"Figuring Forward in an Uncertain Universe"

"Figuring Forward in an Uncertain Universe"

by Maria Popova

"We make things and seed them into the world, never fully knowing - often never knowing at all - whom they will reach and how they will blossom in other hearts, how their meaning will unfold in contexts we never imagined. (W.S. Merwin captured this poignantly in the final lines of his gorgeous poem “Berryman.”)

Today I offer something a little apart from the usual, or sidelong rather, amid these unusual times: A couple of days ago, I received a moving note from a woman who had read "Figuring" and found herself revisiting the final page - it was helping her, she said, live through the terror and confusion of these uncertain times. I figured I’d share that page - which comes after 544 others (here are the first), tracing centuries of human loves and losses, trials and triumphs, that gave us some of the crowning achievements of our civilization - in case it helps anyone else.

Click image for larger size.

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known - an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.

In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.

But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die - in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.

I will die.

You will die.

The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust."

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

“Fish Are the Last to Notice the Water”

“Fish Are the Last to Notice the Water”

by Paul Rosenberg

“I ran into this phrase in a physics lecture, of all places, and knew it would be the title of my next article. And this is generally a true statement. Those who are immersed in something… who have always been immersed in it… are the last to see what it really is.

By now it should be obvious to the people of the West that they’re being held in a primitive bondage. And fortunately, more eyes are opening to this than ever before. But still, most people are so used to this particular “water” and have so long acclimated themselves to it, that they haven’t recognized it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with most of these people; they just haven’t stepped back far enough to see the obvious. So, let’s do that.

The Long View: A single model of human life has dominated the West for thousands of years. I can summarize by saying that this rulership model began to form in about 5400 BC, dominated Mesopotamia by about 4000 BC, took hold in Egypt by 3000 BC, and spread over the rest of the world from there. So, it has dominated for some 5,000 or 6,000 years, depending on which dates you prefer. This model is so common that it’s hard to make out at first. Here are its parts:

• A small minority of men hold a monopoly on making rules everyone else will live by.

• This minority enforces these rules on everyone else.

• The minority extracts regular payments from everyone else. This is said to be necessary for protection and justice.

• The minority fails to provide justice on a daily basis and very often sends the children of the majority to fight in battles to the death.

• A minority-aligned intellectual class assures the majority that this is the best that can be had and that it has been sanctified by some higher power (gods, ancestors, tradition, reason, experience, progress, or whatever).

• No one is permitted to escape this model. Those who try are punished as traitors and heretics.

This is the primary model of human organization and has been for some 5,000 years. And aside from arguing over details (or fury over the audacity to say it), there is no real challenge to this statement. Moreover, this model has been an abject failure – a demonstrable failure:

• Wars have continued throughout its entire reign.

• Justice has never been achieved and generally came closest in places away from power centers.

• Human happiness has not noticeably increased.

• Even when science has broken out, it has been recaptured and forced to serve the model. (The internet, for example.)

On top of that, this model has to be maintained by force. As noted above, straying from it is harshly punished. If this system was truly superior, force wouldn’t be required. After all, we don’t have to force people to buy houses or cars. So, by any number of measurable standards, this model fails, and very, very badly. The best defense one might make for it is that something else could be worse. But since we’re not permitted to test that assertion, the word bondage is perfectly fitting.

At a bare minimum, we can say this: Any system with no major upgrade in 5,000 years must be considered hopelessly obsolete, moribund, and degenerate. This is where we stand today. And it is crucial that we help our fellows see it.

How Do We Do Make Them See? First off, we cannot make people see. And truthfully, they generally see it quite well on their own. What they lack is inner strength to acknowledge what they see. It is not intellectual strength that most people lack; it is emotional strength. And so, you’ll have to be slow and gentle if you want success. Rigorous intellectual arguments are not enough, and in many cases they’re counterproductive.

In the end, the way to help your friends and neighbors is downright biblical: Plant seeds, wait for them to germinate, water them. Show kindness, love them, shine light on their path. It doesn’t matter if this sounds hokey to you or if you’d rather engage in brilliant arguments. This is what works. So, decide what you really want: for your friends and neighbors to see, or for you to “win.” The fish need faith to imagine a dry shore, and they’re not going to get it from intellectual badgering.”

- www.freemansperspective.com

Joel Bowman, "Death in the Afternoon"

"Death in the Afternoon"

by Joel Bowman

"To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, 

all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; 

what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is mortal."

~ Jorge Luis Borges

"Everything is illuminated against its opposite; truth against fallacy; light against darkness; life against death. And who would have it any other way, even if they could? What would life on this mortal coil be, for instance, without the eternity of its terminally mysterious counterpoint?

If there exists a perfect setting for these and associated meditations, it must surely be the magnificent Recoleta Cemetery, located right here in Buenos Aires. On any given weekend, this sacred resting place for thousands of the city’s most famous – and infamous – people is found to be one of the liveliest places in town. Notable interments include a who’s-who list of Argentine writers, painters, poets, musicians, scientists and luminaries from other noble fields of interest. And, because nothing, including death, is beyond the law of equilibrium, a handful of politicians also rot underfoot.

Tourists pour in to adorn Maria Eva Duarte de Perón’s grave with flowers, for instance, bypassing the resting place of a Nobel Prize-winning chemist and a dozen honest writers to do so. Other, temporary attendees pose with Colgate smiles to have their picture taken beside weeping cement angels, frozen, as they are, in a state of perpetual sorrow. Young boys give the “peace” symbol next to the generals’ tombs whose armies laid to waste to tens of thousands of men, not much older than they, the bodies of whom are long forgotten, their makeshift graves unmarked.

Nowhere does irony live a fuller life than in a cemetery. Walking among the deceased, reading bookend dates on the bronze plaques, one is reminded of the finite nature of all things; organisms, currencies, political regimes, class structures. When the cemetery was constructed, back in 1822, it must have been a good ride from the exclusive barrios of San Telmo and Montserrat. The rich probably wouldn’t have been caught dead around the grounds of the Monks of the Order of the Recoletos, nor near the shabby, patchwork graveyard that was built there the same year the group disbanded.

