"The first symptom of the process of our killing our dreams is the lack of time. The busiest people I have known in my life always have time enough to do everything. Those who do nothing are always tired and pay no attention to the little amount of work they are required to do. They complain constantly that the day is too short. The truth is, they are afraid to fight the Good Fight.
The second symptom of the death of our dreams lies in our certainties. Because we don’t want to see life as a grand adventure, we begin to think of ourselves as wise and fair and correct in asking so little of life. We look beyond the walls of our day-to-day existence, and we hear the sound of lances breaking, we smell the dust and the sweat, and we see the great defeats and the fire in the eyes of the warriors. But we never see the delight, the immense delight in the hearts of those who are engaged in the battle. For them, neither victory nor defeat is important; what’s important is only that they are fighting the Good Fight.
And, finally, the third symptom of the passing of our dreams is peace. Life becomes a Sunday afternoon; we ask for nothing grand, and we cease to demand anything more than we are willing to give. In that state, we think of ourselves as being mature; we put aside the fantasies of our youth, and we seek personal and professional achievement. We are surprised when people our age say that they still want this or that out of life. But really, deep in our hearts, we know that what has happened is that we have renounced the battle for our dreams – we have refused to fight the Good Fight.
When we renounce our dreams and find peace, we go through a short period of tranquility. But the dead dreams begin to rot within us and to infect our entire being. We become cruel to those around us, and then we begin to direct this cruelty against ourselves. That’s when illnesses and psychoses arise. What we sought to avoid in combat – disappointment and defeat – come upon us because of our cowardice. And one day, the dead, spoiled dreams make it difficult to breathe, and we actually seek death. It’s death that frees us from our certainties, from our work, and from that terrible peace of our Sunday afternoons."
“The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving mother, gently lays her hand upon our fevered head, and turns our little tear-stained faces up to hers, and smiles; and though she does not speak, we know what she would say, and lay our hot flushed cheek against her bosom, and the pain is gone. Sometimes, our pain is very deep and real, and we stand before her very silent, because there is no language for our pain, only a moan. Night’s heart is full of pity for us: she cannot ease our aching; she takes our hand in hers, and the little world grows very small and very far away beneath us, and, borne on her dark wings, we pass for a moment into a mightier Presence than her own, and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but angels of God.”
"The Era Of Cheap Food And Cheap Gasoline Is Over"
by Michael Snyder
"All of our lifestyles are about to change in a major way, but the vast majority of the population still does not understand what is coming. Throughout our entire lives, we have always been able to depend on a couple of things. There would always be cheap gasoline to fuel our vehicles and there would always be mountains of cheap food at the grocery store. No matter who was in the White House and no matter what else was going on in the world, those two things always remained the same. Unfortunately, those days are now over and they aren’t coming back.
We have entered the greatest energy crisis that any of us have ever experienced, and it isn’t going to go away any time soon. So you might as well get used to high gas prices. Earlier this month, brand new all-time record highs were set all over southern California…
• Los Angeles-Long Beach – $6.46 (Record high)
• Orange County – $6.42 (Record high Saturday)
• Ventura County – $6.40
• Riverside County – $6.33 (Record high)
• San Bernardino County $6.32
But that isn’t the real problem. The real problem is with natural gas. Thanks to the war in Ukraine, supplies of natural gas in Europe have become extremely tight, and this has pushed prices into the stratosphere.
Needless to say, this is going to greatly affect food productions in the months ahead. According to Bloomberg, over two-thirds of all fertilizer production capacity in Europe has already been shut down due to soaring natural gas costs…"Europe’s fertilizer crunch is deepening with more than two-thirds of production capacity halted by soaring gas costs, threatening farmers and consumers far beyond the region’s borders."
This is an absolutely massive story, but hardly anyone in the United States is covering it. Global fertilizer production is going to be greatly reduced, and that is going to have very serious implications for agricultural production all over the world… “Nitrogen plant shutdowns in Europe are not simply a problem in Europe,” she said. “Reduced supply on the scale seen this week not only raises the marginal cost of production of nitrogen fertilizers, but will also tighten the global market, putting pressure on plant nutrients’ availability in Europe and beyond.”
We’re already seeing prices elsewhere rise again. The price of the common nitrogen fertilizer urea in New Orleans rose over 20% in weekly prices Friday, the most since March, a few weeks after the war began, according to Green Markets. I know that fertilizer may not be the most exciting topic for a lot of people, but the truth is that approximately half the global population would starve if we didn’t have any…"In fact, it’s estimated that nitrogen fertilizer now supports approximately half of the global population. In other words, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch - the pioneers of this technological breakthrough - are estimated to have enabled the lives of several billion people, who otherwise would have died prematurely, or never been born at all."
