Saturday, July 23, 2022

"It Is Only a Nano-second to Armageddon"

"It Is Only a Nano-second to Armageddon"
by Paul Craig Roberts

The U.S. Government’s “Nuclear Primacy” meta-strategy says that there are “acceptable” levels of destruction of America in a nuclear war against Russia and/or China, so long as America “comes out on top” globally, at the end.

Brian Berletic walks us through the Rand Corporation’s plan for the Pentagon to attack China during the narrow window until 2025 and perhaps 2030 (3 to 8 years from today) when the US is assumed to still have superiority capable of winning a war that is “unlikely” (undefined and little more than a wishful assumption) to go nuclear. In other words, the assumption on which Washington’s planned military attack on China rests is that China will accept defeat rather than use nuclear weapons. You can read Berletic’s analysis here.

Would a sane government start a war on such a risky assumption?

There are two other highly risky assumptions in the Pentagon’s war plans. One is that the US can dominate the seas from which via airplanes or missiles the US can cause destruction to Chinese industry and social infrastructure. Apparently no attention has been paid to long-range Chinese missiles that make US carrier fleets obsolete.

The other risky assumption is that Russia stays out of it. Considering the confusion in the Kremlin, the inability of the Russian government to give up hope of peaceful cooperation with the West, and the inability of the Kremlin to regard the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony over the world as anything but a fantasy, and most certainly not an operative doctrine, it is possible that the Kremlin would strand aside and watch a US/China war. The Kremlin misses many opportunities, but it is difficult to believe that Putin would be so stupid as to not gang up with China on the US. In which case the US is history. 

As for the Pentagon’s concern for Americans in the event that the assumption that Washington can conquer China without nuclear weapons being used is mistaken, if such weapons are employed, “the U.S. Government’s ‘Nuclear Primacy’ meta-strategy says that there are ‘acceptable’ levels of destruction of America in a nuclear war against Russia and/or China, so long as America ‘comes out on top’ globally.” The Pentagon’s doctrine doesn’t say how many American cities and how many millions of Americans are among the “acceptable levels of destruction.” But it is enough to show that Americans are regarded as cannon fodder by their rulers.

You see, the only importance in the ruling neoconservative doctrine is US hegemony, not your life. For the neocons, as long as America rules over a wasteland devoid of life, we have won. Neocons are truly insane people, and they are in control of US foreign and military policy.

That should scare you and wake you up. But it won’t. The young can’t stop scrolling their cell phones long enough to have any idea of the reality around them. They already live in a virtual world, disconnected from all reality. Older Americans say they have heard fears of nuclear war all their lives and it is never going to happen because there can be no winners. This is a very unsophisticated understanding, especially in the face of a US war doctrine that says Washington can win a nuclear war as long as it doesn’t wait beyond 2025 or 2030.

Eric Zuesse, stimulated by Berletic, writes that Washington intends to conquer both China and Russia. The opening battlefield of WW III is the war Washington arranged in Ukraine. There is no doubt in my mind that the Russian military is very formidable and is capable of sweeping through NATO in an instant. The problem for Russia is in the Kremlin where hesitancy and confusion rule. The Kremlin is unable to get its mind around the fact that Washington is insane. Putin actually thought that Washington would accept Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine as it was limited to the protection of the Donbass Russians. Putin and his foreign minister are so insouciant that they believed Washington would allow them to conduct a limited operation confined to cleansing Donbass of Ukrainian Nazis.

How does the world’s most predominant military power make such a mistake? The only answer I can come up with is that America’s brainwashing of the Russian intellectual class during the Yeltsin years has made Russian leadership, deaf, dumb, and blind. One is tempted to add stupid. Russia’s leaders - Putin, Lavrov - correctly describe the situation, but they cannot bring themselves to do anything about it. Talk is plentiful but action is rare. Apparently the Kremlin is going to continue to sell the energy to NATO countries so that NATO can continue the war on Russia. To paraphrase Alain de Lille in the 11th century, not sovereignty now, but money is all. This appears to hold for Russia.

Zuesse who is as as honest as a leftlwinger can be, is not always reliable. The left have their own myths about Reagan, and here is Zuesse’s statement of one of them: “I have documented that the plan by America’s Government was instead to fool Russia’s Government [Gorbachev] to believe that America ended the Cold War on our side at the same time when Russia ended its side of the Cold War in 1991, but that the U.S. Government was actually planning instead to surround Russia by increasing NATO, right up to Russia’s borders."

I suppose the truth of Zuesse’s statement depends on who is the US government. Is it the President or the neoconservatives and the military/security complex? If the government is the President as the representative of the people, I know for a fact that President Reagan’s intent was to end, not win, the cold war.

He told us this over and over. He formed a top secret presidential committee with authority over the CIA in order to have independent opinion of the CIA’s assertion that the US would lose an arms race if used to bring Russia with her broken economy to the negotiating table. Reagan’s plan was that once his supply-side policy had eliminated America’s stagflation, America’s restored economy would bury Russia’s broken and unrepairable economy in an arms race. The point of the threatened arms race was to bring Gorbachev to the negotiation table to end the Cold War, not to win an arms race.

We investigated the CIA’s documents and reported to President Reagan that it was a case of the CIA protecting its budget and its power. If Reagan dismantled the Cold War, without an enemy the CIA’a budget along with that of the Military Security Complex’s budget would be defenseless at their high levels.