Half a century later - and with Argentina still reeling from the War of the Triple Alliance and its own, subsequent civil war - a yellow fever epidemic tore through the capital city. Its wealthier, southern quarters were among the worst hit areas. Death toll estimates range from thirteen to twenty-five thousand. The clase alta packed up and moved north, largely into and around the Recoleta barrio. As such, the marbled vaults came to be populated with members of this same aristocracia, who, though they escaped the fever, came to rest here eventually just the same.

Today, you could buy an entire building in San Telmo for the same price as some of the finely appointed homes in Recoleta. An entire block in Montserrat might go for half that much.

And so it goes. People die…cities and empires crumble to the ground…and time, indifferent to the fleeting anguishes and triumphs of men, presses on.

At the turn of the 20th century, Argentina was ranked as the 8th most prosperous nation on earth. Only Belgium, Switzerland, Britain and a handful of former English colonies - including the United States – were more favorably positioned, economically. In 1913, Argentina’s bustling, cosmopolitan capital, Buenos Aires, had the thirteenth highest per capita telephone penetration rate in the world. Her per capita income was, around this time, 50% higher than in Italy, almost twice that of Japan and five times greater than its northern neighbor, Brazil. Argentina’s industry churned out quality textiles and leading edge, refrigerated shipping containers carried her prized beef, first introduced in 1536 by the Spanish Conquistadors, from the fertile plains of the pampas to the farthest reaches of the known world.

As the century wore on, protectionist policies at home and increased competition from the export-led, post-WWII economies – particularly from Japan and Italy – undermined Argentina’s international advantage. From 1900 through to the beginning of the new millennium, Argentina’s real GDP per person grew at a rate of 1.88% per year. Brazil outpaced her handily, clocking a 2.39% annualized growth rate. Japan, starting with a real GDP per person of just over $1,500 (2006 dollars) at the turn of the twentieth century, grew an average of 2.76% per year. By the middle of last decade, Japan’s real GDP per person had doubled that of Argentina. By 2020, it was more than quadruple.

The phenomenon is so conspicuous, the local Argentines even have a joke for it. “There are four types of countries in the world,” they lament. “First world. Third world. Japan, where nobody can figure out how they did so much with so little. And Argentina, where nobody can figure out how we did so little with so much.”

War, currency debasement, civil unrest, military rule and the catalyzing agent of political aspiration, harbored by the equally corrupt and inept, all conspired to stultify this once-proud nation’s potential. The great Argentine poet and essayist, Jorge Luis Borges, described one such retarding factor with characteristic flare and wit: “The Falklands thing was a fight between two bald men over a comb.”

On a comfortable Sunday afternoon in late February, an elderly group of well-dressed gentlemen met at their favorite restaurant, right by the gate to the Recoleta Cemetery, for lunch. They took a table outside, one in the shade and with a view of the passing foot traffic. The waiters, having brought the regulars the same thing, more or less, every Sunday for as long as they could remember, immediately set about filling their table. There was bife de lomo and chorizo sausages, mozzarella and buffalo tomatoes and papas fritas by the pile. Rich, Argentine Malbecs and Cabernets flowed freely and the merriment of the group soon became infectious. They flirted with the pretty waitresses and joked with patrons at the nearby tables.

After more than a few bottles, one of the gentlemen got chatting with an Australian editor of no particular importance. “I am a judge here,” he eventually told the younger man. “My friends and I have seen it all in this city…riots, economic crises, war, people’s entire life savings wiped out overnight.”

One of his friends lent over and placed a knowing hand on the judge’s shoulder. “Today, we enjoy the moment,” he said to his lifelong friend, before adding, one long finger pointed over the cemetery wall, “because tomorrow…ha ha…well, you know our next stop old man.” And the table erupted in laughter, as the sun set over the angel’s heads in the background.

Cheers,"

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

Gerald Celente, "More U.S. Lies to Rig Markets, Israel Violence Keeps Escalating"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 8/13/26

"More U.S. Lies to Rig Markets, 

Israel Violence Keeps Escalating"

"In this episode of Trends in the News, Gerald Celente breaks down the latest developments shaking the globe: renewed accusations and narratives surrounding the Strait of Hormuz, escalating violence in Israel and the Middle East, and what Celente calls continued U.S. deception used to manipulate markets. While Western powers struggle with mounting debt, geopolitical tensions, and economic uncertainty, China continues expanding its influence through trade, technology, infrastructure, and global partnerships. Tune in as Gerald separates hard facts from political theater, exposes the agendas driving today's biggest stories, and reveals the current events forming future trends. 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."

- https://trendsjournal.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Jackson, Tennessee, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"There Comes A Time..."

"I make no bones about being partisan for my country. I also feel no shame whatever because of it. I absolutely disagree that "great thinkers don't let that affect the thoughts". I would say exactly the opposite: someone who refuses to let love-of-country affect their thoughts is a moral cripple irrespective of their intellectual prowess. I can look dispassionately at the situation, and I have done so repeatedly. But I will never forget which nation I love and support.

We Americans have a saying: “It’s more important what you stand for than who you stand with.” I do not rely upon peer opinion to decide what is right and what is wrong. I make those decisions for myself, and even if I discover that every other human alive chose differently, that doesn’t mean I was wrong.

There comes a time in every man’s life when he has to choose sides. I have chosen my side. I am comfortable with my decision. I do not think everyone on my side is a saint, but I know that those on the other side are much, much worse.

Sometimes a man with too broad a perspective reveals himself as having no real perspective at all. A man who tries too hard to see every side may be a man who is trying to avoid choosing any side. A man who tries too hard to seek a deeper truth may be trying to hide from the truth he already knows. That is not a sign of intellectual sophistication and “great thinking”. It is a demonstration of moral degeneracy and cowardice.”

- Steven Den Beste

○

“Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and unexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.”

- Mark Twain

"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"

"James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour 

and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe"

by Maria Popova

“Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of life’s most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed simulacrum of reality we so painstakingly construct with our waking lives and reality laid bare in the naked nocturnal mind, is not always a resting place of ease - for there dwells the self at its most elemental, which means the self most lucidly awake to its foibles and its finitude.

The disquietude this haunted hour can bring, and does bring, is what another titanic writer and rare seer into the depths of the human spirit - James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) - explored 130 years after Hawthorne in one of his least known, most insightful, and most personal essays.

