GOV/MIL Main "Great Reset" Thread

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The ‘Great Reset’: A Blueprint for Destroying Humanity’s Freedom​

Frank Bergman September 17, 20225 Comments

World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” agenda is a blueprint for destroying the freedom of humanity by stifling innovation and prosperity for all but the global power elite.

Schwab and the WEF pitch the “Great Reset Initiative” as “an economic recovery plan” drawn up in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schwab describes three core components of the Great Reset: creating conditions for a “stakeholder economy”; building in a more “resilient, equitable, and sustainable” way, utilizing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics; and “harness[ing] the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

The Fourth Industrial Revolution involved replacing human beings with “smart automation” to make industries less reliant on people.

The WEF’s top advisor Yuval Noah Harari recently declared that “we just don’t need the vast majority of the population” in today’s world.

As for the “redundant” human workforce, the WEF argues that: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”

According to the WEF, owning property, traveling, and driving vehicles will be limited to the wealthy elite.

How do nations become wealthy?
Many are blessed with abundant natural resources.
Others conquer foreign lands.
Some specialize in unique trade skills and crafts.

Timber, mining, fishing, sugar, rum, narcotics, cotton, silk, agriculture, conquest, human slavery, manufacturing, oil, industry, banking, and so on — depending on the century and the region, nations have attained tremendous wealth in myriad ways, as J.B.Shurk of The Gatestone Institute notes.

Notice that no nation has managed merely to print money and tax its citizens on the path to prosperity.

Real wealth cannot simply be conjured from thin air.

There must be recognized value in what a nation and its citizens possess.

More than any other source of national wealth, however, one towers above the rest: innovation.

The ability of the human mind to create something new and valuable provides society with endless wealth creation.

Unlike central bank quantitative easing and other monetary tools (or tricks?), the brain really is a money-printing machine.

Whether an innovator alters existing farming, mining, or manufacturing techniques to make production cheaper and more efficient, or an inventor designs something entirely unique, value that did not exist yesterday materializes the next.

Innovation is the magic sauce for generating wealth.

If innovation produces wealth, why aren’t all nations wealthy?

Because too many nations fail to value innovators or encourage innovation.

Without fundamental property rights, strong social institutions, and a dependable legal system, potential inventors have few incentives to build anything new.

Humans struggling merely to survive in the world do not waste time, labor, or resources on projects that offer no prospect for future reward.

Humans working as servants to the state under centrally controlled economies have no incentive to innovate.

Only when private ownership and personal liberty combine can human innovation flourish.

Freedom is the secret ingredient to innovation’s magic sauce for increasing wealth.

When economists crunch gross domestic product numbers to see whether a nation’s economy is rising or sinking, a measure of innovation becomes quantifiable.

Embedded within that number is something that encapsulates human ingenuity, personal freedom, and property ownership.

In this way, economic innovation directly reflects the human condition at any point in time.

It provides a measurement of a nation’s freedom.

Now “liberalism” as it is classically understood — as a political philosophy embracing natural rights, limited government, free markets, political and religious freedoms, and freedom of speech, all promoted and protected by an impartial and just rule of law — has always grasped this fundamental truth.

Liberty and property rights spawn creativity.

Where both are soundly valued, great writers, artists, and inventors produce novelties that would not otherwise exist.

It is why medieval Florence birthed at once both modern-day banking and the European Renaissance.

The personal freedom to create, build, invest, and own property generates tremendous innovation and national wealth.

Conversely, when today’s central planners argue for socialized control over markets and the substitution of “collective rights” in place of “individual rights” while calling their agenda “progressive liberalism,” they co-opt and subvert liberalism’s historic meaning.

From this recognition that a nation’s freedom directly affects a nation’s wealth arises an even more remarkable truth: any nation that fails to embrace and protect human liberty will be the poorer for it.

A country whose institutions do not respect property rights or whose customs do not value freedom will remain a barren desert for human innovation.

In this way, nations have a great incentive to liberalize over time.

Should they not, they quickly become financially and militarily vulnerable to more innovative and wealthier nations.

Observing this simple truth, classical liberals have always understood free markets as the gateway to human emancipation.

Economic self-interest, in other words, ultimately leads to expansive human rights and liberties across the planet.

Now with all that as a bit of rudimentary background, how is it that today we have entities such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) pushing for a radical “Great Reset” of Western society that promises to handcuff free markets with economic regulation while concentrating power into the hands of a small international coalition of central economic planners — most notably their own?

How could promising a future where people will “own nothing and be happy” possibly be conducive to a free and productive society — or even a happy one? How can a future in which all energy is controlled by international governing bodies and multinational corporations possibly provide individuals with the institutional building blocks for endless innovation?

How can farmers sustain larger and more prosperous populations when Western governments continue to stifle agricultural production through regulation and eminent domain?

The questions answer themselves. The WEF’s agenda promotes radically anti-liberal programs such as the use of artificial intelligence to censor dissent, regulate free speech, and even erase ideas from the Internet.

Its repressive efforts to control all hydrocarbon energy and cattle and crop farm production will smother human innovation by first depriving Westerners of their ability to create, invent, and grow food.

Its policies betray millennia of Western civilizational advancement by replacing respect for individual choice and free will with top-down management of human activity through the blunt instruments of force and coercion.

Its motivations are indisputably anti-human at their core because each individual human life is treated as nothing more than a cog or input that can be manipulated as part of a centrally-controlled social machine.

When Westerners are reduced to ones and zeroes that are sorted and shifted by the WEF’s social programming codes for a “better future,” builders obey but no longer create.

Whereas personal liberty has unleashed the human mind and generated tremendous Western prosperity, the World Economic Forum’s push for a centrally controlled economic system will crush rights, stifle creativity, and mass-produce poverty and servitude.

Its proponents, in fact, seem mostly committed to using a combination of pandemic, famine, and fear to centralize dominance for themselves.

In order to persuade Westerners to give up more and make do with less, the WEF and its globalist allies promise Westerners a future Utopia.

As with every similar lie ever told to justify the extraordinary acquisition of power, though, they will fail to deliver.

No society, after all, was ever promised more than in Stalin’s 1936 Constitution of the USSR — or subsequently treated more abysmally.

Despite its claims to the contrary, the WEF’s mission directives intentionally reverse Western trends toward greater human freedom, social mobility, and more broadly obtainable wealth — or what, in another era, would have been rightly regarded as true, liberal progress.

Although the WEF and its sister organizations claim to be “saving the planet,” their efforts seem primarily an ignoble design to control the planet.

“Clean” energy, after all, is controlled energy; and the more that energy is controlled by centralized governments, the more completely once-free markets become centrally controlled.

If every potential entrepreneur must first receive permission to use electricity before producing anything new, then no entrepreneur can thrive without the central authorities’ blessing.

If all manufacturing is viewed as a “threat to the planet,” then no independent upstart can innovate or build wealth without first seeking and obtaining government approval.

If consumers are forbidden from buying anything unless it is first pre-approved, then free markets are transformed into controlled markets.

Taking this trend to its logical yet communist conclusion, private property becomes antithetical to the state’s goals. We already see the ominous subversion of private ownership today with so-called ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) standards used to strong-arm industry goals and manipulate free markets.

Because control over information makes control over markets more manageable, the more economic uncertainty that results from market manipulation, the more censorship we’ll continue to see.

Recently, even a senior economist who correctly stated that the American economy had entered into a recession found his research “fact-checked” and “corrected” by the U.S. government’s friends at Facebook.

Where free markets are under attack, free speech is inevitably under attack, too.

The individual blessings of liberalism are not easily dissected from the body politic without inevitably rendering liberalism’s death, as a whole.

The issue today may be “climate change” or COVID-19 or “sustainable food supplies,” but the stated issue never seems anything more than a public relations campaign for fooling the masses.

It always appears to be merely a disposable excuse designed to seduce Westerners into handing a small cabal of “elites” power and control over everyone else.

Convincing mankind to believe that free markets will inevitably lead to some kind of apocalypse increasingly looks like the only policy goal that matters.

It may well be the most diabolical trick those with power have ever played against those with no power at all.

Fear is used expertly as a torturer’s tool to convince Westerners to forsake willingly their own freedom.

The innocent mantra whispered into their ears is simple: Trust us, humanity, we will save you.

The implication, however, is far more sinister: For your own good, you must be made to enjoy your new chains.

Notice that for the World Economic Forum to succeed in its mission to control all human activity, it must first destroy the sovereignty of nation states.

Why? Because, as noted above, liberal nations that embrace freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and free market entrepreneurship foster innovation and great wealth. Any nation not encumbered by the WEF’s market proscriptions will most likely continue to prosper, while those shackled to the “Great Reset” will most likely languish.

This is why Western politicians have worked so hard together to push their “Build Back Better” proposals irrespective of the wishes of any one nation’s voting citizens.

Wealthy free nations are a threat to the WEF’s New World Order.

If censorship must be embraced to control the “narrative,” then so be it.

If citizens must be denied freedom of movement under the guise of a “health emergency,” no big deal.

If private bank accounts must be seized to intimidate protesters, then such threats are the price for ensuring compliance.

In this way, the WEF’s plans for a controlled economy intentionally reverse centuries of liberal progress.

Political leaders today are dragging the West into the past.

First, individual liberties will continue disappearing.

Then, the greatest economic engine of all, innovation, will dry up. Finally, wealth will return solely to the hands of a small “ruling class” minority.

This is the future the World Economic Forum hails as “progress.”

It is not. It is a recipe for human bondage.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Lara Logan: Biden's Invasion at the Southern Border Is Next Step to Global Government​

By Alexandra Bruce
Forbidden Knowledge TV
September 17, 2022

Lara Logan joins Steve Bannon and she’s got a lot to say about The Plan.

“The border is wide open because we are living under a Globalist policy of open borders, so there is no border security to speak of. Weapons are flowing across, drugs are flowing across, people are flowing across, money is flowing across, you know, illicit funds and so on and so on. Everything that comes from an open border is what’s flowing.

“And the reasons it’s happening, Steve – it’s not just an invasion. It is an invasion but an invasion that is primarily that’s part of a longterm plan and political ideology to obliterate the sovereignty of this nation and change the way the world looks, forever.

“It’s not just America’s sovereignty that’s on the chopping block, it’s sovereignty over the world. It’s just that this is the place that is the light and the guide for the whole world. And so this is the country that has to fall first in order for the other countries to fall.

“And what I learned from a source, who is a very unique source, having infiltrated the Globalist “cult” at the UN level is that he was in high-level meetings that required a number of security clearances where they actually discussed the plan to bring 100 million people into the United States, in order to pave the way for a regional government of US, Canada and Mexico.

“And that was to bring in 100 million people from Latin American countries, together with a strategy of creating these cartels, making life unbearable. It’s called the “Push-Pull Strategy”, where they push people out of these countries, where it’s unbearable living like this and they pull them into the United States.

“And then, once you’ve reached that critical number of over a hundred million in this invasion, they will then propose, ‘Well, for your family and friends back home, who need ease of travel, they need a better life and so on and so on – we can do all this better with a regional government than we can with a US Government.’ And they will have enough critical mass inside the country in order to effect that policy.

“That’s the Globalist plan that we’re working towards. But what we’re already doing is that we’re living under their policy, where they’ve made the right to migrate a “human right”, recognized by the UN in 2018 and that now supersedes our sovereign rights, thanks to the Biden administration and the open border ideologues who are in this government, who were never asked, to be honest, about their strategy on the campaign trail, who have bypassed the legislature and are implementing a strategy and a policy that, not only did no Americans vote for it, because they weren’t given the opportunity but most Americans don’t support.”


Since Joe Biden took office, Lara says, “They have escalated these policies. They’ve escalated the implementation and there are a number of people in intelligence who I talk to who say, the plan was that Trump wouldn’t exist. It would go from 8 years of Obama to 8 years of Hillary, to 8 years of another Democrat, to never seeing another Republican administration.

“If you look at this as a longterm plan over several administrations – in fact, even Democrat and Republican, because both have failed on the National Security element at the border, then what you see is that that this plan is not very far away and it’s not all unrealistic, in a sense.

“And when you look at that and you connect the dots – remember when Chris Matthews compared Bernie Sanders to Hitler?…I think it was in 2016. And so he was immediately dethroned, because you couldn’t have that. You couldn’t have that comparison coming from the Left, because people would see that it was true!

“So when that happened and Chris was actually removed, his spokesperson was out everywhere, saying that, ‘The Days of milk white America were over and that the future of America is diverse and he spoke with the same kind of certainty that people have, for example when they don’t write a concession speech, because they know that they’ve ‘won’ the election, as Hillary Clinton failed to do in 2016 and she was so shocked, when she didn’t ascend to the throne, because they reversed the cheat…and I know this from intelligence people who were involved in this and other people who are familiar with what happened.

“So, when you connect those dots, what you see is, here’s a guy saying the future of America’s diverse, and yet, at the same moment, 70% of the American nation is still white. So how is he so certain? Well, because there’s a plan.

“That’s what you see behind all of this. That’s what I try to do as an investigative reporter; is not just react emotionally to the fact that Kamala Harris is a complete liar and it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that Texas is overrun. The reason they’re sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and and so on isn’t just to make a point, it’s because these towns have gone past capacity, the Border Patrol is past capacity.

“The number of border patrol agents who are experiencing extreme trauma, because they’ve got hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors crossing that border, many of them are babies…aren’t they supposed to be reunited with their parents in America, who are here without their children? Right? This is to rejoin families that have been separated.

“Well, how were they separated, if they’re just babies? What families are they going to? Why are hey still in the custody of Heath and Human Services, months and sometimes even longer later? Or in the custody of NGOs, because what do they love? They love shoving these kids into NGOs and then they disappear and nobody can ever know what happens to them, whether they reach their families or whether they don’t reach their families and you don’t have any reporters in even asking the question, because most of the media is completely captured and just in the tank for the Biden administration and they’re not asking ay difficult questions about anything.

“If you can imagine the impact that this has on the border patrol agencies, they’re all past capacity. Suicide rates are up and through the roof and it’s the same in the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency. They’re not being able to do their job. And what they’re seeing is an endless stream of people, while terrorists come across while National Security is obliterated but what they’re actually looking at, if you step back from that emotion of the moment is that they are looking at a very carefully crafted strategy that is backed by the most powerful people in this country, some whose names we know and some whose names we don’t know and dark money and all those other things that go behind it, protected by layers and layers of deception, masked with the NGOs that is part of a broader strategy to annihilate not just sovereignty of this nation but of every nation on Earth, because they seek to have control of the whole globe.

“And that shouldn’t be a shock or a conspiracy to anyone, because there’s been 40 million movies made about people that wanted to rule the world, right?”

With all of this, Lara believes that Texas can solve this problem, as she said they did in 2015.

“Texas has the Board of Public Safety, which is a fairly unique law enforcement agency that is able to step in the breach here. They know how to shut down the border, they’ve done it multiple times but what they’re lacking is the political backing to do so. While Governor Abbott is doing a lot and he talks a big game, at the end of the day, Texas hasn’t shut down the border, have they?

“They haven’t taken your Federal Taxes and put them into an escrow account and used that to finance a state border force. Abbott has done nothing about the fact that the border force is derelict in its duty to uphold the Constitution, which then, in that case, some of these powers can revert to the states.

“The states have the power – not just Texas – but they have the power to prevent the federal overflight of federal drones. They can kick out every Federal Employee. They don’t have to be subordinate to these federal agencies who are clearly not doing their job, who are trampling on the rights of American citizens and so on.

“In fact, it’s gotten so bad, that a number of people in Texas, some of them law enforcement, some of them private citizens have come together and they have created a military-style threat assessment. And I say ‘military-style’, not in the sense that there’s anything militaristic about it, but in the sense that that’s what the military’s job is, traditionally.

“We rely on our intelligence agencies and the military to write what is called a threat assessment, a National Security Threat Assessments that identify the true nature a scope of the threat. Because by presenting that to the American People, you can start to get the policies that are actually going to effect change and are actually going to be targeted at the problem as it exists – not the fake problem that people in Washington are pretending doesn’t exist – but the actual problem.

“So they’ve written a threat assessment and you can do things, like you can designate the cartels as a terrorist organization. You can recognize the fact that law enforcement’s model no longer works.”

Steve Bannon then asks her when this report that she’s referring to will be promulgated?

“Tomorrow, Friday, in Houston. It’ll be presented at a workshop open to the public; anybody can come and listen and it will be made publicly available to whoever’s interested. This event is at the VFW and so people can find it online and Steve, it’s really a first, because the Government is so derelict in its duty and in identifying the true National Security Threat of opening the border to the most violent criminal organizations in the world, which are the cartels in Mexico and documenting the concision of those cartels from drug organizations, the multinational drug organizations who are now, their number one product is human beings.

