"The World Economic Forum (WEF), a.k.a. the Davos Gang, held its 2022 schmoozefest in that tidy Swiss alpine village last week, after a nearly three-year hiatus on account of the coronavirus pandemic they generously arranged for the rest of us. These are the self-defined leaders of the Great Re-set - Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and Klaus’s scaly majordomo, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, the inverse Adolf Eichmann, famous for declaring that “humans are hackable animals.” Did he mean, like, with a meat cleaver?
Who do these schnitzel-scarfing, Krug-guzzling punks think they are? Or, to paraphrase the immortal words of one Pete Hogwallop, who elected them boss of this outfit? Nobody, that’s who, on this whole, wide, ever-turning world, which they literally aim to take over. Actually, from the way they talk, it already looks like they’ve hijacked the sucker and us “worthless” and “useless” humans riding on it, as Dr, Harari has labeled the multitudes riding the planet in economy class. Kind of looks like we’re in for a rough landing.
As first hallucinated in Herr Doktor Schwab’s pulsating brain, apparently many years ago, the Great Re-set was initially scheduled for 2050, a sort of leisurely stroll-in-the-park to the shimmering gates of transhumanism. Then the gang got nervous and pushed it up to 2030 (climate change, and all). When that retrograde monster of US politics, Donald Trump, came on the scene, they panicked and re-set their Re-set for 2023. Now, despite the surface decorum of this year’s Davos meet-up, it looks like they are - as we say here in the old New World - losing their sh*t.
How come? Well, for one thing, we appear to be in a close race between Klaus’s controlled demolition of the global economy and the US midterm elections this November, and perhaps the gang perceives that won’t go so well for them. Their key project in the 2022 offensive, the War in Ukraine, isn’t working out, either. The idea, it seems, was to bog down and humiliate the Russians so as to bring on the defenestration of Mr. Putin, who, believe it or not and despite the tsunamis of aspersion loosed on him by WEF-funded propagandists, is strangely and actually a defender of Western Civ. Yeah, I know, a stunner, right? (God works in mysterious ways - but the Davos Gangsters don’t believe in him/her /they.)
In their cuckoo clock universe, they are too busy counting the teeth on the gears inside because they are the “experts” and that’s what they do. Which brings us to one of the central fallacies of the mechanistic world-view: that if you measure enough things, you will be able to control them. Their beloved data is failing them. They screwed-the-pooch on the Covid-19 caper and now the data is biting Klaus and Company on the ass. Especially Oberstleutnant Bill Gates’s ass, who was supposed to be in charge of the vaccine op and is jetting around the world now talking out of said cloacal aperture so recklessly that folks are looking to the lampposts of every country he lands in.
Hence, the desperate attempts at censorship by WEF stooges-in-place all around the world. And see how well that has gone, especially in the USA under WEF-installed “Joe Biden,” the cigar-store-Indian in executive drag, who fronts for a US wrecking crew cabinet of oafs, losers, and reprobates. Has the world ever seen a more laughable official exercise as the botched appointment of one Nina Jankowicz, the Singing Censor, to the idiotically-conceived Disinformation Governance Board? They might as well have taken out a Jumbotron billboard ad in Times Square screaming We Suck in flashing psychedelic pixels.
And yet, that demolition of the global economy proceeds a’pace as, with all demolitions, once things start crashing, nothing will stop it. Supply chains for everything are breaking, with sneaky ramifications. For instance, the ammonia-based chemical additive for diesel fuel used to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions from trucks is getting scarce. New EPA rules require computerized sensors in truck engines that register nitrous oxide levels. If they are too high, the sensors automatically cut the engine. Result: trucks stop running. Further result: nothing gets delivered. Furthest result: you starve.
The WEF worked on its starvation program from other angles, too. The Ukraine-Russian war was engineered to reduce the global wheat supply by a hefty percentage, say around 30 percent, as well as to curtail fertilizer exports from the world’s main producers of them: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. No khobz f’tir for you, peoples of North Africa! (And no Hostess Ding Dongs for you, peoples of Calumet Heights, Illinois!).
Meanwhile, recall the parting admonition of the late eminent virologist Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV, the virus behind AIDS, who, just prior to his death predicted that 100-percent of the people vaccinated with mRNA Covid “vaccines” would be dead in two years. Yes, yes, pretty stark stuff, I know. But that was his professional opinion. Forgive me for mentioning it, but there it is, like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl.
We’re in for all kinds of interesting surprises - those of us who survive this clusterf**k - but the biggest one of all will be the WEF’s Great Re-set falling on its aforesaid ass as, when the dust settles, their grandiose, totalitarian, and ultimately wicked model of the human project yields to the astounding re-enchantment of a world pregnant with meaning, purpose, and grace. I’m not kidding around. God may be a prankster, as I’ve suggested many times, but he’s also still God, and he doesn’t appreciate wannabe faux-messianic technocrat pricks like Klaus Schwab messing with his glorious creation."
