Seeking Solutions in Crisis
Patience and diligence
Problem Solvers,
The Deeper Meaning of Ukraine, Alastair Crooke . Thanks Eleni
They (tributary nations of the world) have bad experiences from World Bank and IMF-style predatory development doctrines. Now they have the evidence that properly-prepared states can not only survive western sanctions, but can use them as a tool to alter the global trading system to their advantage.
The risk coming from the coming cost-of-living crisis is easy to grasp: The risk from additional food shortages is almost beyond calculation. There – as in Europe – is fear, and anger too, at system disintegration; fear, as cities become both violent and mal-administered. They are not seeking ‘more Europe’; more identity politics. They don’t care a jot for ‘more anything’. Anger is plain as people want systems to work – yet they don’t . They want to return to living life, normally.
And as the cold winds of inflationary price hikes and recession blow, they look to their leaders - not for ‘more free market’ – but rather, for protection from markets and regulatory absurdities. They sense the danger of unknown ‘doom-loops’ imploding parts of their economies.
This is the major geo-strategic message to emerge from the West’s war on Russia: Russians – and many others - say that they have ‘had it’ with ‘Westification’ (by which is meant its ‘missionary’ attribute). https://english.almayadeen.net/articles/analysis/the-deeper-meaning-of-ukraine
Tom Luongo, Why "Joe Biden" Refuses to Back Off Ukraine Over the weekend I was asked by Sputnik News to comment on why Fungal President Select Biden was so set on supporting Ukraine against Russia with money and weapons despite abysmal approval ratings and a fiscal budget hole that widens daily... The short answer is what I’ve been saying for nearly three years now, The Davos Crowd wants the US destroyed and it is working from within and without our government to achieve that goal. Biden’s staunch support of Ukraine fits that thesis perfectly.https://tomluongo.me/2022/07/04/why-joe-biden-refuses-back-off-ukraine/Last week the issue seemed to be that Ukraine called grain from Donetsk and Luhansk (provinces vs People's Republics) "stolen", while Russia did not agree. Ukraine has lashed out at Turkey and is currently demanding answers over a Russian-flagged cargo ship that was allowed to pass through straits controlled by the Turkish government as it sailed out of the Black Sea. Ukraine alleges the vessel was full of stolen Ukrainian grain, while Moscow has dismissed the reports as false. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ukraine-furious-turkey-allowing-passage-russian-ship-full-stolen-grain
More Tom Luongo, China Queues Up to Join the Davos Beatdown (Long rambling rant, but here's the point. Cut out the WEF/Davos.)
I do believe pushing the US into political crisis is the ultimate Davos play here. The problem is, since Putin moved on Ukraine the way he did, there is no pulling that off without atomizing Europe in the process.
So, for once, Davos is staring at a Hobson’s Choice rather than their victims. That Vlad, what a card!
China doesn’t want war with the US anymore than Russia does. So opening up China’s economy and Biden lifting tariffs here are the right capital-attracting moves to force even more instability on Europe.
If we avoid WWIII, along with the Fed putting Congress in a fiscal straightjacket, then we can effect real political change in the US
Everyone wins.
I do believe this is the single most important point every other analyst has missed over the past couple of years. The point of beating Davos is to stop WWIII, stop the messy dissolution of the US which would be a catastrophe for everyone, and end the cycle of violence which has emanated from the European colonial powers for centuries.
The US can survive this fiscally and politically. https://tomluongo.me/2022/07/05/china-queues-davos-beatdown/
Let me propose a political scenario, to take place after the November midterm elections go strongly Republican, where "Joe Biden" gets thrown under the bus, resigns in ignominy, and Kamala Harris becomes POTUS, which nobody wants. The deal would let all current scoundrels off with resignations, wrist-slaps or nothing, and would declare that the "swamp had been drained". Business-as-usual would proceed with some shift in the mix of special interest groups, but not cutting out the MIC, Big Oil or Wall Street. Steps would be taken to goose the economy. The premise would be that this would create a "bottom" and a sustainable economic rebound. I'm dubious that the rebound after a false-capitulation would be sustainable, because the corrupt and inefficient system would not have been fundamentally changed, and the rest of the world cannot be sold on American global finance from now on. The world is going multipolar with $-debt repudiation on the near horizon.
