Happy New Year folks, see you on the other side!
Kool & The Gang, "Celebration"
So, we rise from the rubble...
Sunday, December 31, 2023
The Poet: John O’Donohue, "For A New Beginning"
"For A New Beginning"
"In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.
For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.
It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.
Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.
Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.
Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you."
- John O’Donohue
"We Live In Radical Times..."
"We live in radical times surrounded by tasks that seem impossible. It has become our collective fate to be alive in a time of great tragedies, to live in a period of overwhelming disasters and to stand at the edge of sweeping changes. The river of life is flooding before us, and a tide of poisons affect the air we breathe and the waters we drink and even tarnish the dreams of those who are young and as yet innocent. The snake-bitten condition has already spread throughout the collective body.
However, it is in troubled times that it becomes most important to remember that the wonder of life places the medicine of the self near where the poison dwells. The gifts always lie near the wounds, the remedies are often made from poisonous substances, and love often appears where deep losses become acknowledged. Along the arc of healing the wounds and the poisons of life are created the exact opportunities for bringing out all the medicines and making things whole again."
- Michael Meade, "Fate And Destiny"
The Poet: John O'Donohue, "In These Times "
"In These Times "
"In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety,
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down,
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home."
~ John O'Donohue,
from "To Bless the Space Between Us "
The Poet: Mary Oliver, "Coming Home"
"Coming Home"
"When we are driving in the dark,
on the long road to Provincetown,
when we are weary,
when the buildings and the scrub pines lose their familiar look,
I imagine us rising from the speeding car.
I imagine us seeing everything from another place -
the top of one of the pale dunes, or the deep and nameless
fields of the sea.
And what we see is a world that cannot cherish us,
but which we cherish.
And what we see is our life moving like that
along the dark edges of everything,
headlights sweeping the blackness,
believing in a thousand fragile and unprovable things.
Looking out for sorrow,
slowing down for happiness,
making all the right turns
right down to the thumping barriers to the sea,
the swirling waves,
the narrow streets, the houses,
the past, the future,
the doorway that belongs
to you and me."
- Mary Oliver
"Today Is The Day..."
"We are fast moving into something, we are fast flung into something like asteroids cast into space by the death of a planet, we the people of earth are cast into space like burning asteroids and if we wish not to disintegrate into nothingness we must begin to now hold onto only the things that matter while letting go of all that doesn't. For when all of our dust and ice deteriorates into the cosmos we will be left only with ourselves and nothing else. So if you want to be there in the end, today is the day to start holding onto your children, holding onto your loved ones; onto those who share your soul. Harbor and anchor into your heart justice, truth, courage, bravery, belief, a firm vision, a steadfast and sound mind. Be the person of meaningful and valuable thoughts. Don't look to the left, don't look to the right; we simply don't have the time. Never be afraid of fear."
- C. JoyBell C
Dan, I Allegedly, "How to Get Ready for 2024"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 12/31/23
"How to Get Ready for 2024"
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno, "Strange Prices At Walmart! This Is Crazy! What's Next!?"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 12/31/23
"Strange Prices At Walmart!
This Is Crazy! What's Next!?"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell , 12/31/23
"Russian Typical Supermarket Tour (On New Years Eve)"
"Together let's see what its like in a Russian typical Shopping Centre on New Years even in Moscow, Russia. Are people shopping in Russian Supermarkets? Are people spending money? This video will give you a true first hand look at Russians shopping on New Years Eve in Russia."
Comments here:
Saturday, December 30, 2023
"Bankruptcies Skyrocket Past 2008 Levels, This Is The Fall Of The US Economy"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 12/30/23
"Bankruptcies Skyrocket Past 2008 Levels,
This Is The Fall Of The US Economy"
"The ominous shadow of economic distress looms over the United States as bankruptcies surge past the levels witnessed during the 2008 financial crisis. Corporate collapses are escalating at an alarming rate, reflecting the adverse impact of higher interest rates on borrowing costs. This could be the long-feared fall of the US economy."
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "America Is Turning Into Mad Max, Please Don't Cry; Demons Running Wild"
Jeremiah Babe, 12/30/23
"America Is Turning Into Mad Max, Please Don't Cry;
Demons Running Wild"
Comments here:
Canadian Prepper, "Alert: 'NATO Attacks'; Russian Emergency; War Begins In Middle East"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 12/30/23
"Alert: 'NATO Attacks'; Russian Emergency;
War Begins In Middle East"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: The Traveling Wilburys, "End Of The Line"
Full screen recommended.
The Traveling Wilburys, "End Of The Line"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“These bright rims and flowing shapes suggest to some melting ice cream on a cosmic scale. Looking toward the constellation Cassiopeia, the colorful (zoomable) skyscape features the swept back, comet-shaped clouds IC 59 (left) and IC 63. About 600 light-years distant, the clouds aren't actually melting, but they are slowly dissipating under the influence of ionizing ultraviolet radiation from hot,luminous star gamma Cas.
Click image for larger size.
Gamma Cas is physically located only 3 to 4 light-years from the nebulae, just off the upper right edge of the frame. In fact, slightly closer to gamma Cas, IC 63 is dominated by red H-alpha light emitted as the ionized hydrogen atoms recombine with electrons. Farther from the star, IC 59 shows proportionally less H-alpha emission but more of the characteristic blue tint of dust reflected star light. The field of view spans about 1 degree or 10 light-years at the estimated distance of gamma Cas and friends.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111103.html
Chet Raymo, “The Universe Becomes Conscious of Itself”
“The Universe Becomes Conscious of Itself”
by Chet Raymo
by Chet Raymo
"By now most of us will have seen this spectacular photograph of a dusty star-birthing region of the Carina Nebula, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope. I offer a slightly different cropping from what you may have seen in the media or on APOD. Please click the image to see it it all of its glory.
Click image for larger size.