"We had some fine traditions in America, though many have been pushed aside because they get in the way of modern politics. And when it comes to patriotism on the days when we mourn our war dead, you can feel the media groaning. Patriots and patriarchs aren’t much appreciated these days. They’re now considered just too toxic, too masculine and they’re such a bother.
America once prized merit and competition. Now, though, we prize politics and our cultural institutions strive to make Beta males. There are unintended costs to all of this, including all those young men lost, boys adrift without fathers to guide them, lonely confused boys who rage in the anonymous shadows of social media. Add unfettered access to violent violent video games, unfettered access to internet porn, raised by mothers who resent the fathers who walked away, shaped by anger and the social isolation that comes from closing schools for the past few years.
Throw in the absence of a spiritual life and the absence of a common morality. Add guns. This stew of rage boils over into murder sprees, in rural areas, in urban centers.
We ignore what we feel in our bones to be wrong. We’d rather play our politics instead.
Ultimately the day comes - and it always comes - when some other powerful nation that isn’t obsessed with creating Beta males shows up with its armies. They come to take all that you have and all that you’d ever dreamed of having. They come to take your food, your life, the lives of your children. Your spine. Your hope. Your identity. Everything. And then you don’t have a country. The landless descend into wandering barbarism. They become as beasts of no nation, because their nation is gone.
Don’t think it can’t happen. It happens. It has happened in many other ages. It happened to Thebes. That nation had destroyed the unstoppable superpower and military might of Sparta, but soon Thebes was itself destroyed, all the way down to the scattered, nameless stones, the people dead or sold off in the slave markets. And who and what they were was forgotten. All that was left were scratches on stones bleaching like bones in the sun.
History tells us these stories again and again, if we’d listen. History warns of what happens to nations that weaken themselves and abandon their own borders, prizing sensitivity and men without chests above virtue.
A culture becoming fragile is awash with tears, but it becomes dry, like pottery. It cracks. And as the ages forget the names, history smirks. When the people are threatened, with the people desperate and frightened, it is then that soldiers are appreciated, welcomed and needed. The armed forces, forming that thin line between civilization and chaos are honored for a time. Though eventually, if they’re successful in defense, they are inevitably forgotten, again. All soldiers throughout history have understood this dynamic, especially in free, prosperous nations like ours.
Our war dead didn’t risk or lose their lives to be praised and petted with flowery words. They knew they were led to slaughter by fine words from the double-tongues about great honor and great sacrifice. But they also knew this: They had a job to do, protecting our liberty and our nation with their bodies and blood. I suppose they hoped, as Americans, that we would live up to our half of the bargain and not dishonor the freedom they’d given to us, that was bought with their lives.
Traditions are an important means for a people trying to stave off cultural betrayal. This is why traditions are often targeted by agents of change. The old traditions remind us who we are, what we were, reminding us of our ideal selves, of virtue lost to time and what we call progress.
But today is Memorial Day, 2022, when we mourn the fallen of the United States Armed Forces who died for our liberty. And because it is Memorial Day, not burger and beer day, not sports day, not play video games day, not chips and dip day, there is one tradition I hope we try our best to keep. It involves us taking time out to think hard and long about a soldier’s poem and the poppies, row on row.
“In Flanders Fields” is that soldier’s poem, written in World War I by Col. John McCrae, a man who’d seen the devastation of war, and hopelessness. Yet with clear eyes and a clean heart he wrote of poppy blossoms as rebirth of hope, those bright orange/red papery thin blossoms, as delicate as dreams, waving in the breeze over the freshly dug graves of the dead.
The scene was Ypres, Belgium at a farm converted to a military hospital, where McCrae was an Army doctor, doctor, dealing with pain and death and disease. Flanders Fields is particularly tragic. The political leadership had led their citizens into hell, and still the citizen soldiers marched toward death and the trenches and the barbed wire, and the gas.
My mother, 92 years old and born of the United Kingdom, hasn’t forgotten. She was born in Guelph, Ontario, the town where Col. McCrae is from. She knew his family. They all knew of the McCraes, but they did not treat them as celebrities. Instead, they respected them. My mom would put a book of his poetry on the breakfast table when my sons were little boys, so that we’d remember as we taught the boys. And that is how traditions are maintained.
And my friend Bill Gritsonis, a former soldier of the U.S. Army and member of the American Legion Hellenic Post 343 hasn’t forgotten. The entire American Legion hasn’t forgotten. The legion remembers the poem and the poppy, and members hand out poppies to help commemorate Memorial Day. “We’d hand out the poppies around City Hall,” he said. “Some of the veterans who survived are so very old. They’re still holding on. We have to do this for them, for us, for our kids, for our country. We just can’t forget.”
On this Memorial Day, when too many of us are thinking of grilling meat and drinking beer and staring at ballgames with sports announcer talking of the loss of a game as if it is death. American Legion posts and Veterans of Foreign Wars and many other groups will attend and participate in ceremonies of somber remembrance and mourning.
Some will be at parades in small towns. Or in quiet gatherings in cemeteries. They’ll bow their heads as a bugler plays “Taps” in a town square, or as the notes from the horns echo on the gravestones in great national cemeteries.