Ronald Reagan was an outsider to the Republican Establishment, represented at that time by George H. W. Bush, vice president and former director of the CIA. Reagan was seen as a challenge to the Republican Establishment’s control of the Republican Party. Eight years of Reagan followed by eight years of Jack Kemp meant the end of the Republican Establishment that serves organized interests. Political parties are concerned with power and control, not with the national interest. Here was Reagan, and his few supporters in his administration, challenging the power and profit of the vested interests for the sake of world peace.

The American media, whores to the CIA, started on us. But it didn’t fit. The narrative wasn’t yet constructed. James Baker, the principal operative of George H. W. Bush, admitted that he promised Gorbachev no movement east of NATO. But there is no written signed document, so the story was changed by later Washington administrations.

Zuesse misses the true story, because he succumbs to ideology and is unable to understand that Reagan, like Trump, was an outsider who brought hope that the political system could be restored to the people’s control. The American media and the American leftwing made sure that this did not happen. Consequently, we now face nuclear Armageddon. It is only a tick away unless Putin decides to surrender.

The US today is much more divided than in 1860. The Democrats regard white people as racists and barriers to social justice and the rule of the oppressed blacks and sexually perverse. Throughout the media and educational systems white Americans are demonized more than Jews were in Nazi Germany. Once white Americans become a minority, which is the principle goal of the Democrat Party, their fate will be the same as the French in The Camp of the Saints. The Republicans are helpless. Their goal is to make America great again, which plays into the neoconservatives’ agenda of US hegemony.

To deal with the challenges America faces requires awareness of the facts, but facts are no longer politically correct. They don’t fit the narratives and, therefore, are untrue and dismissed as misinformation. In my lifetime I have watched my country descend into degeneracy, ignorance, and evil. The nation into which I was born does not exist except as a geographical location."

We're just begging for what's coming, and we'll get it, too...

Friday, July 22, 2022

Musical Interlude: Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"

Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"

And don't you ever give up!

"Blackstone Prepares To Take Your Home; Build A Financial War Chest Now; Distressed Real Estate"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/22/22:
"Blackstone Prepares To Take Your Home; 
Build A Financial War Chest Now; Distressed Real Estate"
Comments here:

"Brace For Energy Supply Shortages And Chaos In The Streets! Prices Being Pushed Higher On Purpose"

Full screen recommended.
"Brace For Energy Supply Shortages And Chaos In The Streets!
 Prices Being Pushed Higher On Purpose"
by Epic Economist

"Energy supply shortages are getting worse by the day. The American energy crisis has entered an ominous new chapter. People often say that “energy is the economy,” and in many aspects that statement is true. Large nations with a very high level of economic activity like the United States tend to use a great deal of energy, and as the population continues to expand, so does the demand for more energy supplies. However, production is struggling to keep up with the growing demand, and now we’re being warned that our major energy supply chains, which are responsible for the generation of power, as well as the processing of oil-based products such as diesel and gasoline, and the extraction of natural gas, are reaching a breaking point where it won’t be possible to produce enough energy supplies for everyone. And the consequences of this impending energy supply chain breakdown are going to be catastrophic for our country.

Last month, the national average price of gasoline surpassed $5 a gallon for the first time. Since then prices edged down by a few cents, but remain well above the historic norm. The massive and sudden increase in gas prices that has been weighing on Americans’ budgets is a result of a much deeper problem: the country is facing a huge shortage of refining capacity. Industry executives have said earlier this year that refineries were nearing peak production and that this issue wouldn’t be resolved any time soon.

In total, the U.S. permanently lost 5 facilities and another 14 remain closed for maintenance and other internal issues. The vast majority of open refineries are extremely overwhelmed right now. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), they are already operating above 90% capacity and are expected to run at 95% for the rest of the summer.While Americans mostly noticed the sky-high prices for gasoline, the lesser-known increase in diesel costs is particularly concerning for our economy. In fact, industry executives say that the shortage of diesel and elevated prices could be what drive the U.S. economy into a deep recession.

But that’s not all of it. The other side of the energy supply chain is also facing nightmarish disruptions. A brutal continental heatwave is pushing the price of natural gas to levels never before seen. In the past month alone, natural-gas futures jumped by 48%. This past Wednesday alone, prices surged by 10%, to $8.007 per million British thermal units (btu).

The heat is also testing aging power grids, as consumers turn up their air conditioners and use record amounts of electricity. According to Daniel Turner, the founder, and executive director at Power the Future, the whole country is at risk. "I think the entire country is incredibly vulnerable because the entire country is facing a huge energy shortage and I don’t think there is any place that is truly safe," he said during an interview with Fox News. The blackouts can have disastrous consequences, as seen in the 2021 Texas winter power crisis when millions of people were left without energy and access to basic supplies for weeks.

The truth is that the average American is going to be the hardest hit by these energy supply shortages. If we are at or near peak energy production right now, what will our country look like once we get past the peak and energy production actually starts steadily declining? If you think that gasoline, diesel, and electricity prices are expensive now, just wait until we get to that stage. By the end of the summer, everyone will understand that we truly have entered a nightmare with no end in sight. The energy supply chain collapse has just begun, and things are about to get even worse from this point on."

"Let Them Eat Bugs"

"Let Them Eat Bugs"
One step before cannibalism…
by Jeffrey Tucker

"A study earlier this year from four prestigious institutions proclaimed that you should eat bugs and spiders. And not only that. The study - conducted by BI Norwegian Business School (BI), Chuo University, Miyagi University and Oxford University - also said that the way to convince people to do this is to have celebrities do it on YouTube videos. Like clockwork, they are suddenly everywhere. You are welcome to look them up. I personally find them revolting. As in they make me want to revolt. These are the same folks who pushed for lockdowns, masking, jabs and a war with Russia. Now they say we have to get used to eating bugs because all the other policies they pushed have dramatically increased world hunger. Indeed, it is reaching a crisis point. For many people, bug eating will soon be the only answer.