In 1964, as the Harlem riots were shaking the foundation of society and selfhood, Baldwin joined talent-forces with the great photographer Richard Avedon - an old high school friend of his - to hold up an uncommonly revelatory cultural mirror with the book "Nothing Personal" (public library). Punctuating Avedon’s signature black-and-white portraits - of Nobel laureates and Hollywood celebrities, of the age - and ache-etched face of an elder born under slavery and the idealism-lit young faces of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Georgia, of the mentally ill perishing in asylums and the newlyweds at City Hall ablaze with hope - are four stirring essays by Baldwin, the first of which gave us his famous sobering observation that “it has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.”

At no time does the terror within, Baldwin argues in the third essay, bubble to the surface of our being more ferociously than in that haunting hour between past and future, between our illusions of permanence and perfection, and the glaring fact of our finitude and our fallibility, between being and non-being. He writes:

"Four AM can be a devastating hour. The day, no matter what kind of day it was is indisputably over; almost instantaneously, a new day begins: and how will one bear it? Probably no better than one bore the day that is ending, possibly not as well. Moreover, a day is coming one will not recall, the last day of one’s life, and on that day one will oneself become as irrecoverable as all the days that have passed."

It is a fearful speculation - or, rather, a fearful knowledge - that, one day one’s eyes will no longer look out on the world. One will no longer be present at the universal morning roll call. The light will rise for others, but not for you.

Half a century before the physicist Brian Greene examined how this very awareness is the wellspring of meaning to our ephemeral lives and a century after Tchaikovsky found beauty amid the wreckage of the soul at 4AM, Baldwin adds: "Sometimes, at four AM, this knowledge is almost enough to force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error. Since, anyway, it will end one day, why not try it - life - one more time?"

After singing some beautiful and heartbreaking Bessie Smith lyrics into his essay - lyrics from “Long Road,” a song about reconciling the knowledge that one is ultimately alone with the irrepressible impulse to reach out for love, “to grasp again, with fearful hope, the unwilling, unloving human hand” - Baldwin continues: "I think all of our voyages drive us there; for I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."

That alone, Baldwin insists, is reason enough to be, as Nietzsche put it, a “yea-sayer” to life - to face the uncertainty of our lives with courage, to face the fact of our mortality with courage, and to fill this blink of existence bookended by nothingness with the courage of a bellowing aliveness.

In a passage that calls to mind Galway Kinnell’s lifeline of a poem “Wait,” composed for a young friend on the brink of suicide, Baldwin writes: "For, perhaps - perhaps - between now and the last day, something wonderful will happen, a miracle, a miracle of coherence and release. And the miracle on which one’s unsteady attention is focused is always the same, however it may be stated, or however it may remain unstated. It is the miracle of love, love strong enough to guide or drive one into the great estate of maturity, or, to put it another way, into the apprehension and acceptance of one’s own identity. For some deep and ineradicable instinct - I believe -causes us to know that it is only this passionate achievement which can outlast death, which can cause life to spring from death."

And yet, so often, we lose faith in this miracle, lose the perspective we call faith - so often it slips between the fingers fanned with despair or squeezes through the fist clenched with rage. We lose perspective most often, Baldwin argues, at four AM: "At four AM, when one feels that one has probably become simply incapable of supporting this miracle, with all one’s wounds awake and throbbing, and all one’s ghastly inadequacy staring and shouting from the walls and the floor - the entire universe having shrunk to the prison of the self - death glows like the only light on a high, dark, mountain road, where one has, forever and forever! lost one’s way. And many of us perish then."

What then? A generation after Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry composed his beautiful manifesto for night as an existential clarifying force for the deepest truths of the heart, Baldwin offers: "But if one can reach back, reach down - into oneself, into one’s life - and find there some witness, however unexpected or ambivalent, to one’s reality, one will be enabled, though perhaps not very spiritedly, to face another day… What one must be enabled to recognize, at four o’clock in the morning, is that one has no right, at least not for reasons of private anguish, to take one’s life. All lives are connected to other lives and when one man goes, much more goes than the man goes with him. One has to look on oneself as the custodian of a quantity and a quality - oneself - which is absolutely unique in the world because it has never been here before and will never be here again."

Baldwin - whom U.S. Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks described as “love personified” in introducing his last public appearance before his death - wedges into this foundational structure of soul-survival the fact that in a culture of habitual separation and institutionalized otherness, such self-regard is immensely difficult. And yet, he insists with the passion of one who has proven the truth of his words with his own life, we must try - we must reach across the divides within and without, across the abysses of terror and suspicion, with a generous and largehearted trust in one another, which is at bottom trust in ourselves.

Echoing his contemporary and kindred visionary Leonard Bernstein’s insistence that “we must believe, without fear, in people,” Baldwin adds what has become, or must become, the most sonorous psychosocial refrain bridging his time and ours: "Where all human connections are distrusted, the human being is very quickly lost."

More than half a century later, "Nothing Personal" remains a masterwork of rare insight into and consolation for the most elemental aches of the human spirit. For a counterpoint to this nocturnal fragment, savor the great nature writer Henry Beston, writing a generation before Baldwin, on how the beauty of night nourishes the human spirit, then revisit Baldwin on resisting the mindless of majority, how he learned to truly see, the writer’s responsibility in a divided society, his advice on writing, his historic conversation with Margaret Mead about forgiveness and responsibility, and his only children’s book."

- https://www.themarginalian.org/

Freely download "Nothing Personal",

 by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, here:

- https://monoskop.org/

"Where Your Gaze Lingers..."

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that has nothing to do with you, this storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.

You have to look! That’s another one of the rules. Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.”

- Haruki Murakami

“Closing your eyes won’t make the awfulness go away. It may be that nothing will. But dwelling on it, dreading the evil, playing out the misery in your head – doesn’t this feed the monster? You can’t close your eyes to life, but you can choose where your gaze lingers.”

- Richelle E. Goodrich

"Something Big Is Developing, Agencies On High Alert; Iran Joining BRICS"

Jeremiah Babe, 8/13/26

"Something Big Is Developing, 

Agencies On High Alert; Iran Joining BRICS"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Record Fuel Prices Blast Off in US Right on Schedule!"