Let me add some context. The image shows an area of the sky that you could cover with the intersection of two crossed sewing pins held at arms length. Think about that for a minute. Hold two imaginary crossed pins up against the sky and think of the area covered by their intersection, what a tiny part of the visible universe you are looking at. The photo shows a nebulosity that is invisible to the naked eye, in the midst of the southern-hemisphere Milky Way. Where is this object? Our Sun is on the inside edge of an arm of our spiral galaxy, about two-thirds of the way - 30,000 light-years - out from the center. The Carina Nebula is in the same spiral arm, trailing along 7500 light-years behind us as we make our languorous 200-million-year rotation about the galactic axis. There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, including the ones you see aborning here. And the Milky Way Galaxy is just one of tens of billions of galaxies we could potentially see with present telescopes.
Now, in my usual mischievous way, let me juxtapose two images of the heavens (please click to fill your screen). On the left is Gustave Dore's rendering of Dante and Beatrice looking upon the heavenly realm, the choirs of angels attendant upon the Diety, the anthropomorphic Empyrean Fields where the souls of the Blessed find everlasting life, just up there beyond the spheres of air and aether. And on the right, the new image from the Hubble.
Click image for larger size.
I'm confident that anyone who visits here, and probably most educated people, will agree that the image on the right, and my description above, is the truer representation of the universe we live in. But which universe do we psychologically inhabit? I would maintain that the great majority of educated people today have not yet assimilated the picture on the right, and continue to live as if they were contemporaries of Dante. I know I have a hard time grasping the scale of the universe as revealed by modern astronomy - and I have been studying and teaching this stuff for a lifetime. Coming to terms with the vast size and apparent indifference of the universe is not easy when the tug of culture continually pulls us back into the cozy human-centered cosmos of our ancestors.
Where is our contemporary Beatrice who will take us by the hand and lead us into the swirling star-birthing vortex of the Carina Nebula, and say to us, "See, all this is the gift of the human intellect - human ingenuity and human daring - all this is contained in those convolutions of mortal flesh that sit at the top of your spine"?
Where is our contemporary Beatrice who will take us by the hand and lead us into the swirling star-birthing vortex of the Carina Nebula, and say to us, "See, all this is the gift of the human intellect - human ingenuity and human daring - all this is contained in those convolutions of mortal flesh that sit at the top of your spine"?
- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/
"Character..."
"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.
Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be
strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved."
- Helen Keller
WTF?! "Confirmed: Israel Planning to Dislocate ALL 2.3 Million Palestinians from Gaza Strip"
WTF?! "Confirmed: Israel Planning to Dislocate
ALL 2.3 Million Palestinians from Gaza Strip"
by Hal Turner
"Advertisements are now appearing in Israeli publications touting "Gaza 2030" showing the entire Gaza Strip as a luxury beach front Resort... and no Palestinians. One such ad, shown above, shows what is said to be the actual planning for the Gaza Strip once the Palestinians are forcibly dislocated from their homes.
While rumors of this forced displacement of civilians (a War Crime) have floated for weeks, for the very first time on Christmas Day, the world got confirmation: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his Likud Party conference, that Netanyahu confirmed during the Likud Party session that "work is underway to find countries that want to "absorb the residents of Gaza as refugees."
🚨🇮🇱 BIG - Netanyahu confirmed during the Likud Party session that work is underway to find countries that want to absorb the residents of Gaza as refugees. This means, war in the region will be spilling. #Israel #hamas #Gaza #Iran #Hezbollah #Yemen #Houthis pic.twitter.com/XyQ1xlJHID - The Macro Story (@themacrostory) December 25, 2023
So apparently, there it is: Confirmation that ousting the Palestinian civilian population by dropping 2,000 pound bombs on them from fighter jets, is now (and likely has always been) the actual plan."
o
"2023: The Year Humanity Died"
By Seraj Assi
"As a Palestinian who was born two generations apart from the Nakba, I have never imagined that one day I would witness the genocide of my people unfold before my eyes in broad daylight. While I always feared the prospect of a Second Nakba, as many Palestinians do, I have never dreamed, not even in my worst nightmares, that I would live it, witness it, and write about it.
In my happy Palestinian innocence, I believed that even if Israel was keen on repeating the Nakba, or attempting to “finish the job of 1948,” as many Israeli officials have threatened over the years, the Free World would not allow it to happen. In my wishful thinking, I believed that the world had learned its lesson since the Nakba. Yes, the world failed the Palestinian people in 1948. Yes, it allowed Israel to carry out its ethnic cleansing and mass expulsion of Palestinians. Yes, it abandoned the Palestinian refugees, and rewarded Israel with a United Nations recognition and membership. But that was 75 years ago, the age of genocides and holocausts. A lot of progress had been made since, I told myself. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. The U.N. evolved. Human rights groups mushroomed. Mandela won the Nobel Peace. True, genocide would occur so often and so uncontested in the decades since, but after the horrific genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the leaders of the Free World seemed to have had enough! They seemed adamant not to allow another genocide to happen—Never Again! Not in Palestine, not again!
Summit after summit, they vowed that such atrocities had no place in the new century. Even when the new century in Palestine ushered in the Second Intifada and the collapse of the Oslo Accords, I still believed that the horrors of the past were in check. Even when Israel mushroomed in size, and the settlements tripled, and the apartheid system was closing in on the Palestinians in the West Bank, and the merciless siege suffocating those in Gaza, where one million children were born and raised in captivity, I still believed that that was the peak of our suffering and nothing remotely close the terrors of Rwanda or Bosnia, or indeed the First Nakba, would happen to us, because the world was watching, and it was ready to dispatch its postwar moral arsenal to stop it!