One Step Before Cannibalism: I’m going to take it as a given that the evolution of society selected against bug eating. It is not something people prefer over, for example, eating chicken, fish, beef and vegetables. I would further postulate that most people, in general, would not eat bugs unless they had to. I’m sure there are many venerable bureaucrats at the UN who would dispute the above, but I don’t care.

There is a name for bug eating: entomophagy. Sounds fancy, but ultimately it means living as if there is a famine going on. It is one step before cannibalism and finally eating tree bark. Sometimes it happens. We call those periods of history deeply tragic. It’s not what we want. The difference this time is that entomophagy is being pushed by top Hollywood influencers. When it arrives, the famine will be celebrated on social media.

Food Is Already Scarce: Already you have probably observed the changes that are happening. Restaurants are worried about their profit margins and figuring out ways to work around the squeeze. They are serving mounds of bread and pasta and ever less meat. Even vegetable portions are getting skimpy. They can’t raise prices the way gas stations can. This is because they have a regular clientele that watches menu prices very carefully. Even a 50-cent increase can prompt consumer protest. Then customers end up tipping less, which is a huge disaster for the server staff that make far less than the minimum wage. Then the server staff quits at a time of huge shortage. As a result, many are trying to find other ways.

In addition, we are hip-deep into the substitution phase of the great inflation. The pricier items at the store are selling much less while the cheaper stuff is selling well. Out with steaks and in with ground beef. Chicken is the going thing and not the best cuts but the cheap ones.

Another trend: home gardening. People very naively imagine that they will beat inflation by growing their own food. What they discover is that this takes more time than one might expect, and it costs too: the tools, fertilizer, water, nets to keep the bugs off and so on. It all adds up. And yes, there are moments of great delight but it hardly makes a dent in the grocery bill.

A Hungry World: Meanwhile, people in the First World forget how lucky they really are. Many parts of the world today are facing true food and health crises combined. The world’s largest and most established humanitarian organization to deliver food has sounded the alarm: The world faces a global hunger crisis of unprecedented proportions.

In just two years, the number of people facing, or at risk of, acute food insecurity increased from 135 million in 53 countries pre-pandemic to 345 million in 82 countries today… We are at a critical crossroads. We need to rise to the challenge of meeting people's immediate food needs at scale, while at the same time supporting programs that build long-term resilience at scale. The alternative is hunger on a catastrophic scale.

We’ll Be Paying the Price for Years: Of course, the elites want to blame climate change and war but the real culprit traces to lockdowns and the supply chains that were shattered as a result of government actions. What a disaster. We’ll be paying for many years to come for this mess. And while it is easy to dismiss problems around the world as their issues and not ours, I wouldn’t be so confident. The food supply in the U.S. has been profoundly affected by the labor shortage, regulatory overreach, inflation and massive problems in the transportation sector.

Federal crop insurance makes its own contribution to lessening supply. This is a program that pays farmers whether they produce or not. It was designed to mitigate against weather risk but it can also create a situation in which it is more profitable to take fields out of production rather than deal with the soaring costs of fertilizer, gas and labor.

There are zero attempts right now in legislation to do anything about this. In addition, there are massive restrictions written in legislation that prevent private farmers and ranchers from selling their products commercially unless they use a federal government-approved meat processor. This is simply incredible. Thomas Massie of Kentucky (one of the few really brilliant statesmen in the U.S. today) has tried to introduce legislation to fix this but it is getting no traction.

Get a Cow: You don’t need this advice because you already know it: It’s a good time to get a large freezer and stock up. Many of my own friends have done this. They are also finding ways around the crazy regulations. This is how people get when they start to fear the future. No regulation will stand between us and the desire to eat.

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room: whether and to what extent all of this is deliberate. I resist conspiracy theories but it is undeniable that many of the elite members of the World Economic Forum believe that the world is overpopulated. And not by just a little but by billions.

Is it possible that this food crisis is all being engineered to reduce global population? Maybe. We know that Bill Gates has long championed population reduction. He has had his way on everything else, so why not this? One does get the feeling these days of a civilization being wrecked by force. Our longevity has been falling for some 10 years, with life spans shrinking for the first time in centuries. This is a terrifying reality. Combine that with an overall health crisis and a food crisis that seems certain to get worse.

Two nights ago, I watched the movie "Mr. Jones" that covers the Stalin-created famine in Ukraine. Utterly terrifying. It can happen. Famines are nearly always created by governments. When they come, there is no way out. Not even the bug population is large enough to meet our food needs.

It’s an unjust smear of Marie Antoinette that she ever said, “Let them eat cake.” But there is no question that many elites and Hollywood celebs are now telling a world dealing with a serious food crisis: “Let them eat bugs.”

Canadian Prepper, "Look Out: The Next Phase Is Going Be Much Worse"

Canadian Prepper, 7/22/22:
"Look Out: The Next Phase Is Going Be Much Worse"
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "Slave Planet: People Are Continuing To Take On More Debt As Inflation Surges"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 7/22/22:
"Slave Planet: People Are Continuing 
To Take On More Debt As Inflation Surges"
Comments here:

"Are You Prepared For The Next Avalanche?"

"Are You Prepared For The Next Avalanche?"
by Jim Rickards

"I began studying complexity theory as a consequence of my involvement with Long Term Capital Management, LTCM, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998 after derivatives trading strategies went catastrophically wrong. After the collapse and subsequent rescue, I chatted with one of the LTCM partners who ran the firm about what went wrong. I was familiar with markets and trading strategies, but I was not expert in the highly technical applied mathematics that the management committee used to devise its strategies.

