Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Wednesday, September 28, 2022
"Stack Your Firewood"
"Stack Your Firewood"
by Addison Wiggin
“For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood.”
- Jack Kerouac
"When politics lead the real economy, we are all doomed. If you haven’t been watching, there’s an international whodunnit taking place. Pundits the world over are playing armchair detective. Here are my three cents. (Aside: You can write to me about your opinions on the War in Europe here: WigginSessions@5minforecast.com)
Step one: The Incident: The Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea has sprung a leak. You can see it mapped out below:
The deeply muffled explosive gun… Get it?
(Source: Guardian, Swedish National Seismic Network)
Step two: The Accusation: The Swedes, Danes and Germans all believe the leaks are an act of sabotage. Seismologists in Sweden heard two distinct blasts shortly before the leaks were sighted on the sea surface.
Step three: The “Whodunnit?” What’s the motive? Who benefits? Russians? Germans? Americans? Sean Ring of the Rude Awakening does an excellent job of tracing the motives back to their actors. Even if some of it may be conjecture, Ring’s musings are worth a read. (Hint: Sean leans heavily in favor of some covert op from the Americans. Think Tom Clancy novel meets Dr Strangelove.)
Let’s say it is sabotage and more than just a media kerfuffle. If the Nordstream accident does prove to be an act of sabotage, then the incident also represents yet another escalation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, you’ve got Germany, Denmark and Sweden directly involved. Their lights will be shut off without an infusion of LNG from the US. Finland, by extension, has already been sucked into the mix, as several hundred thousand Russians flee Putin’s draft by crossing the land bridge that connects the two countries.
This Russian exodus rhymes with other events in history. It was before my time… but I grew up with stories of Americans fleeing to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam. The Russians fleeing their own version of “the draft” may be dashing headlong into a nightmare winter in Europe. “By the close of this year in Europe,” Bill Bonner said in our most recent Session, “they're expecting a very, very bad winter because people don't have gas.” We published these comments three weeks before the pipelines were damaged. The incident only inflames the conflict.
“They don't have energy,” Bill says, speaking to us from Ouzilly, his home four hours south of Paris. “The price of electricity in Europe today, and I'm right here, is priced as though oil were trading at $1,000 a barrel. That's pretty darn expensive.” Bonner continues: "Prices that high push a lot of people out. So we're looking at – it depends on how bad the winter is – we’re looking at a lot of people being shut out in the cold. Where this goes, I don't know. But it wouldn't be the first time in history that it results in a major catastrophe."
Energy crises have a way of leaking out into other kinds of crises. Our whole economy in the United States runs on diesel fuel. Trucks deliver stuff, and trucks run on diesel fuel. Trucks run on diesel fuel to deliver bread and milk, everything else that we eat. If there were a big crisis in diesel fuel, the shortages, all of a sudden. During the Pandemic we got a front row seat on how supply shortages can happen; how geopolitical mayhem can work its way into your life.
In response, to get our heads out of the Whodunnit and the finger-pointing… well, we can take care of ourselves. In New Hampshire, where I grew up, we still heat with firewood. Gathering and curing the wood is a several year process. It requires foresight, wherewithal… a little bit of luck – the same traits you need to make it through a deep freeze in the markets. So it goes..."
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Related:
"Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage"
Full, highly recommended article here:
Video here:
"Oh! Had I The Ability..."
"Oh! Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced."
“I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued.”
- Frederick Douglass
"You’ve Just Been Robbed!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 9/28/22:
"You’ve Just Been Robbed!"
"The Fed is doing so much to make it look like they are trying to help. All they’re doing is playing the classic game of chicken when it comes to the markets. This is a big fake out and we’re going to lose big time."
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "Alert! The Bank Of England Capitulates! Re-Starts Quantitative Easing"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/28/22:
"Alert! The Bank Of England Capitulates!
Re-Starts Quantitative Easing"
Comments here:
"No Ways Tired in A Sea of Lies"
"No Ways Tired in A Sea of Lies"
by Chris Floyd
"I think we are living in a world of lies: lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are the children and grandchildren of lies. One of the hardest things to accept is that the reality of our world is buried under so many layers of official deception and well-cultivated public ignorance about our history and our political system. Even if you break through somehow, momentarily, and hold up a fragment of the truth, most people have no context for dealing with it. It's like a bolt from the blue, they can't process the information. And so the sea of lies closes over us again, and again, and again. And yet the reality of our future appears on the horizon, denial be damned, an irresistible tsunami of destruction, changing all our lives forever.
