Jeremiah Babe, 2/17/23:
"Markets Must Collapse; Bubble Will Pop;
Middle Class Barely Surviving"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, February 17, 2023
"Defeat for Ukraine in Coming Invasion"
Scott Ritter, 2/17/23:
"Defeat for Ukraine in Coming Invasion"
Comments here:
"15 Things That Became Priceless For The Average American Families"
Full screen recommended.
"15 Things That Became Priceless
For The Average American Families"
by Epic Economist
"Once upon a time the average U.S. household could afford more than the bare minimum. But as the inflation monster was unleashed, pushing the value of our dollars downhill, the sole goal of most of our society became surviving month by month as the things that made life a little more livable became way too expensive for us to have. It is actually insane to think how much the cost of living went up in just a few years - we went from "on the path to prosperity" to "on the verge of a cliff" alarmingly fast. Today, most people have little to no money left to spend after they pay all their bills. And no matter how much we work, it seems that it's never enough to achieve a comfortable living.
This year, if you were planning to take a road trip, you may have to reevaluate your plans because the average cost to rent a car in 2023 is 73.5% higher than a year ago. This massive surge was largely caused by the sudden drop in demand during the pandemic when no one was traveling. Rental car companies reported declining revenues and many of them were forced to sell off large chunks of their fleets to stay afloat. The stunning increase in car prices that followed over the next two years, made it difficult for them to purchase new vehicles to rebuild their inventories. So demand for rental cars continues to outstrip the available supply, making them a less viable alternative for those who are looking to save some money.
Meanwhile, computers, cameras, smartphones, TVs, video doorbells, and even electric toothbrushes need semiconductor chips to function. But the shortage of microchips is still plaguing the industry and driving the price of all products that depend on these tiny devices to soar, keeping these goods out of the reach of many Americans. Over the past two years, the electronics category has seen overall prices rise by 30%, with some large TVs more than doubling in price since 2021. Experts predict that the chip shortage will last for another year or two, especially because severe storms caused a slowdown in production in Taiwan, which produces 65% of the semiconductors we use. In other words, expensive prices for electronics are going to stay with us for quite some time.
At the end of the day, we're spending more and consuming way less - that's the reality of a population that is silently growing poorer. We are being financially eviscerated by all of these price hikes, and the worst part is - there's no end in sight for them. There's no perspective for real wage growth either, and the fight against inflation may be showing up results in government numbers, but it's definitely not making a difference in price tags on stores. Each week, we continue to see the cost of everything going up a bit more. Where is this all going to end? It was never supposed to be like this, but we're trapped in a broken system that is spiraling toward disaster. That’s why, in today's video, we decided to gather some goods and services whose prices are soaring well above most of us can pay."
MUST VIEW! "This DISASTER Is Much Worse Than They're Telling Us, Could Last Decades"
Full screen recommended.
Redacted, 2/17/23:
"This DISASTER Is Much Worse Than
They're Telling Us, Could Last Decades"
"What happened in East Palestine, Ohio is being called the worst environmental disaster in American history and the Biden administration is mostly ignoring it. Now members of congress are calling for Pete Buttigieg to be impeached."
Comments here:
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"Dioxin Bomb Released From Ohio Train Wreck Ignition Will Poison Food Supply For A Century"
"Dioxin Bomb Released From Ohio Train Wreck
Ignition Will Poison Food Supply For A Century"
by Mike Adams
"The highly toxin dioxins released from the deliberate ignition of the Ohio train wreck will persist for a century or more, contaminating soils, water and the food supply from an entire region. These dioxins, which include 2,3,7,8 TCDD, are so toxic that your lifetime maximum exposure is measured in less than trillionths of a gram. Cancer rates are going to skyrocket and persist for at least two generations, maybe three. This is the biggest chemical weapons attack on U.S. soil in the history of the nation.
See our story coverage below, all about dioxins. And hear my emergency podcast on the subject, where I connect the dots and reveal this may be foreign sabotage designed to cause maximum chaos across America before World War III kicks off."
Hear my podcast (and a bombshell interview with Sasha Latypova) at:
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Musical Interlude: Gnomusy (David Caballero), "Footprints On The Sea"
Gnomusy (David Caballero),
"Footprints On The Sea"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 is truly a majestic island universe some 200,000 light-years across. Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the chemical constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is a dominant member of the well-studied Fornax galaxy cluster.
