Debt Rattle July 26 2022
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Gustave Moreau Orpheus at the Tomb of Eurydice 1891 • Ukraine Government Issues Blacklist Of ‘Russian Propagandists’ (Unherd) • Needless Death
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle July 26 2022]The war going on in Ukraine is a part pantomime. Zelenski’s costumes are the give-away.
The war on citizens in the west is where the real action is. It is subtle and multi-faceted. It is using psychological operations through media and educational and academic institutions among others. Ukraine is a seemingly state operated and co-ordinated land/power grab by one state against another (although we know otherwise).
The level of sophistication and malfeasance going on right here right now is seeing citizens crave totalitarianism, self-harm and child-sacrifice. It is menticide, genocide and suicide in slow motion and it is amazing. It’s like watching the boxing day tsunami in Banda Ache. Pregnant women having 84% abortion rates among the jabbed. Health care systems generations in the making blown up. Doctors, Scientist and Academics lost outside the trust horizon for who knows how long.
I can’t believe my eyes. Talismanic face masks, virtue signals everywhere, hospitals over run, the media completely out of touch with events on the ground. Indentured debt slaves working in meaningless jobs, the entertainment and music/arts industries crushed. Biomedical weapons alive and well as ‘cure’ in almost the entire population…
It’s Kali Yuga baby and it is on like Donkey Kong.
But today high on a plateau in the country with icy winds and snow not too far away I planted about 80 trees with friends and drank coffee and wine.
And that is just one way to HOLD THE LINE
JD: “This could be a form of seizure, “Absence” seizure.
He needs to see a Neurologist and not drive.” Yes but getting him to see this will be a challenge.Current world leaders do not realize that the energy situation is very much like the water level in Lake Mead. Looking at it from the top, there still seems to be water there but, in fact, the required depth is lacking. Water for watering crops will soon be exhausted. The world’s energy supply is not a whole lot different. The supposedly proven reserves do not tell us anything at all. It is the amount of fossil fuels that can be affordably extracted that is important. We have already exceeded the amount that can be affordably extracted. If central banks cut back future energy supplies using higher interest rates, we can expect to encounter major problems going forward.
In this post, I will try to explain some of the issues involved.
Why raising interest rates to reduce inflation may work out very badly
LIMITS TO THE SCOPE FOR POLICY MANOUEVRE
Following the Fed and the Bank of England, the ECB has become the latest central bank to adopt QT (quantitative tightening) and to raise interest rates, though the ECB’s 0.5% hike still leaves its deposit rate at zero. The ECB has also unveiled a mechanism – the Transmission Protection Instrument, or TPI – designed to ward off sovereign debt crises in some of the bloc’s weaker economies.
The details of these developments are set out very well in this Wolf Street article. The aim here is to discuss what policy actions – if any – make sense for the central banks.
Raising rates – and, by extension, putting prior QE into reverse – are straight out of the standard play-book for combatting inflation. It’s noticeable that central bankers are moving pretty slowly along this orthodox path, with each much-delayed rate rise far more than negated by the next surge in inflation.
But should they be tightening monetary policy at all?
Great selection of the West vs Russia multi-faceted war today Raul.
What gob smacks me is that Germany has its shorts in a knot because they can’t get over the audacity of the Russians — whom they are basically at war with — not supplying them with the essentials to basically sustain the war effort against them.
Just like the Covid fiasco. Did anyone do a SERIOUS, sane risk-reward appraisal? Something based in the REAL world instead of the ideological political world ?
“Is the Clock Finally Running Out on Hunter Biden? …some crimes seem undeniable on the basis of known evidence…”
Since this is not based on the crime, nor the knowledge of his crimes either public or official, what clock IS running for Mr. Hunter? The congress clock? The election clock? I’m-paying-my-Ukrainian-blackmail clock? The financial collapse clock?
“heterodox journalist Glenn Greenwald”
Wouldn’t that be homodox journalist? …Just kidding. We all love Greenwald. Don’t forget Aaron Mate’.
“The exact criteria for inclusion are also unclear”
“Because I SAID so.” Does that make it clearer? There is no logic, rule, standard, or justice. Those are for the little people. I outlaw the opposition party, CAUSE I SAID SO. It makes my life easier. I AM the Law. Every morning I get up, and make up the law all day to be whatever I like without asking anyone. That’s Democracy. Now bring me a 12 year old girl.
“Almost everything you heard
about the war in Ukrainefrom U.S. media, Congressmen, Presidents, Doctors, and World leaders about everything over the course of March, April and May was a lie.”But also just since 1960. Too soon?
“How does one investigate the FBI? The President?”