The partner I was chatting with was a true quant with advanced degrees in mathematics. I asked him how all of our trading strategies could have lost money at the same time, despite the fact that they had been uncorrelated in the past. He shook his head and said, “What happened was just incredible. It was a seven-standard deviation event.”

In statistics, a standard deviation is symbolized by the Greek letter sigma. Even non-statisticians would understand that a seven-sigma event sounds rare. But I wanted to know how rare. I consulted some technical sources and discovered that for a daily occurrence, a seven-sigma event would happen less than once every billion years, or less than five times in the history of the planet Earth!

I knew that my quant partner had the math right. But it was obvious to me his model must be wrong. Extreme events had occurred in markets in 1987, 1994 and then 1998. They happened every four years or so. Any model that tried to explain an event as something that happened every billion years could not possibly be the right model for understanding the dynamics of something that occurred every four years.

From this encounter, I set out on a 10-year odyssey to discover the proper analytic method for understanding risk in capital markets. I studied physics, network theory, graph theory, complexity theory, applied mathematics and many other fields that connected in various ways to the actual workings of capital markets.

In time, I saw that capital markets were complex systems and that complexity theory, a branch of physics, was the best way to understand and manage risk and to foresee market collapses. I began to lecture and write on the topic including several papers that were published in technical journals. I built systems with partners that used complexity theory and related disciplines to identify geopolitical events in capital markets before those events were known to the public.

Finally I received invitations to teach and consult at some of the leading universities and laboratories involved in complexity theory including Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, The Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Applied Physics Laboratory. In these venues, I continually promoted the idea of interdisciplinary efforts to solve the deepest mysteries of capital markets. I knew that no one field had all the answers, but a combination of expertise from various fields might produce insights and methods that could advance the art of financial risk management.

I proposed that a team consisting of physicists, computer modelers, applied mathematicians, lawyers, economists, sociologists and others could refine the theoretical models that I and others had developed and could suggest a program of empirical research and experimentation to validate the theory. These proposals were greeted warmly by the scientists with whom I worked, but were rejected and ignored by the economists. Invariably top economists took the view that they had nothing to learn from physics and that the standard economic and finance models were a good explanation of securities prices and capital markets dynamics.

Whenever prominent economists were confronted with a “seven-sigma” market event they dismissed it as an “outlier” and tweaked their models slightly without ever recognizing the fact that their models didn’t work at all.

Physicists had a different problem. They wanted to collaborate on economic problems, but were not financial markets experts themselves. They had spent their careers learning theoretical physics and did not necessarily know more about capital markets than the everyday investor worried about her 401(k) plan.

I was an unusual participant in the field. Most of my collaborators were physicists trying to learn capital markets. I was a capital markets expert who had taken the time to learn physics. One of the team leaders at Los Alamos, an MIT-educated computer science engineer named David Izraelevitz, told me in 2009 that I was the only person he knew of with a deep working knowledge of finance and physics combined in a way that might unlock the mysteries of what caused financial markets to collapse.

I took this as a great compliment. I knew that a fully developed and tested theory of financial complexity would take decades to create with contributions from many researchers, but I was gratified to know that I was making a contribution to the field with one foot in the physics lab and one foot planted firmly on Wall Street. My work on this project, and that of others, continues to this day. This approach stands in stark contrast to the standard equilibrium models the Fed and other mainstream analysts use.

An equilibrium model like the Fed uses in its economic forecasting basically says that the world runs like a clock. Every now and then, according to the model, there’s some perturbation, and the system gets knocked out of equilibrium. Then all you do is you apply policy and push it back into equilibrium. It’s like winding up the clock again. That’s a shorthand way of describing what an equilibrium model is. Unfortunately, that is not the way the world works. Complexity theory and complex dynamics explain it much better.

Distress in one area of financial markets spread to other seemingly unrelated areas of financial markets. In fact, the mathematics of  are exactly like the mathematics of disease or virus contagion. That’s why they call it contagion. One resembles the other in terms of how it’s spread.

What are examples of the complexity? One of my favorites is what I call the avalanche and the snowflake. It’s a metaphor for the way the science actually works but I should be clear, they’re not just metaphors. The science, the mathematics and the dynamics are actually the same as those that exist in financial markets.

Imagine you’re on a mountainside. You can see a snowpack building up on the ridgeline while it continues snowing. You can tell just by looking at the scene that there’s danger of an avalanche. You see a snowflake fall from the sky onto the snowpack. It disturbs a few other snowflakes that lay there. Then the snow starts to spread… then it starts to slide… then it gains momentum until, finally, it comes loose and the whole mountain comes down and buries the village.

Some people refer to these snowflakes as “black swans,” because they are unexpected and come by surprise. But they’re actually not a surprise if you understand the system’s dynamics and can estimate the system scale.

Question: Whom do you blame? Do you blame the snowflake, or do you blame the unstable pack of snow? I say the snowflake’s irrelevant. If it wasn’t one snowflake that caused the avalanche, it could have been the one before or the one after or the one tomorrow. The instability of the system as a whole was a problem. So when I think about the risks in the financial system, I don’t focus on the “snowflake” that will cause problems. The trigger doesn’t matter. In the end, it’s not about the snowflakes; it’s about the initial critical-state conditions that allow the possibility of a chain reaction or avalanche. Are you prepared for the next avalanche?"

"Your Neighbor… the Sex Offender"

"The Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW) is an unprecedented public safety resource that provides the public with access to sex offender data nationwide. NSOPW is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Justice and state, territorial and tribal governments, working together for the safety of adults and children."