Let that paragraph sink in for a moment. The only way we can even come close to feeding everyone on the planet is by using vast quantities of fertilizer, but now fertilizer plants all over Europe are being forced to shut down because of the price of natural gas. As long as this global energy crisis persists, the global food crisis will also persist.
Russia is normally the largest exporter of natural gas in the entire world, and an end to the war in Ukraine would go a long way toward solving our current problems. But there isn’t going to be an end to the war in Ukraine. Once again, western leaders are assuring us that the war will not end until Russia is forced out of every inch of Ukrainian territory. That includes Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea. Of course the Russians would use tactical nukes long before we ever get to that point. And once the Russians use tactical nukes, the west will do the same.
As it currently stands, there is no “off ramp” for this war. Instead, we are simply counting down the days until it goes nuclear. I am sorry to tell you that, but it is the truth. If the American people truly understood what was at stake, there would be massive peace protests all over the nation right now.
Meanwhile, the worst multi-year megadrought in 1,200 years continues to absolutely ravage agricultural production in the western half of the United States. A reporter from FOX recently visited the cornfields of Wayne County, Nebraska and what he discovered is extremely chilling…“I’m standing in the middle of a cornfield that, if this was a normal year or in other words, if the corn was growing the way it was supposed to be, you wouldn’t even really be able to see me right now,” FOX Business’ Connell McShane reported from Wakefield, Nebraska. “It would be way up above my head. But now I look at this, maybe knee-high at best.” McShane visited field after field in Wayne County and found the same short stalks with very sparse ears. Over 99% of that county is in exceptional drought. This drought has been going on for years and years. And it just keeps getting worse.
On the west coast, we are being warned that production of tomatoes, garlic and onions will be very disappointing this year due to the drought. As a result, prices are going to go much higher in 2023…"In addition to tomatoes, other crops like garlic and onion are also expected to be impacted. “What you’re seeing harvested this summer that really hasn’t even hit the grocery shelf is a 25% increase in the cost of the product to the processors — the canners, the buyers downstream,” California State Board of Food and Agriculture President Don Cameron told Reuters. “The onions and garlic have already been negotiated for 2023 with another 25% increase in price.”
This is really happening. Food prices may seem high to you right now, but the truth is that this is the lowest that they are going to get. The cost of living is becoming extremely oppressive, and countless people out there are really struggling to make it from month to month.
Earlier today, I came across a tweet from a 47-year-old lawyer that really hammered this point home…"20 years ago, working as a server, I lived in a corner 1 bdrm apt downtown with amazing water views for $700/month. A similar apt now $3,600/month, more than 5x as much. As a lawyer at age 47 I am unable to afford living in the apartment I did at age 27 while waiting tables."
Sadly, what we have been through so far is just the beginning. The cost of gasoline is going to continue to go up. The cost of natural gas is going to continue to go up. The cost of food is going to continue to go up. In fact, the cost of just about everything is going to continue to go up. The artificially-inflated lifestyles that we were able to enjoy for decades are now disappearing, and there is a tremendous amount of pain on the horizon. We were warned that this would happen, and now a day of reckoning is here. I would encourage you to prepare accordingly."
"This is almost unbelievable. Banks are holding your Cash and will not release it. I was contacted by over a dozen people around the world that are having the same problems with the financial institution that they deal with. We all need to get ready for the new banking. Beware of what they call biometric banking."
"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"
"I... don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."
- Ayn Rand, “Atlas Shrugged”
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"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard - the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money - the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law - men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter. Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."
"Francisco’s Money Speech” from “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand.
Freely download "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, here:
"Scott Ritter: Ignorance And Fear Causing Nuclear Armageddon"
"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."
"Have you noticed, as the election looms, the Party of Chaos trips deeper into its own self-created chaos? Turns out that the effort to make Ukraine the fifty-first state is not going over so well with the voters. Nor is the campaign to convince children to switch sexes. Or the crusade to sell ever more mRNA “vaccines” that the CDC knows good-and-goshdarn-well is killing and maiming credulous citizens by the millions. Or the program for importing limitless alien “vibrance” across the open border with Mexico. As the venerable Rolling Stones sang more than a half century ago: “Rape… murder… it’s just a shot away!” This is the kind of country that the Party of Chaos has been grooming you up for.
It’s not working. We are coming for you: leaders, mesmerized minions, and obliging tools of this Satanic faction that seized the levers of power in America and turned them into wrecking bars. After the nervous hiatus from November to January, we’re coming for you in 2023. You are going to answer for the decisions you took and the rules you made that drove our country to its knees and half out of it mind. We are storming you in your Kafka’s Castle of lies and malice, and we are going to drag you out of there kicking and screaming. Preserving your decorum will not be our first consideration, Rochelle Walensky, Tony Fauci, Alejandro Mayorkas, Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, and the people who work for you.