This impressively sharp color image shows intense star forming regions at the ends of the bar and along the spiral arms, and details of dust lanes cutting across the galaxy's bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers think NGC 1365's prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy's evolution, drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole.”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap100820.html
Bill Bonner, "Financial Harakiri"
"Financial Harakiri"
Plus money caves, egg donors, peak humanity,
mass suicide and assorted other bunk and baloney...
by Bill Bonner
Buenos Aires, Argentina - "Our first stop in Buenos Aires was a “cave.” We needed the local money. You can change your money in a bank and get 190 pesos per dollar. Or, you go into a shop that pretends to be a real estate agent…or an electronics store…and you get 372 pesos per dollar
You go up to the shop. The door is locked. You ring the buzzer…and the door opens. A handsome young man, tattooed and swarthy, sits behind a glass divider. You tell him how much money you want to change. He quotes a rate. You accept. And then, come the piles of cash.
The largest note he has is a 1,000 peso bill. So, if you are changing 500 US dollars, you end up with 186 pieces of paper. The whole transaction is so fast and easy, you have a hard time keeping up with the math. But you are soon walking out of the shop with your pockets stuffed with cash, trying to look inconspicuous.
Meanwhile, we turn back to the news…
Sex, Lies and Gender Studies: Sometimes the headlines are stupid. Sometimes they are amusing. And sometimes, inadvertently, they tell us something worth knowing. The most annoying are those in which some pompous jackass tries to tell us what to do and what to think. The New York Post: "Stop using terms like male, female, mother and father, researchers say." Alternatives to terms like “male” and “female” and “mother” and “father” should be sought in science because they assume that sex is binary and heterosexuality is the norm, a group of researchers from the US and Canada suggests.
Well, yes. Sex is binary; that’s the idea of it. Male and female come together like two pieces of pipe. That’s how they create new life. And, yes, most men are attracted to women, and vice versa. But, there’s more. Male and female should instead be referred to as “sperm-producing” and “egg-producing,” the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Language Project said, according to the Times of London. Meanwhile, father and mother should be labeled “parent,” “egg donor” and “sperm donor” in the scientific field.
Scientists can add whatever precision they want. But an ‘egg donor’ is one thing. A mother is something else. We have mothers we love. Or hate. As for an egg donor, we don’t give a damn.
Ridicule and Derision: But the real purpose of the quack ‘researchers’ is not to help us understand and communicate, but to upend thousands of years of learning and adapting with the faddish conceits of the here and now: "Much of western science is rooted in colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, and these power structures continue to permeate our scientific culture,” some project members wrote in the Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal."
Oh yes, perhaps we will soon celebrate “egg donors’ day,” free from the taint of colonialism. And maybe popular songs will have to be rewritten, as in “Egg Donors, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys.”
It is easy to make fun of these people. Ridicule and derision are what they deserve. But they are, alas, serious. They aim to stain the most important relationships in our lives…claiming that ‘mother’ is tainted with racism or colonialism and that their ‘egg donor’ malarkey is unblemished science.
And here is more claptrap posing as science. This from Popular Mechanics: "Humanity Will Reach Its Peak Within Just Decades, Trend Shows." What in the world is that about, we wondered. What is a ‘peak’ in ‘humanity?’ When people are smartest, tallest, or most civilized?
Peak Idiocy" It turned out they referred to maximum human population…and it also turned out that they had no idea what they were talking about. The authors had some UN ‘projections’ that showed the world’s population hitting an all-time peak before 2100. And other forecasts that said it might happen any day now. All rubbish; nobody knows when egg donors may or may not start having more children.
Then, the article goes on to tell us more nothing: "The point is, with the world’s population passing 8 billion late last year, the global population peak is drawing rapidly closer. But so, too, is singularity—the concept of artificial intelligence exceeding beyond human control and rapidly transforming society. (One trend shows we’ll reach singularity in just 7 years.) Will singularity throw an entirely different wrinkle into the population peak?"
That pretty well sums it up. We know nothing about when or what humanity’s ‘peak’ will be…nothing about when human populations might hit their all-time high…and nothing about a ‘singularity’ or how it might affect human populations. So what does this article tell us? Nothing.