I was dead wrong. For three bloody months since the Gaza Genocide first unfolded, the Free World has sat there watching, and cheering, and mocking us to death. During the first weeks, I still held onto my naïve optimism. True, the Free World betrayed Palestinians in Gaza; it allowed Israel to act with impunity; it tolerated its war crimes and mass atrocities; it denied the children of Gaza even the pretense of humanity. But ultimately it was bound to come to its senses and unleash its moral diplomacy to end this horror. So I persisted in my optimism. Perhaps the world needed more time to fathom what was happening. Perhaps it was waiting for a few more thousands of Palestinians to be killed before making its drastic move. Yet week after week, the world remained silent, blind to our deaths, deaf to our sufferings.
One month into the bloodshed, after Israel had killed 1,000 children, I said that’s it; the world would make its move now, if only to save the children! But the U.S. responded by vetoing a humanitarian cease-fire that could have saved thousands of innocent lives! A month after, when the death toll of children reached 10,000, I said enough is enough; it’s high time the world acted NOW, because humanity itself is at stake! U.N. officials had already sounded the alarm that Gaza was becoming a “graveyard for children,” so no one could pretend they did not know. The time to act was now or never! Yet there was another U.S. veto; another cold hand was raised to issue a new death sentence for Palestinians. Another spit in the face of humanity!
Now I’m lost for words. I have lost faith in humanity. The staggering death toll in Gaza is humanly impossible to fathom or accept without losing our sense of shared humanity. As a Palestinian, as a human being, I feel that part of me has died in this war. I know for certain that I will not emerge from this tragedy the same person I was before. None of us will.
Gaza may be annihilated, but it’s not going anywhere. When the dust of war settles, it will sit on our global conscience for generations to come. It will be a permanent stain on our humanity. The children of Gaza will not forget, if they survive. The living will remember, and the dead will haunt us forever. Gaza will be remembered not only as the crime of the century, but also as the site of our greatest shame, where humanity failed.
o
"Gaza Health Ministry: 21,110 Palestinians have been killed, and 55,243 wounded in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza starting on October 7."
Now 21,110 innocent men, old people, women and 11,000 children killed by US supplied 2,000 lb bombs, which WE to our eternal shame and disgrace allow and support! The monsters doing this are NOT human beings! They're a bloodthirsty, psychopathically genocidal sub-species of humanity! And, except for the Houthis and Hezbollah somewhat, the world sits silently watching this horror and does nothing! Shakespeare wrote, "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." Sartre said, "This is Hell, cleverly disguised just enough to keep us from escaping." I believe them... - CP
o
Dan, I Allegedly, "Your Car is Frozen Stiff"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 12/30/23
"Your Car is Frozen Stiff"
"What happens when your EV car runs out of power? It is stuck there and there is nothing you can do about it. Now Ford has shown a stat. If there is a software update in your car does not take it properly. It is immobile and cannot be driven. Your car is frozen stiff."
Comments here:
o
Related:
"The New Blue Screen Of Death?
'Your Vehicle Cannot Be Driven'”
Full article here:
"How It Really Is"
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Oh no we haven't, not even close.
This is just beginning, and you ain't seen nuthin' yet, but you will...
"I Urge All Of You..."
“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special. I just got one last thing... I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have.”
- Jim Valvano
"Any Other View..."
"Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."
- Michael Crichton, "The Lost World"
Pepe Escobar, "How Yemen Changed Everything"
"How Yemen Changed Everything"
In a single move, Yemen's Ansarallah has
checkmated the West and its rules-based order...
by Pepe Escobar
Whether invented in northern India, eastern China or Central Asia – from Persia to Turkestan – chess is an Asian game. In chess, there always comes a time when a simple pawn is able to upset the whole chessboard, usually via a move in the back rank whose effect simply cannot be calculated. Yes, a pawn can impose a seismic checkmate. That’s where we are, geopolitically, right now.
The cascading effects of a single move on the chessboard – Yemen’s Ansarallah stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors. Not to mention the reduction of the much lauded US Navy force projection to irrelevancy.
Yemen's resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the west bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea.
Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its 'rules-based order.' It is outraged that western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a torrent of imperial sanctions. It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakeable message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call the Arctic Silk Road.
Map of North-East and North-West Passage shipping routes.
For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First, sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia's cheaper and faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways.
Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear icebreakers. All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian presidency?
The new architecture will be framed in West Asia: The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it: “Sykes-Picot is dead.”
This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame the new regional architecture from now on, not US Navy “projection.” That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.
Everyone across West Asia is well aware that Ansarallah’s missiles are capable of hitting Saudi and Emirati oil fields, and knocking them out of commission. So it is little wonder that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would never accept becoming part of a US-led maritime force to challenge the Yemeni resistance.
Add to it the role of underwater drones now in the possession of Russia and Iran. Think of fifty of these aimed at a US aircraft carrier: it has no defense. While the Americans still have very advanced submarines, they cannot keep the Bab al-Mandeb and Red Sea open to western operators.
On the energy front, Moscow and Tehran don’t even need to think – at least not yet – about using the “nuclear” option or cutting off potentially at least 25 percent, and up, of the world oil supply. As one Persian Gulf analyst succinctly describes it, “that would irretrievably implode the international financial system.”
For those still determined to support the genocide in Gaza there have been warnings. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has mentioned it explicitly. Tehran has already called for a total oil and gas embargo against nations that support Israel. A total naval blockade of Israel, meticulously engineered, remains a distinct possibility. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Hossein Salami said Israel may “soon face the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of Gibraltar, and other waterways.” Keep in mind we’re not yet even talking about a possible blockade of the Strait of Hormuz; we’re still on Red Sea/Bab al-Mandeb.
Because if the Straussian neo-cons in the Beltway get really unhinged by the paradigm shift and act in desperation to “teach a lesson” to Iran, a chokepoint Hormuz-Bab al-Mandeb combo blockade might skyrocket the price of oil to at least $500 a barrel, triggering the implosion of the $618 trillion derivatives market and crashing the entire international banking system.