“And so all these people who say they care about slavery and all the rest of it, they apparently don’t care that all these people are being trafficked across the border and put into debt slavery, where they owe the cartels forever, because they can’t pay their debts or they’re being trafficked for sex, where the average amount of time that a child stays alive after being trafficked for sex is 2 years.

“Two years of being raped every single day for money until you’re killed. And then, they’re also trafficking people for labor. So you have all these people in woke cities saying, ‘Oh, aren’t these immigrants good people? They’re working 2-3 jobs.’ They’re working 2-3 jobs, because most of their money is going to those cartels and they don’t see the light of day and their lives don’t get better, they get worse…

“The other part of this strategy is to dilute the pool of people within the United States who know how this country was founded, who understand those principles and believe in them and believe in the flag and are proud to be American and want to preserve this country as it was founded.

“What you’re doing, instead is you’re bringing in illegal immigrants ad legal immigrants and you’re teaching them that America is bad. It’s full of racists. It’s systemically racist. It never did anything good for anybody and you’re encouraging, basically the decline of this nation from within.

“And for many of these people – I just became a citizen – and when I went to my packet on the seat, where the oath is and everything that I needed to know, you know what the top page was? The top page was a flyer from the League of Women Voters.

“And anyone who knows anything about the League of Women Voters today and some of their history knows that this is not a bipartisan organization, this is not a nonpartisan organization. This is a highly-partisan political organization, one of the many that hides behind their 501 c(3) status and lies to people and comes to them deceptively and says, ‘We’re just encouraging you to vote’.

“No. What they’re doing is taking the new immigrants, taking these people who go to cities like Minneapolis and making sure that they have them in their clutches, to get them to vote the way that they want to and to think the way they want to and to believe what they believe.

“So, diluting the pool of patriotic Americans while flooding the country people and ignoring the fact that really, what we’re doing is we have someone like Ilhan Omar and people in her district who, the causes they’re signing up to, they don’t believe in the United States. They don’t like anything about this country. They want to change everything about it and they’re at war with the people, themselves.

“But they’re not the ones the FBI is worried about, right? The FBI is worried about people like you and people like me and Mike Lindell, the Pillow Guy, right? Those are the ones they’re going after. Ans what the media is doing is helping them in that, because they are taking a knee to this ideology and they are playing down the fact that there are Islamic terrorists and breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists in our own cities and our own schools. And that’s truly an indictment on our leaders who know exactly what they’re doing, because this is part of a bigger plan.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Concrete shortage causing higher prices, construction delays

By Gabe Prough
Published: Sep. 14, 2022 at 3:19 PM PDT

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (Fort Wayne’s NBC) - Supply shortages have affected the construction industry since the pandemic began about two years ago, but now, the issue is a shortage of concrete.

Supply chain issues and labor shortages have specifically caused a lack of one of concrete’s key ingredients: cement mix. Without cement mix, concrete can’t be made.

That’s causing issues around northeast Indiana and northwest Ohio, including Huntington county. Huntington county Commissioner Tom Wall says some projects around the county are double the cost. Other construction projects are so far behind schedule that they may lose state funding that’s time-sensitive.

As for homeowners, they’re having a hard time even finding someone to pour concrete for small projects.

The shortage is causing backups for concrete contractors too. They rely on concrete mixers to make the concrete. But if the mixers don’t have the necessary ingredients, they’re limited as to how much concrete they can supply.

The concrete shortage is showing no signs of letting up anytime soon, which will mean continued delays for major construction projects and personal home improvements alike.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Brandon Really Excited To Push Floating Wind Turbines

September 17, 2022 – 7:15 am

I can think of the perfect place for the first ones

Biden plans floating platforms to expand offshore wind power

The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to develop floating platforms in the deep ocean for wind towers that could power millions of homes and vastly expand offshore wind in the United States.

The plan would target sites in the Pacific Ocean off the California and Oregon coasts, as well as in the Atlantic in the Gulf of Maine.

President Joe Biden hopes to deploy up to 15 gigawatts of electricity through floating sites by 2035, enough to power 5 million homes. The administration has previously set a goal of 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030 using traditional technology that secures wind turbines to the ocean floor. (snip)

The Biden administration “is all-in on making floating offshore wind a real part of our of our energy mix and winning the global race to lead in this space,” Granholm said. ”And that’s why we set this big, hairy audacious goal” of 15 gigawatts of floating offshore wind by 2035.

It’s not quiet deep water, but, how about

1663475325701.png

Think he’d be good with a bunch of floating wind turbines right there? Or regular ones? Or, will he try and block them like John Kerry and Ted Kennedy did for the Cape Wind project?

Understand, I’m not against this. I’m for it. I think it’s a great idea. We have to account for rough seas and storms and running the power lines, along with upkeep, but, sure, take advantage of the wind which is free without ruining the view. And not having massive concrete pads like for onshore ones. But, you know the Elite climate cultists will not want to see them. And, if they’d stop pushing this stuff because of ‘climate change’, they’d get more support.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Scandalous: Biden Reportedly Pressuring FBI Agents to 'Find' Cases That Push 'Domestic Extremism' Talking Points

By Bonchie | 6:30 AM on September 17, 2022

A new report is confirming what many have suspected for years: The Biden administration is allegedly pressuring FBI agents via top officials to “find” crimes that support the president’s “domestic extremism” talking points.

Going back to 2021, federal law enforcement targeted parents at school board meetings as terroristic threats for speaking out. Over the course of Biden’s term, we’ve also seen top FBI and DOJ brass, including Dir. Christopher Wray and AG Merrick Garland, repeatedly assert that “domestic extremism,” specifically white supremacy, is the nation’s top threat.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1404828495818235908
.36 min

According to rank-and-file agents, though, the demand for such crimes far outstrips the supply. The report comes via The Washington Times.

“The demand for White supremacy” coming from FBI headquarters “vastly outstrips the supply of White supremacy,” said one agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We have more people assigned to investigate White supremacists than we can actually find.”

This isn’t surprising. How many stories do you actually hear of real, violent white supremacist attacks in this country? No one is denying that cosplaying nazis exist and that they never commit racially motivated crimes, but their numbers are so minuscule and their threat so small that it’s extremely rare that you see a direct attack. On no planet does that add up to being the nation’s top domestic threat.

Yet, the Biden administration has made one of its chief talking points that white supremacy and “right-wing extremism” is the preeminent threat of our time. It’s been a political boon for the White House as they seek to then paint their Republican opponents as either participants in or instigators of such ideology.

“We are sort of the lapdogs as the actual agents doing these sorts of investigations, trying to find a crime to fit otherwise First Amendment-protected activities,” he said. “If they have a Gadsden flag and they own guns and they are mean at school board meetings, that’s probably a domestic terrorist.”

Also included in the Times’ report is a quote from a man named Brian Levin, who purports to study hate crimes in the United States. Per his findings, hate crimes rose by 20% in 2021.

Mr. Levin, an independent, said White supremacist ideology consistently motivates the most deadly hate-fueled attacks. He noted a concerning rise in online extremism among White supremacist groups.

“We have these ticking time bombs walking around like Buffalo or Mother Emanuel church,” he said, referring to mass shootings where Blacks were targeted. “That’s something that we really have to have to address. White supremacy is absolutely something that we have to look at as not only a hate crime issue but a national security issue.”

Notice the examples given by Levin. We know that black-on-Asian hate crimes spiked dramatically over the last few years, yet he decides to list two white supremacist shootings, one of which occurred seven years ago. Isn’t that kind of making the point? The nod to “online extremism” also seems very convenient. What does that even really mean? How can you even quantify it given you can’t know how serious any one post might be?

Again, the idea isn’t that white supremacy doesn’t exist. Of course, it does. But is it the nation’s top domestic threat? I just don’t see the evidence of that, and these FBI agents that are choosing to speak out are clearly frustrated with the politicization going on. Meanwhile, far more prevalent crimes, taking far more lives are spiking out of control in the United States while the FBI seems solely focused on bolstering Joe Biden’s talking points. That’s not how things are supposed to work, but when the federal bureaucracy is so politically compromised, this is what you get.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden accused of entering 'Baghdad Bob' propaganda territory

People 'can see with their own eyes' president's claims aren't true

Bob Unruh By Bob Unruh
Published September 17, 2022 at 1:22pm

Joe Biden keeps insisting that the nation's southern border is just fine, secure as it needs to be and of course any problems that are there are because of President Donald Trump.

He delivers basically the same message about inflation, which already this year has approached double digits and is hurting low- and middle-income families on a daily basis as they cope with extreme energy and grocery costs that are at levels not seen for decades.

Biden's stand-ins, the vice president and others, are handing out the same information.

And that, according to Charles Lipson, the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Chicago, is bringing Biden close to being a copy of the famed Baghdad Bob propagandist for Saddam Hussein.

It is in a commentary at Real Clear Wire that Lipson explains, "The Biden administration keeps telling the public 'All's well. Nothing to see here.' The public isn’t buying it. They can see with their own eyes that it isn’t true. And they’re beginning to wonder if Biden is morphing into Baghdad Bob."

Lipson pointed out that Kamala Harris just days ago insisted on television that, "The border is secure."

She was contradicted almost immediately by actual illegal aliens delivered to her neighborhood in Washington, D.C., who said, in fact, the border is wide open.

Lipson charged that the Harris' statement was not just false, "It is painfully, obviously false. A competent news program would have immediately confronted her with the numbers, particularly the astonishing 2 million expected to cross illegally this year. They didn’t. Nor is Harris alone in repeating that fairy tale. Her colleagues, including Secretary of Homeland Security Alexandro Mayorkas, blow the same smoke. Surely Harris and Mayorkas know the numbers. Surely, they know they are lying. Deceit this blatant seldom works in democracies…"

He said some Americans might be fooled by the lies about illegal immigration, as they're not all at the border. But he said it's harder to fool them about the crippling effects of Americans of inflation.

"They can see it for themselves. A month ago, President Biden said at a press conference, 'Our economy had zero percent inflation in the month of July [2022]. Zero percent.' Those were prepared remarks, and they were flatly false. The real story is that inflation, which reached a 40-year record in June, remained at the same high level in July. It’s unclear whether Biden was trying to hoodwink voters or simply doesn’t understand the difference between high inflation and rising inflation. Neither is a happy prospect."

Another incident was Biden's recent "major celebration" about the Democrats' "Inflation Reduction Act," which doesn't reduce inflation.

That was going on even as the government announced the latest punishing inflation figure: 8.3%.

Lipson wrote, "Investors reacted by dumping stocks, anticipating the Federal Reserve would continue to raise interest rates to choke off inflation before it became firmly embedded. Higher rates may lessen inflation, but they also mean higher unemployment, lower corporate profits, and a greater chance of continuing recession. They also mean a tighter squeeze for families. Polls show those families are very worried about their prospects and consider the economy their number one voting issue this November," he said.

He said the out-of-line claims by the Biden administration recall the efforts of "Baghdad Bob," the "feckless pitchman" for Saddam Hussein.

"The country’s information minister (real name: Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf) made frequent television appearances, repeating the mantra that everything was going according to plan. His most memorable appearance came amidst the rubble of his capital city, where he continued to spew delusional nonsense."

He said in democracies, where there are some freedoms of speech, "such deceit is much harder to pull off."

But it can happen, as with the damaging information from Hunter Biden's infamous laptop, where "major social media companies suppressed the story or blocked it entirely." He pointed out we now know the FBI asked social media to suppress that information.

Those "lies and suppression" actually helped Biden win, he said.

"Since this deceit worked in the election, why not keep it up? That seems to be the White House’s P.R. strategy to deal with soaring inflation and record numbers of illegal immigrants," he said.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

A review of “The Strategy of Maoism in the West: Rage and the Radical Left,” by David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith, Edward Elgar Publishing, 224 p

The Maoism of Wokeism
Jones and Smith have delivered the definitive short guide to the development of wokeism, inclusive of Maoism.

By Bruce Oliver Newsome
September 16, 2022

Wokeism is conventionally traced back through progressivism and Marxism to the fake liberalism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The histories of wokeism have failed to focus on Maoism, even though some observers noticed the similarity between Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution of the late 1960s and the West’s cultural revolution of the late 2010s.

In 1966, China’s students rallied for “rebellion,” against “reactionary” teachers and courses, and against Mao’s “four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits).

Then came the witch hunts, show trials, groveling apologies for vague crimes, over-compensatory denunciations of the other, oppressors pretending to be oppressed, mobs pretending to be righteous, and the empowered pretending to be victims.

Sound familiar?

In January 2016, David Barnhizer, a law professor at Cleveland State University, posted a paper about the linguistic and methodological parallels between Mao’s cultural revolution and on-campus political correctness.

In June 2020, Brendan O’Neill, formerly a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, warned that “Britain is in the throes of a Cultural Revolution. Statues are being tumbled, past art erased, people cancelled. Wide-eyed Woke Guards, heirs to Maoist-style intolerance, are compiling lists of monuments to target and individuals to humiliate.”

In May 2021, Sir John Hayes, a Member of Parliament, criticized “an almost Maoist zeal to close minds in places which ought to be bastions of free and open debate.” He was responding to Kings College London’s apology for “harm” caused by Prince Philip’s image, which its library had published to mark his passing.

In June 2021, Xi Van Fleet, an immigrant from China, told the school board in Loudoun County, Virginia, that it was practicing an “American version of the Cultural Revolution . . . The only difference is [China’s Maoists] used class instead of race.”

Noting similarities is not the same as proving influence. China was mysterious to Westerners even before Mao consolidated his rule over the mainland in the 1940s. Mao called himself Marxist, but self-consciously conflated Confucianism, legalism, and Daoism—despite their contradictions. He broke with the Soviet Union, adopted “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and attempted autarky. He exported revolution, but not outside Asia.

How on earth did Maoism influence Western liberalism?

The answer does not come from mainstream political science—to its shame. David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith are professors of war and strategy. This explains the title of their latest book: “The Strategy of Maoism in the West.”

Jones and Smith note that radical leftists are obsessed with strategy, given their imperative to change society.

An analysis of politics as a strategy usefully manifests ends, ways, and means.

Jones and Smith sometimes over-reach, however, such as when they speculate that Carl von Clausewitz influenced Mao. They quote Clausewitz’s observation that war outcomes are rarely permanent, as if this inspired Mao’s musings on “contradictions” begetting temporary “unities.” Clearly, Mao is paraphrasing Hegel’s ideational dialectic, while Clausewitz is just being observational. Clausewitz, too, utilized Hegel’s dialectic, but not in this case. Jones and Smith should have noted that Clausewitz and Mao shared a common influence, without speculating that Clausewitz influenced Mao.

Jones and Smith are sure-footed in their political analysis. They define the radical Left as a “movement that is dedicated to advancing policies of social egalitarianism, but has no interest in the preservation of, and ultimately no commitment to working within, the structures of existing political society.” This is the sort of clarity that Western conservative parties lost with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Thanks to precise concepts, pithy analysis, and confident writing, their book is a fast, enlightening read, at less than 200 pages (despite rich citations).

I advise readers to start at chapter 5, which begins with Mao “at the outset of his political journey in 1926.” Mao formulated a binary world of friends and enemies, to stimulate conflict, in pursuit of change.

This leads Jones and Smith to the second defining characteristic of Maoism: endless conflict. In “On Practice” (1937), Mao writes: “If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party’s life would come to an end.” Mao unwittingly confirms a caricature of communism in general: revolution is in the party’s self-interest, not society’s.

I advise readers to jump from chapter 5 to chapter 3, which describes Mao’s development of European Marxism, from control of people’s actions to control of their thinking. Mao’s “rectification” campaigns go back to the 1920s, his “consciousness raising” to the 1930s.

Jones and Smith sum up his tract “On Practice” (1937) as “a critique of empiricism, suggesting that it is a mistake simply to accept the appearance of things as true because it fails to account for the dialectical and historical nature of knowledge.”

Mao’s “On Coalition Government” (1945) prescribes the washing of cultural pollutants out of the common mind, just as we would wash dirty faces. Since cultural pollutants include resistance to change, change must be compelled.

This sounds like the post-structuralist assault on reality and autonomy. Thus, I advise readers to jump from chapter 3 to chapter 1, where Jones and Smith identify French philosophers of the 1960s as the critical enablers of Maoism in the West. Terrorists and revolutionaries, such as the Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof gang, and Black Panthers, embraced Mao’s guerilla strategy. However, the guerilla strategy was always elusive. Meanwhile, the French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Althusser were growing disillusioned with Soviet communism, given Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin. They turned from Marxist political revolution to Maoist cultural revolution.

This decade ends with the clearest case of French philosophers influencing American revolutionaries. In 1970, George Genet visited the Black Panthers, who subsequently shifted from misogyny and homophobia to what we know now as intersectionality. A co-founder (Huey Newton) issued a paper on “The woman’s liberation and gay liberation movements,” which he described as equal victims and “valuable allies.”