"Your Neighbor… the Sex Offender"
"This is the national sex offender registry. All you have to do is enter your address and search radius. There are 23 registered perverts within 2 miles of my home! Bastards! The site shows pictures of these monsters and their address. Sure, some of them look like creepy thugs. But, some look like normal people, like your neighbor, or this perv below - a teacher! America just may be the most perverse country in human history. How many are in your neighborhood?"
"Middle School Teacher Comes to Meet I4 Y/O at 2 AM,
Meets Military Dad Instead"
Hat tip to Stucky at The Burning Platform for this material.

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Separated by about 14 degrees (28 Full Moons) in planet Earth's sky, spiral galaxies M31 at left, and M33 are both large members of the Local Group, along with our own Milky Way galaxy. This narrow- and wide-angle, multi-camera composite finds details of spiral structure in both, while the massive neighboring galaxies seem to be balanced in starry fields either side of bright Mirach, beta star in the constellation Andromeda. Mirach is just 200 light-years from the Sun. But M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is really 2.5 million light-years distant and M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, is also about 3 million light years away.
Although they look far apart, M31 and M33 are engaged in a gravitational struggle. In fact, radio astronomers have found indications of a bridge of neutral hydrogen gas that could connect the two, evidence of a closer encounter in the past. Based on measurements, gravitational simulations currently predict that the Milky Way, M31, and M33 will all undergo mutual close encounters and potentially mergers, billions of years in the future.”
"Everything passes away- suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes towards the stars? Why?"
- Mikhail Bulgakov, "The White Guard"

"Try?"

- Steve Jobs

"Try? What is try? Do or do not do."
- Yoda

The Poet: Neil Gaiman, "What You Need To Be Warm "

"What You Need To Be Warm"
by Neil Gaiman

 "A baked potato of a winters night to wrap
your hands around or burn your mouth.
A blanket knitted by your mother's cunning fingers.
Or your grandmother's.

A smile, a touch, trust, as you walk in from the snow
or return to it, the tips of your ears pricked pink and frozen.
The tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house.

To surface from dreams in a bed,
burrowed beneath blankets and comforters,
the change of state from cold to warm is all that matters, and you think
just one more minute snuggled here before you face the chill. Just one.

Places we slept as children: they warm us in the memory.
We travel to an inside from the outside.
To the orange flames of the fireplace
or the wood burning in the stove.

Breath-ice on the inside of windows,
to be scratched off with a fingernail, melted with a whole hand.
Frost on the ground that stays in the shadows, waiting for us.
Wear a scarf. Wear a coat. Wear a sweater.
Wear socks. Wear thick gloves.

An infant as she sleeps between us. 
A tumble of dogs, a kindle of cats and kittens.
Come inside. You're safe now.

A kettle boiling at the stove. 
Your family or friends are there.
They smile.
Cocoa or chocolate, tea or coffee,
soup or toddy, what you know you need.
A heat exchange, they give it to you, 
you take the mug and start to thaw.

While outside, for some of us, the journey began
as we walked away from our grandparentshouses
away from the places we knew as children:
changes of state and state and state,
to stumble across a stony desert, or to brave the deep waters,
while food and friends, home, a bed, 
even a blanket become just memories.

Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,
to hold out a badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, 
to say we have the right to be here,
to make us warm in the coldest season.
You have the right to be here. "

- Neil Gaiman
"Compassion is not at all weak. It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. To develop this mind state of compassion... is to learn to live, as the Buddha put it, with sympathy for all living beings, without exception."
- Sharon Salzberg

"There Was A Tale He Had Read Once..."

“There was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries. The story had never made sense to him as a boy. It did now.”
- Neil Gaiman

"We Appear To Be Very Close To Peak Global Oil Production, And That Has Enormous Implications For The Entire Global Economy"

"We Appear To Be Very Close To Peak Global Oil Production,
And That Has Enormous Implications For The Entire Global Economy"
by Michael Snyder

"What do you think is going to happen when we get to a point where the world simply cannot produce any more oil than it is already producing? It is often said that “energy is the economy”, and to a large degree that is true. Very wealthy nations with large GDPs tend to use a great deal of energy, while very poor nations with small GDPs tend to use a lot less energy. Just about every form of economic activity requires energy, and so those countries that have a high level of economic activity require more of it. Of course we live at a time when the total population of the world has been steadily increasing and global demand for energy has soared to unprecedented heights. Production has struggled to keep up with demand, and now it appears that we will soon reach a point where we are simply not able to produce enough for everyone.

The “green revolution” was supposed to rescue us from this fate, but the “green revolution” has failed miserably. Just look at Europe. They told us that they were shifting to “green energy”, but they just kept becoming more dependent on Russian natural gas instead. Thanks to the war in Ukraine, much of the population of Europe could get extremely cold this winter. Despite all of the efforts to push us toward “green energy”, our world is powered by traditional forms of energy and that will continue to be the case for the foreseeable future. And the most important form of traditional energy that we rely on is oil.

Today, there are just three countries that collectively produce close to half of the total global supply of oil…"Despite widespread talk about peak oil demand, the truth is that, for now at least, consumption keeps growing. The world relies heavily on three nations for crude: the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia. Together, they account for nearly 45% of global total oil supply."

Everyone has always assumed that Saudi Arabia could produce a lot more oil per day than it is currently producing, but it turns out that was not true at all…"During US President Joseph Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia, the world was so focused on how Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would respond to his plea to pump more oil immediately that it missed a bombshell: the level at which Saudi oil production will peak. It’s a lot lower than many anticipated. It’s lower than the Saudis have ever intimated. And with the world still hungry for fossil fuels, it spells long-term trouble for the global economy."