"Record Fuel Prices Blast Off 

in US Right on Schedule!"

by David Haggith

"Welcome to the summer arrival, as promised, of the most expensive gasoline prices ever seen in the US at this time of year. One has to compare apples to apples, in terms of seasonality, so … Gasoline prices climbed on Wednesday, marking their highest level on record for this time of year. The national average [at $4.03/gal] “is now at its highest ever level this late in the calendar year,” GasBuddy head of petroleum research Patrick De Haan noted on X, “meaning the national average has never been above $4/gal after Aug. 12 in any previous year- ever.”

So, I guess the arrival I promised of soaring fuel prices this summer, to hit shortly after our fuel and oil reserves effectively bottomed out, wasn’t really off at all. There is still lots of summer left, and prices suddenly bounced up to the highest ever seen for this time in the summer. I’m not sure how one can hit it more accurately than that, though I had conceded it felt like it was dragging on a tiny bit longer than I originally thought, but what is a couple of weeks in the grand scope of the highest prices “ever”?

I did warn, too, about how suddenly this could happen in a recent Deeper Dive for paying subscribers: "The safety net keeping oil prices from spiking is nearly gone, and one analyst warns that when it runs out, the move could be sudden and severe…The move … may be less gradual than I suggested; therefore, arrive with a little more delay, but be more sudden and severe when it arrives."

And, yet, we have not begun to see the worst of it, even though prices suddenly spiked to the worst they’ve ever been for this part of summer … or, for that matter, for the remaining part of the year. We haven’t begun to see the worst of it because we have not begun to see actual shortages hit gas stations in this country. We are seeing prices rise as shortages appear in other countries, as I said earlier this week we would experience as a spill-over effect because we are pumping as much fuel toward those countries as our refineries can manage, and those countries are bidding up the price of fuel. So, that didn’t take long either. And we are seeing it happen, even without crude oil prices going back up that much … yet … as I also explained was possible when shortages in fuels start to appear due to refinery destruction outpacing crude destruction.

And we are seeing more continuing refinery destruction as I said we would … even in today’s news: (And, as said, the soaring prices are not just in gasoline, reported above, but in diesel, the fuel that delivers the rest of the economy to our doorsteps.)

Refinery Attacks Deepen Global Diesel Supply Crunch: Diesel prices are surging as Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries and Houthi attacks on Saudi energy infrastructure are deepening an already severe global fuel shortage. U.S. diesel futures jumped 7.4% this week, while retail prices reached $5.32 per gallon.

All of this is also why I said yesterday to discount this month’s inflation reports, which include the Producer Price Index that came in today (see headlines below) because its soft spot is for the same reason we saw in yesterday’s CPI report—FUEL prices and other energy prices fell while most other prices rose, and that, as I have been saying, was purely temporary due to Trump’s blabbergassing about Iran being desperate to make a deal—a charade that might still work with the bidding bots in oil futures, but that can’t do anything with the price increases that actually count—the rising price of fuel at the pumps for everyone, including businesses and airlines. Those are going to keep rising because the war is going to stay hot and destructive, maybe even more destructive. And they push up the priced of everything over time.

No good comes out of an environment of deep corruption

Of course, we have a twisted story today where the completely inane Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, tells more public lies, by repeating Donald Trump, saying that the US now controls the strait. That’s so laughable it isn’t funny. It is a marvel that they are so brazen as to make claims so readily provable as completely false: If the strait is “completely controlled” by the US, why doesn’t Trump just open it up completely … today? If the strait is completely controlled by the US, that means the strait’s continued closure has to be entirely Donald Trump’s fault because he’s the one in control of the strait. So, open up or shut up, Donny Boy!

It is mind boggling that the Trump administration thinks ANYONE will believe such obvious lies when they are so clearly contradicted by reality that everyone can see, However it is mind blowing that so many still don’t see it and keep believing and supporting the Liar-in-Chief. Support the guy who lies to you in the most obvious ways every single day even as you watch his personal profits off the war soar (also in the headlines below today) beyond any profits any president in history has ever made off of any decisions while in office.

Watch him amass a fortune while he takes down your living with higher costs due to his war, and then praise him as the best president ever! Do this while he makes decisions that kill people and destroy the global economy. So, the Demonrats (oh, the audacity of their Trump-hating ways) are finally going after him for the worst insider trading in White House history. 

The most obscene part of this insider trading is that it works by flashing war on and off and betting on the changes those moves will bring to markets just before you announce the decision. The bets have been so blatantly obvious and reported here a number of times that even the sleepy Democrats in congress are finally ginning up a political war over it, getting excited, I guess, that they may win congress entirely this fall so that they can actually go somewhere with this.

Well, they could, except, of course, our brilliant, supposedly conservative Supreme Court has ruled the president can do anything he wants so long as it is an official decision, and what could be more official than presidential decisions to TACO in and out of war on a daily basis? This is what you get when you give absolute power to someone who cravenly craves it. The Dems can impeach him, but they probably cannot bring any criminal charges against him. Meanwhile the Republicans who were enraged at Hunter & Dad are completely benign about the president declaring war (supposedly congress’s constitutionally reserved and mandated power) for insider trading and massive profiteering, and they even provide him cover! Politics in the US has never been more obscene.

In that corrupt environment where the flash-on/flash-off war has been hugely profitable for the president, the war will continue; and Iran promises in the headlines below that it is going to get much more aggressive in bringing the war home to the US. (So, no, fuel prices are not going to see any reprieve, and that means the soft inflation data is, as stated, meaningless because it all rises when energy goes back on the rise, which is what is being reported here today. It’s on the rise!)

Iran’s war threats go into hyperdrive: First off, Iran announced today that it intends to keep the war hot ALL THE WAY THROUGH TO THE END OF THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY in order to teach the US to never attack it again! (So, prices of fuel to go down? Inflation to stay soft due to falling energy prices? I think, NO WAY! Hormuz under US control? NO WAY. Bessent a liar. Yes, daily, along with his blabbergassing boss.)

Iran has suggested it could deliberately prolong the war with the US until Donald Trump leaves office, in order to send a message that attacking the country has lasting consequences. Mohammad Reza Naghdi, senior adviser to the commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, said dragging out the war would show any future US administration that “there is a cost” to hostile endeavours against Iran. “We have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so we can live with security,” he told PBS NewsHour.