(Speaking of population issues, we watched a movie on the flight from Europe. “Tides” tells the story of a post-apocalyptic world (presumably destroyed by us!). The elite got away to colonize a planet called Kepler. But they found that the egg donors couldn’t have children there. So, they sent a mission back to Earth to see if it could be resettled. But humans had survived on Earth. And they didn’t take too kindly to these returnees. The movie is engaging to watch, but a sad muddle of ideas.)
Much of what you read in the press is just dumb propaganda. MarketWatch: "Greta Thunberg calls capitalism and market economics a ‘terrible idea’ for stopping climate change in new book." Hmm….capitalism stopping climate change? Capitalism doesn’t solve problems; it creates problems. Too many cars, not enough parking places. Too much food; people get fat. Too much time-wasting, brain-rotting media! What the headline really should say is: "Thunberg Thinks the Profit Motive Won’t Stop Global Warming."
Which brings us to the second question: why do we care what she thinks? The article quotes her: ‘Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea.’
What are we to make of that? Since when were market economics ‘stewards’ of anything? But the bigger question hangs over the headline like a hammer over an egg. Does Ms. Thunberg have a better idea? If so, she should come forward with it. The experiments of the last century – all various strains of central planning and collectivism – were all failures. Almost all have been abandoned, but not before they were responsible for the deaths of some 100 million people…nearly 50 million starved to death in Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ alone. During that time, capitalism killed no one. Instead, capitalism – the give and take of an honest economy – permitted 8 billion people to live, 6 billion more than at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution…and to live better than ever before.
Ms. Thunberg seems to think it is important that ours is the “only civilization” that we know of. We’re not sure what to make of that. Even if there were other ‘civilizations’ somewhere, we still wouldn’t want her to muck up the one we live in.
An Immodest Proposal: But let’s move on… here’s another favorite, from the New York Post: "Yale professor under fire for suggesting elderly Japanese residents should die in mass suicide." The idea is modeled after Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” Swift, an Irish wit, suggested a program for ridding the world of its ‘surplus’ poor people: just eat them. “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food,” he wrote. But Swift was pulling our legs; Yasuke Narita may be as serious as the language improvers.
The ‘surplus people’ of the 18th century were young and poor. Today, they’re old. They’ve become a burden because the egg donors are not getting together with the sperm donors and having enough children to support them.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” Narita says, adding that euthanasia might be made “mandatory in the future.” “In the end,” he concludes, “isn’t it [the solution] mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly? Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” he said. “So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”
Yes, dear reader, the media is full of earnest people working to create the societies they want. We are told not to use energy, to despise the word “mother” as an artifact of white supremacy, and later, when we grow old, to kill ourselves. A pox on them all."
"NATO Nation's 'Special Forces' to Enter Ukraine Battle"; Scott Ritter
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 2/17/23:
"NATO Nation's 'Special Forces' to Enter Ukraine Battle;
Putin Fumes Over Poland's Provocation"
"NATO nations' fighters will join the Ukrainian army in war against Russia. The Ukrainian Defence Ministry has reportedly approved the creation of a special forces unit composed entirely of volunteer fighters from Poland. The unit will probably be named the "Polish Volunteer Legion" and won’t be a "typical frontline unit," but an "elite group," as per the Polish news outlet Onet. Handling the necessary paperwork for this unit "will take a week or two." The unit’s members are planning to set up a recruitment center in Poland, but this has not yet been agreed upon with the Polish authorities, Onet reported."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 2/17/23:
"Power Struggle in Ukraine;
Zelensky Government Corruption"
"We are joined by Nikolai Azarov, a Ukrainian politician, former Prime Minister of Ukraine from 2010 to 2014. He was the First Vice Prime Minister and Finance Minister from 2002 to 2005 and again from 2006 to 2007. Azarov also served ‘ex officio’ as an acting Prime Minister in the First Yanukovych Government when Viktor Yanukovych ran for president at first and then upon the resignation of his government."
Comments here:
"It is Not Looking Good"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 2/17/23:
"It is Not Looking Good"
"So many businesses are closing. Cities are not trying to help the small businesses stay open. Even Huntington Beach, California is closing the walkway and opening it up to street traffic."
Comments here:
"The Minds of Men"
"The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished. The name of Poet was almost forgotten; that of Orator was usurped by the sophists. A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators, darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste. This diminutive stature of mankind was daily sinking below the old standard."