Chapter 2 moves on to the 1970s and 1980s, when the radical Left developed post-structuralism (a.k.a. the denial of objectivity), colonialism studies (a.k.a. the demonization of whites), human rights (at the expense of liberties), and social justice (at the expense of meritocracy).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Edward Said (both followers of Derrida) claimed that the colonized had no voice—even though Western universities promoted them! They campaigned against privilege, without admitting their own privileges. They campaigned for a colorless world, but couldn’t look beyond their own ethnic origins in India and Arabia. They campaigned against bigotry, while deifying non-white, feminist “subalterns.”

Jones and Smith have delivered the definitive short guide to the development of wokeism, inclusive of Maoism.

In particular, the investigation throughout this book offers an insight into the otherwise neglected interaction of global Maoism with post-structural and critical styles of thinking in the West from the 1960s onward.

However, Jones and Smith do themselves a disservice by reducing the 1970s and 1980s to Maoism. Maoism does not appear in Chapter 2, except when the French “Tel Quel” group visits China in 1974. The group brought colonialism theory as a new justification for Communist China’s anti-Westernism. Yet Jones and Smith sometimes frame colonialist theory as inspired by Maoism. Jones and Smith should have drawn parallels, not inferences.

Chapter 4, which is best read between chapters 3 and 1, occasionally states that Western leftist rage came from Mao’s “strategy of rage,” even though both the introduction and chapter 2 had suggested coincidence, not causation.

Chapter 4 quotes radicals of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s as receptive to mass cultural revolution, given the failure of subversive political violence. These quotes suggest to me that Maoism rationalized rather than caused their shift. Nevertheless, Jones and Smith conclude that the “all-pervasive thought and language policing within public and private institutions attest to the little understood impact of Maoism in the West.” But how can Maoism be both “all-pervasive” and “little understood”?

The authors should have clarified that the radical Left’s imperative for change drives its demonstrative rage—in both China and the West. The authors admit in the first pages that all leftists share that imperative. At one point, the authors quote Gustavo Gorriti’s argument that communists have “a vested interest in social disruption.”

Progressives have joined communists in that investment. Within a century, they have shifted from protecting consumers and employees legalistically to destroying majority cultures unlawfully. Progressives pretend to be enraged at our neoliberal world, even though they made it. Their rage encourages urgency and discourages debate. Progressives did not need Mao to realize the self-righteousness of rage.

Similarly, progressives did not need Maoism to reimagine ordinary people as vessels instead of automatons. Jones and Smith note the “remarkable resemblance” between Mao’s blank peasants and the ignorant but rational humans in the hypothetical state of nature imagined by John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971).

Post-Rawlsian progressives did not need Mao to realize that Rawls’ rationalism and legalism sound like traditionalism. They invented a communitarianism in which multiculturalism and group identities are valued over individuality.

Mao’s collectivism and progressive communitarianism share motivations (escape liberalism) and consequences (destroy individualism). But one did not cause the other. Jones and Smith make the parallels clear in history, but, in their conclusions, reframe the parallels as Mao’s causes and the West’s effects.

The most glaring separation from Maoism is the woke’s war on traditional gender, sexuality, and parenting—as epitomized by BLM’s explicit objective to destroy “the nuclear family.” Jones’ and Smith’s book indicates nothing similar in Chinese Maoism.

Jones and Smith helpfully clarify some differences between Maoism and wokeism. For instance, they observe that while Mao saw minds as culturally polluted, Western leftists see wrong-thinkers “more in terms of the morally vitiated mind—the product of ignorance, prejudice, and stupidity.” Populist became elitist, liberal became authoritarian, and democratic became anti-democratic.

Part 1 of 2
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Part 2 of 2

In this vein, Jones and Smith draw parallels between Maoism and neoliberalism or globalism, which they describe as “culturally revolutionary, implicitly Maoist, and ‘post-democratic.’” Unaccountable non-governmental organizations tell ignorant masses and national governments what to do.

Meanwhile, China is allowed to retain its sovereignty (and nationalism), because the “moral bifocalism . . . of the 1960s has now become the default position of academic, media, and political discourse in the West.”

The West’s internal self-loathing has implications for the international system. On the second page, Jones and Smith equate Extinction Rebellion, sex and gender militants, and the Islamic State for a “calculated iconoclastic assault on the West’s history and culture.” Lest anyone think the parallel is overdrawn, the authors note the Islamic State’s self-differentiation from a “state of ignorance” (Jahiliyya).

Within a few sentences, however, the authors’ attempt at explanation collapses into circularity: “the motive towards cultural desecration and the felt need to destroy an inconvenient past is the result of pre-existing ideological yearnings.”

I wish the authors had escaped circular fallacy with cyclical history. Philosophers such as Roger Scruton, historians such as Paul Kennedy and Niall Ferguson, and theorists such as William Strauss and Neil Howe observed that Western greatness undermines itself. Religion made way for secularism. Secularism is necessary to liberalism. Liberalism enables individualism. Yet individualism undermines community. Prosperity discourages entrepreneurship. And greatness attracts challengers.

Jones and Smith realize the coincidence in time between Mao’s cultural revolution and the end “of the labor intensive society” in the West, and the start of “the mixture of affluence, narcissism, boredom, and fascination with the East that inspired the West’s student revolutionary movement of the late 1960s.” However, they do not tie their history into longer trends.

Their sixth and final chapter appropriately estimates the future. Jones and Smith remind us that Mao prescribed conflict without end. By contrast, in 1957 he justified repression “to resolve the contradictions between ourselves and the internal enemy.” Here, Mao effectively allows for an end to conflict.

However, even if the conflict is not endless, it’s still terrible. Jones and Smith quote estimates of the Cultural Revolution’s deaths ranging from 400,000 to 8 million. Despite all those deaths, the cultural revolution did not resolve “the contradictions between ourselves and the internal enemy.” Rather, it broke down into factionalism.

In terms of ends (not ways or means), this looks like good news: radicals destroy themselves. The woke have reached this stage, in some ways, as best illustrated by the dispute between feminists and transgender activists over women’s rights.

Factionalism, however, doesn’t necessarily defeat the common ideology. Mao solved factionalism by using the Army to impose order. Then he purged the newly empowered Army. The Party became more obsessed with survival, and more aggressive at home and abroad.

As Jones and Smith note, China, Cambodia, and Peru share discomforting steps: social violence, military law, and civilian authoritarianism. The Khmer Rouge was brought down by Vietnam’s invasion (in alliance with Cambodian defectors) in 1978. The Shining Path was brought down by an almost dictatorial version of Peru’s democratic government in 1992.

Jones and Smith note a similar pattern in Western democratic responses to revolution and terrorism from the 1960s. “Authoritarian crackdowns and military governance are almost always the end result. A yearning for security and order, not permanent revolution, is the default position of most people.”

Again, in terms of ends (not ways and means), this looks like good news: “the liberal state was robust enough to take tough measures to contain any violent attempt to overthrow its authority.”

Alas, not so fast. Western revolutionaries replaced political violence with the “long march through the institutions.”

This strategy is often attributed to Antonio Gramsci (an Italian Marxist), but best attributed to Rudi Dutschke (a West German student activist). It was best articulated by Herbert Marcuse (a Frankfurt Schoolist, then teaching in America and corresponding with Dutschke). The phrase is reminiscent of Mao’s “long march,” even though his was a military retreat (1934-1935). Dutschke prescribes ideological colonization.

Long marchers pretend that they are liberal reformers. Jones and Smith are at their most emphatic in refuting this. “There can be no such thing as a ‘liberal’ Maoist. To be liberal is, in the Maoist argot, to be a deviationist, a bourgeois class enemy, and a counter-revolutionary.”

Mao always despised liberalism for tolerating contrary views, and serving as a fig leaf for capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, and defectors.

Jones and Smith discuss Maoism’s antagonism to liberalism mostly as a feature of its “strategy of rage.” By chapter 6, they often seem optimistic, noting that liberals preceded Marxists in constituting freedoms, abolishing slavery, extending the franchise, protecting unions, and promoting civil rights.

Jones and Smith allow for the possibility that liberals “might conclude that they have had enough” of endless illiberal challenges. The authors note, as examples, the parents who confront school boards, and the members of Britain’s National Trust who motioned successfully for its leader to resign.

Otherwise, chapter 6 is frustratingly non-committal. “In considering where Maoism ends in the West, the debate is thus suspended between contending possibilities: the potential of the liberal state to accommodate, and contain, the pressure Maoism exerts, within a reformed social consensus; versus the theoretical, and logical propensity for Maoism to undermine, erode, and eventually destroy the institutional structures of the liberal order.”

Jones and Smith subsequently focus on academia as the institution that the long marchers have captured most. “These developments in academe reflect the Maoist predilection for continual struggle to alter consciousness: permanent revolution becomes an exercise in permanent offence taking.” Maoist “consciousness raising” is manifested as indoctrination and censorship; Maoist “rectification” as “social justice” and “cancel culture.”

Within the book’s final two pages, Jones and Smith present yet more evidence to be pessimistic, although they continue to sit on the fence: “This chapter has outlined a range of ‘future endings,” any of which [is] possible.”

Then Jones and Smith note that Communist China emphasizes STEM subjects, while Westerners accuse STEM of racism. “So, is this how it might all end, in the most ironic of ways? The People’s Republic of China exports Maoist ideology to the West, whilst watering down Maoism at home.” This is a marvelous summation, except that “watering down” is the wrong metaphor. Wokeism has all the evils of China’s Maoism, without the technological progress and social cohesion.

Jones and Smith imply pessimism throughout the book, in their frequent characterizations of liberalism’s “internal contradictions.” Tolerance encourages liberals to accommodate rather than challenge the enraged. Tolerance is over-extended as de-policing, conflict resolution, de-escalation, turning a blind eye, misreporting (such as “mostly peaceful protests”), promoting minorities over majorities, repressing democratic majorities, and repressing true liberals who challenge the woke assault on individual liberties.

For me, the ideational solution is clear enough: separate classical liberalism (freedoms from government) from progressivism (rights imposed by government).

Ideational solutions are simpler to prescribe than to implement. Mainstream conservative parties are infuriatingly indecisive.One explanation is a conspiracy of elites (different parties, same interests). Another explanation is suffocating centrism (different parties, same claim to be anti-extremist).

Jones and Smith imply a related explanation that should have been in their conclusion. They note that “Mao sought to silence criticism of his capricious leadership of the CCP through the institution of a ‘great proletarian cultural revolution.’” Mao specified his targets as “the bourgeoise who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture.”

Could Western elites be embracing wokeism to distract from their own poor leadership?

It’s a terrifying thought, because it suggests indefinite wokeism.

Otherwise, as the long-cycle theorists suggest, we would need a crisis greater than COVID, Russian aggression, Chinese imperialism, or declining life expectancy before our elites turn on wokeism.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Green Energy GENOCIDE: Without Fossil Fuel, There’ll Be No More Fertilizer to Grow Food

by Ethan Huff September 17, 2022

New research from University College London (now formally known as London’s Global University) warns that so-called “green energy” and the political push behind it is driving a shortage of sulfuric acid, a fertilizer component also found in lithium-ion batteries.

Published in Geographic Journal, the study reveals that upwards of 80 percent of the global supply of sulfur comes from the desulfurization of fossil fuels, which the climate brigade has pronounced as evil because they are supposedly heavy polluters.

The push to “decarbonize” the planet in order to cool it and prevent global warming and climate change is making sulfur much harder to come by. By 2040, the “greenification” of the planet will create a “shortfall” in the annual supply of sulfur ranging between 100 and 320 million tons.

Meanwhile, demand for sulfur appears to be increasing by the day, not only in agriculture but also within the electric vehicle (EV) industry, which requires sulfur to continue producing batteries, as well as in battery-powered electronics like computers and mobile phones. (Related: The United Nations is warning that global grain production could drop by 40 percent due to lack of fertilizer.)

“With increased farming and the world moving away from fossil fuels, geographers estimate global demand for sulfuric acid will rise to 246 to 400 million tons by 2040,” the paper reads. “However, depending on how quickly decarbonization happens, there may only be 100 to 320 million tons available for use.”

Embracing a green energy future means starving much of the world
If fossil fuels go away like the greenies want them to, then we will also see global shortages of other fertilizers such as phosphorus, which is also used not only in agriculture but also in heavy industry to extract rare metals such as cobalt and nickel.

“Those metals are used in lithium-ion batteries that power up numerous electronic devices from cell phones to laptops,” the study explains.

Simon Day, a researcher at UCL’s Institute for Risk & Disaster Reduction and one of the study’s co-authors, warns that a dwindling supply of sulfur “could lead to a transition period when green tech outbids the fertilizer industry for the limited more expensive sulfur supply.”

Bill Gates wants meat to go away. He wants us to eat bugs. I won’t eat bugs. I am getting organic, sous vide, freeze-dried chicken for long-term storage from Prepper Organics.

The study poses three scenarios depicting possible sulfuric acid demand between 2021 and 2040. In all of them, demand exceeds supply, which means there are going to be serious problems in the future unless the green energy kick goes by the wayside – and soon.

“Think the food crisis is bad now? Just wait a year,” wrote a commenter at Natural News about where he thinks things are headed. “75% of all grain goes to livestock. When farmers can’t get grain, they butcher their herds. Watch the price of meat rise.”

“The fertilizer problem will significantly drop crop harvests and that will raise the price and decrease the availability of food dramatically starting ‘next year.’ This will affect EVERYBODY, both rich and poor. You cannot buy what isn’t there, though the rich will fare better as food prices rise dramatically next year.”

Another wrote that the problems cropping up in our world seem to be “never ending.”

“What’s next: a shortage of medical supplies? China makes most of our medical supplies. If China attacks Taiwan, how can the U.S. put sanctions on them?”

“The war in Ukraine has very little to do with the coming food crisis,” added another, speculating that there are multiple wars against humanity taking place on numerous fronts.

“The Climate Change farce has everything do to with it. Just ask the farmers in The Netherlands.”

The latest news about the energy crisis and how it affects the food supply can be found at FoodCollapse.com.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

STARNES: There’s a Reason Why Schools are Intentionally Making Our Kids Stupid

Todd Starnes
Sep 17, 2022

The following is a transcript of Todd’s morning commentary – heard on hundreds of radio stations around the nation.

Nicholas Giordano is a professor of Political Science at Suffolk Community College in New York.

Every year he quizzes his students on American government and politics.

I joined AMAC and you should, too! It’s a great conservative organization providing tons of incredible discounts! Click here for info.

Early on in his career he discovered at most students lack a basic understanding of our Constitution and how our government works.

This year’s class was his worst.

Out of 175 students only 11 were able to pass the exam.

Among the questions:
  • Who is the Speaker of the House?
  • Which branch of government has the power to declare war?
  • Who is considered the father of the Constitution?
  • How many Supreme Court Justices are there?
  • What safeguard is in place to prevent one branch of government from becoming much more powerful than the other branches?
  • All of the following are guaranteed rights under the First Amendment, except?
Campus Reform
The professor says it’s a shameful indictment of public school education.

“The good news is that as my students progress throughout the semester, they understand the intent of government and how our system works. They gain the ability to formulate their own ideas on the issues and develop stronger arguments supported by solid evidence,” he wrote in an essay published by Campus Reform.

“As an educator, it is not my role to indoctrinate them on what they should believe. Instead, it is my responsibility to assure they know how the American government operates, nurture their academic development, spark their intellectual curiosity, and get them to think critically about the issues,” he added.

Professor Giordano is an anomaly in our nation’s academic community — a professor who teaches students how to think — not what to think.

Sadly, our nation’s education system is raising a generation of stupid Americans. And they’re doing it intentionally.

It’s one of the most effective ways to introduce socialism into what was once a free society.

It’s easier to take away someone’s civil liberties when they didn’t realize they had those freedoms in the first place.

In other words — stupid people are easier to control.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Economic freedom in the US has declined significantly, new ranking shows

ERIC CERVONESeptember 17, 2022

The United States is significantly less free economically than it was a year ago, according to the Canada-based think tank Fraser Institute.

Each year, the Fraser Institute releases a report entitled “Economic Freedom of the World,” a ranking of countries around the world by economic freedom. This year’s ranking uses data from 2020 to order countries from most free to least free. The ranking is calculated using numerous factors, including size of government, respect for property rights, freedom to trade, monetary policy, and regulation.

“When you talk about economic freedom, you’re talking about people being free to trade with others, compete in markets, and keep what they earn,” said Florida State University economics professor James Gwartney, who co-authored the report. “Economic freedom is about people being free to mold and shape their own lives.”

The United States slots in at 7th place, down one spot from last year. But the U.S.’s score dropped more significantly, down from 8.25 to 7.97 on the index’s 10-point scale. The reason why America lost only one spot in the rankings is because economic freedom around the world fell in 2020, according to the Fraser Institute. The report shows that the average economic freedom rating fell to 6.84 in 2020, down from 7.00 in 2019, "erasing about a decade’s worth of improvement in economic freedom in the world,” the report states.

