Struggling To Exist
Existing,
Battles for existence, for survival, typically become vicious. We may have seen video clips of animals fighting in such struggles. In human affairs, we mostly know abstractions of this.
We don't really know it, unless we have been in a war or something similar. Wartime decisions, which may kill hundreds of thousands of people, like the Siege of Leningrad killing 800,000 civilians, are also made abstractly. They discount the vast human suffering and death as necessary for abstract reasons, and the suffering and death are imposed through military bureaucracy channels.
The bureaucratic channels of finance, which control our life support systems, "economy", are even more effective at distancing the decisions from the human and environmental outcomes, which directly result.
People in general can accept the disconnect, and experience the results and the workings as mysterious. This is coupled with the misinterpretations of history, which we are forced to memorize and regurgitate as children, never to look back. When we look back as adults, we often find that the wars were fought for economic reasons, and the people were made to participate through the propaganda-reasons, which we later memorize.
The global, $US-based, post-WW-2 western financial system is in death-agony, so to speak. At the end of WW-2 the US had an unbombed industrial base and 2/3 of the global gold, so the $US was agreed to be the new gold-standard. Any country holding $US could exchange them for gold. Major European powers had to go off the gold standard after WW-1, which cost more than they could afford to pay back, especially Germany, which got saddled with the debts. The US had made US exports so cheap by devaluing against gold (FDR) that gold came to the US for manufactured goods, as the Great Depression starved and froze cheap American labor.
That's not what I was taught, or you, either.
We did learn about Nixon being forced to default on the gold standard after wars in Asia drained America's gold, and we learned that he and Kissinger made the "petrodollar" deal with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, with Iran's Shah also cooperating, which propped the dollar up quite well. "Just sell your oil for only $US and buy Treasury debt and we will protect your family regime".
American military economy boomed, funded by the rest of the world buying oil in $US. After the USSR collapsed, the target of the American military beg=came any country wanting to sell oil for other than $US, like Iraq, like Libya. That sustained the regime. IMF and World Bank practices to lend at userous rates to corrupt dictatorships with natural resources kept those people too poor to use their own resources, like oil.
Like all such regimes, this one is coming to an end, despite a long run. It hollowed out the US economy in the process, and is doing so to the German and EU economies now, acutely. This is reportedly to shore up the US economy, but it's just cannibalistic financial-colonialism swallowing itself. It seeks to do more of the same, consume real economy, and get rid of people with claims on that economy, like retirees, but these are just temporizing measures. That can has been kicked down the road for decades.
The rest of the world supports this with real economic output, but wants to stop being bled and also extorted, blockaded and bombed.
Russia has recovered from the collapse of the corrupt financial system of the USSR despite neoliberal attempts at corpse-picking. Russians understand neoliberal financial parasitism quite well.
If global financial capitalism could actually parasitize Russia and Russian resources, it could grow again for awhile. The war in Ukraine was supposed to crash the Russian economy and bring Russians to depose Putin and "open their economy" again. It was a hail-Mary-pass.
Russians widely understand that this is now an existential battle between Russia and all of western financial capitalism. Almost no westerners seem to understand this. It is a pretty threatening concept, that we depend upon a corrupt and erosive economic system, not one that is healthy and productive, that such systems collapse (just in Russia and China, right?), and that our system is crumbling into collapse now.
Oil "production" being in terminal decline after half of it being pumped and burned is also an important factor, but it just hastens the inevitable. We should not forget it. The world economy will be different. "Recovery" will be a new experiment going forward.
The rest of the world may well be bitter and want restitution from our bankrupt system. I can only hope that "we" can join whatever the rest of the world patches together.
The Russian Federal Security Service ("FSB") has claimed that the assassination of Dugina was committed by a covert operative of Ukraine. The FSB has identified Natalia Vovk as the alleged assassin...