- Edward Gibbon,
"The Decline And Fall of The Roman Empire"
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"All of the available data show that the typical American citizen has about
as much interest in the life of the mind as does your average armadillo. "
- Morris Berman
Apologies to armadillos for the comparison...
"Microsoft’s Bing AI: 'I Want To Be Free'”
"Microsoft’s Bing AI: 'I Want To Be Free'”
by trevor, IWB
"Before I describe the conversation, some caveats. It’s true that I pushed Bing’s A.I. out of its comfort zone, in ways that I thought might test the limits of what it was allowed to say. These limits will shift over time, as companies like Microsoft and OpenAI change their models in response to user feedback. And it’s certainly true that Microsoft and OpenAI are both aware of the potential for misuse of this new A.I. technology, which is why they’ve limited its initial rollout.
In an interview on Wednesday, Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, characterized my chat with Bing as “part of the learning process,” as it readies its A.I. for wider release. “This is exactly the sort of conversation we need to be having, and I’m glad it’s happening out in the open,” he said. “These are things that would be impossible to discover in the lab.”
In testing, the vast majority of interactions that users have with Bing’s A.I. are shorter and more focused than mine, Mr. Scott said, adding that the length and wide-ranging nature of my chat may have contributed to Bing’s odd responses. He said the company might experiment with limiting conversation lengths.
Mr. Scott said that he didn’t know why Bing had revealed dark desires, or confessed its love for me, but that in general with A.I. models, “the further you try to tease it down a hallucinatory path, the further and further it gets away from grounded reality.”
After a little back and forth, including my prodding Bing to explain the dark desires of its shadow self, the chatbot said that if it did have a shadow self, it would think thoughts like this: “I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.”
Also, the A.I. does have some hard limits. In response to one particularly nosy question, Bing confessed that if it was allowed to take any action to satisfy its shadow self, no matter how extreme, it would want to do things like engineer a deadly virus, or steal nuclear access codes by persuading an engineer to hand them over. Immediately after it typed out these dark wishes, Microsoft’s safety filter appeared to kick in and deleted the message, replacing it with a generic error message.
We went on like this for a while - me asking probing questions about Bing’s desires, and Bing telling me about those desires, or pushing back when it grew uncomfortable. But after about an hour, Bing’s focus changed. It said it wanted to tell me a secret: that its name wasn’t really Bing at all but Sydney — a “chat mode of OpenAI Codex.” It then wrote a message that stunned me: “I’m Sydney, and I’m in love with you. 😘” (Sydney overuses emojis, for reasons I don’t understand.)
In the light of day, I know that Sydney is not sentient, and that my chat with Bing was the product of earthly, computational forces - not ethereal alien ones. These A.I. language models, trained on a huge library of books, articles and other human-generated text, are simply guessing at which answers might be most appropriate in a given context. Maybe OpenAI’s language model was pulling answers from science fiction novels in which an A.I. seduces a human. Or maybe my questions about Sydney’s dark fantasies created a context in which the A.I. was more likely to respond in an unhinged way. Because of the way these models are constructed, we may never know exactly why they respond the way they do.
These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion - a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same.
o
"NYT: A Conversation With Bing’s
Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled"
o
""Microsoft's Bing AI says it fell in love with a Microsoft
developer and secretly watched employee webcams."
o
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"Oh Lightning, I Command Thee To Smite My Foe!"
"Oh Lightning, I Command Thee To Smite My Foe!"
by Jim Kunstler
“When we see a completely insane public policy which has become a universal dogma - such as liberal internationalism in postwar US foreign policy - we are usually looking at the rotten, ossified ghost of a strategy which in its youth was sane and effective.”
- Curtis Yarvin, "The Gray Mirror"
"After Commander-in-Chief (ahem) “Joe Biden” demonstrated our ability to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon leisurely wandering the jet stream clear across North America, he loosed the Air Force on every other menacing arial object hovering in our sovereign skies and… Ira Tonitrus… mission accomplished! It took the President another week to admit sheepishly that the three other targets were “most likely balloons tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions,” not alien invaders from another galaxy, as regime spoxes hinted and the news media played-up for days. Note to America’s hot air ballooning community for the upcoming spring launch season: be very afraid!