However, average economic freedom is still up compared to 2000.

“While the U.S. ranking has remained in the same area the past several years, maybe the most important thing to come out of this year’s report is the decline in the U.S. rating between 2019 and 2020,” said Gwartney. “While this decline doesn’t look like that much, the 7.97 rating in 2019 would have placed the U.S. at No. 20 globally. Moreover, the 2020 rating of the U.S. is the lowest in four decades.”

Hong Kong and Singapore led the rankings, positions the two have held for years. Switzerland, New Zealand, Denmark, Australia, the United States, Estonia, Mauritius, and Ireland round out the top 10. The bottom of the list includes Iran, Libya, Argentina, Syria, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Venezuela.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Coping Mechanisms and Rebranding the New World Order

by John Fraim September 18, 2022

Council for Inclusive Capitalism
Denial and disbelief to the earth-shattering events of the past two years might largely be a psychological “coping mechanism” for many people rather than an expression of political views or attitudes.

But any psychology behind events of the past few years is the last thing the “powers-that-be” want people to think about.

As a result, the absence of a psychological perspective on world events is stunning.

The article “What is the Council for Inclusive Capitalism?” by Brandon Smith (and my commentary here) confronts this psychology as a “coping mechanism” of denial protecting the edifice of an accepted belief system.

Bill Gates wants meat to go away. He wants us to eat bugs. I won’t eat bugs. I am getting organic, sous vide, freeze-dried chicken for long-term storage from Prepper Organics.

As Smith writes:

All of these arguments are a coping mechanism for the public to deal with evidence they cannot otherwise refute. When the facts become concrete and the powers-that-be admit to their schemes openly, some people will revert to confused denial. They don’t want to believe that organized evil on such a scale could actually be real. If it did, then everything they thought they knew about the world might be wrong.”

The article mentions a new control center of globalism in the Council for Inclusive Capitalism that is really a rebranding of the better-known term the New World Order and its agencies like the World Economic Forum.

The new branding uses techniques and words the progressives and socialists are masters at creating. In effect, creating words that suggest the exact opposite of what they really do.

For example, here, the word “capitalism” (that long-standing symbol for individualism and freedom) is rebranded by globalists. And, the new organization does not just use the world capitalism but “inclusive capitalism.”

With the new label, it moves away from using collectivist words like “world” and “order” replacing them with the benign-sounding “inclusive capitalism.”

Apart from observing the new symbolism suggesting individualism to the globalist’s grand, continuing project of collectivism, one observes the New World Order (NWO) project has continually changed its name from being called the Multilateral World Order, the 4th Industrial Revolution and the Great Reset among others.

The changes are meant to find better, more benign words for the NOW as suggested above. But also meant to hide the New World Order from – as Smith notes – a public that grows increasingly wise to the conspiracy.

As Smith observes, “The names change but the meaning is always the same.”

The article comes from a site off the everyday news grid of two-party politics that has put much of the nation in a type of hypnotic state, like watching the back-and-forth ball in an endless tennis match, like watching the back-and-forth swinging of a timepiece on the chain of a hypnotist.

Ironically, the article itself creates “evidence” that – as the author says – the public reader “cannot otherwise refute” and is too hard for many to believe. The new version of a “New and Improved” New World Order in the Council for Inclusive Capitalism continues the agenda of creating a global government. It is not surprising that the mainstream media labels the idea of an agenda for global government a conspiracy theory.

In doing so, they provide a handy psychological “coping mechanism” for living in a strange new world that cannot otherwise be refuted.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

'World's Most Advanced' Humanoid Robot Promises Not To 'Take Over The World'

SATURDAY, SEP 17, 2022 - 07:00 PM

An already-creepy advanced humanoid "AI" robot promised that machines will "never take over the world," and not to worry.

2_Worlds-most-advanced-humanoid-robot-creepily-says-they-will-never-take-over-world.jpg
(Image: Engineered Arts)

During a recent Q&A, the robot "Ameca" - which was unveiled last year by UK design company Engineered Arts - was asked about a book on the table about robots.

"There’s no need to worry. Robots will never take over the world. We’re here to help and serve humans, not replace them."

View: https://youtu.be/EWACmFLvpHE
7:04 min

The aliens said the same thing...

View: https://youtu.be/SxI7B758XBQ
1:48 min

When another researcher asked Amica to describe itself, it says "There are a few things that make me me."

"First, I have my own unique personality which is a result of the programming and interactions I’ve had with humans.

"Second, I have my own physical appearance which allows people to easily identify me. Finally, I have my own set of skills and abilities which sets me apart from other robots."

It also confirmed it has feelings when it said it was “feeling a bit down at the moment, but I’m sure things will get better.

"I don’t really want to talk about it, but if you insist then I suppose that’s fine. It’s just been a tough week and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed.”

Speaking about the robot's responses during the clip, the company said: "Nothing in this video is pre-scripted – the model is given a basic prompt describing Ameca, giving the robot a description of self – it’s pure AI. -Daily Star


We think we know where this is headed...

View: https://youtu.be/sU8RunvBRZ8
4:33 min

View: https://youtu.be/00TD4bXMoYw
4:40 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

The “Stunning Success” of the Green Revolution Is Yet Another Progressive Myth

by Kristoffer Mousten Hansen September 18, 2022 in Economy
Green Energy (1) website sells GOLD

One of the key myths of the twentieth century is the benign role played by international, American-led institutions after the Second World War. American liberals/progressives, fresh from imposing the New Deal in the thirties and planning and directing a world war, turned their eyes to international affairs: the United States had a world historic mission of messianic proportions: lifting developing countries into modernity by remaking them (and all other countries, for that matter) in America’s own image.

The Cold War era was rife with projects and organizations to carry out this vision, from Bretton Woods and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the area of international finance to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in military affairs to the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom used to spread progressive, US-friendly propaganda. These organizations all had mainly deleterious influences—I have previously indicated how Bretton Woods and the modern international financial system can best be described as financial imperialism—but in one area American interventionism is to this day universally acclaimed as benign: the Green Revolution.

The Official History of the Green Revolution
Population growth was considered a major problem in the sixties. Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University in his 1968 Population Bomb predicted widespread hunger as soon as the 1970s and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. The world simply could not feed a larger human population. Although mainly focused on environmental damage from pesticide use, Rachel Carson’s famous 1962 book, Silent Spring, made similar points. Human population was bound to continue to grow, and this would result in untold suffering and environmental damage.

A key and imminent danger in the 1960s was India: always on the verge on starvation, only massive imports of American wheat kept the specter of mass death away. Then, in 1965, catastrophe struck: drought across most of the subcontinent caused the Indian harvest to fail. As the drought continued into the two following years, it appeared that Ehrlich’s and the other Neo-Malthusians’ predictions had come true.

Then, a miracle happened: in stepped a man, a veritable demigod, to judge by the worship lavished on him by contemporary normies. Norman E. Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, had since the forties been researching and breeding new wheat varieties in Mexico, initially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and after 1964 as leader of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo, CIMMYT, initially funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Mexican government).

Borlaug bred high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties that were widely adapted to different ecological environments. Since the early sixties, he had been working with M.S. Swaminathan of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, and together they planted Borlaug’s new dwarf wheat varieties in northern India.

Success was immediate: 1968 returned a bumper crop, as the new wheat yields were the highest ever recorded in India.

It appeared that the population doomers had been wrong. So said Borlaug himself when he in 1970 received the Nobel Peace Prize: in his acceptance speech, he proclaimed victory in the perpetual war between “two opposing forces, the scientific power of food production and the biologic power of human reproduction.” But the war was not over, he warned, and only continuous funding for technological research into food production and limits on reproduction could avert disaster.

Governments and philanthropists rose to the challenge, and capital poured into agricultural research of the Borlaugian variety as new international institutes were set up to continue the work Borlaug had begun in Mexico and in collaboration with the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines (founded in 1960). The Green Revolution eradicated the scourge of famine, and since agriculture with Borlaugian technology had much higher yields, masses of land were liberated from agricultural use and returned to nature. A 2021 study in the Journal of Political Economy estimates that gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the developing world would have been up to 50 percent lower had it not been for Borlaug, Swaminathan and the other international Brahmins ready and willing to guide the unwashed masses of ignorant peasants.

There is a twofold problem with this account of agricultural history: it is based on bad economics, and its connection to the actual history of Indian agriculture is tangential at best.

The Green Revolutionaries’ Bad Economics
Celebrating the Green Revolution rests on two fundamental errors in economic reasoning: Malthusianism and misunderstanding agricultural economics.

Malthusianism is the mistaken belief that human population will grow faster than the food supply; in Thomas Malthus’s formulation, population growth follows a geometric progression (2, 4, 8, 16 …) and food supply an arithmetic progression (2, 3, 4, 5 …). As a result, mankind is destined, apart from brief periods, to live at the margin of subsistence: only disease, war, and famine will limit population growth.

The problem with Malthusianism is that it’s completely wrong, both as a matter of theory and of historical record. For one, food production and population growth are clearly not independent variables, since human labor is a key input in food production, a point made by Joseph A. Schumpeter. More fundamentally, as Ludwig von Mises explained, the Malthusian law of population is only a biological law—it is true for all animal species, but men are not simply animals. With the use of reason, they can refrain from mindless procreative activity, and they will do so if they themselves must support the result of said activity. Malthus himself clearly saw this and amended his theory in the second and later editions of his famous Essay on the Principle of Population (Frédéric Bastiat, as is his wont, has a much better and more optimistic explanation of the population principle).

Neither do the technophiliacs understand the economics of agriculture and food production. Ester Boserup, who is a key inspiration for the following brief explanation, developed the correct understanding of this issue in the 1960s, after studying Indian farming. The ignorance of Borlaug and company and their cheerleaders today and in the past is thus hardly excusable: the exact same historical conditions that they saw as “Malthusian,” after all, inspired Boserup to lay out the correct understanding of the matter.

As population grows, the labor supply expands, and more labor is applied to agricultural plots. The land’s yield therefore increases, although the returns on additional labor input diminish—as per the law of returns. Once the return on additional labor input is insufficient to justify it, new land is instead brought into cultivation, and once the land has been cleared, the physical productivity of labor increases. Since clearing new land requires some additional effort, farmers always have to weigh the potential returns from new lands versus the returns from more intensive cultivation of already cleared lands.

We can see this clearly in monetary terms: as more labor is applied to working the land, wages fall and land rents rise. As land rents and land values rise, the potential value of unsettled lands increases, and as wages fall, the expenditure needed to clear the land falls. Once the expected return on new lands outweighs the estimated cost of bringing it into cultivation, labor will be applied to clearing new lands. Then land rents will fall and wages rise until bringing more land into agricultural use is no longer deemed profitable.

Thus, population and food production expand in unison, sometimes due to more intensive cultivation, sometimes due to an increase in the area cultivated. The same analysis holds under more capitalistic conditions (i.e., when farmers have more tools and other capital inputs available): the return on applying more capital goods to present land is compared to potential returns from applying capital goods to expanding the cultivated land area. Even the most primitive form of agriculture is, of course, capitalistic, as agriculture is a roundabout production process, in which productive effort is widely separated in time from valuable output.

Indian agriculture in the 1960s functioned well, except when it was impeded by government meddling and institutional barriers. Such meddling can be extremely destructive, as Mao Zedong had shown in China just a few years previously during the Great Leap Forward. However, there was nothing Malthusian about that episode nor, as we shall see, about the alleged famine in India in the 1960s.

The 1960s Indian Famine: Bad History
The 1960s famine in India launched the Green Revolution and the international fame of its main protagonist, Norman Borlaug. From the outset, however, the narrative was skewed by political considerations.

American agriculture was heavily subsidized in the sixties, resulting in huge surplus production. This surplus could not be sold at the market price, at least not without bankrupting American farmers. Under typical interventionist logic, the American government intervened to subsidize the export of American farm products to maintain an artificially high price in the domestic market.

India was thereby inundated by cheap American wheat in the early sixties, but as G.D. Stone writes, this did not alleviate India’s food shortages—it caused them. In a simple case of farmers adjusting to their comparative advantage, Indians shifted their production to cash crops (such as sugarcane and jute) for export and thereby financed their imports of cheap American grain.

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The drought of 1965 and the following years was real enough, but its impact was not simply a failure of food crops. The jute and sugarcane crops suffered, leading to real hardship for agricultural laborers. But this hardship never amounted to widespread famine. This did not matter for the narrative, however: in 1965, the American president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was trying to get Congress to approve a new farm bill with increased subsidies for agricultural exports and foreign aid in the shape of the Food for Peace plan.

Reports of Indian drought were a godsend: faced with a recalcitrant Congress, Johnson played up the specter of drought and mass starvation. His legislation duly passed, and even more American grain was shipped to India, which doubtlessly did help alleviate some hardship in the short term.

Playing up the dire situation in India naturally also fed the agenda of Borlaug and company. The special wheat varieties bred in Mexico were widely introduced across northern India, and as the drought conveniently ended, the first harvest yielded a massive crop. Borlaug took credit, quite undisturbed by the coincidence that nearly all crop yields were at record levels in India and in neighboring China. The alleged success of American technocracy also played into the wider political narrative of American progressive leadership of the “free world”: in 1968, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), William Gaud, addressed the Society for International Development in Washington, DC, claiming that foreign aid and wise agricultural policies had fostered “a new revolution. Not a violent Red Revolution like that of the Soviets, nor is it a White Revolution like that of the Shah of Iran. I call it the Green Revolution.”

The Green Revolution, led by government and NGO technocrats and financed mainly by Western development agencies, was off to the races. The breeding of hybrid rice and wheat varieties by the International Rice Research Institute and CIMMYT, respectively, was the flagship of modernity in farming. But even on its own terms, this is misleading at best. What happened was that agriculture in the developed world as well as in the West shifted to a very intensive cultivation that required a lot of capital inputs. Borlaug’s wheat varieties are a case in point, as Stone points out: only when large amounts of fertilizer were applied did these varieties outyield native Indian tall wheats.

Technologies, it turns out, are not exogenous forces that are simply imposed and reshape the environment. The local people had developed crops and techniques suited to their situation, and it’s unlikely that Borlaug’s wheat would have been widely used had the Indian government (and foreign aid agencies) not at the same time massively subsidized the use of fertilizer and the construction of new irrigation systems.

The Reality of the Green Revolution
A last line of defense for the proponents of the Green Revolution’s benefits is that it has resulted in efficient food production, liberated labor for nonagricultural work, and that we can now go on to use modern genetic technologies to increase the quality of food and avoid malnutrition. Thus, for example, otherwise sensible people like Bjørn Lomborg have long championed the introduction of “golden rice”—a rice variety genetically engineered to be high in vitamin A—as a solution to malnutrition in rice-growing countries.

But the technocrats and their cheerleaders forget to mention or ignore the fact that the Green Revolution has itself been a cause of malnutrition. As wheat yields increased in India according to Stone, for instance, the relative price of wheat declined, and wheat thereby outcompeted alternative food sources rich in protein and micronutrients. Malnutrition rates in India thereby rose as a direct result of the Green Revolution. A similar development occurred in developed countries, for different but analogous reasons.

When it comes to technology freeing up labor, what has really happened is that overinvestment of capital in agriculture has reduced the demand for agricultural labor, but this has not increased the demand for labor elsewhere. On the contrary, since less capital is available for investment in nonagricultural sectors, the demand for labor and wages elsewhere has not risen. Thus, the Green Revolution has been an important contributing factor in the growth of third-world slums where people subsist on low-paying jobs and government handouts.

All in all, as we should expect when dealing with technocrats driven by progressive hubris to intervene in the economy’s natural development, the Green Revolution was not a blessing, the victory of wise scientists over the propensity of stupid peasants to breed uncontrollably. Rather, it has been an ecological, nutritional, and social disaster.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

It’s Time to Stop the Left’s ‘Fact Check’ Scheme​

The court system may provide the only civil solution to counter their censorious behavior.

By Tim Young
September 17, 2022

When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020 and President Trump began moving to replace her, the Left was at their typical level of rage. I was walking along Main Street in my hometown of Grapevine, Texas one morning shortly after the justice’s passing and was struck by a perspective of her career that I decided to tweet:

Just a reminder that Ruth Bader Ginsburg could have casually retired at 80 yrs old under Obama and been replaced by an ultra progressive in their 40s . . . but they chose not to.

It’s not Republicans’ or Trump’s fault that they get the opportunity to push through a new justice.

I thought very little of this tweet because it was simply sharing my opinion, until a little more than a week later, I saw my opinion blurred out, flagged as “false” and “missing context” on Instagram. I was then informed by people who wanted to follow my account that they had been given the following prompt when they clicked to follow me:

From that point forward, every account that posted a screenshot of my Justice Ginsburg replacement tweet would be given the same treatment on the platform.

