Reviewing Assumptions,
Colonel Douglas Macgregor is known as an adept military analyst. He advised President Trump, and would have been privy to information which might lead him to this conclusion. He might see a particular war-gamed scenario now playing out, for instance. Somebody he knows may have given him recent information.
"I don't think we'll ever get to the 2024 election.
I think things are going to implode in Washington before then.
I think our economic Financial condition is fragile - it's going to come home to roost in ugly ways.
Now I will tell you I don't know exactly how it will happen, but I think we're going to end up in a situation where we find out the banks are closed for two or three weeks, and nobody can get into them.
I think we're going to run into something like that.
I also think that the levels of violence and criminality in our cities is so high that it's going to spill over into other places in society.
People that normally think they can live remote from the problem are now beginning to be touched by the problem.
Then I look at this thing in Ukraine.
I think Ukraine is going to lose catastrophically - it's going to be a complete collapse and that too is going to have an effect here at home because people are going to say, well, wait a minute everybody told us Ukraine was winning, everybody told us X Y and Z.
I mean sort of the the Russian hoax on steroids.
All of those things are going to come together or converge in some way that's going to prevent us from reaching you know the status quo. Oh. another election... Oh, another set of campaigns... And so forth..." https://www.zerohedge.com/political/i-dont-think-well-ever-get-2024-election-col-douglas-macgregor-ret-warns
Half of Russian Strategic Missile Divisions Now Use Hypersonics in Response to US Escalation. Pentagon Failures in Strategic Weapons Capabilities? https://www.globalresearch.ca/half-russian-strategic-missile-divisions-now-use-hypersonics-response-us-escalation/5825705
Seymore Hersh, FEAR AND LOATHING ON AIR FORCE ONE (I just read the free part, which is quite a good story. Thanks Christine)
Let’s start with a silly fear but one that does signal the Democratic Party’s growing sense of panic about the 2024 Presidential election. It was expressed to me by someone with excellent party credentials: that Trump could be the Republican nominee and will select Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his running mate. The strange duo will then sweep to a huge victory over a stumbling Joe Biden, and also take down many of the party’s House and Senate candidates.
As for real signs of acute Democratic anxiety: Joe Biden got what he needed before the NATO summit this week by somehow turning Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inside out and getting him to rebuff Vladimir Putin by announcing that he would support NATO membership for Sweden. The public story for Biden’s face-saving coup was talk about agreeing to sell American F-16 fighter bombers to Turkey.
I have been told a different, secret story about Erdogan’s turnabout: Biden promised that a much-needed $11-13 billion line of credit would be extended to Turkey by the International Monetary Fund. “Biden had to have a victory and Turkey is in acute financial stress,” an official with direct knowledge of the transaction told me. Turkey lost 100,000 people in the earthquake last February, and has four million buildings to rebuild. “What could be better than Erdogan”—under Biden's tutelage, the official asked, “finally having seen the light and realizing he is better off with NATO and Western Europe?” Reporters were told, according to the New York Times, that Biden called Erdogan while flying to Europe on Sunday. Biden’s coup, the Times reported, would enable him to say that Putin got “exactly what he did not want: an expanded, more direct NATO alliance.” There was no mention of bribery.
A June analysis by Brad W. Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations, “Turkey’s Increasing Balance Sheet Risks,” said it all in the first two sentences—Erdogan won re-election and “now has to find a way to avoid what appears to be an imminent financial crisis.” The critical fact, Setser writes, is that Turkey “is on the edge of truly running out of usable foreign exchange reserves—and facing a choice between selling its gold, an avoidable default, or swallowing the bitter pill of a complete policy reversal and possibly an IMF program.”
Another key element of the complicated economic issues facing Turkey is that Turkey’s banks have lent so much money to the nation’s central bank that “they cannot honor their domestic dollar deposits, should Turks ever ask for the funds back.” The irony for Russia, and a reason for much anger in the Kremlin, Setser notes, is the rumor that Putin has been providing Russian gas to Erdogan on credit, and not demanding that the state gas importer pay up. Putin’s largesse has been flowing as Ergodan has been selling drones to Ukraine for use in its war against Russia. Turkey has also permitted Ukraine to ship its crops through the Black Sea.
