"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger, and are noticing price increases on groceries! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and the empty shelves situation! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
"I’m hearing so many people express feelings of defeat and despair, that they feel they have no agency to make a difference in a world victimized by huge corporate cartels, government overreach or climate instability. To offer a candle of hope against that feeling of powerlessness, I want to remind folks that one person can indeed make a tremendous difference, even in the darkest of times: Never forget, no matter how overwhelming life’s challenges and problems seem to be, that one person can make a difference in the world. In fact, it is always because of one person that all the changes that matter in the world come about. So be that one person."
~ R. Buckminster Fuller
Few people embody being “that one person” better than Nicholas Winton. Never heard of him? Neither had I until a few years ago. But he’s now a hero of mine.
Winton was a British citizen who rescued nearly 670 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia during World War Two. He did this of his own accord, not as part of any state agency or organized movement. Initially on a skiing trip to Switzerland, he canceled his vacation after Kristallnacht and went to Prague to help a friend there who was working to support the local Jewish population. Having learned that Britain’s Parliament had recently voted to accept European war refugees provided they had a place to stay and could pay a £50 deposit, Winton began single-handidly relocating Czech Jewish children to safety in his home country.
Before the Nazis tightened their control on Czechoslovakia, Winton managed to put 669 children on trains to the Netherlands, from where they were then sent to homes of foster families in Britain that he (and his mother) had found for them. Tragically, after their children departed to safety, many of the biological parents left behind ultimately ended up perishing at Auschwitz.
Winton sought no fanfare for his heroism. He spoke so rarely of it that the general public had no idea what he had done until nearly 50 years later. His own wife (whom he married after the war) didn’t even know until she one day came across the ledger he had used to keep track of the children during the evacuation.
Once she realized the magnitude of what this quiet hero had done, she worked with a television producer on a TV special to recognize him publicly for his humanitarian effort. By this time, Winton was an elderly man.
He agreed to attend, embarrassed by the attention. And unbeknownst to him, the producers had tracked down one of the children he had rescued, now an adult, and seated her next to him throughout the evening. It wasn’t until the end of the ceremony that they announced to him who she was. Watching Winton realize that the smiling woman next to him had been able to live a long, happy life because of his courageous action all those years ago is a very tender moment.
And if that doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, what happens next should. The host then asks the audience “Is there anyone else here who owes their life to this man?”… and EVERYONE stands up. Turns out, they had packed the theater with his former rescued children, now in their 50s and 60s, each of whom was saved by this kind, humble man.
Full screen recommended.
We rarely get to witness such a moment of grace like this. It’s simply perfect. For me, it’s a reminder never to discount the impact our own individual acts can have. Winton certainly answered Fuller’s call to “be that one person” to make a difference in the world. Will each of us?"
"And it was pointless to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn't changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You're left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it's knowing you carry your scars with you. "
- Charles Frazier
○
"Never be ashamed of a scar.
It simply means you were stronger than whatever tried to hurt you."
“We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars… everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
- Thornton Wilder
○
“I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.
That myth is more potent than history.
I believe that dreams are more powerful than facts.
That hope always triumphs over experience.
That laughter is the only cure for grief.
And I believe that love is stronger than death.”
- Robert Fulghum
○
“For Those Who Have Died”
“Eleh Ezkerah” (“These We Remember”)
“Tis a fearful thing
To love
What death can touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing,
To love what death can touch.
For your life has lived in me;
Your laugh once lifted me;
Your word was a gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
Tis a human thing, love,
A holy thing,
To love
What death can touch.”
- Chaim Stern
Graphic: “Into The Silent Land”,
by Henry Pegram, 1905
○
“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of Infinity. Life is Eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in Eternity.”
- Paulo Coelho
○
“Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened.”
“You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence. But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.”