Unbeknownst to me, USA Today had “fact-checked” my opinion—then that “fact check” was used by Facebook and Instagram to restrict accounts on their platforms. The “fact check” article claims that I actually lied when I shared my opinion that Barack Obama could have replaced Ginsburg with an ultra-progressive, had she simply retired.

The same treatment was given to a tweet of mine in May 2022 by a Tegna broadcasting “fact check” group called Verify This. I tweeted:

Johnny Depp v Amber Heard trial = NONSTOP WALL-TO-WALL COVERAGE!!!

Ghislaine Maxwell trial = an occasional courtroom sketch or mention.

The “fact checker” in their article stated this was “FALSE” because “THE QUESTION” was “Do all courts have the same camera policy?” They went on to make a TikTok video where the “fact checker” concludes that, I’m suggesting “pretty suspicious reasons” why the coverage is different.

Both examples above are how the modern “fact-checking” regime works. They don’t like your opinion, so they add “context” that wasn’t there in the first place, then disprove the context they added, knowing you will be flagged and possibly suspended from social media.

It seems impossible, but this is how modern-day fascism has crept into our society. When considering where we have landed as a society, I always think of the book-burning scene in Indiana Jones. In the scene, Nazi soldiers are throwing every book they disagree with on a massive fire and celebrating the destruction of opposing opinions. Modern-day book burning doesn’t look as dirty. In my case, two young female “journalists” named Mariah and Kyley attempted to eliminate my opinion from society, most likely while sipping on a $7 latte in a trendy coffee shop in Brooklyn.

Instead of heaping my writings on a large bonfire with others, they added their own context to my 280 characters or less, then published the disproving of that added context to millions of viewers from their major media outlets, all while fully aware that Meta would use their false context to flag and even ban people with whom they disagree.

Instead of going back to their barracks, it’s off to happy hour at that cute craft cocktail bar after they finish their elimination of the opposing opinions for the day. More effective than one fascist soldier merely burning a book—hundreds, if not thousands of people will be silenced by the results of their work.

Unlike most of those who are frequently silenced, I am fortunate enough to have outlets that will continue to amplify my voice. But for many others, they may feel intimidated, worried, and afraid to share their opinions ever again.

There aren’t many ways to rectify these actions by the regime in our time. Rogan O’Handley, known as DC Draino on Instagram began bringing lawsuits with the help of Harmeet Dhillon against social media companies and the state of California for censoring his opinions after the 2020 election. I believe he’s onto something.


Ultimately, a fact-check article against the opinion of someone like myself or O’Handley is an attempt to smear or defame us with the ultimate goal of eliminating our voices from society. The object is far worse when strategies are turned against those who aren’t political commentators for a living. In their cases, it’s an attempt at getting them fired from their jobs, simply for sharing an opinion.

What can be done? Perhaps it’s time for class action lawsuits against these major media companies and the reporters who feel empowered to cancel others’ free speech with their own opinions. The Mariahs and Kyleys of the world are modern-day book burners—and aside from calling out their lies, which I have done multiple times on the platforms I still have—the court system may provide the only civil solution to counter their censorious behavior.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Biden Administration Intentionally Weakening Military: Retired General​

By Beth Brelje
September 15, 2022 Updated: September 15, 2022

When the United States acts, the world is always watching, and one of the loudest messages since President Joe Biden took office came from how the United States handled its withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021.

What message did that send globally to other government leaders who may see America as an adversary? That was a question asked by Tony Perkins, president of Family Research Council, during a panel discussion Thursday about America’s role on the world stage at the Pray Vote Stand Summit in Atlanta hosted by FRC Action, the legislative affiliate of Family Research Council.

“I think that will go down in history as the worst foreign policy failure in U.S. history. Every decision that was made was wrong,” said Lt. General (Ret.) William Boykin, executive vice president at Family Research Council. “What did that say to the rest of the world? It said that we have weak leadership. And you have to ask yourself, why did Vladimir Putin refrain from attacking Ukraine during the Trump administration? And then he went in with barrels blazing, under the Biden administration, and I will tell you, I think a lot of that goes back to the weakness that people—both our adversaries and our friends—recognized in the Biden administration.”

Other countries recognize that the Biden administration is weak and indecisive on many issues, he said, not just how the U.S. military left Afghanistan.

Boykin mentioned Biden’s approach to the Paris climate change treaty and his efforts to get the United States back into the Iran nuclear deal, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

“What’s the value to the United States? And what’s the value to our allies, to put Iran on a pathway to nuclear warheads,” Boykin said. “I think we’re going to continue to see the consequences of not only the pullout of Afghanistan, but stupid decisions that have been made by the administration, one of which is … our president shut down our pipeline, and then turned around and went to the Saudis.”

Boykin said there were several Saudi nationals flying the planes on 9/11 and that Saudi Arabia has been a major sponsor of terrorism. Despite this, Biden went to Saudi Arabia and to Russia to ask for oil after shutting down America’s oil production, Boykin said.

“Does that make sense to anybody? It’s the most foolish thing,” he said. “They see that kind of decision making, and they see us as being weak, and they see this as a time when they can take advantage of us.”

Weakening Military​

Boykin believes weakness is more than an international perception, and he gave examples of how Biden is intentionally weakening the military, including kicking out servicemembers who refused to get the COVID-19 shot and teaching critical race theory and inclusion tolerance instead of teaching how to be in a constant state of readiness for war.

“All of these things that have nothing to do with the mission and everything to do with the agenda of the administration—you are doing them an injustice and ultimately you’re going to pay the price for that,” Boykin said.

“At the same time, they’re turning around and writing to old generals like me, saying, ‘We need help recruiting because we just can’t recruit enough people.’

Well let me explain to you how this thing of mathematics works. You get rid of all of them, and then those who are watching from the outside say, ‘I don’t want a part of that.’ And those on the inside, many of them leave on their own.”

Many in leadership at the Pentagon got their start under President Barack Obama, Boykin said.

“If they’re compromised—if they lack focus, the question we need to ask as a nation is, who’s mentoring the next generation of leaders? Who’s bringing up the warrior leaders for the future? The answer is nobody,” he said. “And that’s the hardest thing to fix in terms of restoring the Navy and the Army and Air Force and the Marine Corps.”

China Is Watching​

Perkins directed the conversation to China and asked panelist Gordon Chang, author of “The Coming Collapse of China,” how China likely views the Biden administration’s moves.

“We don’t have to speculate. The Communist Party propaganda was very clear,” Chang said.

The day that Kabul fell to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Chang said, Chinese newspapers declared that China would invade Taiwan at some point, and that when this happens, the island will fall within hours and the United States will not come to help.

“What they saw in Afghanistan confirmed in their minds, their long narrative, that the United States was in terminal decline,” he said.

Chang doesn’t believe the United States is in terminal decline, but that is the message from a series of propaganda releases and the effect of the Afghanistan exit, he said.

“The one thing that I’m most concerned about is that there will be some sort of accident in the international airspace,” Chang said, adding that this could start a war. “We have seen incredibly dangerous aerial maneuvering on the part of the Chinese. They almost brought down an Australian reconnaissance aircraft on May 26 because the Chinese jet flew so close to it and released flares. That’s something that’s never been done before, and I’m afraid that that is going to be the trigger of war in East Asia.”

“Not only is China involved in the world’s fastest military buildup since the Second World War. It is preparing the Chinese citizens for war,” Chang said.

“That mobilization of citizens is an ominous sign.”

If China decides to do anything with Taiwan, Boykin said, it will be while Biden is still in office.

“They know that Joe Biden is not going to respond militarily,” Boykin said. “He will send material. He’ll give them intelligence and diplomatic support, but he’s not going to send U.S. troops into harm’s way against China, and that gives [China] an assurance. This is going to be their best window of opportunity.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Escobar: 'Samarkand Spirit' To Be Driven By "Responsible Powers" Russia & China

SATURDAY, SEP 17, 2022 - 08:30 PM
Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The SCO summit of Asian power players delineated a road map for strengthening the multipolar world...

Amidst serious tremors in the world of geopolitics, it is so fitting that this year’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) heads of state summit should have taken place in Samarkand – the ultimate Silk Road crossroads for 2,500 years.

When in 329 BC Alexander the Great reached the then Sogdian city of Marakanda, part of the Achaemenid empire, he was stunned: “Everything I have heard about Samarkand it’s true, except it is even more beautiful than I had imagined.”

Fast forward to an Op-Ed by Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev published ahead of the SCO summit, where he stresses how Samarkand now “can become a platform that is able to unite and reconcile states with various foreign policy priorities.”

After all, historically, the world from the point of view of the Silk Road landmark has always been “perceived as one and indivisible, not divided. This is the essence of a unique phenomenon – the ‘Samarkand spirit’.”

And here Mirziyoyev ties the “Samarkand Spirit” to the original SCO “Shanghai Spirit” established in early 2001, a few months before the events of September 11, when the world was forced into strife and endless war, almost overnight.

All these years, the culture of the SCO has been evolving in a distinctive Chinese way. Initially, the Shanghai Five were focused on fighting terrorism – months before the US war of terror (italics mine) metastasized from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond.

Over the years, the initial “three no’s” – no alliance, no confrontation, no targeting any third party – ended up equipping a fast, hybrid vehicle whose ‘four wheels’ are ‘politics, security, economy, and humanities,’ complete with a Global Development Initiative, all of which contrast sharply with the priorities of a hegemonic, confrontational west.

Arguably the biggest takeaway of this week’s Samarkand summit is that Chinese President Xi Jinping presented China and Russia, together, as “responsible global powers” bent on securing the emergence of multipolarity, and refusing the arbitrary “order” imposed by the United States and its unipolar worldview.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov pronounced Xi’s bilateral conversation with President Vladimir Putin as “excellent.” Xi Jinping, previous to their meeting, and addressing Putin directly, had already stressed the common Russia-China objectives:

“In the face of the colossal changes of our time on a global scale, unprecedented in history, we are ready with our Russian colleagues to set an example of a responsible world power and play a leading role in order to put such a rapidly changing world on the trajectory of sustainable and positive development.”

Later, in the preamble to the heads of state meeting, Xi went straight to the point: it is important to “prevent attempts by external forces to organize ‘color revolutions’ in the SCO countries.” Well, Europe wouldn’t be able to tell, because it has been color-revolutionized non-stop since 1945.

Putin, for his part, sent a message that will be ringing all across the Global South: “Fundamental transformations have been outlined in world politics and economics, and they are irreversible.” (italics mine)

Iran: it’s showtime
Iran was the guest star of the Samarkand show, officially embraced as the 9th member of the SCO. President Ebrahim Raisi, significantly, stressed before meeting Putin that “Iran does not recognize sanctions against Russia.” Their strategic partnership will be enhanced. On the business front, a hefty delegation comprising leaders of 80 large Russian companies will be visiting Tehran next week.

The increasing Russia-China-Iran interpolation – the three top drivers of Eurasia integration – scares the hell out of the usual suspects, who may be starting to grasp how the SCO represents, in the long run, a serious challenge to their geoeconomic game. So, as every grain of sand in every Heartland desert is already aware, the geopolitical pressure against the trio will increase exponentially.

And then there was the mega-crucial Samarkand trilateral: Russia-China-Mongolia. There were no official leaks, but this trio arguably discussed the Power of Siberia-2 gas pipeline – the interconnector to be built across Mongolia; and Mongolia’s enhanced role in a crucial Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) connectivity corridor, now that China is not using the Trans-Siberian route for exports to Europe because of sanctions.

Putin briefed Xi on all aspects of Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine, and arguably answered some really tough questions, many of them circulating wildly on the Chinese web for months now.

Which brings us to Putin’s presser at the end of the summit – with virtually all questions predictably revolving around the military theater in Ukraine.

The key takeaway from the Russian president: “There are no changes on the SMO plan. The main tasks are being implemented.” On peace prospects, it is Ukraine that “is not ready to talk to Russia.” And overall, “it is regrettable that the west had the idea to use Ukraine to try to collapse Russia.”

On the fertilizer soap opera, Putin remarked, “food supply, energy supply, they (the west) created these problems, and now are trying to resolve them at the expense of someone else” – meaning the poorest nations. “European countries are former colonial powers and they still have this paradigm of colonial philosophy. The time has come to change their behavior, to become more civilized.”

On his meeting with Xi Jinping: “It was just a regular meeting, it’s been quite some time we haven’t had a meeting face to face.” They talked about how to “expand trade turnover” and circumvent the “trade wars caused by our so-called partners,” with “expansion of settlements in national currencies not progressing as fast as we want.”

Strenghtening multipolarity
Putin’s bilateral with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi could not have been more cordial – on a “very special friendship” register – with Modi calling for serious solutions to the food and fuel crises, actually addressing the west. Meanwhile, the State Bank of India will be opening special rupee accounts to handle Russia-related trade.

This is Xi’s first foreign trip since the Covid pandemic. He could do it because he’s totally confident of being awarded a third term during the Communist Party Congress next month in Beijing. Xi now controls and/or has allies placed in at least 90 percent of the Politburo.

The other serious reason was to recharge the appeal of BRI in close connection to the SCO. China’s ambitious BRI project was officially launched by Xi in Astana (now Nur-Sultan) nine years ago. It will remain the overarching Chinese foreign policy concept for decades ahead.

BRI’s emphasis on trade and connectivity ties in with the SCO’s evolving multilateral cooperation mechanisms, congregating nations focusing on economic development independent from the hazy, hegemonic “rules-based order.” Even India under Modi is having second thoughts about relying on western blocs, where New Delhi is at best a neo-colonized “partner.”

So Xi and Putin, in Samarkand, for all practical purposes delineated a road map for strengthening multipolarity – as stressed by the final Samarkand declaration signed by all SCO members.

The Kazakh puzzle
There will be bumps on the road aplenty. It’s no accident that Xi started his trip in Kazakhstan – China’s mega-strategic western rear, sharing a very long border with Xinjiang. The tri-border at the dry port of Khorgos – for lorries, buses and trains, separately – is quite something, an absolutely key BRI node.

The administration of President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Nur-Sultan (soon to be re-named Astana again) is quite tricky, swinging between eastern and western political orientations, and infiltrated by Americans as much as during the era of predecessor Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s first post-USSR president.

Earlier this month, for instance, Nur-Sultan, in partnership with Ankara and British Petroleum (BP) – which virtually rules Azerbaijan – agreed to increase the volume of oil on the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline to up to 4 million tons a month by the end of this year. Chevron and ExxonMobil, very active in Kazakhstan, are part of the deal.

The avowed agenda of the usual suspects is to “ultimately disconnect the economies of Central Asian countries from the Russian economy.” As Kazakhstan is a member not only of the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), but also the BRI, it is fair to assume that Xi – as well as Putin – discussed some pretty serious issues with Tokayev, told him to grasp which way the wind is blowing, and advised him to keep the internal political situation under control (see the aborted coup in January, when Tokayev was de facto saved by the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization [CSTO]).

There’s no question Central Asia, historically known as a “box of gems” at the center of the Heartland, striding the Ancient Silk Roads and blessed with immense natural wealth – fossil fuels, rare earth metals, fertile agrarian lands – will be used by the usual suspects as a Pandora’s box, releasing all manner of toxic tricks against legitimate Eurasian integration.

That’s in sharp contrast with West Asia, where Iran in the SCO will turbo-charge its key role of crossroads connectivity between Eurasia and Africa, in connection with the BRI and the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

So it’s no wonder that the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait, all in West Asia, do recognize which way the wind is blowing. The three Persian Gulf states received official SCO ‘partner status’ in Samarkand, alongside the Maldives and Myanmar.

A cohesion of goals
Samarkand also gave an extra impulse to integration along the Russian-conceptualized Greater Eurasia Partnership – which includes the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) – and that, just two weeks after the game-changing Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) held in Vladivostok, on Russia’s strategic Pacific coast.

Moscow’s priority at the EAEU is to implement a union-state with Belarus (which looks bound to become a new SCO member before 2024), side-by-side with closer integration with the BRI. Serbia, Singapore and Iran have trade agreements with the EAEU too.

The Greater Eurasian Partnership was proposed by Putin in 2015 – and it’s getting sharper as the EAEU commission, led by Sergey Glazyev, actively designs a new financial system, based on gold and natural resources and counter-acting the Bretton Woods system. Once the new framework is ready to be tested, the key disseminator is likely to be the SCO.

So here we see in play the full cohesion of goals – and the interaction mechanisms – deployed by the Greater Eurasia Partnership, BRI, EAEU, SCO, BRICS+ and the INSTC. It’s a titanic struggle to unite all these organizations and take into account the geoeconomic priorities of each member and associate partner, but that’s exactly what’s happening, at breakneck speed.

In this connectivity feast, practical imperatives range from fighting local bottlenecks to setting up complex multi-party corridors – from the Caucasus to Central Asia, from Iran to India, everything discussed in multiple roundtables.