His comments came as Iran again rejected Donald Trump’s claims that the US has “total control” over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority said “the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked” and it will not be opened until Iran’s conditions are accepted. The conditions? Pay us a ton of money—enough to cover the full cost of EVERYTHING you damaged. Get your butts completely out of our neighborhood, except that your own ships stay stranded as our hostages inside the gulf, and leave our enriched uranium alone while we now tell you up front that we are going to build build a bomb with it.

Going to be accepted by Trump and Bessent? No. And that, as I’ve said all along, is the way Iran wants it. They want to hold Trump in the war in order to keep punishing the US for attacking them. As I noted for the last few months, they are not interested in negotiating.

Trump earlier said that “praise be to Allah”, Washington has “total control over the Strait of Hormuz”, adding: “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT!” Liar-in-chief. Every word completely delusional. The only people more delusional are those who continue to believe him when the real truth all around them is so obvious and is now as close as their nearest gas pump! If anyone thinks Trump has total control over the Strait of Hormuz, they should go buy some gas or diesel today and send me a photo of the price. Then send me another one next week. Or they can look a little further away from home to what other watchers are telling them:

Just 13 vessels transited the waterway on Tuesday, around 90 per cent below the pre-war daily average. Or they can listen to how Iran is telling them this is going to go because the Iranians (to our great shame) have been the ones telling us the truth every time Trump has lied to us. “Look, we have to attain deterrence so that the enemy never dares to attack us, so we can live with security,” Naqdi said in an interview with PBS. “One way is to prolong this war until we get to the next term of the presidency and cause attrition, so that if anyone else wants to attack Iran, they will know there is a cost.” It keeps being the war of attrition I said from the start Iran was determined to create.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Houthi allies attacked Saudi Aramco again today, which sent Crude prices back up, because that is how you make sure it remains a war of attrition. And Ukraine attacked another Russian refinery—this time a 200,000 bpd Gazprom facility in the Urals. Kyiv intensified attacks that have already forced Moscow to curb fuel exports and even import gasoline…. Another Urals refinery is in worse shape. The 120,000-bpd Orsknefteorgsintez plant in the Orenburg region has completely halted operations following Ukrainian drone strikes, regional governor Yevgeny Solntsev said Thursday…

But the bigger threat is this from Iran: “Whenever the conditions are favorable and the order is issued, we must be able to take the operation into enemy territory.” That be us. Iran noted that its prewar doctrine was anchored on defense. Its new doctrine is based on the principle that the best defense is a good offense. Military.com underscores that “Iran has reorganized its military to be more aggressive abroad as talks on ending the war with the U.S. remain mired in stalemate, a sign that Tehran is preparing for a protracted era of regional conflict.”

So, if anyone tells you oil prices are falling, send them this article. Share And if anyone tells you inflation has just started coming down, remind them that just about the only thing that came down in inflation was energy, which fell enough to offset all the other areas where prices rose, and then send them this article about what just happened to fuel prices. Share. Like I say, “The news before it happens.”

- https://www.thedailydoom.com/

"How It Will Never Really Be"

Read a book? That'll be the day! God forbid!

Dan, I Allegedly, "Insurance is a Scam - They Don't Want to Pay"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 8/13/26

"Insurance is a Scam - 

They Don't Want to Pay"

"You pay your insurance premiums every month because you're required to have coverage - but what happens when you actually need to use it? In this video, we look at the growing frustration surrounding insurance claims, claim denials, underinsured drivers, auto insurance, homeowners insurance, and the fight consumers can face just to get a legitimate claim paid. I share several real-world examples, including situations involving auto accidents, vehicle damage, uninsured motorists, and my own experiences fighting with insurance companies and repair-related claims.

Insurance is supposed to protect you when something goes wrong, but consumers are increasingly asking whether they're actually getting the protection they're paying for. We discuss auto insurance, personal finance, rising insurance costs, claim denials, deductibles, uninsured motorist coverage, homeowners insurance, insurance companies, consumer protection, and the business of insurance. If you're paying thousands of dollars a year for insurance, you need to understand what your policy actually covers - and what can happen when you need to file a claim. Subscribe to iAllegedly for daily business news, personal finance, economic news, and stories that affect your wallet."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Bill Bonner, "Wall Street's Odor of Decay"

"Wall Street's Odor of Decay"

by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "A quick weather alert. All week long, our computer - somehow in league with the French authorities - has alerted us to an Extreme Heat Advisory. Today, the temperature will be pushing up to 100 degrees. Tomorrow, too. The Mirror: "Extreme heat is gripping the UK and Europe this summer, with nearly half of England and all of Wales officially in a drought. England’s Environment Agency and Natural Resources Wales announced their driest months on record, marking the third time they’ve been broken over the past five years. It comes in the wake of four record-breaking heatwaves since May, which Chloe Brimicombe, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford, explained that adaptation to and mitigation of climate change are urgently needed. “We need better long-term planning.”

The Washington Post: "Few places around the world have experienced more unusual heat and drought recently than Europe. A record late-spring heat dome was a harbinger. Then the heat domes just kept coming. These extreme conditions have turned once-lush landscapes dusty brown. Rhine and Danube rivers have been particularly affected."

Is this just the random movement of weather patterns? Or does it bespeak a more profound change...towards the final furnace? We don’t know...but here in France it feels End Times-ish. Scorched earth. Zombie trees, still standing but dead to the heartwood. Ground so dry the grass crunches like glass beneath your feet. And people, like the remnants after the fall of Rome, cower in their houses afraid to show their faces in the light of day. A heat apocalypse? We don’t know. But a summer rain is in the forecast for Saturday.

Meanwhile...There is the odor of decay on Wall Street too. It smells as though the AI brew may be getting ready to turn.

There are three main groups in the AI complex. There are the chipmakers — Nvidia leading the pack, followed by Broadcom, Micron, AMD, ASML and TSMC. They are the pick and shovel sellers. Together, they are said to be worth $11 trillion. But they have only free cash flow of $236 billion. The theoretical investor, if he could buy the whole group and pocket the FCF, could expect to get paid back by the year 2073.

That assumes that no new tech comes along in the next half-a-century to compete with them...and no further capital spending (no new innovations requiring investment) are necessary. We might as well assume that the Baltimore Orioles will win the pennant each year for the next half a century too. But at least we see, once again, how hard it is to make money from an investment when it is over-priced at the get-go.

