marsh
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ECUADOR ERUPTS! THE PEOPLE TAKE OVER GOVERNMENT BUILDING 1:40 min
ECUADOR ERUPTS! THE PEOPLE TAKE OVER GOVERNMENT BUILDING
ECUADOR ERUPTS! THE PEOPLE TAKE OVER GOVERNMENT BUILDING
GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread
- Thread starter marsh
- Start date
marsh
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3:45 min
Neil Oliver – ‘we’re definitely moving towards a one world government’
Jun 24, 2022
Neil Oliver
‘…great reset, one world government, one world order, fourth industrial revolution, all of that is absolutely happening….’
marsh
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Cost Of Insulin Driving 80% Of Diabetic Americans Into Debt: Survey
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 01:40 PM
A new survey finds that the cost of insulin is driving many diabetic Americans to go into debt, forcing them to ration medication as they struggle to pay for other living expenses.
The survey, conducted by CharityRX, found that 79% of respondents said insulin costs had created financial difficulty for them personally, or for those in their care - both with and without health insurance, The Hill reports. 80% of those surveyed said they had to take on credit card debt to afford the drug.
What's more, on average, diabetic Americans take on $9,000 of debt to cover these costs.
"While the pandemic has made this situation worse, insulin rationing is a crisis that has been decades in the making. The price of insulin nearly tripled between 2002 and 2013, and the trend upward has made affording this life-saving medication even more challenging for millions of Americans living with diabetes," the American Diabetes Association said in a statement.
According to CharityRX, the new legislation would carry a potential cost savings of 91% by capping insulin costs at $35, or 25% of a health insurance plan's negotiated price - whichever is less.
The survey comes as a bipartisan group of Senators are working on legislation that would cap the cost of insulin, after President Biden reversed a Trump-era measure designed to lower out-of-pocket insulin costs for seniors on Medicare.
More via CharityRX;
The exorbitant pricing of insulin in the U.S. has forced many diabetics and their caregivers to make difficult decisions and compromises that put their health and/or livelihood at risk. Of the 4 in 5 who’ve struggled financially due to insulin pricing:
- 83% say they’ve feared not being able to pay for living expenses due to high insulin costs, cutting expenses such as clothing (55%), food costs (50%) and for some, even rent/mortgage (29%)
- 63% have felt pressure to sell prized, personal possessions (63%), put themselves in risky situations (50%) or to sell prescriptions or illicit drugs (32%) in order to obtain the money needed for insulin
- In an effort to lower costs, 62% have skipped and/or adjusted the dosage of insulin injections for themselves, or as a caregiver for someone else to cut down on costs
- Of those who’ve rationed their insulin, diabetics have experienced the following negative impacts on their day to day life:
- Inability to do everyday activities (54%)
- Inability to work (44%)
- Admission to the hospital for one or more days (38%)
- Inability to attend school (37%)
- Further, 38% have been admitted to the hospital for more than one day and 33% have become sick with an additional health issue as a result of insulin rationing
marsh
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Summer Preview: Rolling Blackouts, Higher Gas Prices, Natural Gas Rationing In Europe And A Historic Diesel Crisis
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 01:20 PM
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Almost everyone has heard about the rapidly growing global energy crisis by now, but most people assume that this crisis will eventually go away because they think that authorities have everything under control. Unfortunately, that is not true at all. This crisis has taken our leaders by surprise, and now many of them have shifted into panic mode because they realize that there will be no easy fixes. Decades of neglect and foolish decisions have brought us to the precipice of a nightmare, and many of us are going to be absolutely astonished by some of the things that happen in the months ahead.
Here in the United States, we have neglected to properly invest in our power grids for a very long time, and now they are at a breaking point.
We are being warned that there could be widespread “rolling blackouts” this summer, and the situation is particularly dire in Midwest states such as Michigan…
Meanwhile, the price of gasoline is likely to continue to go up.
For quite some time, the amount of oil that is being produced around the world each day has been lower than the amount of oil that is being used around the world each day, and as a result supplies have been getting tighter and tighter…
When demand is greater than supply, either prices go up or eventually you have shortages.
And sometimes both things happen.
Bank of America is telling us that oil inventories have reached a “dangerously low point”, and until that changes prices are likely to continue to rise…
I wish that I could tell you that there is hope that things will turn around eventually.
But at this point the CEO of Exxon is actually warning us to expect “up to five years of turbulent oil markets”…
If you think that things are bad now, just wait until you see what happens after a major war erupts in the Middle East.
Then things will really start getting crazy.
Speaking of war, over in Europe a looming natural gas shortage due to the war in Ukraine is likely to cause immense economic problems in the months ahead.
Now that Russia has significantly reduced the flow of natural gas to Germany, it looks like the Germans will soon be forced to ration it, and the Wall Street Journal is telling us that authorities expect “a gas shortage by December”…
It would be difficult for me to overstate the seriousness of this problem. Energy prices have already gone completely nuts in Europe, and one German official is actually comparing this crisis to the collapse of Lehman Brothers…
Needless to say, it isn’t just Germany that is being affected…
If the war in Ukraine could be brought to a peaceful resolution, that would greatly help matters.
But we all know that isn’t going to happen any time soon.
On top of everything else, global supplies of diesel fuel get squeezed a little bit more with each passing day. The price of diesel fuel is 75 percent higher than it was a year ago, and here in the United States we have been warned that the Northeast “is quietly running out of diesel”…
Even though there could be a historic supply crunch, we won’t completely run out of diesel fuel.
However, as I detailed in an article that has gone extremely viral, we are potentially facing really severe shortages of both diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil if solutions cannot be found.
Urea is required to produce diesel exhaust fluid, and the U.S. doesn’t produce enough. We are normally one of the largest importers of urea in the entire world, and Russia and China are two of the largest exporters. Our leaders have decided that we don’t want urea from Russia, and China has restricted exports.
So that puts us in a really tough position. If you have a diesel vehicle, I would highly recommend stocking up on diesel exhaust fluid while you still can.
As for diesel engine oil, there are several key additives that are in short supply right now due to major problems at several manufacturers. An article that Mike Adams just posted goes into the details. This is a very serious situation that is not going to be resolved any time in the near future.
The bottom line is that supplies of diesel fuel are going to get very tight, and there may be times when diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil are not available at all.
All three are required in order for diesel vehicles to operate, and as I explained yesterday, the U.S. economy runs on diesel.
If we were suddenly unable to use our diesel vehicles, all of our supply chains would collapse and we would no longer have a functioning economy.
So hopefully our leaders are working really hard to find some solutions.
Because it looks like this summer could be quite difficult, and the outlook for the months beyond is even less promising.
marsh
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Biden Snubbed Oil Firms And Met With Offshore Wind Partnership
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 12:45 PM
By Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com
U.S. President Joe Biden met on Thursday with governors, labor leaders, and business leaders to discuss the implementation of more offshore wind capacity, snubbing oil company executives who were meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to discuss the soaring gasoline prices in America.
The White House is desperate to lower gasoline prices, which are the most important election issue for many Americans ahead of the mid-term elections in November. Ideas juggled by the Biden Administration range from invoking the Defense Production Act to boost refining capacity and output, to restrictions on oil exports. President Joe Biden also stepped up rhetoric toward oil companies, telling them in a letter sent last week to increase fuel production and noting that “refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable.”
While oil refiners were summoned to meet with Secretary Granholm, President Biden was meeting with officials and executives to discuss an offshore wind partnership. During the meeting, President Biden said the Administration had set a bold target of 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Granholm met with U.S. refiners, reminding them that “oil companies must deliver solutions to ensure secure, affordable supply.”
Secretary Granholm also “reiterated the President’s call for them to do more to ensure that their companies are passing savings on to their customers.”
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Dallas Fed: Surging Costs Hamper US Shale Growth
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 12:05 PM
Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,
The business activity index in the energy firms operating in Texas, northern Louisiana, and southern New Mexico jumped in the second quarter to the highest level in six years, but costs continue to escalate and supply chain delays are worsening, the Dallas Fed Energy Survey showed on Thursday.
Activity in the oil and gas sector in the most prolific U.S. shale basin, the Permian, expanded at a robust pace in the second quarter, with the business activity index—the survey’s broadest measure of conditions facing energy firms—up from 56.0 in the first quarter to 57.7, registering its highest reading in the survey’s six-year history, the Dallas Fed said.
For a sixth quarter in a row, costs have risen this quarter, according to the survey of oil and gas executives at 85 exploration and production firms and 52 oilfield services firms.
The index for input costs at the oilfield services companies jumped to a record high, and none of those firms responding in the survey reported lower costs.
Delivery times for materials and equipment for the industry are rising, with many executives reporting significant delays.
Nearly half of the executives - 47 percent - said supply-chain issues have a “significantly negative” impact on their firms, and another 47 percent see slightly negative impact. Just 6 percent of executives said their firms are experiencing no supply-chain issues or impacts.
Moreover, most executives – or 66 percent – expect it will take more than a year to resolve supply-chain issues.
In comments to the survey, an E&P executive said:
One executive at an oilfield service firm commented: “The supply chain seems stretched to the max in the Permian Basin. There really is not much ability to increase drilling activity.”
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A "Great Purge" Is Pushing Small Truckers Out Of Business At An Unprecedented Rate
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 11:25 AM
By Rachel Premack of FreightWaves
Chris Tucker needed to move some hot tubs. It seemed like a good gig for his network of small truckers.
The Winchester, Kentucky-based owner of Full Coverage Freight, a truck brokerage, recently advertised to truck drivers on a load board that it had a shipment of hot tubs headed from Seattle to a small town in the middle of Wisconsin. The rate came out to under $2 a mile, which Tucker thought was low. He expected drivers to haggle with his company to get paid at least $2.50 a mile, or about $1,000 more for the gig.
Instead, his office was slammed with dozens of phone calls and hundreds of texts clamoring for the hot tub job — exactly at the rate advertised.
It’s not an ideal situation for America’s 2 million truck drivers. Too many truck drivers for the amount of work available means lower and lower pay. During the last major trucking recession in 2019, hundreds of trucking companies declared bankruptcy, unable to cover the costs of running a trucking company with deflating rates.
The last few months have made Tucker believe trucking is about to enter the “Great Purge,” or another spate of major bankruptcies. He predicted in a June 10 Facebook post on the Rate Per Miles Masters group, which hosts about 33,000 trucking professionals, that the many truck drivers who flooded the industry amid unprecedented truck volumes would have to shut down their operations. Ill-prepared brokers would also face the same doom, he wrote.
“I don’t think there’s enough freight out there to justify their existence anymore,” Tucker told FreightWaves this week.
The Great Purge appears to be underway already. In May, net motor carrier revocations hit a record high, according to an analysis of federal data by FTR Transportation Intelligence. January and March of this year were the previous records.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration reported in May that a record number of trucking companies saw their authorities revoked. This data lags by several monthsAs the above FTR graph shows, revocations of trucking authorities reached a record high in May, hitting nearly 9,300. The yellow bar represents some 4,000 revocations from entities that failed to file a required form and may be considered aberrations in the data. Even counting that out, though, the net revocations peaked.
Small fleets as tiny as one driver comprise the bulk of these shuttering trucking companies. Avery Vise, who is the vice president of trucking at FTR, said many of these drivers will join larger fleets rather than get flushed out of the market completely.
The following months will likely break May’s record, representing more fleets fleeing the market. The revocations represented above were likely filed before this spring’s diesel surge and spot rate decline, Vise said.
It’s an about-face from just a few months ago, when small truckers were still bringing in major cash. Here’s what happened:
2020-2022: All the cool kids are becoming owner-operators
In March 2020, retailers and manufacturers expected a long-term economic meltdown to result from the coronavirus. Instead, consumers bought more and more.
Retailers were caught flat-footed with empty warehouses and had to quickly scale up to meet consumer demand for exercise equipment, computer monitors and, yes, toilet paper.
New trucking fleets poured into the market to profit from these sky-high rates. From July 2020 to now, almost 195,000 new carriers have entered the market, according to Vise of FTR. About 70% of these new carriers were just one truck. The previous record 23-month period saw just 86,000 new carriers.
The flood of new carriers was felt around the industry.
Tucker of Full Coverage Freight, which is an independent agency with GlobalTranz, confirmed that through his own experiences. His office was flooded with calls from small truckers who had set up their authority only a few days prior.
“We saw this developing 18 months ago,” Tucker said. “We could support this artificial introduction of all these carriers just because of all this activity going on.”
The unusual marker of the last two years isn’t just that rates and volumes skyrocketed but where they skyrocketed: the spot market.
The spot market usually accounts for 10-20% of the overall trucking market. Vise said that share may have climbed to as high as 50% in the height of COVID-buying craziness.
The rate to move a dry van on the spot market climbed through 2021. The rate to move a load on the spot market soared. Each month of 2021 seemed to break a new record in the rate to move a dry van, with the peak hitting in January 2022. It was a fantastic time to be a small trucker, who can pick up spot jobs easily.
Contract rates didn’t climb at the same pace. That’s best measured by the Outbound Tender Reject Index, which shows how much contract freight is getting rejected.
Unlike, well, every other industry, you don’t need to honor your trucking contracts. If you’re a fleet that can make more money moving spot loads, you’re free to go do that. (Of course, keep in mind that your customer might not be so happy to give you a fair rate when spot rates inevitably crash again — and you’re struggling to make ends meet.)
Trucking companies rejected unusually high amounts of freight in 2021. Around 27% of all contract freight was getting rejected last spring. Even in late December 2021 and early January 2022, the rejection rate was more than 20%.
The spike in spot rates meant more capacity on the small trucker side. Trucking companies with more than 100 trucks didn’t grow at nearly the same pace as the part of the market with one-man bands. Vise estimated around 6-7% of capacity shifted from those fleets of 100-plus drivers to those under 100 in the past two years.
Spring 2022: A collapse in spot rates meets a surge in diesel
As you can safely expect in trucking, the good times ran out. In March, spot rates began a freefall at a stunning rate.
Mazen Danaf, who is the senior economist at Uber Freight, compared the month-over-month drop in spot rates excluding fuel. In March and April, rates dropped by 30 cents compared to the months prior. Rates dropped another 20 cents in May.
Those declines outpace the previous record decline: 15 cents.
Dry van spot rates have crumbled from record highs in 2021 and early 2022.Meanwhile, the contract side of the market is regaining territory. The rejection rate for contract rate, which loomed at more than 20% earlier this year, is now sitting at 7.7%.
Danaf said freight contracts that were negotiated in early 2022 took into account high spot rates. That allowed big trucking companies, which aren’t as active in the spot market as smaller ones, to secure higher rates from their customers. The new, small truckers that flooded the market in the last few years were less likely to have those sort of long-term relationships with big retailers and manufacturers. They lost out on any bump in contract rates earlier this year.
Now, Vise said spot accounts for about 30% of the market. Danaf estimated that number was 18%. Both indicate a trucking economy that’s shifting back from the volatile spot world to steadier contracts — even though it means that some smaller trucking companies will get shuttered in the process.
“What we’re seeing is a shift of the market back to a traditional split,” Vise said. “It could take a long time however.”
Even more challenging to small trucking companies is the soaring cost of doing business.
According to a report from loadboard Truckload.com, it’s now 51% more expensive to run a trucking company in 2022 than last year. Smaller carriers are more likely to shoulder than burden.
The staggering cost of diesel is the most marked cost increase, with the smallest fleets struggling to keep up. Some truck drivers have shut down simply because they couldn’t afford diesel anymore.
David Guzman of San Antonio is one of them. “The way the rates are, you have to run twice as hard to make ends meet,” he told FreightWaves in April. “I can’t help but feel for my fellow truck drivers.”
Equipment has also become more expensive. Truck drivers who bought their trucks in 2021 are paying off loans on trucks that might be two or three times higher than normal. The cost of repairs is also pricier — up nearly 9% in late 2021 from late 2020. Such expenses aren’t getting subsidized by ultra-high spot rates anymore.
Others believe that this winnowing out of small truckers resembles something spookier than a mere shift from spot to contract. This week, FreightWaves CEO Craig Fuller wrote that the issues plaguing trucking may resemble a larger economic recession. Ocean volumes are beginning to collapse, reflecting record inflation and big-box retailers that are already full-up on inventory.