Oh yeah, that definitely means big trouble for the global economy. The Saudis just admitted that “maximum capacity” is 13 million barrels a day, and that figure shocked just about everyone…"For years, Saudi oil ministers and royals have sidestepped one of the most important questions the energy market faces: What is the long-term upper limit of the kingdom’s oilfields? The guesstimate was that they could always pump more, and for longer; if the Saudis knew the answer, they kept it secret. And then, almost casually on Saturday, Prince Mohammed broke the news, revealing that the ultimate maximum capacity is 13 million barrels a day."

If the Saudis can’t do it, where will we turn for additional capacity? We could always try to do more drilling here in the United States, but the truth is that conventional oil production in the U.S. peaked long ago. In a desperate attempt to become less dependent on foreign oil we ramped up unconventional oil production, and that created a “mini-boom” for a time…"Many early peak oil analysts predicted that the maximum rate of oil production would be achieved in the 2005-to-2010 timeframe, after which supplies would decline minimally at first, then more rapidly, causing prices to skyrocket and the economy to crash.

Those forecasters were partly right and partly wrong. Conventional oil production did plateau starting in 2005, and oil prices soared in 2007, helping trigger the Great Recession. Afterward, however, there was strong growth in production of unconventional oil from deepwater wells and Canadian oil sands, and especially from tight oil (also referred to as shale oil) extracted by horizontal drilling and fracking. The US, whose petroleum production rate had been generally declining since the early 1970s, hit new all-time highs as tight oil gushed from North Dakota and Texas."

But now we are reaching the limits as far as what we can do with unconventional production. It is becoming increasingly difficult and increasingly expensive to get oil out of the ground, and that is a huge problem. Cheap oil fueled our economic boom times for many years, but now those days are over.

As for Russian oil production, there is so much that we don’t know. But I did find it alarming when I read that oil shipments to China and India are way down…"There are tentative signs that Russia’s diversion of crude oil to Asia from long-time European customers is faltering. Shipments to China and India are down by almost 30% from their post-invasion peak."

And the Russians have told us that they expect oil production to decline “by as much as 17% in 2022”…"Russia may see its oil production fall by as much as 17% in 2022, an economy ministry’s document seen by Reuters showed on Wednesday, as the country struggles with Western sanctions. The United States has banned Russian oil imports, while Western sanctions against Russian banks and vessels had crippled the oil trade, one of Moscow’s key sources of revenue. The European Union is also considering fully banning Russian oil."

Global supplies of oil have been getting tighter and tighter, and there have been stretches this year when daily global consumption of oil has exceeded daily global production of oil. If we are at or near peak global oil production right now, what will our world look like once we get past the peak and global oil production actually starts steadily declining? If you think that gasoline prices are bad now, just wait until we get to that stage.

Plus, there is the potential that a major war in the Middle East could erupt at any time. Once that happens, the price of oil will go completely nuts.

A lot of people out there seem to think that we will have some sort of an “economic collapse”, but afterwards we will rebuild and life will go back to normal. That is not what we are facing. What we are facing is literally the collapse of everything. We are running out of energy. We are running out of topsoil. We are running out of clean water. And we are already witnessing mass extinctions all over the planet.

There is something that I have been saying a lot lately, and I am going to say it again. The clock is ticking for humanity. Decades of incredibly foolish decisions have brought us to the brink of a planetary nightmare, and there isn’t going to be any easy way out of this mess."

The Daily "Near You?"

Keller, Texas, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"I Asked For, I Was Given..."

“In my youth I respected the world and life,
I needed nothing but peace of heart;
And yet I changed despite myself and believed in Iktomi's lies.
He seemed to know all the truth, he promised to make me happy.

He made me ask Wakan Tanka for wealth, that I might have power;
I was given poverty, that I might find my inner strength.

I asked for fame, so others would know me;
I was given obscurity, that I might know myself.

I asked for a person to love that I might never be alone;
I was given a life of a hermit, that I might learn to accept myself.

I asked for power, that I might achieve;
I was given weakness, that I might learn to obey.

I asked for health, that I might lead a long life;
I was given infirmity, that I might appreciate each minute.

I asked Mother Earth for strength, that I might have my way;
I was given weakness, that I might feel the need for Her.

I asked to live happily, that I might enjoy life;
I was given life, that I might live happily.

I received nothing I asked for, yet all my wishes came true.
Despite myself and Iktomi, my dreams were fulfilled,
I am richly blessed more than I ever hoped,
I thank you, Wakan Tanka, for what you've given me.”

- Billy Mills, Oglala Lakota (1938-)
“William Mervin Mills, also known as Tamakoce Te'Hila, is an Oglala Lakota former track and field athlete who won a gold medal in the 10,000 meter run at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. His 1964 victory is considered one of the greatest Olympic upsets because he was a virtual unknown going into the event.”

"A Wise Man Once Said..."

“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”
- “Dr. Meredith Grey”, “Grey’s Anatomy"

"Loan Defaults are Booming - People Cannot Afford to Pay Their Phone Bills"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 7/22/22:
"Loan Defaults are Booming - 
People Cannot Afford to Pay Their Phone Bills"
"We’re being told that there is no recession. People cannot afford to even pay their phone bills on time. So much is happening and loan defaults are going through the roof."
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "Epic! 10-Year Yield Is Cratering! This Is The Fall Of An Empire"

Full screen recommended.
Gregory Mannarino, AM 7/22/22:
"Epic! 10-Year Yield Is Cratering! This Is The Fall Of An Empire"
Comments here:

Jim Kunstler, "People, Get Ready"

"People, Get Ready"
by Jim Kunstler

“Worse is better,” V. Lenin used to explain to his Bolshevik cohorts in their vicious pursuit of power. And is there any question now that this is the same operational formula of the shadowy crew behind “Joe Biden” in its mission to turn the American Republic into a branch-office of the Schwabenklausian trans-human techno-tyranny?