"The Ukraine War is Over Except for Some More Dying"
by Bob Moriarty
"Ukraine lost the war in March. Zelensky knew it. The very real Nazis who think they are running the country but have accomplished nothing but the destruction of the country threatened him. They told Zelensky that if he surrendered to Russia they would kill him. But Ukrainian officials sat down with the Russians in Turkey in March of 2022 and basically came to an agreement that the forces would return to the borders on February 23, 2022 and would return to the agreement of Minsk II. Of course that would have been a non-agreement agreement since Ukraine, France and Germany only pretended to intend to adhere to the original Minsk II agreement.
In any case, Boris Johnson the then PM of the UK showed up by surprise on April 9th and reportedly told Zelensky to keep fighting to the last Ukrainian soldier. Nato would continue to pour weapons into the most corrupt country in Europe. It was nice of Boris to volunteer the services of Nato seeing as how the UK doesn’t really have an army. In comparison the USMC has 182,000 personnel in uniform. A well-attended Girl Scout Jamboree is bigger than the UK Army. It was very brave of Boris to suggest the UK would supply weapons to Ukraine so Zelensky get more Ukrainian soldiers killed.
Russia attacked Ukraine in late February after months of trying to get Zelensky to understand that Ukraine joining Nato was a red line he didn’t want to cross. In exactly the same way as John F. Kennedy felt in 1962, having a nuclear-armed enemy state on your front porch was unacceptable.
Russia attacked with a tiny force estimated at about 80,000 fighting a Ukrainian army of between 500,000 and 750,000. But the Ukrainian army was trained and equipped to Nato standards, which frankly aren’t very high.
Russian military tactics call for heavy artillery and rocket barrages against enemy positions. When this war concludes military academies everywhere will be studying the Russian actions. I’ve been under fire from rockets and artillery in Vietnam. Frankly what the Russians unleashed on the Ukrainian solders across the lines from them was hundreds of times more devastating. The Russians are the masters of the use of artillery now controlled with pinpoint accuracy by the use of thousands of low cost drones. Russian drones are dropping $15 grenades on the Ukrainians lying in bunkers protected against everything except things being dropped directly from above.
The kill ratio between the Ukrainian forces and the Russians is probably between 6-1 and 10-1. A good way to estimate it would be to compare the rate of fire of artillery. Since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainians have admitted being out gunned by 8-10 to one. For every round Ukraine fires at the Russians, the Russians fired 8 or 10 right back. Since artillery kills somewhere between 80 and 85% of those who die in battle, simply comparing the rate of relative fire will give you a reasonable estimate ratio of people killed and wounded between each side.
But Russia has already won the war. They convinced Zelensky to agree to terms as far back as March but Johnson queered that deal. Since then there was a minor Ukrainian counteroffensive to reclaim some ground the Russians lacked the ability to defend so they removed all of their forces from the battlefield to safer positions.
Nobody told the Russians. Putin’s forces unleashed thousands of attacks on the Ukrainian energy infrastructure. In my view, he should have done that in the first two weeks of the war but it’s always easy to be critical when you are sitting in the cheap seats. In any case, Ukraine has been destroyed economically. They have a barely functioning electrical system, their electric trains don’t work any longer and few cities have a functional water supply system.
But that’s not the bad part. The bad part if that it will take hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild what was a dysfunctional state already. Inflation is out of control in the EU due to their stupidity in listening to the US and putting sanctions on Russia that hurt the EU far more than they hurt Russia and not being adult to admit they screwed the pooch by doing so. Is the EU nothing but a sock puppet for the US? Who is going to pay for rebuilding Ukraine? The total military and cash contributions to Ukraine since February don’t even come close to what it is going to cost to rebuild what is now a broken country.
Nato is not a defense force; it’s a force of destruction and murder that passed its sell-by date thirty years ago. If you don’t believe me look at Libya. Does anyone even remember what bullshit excuses Nato used to destroy the most prosperous and well-run country in Africa because Israel didn’t like them? Take a two-week vacation to Tripoli. If you go into the market you can now buy a slave. You can thank Nato.
