicted” the sanctions would not only fail, but boomerang on the sanctioners.

Those few analysts who predicted the invasion of Ukraine well in advance universally failed to anticipate Berlin would support and facilitate any US counterattack, particularly in the financial sphere. They believed Germany possessed the requisite autonomy and sense not to commit willful economic suicide in service of Empire. After all, the country’s stability, prosperity and power were heavily dependent on cheap, readily accessible Russian energy. Voluntarily ending that supply would be inevitably disastrous.

For this shortcoming, they can be forgiven. Berlin, particularly in the wake of reunification, has successfully presented itself to the world as sovereign, led by sensible people acting in the best interests of their nation, and Europe. In truth, ever since 1945, Germany has been a heavily occupied nation, drowning under the weight of US military installations, and its politics, society and culture aggressively shaped and influenced by the CIA.

This unacknowledged reality is amply spelled out in Agency whistleblower Philip Agee’s 1978 tell-all book, Dirty Work: The CIA in Western Europe. Comprehending who is truly in charge in Berlin, and what interests Germany’s elected representatives are actually serving, is fundamental to understanding why Scholz, et al., so eagerly embraced the self-destructive sanctions. And why the facts of Nord Stream 2’s criminal destruction can never emerge.

‘Enormous Presence’

Following World War II, the United States emerged as the world’s undisputed military and economic superpower. As Agee wrote, the overriding aim of US foreign policy thereafter was to “guarantee the coherence of the Western world” under its exclusive leadership. CIA activities were accordingly “directed toward achieving this goal.” In service of the Empire’s global domination project, “left opposition movements had to be discredited and destroyed” everywhere.

After West Germany was forged from the respective occupation zones of Britain, France and the US, the fledgling country became a particularly “crucial area” in this regard, serving as “one of the most important operational areas for far-reaching CIA programs” in Europe and elsewhere. Domestic Agency operations in West Germany were explicitly concerned with ensuring the country was “pro-American,” and structured according to US “commercial interests.”

In the process, the CIA covertly supported the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and SPD, and trade unions. The Agency “wanted the influence of the two major political parties to be strong enough to shut out and hold down any left opposition,” Agee explained. The SPD had a radical, Marxist tradition. It was the only party in the Reichstag to vote against the 1933 Enabling Act, which laid the foundations for Germany’s total Nazification, and led to its proscription.

Newly reinstituted following the war, the SPD maintained its revolutionary roots until 1959. Then, under the Godesberg Program, it abandoned any commitment to seriously challenging capitalism. It stretches credibility to suggest the CIA was not expressly responsible for neutering the party’s radical tendencies.

In any event, effective control of West German democracy ensured that Washington’s “enormous presence” there – which included hundreds of thousands of troops and almost 300 separate military and intelligence installations – was not challenged by those in power, irrespective of the party to which they belonged, despite a majority of the population consistently opposing US military occupation.

This presence in turn granted the CIA “a number of different covers to work behind,” according to Agee. The majority of its operatives were embedded within the US military, posing as soldiers. The Agency’s biggest station was an army base in Frankfurt, although it also boasted units in West Berlin and Munich. US operatives were “highly qualified technicians who tap telephones, open mail, keep people under surveillance, and encode and decode intelligence transmissions,” working “all over the country.”

Dedicated divisions were charged with “making contact with organisations and people within the political establishment,” such as the SPD and its elected representatives. All the intelligence collected was “used to infiltrate and manipulate” the same entities. The CIA, moreover, collaborated “very closely” with West German security services in many domestic spying efforts, the country’s assorted intelligence agencies conducting operations at the Agency’s direct behest, “often [to] protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

‘Discredit and Destroy’

Intimate bedfellows as they were, there were nonetheless “difficulties” in the CIA’s relationship with its West German counterparts, per Agee. The Agency never fully trusted their protégés, and felt a pronounced need to “keep an eye” on them. Still, this lack of faith was no barrier to the CIA partnering with the BND, West Germany’s foreign intelligence service, to secretly purchase Swiss encryption firm Crypto AG in 1970. Perhaps this was done to “protect CIA activities from any legal consequences.”

Crypto AG produced high-tech machines through which foreign governments could transmit sensitive high-level communications around the world, safe from prying eyes. Or so they thought. In reality, the clandestine owners of Crypto AG, and by extension the NSA and GCHQ, could easily decipher any messages sent via the firm’s devices, as they themselves crafted the encryption codes. The connivance operated in total secrecy for decades thereafter, only being exposed in February 2020.

The full extent of the information collected via Crypto AG – along with key national competitor Omnisec AG, which the CIA also owned – and the nefarious purposes to which it was put is unknown. It would be entirely unsurprising though if the harvested data helped inform CIA operations to “discredit and destroy” left-wing opposition in West Germany and beyond, efforts that no doubt continue to this day.

The Cold War may be over, but Germany remains heavily occupied. It hosts the largest number of US troops of any European country, despite an overwhelming majority of the population supporting their partial or total withdrawal in the years following the Berlin Wall’s collapse. In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump announced the withdrawal of 12,000 soldiers of the 38,600-strong contingent still there.

Episode 7 Snefaru the Pyramid Builder

The History of Ancient Egypt

Professor Robert Brier

Film Review

Snefaru, who ruled Egypt between 2613-2589 BC, built the first pyramids, some of which collapsed while being built.

According to Brier, the pyramids represented the end point of a spectrum of grave building, starting with sandpits, then rock cut tombs, then rock cut tombs covered by mastabas, then above ground mastabas on top of mustabas (which were gradually ocverted to pyramids)

The step pyramid built under the pharaoy Snefaru (in Djosier) was the first stone building in the world.

His attempt to build the first true pyramid (in Mydoom). His initial approach (below) was to to convert a step pyramid to a full pyramid by filling in the steps. This would cause slippage and collapse of the stone blocks at the bottom.

Although a causeway connected both of Snefarus first two pyramids to a valley temple (where the pharaoh’s body would be mummified) and a mortuary temple (where priests would offer up sacrifices on behalf of the dead pharaoh, neither was used.

This first pyramid builder would be buried in the first successful pyramid he built in Dahshur (below). Snerafu never inscribed the temple. We only know he built it because of grafiti added 1000 years later.

Under Snefaru, Egypt would become an international power. There’s evidence he  obtained cedar beams from Lebanon for boats, temple doors and flagpoles. The expedition to Lebanon must have involved a boat trip on the Mediterranean, which early Egyptians avoided because they were very poor sailors.*

Snefaru also sent troops on turquoise mining expeditions to the barbarian-invested Sinai. Mining turquoise, which required crawling on your belly through tiny tunnels, was extremely difficult. There are hieroglyph inscriptions in the Sinai referring to the extreme heat (“the mountain burned our skin”) and a temple Snefaru had a temple dedicated to Hathur Snefaru had built one one of the mountains. Hathur was the cow-headed goddess who was the patron of turquoise miners.

Snefaru also set standards for Egyptian art (which included turquoise inlaid jewelry and life size statues of his children and favorite minister that would endure for three millenia.

*Sailing the Nile was extremely easy given the prevailing wind blew north to south. For the return trip, sailors simply took down their sails and allowed the current to propel them home.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/watch/video/1492791/1492808