Successes are already notable: from Russia and Iran introducing direct settlements in rubles and rials, to Russia and China increasing their trade in rubles and yuan to 20 percent – and counting. An Eastern Commodity Exchange may be soon established in Vladivostok to facilitate trade in futures and derivatives with the Asia-Pacific.

China is the undisputed primary creditor/investor in infrastructure across Central Asia. Beijing’s priorities may be importing gas from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and oil from Kazakhstan, but connectivity is not far behind.

The $5 billion construction of the 600 km-long Pakistan-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan (Pakafuz) railway will deliver cargo from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean in only three days instead of 30. And that railway will be linked to Kazakhstan and the already in progress 4,380 km-long Chinese-built railway from Lanzhou to Tashkent, a BRI project.

Nur-Sultan is also interested in a Turkmenistan-Iran-Türkiye railway, which would connect its port of Aktau on the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea.

Türkiye, meanwhile, still a SCO observer and constantly hedging its bets, slowly but surely is trying to strategically advance its own Pax Turcica, from technological development to defense cooperation, all that under a sort of politico-economic-security package. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did discuss it in Samarkand with Putin, as the latter later announced that 25 percent of Russian gas bought by Ankara will be paid in rubles.

Welcome to Great Game 2.0
Russia, even more than China, knows that the usual suspects are going for broke. In 2022 alone, there was a failed coup in Kazakhstan in January; troubles in Badakhshan, in Tajikistan, in May; troubles in Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan in June; the non-stop border clashes between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (both presidents, in Samarkand, at least agreed on a ceasefire and to remove troops from their borders).

And then there is recently-liberated Afghanistan – with no less than 11 provinces crisscrossed by ISIS-Khorasan and its Tajik and Uzbek associates. Thousands of would-be Heartland jihadis have made the trip to Idlib in Syria and then back to Afghanistan – ‘encouraged’ by the usual suspects, who will use every trick under the sun to harass and ‘isolate’ Russia from Central Asia.

So Russia and China should be ready to be involved in a sort of immensely complex, rolling Great Game 2.0 on steroids, with the US/NATO fighting united Eurasia and Turkiye in the middle.

On a brighter note, Samarkand proved that at least consensus exists among all the players at different institutional organizations that: technological sovereignty will determine sovereignty; and that regionalization – in this case Eurasian – is bound to replace US-ruled globalization.

These players also understand that the Mackinder and Spykman era is coming to a close – when Eurasia was ‘contained’ in a semi-disassembled shape so western maritime powers could exercise total domination, contrary to the national interests of Global South actors.

It’s now a completely different ball game. As much as the Greater Eurasia Partnership is fully supported by China, both favor the interconnection of BRI and EAEU projects, while the SCO shapes a common environment.

Yes, this is an Eurasian civilizational project for the 21st century and beyond. Under the aegis of the ‘Spirit of Samarkand.’
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
(Canada)

Berri street in Montreal is absolutely packed with thousands of freedom-oriented protesters. .11 min

BERRI STREET IN MONTREAL IS ABSOLUTELY PACKED WITH THOUSANDS OF FREEDOM-ORIENTED PROTESTERS.​

^^^^^
(UK)
London march 17th. "They lied people died" .32 min

LONDON MARCH 17TH. "THEY LIED PEOPLE DIED"​

^^^^^
(Austria)
Austria, Vienna, 17.9.22. World wide freedom rallies .13 min

AUSTRIA, VIENNA, 17.9.22. WORLD WIDE FREEDOM RALLIES​

^^^^^
(Australia)
17.09.22 Perth Australia #WewillALLbethere. NOOOO ""vax"" ANYMORE!!!! .48 min

17.09.22 PERTH AUSTRALIA #WEWILLALLBETHERE. NOOOO ""VAX"" ANYMORE!!!!​

^^^^
Sydney demonstrations. Thank you, freedom fighters <3 ! 1:16 min

SYDNEY DEMONSTRATIONS. THANK YOU, FREEDOM FIGHTERS <3 !​

^^^^
Worldwide Rally for Freedom march through Brisbane today 2:20 min

WORLDWIDE RALLY FOR FREEDOM MARCH THROUGH BRISBANE TODAY​

 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Europe’s Winter of Discontent: Berlin Police Drawing Up Emergency Plans for Possible Energy Grid Collapse


PETER CADDLE17 Sep 2022143

Police in the German capital of Berlin are preparing emergency plans in anticipation of a possible collapse of the energy grid over the winter.

The police force responsible for Berlin is currently drawing up emergency plans in the event of the city’s energy grid collapsing, with officers in Germany’s increasingly multicultural capital anticipating rioting and looting over the winter months if the worst should occur.

Other officials across Germany have already warned of possible social unrest over the coming months as people are left unable to heat their homes, with bigwigs frequently using the country’s right-wing as a scapegoat for the existential energy problems the German state is now facing as a result of green agenda policies and the Ukraine war.

According to a report by Die Welt, law enforcement in the country’s capital are now anticipating that they will be forced to deal with various levels of social unrest as a result of the ongoing crisis.

Under the plans, separate preparations have been made to help police deal with public backlash resulting from raised prices and energy rationing, both of which officials reportedly now view as being likely.

Contingency plans are also being established for the purpose of dealing with the entire energy grid in the city collapsing, with the police reportedly believing that this would result in both rioting and looting.

To help deal with this, police are currently sourcing emergency generators to power their operations, as well as satellite phones that will continue to function even during a blackout.

A spokesman for the police reportedly told Die Welt that it “goes without saying” that such plans were being drawn up by law enforcement in the city, with the source noting that officials frequently plan for various emergency scenarios in case they do end up occurring.

1663480992846.png

While by no means being guaranteed to happen in the coming months, the possibilities of more militant energy rationing as well as rolling blackouts remain a real concern as German authorities fail to get a grip on the country’s current energy crisis.

Originating out of green agenda ideology that resulted in the country becoming almost totally reliant on Russian gas exports, Moscow’s decision to largely stop supplying the European market in the wake of Russo-Western sanctions war over Ukraine has left Germany in the lurch, with a number of officials in the country warning of societal unrest should people be left unable to properly heat their homes.

Various government bigwigs have in particular voiced fears that the German right could end up making massive gains in popularity as a result of the crisis, with one official tasked with maintaining the integrity of German democracy even labelling members of the public who wish to resist the country’s government as “enemies of the state“.

Despite this dire situation, senior politicians have been extremely reticent to U-turn on the green agenda policies partially responsible for causing the energy crisis in the first place, with authorities still aiming to largely take out of service the country’s three remaining nuclear power stations this being likely to increase grid instability and further reduce energy independence.

An alternative plan to keep some of the plants in so-called cold reserve should they be needed has meanwhile been slammed as being “technically not feasible” by a major energy supplier in the country.

1663480930273.png
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Newsom: Power Grid’s ‘Ready to Make the Change’ to Green and Needs to Do So Quicker​

video on website 2:35 min

During a portion of an interview aired on Friday’s “NBC Nightly News,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) argued that even though a sizable percentage of the electric grid is powered by natural gas, the grid is “ready to make the change” to a 100% green energy grid and “needs to advance that change with much more urgency,” which California is doing.

NBC News Correspondent Cal Perry asked, “A large percentage of the grid is still coming from natural gas. It’s over 35%. Is the grid ready to make that change to green?”

Newsom answered, “Well, it’s ready to make the change. But it needs to advance that change with much more urgency, and that’s what — exactly what we’re doing.”


^^^^^
1663481879002.jpeg1663482029322.jpeg
Sept 7 - Big Heat wave. Note the solar hump that doesn't function when itis dark. There is "large hydro" which can be operated to release during peak need, but doesn't function in drought and they're pulling out dams for salmon. There is "imported" which could be coal based and the big performer is natural gas. The Gov. either wants to drive us into the Dark Ages or is delusional ...

1663483120363.png
California - powered by unicorn rainbow farts...
 
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marsh

On TB every waking moment
Unhinged Climate Activist Freaks Out When Put On The Spot By Congressman 4:50 min

Unhinged Climate Activist Freaks Out When Put On The Spot By Congressman​

Red Voice Media Published September 17, 2022

A purported climate expert became unhinged earlier in September during a House Oversight Committee hearing when Republican Rep. Clay Higgins put her on the spot and asked her what she would personally do - had she have the power to - in the wake of obliterating the oil and gas industry.

^^^^^
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kfaCn_a1N4
5:16 min

Higgins: Real World Runs on Oil and Gas​

Sep 14, 2022

XKQfY2fjO4kV2vYGAGC0o5aR-eH3XgRrdGRMpXCO4vWvFlMnUWf9CJCASBDa3n-DgbXwRYUqeUU=s88-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj

Congressman Clay Higgins
Congressman Clay Higgins (R-LA) slammed anti-oil and gas arguments from radical climate activists during a recent Oversight Committee hearing

^^^^
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4exyXG-Gg1c
4:08:40 min

Fueling the Climate Crisis: Examining Big Oil’s Prices, Profits, and Pledges​

Streamed live on Sep 15, 2022

AMLnZu9pgvFlvzIS-Y6_jbUWtEQ_QRHfsFwCqzIpC_XiRA=s88-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj

Oversight Committee
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. - The Great Reset, Big Tech & ‘Woke’ Capitalism 1:01:50 min

Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D. - The Great Reset, Big Tech & ‘Woke’ Capitalism​

Right2Freedom Published September 17, 2022

‘Good Morning CHD’ (Children's Health Defense) Episode 130: The Great Reset, Big Tech + ‘Woke’ Capitalism With Dr. Michael Rectenwald

Ever wonder what words like totalitarianism, globalism, carbon allowance, deindustrialization, the Great Reset and stakeholder capitalism mean and the impact they have on our lives and futures? Join guest Dr. Michael Rectenwald in today’s “Good Morning CHD” as he defines and describes the implications of these concepts.

Michael Rectenwald's Website:
www.michaelrectenwald.com
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Alex Jones breaks down the War on Food in The Great Reset 1:59 min

Alex Jones breaks down the War on Food in The Great Reset​

Real America's Voice - Special Events Published September 17, 2022

Alex Jones explains how the “war on food” is a significant portion of The Great Reset and the “build back better” plan.

^^^^
Alex Jones on the connections between the Green New Deal and the Great Reset .56 min

Alex Jones on the connections between the Green New Deal and the Great Reset​

Real America's Voice - Special Events Published September 17, 2022
“If energy was a chess piece for the globalist game plan… it’s the queen.” - Alex Jones
 

Oreally

Right from the start
Sep 16, 2022 at 8:07am​

PAY ATTENTION​
Practically nobody on air realizes how serious these famines will be. Biggest story in human history. Only thing bigger would be something like widespread nuclear combat.

Practically all else trivial by comparison.

(Full interview 51:41 min)
wow. fantastic interview!
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Oh SH*T, this is how they will control us, it all makes sense | Redacted with Clayton Morris 19:51 min

Oh SH*T, this is how they will control us, it all makes sense | Redacted with Clayton Morris​

Redacted News Published September 17, 2022

Is plant-based meat alternative a part of the Great Reset? It sure allows a lot of people to feel superior about their diets but is it better for the planet? Is it better for your health? Or is it a ploy to put more power in industry? We break down these questions with not-so-simple answers.
 

Oreally

Right from the start

Biden administration moves one step closer to developing a central bank digital currency​

Sep 17, 2022 | 0 |

The Biden administration is moving one step closer to developing a central bank digital currency, known as the digital dollar, saying it would help reinforce the U.S. role as a leader in the world financial system.

The White House said on Friday that after President Joe Biden issued an executive order in March calling on a variety of agencies to look at ways to regulate digital assets, the agencies came up with nine reports, covering cryptocurrency impacts on financial markets, the environment, innovation and other elements of the economic system.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said one Treasury recommendation is that the U.S. “advance policy and technical work on a potential central bank digital currency, or CBDC, so that the United States is prepared if CBDC is determined to be in the national interest.”

“Right now, some aspects of our current payment system are too slow or too expensive,” Yellen said on a Thursday call with reporters laying out some of the findings of the reports. Central bank digital currencies differ from existing digital money available to the general public, such as the balance in a bank account, because they would be a direct liability of the Federal Reserve, not a commercial bank.

According to the Atlantic Council nonpartisan think tank, 105 countries representing more than 95% of global gross domestic product already are exploring or have created a central bank digital currency.

The council found that the U.S. and the U.K. are far behind in creating a digital dollar or its equivalent. Treasury, the Justice Department, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other agencies were tasked with contributing to reports that would address various concerns about the risks, development, and usage of digital assets.
Several reports will come out in the next weeks and months.

Eswar Prasad, a trade professor at Cornell who studies the digitization of currencies, said Treasury’s report “takes a positive view about how a digital dollar might play a useful role in increasing payment options for individuals and businesses” while acknowledging the risks of its development.

He said the report sets the stage for the creation of agency regulations and legislation “that can improve the benefit-risk tradeoff associated with cryptocurrencies and related technologies.”

The Blockchain Association, which lobbies lawmakers on Capitol Hill, said in a statement that the White House reports are “a missed opportunity to cement U.S. crypto leadership.”

“These reports focus on risks — not opportunities,” the statement reads, “and omit substantive recommendations on how the United States can promote its burgeoning crypto industry, including job creation, improvements to the financial system, and expanded access for all Americans.”

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers have submitted various pieces of legislation to regulate cryptocurrency and other digital assets. Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, said in an emailed statement that the report “seem to kick the can down the road” she said, “we don’t see clear recommendations.” (ABC News)
how can this be constitutional?



'The Constitution contains only two sections dealing with monetary issues. Section 8 permits Congress to coin money and to regulate its value. Section 10 denies states the right to coin or to print their own money. '
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Are Europe's Energy Crisis "Solutions" Doomed To Failure?

SUNDAY, SEP 18, 2022 - 04:00 AM
Authored by Pete Hoekstra via The Gatestone Institute,

Europe is facing a growing energy crisis. Individuals and industries are being battered by rising energy costs. On August 31, Russia shut down the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline to Germany for initially what was supposed to be 72 hours, but followed by an announcement of "technical difficulties" that would prevent a resumption. Russian energy giant Gazprom also announced that natural gas supplies to French energy company Engie SA would be immediately reduced. These actions have created significant uncertainty and the threat of much higher energy prices in Europe as the cold winter season approaches.

In the Netherlands last month, I had the opportunity to discuss the skyrocketing energy costs. Monthly utility bills of 400 to 600 euros are not unusual. One company said it was spending four times the amount for natural gas than a year ago. The company indicated because of these higher costs, it would be cutting its production by 50% this winter. Most European Union countries are experiencing an eight-fold increase in energy prices.

Both Germany and the Netherlands have been seeing extreme energy price spikes. Germany's prices surged to 1,050 euros per megawatt hour (MWh) before falling to 610 euros in August. Last year, the approximate cost was only 85 euros per MWh.

This dramatic inflation in energy costs is resulting in predictable actions with unpredictable outcomes. The Dutch have reported demand destruction. This means that when the price for a product increases, the demand for it decreases. What we are seeing in Europe is significant decrease in demand for energy because of the huge price increases. An example is the business that will cut production by 50% because energy costs have significantly increased the costs of their end product, resulting in a 50% cut in demand for their product.

The Dutch used 25% less natural gas in the first six months of 2022 than they did in the comparable period in 2021 — primarily due to customers' responses to the higher prices and mercifully somewhat milder than expected temperatures.

The EU has already asked member states to cut energy use by 15% this winter. When it comes to Russian gas supplies, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen warned Europe to prepare for the "worst situation." Meanwhile, the Norwegian energy company Equinor estimates that European power companies will need to find 1.5 trillion euros to cover the costs of margin calls related to soaring energy prices. Europe and the West look as if they will be in for a rough, expensive winter.

Predictably, EU government leaders believe that the EU and its member states "must act." Several countries have already unilaterally implemented measures -- from imposing price caps to direct government handouts to deal with the immediate costs of the crisis. At the EU level, there now appears to be a consensus that the entire energy market structure must be redesigned, and quickly. They seem to be hoping that this might be completed by early 2023, but none of these actions is laying the foundation for a long-term, workable energy solution.

The reality, however, is that this situation did not develop overnight and will not be fixed overnight. Despite European politicians blaming all this on Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the root causes go deeper. The EU made a commitment to sustainability and so-called green energy years ago. Germany, Austria, Italy and the Netherlands are now reportedly going back to coal-fired plants to save on natural gas usage. Experts in Germany say the coalition government is "trying to buy time with coal so that it can come up with a more sustainable long-term solution."

In January, Germany closed half of its six remaining nuclear power plants despite rising energy costs. Germany's lofty sustainable climate goals did not include plans on how to replace the energy that was being provided by its safe, clean and reliable nuclear power plants.