The idiots in Ramstein today are talking about how they are going to defeat Russia and break it into pieces. Are they kidding? If you send a bunch of tanks to a country whose army has been destroyed, who is going to operate them? How is it that a hundred tanks will make some difference? Or five hundred? Or one thousand? Russia has killed thousands of Ukrainian tanks. They don’t need more targets but no doubt they are always welcome.
Ukraine is no longer a country. Poland is seizing land on the west side and Russia already controls most of the country with any economic value in the east. What is left is a third world shithole run by the remaining Nazis that Putin hasn’t gotten around to whacking yet. Ukraine is now drafting 16-year-old kids, both male and female. Tell me that doesn’t sound like the last days of the 3rd Reich.
In the mid-1960s it cost US taxpayers over a million dollars to put me in the front seat of an F-4B and took about 21 months. Training people to operate complex weapons systems takes a lot of time and a lot of money. Who is going to operate tanks in a broken country with no electric power? Who is going to spend six months in training to learn how to fire a Patriot missile when one battery wouldn’t be large enough to protect a girl-scout campfire and they barely work anyway? How does getting equipment to Ukraine a year from now or longer going to have any impact? They are losing 1,000 dead a day now. How much longer before the survivors wake up and realize where their real enemies are?
The war is over and all that is left is the dying of hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians of starvation or freezing or medical issues when the entire system has been destroyed. Nato has shot its wad unless of course they are brilliant enough to keep fighting a lost battle until it goes nuclear and the world ends. Nato is finished. The EU is finished and soon the US will realize it committed suicide fighting a war that they could never win.
What was Russia’s sin? Was it selling inexpensive natural gas to Germany so they could be the driver of the EU economy producing chemicals, pharmaceuticals and electricity? Russia was never a threat to Europe before the war and is not now. They were a neighbor who wanted safe borders and their citizens to not be killed by psychopaths who hate them because they are Russian.
Russia has 100-megaton torpedoes that go faster than any weapon can stop. One torpedo that could wipe out Great Britain and leave it unlivable for decades or wipe out the entire East coast of the US. What kind of idiots want to attack a nuclear armed state?
And I forgot. The brain dead idiots running the US want to go after China next. It’s a sort of twofer. Get two for the price of one. The US spent twenty years trying to convince goat herders to do things our way. And totally failed and got booted out of Kabul with their tail between their legs. Are they f**king kidding or just f**king stupid?"
This never had to happen, and the $121 BILLION YOU and me and all of us sent to support this insanity has resulted in 157,000 Ukrainian and 20,000 Russian soldiers killed so far, but that'll be dwarfed by the very-soon massive Russian offensive, ending with a bloodbath of astonishing proportions, and the surrender of Ukraine. Watch and see...And for what? Why?
"Today's Ultra-important Situation Update Podcast and Interview Features Dane Wigington from Geoengineering Watch, where we discuss the engineered devastation of Earth's biosphere. Events are reaching such criticality that a tipping point of planetary extinction may be approaching. Yet the attacks on the atmosphere and biosphere are all deliberate."
"Dwarf galaxies NGC 147 (left) and NGC 185 stand side by side in this sharp telescopic portrait. The two are not-often-imaged satellites of M31, the great spiral Andromeda Galaxy, some 2.5 million light-years away. Their separation on the sky, less than one degree across a pretty field of view, translates to only about 35 thousand light-years at Andromeda's distance, but Andromeda itself is found well outside this frame.
Brighter and more famous satellite galaxies of Andromeda, M32 and M110, are seen closer to the great spiral. NGC 147 and NGC 185 have been identified as binary galaxies, forming a gravitationally stable binary system. But recently discovered faint dwarf galaxy Cassiopeia II also seems to be part of their system, forming a gravitationally bound group within Andromeda's intriguing population of small satellite galaxies."
