The lazy days of summer serve a useful purpose. A few weeks of being away from everything will clear your head, if you can get away from the global chaos. It works. Try it if you can; clear your mind, step away from the fray. When you return, it may seem like you can see the forest instead of the trees, to gradually re-engage with the flow of information from a higher, undisconnected level.
Personally I find that getting out of the energy world and going to places far from the energy center to listen to people who have nothing to do with it is also helpful.
That said, it can be a shock to realize how poorly understood energy is. Of course, that’s not really shocking; it’s a vast and complex subject that hardly anyone fully understands.
It is not unreasonable to ask our leaders to get a better grip, but it is frightening to realize that they do not. We see senior policymakers and geopolitically important people/institutions/policymakers enacting suicidal energy policies (there are hundreds of examples, but consider Germany’s decision to close much-needed nuclear power plants as a prime example).
The reason why leaders are so eager to throw out common sense and embrace ignorant energy policies is made quite clear when talking to ordinary people about the thing everyone talks about – the weather. It may be a Canadian thing, but it’s an unavoidable topic, and right there, right away, things get messy. Climate messaging has been so successful that, in the eyes of the public, any deviation from the weather is evidence of human-caused climate change. The news cycle pushes this phenomenon to its extreme. It’s exhausting; getting sidetracked in a conversation about the weather ruins my peace of mind and I run away.
This attitude is so common that it’s as if people have forgotten that heat waves/droughts/floods have existed since ancient times, and that many ancient heat waves were much more severe than today’s events. But as we all know, once something is drilled into someone’s head long enough and loudly enough, it becomes truth. (Former Trudeau government official Catherine McKenna, a prodigious climate alarmist, was once recorded explaining to an acquaintance in a bar that this works: “Say something louder and louder and they’ll eventually believe it.” (A not-so-stupid Eastern Canadian lawyer explained to me that climate change is now so bad that the earth is actually warming from within, which is her explanation for why the soil on her property is dry to a depth of about six feet. That kind of boldly asserted nonsense isn’t easy to drill into a head, but once it’s there, dynamite can’t get it out.)
It’s easy to point the finger at the general population and say “they’re all stupid,” and I hear that a lot, but it’s a little unfair. They don’t know anything about energy, just like most people, and when it comes to panic messaging, when the government engages in scare tactics at the highest levels, like when federal leaders in their crazy way imply that extreme weather is something they can ultimately control through government policy, a lot of people just sigh and accept it, they go with the flow.
The media machine, starved for attention, loves chaos, fear, and spectacle. It encourages us to hate by focusing on incitement. It encourages us to be angry by taking a stand and dressing up in a false sense of innocence – “What? Us? Biased? Nonsense. We even have fact-checkers!”
Yeah… about that… CBS News reported on the idea of ‘no tip tax’. In June 2024, Trump proposed the idea of eliminating the tax on tip income. CBS News tweeted: “Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to end the tip tax would cost the federal government up to $250 billion over 10 years, according to a nonpartisan watchdog group.”
In August 2024, two months later, Kamala Harris somehow came out with the exact same policy, and CBS News reported on her theft as follows: “Vice President Kamala Harris is taking a new policy stance, announcing that she will fight to end the tip tax on service and hospitality workers.”
They don’t even care anymore. There’s no shame, no self-reflection, no hesitation. It’s all peacock feathers.
And while there are crazies on both sides of the spectrum, the difference is that right-wing crazies are still right-wing crazies, and CBS News is still CBS News.
Despite being a generation that thinks times have never been crazier, it’s hard to put today’s weirdness into any historical context. “News” is a relatively new phenomenon in the grand scheme of things, barely a century or two old, and as such it is a living thing, evolving over time as communication capabilities change and we become more interconnected at the speed of light. Fifty years ago, we either waited for a daily or weekly newspaper to find out what was happening in the world, or tuned in to a nightly television show that picked out stories for us and read them aloud in a soothing voice.
We were told what news was insofar as news organizations could dig up or report it, at a time when the ability to report on larger events on the other side of the world was almost non-existent. Crack reporters did a great job of talking to people who witnessed or participated in events, and politics reported on what was known about what politicians were doing, and not much was known. In fact, those politicians were operating in huge information gaps, too.