There’s a lot of loose talk about some as-yet-unknown Party of Chaos’s ploy to stave off the November 8th reckoning - say, drag out the vote count for weeks and confabulate the results… declare some emergency to shut down in-person voting… or somehow postpone the vote altogether. Nothing like that will go over successfully this time around. The lamp-posts in the WalMart parking lots could be decorated with dangling local election officials who get caught churning phony ballots, tweaking Dominion machines, and taping-up the polling places’ windows with cardboard.
You’re getting no help, meantime, from the folks who run the maundering flunkey you installed as president. They just flipped-off Sergey Lavrov’s invitation to negotiate some reasonable end to your $60-plus billion orchestrated fiasco in Ukraine. These are the people that party apostate Tulsi Gabbard identified lately as “an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” She got that exactly right, and at exactly the right moment in history, too.
Did you actually propose, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, that the purpose of our misadventure in Ukraine was “to weaken Russia?” How’s that working out? I’ll tell you: Russia is fixing to wipe up the floor with its Nazi antagonists in Kiev (and their NATO helpers). Russia is proceeding with prudence and determination to neutralize our country’s foolish provocations, even despite “Joe Biden’s” admission that “Armageddon” is an option. Here’s some news for you, Party of Chaos: Russia is not insane, but you surely are. You, Lloyd Austin, are busy destroying the American military with your deranged sexual boundary bamboozle. Your sinister “vaccine” policies that have led, among other disasters, to a tripling of cancer rates in the ranks. What, exactly, have you succeeded in weakening?
Do you think the American people have failed to notice this? How are those financial sanctions working against Russia, Tony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, and Susan Rice? Here’s how: they energized trade relations and financial settlements between Russia and the 70-percent of the economic world that is outside the orbit of Western Civ. Meanwhile, they drove the birthplace of Western Civ (Europe) to its knees, upon which it is sliding headlong back to the Twelfth Century. Who told you to do that? George Soros? Klaus Schwab? (Oh, by the way, we’re coming for the two of them also, if they’re still alive in 2023.)
We’ve also had enough, Party of Chaos, of your “Green New Deal” and climate change bullshit. The former is a sheer shuck-and-jive. You propose to mandate the end of gasoline-powered cars in favor of electric cars that charge off of fossil fuel fired power plants? That’s rich. Ironically, though, the whole mass-motoring matrix is failing not on the basis of whatever powers a car but on the simple fact that a sinking middle-class, whose destruction you engineered, can’t afford to buy any kind of car anymore, whatever way it’s powered.
As for your climate change hysteria, consider that human culture has gone through scores of climate swings since the Age of the Pharaohs; the main ones being the Bronze Age warming, the Hellenic cooling, the Roman warming, the Dark Age cooling, the medieval warming, the “Little Ice Age” cooling, and now the present-day warming - with evidence that we are slipping back into another cooling.
The truth is that it has always been difficult for civilizations to adapt to these events, but it’s especially difficult for us with our super-complex, mutually-dependent, hyper-tech systems of daily life, not to mention the giant scale of it all, which pretty much guarantees a hard landing for us. We’re not going to run Wal-Mart, Walt Disney World, and the suburbs on any combination of wind, solar, and recycled fry-max oil, so stop pretending, and quit making everything worse than it has to be. We’ve got to make other arrangements for sure, and that will be hard enough - but no thank you on that transhumanist robot utopia you’re trying to sell.
Well, of course, you’d never quit trying. You just have to be defeated. And that’s exactly what’s going to happen. And after you’re defeated, we’re going to come for you, and stuff your asses into those witness chairs, and compel you to come clean on why you worked so hard to destroy the USA. Maybe you’ll apologize. You should be the first to know, though, that it won’t matter. When did anyone’s apology ever induce in you something besides the demonic lust to inflict more pain on your victims?"
"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."
"In today's vlog we are at Walmart, and are noticing some strange price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
"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."
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." - Carl Sagan
"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841. The book chronicles its subjects in three parts: "National Delusions", "Peculiar Follies", and "Philosophical Delusions". MacKay was an accomplished teller of stories, though he wrote in a journalistic and somewhat sensational style.
The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetizers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics. Present-day writers on economics, such as Michael Lewis and Andrew Tobias, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles. Scientist and astronomer Carl Sagan mentioned the book in his own discussion about pseudoscience, popular delusions, and hoaxes.