“If there is one word that should not be uttered, it is the name of – no, I will not say it. Any name diminishes. In the face of whatever it is that is most mysterious, most holy, we are properly silent. It is appropriate, I think, to praise the creation, to make a joyful noise of thanksgiving for the sensate world. But praising the Creator is another thing altogether. When we make a big racket on His behalf we are more than likely addressing an idol in our own image. What was it that Pico Iyer said? “Silence is the tribute that we pay to holiness; we slip off words when we enter a sacred place, just as we slip off shoes.” The God of the mystics whispers sweet nothings, as lovers do.
In a diary entry for “M.”, near the end of his too-short life, Thomas Merton wrote: “I cannot have enough of the hours of silence when nothing happens. When the clouds go by. When the trees say nothing. When the birds sing. I am completely addicted to the realization that just being there is enough.” The natural world was for Merton the primary revelation. He listened. He felt a presence in his heart, an awareness of the ineffable Mystery that permeates creation. It was this that drew him to the mystical tradition of Christianity, especially to the Celtic tradition of creation spirituality. It was this that attracted him to Zen.
There come now and then, perhaps more frequently in late life than previously, those moments of being (as Virginia Woolf called them) when creation grabs us by the shoulders and gives us such a shake that it rattles our teeth, when love for the world simply knocks us flat. At those moments everything we have learned about the world – the invaluable and reliable knowledge of science- seems a pale intimation of what is. In Virginia Woolf’s novel “The Waves”, the elderly Bernard says: “How tired I am of stories, how tired I am of phrases that come down beautifully with all their feet on the ground! Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”
In moments of soul-stirring epiphany, it is reassuring to feel beneath our feet a floor of reliable knowledge, the safe and sure edifice of empirical learning so painstakingly constructed by the likes of Aristarchus, Galileo, Darwin and Schrodinger. But at the same time we are humbled by our ignorance, and more ready than ever to say “I don’t know,” to enter at last the great silence. Erwin Chargaff, who contributed mightily to our understanding of DNA, wrote: “It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same blind force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If the scientist has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist.”
The whole thrust of the mystical tradition, the whole thrust of science, is toward the great silence- an awareness of our ignorance and a willingness to say “I don’t know.” A lifetime of learning brings one at last to the face of mystery. We live in a universe of more than 2 trillion galaxies. Perhaps the number of galaxies is infinite. And the universe is silent. Achingly, terrifyingly silent. Or, rather, the universe speaks a little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.”
“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, so all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last. You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals… What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to defer wise resolutions to the fiftieth or sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained.”
“Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country – hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
- Mark Twain
"There comes a time in every man's life when he has to choose sides. I have chosen my side. I am comfortable with my decision. I do not think everyone on my side is a saint, but I know that those on the other side are much, much worse. Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows. That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and 'great thinking'. It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice."
"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."
“People underestimate how much resistance to imperial edicts out of DC there is, they underestimate how many people are waiting for the fall, but they also misunderstand that this resistance is taking a muscular but passive form.” - Deep South SR on Twitter
Of course, the “Joe Biden” classified document scandal is less about the documents per se than it is about the Biden family business, which was accepting large sums of money from shady foreign interests for unspecified services rendered. “Joe Biden,” the brand, is owned, perhaps to the degree that he can be called “a sell-out.” Selling out your country is kind of serious.
For instance, our country is right now deeply involved in a war between a Biden family client, Ukraine, and its angry relative, Russia. The USA has pumped more than $100-billion into Ukraine just this past year. That’s quite a return-on-investment for the million or so Hunter Biden grifted out of the Burisma gas company. It is alleged that Ukraine has operated as a gigantic international money laundry, especially since our State Department and Intel Community overthrew Ukraine’s government in 2014 and put in a series of errand boy presidents.