These are the facts, and they can't be altered. But how to respond to this catastrophe? Shall we weep, moan, rend our garments, cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of republics? Shall we cower in the shadows and sing glamorous dirges for the Lost Cause, for vanished glories and broken dreams?
Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads high, laughing fools to scorn, rejecting at every turn the moral authority of murderers and thieves to rule our lives, determine our reality, act in our name? Let's dispense with lamentation - give not a single moment to that emotional indulgence - and get right back to work, more determined than ever to bear down harder, dig deeper and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still glowing beneath the slag-heap of ruin.
Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist - without violence, the weapon of the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary backsliders in thrall to the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing up their ape-lust for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant. Let's fight these pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands on our world and rape it like beasts in a mindless rut. Fight them with the truths we find, exposing their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people they've suckered, perverted and betrayed.
This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how impervious the Machine - that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen, Congressional rubber stamps, psychopathic media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, sex-crazed theocrats, war profiteers, think-tank bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, and woman-haters - might appear at the moment.
I don't know what else we can do, except to keep on telling as much of the truth as we can find, to anyone who will listen: reclaiming reality, fragment by fragment, one person at a time. It's an endless task- maybe a hopeless task- but the alternative is a surrender to the worst elements in our society- and in ourselves. It's worth the fight. Let's take it on. In the words of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to sanity starts now."
"Flirtin’ With Disaster, And By Disaster, I Mean Nuclear War"
"Flirtin’ With Disaster, And By Disaster, I Mean Nuclear War"
by John Wilder
"The big story in the news is the hurricane about to hit Florida. If it were about to hit Detroit or Baltimore, it might add a few billion in value to those cities, but alas, it looks like it might create damage beyond anything ever seen by man – it might muss Tom Brady’s hair. It also reminded me that I’m hungry, since I accidentally typed “burricane” twice before I got it right – my mind must be on burritos. Or maybe it’s prophecy – that a hurricane-sized burrito will hit Tampa? That’s (the hurricane, not the burrito) the story in the news, however, I think the much bigger story is buried. Or it was buried.
Russia makes most of its money by shipping natural gas, oil, fertilizer, and wheat out to the world. It imports tracksuits, cell phones, and gold chains. As I’ve covered before, what Russia imports is silly, but what it exports is crucial. The cheapest way, by far, to export oil is in the hair of a Russian or Italian. But they don’t do so well at moving natural gas, so people build big holes called pipelines.
Really, that’s all a pipeline is. It’s a hole. As tempting as it is, I’m not going to make a Kamala Harris joke. And you can bury it like they do most places, you can put it on stilts like they did in Alaska, or you can even have it under the sea.
As the Europeans have come under more political pressure to stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, they’ve moved away from coal. They’d like to move to entirely renewable energy sources, but last I heard those only exist in sufficient supply to power a technological civilization in the dreams that Greta Thunberg had in the womb as her mother engaged in one too many vodkas while riding rollercoasters on sleeping pills.
No, in 2022 Europe is powered by fossil fuels. Sure, there are some renewables, and the French built a lot of nuclear power plants. But the desire for power has increased exponentially to keep up with civilizational growth. Concentrated energy is also a multiplier, it allows a person or a company or a nation to do far more. With natural gas, a German factory can build all the Volkswagens® and bratwurst and lederhosen that the world needs. Without it? The production is (if they’re lucky) one percent of the powered production.
Russia was the biggest single supplier of natural gas to Europe, providing 45% of the needs. Nord Stream© was one such pipeline, and it took the route of going on the seabed from Russia to Germany. Why? One reason was that it avoided having to pay Poland, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries that never visit this blog for “transit rights” through those countries. For example, if Russia wanted to send gas through Ukraine (natural gas, not sarin) then Russia would have to pay Ukraine for the right to do so.
As such, the Poles and the Ukrainians hated Nord Stream®. But, it was successful. And the Germans loved it. Besides Austrians in the 1930s, what can all Germans agree on? That they like the Nord Stream© and Nord Stream II ™ projects. It lowers the price of energy for them, and makes it less likely that they’ll be held hostage by the Poles (hint, the Poles are still a bit miffed at the Germans and the Russians). The Ukrainians hated it most of all, since it looked like those projects alone would end up costing them over $4 billion dollars a year in transit fees, and it also lowers their political power to hold Russia hostage at the expense of European countries.