In later editions, Mackay added a footnote referencing the Railway Mania of the 1840s as another "popular delusion" which was at least as important as the South Sea Bubble. Mathematician Andrew Odlyzko has pointed out, in a published lecture, that Mackay himself played a role in this economic bubble; as leader writer in the Glasgow Argus, Mackay wrote on 2 October 1845: "There is no reason whatever to fear a crash."
"Las Vegas, Nevada has been our resort for these past several days. Here we have witnessed several madnesses - madnesses large, madnesses small. Madnesses public, madnesses private. Yet the public madness, the mass madness, the extended madness is our concern today. That is, the market madness.
And so we publish once again our reflections on the madness of crowds. As we have written before: When a man enters a crowd he exits civilization. He goes in, his blood goes up… and his reason goes out. As Herr Nietzsche long ago observed, madness is a rarity in individuals - but the rule in crowds. Or as argued Mr. Charles Mackay, author of the 1841 classic "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds": "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
“A Crowd Runs Not on Thought but on Hormones”: A man in a crowd ceases to be a man. He is instead a face. He is but a cog in a lunatic machine. And a man in a crowd does not think for himself. The crowd thinks for him. That is, the man ceases to think whatsoever. For a crowd runs not on thought but on hormones. The crowd’s lusts become the man’s lusts. The crowd’s will becomes the man’s will. The crowd’s devils become the man’s devils. It is these devils - in fact - that cement together a crowd.
A Crowd Needs a Devil: These devils may appear in the form of policemen, of whites, of blacks, of Muslims, of Christians, of Chinamen, of Russians, of conservatives, of progressives, of capitalists, of anti-capitalists, of greenhouse gas-geysers, of meat-munchers. One crowd has its devil. A second crowd, another. A third, a devil of its own. Above all: Any crowd’s hate for devils vastly exceeds its love for angels.
Angels do not excite the blood. Angels do not bubble the hormones. Angels do not furl the fingers into fists. Devils do excite the blood, get the blood up. Devils do bubble the hormones. Devils do furl the fingers into fists. Once you understand this you understand politics - politics yesterday, politics today, politics tomorrow.
A Crowd Is Not Necessarily a Street Mob: Let us now extend our analysis, beyond crowd, beyond mob… to nation…A crowd is not merely a mass on a street or a mob. A nation is a sort of crowd and a sort of mob. For our purposes we will label it a supercrowd. And no greater menace exists than a supercrowd after a devil… This supercrowd is given to the same madnesses as the street crowd… only its madnesses are amplified by the tens, by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions, by the hundreds of millions. It often leaves “rivers of blood” and a “harvest of groans and tears” trailing behind them.
From the aforesaid "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds": "In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion and run after it till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple, and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity."
The Madness of Market Crowds: A market too is a crowd, a mob… and equally susceptible to lunacy. Do you doubt it? Mr. Mackay consecrates page upon page to the Tulip delirium (1636–37), the Mississippi Bubble (1718–20) and the related South Sea Bubble (1720). And let us say it now: It is a pity the fellow no longer writes.
The stock market bubble of 1929, the technology bubble of 2000 and the housing bubble of 2008 added entire chapters to the literature of mass delusion. Additional chapters - no doubt - await writing. We hazard the 2020-2021 market deliriums will rank high among them. Here is the common element that unites them all: The man in a crowd. Only the man under crowd influence heaves his reason into a ditch. Why do men do it?
Man Must Choose Between Freedom and Happiness: Mankind confronts a choice, argued George Orwell in "1984." He must choose between freedom and happiness. And the mass of men prefer happiness to freedom: "The choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better."
The great bulk of men seek the peace and contentment of herd living - of life in a crowd. The man truly divorced from the social influence is a man truly exceptional. Freedom is too hot for most hands, as Mencken described it - or too cold for most spines, as Nietzsche described it. Either way… freedom runs to temperatures too extreme for most constitutions.
Here we do not judge. Nor do we evaluate or condemn. We merely describe, describe a phenomenon. The crowd offers safety. Numerical strength. Solidarity. Companionship. Reassurance.
“Freedom Includes the Freedom to Starve”:
As we have written before: The free man must go upon his own hook. He must push along under his own steam, weave his own safety net, face cruel fate alone. Do not forget: Freedom includes the freedom to starve. We therefore have no heat against the man who chooses security over freedom, the full belly over the empty belly.
We enjoy happiness ourself. Safety. Security. And a belly stretched to capacity. Extremes of heat and cold, meantime, immiserate us. And - despite all evidence - we enjoy human companionship. We nonetheless confess a vast respect for the man who never wanders into a crowd, for the man who does not flock. For we prefer humanity in batches of one. The free man’s example is the eagle, the free and noble eagle.