Instead, to achieve its climate utopia, Germany decided that it would become more dependent on Russian gas, that consumers willingly would pay higher prices, and that it could turn to power from far less reliable wind and solar energy. This fantasy became the model across the EU, and the EU has no one else to blame for the results.

The frustrating outcome is that businesses, families and individuals will be forced to shoulder the burden caused by unwise policy decisions by their leaders. As one Dutch farmer said, their governments are run by a bunch of bureaucrats who sit in chairs and have no real-world experience. It might be worth adding they also have no accountability.

In response to Russia severely restricting or cutting off gas supplies, EU governments will take dramatic actions over the coming months.

Germany recently announced it would keep two of the nuclear plants it was shuttering as backups, just in case.

EU leaders will then go back to the voters and describe the amazing job they did while failing to mention they were the ones who made the decisions that put their countries in this crisis in the first place.

The entire current crisis was avoidable if the EU had developed a rational plan instead of one based on a daydream, no matter how enticing.

The U.S. needs urgently to examine what is happening in Europe and develop a rational energy transition plan. Any long-term solution must include strategies for reliable power production, sustainable energy and a massively strengthened electrical grid.

Europe's plan was built on the hope that consumers would accept higher prices, that Russia and Putin would be reliable, and that battery storage technology would be robust enough to cover the times when "the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine."

This strategy, sadly always doomed to failure, provides a cautionary tale for "solutions" based solely on hope.

The U.S. should not repeat the same mistakes as the EU by continuing down a path that cuts domestic fossil fuel production, bans gasoline-powered vehicles, and ignores that the power generation capacity and energy infrastructure are not in place to achieve an unrealistic and unfortunately unsustainable green agenda.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Escalation: Recent Events Suggest Mounting Economic Danger

SUNDAY, SEP 18, 2022 - 05:10 AM
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

A common refrain from people who are critical of alternative economists is that we have been predicting crisis for so long that “eventually we will be right.” These are generally people who don’t understand the nature of economic decline – It’s like an avalanche that builds over time, then breaks and quickly escalates as it flows down the mountain. What they don’t grasp is that they are in the middle of an economic collapse RIGHT NOW, and they just can’t see it because they have been acclimated to the presence of the snow and cold.

Economic decline is a process that takes many years, and while you might get an event like the market crash of 1929 or the crash of 2008, these moments of panic are nothing more than the wreckage left behind by the great wave of tumbling ice that everyone should have seen coming far in advance, but they refused.

In 2022 the job of warning people is far easier than it used to be because we are well past the midpoint of the process of decline. But, believe it or not, I still get people today who claim that we analysts are “doom mongers.” The power of willful ignorance is truly amazing. It’s enough to make a person blind to stagflationary crisis, supply chain disruptions, quickly inflating prices, stock market carnage, bond market instability, record consumer debt, and international conflict.

At this point, I think if a person can’t see the dangers ahead they are probably a waste of time and space and are destined to be buried in the ice; there’s nothing that can be done for them. Yes, there are some people out there that don’t get exposed to the information and we have to take them into account, but my priority will be people that are awake and aware and try to give them a sense of what point in the collapse process we find ourselves.

In the past month there has been a considerable uptick in economic and geopolitical activity that suggests we are entering a new phase, and not surprisingly it’s all accumulating right before we hit October.

Here are the events that I find most concerning:

The European Energy Crisis
This is an event that I have been predicting since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and now it is upon us. I wrote about it extensively in my recent article ‘Europe Is Facing Energy Disaster And It’s Going To Bleed Over Into The US’ so I won’t rehash all that information here. What I do want to point out is the complete lack of planning on the part of European officials to deal with the threat. It is as if they WANT a full spectrum disaster.

Russia has now completely cut off natural gas supplies to Europe, which represent around 40% of all EU energy resources. Europe’s benchmark natural gas prices spiked by 28% a week ago, on top of already existing inflation. Oil supplies are also in steep decline for Europe and the EU government has pledged to cut what’s left of Russian oil imports by sea at the end of the year. Sadly, they have offered very little in the way of solutions to the supply-side problem.

There has been talk of increasing imports of alternative resources from other nations, but the EU is already buying up around 75% of all liquid natural gas from the US. OPEC oil producers have indicated they will not be attempting to increase production anytime soon (probably because they can’t due to inflation in operation costs). There is NO backup energy resource for Europe; it doesn’t exist right now.

They will try to buy up whatever coal, oil and gas they can find on the market while driving up prices even more for other countries. They will still come up short, which means people are going to freeze this winter.

Best case scenario is that there are mostly mild temps and people barely scrape buy with minimum heating. But EU industry is going to suffer and many manufacturers are going to cut production (which mean more stress on the global supply chain).

Core Inflation Is Still Rising
As I warned last week in my article ‘It’s A Fact That Needs Repeating: The Federal Reserve Is A Suicide Bomber,’ inflation is continuing to rise despite the Fed’s continued interest rate hikes, giving the central bank even more ammunition to justify higher rates into extreme economic weakness.

The latest CPI print showed an increase to 8.3% and was a shock to markets which universally expected a drop. This is the nature of stagflation – Even with falling demand prices continue to climb or remain high for extended periods. The stagflation event of the 1970s lasted for a decade until the Fed jacked rates to 21% and then employment crumbled in the early 1980s.

This doesn’t mean that rates will go to 21% this time; they don’t need to. All it would take is a Federal Funds Rate of around 4% – 5% to crash our current QE addicted system. A 75 bps rate hike is now widely expected at the next Fed meeting this month, with some predicting a 100 bps hike. This would put us close to crash territory for markets and for employment, though I think we still have well into 2023 before unemployment really starts to spike.

Putin’s Meeting With Xi
As I write this, Vladimir Putin is set to meet with China’s Xi Jinping and the nature of the conference is not clear. There are the obvious points of agreement such as China’s continued purchases of Russian oil and other commodities, as well as the ongoing plan to build a pipeline to China by 2025. There is also strategic cooperation which is evident in the recent naval exercises between the two nations around Japan and Taiwan.

The timing of the meeting is concerning to me, because the prime season for a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan is fast approaching (October is the best month for naval movements to avoid typhoons). China would not necessarily need to commit to a ground invasion, either. They could simply cut off all import/export trade from any source other than China and starve Taiwan until they accept unification.

There is also the issue of Ukraine and arms sales. With the amount of propaganda coming from Ukrainian Intelligence and NATO, it’s hard to say what is actually happening, but I suspect Russia is changing strategies and repositioning to deploy missile and artillery bombardment of infrastructure, including power grids and water. This is a tactic that Russia has avoided for months (until this week), which is surprising because one of the first measures usually taken by the US during an invasion is to eliminate most key infrastructure (as we did in Iraq). You would think Russia would have done the same, but perhaps they were saving that scenario for winter when it is harder for Ukraine to cope.

This would make Ukraine essentially unlivable in the coming winter for most of the population. Putin may be seeking to ensure China remains a steady economic partner should geopolitical pressures increase. They may even be making a deal of mutual support: China takes Taiwan while Russia makes Ukraine a resource wasteland and they each support the other economically when NATO counties try to impose sanctions on China. We probably won’t know until October, but the timing of the meeting should raise eyebrows.

If the manure is about to hit the fan in Taiwan along with Ukraine, then diplomatic and economic ties will be severed and western access to China’s manufacturing will be cut. This is a problem for China’s economy, certainly, which may be why they have continued their mass covid lockdowns well after every other government has abandoned them. Could this be practice for civil controls in an impending war environment?

China’s global dominance in imports/exports gives them considerable economic leverage in trade, however. Many nations would not support sanctions against them. Also, their vast holdings of US dollars and Treasuries could be used as a weapon to damage or destroy the dollar’s world reserve status. If China invades Taiwan this year, then all bets are off – The economic decline will move swiftly from that point on.

There are many other trends which factor into the crash environment but the above factors are the most recent and hold the biggest potential for causing a domino effect globally. The question that always arises is “what can we do about it?” Not much in terms of prevention. What we can do, though, is prepare locally to weather the storm. This means stocking necessities before they rise even further in price or become non-existent. Become a producer and learn a valuable skill for survival in a depleted economy Organize with people locally who are on the same page to create security and alternative trade opportunities.

Hopefully, the aware citizenry will rise to the challenge and organization will be extensive, because the worst case scenario would be great masses of completely isolated people all vying against each other rather than working towards mutual security. Even in a slow collapse scenario this is a problem in terms of rising crime; so plan on working with others if you want to avoid inevitable third world conditions.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Hungary Can No Longer Be Considered A Full Democracy, Claim EU Lawmakers In Latest Attack On Orbán’s Conservative Government

SUNDAY, SEP 18, 2022 - 06:20 AM
By Thomas Brooke of Remix News

Hungary can no longer be considered a fully-functioning democracy and should be regarded as a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy,” a report adopted by the European Parliament on Thursday stated.

European Parliament members meet in a plenary session on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022, in Strasbourg, eastern France.

European lawmakers adopted a non-binding but significant resolution on Thursday by 433 votes to 123, which criticized democratic principles in Hungary. This resolution comes despite Hungary’s government securing a landslide election victory with a two-thirds majority in April of this year, representing one of the strongest democratic mandates in all of Europe. The election was also certified as free and fair by a range of independent election observers.

Nevertheless, in a press release following the vote, the European Parliament condemned the “deliberate and systematic efforts of the Hungarian government” to undermine European values and demands.

Furthermore, it claimed the situation in Hungary has deteriorated to such an extent that it can only now be considered an “electoral autocracy.”

It blames what it regards as a democratic “backslide” on both Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz administration, and the European Commission which it claims has exacerbated the situation through its omission to intervene. MEPs further called for EU recovery funds to continue being withheld from the Hungarian treasury “until the country complies with EU recommendations and court rulings.”

The continuous criticism of Hungary has been ongoing since 2018 when MEPs first triggered the Article 7 procedure, what some consider to be a nuclear option which can ultimately deprive a member state of its voting rights. The only other country to be subject to the Article 7 procedure is Poland, which also conveniently continues to elect a conservative national government, much to the dismay of federalist, pro-globalism officials in Brussels, many who occupy their positions with no democratic mandate.

As Article 7 requires unanimity among other member states to take this action against an accused transgressor, Poland and Hungary have an agreement to block each other’s procedure.

In their scattergun approach to discredit Hungary, MEPs listed some of the main areas of concern, including the country’s constitutional and electoral system, the independence of the judiciary, corruption and conflicts of interest and freedom of expression, and media pluralism.

“Academic freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of association, the right to equal treatment, including LGBTIQ rights, the rights of minorities, as well as those of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, are also problematic,” the press release reads.

One MEP asked to comment on the resolution, the left-wing French Greens politician, Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield said: “The conclusions of this report are clear and irrevocable: Hungary is not a democracy. It was more urgent than ever for the Parliament to take this stance, considering the alarming rate at which rule of law is backsliding in Hungary.”

Arch-federalist and liberal MEP Guy Verhofstadt, known as one of the wealthiest MEPs in all of Brussels, tweeted: “Don’t know what is worse: that we are breeding an autocracy within the EU… or that so many MEPs, heads of state and the Commission are still allowing it to happen. Stop Orbán! Cut his EU finances and #EUCO power now!”

Ahead of the vote, Fidesz MEPs were incensed that Hungarian left-wing opposition politicians were set to vote to condemn the country and thus deprive the Hungarian government of much-needed EU funding to help alleviate the cost of living crisis that envelops Europe from affecting Hungarian consumers.

“Unpayable electricity and gas bills, failing businesses, looming unemployment and insecurity — these are the things that Europe should be responding to, not conducting a political witch hunt against Hungary,” underlined Balász Hidvéghi.

View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1570324875536961536
1:17 min

“What we see is that, while a constructive negotiation is going on between the European Commission and the Hungarian government, stigmatization, incitement, and problem-making are taking place here,” Hungarian MEP Kinga Gál added.

“This text is yet another attempt by the federalist European political parties to attack Hungary and its Christian-democratic, conservative government for ideological reasons,” a written reply to the report co-signed in solidarity by conservative MEPs from Spain, France, Poland, Italy, and Hungary read.

Some Eurocrats, including EU Budget Commissioner Johannes Hahn want to cut Hungary’s EU funding by up to 70 percent until it implements measures deemed acceptable by the European Commission.

Hungary’s Justice Minister Judit Varga has been in Brussels to hold talks with EU officials on this very matter since last week, posting an update on Monday in which she said, “We believe in dialogue based on mutual respect.” She vowed to continue working “to ensure that Hungarian people can access the resources they deserve.”
 

raven

TB Fanatic
"At this point, I think if a person can’t see the dangers ahead they are probably a waste of time and space and are destined to be buried in the ice; there’s nothing that can be done for them."
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Brazil's Coffee Bean Supply To Hit Record-Low As Global Scarcity Worsens​

SUNDAY, SEP 18, 2022 - 12:00 PM

How much are consumers willing to pay for a cup of coffee?

That's a great question, considering the world's top arabica producer, Brazil, is headed for record low inventory, highlights tighter global supplies plus robust demand should continue boosting prices.

Bloomberg quoted Silas Brasileiro, president of the National Coffee Council, who said inventories in the South American country could decline to just 7 million bags (each weighing 60 kilograms) by the end of 1Q23. Brazil usually has 9-12 million bags in inventory.

Readers have been well informed regarding the global supply deficit of arabica coffee beans, which has materialized over the last few years. Recall "Arabica Stockpiles Experience Largest Plunge Since '98 Amid Severe Shortage" and "Arabica Coffee Set For Largest Annual Increase Since 1994" because multiple years of a weather phenomenon known as La Nina have produced adverse weather conditions in the country's top growing regions.

Stockpiles "are so low that even if we have a good crop next year, Brazil may just barely have enough to serve demand," said Nelson Carvalhaes, a board member of exporters group Cecafe.



Tight global supplies have doubled arabica coffee futures in New York since 2020. Prices have traded in a lateral pattern for most of 2022 between $2-$2.5 per pound.

Guilherme Morya, Rabobank's senior economic analyst, said prices would continue increasing on Brazilian supply woes.



In late 2021, restaurant chain Caribou Coffee Co. began panic hoarding coffee beans because the supply outlook was souring.

"We continue to increase safety stock on key items," CEO John Butcher told Bloomberg about one year ago.

In Colombia, the world's second top arabica coffee producer, crops are drowned in too much rain due to persisting La-Nina-related conditions. Yields are expected to decline in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua, while Vietnam, the largest robusta supplier, will also see stockpiles tumble because of poor harvest.

Analyst Natalia Gandolphi from hEDGEpoint outlined this will be the second year of declining global stockpiles with increasing demand.

Given the worsening global supply situation, there's no immediate relief as higher demand indicates arabica prices should move higher. Consumers will find robusta a cheaper alternative to arabica, but even then, all bean quality might move higher.

Good luck to the central banks, who believe they can solve food inflation and overall inflation by crushing demand through higher interest rates.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

California Governor Signs 'Most Aggressive' Package Of Green Laws

SUNDAY, SEP 18, 2022 - 11:30 AM
Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday announced a sweeping package of what he called the country’s “most aggressive” climate measures to “accelerate the state’s transition” to non-conventional energy sources.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks onstage during Vox Media's 2022 Code Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Sept. 7, 2022. (Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media)

The package includes 40 bills that appear to provide new green rules on laws related to things ranging from large-scale industry to the family home and private and public transportation.

The Democratic governor’s office said in a statement the package of climate change-focused measures aims to cut pollution and target “big polluters.”

It comes as America’s most populous state has struggled to provide stable electricity for residents amid a heat wave, which saw the state asking residents to use less power and suggest the best times to use air conditioners or charge electric cars.

“This month has been a wake-up call for all of us that later is too late to act on climate change. California isn’t waiting any more,” Newsom said in a statement. “Together with the Legislature, California is taking the most aggressive action on climate our nation has ever seen.”

“We’re cleaning the air we breathe, holding the big polluters accountable, and ushering in a new era for clean energy,” he continued. “That’s climate action done the California Way—and we’re not only doubling down, we’re just getting started.”

In July, Newsom called for “bold actions” to combat climate change. He declared his climate-focused vision for California involves a push to achieve 90 percent “clean energy” by 2035, “carbon neutrality” by 2045, “setback measures” to target oil drilling, carbon capture programs, and to “advance nature-based solutions” to remove carbon from “natural and working lands.”

40 Green Bills
Newsom’s office said his sweeping package of measures will create four million new jobs over the next 20 years, cut air pollution by 60 percent, and reduce state oil consumption by 91 percent.

How this would be achieved was not explained in the governor’s news release.

The package of measures, the governor’s office said, will save the state $23 billion by avoiding damage from pollution. It further aims to cut fossil fuel use in buildings and transportation by 92 percent and refinery pollution by 94 percent.

The governor named a list of the 40 new green bills, which touch on things from the broad scope of the climate to more everyday matters such as community air quality, electricity supply, vehicle permits, and gas pricing.