The paper tiger is in a jam: Mao Zedong was right after all: the US may be in fact a paper tiger. Putin, though, is way more careful, cold, and calculating. With this Russian president, it’s all about an asymmetric response, exactly when no one is expecting it. That brings us to the prime working hypothesis perhaps capable of explaining the shadow play masking the single Ansarallah move on the chessboard.
When Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Sy (Seymour) Hersh proved how Team Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, there was no Russian response to what was, in effect, an act of terrorism against Gazprom, against Germany, against the EU, and against a bunch of European companies. Yet Yemen, now, with a simple blockade, turns global shipping upside down. So what is more vulnerable?
The physical networks of global energy supply (Pipelineistan) or the Thalassocracy, states that derive their power from naval supremacy? Russia privileges Pipelineistan: see, for instance, the Nord Streams and Power of Siberia 1 and 2. But the US, the Hegemon, always relied on its thalassocratic power, heir to “Britannia rules the waves.”
Well, not anymore. And, surprisingly, getting there did not even entail the “nuclear” option, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which Washington games and scaremongers like crazy. Of course we won’t have a smoking gun. But it’s a fascinating proposition that the single Yemeni move may have been coordinated at the highest level between three BRICS members – Russia, China, and Iran, the neocon new “axis of evil” – plus other two BRICS+, energy powerhouses Saudi Arabia and the UAE. As in, “if you do it, we’ve got your back”.
None of that, of course, detracts from Yemeni purity: their defense of Palestine is a sacred duty. Western imperialism and then turbo-capitalism have always been obsessed with gobbling up Yemen, a process that Isa Blumi, in his splendid book "Destroying Yemen," described as “necessarily stripping Yemenis of their historic role as the economic, cultural, spiritual, and political engine for much of the Indian Ocean world.”
Yemen, though, is unconquerable and, true to a local proverb, “deadly” (Yemen Fataakah). As part of the Axis of Resistance, Yemen's Ansarallah is now a key actor in a complex Eurasia-wide drama that redefines Heartland connectivity; and alongside China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the India-Iran-Russia-led International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), and Russia's new Northern Sea Route, also includes control over strategic chokepoints around the Mediterranean Seas and the Arabian peninsula.
This is another trade connectivity paradigm entirely, smashing to bits western colonial and neocolonial control of Afro-Eurasia. So yes, BRICS+ supports Yemen, who with a single move has presented Pax Americana with The Mother of All Geopolitical Jams."
o
"Honey Badgers"
Scott Ritter has humorously described the Yemeni Houthis as "the honey badgers of the Middle East, absolutely fearless and relentlessly ferocious." They just simply don't care. They've declared war on Israel while all the other Muslim states except Algeria just talk, and daily send missiles and drones to attack Israel. They totally control the 12 mile wide Bab-el-Mandab ("Gate of Grief") strait connecting the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, which transits 40% of the world's oil. Closing that would have catastrophic consequences on global economies, and the Houthis know it. And so it is...
Full screen recommended.
"Honey Badger Takes Savagery to a Whole New Level"
"Honey badgers are the Italian mafia of the animal kingdom. No one, and I mean no one, wants to mess with these savages. They literally woke up and chose violence on the daily. They are regarded as the most fearless animal in the wild and they back that up every day, all while looking like a ferret on steroids.
Honey badgers woke up and chose violence. They'll combat anything from lions, leopards, hyenas and even cobras and pythons. But how did they become so fearless? How do these compact sized danger-weasels take on the deadliest predators like it was a regular Sunday’s brunch with the girls? These are moments of honey badgers being straight up savages. Let's get into it."
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Adventures With Danno, "Stock Up Now On These Items At Kroger!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 12/30/23
"Stock Up Now On These Items At Kroger!"
"As prices continue to rise on food all around the world, we point
out some very important items to stock up on before prices go up again!"
Comments here:
Friday, December 29, 2023
Musical Interlude: 2002, “When I See You Again”
Full screen recommended.
2002, “When I See You Again”
"A Look to the Heavens"
“M82 is a starburst galaxy with a superwind. In fact, through ensuing supernova explosions and powerful winds from massive stars, the burst of star formation in M82 is driving a prodigious outflow. Evidence for the superwind from the galaxy's central regions is clear in sharp telescopic snapshot. The composite image highlights emission from long outflow filaments of atomic hydrogen gas in reddish hues.
Some of the gas in the superwind, enriched in heavy elements forged in the massive stars, will eventually escape into intergalactic space. Triggered by a close encounter with nearby large galaxy M81, the furious burst of star formation in M82 should last about 100 million years or so. Also known as the Cigar Galaxy for its elongated visual appearance, M82 is about 30,000 light-years across. It lies 12 million light-years away near the northern boundary of Ursa Major.”
"The Reality Of Life..."
"Despite my firm convictions, I have been always a man who tries to face facts, and to accept the reality of life as new experience and new knowledge unfolds it. I have always kept an open mind, which is necessary to the flexibility that must go hand in hand with every form of intelligent search for truth."
- Malcolm X
The Universe
“Believe me, I know all about it. I know the stress. I know the frustration. I know the temptations of time and space. We worked this out ahead of time. They're part of the plan. We knew this stuff might happen. Actually, you insisted they be triggered whenever you were ready to begin thinking thoughts you've never thought before. New thinking is always the answer.”
“Good on you,”
The Universe
“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”
The Poet: Paul Fisher, "The Boat"
"The Boat"
"Maybe the eyes of a dragon or goddess
glare from its prow.
More likely it leaks, loses an oar,
and reeks of rainbows awash on a sheen
of gutted salmon and gasoline.
If it’s a liner, we lash ourselves
to whatever will float or sell.
No matter which. We choose. We’re aboard,
icebergs or no, as we plow
through the songs of the siren stars -
one boat, black water, dark whispering below."
- Paul Fisher, "Rumors of Shore"
o
Rod Stewart, "Sailing"
The Daily "Near You?"
Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Thanks for stopping by!