The Eagle: We would emulate the solitary eagle over the flocking birds - over the birds that crowd. For the eagle does not flock. You find him one by one. That is, the eagle takes the individual view. In our experience, that view is often the higher view, the superior view. The free man is the eagle high aloft, wheeling and wheeling on motionless wings, on steady wings, on confident wings…On free wings. He is free to starve, it is true. But he is also free to soar. And the man in a crowd? As the bird in a flock… he is free only to follow…
"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."
"The Bond market is affecting everything. The stock market and the real estate market are crashing. Get ready. Today I’m lucky enough to bring back Bob Kudla. He runs Trade Genius."
“What will become of these galaxies? Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Typically when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides.
Close inspection of the above image taken by the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile shows a bridge of material momentarily connecting the two giants. Known collectively as Arp 271, the interacting pair spans about 130,000 light years and lies about 90 million light-years away toward the constellation of Virgo. Recent predictions hold that our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in a few billion years.”
“There is a concept in physics called angle of repose. Set an object, a book say, on a plank. Now slowly tip up one end of the plank until the moment when the book just starts to slide. The angle between the plank and the horizontal is the angle of repose, where the component of the gravitational force down the plank becomes greater than the maximum friction force holding the book at rest. Or, in more evocative terms - as I write I am lying on the couch with the laptop in my lap, in perfect repose. If you started tipping up the couch, at some point I'd go sliding into a heap at the bottom. That's the angle of repose, or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the angle of the end of repose.
This comes to mind because I just spent fifteen minutes on my knees in the yard watching ants excavate a nest in the ground. One by one they scurry out of the hole carrying a tiny grain of sand, which they dump in a ring around the hole. A circular pile. Now if the ants just dumped their burdens at the mouth of the hole, pretty soon the pile would get so steep that the sand grains would slide back into the hole. Instead, the circular ring gets higher and wider, with a slope that never exceeds the angle at which the grains will slip - the angle of repose. Now here's the thing: the ants almost invariably carry their grain to just beyond the top of the pile. If the grain slips, it will slide away from the hole. These tiny ants, hardly bigger than sand grains themselves, understand a little physics in their mysterious instinctive way.
Wallace Stegner has a novel titled "Angle of Repose." It is indeed an evocative phrase. In a job, in a relationship, in life itself, many of us instinctively seek that maximum degree of individual gratification that will satisfy emotional needs without doing violence to our essential repose, and that of those around us - the art of walking close to the edge, the thrill without the spill. Every day in the news we hear of folks - politicians or celebrities - who tipped the plank too far, whose lives went sliding into self-destruction, who failed to grasp, metaphorically speaking, something that a tiny ant instinctively understands.”
"Never, ever forget that nothing in this life is free. Life demands payment in some form for your "right" to express yourself, to condemn and abuse the evil surrounding us. Expect to pay... it will come for you, they will come for you, regardless. Knowing that, give them Hell itself every chance you can. Expect no mercy, and give none. That's how life works. Be ready to pay for what you do, or be a coward, pretend you don't see, don't know, and cry bitter tears over how terrible things are, over how you let them become."
"War does not determine who's right... only who's left."
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Full screen recommended,
10/13/22: "Col. Douglas MacGregor:
Ukraine Is In A Very Serious Crisis, It May Not Survive"
"Ukraine is reeling from the targeted strikes from Russia. Much of the country is without water and electricity because of the critical infrastructure strikes. It is a signal that Russia knows what is happening behind the curtain in Ukraine and can reach into wherever they'd like. What happens when the soil freezes? Massive offenses? We have chilling predictions from Colonel Douglas MacGregor."
"All wars have their unique character, but the war in the Ukraine is probably one of the strangest in the history of the West. Its strangeness is due to the two sides operating from a different set of facts and a different framework for those facts. It is as if the two sides are fighting entirely different wars. In point of fact, the two sides are fighting different wars, despite doing so on a common battlefield. That reality is about to become clearer as the war moves into winter.
The first main difference in the war is that the Russians are fighting it from a highly legalistic and bureaucratic perspective. The West does not seem to grasp this and keeps treating it like a cartoonish war of conquest. They frame Putin as a version of Hitler, who is now a cartoon villain in the Western imagination. Putin is attacking Ukraine for no reason at all and has no real plan other than war. It is just some irrational land grab, like when Hitler conquered Poland¹.
In reality the Russians have conducted this war like a group of lawyers engaged in complex civil litigation. They spend a lot of time on legalistic points like the official legal status of the disputed territory. Before the start of the war, the Russians put a lot of time into legally recognizing Luhansk and Donetsk as independent territories. The ongoing attacks on these areas by Ukraine was the legal pretext for the Special Military Operation that started eight months ago.