This is why we have 2A. There was just a discussion on this, that it was ridiculous to claim the People are to be fully armed to overthrow their government! …Except that Hamilton and Jefferson said just that. It’s because, suppose government itself was captured by the British: should we just follow government orders even though it had become treasonous to the real Federal level, to the People’s weal, and to the Constitutional Contract? What if Trump fires everyone else in government and becomes King? Should we not fight “His Government” and remove him? That’s what “We the People ARE the Government” means. WE are. Not you. You’re my servant, my slave, my go monkey. Dance, Monkey! It means WE on juries and other terrible means no one wants to resort to, WE will ultimately remove the FBI and the President if necessary. Any time we feel like if necessary. That’s what that other document, the Declaration, demanded.
“The war on citizens in the west is where the real action is.” –Oxy
Yes, and that is why.
“It is menticide, genocide and suicide in slow motion”
The crazy part is: it’s all just lies. That’s it. That’s their sole power. Which is why I harp on it so much. Our only protection is therefore love and adherence to truth. Not admitting or tolerating lies because they are so destructive, whole genocides run on them, like today, this minute, in your town.
“Gazprom Halts Another Nord Stream Turbine Cutting Flows in Half (ZH)”
They are screwing with it, but people underestimate how much high-quality work and rare, expensive parts go into every crevice of modern life. I mean, would winter be better for repairs? They have to happen sometime.
“Thank you sanctions. But where does the [Greek] money come from?”
It’s not the “money” we have to worry about. The €1.1B is in the form of COAL, Uranium, Gas, and paying highly-skilled people getting up every morning to make it all happen. You can make the “money”, but you can’t make the “reality.” As Germany and Italy just found out, shuttering naughty Russian gas…only to trainload in Russian coal. And now Donbas coal.
“All EU countries have allegedly agreed to a voluntary 15% gas usage cut.”
Yes but like Global Warming, it’s all talk and they have no intent to actually do anything. They LIE (#1), to get the edge and steal from their neighbor nations (#2).
“Germany’s energy transition to green energy has been an incredibly expensive disaster.”
Boy those German engineers sure showed the rest of the world how to do it. No energy, no security, and no nation. And the Greens want to double down.
““..propaganda intended to ensure that Ukraine “becomes the eternal enemy of Russia.”
They’ve been at this since the two churches, Vatican in 1600, but politically before 1950. That’s a lot of time for bribery, blackmail, and lies to work. But here it’s been the same people and the same methods since 1913, another 50 years. How much worse in Congress? How much worse for the Red and the Blue?
“ No Farmers, No Food, No Life (Peeters) “
They won’t listen even til they’re dead and probably not even then. Pry the propaganda and hate from my cold, dead fingers… Or that’s been my experience so far.
Ackerman’s suggested repost has the usual: logical but conservative (backward) people vs emotional but artistic progressive people. But the author adds something. Yes, as we go, we can lean into one or the other unless we’re very careful to remain balanced. But what he adds is a third brain, the amygdala, fight or flight.So the technology is: set up the divide for decades, but nothing happens. It only breaks open when you stress people. Only when they get into fight-or-flight, fighting, fear, stress, will people start to act out about it. But what would Conservatives do? Act carefully, logically, and conservatively. What would Progressives do? Act EMOTIONALLY. FEARFULLY. Having imagination run away with them. What makes them feel good and safe in this sea of fear? To have people in agreement with them, and be supportive of each other, to not be fearful and fighting.
This is why we on the outside are going “Where are you getting these weird conspiracy ideas from?” Russia? Like where? Armed KKK members behind every tree? Where? Fabricating these fears, imagining them, is creativity, imagination. Related to caring and idealism.
Personally, I’ve seen another medical function equally interesting: if you stress someone, their brain will fixate on a cause. Even if there isn’t one. Like if someone’s had a bad day, and you’re at the counter, YOU are the problem. Okay. But also if you have free-floating fear and anxiety, you look for a cause. THEM. Whoever “them” is. Clearly this is not at all related to Liberals or Conservatives, everyone does this, and mostly we identify a correct cause before too long. …But only because we are being logical. We think “Oh it must have been that cheese I ate.” “Must have been the potato salad in the sun”. And test it, prove it. But if you stress people enough, they can fixate the wrong cause and they’re too worked up to keep going and looking for the right cause. You’re there: It’s you, end of story. But that’s caused again by frantic stress. Free-floating stress as we increase unemployment, employment uncertainty, inflation, increase family uncertainty, etc. But they’re all from…
I’m not going to answer. Because then looking for the cause of the s—tty stress in your life is the reason to latch onto conspiracy theories of one type or another. And maybe correct or maybe not. Maybe it’s Congress and maybe not. Maybe it’s the WEF and maybe not. Maybe it’s your ex-wife, maybe not. Maybe it’s that CRT at school. Maybe they are related, or not, or all from one source, or just dumb ideas individuals are dumping on you.