What consumer spending is still growing is on the travel and entertainment side, which doesn’t move as much freight.
“What’s going to happen is going to be tough,” Tucker, the freight broker, said. “It’s going to be painful for a lot of people. Very few people will be left standing.”
There’s one way out for small truckers, but that opportunity is closing
Vise said many of the small truckers who gave up their authority rejoined a big fleet as company drivers. Others leased their truck back to one of those mega-carriers, where they can benefit from fuel surcharges to underwrite big diesel payments
Those drivers might be the lucky ones. Those who already sold their trucks were still able to take advantage of high used truck prices, which are now quickly declining.
What’s more, there may not be many more jobs available at big carriers. Nonsupervisory trucking employment hit a record high in April, the latest available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Vise said he’s closely monitoring these numbers to see if trucking fleets decide themselves they have too many drivers.
Vise is still positive on the current market, saying that trucking is shifting from spot freight dominated by small truckers back to contract loads dominated by big carriers. Pointing to pent-up manufacturing demand and signs of resiliency on the consumer side, he said he’s “fairly optimistic we will muddle through this year without a recession.”
Not all are feeling so chipper. Thom Albrecht, chief financial officer of transportation insurance agency Reliance Partners, said current rates can’t match the new cost structure of running a trucking company. Fuel, equipment and labor have become too expensive — and these problems are matching a slowdown in job creation and the Federal Reserve’s struggle to tame inflation.
“The party’s over,” Albrecht said.
marsh
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Von Greyerz: Concurrent Deflation & Hyperinflation Will Ravage The World
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 03:30 AM
Authored by Egon von Greyerz via GoldSwitzerland.com,
FLATION will be the keyword in coming years. The world will simultaneously experience inFLATION, deFLATION, stagFLATION and eventually hyperinFLATION.
I have forecasted these FLATIONARY events, which will hit the world in several articles in the past. Here is a link to an article from 2016.
With most asset classes falling rapidly, the world is now approaching calamities of a proportion not seen before in history. So far in 2022, we have seen an implosion of asset prices across the board of around 20%. What few investors realise is that this is the mere beginning. Before this bear market is over, the world will see 75-90% falls of stocks, bonds and other assets.
Since falls of this magnitude have not been seen for more than three generations, the shockwaves will be calamitous.
At the same time as bubble assets deflate, prices of goods and services have started an inflationary cycle of a magnitude that the world as whole has never experienced before.
We have seen hyperinflation in individual countries previously but never on a global scale.
Currently the official inflation rate is around 8% in the US and Europe. But for the average consumer in the West, prices are rising by at least 25% on average for their everyday needs such as food and fuel.
A CALAMITOUS WORLD
So the world is now approaching calamities on many fronts.
As always in periods of crisis, everybody is looking for someone to blame. In the West most people blame Putin. Yes, Putin is the villain and it is his fault that food and energy prices are surging. Nobody bothers to analyse what or who prompted Russia to intervene, nor do politicians or main stream media understand the importance of history, which is the key to understanding current events.
In troubled times, everyone needs someone to blame. Many Americans will blame Biden who has both lost his grip on most US events as well as his balance. In the UK, the people blame Boris Johnson who has lost control of Britain since Partygate. In France the people are blaming Macron who just lost his majority in parliament, and in Germany people blame Scholz for sending money to Ukraine for weapons and money to Russia for gas.'
This blame game is only just beginning. Political turmoil and anarchy will be the rule rather than the exception as the people will blame the leaders for higher prices and taxes and deteriorating services in all areas.
No country will be able to provide social security payments in line with galloping inflation.
Same with unfunded or underfunded pensions, which will fall dramatically or even disappear totally as the underlying asset base of stocks and bonds implodes.
As a consequence, many countries will be anarchic.
Deflationary implosion of investment markets
Stocks
The everything bubble has come to an end. It was only possible due to the benevolence of central banks in creating the most perfect manipulation of the instruments that they control, namely money printing and interest rates.
The result of free money has meant a trebling of global debt in this century to $300 trillion at virtually zero interest cost.
This has been real Manna from heaven for investors, both big or small. Everything investors touched went up and at every correction in the market, more Manna was produced.
For investors it was always “Heads I win, Tails I win.”'
This Shangri-La of markets makes everyone an investment guru. Even a fool became rich.
Speaking to investor friends today, they might be slightly unsettled but see no reason why the long term bull trend won’t continue. As far as investors are concerned, Greenspan, Bernanke, Yellen and Powell have been their best friends and the Fed’s main purpose is to keep investors happy and rich. Therefore most investors are sitting tight in spite of 20% falls or more across the board. They will regret it.
So most investors are relying on being saved yet another time and don’t realise that this time it is really different.
As we know, it is NOT the fact that central bankers have done a volte face (about turn) in raising rates and also reversed quantitive easing into tightening which has led to investment markets crashing.
No, these geniuses running the Central Banks can never see anything coming before it is too late. Inflation hitting the world with a vengeance was clear to many of us for quite a while–but obviously not to the people running monetary policy. They are clearly not paid to see anything coming before it has actually happened.
The chart below shows the Dow since 1970. In 1982, the current 40 year bull market started. Since then investors have seen a dramatic 46X increase in their stock portfolios.
There have been four frightening corrections of between 35% and 55%. I remember well the first one in October 1987. It was Black Monday and I was in Tokyo for the listing of Dixons in Japan, the UK FTSE 100 company I was Vice-Chairman of. The market crashed 23% on October 19th and over a 12 day period the Dow was down 40%.
Not the best timing for a listing on the Tokyo stock exchange.
If we look at 1987 in the chart below, we can see that the massive fall we experienced at the time is hardly visible.
Another very important technical factor on this chart is the bearish divergence on the Relative Strength Index – RSI. Since 2018, I have pointed out that the RSI on this quarterly chart has made lower highs since 2018 as the Dow has made new highs. This is a very bearish signal and will inevitably result in a major fall of the Dow as we are now seeing.
My long standing forecast of a 90% fall in stocks in real terms has not changed. This fall is no bigger than the 1929-32 one with dramatically worse conditions today both in debt markets and in the global magnitude of the bubbles . Just a return to the 2002 and 2009 lows would involve an 80% fall from the top.
The Wilshire 5000 representing all US stocks has lost $11 trillion or 23% since the beginning of 2022. See chart below. Additional trillions have been lost in bond markets.
Bonds
The 39 year bull market in bond prices (bear market in interest rates) has now come to an end. In fact it ended in 2020 at 0.5% having fallen all the way from 15.5% in 1981.
I expect rates to surpass the 1981 level as the biggest debt market in history implodes.
Many debtors, both sovereign and private will fail and bond rates will reach infinite levels as bond prices collapse.
This implosion of bond markets will obviously have major repercussions for the financial system and markets with banks and other financial institutions defaulting.
After more than a decade of long struggle to raise inflation up to 2%, central bankers like Yellen and Lagarde got the shock of a life time with official inflation rapidly surging to over 8% with real inflation probably around 20-25% for most people.
This increase in inflation was such a shock to the Bank heads that they were in denial for many weeks, calling it transitory.
These Fed and ECB chiefs have this uncanny ability not to see anything that they haven’t projected. And since they never project one single market trend correctly, they will inevitably always take the wrong road.
They would be more successful it they just rolled the dice. Over time they would then at least have a 50% chance of being right. Instead they have a perfect record of being 100% wrong.
As I state over and over again, central banks should not exist. The laws of nature and supply and demand would do a much better job at regulating markets. Without central banks and their manipulation, markets would be self correcting rather than the extreme peaks and troughs that the banks create.
The absurdity of central banks’ disastrous manipulation is clearly exposed in credit markets. We have for years had credit surging with rates being around zero or negative.
It is obvious to any student of economics that high demand for credit would lead to a high cost of borrowing. These would be the obvious consequences of supply and demand in a free and non-manipulated market.
The inverse would clearly also be the case. If there is no demand for credit, interest rates would come down and stimulate demand.
I wonder what they teach students of economics today since no market functions properly with the current blatant manipulation. I suppose that our woke society is rewriting the books also in economics just as they have done with history.
I would hate to be a student today under those conditions.
INVESTMENT MARKETS – NOWHERE TO HIDE
So what are the consequences of these calamitous times?
Well, in 2022 virtually every single investment class is down around 20%, as the table below shows. And the era of successful dip buying has ended as everything is collapsing.
With panic in markets and already some blood in the streets, investors are paralysed. They hope that the Fed and other central banks will save them but they fear that it might be different this time. This is just the very beginning. Much more panic and blood to come.
Both private and institutional investors are totally lost. All sectors are falling together. There just is nowhere to turn.
Just look at the table below:
Gold in euros as well as gold in most other currencies have had a positive return in 2022 so far.
But just look at the rest – from Corporate Bonds to Treasuries to Stocks, Real Estate, Tech Stocks and Cryptos etc they have all seen double digit losses in 2022 from 16% to 71%.
And nobody realises that this is just the beginning.
The majority of investors are totally paralysed. They are all hoping for the rapid April-2020-style recovery but they will be very, very disappointed. IT JUST WON’T COME!
Investors are neither mentally nor financially prepared for what is coming.
The selling we are currently seeing is just marginal. Most investors are staying put and will ride the market down by 50% or more before they realise that this is serious. And at that point they will hope and pray since they will believe it is too late to get out.
Sadly no one will understand that it is really different this time and that most asset classes will fall by 90% or more in real terms.
EPIC SUPER BUBBLES ALWAYS HAVE AN UNHAPPY ENDING
Epic super bubbles can only end badly. But no investor has the experience of such a massive implosion of bubbles because it has never happened before in history.
I have discussed the consequences in many articles, and they will be devastating.
Sadly Cassandras are never taken seriously until it is too late. This time will be no different.
And don’t believe there is anyone there to help. The Fed, which has reacted at least 10 years too late in tightening, will not save investors. Instead, they will offer more pain in the form of higher rates and more tightening.
Yes, of course the Fed will react at some point and in panic lower rates and inject fake money into the system. But that will be much too late. Also, no amount of fake money can save a system which is morally and financially bankrupt.
A morally and financially bankrupt western world has created this coming calamity, and we will now have to suffer the consequences.
Sadly, this this is the only way that it can end. A rotten and debt infested system can only end in a calamity.
Debts will implode and assets will implode. Society will not function nor will social security, pensions etc. This will create human suffering of a magnitude, which will be devastating for everyone.
Global population will also come down dramatically. In the mid 1800s there were 1 billion people on earth with very slow growth for the previous thousands of years. Then population exploded over the next 170 years to 8 billion. A chart that look like a spike up normally always corrects up to 50% down. The reasons for a reduction of world population are obvious: Economic collapse, misery, famine, disease and wars.
Such a singularity event is necessary for the world to clean up the rotten system and start a new era with green shoots and stronger moral and ethical values.
WEALTH PROTECTION A NECESSITY
For the few people who have assets to protect, physical gold and some silver will perform much better than all conventional asset markets which will collapse. That trend has already started as the table above shows.
Stocks will tank and commodities will soar.
For investors this is best illustrated in the Dow/Gold Ratio. This ratio is currently 16.5 and is likely to find long turn support at 0.5. Reaching that target would involve a 97% fall of the Dow relative to gold. Sounds incredible today but bearing in mind the circumstances this level is certainly possible. See my article.
An 0.5 Dow/Gold ratio could for example mean Dow 5,000 and Gold $10,000
GOLD – THE ULTIMATE INSURANCE AGAINST WEALTH DESTRUCTION
Anyone who has experienced hyperinflation also knows that the only money that survives such a calamity is gold. I met a year ago a man from former Yugoslavia who recognised me and told my friends who were with me that physical gold saved his family from total devastation. My friends sadly did not take his advice.
But remember that any protection or insurance must be acquired before disaster hits you.
Your most important assets are your brain, heart and soul. There are always opportunities for individuals who apply those assets wisely.
And as always in periods of crisis, being with and helping family and friends is your most important task.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
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Escobar: Exile On Main Street - The Sound Of The Unipolar World Fading Away
THURSDAY, JUN 23, 2022 - 08:40 PM
Authored by Pepe Escobar,
The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states. The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.
Let’s cut to the chase and roll in the Putin Top Ten of the New Era, announced by the Russian President live at the St. Petersburg forum for both the Global North and South.
The era of the unipolar world is over.
The rupture with the West is irreversible and definitive. No pressure from the West will change it.
Russia has renewed with its sovereignty. Reinforcement of political and economic sovereignty is an absolute priority.
The EU has completely lost its political sovereignty. The current crisis shows the EU is not ready to play the role of an independent, sovereign actor. It’s just en ensemble of American vassals deprived of any politico-military sovereignty.
Sovereignty cannot be partial. Either you’re a sovereign or a colony.
Hunger in the poorest nations will be on the conscience of the West and euro-democracy.
Russia will supply grains to the poorer nations in Africa and the Middle East.
Russia will invest in internal economic development and reorientation of trade towards nations independent of the U.S.
The future world order, already in progress, will be formed by strong sovereign states.
The ship has sailed. There’s no turning back.
How does it feel, for the collective West, to be caught in such a crossfire hurricane? Well, it gets more devastating when we add to the new roadmap the latest on the energy front.
Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, in St. Petersburg, stressed that the global economic crisis is gaining momentum not because of sanctions, but exacerbated by them; Europe “commits energy suicide” by sanctioning Russia; sanctions against Russia have done away with the much lauded “green transition”, as that is no longer needed to manipulate markets; and Russia, with its vast energy potential, “is the Noah’s Ark of the world economy.”
For his part Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller could not be more scathing on the sharp decline in the gas flow to the EU due to Siemens’ refusal and/or incapacity to repair the Nord Stream 1 pumping engine: “Well, of course, Gazprom was forced to reduce the volume of gas supplies to Europe by 20%+. But you know, prices have increased not by 20%+, but by several times!
Therefore, I’m sorry if I say that we don’t feel offended by anyone, we are not particularly concerned by this situation.”
If this pain dial overdrive was not enough to hurl the collective West – or NATOstan – into Terminal Hysteria, then Putin’s sharp comment on possibly allowing Mr. Sarmat to present his business card to “decision-making centers in Kiev”, those that are ordering the current shelling and killing of civilians in Donetsk, definitely did the trick:
“As for the red lines, let me keep them to myself, because this will mean quite tough actions on the decision-making centers. But this is an area that shouldn’t be disclosed to people outside the military-political leadership of the country. Those who deserve appropriate actions on our part should draw a conclusion for themselves – what they may face if they cross the line.”
Baby please, stop breaking down
Alastair Crooke has masterfully outlined how the collective West’s zugzwang leaves it lumbering around, dazed and confused. Now let’s examine the state of play on the opposite side of the chessboard, focusing on the BRICS summit this Thursday in Beijing.
As much as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and ASEAN, now it’s time for a reinvigorated BRICS to step up its game. In conjunction, these are the key organizations/instruments that will be carving the pathways towards the post-unipolar era.
Both China and India (which between them were the largest economies in the world for centuries before the brief Western colonial interregnum) are already close and getting closer to “the Noah’s Ark of the world economy”.
The G20 – hostages of the Michael Hudson-defined FIRE scam that is the core of the financialized neoliberal casino – is slowly fading away, while a potential new G8 ramps up: and that is directly connected to BRICS expansion, one of the key themes of this week’s summit. An expanded BRICS with a parallel G8 configuration is bound to easily overtake the Western-centric one in importance as well as GDP by purchasing power parity (PPP).
BRICS in 2021 already added Bangladesh, Egypt, the UAE and Uruguay to its New Development Bank (NDB). In May, at Foreign Ministry-level debates, Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Thailand were added to the 5 BRICS members.
Leaders of some of these nations will be connected to the Beijing summit.
BRICS plays a completely different game from the G20. They aim for the grassroots, and it’s all about slowly “building trust” – a very Chinese concept. They are creating an independent Credit Rating Agency – away from the Anglo-American racket – and deepening a Currency Reserves Arrangement. The NDB – including its regional offices in India and South Africa – has been involved in hundreds of projects. Time will tell: one day the NDB will make the World Bank superfluous.