This legalistic mindset is turning up in the response to the terrorist attack on the Kerch bridge in the Crimea. The facts were quickly established. Ukraine took credit for the attack and promised more. Once the Russian investigators confirmed the essentials of the attack, that it was terrorism and sponsored by Ukraine, the Russians could then conduct anti-terrorism activity. Again, this an important legal distinction for the Russians, as it permits specific activities.
Russia launched one hundred missiles at key Ukrainian facilities overnight as a response to the attack and as a warning. Much of the internet is down in Ukraine and parts of various cities are without power and water. You see, Russia can legally attack civilian infrastructure in response to terror attacks. The warning here is that if the terrorism continues, the Russians have the legal right to take out all of Ukraine’s power, water and communications systems.
Contrast this with how the West is fighting the war. At the start, Western governments seized the property of Russian companies and individuals. There was no court case or legal arguments about it. They just did it. They filled Western media with gleeful stories about stealing the yachts of Russian oligarchs. The owner of the Chelsea football club was forced to sell the team. Germany seized the assets of Gazprom, the Russian energy firm that supplies its natural gas.
Then you have the sanctions war. Much of what has been imposed on Russia has been done outside the normal channels. The whole point of the New World Order is that it is a rules based world and those rules are administered though global entities like the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. The point of these groups is to hash out difference between countries. All of those were bypassed. Even the legislatures of the respective countries were bypassed.
When you put the two ways of waging the war side-by-side, you get a picture that is the opposite of what is presented. The one side is bogging itself down in paperwork and legalism while the other side is cutting through the red tape and the rule of law to implement the latest polices. In a way, it is like this war is being waged between the bureaucracy of the post office and the leadership of the Mafia. It is a war between two entirely alien ways of viewing the world.
Another place you see the contrast is in public relations. The Russians have abandoned the field when it comes to the meme war. They have invested no effort in winning the daily news cycle or spinning events into clever narratives. Instead, they provide daily updates on the granular details of the war. If you care about how many flat tires were fixed by Russian forces every day, the Ministry of Defense is your source. Their reports are a dry accounting of the basic facts.
On the other hand, the Western side of the war is a carnival of creative stories that are splashed across Western media. The occupation of abandoned territory in the north was treated like the Battle of the Bulge. The terror attack on the Kerch bridge was a great blow to the Russian army. Once it was clear the bridge was not destroyed and was back in service, it was off to the next narrative. The West has been waging this war on the internet as if it is actually taking place there.
Probably the biggest difference between the two sides is how they explain their respective involvement in the war. The Russians see it as a defense of the Russian people and the Russian homeland. The people in the Donbas are Russians and therefore must be defended by Russia. Further, Western activity in Ukraine is portrayed as part of a larger American effort to destroy Russia. The Russian people are once again being called upon to defend the motherland.
In the West, the war is an abstract thing. It is a defense of democracy, which is a thing no one bothers to explain. In fact, if you ask what it means you get shouted down as a threat to our democracy. Like so much of what has happened in the West over the last three decades, this war is a moral signifier. If you support it, you are a good person, but if you have doubts, it means you are a bad person. Even thinking about why this is true is a sign you may be a bad person.
All wars have consequences but it is never easy to see what they are until they finally arrive, usually long after the fighting has ended. No one at the end of the Great War imagined the events of the 1930’s. In this case, the West is sure that what lies ahead is their New World Order. The Russians think what lies ahead is a multipolar world of which they are an important part. Two powers, fighting two wars with two visions of what comes next and both cannot be right.
“We are not threatening anyone. We have made it clear that any further NATO movement to the east is unacceptable. There’s nothing unclear about this. We aren’t deploying our missiles to the border of the United States, but the United States IS deploying their missiles close to our home, to the porch of our house. Are we asking too much? We’re just asking that they not deploy their attack-systems to our home… What is so hard to understand about that?” - Russian President Vladimir Putin, YouTube, Start at :48 seconds:
Imagine if the Mexican army started bombarding American ex-pats living in Mexico with heavy artillery-rounds killing thousands and leaving thousands more wounded. What do you think Joe Biden would do? Would he brush it off like a big nothingburger and move on or would he threaten the Mexican government with a military invasion that would obliterate the Mexican Army, level their biggest cities, and send the government running for cover? Which of these two options do you think Biden would choose?
There’s no doubt what Biden would do nor is there any question what the 45 presidents who preceded him would do. No US leader would ever stand by and do nothing while thousands of Americans were savagely slaughtered by a foreign government. That just wouldn’t happen. They’d all respond quickly and forcefully. But if that’s true, then why isn’t the same standard applied to Russia? Isn’t the situation in Ukraine nearly identical?