But you have to be logical to figure it out, and if you’re stressed: you’re not.
I think that’s the point. The goal. All the way back when we first started saying this in October 2001. And no one listened then, and no one’s gonna listen now. But to cope? You need your life under control and a spiritual foundation.
“Former Olympian Swimmer Says Trans Hate Mob Has “Made My Life Hell”
Idealism? Check. Emotion? Check. Love and Helping? Check. And fighting, hurting, and hell? …Check. Why is one participant in this story to be loved and coddled, and yet the other hated and harmed? Is one not human? They often harm humans to save trees, whales, or dogs, so that’s not it. Is it really logic that makes a person say “Well they both exist so we’ll have to find a way to work together”? Not yet sure. Just know it’s non-stop hating and hurting other humans, then claimed in the name of love and tolerance. And that’s exactly what they also hate and have no tolerance for, what got their goat for some many, many years with the Christians: hating others in the name of love.
Don’t stare into the abyss too long. If you wait long enough, everything becomes its opposite.
“the ideological political world ?”
the ideological political world of AI derived outcomes from hypothetical situations based on worst outcomes possible?Idea on eating the bugs:
There’s another thing for bugs. Our alien ant farmer overlords seem to think humans are insects. Howso? It’s their weird, alien approach to gender I’ve been wondering about for many months. Now for humans, nothing could be nicer than genders, either for men, women, or looking at the pretty boys if you’re gay. We LOVE gender! We love feeling it, even just LOOKING at it, defend it with our lives just because. But they firmly never think this way. To them, gender is optional. Now is that for rabbits? Lizards? Monkeys? Birds? Nope. But Bees? Yes. Feed them the special jelly, poof! You have a drone. Poof! You have a queen. Poof! You have a worker. Just give them the magic pheromones, the hormone therapy. Nothing bad happens. It’s perfectly natural and normal to choose and switch genders…for insects that is.
For some weird reason, they seem to think we humans are the same. Why I can’t imagine, but that’s how they act. Turn boys into girls, girls into boys, and both into none. So long as it stops conception and birth, love and family, turns a family into a hive of mindless drones, they’re happy.
That’s the other thing: Insects don’t have family. They are raised by the state. Like these people desire. Their tasks and status are decided at birth. Just like these weirdos. There is no property, so workers own nothing. Property is owned communally, and ruled by the Queen Bee, the philosopher-king that runs everything. Logical. Orderly. Efficient. A place for everything and everything in its place.
But so goes the gender, and gender swapping hormone therapy they love for everyone. Just perfect. …If you’re a bug. Hey, you see Brad Pitt in a dress? Maybe he’s one too.
Insects live in the pods. Insects eat insects. It’s a bug-eat-bug world. Join today, pharmacists standing by!
That’s the only place and paradigm where such weird and narrow ideas fit.
Time for a new analogy(fishing expedition?) comparing classical music to science/medicine.
Classical music had a great run. For centuries it was the most popular form of music. Around 1900 that began to change when Arnold Schoenberg & company decided that music needed to progress from tonal to atonal. Romanticism or neo-reomanticism was for old farts like Rachmaninoff or backward looking hicks like Howard Hanson, while the real musical pioneers were progressives creating new music. Yes their music looked so advanced and superior on paper, however how many people can read music? What did it actually sound like: chaotic noise.
No worries, for over a century they’d promote their progressive music, plus make sure their progressive composers got all the funding and hype. Just repeat how superior their music was over and over again, louder and louder. Happily trapped in their elite echo chamber.
Meanwhile, in the real world, classical music ceased to be popular music. For the large minority which still embraced it, they fled to the past and listened to dead composers. Music historians would even resurrect neglected composers, like Vivaldi & Mahler, to give the music loving public more choices. Concerts of dead composers’ music, records sold of dead composers’ music. Like being trapped in a time loop.
Did the musical elites accomplish anything except to retard classical music for over a century? If not for movie music, we might claim they killed it off completely.
Is this what’s happened to science/medicine? The elites come up with progressive ideas, like GMO foods and mRNA vaccines. Great theories, therefore they must be superior! Never mind what their effect in reality is. Who cares if all the ferrets die in the lab. They have the solution for these flaws: just keep telling people over and over about how safe & superior these things are. Progress for the sake of progress.
Meanwhile people will react by looking backward. They’ll grow their own food. They’ll stop popping pills and begin using natural healing practices.
Does this mean we can expect the science/medical corruption to last for over a century?