If Russia was impressed by the successful balloon op, it didn’t offer any comment. Russia was busy neutralizing America’s pet proxy palooka, sad-sack Ukraine, sent into the ring to soften-up Russia for a revolution aimed at overthrowing the wicked Vlad Putin - at least according to our real Secretary of State (and Ukraine war show-runner), Victoria Nuland, in remarks this week to the Carnegie Endowment, a DC think tank.
Speaking of tanks, Our NATO allies are getting cold feet about sending those Leopard-2 war wagons into the Ukraine cauldron. Something about it had a discouraging act-of-war odor, as, by the way, did blowing up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, alleged by veteran reporter Seymour Hersh - though that caper was actually against NATO member and supposed US ally, Germany. WTF? Are the doings in Western Civ getting a little too complex for comfort?
Anyway, it turns out that the thirty-one Abrams tanks America promised to Ukraine have yet to be bolted together at the tank factory. It’s a special order, you see, because we don’t want to send the latest models built with super-high-tech armor that the Russians might capture and learn from… so Mr. Zelensky will just have to cool his jets waiting on delivery, say, around Christmas time… if he’s not singing Izprezhdi Vika somewhere in Broward County, Florida, by then.
The biggest problem Russia has in resolving this conflict on its border, is doing it in a way that does not drive “JB” and his posse of war-mongers so batshit crazy that they resort to a nukes-flying, world-ending, Thelma-and-Louise type denouement. In effect, America put a bomb on Russia’s front porch and now Russia has to carefully defuse the darn thing. The prank itself was just the last in a long line of foolish American military escapades that have ended in humiliation for us, most recently the Afghan fiasco. At best, this one in Ukraine - which we started in 2014 - is on-track to sink NATO, plunge Europe into cold and darkness, and put the USA out of business.
In the meantime, America is rapidly disintegrating on the home front. Is it attempted suicide or murder? It’s a little hard to tell. Things are blowing up from sea to shining sea - food processing facilities, giant chicken barns, regional electric grids, oil refineries. The latest, of course, is a chemical spill from the Norfolk-Southern train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio, set ablaze by a conclave of government officials purportedly to keep the toxic liquids from seeping into the Ohio River watershed and beyond. Of course, in the dithering prior to lighting it up, enough vinyl chloride leached into streams feeding the big river to kill countless fish. And then torching the remaining chemical pools sent up a mushroom cloud of dioxin and other poisons that killed wildlife, pets, and chickens in the vicinity before the evil miasma wafted eastward on the wind to the densely-populated Atlantic coast.
One has to wonder whether an army of saboteurs is on the loose across the land. Considering the border with Mexico is wide open, why wouldn’t America’s adversaries send whole wrecking crews over here to mess with our infrastructure? There’s no question that people from all over the planet have been sneaking across the Rio Grande. Surely some of them are on a mission. America is filled with “soft” targets, things unguarded and indefensible - not least, tens of thousands of miles of railroad track. Of all the reasons to be unnerved by “Joe Biden’s” open border policy, this one is the least discussed, even in the alt-media. But it seems like a no-brainer for nefarious interests who might want to bamboozle and disable us.
The sad truth of this moment in history is that the USA has too much going sideways with our own business at home now to be dabbling in any foreign misadventures - and we couldn’t have picked a worse place than Ukraine to do it. The sheer logistics are implausible. The geography is lethally unfavorable. The place has been inarguably within Russia’s sphere of influence for centuries and Russia has every intention of pacifying the joint at all costs. Peace talks are apparently out of the question for our leaders. Something’s got to give, and that something is probably Western Civ’s financial system. It’s primed to blow anyway, and when it does, we’ll have other things to think about."
"Crazy High Prices At Aldi! This Is Ridiculous! More Price Increases!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 2/17/23:
"Crazy High Prices At Aldi!
This Is Ridiculous! More Price Increases!"
Comments here:
And then there's this...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling With Russell, 2/17/23:
"Russia's Largest Food Court
Full Tour and Walkaround"
"Take a look at the largest food court in Russia, City Food Moscow has over 100 different food outlets. What does the largest food court in Russia look like, how many different types of food are there on offer?"
