Collapse

[Dreamtimer]

"That's just who we are."

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtTvXZ5lby8


"Here's how I believe the world ends."

[Chris]

Just in case you were feeling optimistic, Kollapsnik-in-Chief Kunstller brings you back to reality...

Boy, is this a veritable clusterfuck... I wonder when the Sh will hit the F.

Except for the partisan Biden-bashing (I actually rather like him these days), I have to agree with most of his other stuff. Hopefully he's overplaying the danger of Spike Protein vaccines and an Imminent Chinese surprise attack, but I sure share his concerns.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nat...king-out-loud/

CLUSTERFUCK NATION – BLOGJune 21, 2021

Thinking Out Loud

Events are tending toward an unfortunate convergence that may leave the USA in a very reduced condition before the end of this year, while the “Joe Biden” government cripples all our institutions, especially the military, with race-and-gender mind-fuckery as a distraction from its own coming and untoward collapse. The “president” is back from his toilsome travels through Europe, which included a summit meeting to butter-up Vladimir Putin, hoping to possibly use Russia as a buffer against an increasingly hostile China.

In a kind of comic reversal of George W. Bush’s first meeting with Vlad Putin — “I was able to get a sense of the man’s soul,” W said — this time, Vlad looked into “Ol’ Joe’s” eyes and probably saw the ghost of Konstantin Chernenko. You may recall Ol’ Konstantin led the foundering Soviet Union for about a year, his final months from Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital, where emphysema, congestive heart failure, and cirrhosis of the liver laid him low. “Joe Biden” did not start smoking cigarettes at age nine, as Chernenko had, but when Vlad P looked into his eyes, he probably saw a 15-watt bulb flickering within, and played him accordingly. After the summit, Vlad sized-up the “POTUS” as “professional” for the press — a witty snark, if ever there was one.

You can see a procession of events now marshaling up toward an epic storm of bad karma for this exceptional nation of ours turning the corner into summer and then the fall. Of course, the friendly news media is not fully reporting the latest institutional failure, that is, the perfidious behavior of US chief health official, Dr. Tony Fauci, who, with either stupefying naïveté or by some other motive, assisted China in the development of a bio-weapon, which China then loosed upon the USA (and everybody else). Net result: millions dead around the world, and an awful lot of people here now extremely suspicious of the vaccines being aggressively touted by the government. Meanwhile, the roughly half of the US population who took the vaxes now have to worry about what the active ingredient, a toxic spike protein, is doing to their hearts, blood vessels, brains, and other organs, and whether something worse awaits down-the-road. Has a trap been set? (We’ll get to that below.)

Just now, we have news of the strange case, revealed last week, of a “top Chinese counter-intel official,” a vice-minister of State Security, name of Dong Jingwei, defecting to the USA back in February. The strange part is that he came in from the cold to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) because he did not trust the CIA or the FBI to be outside China’s influence, and Dong sought protection from them. More American institutional failure? This raises a whole bale of questions, including whether Dong is a double-reverse disinfo agent, or what? It is rumored that he is proffering even more sordid dirt on “Joe Biden’s” son, Hunter, than is already known from the memo-and-email cache lodged on his infamous laptop-from-hell — not just sexual escapades while in China, but details of big money deals made for the Biden family business. And not just that, but heaps more dirt on other prominent political figures paid off by China. As if the US government is not already in a bad odor with at least half the country’s citizens.

This Chinese spy tale is ripening at exactly the same time that the Maricopa County, AZ, election audit concludes phase one of its operations — scaring the panties off of the DNC and its PR staff at MSNBC, CNN, and the WashPo — with a lot of noises coming in from Georgia and Pennsylvania about likewise conducting vote audits. All that, plus Dong’s garbage barge of toxic political dirt, suggests that “Joe Biden” will have an even shorter run than Konstantin Chernenko did. We may find ourselves in an intense constitutional crisis by mid-summer. Hold that thought….

While all that is cooking on one front burner, we also have the case of the US equity markets burbling away at bubblicious highs on another burner, and therefore primed for a nauseating boil-over. Would a new and lethal government scandal supply the few extra therms for that? And by scandal, I mean something more like a broad loss of legitimacy and paralysis of the “Joe Biden” government. Also, how would a market train-wreck affect the credit markets? The US dollar? Whatever is left of the on-the-ground economy? Let’s just say it sure won’t act as a tonic for any of that; more like a slug of ethylene glycol. So now we’re talking about a simultaneous government crisis and financial crisis.