Personally covid has been quite revealing. As someone who grew up aspiring to be an intellectual and who looked down on rednecks, I now find myself waiting for the border to open so I can escape to rural Indiana. I’d rather live with rednecks, who mind their own business, and never ever have an intellectual interfere in my life again.
It sure looks like Zelensky is speaking for the Democrats, with his blacklist. It’s no wonder these stick figures thought Trump was playing 4D chess.
Pick #1 or #2
Failure to find a substitute for Russian gas could lead to
1. “people freezing to death next winter,
2. as well as industrial collapse,” Ebell said.
———-
Imposing a cease fire would work.
“The West insists that Ukraine must not start negotiations until Russia is defeated on the battlefield,” Lavrov said.
(Just like Israel does it)
———–
Problem ….. farmers/sellers have food for sale …. buyers have no money to buy/pay for it
————–
More than 7,000 civilian facilities, USED BY NON-NAZY AND RUSSIAN SYMPATHIZERS), have been destroyed in attacks by the Ukrainian side, including homes, schools and kindergartens, with over 91,000 people being designated as victims, the Investigative Committee chief said.
————-
A better question ….. Who is getting the money
Thank you sanctions. But where does the money come from?• Greek Electricity Subsidy In Excess Of 1.1 Bln Euros In August (K.)
————
A rose by any other name …..
Its still a lie/fake
The FBI’s investigation into Hunter Biden wrongly labeled verified evidence as “disinformation,
….. derogatory information is disinformation,
discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease,Are you expecting ….. “justice to fit the crime”, ….. Hahahahaha
———–(From yesterday) @wdt “…transmutation..I don’t think this means what you think it means… Organic transmutation….sorry, no”
Uh sorry, Yes, I know exactly what it means. Just because the scientific orthodoxy of our time runs shrieking with its hair on fire at the mention of it, it has nonetheless been repeatedly found true. Of course, you will have to dig deep and hard to find anything on the ‘net about it precisely because of that orthodoxy. Believe what you want.
As far as feeding straw to cattle, you are absolutely correct. The ‘protein’ in green forages are the molecules with large shares of nitrogen, which is absent in straw (cellulose and lignin). The ‘fermenting’ of those compounds releases the energy necessary to maintain a healthy rumen biome, which can then process limited amounts of cellulose, especially for heat production.
Prologue : when I started writing this it was in response to a friendly request to relate the story of my brush with starvation, so I thought it was going to be mostly unrelated to the usual topics discussed on TAE, but would at least be mercifully short. Turns out I was mistaken on both counts. The piece is brutally long . . . and right on topic. Had almost finished writing it before the lights finally flickered on.
Dear @Willem and @MyParentsSaidKnow,
Happy to oblige with the slightly less abridged version of the tale. I love relating episodes of my Dad’s story, so it’s a pleasure not a chore. My father was basically a real life Forrest Gump . . . . but in reverse. (Forrest always always got the prize and the riches, and G.W. Smith always passed up the prize and went broke, to go do something else more interesting than riches.)
Seriously. I myself would not believe a word of it if I had not seen so much with my own two eyes that it lends credence to the parts I was not present to witness.
Dad graduated a tiny rural High School in central Illinois in the late 1930’s, along with his best friend and fellow larger-than-life adventurer Harmon “Bud” Helmericks. They departed for Arizona the day after graduation to work good paying jobs at the copper mines through Bud’s family connections, but got bored and became gold prospectors instead. They found gold, staked a claim and sold the claim to HomeStake Mining Company for the mind boggling sum of $5000. Homestake later produced several million ounces of gold from the deposit. Bud used his share of the $5 grand to move to Alaska (where he became the preeminent Arctic bush pilot of his day, number one hunting guide for the rich and famous, published author, some kind of agent for the US military (by dint of skills and locale) and an actual member (much later) of the genuine Explorers Club.Dad used his share to buy a ’32 Ford convertible and went looking for adventure, women, and trouble in California. He found all three, and wound up flying Heavy Bombers out of Darwin northern Australia where he became local legend as an extremely skilled, fearless, effective and apparently charmed-life bomber pilot and fist fighter. He never lost a fight or failed a mission, and saved his crew from virtually certain death on THREE separate occasions.
Line officer Generals and combat fliers are a superstitious bunch, or maybe it’s just that their line of work favors those who are more attuned to higher realms. In any case, word got around in those upper echelons that this G. W. Smith guy was sort of unkillable and very very VERY lucky . . . not to mention being good to avoid in a fist fight. So they started using him to fly top top brass, like MacArthur, LeMay and Groves. Eventually he became Robert Oppenheimer’s assigned pilot, driver, body guard and babysitter (Oppie sometimes became alarmingly lost in thought) until the project concluded.