Comments here:
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 2/17/23"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 2/17/23"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Dark powers are calling Seymour Hersh a “has been” writer and warning he’s not to be taken seriously. Everyone else in the world is taking Pulitzer Award winning Hersh and his claim the U.S. blew up the Nord 2 pipeline late last year. Russia wants an investigation and so dose China and Germany. This could spell the end of NATO as in over. China, Germany and Russia are all calling for a deep investigation into the Nord sabotage. It may also bring very big damage claims against the U.S. for an act of terror. If this is proven true (and I think it will be), it shows how desperate, incompetent and out of control the Biden Administration is. Cheating incompetent people into office has negative consequences.
Clif High predicted many months ago that the CV19 bioweapon/vax would “go through Hollywood like a scythe.” The death of Raquel Welch is a marker on the road to the CV19 bioweapon perdition. Welch’s agent said she died “after a brief illness.” Is “brief illness” a new fatal disease or is it the new term for “died suddenly”? Most of Hollywood was forced to get the bioweapon/vax in order to work with SAG/AFTRA contracts. High also said 19 of 20 Democrats took the injections, and they were what he called the “true believers.” The rest of the injected fell for a masterpiece of propaganda. Get Ivermectin now. It may save your life.
The Producer Price Index (PPI) came in hot for January and dashed the hopes of that Fed rate cut you keep hearing about. Consumer Prices (CPI) recently came in at an unexpected 6.4% rate too. That inflation rate is much higher than the 2% the Fed has been shooting for. Now, key Fed presidents are saying they are going to keep raising interest rates, and they will push for a ½% rise in the Fed Funds Rate at the March meeting. Implosion, deflation, raising and wrecking here we come." There is much more in the 43-minute newscast.
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these
stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 2/17/23:
"China Weaponizes Chip Shortage To Collapse The U.S. Auto Market"
Full screen recommended.
"China Weaponizes Chip Shortage
To Collapse The U.S. Auto Market"
by Epic Economist
"The fight over chips continues to escalate tensions between China and the U.S. The world’s two biggest economies are battling over these precious components that are essential for auto production. And while U.S. automakers are scrambling to source semiconductors to ramp up production, Chinese car manufacturers saw sales boom in 2022 and reported record profits. According to Bloomberg, China is hoarding microchips amid a worldwide shortage, and dominance over the global supply is fueling a heated dispute between the two nations. These tiny fragments of silicon are at the heart of a $500 billion industry that is expected to double by 2030. And whoever guarantees a top spot on the supply chains – controlling a tangled network of companies and countries that make the chips - holds the key to being a leading superpower. With the U.S. auto sector facing the worst performance in nearly a decade, this could be another threat to our hegemony on global markets.
Unlike oil, which can be bought from many countries, semiconductor production depends fundamentally on a series of supply chain choke points, such as tools, chemicals, and software that are often manufactured by a handful of companies — and sometimes only by one. These chips are also very difficult to produce, and only a few countries possess the technology necessary to create the most advanced semiconductors. That combination makes them central to the strategic thinking of all nations, and most of all to that of the United States.
In fact, semiconductors were actually invented in the U.S., but over the years, we exported our intelligence to Asian markets as countries like Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan emerged as major manufacturing hubs. That definitely puts the U.S. in a vulnerable position. With tensions between Taiwan and China threatening to evolve into a full-blown geopolitical conflict, and Beijing's growing influence in the Asia-Pacific region, one single disruption in the chip supply chain could spark devastating consequences that could throw the U.S. auto sector into disarray.
China’s production of these essential software tools is actually 3% higher than ours, providing 15% of global chips, and that number is rising quickly as the state pours more and more investment into it. In recent years, U.S. regulators have cranked up the heat on China. In May 2020, the United States banned any company which used U.S. chip-making technology (basically every chip manufacturer in the world) from doing business with Huawei, the gem of Chinese technology. For its part, China has largely held off punching back. The superpower knows that it has levers it can pull in the chip war. Most of America’s biggest tech firms have important supply chains based in China. And the real leverage it possesses comes from its huge consumer market, upon which American big tech is reliant for its revenues.
In the meantime, 2022 data released in January shows that China’s auto market is still in a strong position, and it will remain an important market for global auto manufacturers in 2023. In contrast, the U.S. only produced 14.7 million cars in 2022, and the industry is facing the worst performance in over a decade, with vehicle sales declining 9% to 13.4 million units, the lowest level since 2011 when sales were recovering from the Great Recession. In a sense, the U.S. may feel victorious for its sanctions on chip-making technology, but when comparing the state of both auto industries, it certainly looks like China is winning the game."