American Legion Hellenic Post 343 plans on being at Elmwood Cemetery, in River Grove, Il., as they have for years, since the 2011 dedication of the Hellenic American Veterans Memorial that honors Greeks who served. “This began way before my time, with others, the group as a whole, Hellenic Post 343 bought the land at Elmwood Cemetery, raised the funds,” Gritsonis said. “The Scouts remember. Our former commander, Anastasios “Steve” Betzelos, he’s 98 and a half. He’s going to try to make it.”
Gritsonis isn’t looking for a mention. He’s not like that. Once a top soldier, he doesn’t seek glory in the words of others. He’d rather that I write around his name. But he and other former U.S. Armed Service Personnel and those on active duty will remember. Why? Once you learn about Flanders Fields, once you read the poem, it sears. It is difficult to forget.
And perhaps because we all come from someplace else. We’re Americans. And whatever our ethnicity or creed, we’re bound together by the ideas that maintain our liberty. They’re written in the Constitution of the United States and The Bill of Rights added to the Constitution by wise and great men, that form a nation that is still the last, best hope of mankind on earth.
Some old soldiers will be asked about Col. McCrae’s poem and the poppies on the graves. I hope they’re asked about it. You might want to print this poem out, take it with you to the cemetery, or a parade, or a lonely grave. You might leave a copy of the poem on a picnic table, as others stuff their faces and guzzle beers without a thought of the Americans who gave everything for them. I don’t mean to shake it at them as if it’s some kind of dare. We’ve had too much of that on all sides.
Politicians and their angry mouthpieces are waging wars of words right now over what to do in the aftermath of mass shootings, like the one in Texas. The way they talk, they’re all about winning some kind of advantage, hoping to crush their political opponents. It’s as if their words were political tomahawks fashioned from the bones of the dead children from that school in Uvalde. The dead children become the pointed tips of their rhetorical spears.
And others wage wars of words over escalating the war in Ukraine, the same voices that frightened the nation about those weapons of mass destruction that couldn’t be found in Iraq, the same voices that argued for that war. The same voices that assured us that Western-style democracy could be imposed on people with no idea or appreciation for our democratic traditions. These are same voices that told us not to worry about the rise of the American Surveillance State.
And all these barking dogs on all sides sound as if they have a deep faith, not in God, but in themselves, and their own special talents. The anonymous life on social media has left them unbound. They rage and become their own gods, and for as long as they keep barking, I suppose they feel they’ll never be held accountable. So the barking continues.
When “In Flanders Fields” was first published anonymously, in the English magazine “Punch” on Dec. 15, 1915, it seemed as there was a common purpose to our history. And then as now, the young wanted so desperately to live. It became an anthem. Here is John McCrea’s poem:
There have been other poems. But this, to me, to many of us, on this Memorial Day, when we mourn our war dead, is one of a kind. ‘Lest we forget."
One carbon conscious, dollar destroying, virtue signaling step at a time...
by Bill Bonner
Geneva, Switzerland - "Prices rising. Shelves empty. This is a ‘good thing,’ isn’t it? It will mean less consumption, less production, less CO2 in the atmosphere, lower standards of living, people will get less of what they want… and they will be poorer. But it will save the planet, right?
Right. Friday, we made some suggestions about how you personally can enjoy your indigence with a sniffy, superior air. Today, we focus on the bigger picture, the whole economy. How can we impoverish other people too? And here we connect some big, fat dots. Let’s look first at the basics.
Home to Hovel: You don’t have to do anything to be poor. In fact, for an individual, the less you do, ceteris paribus, the more poverty you get. Poverty is easy. It gives you plenty of time to read The New Yorker magazine, update your Facebook page or watch CNN.
Prosperity, on the other hand, takes work, self-discipline, investment, learning, savings, innovation – and a few rules. Respect for each others’ property is one of them. If you can’t hold onto your stuff, it won’t work. A rich man’s house, for example, is the product of many generations’ worth of trial and error… and a multitude of inputs by skilled artisans and engineers – with HVAC systems and stylish moldings… and carefully laid tile work… expert carpentry… and all the other things that go into a modern, expensive house. Nobody would bother to build such a house if he thought it might be taken away from him.
The poor man’s house, by contrast, is a hovel, little changed in the last 2,000 years. In our area of Argentina, for example, people still live in mud huts. Mud on the floor. Mud on the walls. Mud on the roof. Few inputs. And those few are rude, rustic and unskilled. Doors are made of wooden planks held together with rawhide strips. There is no plumbing (and until recently), no electricity.
Poverty is a natural condition. But it’s also natural for people not to want to be poor. The human species was barely better off than orangutans for the first 290,000 years of its existence. People lived in small family or tribal groups, with little change from one generation to the next. It’s only in the last 10,000 years or so that it has made much material progress.
