John Day
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Jason Aldean’s “Try That In A Small Town” Becomes No. 2 Hit [That’ll larn ’em better!]
Country Music Television (CMT) pulled his video from the air without explanation, after it had already aired for three days.
The controversy caused a backlash among music fans, who then rushed to hear Mr. Aldean’s song, as streams and downloads of his hit exploded last week.
Audio and video streams from Mr. Aldean’s song have since risen from 987,000 to 11.7 million, a 999 percent increase, a week after the music video was released, Luminate told FOX Business.
Before Mr. Aldean released the music video, the song had sold only 1,000 downloads, but it has since sold 228,000, according to Luminate.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/jason-aldeans-try-small-town-becomes-no-2-hit Pepe Escobar packs in a lot of news. Don’t look for the new Gold-BRICS currency this year. BRICS problems, BRI solutions
As the BRICS approach the most important summit in their history on August 22-24 in Johannesburg, South Africa, some fundamentals need to be observed.
The top three BRICS cooperation platforms are politics and security, finance and the economy, and culture. So the notion that a new BRICS gold-backed reserve currency will be announced at the South Africa summit is spurious.
What is in progress, as confirmed by BRICS sherpas, is the R5: a new common payment system. The sherpas are only in the preliminary stages of discussing a new reserve currency which could be gold or commodities-based. The discussions within the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), led by Sergey Glazyev, by comparison, are way more advanced.
The order of priorities is to get R5 rolling. All current BRICS currencies start with an “R”: renminbi (yuan), ruble, real, rupee, and rand. R5 will allow current members to increase mutual trade by bypassing the US dollar and reducing their US dollar reserves...
..Chinese trade with BRI nations increased 9.8 percent in the first half of 2023 – compared to the same period last year. That contrasts sharply with the 4.7 percent overall contraction of trade between China and the collective west: Down with the EU by 4.9 percent, and down with the US by 14.5 percent.
Chinese trade with Russia, meanwhile, alongside exports to South Africa and Singapore, raised exponentially by 78 percent. As an example, late last week, a Chinese cargo set sail from St. Petersburg loaded with fertilizers, chemicals, and paper products. It will cross the Arctic and arrive in Shanghai in early August…
..The Arctic Silk Road, from now on, will be increasingly strategic. The Chinese can keep it open at least from July to October every year. And as a bonus, a warming Arctic allows better access to oil/gas resources…
.. On the Russian front, all eyes are on the 7,200 km-long, multimodal International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC) – which alarms the collective west as a de facto replacement of the Suez Canal. The INSTC cuts shipping costs by about 50 percent and saves up to 20 days of travel compared to the Suez route. INSTC trade – via ship, rail, and roads linking Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, India, and Central Asia – should triple over the next seven years…
..The Trans-Afghan Railway will emerge as a follow-up to something very important that happened last week, when Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan signed a joint protocol to connect the Uzbek and Pakistani networks via Mazar-i-Sharif and Logar in Afghanistan.
Welcome to the UAP railway – which could be hailed not only as a BRI but also as a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) project – where Tashkent and Islamabad are full members, and Kabul is an observer….
..The Uzbeks estimate that the 760 km-long railway will reduce travel time by five days and costs by at least 40 percent. The project could be finished by 2027.
The subsequent 573 km-long Trans-Afghan Railway has already got its road map: it’s bound to connect the intersection of Central and South Asia to ports on the Arabian Sea...
..Every investor from Jeddah to Hong Kong knows that Beijing is aiming to turn the Greater Bay Area into a prime global tech center, centered in Shenzhen, with Hong Kong playing the role of privileged global finance hub and Macau as the cultural hub.
The Greater Bay Area, not by accident, is a key BRI plank. As a whole, the nine cities in Guangdong, plus Hong Kong and Macau (more than 80 million people, 10 percent of Chinese GDP), will be configured as an astonishing first-class economic powerhouse by 2035, largely overtaking Tokyo Bay, the New York Metro Area, and the San Francisco Bay Area.
With Saudi Arabia aiming to become a full member of both BRI and SCO, Beijing and Riyadh will turbo-charge their tech cooperation on top of energy and infrastructure.
All eyes on South Africa next month are on how BRICS will work to solve its internal issues while organizing the expansion to BRICS+. Who will get to join the club? Saudi Arabia? UAE? Iran? Kazakhstan? Algeria?
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/brics-problems-bri-solutions More than 40 countries have shown an interest in joining BRICS, Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador-at-large responsible for ties with the economic alliance and Asian countries, has said.
The diplomat told reporters in Johannesburg on Thursday that 22 countries have formally applied to join the group, while “an equal number” of states “have been informally asking about becoming BRICS members”.
https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/more-than-40-countries-willing-to-join-brics-official/Lawmakers Pass Key Part Of Netanyahu’s Sweeping Judicial Overhaul As Protesters Seek To Blockade Knesset
Following almost 30 weeks of some of the largest protests Israel has seen in its history, Israeli lawmakers on Monday passed a key part of the Netanyahu government’s ultra-controversial overhaul plan which will see the independent judiciary severely weakened.
It is being widely called the biggest and most far-reaching shake-up to the Israeli system, and the judiciary in particular, since 1948. The ‘Reasonableness bill’ passed with 64 votes in favor and 0 against, given that opposition members of the Knesset boycotted the final vote in protest, as raging demonstrators took over streets, in many cases blocking roadways and city centers across the country. Protesters tried to blockade the Knesset building itself.
The Reasonableness bill gets its name from the legislation in effect stripping the Israeli Supreme Court’s ability to declare government decisions unreasonable, which critics say so severely erodes checks and balances that it will lead to a Netanyahu coalition “dictatorship”.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/knesset-passes-key-part-netanyahus-sweeping-judicial-overhaul-hundreds-thousands-rageWhat Time It Is (thinking of Saturday In The Park by Chicago)
https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/what-time-it-isA good interview with Maria Bartiromo. Kennedy gets to talk, and is treated politely; invited back…
“We Need A Real Investigation” Of Biden Bribery & Burisma; RFK Jr Says Mainstream Media Criticizing Him More Than Trump
He went on to comment on a Harvard-Harris poll on July 21, saying that he has the highest favorability rating than any other presidential hopeful in 2024.
“So, somehow, the American people are hearing what I’m saying. I don’t know whether it’s through the podcasts or through social media,” Mr. Kennedy said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/we-need-real-investigation-biden-bribery-burisma-rfk-jr-says-mainstream-media-criticizingHunter Biden put then-VP dad Joe on the phone with business associates at least 2 dozen times, ex-partner Devon Archer to testify
https://nypost.com/2023/07/23/hunter-biden-put-then-vp-dad-joe-on-the-phone-with-business-associates-at-least-2-dozen-times-ex-partner-devon-archer-to-testify/ RFK Jr. Maintains Highest Favorability Rating Among Presidential Candidates In New Poll
Days after a House hearing on censorship that saw Democrats attempt to prevent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from testifying, a new Harvard-Harris poll showed that he has a higher favorability rating than any other presidential candidate.
Mr. Kennedy has a net favorable rating of 47 percent and a net unfavorable mark of 26 percent according to the survey, which was released on July 23 and conducted from July 19 to July 20 among 2,068 registered voters (pdf). [The poll was taken before/during the censorship hearing. How’s he doing now?]
Poll respondents said that former President Donald Trump has a favorability rating of 45 percent compared to a 49 percent unfavorability number. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has a 40 percent favorable rating and 37 percent unfavorable, and President Joe Biden has 39 percent favorable and 53 percent unfavorable rating, also lagging behind Mr. Kennedy.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/rfk-jr-maintains-highest-favorability-rating-among-presidential-candidates-new-poll Alastair Crooke, Counter-Revolution – ‘Do you know what time it is?’
To be blunt, both the U.S. and Europe have stalked brazenly into traps of their own making. Caught in the lies and deceit woven around a claimed inheritance of superior cultural DNA, (vouchsafing, it is said, almost certain victory), the West is awakening to a fast-approaching disaster to which there are no easy solutions...
..The coming devastation is not just centred around the failed Ukraine offensive and NATO’s weak showing…
..In the U.S., the run-up to momentous elections is underway. The Democrats are in a fix: The party has long since turned its back on its old blue-collar constituency, engaging instead with an urban ‘creative class’ in an exalted, world-shaping ‘social engineering’ project of moral redress, in alliance with Silicon Valley and the Permanent Nomenklatura. But that experiment has run off into the weeds, becoming ever more extreme and absurd. Push-back is building…
..Either way – Biden staying or going – there is no ready solution to the Party’s conundrum of a non-performing, non-platform…
..Heavy ‘lawfare’ artillery is intended to break the Trump defences and drive him off the field, whilst an attrition of disclosures of Biden family malfeasance are intended wear down and implode the Biden bubble. The Democratic Establishment is spooked too by the flanking manoeuvre of the R. F. Kennedy candidature, which is snowballing rapidly…
..Put simply, the Democratic wokish ideology of historical redress is separating the U.S. into two nations living in one land...
..Ukraine has served as the solvent to the old order and has become the Albatross hanging around the neck of the Biden Admin: How to spin the looming Ukraine debacle as somehow ‘mission achieved’. Can that be done? Because the escape route of a ceasefire and a frozen line of contact is unacceptable to Moscow. In short, ‘Biden’s war’ cannot continue as it is, but nor can it do ‘other’ without facing humiliation. The myth of American power, NATO competence and the reputation of U.S. weaponry hangs in the balance.
The economic narrative (‘everything is fine’) is poised, for somewhat unconnected reasons, to turn sour too. Debt – finally – is becoming the sword suspended above the economy’s neck...
..Faced with many questions – and no solutions – the mood amongst sectors of the electorate is driving a radical and increasingly iconoclastic mood. A counter-revolutionary spirit, perhaps. It is too early to say whether it will sweep a majority, but it may – for the radicalism is coming from the two wings: GOP grassroots and the Kennedy ‘camp’… [I personally see the “Spirit of ’76” revisiting our land. Not “counter-revolution”, but the same thing again.]
..One strain of GOP voters separates conservative leaders into two camps: those who “know what time it is” and those who don’t. That is the catchphrase on the Right that has become increasingly important to a significant wing of the Party who see a country weakened and corrupted by ideology; who hold that there is almost nothing left to ‘conserve’. Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is advocated as a sort of counter-revolution – and the only road forward.
That aphorism for ‘knowing what time of day it is’ refers to an emerging sense of urgency and appetite for sweeping action, not dragging and dull academic debates among more populist-minded conservatives. “The premise is that the struggle against wokish cultural power is existential, and that extreme tactics that would shock an older generation of conservatives need to be the norm”.
In fact, if a leader is not shocking in his conduct and proposals, he or she probably “doesn’t know what time it is”…
..”When you realize this, what looks at first like a hodgepodge of different ideas seems more unified. Covid health policy, disgust about Jan. 6, the Pentagon budget, immigration, support for Ukraine, promoting racial diversity, trans rights — these are all issues that enjoy a measure of élite bipartisan consensus. But for the Tucker Carlson wing – Republicans who embrace these things simply – don’t know what time it is”, Politico explains.
What is salient in this formulation is that just as unreserved support for Covid regulatory practices was a ‘marker’ of ‘correct-think’ in pandemic time, so support for Ukraine is defined as ‘a marker’ of correct liberal-think (and being in the Team) in the post-pandemic era...
..However, as American fireworks illuminate the political sky, resonance in Europe is almost certain. Europeans share the distrust for their élites and the Brussels technocracy in the same fashion as the Carlson-Kennedy constituencies.
The Euro-élites disdain the people. Ordinary Europeans know that their rulers regard them with contempt – and know that their élites know it too…
..Fireworks are coming for Europe – but slowly. It has already begun (governments are falling); but the U.S. is the vanguard for radical change as the West loses its grip on the meta-narrative of its ‘vision’ being uniquely the paradigm through which the world’s ‘vision’ must be shaped too. A shift that changes everything. [“Lies and deceit” are not standing up well to realities like heavy artillery any more.]
https://www.sott.net/article/482712-Counter-Revolution-Do-you-know-what-time-it-isOne of our recurrent topics got a bit more fleshed-out.
CIA, DoD & Rockefeller Foundation confirmed as architects of Deagel .com 2025 Depopulation Forecast & current Mortality Rates imply Covid Vaccination has made it a target that could be hit
Deactivating Sputnik, Tass and RT links let me upload. It wouldn’t evan take one of them.
The US military is broadly involved in setting up integrated networks of information access, integration, evaluation, decision-making and command, so as to respond quickly, accurately and decisively, but… Michael Klare, The Military Dangers of AI Are Not Hallucinations
It doesn’t require great imagination to picture a time in the not-too-distant future when a crisis of some sort — say a U.S.-China military clash in the South China Sea or near Taiwan — prompts ever more intense fighting between opposing air and naval forces. Imagine then the JADC2 ordering the intense bombardment of enemy bases and command systems in China itself, triggering reciprocal attacks on U.S. facilities and a lightning decision by JADC2 to retaliate with tactical nuclear weapons, igniting a long-feared nuclear holocaust…
..As early as 2019, when I questioned Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, then director of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, about such a risky possibility, he responded, “You will find no stronger proponent of integration of AI capabilities writ large into the Department of Defense, but there is one area where I pause, and it has to do with nuclear command and control.” This “is the ultimate human decision that needs to be made” and so “we have to be very careful.” Given the technology’s “immaturity,” he added, we need “a lot of time to test and evaluate [before applying AI to NC3].” …
..Such a prospect should be ample cause for concern. To start with, consider the risk of errors and miscalculations by the algorithms at the heart of such systems. As top computer scientists have warned us, those algorithms are capable of remarkably inexplicable mistakes and, to use the AI term of the moment, “hallucinations” — that is, seemingly reasonable results that are entirely illusionary. Under the circumstances, it’s not hard to imagine such computers “hallucinating” an imminent enemy attack and launching a war that might otherwise have been avoided.