What sends the chipmakers into orbit is spending by another piece of the confabulation - the ‘hyperscalers’ - Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Oracle and Meta. These are companies that survived and grew fat after the last big boom/bust cycle in tech. They are worth, together, about $16 trillion. Now, instead of sharing out earnings with stockholders, they spend their money on capital investments (Capex) trying to stay on top of the latest tech innovations. Which just goes to show how hard it is to make money in new tech at all; there is always newer tech.

Their total Capex for the next twelve months is said to equal to nearly 3% of GDP. And there’s the trick. The money, flowing into the AI cluster, flatters sales and profits for them all. Capital goes into one company...and is taken as income by another. The casual investor sees the whole whoop-de-doo as a boom...and is desperate to get a ticket before the show leaves town.

Finally, there are the explorers and miners themselves...OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI among the most prominent. In turn, they contract with the chipmakers and hyperscalers...providing more ‘proof of concept’ and further exciting the AI bulls. Behind them all is the hunch that if we were to reduce the cost of knowledge...thereby eliminating the salaries of the people who have it...we’d all be a lot better off.

But it’s all very well to make something cool. Then you have to sell it. Henry Ford doubled his auto factory wages...giving ordinary workers the money they needed to be automobile owners. In the AI revolution, however, instead of doubling their employees’ wages, AI is firing them. Forbes: "Companies Are Firing Workers To Fund AI That Isn’t Working Yet." In the Dot.com craze, investors believed internet traffic would double every 100 days. So, presumably, would sales. Success depended on getting as many ‘eyeballs’ as possible.

But now AI may actually pluck out the ‘eyeballs’ it needs to pay for itself. Eventually, as in all other big tech revolutions, the displaced workers will find new sources of revenue. Perhaps, as in ages past, they will rent themselves out as grooms, gardeners and chamber maids on the vast estates of the AI impresarios. But between the pink slip and the livery, it could be a rough transition.

And while the eyeball base may be shrinking, we are supposed to believe that the big AI ‘labs’ have a tollbooth on the road to tomorrow. This is not an impossible thing. The costs of entry into the business are so high that, like oil retailers, there are naturally only a few of them. Or, citing reasons of ‘national security,’ the feds might take charge of the turnpike themselves. The big tech bosses stood shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump at his second inauguration. Could some public/private backroom deal be in the works, forcing AI traffic onto a few controlled highways - with regulated tollbooths? Maybe.

But every bubble eventually makes eye contact with its pin. The AI craze is facing all the prickly thorns that typically doom an investment mania. Most important, whatever trickle of profit the industry eventually produces will be dwarfed by the torrents of investment capital that have flooded in to get it.

After the high-water mark in 1999, Microsoft, a genuine success story, saw its stock price cut in half. For Intel investors, the pain was much worse. The stock did not recover until this year - more than a quarter of a century after the bust. And JDS Uniphase investors, just to take a name from one of the tombstones, lost 97% of their money. The pin is patient. But we doubt AI investors will do much better."

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

Todd Hayen, "Deep Sea Fishing"

"Deep Sea Fishing"

by Todd Hayen

Ed Note: I decided today to run the first article ever published by this Substack back on April 1, 2022 (or, it could have been the second, not sure). This seems like an obvious description of “limited hangout,” a term not yet made popular. Enjoy!

"Every good fisherman knows that reeling in a big fish takes skill and conscious intention. One of the first things they learn is that you can’t just crank in the big guy with one effortless winding up of the line. It takes finesse, a dance of sorts. While always keeping a steady line, you bring them in slowly, with the primary focus on wearing them out, almost hypnotizing them into compliance.

A popular fishing website HUK says this about the process: "Remember that too much tension can snap the line and when large fish decide to make a run for it, the worst thing you can do is try to keep them in place. By fighting their runs, all you are doing is increasing the chances that your line will break and your prize will get away. Instead, set the drag so the fish can take out line while still tiring itself. This will wear down the fish; eventually their runs will get shorter, less violent, and less frequent."

Hmmm. Sounds a bit too close for comfort, eh? I am afraid I am not all that excited about the current hoopla regarding our apparent victory over the mainstream narrative. I simply don’t believe it entirely. We’ve made a run, so to speak, maybe have gotten too rowdy, too powerful, and we are being given a bit of slack so we don’t break the line. This run is not being executed only by the folks on our side of the fence, but by the sheep as well. We are ALL tired, we are all ready to get out of this mess and call it a day.

It seems like a sensible tactic on their part—to let out a little line, but still keeping us hooked and apparently still in their control. All this euphoria about us finally winning the battle and that the narrative is finally crumbling indicates to me that we may be getting lost in the weeds of apparent success and the hook and line is still, in reality, firmly embedded in our flesh, only to suddenly reel us in again, after a dizzying and disorienting taste of freedom. I don’t like it.

Most everyone is familiar with the 1950’s Harvard experiment conducted by a rather soulless Curt Richter. Rats were placed in a tank where they had to frantically tread water to survive. Typically they lasted only 15 minutes or so before giving up, sinking, and subsequently drowning. A second set of experiments showed that if the rats were saved right before their demise, dried off and given a little respite, and then again returned to the tank of water, they could tread, and stay alive, for up to 60 hours. They called this the “hope experiment,” which is relevant to the current happenings. 

To maintain the narrative, people must maintain some sort of hope. When we are about to throw in the towel we are given a little slack in the line, and when the pressure hits again—with a new variant, a new virus, or, in a radical right turn, a nuclear war threat—we can sustain our loyalty, and ultimate compliance, believing we will not drown but will be saved at the last minute by our surrogate parents and archetypal “protectors.” These tactics work in different ways with the masses on opposing sides of the fence. The sheep need the slack when they are about to throw in the towel of compliance. The rest of us are not about to throw in the towel, but are about to gain greater potential of harm to the narrative—they respond to both situations with the same tactic, but with different results depending on where you sit in this whole mess.

