Just Some Randomer
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It’s over already?
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 13, 2024
This is why the Gold slam yesterday. Knock it down in advance of events that will spike it up. Exactly the same thing happened hours before Bernanke announced QE1.
Is the US now facing its end-of-empire ‘Suez Crisis’ moment? ‘Allies’ in the region closing ranks against them and closing airspace? Could very well be. It’ll be interesting to see what’s happening at Incirlik air base.
@ Dr D “Mass feeling is Carbs and seed oils but who knows if that’s right. Probably not literally, they are cutting out large, cloudy wings of whatever “it” is, when some still gets through.”
My observation is that much of what passes for ‘Food’ in the US contains numerous substances that are outright banned and illegal to use in most of world. Examples include High Fructose Corn Syrup (there’s the cause of your diabetes epidemic right there), Genetically Modified corn, soy and so on, and any number of colourings/flavourings/preservatives.
I am not saying that no other country has serious issues with the quality of, and nutrition provided by, the food consumed by the general population, but it seems that US food manufacturers have gone out of their way to include some really nasty and dangerous things in their products.
Even a comparison of the US and European versions of a McDonalds meal containing what are ostensibly the same items reveals how much more polluted the US version is. The humble french fry, for example, lists 14 ingredients in the US version whereas in Europe they contain potatoes, oil, dextrose and salt.
If I were looking to understand why so many people are overweight and unhealthy I think I’d start with the regulatory frameworks that allow all of this.
@Dr D. “……If so, my guess is he’s the equivalent to our UniParty RINOs, and he gets by on people over 60 and divides the others. Let me know, but I bet the first. Nobody likes him now AND nobody EVER liked him AND your voting system hasn’t worked in 20 years.”
Macron got into power purely and solely because all the other parties agreed on an ‘Anyone but (that dangerous fascist!) Le Pen’ policy and coordinated during the second round of voting to ensure it was implemented. Luckily for Rothschild-backed Macron he was the anointed spoiler candidate and so it came to pass that the lions lay down with the lambs across virtually the whole political spectrum (other than Le Pen’s team) and all supported his run.
“So what you’re saying is, if I leave the country, destroy my passport (that’s physically impossible)…”
Damn right. You can even blow them up with a jetliner full of kerosene and they’ll still flutter to the ground unscathed. Damn tough stuff those passports are made from. You’ll probably have to fling it into Mount Doom to unmake it.
“Great. Um, if no one’s in space…there’s no one there, we have no Mars bases, no Aurora space planes….then what are you powering? Waving Buddhist cat figures? Or are you saying something is ALREADY on the moon, and you’re finding a way to finally admit it?”
All good questions, BUT – if we do have Mars Bases and space planes, they sure as hell aren’t powered by 1950’s technology like Nuclear Power Plants – so why build one on the Moon instead of just using the Fusion-Reactor-In-A-Briefcase tech that got us to Mars and allowed us to build a Base there?
Victoria Nuland is “retiring”!
Good riddance. Maybe she can return to her ancestral home in Ukraine and enjoy at first hand the complete and total clusterf*ck she’s made of the place. I’m sure the population there will be effusive in their thanks and will welcome her with open arms.
@ Dr. D “The marble is at the top, falls down the track: Order.”
And sometimes quite beautiful order….
Well…..that’s interesting.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1762107989241078163
Nalvany ‘Died Suddenly’ of a Blood Clot – says Ukrainian intelligence. Two of my favourite ‘Conspiracy Theories’ unite in a pleasing manner.
Probably the single most important phrase in the English language…
Fortunately, she reminds me on a regular basis.
The ICJ ruling was actually a de facto ceasefire demand to Israel. They didn’t call it such but the only way Israel can comply is to effectively pull out of Gaza other than possibly some very focussed Spec-Ops type actions against Hamas.
Now whether this will be enforced is another matter. The US could, veto any action when it gets to the security council stage, but Biden is under increasing pressure from the Democrat left and younger voters are largely pro-Palestine so it’s not necessarily a given.