And that’s not the worst of the dangers to consider. After all, there’s the obvious likelihood that America’s adversaries will similarly equip their forces with robot generals. In other words, future wars are likely to be fought by one set of AI systems against another, both linked to nuclear weaponry…
..Not much is known (from public sources at least) about Russian and Chinese efforts to automate their military command-and-control systems, but both countries are thought to be developing networks comparable to the Pentagon’s JADC2…
..China is said to be pursuing an even more elaborate, if similar, enterprise under the rubric of “Multi-Domain Precision Warfare” (MDPW). According to the Pentagon’s 2022 report on Chinese military developments, its military, the People’s Liberation Army, is being trained and equipped to use AI-enabled sensors and computer networks to “rapidly identify key vulnerabilities in the U.S. operational system and then combine joint forces across domains to launch precision strikes against those vulnerabilities.”…
..Though this may seem an extreme scenario, it’s entirely possible that opposing AI systems could trigger a catastrophic “flash war” — the military equivalent of a “flash crash” on Wall Street, when huge transactions by super-sophisticated trading algorithms spark panic selling before human operators can restore order. FBI told Twitter Hunter Biden laptop was real on day of Post scoop, official says
“Somebody from Twitter essentially asked whether the laptop was real. And one of the FBI folks who was on the call did confirm that, ‘yes, it was,’ before another participant jumped in and said, ‘no further comment,’” Laura Dehmlow, section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, recollected in a closed-door deposition Monday, according to a release from the Republican-led committee.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/20/fbi-told-twitter-hunter-biden-laptop-was-real-day-of-post-scoop-official-says/ The weeks after “vacine” injecton are the most dangerous in yet another way, much higher risk of both kinds of stroke if COVID is contracted in this defenseless period, which is a time of much higher susceptibility to catching COVID.
Nahab and coworkers from Emory analyzed a statewide database of COVID-19 vaccine recipients. Approximately 5 million adult Georgians received at least one COVID-19 vaccine between December 2020 and March 2022: 54% received BNT162b2, 41% received mRNA-1273, and 5% received Ad26.COV2.S. Those with concurrent COVID-19 infection within 21 days post-vaccination had an increased risk of ischemic (OR = 8.00, 95% CI: 4.18, 15.31) and hemorrhagic stroke (OR =5.23, 95% CI: 1.11, 24.64).
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/risk-of-stroke-skyrockets-with-covidExtensively detailed article from A Midwestern Doctor: How Do Vaccines Cause Autism?
https://amidwesterndoctor.substack.com/p/how-do-vaccines-cause-autismDrink R.O. Water. The membrane filter removes these compounds well.
Almost Half of U.S. Tap Water Contaminated With ‘Forever Chemicals’
A U.S. Geological Survey found 45% of U.S. tap water is contaminated with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) chemicals, with measured concentrations in both private wells and public water sources.Almost Half of U.S. Tap Water Contaminated With ‘Forever Chemicals’
Trying again from back in Austin. Didn’t work. I’ll deactivate Russian links.:
C’mon “Chinks”, buy US Savings Bonds! We won’t cancel them, like we did to Russia.
Biden Needs China to Bail Out US Economy: Here’s Why
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s trip with Beijing was widely ridiculed in the media. But geopolitical and financial analyst Tom Luongo, publisher of the newsletter ‘Gold, Goats ‘n Guns’, said her real mission was to beg China for economic aid.
https://sputnikglobe. com/20230721/biden-needs-china-to-bail-out-us-economy-heres-why-1112006490.html Pepe Escobar, Mirroring meticulous Chinese attention to protocol, they met at Villa 5 of the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse – exactly where Kissinger first met in person with Zhou Enlai in 1971, preparing Nixon’s 1972 visit to China.
The Mr. Kissinger Goes to Beijing saga was an “unofficial”, individual attempt to try to mend increasingly fractious Sino-American relations. He was not representing the current American administration. [Henry Kissinger has always represented Rockefeller interests.] ..
..Everyone involved in geopolitics is aware of the legendary Kissinger formulation: To be the US’s enemy is dangerous, to be the US’s friend is fatal. History abounds in examples, from Japan and South Korea to Germany, France and Ukraine.
As quite a few Chinese scholars privately argued, if reason is to be upheld, and “respecting the wisdom of this 100-years-old diplomat”, Xi and the Politburo should maintain the China-US relation as it is: “icy”.
After all, they reason, being the US’s enemy is dangerous but manageable for a Sovereign Civilizational State like China. So Beijing should keep “the honorable and less perilous status” of being a US enemy.
https://sputnikglobe. com/20230721/pepe-escobar-neocons-want-war-with-china-1112033985.html Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is carrying out “polonization” of Ukraine in hopes that this would allow him to stay in power for longer, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin said on his Telegram channel.
“Zelensky is carrying out a process of polonization [capture of Ukraine by Poland – TASS] of his country, hoping that, in return, his masters [Washington and Brussels – TASS] will allow him to stay in power for longer,” he said.
To that extent, a law was adopted that effectively equals Poles to Ukrainians, providing them with the same set of rights – stay without permission, employment, education, medical service and even some allowances, the official added.
According to Volodin, Ukrainians are being expelled from their homes in Sumy and Chernigov regions, which border Russia, as the authorities seek to replace them with Polish migrants, loyal to the neo-Nazi regime. Ukrainian citizens are also being forced to use Polish language instead of Russian; orthodox Christianity is being persecuted, with Ukrainians being converted to Catholicism, the Duma Speaker underscored.
“Meanwhile, a 25-thousand military force comprised mostly of Polish and Lithuanian armed soldiers, ready to occupy Western Ukraine, has been established. The Poles want to take back what they consider their historic lands – the Eastern Borderlands. They do not need Ukrainian citizens on these territories,” Volodin noted.
https://tass. com/politics/1650465 During Friday’s meeting, the head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), Sergei Naryshkin, also alleged that Warsaw was considering capturing western territories of Ukraine by deploying its own troops to the region as part of a Polish-Lithuanian-Ukrainian security initiative.
According to Naryshkin, Polish officials are gradually coming to the realization that “the issue of Ukraine’s defeat is only a matter of time,” regardless of the amount of Western military assistance sent to Kiev.
Commenting on the SVR report, Putin suggested that the true purpose of such a coalition would only be to occupy Ukrainian territories. “The prospect is obvious – if the Polish units enter, for example, Lvov or other territories of Ukraine, then they will remain there. And they will remain there forever.”
Putin also noted that it is “well known” that Warsaw “dreams” of also claiming parts of Belarusian territory as well.
The Russian leader warned, however, that while Ukraine has the right to sell off as much of its own territory as it wants, when it comes to Belarus, any aggression against a part of the Union State would mean aggression against Russia. “We will respond to this with all the means at our disposal,” Putin stated. [This sounds to me like Putin is saying that Ukraine can cede Galicia to Poland under the current administration.]
https://www.rt. com/russia/580080-poland-western-ukraine-putin/John Helmer on the end of the grain-deal.
White House officials claimed the Russians are weaponizing food. “Russia’s decision to resume its effective blockade of Ukrainian ports and prevent this grain from getting to markets will harm people all over the world,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said at a White House briefing.
These claims aren’t true. They are “clashes with shippers’ reality”, a Bloomberg report acknowledged. Like almost every scheme the corruptly clever Zelensky (lead image, left) and the corruptly stupid Joseph Biden (right) have devised in the current war, the conversion of the fight for Odessa and Ukraine’s other Black Sea ports into a war to starve the hungriest peoples of the world is failing.
Instead, the battle for Odessa has begun where the electric war to turn off the city’s lights left off. The end of the Black Sea grain initiative will profit the Russian grain and fertilizer exporters by a big margin, compared to the past year; the neediest country importers will gain from direct Russian shipments at low to zero price; and the Ukraine will lose, not only its remaining ports and their trading and shipping infrastructure, but also its sea lanes southward.
At the same time, Ukraine’s neighbours in the European Union (EU) are closing the river lanes, roads, and rail lines to Ukrainian grain exports northward and westward. That’s weaponizing food – but the Europeans are doing it to protect their own farmers.
The Russian naval blockade was officially announced by the Russian Defense Ministry on July 19...
..““No sane owners will call there uninsured,” Bloomberg quoted the Greece-based Doric Shipbrokers SA, which has been sending vessels through the UN sea lane for the year of the grain agreement. Without the protection of the safe corridor “the Ukraine trade is dead.” “I don’t think shipowners will go to the Ukrainian ports until the corridors are reestablished — it’s not safe to do so,” another Bloomberg shipping source announced...
[This is like blowing up Nordstream pipelines to lock Germany in to the NATO plans.].. The new Russian military campaign, combining blockade at sea with targeted destruction of port infrastructure is aimed at landlocking the Kiev regime. Zelensky “can at least beg an aircraft carrier group from Biden to escort grain carriers and drag her into the Black Sea, spitting on the Montreux Convention,” commented Nikolai Storozhenko in Vzglyad. “But what’s the use of it if the ports can’t ship?” …
..“The termination of the grain deal makes it possible to carry out the necessary restructuring of logistics routes and use the North–South route with maximum load with access to Asian and African markets through Iran. The development of this direction seems to be key for the level of food exports from Russia. This scenario will not only preserve the level of export earnings, but also supply grain, food and fertilizers to the poorest countries of the world. That is, to realize the same goals that were laid in the foundation of the grain deal, but were shamelessly ignored by our former partners”, says Maximov.
As for the export of Russian mineral fertilizers, this has decreased by about 15% due to the general sanctions restrictions. However, in 2023 Russia is gradually restoring fertilizer exports, and this year it may reach supply levels comparable to the record figures of 2021 of almost 38 million tonnes, Andrei Guriev, head of the Russian Association of Fertilizer Producers (RAPU) said in May. And again, it’s not just been the grain deal, but the fact that fertilizer producers needed more effort and time to change buyers from unfriendly to friendly, to agree on payment, logistics and insurance. There was a tougher situation with delivery restrictions, for example, via the ammonia pipeline.Well, I can’t seem to upload another story, let alone the rest of the data-dump.
Please do look at :
https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/control-freaks-outControl Freaks Out https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/control-freaks-out
Michael Hudson , The Looming War Against China [I’m skipping that “war” part, because nobody can tell, and going to the last part about global economics.]
The problem lies in what the word “capitalism” has come to mean in today’s world. Back in the 19th and early 20th century, industrial capitalism was expected to evolve toward socialism. The U.S. and other industrial economies welcomed and indeed pressed for their governments to subsidize a widening range of basic services at public expense instead of obliging employers to bear the costs of hiring labor that had to pay for basic needs such as health care and education. Monopoly pricing was avoided by keeping natural monopolies such as railroads and other transportation, telephone systems and other communications, parks and other services as public utilities. Having governments instead of business and its employees pay for these services increased the global competitiveness of national industry in the resulting mixed economies.
China has followed this basic approach of industrial capitalism, with socialist politics to uplift its labor force, not merely the wealth of industrial capitalists – much less bankers and absentee landlords and monopolists. Most important, it has industrialized banking, creating credit to finance tangible investment in means of production, not the kind of predatory and unproductive credit characterized by today’s finance capitalism.
But the mixed-economy policy of industrial capitalism is not the way in which capitalism evolved in the West since World War I.
Rejecting classical political economy and its drive to free markets from the vested rent-extracting classes inherited from feudalism – a hereditary landlord class, a financial banking class and monopolists – the rentier sector has fought back to reassert its privatization of land rent, interest and monopoly gains. It sought to reverse progressive taxation, and indeed to give tax favoritism to financial wealth, landlords and monopolists.
The Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has become the dominant interest and economic planner under today’s finance capitalism. That is why economies are often called neofeudal (or euphemized as neoliberal).
Throughout history the dynamics of financialization have polarized wealth and income between creditors and debtors, leading to oligarchies. As interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, more and more income of labor and business must be paid as debt service. That financial dynamic shrinks the domestic market for goods and services, and the economy suffers from deepening debt-ridden austerity.
The result is de-industrialization as economies polarize between creditors and debtors. That has occurred most notoriously in Britain in the wake of Margaret Thatcher and the New [Anti-]Labour Party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s “light touch” deregulatory approach to financial manipulation and outright fraud.
The United States has suffered an equally devastating shift of wealth and income to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-government deregulation, Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” takeover by Wall Street. The “Third Way” was neither industrial capitalism nor socialism, but finance capitalism making its gains both by stripping and indebting industry and labor of income.
The new Democratic Party ideology of deregulated finance was capped by the massive bank-fraud collapse of 2008 and Barack Obama’s protection of junk-mortgage lenders and wholesale foreclosures on their financial victims. Economic planning and policy was shifted from governments to Wall Street and other financial centers – which had taken control of in government, the central bank and regulatory agencies.
U.S. and British diplomats are seeking to promote this predatory pro-financial and inherently anti-industrial economic philosophy to the rest of the world. But this ideological evangelism is threatened by the obvious contrast between the US-British failed and de-industrialized economies compared to China’s remarkable economic growth under industrial socialism. [Not perfect, as we see, but point taken, Michael.]
This contrast between China’s economic success and the NATO West’s “garden” of debt-ridden austerity is the essence of today’s campaign by the West against the “Jungle” countries seeking political independence from U.S. diplomacy so as to uplift their living standards. This ideological and inherently political global war is today’s counterpart to the religious wars that tore European countries apart for many centuries.
We are witnessing what seems to be an inexorable Decline of the West. U.S. diplomats have been able to tighten their economic, political and military control leadership over their European NATO allies. Their easy success in this aim has led them to imagine that somehow they can conquer the rest of the world despite de-industrializing and loading their economies so deeply in debt that there is no foreseeable way in which they can pay their official debt to foreign countries or indeed have much to offer.
The traditional imperialism of military conquest and financial conquest is ended.
There has been a sequence of tactics for a lead-nation to carve out an empire. The oldest way is by military conquest. But you can’t occupy and take over a country without an army, and the US has no army large enough. The Vietnam War ended the draft. So it must rely on foreign armies like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and most recently Ukraine and Poland, just as it relies on foreign industrial manufactures. Its armaments are depleted and it cannot mobilize a domestic army to occupy any country. The US has only one weapon: Missiles and bombs can destroy, but cannot occupy and take over a country.