Comparisons between BRICS and the Quad, a U.S. concoction, are silly. Quad is just another crude mechanism to contain China. Yet there’s no question India treads on tightrope walker territory, as it’s a member of both BRICS and Quad, and made a vastly misguided decision to walk out of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – the largest free trade deal on the planet – opting instead to adhere to the American pie-in-the-sky Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF).
Yet India, long term, skillfully guided by Russia, is being steered to find essential common ground with China in several key issues.
BRICS, especially in its expanded BRICS+ version, is bound to increase cooperation on building truly stable supply chains, and a settlement mechanism for resources and raw material trade, which inevitably has to be based in local currencies. Then the path will be open for the Holy Grail: a BRICS payment system as a credible alternative to the weaponized U.S. dollar and SWIFT.
Meanwhile, a torrent of bilateral investments from both China and India in the manufacturing and services sector around their neighbors is bound to lift up smaller players in both Southeast Asia and South Asia: think Cambodia and Bangladesh as important cogs in a vast supply wheel.
Yaroslav Lissovolik had already proposed a BEAMS concept as the core of this BRICS integration drive, uniting “the key regional integration initiatives of BRICS economies such as BIMSTEC, EAEU, the ASEAN-China free trade agreement, Mercosur and SADC/SACU.”
It’s only (BRICS) rock’n roll
Now Beijing seems eager to promote “an inclusive format for dialogue spanning all the main regions of the Global South via aggregating the regional integration platforms in Eurasia, Africa and Latin America. Going forward this format may be further expanded to include other regional integration blocks from Eurasia, such as the GCC, EAEU and others.”
Lissovolik notes how the ideal path from now on should be “the greater inclusivity of BRICS via the BRICS+ framework that allows smaller economies that are the regional partners of BRICS to have a say in the new global governance framework.”
Before he addressed the St. Petersburg forum on video, President Xi called Putin personally to say, among other things, that he’s got China’s back on all “sovereignty and security” themes.
They also, inevitably, discussed the relevance of BRICS as a key platform towards the multipolar world.
Meanwhile, the collective West plunges deeper into the maelstrom. A massive national demonstration of trade unions this past Monday paralyzed Brussels – the capital of the EU and NATO – as 80,000 people expressed their anger at the rising and rising cost of living; called for elites to “spend money on salaries, not on weapons”; and yelled in unison “Stop NATO.”
It’s zugzwang all over again. The EU’s “direct losses”, as Putin stressed, provoked by the sanctions hysteria, “could exceed $400 billion a year”. Russia’s energy earnings have hit record levels. The ruble is at a 7-year high against the euro.
It’s a blast that arguably the most powerful cultural artifact of the entire Cold War – and Western supremacy – era, the perennial Rolling Stones, is currently on tour across a “caught in a crossfire hurricane” EU. On every show they play, for the first time live, one of their early classics: ‘Out of Time’.
Sounds much like a requiem. So let’s all sing, “Baby baby baby / you’re out of time”, as one Vladimir “it’s a gas, gas, gas” Putin and his sidekick Dmitry “Under My Thumb” Medvedev seem to be the guys really getting their rocks off. It’s only (BRICS) rock’n roll, but we like it.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
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How (Un)Affordable Is Gas In Latin America?
THURSDAY, JUN 23, 2022 - 08:20 PM
As gas prices have risen around the world, not each region and country is impacted equally.
Globally, the average price for a liter of gas was $1.44 USD on June 13, 2022.
But, as Visual Capitalist's Carmen Ang details below, the actual price at the pump, and how affordable that price is for residents, varies greatly from country to country. This is especially true in Latin America, a region widely regarded as one of the world’s most unequal regions in terms of its income and resource distribution.
Using monthly data from GlobalPetrolPrices.com as of May 2022, this graphic by Latinometrics compares gas affordability in different countries across Latin America.
Gas Affordability in 19 Different Latin American Countries
To measure gas affordability, Latinometrics took the price of a liter of gas in 19 different Latin American countries and territories, and divided those figures by each country’s average daily income, using salary data from Statista.
Out of the 19 regions included in the dataset, Venezuela has the most affordable gas on the list. In Venezuela, a liter of gas is equivalent to roughly 1.3% of the country’s average daily income.
This isn’t too surprising, as Venezuela is home to the largest share of proven oil reserves in the world. However, it’s worth noting that international sanctions against Venezuelan oil, largely because of political corruption, have hampered the once prosperous sector in the country.
On the other end of the spectrum, Nicaragua has the least affordable gas on the list, with one liter of gas costing 14% of the average daily income in the country.
Historically, the Nicaraguan government has not regulated gas prices in the country, but in light of the current global energy crisis triggered in large part by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the government has stepped in to help control the situation.
As the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues with no end in sight, it’ll be interesting to see where prices are at in the next few months.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
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ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
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Pozsar Was Right Again: Shipping Costs Soar 82,000% Amid Global Supply Chain Chaos After Ukraine
THURSDAY, JUN 23, 2022 - 07:00 PM
Several months ago, Credit Suisse strategist and former NY Fed "liquidity plumber" Zoltan Pozsar predicted that as a result of Russian commodity exports being shunned by western nations and/or distributors while greeted by eastern nations (such as India and China) would would find delight in the 30% discount to spot on Russian oil, shipping costs would soar as a result of the challenging - and expensive - realignment of global supply chains which would see legacy tanker flows be scrapped only to be resurrected in the form of much more expensive alternatives.
Well, Pozsar was right again because four months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the resulting dislocation of global fuel markets has lead to a surge in shipping costs of products such as diesel by sea.
Rates to haul fuels such as gasoline and diesel, known in the industry as clean tanker freight, have more than doubled this year to the highest since April 2020, according to Baltic Exchange data. On one key route in Asia, ship owners are now earning over $47,000 a day transporting products from South Korea to the distribution hub of Singapore, compared with $98 a day prior to the war.
The Russian invasion has exacerbated a tightening of energy markets, upending trade flows and forcing buyers to scour the world for alternative fuel supplies, according to Bloomberg. At the same time, an initial surge in rates for hauling crude hasn’t been sustained, partly due to reduced demand from China, leading to some shipowners switching part of their fleet to haul fuels rather than oil, according to two tanker charterers.
The last time clean tanker freight rates were this elevated was in early 2020, after the pandemic decimated oil consumption and forced fuel producers to export as much product as possible to alleviate swelling storage tanks. Now, we are observing a mirror image of that predicament as demand for ships to haul fuels is expected to climb by 6% this year, underpinned by Europe, said Anoop Singh, head of tanker research at Braemar ACM Shipbroking.
"The European resolve to reduce reliance on Russian supplies will likely outlive the war in Ukraine and that will re-draw trade routes,” said Singh, who notes that Russia was the single largest external supplier of diesel to Europe prior to the war.
Furthermore, and also as Zoltan predicted, more long-range class ships are being used to transport refined fuels since the invasion in late February, according to S&P analysts Fotios Katsoulas and Krispen Atkinson. Longer voyages are reducing the amount of available capacity on vessels and driving up freight rates, they said. LR tankers are the most common and are used to carry both products and oil.
The surge in rates is being replicated across other regions. Ship owners transporting fuel from the Middle East to Japan on a route known as TC-5 -- a key passage for naphtha -- were earning more than $50,000 a day on Wednesday, compared with as low as $61 a day in February, an 82000% increase, according to Baltic Exchange data. The cost of shipping fuel from the US to Brazil on the TC-18 route was near $37,000 a day, up "more modestly", from $3,800 a day four months ago.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
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ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
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North Dakota AG Investigates Bill Gates Farmland Purchase
THURSDAY, JUN 23, 2022 - 06:20 PM
The North Dakota Attorney General's office is investigating a land transaction involving one of the biggest farmland owners in America, billionaire Bill Gates.
In a letter dated June 21, Attorney General Drew Wrigley's office asked the Red River Trust, an entity connected to Gates, about a recent purchase of a multi-thousand-acre potato farm, according to local news KFYR.
Wrigley's office informed the trust that all corporations or limited liability companies are strictly "prohibited from owning or leasing farmland or ranchland in the state of North Dakota" and "engaging in farming or ranching."
Red River Trust has 30 days to respond from June 21 to Kerrie Helm, the AG's Corporate Farming Enforcement Division, about the farm purchase.
A corporation or LLC "found in violation" of the anti-corporate farming laws could face harsh penalties, such as a $100k fine and one year to divest the land.
AgWeek revealed the trust spent $13.5 million on a 2,100-acre potato farm in Pembina County in November 2021.
North Dakota AG Commissioner Doug Goehring told KFYR that many people across the state are "upset" and "livid" about the billionaire purchasing farmland.
Over the years, Gates has quietly amassed 270,000 acres of farmland across the country through personal investment vehicles, though still a small slice of the nearly 900 million total farm acres.
Gates isn't alone. Other billionaires, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, have recently increased farmland holdings.
Could this be why billionaires are buying so much farmland?
Rockefeller Foundation President did warn a "massive, immediate food crisis" is on the horizon.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Russ Vought: Biden’s ‘Weaponization’ Of The Government Towards ‘Political Opponents’ Is Increasing 12:54 min
Russ Vought: Biden’s ‘Weaponization’ Of The Government Towards ‘Political Opponents’ Is Increasing
Bannons War Room Published June 24, 2022
(no synopsis given. Didn't watch)
Russ Vought: Biden’s ‘Weaponization’ Of The Government Towards ‘Political Opponents’ Is Increasing
Bannons War Room Published June 24, 2022
(no synopsis given. Didn't watch)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Biden Adviser Laughs At Suffering Americans Until Anchor Brings The Receipts To His Face On Live TV 1:37 min
Biden Adviser Laughs At Suffering Americans Until Anchor Brings The Receipts To His Face On Live TV
Red Voice Media Published June 24, 2022
Watch his facial expressions once he realized he wasn't going to be able to spin it...
Biden Adviser Laughs At Suffering Americans Until Anchor Brings The Receipts To His Face On Live TV
Red Voice Media Published June 24, 2022
Watch his facial expressions once he realized he wasn't going to be able to spin it...
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
Biden Snubbed Oil Firms And Met With Offshore Wind Partnership
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 12:45 PM
By Charles Kennedy of Oilprice.com
U.S. President Joe Biden met on Thursday with governors, labor leaders, and business leaders to discuss the implementation of more offshore wind capacity, snubbing oil company executives who were meeting with U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to discuss the soaring gasoline prices in America.
The White House is desperate to lower gasoline prices, which are the most important election issue for many Americans ahead of the mid-term elections in November. Ideas juggled by the Biden Administration range from invoking the Defense Production Act to boost refining capacity and output, to restrictions on oil exports. President Joe Biden also stepped up rhetoric toward oil companies, telling them in a letter sent last week to increase fuel production and noting that “refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable.”
While oil refiners were summoned to meet with Secretary Granholm, President Biden was meeting with officials and executives to discuss an offshore wind partnership. During the meeting, President Biden said the Administration had set a bold target of 30 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Granholm met with U.S. refiners, reminding them that “oil companies must deliver solutions to ensure secure, affordable supply.”
Secretary Granholm also “reiterated the President’s call for them to do more to ensure that their companies are passing savings on to their customers.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Dry Weather Status in 4 Maps: Could We See a Flash Drought?
The heat is on. The combination of high temperatures and low precipitation is expanding the drought footprint across the country. (Farm Journal)
By SARA SCHAFER June 24, 2022
The heat is on. The combination of high temperatures and low precipitation is expanding the drought footprint across the country.
As of June 21, the U.S. Drought Monitor shows 62% of the country covered by some form of dryness/drought, up five points over the past week.
Above-normal temperatures plagued much of the central and eastern contiguous U.S. this week, from the Great Plains eastward to the Mississippi Valley and Southeast. Precipitation was lacking in many locations that experienced excessive (in some cases record) heat, leading to widespread expansion of abnormal dryness and moderate drought conditions along the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, the Southern Plains, and the Southeast, according to the Drought Monitor.
From the Central Plains northward, despite the excessive heat (daytime high temperatures above 100°F several days this week), recent improvements driven by an active storm track leading up to this week resulted in modest, more targeted degradations in the drought depiction.
Drought is emerging in new areas, reports Matt Yarosewick, AgDay meteorologist.
“We’re watching for the possibility of a flash drought, which means drought conditions have not existed but over the next week or two we could see rapid development of those drought,” he says.
Yarosewick is watching for drought conditions to surface in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and eastern Missouri.
The isolated storms in the near-term forecast likely won’t provide large-scale relief to the emerging flash droughts, adds Eric Snodgrass, principal atmospheric scientist for Nutrien Ag Solutions.
“I am most concerned about the South, MidSouth and Lower Mississippi River Valley over the next 10+ days as these region continue to see much above normal temperatures,” he says.
To gauge your farm’s drought threat, take a look at these four maps:
droughtmonitor.unl.eduThis map shows how drought conditions have from June 14 to June 21. The yellow areas are where drought conditions have increased. How this progresses in the next two weeks will be critical in terms of crop development, Snodgrass says.
go.usa.gov/3eZ73The National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center’s seasonal drought outlook calls for hot and dry conditions through the end of June, which may result in flash drought development across eastern Texas, northern Louisiana, the lower Mississippi Valley and the central Corn Belt.
Above-average temperatures and below-average precipitation favored in the CPC outlook may cause these flash drought impacts to persist through the end of the outlook period. Areas of flash drought development are also likely across the Southeast through the end of June and into early July, but with both the monthly and seasonal outlooks favoring above-average rainfall, these drought conditions are less likely to persist on a seasonal time scale.
www.cpc.ncep.noaa.govThis map from NOAA/CPC shows regions during July 1 to July 7 that could experience flash drought
.
This map shows the last 14-days of precipitation anomalies (% of normal) through June 22. The dark red indicates regions that have received less than half of normal rainfall during the last two heat waves. “Daily evaporation rates have ranged from 0.25 - 0.4 inches causing regional flash drought to develop (on top of regions that have been in long tern drought like in the Southern Plains,” Snodgrass says.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Food inflation smoking, 11.9% higher than a year ago
By TOM KARST June 24, 2022
Grocery food prices in May were up 11.9% above year-ago levels, the USDA reported in the June 24 Food Price Outlook report.
The USDA said overall food prices in May, including both retail grocery and foodservice outlets, were 10.1% above May 2021, and 1.1% above April levels.
Restaurant food prices in May were 7.4% above a year ago and increased 0.7% compared with April.
Grocery food prices in May jumped 1.3% compared with April and now are up 11.9% compared with May 2021.
Updated forecast numbers from the USDA put grocery inflation for all of 2022 at between 8.5% and 9.5% higher, while restaurant food prices are predicted to increase between 6% and 7%.
The USDA said fresh fruit and vegetable prices for all of 2022 are expected to increase between 6.5% and 7.5%, compared with inflation rates of 2% in 2021 and 3.2% in 2020.
“Price increases for food at home and food away from home are expected to exceed historical averages and the inflation rate in 2021,” the USDA said in the report.
The USDA said all-items Consumer Price Index , the measure of inflation for the entire economy, increased 1.1% from April to May and is now 8.6% higher than a year ago.
In 2021, grocery food prices increased 3.5% and restaurant prices increased 4.5%, with all-food inflation rated at 3.9%.
USDA projections of inflation for food categories in 2022:
- Food at home: 8.5% to 9.5%
- Meats, poultry, and fish: 8.5% to 9.5%
- Meats: 7.5% to 8.5%
- Beef and veal: 6% to 7%
- Pork: 7% to 8%
- Other meats: 11.5% to 12.5%
- Poultry: 13% to 14%
- Fish and seafood: 8.5% to 9.5%
- Eggs: 19.5% to 20.5%
- Dairy products: 10.5% to 11.5%
- Fresh fruits and vegetables: 6.5% to 7.5%
- Fresh fruits: 8.5% to 9.5%
- Fresh vegetables: 4% to 5%
- Processed fruits and vegetables: 7.5% to 8.5%
marsh
On TB every waking moment
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Spread of ‘free-range’ farming may raise risk of animal-borne pandemics – study
If we can’t dramatically cut meat consumption then intensive ‘factory farming’ may be comparatively less risky, say authors
www.theguardian.com
Spread of ‘free-range’ farming may raise risk of animal-borne pandemics – study
If we can’t dramatically cut meat consumption then intensive ‘factory farming’ may be comparatively less risky, say authors
Chickens in a Tanzanian farm. A global shift from intensive farming would require an area almost as large as India, increasing the risk of disease ‘spillovers’ to humans, the study says. Photograph: Peter Caton/The Guardian
John Vidal
Thu 23 Jun 2022 12.10 EDT
The industrial farming of animals such as pigs, poultry and cattle to provide meat for hundreds of millions of people may reduce the risk of pandemics and the emergence of dangerous diseases including Sars, BSE, bird flu and Covid-19 compared with less-intensive farming, a major study by vets and ecologists has found.