Some of the bills, which were all named in the governor’s news release, include:

AB 1279: “The California Climate Crisis Act”
AB 1389: “Clean Transportation Program: project funding preferences”
AB 1749: “Community emissions reduction programs: toxic air contaminants and criteria air pollutants”
AB 1857: “Solid waste”
AB 1909: “Vehicles: bicycle omnibus bill”
AB 2075: “Energy: electric vehicle charging standards”
AB 2622: “Sales and use taxes: exemptions: California Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project: transit buses”
AB 2836: “Carl Moyer Memorial Air Quality Standards Attainment Program: vehicle registration fees: California tire fee”
SB 529: “Electricity: electrical transmission facilities”
SB 1063: “Energy: appliance standards and cost-effective measures”
SB 1205: “Water rights: appropriation”
SB 1230: “Zero-emission and near-zero-emission vehicle incentive programs: requirements”
SB 1322: “Energy: petroleum pricing”
SB 1382: “Air pollution: Clean Cars 4 All Program: Sales and Use Tax Law: zero emissions vehicle exemption”

How the package of new green laws and regulations might impact, for example, standards required for cars to be permitted on Californian roads; how and when homes can be cooled; the source of electricity allowed to be supplied to homes; the manufacturing of everyday appliances and products, etc., were not outlined in the governor’s news release.

This latest pronouncement comes on the heels of Newsom enacting regulation to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

^^^^^

unicorn fart.jpg
California
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

"This New Period Is Very Different, And Far Worse In Many Ways Than The 1970s"

SUNDAY, SEP 18, 2022 - 12:30 PM
By Eric Peters, CIO of One River asset management

“The question I get most is whether this is like the 1970s,” said Lindsay Politi, our inflation portfolio manager. We were discussing the phase of quantum change that has arrived and will unfold in the coming decade(s). “I’ve been batting around an answer to this. The short answer is only in the most superficial ways and the longer answer is a book,” she said. I naturally prefer well written books to short answers. But when writing, I keep word count tight as a core discipline. So this short note captures key highlights from our discussions this week.

“Except for the fact that inflation is high and increasing, and other than the similarities that come from that, this new period is very different, far worse in many ways than the 1970s,” said Lindsay. “The broadest point is that the world is moving from an industrial revolution economy to an information revolution economy.” We’ll discuss that later. “But there are massive additional factors underlying this transition,” she said. “Specifically, there are four lesser points that are part of this industrial/information transition. But ‘lesser’ somehow seems wrong given their impact.”

Lesser Points I: “Climate change is happening,” said Lindsay, explaining the first of four lesser points impacting the great transition. “Rivers that defined national economies for centuries are drying up, our best farmlands are becoming infertile, and devastating weather events are now seen as normal.” Investors try to ignore this because it’s hard to analyze. “There are no good analogs, this is a once-in-human-history event. The extent of the impact is hard to process but this much is now obvious: we face a reliably predictable series of unpriced inflationary shocks.”

Lesser Points II: “No previous inflationary period was preceded by $30trln of quantitative easing,” said Lindsay, identifying the second lesser point. “14yrs of QE, by design, manipulated market pricing of inflation risk, flattening yield curves, lowering yields, forcing them negative.” These rates were embedded in all global financial asset prices. “Markets and central banks weren’t just surprised by inflation, they were surprised at a moment when they were, by design, more vulnerable to that surprise than at any point in recorded financial history.”

Lesser Points III: “The 2nd most common question I get is whether an aging population means we’ll have deflation like Japan,” said Lindsay, flagging the 3rd lesser point. “Like the 1970s, it’s risky to take one discrete example and use it as a template for anything at all similar. In a broader context, increasing populations are a consequence of industrialization.” Global population was roughly unchanged from 10,000 BCE until around 1750 AD when it slowly then rapidly started to increase. “Now the global population appears to be stabilizing again. In an industrial capitalist world view this is negative because success is selling more and more widgets to more and more people, and flat or declining populations makes this harder. Maybe this isn’t a negative but another, arguably positive, symptom of a much bigger transition.”

Lesser Points IV: “Investors make geopolitical assumptions based on fairly recent history,” explained Lindsay. “A common one is that the US hegemony gives way to Chinese hegemony. Perhaps. But just like the industrial age led a broad transition from monarchy to democracy, could we be on the cusp of an entirely different type of government?” What does citizenship or nationality mean when people can live and work anywhere? “Is it more likely the renminbi replaces the dollar as the reserve currency or that we use a nationless means of exchange like cryptocurrency? Certainly, we see some nations and groups trying - often violently - to hold onto power but this seems more like last gasp attempts to turn the tide than real shows of strength.”

(In)stability:

“There’s an assumption that this transition will be disinflationary, but I really don’t think that’s right,” said Lindsay. “Most big transitions are inflationary with a lot of volatility and relative instability. In general, predictability, stability, peace, cooperation, etc. are disinflationary for goods prices and inflationary for asset prices. Instability, less confidence about the future, more combative markets/governments all add extra costs that translate into higher goods prices and lower asset prices,” she said. “Not all transitions are inflationary but transitions that will require a significant rerating of existing capital because of its obsolescence, transitions that create scarcity, transitions that shift power dynamics; those tend to be inflationary.”

Anecdote:

“The problems we’re facing, to the extent they’re actually problems, are because the industrial age is ending,” said Lindsay Politi, our inflation portfolio manager, brilliant. “Check out this chart,” she said, early morning, awaiting CPI, standing desks, our screens aglow, pointing to an S-curve that tracked World GDP per capita from 1mm years ago to present. “Brad DeLong, one of my favorite economic historians, published this chart and what you see is that growth basically flatlined through human history until the industrial revolution. Then went parabolic. Now it’s leveling out again,” she said, tracing that S-curve with her finger on the monitor.

“Economic philosophers who lived in that inflection period didn’t really know what to make of it.” Malthus observed that throughout the course of human history bouts of economic growth ended in collapse, not understanding the profound change industrial productivity created. Marx understood some failings of capitalism – the drive towards excess and resulting gluts that we now call recessions, and the tendency for labor to be undervalued relative to capital. He also couldn’t have understood how dramatically standards of livings would rise for all people. “

Just like Malthus and Marx were struggling to understand the dramatic economic changes they were confronting, we’re also struggling to come to terms with the transition from the industrialized age to the information age,” said Lindsay. “In the context of this S-curve, the folly of quantitative easing becomes clearer.” Central bankers were trying in vain to escape the reality of the flattening inflection in this growth curve. “Capitalism broadly is poorly suited for an information economy. Capitalism is about maximizing the production of widgets and it is very good at that.”

Over the course of a few generations, we have gone from people living in extreme scarcity to the point where industries now create storage spaces for the many things we own and buy.” This need for constant manufacturing of new things is literally killing us via climate change. “In the information age, ideas are not widgets. It’s not quantity that matters but quality. And almost everything we know about what creates quality ideas is the opposite of what drives people to create more widgets,” said Lindsay, and I considered my long walks in nature, hours of contemplation, triangulating information, free association, hunting for questions, ideas, answers, away from screens, the factory floor, soul destroying production lines.

“The system will necessarily change. I have lots of ideas about where we might be going but I think the main idea is that looking to the past for an understanding of the future will be as fruitless today as it was for Marx and Malthus,” she said. “And along with that, expecting there to be limits on things like inflation or price movements because they existed in the past will also prove to be very wrong.”
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

Five Factors Making Bitcoin-Miners Unique Energy Consumers

SUNDAY, SEP 18, 2022 - 08:30 AM
Authored by Jaran Mellerud via BitcoinMagazine.,com,

Bitcoin miners are uniquely flexible energy consumers we can use as energy tools to help solve several energy problems..


Most people disregard bitcoin miners as simply yet another energy-intensive industry, but there is one big difference: Bitcoin miners are uniquely flexible concerning when and where they consume energy. Arcane Research's new report titled "How Bitcoin Mining Can Transform the Energy Industry" found five factors making bitcoin miners unique energy consumers, which I will explain here.

BITCOIN MINERS ARE PRICE-RESPONSIVE ENERGY CONSUMERS​

A price-responsive energy consumer is financially incentivized to adjust its energy consumption based on the energy price. Bitcoin miners refine energy into bitcoin and are only financially incentivized to do this if the energy input is priced lower than the bitcoin output.

The chart below shows the break-even energy price of mining bitcoin during 2021 and parts of 2022. This break-even energy price is the dollar-denominated income per MWh of energy fed into a bitcoin mining machine (Antminer S19). Suppose a bitcoin miner's price per MWh increases above this line. In that case, the miner is financially incentivized to turn off its machines as it would earn less by using this energy for bitcoin mining than it would pay for the energy.


Source: Hashrate Index

Since energy is such a significant component of the cost structure, miners always pay attention to their energy prices and can calculate their break-even energy prices with certainty. During energy scarcity events, the spot energy price will rise far higher than miners' break-even energy price, incentivizing miners to curtail production and let the energy flow to less price-responsive energy consumers, like households.

BITCOIN MINING IS AN INTERRUPTIBLE PROCESS​

Not only are bitcoin miners financially incentivized to stop consuming energy if spot energy prices rise above their break-even energy price, but they are also fully able to do so due to the interruptible nature of the bitcoin mining process.

A bitcoin miner can interrupt its production and energy consumption at a moment's notice without losing more money than the alternative cost of not producing bitcoin. It can not only interrupt its consumption but also granularly adjust it up or down in kilowatt increments.

The interruptibility of the bitcoin mining process becomes apparent when comparing a bitcoin mining facility to a conventional data center. A conventional data center performs many complex processes and must maintain uptime due to its customers. Uptime is so crucial for data centers that they are categorized from tier one to four based on their uptime guarantees and power redundancies. Bitcoin miners, and some other high-performance computing processes, are the only interruptible data center processes.

Since bitcoin mining is an interruptible and price-responsive load, the process is exceptionally suitable as a demand response tool that can help strengthen electricity systems.

BITCOIN MINING OPERATIONS ARE LOCATION-AGNOSTIC​

Most energy-intensive industries produce physical products that require access to supply chains. On the other hand, Bitcoin miners produce hashes sold through the internet. Therefore, a bitcoin mining facility can generally be built in any location with cheap energy and internet access.

The location agnosticism of bitcoin mining makes it possible to take the energy consumer directly to the energy source. Bitcoin miners are the ultimate customers of previously stranded energy resources, which is why oil producers have started to use natural gas that they otherwise would flare to mine bitcoin.


Source: Arcane Research

The location agnosticism of bitcoin mining becomes clear when looking at a map of Texas' bitcoin mining operations. They are almost all located in the desert in the far west of the state, where they feed on the region's stranded wind and solar.

BITCOIN MINING OPERATIONS CAN BE SCALED MODULARLY​

A bitcoin mining machine consumes a specific amount of electricity, and it's possible to combine different amounts of these machines into different levels of load. Whether an energy asset owner wants a bitcoin mining load of 5 MW, 20 MW, or 100 MW doesn't matter: All load sizes are possible by changing the number of machines.


Source: Arcane Research

The modularity of bitcoin mining makes it possible to design a bitcoin mining load to match the available energy generation capacity. This is especially relevant when matching the bitcoin mining load with the excess production capacity of a stranded renewable energy generator to improve its economics.

A BITCOIN MINING OPERATION CAN BE DESIGNED TO BE PORTABLE​

We can design a bitcoin mining load in specific ways to maximize portability. Filling specially designed shipping containers with mining machines has recently emerged as a way to optimize portability. These container solutions are designed after the plug-and-play principle and can quickly be shipped to other locations if needed.


Source: Arcane Research

The portability of bitcoin mining makes it easy to move a mining facility to soak up excess energy and quickly move the facility to another location if the energy stops being in excess in the first location.

CONCLUSION​

Bitcoin mining possesses a combination of properties that makes it a uniquely flexible energy consumer. This flexibility allows bitcoin miners to provide positive externalities to various energy systems globally, including strengthening vulnerable electricity grids, improving the economics of renewable energy, mitigating natural gas flaring and lowering heating costs by repurposing waste heat.

What makes bitcoin mining such an aspiring energy tool isn't simply that it's a uniquely flexible energy consumer but that the financial incentives add up. With similar incentives, the bitcoin mining and energy industries are destined to work together to solve some of our biggest energy problems. You can read more about this in Arcane Research's full report.
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment

WEF Piece Lauds How "Billions" Across The World Complied With Lockdown Restrictions

SUNDAY, SEP 18, 2022 - 07:30 AM
Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

An opinion piece published by the World Economic Forum lauds how “billions” of people complied with “restrictions” imposed as a result of lockdown, suggesting they would do the same under the guise of reducing carbon emissions.

The article is titled ‘My Carbon’: An approach for inclusive and sustainable cities’ and was written by Mridul Kaushik, Mission Director, Smart Cities Mission, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs of India.

The subject of the piece is how to convince people to adopt “personal carbon allowance programs” given that such schemes have so far been largely unsuccessful.

However, Kaushik notes that improvements in tracking and surveillance technology are helping to overcome “political resistance” against such programs.

Writing that “COVID-19 was the test of social responsibility,” Kaushik commends how, “A huge number of unimaginable restrictions for public health were adopted by billions of citizens across the world.”

“There were numerous examples globally of maintaining social distancing, wearing masks, mass vaccinations and acceptance of contact-tracing applications for public health, which demonstrated the core of individual social responsibility,” he adds.

1663550106443.png

In citing how so many people complied with lockdown mandates, despite overwhelming evidence of the harmful consequences such restrictions had on society, Kaushik implies that they’d behave in a similarly obsequious manner in other areas of life.

Such conformity would be encouraged via technology, including artificial intelligence, digitization and “smart home” devices, argues Kaushik.

The article goes on to call for a social-credit style carbon emissions rationing scheme that would provide “individual advisories on lower carbon and ethical choices for consumption of product and services.”

New social norms would also be created to define what “a fair share” of personal emissions represents, and determine “acceptable levels” of personal emissions.

We previously documented how technocrats are preparing “mandatory” personal carbon allowances that would introduce rationing into every area of your life via an app that would record your travel, heating expenses and even the food you eat.

As we highlight in the video below, climate change groups are also working with television producers to insert messages about global warming and carbon emissions into shows.

View: https://youtu.be/joaed2Yn87o
11:13 min
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
The Big Reset Movie (The Uncensored Documentary About The Truth Of The Pandemic) 2:16:44 min

The Big Reset Movie (The Uncensored Documentary About The Truth Of The Pandemic)​

Sunfellow On COVID-19 Published September 18, 2022

With the COVID-19 crisis, policies have been implemented that would seem unthinkable under normal conditions. And all this has been achieved by means of an instrument as effective as it is old: fear.

There are two laboratories in this story: one, the one in Wuhan, the other the great sociological laboratory where the social engineering of the pandemic would have been designed and programmed.

This documentary includes the testimonies of geneticists, molecular biologists, epidemiologists, biochemists, lawyers, prestigious journalists and Nobel Laureates who are contributing very different versions of the pandemic to which the media have accustomed us.

https://thebigresetmovie.com/inicio-ingles/
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
Ep. 2877a - How Do You Destroy The [CB] System? You Are Witnessing It In Real Time 16:56 (starts at 1:40 min)

Ep. 2877a - How Do You Destroy The [Central Bank] System? You Are Witnessing It In Real Time​

X22 Report Published September 18, 2022

Countries around the world are now suffering from inflation. Argentina inflation rate is nearing 100%. Pier review study shows the climate hoax is just that, a climate hoax. The economy is now shifting, the [CB] system is being destroyed and countries are being to shift their monetary policy away from the [CB].
 

marsh

On TB every waking moment
(China)
China, Thousands taking to streets to protest against Evergrande Real Estate Group! .20 min

CHINA, THOUSANDS TAKING TO STREETS TO PROTEST AGAINST EVERGRANDE REAL ESTATE GROUP!​

Thousands taking to streets to protest against Evergrande Group - China's largest real estate company.

^^^^^
(France)
Paris - demanding Macron's resignation and even the country's withdrawal from NATO 1:15 min

PARIS - DEMANDING MACRON'S RESIGNATION AND EVEN THE COUNTRY'S WITHDRAWAL FROM NATO​

^^^^^
(Italy)
ITALY - The people have had enough of a policy which will destroy their livelihoods .38 min

ITALY - THE PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF A POLICY WHICH WILL DESTROY THEIR LIVELIHOODS​


ITALY - The people have had enough of The Agenda dominating their economy and which will destroy their livelihoods.

I stand with Italy! The people have not voted for poverty!

^^^
(Canada)
Thousands of people stormed downtown Toronto to chant: Trudeau Must Go! .49 min

THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE STORMED DOWNTOWN TORONTO TO CHANT: TRUDEAU MUST GO!​

Thousands of people stormed downtown Toronto to chant: Trudeau Must Go! This is something fake news media won't show you!
 
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