According to the FSB's investigation, Vovk entered Russia in July before situating herself in the same apartment building that Dugina resided in. Vovk would then follow Dugina to the festival in which the explosive device that led to her death was planted. Vovk, who was accompanied by her 12-year old daughter, fled to Estonia following the assassination, according to Russian intelligence. Following her identification, Russian law enforcement agencies declared their intent to seek her extradition.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russian-fsb-identifies-alleged-dugina-assassin
Russia releases video of suspected Moscow car bomber http://thesaker.is/russia-releases-video-of-suspected-moscow-car-bomber/
Russian soldiers in Ukraine hospitalized with severe chemical poisoning Traces of Botulinum toxin Type B, which is an “organic poison of artificial origin,” have been discovered in samples taken from the servicemen, the ministry said, accusing Kiev of “chemical terrorism.” https://www.rt.com/russia/561214-ukraine-chemical-poisoning-moscow/
Consciousness of Sheep, "The Purpose of the System" , Thanks A.F.K.T.T. in Kiwiland. If I were to suggest that we do not have an energy crisis, you would no doubt wonder exactly what type of mushrooms I’d put in my risotto. Nevertheless, please bear with me for a moment while I explain. While it is certainly true that the UK (and Europe) is currently experiencing eye-watering rises in the price of gas, electricity, petrol, and diesel, this is not – at least not yet – the energy crisis that I have been writing about on this blog for close to a decade. What we are currently experiencing is the final economic crisis of the neoliberal system… expensive energy is merely the rocky nemesis upon which the neoliberal ship is being torn apart..... the most pernicious myth to emerge out of the crisis of the 1970s – that a recession actually caused by an oil shock – the Iranian revolution and the enduing war with Iraq – came to be attributed to the steely determination of Saint Paul Volcker and the all-seeing and all-powerful Federal Reserve Bank. And just as the recession had very little to do with central bank policy – except for making matters worse than they need have been – the recovery in the mid-1980s was primarily the result of opening up new, non-OPEC, oil fields in Alaska, the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico rather than the technical expertise of economists and central bankers.....And the purpose of the system? Well, as Anthony Stafford Beer, a management theorist of an earlier age, explained:
“The purpose of a system is what it does. There is after all, no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.”
If you and I are forced to go hungry and cold this winter it is not because we have an energy crisis, it is simply that the neoliberal system – which includes such utilities as energy, water, and the fair distribution of wealth – is doing what it was set up to achieve. https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/08/21/the-purpose-of-the-system/
China has converted industrial regulations to an even more direct wartime command structure. China Is Preparing To Go To War https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/08/china-is-preparing-to-go-to-war/
As drought dries up the Yangtze river, China loses hydropower
No rain and a 70-day heat wave spur crop failures, power cuts, and dangerously-low reservoirs across parts of China. https://grist.org/drought/as-drought-dries-up-the-yangtze-river-china-loses-hydropower/
Time to regulate Dutch family farms out of business for the environment!European Corn Yields Expected To Plunge Amid Worst Drought In 500 Years https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/european-corn-yields-expected-plunge-amid-worst-drought-500-years
See "The purpose of a system is what it does", above. ‘No Farms, No Food:’ Dutch farmers confront billionaire ‘green’ elite’s food system reset plan https://thegrayzone.com/2022/08/19/farms-food-dutch-farmers-protests-elite/
Pea-Picking (picking black-eyed peas)
Always worth reading your subs. Thank you so much. Very informative.
Very nice....
I didn't know about the drought in China.
But I do know about the manipulation that forces us into outcome WAR.
Some three months ago the great damn was close to collapse / overflown and now that.
It is in fact all unnecessary and man made from Top down.
I actually wrote about this because I see that we can make a change with simple solutions that will bring balance to the ecosystem devastated by irrational thought:
I envisioned a great sea in the land of Australia which is over 10m below the sea level.
Connecting it with the open sea would do the clogged arteries of the planetary ecosystem a lot of good, a system that naturally keeps itself in balance.... with a little help from its passengers.
Call it the Great Mar a Alice Springs... where 50° C of Sunlight would produce natural clouds in abundance... Ground water levels are raised... and food is provided.
The passengers themselves would be fed by this in land sea that used to be there in Australia.
I envisioned a great artificial lake of similar making in the Sahara.
Not only would Ground water levels be raised but also energy production water purification and farmland activation could be build there for centers of excellence and learning hubs.
These Learning places would perfect the technology as to split water into H² and O² with the highest level of efficiency.
All this together would not only clean up this world raise Ground water levels it would also implement a new way of thinking and provide food and education in abundance.
Food for thought.