The second way to create imperial power was by economic power to make other countries dependent on U.S. exports. After World War II the rest of the world was devastated and was bullied into accepting U.S. diplomacy maneuvering to give its economy a monopoly on basic needs. Agriculture became a major weapon to create foreign dependency. The World Bank would not support foreign countries growing their own food, but pressed for plantation export crops, and fought land reform. And for oil and energy trade, U.S. companies and their NATO allies in Britain and Holland (British Petroleum and Shell) controlled the world’s oil trade.
Control of world oil trade has been a central aim of US trade diplomacy.
This strategy worked for US assertion of control over Germany and other NATO countries, by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline and severing Western Europe from access to Russian gas, oil, fertilizer and also crops. Europe has now entered an industrial depression and economic austerity as its steel industry and other leading sectors are invited to emigrate to the United States, along with European skilled labor.
Today, electronic technology and computer chips have been a focal point of establishing global Economic Dependency on U.S. technology. The United States aims to monopolize “intellectual property” and extract economic rent from charging high prices) for high-technology computer chips, communications, and arms production.
But the United States has deindustrialized and let itself become dependent on Asian and other countries for its products, instead of making them dependent on the US. This trade dependency is what makes U.S. diplomats feel “insecure,” worrying that other countries might seek to use the same coercive trade and financial diplomacy that the United States has been wielding since 1944-45.
The United States is left with one remaining tactic to control other countries: trade sanctions, imposed by it and its NATO satellites in an attempt to disrupt economies that do not accept U.S. unipolar economic, political and military dominance. It has persuaded the Netherlands to block sophisticated chip-engraving machinery to China, and other countries to block anything that might contribute to China’s economic development. A new American industrial protectionism is being framed in terms of national security grounds.
If China’s trade policy were to mirror that of U.S. diplomacy, it would stop supplying NATO countries with mineral and metal exports needed to produce the computer chips and allied inputs that America’s economy needs to wield its global diplomacy.
The US is so heavily debt-laden, its housing prices are so high and its medical care is so extremely high (18% of GDP) cannot compete. It cannot re-industrialize without taking radical steps to write down debts, to de-privatize health care and education, to break up monopolies and restore progressive taxation. The vested Financial, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE sector) interests are too powerful to permit these reforms.
That makes the U.S. economy a failed economy, and America a Failed State.
In the wake of World War II the United States accumulated 75% of the world’s monetary gold by 1950. That enabled it to impose dollarization on the world. But today, nobody knows whether the U.S. Treasury and New York Federal Reserve have any gold that has not been pledged to private buyers and speculators. The worry is that it has sold European central-bank gold reserves. Germany has asked for its gold reserves to be flown back from New York, but the United States said that it was unavailable, and Germany was too timid to make its worries and complaints public.
America’s financial quandary is even worse when one tries to imagine how it can ever pay its foreign debt for countries seeking to draw down their dollars. The United States can only print its own currency. It is not willing to sell off its domestic assets, as it demands that other debtor countries do?
What can other countries accept in place of gold? One form of assets that may be taken as collateral are U.S. investments in Europe and other countries. But if foreign governments seek to do this, U.S. officials may retaliate by seizing their investments in the United States. A mutual grabbing would occur.
The United States is trying to monopolize electronic technology. The problem is that this requires raw-materials inputs whose production presently is dominated by China, above all rare-earth metals (which are abundant but environmentally destructive to refine), gallium, nickel (China dominates the refining), and Russian helium and other gasses used for engraving computer chips. China recently announced that on August 1 it will start restricting these key exports. It indeed has the ability to cut off supplies of vital materials and technology to the West, to protect itself from the West’s “national-security” sanctions against China. That is the self-fulfilling prophecy that U.S. warnings of a trade fight has created.
If U.S. diplomacy strongarms its NATO-garden allies to boycott China’s Huawei technology, Europe will be left with a less efficient, more expensive alternative – whose consequences help separate it from China, the BRICS and what has become the World Majority in a self-reliant alignment much broader than was created by Sukarno in 1954.@DBS: Several things about the video. They explained tht there was something like congestive heart filure, though the heart-lung-sack was one-thing. They explained that there were mechanical and biological comonents to this entity. There were a couple of guys with masks wiping the mouth and supporting the head. There was supportive activity, but taking the final statement appeared to be the main goal. They say the entity died shortly thereafter.
So Why? This is a world of expert selfishness and compartmentalized knowledge and duties. Secrets are kept to the grave as a matter of duty and honor.
We’re not that way. I was thinking I could make better ESP contact if I was there. Who knows?I have not met an extraterrestrial, but I have alwys been interested. They say there are nice ones like this “Grey”, and not-nice “Reptilians”. They say Harry Truman knew about them, even had a meeting.
I don’t know. I can’t tell.
“What” is “God”? What is my essential nature?
It’s not just that we can’t agree, but I’m still trying to even “know” for my own understanding.@ D Benton Smith: About 1978, when I was in college, visiting my grandparents at their cattle ranch near Bandera, where I had lived before, I was getting a ride to church on Sunday, from a neighbor, a retired USAF Colonel, a pilot. He told me as if I should maybe already know it, that there were alien bodies in cold storage in a mountain base in Colorado, which he had seen. I’m not sure why he took that moment to tell me that. It’s clearly not on any record. Maybe he wanted to tell somebody and still not-have-told-anybody.
I was that recipient. I can’t prove anything, and he has probably died by now.Anyway, I actually watched that whole video. It’s not “evidence” by itself. It is plausibly “real” and plausibly “staged”, but I think the Colonel was for real.
Belarus To Hold Exercises With Wagner Near NATO-Member Poland’s Border [It’s a straight shot across a superhighway to Warsaw from there.]
Belarus’ Defense Ministry has announced it will hold joint military exercises with Wagner fighters along the border with NATO-member Poland, in a fresh escalation after Warsaw has already remained on edge over the presence of Russian mercenary forces next door.
“The Armed Forces of Belarus continue joint training with the fighters of PMC ‘Wagner,’” the defense ministry said in a fresh statement. “During the week, units of the special operations forces together with representatives of the company will work out training and combat tasks at the Brestsky training ground.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/belarus-hold-exercises-wagner-near-nato-member-polands-border UK intelligence ‘freelancers’ helped Ukraine target Crimean Bridge – The Grayzone
Ukraine’s drone attack on the Kerch Bridge was most likely planned by former British military intelligence agents who signed a contract with Kiev in 2022, the independent outlet Grayzone has reported citing leaked documents.
https://www.azerbaycan24.com/en/uk-intelligence-freelancers-helped-ukraine-target-crimean-bridge-the-grayzone/This is the medical literature cited by Kennedy in his testimony and his private discussion over dinner, which is worth watching fully. It’s not what some people say.
New insights into genetic susceptibility of COVID-19: an ACE2 and TMPRSS2 polymorphism analysis
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32664879/Professor Anthony Hall on government lies and censorship, with context:
9/11, the COVID Hoax, the Climate Change Fraud, and TWA Flight 800, 1997-2023 , Punishing the Truthers to Protect the Liars
https://anthonyjhall.substack.com/p/911-the-covid-hoax-the-climate-changeGrassley Releases Bombshell FBI Doc Discussing $10MM Biden Bribe; Burisma Boss Said Hunter ‘Dumber Than His Dog’
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/grassley-releases-bombshell-fbi-doc-discussing-10mm-biden-bribe-burisma-boss-said Nigel Farage had his bank accounts shut down with the high-net-worth bank Coutts after officials decided the former conservative politician’s views did not align with the bank’s values, it has emerged.
The former UKIP and Brexit Party leader went public last month with the difficulties he was having in opening a U.K. bank account after Coutts, an institution he had been banking with for almost a decade, inexplicably closed his accounts and several other banks refused his applications to open a new one.
New evidence obtained by Farage now contradicts the initial response provided by the bank.
In a 40-page dossier Mr. Farage acquired via a subject access request, Coutts made it clear that his conservative views were problematic for the bank, citing Brexit no fewer than 86 times, and his support of Donald Trump who is mentioned 39 times.
The minutes of a meeting of Coutts’ wealth reputational risk committee held on Nov. 17 last year stated that Mr. Farage is “seen as xenophobic and racist. He is considered to be a disingenuous grifter. Being associated with Nigel Farage presents a material and ongoing reputational risk to the bank.”
The bank does not state who “sees” Mr. Farage in this fashion, or why this individual or social group holds weight in a decision on whether or not to provide a British citizen with a U.K. bank account. It should be noted that Mr. Farage has won elections in Britain as the leader of a political party, namely the European parliamentary elections with the Brexit Party in 2017, and wields considerable public support.More from Dr. Nass, the rollout of iris scan digital banking ID, an offer some Ethiopians “can’t refuse”. (What would put You in a bind like this? Think. Don’t speak.)
Ethiopia, where most people are “unbanked” and the UN food program provides many with rations.
The country cannot afford food but apparently they can afford iris scans. The UN is requiring the scans to supply the food. No wonder Ethiopia is where the globalists are piloting the program.
Ethiopia, a nation currently struggling with deep food shortages and famine, has announced that they will make it obligatory to have a national digital ID in order to use banking services in the country.
Over a week ago the United Nations’ World Food Programme said that they were appalled at the levels of theft going in Ethiopia, in regards to how many people were stealing the provided rations, and have demanded that biometric checkpoints be instigated to alleviate the problem before they start making any real resupplies there….
Biometric Update also noted, ‘Ethiopia is implementing a World Bank-supported MOSIP-based digital ID project which intends to have all eligible citizens enrolled by 2025. The country also recently contracted IrisGuard to support benefits payments to citizens with iris biometrics.
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/mandated-digital-ids-happening-fastSpeaking Of Problems (as we do here) https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/speaking-of-problems
Consciousness of Sheep, Our Predicament Restated (long, good, excerpted for brevity)
There is a meme doing the rounds on social media… a picture of a vegetable patch, captioned “the time is coming when only those who know how to grow food will survive.” The idea being that, as our complex civilisation breaks down, we will be forced to return to a far simpler economy, where most people revert to roles within agriculture and food production. As with most memes, it functions as a thought-stopper… one which hides the obvious reality – backed by millennia of experience – that, in fact, “it will be the people who know how to force others to grow food,” who will be the real winners in the post-industrial economy...
..The problem with both visions of the future – and the spectrum of views between them – is a fundamental misunderstanding of the collapse which has begun to break over us. This is that each assumes the continuation of that part of industrial civilisation which is required to make their version of the future possible, even as the coming collapse wipes away ALL aspects of industrial civilisation. Most obviously, nobody had developed even an embryonic version of the renewable energy supply chain which is the essential first step to turning non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) into the envisioned “renewables” upon which the promised techno-psychotic future is to be built. That is, until it is possible to mine the minerals, build the components, manufacture and transport the technologies without the use of fossil fuels at any stage in the process, then there is no such thing as “renewable energy” in the sense which the term is currently promoted... But even at the dark green de-growth opposite end of the spectrum is a version of denial which assumes that it is possible to gradually shrink the global economy in a managed way which results in the least suffering possible…
.. And so, some return to an agricultural civilisation is far more likely than a future which – for the moment at least – requires energy sources which don’t exist, along with technological breakthroughs which defy the laws of physics…
..Any possibility of a managed de-growth, however, died half a century ago for two related reasons. The first is that we didn’t take the October 1973 oil shock seriously. That is, geologists had already mapped out the process of “peak oil” – based on a roughly 40-year timeline between discovery and peak, which had played out as predicted in the USA… peak discovery in the early 1930s followed by peak production in 1970. It followed that since the world peak of oil discovery was in the early 1960s, then decline would begin some time in the first decade of the twenty-first century….
..The second – and intimately related – reason was the collapse of the post-war Bretton Woods currency system in August 1971. If the history of money teaches us anything, it teaches us that fiat currency systems – especially debt-based ones – are extremely corrosive to functioning economies…
..The system came to grief because – shock-horror – the US government lied. The temptation was simply too great to resist. And so, domestically, the US government overspent on social programs while internationally it deficit funded the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and a host of tied-aid packages which obliged states in the global south to purchase American goods…
..The event which triggered the cascade which resulted in the 2008 crash, was the global peak of conventional oil production in 2005. The ensuing oil price rises filtered through the economy, as everything made from, made with, or transported using oil increased in price accordingly…
..The 2008 crash simply could not have occurred had it not been for the halt in oil production growth and the ensuing price increases. That is, if – hypothetically – someone had opened up another large and cheap to extract oil deposit prior to 2005, the energy to underwrite real economic growth would have been available and prices would not have increased. To some extent, this also explains why the economy has not been in freefall ever since. I said above that the broadly correct peak oil narrative was more nuanced. This is because US peak oil in 1970 was partially artificial. The corporations which did the drilling within the USA were the same ones that drilled for oil around the planet. And since in 1970, there was plenty of cheap oil to be had elsewhere, there was little point investing in more difficult and expensive – including “unconventional” – deposits within the USA. Indeed, once the 1973 shock had served to raise the price of oil to a new level, deposits off Alaska, the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico became viable and, from the late 1980s, underwrote another debt-based boom (albeit at a lower level of general prosperity than in the post-war years)...
..Meanwhile, the post-2008 low interest rate financial environment provided sufficient speculator funding to develop the large deposits of unconventional oil in North American shale and bitumen sands. This provided the world economy with one final oil boom before a final peak was reached in November 2018.
The global economy was already entering a recession before SARS-CoV-2 embarked on its world tour, although this has been obscured by two years of economic lockdown followed by a self-defeating economic war with Russia. Nevertheless, as the economy re-opened, with oil production at some 4 million barrels-a-day below the November 2018 level, oil and gas prices quickly began to spiral upward. At the same time, broken supply chains resulted in generalised shortages, which also drove prices up across the economy…
..The banks, however, are correct to doubt the likely future growth of an economy increasingly starved of the energy that it needs to function. In the 2020s, it is not just that we are out of cheap oil, but we are rapidly running out of more accessible oil entirely. And since none of the alternatives to oil – fossil and non-fossil – is viable without oil, then the only possible economy in future is a shrinking one… and nobody has figured out how to operate one of those...