Despite reports from the UN and other bodies in the wake of Covid linking the intensive farming of livestock to the spread of zoonotic (animal-borne) diseases, the authors argue that “non-intensive” or “low-yield” farms pose a more serious risk to human health because they require far more land to produce the same amount of food.
This, it is argued, increases the chances of “spillover” of dangerous viruses between animals and humans because it drives habitat loss, which displaces disease-carrying wild animals such as bats and rodents and brings them into closer contact with farmed animals and humans.
The authors of the report, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, acknowledge that the rapidly increasing consumer demand for meat and other animal products is posing a significant risk to humanity.
“The risks of emerging infectious diseases are escalating. Livestock biomass now vastly exceeds that of wild mammals and birds, and livestock hosts increasingly outnumber wildlife hosts for pathogens they share”, it says.
While eliminating the farming of animals would take away a lot of the disease risk, say the authors, they argue that a dramatic reduction in meat consumption would be “challenging” to achieve.
So instead the report looked at whether intensive or less intensive farming was a better option for reducing disease risk.
Worthy Farm, home of Glastonbury festival (with the Pyramid stage being built in the distance).
Low-yield farms need far more land to produce the same amount of food than high-yield farms, the study notes. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
Intensive livestock farming has been widely blamed for increasing the risk of bird and pig flu and other pandemics because of long-distance livestock movements, crowded farms, poor animal health and welfare, low resistance to disease among animals and low genetic diversity.
But data on the emergence of disease in intensive farms is limited, says the report, and typically ignores how land use affects risks.
“High-yield or ‘intensive’ livestock farming is blamed for pandemics, but those calling for a move away from intensive farming often fail to consider the counterfactual – the pandemic risk of farming less intensively and particularly the consequences for land use,” says the lead author, Harriet Bartlett.
“Low-yield farms need far more land to produce the same amount of food compared with high-yield farms. A widespread switch to low-yield farming would result in the destruction and disturbance of vast areas of natural habitats. This increases the risk of viral spillover [ie the first transmission from a wild animal] by disturbing wildlife that may well host the next pandemic virus and increasing contact between wildlife, people and livestock.
“Lower-yielding farms typically involve larger livestock populations, poorer biosecurity, more workers and more area under farming, resulting in different, but not necessarily lower, disease risks than higher-yielding systems producing the same amount of food”, says the report by vets and ecologists at Cambridge and Leeds universities.
A global shift away from intensive farming would require an area of land almost as large as India, inevitably increasing the risk of spillovers, Bartlett says. “The conversion and fragmentation of natural habitats means that we are farming in places where livestock and people [come into closer contact] with stressed populations of wild animals.”
Evidence that zoonotic diseases emerge more often in intensive-farming systems rather than extensive ones is hotly debated, with governments and the £150bn-a-year poultry and livestock industries arguing that intensive farming is generally extremely safe and now essential. Animal welfare campaigners argue that such farms are hotbeds of disease.
The report says poultry farms described as both “industrial” and “back yard” played a role in the 2004 outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) in Thailand. However, which one played a greater role – “spillover in ‘back-yard’ production due to poor biosecurity permitting contact between wild and domesticated birds, or amplification and reassortment from low to high pathogenicity in ‘industrial’ systems” – remains open to debate.
The intensive farming of pigs close to bat colonies is widely thought to have led to the emergence of the Nipah virus in pigs and humans in 1999, and of Mers in Saudi Arabian camels. World Health Organization investigators have stated that Covid is likely to have originated in a Chinese wildlife farm before being spread in an urban “wet” market.
Dr Guillaume Fournié, an epidemiologist at the Royal Veterinary College in London, said supposedly better biosecurity on intensive farms was not always a defence against the spread of disease.
The recent wave of bird flu outbreaks in Europe had “shown how difficult it can be to ensure optimal biosecurity standards and how this may lead to onward spread in high farm-density areas”, he said.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Invade Spain .28 min
Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Invade Spain
RAIRFoundationUSA Published June 24, 2022
Invasion: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' African Migrants Storm Spain (Videos)
Amy Mek
June 24, 2022
Hundreds of members of the security forces were injured, five of them seriously, during their intervention to prevent the migrants from entering Melilla.
An army of over 2,000 migrants staged an attack on Friday at 6:40 am on Melilla’s border fence in Spain. They used shears to break through the gate to the border control and then jumped through the roof to enter the city. Spanish officers deployed to the Chinatown border were injured fighting off the “perfectly organized and violent” group of sub-Saharans illegals.
Invasion: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Storm Spain 2:20 min
This was the first massive assault by migrants trying to enter Melilla since last March, when Spain and Morocco ended the diplomatic crisis that had been going on for eight months.
According to the first reports, 500 of the 2,000 illegal were able to enter the city by breaking through the access gate that connects the Chinatown border post. This point of entry has not been attacked before, causing security forces to be caught by surprise.
Invasion: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Storm Spain .17 min
Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Invade Spain .28 min
Another group of about 200 illegals managed to enter the city through another area; however, security forces were able to contain them. Nevertheless, the National Police and the Civil Guard officer were viciously attacked by the migrant soldiers and injured due to the violence.
There were 106 people injured, specifically 49 Civil Guard agents and 57 illegals, of whom three had to be taken to hospital.
Military Invasion: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Storm Spain 1:13 min
Invaded: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Migrants Storm Spain .34 min
Moroccan Officers Also Injured
On the Moroccan side of the border, 120 agents were injured, preventing hundreds of dangerous migrants from carrying out another attack on the fence. One of the agents had to be admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in the Moroccan city of Nador.
A view of the border fence that separates Morocco from the Spanish city of Melilla taken on March 4, 2022, from the Moroccan city of Nador
According to the latest information, during the border assault, 18 migrants died trying to jump the fence. Many of the deceased were trapped while trying to force their way into Spain, while several dozen are in serious condition.
Likewise, this same group of around 500 migrants tried to break through the cordon of Moroccan police forces in the early hours of Saturday morning. During this incursion, 100 Moroccan police officers were injured.
Sánchez highlights “the close collaboration” with Morocco.
Spain’s open borders president, Pedro Sánchez, thanked the Spanish Security Forces and Morocco for their collaboration in preventing a larger invasion. In addition, he has highlighted the “need to have the best relations and close collaboration” with this neighboring country in the fight against irregular immigration.
“On behalf of the Government of Spain, I would like to thank the extraordinary collaboration we are having with the Moroccan government, which demonstrates the need for the best relations and close collaboration. Also, in matters of the Interior and the fight against irregular immigration which, unfortunately, has been suffered today in the autonomous city of Melilla”, he said at a press conference in Brussels, where he participated in the European Council.
Open Borders Spain
Instead of Spain’s socialist-led government immediately deporting the illegals, they transferred them to the Centre for the Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI). Unfortunately, most CETI centers are overrun and unable to handle the capacity of illegals pouring into Spain. The situation has only been exacerbated by Covid, which has pushed the migrant reception systems to a dangerous breaking point.
The first illegals to penetrate Spain arrive at the CETI and are greeted by their fellow soldiers with joy and celebration:
Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Storm Spain .33 min
SPAIN: Migrants Arrive at CETI and are Welcomed By Their Fellow Illegals .38 min
Many of the migrants who were captured are of Sudanese nationality and came from nearby forests where they were congregating in recent days to carry out a massive entry into the Spanish city.
Melilla has seen many violent attacks and incidents over the last several years. Thousands of often dangerous migrants each year try to scale Melilla’s border fence and invade Spain’s shores, hoping they won’t be returned and get asylum.
There is no negative consequence for migrants trying to make their way to Spain. Once they scale the border wall and invade the country, they are handed food, clothing, money, and shelter. Under Spain’s Socialist-led government, all asylum applications must be considered.
Those denied asylums are rarely deported and instead make their way to the other 26 European Union states.
Vox Fighting To Protest Spain’s Borders
Last summer, the president of Spain’s conservative party Vox, Santiago Abascal, visited Hungary to meet with Fidesz’s leader and Prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in Budapest. The two leaders came together to address Europe’s “migratory invasion.” Abascal was in Europe seeking knowledge and cooperation with other parties who believe that “protecting their borders is key for our future.”
“We patriots have to be united in the face of the multicultural policies of the European Union: massive and illegal immigration, the Islamization of Europe, and the abandonment of common roots,” explained Abascal.
The Vox leader expressed his concern to Orbán about the migrant invasion in Ceuta and Melilla, where tens of thousands of illegals sent by Morocco continue to invade their shores.
There is no negative consequence for migrants trying to make their way to Spain. Once they scale the border wall and invade the country, they are handed food, clothing, money, and shelter. The European Union (EU) forces its 27 member states to accept all asylum applications despite the country’s overwhelmed and financially depleted systems,
The only hope to stop Spain’s “migratory invasion” is the conservative VOX Party. They are the “Make Spain Great Again Party,” which defends traditional Spanish values, borders and has a Trump-like “Spain First” message. Despite the attacks by the radical left and the media that the Vox Party faces, they continue to address the threats of Islam and illegal migration to Spain.
Read more about the VOX Party and the violence caused by the migration crisis below:
Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Invade Spain
RAIRFoundationUSA Published June 24, 2022
Invasion: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' African Migrants Storm Spain (Videos)
Amy MekJune 24, 2022
Hundreds of members of the security forces were injured, five of them seriously, during their intervention to prevent the migrants from entering Melilla.
An army of over 2,000 migrants staged an attack on Friday at 6:40 am on Melilla’s border fence in Spain. They used shears to break through the gate to the border control and then jumped through the roof to enter the city. Spanish officers deployed to the Chinatown border were injured fighting off the “perfectly organized and violent” group of sub-Saharans illegals.
Invasion: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Storm Spain 2:20 min
This was the first massive assault by migrants trying to enter Melilla since last March, when Spain and Morocco ended the diplomatic crisis that had been going on for eight months.
According to the first reports, 500 of the 2,000 illegal were able to enter the city by breaking through the access gate that connects the Chinatown border post. This point of entry has not been attacked before, causing security forces to be caught by surprise.
Invasion: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Storm Spain .17 min
Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Invade Spain .28 min
Another group of about 200 illegals managed to enter the city through another area; however, security forces were able to contain them. Nevertheless, the National Police and the Civil Guard officer were viciously attacked by the migrant soldiers and injured due to the violence.
There were 106 people injured, specifically 49 Civil Guard agents and 57 illegals, of whom three had to be taken to hospital.
Military Invasion: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Storm Spain 1:13 min
Invaded: Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Migrants Storm Spain .34 min
Moroccan Officers Also Injured
On the Moroccan side of the border, 120 agents were injured, preventing hundreds of dangerous migrants from carrying out another attack on the fence. One of the agents had to be admitted to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in the Moroccan city of Nador.
A view of the border fence that separates Morocco from the Spanish city of Melilla taken on March 4, 2022, from the Moroccan city of Nador
According to the latest information, during the border assault, 18 migrants died trying to jump the fence. Many of the deceased were trapped while trying to force their way into Spain, while several dozen are in serious condition.
Likewise, this same group of around 500 migrants tried to break through the cordon of Moroccan police forces in the early hours of Saturday morning. During this incursion, 100 Moroccan police officers were injured.
Sánchez highlights “the close collaboration” with Morocco.
Spain’s open borders president, Pedro Sánchez, thanked the Spanish Security Forces and Morocco for their collaboration in preventing a larger invasion. In addition, he has highlighted the “need to have the best relations and close collaboration” with this neighboring country in the fight against irregular immigration.
“On behalf of the Government of Spain, I would like to thank the extraordinary collaboration we are having with the Moroccan government, which demonstrates the need for the best relations and close collaboration. Also, in matters of the Interior and the fight against irregular immigration which, unfortunately, has been suffered today in the autonomous city of Melilla”, he said at a press conference in Brussels, where he participated in the European Council.
Open Borders Spain
Instead of Spain’s socialist-led government immediately deporting the illegals, they transferred them to the Centre for the Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI). Unfortunately, most CETI centers are overrun and unable to handle the capacity of illegals pouring into Spain. The situation has only been exacerbated by Covid, which has pushed the migrant reception systems to a dangerous breaking point.
The first illegals to penetrate Spain arrive at the CETI and are greeted by their fellow soldiers with joy and celebration:
Army of 'Organized and Very Violent' Sub-Saharan African Migrants Storm Spain .33 min
SPAIN: Migrants Arrive at CETI and are Welcomed By Their Fellow Illegals .38 min
Many of the migrants who were captured are of Sudanese nationality and came from nearby forests where they were congregating in recent days to carry out a massive entry into the Spanish city.
Melilla has seen many violent attacks and incidents over the last several years. Thousands of often dangerous migrants each year try to scale Melilla’s border fence and invade Spain’s shores, hoping they won’t be returned and get asylum.
There is no negative consequence for migrants trying to make their way to Spain. Once they scale the border wall and invade the country, they are handed food, clothing, money, and shelter. Under Spain’s Socialist-led government, all asylum applications must be considered.
Those denied asylums are rarely deported and instead make their way to the other 26 European Union states.
Vox Fighting To Protest Spain’s Borders
Last summer, the president of Spain’s conservative party Vox, Santiago Abascal, visited Hungary to meet with Fidesz’s leader and Prime minister, Viktor Orbán, in Budapest. The two leaders came together to address Europe’s “migratory invasion.” Abascal was in Europe seeking knowledge and cooperation with other parties who believe that “protecting their borders is key for our future.”
“We patriots have to be united in the face of the multicultural policies of the European Union: massive and illegal immigration, the Islamization of Europe, and the abandonment of common roots,” explained Abascal.
The Vox leader expressed his concern to Orbán about the migrant invasion in Ceuta and Melilla, where tens of thousands of illegals sent by Morocco continue to invade their shores.
There is no negative consequence for migrants trying to make their way to Spain. Once they scale the border wall and invade the country, they are handed food, clothing, money, and shelter. The European Union (EU) forces its 27 member states to accept all asylum applications despite the country’s overwhelmed and financially depleted systems,
Those few migrants denied asylum are rarely deported and instead make their way to the other 26 European Union states. Spain’s Socialist-led government has been happy to oblige the EU’s rules. In contrast, the Hungarian government had refused to sacrifice their country by following the EU’s demands.
The only hope to stop Spain’s “migratory invasion” is the conservative VOX Party. They are the “Make Spain Great Again Party,” which defends traditional Spanish values, borders and has a Trump-like “Spain First” message. Despite the attacks by the radical left and the media that the Vox Party faces, they continue to address the threats of Islam and illegal migration to Spain.
Read more about the VOX Party and the violence caused by the migration crisis below:
- Spain Under Attack: 2,700 Migrants Invade Spanish Enclave of Ceuta, New Record (Update: 5,000 in 24hrs)
- Spain At War: Migrants Storm Border Fence, Overpower Guards (Video)
- VOX Slams EU Migrant Invasion: Choose ‘Civilization or Barbarism, Globalism or Homeland’ (Video)
- Spain: VOX Wins Big in Catalan Elections Despite Leftist and Islamic War To Stop Them (Video)
- Spain Under Attack: Military-Aged Migrants Infected With Coronavirus Storm Border Fence (Video)
- Vox Party Slams Congress: Citizens will Not allow Spain to be converted into ‘Multicultural Dung Heaps’ (Watch)
- Vox Party Slams Congress: Citizens Will Not Allow Spain To Be Converted Into ‘multicultural Dung Heaps’ (Watch)
- Terror Attack in Spain: ‘Refugees’ Ambush and Beat VOX’s Rubén Pulido outside his Home (Watch)
- Patriots Protect Christopher Columbus Statue in Spain: ‘We are Here to Defend Our History’ (Watch) Spain’s Populist VOX Party Kicks Off Campaign With Trump Like Crowds!