Now, consider what might happen in the fall if a potent new strain, or “third wave,” of Covid-19 virus wafts across America. We’ve already seen speculation in the medical media that the residual action of mRNA “vaccines,” if exposed to yet another novel coronavirus, might tend to whack-out the immune response of those who got vaxed, killing them, as well as killing a new cohort of victims among the unvaxed, adding up to many millions of dead Americans. How would the country manage any of this along with a twin crisis of economy and government? We couldn’t even manage the pandemic when our institutions were supposedly still functioning.

And now, consider what might happen if China decides this is a good time to gain control of Taiwan (and the world’s leading chip manufacturers). A savvy friend of the blog writes:

They’ll hit Taiwan, Guam, Vietnam, South Korea, Philippines, Australia. Iran would move to secure the overland route from China to Africa. The Israeli/Saudi coalition could stop Iran but only if China didn’t help Iran. (Iran/China are far ahead of us in drone swarm warfare.)

China could overrun all of it in a matter of weeks and establish a deep defensive perimeter before we could effectively respond. More importantly they’ll hit our infrastructure so hard we’ll have a hard time hitting back effectively for years.

Last year pretty much exposed our weakness; now they’ll move to exploit it. They’ll not wait till 2030, as our fearless leaders are touting, otherwise we might have time to mend our ways. Sun Tzu dictates they act now. My bet is they follow his guidance. It is the one area they are most predictable. Xi is following The Art of War to the letter so far.”

Kind of makes you take a deep breath and say, Whoaaaa…?

Those are known unknowns, as Mr. Rumsfeld liked to say. Add to that the known known of the mega-drought that has already developed in the American West and its implications for the food supply (not to mention the electric supply from the great western dams and the water supply to the western mega-cities). And add to that the extremely bad mood the various ethnic and racial groups remain in, due to the years-long DNC-Marxist fermentation of hatred among us. It all boils down to something that looks like an American collapse. Just sayin’. Also sayin’ it might be a really good time to lay in a few extra bags of rice, dried beans, and chili powder to make it edible.

[Chris]

Dmitry Orlov's take on the convulsions of the technosphere post-corona-pandemic

My own comment is that we are seeing clear signs of hyperinflation taking hold globally, with unrestricted money printing from governments, historically low interest rates on the demand side and massive shortages of all sorts of consumer goods and raw materials on the supply side, with a helping of transport bottlenecks that don't seem to get better.

read://http_cluborlov.blogspot.com/?...ip.html%23more

The Technosphere chokes on a chip

The technosphere, which I defined in my 2016 book Shrinking the Technosphere as a nonhuman global emergent intelligence driven by an abstract teleology of total control, has seen its interests greatly advanced in the course of the 2020-21 coronavirus pandemic, with large parts of human populations forced to submit to control measures that made a mockery of their vaunted human rights and democratic values. This is as expected: the technosphere's most potent technologies are its killing technologies, and the way it goes about using them reflects its profound hatred for all living things, especially the willful and hard to control ones. But then the technosphere started to shrink—in certain locales. It is still going strong in others, but it not to early to imagine (dare I say, predict?) how it might continue shrink and what the consequences are going to be.

In my book, I described the reasons why and the methods how we should avoid becoming trapped under the inert hulk of the technosphere. I even provided a worksheet which readers could use to track their progress in freeing themselves from the technosphere's clutches. This was, as was to be expected, to no avail. The only how-to books in this world are cookbooks; the rest are read mainly for entertainment—first alone and, later, at cocktail parties. And the purpose of writing them is to make a bit of extra money to pay baby-sitters (at least it was in my case at the time).

To understand what seems likely to unfold, have to first delve into the technosphere's ontology: what does its emergent intelligence software it run on? It turns out that, seen as a network operating system, it runs partially on human brains but mostly on various microchips, with a wide assortment of optical, electromagnetic and mechanical sensors attached. Although humans still (think that) they exercise a modicum of control over the technosphere, it is the technosphere's natural tendency to take control away from humans even unto life-and-death decisions, as evidenced by a recent event in Libya where an unmanned military aircraft autonomously made the decision to kill someone. And exercising control requires control circuitry.