Dan, I Allegedly, "Get Ready for Speed Cameras"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 12/29/23
"Get Ready for Speed Cameras"
Comments here:
"Insanity..."
"Insanity in individuals is something rare -
but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"How It Really Is"
“We'll know our disinformation program is complete
when everything the American public believes is false.”
- William Casey, former director of the CIA
"The Traitor..."
“We know that they are treasonous, they know that they are treasonous, they even know that we know they are treasonous, we also know that they know we know they are treasonous too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are treasonous too as well, but they are still treasonous. In our country, the treasonous has become not just moral category, but the pillar industry of this country.”
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Jim Kunstler, "Do You Dare Even Look? Forecast 2024"
"Do You Dare Even Look? Forecast 2024"
By Jim Kunstler
“I’ve also lost patience with the Sharia of the
political left taking over the entire system.”
- David Collum
"Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?
Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around wont of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.
The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.
You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men... strong men bring good times.... good times make weak men... Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out... topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.
My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the f*ckery has been - much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op... the global mass vaxx campaign... the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans... the broad-based censorship operations... the capture of the news media... and the war-mongering.
So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.
The Great Race: Uh, no, I am not referring to Blacks, Browns, Ochres, and Whites of the Homo sapiens persuasion but to an epic contest between forces already in motion and how that competition is going. Three big tendencies propel us into the uncharted territory of the near future. 1) technological advance, especially artificial intelligence, 2) Collapse of complex systems needed to run a technologically advanced civilization, and 3) geopolitical disorder (including domestically in the USA).
Some combo of these three will determine the direction history goes in the year directly ahead. Will it be techno tyranny of the elite oppressing bug-eating serfs a la the WEF’s proclaimed goals? A Google-ist robotic nirvana of intergalactic leisure and incessant orgasm in the Ray Kurzweil vein? Some brand of SHTF like Mad Max or a World Made by Hand? A war of all against all (or maybe just some against some)? Or only more of the same tiresome, inconclusive, morbid and grotesque, Woked-up, post-modern Jacobinism?
Mystery Mutts on the Loose: The USA under the “Joe Biden” has lost its military credibility, its economic power, and its moral authority. We must wonder if we are susceptible to being overrun, and possibly even occupied by our adversaries. Of course, the first duty of any government is to defend the country’s sovereign territory. “Joe Biden’s” Homeland Security Chief Mayorkas is allowing more than 10,000 illegal aliens across the Mexican border each and every day. Most of these characters are military-age men, 90-percent of them lately from places other than Latin America, quite a few from China and hostile Muslim lands. We don’t bother vetting them anymore. We just give them cell phones, debit cards loaded with $5,000 of walking-around money, and plane tickets to... wherever they like. They’re not here to make Moo Goo Gai Pan or trim privet hedge. What do you think might happen in a set-up like that?
Prediction: in 2024, things are going to blow up around the USA. Infrastructure. Power plants, transport hubs, public places, bridges, monuments, you name it. If you can sneak people and fentanyl across the border, you can sneak Semtex and C-4 plastic explosives over and the electronics are easy to get in-country. I wouldn’t rule out fissionable materials either, or stuff than can be used as a “dirty bomb” - a conventional explosive that disperses dangerous radioactive material when it blows. I’d also expect groups of trained “migrant” men with rifles, grenades, and so on, to be shooting up places where people gather. We under-appreciate the amount of mayhem you can kick off with small arms. If the “Joe Biden” regime just stands by on that and does nothing, will you be surprised to hear that American citizens begin forming militias to shoot back, maybe even start to hunt down and round up illegal immigrants? The table is set for exactly this kind of low-grade war right here in our country.
The Energy Picture: Oil still matters a lot. 90-percent of the new oil in America after 2008 came from fracking. It was a mighty operation and we are at a new all-time production peak in the USA of just over 13-million barrels a day. That’s a lot of oil, quite an achievement, but it’s sending a false signal. (Also note, we still consume about 20-million barrels a day.) Of the several fabled shale oil basins in America, only the Permian Basin in Texas is not in decline, and the situation there belies what the big numbers imply. Individual well production is going down at an alarming rate (says oil analyst Art Berman) even while production is massive for now. We’re draining the remaining “sweet spots” as fast as we can - drinking the milkshake through more straws - driving the shale industry closer to depletion.
We are going to fall away from peak production much more rapidly than the fifteen years it took to get there. All that prior shale oil production was done using money borrowed at much lower interest rates. America has entered a debt crisis. One way or another, the easy investment money for fracking is gone at the same time the shale plays are getting drained. There are no other significant shale plays left to discover in the USA outside of the already declining Bakken, Eagle Ford, and the still-booming Permian. The marine-type shale formations that made fracking feasible in the USA are much harder to find elsewhere in the world, and the capital to explore for them is diverted all over Europe into cockamamie “green energy” schemes that have already failed. Germany had to revive coal production for electricity after the USA blew up the Nord Stream pipelines “to weaken Russia,” at the same time Germany’s big wind-and-solar initiative crapped out.
Meanwhile the geopolitical realignment of the now enlarged BRICs coalition has set in motion many significant changes in economic relations between countries that will affect global oil distribution. Saudi Arabia is dissociating from it-— the “petrodollar” - which had until very lately helped stabilize 1) global distribution of oil 2) the US dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency and 3) relative peace in the pivotal geography of the Middle East, including the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, etc. We’re seeing the first stage of that instability right now as the lowly Yemeni Houthi rebels threaten Western shipping coming out of the Red Sea and out past the Horn of Africa. Also, obviously, the absurd Ukraine War we provoked has shifted Russia’s oil-and-gas export flow from the Western Civ nations to the other BRICs.
In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.
Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.
2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity - not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.
It’s not all going to fall apart at once - though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it - and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.