After that he flew “Fog & Smogger” flights in the Berlin Airlift, which accidentally led to an IRA leader getting a free lift back to the Emerald Isle right under the noses of British Intelligence. THAT screw up led to G.W. being persuaded ( penance? coercive extortion?) to infiltrate a hugely successful smuggling network long operated in post-war Berlin by a former Nazi war criminal who both Brits and OSS wanted stopped. Therefore, Dad became a respected smuggler for the Nazi and then captured him, in a gunfight to which the guy had brought only a knife.
Fast forward fifteen years.
G.W. Smith is raising 5 kids in suburban Antioch, California and selling Allstate Insurance for a living. In short, it was killing him. So when his friend “Bud” wrote and invited his old side-kick to escape the Rat Race and bring the family to Alaska to help set up a whale hunting business using surplus wartime Navy LST Landing Craft ships, well how could he say no so such an imminently practical venture that was so certain to make everyone rich?
So Dad packed us up and off we went. Just like that. It took all of a month (June, 1959) to make the trek. I still have the newspaper article from the Spokane Daily Chronicle about the crazy man with his wife and five kids headed for the Arctic for clearly inadequate reasons.
Once in Fairbanks we could not dilly dally. Although a house had been started on Anachlic Island (our destination), and building materials were on site, it was only a stud-walled platform and if the house wasn’t a closed in heat-able shell by first snow then all bets were off. We had maybe 3 months, but G.W. was an experienced farm-boy with two grown sons and two half-grown . . . so what the hell. He went for it.
Anachlik is at the mouth of the north flowing Colville River, where it empties into the Arctic Ocean about 50 miles West of Prudhoe Bay. You can find it (with some effort) on Google Maps, but an easier way is this link to the Helmerick’s descendants’ family website about the place, here: http://www.goldenplover.org/Maps.html .Fairbanks to Anachlik is 375 miles of mountains, tundra and generally uninhabitable wilderness. Our loaded to maximum Cessna 170 would therefor need refueling and “An airplane must have enough fuel in the tanks to get all the way on to the destination. . . or . . . all the way back to where it came from.” The arithmetic of that works out to TWO fuel stops, not one. Seven passengers (and a pilot) meant that it was going to take two, grueling, round trips (with two fuel stops on each leg) just to get the G.W. Smith Family entourage into place. Additional trips for food and supplies would be needed for us to survive once we got there. Some stuff already in place, of course, but for way fewer people and much less time. Nowhere near enough for 7 people to last three months or more.
In retrospect it is patently obvious that adequate supplies should have been well stocked and maybe even padded a bit before putting a family of 7 in the easily predictable probability of being trapped there without enough food, clearly a risk to all of their their lives. An experienced resident of the far north, like Bud,would know better than most what the vast cruel Arctic world could . . . . . and often did . . . . . throw at puny little humans. It’s not the high risk sort of gamble that anyone would do to anyone that they truly cared about very much. Bud’s viewpoint (which he much later explained explicitly and at length, and which does have some merit) was that nature is utterly unforgiving of mistakes. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Arctic where one’s first mistake is usually the last one they’ll ever make. It was not his responsibility that we lost the gamble of “supply chain issues”. People who make such rooky errors do not last long in places as isolated and dangerous as the permafrost tundra 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle.
In other words, we were not his kith and kin. We were business associates, employees, and although he would never deliberately cheat us or fail in a promise to bring supplies when able to do so, it was our responsibility . . . not his . . . to be sufficiently wise and self reliant enough to survive in a place like Anachlik.
So he delivered us to our destination and promised to be right back as quickly as he could, and then didn’t come back for what turned out to be a very long time.
First off, the weather went to shit and was unsafe for flying the re-supply flight for many weeks following our arrival. Then the ground conditions were impossible for landing for a further month. And then the weather was unsafe for flying again for yet another extended period. It seemed worrisome at first but not life threatening at first. A real deal but not a big deal. Sure, we were rationing the flour, sugar, oil and beans, and had no red meat because the vast enigmatic caribou herd moved beyond our range of discovery. The migratory ducks and geese were long gone, naturally, but a few ptarmigan were still around and we could go out on the river in our small boat to fish. We were all losing weight, yeah, but at first we all had some weight we could afford to lose.
But then the ptarmigan left and the river froze a month earlier than expected. The fresh ice was too thick to land a pontoon float plane, or fish from the shore or run our little boat, but it was too thin to get out on it to ice fish or land a plane with skis or wheeled landing gear. The land was half frozen mud and the river was a treacherous glaze.