That brings us close to today. The United States has always opposed any of the Nord Stream projects. Why? First, if Europe is divided, the United States has one less group to be concerned with on the world stage. Almost as bad as a united Europe is Germany and Russia on good terms. Combine Germany’s economic powerhouse with Russia’s raw materials? That’s a threat that gives the State Department bad dreams.
This probably explains 90% of what went on in Ukraine, and the other 10% involves Hunter. Could Biden have de-escalated the conflict? With one phone call, yes. But it’s going now, and there reaches a point where even I’m concerned – and that’s the crippling (it can be fixed, but how bad is the damage?) of Nord Stream™ I and Nord Stream® II.
Why would the United States do that? Well, the biggest reason (that I can think of) is that it makes it so that Germany can’t back out of the sanctions when winter gets cold and prices start to be amazingly high and there just happens to be this nice, big straw filled with natural gas that they could suck on all day to be warm.
How do we know that people knew this was going to happen? Well, there are reports the CIA told Germany an attack was imminent. And there’s this little matter of the British pound collapsing right before the incident. And, there’s the little matter that an explosive was found next to the original Nord Stream© not too long after Russia took Crimea back in 2014. The detonation wire was cut, so whoever was getting ready to blow up the pipe had changed their mind (cough) Obama (cough). The fact that this happened even before we know the results of the Russian referendum?
Do I think that Germans will freeze to death? Probably not many. They may clear-cut forests, they may shut down industry for February and March, and they might make it against the law to heat your house in any way other than having a chubby girl in corduroy pants rub her thighs together as a space heater. On an economic scale, Frequent Commenter Ricky noted, it might devastate Germany’s economy even more than 9/11 did ours.
But now they can’t pick up the phone and call Putin and say, “We miss heat. Er, you. Please turn it back on. Here are rubles.” That option is gone, and that’s why I’m certain that it wasn’t the Russians who did this: why destroy your best bargaining chip? And, no, it’s not shoddy Russian construction – the companies that made the pipe and built the line are the best in the world, not Yuri’s Pipeline By Mail Company.
So the United States did it. Biden even told us that he was going to do it. I’m not sure he remembers he did it, but he did. It’s even on video, and he looks rather lucid (for Biden) during the speech. https://wilderwealthywise.com/
The thing that scares me is this: if I were Russia, I’d take this as a rules expansion pack: undersea pipelines are now fair game. And the ones that feed Europe from Norway are mighty vulnerable. This, more than anything, just ups the level of tension and ensures that what started as a property dispute keeps escalating. And escalating. And escalating. And one thing I learned from Tom Clancy movies?
Hmm. Good advice. I’ll even add this bit: Frequent Commenter Ricky also noted that I get to be the first person to make fun of the next stage in escalation toward a nuclear war. So, I’ve got that going for me."
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Related:
"Shopping At Target! Rising Prices, And Some Empty Shelves!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 9/28/22:
"Shopping At Target! Rising Prices, And Some Empty Shelves!"
"In today's vlog we are at Target, and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:
Greg Hunter, "Unpayable Debt & Vax Causing Hell on Earth"
"Unpayable Debt & Vax Causing Hell on Earth"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"Wall Street money manager Edward Dowd made billions of dollars in part by being a skillful number cruncher. When he applied his skills to the vax, he saw massive fraud, death and economy killing disability everywhere he looked. Add the vax genocide to the popping debt bubble, and a nightmarish perfect storm is clearly taking shape. Dowd explains, “It’s my thesis that the vaccines are not only deadly but cause massive amounts of disability. We had 220 million people in this country take the jab. Globally, it’s even worse because some countries had higher vaccination rates. What we are seeing now, 91 or 92 weeks since the vaccination program started, is rising disability. Everyone focuses on the deaths, and that’s bad, but disability is multiples of the deaths, and these are disabilities where people can’t work. They are incapacitated. Three million people disappeared from the labor force from death and disability. That number will cause labor shortages. That number will cause supply chain breaks, and we are seeing that. Here on Maui, my car got injured in an accident, and I am not going to get it fixed for six months because of parts and labor shortages on Maui. . . .
There are some predictions I make that I hope I am dead wrong. This is not one I want to be right on. I think, personally, that Hell on Earth has already started, and it’s going to start to accelerate. What I mean by that is we are going to be overwhelmed by people being disabled and dying at such a rate we have a breakdown in the supply chain and basic necessities that we used to take for granted. They just won’t be there because there are not enough people to deliver goods and services. This is where I hope I am dead wrong, but my own anecdotal situations is I see a lot of people who took the vax a year ago and the problems are just now starting to show up. This makes me very, very frightened.”