Having had successful careers as an electronics engineer and then as a software engineer, I am something of a walking, talking museum of automation technology, and can take you on a brief tour of its development. The dumbest control element is the light switch. It has no memory and it decides nothing. The next slightly less stupid control element is a toggle: it remembers whether the light is on or off and when pushed turns it off or on, respectively. This is already surprisingly far along: to build a computer, we need just a few more elements. We need a threshold switch with two buttons, which, depending on what you want, turns the light on when either button is pushed (called an "or gate") or when both buttons are pushed (called an "and gate"). We also need a "not": something that turns the light off when actuated. Finally, we need an actuator; instead of turning on a light bulb, all of these elements should be able to push each others' buttons. And now we are off to the races!

All of the above can be implemented out of any number of mechanical components: mechanical, pneumatic, hydraulic, but none of these were particularly practical for automating control functions. The advent of electric circuits made possible the use of electromechanical components, enabling the great breakthrough that was Strowger switch, patented in 1891. It replaced the human telephone switchboard operator: instead of turning a crank and saying "Number 17, please!" one simply turned the rotary dial, first to 1, then to 2, resulting in a click, a pause, and then 7 rapid-fire clicks (two-digit phone numbers were the limit at the time, limiting a telephone exchange to 99 subscribers).

This system went on for a surprisingly long time. In the mid-1970s I found myself in a hotel room in Italy that was equipped with a rotary-dial phone that had a dainty little padlock on the dial to prevent guests from dialing out. But I needed to make a phone call to Russia, so I tapped out the entire long-distance number on the hook. After all, the rotary dial just actuates an interrupt switch wired in sequence with the hook.

The evolution of control circuits went from electromechanical (based on solenoids and relays) to vacuum tube-based (consisting of vacuum tube switches and ferrite cores for forming memory cells) to discrete transistor-based, to early integrated circuits (a few hundred to a few thousand transistors on a chip) and eventually to modern large-scale integrated circuits, with a recent record set by Samsung's 1 terabyte eUFS (3D-stacked) V-NAND flash memory chip, with 2 trillion floating-gate MOSFETs (4 bits per transistor). Don't worry if you don't understand what this means; just remember that it's damned impressive—because it is. But therein lies the danger. The race to build more and more powerful chips may be heading toward a cliff.

At this point just about anything—cars, washing machines, water heaters, internet routers...—has control circuits on it, all of them based on microchips. In turn, these microchips are made in gigantic factories costing several billion dollars to build. Because economies of scale are only achievable by concentrating production, each microchip is generally made at just one factory. To maintain a competitive advantage, microchips are not interchangeable. In turn, every device design that includes microchips (which by now most of them do) can only be built if every single microchip it uses is available. If that is not the case, then what is required is a very expensive redesign process to replace that one chip with another one. Often this is not economically feasible, meaning that production lines are simply shut down until all of the needed components become available.

We have already had warnings. A tsunami in Japan in 2011 drove up prices for certain computer memory chips, more than half of which were produced in Japan. A flood in Thailand caused a shortage of voltage regulators, halting car production lines around the world. And now, after a year of coronavirus emergency, there is a dire shortage of chips because of shutdowns at semiconductor factories around the world. So far Covid-19 has killed 3.75 million people worldwide, which is around 0.047% of the world's population, adding less than 5% to the normal 0.7% annual death rate. Now that multiple vaccines are available (Russia's Sputnik-V alone has been approved for use in over 65 countries) and protocols in place around the world for rapidly detecting limiting the spread of any new contagions, a reprise seems unlikely.

What does seem likely (and is already observable in many places around the world) is severe economic dislocation. Coronavirus-motivated shutdowns have caused supply chain disruptions around the world, specifically in the semiconductor industry, causing many production lines to be idled. And then come the knock-on effects. Stoppages on car production lines caused new car prices to increase. In turn, this forced rental car companies to charge more. In turn, this caused many tourists to reconsider their travel plans, causing rental car revenues to plummet, causing them to buy fewer new cars when production resumes, making it more difficult for automakers to recoup their losses.

The once expected V-shaped post-coronavirus recovery has failed to materialize; instead, what we are seeing is the onset of hyperinflation. For the very highly indebted governments, mostly in the West but also elsewhere, the standard remedy of fighting inflation by cutting spending while raising interest rates is no longer available because even a slight increase in interest rates will render them unable to pay the interest on their debt except by printing even more money, further driving up inflation.