Ukraine did not have to become a geopolitical hot-spot. We made it a problem on-purpose. The strategy, if you can call it that, was stated explicitly by SecDef Lloyd Austin: “to weaken Russia.” That was based on the NeoCon game theory that the USA had to maintain at least the appearance of dominance over as much of the world as possible - a.k.a. hegemony - at the very moment in history that America’s economy, culture, and institutions had entered a state of collapse, visible to everyone in the world. By the way, our efforts in Ukraine against Russia, have only strengthened Russia - its currency, its balance of trade, its own internal political security, and its military defenses.
The Ukraine fiasco has surely benefited America’s military contractors and the parasitical ecosystem that feeds off them. Ukraine has benefited not so much. To be blunt and concise, Ukraine will come out of this a much-diminished entity, with no ability to cause any more problems in that region of the world. The money laundry will be closing down. As that happens, recriminations will pour out of Ukraine, implicating many American officials in the laundry operations, including former Ambassador Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch and her circle. Wait for that.
So, the tussle over the docs is a smokescreen for those artful machinations. The appointment by praetorian Attorney General Merrick Garland of a special counsel, Robert K. Hur, to investigate the doc affair is the insurance policy. Mr. Hur’s job is to prevent any witness from testifying on these matters before a congressional committee on the grounds of protecting “an ongoing investigation.” You can bet that whichever committee takes on this hairball, it will find workarounds to overcome that gambit and start unraveling the grift behind the docs. It will get ugly.
The evidence for all that is neatly packaged in the notorious laptop computer that Biden family bag-man Hunter Biden dropped off in a Wilmington, DE repair shop and then “forgot about,” so the story goes. I wonder about that. My armchair psychiatrist’s take is that Hunter harbors a not-so-well suppressed wish to destroy the Big Guy, his father, who has sinned grievously against his son and made a monster of him. (A monster of depravity.) The classified docs that the Big Guy stashed in his various properties are quite secondary to the gigantic trove of deal memos with purchasers of influence (and photos of them with the Biden gang) stashed on that radioactive hard-drive.
I’ll never understand - and neither will you - how “Joe Biden” got propelled out of ignominious defeat in the earliest presidential primaries, to sweep the field on Super Tuesday, March 3, 2020. Around the same time, all his rivals magically dropped out of the race for the nomination. Some kind of message must have gone out from Deep State Central. Who wanted this licentious old grifter in White House? Well, probably his old boss, Barack Obama, and just about everyone in officialdom connected to the shenanigans in Ukraine dating back to 2014, and then the RussiaGate illegalities that ensued from it, especially former CIA boss John Brennan and his cronies. Under Mr. Obama, the whole US government had become something like a rotten log infested with sowbugs of grift, deceit, and malfeasance. Installing the dotty old bird in the White House would give Mr. Obama a stealth third term. Mostly, it would prevent the dreaded Golden Golem of populism, Donald Trump, from bringing any harm to that cabal and its, ahem, interests.
We do understand how “Joe Biden” won the 2020 election: via massive fraud engineered by fraud-master Marc Elias, king of the Lawfare trolls, who fine-tuned the mail-in ballot operation during the likewise engineered Covid-19 public health ruse. That wicked election business, of course, is just another grave matter requiring the utmost protection to prevent any inquiry from ever gaining traction. And yet all of it, the monumental government crime spree of recent years, is all unraveling before our eyes - even before Jim Jordan or anyone else has said boo from a House committee chair.
It’s all falling apart - along with America’s economy, our institutions, and our culture. The Biden family’s cover stories are collapsing, the government’s censorship and propaganda machine has thrown a rod, the Covid-19 story looks day-by-day like organized mass murder, election fraud issues still stalk the land despite every effort to squash them - and the grim reality coalesces that Russia is going to clean up the mess we made in Ukraine, and, in the aftermath, probably produce a shit-ton of evidence of American corruption and villainy there.