Even back when we had caribou, birds and fish we were nevertheless still slowly consuming the rationed sugar, beans oil and flour, but with the rationing it looked like enough to last a couple of months. Then, when the foraged protein stopped, it became obvious that the stored food could not be used to take up the slack, because that would lead to zero food in only one month (instead of rationed food for two). So we cut rations even further, and that’s when we started to to starve.
The caribou disappeared in late August. The ptarmigan (like a big quail or small grouse . . . and delicious) got scarce soon after and were gone by the time the river started freezing in September.
By late September I thought of almost nothing other than calorie packed foods. . . and how to actually obtain them. I literally coveted caloric content. Dark chocolate (pure fantasy) topped the list. Crisco, lard and deep fried anything came a close second and seal oil was strong third. To me it smelled like fresh strawberries and was as beautiful as amber. To appreciate the significance of those mental associations you should know what seal oil is and how it’s made. Seal oil is decomposed seal blubber, which reeks of old fish when you’re slicing it up, and is made by dropping the slices of blubber into a 5 gallon can, closing the lid and letting it rot until the clear and aromatic oils separate and rise to the top. Anything dipped into it tastes wonderful. When you’re teetering on the cusp of starvation.The day we awakened to the river being iced over we searched the house for food. We didn’t find much but one thing we found left an indelible image in my memory. Wrapped in a burlap sack, under a bench where it had been for months, was one half of a rib cage of a small caribou. It was completely coated in a biological velvet of green and gray mold, so Mom washed the mold off before cooking the ribs up for us. Can’t honestly say that I liked the smell while it simmered, but I had no complaints about the taste when I ate my portion. Basically, if something was not poisonous, it became part of the rationing, and we ate it.
I was only 11 years old at the time, so a few facts only emerged in review. One of them was that although we had worked like maniacs for the first two months (first closing it in weather-tight and then insulating and covering the interior of the 40 ft x 40 ft two story structure) now we stopped building altogether. Or rather I should say, Dad just quietly stopped demanding our labor. Instead, and except for the bare essentials of eating and drinking water, we spent the greater part of every day asleep or resting in our double, eider down, sleeping bags. His quietly implemented solution . . . once again . . . for maintaining body temperature with absolute minimum calorie consumption.
There’s this calorie thing about living in the arctic. Your body turns into a furnace that you shovel calories into for the purpose of maintaining that good old 98.6 . As a schoolwork exercise Mom helped me figure out how much we were actually using. I was five feet tall, weighed 115 pounds and was consuming 3,000 calories just to maintain weight. For Dad and the older boys it was around 5000.
There’s an Eskimo adage : food is sleep and sleep is food. Dad applied that and it probably saved all of our lives, his own included. Otherwise we would have had to burn calories that simply did not exist. There were a few other people out there who knew of our plight. Point Barrow, for example, was 180 miles away, and the military DEW Line station was just 35 miles away . . . but all 35 miles were across open Arctic Ocean seas. There was nothing any of them could do to help us. Which brings me to the inspirational conclusion of our little tale.
When ground and weather conditions finally aligned to make resupply possible (November 22, 1959 just a few days before traditional Thanksgiving), and after recovering from the mistake of trying too quickly to eat normally again, we had an incredibly open and frank family conversation.
We reviewed the facts and the lessons learned and unanimously decided to leave Alaska as soon as full length daylight returned in the Spring. We had made a mistake that had almost cost us our lives, and then we had made choices and done other important things right, which had saved them.
We very nearly died because we had trusted our lives to someone who placed too little value on ours, and we had survived only because all of us valued each other as much or more than we valued our individual selves. Awesome lesson.
@D Benton Smith
Thanks for sharing your story.
I too had intended to encourage you to do so yesterday.
This has the makings of a great book, and maybe a movie!@EoinW.
Why hate of everything that you were and spent so much energy to become? People of rural Indiana may know-sense that you looked down on them for the good part of your life (if that’s how I understood your post), so brace for the surprise. Love of expertise and competence in any human occupation and endeavor shields one from feeling of superiority and “looking down on somebody”. Incompetence, ignorance and stupidity…..well, we know when we see it and can not be compared to someone doing “lesser job”, just like it may be a bad idea to compare art and science.Turdeau of Canadada was told by his Empire of Lies pimps to fuckaround with Gazprom’s turbine. What should have taken 2 weeks to fix took two months.
So Gazprom is going to fuckaround with Deutschland uber alles and make up an excuse to reduce the gas flow to 20% because, surprise surprise, it seems another turbine is having ‘maintenance issues.’
So sad :>(Germany has pulled the pin on the grenade and now doesn’t know what to do. (Pro Tip:sit on it)
This will put the de-industrialization of Germany on the fast track to Green Nazi Nirvana.