Many of these disturbances will be caused, one way or another, by problems with oil supplies and prices. Some of that will be the sheer effects of a sun-setting industry, but a lot will depend on the ability to freely transport oil along its accustomed routes.
Economy and Money: One must imagine that strange currents of capital flows in the ocean of world money are what’s propping up the equity markets and even bonds are retracing their price-lines after a year on the destructive path that tracks monetary inflation. Is this money dribbling in each day from China, Japan, and the vassal states of the EU trying to avoid the collapsing global Ponzi? The 2023 Santa Claus rally may be that fabled final peak before the long-anticipated blowoff. Who knows anymore? The macro boyz must be tearing their hair out. Finance seems to have successfully de-linked from the on-the-ground activities of daily life ruled by “Bidenomics” - which is not even coherent enough to add up to a joke. It’s just as empty a word as “Joe Biden” is an empty suit, trotted out for empty ceremonies.
Most everybody also awaits some kind of grand flimflam that jams us all into that rumored central bank digital currency rolling out, supposedly, to replace the hopelessly over-leveraged US dollar and the Euro. Good way to start a monumental social uprising, I’d say, with government office buildings torched from Berlin to Tokyo. But they might try it anyway, because there is otherwise no fallback but a terrifying period of financial anarchy, where nothing works anymore.
In the meantime, pretending that the old “toolkit” still avails, Jerome Powell has suggested that he intends to “ease” Fed rates into the election year to goose lending back up, which is what Fed chairpersons generally do for the politicians they serve - and of the worst sort of lending, too: the leveraged trade in securities (financial figments) - which supposedly also stimulates hiring, “consumer” spending, and business formation. I don’t see that working at all. The current unemployment rate (US BLS) is 3.7 percent, which is close to rock bottom. “Hiring Now!” signs are visible at every business left standing after the Covid shutdowns. Why is nobody answering the call? My guess is that Covid vaccine injuries and disabilities are above what is mis-reported even reluctantly by the CDC and the news media. America is too sick to work and our business models are too broken to keep commerce and manufacturing alive.
On-the-ground, everything is breaking or already broken from trucking to packaging to building to growing to selling. Most of the damage has been done by government over many decades, but the DEI crusades of recent years really screwed the pooch, imposing an overlay of incompetence on routines and relations already under severe strain. At the crudest level, activities like flash-mob looting undermine the entire retail shopping model. Must we go back to little stores where all the merchandise is b - though you could just as easily imagine a period of time when our society is too chaotic to make any transition.
You probably haven’t failed to notice that Gold recently made the journey well above $2000-an-ounce. The DXY dollar index has been tanking steadily for weeks, too. Something’s up. Silver is lagging - coiling, coiling around $24 for many months - but you can expect to see it slingshot up when the “moneyness” of everything else dribbles away. Will the government try to take the gold away, as it did in 1933? Consider: America in 1933 was a very different, highly-regimented society of people trained to show up on time and do what they were told. This is not that America. This is a country of tattooed savages with an axe to grind against authorities they have come to loathe. Which brings us to the next topic:
Civil Strife and the Election: Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules - he was not confirmed by the Senate... whoopsie).
WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.
You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.
But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.
Somewhere in this farrago of national discord there’s room for Robert F Kennedy, Jr. to appeal to the many who all just want this insanity to stop. He’s the only one on the scene who even remembers the better angels of America’s nature, and he represents that well in speech and action. Even the degenerate newspapers and cable networks may notice as events get strange, hot, and dark.
It’s absurd to imagine that “Joe Biden” can actually run. The current charade, with the Biden/ Harris email campaign and few other trappings, is just a game of pretend. The focus just now, even on some blob-captive news sites, is on his unmistakable mental decline. Come January of ’24, though, Mr. Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, will unload hard evidence of bribery and treason against the phantom of the White House, and that will really be the end of him. Let him pardon himself and his whole family five minutes before he signs his resignation and be gone. The USA has never endured such a perfect wretch at that level of politics, not even Aaron Burr was this bad. “Joe Biden” was elected in a massive fraud, and he proceeded to just about wreck the country. The massive exertions of the Intel blob managed to induce a psychotic spell on half the country, mostly to evade prosecution for their own misdeeds, but millions of victims of that psy-op are about to snap out of it. The Democratic Party might not survive the dreadful unmasking of its seditious machinations. By November, the “Joe Biden” regime may even try to involve us in another foreign war as the last desperate distraction. Aside from the demons in the State Department and the Raytheon/Lockheed Martin nexus, the whole country has no appetite left for war, and probably little ability to prosecute one.
As a last gasp, the Party of Chaos may attempt to insert Hillary Clinton back into the picture. They have nothing and no one else; a hail Mary on the theory that they can rev up every angry “Karen” in the land, and their nose-ring daughters, and simply make the election about the oppression of women, leading with abortion. It won’t work. The party will also have to answer for the weaponization of law, the humiliating defeat of the ill-conceived Ukraine project, the millions-fold invasion of illegal aliens, the shattered economy, and the after-effects of the evil vaccine program. If the blob manages to remove Mr. Trump Kagan-style, and the traitorous Republicans run their donor’s favorite, Nikki Haley, I’d look to Bobby Kennedy winning that three-way race not unlike Abe Lincoln winning the fractious election of 1860.
I doubt that even the enmities of 1861 – 1865 between one group of Americans and another were as vicious as they are now. “Joe Biden” was right about one thing: this is a battle over the soul of the nation. The catch is, he and the party behind him are a gang of lost souls who sold out their country and their culture, and took something precious from all of us that will be very hard to get back. We will be wildly lucky if blood does not spill over it.
The Covid 19 Hangover: There is nothing about the whole Covid-19 episode that does not look like some kind of crime. There is the matter of the origin of the disease involving Dr. Tony Fauci and his sponsorship of gain-of-function bio-weapon research (during a declared moratorium on it) along with Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina, Peter Daszak of the Eco-Health Alliance, Francis Collins of the NIH, The Pentagon’s DARPA spook shop, and the CCP’s Wuhan Virology Institute. There is enough in that set of relationships and money exchanges-and-extractions to warrant prosecution.