On the economic front, Dowd says, “I have talked about this extensively, and a sovereign debt collapse is inevitable. The way you know it’s occurring is watching the U.S. dollar index. That is accelerating to the upside, and the dollar is going to fail up. They will eventually try to introduce a new currency. It will be central bank digital currency or something. The dollar is 113 on the U.S. dollar index, and it was 104 this summer. So, this is a big, big problem. It’s causing debt defaults globally. It’s causing margin calls. I think we are seeing the greatest ever margin call ever seen in the history of the world unfolding before our eyes. What I have been telling people since January and February is we are going into a global economic death spiral. I told people to raise cash in their portfolio. I also think gold should be a good part of your portfolio, but don’t have all your eggs in one basket.”
In closing, Dowd warns, “80% of the country thinks everything is fine. It’s not fine, and the global crash is already in progress.” There is much more in the 42 min. interview.
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he as he goes One-on-One with money manager and investment expert Edward Dowd, author of the upcoming book called “Cause Unknown” The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022."
(The video is not playing because Rumble has internal problems, and I am hoping they will get this video player fixed soon. I uploaded this video 4 times and it is good on my end. As I said it’s a Rumble problem. They will get this fixed. The video will be worth waiting for, so keep checking back.)
"Brandon Euthanizes Europe"
"Brandon Euthanizes Europe"
by Bob Moriarty
"On February 16th the comedian running Ukraine began a massive shelling attack on the Donbas after murdering over 14,000 innocent civilians since 2014 in the region because they did not support the illegal coup d’état sponsored by the US.
In a speech given at the Munich Security Conference on February 19th the clown made it clear Ukraine wanted to regain its nuclear arsenal. Also on February 19th Brandon announced he knew Putin was about to attack Ukraine. That may have had something to do with Ukraine’s planned invasion of the Donbas scheduled for early March.
Russia responded with a preemptive attack on Ukraine on February 24th. Brandon called for more sanctions on Russia in response in addition to those imposed before Russia had done anything. The European allies and US seized billions of dollars of Russian reserves in the west and other assets without even a shred of legal justification. The Ruble went into free fall going from 85 to the dollar on February 15th to a high of 147 on March 7th. Clearly the sanctions had an effect and cut the value of the Ruble almost in half.
Russia was prepared for yet another round of sanctions. They raised internal interest rates and demanded payment for their gas and oil in Rubles. Since then the Ruble has been the strongest currency in the world currently trading at 55 to the dollar. The Euro has fallen to below par with the Dollar, the British Pound is down over 20% and almost at par with the dollar. The sanctions hurt.
But they hurt Europe, they didn’t hurt Russia. On March 1st I posted an article I had written in response to the sanctions. I called it "The US, EU and Nato Just Committed Suicide." I’m going to take credit for being the first person in the world to write about how stupid and self-destructive the sanctions were. Since then the word suicide has been recognized by hundreds or thousands of other commentators. Everyone now understands just how much damage the sanctions have done to the economy of Europe and the US.
You see, there is no energy shortage. There is lots of natural gas available and coal and oil to any willing buyer. But at the insistence of the US upon their European sock puppets, Europe refused to agree to perfectly reasonable terms offered by Russia. This wasn’t a case of Russia refusing to sell resources to the EU. It was a case of the EU first stealing from Russia and then demanding Russia agrees to their terms.
Putin understood something that none of the “leaders” of the EU understood and most of the world still doesn’t get. Europe needs Russia. Russia does not need Europe.
So the cost of energy and food across the world has skyrocketed. This winter thousands of businesses in Europe are going to be forced to close because they cannot afford to pay their energy bills. Millions of Europeans are going to starve or freeze or be forced into poverty as a result of their own stupidity or all three at the same time.
I’ve been amazed because the solution to the problem was so simple but the actions of the “leaders” of the EU so obtuse. Regardless of how they feel about the war, right or wrong on anyone’s part, if the sanctions hurt Europe and didn’t hurt Russia, all the EU had to do was declare victory and announce the end of the sanctions. Agree to pay on the terms Russia has offered to everyone and the economy recovers from this latest stupidity in government in a few months.
If Germany needs natural gas as a feedstock for their chemical plants and to provide heat for businesses and homes, all they had to do was turn on the Nord Stream II pipeline. That was until September 27th when the US blew up Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II. Which Brandon has promised was in the works long ago.
So we are in one of those good news, bad news places. The good news is that thousands and perhaps millions of Europeans led by the Germans are going to starve, freeze and go bankrupt this year.
Because of this act of war on the part of the US, the probability of a nuclear exchange just went through the roof. We are closer to nuclear annihilation than we have ever been in history. The bad news of course is that no matter how grim this winter is in Europe, they are totally f**ked next year. Turning on the tap is no longer an option even if the EU sobered up.
Welcome to World War III brought to you by Brandon and the idiot neo-cons surrounding him. Is anyone stupid enough to believe Russia will not respond in kind?"
Tuesday, September 27, 2022
"15 Signs That The Middle Class Is In Serious Trouble"
Full screen recommended.
"15 Signs That The Middle Class Is In Serious Trouble"
by Epic Economist
"America has been built upon the backbone of a strong and resilient middle-class. We used to be a nation of opportunity, wealth, and prosperity. But little by little, that crucial foundation has started to crumble, and today, we all can tell that the U.S. middle-class is disappearing while poverty continues to explode all across the country and wealth becomes more and more concentrated amongst the ultra-rich. This is a nationwide trend that has greatly accelerated over the past three decades, according to data released by the Pew Research Center. Now more than ever, it can be a real struggle to thrive in our society. But the truth is that the system has been designed for the average person to fail.
For almost 50 years, middle-class incomes haven’t kept pace with living expenses. Middle-income families watched their nominal hourly wages grow a dismal 8% between 1972 to 2022, when adjusted for inflation, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. During that same span, health care costs have grown over 600%, and the cost of college education shot up 1,120%. Over the past two years alone, the rise in inflation pushed the cost of living for the average middle-class household in America to jump by an average of $16,200 a year. It’s safe to say that workers haven’t seen a pay raise that matched those staggering increases. It’s a very difficult challenge to stay afloat in an economic environment that keeps squeezing us financially but provides very few chances for us to turn things around.
As incomes flatlined, the middle class was forced to go into debt. To try to keep up with higher prices for everything, people in this income tier had to resort to their credit cards. Federal Reserve data shows that since 2013, the debt burden of the average middle-class household is around 122% of their annual household income. That’s nearly double the debt load of American families in 1990, and a major issue considering that high levels of debt can prevent these families to save for retirement and emergency expenses. Without a reliable financial cushion to fall back on, any middle-class family can fall straight into poverty in face of adversity.
Unfortunately, we're trapped in a system that set us up for failure. We can't find decent jobs, we can't afford to get educated, we can't keep up with rising expenses, and we continue to see these problems piling up from generation to generation. The death of the U.S. middle-class is happening right before our eyes, and as we're forced to become more and more reliant from this rigged economic structure, we'll continue to watch our nation falling apart at the seams.
The road to the American dream doesn’t lead us anywhere anymore – and, unfortunately, conditions are unlikely to improve anytime soon. That’s why in this video, we’re going to expose the main reasons why the backbone of the U.S. economy is in serious trouble."
"Who Did It?"
"Who Did It?"
by Brian Maher
"What - or who - did it? That is: What… or who… blasted holes in the Nord Stream pipeline today? AP News reports the particulars: "Explosions rattled the Baltic Sea before unusual leaks were discovered on two natural gas pipelines running underwater from Russia to Germany, seismologists said Tuesday… The first explosion was recorded early Monday southeast of the Danish island of Bornholm, said Bjorn Lund, director of the Swedish National Seismic Network. A second, stronger blast northeast of the island that night was equivalent to a magnitude-2.3 earthquake. Seismic stations in Norway and Finland also registered the explosions. “There’s no doubt this is not an earthquake,” Lund said."
If definitely “not an earthquake,” we wonder, what then jolted the seismometers? We had our men ransack the technical literature. They informed us that the likelihood of two accidental detonations - two near-simultaneous accidental detonations - nears zero. Eurasia Group analysts Henning Gloystein and Jason Bush are with our men. They observe that undersea pipelines are engineered to a very high state of robustness. These tubes are not ruptured easily, they affirm. Moreover, leaks as these are vanishingly rare.
Meantime, Nord Stream AG operates the Nord Stream pipeline apparatus. They insist that "the destruction that happened within one day at three lines of the Nord Stream pipeline system is unprecedented.” These and other pipeline savants therefore lean toward one solitary explanation:
Sabotage. Something did not simply go awry. Someone dynamited holes in the Nord Stream pipeline, purposely and intentionally. That is also the conclusion of Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. “We can clearly see that this is an act of sabotage,” he fumes. Meantime, Denmark’s prime minister declared: "It is now the clear assessment by authorities that these are deliberate actions. It was not an accident."
Just so. Yet two critical questions immediately present themselves: Who is responsible?… and why did they do it? Our men hunted up one potential clue…A rival pipeline to Nord Stream - the Baltic Pipe by name - begins conducting Norwegian natural gas to Poland days from now, Oct. 1. The new pipeline could make good some of the energy shortages Europe confronts this winter. A certain Anders Puck Nielsen, with the Royal Danish Defense College, labels the blasts’ timing “conspicuous.” He suggests they were carried out “to send a signal that something could happen to the Norwegian gas.”
Yet the question lingers in the air: Who did it? This Puck Nielsen fellow fingers Russia: "The arrow points in the direction of Russia. No one in the West is interested in having any kind of instability in the energy market… I think if we look at who would actually benefit from disturbances, more chaos on the gas market in Europe, I think there’s basically only one actor right now that actually benefits from more uncertainty, and that is Russia." Many others likewise suspect Russian vandalism.
Incidentally - or not incidentally…The German magazine Der Spiegel reports today that the Central Intelligence Agency warned German authorities weeks ago of possible sabotage against the Nord Stream pipeline. We cannot confirm the report… yet we have put our spies on the case. Yet why would Russia blast holes in its own pipeline?
Mr. Simone Tagliapietra is energy analyst with Belgium’s Bruegel “think tank.” He suggests Russia orchestrated the sabotage to telegraph that it is “breaking forever with Western Europe and Germany” as Poland starts up its pipeline with Norway. AP News reports some believe Moscow dynamited its own pipeline “out of spite” or to remind the West of pipelines’ vulnerabilities.
Yet we are not half so convinced. Media sources have habitually informed us that the Nord Stream pipeline was Russia’s carrot and stick. A carrot in that Russia would open the taps and deliver Europe its desperately natural gas - if Europe would merely abandon its sanctions… A stick in that Russia would choke off Europe in event Europe did not abandon sanctions. In brief, the Nord Stream pipeline represented Russia’s “leverage” over Europe.
Why then would Russia lift its hand from the lever - and shortly before winter - when its leverage is greatest? And if Russia wished to squeeze Europe good… why not simply wreck the new pipeline from Norway to Poland? Europe would do a lot of yelling but how could they prove the Russians did it? Vladimir Putin need only shrug his shoulders in bafflement and denial. He could then remind them that the Nord Stream pipeline is ready to meet their energy needs if only they capitulate - another dangle of the rewarding carrot. And what fresh sanctions could Europe impose on Russia that haven’t already been scheduled?
These are some of the questions flogging our overlabored and sore-beset brain this day. Here is another: Who - besides the Russians - may have executed the sabotage? Who do you think was responsible? Let us know: feedback@dailyreckoning.com
Then read on. Below, Jim Rickards takes apart the media spin to give you the real state of the war in Ukraine. Has Ukraine’s latest offensive turned the tide against Russia? Read on."
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"Ukraine: Separating Fact From Fiction"
By Jim Rickards
"How many stories have you read recently about the turning point in the War in Ukraine? The narrative says that the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched a successful counterattack across a broad front south of Kharkiv and extending across the borders of Donetsk and Luhansk. Russians were not only pushed back but they retreated in disarray. Vehicles were abandoned, Russian deserters were everywhere, and Russian morale was low. Ukraine was poised to regain much of the territory it had lost earlier in the war. Putin was under threat at home and might soon be replaced in a coup d’état.
All that was needed was more money and more advanced weapons from the U.S. and its NATO allies and the Russians could be pushed back to Russian territory. Almost every aspect of this narrative is false. Here’s the real story…Ukraine did launch a counteroffensive and it did regain some territory. None of the territories was critical in terms of natural resources, industrial capacity, or logistics nodes except for one relatively minor junction.
The Russian troops who rolled back were not regular army or even mercenaries but something like a local police force organized by the Russians to patrol the villages and towns on the perimeter of Russian control. Those forces were mostly withdrawn safely; very few engaged in an actual confrontation with Ukrainian forces and casualties were light.
The Russians quickly consolidated along interior lines and the stalemate on the Donbas front continues. Except now the Russians have mobilized 300,000 fresh troops and will quickly reinforce and expand their presence in Ukraine. The Ukrainians suffered large casualties in the aftermath of the offensive as a result of Russian artillery barrages.
The Russians will wait for colder weather when their experience and equipment will give them a decisive edge and then push back the line and prepare for new objectives such as Odessa. Meanwhile, the winter will bring Russia’s energy advantage to the fore as Western Europe has to shut down industry, turn down thermostats, and face popular unrest at the high cost of supporting the Ukrainian oligarchs and neo-fascists.
The Ukrainian offensive was little more than a show intended to spin up Western media and open the door for more money to be sent to the oligarchs (much of which gets recycled as campaign contributions to Democrats ahead of the midterm elections). That’s the real story. But you won’t find it in the mainstream media.
Meanwhile, Russia’s been busy on the economic front, and continues its plans to move away from the dollar. We need to confront the reality that the sanctions were a blunder from the start. But the “hate Russia” crowd was so blinded by their contempt for Putin that they plowed ahead regardless. Now the unforeseen consequences are emerging and they’re even worse than the critics imagined.
The globalist elites and Western politicians pursue their fantasies of windmills and solar modules while serious countries like Russia and Iran gain a lock on the only energy supplies that will really matter for the foreseeable future - oil and gas.
Instead of sanctions hurting Russia, it’s making over $21 billion per month from its energy exports. That’s far more than they made before the war, and the Russian ruble is stronger than it was before the war. In fact, the head of the Central Bank of Russia recently cut interest rates because the ruble was too strong. Of course, all the “experts” said that sanctions would cripple the ruble.
Meanwhile the U.S. is in a recession, inflation is at 40-year highs, interest rates are rising and gas and food prices have doubled in the past year. In Europe it’s worse with energy and food shortages looming in the months ahead.
By weaponizing the U.S. dollar, freezing Russia’s assets and ejecting Russia from the global payments systems, the U.S. has forced Russia to consider alternative payment currencies, alternative payment channels and possibly a new global reserve currency including new digital currencies backed by a basket of commodities including gold.
I’ve written a lot lately about efforts to derail the dollar as a leading payment currency. That continues to be an active arena for Russia and others. Any discussion of this requires a careful separation of the roles of a payment currency and a reserve currency. The term reserve currency is applied to the currency of denomination of reserves (usually bonds) held by central banks and finance ministries as the chosen store of value for a country’s net cash accumulation from trade and direct foreign investment. The reserves are not in the form of currency deposits. They are held as bonds, notes, sometimes stocks and other assets predominately denominated in dollars.
Becoming a reserve currency or dislodging an existing reserve currency is a long-term undertaking. It requires a large liquid bond market, and associated features of a bond market such as bank dealers, repo facilities, auctions, and derivatives that can be used for hedging purposes. Above all, it requires a good rule of law so investors can rely on the credit of the bond issuer and seek recourse if that credit is impaired in any way.
A payment currency is different and much easier to implement. It requires a unit of account (which could be Russian rubles, Chinese yuan or even baseball cards), two or more countries willing to accept the payment currency in trade, and reliable payment channels. This is where Russia is making significant progress. Russia has doubled its efforts to create an alternative to the SWIFT payments messaging system from which Russia was ejected last spring.
The new channel is called the System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS in the Russian acronym), which currently has 440 members, including 100 outside of Russia. Russia is also developing the Mir system, which issues bank credit cards. These are an alternative to MasterCard and VISA, which also banned Russia.
These new systems won’t reach full scale overnight, but Russia’s progress suggests they will be more widely used sooner than later. It also means that once these systems become large and liquid enough, there will be no turning back and the dollar will be permanently displaced to the extent users prefer SPFS and Mir. And this is how new reserve currencies eventually emerge - slowly at first, then suddenly."
Gerald Celente, "The Future Does Not Like You"
Full screen recommended.
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, 9/27/22:
"The Future Does Not Like You"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, "Book of Hours II, 16"
"Book of Hours II, 16"
"How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child-
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly."
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
Chet Raymo, "In the Cave"
"In the Cave"
by Chet Raymo
"I have mentioned here before the ospreys that patrol our beach - or "fish hawks," as they call them here - generally in the afternoon at about the time I take my long walk to the palm point. Magnificent birds with broad wings that glide seemingly effortlessly on the wind. And here's the thing: As often as not I am startled by a bird's shadow before I see the bird itself. That wide-winged shadow, sweeping across the white sand, sometimes across me. That flicker of chill as the osprey blocks the sun.
"Game Over. WW3 Just Entered a New Phase"
Canadian Prepper, 9/27/22:
"Game Over. WW3 Just Entered a New Phase"
"Everything just changed. In the next 24 hours
tensions escalate to a whole new level. Get ready."
Comments here:
"Truth..."
"Truth: the most deadly weapon ever discovered by humanity.