Nowadays, everything is out in the open. We see everything. At least we do in the West, not so much in totalitarian countries, but even there we can see a lot. We keep an eye on everything including live flight trackers doing their thing every minute of the day on social media, we can see graphics of every trip Taylor Swift’s jet has taken over the course of a year (yes, she’s had two, apparently, another interesting bit of information that I have no legitimate reason or interest in knowing).
We also see an endless review of government policy, how it is formulated, how it is enacted, how it is implemented, how it is played out, like we have never seen before in history. The feedback loops are constant and detailed, and while information is sometimes distorted for ideological purposes, for the most part the analysis tends to focus on what is actually happening, cutting out much of the hype.
We can see the origins of much of today’s madness. One gets the sense, from a high enough plane of thought, that some highly educated and well-funded people have decided to make some very big tectonic moves that will put the world on a better path. As a gift from God to central planning, these globalists have fully accepted radical change – and I mean radical – as a prerequisite for human survival. (The IPCC, for example, has said that, to meet climate targets, there will need to be an unprecedented reconstruction and rebuilding of almost the entire world, and very quickly. They offer no advice, just “do it or you all die,” and that’s enough for the WEF crowd to amass billions of dollars and bribe the best politicians they can.)
Our Western leaders, full of pride, delusions of grandeur, and a blank checkbook – because they don’t understand the harsh realities of running a successful economic enterprise – have gone bankrupt, seeking to go down in history as visionaries who bent the trajectory of modern life as we know it. They have burned bridges – no turning back, no second-guessing (any second-guessing is now considered ‘disinformation’ or ‘disinformation’).
What we see around us is the debris of their failure, on so many levels, and we don’t really know what to do about it. We’ve been taught to accept that “experts” know what they’re doing, and that competent hands will guide us through whatever fate throws at us. We look to the world of pop culture for explanations simply because the cold reality of things is too hard to understand, and we don’t want to spend all day trying to figure it all out.
We are still human, and it is foolish to expect a solid foundation on complex topics that the media mercilessly distorts to satisfy fear.
And of course there are idiots, across the political spectrum and beyond. Feel free to exclude them entirely. Luckily, let’s be honest, regardless of our political leanings, they’re generally not hard to spot, which is why trying to limit free speech is such a fool’s game.
On the other hand, it seems like the world’s attention will be dominated by the upcoming US election, and it’s going to be so insane and crazy that it will be hard to make it to December without suffering from PTSD.
Some words to remember when things get so crazy that they seem unreal (if you think that’s hyperbole, consider Russia’s war against Ukraine, a real war with tanks, bombs, endless death and suffering, which sadly often doesn’t even make the front pages, pushed aside by the madness in the US, UK, Middle East, Africa…).
We are in a time of chaos where people don’t know where to turn. Most people are led to believe that they are fundamentally bad, either through their consumer choices or their preference for “what used to be good” or if their belief system doesn’t quite fit the mainstream narrative.
As a wise friend recently pointed out, in hard times people look for “saviors,” they look for a boost from outsiders, because “inside,” the swamp, has failed them and left them disoriented. Remember that Trump is a symptom, not a cause. Many, many people, perhaps the majority, are willing to overlook his bombastic antics because he represents a hope that can only come from outside. To prove this point, consider this quote from an incredible source—John Lydon of Public Image Ltd., formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, the ultimate punk of all punks, talk about Trump: “He’s a total jerk, no doubt about it. But he’s not a politician and I hate politicians! Fuck them. I’d rather have a crazy guy…a real estate shark. There’s no way the world is going to go on as long as we continue to enforce dogma.”
No matter what happens in the next year or two, we will find a new equilibrium, much like the world did after World War II. What that will look like is a good question, but there will be some kind of stability.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Maybe. What the hell do I know. Good luck.
Since you are reading this on an energy website and are probably curious about that aspect, rest assured that the future of energy providers is as strong as ever, regardless of what you hear on the airwaves. Energy will be the last industry left standing, no matter what happens.
What the world desperately needs – energy transparency. And a few laughs. Check out The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity, aavailable at Amazon.ca, Indigo.caor Amazon.com.
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