And now, people can get ahead in life… and live in comfort, with the satisfaction of getting richer than their brothers-in-law. They innovate, work hard, go to college, etc. As if by an ‘invisible hand,’ are they guided to win-win deals, giving to others so that they get from them what they want too. One learns how to treat cataracts. Another builds tree-houses. Progress is made. Left alone, in other words, growth happens. Wealth increases. And ‘the people’ are better off.
From Riches to Rags: So, if we want to move the meter in the opposite direction – towards poverty – we are going to have to backtrack; we’ll need to get control of ‘the people.’ We can’t allow them to do what they want… live their lives the way they want, trying to get what they want by working, saving, building, learning, inventing and so forth.
Prosperity depends on letting ‘the people’ do their thing. But de-growth and poverty depend on stopping them. And that’s what the feds are for. If they’re going to make us poorer, they’ll have to step up to the plate… and whack us with the bat. And they have plenty of models and ‘five year plans’ to guide them. North Korea, for example. Cuba. The Soviet Union. Baltimore.
There’s a reason South Korea is a lot richer than North Korea. The difference is public policy. The latter is a society tightly controlled by a political elite, swinging a big stick. The former is a ‘light touch’ society, with much more individual freedom. So if poverty is the new prosperity, we will have to imitate North Korea, not South Korea. The North Korean deciders know how to stimulate poverty; and they’re good at it. And the North Korean people are model citizens for the Brave New World of planet-savers. No Hyundai for them. No Samsung. No Korean barbecue. No Squid Game. No passports; if they were let out of the country, they may not come back.
Few of them have cars. They eat little… and very little meat. Their clothes are drab. They travel rarely… almost never leaving the country. In short, they use little fossil fuel. The Davos elite applaud their tiny carbon footprints. And some are even virtuous enough to starve to death."
"Lunatics are Leading Us to Death – Gerald Celente"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Renowned trends researcher and publisher of “The Trends Journal,” Gerald Celente, boldly stated in March “World War III has Begun.” Don’t expect that trend to change anytime soon. Celente explains, “Hey, I’m the President of the United States, and I am going to send weapons of death to kill more people. Am I an accessory to the crime? Yes. It’s not a proxy war with the United States and Russia, it’s at war. We have maniacs in charge, and Biden just said we will defend Taiwan. World War III began with the Ukraine war and the United States and NATO giving others what they need to go kill. Now, they are heating it up with China. Anybody with a brain bigger than a pea would say if we go to war with China and Russia, it’s the end of the world. There will be nuclear destruction. That’s anybody with a mind bigger than a pea. The people in charge, they are lunatics, and they are not men. They have cajones smaller than a pea. These are the people leading us to death. These are insane people. They are mentally ill, and they cover it with a good act playing a politician.”
Celente sees a big trend for Russia this year. Celente predicts, “Russia is going to become one of our top trends for 2022. It will have a self-sufficient economy. Go back to Davos, and they want to control all. Russia, because of what the United States, along with 30 other nations, have done to them with sanctions, is going to become a self-sustaining economy. They are pulling out of globalization. They have all the natural resources they need. What’s happening to Russia, and what the world is forcing on them, is going to be a gem for Russia. It’s going to be a fight about over what they can’t get against those who have it.”
The trend on inflation is not good, and Celente says it’s mostly happening because of the current leadership in the Biden/Obama Administration. Celente says, “The whole society is collapsing in front of us. We have freaks and fools ruining our lives. It’s not going to be stag-flation, it’s going to be drag-flation. We are dragging down as inflation skyrockets. We have maniacs in charge. These are people that could not get a real job that are running or ruining our lives. We are going to see a global disaster the likes of which we have never seen before.”
On gold and silver, Celente says, “Gold and silver, right now, the prices are soft. They are going to go down again when interest rates go up because the dollar gets stronger. When will gold and silver go up? Now hear this, when the equity markets crash because that’s when the common person knows how bad it is, and that’s when they start freaking out. When Wall Street crashes, the common people that look up to these clowns will know how bad it is, and that’s when you are going to see precious metals spike.”
In closing, Celente says, “Absolutely, America will be hit by nukes in the upcoming war with Russia. We need peace, and there is no peace movement in America. If we don’t stop it, it’s going to be hell on earth. United we stand, divided we die.”
Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he goes One-on-One with the top trends researcher on the planet, Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal:
"We are Living Through an Economic Crash and Burn Playbook"
"It does not matter where you live or what industry that you are in. This economy has taken its toll on everyone. I am calling us the crash and burn economy where things are bad but it looks like we haven’t seen anything yet. We are basically in the third chapter of this book. So much is about to happen."
"In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves."
Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.
"Requiesce in Pace"
by Brian Maher
"It is Memorial Day… when we pause to honor the nation’s war dead. Most Americans will not, of course. It merely represents a chance to lie flat on a beach… to munch frankfurters… to dream the tall dreams of approaching summer. We will be among them. We will not be planting tiny American flags atop forgotten graves today. We will not be bugling taps. It is unlikely we will thank a veteran for his service - not out of disrespect - but because we scarcely know any.