Biden Sold 1 Million Barrels From Strategic Petroleum Reserve To Chinese Firm Hunter Invested Inhttps://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-sold-1-million-barrels-strategic-petroleum-reserve-chinese-firm-hunter-investedTop House Republican Presses Yellen For Records On Hunter Biden’s Foreign Business Dealings https://www.zerohedge.com/political/top-house-republican-presses-yellen-records-hunter-bidens-foreign-business-dealings
They can't push the refineries any harder, and investing in new refineries is a bad-economics with current US government policy. U.S. refineries have been operating at or near maximum utilization levels in recent weeks as demand recovers. Petroleum stocks are sitting at multi-year lows, and refining margins are sky-high. Refinery utilization at 95% is at its highest since before COVID—September 2019. Yet, refiners don’t have much room to safely raise capacity usage further, while the summer season with heat waves and hurricanes could suddenly take some capacity off the market, further straining gasoline supply and putting upward pressure on gasoline prices.
Refiners are running crude processing at full tilt. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Are-US-Gasoline-Refiners-Running-Out-Of-Steam.html
Charles Hugh Smith, on economic first-principles:
..If you don't keep the foundation--the industrial base--glued together, then all the high-minded ideological or financial fixes will all be completely, utterly meaningless. When the generator breaks down and can't be fixed due to a lack of critical spare parts, that isn't a problem that has a "Progressive" or "Conservative" fix. Printing money and tax breaks won't fix it either. And neither will ideological fixations like "global markets."
Financial gimmicks and global markets are what got us into this mess in the first place. Greed is good until you sacrifice your national security and industrial base for a few extra bucks.
From this perspective, there is one solution to all the problems, because if you don't fix the industrial base then the whole shebang collapses. All those little things like a judiciary, law enforcement and food supply system all rely on a functional industrial base, by which I mean the interwoven industries that made the millions of essential parts and components of a complex industrial economy. https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly22/one-solution7-22.html
Thanks Michael Reid, The End of the Industrial Age, John Michael Greer (The Archdruid)
..My basic advice hasn’t changed. “Collapse now and avoid the rush” remains the keynote of an effective response. What this means, with the snark filtered out, is that you are going to be living for the rest of your life with much less energy and much less of the products of energy than you’re used to. The sooner you start living that way, the sooner you’ll get competent at it, and the sooner you’ll discover that most of the energy- and resource-wasting activities central to the American way of life of the recent past don’t actually do you any good—their real function, after all, is to keep you shackled as closely as possible to the corporate-bureaucratic technostructure. The more high-tech gimmickry you can do without, and the more you rely on your own capacities instead of slurping at an assortment of technological teats, the more free you are and the more resilience you have in the face of the future.
The same rule applies to families, groups, and communities. There was a lot of noise back in the peak oil days about building sustainable communities, and nearly all of it ended up as wasted breath, for two simple reasons. The first was that everybody wanted the benefits of community but next to nobody wanted to put up with the costs, burdens, commitments, and annoyances that a viable community involves. The second was that a genuinely sustainable community in the deindustrial future taking shape around us is going to involve a lot fewer middle-class comforts and a lot more plain hard muscular labor than most Americans these days are willing to consider. https://www.ecosophia.net/the-end-of-the-industrial-age/
Fewer Americans are employed, but more Americans are working 2 jobs, so the statistical sets have very different appearances. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/something-snaps-us-labor-market-full-part-time-workers-plunge-multiple-jobholders-soar
Thanks Eleni, Japan’s Kishida steps on Russian oil slick , M. K. Bhadrakumar
Last week, President Vladimir Putin issued a decree that appears to be a step towards nationalisation of the foreign shareholdings in the giant Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project where Mitsui and Mitsubishi hold 22.5% shares. The five-page decree says it is up to the Kremlin to decide whether foreign shareholders should remain in the consortium.