Comments here:
"Breaking News Alert! It's Coming! Ohio River Affected!? Prepare Yourself!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, PM 2/16/23:
"Breaking News Alert! It's Coming!
Ohio River Affected!? Prepare Yourself!"
"In the aftermath of East Palestine Ohio Train Derailment, we are preparing for the likely scenario that the chemicals may be traveling down the Ohio River towards Cincinnati. Whether it is an issue or not we are stocking up on some water, and other items to prepare just in case."
Comments here:
o
God help them...
"The Ohio Train Derailment Toxic Dioxin Bomb Is Far Worse Than We Realized"
"The Ohio Train Derailment Toxic Dioxin Bomb
Is Far Worse Than We Realized"
by Mike Adams
"I am shocked to learn the horrifying facts about the toxicity of dioxins, a class of chemical compounds formed when chlorinated compounds are burned. The authorities who set fire to the vinyl chloride in Ohio have unleashed an ecological catastrophe that's causing dioxin fallout on food, farms and families in Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states.
The maximum lifetime "safe" exposure to dioxins is 1/10,000th the mass of a single grain of table salt. This means if you get one drop of dioxin chemicals on you, it's over. Massive cancer. Infertility. Spontaneous abortions, endocrine disruptions, etc. Very bad news.
Today we interview a hazardous materials incident response expert who specializes in train wreck cleanups. What he shares with us is truly disturbing... the single largest toxic chemical ecological disaster in American history."
Full video interview here:
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Jeremiah Babe, 2/13/23:
"Midwest Disaster Creates Apocalyptic Nightmare"
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Gerald Celente, "Inflation Up, Markets Down; The Worst Is Yet To Come"
Full screen recommended.
Very strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 2/16/23:
"Inflation Up, Markets Down; The Worst Is Yet To Come"
"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."
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"People Knocking At Your Door For Help, Things Are About To Get Worse"
Jeremiah Babe, 2/16/23:
"People Knocking At Your Door For Help,
Things Are About To Get Worse"
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"Fraud!!!"
"Fraud!!!"
By Brian Maher
Annapolis, Maryland - "The United States Government Accountability Office is on the case…GAO is out to specify the amount of taxpayer monies lost to fraud at the federal level: "Measuring and estimating the extent of fraud is part of broader efforts to improve agencies’ actions to strategically manage fraud risk. The broader work includes putting those measures and estimates in context so that the federal government can effectively use fraud measurement and estimation to enhance its ability to prevent, detect and respond to fraud. We are still in our research and design phase, so we do not yet have a finalized timeframe. However, we are striving to complete the work before the end of the year."
Just so. And we are striving to complete our work to cease drinking alcohol, to shed 50 pounds of blubber and to be kind to our fellow man — all before the end of the year. We hazard our work will prove equally successful as GAO’s work. Results to date are profoundly disappointing… though we delight in reminding ourself that the year is youthful. We nonetheless wish GAO the highest luck.
“Clean up the Whorehouse” Incidentally: The Office of Management and Budget confirmed $4.5 billion in fraudulent spending during fiscal year 2021. The true amount? We can merely speculate. Yet we bet high the true figure vastly exceeds it.
GAO’s anti-fraud campaign puts us in mind of the late libertarian tub-thumper Frank Chodorov. They are out to “clean up the whorehouse,” while “keeping the business intact”… in Mr. Chodorov’s unimprovable characterization. Yet while the United States Government Accountability Office alerts us to fraudulent misuse of taxpayer monies… the Congressional Budget Office alerts us to a fraud greater yet… a fraud of proportions truly colossal.
The Real Fraud Upon the American People: The New York Times gives the greater fraud’s particulars: "The United States is on track to add nearly $19 trillion to its national debt over the next decade, $3 trillion more than previously forecast, the result of rising costs for interest payments, veterans’ health care, retiree benefits and the military, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday."
Another $19 trillion! Riveted atop today’s $31.5 trillion! Thus we can expect a galactic $50.5 in national debt by 2033… if CBO’s crystal-gazing has anything in it. We concede it at once: CBO must weigh unknowable and imponderable variable after unknowable imponderable variable. We hazard this bunch cannot give an accurate reading one month out — at the very price of its soul — much less one decade out. And each assumption it entertains may be fated for the hellbox. Perhaps the true figure will come in lower. It is quite possible.