We nonetheless recall strolling the American military cemetery above Omaha Beach one day… and how it brought us up short. The rows and rows and rows of bleach-white crosses - and an occasional Star of David - seeming to span from horizon to horizon. We wandered among the dead… and listened for their ghostly counsel.
Beneath the rustling breeze, we detected a faint murmur. It seemed to whisper a poem from the First World War: “In Flanders Fields.” From which:
"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead; short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields."
Flanders Field
Standing above Omaha Beach that day, what fetched us was not so much the gravity of those events 78 years distant - but the soul-numbing waste of it all. What great things may have awaited that 21-year-old second lieutenant if a German bullet hadn’t cut him down on June 6, 1944? What did life have in store for that sergeant of the 2nd Ranger Battalion... who never made it up Pointe du Hoc that morning? What about this young paratrooper of the 101st Airborne Division, whose bones lie beneath a shady tree above Omaha Beach?
The American military cemetery above Omaha Beach
What might they have amounted to? Perhaps much. Perhaps nothing whatsoever. But they had lives to live. And every right to live them. Let us also not forget the pulverized and unidentified dead, known only to their Almighty creator. What about the futures they never had?
"For of all sad words of tongue or pen,” lamented poet John Greenleaf Whittier, “the saddest are these: “It might have been.” What might have been... had they lived? Alas, we will never know.
Let us finally spare a thought for the vanquished…Not all the German dead were Nazi hellcats. They were rather conscripts taking orders. Most were broken and wrecked veterans of the Russian front, dispatched to Normandy to recuperate. And not all Germans in Normandy were… Germans. Many were Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, conscripted into German service… and sent to man the Atlantic Wall. Conscripts from Azerbaijan, India, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, Indonesia - and Thailand - were likewise among the “Germans” defending the French coast.
“Germans”
But this is America’s day of remembrance. And so as we conclude this Memorial Day weekend…Let us lower our heads in mournful reflection of America’s martial departed… and what might have been. Requiescant in pace."
"20 U.S. Health Care Statistics That Will Absolutely Astonish You"
by Epic Economist
"The U.S. health care industry has become a massive money-making scam, and in today's video, we are going to show the statistics that prove it. The United States spends more on health care per person than any other country in the entire world, and even though we are the most medicated population on the planet, we are also one of the sickest. Amongst developed countries, we have the worst life expectancy and the highest infant mortality despite having to pay the highest prices for health care services by far. While millions of Americans are drowning in medical debt, big pharmaceutical corporations are recording billions of dollars of profits every year, but the quality of the health care that the U.S. population receives in return is rather quite poor.
Right now, health care bills cause more bankruptcies than anything else does. Millions of people are afraid to go to the hospital because they know that even a short visit could result in a gigantic financial burden that could devastate them for decades. Meanwhile, rates of cancer, heart disease and diabetes continue to rise all over the nation. Considering the gigantic piles of money we shell out for health care, we should have the greatest system in the entire world. But we definitely don't, and this is a major indication that something has gone horribly wrong.
According to Brookings data, spending on health care in the United States has grown steadily over the past two decades, rising from $2,900 per person in 1980 to $11,200 per person in 2020, marking a staggering 290% increase.
With each passing year, health bureaucrats and greedy corporations get increasingly richer with the demise of the U.S. health care system while the rest of us go broke trying to pay for our health care. Over the past three decades, Americans had to face an absurd rise in medical bills and deal with insane levels of medical debt.
According to estimates released by the Kaiser Family Foundation, in 2021 alone, 70% of Americans with medical bills had to lower their spending on food to avoid bankruptcy, while 59% had to dig into their savings, using most or all of it to cover an unexpected health expense, 41% were forced to take a second job to be able to pay their debt, and 37% had to borrow money.
Rather than doing something to address the abuses of the health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations, over the past two decades, U.S. politicians have actually come up with policies that gave these companies even more power. Under the current policies, our health care costs will go up even faster, and the quality of health care services will continue to go down.
Right now, the health care system in the United States is so broken that it probably cannot be repaired. The entire structure needs to be dismantled and completely reinvented if we want to see actual improvement. But considering that the wealthy bureaucrats are pretty comfortable with their billion dollar profits, most of us won't likely see such a change happening in the U.S. health care system in our lifetime."
"We Are in Big Trouble: The Next 30 Days Changes Everything"
"The US is sending weaponry which will escalate the conflict in Euro, Gas prices could reach apocalyptic levels, peace talks are likely doomed to fail, energy prices prohibit mitigation of record temps the time to prepare for the summer from hell is now!"
"NGC 253 is one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, but also one of the dustiest. Dubbed the Silver Coin for its appearance in smalltelescopes, it is more formally known as the Sculptor Galaxy for its location within the boundaries of the southern constellation Sculptor. Discovered in 1783 by mathematician and astronomer Caroline Herschel, the dusty island universe lies a mere 10 million light-years away.
About 70 thousand light-years across, NGC 253, pictured, is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest to our own Local Group of galaxies. In addition to its spiral dust lanes, tendrils of dust seem to be rising from a galactic disk laced with young star clusters and star forming regions in this sharp color image. The high dust content accompanies frantic star formation, earning NGC 253 the designation of a starburst galaxy. NGC 253 is also known to be a strong source of high-energy x-rays and gamma rays, likely due to massive black holes near the galaxy's center. Take a trip through extragalactic space in this short video flyby of NGC 253."
"For many great deeds are accomplished in times of squalid struggle. There is a kind of stubborn, unrecognized courage which in the lowest depths tenaciously resists the pressures of necessity and ill-doing; there are noble and obscure triumphs observed by no one, unacclaimed by any fanfare. Hardship, loneliness, and penury are a battlefield which has its own heroes, sometimes greater than those lauded in history. Strong and rare characters are thus created; poverty nearly always a foster-mother, may become a true mother, distress may be the nursemaid of pride, and misfortune the milk that nourishes great spirits."
"You've undoubtedly heard rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as an analogy for the futility of approving policy tweaks to address systemic crises. I've used the Titanic as an anology to explain the fragility of our financial system and the "glancing blow" of the pandemic.
But there's a powerful analogy you haven't heard before. To understand the analogy, we first need to recap the tragedy's basic set-up.
On April 14, 1912, the liner Titanic, considered unsinkable due to its watertight compartments, struck a glancing blow against a massive iceberg on that moonless, weirdly calm night. In the early hours of April 15, the great ship broke in half and sank, ending the lives of the majority of its passengers and crew. Of the 2,208 passengers and crew onboard, 1,503 perished and 705 survived. The lifeboats had a maximum capacity of 1,178, so some 475 people died unnecessarily. Passengers of the Titanic (Wikipedia)
The initial complacency of the passengers and crew after the collision is another source of analogies relating to humanity's near-infinite capacity for denial. The class structure of the era was enforced by the authorities - the ship's officers. As the situation grew visibly threatening, the First Class passengers were herded into the remaining lifeboats while the steerage/Third Class passengers - many of them immigrants - were mostly kept below decks. Officers were instructed to enforce this class hierarchy with their revolvers.
Two-thirds of all passengers died, but the losses were not evenly distributed: 39% of First Class passengers perished, 58% of Second Class passengers lost their lives and 76% of Third Class passengers did not survive.
Rudimentary calculations by the ship's designer, who was on board to oversee the maiden voyage, revealed the truth to the officers: the ship would sink and there was no way to stop it. The ship was designed to survive four watertight compartments being compromised, and could likely stay afloat if five were opened to the sea, but not if six compartments were flooded. Water would inevitably spill over into adjacent compartments in a domino-like fashion until the ship sank.
What did the authorities do with this knowledge? Stripped of niceties, they passively accepted oblivion as the outcome and devoted their resources to enforcing the class hierarchy and the era's gender chivalry: 80% of male passengers perished, 25% of female passengers lost their lives. The loading of passengers into lifeboats was so poorly managed that only 60% of the lifeboat capacity was filled.
What if the officers had boldly accepted the inevitability of the ship sinking early on and devised a plan to minimize the loss of life? It would not have taken any extraordinary leap of creativity to organize the crew and passenger volunteers to strip the ship of everything that floated - wooden deck chairs, etc. - and lash them together into rafts. Given the calm seas that night and the freezing water, just keeping people above water would have been enough.
Rather than promote the absurd charade that the ship was fine, just fine, when time was of the essence, the authorities could have rounded up the women and children and filled every seat on lifeboats. Of the 1,030 people who could not be placed in a lifeboat, 890 were crew members, including about 25 women. The crew members were almost all in the prime of life. If anyone could survive several hours on a partially-submerged raft, it would have been the crew. (The first rescue ship arrived about two hours after the Titanic sank.)
Would this hurried effort to save everyone on board have succeeded? At a minimum, it would have saved an additional 475 souls via a careful loading of the lifeboats to capacity, and if the makeshift rafts had offered any meaningful flotation at all, many more lives would have been saved. Rather than devote resources to maintaining the pretense of safety and order, what if the ship's leaders had focused their response around answering a simple question: what was needed for people to survive a freezing night once the lifeboats were filled and the ship sank?
I think you see the analogy to the present. Our leadership, such as it is, is devoting resources to maintaining the absurd pretense that everything will magically re-set to September 2019 if we just print enough money and bail out the financial Aristocracy. Whether we realize it or not, we're responding with passive acceptance of oblivion. The economy and social order were precariously fragile before the pandemic, and now the fragilities are unraveling. We need to start thinking beyond pretense and PR."
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "...but only just! A few hours from now, we’ll be burning up the atmosphere in a common commercial jetliner, stomping our filthy carbon footprint all across God’s blue skies. (We reached out to St. Greta Thunberg to see if we might hitch a ride but, alas... there’s not enough room in her holy ark for all the wretched animals in this world.)
Still, we count ourselves among the fortunate, the few. To think that Julius Caesar never dined from a seat back tray table... Mark Antony never joined the mile high club... Cleopatra never got the additional pat-down from leering TSA creeps...
Far greater beings have walked the earth before us... and gazed at the heavens in idle vain. It’s time we check our privilege... and give thanks! Thanks to long-dead fossils and wayward meteors and to sticky tar pits too...Thanks to energy-dense hydrocarbons... and inexorable chemical processes... and the slow march of time...Thanks to heavy sour crude and the light sweet stuff... to oil sands and the fracking revolution and holes drilled deep in the ocean floor... Thanks to glorious, super high-octane jet fuel!
And while we’re at it...Hats off to Colonel Drake and his Titusville gusher... to nodding donkeys and humble derricks... to lonely posts on offshore rigs and patient wives, waiting back home...
Cheers to the brave... the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur... to Charles Lindbergh and Howard Hughes and Amelia Earhart, too... and to all the unnamed pilots who dove to watery graves so that their tearful, dogged colleagues might return to the drawing boards, tinker with the models, streamline their designs, and try, try again...
Thanks to the brainy... the engineers and idiot-savants and all the math whizzes who nutted out the dihedral effect and the lift coefficient and the aspect ratio... and all the other ballistic and aeronautical inputs far beyond our own innumerate grasp.
Thanks to the minds behind radar and GPS and even (yes, even) inflight entertainment...
Praise be to the high and the low, the grease monkeys and air traffic controllers and baggage handlers... the airport janitors and the lounge waitresses too...And to everyone who turns the impossible, the miraculous, the positively stupendous – human flight! – into a banal reality at which the elites of the world so dismissively scoff... we salute you!
Owing to their efforts, and standing on their gigantic shoulders, we embark on an air-bound journey to finally reunite Dear Daughter with her antipodean grandparents... after nearly three irreplaceable years of heartfelt absence. And to those who locked the world down, who kept our kinfolk apart, despite the cumulative efforts of these aforementioned heroes...a pox on all your houses! Which brings us to this week’s feature essay..."
"Libs of Davos"
By Joel Bowman
"In a pop-up city, nestled in the lush countryside of one of the world’s richest countries, your enlightened (yet humble) overlords gathered this week to discuss your future... your children’s future... and the future of the entire planet. Chances are, you’re not going to like what they had to say. But hear them out; it’s for their own good.
Spirited on luxury private jets angel wings, 2,000 of personkind’s finest moral exemplars journeyed to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to engage in an cloistered mass debate over how best to organize the miracle of life here on this precious blue orb.
Among the anointed attendees lurked all the usual perps and meddlers – with names like Bill Gates, George Soros and Henry Kissinger – so beloved by their fellow humans the WEF only needed 5,000 uniformed military personnel, in addition to the local police, plus a no-fly zone manned by Swiss Army fighter jets, to keep them safe from their adoring fans. (Boy oh boy, imagine how many windmills and solar panels it took to power those big strong planes!)
Of course, Big Business was in the house too, just checking if anyone needed a hand in the kitchen and generally helping to guide the world toward the best possible version of itself. Righteously conscious of the widening pay-gap between the corner office and the factory floor, multinational corporations sent 600+ of their highest paid, multi-millionaire CEOs and a couple dozen CFO sidekicks along, presumably to mind that the gap/canyon is properly preserved.
(Something else rings a bell about that year, no? Something about a Knock on Bretton Woods? Hmm... It’ll come to us...)
Your friendly Big Tech invigilators were there, of course... including the CEOs of Wokepedia, Microsoft and Cloudfare, plus schmoozing reps from Meta, IBM and Google, all working in tandem with their toy poodles in the official, accredited media to “deliver the message” from on high. Think of Moses descending from the top of Mt. Sinai, but with updated tablets and a goose stepping platoon of question-free “fact checkers” in tow. (All with an approved list of the same “facts,” of course.)
And how could we forget those with their fingers on the planet’s thermostat, the climate experts, there to help us know what type of bugs to eat, how far we may or may not travel, and whether to do so by scooter, bicycle or rickshaw? No fewer than 42 WEF attendees had the word “sustainability” in their “job” title. Bless them! So much sus, stain and inability to go around!
But let us turn for a moment to the grand poobah of the event, that is, part-time Dr. Evil impersonator and the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Martin Schwab. Here he is, somewhat behind the inflation curve...
Whoopsie! Wrong photo. Apologies to Mike Myers, who is no evil genius; merely a genius actor. Herr Schwab, on the other hand, is the real deal! Excuse us a second while we find another snap...
“But Joel,” we hear you protest, “isn’t Klauss Schwab the son of Eugen Schwab, managing director of the Zurich-based engineering firm Escher Wyss, which supplied armaments to the Nazis during WWII, including flame throwers, gas powered turbines, compressors and propellers?” (Yes - SOURCE)
“And wasn’t the firm ‘an integral part of researching and developing turbines to produce heavy water for the creation of nuclear weapons for the Nazis?’” (Correct - SOURCE)
“And, ahem, not to be a stickler here, but didn’t that very same company, under Klauss’s father’s directorship, use slave labor - Jewish, Russian, Gypsie, homosexual, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish and POWs - to man its factory floors?” (Aaaand... yep again - SOURCE)
“To think they might have even toiled for less than a living wage (gasp!)... you know, before they were tossed into the pit...”
Be that as it may, gentle, well-researched reader, we should not rush to judge a man by the actions of his father, but rather let him speak for himself. Besides, when it comes to using forced labor camps to supply genocidal dictators with critical components for their nuclear weapons programs, who among us has not erred? Eh? Eh? Amiright?
So let’s hear from Herr Schwab Jr., in his own words. Here he is, talking up the “penetrative power” exerted by graduates of his visionary young leader’s program, back in 2017. “I have to say, when I mention now names, like Mrs. (Angela) Merkel and even Vladimir Putin, and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum. But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like Prime Minister [Justin] Trudeau... We penetrate the cabinet. So yesterday I was at a reception for Prime Minister Trudeau and I know that half of his cabinet, or even more than half of his cabinet, are actually Young Global Leaders.”
Now you see in what capable hands your future rests, you can sleep with both eyes open. And since there’s nothing else to comment on there, nothing notable or out of the ordinary or of obvious concern, let’s move right along, to Herr Schwab’s address at this year’s billionaire convocation... “The future will be built by us,” he rallied his heavily-guarded coven of insiders and political operatives, “by a powerful community as you here in this room.”
Who are these other attendees, cackling around the cauldron? Where is the diversity of opinion? The champions of the working man? The voice of the downtrodden? The people who don’t “have the means,” as Darth Schwab so blithely puts it... or rather, who are presently having the means stolen right out from under them through inflation, taxation and outright confiscation? Where are the dissenters, the gadflies, those speaking truth to power?
Alas, the much-teased mass debate was somewhat anticlimactic. Turns out, the World Economic Forum at Davos is nothing if not committed to a diversity of people propagating identical ideas. As such, pretty much everyone present stood in firm agreement on what needs to be done (de-carbonize, de-capitalize, de-colonize, de-carnivorize), when it needs to be done (“we’ve got 12 years to save the planet”)... and to whom it ought promptly to be done (you).
Here’s Inconvenient Al Gore, boasting of having personally trained 50,000 “climate activists” who, after three full days of on-the-job training, have “all the information they need about the climate crisis” to go out and “implement solutions.” - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/
Gee whizz... from tens of thousands of pimply agitators bringing rush hour traffic to a standstill around the world with their “communication skills,” to the Climate TRACE program, where a coalition of artificial intelligence companies, universities and NGOs track real time atmospheric carbon emissions; where they’re coming from, in what amounts and from which sources... are you feeling cleaner and greener yet?
Readers who find themselves inconveniently composed of 18% carbon (and 65% oxygen, the other offending element in the planetary hemlock that is CO2), might fairly be wondering what, exactly, a “carbon free” world might look like. The curious mind wonders... Are we the carbon they wish to eliminate?
If so, could the solution be as easy and relatively painless as, say, sawing off a superfluous limb? Hmm... And what if you happen to be composed of cisgender, white, male carbon? Will that cost you two limbs? Four? How else to level the playing field?
Fear not, dear reader! It’s not just Big Al and his 50,000 activists on the job. No siree Bob! From the big picture to individual invigilation, when it comes to tracking, tracing and monitoring your every move, to “measuring and managing” the problem, you can be sure these tireless busybodies have their eyes on you, too. Here’s Alibaba president, J. Michael Evans, not even bothering to hide what’s in store for his “users”...
“But… but… but… Creepy Uncle Evans. What if we don’t want your present.” Stay tuned, indeed!
But wait... if they aim to track where you travel, how you travel, what you eat, what you consume... what else about your private life might they want to keep a big, brotherly eye on? Enter the world’s most infamous veterinary scientist, the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, with his next great idea: ingestible chips... (NOT Doritos.)
This is Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla explaining Pfizer's new tech at Davos : "ingestible pills" - a pill with a tiny chip that sends a signal to relevant authorities when the pharmaceutical has been digested. "Imagine the compliance," he says #NWO##Davos
“Imagine the compliance.” Uh, no thanks. As the late, great, late-20th century philosopher, Kurt Cobain, cautioned in his delightful teen ditty, Territorial Pissings: “Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.” Psst… pass it on."
"The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are."
"Author and raconteur James Howard Kunstler joins me for a wide-ranging talk about all things Bond Villain in this week’s episode. Jim’s unique perspective on the world is a welcome one as we try to piece together just how cartoonishly evil these Davos types are."
"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to
TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing."
- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"
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"You cannot kill me here. Bring your soldiers, your death, your disease, your collapsed economy because it doesn't matter, I have nothing left to lose and you cannot kill me here. Bring the tears of orphans and the wails of a mother's loss, bring your Jesus on a cross, bring your hate and bitterness and long working hours, bring your empty wallets and love long since gone but you cannot kill me here. Bring your sneers, your snide remarks and friendships never felt, your letters never sent, your kisses never kissed, cigarettes smoked to the bone and cancer killing fears but you cannot kill me here. For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. Because you cannot kill me here."