Meanwhile, Tokyo’s support for the US proposal at the recent G7 summit advocating a price cap on Russian oil has put Moscow’s back up. On Tuesday, the former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev sternly warned that Japan would be kicked out of Sakhalin-2 project and its supplies of Russian oil and gas cut off if it supported the US move. Medvedev forecast that if any price cap is imposed on Russian oil, the market price will touch somewhere between $300-$400 per barrel!
Sakhalin-2 is critical to Japan for meeting its energy needs. Sakhalin-2 alone meets about 8% of Japan’s gas needs and to replace it, Tokyo has to buy from spot market where competition for LNG shipments globally is currently intense and the price is around 6 times that of Russian gas. Besides, Japan’s entry will tighten the LNG market materially this decade, as Japan will have to compete with Europe.
Japan depends on imports to meet 90% of its oil and gas needs... As Russia tightens its screws on Japan, it appears Kishida may have bitten more than what he could chew on the price cap idea. Top Japanese experts have doubted the rationale behind Japan’s policy trajectory. Of course, Moscow’s dexterity to use oil and gas as geopolitical tool is not to be doubted. The Kremlin decree on Sakhalin-2 could be intended, partly at least, as a wake-up call that alienating Russia could damage Japan’s vital long-term interests. https://www.indianpunchline.com/japans-kishida-steps-on-russian-oil-slick/
This has been going on all month and you would not know that from Western mainstream media. Most Americans have heard nothing at all about this massive protest, bigger than the Canadian truckers. Dutch farmers are very productive, export a lot, and are well organized.
The Dutch Farmers’ Protest and the War on Food, 7/2/22 This (now last) week, tens of thousands of farmers have gathered from all across the Netherlands to protest government policies which will reduce the number of livestock in the country by up to a third.
In a typical example of media weasel-wording, the press reports on this all headline something like “Dutch farmers protest emissions targets”, but this is a massive lie by omission.
The government policy being protested is a 25 BILLION Euro investment in “reducing levels of nitrogen pollution” true, but it plans to achieve this by (among other things) “paying some Dutch livestock farmers to relocate or exit the industry”.
In real terms, this ultimately means reducing the number of pigs, chickens and cows by about thirty per cent. That’s what is being protested here – a deliberately shrinking the farming sector, impacting the livelihood of thousands of farmers, and the food supply of literally hundreds of millions of people. https://off-guardian.org/2022/07/02/the-dutch-farmers-protest-and-the-war-on-food/
The police missed his head by an inch as he was driving the tractor away from the protest at night. They claimed that he was threatening police lives, but the video shows that charge to be completely false. (Nice looking farm-kid. His dogs appear to like him alive.)
Jouke, a 16-year-old teen that was shot at by Dutch police officers late Tuesday night, has just been freed. Before being released, a massive crowd of Dutch farmers and protesters rallied outside the police station holding him to protest the arrest.
Indeed, farmers and other protesters showed up in droves, with tractors lining the streets and people crowding the sidewalks. Signs to Free Jouke have been seen across the country, and police have been under extreme pressure. https://thecountersignal.com/breaking-teen-who-was-shot-at-by-dutch-police-freed/
100 Sikh security guards fired for not adhering to Toronto’s mask mandate According to CBC News, the city has been mandating that security guards wear N95 masks while on the job at settings such as homeless shelters since January. The city confirmed that employees working within the Shelter, Support, and Housing Administration (SSHA) department must wear N95 masks at all times and be clean-shaven so that the masks provide effective protection against Covid-19...