..The point of a bank is to make loans in a way that guarantees a return. And collectively that means that the real economy of energy and materials must grow. Now that the material growth has come to an end, banks have little incentive to keep lending…
..It is this growing reality which is fuelling a populist backlash against the neoliberal “green” energy fantasy, and which threatens to deny climate change itself …“US President Joe Biden arrives [at COP26] in a cavalcade of 21 vehicles from Edinburgh airport, and then appears to fall asleep in the conference chamber – surely the most carbon-intensive afternoon nap in history…”
It matters not one iota that economists are generally wrong. The economy matters. Because strip away the imposed ideological froth and the one thing common to all revolutions is that they were preceded by rumbling bellies. Rumbling bellies, that is, which are growing louder by the day across the formerly prosperous working-class districts of the western economies. It can only be a matter of time before this turns nasty – most likely when one or more of the political psychopaths finally realises that a return to burning fossil fuels provides the easiest route to power – and the political violence we used to associate with banana republics comes home to roost. And it is for this reason that the unfolding economic crisis, despite being the least serious of the “Three E’s” – economy, energy and environment – is going to strip us of the means to carry out either the disruptive science required for an alternative energy transition or for the reasoned management of a shrinking economy in line with the depleting energy and resources available to us.
Energy though, is the true driver of the process. In this at least, the climate sceptics have a point. Attempting to maintain an advanced, complex, and globalised industrial economy by expanding the tiny fraction we currently generate from wind and solar, while simultaneously removing the eighty percent that we currently derive from coal, gas, and oil, is simply impossible – there is neither the energy nor the mineral resources to come even close…
..Currency derives its true value as a means of allocating material resources – which include energy, minerals, but also human labour and human ingenuity. But these material economic inputs impose physical limits on what is possible…
…In thermodynamic terms, technological development – and productivity more generally – is really about lowering the amount of energy wasted as heat so that more can be directed to useful work. And sadly, the laws of physics leave even the most efficient technologies wasting more heat than they are able to convert for useful work… This applies to energy itself, of course. There is always an energy cost to producing energy for useful work. Productivity improvements such as better technology and economies of scale can lower this cost. But high cost and high waste is inevitable. For example, most of the energy powering an internal combustion engine is lost as heat or in powering cooling systems. Similarly, around a third of grid electricity is lost in transmission, and more again is lost as heat from the appliances using it…
..The energy cost of energy sets an important system-level boundary too. The economy as a whole must set aside a proportion of the potential energy available to producing energy. This means that only the energy left over is available to power the much larger non-energy economy. Prior to the Industrial revolution, when energy was limited to wood, food, animal fodder, and small-scale wind and water power, the non-energy economy was tiny – primarily the few luxuries available only to the very wealthy. Everyone else, one way or another, was involved in the production of energy – either directly growing food or engaging in the many peripheral trades required to allow farming to operate.
It is a measure of the raw power that fossil fuels – first coal, and later oil and gas – provide, that while as late as the 1930s, one in four of us was working the land, today it is less than two in a hundred. And today’s massive consumer and public services economy is the result. In the event that another Carrington Event were to strike the planet, almost all of the global economy would come to a possibly irreversible standstill in a matter of hours.
It is not only some external catastrophe that might spell disaster for the global economy though. Because of the way we have harvested fossil fuels – like technology, beginning with the cheap and easy before moving on to the expensive and difficult – the energy cost of energy has been growing remorselessly since the oil shocks of the 1970s. The impact upon the wider economy was partially offset by the neoliberal revolution, through such things as offshoring production to countries with lower wage rates and fewer environmental regulations, and by using debt to bring consumption forward from the future… that is, today! …
..In the developed states, real economic growth stalled prior to 2008. And there are growing signs that states like China and India are now also struggling to maintain real growth. Again, this is why the first wave of our collapse is experienced as an economic crisis. As the energy available to the wider economy declines, so there is simply not enough to maintain what already exists, still less provide the power for new goods and services. But other than the ever-louder complaints about the cost of electricity and gas, most of us experience the crisis via general price rises and falling incomes. And our individual common-sense response is to rein-in our discretionary spending in order to maintain essentials like housing, food, transport and utilities…
..Because this energy crisis manifests as a monetary problem, it is unrealistic to imagine that most people – including politicians, economists and establishment journalists – will recognise it for what it is…
..Awareness of the energy crisis, then, is most likely to come to public awareness only when rationing by price morphs into full-blown rationing. That is, when it is clear to all that there is no longer enough to go around. Clearly this will be a lot worse in places where there is a high level of intermittent capacity, since your electricity hour may be cancelled if the wind isn’t blowing…
..The symbolic moment when our problems became a predicament was the day Ronald Reagan ordered the solar panels to be removed from the White House roof. Prior to that point, a sizeable part of the population had been grudgingly accepting that lowering speed limits, making smaller, fuel-efficient cars, purchasing local goods, and wearing an extra sweater in the winter, were necessary. After Reagan and Thatcher, we were back to drill-baby-drill and let the future reap the consequences.
That future is now breaking over us. The gathering economic collapse – and the accompanying social unrest – will soon remove the resources that we would need even to mitigate the worst of what awaits us. And economic hardship is only the first tsunami wave to break over us. In the course of the 2020s, energy failures will worsen. Beginning with people being priced out of access to energy, soon enough we will be faced by absolute shortages. Again, this will inevitably be accompanied by unrest as the wealthy cling onto their ill-gotten gains in the face of growing public hostility…
..All we can say with some certainty is that tipping points are being crossed, and that the scope for us to respond meaningfully is fast shrinking to zero. We will still respond, of course. But our responses are likely to become ever angrier and more impotent as the crises engulfing us remain unmoved by our feeble attempts to respond… we must conclude that the age of solutions has passed… the age of consequences is just beginning.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/07/19/our-predicament-re-stated/A CATASTROPHIC DEBT IMPLOSION CAN BE INCREDIBLY QUICK
The growth of the economy is not driven by money but by energy. As Tim Morgan of Surplus Energy Economics states:“The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel.”
The dilemma is that the Energy Cost of Energy is constantly increasing. In 1990 that cost was 2.6% of fossil fuels and is estimated to be 12% in 2025. According to Dr Morgan, with the current Energy Cost of Energy, the real economy as well as prosperity has started to decline and that trend will continue for several decades. Fossil fuels still represent 83% of all energy globally and renewable energy is unlikely to make any significant difference in the next few decades. So we are now looking at peak cheap energy at a time when asset markets are in bubble territory with debts and deficits at levels which can only result in an implosion. Again let me emphasise that cheap energy is a prerequisite for economic growth. Consider all of the reality above as a threat to the established power structure, especially if it were to be understood broadly by people, and openly discussed in the political arena, so as to seek rational and cooperative adaptations to the economy which supports us all. However broad and open public discourse, leading to consensus actions of our societies, particularly American society, is necessary for any adaptation to the predicament of declining energy and economy to be worked out and implemented.
Everybody having wires into their brains to be controlled by A.I. is not a solution or an adaptation. It is a blind alley where human life will die out.
The one political candidate who is raising the most questions, and doing so politely and intelligently, is Robert Kennedy Jr. This is a threat to the established (and failing) power regime, which can only be met by silencing his voice. These are not topics which the power structure can address at all, because they do not exist in its control-narrative.
To acknowledge the existence of the many problems Bobby Kennedy Jr. is openly addressing is to break the control-narratives, and to lose legitimacy, as it is seen to have been a false-legitimacy all along. Thursday he testified before a House Committee on censorship. (Kennedy’s campaign manager, Dennis Kucinich sits behind him, and Elizabeth Kucinich sits behind Dennis’s left shoulder. Dennis ran for President back in the day, one of the honest candidates I voted for, who did not get nominated.)
CNN has the video. The gold stars for key points are very useful. Do listen to his opening testimony.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?529216-1/robert-f-kennedy-jr-testify-censorship-free-speech-part-1&live=&vod=Meryl Nass MD, The Hearing Goes On
Dr. Nass monitored the hearing and encapsulated much of the testimony and many of the arguments here in a court-reporter’s style.
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/the-hearing-goes-onThe Suwalki Gap is the Polish-Lithuanian border, which is about 36-60 miles long, lightly populated, and forms the shortest distance between the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, with its Baltic Sea port and Russian ally Belarus. It is shorter, but more mountainous and forested on the Polish side, but mostly farmland with some decent roads on the Lithuanian side. A railway crosses Lithuania, which has been politically contentious during the current war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap#Military_considerationsThat’s NOT where the PMC Wagner forces are. They are at the Brestsky Training Ground on the Polish border, the shortest possible distance to Warsaw, and connected by a straight-line superhighway.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/belarus-hold-exercises-wagner-near-nato-member-polands-border
That threat will tie-down Polich forces to protect Warsaw, the way Ukrainian forcess were tied down by the Russians north of Kiev last year.They could be moved up to the Suwalki Gap from there easily enough.
Quoth jb-hb:
“I inquired as to their specific MEANS for determining validity of beliefs. Did they, for instance have a conclave of religious leaders, philosophers, and secular ethicists providing expert belief-judgement? HOW were they determining belief-validity?
No answers. Well, other than the firing.
Anyway, I just got hired by a self avowedly Christian company that provides non-GMO products across north america – particularly homesteaders.
Since I don’t like GMO and am a wannabe homesteader, I think I will like this job.”Go jb-hb and Christian pureblood homesteaders!
WEATHER MAKERS (Thanks Christine. Thanks especially, Anastasia.)
Forests supply the world with rain. A controversial Russian theory claims they also make wind.
Every summer, as the days get long, Anastassia Makarieva leaves her lab in St. Petersburg for a vacation in the vast forests of northern Russia. The nuclear physicist camps on the shores of the White Sea, amid spruce and pine, and kayaks along the region’s wide rivers, taking notes on nature and the weather. “The forests are a big part of my inner life,” she says. In the 25 years she has made her annual pilgrimage north, they have become a big part of her professional life, too.
For more than a decade, Makarieva has championed a theory, developed with Victor Gorshkov, her mentor and colleague at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI), on how Russia’s boreal forests, the largest expanse of trees on Earth, regulate the climate of northern Asia. It is simple physics with far-reaching consequences, describing how water vapor exhaled by trees drives winds: winds that cross the continent, taking moist air from Europe, through Siberia, and on into Mongolia and China; winds that deliver rains that keep the giant rivers of eastern Siberia flowing; winds that water China’s northern plain, the breadbasket of the most populous nation on Earth.
With their ability to soak up carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen, the world’s great forests are often referred to as the planet’s lungs. But Makarieva and Gorshkov, who died last year, say they are its beating heart, too. “Forests are complex self-sustaining rainmaking systems, and the major driver of atmospheric circulation on Earth,” Makarieva says. They recycle vast amounts of moisture into the air and, in the process, also whip up winds that pump that water around the world. The first part of that idea—forests as rainmakers—originated with other scientists and is increasingly appreciated by water resource managers in a world of rampant deforestation. But the second part, a theory Makarieva calls the biotic pump, is far more controversial...
..Yet, if correct, the idea could help explain why, despite their distance from the oceans, the remote interiors of forested continents receive as much rain as the coasts—and why the interiors of unforested continents tend to be arid. It also implies that forests from the Russian taiga to the Amazon rainforest don’t just grow where the weather is right. They also make the weather. “All I have learned so far suggests to me that the biotic pump is correct,” says Douglas Sheil, a forest ecologist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-russian-theory-claims-forests-don-t-just-make-rain-they-make-wind Juan Cole, Israel Moves toward “Dictatorship” and Polarization, as one Likud Activist lauds the Targeting of Ashkenazi Jews in the Holocaust
On Sunday, Netanyahu was constrained to expel from his far right Likud Party the activist Itzik Zarqa. Zarqa had gotten into an argument with protesters, who are generally coded as Ashkenazi or European Jews, while the current coalition draws a great deal of support from the Jews of the Middle East, called Mizrahim.
Zarqa was caught on video shouting, “It’s not for nothing that six million were killed. I’m proud that six million of you were burned!”
He quickly backtracked, but that moment of intense political hatred that turned into an ethnic slur and a glorification of the horrific Nazi genocide of six million European Jews crystallized the rhetorical civil war that has gripped Israel.
https://www.juancole.com/2023/07/dictatorship-polarization-holocaust.html Israeli Fighter Pilots, Commandos Threaten To Resign If Judicial Reform Proceeds
More than a thousand Israeli military reservists have threatened to stop reporting for duty — or resign altogether — if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government proceeds with a plan to overhaul the country’s judicial system this month. Among those threatening to withhold their service are hundreds of elite fighter pilots and commandos.
Given reservists are an essential part of Israel’s military, and especially its air force, the country’s military leaders say such a mass walkout could have a significant impact on the country’s military operational capacity. They also fear a scenario where activism by reservists could inspire absenteeism among the country’s full-time service members. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israeli-fighter-pilots-commandos-threaten-resign-if-judicial-reform-proceeds(Russian) Sasha Latypova, Ethnically Targeted Bioweapons?
Robert Kennedy Jr recently caused quite a tempest in the “progressive” media goo (his sister Kerry stated to NBC that she “strongly condemned his deplorable and untruthful remarks”). His crime – he publicly mentioned that ethnic targeting was studied with respect to whatever was the covid-19 poisoning agent.
Of course, the woke tantrum about this subject is a politically motivated slander. To them an ideological opponent is a racist when he mentions anything that has to do with race or ethnicity. Or mentions anything at all. Or exists.
However, if you are wondering whether ethnically targeted bioweapons are a thing, let’s look into this. This topic is definitely studied and discussed in many press, science, government and military reports. RFK Jr. is perfectly correct to state this. He did not suggest the covid-19 poisoning agent was preferentially designed to protect Ashkenazi population. This is also correct. It wasn’t…
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/ethnically-targeted-bioweaponsWhy do all these graphs of COVID-vaccine side effects all have the same big spikes, right away and about 2 weeks out from the injection?
Is the CDC totally blind to all the adverse events from the COVID vaccines?