“Joe B” is doing his part to personally make things worse by taking Paxlovid, the Pfizer wonder drug that wondrously amps up Covid-19 symptoms and extends the course of the illness - as recently admitted by that other eminent, double-boosted Covid-19 sufferer, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the sage of US public health. If White House doctors follow the CDC’s treatment protocol they’ll soon put “JB” on remdesivir. Naturally, it kills him. State funeral… boo hoo… “46” is entombed under the Wilmington Amtrak station….

My political fantasy du jour: Thus, Kamala accedes to greatness! She must then appoint a new vice-president. That would be… wait for it… California governor Gavin Newsom - who else? (He was recently captured on video skulking into a back door of the West Wing while “Joe Biden” was out-of-town schmoozing up the honchos of Saudi Arabia.) Gov. Newsom is easily confirmed in the House and narrowly in the Senate when Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski vote with the Party of Chaos. Kamala soon resigns, citing “anxiety problems.” Now president, Mr. Newsom proceeds to accelerate the wrecking of the old USA along the lines of his recent work in California. All D.C. gas stations are ordered shut to promote the transition to renewables. The D.C. Mall is declared the National Homeless Camp…

I called it a fantasy, but this may be their only move as the nation utterly loses its patience with the “Joe Biden” fiasco and the escalating disorders of Western Civ take us into August. The mid-term election must be revamped at all costs, they’ll say, “to save our democracy.” A new pandemic is declared in early October, complete with lockdowns, while Google partners with Facebook to roll out a new vote-by-phone app. By some miracle, then, the Democrats add thirty more seats to their house majority and five in the Senate. We enter the new frontier of the Green New Deal and Build Back Better. In other words, the USA completely collapses.

A dark scenario, I confess, but doesn’t that seem but exactly where things are going? An epic crackup is upon us. Every place in the world is primed for meltdown, and a few lands in the periphery are already sinking. Sri Lanka is broke and out of gas after being set up as a WEF / Schwabenklaus low-carbon eco-state experiment. Panama is in revolt over extreme government corruption, food scarcity, and the after-effects of an especially severe two-year-long Covid lockdown that the rest of the world hardly heard about - perhaps because China has operational control over the vital Panama Canal and the CCP has operational control over the World Health Organization, which set up Panama as a lockdown lab project.

Of course, Europe is suddenly a magnificent mess with governments falling like duck pins, industry shuttered from lack of fuel, and citizens rising up against insane WEF diktats to drastically reduce livestock and shut down farming - in effect declaring food production an unacceptable environmental hazard. This, of course, after the governments of Euroland cut their own throats by self-sanctioning themselves out of Russian oil and natgas. It’s especially bizarre in Germany, the largest economy of the region, which had just this year conclusively realized and admitted that its “green energy” policy was a complete bust, forcing them to shut down major wind turbine installations and resort to producing electricity with coal. The governments of Merkel, and then Olaf Scholz, reveal themselves as the sheerest hypocritical idiots.

And now, the ground is even shifting under the CCP as China’s extravagant matrix of city-building, mortgage debt, and banking fraud rattles its financial system. What a surprise! Potent as it has been in bribing politicians around the world, infiltrating governments and cultural institutions in every land, and getting the news media to do their bidding, the CCP is apparently losing its grip on the Chinese people, who are sick of being locked down, tracked, and swindled. The tanks are out. This is not the same movie as Tiananmen Square, 1989. This is the CCP bankruptcy, an epic event that will thunder through “the global south,” sending Africa into famine and chaos and South America into yet another rotation of elites.

Pretty soon, it’s going to be every country for itself in this main event of the fourth turning (a.k.a. the long emergency). Global unity is a mirage, along with all the preposterous narratives of a world government. And in every country for itself, it’s going to be every community, every family, every person for itself until, emergently and painfully, everyday life can be reorganized from the ground up. People, get Ready."

"Strange Price Increases At Big Lots! This Is Crazy! What's Next?"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 7/22/22:
"Strange Price Increases At Big Lots! This Is Crazy! What's Next?"
Comments here:

"The United States Does Not Have an Economy"

"The United States Does Not Have an Economy"
by Paul Craig Roberts

"The first lesson of economics is scarcity: 
there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it.
The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics."
  - Thomas Sowell

"The US financial sector has long looted other countries. A number of participants have described the process. First a country is enticed with bribes to the leaders to take out loans that cannot be serviced or repaid. Then in comes the IMF. Austerity is imposed on the population. Public services and employment are cut to free resources for debt service, and public assets are sold to repay the loan. Living standards fall, and US corporations take over the country’s economy.

As foreign governments, having experienced or witnessed the economic carnage and fearing accountability, are less willing to be bribed into indebting their countries, American finance is now applying this technique to Americans. Contrary to the narrative in the financial press, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates in order to fight inflation. It is ludicrous to think that a three-quarters of one percent rise in a very low interest rate is going to have any impact on a 9.1% rate of consumer inflation or that speculation that the Federal Reserve has in mind another three-quarters of one percent possibly followed by one half of one percent comprise an anti-inflation policy. If all these increases occur, it still leaves the interest rate below the inflation rate.

Moreover, as I have previously explained, the inflation is not monetary. The higher prices are the result of supply disruptions caused by Washington’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions. Production was stopped and supply chains are broken.