This “hope experiment” reminds me of BF Skinner’s work (also a psychology research scientist of Harvard fame—many also believed Skinner has very little soul). His work with pigeons pressing levers to get food led him to conclude that a type of “uncertainty principle” affected animals, and thus people. If the food was dispensed at variable intervals, the pigeons went nuts, pecking the lever incessantly. There was no rhyme or reason when the reward would come, therefore the pecking never stopped. You can see how this psychology is relevant here (and yes, as much as I hate to admit this, behavioral science is indeed real, it doesn’t give answers to all questions, but humans, at times, do indeed behave like rats and pigeons). If something is given, taken away, given again, taken away again, at what seems to be for irrational and unpredictable reasons, you create craziness: variable intervals of tension and release. Good way to mess around with people’s heads.

It seems what we are seeing now with the seeming turning of the mainstream narrative is too calculated, too fast, too easy, and simply not as deep as it needs to be to declare victory. Where are the arrests and prosecutions of government officials or Big Pharma officials? Where is the accountability of the thousands who have been injured by the vaccines? Where is the admission that this all was a horrible attempt to create a New World Order?—A Great Reset? The allies in World War II had to literally LEVEL Germany before those bastards gave up. I don’t think this “victory” is going to be this easy.

James Corbett, of “The Corbett Report” put it succinctly recently on his program “New World Next Week”. Corbett said: “This isn’t the kill shot, literally or metaphorically, this is the first salvo in a years long, decades long, process of re-engineering the governing principle of society into the biosecurity state, and this is just about re-laying the infrastructure.” Corbett goes on to say there is likely much more to come, another virus even more deadly and scary, for example, and that everything is now all geared up and ready for the next horrifying event.

So maybe Covid IS finished. It has possibly been tapped out. Maybe it didn’t make the full mark that was expected, maybe it wasn’t deadly enough, or maybe the variants didn’t propel the boosters forward as expected. Maybe the vaccine wasn’t intended to be such a dud. Or, maybe it all worked out exactly as planned. Regardless, they did make a rather substantial move. At the very least they have been successful in normalizing nearly every major goal they had set. The goals such as digital passports, social credit scoring, digital currency, and blind, stupefying, sheep-like compliance, to name just a few, maybe are not as deeply ensconced in the day to day operation of society as they had expected, but these concepts certainly are normalized now as active probabilities in the minds of the masses (and some of them, such as “blind stupefying sheep-like compliance”, are well established). It will take much less future effort to drop them into place, fully functioning.

Hannah Arendt, one of the past century’s most incredible heroes of truth, said in her seminal work "The Origins of Totalitarianism": A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Although I do not believe that the masses see everything as a lie, I do believe if it were proven to be a lie, it would have nearly no impact. I have not heard yet from the sheep side any sort of eating of humble pie. All this that is happening is seen as “business as usual” from the sheep . . . maybe some things have come to light that were just not known before (according to them), but they see this as a victory of their own—they have beat Covid by wearing masks, locking down, vilifying the nasty unvaccinated. The “I told you so’s” from our side of the fence are falling on deaf years. “The crazies on the Right have beaten up the hero-god Fauci, but he is still the hero-god to most.” As Arendt so deftly points out, the sheep continue to “admire their leaders for their superior tactical cleverness” as a result of any “backing down and changing the narrative” as we believe Fauci has exhibited in our own interpretation.

Yes, some have “flipped” so to speak. Maybe many have. But this is where the fishing analogy comes to light. The powers that be see the sheep taking a run, albeit maybe a small one, but a run nonetheless, they are hearing the masses grumbling about the efficacy of the vaccines, the pointlessness of taking the booster—the weariness of lockdowns, masks, and social restrictions. They say, “maybe it is time to give them a little slack . . . to let them have a bit of a rest . . . before we reel them in for the final scoop into the net, the flop into the bucket . . . and the trip to the taxidermist”. So some of them started to flip (run) and the narrative shifts to give them slack.

All that being said, I don’t think much has changed in sheep-ville. Certainly most normies have never bought into what is to be found in the depths of the rabbit hole that imply a greater horror above the levels of government, viruses, and vaccines (as James Corbett points out). Few see a problem with digital currency, loss of constitutional freedoms, social credit, vaccine passports or the like. The agenda in this overarching echelon of control can, as it stands now, continue unfettered, Covid or no Covid. From this perspective, we’ve really won nothing at all. Can we call anything a victory as long as Fauci and his NIAID, NIH, HHS, FDA and CDC compatriots and minions remain standing? As long as the smear campaign to eliminate effective and inexpensive treatments continues? As long as vaccines are mandated or even just recommended without informed consent? Can we declare any sort of victory as long as people continue to suffer from vaccine injury and are not even accounted for? Can we really believe the narrative is crumbling when the perpetrators of these heinous crimes against constitution and humanity are not brought to justice? Can we sleep easy under the false euphoria of victory as long as tens of thousands of medical doctors and researchers and scientists go on being persecuted through the loss of careers and reputation and free speech? I could go on and on. No, we are not even beginning to see this narrative “crumble” until quite a bit more evidence is brought to light that this just isn’t another tactic in this ongoing agenda.

But. . .  maybe I am wrong. Maybe it just takes a little time to kill all of the hydra’s heads. Just killing one won’t do it, they will just grow back, but maybe we have just killed one or two heads and it will take time to go all the way through them, killing them all. Maybe the Trucker’s Convoy, the Boris Johnson announcements in the UK, the US Supreme Court ruling are indeed signs of the agenda crumbling, a few of the many hydra heads being lopped off by the swords of justice and sane thinking. I don’t want to give up hope, but I do think at the very least we must continue to be wary, with swords continually drawn and always at the ready."

- https://www.shrewviews.com/

"The Daily Global Oil Deficit Is Even Higher Than Originally Projected, And That Means That The Energy Crisis Is About To Greatly Escalate"

by Michael Snyder

"Since war with Iran erupted in February, the world has been using a lot more oil than it has been producing. The good news is that we had a tremendous amount of extra oil sitting around. As a result, we have been able to avoid shortages and we have been able to serve as the supplier of last resort for nations all over the globe. The bad news is that our commercial oil inventories are now almost entirely depleted, and the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is being drained very rapidly. We will soon hit a wall, and when that happens the global energy crisis will start getting really crazy.