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/is-the-cdc-totally-blind-to-all-theVAERS data shows that vaccines cause autism
If autism is not caused by vaccines, the reported rates of autism should be proportional to the number of doses of the vaccine since these are all coincidences. But they aren’t.
(But this one “goes to eleven.”)
So since the COVID vaccines rolled out, a relatively stable rate of autism has increased DRAMATICALLY in the UK. A Z-score of 15 means something caused it. It coincides with the COVID vaccine rollout in the UK.
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/vaers-data-shows-that-vaccines-cause Simplicuis Updates on the Ukraine war are extensive. My excerpts are not in order.:
Let’s talk about Ukraine’s new terrorist attack on the Kerch Bridge before diving into other updates.
Why does Putin specifically call it a terrorist attack? Because, as he states, the Kerch Bridge is actually no longer used for military supplies and has not been for many months, and is therefore exclusively a civilian corridor. This is an interesting admission on his behalf because it appears to possibly point to a secret agreement with the West/Kiev, perhaps as part of the Grain Deal and other such backdoor handshakes that go on all the time, both explicit and implicit… I’d be more inclined to believe it was done by simple fast-traveling surface drones of a similar variety to the ones used on Sevastopol repeatedly. The satellite photos I posted earlier which claimed to have picked them up appear to confirm this…
..The most important thing to note, though, is that the timing of this attack happened on exactly July 17th, which was the long awaited grain deal expiration date, if you’ll recall. That is not by coincidence. It means this attack was specifically done to try to stymy Russia as much as possible in terms of putting it between rock and hard place in making its decisions. In essence, it’s designed to erode Russia’s stature with its allies, particularly Turkey… This appears to imply that not attacking the bridge was part of the grain deal, and that Kiev attacked it on the exact day of the deal’s expiration as a ‘message’ to Moscow…
..Where does that leave us then? Likely, Russia will await the West to ‘crawl back on its knees’ with some concessions in hand. Putin had already made the statement last week, if you’ll recall, in light of the upcoming grain deal’s expiration, that Russia will no longer make the initiative themselves but will wait for the West to ‘come bearing gifts’ in the form of their own concessions first...
..I did another report that highlighted major new findings in Russian Lancets—that they in fact had autonomous capabilities and were already tested and used in the SMO in autonomous mode. In the manufacturer video above, they actually confirm this fact… Now, this new generation variant they have already developed does the same, however it does it in swarms. The Lancets are fired in large batches from batched containers rather than slingshot-launched one by one...None of this is confirmed so it’s difficult to make a true analysis until we get further information. But if this is the case, then it clearly points to an ongoing Russian MOD purge of anyone showing even the slightest insubordination in the wake of the Wagner rebellion. The MOD clearly wants to build a strong military hierarchy based on a foundation of loyalty, all the old guards who are used to the corrupt ways of the 2000-2010 era, where feuding warlord Generals carved out their own fiefdoms and could do or say anything they want because they had major leverage against the MOD command simply from the fact that they aligned their soldiers to themselves, and not to the then-weak MOD—those days are gone. The MOD is now designing a professional, futuristic force with a strong central command, and anyone of the corrupt old guard who doesn’t like it is getting the boot.
The problem is, many of these generals had gotten lax and comfortable with the status quo of the ‘good ol’ days’. Remember those days? The RuAF of the Serdyukov era where weekly reports about soldier ‘hazing’ played on CNN, showing Russian troops brutally abusing and sometimes even killing each other in dungeon-like conditions. Shoigu has reversed all that and is designing a modern armed force based on respect, leadership, and proper chain of command. Many of the ‘old guard’ generals were so used to having their little sinecures and acting like mafia bosses that they take this as an affront. You see, in the old days, threats and violence was how you got things done and the armed forces were run more like a mafia, with each general controlling his own private little ‘brotherhood’ cell. Like I said, the ones who can’t handle being reformed into a modern force can go off to the pastures. Some people may not like to hear it but an effective armed force is built on a strict system of loyalty and subordination.
The jury is still out on the Surovikin case, however there is a new report that Putin will be meeting with him personally next week, so we’ll see what happens…
..Russian Duma Defense Committee chair hints that the true role of Wagner in Belarus is to recapture the Suwalki Gap: Given that he’s a high ranking defense insider one can only assume this means that Russia is anticipating the type of future Polish-Lithuanian military actions we’ve discussed here before. This follows a French LCI TV channel report which re-iterates the growing threat of Poland itching to enter the war. https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/kerch-bridge-deja-vu-breakdown The Suwalki Gap is the Polish-Lithuanian border, which is about 36-60 miles long, lightly populated, and forms the shortest distance between the Russian territory of Kaliningrad, with its Baltic Sea port and Russian ally Belarus. It is shorter, but more mountainous and forested on the Polish side, but mostly farmland with some decent roads on the Lithuanian side. A railway crosses Lithuania, which has been politically contentious during the current war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap#Military_considerationsRussia announces blockade of the (currently) Ukrainian port of Odessa:
Russian jets challenge illegal US presence over Syria
US officials are expressing new worries over Russian, Syrian, and Iranian pressure to end Washington’s illegal occupation
US officials said a Russian fighter jet flew close to a US reconnaissance plane over Syria, forcing it to fly erratically and endangering the lives of the four American crew members, Politico reported on 18 July.
The US-based news outlet quoted US officials as saying that the latest incident, which occurred on 16 July was “a significant escalation in a series of confrontations between US and Russian aircraft in Syria in recent weeks,” adding that “the interception of the Russian Su-35 aircraft impeded the ability of the American crew to safely operate their MC-12 aircraft.”
https://new.thecradle.co/articles/russian-jets-challenge-illegal-us-presence-over-syriaCountries Wage War Over Clean Energy Subsidies
The United States and Europe are locked in a subsidy race for the energy transition.
Economists are warning that huge subsidies could trigger a new wave of inflation.
Poorer EU member states are crying unfair-game on the part of the wealthy ones.
https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Renewable-Energy/Countries-Wage-War-Over-Clean-Energy-Subsidies.htmlRFK Jr Vows To Back US Dollar With Bitcoin Or Gold If Elected President (Complicated, but gold would be better now.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/rfk-jr-vows-back-us-dollar-bitcoin-or-gold-if-elected-presidentClub Members (Not You!) https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/club-members-da2
“Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”: Secret Gathering Sponsored by Bill Gates, 2009 Meeting of “The Good Club” , Michel Chossudovsky
For more than ten years, meetings have been held by billionaires described as philanthropists to Reduce the Size of the World’s Population culminating with the 2020-2022 Covid crisis.
Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called Covid mandates including the lockdown policies and the mRNA “vaccine”.
Flash back to 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”.
In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.
This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”.
Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and many more.
In May 2009, the WSJ as well as the Sunday Times reported: (John Harlow, Los Angeles) that
“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.”
The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation”, i.e,. the reduction in the absolute size of the World’s population.The context of global financial capitalism is not a context of wealth creation, as is the case of industrial capitalism. Rather, financial capitalism uses finance to extract value from industry, the environment, governments, societies, families and people, which value is then deployed to extract more value from real-world ecosystems, economies and people.
Once that value is extracted it must be defended from people and entities which have competing claims upon the value. There are many more future claims than there is current real wealth, which is manageable if the real economy keeps growing, but it is contracting in most places, certainly in the US and EU. This contraction comes from the very debt-service which has been layered upon productive economies, as well as the rising real price of energy like oil, gas and coal, and the increased cost of all resource extraction, as the easy ores and cheap forests have been used.
This means that the billionaires must protect their extracted wealth in the period we have entered. If people die younger, there will be fewer retirement plans with competing claims, for instance. If the human growth engine has hit the Limits To Growth in most places, these financial capitalists are accustomed to identifying trends and “front-running” them.
They are also accustomed to convincing people to commit to long term contracts, which would be good for the people, if current trends would continue, but which will extract wealth from the people if the identified-trends of the financiers actually emerge. People may be desperate for a highly extractive “payday loan”, as are countries which go to the IMF for debt management. IMF loans aim to extract natural resources and public property from the country at very low cost, leaving them just as indebted, but asset-stripped for the future.
Please keep this approach of the wealthy in mind. They do control the political, military and economic directions of the western world, but they are bleeding the nations of the west and of the “global south” to death.CEO of Worldcoin Says “Something Like (iris-reading) World ID Will Eventually Exist…Whether You Like It Or Not”
CEO of Worldcoin Says “Something Like World ID Will Eventually Exist…Whether You Like It Or Not”
Dollar Diplomacy Down is a presentation (with transcript) by Professor Michael Hudson and Professor Radhika Desai, about the transition of the $US from a gold backed global trade currency, replacing the Imperial Pound Sterling system, to an imperial fiat-currency, backed by the need to buy oil in dollars, and by being able to get paid good (value-extractive) returns on $US investments. The maintenance of the $US value by paying higher interest on investments became more extractive of existing value as industrial production declined in the US. This hollowed-out the US industrial economy, by making it higher-cost, so not competitive, and not worth building new factories, which were built in low-production-cost countries, instead. The globalization of finance, by removing controls on the movement of money across borders, made this profitable for international investors.
Western finance is in a late stage of hollowing out the home economies of the US and UK, while the new factories in other countries continue to send profits to New York and London. This creates a vulnerability for global financiers over the horizon, especially as interest rates rise, because the benefit of defaulting on these loans may exceed the benefit of servicing them, at such time as a parallel financial system may arise to compete with the $US system. The Euro has internal conflicts, as does the $US system. These are explored from several perspectives, as is the dynamic of competition between financial systems of Europe and the US. I have excerpted this for brevity. Thanks Christine.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the United States aimed to not lose any more of its gold, because gold is how it had bolstered its control over international finance since the 1920s.
The US also wanted to keep its veto power in the IMF and the World Bank. And it’s continued to be led —the World Bank certainly — by US military strategists, and the IMF has in fact just continued American foreign policy.
So the story is that what was new is that the United States was able to pay in IOUs — Treasury securities — and which now we all know really are never going to be paid because they can’t be repaid…
…It enabled the United States to get so much revenue from its foreign investments, from its foreign lending, and from its control of the foreign trade system and the tariff system, that it was able to deindustrialize and actually become dependent on other countries for essentials. Just the opposite of what it had tried to make other countries do.
And this was a kind of poison chalice. It left the United States in what we now know is an untenable position.
How can it live off the surplus exports and payments of others while it itself is being deindustrialized? What is the basis for its power if not ultimately military? …
..So it needs to have an international financial system that actually works as a kind of neo-colonialism, a neo-imperialism. You can call it financial colonialism and financial imperialism…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..If you want to run a system like the dollar system, what you’re going to do is exact a price from your productive economy. You’re going to deindustrialize it. You’re going to make it weaker… But the important point is that, as soon as the UK started essentially running the sterling system, it also set the stage for the deindustrialization of the UK. And you are seeing a repeat of that process a century later in the case of the United States. This is really quite a serious point… In reality it is the maturation of the contradictions of the dollar system… since 1971, essentially the United States has sought to make the dollar system function by counteracting the “Triffin dilemma” effect. By expanding purely financial demand for the dollar. Not economic demand, not investment demand, not trade demand, but purely financial speculative demand for the dollar. And this system essentially is now unraveling…
MICHAEL HuDSON: ..Soon we were going to deindustrialize and not really be an export economy in the way that we were before, because we were becoming a very high-cost economy. A high-cost economy because of our military spending, because of the increasing financialization, by the fact that more and more of the income in the American economy wasn’t going to the export sector of products at all. It was going to real estate and finance and was becoming the kind of economic overhead that has undercut America’s ability to export…
RADHIKA DESAI:…I should say here that this was a very complex moment — the quadrupling of oil prices — for the US because in part of course the US itself had big oil companies which were of course happy to benefit from it…And the other thing that this did of course, is that by raising prices of oil and ensuring of course that and still dominating it in dollars, meant that the rest of the world now acquired four times as many reasons to hold dollars. So again this in itself played a role in stabilizing, temporarily at least, the value of the dollar…Americans basically persuaded the OPEC countries to deposit their money in Western financial institutions, US financial institutions, particularly those based in London but elsewhere as well. And they of course had to go on a lending spree… Third World countries were also using this money to industrialize. And in the end, this is not something that the United States wanted to see, because from the start the United States has always wanted to have its relative power unquestioned, not just its absolute power… So once the Committee of 20 negotiations were essentially scuttled by these means, the Europeans were essentially quite mad, and they said, “Ok, we are going to start our process of monetary integration” … But they now took the first steps in European monetary integration which would eventually lead, almost thirty years later, into the creation of the euro. So this is also very important, because people fail to see this, but the euro itself constitutes the first example of exit — a planned exit from the dollar system. Because by creating the euro, the European countries essentially ejected the dollar from their mutual transactions…
MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to say what was happening in the banking sector.The government wanted the banks to find it profitable to accept the oil OPEC deposits. When I was working at Chase in the 1960s, my job was to analyze whether countries could pay or not. But by the 1970s, I had a meeting at the Federal Reserve and they said, “You don’t need to analyze the ability to pay anymore. Because if a country can’t pay its debt to the United States, we will lend that country the money.”
And I said, “I don’t see how” — and I named some Latin American countries, Argentina and Chile. “How are they going to be able to pay?”
And the Federal Reserve officer said, “Well according to your analysis, Professor Hudson, England is insolvent. It can’t pay.”
And I said, “Oh I’m glad you mentioned that. Yes.”
And they said, “But is it going to pay? Of course it’s going to pay. We will always lend England the money to pay the money it owes the United States. It’ll just be indebted to us.” And we were going to do the same for Latin America.
So the American Banks were encouraged. They said, “Okay, we don’t have to look at the markets anymore. We don’t have to do an analysis of the ability to pay. The whole system has become political.”
Well, since you bring up the creation of the euro, Radhika — the euro was indeed meant to integrate the European economies, largely by combining the surplus run by the German economy, with the rest of the Eurozone that was running a deficit.
And so in that sense, they were trying to balance and stabilize their own exchange rates. However, the way in which the euro was created was basically the satellite currency of the United States… It was sort of crippled from the very beginning by the rules that made sure the government would not be able to create enough credit to enable European recovery to take place without very very heavy borrowing from the European banks and from the American banks.