All of this European political and economic double dealing was done openly and in plain sight.
Turkey is also getting the EU-membership carrot dangled:
Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of the alliance ... announced that an agreement had been reached between Ankara and Stockholm.
The Turkish authorities previously stated that the main condition for approval of the NATO application submitted by Sweden in May 2022, should be the fulfillment of the obligations of the Madrid Memorandum on Combating Terrorism. However, before flying to the NATO summit, Erdogan said that Turkey would support Sweden's application to join the alliance in exchange for lifting barriers to Ankara's EU membership.
Turkey has been officially seeking EU accession as a full member since 2005. https://tass.com/world/1646383
Meryl Nass MD, Mr. Kennedy Goes to Washington
to testify to the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government and specifically CENSORSHIP
“The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government will hold a hearing on Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 9:00 a.m. ET. The hearing will examine the federal government's role in censoring Americans, the Missouri v. Biden case, and Big Tech's collusion with out-of-control government agencies to silence speech.”
WITNESSES:
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., attorney
Emma-Jo Morris, journalist at Breitbart News
D. John Sauer, Special Assistant Attorney General, Louisiana Department of Justice...
..This follows Kennedy’s 2024 presidential campaign announcement in April. He has frequently been referred to as an “anti-vaccine activist,” and in June, YouTube removed an interview between Kennedy and Jordan Peterson for violating its guidelines against vaccine misinformation.
The social media platform told The Hill in a statement that its general vaccine misinformation policy “prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities.” [On those "facts" of theirs. "Not good facts", as lawyers say.]
Yesterday’s hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray was another maddening experience of faux contrition and open evasion. Wray apologized for violations that have already been established by courts or Congress (often over the best efforts of the FBI). However, on ample public evidence of new violations, Wray continued to use his favorite testimonial trilogy to dismiss any questions: expressing (1) lack of knowledge, (2) ongoing investigations, and (3) promises of later answers or briefings. He did, however, hold forth in detail after Rep. Eric Swalwell asked him about FBI Family Day. Despite the near total lack of substance, Wray did make one surprising denial. He insisted that the FBI does not engage in censorship efforts, focuses only on “foreign disinformation,” and does not pressure companies to censor others. Those denials are not only directly contradicted by the recent 155-page opinion of a federal court and the Twitter Files, but a new release from the Twitter Files and journalist Matt Taibbi. Johnathan Turley https://jonathanturley.org/2023/07/13/my-wray-or-the-hard-wray-new-twitter-files-contradict-fbi-directors-testimony/
Charles Hugh Smith is positioned without much money, but good social capital and a vegetable garden in rural Hawaii.
The "Goldilocks" economy of the past 30 years was enabled by the deflationary forces of globalization and the vast expansion of credit, a.k.a. financialization. Both of these have topped out and are reversing. Globalization is no longer lowering costs and everything under the sun has already been commoditized and financialized. There's no more pools of "free money" (or free anything) waiting to be exploited.
Real-world inflation is crimping discretionary spending, leaving less to service additional borrowing. Post-pandemic "revenge" splurging has depleted savings, and since all speculative bubbles eventually pop, the inevitable collapse of the Everything Bubble will kick the reverse wealth effect into high gear.
In summary, here's the problem: the system only functions with Goldilocks moderate inflation but that is no longer possible given the changing tides of globalization, financialization, real-world inflation and rising global risks. This leaves those in charge of the status quo system that benefits the few at the expense of the many with no sustainable option other than doing more of what's failed until it fails spectacularly.
Michaael Hudson sums up a recent interview:
America is in the same position as the Roman Republic, when it finally turned into the Roman Empire. The polarization has gone so far that there cannot be any recovery of living standards, any rise in wages, any improvement in living conditions, without radically changing the tax policy, the economic policy, without having a policy that benefits labor and productive industry, not the financial sector, and the real estate sector. That the financial sector and the property owning sector is outside of the economy. It’s external, it’s imposed on the economy. The economic core is workers for wages, producing goods and services. That core doesn’t need a financial wrapping.