It is nearly identical, only the situation in Ukraine is worse, much worse. And if we stretch our analogy a bit, you’ll see why: Let’s say, the US Intelligence agencies discovered that the Mexican government was not acting alone, but was being directed to kill and maim American ex-pats on orders from the Chinese Communist government in Beijing. Can you imagine that?
And the reason the Chinese government wants to kill Americans in Mexico is because they want to lure the US into a long and costly war that will “weaken” the US and pave way for its ultimate splintering into many pieces that China can control and exploit. Does any of this sound familiar? (Check out the Rand Strategy for weakening Russia here.)
So, let’s say, the Chinese are actually the driving force behind the war in Mexico. Let’s say, they toppled the Mexican government years earlier and installed their own puppet regime to do their bidding. Then they armed and trained vast numbers of troops to fight the Americans. They supplied these warriors with cutting-edge weapons and technology, logistical support, satellite and communications assistance, tanks, armored vehicles, anti-ship missiles, and state-of-the-art artillery units all of which were provided with one goal in mind; to crush America in a proxy war that was concocted, controlled and micro-managed from the Chinese Capital of Beijing
Is such a scenario possible? It is possible, in fact, this very same scenario is playing out right now in the Ukraine, only the perpetrator of the hostilities is the United States not China, and the target of this malign strategy is Russia not the US. Surprisingly, the Biden administration isn’t even trying to hide what they’re up-to anymore. They’re openly arming, training, funding, and directing Ukrainian troops to prosecute a war aimed at killing Russian soldiers and removing Putin from power. That’s the objective and everyone knows it.
And the whole campaign is based on the sketchy claim that Russia is guilty of “unprovoked aggression”. That’s the whole deal in a nutshell. The moral justification for the war rests on the unverified assumption that Russia committed a criminal offense and broke international law by invading Ukraine. But, did they? Let’s see if that assumption is correct or if it’s just another fake claim by a dissembling media that never stops tweaking the narrative to build the case for war.
First of all, answer this one question related to the analogy above: If the US deployed troops to Mexico to protect American expats from being bombarded by the Mexican army, would you regard that deployment as an ‘unprovoked aggression’ or a rescue mission? Rescue mission, right? Because the primary intention was to save lives, not seize the territory of another sovereign country.
Well, that’s what Putin was doing when he sent his tanks into Ukraine. He was trying stop the killing of civilians living in the Donbas whose only fault was that they were ethnic Russians committed to their own culture and traditions. Is that a crime? Take a look at this map:
This map is the key to understanding how the war in Ukraine started. It tells us who did the provoking and who was being provoked. It tells us who was dropping the bombs and who was getting bombed. It tells us who was causing the trouble and who was being blamed for the trouble-making. The map tells us everything we need to know.
Can you see the yellow dots? Those dots represent the artillery strikes that were documented in daily summaries by “observers of the Organization for Security and Co-operation (OSCE), positioned at the frontlines.” The vast majority of the strikes were in the area inhabited by Russian-speaking people who have been under military siege for the last 8 years. (14,000 ethnic Russians have been killed in the fighting since 2014.) The Minsk Agreements were drawn up to resolve the issues between the warring parties and end the hostilities, but the government in Kiev refused to implement the agreement. In fact, the former President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, even admitted that the treaty was just a vehicle for buying time until another full-scale offensive on the Donbas could be launched.
In short, the Ukrainian government never had any intention of reaching a peaceful settlement with leaders of the Donbas. Their goal was to intensify the conflict in order to provoke Russia and draw them into a protracted war that would exhaust their resources and collapse their economy. The long-range objective was to remove Putin from office and replace him with a Washington-backed stooge that would do as he was told. US officials – including Joe Biden - have even admitted that their plan involved regime change in Moscow. We should take them at their word.
The map provides a visual account of the events leading up the Russian invasion. It cuts through the lies and identifies the true origins of the war which can be traced back to the heavy artillery strikes launched by the Ukrainian Army more than a week before the Russian invasion. (February 24) The massive shelling was aimed at the Russian-speaking people living in an area in east Ukraine. These are the people who were being bombarded by their fellow Ukrainians.
What Really Happened? On February 16 - a full 8 days before the Russian invasion - the shelling of the Donbas increased dramatically and steadily intensified for the next week “to over 2,000 per day on February 22.” As we said, these blasts were logged in daily summaries by observers of the OSCE who were on the frontlines. Think about that for a minute. In other words, these are eyewitness accounts by trained professionals who collected documented evidence of the Ukrainian Army’s massive bombardment of areas inhabited by their own people.
Would this evidence hold up in a court of law if a case against the Ukrainian government was ever presented before an international tribunal trying to assign accountability for the hostilities?