“Joe Biden,” the phantom president, has entered the air-lock, waiting to be jettisoned into the deep space of ignominy, chocolate mint chip ice cream cone in hand. Kamala Harris watches the action offstage in a fugue of anxiety and depression. She does not want to become president - and, guess what, nobody really wants her to be, either. She won’t even have to be induced to step aside. Her hysteria will be so great that not even the hypnotists of the Intel Community will be able to calm her down. She’ll run shrieking from it back to California. The levers of control finally fail. By a caprice of history, and the genius of the founding fathers, Kevin McCarthy lands in the White House. A page turns. The coup is finally over. That’s my fantasy du jour."
"You have to look at all the changes that are being made to major companies. Massive layoffs are happening. Plus, we just found out that retail sales for last month were down. We also found out that manufacturing is down. Plus, wholesale prices are up as well. Should be."
~ General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s last words.
Normandy, France - "Davos…Davos…Davos. There’s France’s finance jefe on TV this morning, Bruno LeMaire, wearing a scarf. And there’s the Infosys CEO in a hooded parka. They may have flown in on carbon spewing private jets… but when they get in front of the cameras they go green. ‘Turn down the thermostat’ is the message. The news media is back on the Davos story – riding its usual hobby horses, bowing to its sacred gods and promoting its favorite bamboozles.
This year, Ms. Zelenska, wife of Mr. Zelenskyy, is the queen of the prom. Speaking at the confab, words came out of her mouth and were greeted by wide approval: “We are all internally convinced that there is no such global problem that humanity cannot solve…This is more important now when Russia’s aggression in Europe poses various challenges.” Of course, there are plenty of ‘problems’ humans can’t do much about. Rats in Baltimore. Bores at social functions. Morons in Congress. Few people actually want to die. But everybody does.
Then, turning to the war…“…there are no day offs from war…everyone in Ukraine has to risk their lives every day..” Of course, that is not true either. Most people in the Ukraine are nowhere near the combat zone…and the civilian casualty count is low; Russia has apparently tried to limit the collateral damage. The figures show about 8,000 civilian deaths in the country last year, caused by the war. Out of a population of 43 million, that’s a violent death rate of 18 per 100,000.
Volley and Thunder: The Russians will have to do a lot more killing than that to equal the violent death rate of American cities. In Baltimore last year, for instance, the rate was 55 – three times as high.
Later in the program, Ms. Zelenska’s husband took the stage. He and his wife must share the same speechwriter. There are “no accidents at wartime,” said the man on the podium. He was speaking only a few hours after a helicopter crashed in Kyiv. On board was Ukrainian Interior Minister, now dead.
That there are no accidents in war is surely incorrect too. Military history is full of them. In almost every battle, the fog of war is thick with mistakes, lies and accidents. In the famous “Charge of the Light Brigade,” for example, the English cavalry rode valiantly ‘into the valley of death,’ as Kipling put it, in Crimea. (Britain was the America of the era – ready to throw its weight around all over the planet.)
But the Light Brigade was going the wrong way. The commander, Lord Cardigan, had spent so much time out on his private yacht, anchored offshore in the Black Sea, with its own chef aboard, that he was confused by the lay of the land. Lord Lucan, his brother-in-law, whom he detested, ordered him to advance on a Russian gun emplacement and waved his hand generally in the direction to which the Light Brigade later went. Soon, there were indeed cannons to the left of them, cannons to the right of them, and cannons in front of them. All volleyed and thundered. And cut the poor English cavalry to pieces.
The Light Brigade had blundered into the wrong place. And when the dust settled, it had lost more than 200 men and 300 horses. For his part Lord Cardigan rode all the way up the valley to the Russian guns. The Russian commander recognized him as he rode…the two had enjoyed parties together in London before the war. He told his men not to kill him, but to capture him. Perhaps he was looking forward to more charming dinner conversation. But Cardigan, realizing that he was about to be captured, spurred his horse, jumped over the breastworks of the gun emplacement and dashed back down the valley. Leaving the dead and wounded behind him, he went back to his yacht in time for dinner.