But such knock-on effects are economic and financial; the worst ones will be physical, and will manifest themselves in the inability to maintain various life support systems that control the delivery of water, electricity, fuel, food, drugs and other essentials. Over the past decades systems that were previously operated based on paper schedules and manual operations (turning valves and flipping knife switches) have become automated, making them more efficient (in a limited sense) but much more fragile.

The electronic control systems are a layer cake of technologies. At its base are servers sitting in racks inside data centers and client systems with display screens and keyboards in the control rooms. On top of that hardware run operating systems. On top of operating systems run integrated development environments used to develop process automation tools. Finally, the process automation tools allow system integrators to configure control systems by graphically dragging-and-dropping and linking system components such as actuators and sensors and define rules and configuration parameters for their operation. Knock out any bit of any layer and the entire fragile, precarious Rube Goldberg stops functioning. The inability to replace any of these components when it fails with a compatible unit—be it a single sensor, a router or a server, forces at least a part of the entire system to shut down. And if that replacement cannot be found, then it remains down.

When looking around for a first casualty of collapse, the global semiconductor industry makes a strong candidate. It is very energy-hungry and extremely capital-intensive. It relies on a steady, reliable energy supply—wind and solar won't cut it because of their intermittency. It relies on the availability of highest-purity crystalline silicon and rare earth elements that are sourced from just a few places in the world, the main one being China. And it requires a highly disciplined and skilled workforce. The largest exporter of integrated circuits by far is China (Hong Kong and Taiwan included) followed by South Korea, Singapore and Malaysia. The US is only the first in a long list of minor players in niche markets.

It seems natural to expect that, as the market conditions affecting the semiconductor industry continue to deteriorate while the demand for critical components needed to maintain vital infrastructure systems around the world continues unabated, China will be able to exert a disproportionate influence on the availability of these components. It is quite foreseeable that the Chinese Communist Party will see the semiconductor industry as strategically important and nationalize key parts of it, fashioning it into a tool of foreign policy. The United States will, of course, pretend to be doing something about this state of affairs, making for a noisy international environment, but will not be able to prevent access to semiconductor products from becoming rationed, with China in almost complete control of the arrangements.

These arrangements are likely to be enforced by China and Russia working in tandem. China is insular by nature and can in general either trade with other cultures or absorb them. The one exception in Russia, to which China now clings like a needy girlfriend. The symbiosis is a natural one: unlike China, Russia is the opposite of insular and can digest and appropriate entire foreign civilizations. This century they are Mongols; next, Germans; then the entire Russian imperial court starts speaking French; and now English is fashionable.

As Putin famously put it, "The borders of the Russian Federation do not end anywhere." Unlike China, whose military is huge but untested in battle and uninterested in power projection, the Russians are a warrior culture that prides itself on its invincibility and that has made coercion to peace its specialty. Russia excels at building and operating huge energy, transportation and materials production systems which China needs and has the vast natural resources to continue operating them for centuries. Its fossil fuels will hold up for another half a century; after that, if all goes according to plan, it will switch to burning depleted uranium using its closed nuclear cycle technology, and there are a few thousand years' worth of it already stockpiled.

Faced with such major difficulties, the technosphere has not given up. Without filing a change of address form, it has quietly relocated and is now busy telecommuting between Moscow and Beijing. Those frisky boys at Davos and their James Bond villain wannabe Klaus Schwab are yet to get used to this turn of events. Putin and Xi have pretty much said this to their faces at their last virtual confab, but I don't think that the news has quite sunk in with them yet; let's give it time. The Germans seem to be quicker on the uptake than the rest, having understood that without Russian natural gas they would be nothing. The Americans seem to be the slowest; at this rate, it may take forever for the penny to drop. They may go down into the gurgling void all the while exclaiming that their Atlantis is not sinking!

[Dreamtimer]

During the 2008 presidential election, Vijay Boyapati quit his job as an engineer at Google to campaign for Ron Paul in New Hampshire. A few years after that, he discovered bitcoin, and in 2018 he published an essay on Medium titled "The Bullish Case for Bitcoin," which got widespread attention and was translated into more than 20 languages.

Boyapati, an Australian native who now lives in the Pacific Northwest, launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter to expand the essay into a book, and it was released at the star-studded 2021 Bitcoin Conference, which was held in early June in Miami.