We think it would. We think the evidence is rock-solid. In fact, we have not read or heard of even one analyst who has challenged this vast catalogue of documented evidence. Instead, the media simply pretends the proof doesn’t exist. They have simply swept the evidence under the rug or vanished it from their coverage altogether in order to shape a Washington-centric version of events that completely ignores the historical record. But facts are facts. And the facts don’t change because the media fails to report them. And what the facts suggest is that the war in Ukraine is a Washington-concocted war no different than Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria. Once again, Uncle Sam’s bloody fingerprints are all over this sorry affair.
Check out this summary of ceasefire violations posted on podcast host Martyr Made’s twitter account:
Martyr Made @martyrmade
On Feb 15, the OSCE recorded 41 ceasefire violations as Kiev’s forces began shelling Donbas.
Feb 16: 76 violations
Feb 17: 316 violations
Feb 18: 654 violations
Feb 19: 1,413 violations
Feb 20-21: 2,026 violations
Feb 22: 1,484 violations
…virtually all by the Kiev side.
Feb 24: Russian forces intervene.
Notice how the shelling of the Donbas increased every day before the invasion? I’d call that a thoroughly-calculated provocation, wouldn’t you?
Why does this matter? It matters because the vast majority of people have been hoodwinked into supporting a war for which there is no moral justification. This is not a case of “unprovoked aggression”. Not even close. And Putin is not an out-of-control tyrant bent on reconstituting the Soviet Empire by terrorizing his neighbors and seizing their territory. That is a complete fabrication based on nothing but speculation. In Putin’s own words, he invaded Ukraine because he had no choice. His own people were being ruthlessly exterminated by an army that acts on Washington’s orders alone. He had to invade, there was no other option. Putin felt a moral obligation to defend the ethnic Russians in Ukraine who could not defend themselves. Is that aggression? Here’s a bit more background from an article at The Intercept by James Risen:
Despite staging a massive military buildup on his country’s border with Ukraine for nearly a year, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not make a final decision to invade until just before he launched the attack in February, according to senior current and former U.S. intelligence officials.
In December, the CIA issued classified reports concluding that Putin hadn’t yet committed to an invasion, according to the current and former officials. In January, even as the Russian military was starting to take the logistical steps necessary to move its troops into Ukraine, U.S. intelligence again issued classified reporting maintaining that Putin had still not resolved to actually launch an attack, the officials said.
It wasn’t until February that the agency and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community became convinced that Putin would invade, the senior official added. With few other options available at the last minute to try to stop Putin, President Joe Biden took the unusual step of making the intelligence public, in what amounted to a form of information warfare against the Russian leader. He also warned that Putin was planning to try to fabricate a pretext for invasion, including by making false claims that Ukrainian forces had attacked civilians in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which is controlled by pro-Russian separatists. The preemptive use of intelligence by Biden revealed “a new understanding … that the information space may be among the most consequential terrain Putin is contesting,” observed Jessica Brandt of the Brookings Institution.”
Biden’s warning on February 18 that the invasion would happen within the week turned out to be accurate. In the early hours of February 24, Russian troops moved south into Ukraine from Belarus and across Russia’s borders into Kharkiv, the Donbas region, and Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.” (“U.S. Intelligence Says Putin Made a Last-Minute Decision to Invade Ukraine”, James Risen, The Intercept)
There’s so much baloney in this excerpt, it’s hard to know where to begin. But just review the timeline we provided earlier; a timeline that has been verified by officials from the OSCE. Can you see the discrepancy?
Biden issued his warning on February 18; that’s two days after monitors from the OSCE reported an intensification of the bombing in the Donbas. In other words, Biden already knew that his buddies in the Ukrainian army were bombing the shit out of east Ukraine when he tried to make it look like he was privy to some sensitive, insider information about the upcoming invasion.
Of course, he knew Putin was going to invade! They created the provocation that forced him to invade! They were bombing the hell out of the people Putin is obliged to protect. What else could he do? Any leader worth his salt would have done same thing.
What bothers me is that people continue support the war in Ukraine because they have no idea of what actually happened in the lead-up to the invasion. They know nothing about the relentless bombing of civilians, or the defiant rejection of Minsk or the repeated military attacks on the Donbas, or the or the plan to retake Crimea through force of arms. or the laws directed against ethnic Russians, or the rise of Nazi fascism in Kiev. They know nothing about any of these things. Their views on Ukraine are entirely shaped by the rubbish they read in the western media or hear on the cable news channels where the deluge of propaganda issues like a mighty river pulling the population inexorably towards another vicious neocon bloodbath. People must know the truth or this war will escalate into something far worse."