So the euro was created in a way to minimize the role of government, maximize the role of banks, and essentially that’s what made it a right-wing Chicago School development from the very beginning, and we’ve now seen how it’s unfolded…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..The fact of the matter is that the euro did — the whole process of European monetary integration and eventually the euro — it did take the mutual transactions of the Europeans out of the dollar system. It made them independent of the dollar system…
..Now, we are still in the 1970s and another thing that I would like to point out and remind people of, is that the mid-1970s is also the period when the G7 meetings begin. Originally the G6 and then the United States brought in Canada as sort of a North American partner. And this made it the G7.
And the G7 meetings, which are annual, were forums where a lot of the extremely fraught politics of the dollar were played out. Where the Europeans, for example, would demand that the United States reduce its deficits, and so on.
And now remember they no longer needed dollars. So they kept saying the United States should reduce these deficits. They also put pressure on the United States to stop the war in Vietnam which was proving very inflationary. They essentially ensured that [Lyndon B.] Johnson would refuse to run for a second [presidential] term because they made it politically impossible, and people even said this was the Europeans dictating to the Americans…
..And so in that sense, you also see the depth of the crisis of the dollar system that you found in the 1970s.
And this crisis appears as though it is resolved by the Volcker shock. And essentially this is the point where in the late 1970s inflation is going out of control in the United States and Paul Volcker, who is regarded as a “sound money” man, is brought in as the new Federal Reserve chairman in order to deal with this problem.
And Volker does the only thing that capitalist country central banks know how to do — which is, the only way they know how to deal with inflation is to restrict money supply, and allow interest rates to rise as high as they want, a particularly rise above the rate of inflation, so that eventually by rising high enough they will create a recession and they will eventually — the recession will kill inflation, rather than any particularly deft monetary policy,
So this is what he did in 1978-79.
Well Volker was my old boss’s boss at Chase Manhattan, and I was the note taker on talks that he would give periodically to the banks. And when you say he was fighting inflation, he defined inflation as “what construction workers are paid.”
And he said, “I’m going to raise interest rates until I don’t see the wages of construction workers rising anymore.”
And they rose to a peak of twenty percent in 1980…
This set the stage for the Reagan decade, for Reaganomics. This set the stage for the largest bond rally in history.
Interest rates went down from twenty percent then to I guess you could say last year’s almost zero rates. There was a steady decline in interest rates, a creation of enormous interest credit and basically the banks were given enough money that all of a sudden the way to make money after Volcker was not by industry anymore.
It was by financial means: by corporate takeovers, by the leveraged buyout — all of that became the legacy under Reagan, combined with tax cuts for the financial sector, tax cuts for the high income people, but most of all the financialization of industry the transformed the whole role of the US economy in international affairs…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..But this sort of Volcker shock created the Third World debt crisis, beginning with the default of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. And this is also very important from our point of view today, because, again, first of all, the fact that the Volcker shock created the debt crisis, the fact that the dollar went up very high in this period — again this is used as grist for the mill by those who are boosting the dollar.
But in fact it is actually — this whole process was creating many contradictions.
As far as the Third World was concerned, it did look as though this was the United States not only bullying the Third World and oppressing the Third World but also getting away with it…
..Third World countries actually experienced a retardation in their growth. They had to work harder and harder to produce more and more of the cheap goods — whether it was coffee or cocoa or cotton goods or cheap manufactures or whatever it was that they were producing — they were producing their guts out in order to export to the rest of the world, particularly to the First World countries, in order to earn the dollars to repay the debt.
So this debt was being repaid. And of course, the fact that they were repaying the debt was also bringing fund flows into the dollar system. But this sort of dollar repayment was really repayment by punishment… And of course the whole process was overseen by the World Bank and the IMF. So when Michael says that these institutions were actually promoting underdevelopment rather than development…
..The Volcker shock basically induced a recession, and the recession was a double-dip, or double-u shaped, recession, so it extended over several years.
and in the first few years there was a manufacturing industry.These people got together, they went and talked to Reagan, they talked to Volcker, they pleaded for a lowering of interest rates so that they could continue industrial expansion and so on. But they eventually failed, and what this also did is, when they failed, they essentially threw in the towel. They said, “If we can’t make money by producing, we are going to try to make money through financialization.”
So this set in process the financialization of many productive American corporations.
This is how — you may read in many places, a company like GM today is probably going to make more money by lending you money to buy their cars, rather than by making their cars…
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’ve described two parallel forms of deindustrialization.
I want to review just what you said about the Third World countries.
Mexico defaulted in 1982. It could not pay the interest on its Tesobonos. All of a sudden, the high interest rates that were created at that time were not renewed. A lot of Third World debts were falling due, and they couldn’t re-borrow…
..The only way they could balance their payments was to do what the US State Department told the IMF to tell them. “Sell off your industry. Sell off your public ownership of utilities, of basic natural monopolies. Your oil, your minerals.”
So there was a huge selloff, and there was no money at all under the austerity of the 1980s for the Third World countries to really develop.But what happened in the United States was similar! … This was the decade of junk bond takeovers, leveraged buyouts… they could begin to sell off the companies. They could carve them up. Companies were being bought out, broken up — [Henry] Kravis and KKR and all sorts of other companies were doing this.
And in fact it was free money for the investors, because they organized a criminal conspiracy, for which Drexel Burnham people and their clients, such as Ivan Boesky, were sent to jail…
..Wall Street understood exactly what was happening, and they became — ever since the Reagan administration — participants in this industrial suicide of the United States by financializing the company, replacing industrial engineering with financial engineering, and essentially transforming the whole character of capitalism itself — away from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism…
..It was creating financial wealth, not industrial means of production or what people had usually thought of as being tangible, real wealth.
The byproduct of all of this wealth is that it was very heavily concentrated in the wealthiest 1% — maybe 10% — of the economy. This financial wealth was not shared with the participants in the industrial economy of production and consumption. And so the economy was being distorted. Its shape was shifting. It was polarizing.
The wealth of the 1% really found its counterpart — on the opposite side of the balance sheet — in the debts of the 99%…
RADHIKA DESAI: And you know Michael, as you say, so much of the wealth in the United States over the past so many decades has become financial wealth.
And this underlines a point that our friend Jacob Assa has made in his concept of the financialization of GDP, which is that this vastly exaggerates the the wealth — because US method of counting GDP turns all this financial activity and makes it look as though it’s productive…
..So the whole point we’re trying to make is that these features of a neoliberal United States, based on financialization, have been on the one hand necessary to support the dollar system, and on the other hand they have strangulated productive activity and made the United States into a less productive and more and more unequal system.
And this policy paradigm has been continued from Reagan to Bush Senior to Clinton to Bush Junior to Obama, Trump, and today Biden…
..And in this context, it’s also important to see that part of the reason why the Third World got so badly punished by the system — essentially by having to repay their debts — is that their elites, their ruling classes, did not have the courage and the political will to default…
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the 1990s really were the turning point in this financialization. And what happened in America was very much like what had happened in England.
You could think of Clinton as the American Tony Blair. In England there were certain things that even the Thatcherite government couldn’t do to privatize. Tony Blair went much further than Thatcher in privatizing the railroads and just driving the nail into what had been Britain’s industrial economy…[He] ended the Glass-Steagall act, which led commercial banks to become brokerage houses. That diverted credit creation away from the industrial economy into the purchase of stocks and bonds and speculative investments and real estate. And then it deregulated the commodity markets, essentially…And that was sort of the Rubinomics that was turned over to the Fed under Alan Greenspan to essentially let the financial system run wild while basically ending — winding down — the American tradition of social protection of labor and consumers and the poor and welfare…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..People call this 2008 crisis the “global” financial crisis. But you see why in this instance it’s actually more accurate to call it the “North Atlantic” financial crisis.
Because the overwhelming majority of international funds that went into the toxic securities being generated by the United States were coming from Britain and from the Eurozone financial institutions, because these were the guys who gorged themselves on the toxic securities being generated.
And that is why the bulk of the financial distress was concentrated in Europe…
RADHIKA DESAI: ..I should say that now we’ve gone for more than an hour… But for now let me bring this discussion to a conclusion by saying a couple of things.
So what we’ve done is, we’ve tried to show that what’s seen as this period of easy dollar dominance after 1971, has been a heavily managed process, but also a process in which American attempts to try to manage the system in order to keep the dollar going have been full of contradictions…
And now we are moving into a period of serious reckoning. Because on the one hand, the Federal Reserve’s capacity to generate asset bubbles and to keep money flowing into the United States is being exhausted.
Moreover, and this is the first thing I want to say, and that is that the fact that these asset bubbles now exist, and that the bulk of the wealth of rich people in the United States depends on these asset bubbles, means that the Federal Reserve is now caught in a bind.
Because on the one hand, these asset bubbles are necessary for keeping the dollar’s value high, etc. But on the other hand, dealing with inflation will require increasing interest rates to an extent where this will burst these asset bubbles… If inflation goes high, the dollar’s value will suffer. If the asset bubbles are burst, the dollar’s value will suffer. So the Federal Reserve is caught between a rock and a hard place…
..Since the 1960s the rest of the world has complained that the United States has been living beyond its means. So as early as 1961, as gold was flowing out and a gold pool had been necessary — we discussed this in the previous episode — it had been necessary to back the dollar with adequate gold, this is when you first hear the first denial that the United States was living beyond its means… “At the end of the 1960s the US government owned foreign assets totalling twenty-one billion dollars, in addition to gold holdings of eighteen billion dollars.” Of course they had been much bigger before.
To quote further, “And US citizens owned fifty billion in assets abroad. These US claims on foreigners,” the Economic Report claimed, “gave a ‘basic long-run strength to the dollar’ even though some of these claims were private and long-term and could not be quickly mobilized.
Now by 2001 you have a very different scenario. The US international investment position has turned negative. It has moved from an accumulated surplus of less than ten percent of GDP in the late 1970s, to a deficit of nearly twenty percent of GDP in 2001. (These are statistics from the Economic Report of the President from 2003.) ….
MICHAEL HUDSON: This is the plan already in the 1960s and 1970s. That America would buy the highest profit European and Third World sectors and they would recycle the money by buying Treasury Securities. So America would owe low interest on Treasury Securities, make a killing on what it had bought from their privatization of infrastructure, and buying out their commanding heights, their leading companies.
That was very explicitly said in the 1960s and 1970s…
RADHIKA DESAI: In fact in 2005 Paul Volcker actually said, “As a nation we are consuming and investing about six percent more than we are producing, and this cannot continue.” Already by this time the United States was absorbing about eighty percent of the net worth of the world’s capital …So this is the way in which the dollar’s very contradictory problematic world role has been naturalized or has been sought to be naturalized. But we are now increasingly looking at the end of that system.Israeli ranks breaking?
In an incident that highlights ethnic tensions among Israel’s Jews, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered a prominent Likud Party member ejected after the Jewish activist was recorded declaring his pleasure over the Holocaust’s toll on European Jews — and wishing for another round.
Itzik Zarka’s outburst came as he confronted protesters opposed to the right-wing Likud Party’s effort to overhaul the judiciary system. Spitting and cursing at the protesters, Zarka said, “Ashkenazim, whores, may you burn in hell. I am proud of the six million that were burned, I wish that another six million would be burned.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/netanyahu-ejects-jewish-likud-member-cheering-holocaust-toll-european-jews@Zerosum: I’d like tank #9, please. T-90AM (Russia) – $4.25 Million
Thanks jb-hb, Susmarie108 and DBS. Dr.D, I’m always reading your comments.
GERM: Thank you for what still bears repeating, and repeating, and repeating …Steve Kirsch, VAERS data clearly shows that the COVID vaccines are an unmitigated disaster for pregnant women
The CDC said the COVID vaccines were perfectly safe for pregnant women. They lied and they continue to lie to the American people.
What I found should alarm everyone on the planet: the absolute number of stillbirths and miscarriages reports associated with the COVID vaccines is literally “off the charts”: 4X higher than for all other vaccines combined.
Because VAERS is around 100X under reported, meaning the COVID vaccines have likely caused an estimated 360,000 excess deaths.
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/breaking-vaers-data-clearly-shows In 2021, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — without any evidence of safety — authorized the mRNA shot for pregnant women and anyone 6 months and older, Pfizer suddenly stopped its randomized trial for pregnant women. The vaccine maker has yet to disclose its study data.
..Thorp and colleagues published a preprint study that found striking risks to pregnant women who received the shots, along with their unborn babies.
The outcomes were so dire that the researchers concluded pregnant women should not receive COVID-19 shots until further research is completed.
“A worldwide moratorium on the use of COVID-19 vaccines in pregnancy is advised until randomized prospective trials document safety in pregnancy and long-term follow-up in offspring,” they explained.
Compared to the flu vaccine, COVID-19 shots were associated with a significant increase in adverse events including:
Menstrual abnormality
Miscarriage
Fetal chromosomal abnormalities
Fetal malformation
Fetal cystic hygroma
Fetal cardiac disorders
Fetal arrhythmia
Fetal cardiac arrest
Fetal vascular mal-perfusion
Fetal growth abnormalities
Fetal abnormal surveillance
Fetal placental thrombosis
Low amniotic fluid
Fetal death/stillbirth
The data also revealed a 27-fold higher risk of miscarriage and a more than twofold increased risk of adverse fetal outcomes across six different categories, according to board-certified internist and cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough.Why Did Pfizer Halt COVID Vaccine Clinical Trials for Pregnant Women?
An informative sub 4 minute video. Importantly, as magnetic fields weaken, more high-energy protons and electrons enter Earth’s atmosphere, depleting ozone, and increasing penetration of UV to the planetary surface. This has been a core cause of species extinctions with previous polar excursions and reversals, with magnetic field decay. Real Climate Information | Volcanos and Magnetic Pole Shift
5 more minutes on this: Extinctions on Deck | Why Every Magnetic Flip Hits Hard
Russia Terminates Black Sea Grain Deal, Wheat Prices Spike, As Extent Of Crimea Bridge Terrorist Attack Revealed
Moscow has the two killed in the overnight Crimea Bridge attack involved a Russian family traveling on vacation whose vehicle was destroyed. A statement further alleged assistance to Ukrainian forces by the US and UK.