- RAIR Exclusive Videos: Spain’s Trump – VOX Party’s Santiago Abascal!
- Spain’s VOX Leader Santiago Abascal Electrifies Italian Audience & Joins Forces With Salvini, Orbán & Meloni! (VIDEO)
- COVID-19 Protests Erupt: Spanish Politician Demands Citizens have the Right To Fight ‘Dictatorial’ Restrictions (Watch)
- Selective Enforcement: Spanish Police Raid Legal Christian Mass Yet Allow Illegal Islamic Gatherings (Watch)
- ‘I’m Going to Kill You’ – Machete Waving Jihadi Threatened an ‘Allahu Akbar’ Christmas in Spain (Video)
- Spain: Military-aged ‘invaders’ Riot, Attack Police With ‘knives And Paving Stones’
- Spain: Military-aged Migrants Infected With Coronavirus Storm Border Fence And Coasts (Watch)
- Spain: Jihad Terrorist Attack Thwarted In Barcelona – Two Algerians Arrested (Watch)
- Patriots Protect Christopher Columbus Statue In Spain: ‘we Are Here To Defend Our History’ (Watch)
- Spain: Hundreds Of Tunisian Migrants Protest Their Deportations And Demand They Have The Right To Stay (Watch)
- Provocation In Spain: Muslims Allowed To Break Quarantine And Blast Call To Prayer From Historic Catholic Cathedral (Watch)
- Spain: Afghan Migrants Rape Three American Sisters on New Years Eve (Video)
- Breaking: While Spain Endures Nationwide Lockdown, Hundreds Of Military-aged Migrants Storm Border Fence (Watch)
- Spain: Afghan Migrants Rape Three American Sisters On New Years Eve (Video)
- Kamikaze Van Attack In Spain: 52 Illegal Migrants Violently Crash Into Border Gate!
- Mafia Is Capitalizing On Spain’s Migrant Invasion!
- Spanish Ngo Boats Are Dumping Even More Illegals Into Spain
- RAIR Exclusive Video: Over 150 Migrants Storm Through Spain’s Ceuta Enclave Fence!
- Covid-19 Protests Erupt: Spanish Politician Demands Citizens Have The Right To Fight ‘dictatorial’ Restrictions (Watch)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Former Trump DOJ Official Jeff Clark Describes 'Soviet' Style FBI Raid He Endured 4:27 min
Former Trump DOJ Official Jeff Clark Describes 'Soviet' Style FBI Raid He Endured
Red Voice Media Published June 24, 2022
Jeff Clark, a former Justice Department official under the Trump administration, appeared on Tucker Carlson's show to detail the FBI raid he was subjected to.
Former Trump DOJ Official Jeff Clark Describes 'Soviet' Style FBI Raid He Endured
Red Voice Media Published June 24, 2022
Jeff Clark, a former Justice Department official under the Trump administration, appeared on Tucker Carlson's show to detail the FBI raid he was subjected to.
von Koehler
Has No Life - Lives on TB
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
Summer Preview: Rolling Blackouts, Higher Gas Prices, Natural Gas Rationing In Europe And A Historic Diesel Crisis
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 01:20 PM
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Almost everyone has heard about the rapidly growing global energy crisis by now, but most people assume that this crisis will eventually go away because they think that authorities have everything under control. Unfortunately, that is not true at all. This crisis has taken our leaders by surprise, and now many of them have shifted into panic mode because they realize that there will be no easy fixes. Decades of neglect and foolish decisions have brought us to the precipice of a nightmare, and many of us are going to be absolutely astonished by some of the things that happen in the months ahead.
Here in the United States, we have neglected to properly invest in our power grids for a very long time, and now they are at a breaking point.
We are being warned that there could be widespread “rolling blackouts” this summer, and the situation is particularly dire in Midwest states such as Michigan…
Meanwhile, the price of gasoline is likely to continue to go up.
For quite some time, the amount of oil that is being produced around the world each day has been lower than the amount of oil that is being used around the world each day, and as a result supplies have been getting tighter and tighter…
When demand is greater than supply, either prices go up or eventually you have shortages.
And sometimes both things happen.
Bank of America is telling us that oil inventories have reached a “dangerously low point”, and until that changes prices are likely to continue to rise…
I wish that I could tell you that there is hope that things will turn around eventually.
But at this point the CEO of Exxon is actually warning us to expect “up to five years of turbulent oil markets”…
If you think that things are bad now, just wait until you see what happens after a major war erupts in the Middle East.
Then things will really start getting crazy.
Speaking of war, over in Europe a looming natural gas shortage due to the war in Ukraine is likely to cause immense economic problems in the months ahead.
Now that Russia has significantly reduced the flow of natural gas to Germany, it looks like the Germans will soon be forced to ration it, and the Wall Street Journal is telling us that authorities expect “a gas shortage by December”…
It would be difficult for me to overstate the seriousness of this problem. Energy prices have already gone completely nuts in Europe, and one German official is actually comparing this crisis to the collapse of Lehman Brothers…
Needless to say, it isn’t just Germany that is being affected…
If the war in Ukraine could be brought to a peaceful resolution, that would greatly help matters.
But we all know that isn’t going to happen any time soon.
On top of everything else, global supplies of diesel fuel get squeezed a little bit more with each passing day. The price of diesel fuel is 75 percent higher than it was a year ago, and here in the United States we have been warned that the Northeast “is quietly running out of diesel”…
Even though there could be a historic supply crunch, we won’t completely run out of diesel fuel.
However, as I detailed in an article that has gone extremely viral, we are potentially facing really severe shortages of both diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil if solutions cannot be found.
Urea is required to produce diesel exhaust fluid, and the U.S. doesn’t produce enough. We are normally one of the largest importers of urea in the entire world, and Russia and China are two of the largest exporters. Our leaders have decided that we don’t want urea from Russia, and China has restricted exports.
So that puts us in a really tough position. If you have a diesel vehicle, I would highly recommend stocking up on diesel exhaust fluid while you still can.
As for diesel engine oil, there are several key additives that are in short supply right now due to major problems at several manufacturers. An article that Mike Adams just posted goes into the details. This is a very serious situation that is not going to be resolved any time in the near future.
The bottom line is that supplies of diesel fuel are going to get very tight, and there may be times when diesel exhaust fluid and diesel engine oil are not available at all.
All three are required in order for diesel vehicles to operate, and as I explained yesterday, the U.S. economy runs on diesel.
If we were suddenly unable to use our diesel vehicles, all of our supply chains would collapse and we would no longer have a functioning economy.
So hopefully our leaders are working really hard to find some solutions.
Because it looks like this summer could be quite difficult, and the outlook for the months beyond is even less promising.
It's amazing that no one has suggested the obvious solution; just rollback the mandated diesel emissions standard.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
REAL AMERICA -- Dan Ball W/ Tom Oltorik, Major Airline Issues Disrupt American Travel Plans, 6/24/22 12:26 min
REAL AMERICA -- Dan Ball W/ Tom Oltorik, Major Airline Issues Disrupt American Travel Plans, 6/24/22
One America News Network Published June 24, 2022
REAL AMERICA -- Dan Ball W/ Tom Oltorik, Major Airline Issues Disrupt American Travel Plans, 6/24/22 (No other synopsis given)
REAL AMERICA -- Dan Ball W/ Tom Oltorik, Major Airline Issues Disrupt American Travel Plans, 6/24/22
One America News Network Published June 24, 2022
REAL AMERICA -- Dan Ball W/ Tom Oltorik, Major Airline Issues Disrupt American Travel Plans, 6/24/22 (No other synopsis given)
marsh
On TB every waking moment
What’s The Climate Cult’s Next Target? Hide Your Lawnmowers!
Certain scientists are now making the case that green, well-manicured and attractive lawns are a problem for our planet's climate. Hmm.
thebluestateconservative.com
What’s The Climate Cult’s Next Target? Hide Your Lawnmowers!
- by Jordan Case
- June 24, 2022June 23, 2022
There’s little doubt that our planet’s climate is changing. It also appears highly likely that human activity has been at least partly responsible, though the level of responsibility remains very much in question. But what truly matters regarding the ongoing climate debate is this:
How do we fix it? Life isn’t as simple as identifying problems, pointing them out, walking away, and living happily ever after. Problems need fixing, and it is in the fixes leftists propose that expose their true agenda.
The fact is, actions by America alone will do little to change the course we’re on, whatever that course may be. Furthermore, solutions proposed by climate alarmists tend to be entirely dismissive of the impact of those solutions on our economy. And that may very well be the point.
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-CA) unveiled her ridiculous Green New Deal three years ago, her ‘fact sheet’ lectured us about the perils of cow farts and the need to eliminate airplanes, while simultaneously waxing poetic about the need to financially support those who are “either unable or unwilling to work.” Excuse us for our skepticism, AOC, but it seems like you have ulterior motives when you try to scare us about global warming and then attempt to leverage that fear to enable fellow, lazy leftists to sit on their asses all day.
So, when we see an article such as the one published yesterday by Yahoo News titled “Leaf blowers, lawn mowers and fertilizer: How lawns contribute to climate change,” we need to scrutinize every aspect of their assertions. Consider the following points from the report:
What are the solutions? You won’t be surprised:
If totally altering our economy is unnecessary for addressing climate change – and credible analyses on the matter state exactly that – then what meaningful impact would we accomplish by having a nation scattered with clover and dandelion-filled lawns in constant need of mowing? The answer seems pretty obvious. Nothing.
Why are the climate cultists targeting lawns? Because they need to come up with new topics and ideas. Billions of dollars are being spent on climate change research worldwide, and they have to look at something. So, the real question is.. why not attack green lawns? They’re probably owned by money-hungry conservatives anyway.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
The working class is turning on Marx and the party that promotes him
A month ago I wrote a purely anecdotal account of how in my local manufacturing community, there was an increasingly large portion of the union households who were abandoning the Democrat Party.
notthebee.com
The working class is turning on Marx and the party that promotes him
Peter Heck
Jun 24th, 2022 8:48 am
A month ago I wrote a purely anecdotal account of how in my local manufacturing community, there was an increasingly large portion of the union households who were abandoning the Democrat Party.
Long viewed as the voice of the working class, I suggested admittedly without any scientific or statistical evidence, the party's primary obsession with social issues like abortion and the ongoing sexual revolution has caused an exodus of middle-class families who no longer feel represented.
It's becoming so apparent that even Democrat Party propaganda specialists in media are being forced to admit it.
But that's not all. Former Obama "Green Jobs" Czar Van Jones recently appeared on that same network asserting that same premise, that the Democrat Party has indeed abandoned the middle class. But Jones attributes their decision to a conscious deference to the two opposite ends of the socioeconomic spectrum.
View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1537857079410577409
.44 min
In other words, the "working class" is the middle class, and progressives are utterly disinterested in advocating for policies that truly benefit such a group. The green agenda after all is a poison-tipped blow dart right to the heart of working men and women.
The modern Democrat party leadership and their media allies would rather appeal to the wealthiest white liberals, playing along with their silly word games and victimization-driven identity politics gambit. Simultaneously, and perhaps to assuage their wealthy, privileged guilt, the party also appeals to the poorest economic classes by promising significant government redistribution of wealth.
Squeezed out of this equation, of course, is the middle class. That's an odd reality for the party spreading unabashedly pro-socialist propaganda, which deceitfully is marketed as a blessing to working people. The godfather of socialist economic philosophy, Karl Marx, envisioned a just society based on even distribution of public resources, depriving the wealthy of their greedy opulence and rewarding the blue-collar masses with their fair share of society's loot.
This, not so-called economic liberty and free-market capitalism, would be the best friend of the working class. Yet here we are.
In one of history's funniest and most enlightening revelations, notice that it is the celebrity class, the wealthiest, the most professionally over-educated who are supportive of Marxism, while the truckers, factory workers, and coal miners are craving the economic freedom of capitalism.
Marxism and progressivism work wonders in textbooks and theoretical classroom exercises. But life isn't lived in a textbook or on paper. It's lived, as Van Jones of all people pointed out, in barbershops, nail salons, and grocery stores. And that is where the modern Democrat Party is failing so badly.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Activists’ Ideological War On Energy
Radicals are putting America’s security and economic well-being at risk.
issuesinsights.com
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
Activists’ Ideological War On Energy
Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller
June 24, 2022
The conflict in Ukraine evokes a World War II strategy we had all hoped was gone forever: the purposeful victimization and killing of civilians to weaken and demoralize the opposition. Sadly, climate activists who seem to exert inordinate control over U.S. government policies are exacting an analogously high price from the American public in pursuit of their ideological goals. They are conducting what we call the War On American Energy, or WOAE (pronounced “WHOA!”)
The WOAE strategies include direct actions as well as less obvious “behind the lines” logistics and support functions. The most destructive is the attack on the nation’s fuel supply. Biden administration officials have rescinded permissions for existing pipelines such as the Keystone XL; cancelled the sale of exploration leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska; and slowed the issuance of permits for collateral construction such as roads necessary to use existing exploration leases. Despite their own culpability for obstructions to drilling, they threaten early cancellation of “unused” leases.
To add insult to injury, President Joe Biden has called on energy to companies to refine more and profit less after disincentivizing investment in fossil fuels to achieve “cleaner energy.” What kind of disincentiving? Who can forget Biden’s emphatic message during the election campaign about his energy policies if he were to become president: “No more subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. It ends.”
The results are predictable: Less investment in energy, diminished resilience against supply disruptions, and massive spikes in fuel prices. And earlier this month, the EPA proposed to reverse a Trump-era rule that limited the power of states and Native American tribes to block energy projects like natural-gas pipelines, a certain path to increasing costs and delays.
So much for the once much-vaunted phrase, “American energy independence.”
Activists are also engaged in a relentless disinformation campaign to hide the challenges of renewable energy sources. Wind and solar power without sufficient fossil fuel or battery backup will produce rolling blackouts. Battery backup for just the region of West Texas that lost power for four days in February 2021 would cost about $20 billion (11,000 turbines times 96 hours times two megawatts per turbine-hour times $100,000 per megawatt hour for batteries).
Also, building wind and solar farms consumes millions of tons of steel, concrete, plastic, etc., at a high energy cost. Furthermore, management of power grids is hugely complicated by the variable nature of power generation from renewables, including the mandated purchase of excess electricity from consumers with solar panels on their roofs.
Then there is the fantasy of electric vehicles (EVs) as a panacea. Expensive subsidies remain necessary, and each EV requires 250 tons of minerals to be mined with an energy expenditure of 86 million BTUs, which is equal to 1.5 person-years of total energy consumption. Many of the necessary rare earth elements and lithium are scarce and come from hostile or largely inaccessible parts of the world such as China, Congo, and Russia, and industrial-scale battery demands would exacerbate the problem. And although charging at single-family homes seems straightforward, neighborhood power transformers are generally intended to supply eight to 10 homes without EVs, presaging major renovations of local grids. Plus, are we willing to tear up our streets to install chargers for city dwellers? And who pays for and manages a vastly expanded garage charging infrastructure? And all this while we’re producing less reliable and more expensive electric power.
Paradoxically, the ideal available clean energy – nuclear – continues to be disfavored and has long been headed for the WOAE scrap heap. This is despite the potential of small modular reactors and even “nuclear batteries,” which can be used to power devices and machines of any size, from aircraft and rockets to charging electric vehicles. Perfectly safe and serviceable nuclear plants are being decommissioned at an alarming rate. Germany is now deeply regretting former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to phase out nuclear energy.
Finally, there is the unreality of the entire underlying rationale for the WOAE. While the United States produces 14% (and a decreasing fraction) of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), China, India, and Russia account for 40%. How are our actions supposed to affect their practices? China and India have 1,400 coal power facilities, with their numbers growing, while the U.S. has 240, with the number declining. And the war in Ukraine has clearly exposed the national security implications of insufficient energy resources that can lead to energy blackmail.