The drums of War certainly are beating loudly across the entire UK mainstream press at the moment. Lots of reports and editorials being published, the tenor of which appears to be an attempt to shift the Overton window towards contemplation of an inevitable all-out war with Russia. Conscription, Army expansion, Navy expansion, US Nukes back in town – you name it it’s being trial ballooned right now.
The obvious (to TAE regulars and other sentient beings at least) imminent collapse of ‘Project Ukraine’ and the more recent but equally obvious exposing of US/UK military capabilities in the middle east as a paper tiger will require some industrial strength misdirection when those truths finally hit home in suburban sitting rooms.
Looks like what’s in motion here is a broad based psyop strategy to position RussiaRussiaRussia as the pan-spectrum bad guy upon whom can be hung not only the military failure of the west, but also the implosion of the financial system (Russia broke our banks), the ruinous increase in consumer prices (Russia stole our oil and gas) and for good measure either the election of The Donald or the justification for not having an election at all – can’t risk Russia ‘Hacking’ another election, you see.
When the public are in a state of panic and, as is our wont as humans, looking for someone to blame – well, why not sign up to fight against the Russians who caused all of this in spite of the best efforts of our enlightened, benevolent (and entirely blameless btw) ruling class in the West?
No actual war could realistically take place, of course. Even should NATO manage to provoke some sort of conflict, we’d be reduced to throwing stones at them within a week unless that elusive cache of weapons and ammo that is rumoured to lie at the end of the rainbow is finally located. No, once the public can be made to accept that Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia that’ll be enough to focus public anger outwards and prevent heads rolling in the west.
Taking the country to war is said to be the last resort of a failed leadership whose crimes and failures are about to explode in their faces, potentially along with some molotov cocktails. The current all-out media push to position war not as something that our brave lads in camo deal with in countries far, far away but as something that concerns the average citizen who may be asked to make sacrifices up to and including being conscripted into the military is a rather ominous development when viewed in that light.
Something very bad may be on the horizon.
““If this is true, and search and arrest warrants are used to drag Steve out of his house in the early morning hours someday soon, that will be evidence of retaliation against a journalist exercising his First Amendment rights to report information that is embarrassing to government officials.”
Since they’ve been doing that for 100 years they’re going to be very confused as to why that’s not okay.
Yep – ask Julian Assange. This is the exact same thing as his ‘Crime’
@ Dr. D “No one will want to hear this, but it’s obvious: there were 6 foot dragonflies then and not today. If there could be, there would be because insects are like that. That means oxygen and/or gravity itself must have been substantially different. Which would make those Brontosaurs possible too.”
There was a lot more oxygen in the atmosphere in the carboniferous and permian periods than now (31% of the atmosphere vs 21% now). Insects don’t have lungs, they breath through tubes in their bodies called spiracles – this ‘Passive’ intake of oxygen, as opposed to actively breathing using lungs with associated muscles, makes them very sensitive to oxygen levels.
Higher atmospheric oxygen levels make it possible to absorb more, even passively, and thus built larger bodies. If oxygen levels fall, mammals can just breathe harder and add red blood cells, insects can’t do that. Their only response is to get smaller and lower their oxygen requirements.
Long story short – the makeup of our atmosphere can change very significantly over time. With or without human involvement.
@Oroboros – When I last worked on a project in Silicon Valley, must be 5 years ago now, one of my colleagues there had just spent a shade under a million dollars on a ‘Residence’ in Mountainview that looked a lot like that shed.
His parents came over from India to visit him and he had to spend quite a lot of time explaining to them that he was not, in fact, poor and living in a shed but a successful tech-worker living in a prestige property in a prime location.
@zerosum “So you built a 3 billion pound paperweight. Nice work!”
No, no, no. Don’t be so silly. They built TWO 3 billion pound paperweights.
Thanks. Genuinely plausible to an expert such as yourself given that he is someone who can obtain the best healthcare known to mankind – or just plausible enough for the people who get their information from the TV?