Once Germany has been gelded and it’s collective balls are hanging from Russia’s rear view mirror like a pair of fuzzy dice on a vintage muscle car, the rest of Eurotardistan will self immolate
Speaking of the West loosingitscollectiveshit.
London narrowly avoided blackout as electricity prices surged last weekhttps://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/london-belgium-london-fire-brigade-europe-france-b2130623.html
The UK was forced to pay 5,000% higher than the typical price for electricity from Belgium to prevent a power blackout in south-east London.
Wow, I guess a penny saved is a penny earned.
At 5000% above average cost, self-immolation for Olde Blighty is in the cards.
I find this to be very strange
Thank you, D Benton for your tale. I’ve done a few trips out to the Alaska penninsula and the Aleutian and Shumagin islands. In the process I became familiar with traditional food items, seal oil included. I had read accounts of its awful taste but found the real thing to be quite tolerable. Seal oil used to be a universal condiment in arctic cuisine since seal and sea lion meat is free of fat. The meat is almost black and all the fat is in a layer right under the skin.
If anyone is interested in a detailed account of starving in a cold climate, read The Lure of the Labrador Wild by Dillon Wallace, available right now for free on Amazon Kindle.
By the way, preppers always mention beans and rice as part of their survival kits. Don’t know if they talk about fat at all. I would suggest some good amount of lard as part of the mix.The Cremation of Sam McGee
BY ROBERT W. SERVICEThere are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam ’round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that “he’d sooner live in hell.”On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see;
It wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and “Cap,” says he, “I’ll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.”Well, he seemed so low that I couldn’t say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
“It’s the cursèd cold, and it’s got right hold till I’m chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet ’tain’t being dead—it’s my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.”A pal’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.There wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: “You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it’s up to you to cremate those last remains.”Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows— O God! how I loathed the thing.And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I’d often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May.”
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then “Here,” said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum.”Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared—such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.Then I made a hike, for I didn’t like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: “I’ll just take a peep inside.
I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked”; … then the door I opened wide.And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm—
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”DBS: Thanks so much for the obvious effort you took to put that story together. Not only is it a fascinating tale, but you are a very good storyteller!
I looked up Anachlik Island and saw that the airstrip there is named “Helmericks”, the same family your father’s buddy belongs to, I presume.
Yes those are the folks, although the current occupants are one, two or even three generations further down trail from Bud, Martha and their sons Jimmy and baby Mark who were contemporary of the Smith Clan misadventure.
I wrote to them once many years ago but they literally didn’t even know who I was and there was no reciprocal interest in staying in touch.
“GOP civil war on Ukraine builds between MAGA, Reagan Republicans”
I couldn’t hold back my reaction to the tripe expressed by some who were quoted in this article.
“If freedom is under assault by dictatorship and we don’t back up freedom, then what message does that send?” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) More like “dictatorship under assault by dictatorship,” perhaps? “We can’t allow domestic politics to overshadow the fact that there’s genocide going on in Ukraine right now.” There’s that word “genocide” again. But perhaps the right question is “by who?”
“I actually think there’s been very strong bipartisan support for Ukraine. It was a minority of people who voted against the aid, and they sort of vote against everything. I don’t expect that to change,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) So the only ones against military aid for Ukraine are the ones “against everything”?
Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), a former CIA official who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, called a potential GOP majority “deeply concerning” because “we see such an extremist element on the other side of the aisle that’s self-aligning with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, as well as a whole host of others with extreme positions.” I guess it is “extremist” now to be against encouraging a war that does nothing to serve our national interest.
And finally we have Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas), who traveled with Fitzpatrick to Ukraine in May, called it an “unholy alliance” between far-right isolationists and what he described as the anti-war left. Which religion considers it “unholy” to ally with like-minded people against military engagement? And it is beyond tiresome to keep hearing anti-interventionists characterized as “isolationist”—suggesting that there is no other way to engage in international relations other than to break out the guns.
@ Kultsommer
I didn’t mean it to sound like being hateful. I’m lucky to be of an age to have already lived a full and very good life. There’s still lots of decent people in Ontario. I wish they would think for themselves and be more long sighted. Normalcy bias, I guess. Positive attracts positive so I’ll always aim for that.
Fact is, the border may never open. They introduced passports after 9/11. Two decades later, the passports remain.
Thank you D Benton Smith for your wonderful but very trying life story.
After spending the first 10 years of my life I northern Quebec/Labrador, I can relate to the type of wild life you describe and their early fall migration south. The ice too thick to chop a hole in to fish. The strong cold winds that never stop. The only thing missing were the seals.