Reason caught up with Boyapati in Miami to talk about inflation, how bitcoin fits with the Austrian school of economics, his libertarian origin story, and what he thinks has to happen for bitcoin to finally become the new global monetary standard.


Chris and others have addressed the idea of bitcoin replacing the dollar. Here's a discussion bout it.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXx8vKO6ftI

[Aragorn]

During the 2008 presidential election, Vijay Boyapati quit his job as an engineer at Google to campaign for Ron Paul in New Hampshire. A few years after that, he discovered bitcoin, and in 2018 he published an essay on Medium titled "The Bullish Case for Bitcoin," which got widespread attention and was translated into more than 20 languages.

Boyapati, an Australian native who now lives in the Pacific Northwest, launched a fundraiser on Kickstarter to expand the essay into a book, and it was released at the star-studded 2021 Bitcoin Conference, which was held in early June in Miami.

Reason caught up with Boyapati in Miami to talk about inflation, how bitcoin fits with the Austrian school of economics, his libertarian origin story, and what he thinks has to happen for bitcoin to finally become the new global monetary standard.


Chris and others have addressed the idea of bitcoin replacing the dollar. Here's a discussion bout it.

Personally I detest Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum and all those other cryptocurrencies, because instead of solving any problems, they are creating more of them. It also takes the already only partial control over currency away from the governments and puts it into the hands of the tech industry.

It's also susceptible to and highly coveted by organized crime, and the mining for cryptocurrencies has a significant impact on the environment because of the consumption of electricity and the heat it generates. And now you also already have malware that uses the computers and handheld internet-connected devices of unsuspecting people for mining cryptocurrency at somebody else's expense.

Unfortunately, local communities and even entire governments have begun embracing cryptocurrencies as an official trade mechanism, so it stands to reason that cryptocurrencies will become the norm in the future, possibly enforced by the abolishing of other currencies. There is no escape from mankind's stupidity and short-sightedness.

The same holds true for all of the proponents of transhumanism. And the ultimate nightmare would then of course be transhumanism with built-in cryptocurrency payment, or even cryptocurrency generation. I can even already see it happening in the form of a new propaganda slogan: "Work your microchipped brain harder and you'll generate more cryptocurrency that way!" And then the unanswered question will be "Yeah, but for whom?"

[Dreamtimer]

It's also susceptible to and highly coveted by organized crime, and the mining for cryptocurrencies has a significant impact on the environment because of the consumption of electricity and the heat it generates.

I only just learned about the electricity consumption because I installed a panel for a generator. It wouldn't be able to handle the loads. That's when I knew how little I know.

(I seem to recall Sinzzer going off to pursue bitcoin)

[Aragorn]

(I seem to recall Sinzzer going off to pursue bitcoin)

Yep. When Bitcoin first appeared, everyone in the tech world was jumping right onto it. It was the newest fad, and because of the knowledge barrier between the tech world and the political world ─ who in the end have to ratify and legalize currencies and methods of payment, but who don't really have a clue about anything other than the inside of their own asses ─ it's going to remain a fad for a while still, which the politicians will be smitten with and drooling about when they discover it, while those of us with a head on our shoulders have already long seen it for what it is, and what danger it's dragging along in its wake.

[Chris]

Aren't we the lucky ones...

I have been writing about the internationalism of the global right for years on this forum, but this week it has finally gone mainstream, with Tucker Carlson (Yes, that one) relocating to Budapest for the week and singing the praises of our dear leader.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...orban-hungary/

U.S. conservatives yearn for Orban’s Hungary

It’s one of the least surprising convergences on the planet. Fox News host Tucker Carlson — arguably the most influential voice on the American right, absent a certain former president — is in Hungary. Every episode of his prime-time show this week will be televised from Budapest. Carlson is also expected to address a conference in the Hungarian capital that’s linked to the political movement of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who shared images Monday on social media of his meeting the 52-year-old American broadcaster.

Carlson, as my colleague Michael Kranish charted in a probing profile last month, has become the “voice of White grievance” in the United States, the most well-known proponent of a brand of far-right, nativist politics popularized by former president Donald Trump and now pushed further by a coterie of pundits and politicians who are steadily taking hold of the Republican Party. In a departure from the Reaganism of the past, they are virulently anti-immigrant and skeptical of free trade and corporate power (except, of course, when it suits their political interests). They embrace an often religious and implicitly racist brand of nationalism, while waging a relentless culture war against the perceived threats of multiculturalism, feminism, LGBT rights and liberalism writ large.