@ John Day – if he ‘Dies’ before the end the week then I’ll agree that it was a bad case of Khinzal-itis that got him. If the official line is that prostate cancer was the cause of death , that would be as good as admitting that notavax caused turbo cancer killed him. As far as I am aware people do not die quickly from prostate cancer under normal circumstances.
‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive’ as Rabbie Burns once wrote. Hard to get the lies straight in a hurry.
I don’t buy the ‘Putin killed Lloyd Austin’ story at all. While I can certainly believe that he might inadvertently have been caught in a strike on an underground bunker in Kiev it’s just highly unlikely that such an escalatory strike would have been ordered if Russia knew he was there. Totally inconsistent with how the SMO has been run so far.
@Oroboros – the original 1891 patent drawings by the inventor of the toilet roll holder S. Wheeler indicate that he intended it to be used as in option B. On that basis we must consider option A to be incorrect.
@kultsommer – Coincidentally, I visited Brač back in October and brought home a nice bottle of Olive Oil. Lots of locals selling it from little stalls around Supetar. A truly beautiful place.
@ WES – Is “olive” oil a “good” oil?
Yes it is. Olive Oil is simply pressed from Olives – just like the Romans did. No chemicals or processing factories required.
@ Red – Quite so. I reckon that Neil Ferguson has personally cost the UK more than any other private individual in history. His constant statistical Chicken Little-ing of everything from BSE (Oh yes – he was responsible for that catastrophe too) to Foot and Mouth disease and then to Covid has cost the country many, many, many tens of billions of pounds.
And after having been demonstrably, unequivocally and catastrophically wrong in his recommendations for handling the BSE and F&M situations, who does the Govt turn to for advice on how to handle Covid? Ferguson the serial catastrophist of course! It’s just unbelievable. It truly is.
Unless, of course, they were specifically looking for someone in a white lab coat who would be willing to appear in the media and confidently declare Covid to be an incipient catastrophe ‘According to my ever-so-scientific modeling’. Hmmm.
How he is not in jail, or even just simply shunned and ridiculed by his professional peers I simply do not understand.
@EoinW – you forgot the best bit.
Create a Cow Futures market (make sure it has a clause ensuring you can choose to settle in cash rather than having to deliver any actual cows) then sell 100 contracts for cows you obviously don’t have, drive the price of ‘Cows’ down as far as you can and then buy back the 8 cows you sold for pennies on the dollar while also banking the profits from the other 92 futures contracts which you buy back for far less than you sold them for.
Ask JP Morgan’s precious metals desk how this gig works – they are the epitome of modern regulatory capture enabled ‘Capitalism’
“Elon Musk Says Would Rather “Go To Prison” Than Restrict Free Speech On X ”
Aww – he shouldn’t have said that. Never give the enemy ideas. Anti-Musk legislation incoming in 5…4..3..2..1
@ Dr. D
“If you laid all the Victoria Nulands end to end….”
I’d have to seriously question your taste in women 🙂
(With apologies to Dorothy Parker)
@zerosum “They see that Palestinians, largely friendless, without power…..”
By contrast to the Palestinian’s lack of access to the levers of power both today and historically, this is the house in Buckinghamshire in which is displayed the original Balfour declaration where the British Empire acceded to the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the request of Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild.
Waddesdon Manor was built by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild between 1874 and 1885 to display his collection of arts and to entertain his friends.
So it was really just a kind of weekend country cottage which the Rothschilds used to entertain and schmooze their powerful London friends and make sure events just happened to fall in their favour.
I posted a comment to exactly this effect a few days ago…..there is a real danger we will end up in WWIII more by accident and as the mechanical outcome of current politics arrangements and ‘Defence’ alliances than out of any specific desire on anyone’s part to do so.
Looks like the Gaza invasion has been put off once again while Netanyahoo tries to suck yet more materiel and firepower from the US.