Fatal Equations: Take out the accidents, mistakes and miscalculations and not much military history would remain. What was Napoleon’s attack on Moscow if not a giant, boneheaded error? Adolf Hitler might have thought that mechanized transport made it possible for him to succeed where Gustavus Adolphus and Napoleon Bonaparte had failed. But the Soviets had machines too. They moved their heavy industry to the East…and when they got rolling, so to speak, they could turn out dozens of tanks in the time the Germans produced only one.
New York Times economist, Paul Krugman, writes to say that the secret to war is there: “I’m not a defense expert. But I do know something about applied math — and contemporary wars are, to a large extent, about arithmetic.” And yes, of course, numbers play a part. But, Paul, riddle us this: At Rorke’s Drift, in South Africa, 1879, a rag-tag bunch of British soldiers, local militia, and hospital patients were outnumbered by Zulu warriors, 40 to 1. The arithmetic was terrible. But they won. How come?
And Robert McNamara was a numbers guy. He provided detailed statistics, showing our overwhelming superiority against the North Vietnamese. We had more guns, more tanks, more helicopters, more coca cola, and more prostitutes in Saigon. Who won?
The same question could be posed about Afghanistan – now in the hands of the Taliban…and Iraq, now run by Muqtada al-Sadr, whose militia killed some 600 US troops after the US invasion. In both countries, the numbers left no doubt; the US would prevail. What happened?
Krugman says the Ukraine will win its battle with Russia, because it is backed by NATO, which has bigger numbers. But ‘accidents’ still happen.
Disarmed: One of the most famous of them occurred in central Virginia in 1863. That was when General Stonewall Jackson was riding back to his lines after reconnoitering the terrain for the morrow’s battle. He had just inflicted a stunning defeat on Union troops, in what came to be known as the Battle of Chancellorsville.
The confederates were outnumbered, 2 to 1, but Jackson still managed to split away from Lee’s army and attack the Northerners from the flank. Then, after dusk, Jackson prepared another assault on the demoralized Yankees. Had he been able to follow up, he might have inflicted such a devastating defeat on the Army of the Potomac, that Lincoln might have been forced to make peace.
After the first day of battle, Jackson studied the lay of the land in the twilight and headed back to his camp. But in the half-light, he was mistaken for the enemy. Jackson was hit by three bullets from his own troops. His arm had to be amputated. He crossed the river soon after. “You have lost your left arm,” General Lee wrote to him on his deathbed, “and I have lost my right.”
But we are not here to quibble with silly talk from Davos. We don’t know why the Ukrainian helicopter crashed. And the only way Zelenskyy can be sure that it wasn’t an accident is if he caused it to crash himself."'
"There was big global news coming out of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, and it’s not the usual tyrannical pompous crap you are used to hearing about. The finance minister of Saudi Arabia signaled death of the petrodollar was officially announced. Mohamad Al-Jadaan said the Kingdom is open to settling trade in currencies other than the dollar. Oil trade has been exclusively done in U.S. dollars since the early 1970’s, and this is a big reason why the dollar became the world reserve currency. This move may not actually kill the dollar, but it will hurt its buying power. You have been warned.
The optic at WEF has never been worse. The conference attendees are being openly mocked by everyone from to Elon Musk to FOX News. Is this showing the world that the WEF is not as important as it thinks, or is every one of the so-called “useless eaters” finally getting wise to the pompous tyrants who think they are running the world? They act more like demons than caring people trying to save the world. It’s the most disrespectful coverage I have ever seen of the WEF, and rightly so. Now, organizations like Rebel News are running down the elite at Davos, such as Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. Rebel News reporters confront Bourla about his ineffective and deadly CV19 vax. It’s amazing reporting, and bravo, Rebel News. Enjoy the embedded video below:
Finally, forget all the good news you are hearing about the economy because the real news, without the spin, is telling you to get ready for a massive economic downturn. There is the new debt ceiling fight, record high unpayable credit card debt, more big layoffs at big banks and economist John Williams of Shadowstats.com warning of a “new and significant recession” that is already here." There is more in the 36-minute newscast.
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