The Federal Reserve’s rise in interest rates is just a continuation of its policy of concentrating income and wealth in the hands of the One Percent. Quantitative Easing was the cloak for the Federal Reserve to print $8.2 trillion in new money which was directed or found its way into the prices of stocks and bonds, thus enriching the small number who own most of these financial instruments. Having maxed out this avenue of wealth concentration, the Federal Reserve is now raising interest rates in order to drive up mortgage costs to aspiring home owners. The Federal Reserve is driving individuals out of the housing market in order to free up properties for “private equity” firms to purchase homes for their rental values. That private equity firms see rental income from the existing stock of houses as the best investment opportunity tells us that the US economy has played out. When investment goes into existing assets, not into producing new assets, the economy ceases to grow.

The Obama regimes policy of bailing out the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 crash while foreclosing on their victims, reduced American homeownership from 70% to 63 percent. The Urban Institute predicts further declines. Today homeowners’ equity has declined from 85% after World War II to one-third, leaving two-thirds of homeowner equity in the hands of creditors. This makes it completely clear that a financialized economy indebts the people for the sake of rentier income to the One Percent. Indeed, the financialized economy created by the Federal Reserve has reimposed a class system akin to the landed British aristocracy that was overthrown. Indeed, we have an economically far worst class system. The landed British aristocrats produced food that fed the nation. The American class system produces interest and fees for the financial system.

As Michael Hudson has shown us, a no-growth economy is the end result of a financialized economy. A financialized economy is one in which consumer income is diverted by debt expansion away from the purchase of new goods and services into debt service and fees–interest on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loan debt. With such a large share of household income spent on debt service, little is left for driving the economy forward.

If American economists were capable of escaping from their neoliberal junk economics, they would realize that “the world’s largest economy” they attribute to the United States is total fiction. The fact is that the United States does not have an economy. Corporations driven by Wall Street located American manufacturing in Asia so that the One Percent could benefit from higher profits from lower labor costs, while the deserted city and states had to sell their income streams, such as Chicago’s parking meter revenues for 75 years, to foreigners for one lump sum payment to solve one year’s budget crisis.

The offshoring of American production, carried out under the cloak of “globalism,” destroyed the American economy and the tax bases of cities and states. While the real economy declines, the Democrat Party, seeking permanent power, has imposed a policy of open borders for immigrant-invaders. How are these millions of peoples to support themselves in an economy whose manufacturing has been moved abroad? How can a population, deserted by American corporations, that is experiencing debt deflation absorb the costs of support and social infrastructure for tens of millions of third world immigrant-invaders?

You will never hear it from the whores in the financial press, but the United States is on the precipice of economic and social collapse. And what are the fools in Washington doing? The idiots are ginning up wars with Russia, China, and Iran."
Related:

"We Are All Born Mad..."

Seal, "Crazy"

"Dr. Birx Admits She And Fauci Made Up 'The Science' On Lockdowns, Social Distancing"

"Dr. Birx Admits She And Fauci Made Up 
'The Science' On Lockdowns, Social Distancing"
by Tyler Durden

"President Trump's former Covid-19 adviser Dr. Deborah Birx has made several stunning admissions of late - first telling the Daily Mail that Covid-19 "came out of the box ready to infect" when it hit Wuhan, China in 2019 - and that it may have been created by Chinese scientists who were "working on coronavirus vaccines." But it goes further than that.

As Fox News' Jesse Waters lays out, Birx admitted in her new book that she and Dr. Anthony Fauci were essentially shooting from the hip when it came to national directives such as "two weeks to stop the spread," and social distancing requirements. According to Waters, Birx "admitted to making things up," adding that she and Fauci "were lying to the president and to the American people about their COVID protocols."

With the first lie; '15 days to stop the spread' - Birx writes "No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of the two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it."

"So that 15 days to slow the spread was just a sneaky way to get their hooks into us, so they could lock us down for longer," Waters opines. "And if you dared to leave your house, Birx told us, the only way to stay safe was to social distance." To that end, Birx writes that she "I had settled on 10 (feet) knowing that even that was too many, but I figured that ten would at least be palatable for most Americans - high enough to allow for most gatherings of immediate family but not enough for large dinner parties and, critically, large weddings, birthday parties, and other mass social events..."

Must Watch: "Scarf Lady" committed scientific fraud and misled the president and the nation into unnecessary lock-downs and restrictions based on the false presumption that the virus spread among health people (asymptomatic spread) that was disproved by Cao et al Madewell et al." pic.twitter.com/Doeion4tu7
- Peter McCullough, MD MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) July 20, 2022
Related must reads:
"Everyone Vaccinated For Covid Will DIE, Warns French Virologist"
“There is no hope and no possible treatment for those who have already been vaccinated,” Montagnier stated plainly during the segment. “We must be prepared to cremate the bodies.” After studying at length the ingredients contained in the injections and what they do, Montagnier came to the conclusion that every single person who gets the shot will eventually die from antibody-dependent enhancement, or ADE. “That is all that can be said,” he added."
"Complicity: The data suggests that we may currently be witnessing the greatest organized mass murder in the history of our world."
Research it yourself, as always draw your own informed conclusions...

"How It Really Is"

"We're so freakin' doomed!"
- The Mogambo Guru

Thursday, July 21, 2022

"Bank Accounts Frozen, Doors Locked - Get Your Money Out! Can't Pay Phone Bill; Economy Of Fake Success"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/21/22:
"Bank Accounts Frozen, Doors Locked - Get Your Money Out!
 Can't Pay Phone Bill; Economy Of Fake Success"
Comments here: