Monday, January 30, 2023

"We Are Not The First Civilization To Collapse, But We Will Probably Be The Last"

"We Are Not The First Civilization To Collapse,
 But We Will Probably Be The Last"
by Chris Hedges

"I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.

I look out from the structure - known as Monks Mound - at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.

This great city, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.

“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in "The Collapse of Complex Societies." “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”

Several centuries ago, the rulers of this vast city complex, which covered some 4,000 acres, including a 40-acre central plaza, stood where I stood. They no doubt saw below in the teeming settlements an unassailable power, with at least 120 temple mounds used as residences, sacred ceremonial sites, tombs, meeting centers and ball courts. Cahokia warriors dominated a vast territory from which they exacted tribute to enrich the ruling class of this highly stratified society. Reading the heavens, these mound builders constructed several circular astronomical observatories - wooden versions of Stonehenge.

The city’s hereditary rulers were venerated in life and death. A half mile from Monks Mound is the seven-foot-high Mound 72, in which archeologists found the remains of a man on a platform covered with 20,000 conch-shell disc beads from the Gulf of Mexico. The beads were arranged in the shape of a falcon, with the falcon’s head beneath and beside the man's head. Its wings and tail were placed underneath the man’s arms and legs. Below this layer of shells was the body of another man, buried face downward. Around these two men were six more human remains, possibly retainers, who may have been put to death to accompany the entombed man in the afterlife. Nearby were buried the remains of 53 girls and women ranging in age from 15 to 30, laid out in rows in two layers separated by matting. They appeared to have been strangled to death.

The poet Paul Valéry noted, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.”

Across the Mississippi River from Monks Mound, the city skyline of St. Louis is visible. It is hard not to see our own collapse in that of Cahokia. In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers - Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina - have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita, of the 100 largest police departments in the nation, according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization in terminal decline.

“Just as in the past, countries that are environmentally stressed, overpopulated, or both, become at risk of getting politically stressed, and of their governments collapsing,” Jared Diamond argues in "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." “When people are desperate, undernourished and without hope, they blame their governments, which they see as responsible for or unable to solve their problems. They try to emigrate at any cost. They fight each other over land. They kill each other. They start civil wars. They figure that they have nothing to lose, so they become terrorists, or they support or tolerate terrorism.”

Pre-industrial civilizations were dependent on the limits of solar energy and constrained by roads and waterways, impediments that were obliterated when fossil fuel became an energy source. As industrial empires became global, their increase in size meant an increase in complexity. Ironically, this complexity makes us more vulnerable to catastrophic collapse, not less. Soaring temperatures (Iraq is enduring 120 degree heat that has fried the country’s electrical grid), the depletion of natural resources, flooding, droughts, (the worst drought in 500 years is devastating Western, Central and Southern Europe and is expected to see a decline in crop yields of 8 or 9 percent), power outages, wars, pandemics, a rise in zoonotic diseases and breakdowns in supply chains combine to shake the foundations of industrial society. The Arctic has been heating up four times faster than the global average, resulting in an accelerated melting of the Greenland ice sheet and freakish weather patterns. The Barents Sea north of Norway and Russia are warming up to seven times faster. Climate scientists did not expect this extreme weather until 2050.

“Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up,” the anthropologist Ronald Wright warns, calling industrial society “a suicide machine.” In "A Short History of Progress"he writes: "Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee - or to watch out for - long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer."

Wright also reflects upon what will be left behind: "The archaeologists who dig us up will need to wear hazmat suits. Humankind will leave a telltale layer in the fossil record composed of everything we produce, from mounds of chicken bones, wet-wipes, tires, mattresses and other household waste to metals, concrete, plastics, industrial chemicals, and the nuclear residue of power plants and weaponry. We are cheating our children, handing them tawdry luxuries and addictive gadgets while we take away what’s left of the wealth, wonder and possibility of the pristine Earth."

Calculations of humanity’s footprint suggest we have been in ‘ecological deficit,’ taking more than Earth’s biological systems can withstand, for at least 30 years. Topsoil is being lost far faster than nature can replenish it; 30 percent of arable land has been exhausted since the mid-20th century. We have financed this monstrous debt by colonizing both past and future, drawing energy, chemical fertilizer and pesticides from the planet’s fossil carbon, and throwing the consequences onto coming generations of our species and all others. Some of those species have already been bankrupted: they are extinct. Others will follow.

As Cahokia declined, violence dramatically increased. Surrounding towns were burned to the ground. Groups, numbering in the hundreds, were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. At the end, “the enemy killed all people indiscriminately. The intent was not merely prestige, but an early form of ethnic cleansing” writes anthropologist Timothy R. Pauketat, in "Ancient Cahokia and the Mississippians." He notes that, in one fifteenth-century cemetery in central Illinois, one-third of all adults had been killed by blows to the head, arrow wounds or scalping. Many showed evidence of fractures on their arms from vain attempts to fight off their attackers.

Such descent into internecine violence is compounded by a weakened and discredited central authority. In the later stages of Cahokia, the ruling class surrounded themselves with fortified wooden stockades, including a two-mile long wall that enclosed Monks Mound. Similar fortifications dotted the vast territory the Cahokia controlled, segregating gated communities where the wealthy and powerful, protected by armed guards, sought safety from the increasing lawlessness and hoarded dwindling food supplies and resources.

Overcrowding inside these stockades saw the spread of tuberculosis and blastomycosis, caused by a soil-borne fungus, along with iron deficiency anemia. Infant mortality rates rose, and life spans declined, a result of social disintegration, poor diet and disease.

By the 1400s Cahokia had been abandoned. In 1541, when Hernando de Soto’s invading army descended on what is today Missouri, looking for gold, nothing but the great mounds remained, relics of a forgotten past.

This time the collapse will be global. It will not be possible, as in ancient societies, to migrate to new ecosystems rich in natural resources. The steady rise in heat will devastate crop yields and make much of the planet uninhabitable. Climate scientists warn that once temperatures rise by 4℃, the earth, at best, will be able to sustain a billion people. The more insurmountable the crisis becomes, the more we, like our prehistoric ancestors, will retreat into self-defeating responses, violence, magical thinking and denial.

The historian Arnold Toynbee, who singled out unchecked militarism as the fatal blow to past empires, argued that civilizations are not murdered, but commit suicide. They fail to adapt to a crisis, ensuring their own obliteration. Our civilization’s collapse will be unique in size, magnified by the destructive force of our fossil fuel-driven industrial society. But it will replicate the familiar patterns of collapse that toppled civilizations of the past. The difference will be in scale, and this time there will be no exit."

"Essential Readings"

"The 5 Stages of Economic Collapse”
by Dmitry Orlov

Excerpt: “Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defined the five stages of coming to terms with grief and tragedy as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and applied it quite successfully to various forms of catastrophic personal loss, such as death of a loved one, sudden end to one’s career, and so forth. Several thinkers, notably James Howard Kunstler and, more recently John Michael Greer, have pointed out that the Kübler-Ross model is also quite terrifyingly accurate in reflecting the process by which society as a whole (or at least the informed and thinking parts of it) is reconciling itself to the inevitability of a discontinuous future, with our institutions and life support systems undermined by a combination of resource depletion, catastrophic climate change, and political impotence.

But so far, little has been said specifically about the finer structure of these discontinuities. Instead, there is to be found continuum of subjective judgments, ranging from “a severe and prolonged recession” (the prediction we most often read in the financial press), to Kunstler’s evocative but unscientific-sounding “clusterf**k,” to the ever-popular “Collapse of Western Civilization,” painted with an ever-wider brush-stroke.

For those of us who have already gone through all of the emotional stages of reconciling ourselves to the prospect of social and economic upheaval, it might be helpful to have a more precise terminology that goes beyond such emotionally charged phrases. Defining a taxonomy of collapses might prove to be more than just an intellectual exercise: based on our abilities and circumstances, some of us may be able to specifically plan for a certain stage of collapse as a temporary, or even permanent, stopping point."
Please view this complete article here:
The 12 Rules of Survival”
by Laurence Gonzales

Excerpt: “As a journalist, I’ve been writing about accidents for more than thirty years. In the last 15 or so years, I’ve concentrated on accidents in outdoor recreation, in an effort to understand who lives, who dies, and why. To my surprise, I found an eerie uniformity in the way people survive seemingly impossible circumstances. Decades and sometimes centuries apart, separated by culture, geography, race, language, and tradition, the most successful survivors–those who practice what I call “deep survival”– go through the same patterns of thought and behavior, the same transformation and spiritual discovery, in the course of keeping themselves alive.

Not only that but it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are surviving being lost in the wilderness or battling cancer, whether they’re struggling through divorce or facing a business catastrophe – the strategies remain the same. Survival should be thought of as a journey, a vision quest of the sort that Native Americans have had as a rite of passage for thousands of years. Once you’re past the precipitating event– you’re cast away at sea or told you have cancer– you have been enrolled in one of the oldest schools in history. Here are a few things I’ve learned that can help you pass the final exam."
Please view this complete article here:
"The Collapse Of Complex Societies"
"Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses."
Freely download “The Collapse of Complex Societies” here;

Bill Bonner, "Decline and Fall"

"Decline and Fall"
The Seven Stages of Empire, 
plus fraud at home and war abroad...
by Bill Bonner

Normandy, France - "Last week ended on a grim note. Americans’ disposable income dropped by more than $1 trillion. This was the second largest drop – since the Great Depression. And the ‘inflation tax’ paid so far by America’s families during the Biden years, totes to $7,400 per household. That is bad news. But who cares? You destroy a nation, first with inflation…then with war. The US elite is working both angles. Last week, it pledged to send 100 US tanks to the Ukraine… prolonging the war… and getting itself in deeper.

This was heralded as a ‘game changer’ for Ukrainian forces. We know nothing about military matters. Still, we can’t help but notice a familiar pattern. Just as a summer leaf dries up in the autumn…and the old duffer forgets where he left his car keys…so does a great power become a not-so-great power.

Fraud and Force: Our beat here is money. But money woes often come in a ‘cluster’ of other troubles. In our opinion, the introduction of the fake US dollar – in 1971 – was really the beginning of America’s great decline (probably between #5 and #6 below). Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly…and great empires gotta decline somehow. Typically, they do it with a combination of fraud (inflation) and force (war). As for war…the elite is doing its best to keep the war in the Ukraine going as long as possible…and to prepare the public for war with China.

Meanwhile back on the inflation front, as we saw last week, the Fed is in a rare phase of returning to ‘normal.’ Higher rates are squeezing the extravagance out of the financial markets…forcing the middle class to pay more for mortgages…and generally making the rich less rich.

If this correction is allowed to continue, we can expect asset prices to fall further and interest rates to rise. This is what we call the “Primary Trend.” After 4 decades of boom; we expect at least a couple decades of bust. This would be a good thing for the middle class, because it would stop inflation from stealing its wealth. Ordinary people benefit from ordinary, honest money, not from the Fed’s tricked-up currency.

But…don’t hold your breath. In the first place, ‘The People’ do not control the Fed. The elite do. And while the economy of the last 4 decades was not very pleasant for the middle class, it was a charm for the elite. And the more the Fed helps Mr. Market to ‘correct’ the excesses of the past – that is, cause the rich to lose money – the more the elite are going to want a ‘pivot.’

This inevitably sets up a showdown. Between the feds and Mr. Market…and between what is good for The People (the middle class) and what is going for the elite. It’s going to get confusing…muddled…contradictory. Prices will go up….but what will they mean? Will inflation erase the gains? Will we be making money or losing it? For today, let us stick with the ‘Decline and Fall’…

Seven Stages of Decline: The process is well documented by the connoisseurs of decline – such as Gibbon, Tainter, Spengler and Sir John Glubb. It was Glubb who calculated the average lifespan of an empire; from ashes to ashes, he figured, it was about 250 years. Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha, outlined the stages of empire as follows:

1. The age of outburst (or pioneers).
2. The age of conquests.
3. The age of commerce.
4. The age of affluence.
5. The age of intellect.
6. The age of decadence.
7. The age of decline and collapse.

Which, of course, raises the question: where are we? Typically, an empire aids in its own destruction…with excess expenses, complications, and corruptions…weakening its economy internally as other countries rise up.

Since 1945, for example, the US has spent trillions of dollars on ‘defense.’ But its safety was never in danger. Instead, it involved itself in ‘wars of choice’…standard practice for empires that are peaking out. There is nothing really at stake. So, the idea is to spend money, not to win wars.

On Abrams tanks, for example. The Abrams is a huge, sophisticated machine. It was built to protect the profits of Chrysler Defense, not to defend the USA. It would only make sense as a defensive weapon if we believed a foreign army could attack us on land…as in, Chinese hoards bursting across the 49th parallel…or the Iranian Guards suddenly crossing the Rio Grande and advancing on Dallas. Neither of those things are plausible.

Iron and Brass: Instead, the tank is sent far away, into one foreign quagmire after another. There, it serves its real purpose well. It inevitably breaks down, and needs careful maintenance and high-tech repair…involving huge additional expense. Weighing 68 tons, it is a monster headache for road repairs.

Money is often a hindrance in warfare, not a help. It tends to buy weapons systems that are too complex…and command structures with too many overpaid consultants and too much top brass. Here’s a smallish illustration from the National Defense University Press: "There are approximately 900 Active-duty general/flag officers (GO/FOs) today of 1.3 million troops. This is a ratio of 1 GO/FO for every 1,400 troops. During World War II, an admittedly different era, there were more than 2,000 GO/FOs for a little more than 12 million Active troops (1:6,000). This development represents “rank creep” that does not enhance mission success but clutters the chain of command, adds bureaucratic layers to decisions, and costs taxpayers additional money from funding higher paygrades to fill positions." Yes, the leaf turns brown…and the empire prepares for its defeat!"

Douglas Macgregor, "Massive Russian Offensives Are Crushing Ukraine"

Straight Calls with Douglas Macgregor, 1/30/23:
"Massive Russian Offensives Are Crushing Ukraine"
"Your home for analysis of breaking news and in-depth discussion of current geopolitical events in the United states and the world. Geopolitics. No ego descriptions. No small talk. Straight to the point. Calls with the relevant analysis only."
Comments here:
o
Douglas Macgregor, 1/30/23:
"300,000 Combat Troops"
Comments here:

Jim Kunstler, "The War Against Us"

"The War Against Us"
by Jim Kunstler

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy.” - Chris Hedges

"The question you might ask these days: how did we weaponize everything in American life against ourselves? Can you name an institution that is not at war with the people of this land? The exact mechanisms for all that bad faith stand in plain sight these days, and persons responsible can be easily identified. What’s missing are discernable motives. For now, it just looks like the greatest collective act of ass-covering in history.

It’s pretty clear, for instance, that all the criminal misconduct in the FBI/DOJ - continuing to this moment - emanates from the years-long effort to cover up the seditious campaign to nullify Donald Trump starting well before Nov. 8, 2016. All the players in the agencies, and their news media accomplices, stand to lose at least their reputations, if the public cared about how dishonestly they acted. Many of those still working would lose their jobs and their livelihoods too, and quite a few would lose their freedom in prison. So, their motive to keep up the skullduggery is simple self-preservation.

The Covid-19 pandemic looks like a pretty large-scale racketeering operation gone awry with plenty to hide. You have the reckless, symbiotic relations between the US public health bureaucracy and the pharmaceutical companies, and tons of money at stake, plus the colossal ego of hapless Dr. Anthony Fauci wishing to pose as an historic world-saver, another Louis Pasteur or Alexander Fleming. And then you have the amazingly foolish act of imposing an untested, dangerous “vaccine” on the world, and years of lying and covering-up the repercussions of injury and death from it. And then the opaque and nefarious roles of other actors in the story ranging from the CCP to the WEF to the Bill Gates and George Soros empires of money in what looks a genocide.

It’s harder to unpack the enigma of the obviously unfit “Joe Biden” getting installed in the White House. My guess: the Obama claque behind him knew that “JB” was easily manipulable, and that his lame rivals, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Liz Warren, and especially the proud socialist Bernie Sanders, could not be counted on to do exactly what they were told. The Obama claque especially needed a president to appoint agency heads who would cover-up its creation of an Intel Community Frankenstein, and all that monster has inflicted on the American public.

Of course, the main device the claque had for pulling “Joe Biden’s” strings was the flagrant record of his many years of bribery and treason. The major effort to cover-up all that was the DOJ and FBI’s suppression since 2019 of the Hunter Biden laptop, and the most stunning upshot was that the incendiary evidence of bribery and treason came out anyway, because so many copies of the laptop’s hard-drive got distributed. And absolutely nothing was ever done about it, nor about the actual persons - Christopher Wray, William Barr, and Merrick Garland - who worked to squash it, making themselves accomplices to ongoing bribery and treason.

All this criminal misconduct is connected in a foul matrix of lawbreaking. The fact-patterns are well-established. Dozens of excellent books have catalogued the misdeed of RussiaGate and scores of websites daily dissect the shady intrigues around the “vaccine” crusade. The infamies of gross election interference have been systematically laid-out in the Twitter Files of the past two months. Many books, published essays, and videos substantiate the reality of massive ballot fraud in 2020 and 2022, including the felonious role of Mark Zuckerberg’s front org, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, and the election law manipulations or Lawfare goblin Marc Elias.

There’s an understandable wish that upcoming hearings in Congress will lead to a reckoning for all of this. To banish consequence from public life, as we have done, is a pretty grave insult to nature, but who can tell whether accountability might restore our institutions at this point. We may be too far gone. The US is visibly collapsing now: our economy, our financial arrangements, our culture, our influence in world affairs, and our basic consensus about reality. We’re entering a phase of disorder and hardship that is likely to moot the further depredations of a government at war with its people. For one thing, it’s becoming impossible to pretend that this vicious leviathan has the money to carry on because the money is only pretending to be money.

It’s no wonder that the collective ability for sense-making has failed. It will be quickly restored by each of us in the scramble to survive these disorders and hardships. The bewildering hypotheticals of recent years begin to dissolve like mist on the mountain and things come back into focus: your health, your daily bread, your shelter, your associations with other people close to you, your values, and most of all the power of your own choices. Nature, much insulted and maligned, will sort out the rest."

"Massive Price Increases At Aldi! This Is Crazy! What's Next!?"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 1/30/23:
"Massive Price Increases At Aldi! This Is Crazy! What's Next!?"
"In today's vlog we are at Aldi 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:

"Economic Market Snapshot 1/30/23"

"Economic Market Snapshot 1/30/23"
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: creditequity valuationfunding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United Statesother advanced economies, and emerging markets."
Job cuts and much more.
Commentary, highly recommended:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
And now... The End Game...

Sunday, January 29, 2023

"Red Alert! It's Starting...There's Only One Way This Ends"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 1/29/23:
"Red Alert! It's Starting...
There's Only One Way This Ends"
Comments here:
o
A critically important article:

"Perfect Financial Storm; Surviving On Food Stamps"

Jeremiah Babe, 1/29/23:
"Perfect Financial Storm; Surviving On Food Stamps"
Comments here:
o

"Alert! They Signal The End Of ‘Petro’ Status! 2023 Petrodollar Collapse"

Full screen recommended.
"Alert! They Signal The End Of ‘Petro’ Status! 
2023 Petrodollar Collapse"
by Epic Economist

"The sovereignty of the almighty U.S. dollar is in great danger, with many global economic superpowers, including Saudi Arabia, now signaling that the end of its petro status is near, meaning that soon oil sales and revenues in global markets will no longer be denominated in U.S. dollars, which can result in unspeakable consequences for the U.S. economy. A dollar collapse is now in motion, according to new reports and warnings from strategists that are familiar with the matter. And that’s what we’re going to investigate in today’s video.

One of the main pillars still maintaining the dollar in place as the leading global currency reserve is crumbling down. Its petro status, which determines that global transactions of oil and oil-based fuels are denominated in U.S. dollars, is being threatened by the US worsening relations and rising tensions with other major geopolitical and economic superpowers.

It has been revealed to the public that white papers and essays written by globalists specifically highlight the need for a smaller role for the US currency as well as the promotion of the decline of the American economy as a way to introduce Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and implement a new global currency system completely controlled by the IMF.

Over the past six years, the relationship between Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China has grown immensely. Commodity and raw material deals between the three nations are becoming more and more common, and this has also prompted a silent but steady steady distancing of the Saudis from the dollar. Meanwhile, the rate of bilateral transactions between Russia and China conducted in dollars has declined from 90% in 2015 to 41% in 2021.

Moreover, as China seeks to purchase its oil in yuan rather than dollars, last week they may have found another seller in Saudi Arabia. On Tuesday, Saudi Arabia announced at Davos that they are now willing to trade oil in alternative currencies. A few moments after, Xi Jinping pledged to increase efforts to promote the use of the Chinese yuan in energy trade.

In essence, the U.S. weakening relations with Eastern nations are being exploited to create a catalyst for the end of the dollar’s petro status. Now more than ever, the dominoes are set in motion for a dollar collapse. This is similar to the developments that led to the downfall of the British Sterling decades ago as the global petro currency. And today, globalists have the perfect excuses to dump their dollar holdings, and that’s all thanks to the poorly managed monetary policies enacted by the federal government and the Federal Reserve.

The repercussions of the loss of reserve status will be catastrophic for the U.S. economy. The dollar dominance is the only thing that is still keeping our system together. If the dollar ceases to be the main international trade mechanism, “the trillions upon trillions of dollars the Fed has created from thin air over the years will all come flooding back to the US through various avenues, and hyperinflation (or hyper stagflation) will be the result,” Smith warns.

You’ll probably see the mainstream media and government officials trying to find a new scapegoat to blame inflation on, and saying that “nobody could have seen this coming.” But the truth is that many people saw it coming, and they’ve been alerting for a long time that the dollar is reaching the end of an era."
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Yanni, "Live At The Acropolis - 'Standing in Motion'”

Full screen recommended.
Yanni, "Live At The Acropolis - 
'Standing in Motion'”

"A Look to the Heavens

"Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. 
Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen at the right of the starry field of view. Inside the nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation. With the eerie hue of dust reflecting bluish light from hot young stars of NGC 7023, the Iris Nebula stands out against the dark just left of center. In the broad telescopic frame, these fertile interstellar dust fields stretch almost seven full moons across the sky."

Chet Raymo, “Yet…”

“Yet…”
by Chet Raymo

“My suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose,
but queerer than we can suppose.”
- J. B. S. Haldane

“Legend has it that after reciting his official recantation, kneeling on the floor of the Holy Office in Rome before assembled officials of the Inquisition, Galileo whispered, “And yet it moves.” To save his life, or at least to avoid some dank dungeon and perhaps torture, the old man had publicly denied that he ever believed or taught that the Earth orbits the Sun, rather than the other way around. The public recantation was real enough. Whether Galileo whispered the private qualification we’ll never know. It makes a lovely story. In any case, he was allowed to go back to Florence under house arrest and in the final years of his life invented (I will dare to assert) mathematical physics.

And yet it moves. The Earth goes spinning around the Sun with its sister planets. The Sun whirls with its neighboring stars around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way drifts with its attendant galaxies toward the Andromeda cluster. The Milky Way Galaxy, the Great Andromeda Galaxy, and their lesser galactic companions, the so-called Local Group, dance somewhere near the outer edge of the Local Supercluster of galaxies. Which are but the tiniest swarm of galaxies in the whole outward-racing shebang.

It moves. Oh, yes, it moves, and Galileo didn’t know the half of it. His inquisitors didn’t know any of it, but they thought they knew all of it. And their descendants still claim infallibility. But let me not beat up on the dogmatists. We should all whisper to ourselves now and then, “And yet, and yet.” Our descendants may be surprised at our own naivety. Wholly new paradigms may be required before we understand the origin of the universe or the mysteries of biological development and consciousness.

Such a little word, “yet.” Maybe the most significant word in our vocabulary.”

The Poet: Alfred, Lord Tennyson,"The Charge of the Light Brigade"

"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
"The Charge of the Light Brigade"
Read by John Davies

"The Battle of Balaclava, fought on 25 October 1854 during the Crimean War, was part of the siege of Sevastopol to capture the port and fortress of Sevastopol, Russia's principal naval base on the Black Sea. The Charge of the Light Brigade was a charge of British light cavalry led by Lord Cardigan against Russian forces during the Battle of Balaclava on 25 October 1854 in the Crimean War. Lord Raglan, overall commander of the British forces, had intended to send the Light Brigade to prevent the Russians from removing captured guns from overrun Turkish positions, a task well-suited to light cavalry.

However, there was miscommunication in the chain of command, and the Light Brigade was instead sent on a frontal assault against a different artillery battery, one well-prepared with excellent fields of defensive fire. They reached the battery under withering direct fire and scattered some of the gunners, but they were forced to retreat immediately. Thus, the assault ended with very high British casualties and no decisive gains.

The events are best remembered as the subject of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's narrative poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), published just six weeks after the event. Its lines emphasize the valor of the cavalry in bravely carrying out their orders, regardless of the obvious outcome. Blame for the miscommunication has remained controversial, as the original order itself was vague, and the officer who delivered the written orders with some verbal interpretation died in the first minute of the assault."
As glorified by Hollywood:
Full screen recommended for all parts.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:

"We Must Marvel..."

“In our society, confidence leads to knowledge – which leads to power – which leads to pride – which leads to a fear of seeming ignorant – which constricts learning like an iron vise. We must understand that confidence is a blessing, for it is the embodiment of self-love, and through it we find the fuel for innovation and progress. We must realize that ignorance is merely the opportunity to learn more. And lastly, we must marvel rather than groan at the fact that there will always be more to learn… Only then will we be free of the intellectual prisons we have so readily caged ourselves within.”
- Zeb Reynolds

"Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity"

Full screen recommended.
"Bonhoeffer‘s Theory of Stupidity" 
"Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that stupid people are more dangerous than evil ones. This is because while we can protest against or fight evil people, against stupid ones we are defenseless - reasons fall on deaf ears. Bonhoeffer's famous text, which we slightly edited for this video, serves any free society as a warning of what can happen when certain people gain too much power."

The Daily "Near You?"

Sand Springs, Oklahoma, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Don't Think You Can Escape...

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impassible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance.

Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” 
– Strauss & Howe, “The Fourth Turning”

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: The Market Can Run But It Can't Hide"

Gregory Mannarino, 1/29/23:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: 
The Market Can Run But It Can't Hide"
Comments here:

"The FDIC Is A Scam"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 1/29/23:
"The FDIC Is A Scam"
"Let’s face it we all have a lot of faith that if there is a bank failure that we will get our money. I’m sure after this video, you will not feel so comfortable and confident that they may ever pay us back. Today I share letters that the FDIC sent other subscribers, as well as the EDIE calculator."
Comments here:

"How It Really Is"

Jethro Tull, "Locomotive Breath"

"Massive Shrinkflation At Dollar Tree! This Is Ridiculous!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 1/29/23:
"Massive Shrinkflation At Dollar Tree! This Is Ridiculous!"
"In today's vlog we are Dollar Tree, and are noticing massive food products that have shrunk in size! We are also noticing a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Traveling With Russell, 1/29/23:
"Russian Owned Hypermarket After 11 Months of Sanctions"
"Take a look inside a Russian Owned Hypermarket in Moscow, Russia. After 11 months of sanctions, see what its like inside this typical Russian owned hypermarket. What can you buy, what is available."
Comments here:

"Douglas Macgregor, "Russians Started Massive Offensive In Eastern Ukraine"

Full screen recommended.
"Douglas Macgregor, 
"Russians Started Massive Offensive In Eastern Ukraine"
Comments here:

"Relax..."

"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to
TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing."
- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"

"Businessman Pulled Away This Older Man's Chair At A Restaurant And Learned A Life Lesson"

Full screen recommended.
"Businessman Pulled Away This Older Man's Chair 
At A Restaurant And Learned A Life Lesson"
Clarence Purvis, a 90+-year-old gentleman, eats lunch daily with a picture of his late wife, and when he was asked why, everyone had to hold back their tears...
Comments here:
o

Saturday, January 28, 2023

Douglas Macgregor, "Russia Mobilizes 700,000 Troops for a New Offensive"

Douglas Macgregor,1/28/23:
"Russia Mobilizes 700,000 Troops for a New Offensive"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Neil H, "Spellbound"

Neil H, "Spellbound"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Do you see the bat? It haunts this cosmic close-up of the eastern Veil Nebula. The Veil Nebula itself is a large supernova remnant, the expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. While the Veil is roughly circular in shape and covers nearly 3 degrees on the sky toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus), NGC 6995, known informally as the Bat Nebula, spans only 1/2 degree, about the apparent size of the Moon. That translates to 12 light-years at the Veil's estimated distance, a reassuring 1,400 light-years from planet Earth. 
In the composite of image data recorded through narrow band filters, emission from hydrogen atoms in the remnant is shown in red with strong emission from oxygen atoms shown in hues of blue. Of course, in the western part of the Veil lies another seasonal apparition: the Witch's Broom Nebula."