The WOAE is putting at risk America’s security and economic well-being. And in the process, strategies to promote resilience from geopolitical or climatic challenges are neglected.
Politicians should be devising approaches like coastal building restrictions, mass planting of CO2-absorbing trees, carbon sequestration technology, and a massive expansion of nuclear power. But the WOAE consists largely of endless virtue-signaling and pinning medals on one another for imaginary victories. Its strategy is no better conceived or beneficial to the public than is Vladimir Putin’s in Ukraine. We Americans need to find our Volodymyr Zelensky for this fight.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Merrick Garland's DOJ Is A Threat To The Republic
Federal raids this week, along with an inappropriate statement about a SCOTUS ruling, underscore the weaponization of the DOJ under Garland.
thefederalist.com
Merrick Garland’s Department Of Justice Is A Threat To The Republic
BY: JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON
JUNE 24, 2022
IMAGE CREDITNBC NEWS / YOUTUBE'
Federal raids this week, along with an inappropriate statement about a SCOTUS ruling, underscore the weaponization of the DOJ under Garland.
JOHN DANIEL DAVIDSON
It’s become painfully obvious over the past year that the Justice Department under Attorney General Merrick Garland has been weaponized and politicized to the point that it represents an active threat to the rule of law and the separation of powers. It’s not too much to say that Garland’s DOJ has become a threat to the republic.
Just take this past week. On Thursday, following an historic 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down a New York law for violating state residents’ Second Amendment rights, a DOJ spokeswoman released a statement saying “we respectfully disagree” with the ruling.
The ruling is of course a great victory for the Constitution and a long-overdue vindication of New Yorkers’ Second Amendment rights. The law in question had been on the books for more than a century, and made it nearly impossible for ordinary people to obtain a concealed-carry license, The unconstitutional law forced New Yorkers to prove to a municipal bureaucrat that they needed a gun for self-defense. In practice, this made it almost impossible for law-abiding citizens in New York to exercise their constitutional right to bear arms.
But neither the law in question nor the Supreme Court’s decision implicates federal gun laws in any way. There is no reason for the DOJ to weigh in on the matter or express any opinion whatsoever on the ruling. Only an utterly politicized Justice Department hoping to undermine the Supreme Court’s constitutional authority and sow the seeds of nullification would issue such a statement.
But that’s not nearly the worst thing Garland’s DOJ did this week. In the pre-dawn hours of Wednesday morning, more than a dozen federal investigators raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official with the Trump administration. Why? Because Clark had the temerity to investigate claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election.
That made Clark a target for the House Democrats’ Jan. 6 committee, whose Soviet-style show trial spent a good deal of time Wednesday implying that Clark, who once oversaw 1,400 lawyers and two divisions at DOJ, is traitor who tried to overturn the results of the election.
This should come as no surprise, since the entire raison d’être of the Jan. 6 committee is to smear anyone who questioned the outcome of the election or raised concerns about its unprecedented irregularities as a coup-plotter responsible for the Jan. 6 “insurrection.” In fact, Clark’s only crime is that in a sea of attorneys who didn’t want to lift a finger to investigate the election, he looked for options and fought to uncover the truth.
Of course, he’s not the only one the DOJ targeted this week. The same day Clark’s house was raided, FBI agents raided the home of Michael McDonald, Nevada’s top GOP official.
His crime, according to the Justice Department and the Jan. 6 committee, was signing a document with five other Nevada Republican Party electors after the 2020 election signaling their support for Trump. Among the signatories of the purely symbolic document was state GOP secretary James DeGraffenreid, whom FBI agents tried but failed to find on Wednesday.
These are just a few of the people against whom the Jan. 6 committee has unleashed Garland’s Justice Department. So far, the committee has subpoenaed more than 100 lawmakers, local officials like McDonald and DeGraffenreid, internet and communications companies, Trump White House officials, and others. Make no mistake: the committee is using the DOJ as a weapon against its political enemies, and Garland is allowing it to happen.
We should have seen this coming. From the outset of his tenure, Garland has betrayed a willingness to use the DOJ as a partisan weapon. There was the raid on Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe’s home last November, and preceding that months of illegal spying on his organization.
Even worse, in some ways, was the unprecedented memo in October designed to threaten and silence parents whose only “crime” was to speak out about the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Garland smeared them as “domestic terrorists” and directed the Department of Justice and the FBI to “launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
But this “rise in criminal conduct” was pure fiction. Garland got it from a letter sent to President Joe Biden by the National School Boards Association, which made vague and unsubstantiated claims about “threats and acts of violence” against school board members from parents opposed to critical race theory. Less than a week after the letter was sent, Garland’s memo appeared. It was a transparent ploy to get the federal government to intimidate parents into silence and suppress their First Amendment rights, which Garland was happy to do.
At every turn, Garland has shown himself hostile to the Bill of Rights and to law-abiding Americans who exercise those rights, and beholden to Democrat partisans and left-wing advocacy groups. He has brazenly allowed political influence to direct the Justice Department’s considerable powers.
If you think Garland’s DOJ isn’t a threat to the republic, then you need to start paying attention, because the weaponization of federal law enforcement under Biden and Garland is almost certainly going to get much worse.
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The Link Between Soaring Food Prices & Political Instability
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 08:20 PM
The Russian war in Ukraine has had immediate repercussions for global food markets given the countries’ role as major exporters of essential agricultural products, such as wheat, sunflower oil, barley and corn, while also affecting perishable foods like fruits and vegetables.
As shown in FAO data, the price of basic food products has surged since the invasion of Ukraine after already having followed an upward trend since 2020 over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic.
You will find more infographics at Statista
As Statista's Katharina Buchholz notes, in the past, similar surges in the price of food have led to unrest, mostly in developing countries, and even coincided with the Arab Spring in 2011, when populations in North Africa and the Middle East cornered by oppressive regimes and feeling the additional squeeze on their livelihoods due to high prices rose up and toppled several regional regimes. The current level of food prices is even surpassing the peaks observed in 2011 and 2008, when food and other prices rose dramatically, causing unrest in several African countries as well as in Bangladesh, Haiti, Indonesia and Yemen. The onset of the global financial crisis put an end to the price surge that year.
In the current situation, Human Rights Watch has warned that food crisis could hit North Africa and the Middle East again, as several countries in the region are major importers of Russian or Ukrainian food products.
According to Cornell University economics professor Chris Barrett, the potential for unrest is again heightened.
As of early June, food prices had already fueled protests all over the world, including in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Europe.
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Everybody's Guilty: To The Police State, We're All Criminals Until We Prove Otherwise
BY TYLER DURDEN
FRIDAY, JUN 24, 2022 - 08:00 PM
Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
The burden of proof has been reversed.
No longer are we presumed innocent. Now we’re presumed guilty unless we can prove our innocence beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. Rarely, are we even given the opportunity to do so.
Although the Constitution requires the government to provide solid proof of criminal activity before it can deprive a citizen of life or liberty, the government has turned that fundamental assurance of due process on its head.
Each and every one of us is now seen as a potential suspect, terrorist and lawbreaker in the eyes of the government.
Consider all the ways in which “we the people” are now treated as criminals, found guilty of violating the police state’s abundance of laws, and preemptively stripped of basic due process rights.
Red flag gun confiscation laws: Gun control legislation, especially in the form of red flag gun laws, allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats. These laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, will put a target on the back of every American whether or not they own a weapon.
Disinformation eradication campaigns. In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.” The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association. In the government’s latest assault on those who criticize the government—whether that criticism manifests itself in word, deed or thought—the Biden Administration has likened those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists. This latest government salvo against consumers and spreaders of “mis- dis- and mal-information” widens the net to potentially include anyone who is exposed to ideas that run counter to the official government narrative. In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly. In this way, government and corporate censors claiming to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns are, in fact, laying the groundwork now to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
Government watch lists. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies have increasingly invested in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention. In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, or appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom.
Thought crimes. For years now, the government has used all of the weapons in its vast arsenal—surveillance, threat assessments, fusion centers, pre-crime programs, hate crime laws, militarized police, lockdowns, martial law, etc.—to target potential enemies of the state based on their ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that might be deemed suspicious or dangerous. It’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted. There’s a whole spectrum of behaviors ranging from thought crimes and hate speech to whistleblowing that qualifies for persecution (and prosecution) by the Deep State. It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Security checkpoints and fusion centers. By treating an entire populace as suspect, the government has justified wide-ranging security checkpoints that subject travelers to scans, searches, pat downs and other indignities by the TSA and VIPR raids on so-called “soft” targets like shopping malls and bus depots by black-clad, Darth Vader look-alikes. Fusion centers, which represent the combined surveillance efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement, track the citizenry’s movements, record their conversations, and catalogue their transactions.
Surveillance, precrime programs. Facial recognition software aims to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. Coupled with surveillance cameras that blanket the country, facial recognition technology allows the government and its corporate partners to warrantlessly identify and track someone’s movements in real-time, whether or not they have committed a crime. Rapid advances in behavioral surveillance are not only making it possible for individuals to be monitored and tracked based on their patterns of movement or behavior, including gait recognition (the way one walks), but have given rise to whole industries that revolve around predicting one’s behavior based on data and surveillance patterns and are also shaping the behaviors of whole populations. With the increase in precrime programs, threat assessments, AI algorithms and surveillance programs such as SpotShotter, which attempt to calculate where illegal activity might occur by triangulating sounds and images, the burden of proof has been turned on its head by a surveillance state that renders us all suspects and overcriminalization which renders us all lawbreakers.
Mail surveillance. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”
Threat assessments and AI algorithms. The government has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state. Before long, every household in America will be flagged as a threat and assigned a threat score. It’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
No-knock raids. No-knock, no-announce SWAT team raids are what passes for court-sanctioned policing in America today, and it could happen to any one of us. Nationwide, SWAT teams routinely invade homes, break down doors, kill family pets (they always shoot the dogs first), damage furnishings, terrorize families, and wound or kill those unlucky enough to be present during a raid. No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as much as five times a day. Police carry out tens of thousands of no-knock raids every year nationwide.
Militarized police. America is overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the public, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry. This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.
Constitution-free zones. Merely living within 100 miles inland of the border around the United States is now enough to make you a suspect, paving the way for Border Patrol agents to search people’s homes, intimately probe their bodies, and rifle through their belongings, all without a warrant. Nearly 66% of Americans (2/3 of the U.S. population, 197.4 million people) now live within that 100-mile-deep, Constitution-free zone.
Asset forfeiture schemes. Americans no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have been associated with some criminal scheme. As libertarian Harry Browne observed, “Asset forfeiture is a mockery of the Bill of Rights. There is no presumption of innocence, no need to prove you guilty (or even charge you with a crime), no right to a jury trial, no right to confront your accuser, no right to a court-appointed attorney (even if the government has just stolen all your money), and no right to compensation for the property that's been taken.”
Vehicle kill switches. Sold to the public as a safety measure aimed at keeping drunk drivers off the roads, “vehicle kill switches” could quickly become a convenient tool in the hands of government agents to put the government in the driver’s seat while rendering null and void the Constitution’s requirements of privacy and its prohibitions against unreasonable searches and seizures. As such, it presumes every driver potentially guilty of breaking some law that would require the government to intervene and take over operation of the vehicle or shut it off altogether. The message: we cannot be trusted to obey the law or navigate the world on our end.
Bodily integrity. The government’s presumptions about our so-called guilt or innocence have extended down to our very cellular level. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid with these mandates is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race. “Guilt by association” has taken on new connotations in the technological age. Yet the debate over genetic privacy—and when one’s DNA becomes a public commodity outside the protection of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on warrantless searches and seizures—is really only beginning. Get ready, folks, because the government has embarked on a diabolical campaign to create a nation of suspects predicated on a massive national DNA database.
Limitations on our right to move about freely. We think we have the freedom to go where we want and move about freely, but at every turn, we’re hemmed in by laws, fines and penalties that regulate and restrict our autonomy, and surveillance cameras that monitor our movements.
For instance, license plate readers are mass surveillance tools that can photograph over 1,800 license tag numbers per minute, take a picture of every passing license tag number and store the tag number and the date, time, and location of the picture in a searchable database, then share the data with law enforcement, fusion centers and private companies to track the movements of persons in their cars. With tens of thousands of these license plate readers now in operation throughout the country, police can track vehicles and run the plates through law enforcement databases for abducted children, stolen cars, missing people and wanted fugitives.
Of course, the technology is not infallible: there have been numerous incidents in which police have mistakenly relied on license plate data to capture suspects only to end up detaining innocent people at gunpoint.
The war on cash and the introduction of digital currency. Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with a mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient. This push for a digital currency dovetails with the government’s war on cash, which it has been subtly waging for some time now. In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue. A cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—plays right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).
The Security-Industrial Complex. Every crisis—manufactured or otherwise—since the nation’s early beginnings has become a make-work opportunity for the government to expand its reach and its power at taxpayer expense while limiting our freedoms at every turn. What this has amounted to is a war on the American people, fought on American soil, funded with taxpayer dollars, and waged with a single-minded determination to use national crises, manufactured or otherwise, in order to transform the American homeland into a battlefield. As a result, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, denied due process, and killed.
These programs push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
The ramifications of empowering the government to sidestep fundamental due process safeguards are so chilling and so far-reaching as to put a target on the back of anyone who happens to be in the same place where a crime takes place.
The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it won’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen. What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.
In effect, you will disappear.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms are already being made to disappear.
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Prepare For A Tidal Wave Of Evictions
BY TYLER DURDEN
SATURDAY, JUN 25, 2022 - 02:00 AM
A tidal wave of evictions could be ahead. More than eight million Americans are behind on rent payments, and the CDC's series of eviction moratoriums has long since expired. In other words, the government safety net to keep people off the streets is gone.
With no federal eviction moratorium in place, 8.4 million Americans, or about 15% of all renters, who are behind on rent, are at risk of being evicted. The new figures were part of a Census Bureau survey conducted between June 1 to June 13 of households and was first reported by Bloomberg.
The survey found that 3.5 million households were somewhat likely to leave their rented spaces (homes/apartments) within the next two months because of an eviction. Most of these folks are of the working poor class and situated in large metro areas from New York to Atlanta, where the cost of living, including shelter, food, and fuel, has skyrocketed.
About 6.7 million households said their rents increased, on average, $250 per month over the last year. The increase doesn't sound like a lot but remember that many of these folks are being crushed under the weight of the highest inflation in four decades. Their credit cards are maxed out, and savings are drained as wages fail to keep up with soaring consumer prices.
This shocking revelation is a reminder that today's current economic backdrop, which some say is stagflationary, could quickly morph into recession and surging jobless.
So who will the Biden administration blame for the coming tidal wave of evictions? He can't keep blaming "Putin."
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43:19 min
Transforming Through Trust | Davos | #WEF22
Jun 25, 2022
World Economic Forum
From harnessing emerging technologies to empowering those on the fringes of society, systemic solutions to the world's most pressing problems will require coordinated action from governments, businesses and local actors to ensure a sustainable and equitable post-COVID era. What actions and solutions can leaders take to rebuild the trust needed to reimagine the ways we live? Join us for an awards ceremony reimagined to celebrate the 2022 Social Innovators of the Year, who are transforming the world through trust. The World Economic Forum is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. We believe that progress happens by bringing together people from all walks of life who have the drive and the influence to make positive change. World Economic Forum Website
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The World Is Failing In Both Energy Affordability And Climate Goals
SATURDAY, JUN 25, 2022 - 03:30 PM
Authored by Alex Kimani via OilPrice.com,
- Global energy investment is forecast to rise by 8 percent to $2.4 trillion this year.
- Investment in renewables is rising, but it’s nowhere near the levels necessary to limit global warming within a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase.
- IEA: Inflation has brought the first increases in the cost of renewables in a decade.
- U.S. shale spending remains far below 2019 levels in 2022.
On the face of it, that’s great news for global energy supply and climate goals. But in reality, the rising trend is a function of galloping inflation, a deepening divide between developed and emerging economies’ investment trends, and an increase in coal investments as the biggest economies in Asia prioritize energy security amid soaring energy prices and upended energy markets following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Inflation To Eat Up Nearly Half Of Investment Increase
Global energy investment is forecast to rise by 8 percent to $2.4 trillion this year, with renewables and grid investments increasing at the fastest pace.