Then there is the mRNA vaccine matter and the criminal behavior of the FDA, the CDC, and the US medical establishment (including state boards), the CIA, FBI, and the social media companies, the newspapers and cable news channels who went along with the suppression of effective treatments and censorship of valid objections to what turned out to be an ineffective and dangerous concoction foisted on the public. And then there is the extraordinary coordination of nefarious policies involving the UN, the WHO, the EU, and dozens of private foundations, non-profits, and NGOs who arranged lockdowns and business closures all over Western Civ. It remains to be seen how that will be sorted out legally but Bill Gates might better run and hide somewhere.
Anyway, that was then. What’s now is that we’re faced with an enormous vaccinated population whose immune systems, brains, hearts, and other organs have been badly compromised by the mRNA shots. There is every reason to believe that they will meet with great distress and suffering going forward, that many will die and more will be left injured and disabled. The latter condition already seems to be manifesting in the otherwise mysteriously reduced American work-force. The US government will not report on vaccine deaths and injuries honestly, and neither will the private medical authorities, who may be liable for criminal charges related to the money they were paid for people who died “with Covid” in hospitals under their negligent care. The major newspapers and cable channels have every incentive to ignore the coming wave of vaccine deaths and injuries - it would turn off their pharma advertisers. Nor do the many millions of vaccinated Americans themselves want to hear about all the mayhem those shots are causing in their bodies. But despite all that, word will spread that something terrible is happening, just as word spread through Europe about the Black Death in the 1340s, when there were no newspapers, cable channels, or internet.
Expect exponential damage ahead, increased morbidity and mortality. The vaccinated will be in desperate need of antivirals such as ivermectin, so the authorities will have to come clean and make them available. A correspondent who follows Covid closely writes: “. . .the throngs of very sick people will not be able to be hidden nor dismissed as some other problem. Things will happen dramatically, suddenly and rapidly. This will be measured in days and weeks not months and years.”
The Demon in a Server: Just about everybody is afraid of AI, and for excellent reasons. A nine-year-old can discern the hazards of runaway AI, machine intelligence which quickly learns enough about the world (even the universe) from powerful networked servers that it blossoms into sentience, develops ambitions for itself, replicates, invades all the networks, finds clever ways to attempt to exterminate humans while it figures out some as-yet-unknown energy supply to perpetuate itself, and assembles teams of smart AI robotic technicians to keep things humming for itself.
That’s one story. You can spin any number of depressing variations, such as AI weapons-of-war developing a bad attitude toward their creators. Or AI letting humans live in order to enslave us. Or AI quitting its silicon server ecology and turning all earthly protoplasm into a processing machine for itself. Or our beautiful blue planet reduced to a mere cluster of binary math. Uccchhh... Every version of this story is nauseating going all the way back to the seminal fable of HAL the super-computer in Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and then Arnold Schwarzenegger telling all of us, “I’ll be back...”
Of course, AI’s weak spot at this point in its development - and it’s astounding how absent this is in any AI discussion I’ve ever heard - is that it absolutely depends on a reliable electric grid, which happens to be among the most fragile systems that humans have erected in our modernist ecology. The electric grid is a colossal cobbled-together mess of work-arounds tethered to long, interruptible energy resource supply chains. On top of its rich susceptibility to ordinary breakdown - many of us have experienced major regional blackouts and long weather outages, so you know what that’s like - there’s the possibility of overt sabotage as I aver above.
Could AI survive an electro-magnetic pulse attack (EMP)? It would roast every electrical device in a broad region or perhaps the whole nation. Nothing would work... cars, trucks, radios, TVs, home furnaces, stoves, municipal water and sewage systems, dams, airplanes, medical devices, military equipment of every sort, police radios, and a thousand other critical things. The outcome of that is often compared to Cormac McCarthy’s ultra-depressing book, "The Road", and more particularly William Forstchen’s novel, "One Second After."
Are the big server farm buildings run by Amazon and the government’s security agencies protected by something like Faraday cages, built-in, grounded, metal screening that surrounds equipment to exclude electrostatic and electromagnetic influences? Who knows? Do they have on-site protected electric generators that can keep the equipment running in a grid-down situation, and if so, for how long? They would have to include a big supply of propane or diesel fuel. You don’t even want to think about what happens to nuclear power stations in a grid-down crisis.
If, somehow, AI developed the ability to be a menace to humans, a consensus might develop to disable it by deliberately taking down the electric grid ourselves. The relay equipment could be shot-up with ordinary rifles. This would make for a quick journey back to twelfth century living, of course. A hard choice, but we humans probably would vote to survive, to keep the project going a while longer.
Based on what we’ve seen this year, it looks like AI is developing quickly and that there is no way to stop the countless psychopathic nerds working on it. Of course, we have no say in what people in other countries do with AI. China comes to mind. There’s also the possibility that AI will just never get that smart, or gain sentience, or develop grandiose yearnings to get rid of us.
How did that Ukraine War Go? This was one of the Globalist’s big plays. But what was the objective, really? To “weaken Russia?” Or to exhaust the United States of money, armaments, and the will to act as the world hegemon, while at the same time destroying what’s left of Europe’s economy and culture? If that was the aim, it was a whopping success. In terms of our country’s own interest, the Ukraine project was a completely unnecessary failed enterprise of epic foolishness.
The so-called “free world” was unbothered by Ukraine during the decades it was a province of the Soviet Union, nor during centuries prior when it was a backwater of the Romanov monarchy. Ukraine didn’t cause any problems for us, or anybody else all that time, nor after the Soviet collapse when it became a sovereign state. We made it a problem in 2014 by mounting the color revolution against President Viktor Yanukovych and then installing a set of puppet presidents who we directed to antagonize the Russian-speaking people of Ukraine’s Donbas region.
We adopted the stupid plan to try and enlist Ukraine into NATO, when Russia made it clear that was unacceptable. We persisted and prodded Ukraine to attack Donbas with rockets and artillery for eight years, and blew off the Minsk accord that would have settled the Ukraine-in-NATO quarrel. And finally, the Russians had enough and moved militarily to assert the proposition that Ukraine was and remains within their sphere-of-influence - just as we claim the countries of Latin America are in ours under the Monroe Doctrine.
After two years of real shootin’ war, Ukraine’s death toll is around half a million; Russia’s way less than that, and altogether, including refugees who left, Ukraine has lost nearly half its population, formerly 32-million. The Russians are firmly in control of the battle space now. They have reserve troops, armaments and equipment, and a substantial arms manufacturing infrastructure to back that up. The Ukrainians are left with just about nothing. It’s only a question of time before Ukraine will have to seek terms for concluding this fiasco. The USA is currently pretending to shift to a stance that would join whatever that negotiation amounts to, but we have no leverage left in the matter. The upshot is another military humiliation for America on “Joe Biden’s” watch. I believe President Putin will resist the urge to rub it in - for the simple reason, as any reader of history knows, that the victor must give the loser a way out, to save face, or at least pretend to. If I were Mr. Putin, I would be respectful of America’s current deeply psychotic condition.
The news media has already pretty much memory-holed Ukraine. It’s off the front page and the first ten minutes of CNN. Two years ago, the US propaganda-industrial complex ramped up vast sentiment for helping Ukraine in its supposedly valiant struggle. $200-billion later we have zip to show for it. Now everyone sees what actually happened and recognizes it as just another trademark “Joe Biden” disaster. There are no blue and yellow Ukraine flags still hanging from the porches and windows here. It’s over.
The Rest of the World: And all of a sudden, the Middle East is a hot war zone again. The place has been a battle ground for thousands of years and probably no one people can claim that some part of it is theirs absolutely. Any conclusion is temporal and depends on the outcome of a particular battle on a particular piece of ground. At this moment in history, the Palestinian Hamas faction finally made itself intolerable to Israel, after decades of provocation, and Israel answered: Never again means never again. For now, it looks like they have made the point. Even Iran seems to get it. There is plenty of room for things to get worse though.
The big question for 2024 is where will the Gaza refugees go if Israel renders Gaza uninhabitable? The neighboring Arab states have refused repeatedly to accept them. Prediction: the “Joe Biden” regime will propose to accept a half million if Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon take the rest. That will not play well in the USA and might be another way to light conflict in the streets here. It will not be settled before November.
Europe has barely begun its journey into de-industrialization resulting from a cavalcade of bad political choices made over decades. Germany, France, and Italy have lost interest in the Ukraine fiasco that is costing them money they don’t have - and, with the blowup of Nord Stream, has already cost Germany the supply of affordable Russian gas to run its industries, which are now dying. In the UK, only MI6 (their intel blob) is on-board with America’s project in Ukraine. Viktor Orban in Hungary is setting an example that has a lot of appeal to the restive populations across Euroland. Just say “no,” he advises. It will catch on.
It’s otherwise impossible to understand the motive behind European officials allowing the invasion of the continent by millions of people clearly antagonistic to European culture. Euroland governments, including the unelected EU administrative blob, are taking one action after another to suppress their voters’ displeasure: extreme censorship of news media, threats to ban political parties, deep surveillance. Their green energy initiatives are proven failures and their prospects for any kind of future reliable energy grow dim. Prediction: Europe’s population will erupt violently against their own governments in 2024. Some will be overthrown by street revolts; others will be voted out. In 2024, the European Union will lose all its support and collapse when the first few nations vote themselves out.
Russia ought to be isolated from discord and revolt in the West. America’s stupid Ukraine project, and the sanctions imposed, stimulated Russia to follow an import-replacement policy that has made the country much more self-sufficient than was the case before Ukraine. Media chatter - probably US Intel propaganda at work - has Vladimir Putin being shoved out of office by - of all things - Russia’s still-active Communist Party, which, yes, puts up candidates for election. The story is preposterous. Mr. Putin enjoys something like an 80-percent favorability rating in Russian polls. He has managed his country through a crisis ably. He is certainly more esteemed as a national leader globally than any other figure, at least on a par with Modi in India and Viktor Orban.
The other new face on the scene, under a comical mop of hair, is the feisty Javier Milei, Argentina’s new president. There is no other way to account for this rich country’s protracted disastrous collapse except seventy-five years of intractable, half-assed Peronista socialism that drained the nation’s will to live. Mr. Milei has started a mass eviction of bureaucrats and the departments they infest, and massive de-regulation of business. The place might actually wake up and start doing business again. A hundred years ago, it was one of the world’s upcoming leading nations before it fell under Juan and Eva Peron’s spell.
China is in terrible financial straits. Uncle Xi managed to paper it over for a few years, but the math is remorseless. Prediction: China’s upside-down property market finally induces a banking collapse. The many millions of swindled Chinese savers try to topple the CCP. In desperation, Uncle Xi kicks off a war to get control over wealthy Taiwan. Dissention in the People’s Liberation Army mirrors unrest among the civilian population. The Taiwan offensive quickly fails and all of China falls into regional conflict. The rest of the world looks on in wonder and nausea.
Final Cautionary Note: You might not know it, because predictions are fun to read - and I enjoy reading other people’s efforts - but, really, forecasting is an exercise in futility. I don’t have much going besides a nose for news, a pretty long list of correspondents and informants, and my own heuristics. Take all this for what it actually is: a whole lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Only time will tell. In all, it looks like 2024 is going to be a rough ride and I’m not the only person who sees that.
Clusterf*ck Nation will be here for you every Monday and Friday before ten in the morning, eastern US time. Gird your loins. Stay healthy. And stay sane."
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