”This regime [the Ukrainian government] is terrorist and has all the hallmarks of an international organized crime group,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a written statement. “Ukrainian officials and military personnel take those decisions with direct input from American and British special services and politicians. The US and Britain are managing a state-like terrorist structure,” it said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/russia-terminates-black-sea-grain-deal-wheat-prices-spike-extent-crimea-bridge Brian Berletic at Military Summary presents the case that the undersea drone that hit the Crimean bridge came from the Azov Sea side, which was not well defended, since the Azov Sea is under Russian control.
Gilbert Doctorow (Thanks Christine) Putin, Prigozhin and the management principle: “work with the hand you are dealt”
There has been a lot of talk these past couple of days about the revelation that on 29 June, less than a week after the Wagner Group’s armed mutiny, Vladimir Putin received Yevgeny Prigozhin and 35 of his senior military commanders in the Kremlin for three hours of talks.
How can this be? What is the sense of it? Why would Putin talk to the man he had denounced a few days before as a traitor?
Anyone posing these questions has not been paying much attention to Vladimir Putin’s “people management” record these past twenty-three years. It all follows the principle that you find practiced in many large institutions, both private and public: work with the hand you have been dealt, considering that most everyone under you is good for something. This is the operating principle I saw around me during my four years working for United Parcel Service. It surely is the ruling principle in the United States armed forces.
When he came to power in 2000, Putin was dealt a large contingent of rapacious oligarchs whom he tamed, especially by breaking the back of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s presumptuous political ambitions and sending the troublemaker to a long stay behind bars. Once tamed, the robber barons stayed clear of politics and spent their time developing the broad swathes of the economy that they had come to control, even if they skimmed off unseemly profits for themselves.Putin, Prigozhin and the management principle: “work with the hand you are dealt”
Sasha Latypova, Thoughts on the BRICs Currency As the dollar death spiral continues, multi-polar alternatives are being attempted.
https://sashalatypova.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-brics-currencyThe Dutch people do not want their farming brothers and sisters steamrolled, and have just made that clear in elections.
The Future of Traditional Farming and Healthcare in the Netherlands
The Netherlands has been chosen as a pilot area in the EU to be climate neutral with a transition in protein food and a transformation of healthcare into a telemedicine, data, and AI-driven connected system approach led by Public Private Partnerships. A closure of 55-70 percent of traditional farming is foreseen to be replaced by tech-driven vertical farming, gene-edited crops, edible insects, veganism, 15-minute cities and a CBDC passport covering personal health data.
Citizens will pay for the transition by increasing prices for energy, food, healthcare services, and insurance.The Future of Traditional Farming and Healthcare in the Netherlands
Defeating Reality https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/defeating-reality
Thanks Christine and F.S. for this insightful piece about the limits of propaganda by Alastair Crooke. [Artillery just can’t be ignored, after all.]
Hubris consists in believing that a contrived narrative can, in and of itself, bring victory. It is a fantasy that has swept through the West – most emphatically since the 17th century. Recently, the Daily Telegraph published a ridiculous nine minute video purporting to show that ‘narratives win wars’, and that set-backs in the battlespace are incidentals: What matters is to have a thread of unitary narrative articulated, both vertically and horizontally, throughout the spectrum – from the special forces’ soldier in the field through to the pinnacle of the political apex...
..Narrative is now how western élites imagine the world. Whether it is the pandemic emergency, the climate or Ukraine ‘emergencies’ – all are re-defined as ‘wars’. All are ‘wars’ that are to be fought with a unitary imposed narrative of ‘winning’, against which all contrarian opinion is forbidden.
The obvious flaw to this hubris is that it requires you to be at war with reality...
..Western élites have ‘bet their shirts’ on maximum control of ‘media platforms’, absolute messaging conformity and ruthless repression of protest as their blueprint for a continued hold in power. Yet, against the odds, the MSM is losing its hold over the U.S. audience...
..Ukraine: How do you win an unwinnable war? Well, the élite answer has been through narrative. By insisting against reality that Ukraine is winning, and Russia is ‘cracking’. But such hubris eventually is busted by facts on the ground…
..“We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met … [however] unless Ukraine wins this war, there’s no membership issue to be discussed at all” – Jens Stoltenberg’s statement at Vilnius. Thus, after urging Kiev to throw more (hundreds of thousands) of its men into the jaws of death to justify NATO membership, the latter turns its back on its protégé. It was, after all, an unwinnable war from the beginning...
..It is an old, old story that Russia is military weak, politically fragile, and prone to fissure. Conor Gallagher has shown with ample quotes that it was exactly the same story in World War 2, reflecting a similar western underestimation of Russia – combined with a gross overestimation of their own capabilities...
..Team Biden needs Russia to accept a ceasefire. And here lies the (the largely overlooked) flaw to that strategy: It simply is not in the Russian interest to ‘freeze’ the situation. Again, the assumption that Putin would ‘jump’ at the western offer of a ceasefire is hubristic thinking: The two adversaries are not frozen in the basic meaning of the term – as in a conflict in which neither side has been able to prevail over the other, and are stuck.
Put simply, whereas Ukraine structurally hovers at the brink of implosion, Russia, by contrast, is fully plenipotent: It has large, fresh forces; it dominates the airspace; and has near domination of the electromagnetic airspace...
..But the amour propre of certain EU leaders puts them at war with reality. They want to continue to feed Ukraine into the grinder – to persist in the fantasy of ‘total win’: “There is no other way than a total win – and to get rid of Putin … We have to take all risks for that. No compromise is possible, no compromise”. The EU Political Class have made so many disastrous decisions in deference to U.S. strategy – decisions that go directly against Europeans’ own economic and security interests – that they are very afraid.….
..It reflects existential fears of an unravelling of the western meta-narrative that will take down both its hegemony, and the western financial structure...
..In her new book, The West, classical archaeologist Naoíse Mac Sweeney takes issue with the ‘master myth’ by pointing out that it was only “with the expansion of European overseas imperialism over the seventeenth century, that a more coherent idea of the West began to emerge – one being deployed as a conceptual tool to draw the distinction between the type of people who could legitimately be colonised, and those who could legitimately be colonizers”…
..The deeper fear of western political leaders therefore – complicit in the knowledge that the ‘Narrative’ is a fiction that we tell ourselves, despite knowing that it is factually false – is that our era has been made increasingly and dangerously contingent on this meta-myth. The video is mercifully short. Kamala never noticed her (Freudian-slip) “mistake” at all.
”When President [Joe] Biden and I took office, we set an ambitious goal … to cut our greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 and to reach net-zero emissions by 2050,” Harris told an audience at Coppin State University in Baltimore on Friday.
”When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” she continued.
According to the official transcript, the 58-year-old Vice President meant to say ‘pollution,’ not ‘population.’
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/reduce-population-kamala-harriss-verbal-slip-sparks-outrage Door To Freedom is a new website, dedicated to exposing emergent Globalist end runs around human rights in representative democracies and republics. Meryl Nass MD is funding the project herself, and (we) the writers are donating journalistic efforts. We are all threatened. Free subscriptions, or choose to donate.
We also want to inform you about the efforts of the W.H.O. to take over management of public health emergencies. The W.H.O. is proposing to govern how pandemics and other public health emergencies are handled in the future. It would prescribe uniform medical treatments and restrictions for all—worldwide.
The way this would be achieved is through 2 new legal documents that are now being negotiated: a Pandemic Treaty and Amendments to its existing International Health Regulations.Is Name Calling All You’ve Got? (essay I wrote for “Door To Freedom” new website, not yet posted, but “Young Globl Leaders” essay is) https://doortofreedom.org/
We all miss polite disagreement these days. It used to be everywhere. Nobody who sought to be taken seriously would stoop to rudeness in public discourse.
The subtle-dig, and discrete-innuendo were art forms flourished by the most facile debaters. “Touche!” William F. Buckley was that way. I would have dreaded debating him.
Today Bill Buckley might be quickly dispatched as a wealthy, paternalistic white male graduate of Ivy League Yale University. That kind of labeling has come to be accepted as “other”, as “not one of us” for most people. Calling Buckley that “name” would be an effective debate tactic today, so it would be used.
How does a rational public debate take place?
Rational debate is still instrumental and necessary in today’s political arena, despite name-calling interruptions.
It seems that there is no better choice than patience, forbearance and restraint for a public figure who wishes to engage in public policy discussions.Name-callers usually don’t want to discuss public policy. Perhaps their political position is already the status quo, and they just want to silence any citizen or political figure who questions it. They don’t want debate on what pays their bills. That’s a threat.
We know how threats feel. I don’t want to be polite to people who are threatening me. I want to back them off, maybe shame them. (I don’t usually do it, though.)
Most of us have learned to restrain our first impulse to lash out, and choose to discuss things sensibly. Lashing out escalates sometimes, and hurts everybody.Maintaining a constructive and engaging tone when somebody is calling you unfair names is difficult, but it can be done, and most people who are paying attention will look favorably upon the presenter who is courteous and thoughtful, especially under unfair attack.
When I see name-calling happen in politics, I usually think that the name-caller doesn’t have any rationale arguments to favor their position.
If they did have rational arguments to convince me, they would voice them.
If I don’t accept the label they seek to apply to their debating-opponent, I wait for their follow-up argument, …. patiently wait for their follow up argument.A recent case of this was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being branded “Antisemitic” for statement he made about genetically selective biological warfare agents.
Genetically selective infectious weapons have long been desired by the militaries of the world, including the US and Chinese militaries, the specific point Kennedy was making to some friends at his table. He gave the case in point that SARS CoV-2 bound to a specific human bloodstream receptor, ACE-2, which has genetic variants. It was found to bind more strongly to some genetic variants, and make worse infections in those people. Conversely, it bound more weakly to other genetic variants, and killed fewer people whose bodies had those genes. Kennedy referred to scientific papers which found that to be true.“COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are—because of the genetic structure, the genetic differentials among different races, of the receptors, of the ACE-2 receptors—COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential impact of that.”
Peter McCullough MD is much published in Cardiology and in COVID-19 treatment research. His website examined Kennedy’s statement, found confirmatory medical research papers and hundred of thousand of Google-search results for “Ethnic Susceptibility to COVID-19 ACE-2 Receptor”. That analysis, which finds Kennedy’s sttement to be perfectly factual, is here: https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/media-twists-rfks-remark-at-ny-pressThat’s enough for today. We should all hold our tempers and count-to-three, as we learned in kindergarten. Some damage has probably been done by name calling, and feelings unfairly hurt, even among those of people not called the names. I’m going to avoid name-calling, myself.
Whenever I see somebody calling names, I’ll think that’s all they have got as an argument, and that “the other person is probably right”, as a friend said today.I was just going to post that Janet Yellen on mushrooms story.
There was a rainbow over her plane when she touched down in Beijing, so why not go-all-the-way!
🙂@Phoenixvoice: I read this as “meandering”, heh, heh, heh…
“Misgendering has been referred to as an “act of violence” at some U.S. universities.”
@Aleexander Carpenter: Rainfall is not increased over 20 years; maybe a bit decreased in “intensity”. With global heating, it should increase.
Not factored in is the vast application of aluminum oxide aerosols, “chemtrails”, which generally decrease rainfall. It’s not a “thing” to this analysis, but it has been happening for over 20 years. I pointed a sky full of chemtrails spreading out to haze (over Austin, Tx.) to a Vietnam-special-forces vet friend a couple of evenings ago. It was very easy to see, with older dense chemtrails already spread out, intermediate chemtrails, and some fresh.TAE comments were hot late last night, and TAE Summary input appreciated.
Here’s this for your efforts, fellow-travelers.
Midnight Confessions : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nZnqtDdswsThanks for the RFK Jr. video, Oroboros. People can watch it and see what they think, now that it is confirmed to be factual-as-stated.
Thanks Zerosum I hope you get food on the table. I did notice the clue you gave recently related to a doctor visit. “Mum’s the word”, as they say.
Thanks Phoenixvoice: “Everything Changes” https://www.stlyrics.com/songs/e/eurythmics1422/thisisthehouse66879.html
Attention Elon Musk!
Chemically induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging , Journal Aging
Abstract: A hallmark of eukaryotic aging is a loss of epigenetic information, a process that can be reversed. We have previously shown that the ectopic induction of the Yamanaka factors OCT4, SOX2, and KLF4 (OSK) in mammals can restore youthful DNA methylation patterns, transcript profiles, and tissue function, without erasing cellular identity, a process that requires active DNA demethylation. To screen for molecules that reverse cellular aging and rejuvenate human cells without altering the genome, we developed high-throughput cell-based assays that distinguish young from old and senescent cells, including transcription-based aging clocks and a real-time nucleocytoplasmic compartmentalization (NCC) assay. We identify six chemical cocktails, which, in less than a week and without compromising cellular identity, restore a youthful genome-wide transcript profile and reverse transcriptomic age. Thus, rejuvenation by age reversal can be achieved, not only by genetic, but also chemical means...
.. Discussion: Although the potential of these and other combinations of chemicals to achieve cEPOCH (chemical epigenetic programming of old cell health) is great, from treating blindness to liver failure and skin damage, in light of the toxic effects of expressing all four Yamanaka factors in mice [22], it is critical that the safety of chemical rejuvenation cocktails is tested rigorously in mammalian animal models before human trials are initiated. Although transcriptomic analysis did not indicate any developing pluripotency, based on the absence of mRNA for pro-tumorigenic genes such as NANOG and by RNA-seq analysis looking for pluripotency signatures, the only way to assess the full safety of these and other rejuvenative cocktails is to test their effects in multiple animal models, paying particular attention to signs of tissue dysplasia or cancer. To date, our experiments with genetic and chemical rejuvenation methods indicate that cells possess a barrier to becoming too young or completely losing their identity like iPSCs created using OSKM. Understanding this putative barrier would also speed the identification and development of improved age reversal methods.
https://www.aging-us.com/article/204896/textVC6TF drug and small-molecule combination ”CIPSC Cocktail” used in the study above. (Billionaires First! Don’t try this at home!)
https://aobious.com/aobious/157-vc6tf-cipsc-cocktailWhew! They’ve already got some catching up to do. They just need to drag this case out for years, now. Meryl Nass MD has the story:
Federal Agencies Can Start Censoring Again: A 3 judge panel in New Orleans issued a ‘stay’ today on Judge Doughty’s order pending an appeals panel rule on the merits
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/federal-agencies-can-start-censoring The Pentagon “disappeared” a 5 inch exit-hole in the back of John Kennedy’s skull. after illegally removing his body from Parkland Hospital in Dallas.