Capable of destroying entire perceptual sets, cultures, and realities.
Outlawed by all governments everywhere.
Possession is normally punishable by death."
- John Gilmore
A comment: According to statistics compiled by the UN, by the time the sun rises tomorrow morning 30,000 children world wide will have died overnight from starvation and malnutrition, disease, lack of potable water, and lack of basic medical care. That's every night, all year long, 30,000 children dying because no one cared. Trillions of dollars wasted on insane wars, economies destroyed by psychopathic greed, the environment dying in front of our eyes, and no one cares. No wonder Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described humanity as, "Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts." The "instincts of beasts" is evident for all to see... sometimes all this wears us down, and we look around, hoping to see the "aspirations of angels," hoping desperately that we can somehow awaken from the madness crushing us all, that together we can still rise above the despair and hopelessness and make a better world, where no child dies from hunger, where wars are a distant memory, where everyone can live full, dignified and honorable lives in peace. An impossible, hopeless struggle? Perhaps, but how dare we call ourselves "Human" if we don't try to make that vision real, in any way we can, no matter the price? A dream, you say? Yes, that's all it is... but without those dreams, those aspirations, all that's left is the "instincts of beasts", and we all see very clearly what those have brought this world to...
- CP
"Warning! Safe Deposit Boxes Seized - Is Your Money Safe? Market Apocalypse, Crashing Daily"
Jeremiah Babe, 9/27/22:
"Warning! Safe Deposit Boxes Seized - Is Your Money Safe?
Market Apocalypse, Crashing Daily"
Comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, "The Global Financial System Is Collapsing; Home Prices Plunge At Fastest Pace On Record"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/27/22:
"The Global Financial System Is Collapsing;
Home Prices Plunge At Fastest Pace On Record"
Comments here:
"Saying Things People Don't Want To Hear
"Saying Things People Don't Want To Hear
by Bruce Wilds
"If there were a "Saying Things People Don't Want To Hear Award" it would go to Dr. Jordan Peterson. He is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, a clinical psychologist, and the author of the multi-million copy bestseller "12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos", #1 for nonfiction in 2018 in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Norway.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have never heard of/or read his book. What did catch my eye was an interview on Sky News Australia that lasted just under seven minutes. In the first minute, Peterson comes out swinging. He does this by making the startling statement that there is more than a bit of Hitler in all of us. Not wishing to create a "spoiler alert" for those deciding to watch the short interview it is still fair to call his prediction of Ukraine's future grave.
Victory Is Often In The Eyes Of The Beholder: Peterson states any notions that the Russians are going to lose the war in Ukraine are “naïve." He then elaborates, “Or that we’re going to win,” he said. “I don’t understand that. What do you mean we’re going to win? What are we going to win here exactly?" Dr. Peterson said even if Vladimir Putin allowed Russia to retreat from Ukraine, the country would be left in “smoking ruins.”
For Russia, victory could be declared if they are successful in pushing back the advancing borders of NATO. Peterson also delves into the whole idea of totalitarian states. He also points out that America and NATO, if limited by reason, may not be able to respond with nuclear weapons if Putin decides to unleash a "tactical" nuclear weapon. In my opinion such an event could well redefine modern warfare.
Peterson keys in on the fact you cannot win against someone you cannot say no to. We sold our soul to Putin for his oil and gas. Putin holds the best cards in that he controls the gas flow into Europe. This winter has the potential to be very very ugly. If anything, I failed to enter the word very enough times in that last sentence."
Gonzalo Lira, "The Americans Declared War On Europe"
Gonzalo Lira, 9/27/22:
"The Americans Declared War On Europe"
Comments here:
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Related:
"Shopping At Meijer - High Prices, And Some Empty Shelves! What's Next?"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 9/27/22:
"Shopping At Meijer - High Prices,
And Some Empty Shelves! What's Next?"
"In today's vlog we are at Meijer, and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:
Must View! "Dam is Breaking in the Financial Markets"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 9/27/22:
"Dam is Breaking in the Financial Markets"
"With all these warnings from hurricanes, the stock market, inflation to the world economy people still don’t want to listen to this. There is still time to prepare. I really think that the Fed just wants to finish us off."
Comments here:
○
Related:
Gregory Mannarino, "October Stock Market "Surprise?" Debt Market Meltdown, Currency Crisis, Cratering Economy"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/27/22:
"October Stock Market "Surprise?" Debt Market Meltdown,
Currency Crisis, Cratering Economy"
Comments here:
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Related:
The beginning of the end is finally here.
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