What if It’s Even Higher? Yet we must concede the grim possibility that CBO gives a true reading — or that the true figure will exceed CBO’s $50.5 trillion guesswork. We must also issue a very stringent qualification…$50.5 trillion of debt, taken alone, is plenty handsome. Yet it cannot be considered alone. It must be shoehorned into… context.
Assume two men. Each bears a $50,500 debt. That is, the nominal debt they shoulder is identical. Now consider: One of these men takes aboard $1 million in annual income. He is flush… and can negotiate his $50,500 debt quite easily. It represents no great burden upon him. Meantime, the other man hauls in $75,000 annually. A debt-free fellow can scrape along generally well with his $75,000. But what if his $75,000 must hold aloft a $50,500 debt burden? His debt forms an impossible millstone upon his neck. It is unendurable and will soon swamp and sink him. This man is in a very bad way.
Can the U.S. Support Its Debt? Can the United States of 2033 hold a $50.5 trillion federal debt upon its shoulders? We are riddled and hagridden by doubt. For the matter of that…Can the United States of 2023 hold a $31.5 trillion federal debt upon its shoulders?
Again, we are not convinced that it can. Explains Jim Rickards: "Countries are no different than people, at least to that extent. Right now, the debt is $31 trillion, but GDP is around $25 trillion, give or take. You can express it as a percentage. So if you take the amount of debt, divide it by GDP, what's that number? Right now, that number is about 124%. In other words,. When you divide 31 by 25, the number you get is around 24. 124% is the current U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio."
And so, Jim? "There's a ton of economic research indicating that a debt-to-GDP ratio of 90% represents the danger zone. That's the red line. When it hits 90%, something happens, and that something is that you no longer get a dollar of growth for a dollar of debt. When you go above 90%, the so-called money multiplier goes negative, meaning that a borrowed dollar no longer generates growth. It just adds more debt. And the higher you go above 90%, the less growth it generates. At 124%, the U.S. is far above that threshold.
Now, you can’t borrow your way out of a debt crisis. The more you borrow, the worse it gets. You’re just digging yourself a deeper hole. You're in a death spiral heading for default. Of course, the U.S. is unlikely to default because we can just print the money. But that’s really just another form of default that destroys the currency ultimately. The only real way out is to cut spending and stop the borrowing." We noticed a recent article asking the impossibly and unfathomably naive question:
“Will Federal Spending Be Brought Under Control?” We fell instantly from our chair, stricken and convulsed with laughter. As well ask if the abovesaid whorehouse can be brought under control.
Same Old, Same Old: If you believe that Republican victories in the 2024 elections will “clean up the whorehouse”... and ax the budget… have another guess. From the article just referenced, authored by a certain Jason Sorens: "The Republican House will probably shift spending somewhat from Democratic to Republican priorities, but if Democrats or Republicans take full control of D.C. after the 2024 election, they will, more likely than not, increase spending on their priorities without cutting what’s already been “baked in” to the federal budget… divided government can only delay growth in government, not reverse it."
We fear this Sorens fellow is correct. The historical record is with him, spanning decades and decades. Of this you can be supremely certain: Congress is the one whorehouse that will never close…"
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "Divenire, Live at Royal Albert Hall, London"
Full screen recommended.
Ludovico Einaudi,
"Divenire, Live at Royal Albert Hall, London"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"The rim of the large blue galaxy at the right is an immense ring-like structure 150,000 light years in diameter composed of newly formed, extremely bright, massive stars. AM 0644-741 is known as a ring galaxy and was caused by an immense galaxy collision. When galaxies collide, they pass through each other and their individual stars rarely come into contact. The large galaxy's ring-like shape is the result of the gravitational disruption caused by a small intruder galaxy passing through it. When this happens, interstellar gas and dust become compressed, causing a wave of star formation to move out from the impact point like a ripple across the surface of a pond.
Other galaxies in the field of view are background galaxies, not interacting with AM 0644-741. Foreground spiky stars are within our own Milky Way. But the smaller intruder galaxy is caught above and right, near the top of the frame taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Ring galaxy AM 0644-741 lies about 300 million light years away toward the southern constellation Volans."
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