The autopsy that the U.S. national-security establishment conducted on President Kennedy’s body has always been the Achilles heel of the assassination. That’s because the autopsy was fraudulent. But because the military “classified” the autopsy, forcing enlisted personnel to sign secrecy oaths and threatening them with court martial or criminal prosecution if they ever revealed what they saw or did, the military was able to cover up much, but certainly not all, of its autopsy fraud for decades. That cover-up came to a screeching halt during the 1990s during the term of the Assassination Records Review Board. Kennedy accuses Biden of preparing for ‘war with Russia’
“Biden has lost his way,” Kennedy tweeted on Friday, arguing that the president should focus on America’s domestic problems instead of trying to achieve “global military dominance.”
“I want people to understand what this troop mobilization is about. It’s about preparing for a ground war with Russia,” he said.
The idea of defeating Moscow in its conflict with Kiev is a “futile geopolitical fantasy” of the Biden administration, the Democratic presidential candidate added.
Thousands of Ukrainians have already lost their lives because “America’s foreign policy establishment manipulated their country into war… Now, rather than acknowledge failure, Biden admin prepares to sacrifice American lives too,” Kennedy said.
https://www.rt.com/news/579746-kennedy-biden-trump-ukraine/Moon of Alabama has this. Thanks Christine. The Syrian government may get a little more control of traffic across its border into the illegally-US-occupied zone.
Syria Outmaneuvers ‘West’, Regains Legitimacy
Since 2014 the United Nations delivered humanitarian supplies to the al-Qaeda infested north-western ‘rebel’ region in Syria. A UN Security Council decision provided the necessary backing.
Coming from Turkey the UN convoys passed mostly through the Bab al-Hawa crossing, east of Hatay in south Turkey. The ‘authorities’ in the north-western area, i.e. al-Qaeda, used the distribution of the goods to keep control of the population...
..On Tuesday the new attempt for another renewal failed. Russia vetoed the ‘western’ supported resolution and proposed a different one which failed to gain the necessary quorum.
Without the authorization of the Security Council the UN had no legal way to continue the convoys. Today the Syrian government made a surprise move and offered its approval to keep Bab al-Hawa open for the UN convoys:
In a letter submitted to the United Nations and the Security Council, Syria said it would allow the United Nations access to the crossing for six months “in full cooperation and coordination” with the Syrian government.
The United Nations said on Thursday it was studying Syria’s letter and the potential effects on its aid delivery operations.
“The coordination and cooperation with the U.N. has always been there and will be there,” Bassam al-Sabbagh, Syria’s ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters. He did not elaborate on requirements by his government, but said the U.N. should not work with “terrorists” in the north, an apparent reference to opposition groups that control the area.
The UN will not want to end the convoys. With this move the Syrian government will gain at least some control over the goods coming in and over their distribution.
..By keeping Bab al-Hawa open for the UN Syria will strengthen its global position. Syria, with the help of Russia, will likely continue to make diplomatic moves which will, slowly, slowly, enable it to regain a more normal standing in the world.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2023/07/syria-outmaneuvers-west-regains-legitimacy.html#moreNobel Physics Laureate 2022 Slams ‘Climate Emergency’ Narrative as “Dangerous Corruption of Science”
The co-winner of the 2022 Nobel Physics prize has launched an excoriating attack on the ‘climate emergency’ narrative, calling it a “dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”. Dr. John Clauser notes that misguided climate science has “metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”...
..In turn, continued Clauser, the climate pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies and environmentalists. “In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis. There is, however, a very real problem with providing a decent standard of living to the world’s largest population and an associated energy crisis. The latter is being unnecessarily exacerbated by what, in my opinion, is incorrect climate science,” he added.Nobel Physics Laureate 2022 Slams ‘Climate Emergency’ Narrative as “Dangerous Corruption of Science”
Media Twists RFK’s Remark at NY Press Event , Big pounce on candidate’s talk about COVID-19 susceptibility variation. Peter McCullough MD
So, what exactly did RFK, Jr. say? [in a private conversation, recorded secretly]
“We need to talk about bioweapons. …. We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars into ethnically targeted microbes. The Chinese have done the same thing. In fact, COVID-19, there is an argument that it is ethnically targeted. COVID-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. The races that are most immune to COVID-19 are—because of the genetic structure, the genetic differentials among different races, of the receptors, of the ACE-2 receptors—COVID-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know if it was deliberately targeted or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential impact of that. We do know that the Chinese are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing ethnic bioweapons, and we are developing ethnic bioweapons. That’s what all of those labs in the Ukraine are about. They are collecting Russian DNA so that we can target people by race.” …
..What are we to make of RFK, Jr.’s second claim about “genetic differentials among different races, of the receptors, of the ACE-2 receptors”?
A quick Google search for Ethnic Susceptibility to COVID-19 ACE-2 Receptor yielded 504,000 results. At the top of the list was the 2022 paper SARS-CoV-2 Susceptibility and ACE2 Gene Variations Within Diverse Ethnic Backgrounds.
An augmented Google search for Ethnic Susceptibility to COVID-19 ACE-2 Ashkenazi Jews yielded 92,500 results. At the top of the results was a series of academic papers about variations of DNA polymorphisms in ACE2 and TMPRSS2 and how these variations seem to render some ethnic groups more or less susceptible to COVID-19. with Ashkenazi Jews apparently being less susceptible.
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/media-twists-rfks-remark-at-ny-pressSteve Kiirsch backs up his statements, as usual. Over 1M Americans are likely severely vaccine injured by the COVID vaccines
https://kirschsubstack.com/p/over-1m-americans-are-likely-severely FDA confirms Graphene Oxide is in the mRNA COVID-19 Vaccines after being forced to publish Confidential Pfizer Documents by order of the US Federal Court
In early January 2022, Federal Judge Mark Pittman ordered the FDA to release 55,000 pages per month, and since then, PHMPT has posted all of the documents on its website as they have been published.
One of the most recent documents published by the FDA saved as 125742_S1_M4_4.2.1 vr vtr 10741.pdf, confirms the use of Graphene Oxide in the manufacturing process of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine…
.In layman’s terms, the study was conducted to determine how the vaccine works. The study found that the vaccine used mRNA to instruct your cells to produce a protein (called P2 S), which is the Spike protein of the alleged Covd-19 virus.
The millions of spike proteins then bind to a receptor called ACE2 on the surface of your cells, inducing an immune system response.
But what is most interesting about the study is that it confirms on page 7 that reduced Graphene Oxide is required to manufacture the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine because it is needed as a base for the lipid nanoparticles...
..Because as this document, which the FDA attempted to keep confidential and sealed the 75 years, shows, Graphene Oxide is indeed used in the manufacturing process of the vaccine because it is vital in helping to make the vaccine’s lipid nanoparticles stable.
Therefore, trace amounts or large amounts, depending on the batch, of reduced Graphene Oxide inevitably make their way into the Pfizer Covid-19 injections.
https://www.2ndsmartestguyintheworld.com/p/fda-confirms-graphene-oxide-is-inEasy choice? Santa Clara University Students Must Take Covid Vaccines or Withdraw
Santa Clara University Students Must Take Covid Vaccines or Withdraw
Genocidal Class War https://drjohnsblog.substack.com/p/genocidal-class-war
The Government solution to undesired topics. POOF!
DOJ Removes Sex Trafficking Info From Website , John Leake
In my recent review of the film Sound of Freedom, I noted the strange preposterousness of the film’s mocking, snarky reviews published by Rolling Stone and the UK Guardian. Why, I wondered, would the reviewers characterize the film’s premise as “QAnon conspiracy theory” when the State and Justice Departments have plainly acknowledged the reality of child sex trafficking on their websites?
https://petermcculloughmd.substack.com/p/doj-removes-sex-trafficking-info Colin Todhunter presents this, which I also featured last August.. It bears further consideration.
An Engineered Food and Poverty Crisis to Secure Continued U.S. Dominance
We see an abundance of food but skyrocketing prices. The issue is not food shortage but speculation on food commodities and the manipulation of an inherently flawed global food system that serves the interests of corporate agribusiness traders and suppliers of inputs at the expense of people’s needs and genuine food security.
The war in Ukraine is a geopolitical trade and energy conflict. It is largely about the US engaging in a proxy war against Russia and Europe by attempting to separate Europe from Russia and imposing sanctions on Russia to harm Europe and make it further dependent on the US.
Economist Professor Michael Hudson recently stated that ultimately the war is against Europe and Germany. The purpose of the sanctions is to prevent Europe and other allies from increasing their trade and investment with Russia and China…
..The US knew beforehand how sanctions on Russia would play out. They would serve to divide the world into two blocks and fuel a new cold war with the US and Europe on one side with China and Russia being the two main countries on the other.
US policy makers knew Europe would be devastated by higher energy and food prices and food importing countries in the Global South would suffer due to rising costs.
It is not the first time the US has engineered a major crisis to maintain global hegemony and a spike in key commodity prices that effectively trap countries into dependency and debt.
In 2009, Andrew Gavin Marshall described how in 1973 – not long after coming off the gold standard – Henry Kissinger was integral to manipulating events in the Middle East (the Arab-Israeli war and the ‘energy crisis’). This served to continue global hegemony for the US, which had virtually bankrupted itself due to its war in Vietnam and had been threatened by the economic rise of Germany and Japan.
Kissinger helped secure huge OPEC oil price rises and thus sufficient profits for Anglo-American oil companies that had over-leveraged themselves in North Sea oil. He also cemented the petrodollar system with the Saudis and subsequently placed African nations, which had embarked on a path of (oil-based) industrialisation, on a treadmill of dependency and debt due to the spike in oil prices.
It is widely believed that the high-priced oil policy was aimed at hurting Europe, Japan and the developing world…
..Current policies are designed to create a food and debt crisis for poorer nations especially. The US can use this debt crisis to force countries to continue privatising and selling off their public assets in order to service the debts to pay for the higher oil and food imports…
..The closure of the world economy in March 2020 (‘lockdown’) served to trigger an unprecedented process of global indebtedness. Conditionalities mean national governments will have to capitulate to the demands of Western financial institutions. These debts are largely dollar-denominated, helping to strengthen the US dollar and US leverage over countries.
The US is creating a new world order and needs to ensure much of the Global South remains in its orbit of influence rather than ending up in the Russian and especially Chinese camp and its belt road initiative for economic prosperity.
Post-COVID, this is what the war in Ukraine, sanctions on Russia and the engineered food and energy crisis are really about.
Back in 2014, Michael Hudson stated that the US has been able to dominate most of the Global South through agriculture and control of the food supply. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has transformed countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops…
..And what we have also seen is countries being placed on commodity crop production treadmills. The need for foreign currency (US dollars) to buy oil and food entrenches the need to increase cash crop production for exports.
The World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) set out the trade regime necessary for this type of corporate dependency that masquerades as ‘global food security’…
..‘Food security’ has led to the dismantling of food sovereignty and food self-sufficiency for the sake of global market integration and corporate power.
We need look no further than India to see this in action. The now repealed recent farm legislation in India was aimed at giving the country the ‘shock therapy’ of neoliberalism that other countries have experienced.
The ‘liberalising’ legislation was in part aimed at benefiting US agribusiness interests and trapping India into food insecurity by compelling the country to eradicate its food buffer stocks – so vital to the nation’s food security – and then bid for food on a volatile global market from agribusiness traders with its foreign reserves.
The Indian government was only prevented from following this route by the massive, year-long farmer protest that occurred…
..The cynical ‘solution’ promoted by global agribusiness to the current food crisis is to urge farmers to produce more and seek better yields as if the crisis is that of underproduction. It means more chemical inputs, more genetic engineering techniques and suchlike, placing more farmers in debt and trapped in dependency.
It is the same old industry lie that the world will starve without its products and requires more of them. The reality is that the world is facing hunger and rising food prices because of the system big agribusiness has instituted…
..For too long, ‘class’ has been absent from mainstream political discourse. It is only through organised, united protest that ordinary people will have any chance of meaningful impact against the new world order of tyrannical authoritarianism and the devastating attacks on ordinary people’s rights, livelihoods and standards of living that we are witnessing.An Engineered Food and Poverty Crisis to Secure Continued U.S. Dominance
Globalists Suggest ‘Finance Shock’ And Climate Controls To Launch Their Great Reset , Brandon Smith
At the end of June government leaders and think-tank power brokers from around the world met at the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact in Paris. Participants include United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank President Ajay Banga.
The supposed purpose of the summit was to find financial solutions to the goals of tackling poverty while simultaneously curbing “planet-heating emissions.” As with all climate change related events the discussion in Paris inevitably turned to international centralization of power and the formation of a global consortium to fix the problems that they claim sovereign nations cannot or will not fix...
..These all seem like disjointed plans to simply inflate prices through different forms of taxation and force the public to consume less goods, but there is a much bigger scheme at play here. It’s important to understand that climate change is nothing more than a vehicle to deliver a fully centralized global economic system, likely under the control of the IMF, BIS, World Bank and the UN.
The annual payments by wealthier nations into global institutional coffers is an act of tribute, a show of fealty. It’s also a way for groups like the IMF to create a system of greater interdependency. If vast sums of money are flowing through globalist institutions and they become the arbiters of how that wealth is redistributed, they can also build a system of rewards and punishments. They can punish countries that don’t follow their dictates and they can give advantages to countries that toe the line.Globalists Suggest ‘Finance Shock’ And Climate Controls To Launch Their Great Reset