For devout Sikhs, leaving their hair uncut is an important part of their faith. In a practice called Kesh, Sikhs allow one’s hair to grow out naturally out of respect for the perfection of God’s creation. https://tnc.news/2022/07/04/100-sikh-security-guards-fired-for-not-adhering-to-torontos-mask-mandate/
The ones who leave have the stronger wills, compared to those who comply. They commit to working out the difficult consequences of their actions. What happens to the owners when they fire 22% of their (already undermanned) enforcers?
San Diego Loses 22% Of Its Police Force Due To Vax Mandates https://www.zerohedge.com/political/san-diego-loses-22-its-police-force-due-vax-mandates
This is not where the buck-stops, is it? Austria passed laws fining people every month they were not "vaccinated"Cracks in the wall appearing. Austrian Minister of Health Shifts Responsibility for Vaccine Damage to Doctors. The most epic throwing under the bus to save your own ass of our generation begins.
All-cause mortality has risen in all age groups , including children, around the world, synchronized with use of COVID vaccines in those groups. National governments will not cough up the requested specifics of the statistics to see if most deaths are among the vaccinated. Why not? https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/all-cause-mortality-effects-of-covid
One of the members of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) vaccine advisory panel explained why he voted against adding an Omicron component to fall COVID-19 booster shots raising serious questions over a lack of critical data and the Biden administration’s role in politicizing the process...
Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and professor of pediatrics in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, described the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee’s (VRBPAC) recent meeting as “unusual.” ...
“Here on the other hand, normally you get the EUA [Emergency Use Authorization] submission from the company, which is 85 to 100 pages long, and then you get the FDA’s review of all those data. It’s a very thorough review. Not here though. Here, it was 22 pages from the FDA, which included a half-page on Pfizer’s data and a half-page on Moderna’s data.”
“You could get that from the press release,” Offit said. “In fact, it was no more detail than the press release provided.” ...
..Offit said he was surprised that out of 21 voting members, 19 voted “yes” because he “just didn’t see the evidence for that.” ...
..The press release mentioned VRBPAC had just made its decision the day before, “so you just kind of felt like the fix was in a little bit,” Offit said. “Maybe that’s not the right phrase but it was something they wanted and I felt like we were being led here and with a critical lack of information.” https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/dr-paul-offit-covid-vaccine-mandate/?
There are many more childhood cancers where pesticides are sprayed on crops, county by county, very specific data on cancers and spraying locations. Two studies published in the peer-reviewed journal GeoHealth used geospatial data and publicly available pesticide databases to uncover the relationship between chemical-heavy agricultural practices and cancer in both adults and children...
..Rather than focus solely on the impacts of pesticide use on farmers or agricultural workers, the studies consider the broader effects of agricultural pesticide use on the public at large...
..Delving deeper into specific pesticide types, a strong connection is found between the amount of fumigants applied in each state and the rate of pediatric cancers.
Specifically, the fumigant pesticide metam sodium has a strong connection between its higher use and the total cancer rate.
These findings are even more prevalent at the county level...
..Notably, the areas where fumigant use is high are those with more vegetable and fruit production, rather than grain crops like corn and soy. Regarding the cancer connection to fumigant use, study co-author Naveen Joseph, Ph.D. says, “We have not seen it expressed in a fumigant like this before, and it’s absolutely striking.”https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/pesticides-cancer-children-western-united-states/?
Japanese militarist former Prime Minister , Shinzo Abe was assassinated with 2 discharges from a homemade shotgun by a "frustrated" former maritime self-defense forces (navy) member. The 41 year old assassin did not try to flee and was arrested at the scene. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/former-japanese-pm-shinzo-abe-shot-chest-rushed-hospital
Organic Grower (took this picture of Jenny in new kitchen with custom window trim and shave-leveled cabinets)
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Thanks for your efforts in navigating these turbulent waters, capt Day... Salty seadogs galore there be... Arrr