Still, nearly half of the $200 billion increase in investment in 2022 is likely to be eaten up by higher costs rather than bringing additional energy supply capacity or savings. Costs are soaring amid supply chain pressures, tight labor, and energy services markets, and surging steel and cement prices, the Paris-based agency said.
Inflation has also brought the first increases in the cost of renewables in a decade, and as capital-intensive technologies, renewables face a stronger impact from pressures affecting the cost of raw materials and financing than other forms of power generation, the IEA notes.
Cost pressures could raise the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) from variable renewables by 20-30 percent this year compared to 2020.
Nevertheless, the IEA says, investment in renewables remains attractive due to the role of clean energy in the energy transition, especially if backed by supportive government policies and incentives.
Renewable Investment Is A Tale Of Two Worlds
While renewables investment and capacity installations are continuously rising in developed economies and China, the developing and emerging economies are stuck at the same level of clean energy investment as in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed, the IEA’s estimates showed.
Apart from some bright spots such as growth in wind and solar in Brazil and utility-scale renewables in India, the developing economies except China struggle to see renewable energy investment take off. Those major regional variations in clean energy investment “underline the risk of new dividing lines on energy and climate,” the IEA notes, adding that “overall, the relative weakness of clean energy investment across much of the developing world is one of the most worrying trends revealed by our analysis.”
The cost of capital can be up to seven times higher in developing markets than in advanced economies. Moreover, in developing economies excluding China, public funds to back renewables are lacking, policy frameworks are often weak, economies are threatened by soaring inflation and increased poverty, and borrowing costs are rising.
“Much more needs to be done to bridge the gap between emerging and developing economies’ one-fifth share of global clean energy investment, and their two-thirds share of the global population,” the IEA said.
Fossil Fuel Investment Caught Between Climate Goals And Energy Security
Investment in renewables is rising, but it’s nowhere near the levels necessary to limit global warming within a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase. At the same time, investment in fossil fuels, including coal, is set to increase this year, undermining the global pathway to climate goals on the one hand, but still insufficient to meet rising global energy demand, on the other hand.
Investment in new coal supply is rising amid energy security concerns.
Investment in coal supply jumped by 10 percent last year, led by Asia, and is likely to rise by another 10 percent this year to reach $116 billion, which would be higher than the 2019 investment of $104 billion.
In upstream oil and gas, investment is also set for a 10-percent rise this year, to $417 billion, but it lags the $500 billion investment in 2019, per the IEA’s estimates. Moreover, cost escalation is diminishing the impact of higher spending on activity levels. Only the national oil companies in the Middle Eastern oil exporters are set to spend more this year than in 2019, as Saudi Arabia and the UAE look to boost oil production capacity.
Despite an expected increase of U.S. shale investments, the level of 2022 spending is still expected to be around 30 percent below 2019 levels, as operators focus on profitability and capital discipline rather than production expansion, the IEA noted.
In refining, the sector saw in 2021 the first net reduction in global capacity for the first time in 30 years, as near-record levels of capacity were retired in 2020 and 2021, contributing to the current tightness in global fuel markets. Investment in refining, however, is not certain going forward, the IEA says.
“However, the strong financial performance and high utilisation rates seen in recent months may not necessarily translate into higher investment levels given lingering uncertainty around the long-term outlook for oil demand.”
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Diesel Demand Set To Drop As Economies Enter Recession: Kemp
SATURDAY, JUN 25, 2022 - 11:30 AM
By John Kemp, senior energy analyst
U.S. diesel consumption is likely to decline by 200,000 to 600,000 barrels per day (5%-15%) over the next year as the economy slows in response to rising interest rates.
The Federal Reserve is not deliberately trying to induce a recession to bring inflation under control, central bank chief Jerome Powell told legislators on Wednesday. But he said that was a possible and foreseeable outcome of rapid rate rises – an interesting application of the doctrine of double effect.
The central bank hopes for soft landing but feels it must risk a hard one to reduce inflation running at the fastest rate for 40 years. Distillate fuel oil, a category that includes diesel, gas oil and heating oil, are the petroleum products most sensitive to changes in the business cycle so they will be impacted most as the rate of growth slows.
Even if the central bank can engineer a mid-cycle slowdown, rather than a cycle-ending recession, consumption of distillates is very likely to decline over the next year.
Both recessions and mid-cycle slowdowns have tended to reduce consumption of distillates by between 5% and 15% compared with the previous year.
With the volume of distillates supplied to domestic customers in the United States running at a little over 4 million barrels per day, the expected decline is equivalent to between 200,000 and 600,000 bpd.
Eurozone Recession
Europe’s distillate consumption is likely to see a similar or greater fall as the region’s economy enters a recession in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the impact of sanctions.
Eurozone manufacturers are already on the leading edge of a recession, according to preliminary data from purchasing managers’ surveys for the first part of June.
The eurozone composite manufacturing activity index slumped to 52.0 (47th percentile for all months since 2006) in early June, down from 54.6 (65th percentile) in May and 63.4 (100th percentile) in June 2021.
Rapidly escalating prices for crude, diesel, gasoline, gas and electricity as well as food are likely to force households and businesses to reduce spending over the next few months, pushing the economy into recession.
Lower volumes of manufacturing, construction and freight transportation activity will in turn cut diesel and gas oil consumption in the region, likely by a similar amount to the United States.
Lower distillate consumption is the only way to resolve shortages caused by the rapid rebound in economic activity after pandemic lockdowns, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and sanctions imposed by the United States, the EU and their allies in response on Russia’s oil exports.
In time, reduced distillate consumption will give the global refiners a chance to replenish severely depleted inventories and take some of the heat out of diesel crack spreads and prices.
Ultimately, reduced distillate consumption will stabilize and then lower fuel prices and transportation costs, which will flow through into slower inflation later in 2022 and 2023.
But the transition to lower oil prices and slower inflation is likely to involve a painful contraction in manufacturing and construction activity and employment first.
The Fed and the other major central banks may not intend to induce a recession or a significant mid-cycle slowdown, but that is the logical effect of sharply higher interest rates and tighter financial conditions.
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The Gas Inflation Crisis Is Far From Over – Where Will Prices Finally Stop?
SATURDAY, JUN 25, 2022 - 10:30 AM
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us
After a single Federal Reserve rate hike of 75bps I am noticing a trend among mainstream economists whipping out their crystal balls and predicting an almost immediate reversion to deflationary conditions. In their view, a recession will “balance everything out.” For most of these people I would suggest that they keep their crystal balls in their pants; they have been consistently wrong and it’s time for them to shut up. If you were predicting that inflation would be “transitory” last year, then you have no right to act like you are an economist today.
It’s going to take a lot more than one semi-aggressive rate hike from the central bank to stop the inflation problem, and when I say “inflation” I am talking about PRICE INFLATION, not the mere increase of the money supply or a bubble in stock markets. There are far too many financial analysts out there that don’t even grasp what true inflation really entails.
There are certain sectors of the economy that will indeed see deflationary pressures. Real GDP, for example, is witnessing declines. Retail sales are in decline. US wages are stagnant in comparison to prices. Housing sales are now falling rapidly. Manufacturing is dropping. Yet, prices continue to remain high. Clearly there is a mix of inflationary and deflationary elements within the same economic crisis. In other words, it’s a stagflation event.
An area in which prices continue to climb without much relent is energy. The mainstream blames this almost entirely on Russia’s conflict with Ukraine and the evolving sanctions against Russian oil and natural gas. However, gas prices were spiking well before Russia ever invaded Ukraine. Inflation in the overall economy hit 40 year highs long before Ukraine became an issue, as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell finally admitted this past week.
Let’s not pretend like we don’t know the cause of all of this. It is caused by fiat money printing by the Federal Reserve since 2008, and central banks in general are the culprits. The bankers can fund or refuse to fund whatever they wish. Government politicians play their role in creating inflation by ASKING for the money, but it is the Fed that decides if they create the money. The government has zero power to dictate policy to the Fed; as Alan Greenspan once admitted, the Fed answers to no one.
The central bank could print us into oblivion if they wished, and this is essentially what they have done. That said, there are other elements to our current crisis beyond too many dollars. There is also the issue of supply chain disruptions.
I am specifically reminded of the stagflation threat that occurred in 1970s. The oil and stagflation crisis of the late 1970s ran its course right before I was born, so obviously I can’t give a first hand accounting of what it was like, but when I study the events that led up to it I find a lot of similarities to the situation we are facing today. Though, the crisis that is developing right now has the potential to become far worse.
In the early 1970s Richard Nixon, at the request of central bankers, removed the dollar from the last vestiges of the gold standard. Central banks shifted away from gold as the primary trade mechanism between governments and started switching over to Special Drawing Rights; the IMF’s basket currency system. Not surprisingly, the dollar began an immediate spiral and its buying power began to crash. Stagflation became a household concern throughout the 70s.
This problem was mitigated eventually as the dollar’s world reserve status grew. Basically, we exported many of our dollars overseas for use in global trade, and by extension we also exported a lot of our inflation/stagflation. As long as the dollar remained the premier reserve currency, most of the consequences of central bank fiat printing would not be felt by the general populace. In terms of gasoline, the dollar has been the petro-currency for decades which allowed us to keep prices in the US lower than in many countries.
But things are changing. The dollar’s portion of global trade has been in decline for the past several years, and the Fed just keeps creating more greenbacks from nothing. In 2020 alone, the Fed conjured $6 trillion to fuel the covid stimulus response, pumping all that money directly into the system through covid checks and PPP loans. In order for this process to continue, the dollar’s global percentage of trade would have to keep growing in order to export US inflation overseas. This is not happening. The dollar’s percentage of global trade is in reversion.
We are dealing with the end of a cycle that started in the 1970s. We are going back to the beginning.
Furthermore, the gas crisis in the late 70s and early 80s was also driven by the Iranian revolution and the removal of Iranian oil supplies from the global market. This created a loss of around 7% of total oil from markets, but it resulted in gas prices exploding from 65 cents in 1978 to $1.35 in 1981. Prices more than doubled in the span of three years and never went back to where they were before the crisis.
As in the late 1970s, we also have a supply chain issue with an OPEC nation. The Russian portion of the global oil production was around 10% in 2020, but the nation is the 2nd largest oil exporter in the world. Only 3% of oil imported into the US comes from Russia, but Europe relies on Russia for around 25% of its total oil consumption.
The EU now supposedly cutting off that supply of oil, though there are questions surrounding loopholes and how much Russian oil is actually still being supplied to European nations. As sanctions continue, the EU will have to go to other exporters to get what they need and this is reducing the amount of supply available to western countries. The Russians have simply adapted, and are now selling more oil as a discount to major eastern markets like China and India. But for the rest of us, Europe’s thirst for oil is going to continue to cause price expansion as supplies falter.
So where does this leave us? Our situation is similar to the gas crisis of the late 1970s because we have ongoing stagflation, a weakening currency as well as a major economic conflict with an OPEC producer. That said, things are measurably worse than the 1970s for a few reasons, notably the fact that our country is in far more debt, foreign treasury and dollar holdings are in decline, and the conflict with Russia is far more egregious than our troubles with Iran in the 70s.
I suspect we will see at least a 300% markup in gas prices from pre-pandemic lows, which were around $2.60 per gallon for regular. Meaning, prices will continue to climb over the course of this year and level out around $7.50 per gallon by the second quarter of 2023. I am basing the pace of the price increases according to the pace that occurred from 1979-1981.
Obviously, there will be market dips and pauses, but it is unlikely we will see prices at the pump fall dramatically anytime soon. There will be endless predictions in the mainstream media about when inflation will stop and many pundits will claim that the Fed will capitulate soon on rate hikes. All this clamor will affect oil markets to a point, but prices will continue to rise regardless.
Some people will argue that declining demand will stop rising prices, however, the stagflation problem does not only revolve around demand, there are many other factors at play. Unless we see a drop in demand similar to what we saw at the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns, there is little chance there will be a meaningful reversal.
Also, for anyone hoping that US shale or OPEC will pick up the slack from Russia, this is not going to happen. Oil industry experts have already noted that because of inflation and lack of manpower there will not be a major uptick in oil pumping and so shortages will continue for some time.
What does this mean for the wider economy? Inflation in necessities like gas means an implosion in retail. People will divert funds away from other purchases to cover gas and energy costs. Expensive gas also means expensive freight rates, which means higher prices for everything else on the store shelves. Expensive gas will also cause smaller freight companies to go bankrupt or close up shop, along with much higher interest rates being instituted by the Fed. My own grandfather lost his trucking and freight company in the 1970’s for this exact reason.
In turn, less freight means less supply, which in turn means higher prices on everything. It’s a terrible cycle. The point is, you should expect gas prices to remain very high (into the $7 per gallon range) over the course of the next year, and this will affect EVERYTHING else in terms of your pocket book and your life. Don’t put too much stock in the people claiming deflation is on the way; not in prices of necessities it’s not.
Eventually, lack of demand will slow price increases but not until we are much higher than the current national average of $5 a gallon. And, if you live in a state with high gas taxes like California, then be prepared for double digit costs at the pump.
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
Zerohedge
ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero
www.zerohedge.com
EU Renews Digital COVID Pass Despite 99% Negative Public Feedback
SATURDAY, JUN 25, 2022 - 05:10 AM
Authored by Robert Kogon via The Brownstone Institute,
Acting on a proposal of the European Commission, the European Parliament, as expected, voted yesterday to renew the EU Digital Covid Certificate for another year. The vote was 453 for, 119 against and 19 abstentions.
The certificate regulation had been scheduled to expire on June 30. Earlier this month, a delegation from the parliament had already reached a “political agreement” with the Commission on renewing the certificate, thus making yesterday’s vote virtually a foregone conclusion.
The certificate regulation was originally adopted in June of last year, ostensibly to facilitate “safe travel” between EU member states. But the EU digital certificate quickly evolved into the model and sometimes infrastructure for the domestic “health” or Covid passes that would serve to restrict access to many other areas of social life over the following year.
The EU has opted to extend the covid certificate despite the overwhelmingly negative results of a public consultation on the subject that was launched by the European Commission under the heading of “Have Your Say” and that was open to the public from February 3 to April 8. The consultation elicited over 385,000 responses – almost all of which appear to be opposed to renewal!
In a letter to the European Ombudsman that the French member of the parliament Virginie Joron posted on her Twitter feed, Joron writes:
The overwhelmingly negative tendency of the responses was indeed evident from the outset.
The first full page of responses, all of them dating from February 4, is available here. They are, of course, in the varieties of languages of the European Union: French, German, Italian, and also one in English.
To provide readers an idea of the tenor, here is a translation of just the first line or two of the first several responses (starting from the bottom of the page):
And, finally, the English-language entry:
And so on and so forth through 385,191 responses.
The renewal of the Digital Covid Certificate does not mean that it will be immediately applied, but that the infrastructure will remain in place and that it can be applied if and when member states see fit to do so.
The current rules for holding a valid EU Digital Covid Certificate do not only, needless to say, discriminate against the unvaccinated, but also against natural immunity, which is treated as more ephemeral than vaccine-induced immunity.
Proof of completed primary vaccination makes a certificate valid for 270 days; proof of having received a booster dose confers unlimited validity for the moment. On the other hand, proof of “recovery” – with a positive PCR test being the only accepted proof – only confers 180 days of validity.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Dutch Political Party Warns: 'Transhumanism is as Dangerous as Nazism or Communism' (Video)
Amy MekJune 25, 2022
“Davos and Yuval Harari aim to create a physically and intellectually superior being that elites can control for the so-called greater good – for instance, to save the planet or prevent people from voting for Trump.”
For several months, the Dutch party Forum for Democracy (FvD) has made English-language videos about the most critical topics threatening our world. In the conservative party’s latest video, politician Simone Kerseboom warns us of the return of totalitarianism imposed by the globalist elite through transhumanism. The leader takes on the subversive World Economic Forum (WEF), its founder Klaus Schwab and his advisor Yuval Harari who plan to end Free Will and transform humans into robots.