According to the International Energy Agency, the amount of oil being produced globally each day is falling faster than they originally projected…Global oil ​supply will fall by ~4% and oil demand is set for a deeper contraction this year, as renewed hostilities in the Middle East push up fuel prices and weigh on consumption, the International Energy Agency said in its ‌monthly oil market report on Wednesday. The Paris-based agency sees global oil ​supply falling by 4.3M bbl/day this year, compared with the 3.7M bbl/day forecast in the IEA’s July report, ​which would take total supply to the IEA’s lowest forecast yet for this year at 102M bbl/day.

At this stage, global demand for oil is well above global supply. In fact, the International Energy Agency is now expecting the world to run an oil deficit of approximately 1.8 million barrels a day during the third quarter of this year. That is “more than double its previous estimate”…The result would put ⁠global oil supply ~1.27M bbl/day below demand this year, widening from an 860K bbl/day deficit implied from the IEA’s July forecasts. “Global ​oil supply has fallen well below demand due to the Strait of Hormuz shutdown, the U.S. blockade of Iranian exports, attacks within the Bab el-Mandeb Strait ​and reduced Kazakh CPC Blend exports,” the IEA said. For Q3, the IEA expects the global oil market to run a deficit ‌of 1.8M bbl/day, more than double its previous estimate of ~800K bbl/day and the deepest quarterly deficit since Q4 2021.

I realize that there is a lot of technical jargon there, and so let me try to break this down very simply. Things are a lot worse than they thought they would be. Now our commercial oil inventories have almost disappeared and the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen under 300 million barrels for the first time since early 1983… Crude oil stockpiles in the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve have fallen below 300 million barrels, the lowest level in more than four decades, as global inventories stay under pressure due to the Iran war. The SPR fell by 6.1 million barrels to 298.7 million barrels last week, according to data released by the Department of Energy on Monday. The reserve, created in 1975, is at its lowest level since January 1983.

Of course we will not be able to use all of that oil. There is a certain level that we cannot go below, and apparently more than 25 percent of the oil is “physically inaccessible” for various reasons…More than a quarter of that oil is physically inaccessible, blocked by failing pumps, corroded pipes, and underground salt caverns that have deformed beyond their operational parameters, according to internal government documents reviewed by Sputnik. The finding means the actual emergency capacity of the American energy backstop is smaller, and slower to deploy, than any headline barrel count conveys.

We are being told that we have about 40 days left. What will we do after that? Already, diesel prices are starting to go through the roof…U.S. and European diesel prices rose sharply on Monday after attacks on refineries in Russia and Saudi Arabia added to supply disruptions, raising ​concerns for farmers in need of the fuel for the planting season ‌in the Northern Hemisphere and harvesting season in the Southern Hemisphere.

The U.S. ultra-low sulfur diesel futures contract rose 7.4% to settle at $4.19 a gallon on Monday, the biggest gains since July 13. European ​diesel refining margins, measured as the difference between the price of fuel ​and the cost of crude oil, rose nearly 10%. The surge followed confirmation of ⁠an attack by Ukraine on a refinery in Russia’s Tatarstan region and another attack by ​Yemen’s Houthis on the Jazan refinery in Saudi Arabia. The Jazan refinery has been ​shut since July 27 due to an earlier strike by the Houthis, and plans to restart it have been postponed from August 15 to August 30, according to industry monitor IIR Energy.

It is just a matter of time before we see diesel shortages start to pop up all over the world. This will greatly affect farmers and truckers. What we really need is for the conflict in the Middle East to end and for traffic to start flowing through the Strait of Hormuz like it did before the war. But that is not going to happen because there isn’t going to be a deal.

The Iranians are insisting that President Trump must agree to all of their demands before they will reopen the Strait, and there is no way that President Trump will ever do that. So for now Trump is maintaining the naval blockade on Iran and he is declaring that the U.S. has “total control over the Strait of Hormuz”… “The U.S.A. has total control over the Strait of Hormuz,” he wrote. “I THINK WE WILL KEEP IT! Our Naval Blockade is being called, by everyone, ‘A WALL OF STEEL,’ and there is nothing Iran can do about it. They have no Navy, they have no Air Force, their remaining soldiers are unpaid, the IRGC is decimated and fleeing, and their ‘Leadership’ is uncertain, at best! They have No Money – Their country is ‘shot.'”

Both sides can argue about who controls what, but nobody can deny that hardly anything is getting through. In fact, only 8 vessels traveled through the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday… The number of vessels tracked transiting the Strait of Hormuz fell to a one-week low of eight, according to data reported by the Reuters news agency, as the ongoing conflict and stalemate kept shipping companies away from the vital waterway. Tuesday’s tally of eight vessels fell below a 10-day average of about 12, for the lowest daily count since August 5, according to Kpler data reported by Reuters. Around 130 ships a day passed through the vital waterway before the war started on February 28. A drop from 130 ships to 8 ships is a disaster.

The world desperately needs the oil, natural gas, fertilizer and petrochemicals that normally travel through the Strait of Hormuz. But now very few shipowners are willing to have their extremely expensive vessels make that trip. Iran has been hitting one commercial vessel after another, and one tanker that recently got attacked has spilled oil over an area of 155 square miles…

Oil from a spill off Oman has started to reach the country’s mainland, the U.N.’s shipping body said on Wednesday, according to the Reuters news agency. “Oil is drifting offshore to the northeast of [Oman’s] Al-Qibliyyah Island, with some oil reported to be reaching ⁠the mainland. Oil spill contingency planning is in place,” a spokesperson at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) said. The oil is believed to be leaking from the grounded tanker Caroline Bezengi, with the slick now covering almost 155 square miles, according to the Omani government.

Meanwhile, the Houthis continue to fire missiles at commercial vessels in the Red Sea…

All of this has enormous implications for our economy. An extended energy crisis will essentially guarantee a major global economic downturn. We are already witnessing big problems in Japan and in Europe. Here in the United States, we lost 23,000 jobs last month, and the employment numbers for 21 of the last 30 months have been revised down…

As I have discussed previously, the size of the U.S. workforce has shrunk by more than a million people over the past year. Just think about that. More than a million workers have simply disappeared from the workforce somehow. Sadly, if the crisis in the Middle East is not resolved things will get a lot worse. Our entire way of life depends upon cheap energy, and we now find ourselves in unprecedented territory."

- https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/