Dr. D:
Thanks for providing a link to the article “Why Liberals Dump Their Oldest Friends” by Rick Ackeman GoldSeek. com July 25, 2022.
The hands that are revolting are
Hiding in the complexity of our social/economic systems,
Like the air being disturbed by the beat of the wings of the butterfly gathering into a destructive hurricane.
Or if you prefer
A snow ball getting bigger as it gathers speed and rubble going down hill.The latest bulletin and podcast from Spartacus:
“…Fifth-Generation Warfare was based on information. Just ordinary people sharing information with each other. People outside the uniformed services. Civilians, like you and me. See how that works? They redefined talking as an act of warfare…”
“Sixth-Generation Warfare won’t be based on information. It will be based on cognitive warfare. That is, altering the sources of information, such that the second and third-order effects of that information will change…When China wants America weakened, they’ll dump nanoparticles in a reservoir somewhere, and people will drink them, and they’ll cross their blood-brain barrier and slowly give them dementia. Do you see how this works, yet? Civilians are the primary targets of this new form of warfare.”
“Biotech is being seriously investigated as a means of broad social control on a global scale. This isn’t just to achieve military objectives. This is the redefinition of basic sociopolitical activity on this planet as something subject to unprecedented, clandestine military action, using a novel paradigm that has seen very little coverage in the media.
This is the story of the century…”
COVID Jabs Impact Both Male and Female Fertility…
Expert warns that there is credible evidence that the COVID shots may cross-react with syncytin and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that might impair reproductive outcomes. ‘We could potentially be sterilizing an entire generation.’
https://www.theepochtimes.com/covid-jabs-impact-both-male-and-female-fertility_4619827.html
Green Disaster: Battery Fire Turns Connecticut Electric Bus into Towering Inferno…
Luckily, no one died in the inferno, although two transit workers and two firefighters were hospitalized as a result of the blaze.
Disinfo Board Redux: Former Google ‘Disinformation’ Expert Given Top White House Cyber Role…
The White House’s Office of the National Cyber Director has a new Deputy National Cyber Director: Camille Stewart Gloster, a former Google executive who specialized in removing “disinformation” from the tech giant’s app store, and in her spare time rants about “systemic racism” in America.
Joe Biden elevates another Big Tech exec and Social Justice Warrior to run his cyber office. The Big Tech, Big Government alliance continues https://t.co/k0q8aQ7rl2
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) July 25, 2022
D. Benton Smith, thank you for your well written true story, I really enjoyed it and I’m glad your family made it through.
“Sixth-Generation Warfare won’t be based on information. It will be based on cognitive warfare. That is, altering the sources of information, such that the second and third-order effects of that information will change…When China wants America weakened, they’ll dump nanoparticles in a reservoir somewhere, and people will drink them, and they’ll cross their blood-brain barrier and slowly give them dementia. Do you see how this works, yet? Civilians are the primary targets of this new form of warfare.”
Dr D,, no bees don’t switch genders,
they can’t,,,, queens get ‘milk’ their whole life
workers quickly get solid food
Occasionally diploid drones happen (same sex alle),
as soon as workers recognize this larvae is eaten
All adult drones are monoploid, unfertilized egg
But apis mellifera, apis cereana are different
than nearly all other wild bees
Most wild queens over-winter solitary
and start new nest, all on her own
So early brood is 1/2 starved
And bees tasks change as they age
Not so simpleEvery time AOC goes back to her New York district from Washington DC, she raises the average IQ of both places.
American political scientist and expert in international relations John Mearsheimer also told UnHerd how disappointed he was to be labelled in this way: “When I was a young boy, my mother taught me that when others can’t beat your arguments with facts and logic, they smear you. That is what is going on here.
Ukraine has been losing since before it gained the headlines in 2014, losing seems to be the Ukrainian thing, their raison d’etre. Even Zelensky, at the start he thought he was a winner, wearing suits and the like, but after a while he couldn’t even be bothered to dress for any occasion, he reverted to type, the third rate comedian loser in a tee shirt. I cannot think of a single victory to chalk up to Ukraine. Never has a country been so obviously flushed down the toilet to assist western ambitions, apart from Libya, Iraq etc. Ukraine is totally dispensable, the people are not a consideration, the democracy is being publicly raped, all to show the minions like us how worthless we are and how we have no power, even at the ballot box, even logic no longer applies to the minions.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump had warned Germany against overreliance on Russian energy at a UN General Assembly meeting in 2018.
The real problem was Germany’s subservience to the USA. Trump as POTUS was as ineffective as the German government, but that is not really relevant. Both Turmp and Germany need to discover their balls and do the right thing for themselves, rather than pandering to third parties.
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