Dutch Political Party Warns: 'Transhumanism is as Dangerous as Nazism or Communism' 4:11 min
Transcript
You have to follow science. Now, where have we heard that phrase before? As you know, it was used to defend the appalling Covid policies of lockdown and curfew around the world policies was destroyed human freedom.
But as we also know, these policies were not following the science at all. They were instead following scientists, some of them very sinister people who were not aiming to protect health because Covid is dangerous, but who instead became intoxicated with the possibilities of wielding immense power, which is what they did—helped, of course, by politicians who wanted the same thing.
Yet the same expression you have to follow science can also be heard from the lips of Yuval Harari, an Israeli intellectual who is the guru of the guru of Davos, Klaus Schwab. Harari uses it to defend transhumanism. Like Schwab, Harari says that Covid is an opportunity to develop what he calls a new regime of surveillance under the skin. What he means, and again, I’m quoting, is that “we’ll be able to hack human beings. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself”, Harari, says. AI and biotechnology will give us godlike ability to recreate completely new life forms.
Wow. Klaus Schwab’s great reset includes what he calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This, he claims, will lead to the fusion of a physical, digital, and biological identities.
Schwab said that in the next ten years, we will have intelligent microchips implanted into our bodies, which will communicate with devices outside our bodies and help us to develop into super humans, to quote a video called the Fourth Industrial Revolution available even now on the website of the World Economic Forum.
But this transhumanist project is, therefore, the official policy of the Davos elites. Of course, it is presented as progress, robotic limbs, and that sort of thing. But in fact, it is very sinister.
Harari has said the whole idea that humans have souls or spirits, and nobody knows what’s happening inside them, and have free will. That’s over. In other words, transhumanism aims to transform humans into robots. Free Will, that’s over. Transhumanism is the end of humanism and the end of humanity.
Now, most normal people, people like you, dear viewer, well, this myth such cheap science fiction as ridiculous nonsense. But unfortunately, Harari’s ideas are taken very seriously by very powerful people, and his books have sold 10s of millions of copies. He is believed by Schwab, who boasts Davos penetrates governments around the world. And the reason why is believed is that crazy people throughout history have indeed wanted to create a new man.
Hitler wanted to create physically superior beings through eugenics. The Bolsheviks wanted to create Soviet man whose behavior will be socialist and not individualist. Davos and Harari aim to do both to create a physically and intellectually superior being that elites can control for the so-called greater good – for instance, to save the planet or to prevent people from voting for Trump.
But none of this will ever work, of course, because there is such a thing as human nature, and it does not change. But the attempt to change it, as Hitler’s and Stalin’s experiments showed us, can cause horrific damage. The transhumanist danger is no less a danger than the Nazi or communist danger. And that is why Forum for Democracy we are determined to fight it.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Elon Musk's 'I-Robot' with 'unique human personality' set to be ready in three months
An I-Robot which can develop a unique human personality will be ready in just months, Elon Musk has revealed. The tech tycoon will unveil a prototype of
endtimeheadlines.org
Elon Musk’s ‘I-Robot’ with ‘unique human personality’ set to be ready in three months
Jun 25, 2022 | 0 |
An I-Robot which can develop a unique human personality will be ready in just months, Elon Musk has revealed. The tech tycoon will unveil a prototype of the humanoid called ‘Optimus’ during Tesla’s ‘Al Day’ event on September 30.
According to the Daily Star, The 125-pound bot is 5ft 8inchs and will be capable of dead-lifting 150 pounds ( 69kg) while carrying 45 pounds (21kg). Optimus’ face features a screen display of information and will be fitted with autopilot software, reports LadBible. Musk says it will include eight cameras to feed into the neural network, which is said to match the functions of the human brain.
The clever machine will use the cameras the analyze environments by identifying objects, images, and routes. Technologist, Raj Rajkumar, expressed his doubts about Optimus and said: “Is the ‘Tesla bot’ the next dream shot to pump up the hype machine?
“I can safely say that it will be much longer than 10 years before a humanoid bot from any company on the planet can go to the store and get groceries for you.” But the SpaceX founder has reassured critics that the robot can only carry out “boring tasks.” He told British journalist John from a live link-up at the forum in Doha:
“I hope that we will have an interesting prototype to show people.”We have a very talented team at Tesla that I’m working with closely to have a prototype humanoid robot ready by the end of September. “And I think we are tracking to that point.”
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Ahead of G7 Germany asks for Urgent Discussion on Inflation, Climate Policy and Worsening Energy Crisis - The Last Refuge
For those not paying close attention, the G7 is in serious trouble right now. The G7 includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and Germany. The EU and Japan are on the verge of a central bank financial crisis. Germany is the heart of the EU and their economy...
theconservativetreehouse.com
Ahead of G7 Germany asks for Urgent Discussion on Inflation, Climate Policy and Worsening Energy Crisis
June 25, 2022 | sundance | 151 Comments
For those not paying close attention, the G7 is in serious trouble right now. The G7 includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and Germany. The EU and Japan are on the verge of a central bank financial crisis. Germany is the heart of the EU and their economy is FUBAR as a result of sanctions against Russia, their energy dependence and an internal inflation rate exceeding 30%.
The G7 spending response to the COVID pandemic, a collective decision outlined by the World Economic Forum and central bank organizers, has created a massive inflation crisis amid all attached economies. Making matters worse the Build Back Better agenda promoting climate friendly energy policy over fossil fuels is pouring gasoline on the raging inferno of economic disruption.
The EU and Japanese central banks are tenuous at best, and the U.S. has seemingly positioned Europe and Asia for even further economic pain as a result of sanctions against Russia (EU) and a contracting U.S. economy impacting Asia. The intentional global cleaving is not working out too well as the G7 leaders assemble for their summit in the Bavarian Alps. This is the backdrop for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. In essence, the G7 climate policy cannot be sustained simultaneously with the German economy surviving:'
GERMANY – German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said he wants to put soaring inflation, the energy crisis and climate change at the center of the agenda when he meets fellow G7 leaders at Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps.
Germany, which holds this year’s G7 rotating presidency, is hosting the gathering of the heads of state and government of the world’s seven leading industrialized nations from Sunday through Tuesday.
“Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine is also having an impact here,” Scholz said in his video podcast on Saturday, pointing to steep rises in the prices of food and energy.
“Many things we buy are more expensive. Food, but especially the prices for energy. We notice that at the petrol station, we notice that when we have to pay the heating bill. Heating oil, gas — everything is much more expensive than a year ago,” he said, adding: “That’s why we have to prepare for it.”
The chancellor said the G7 leaders would discuss the current situation triggered by the war “and at the same time ensure that we stop man-made climate change.”
He stressed the need for a “climate club” to enable countries to work together to combat climate change as well as the current geopolitical and inflation crises. (read more)
For those unfamiliar with history, finance and global economics… The current geopolitical scenario is coalescing toward one specific outcome, WAR With Russia.
The only way out of the economic crisis the western alliance has created, is to go to war.
These are very serious times.
Beware the needs of the banks, the drumbeats of war always originate against a backdrop of empty vaults.
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marsh
On TB every waking moment
Meckler: In the Wake of Dobbs, Radical Federalism Is the Only Way Back to Civility
BY STACEY LENNOX JUN 25, 2022 6:26 PM ET
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, something strange happened. The largest and most vocal protests happened in Washington, D.C., and states such as New York and California where abortion access is likely to remain as permissive as it is today. Once people figure out a little bit of federalism is in play, the protests are not sustainable. The outrage will wane when people passionate about the right to abortion on demand, throughout pregnancy, and without apology realize most of them live in states where it is still available.
According to Mark Meckler, President of Convention of States Foundation & Convention of States Action (COSA), Dobbs must be the beginning of a trend toward more federalism, not an isolated decision. “The country is coming apart at the seams, and the fundamental reason, in my opinion, is a lack of federalism,” Meckler asserted. “What I mean by that is, is whoever is in power in Washington D.C., whether it’s Republicans or Democrats, roughly 50% of the country is angry about everything that is happening.”
“There’s too much being decided in D.C., and the way we solve the discord and calm everything down is to take the power away from D.C. and give it back to the states. Then we can debate these issues in the states where it was always intended to be done,” he added. Dobbs has put the issue of abortion squarely back in the hands of state legislatures.
According to Meckler, we need more issues sent back to the states to ease the pressure valve. Georgia can be Georgia and hold its elected leaders accountable. California can paint an airplane pink and fly all over the country, picking up abortion tourists if it likes. On a national level, abortion just ceased to be a wedge issue. For the foreseeable future, it will be hard to fundraise off it or campaign on it for federal office.
Because so much power has consolidated in the nation’s capital, starting with the reinterpretation of the commerce clause under FDR, almost every issue is becoming a national tug of war. “It’s not just every election,” Meckler noted. “It’s every Supreme Court nomination.
The Supreme Court now is the ultimate decider. So every time you have a Supreme Court Justice being nominated, there’s going to be a political nuclear war.” Returning to a more expansive view of the Tenth Amendment, where all but express powers return to states, would return Supreme Court confirmations to a legitimate measure of competence. That is something many of us have never seen since Robert Bork’s name became a verb in the late 1980s.
“I call what is going on in the country right now ‘The Great Decoupling.’ The country will come apart no matter what,” Meckler predicted. “The question is, how does it come apart? Does it come apart violently? Are people talking secession and civil war, or do we do it in a civil way?
The way you do it civilly is that you simply go back to the way that worked.” Meckler believes that since World War II, the United States has operated under what he calls a “veneer of unity” inconsistent with our history.
The states cooperated to address existential threats between the Revolutionary War and World War II. But people lived as a large, diverse group of loosely knit states in a republic. The founders were not a group of like-minded individuals and, in many cases, really disliked one another. They realized they needed to cooperate to address the threats from England, France, the Native American tribes, and Spain. They set up a federalist system to peaceably co-exist and come together for specific purposes when required.
That changed during World War II. The entire nation faced an existential threat with a spirit of national unity not seen since the Revolutionary War. Women entered the workforce together.
Everyone knew someone who was serving or had died in battle. The nation sacrificed, recycled, scrapped, and tended victory gardens together. When the troops came home, the country started to govern more from the federal level, ignoring the history of federalism.
The federal agencies started by Woodrow Wilson and FDR increased in number and consolidated power. By the 1950s, the national media emerged, reinforcing a veneer of unity.
Then national retail chains appeared, and we started eating the same food, watching the same entertainment, and cheering our favorite teams in national sports leagues. The feeling of unity began to crumble with the radical anti-war, anti-American movements in the 1960s. Our social schisms began during that contentious and violent period and have never gone away. Yet, power continued to consolidate in Washington, D.C., through an ever-expanding administrative state run by the Oval office.
We have existential threats today in China, Russia, a failed state and international criminal organizations on our southern border, and Islamofascism. According to Meckler, to release the pressure and resentment building in the country and deal with these threats internationally, the nation needs to return to a federalist approach to governance quickly. Fortunately, he feels the court’s current composition can aid in that process.
“I expect over the next couple of terms, we will see an end to Chevron deference. We have a [Supreme] Court that is hostile to the administrative state, which is an extraordinarily positive development,” Meckler observed. “The very essence of the administrative state is anti-federalism. One size fits all solutions come straight from unelected bureaucrats in D.C.” In Meckler’s opinion, most federal agencies have no constitutional basis and contribute to the ideological tug of war in the country today.
The carrots are getting harder to swallow, and the sticks are getting bigger. “These agencies are broadening their own powers because the administration directs them to do things like impose transgenderism on local schools by depriving kids of food,” Meckler added. Luckily, he thinks SCOTUS has shown hostility to that kind of bureaucratic overreach in their vaccine mandate decision and limitations the court already placed on the Chevron doctrine.
The decision in Dobbs reinforces his view that this court will make decisions that support federalism by sending issues back to the states that belong there according to the Constitution and limiting executive agency power. With states threatening to ignore the decisions of SCOTUS, staff leaking rulings in advance to sway the justices, and President Biden and the DOJ openly objecting to recent decisions, radical federalism can’t get here fast enough.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
Is the Green Agenda Being Forced Upon Us by Accident?
BY ROBERT SPENCER JUN 25, 2022 2:33 PM ET
The Left hates oil and gas, beef (and chicken, and all meat), and coal. But millions of Americans don’t believe the hysterical Leftist claims that these things are destroying the planet. What to do about these folks? A number of suspicious recent incidents suggest that some people have decided to take matters into their own hands and force compliance with the green agenda by leaving us no other choice.
Belying his “Putin’s price hike” propaganda, Old Joe Biden suggested in late May that skyrocketing gas prices were all part of a plan: “And when it comes to the gas prices, we’re going through an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels when this is over.”
Meanwhile, an April fire at the port of Benicia, Calif., hampered gasoline production. A natural gas pipeline exploded in Michigan in March.
The ”incredible transition” seems to be taking other forms as well. After a boiler explosion at Shearer’s Foods in Hermiston, Ore., in February, the company laid off its employees. In March, there was a large fire at the Penobscot McCrum potato processing plant in Maine. In April, a private plane crashed into Gem State Processing, a potato processing plant in Idaho. A week later, another private plane crashed into the General Mills plant in Covington, Georgia.
That same month, there was a massive fire at the Taylor Farms food processing plant in Salinas, Calif. Also in April, the Dufur, Ore., headquarters of Azure Standard, a leading organic food distributor, was destroyed by fire, and another fire destroyed the East Conway Beef & Pork Meat Market in Conway, N.H. Early in May, a chicken farm in Jones County, Miss., was destroyed by fire. Saladino’s food processing plant in Fresno, Calif., caught fire around the same time. A Walmart Fulfillment Center in Indiana caught fire in late May. Also in late May, a fire at Forsman Farms in Howard Lake, Minn., killed tens of thousands of chickens. In mid-June, there was a huge fire at the Festive Foods pizza plant in Belmont, Wis.
In Iowa in April, five million chickens were killed after discovery of a single case of avian flu. 22 million chickens have been killed nationwide in an attempt to contain the outbreak. Thousands of cattle died in Kansas in June; their deaths were blamed on the heat, but it was not an unusually hot month, and numerous people with farming experience were skeptical of the official explanation.
Meanwhile, on May 26, a coal train derailed near Gothenburg, Neb. On June 1, a train derailed near Lansing, Iowa, with ten coal cars leaving the tracks; the contents of one spilled into the Mississippi River. Another train derailed in Shiner, Texas, on June 3, dumping coal in the center of the town. In British Columbia, yet another coal train derailed on June 18, losing coal from fifteen rail cars. That same day, one more coal train derailed in Lawrence, Kan., spilling a “large amount” of coal.
Maybe it’s all just a huge coincidence. Accidents do happen, and many of these incidents have been classified as just that, accidents, with no foul play suspected. The problem with that is the sheer number of these incidents (and this article doesn’t contain a complete list) as well as the fact that all these alleged accidents coincide perfectly with the push towards the bicycle-riding, bug-eating future the Left envisions for us.
Whatever their cause, if these fires, derailments, and other odd incidents keep happening, we’ll simply have no other choice than to go green and start chowing down on grasshoppers.
And when has the Left ever been interested in choice, aside from its vaunted “pro-choice” stand on abortion (that doesn’t carry over to bodily autonomy for vaccines or anything else)? Back in 2015, hardline Socialist Bernie Sanders declared, “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” George Orwell was yet again dead-on in 1984 when he envisioned a socialist dystopia that offered only one brand of everything (“Victory Cigarettes,” “Victory Gin,” etc.), all of it shoddy and poorly made. That was life in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and that will be life in the United States if the Left gets its way. And with all these “accidents” happening, the Left is closer than ever to getting its way.
marsh
On TB every waking moment
American Agri-Women Warn, Significant Vulnerabilities in the US Food System 4:55 min
American Agri-Women Warn, Significant Vulnerabilities in the US Food System (Lt. Col Tommy Waller)
Economic War Room Published June 25, 2022
Putin knows food is a weapon of war, foreign policy depends on it. Are you ready?
American Agri-Women Warn, Significant Vulnerabilities in the US Food System (Lt. Col Tommy Waller)
Economic War Room Published June 25, 2022
Putin knows food is a weapon of war, foreign policy depends on it. Are you ready?