You have to admire the Israeli chutzpah in (still) claiming that they have the best and most sophisticated army in the world while running crying back to Mommy in Washington for equipment, troops and backup literally the same day they are attacked by a small group of Hamas fighters using improvised techniques and weapons.
I mean – they didn’t even last one day on their own two feet with this marvellous military they claim to have. Didn’t even try to fight back by themselves before crying to mommy because the bad boy gave them a bloody nose. Without getting too political, this is classic, absolutely textbook behaviour of a bully when the object of their bullying unexpectedly punches them back.
@Markster – yeah it’s incredible that the guy never even considers that maybe, just maybe, the locals don’t like him because he’s a member of a military force that has no business being in their country, blowing stuff up and generally acting like colonial overlords.
Hypothetically, how popular/safe would a member of the Chinese military be strolling about the streets of Dallas following a Chinese occupation of Texas to ‘Protect innocent Texans from the depredations of the despotic regime in Washington’ (i.e. ensure the safety of the oil flows Beijing depends on)? Not very, would be my assessment.
And if Americans would do that to foreigners in their own country – well imagine what they would do if they were ever let loose on the rest of the world! Why it hardly bears thinking about.
@John Day – good article. Looks like Hamas will be accidentally hitting a few more churches and hospitals with faulty missiles in the coming days. Oddly enough, we can probably tell which ones they will be simply by referring to the Israeli target list. What a coinkydink.
@Red – a lot of people will argue that the notional 700 trillion figure is gross and actually nets out to a much smaller exposure, e.g. I have an outstanding derivative of $1bn with Joe but I have a hedging derivative with Bob. If one transaction loses money the other side will gain so my exposure is actually way below the notional value of the two combined.
This of course works splendidly until someone in the hedging chain goes broke and cannot pay up, so I lose $10m on the deal with Joe and go to Bob to collect my $9.5m offsetting gain – only to find that Bob has gone bust and can’t pay up.
It is at this point that my supposedly small net exposure very suddenly becomes a very large unhedged exposure.
The chances of that 700trn total outstanding derivative pool ever being unwound calmly and completely without some party in the chain going under and triggering a cascading failure is somewhere in the regions of zero.
“Exterminate the individuals responsible for the crimes.
Exterminating everyone in a group is the wrong solution.
Very unlikely everyone in a group is responsible.”
Wise words. Has anyone made this point the authorities in Israel? It would appear not, on the face of it.
Maybe it’s just me, but it really feels like we are sliding into a major war nobody really wants, or indeed expects. Rather like the run-up to beginning of WWI in fact. Just as then, we see conflicting regional power alliances facing off against each other in a very tense and unpredictable environment, with all the attendant danger that some action against one party (real, perceived or false flag) will drag it’s allies, and by implication, the parties of the other alliance into an all against all war.
Also like back in 1914, since nobody in power seems to expect the situation to explode into war, so nobody’s really doing anything specific to prevent it happening. Waiting for the modern-day Archduke Ferdinand to arrive on the scene….
@jb-hb Borrell is a pompous buffoon. His little tantrum reminds of this Southpark episode
‘Respect My Authoritaaa’.
Lol
Anyone else here shocked by the level of bloodlust and raw hate that fills the below-the-line comments on any news article related to the situation in Israel? It’s frightening how my fellow countrymen seem to have become savages filled with an unholy lust for death and destruction.
It’s possible this is driven by the official media management teams driving the governments agenda but if not then something is truly sick in our society.
Anyone who’s seen ‘28 Days Later’ will know what I mean when I say that the Rage virus seems to be spreading fast. Maybe that’s what was in the nottavax.
Seems like the Israelis are in need of some kind of ‘Final Solution’ to their problems. I know a guy who did some early work in that area back in the ‘40s – they could learn a lot from his methods.
Maybe complacency but I can’t help noticing that the monumental screw-up in Ukraine has completely vanished from the media now that there’s a new ‘Current thing’ to focus on.
Very convenient.