You don’t need a wealthy 1% to finance the government’s budget deficit. Governments can do it by itself. The governments should have the role that the banks have today. That means there are not going to be any more big bank buildings overshadowing urban skylines. It means that there will be, basically, a return to what the whole world thought was an ideal of industrial capitalism, before World War I. And that was that capitalism would evolve steadily into socialism, to be a more productive economy, to free itself from the financial class, from the landlord class, and from the monopolists, and that a free market is a market free from land rent, free from bank rent, and free from unearned income, and wealth, that doesn’t play any productive role at all. https://globalsouth.co/2023/07/10/michael-hudson-why-the-u-s-economy-cannot-re-industrialize/
Sergey Lavrov following the results of the Russia-ASEAN Conference, Jakarta, July 13, 2023
Question: At the NATO summit in Vilnius, J. Stoltenberg officially stated that the alliance would work closely together with partners from the EU and Asia against Russia and China. Is this setting of goals surprising or not? How, in principle, can one evaluate the results of the summit, given the rather vague wording regarding Ukraine?
Foreign Minister Lavrov: I have known Johannes Stoltenberg for a long time. Nordic character, speaks directly, not in verse. This is not the first time such statements have been made.
I have already mentioned that the US and NATO doctrinal documents state that Russia and China are threats and challenges. Now in Vilnius, he said that not just the plans of Russia and China, but relations between Russia and China are a threat to the North Atlantic Alliance. It turns out that we are not even supposed to have a relationship, according to their desire. This is a hopeless path, once again confirming the relevance of the task we are now setting together with many partners of countering modern forms of colonialism, attempts to hegemony in world affairs and a direct violation of the aforementioned principle of the UN Charter on the need to respect in practice, in deed, the sovereign equality of all states.
NATO members are clearly not ready for this. https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1896772/
A Midwestern Doctor relates having the same thoughts and observations over time that I did. We did not expect these novel vaccines to be effective against a coronavirus, but to cause increased deaths in the vaccinated, like happened in all of the animal trials of coronavirus vaccine over decades. It was worse than that, because of specific engineered parts of the spike protein resembling human cellular proteins, and inducing autoimmune disease. The lipid-nanoparticle platform and mRNA (that never turned off for months) had their own damaging effects, making these vaccine-products actual bioweapons against the people who accepted them.
Why Do Vaccines Continually Fail to Live Up to Their Promises?
Proceeding Cautiously (pictured with stir-fry)
The only glimmer of hope I have—and it remains just a glimmer—is the Trump-Kennedy ticket being allowed to run and win without either another assassination or election theft. Once in office Kennedy may be enough of a politician to navigate Trump’s great vanity and narcissism toward a coherent policy of constructive domestic reform and dismantling the empire. Given the assassination of Kennedy’s uncle, his father, and cousin (John, Jr.), and given the blatant theft of the 2000 presidential election and so many local ones like Kari Lake without effective political push-back; given the persecution of the January 6th PSY-OP “insurrectionists” succeeded wonderfully despite piecemeal reversals over time, and its planners go unscathed, one has to imagine a scenario in which the various Deep State-Ruling Elite actors decide that they have gone too far and that their own interests would be better served by putting Trump-Kennedy at the helm. That takes more imagination than I have these days.
It is extremely difficult to differentiate between Roman Empire decay and planned destruction of the Nation-State and there are clearly elements of both operating. If the general collapse foreseen by McGregor happens these elites have already paved the way for a fully totalitarian dystopia of total social control with W.H.O. forcing more constraints and vaccine health upon us while sustainably-programmed CBDC abandons growth in favor of a centralized totalitarianism telling us how and where and when to spend our chits before they or we expire, preferably the latter.
Thank you Dr John for this thought provoking blog - so much detail and credible scenarios. All we can do is wait and see how this plays out - stacked up with food and water. Talking of which supper looks PDG..enjoy!