In Orban, Carlson and his ilk have in recent years found both a kindred spirit and a pioneering champion. The illiberal Hungarian prime minister’s dominance at home — his current spell in office could extend to the better part of two decades if his ruling Fidesz party wins elections next year — is matched by his capacity to antagonize liberals abroad, especially the political elites at the helm of the European Union. Former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon once hailed Orban as “Trump before Trump,” a nod to the Hungarian leader’s ultranationalist bona fides.

On his show, Carlson has frequently celebrated Orban for defending his countrymen from the supposed dangers of Muslim migrants and Brussels technocrats. “Hungary’s leaders actually care about making sure their own people thrive,” Carlson said in 2019, referring to Orban’s efforts to incentivize Hungarian families to have more children. “Instead of promising the nation’s wealth to every illegal immigrant from the Third World, they’re using tax dollars to uplift their own people.”

Carlson, of course, has said next to nothing about the autocratic character of Orban’s rule, which critics on both sides of the Atlantic cast as a cautionary tale of how democracies backslide. To a certain extent, that should be expected. After all, Orbanism represents the fever dream of the American right: The Hungarian prime minister rules a government steadily captured through gerrymandering and a stacked judiciary. The overwhelming majority of media outlets are now loyal to him, while he presides over a network of patronage — and alleged graft — that ties in many of the country’s titans of industry.

All the while, he and his allies peddle a traditionalist, ethnic nationalism and constantly sound the alarm over the rather illusory menace posed by immigrants, minorities and refugees — or “invaders,” as Orban described them — to Hungary’s way of life. Like a number of Republican state governments in the United States, Orban has sought to make Hungarian education more “patriotic.” In his attacks on various civil society institutions, Orban has been accused of invoking antisemitic tropes. The Hungarian parliament recently passed anti-LGBT legislation that prompted furious backlash elsewhere on the continent, with some European leaders calling for Hungary’s departure from the E.U. And under Orban’s watch, Hungary appears to have deployed military-grade spyware to tap the phones of independent journalists and dissidents, a slap in the face of the E.U.’s strict digital privacy protections. (Orban’s office responded to the allegations with a broad statement asserting its continued governance by “rule of law.”)

“Millions of Fox News viewers this week are likely to be presented with a vision of Hungary that not only deprioritizes its political shift but champions Orban’s ostensible focus on preserving national character,” noted my colleague Philip Bump. “Orbanism will almost certainly be cast not as a danger to American traditions but the salvation of it.”

The Fox News host is hardly the only right-wing American pointing to Orban’s example. In a recent speech, J.D. Vance, a venture capitalist campaigning on a folksy, nationalist platform in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio, derided the “childless left” in the United States as agents of “civilizational collapse.” He then pushed for Orban’s agenda: In Hungary, “they offer loans to newly married couples that are forgiven at some point later if those couples have actually stayed together and had kids,” Vance said. “Why can’t we do that here? Why can’t we actually promote family formation?” (Of course, tens of millions of American households already benefit from child tax credits.)

The influential conservative commentator Rod Dreher relocated to Budapest earlier this year on a fellowship after touting Hungary as a kind of safe space to host right-wing Americans desperate to escape the “hegemonic” liberalism taking root in their homeland. In his defense of Orban, Dreher espoused the merits of Hungary’s “soft authoritarianism” over the “soft totalitarianism” of the E.U. project.

It’s a peculiar statement of our times that Hungary — a small nation whose modest economy gets buoyed by E.U. handouts and whose government goes in search of Chinese loans — has become such a lodestar for the right-wing movement in the world’s most powerful country. But that is where we are. In its index tracking the political direction of democratic parties around the world, the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute found that the Republican Party had slid toward the illiberalism of ruling parties in Turkey and Hungary, both home to right-wing, majoritarian governments that have eroded democratic norms to maintain power.

Such a context, of course, no longer seems that alien to the United States, where Trump and myriad Republican lawmakers propagate falsehoods about their defeat in the last presidential election and attempt to whitewash or excuse the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.

In Hungary, opposition parties of all stripes are working to form a united front against Fidesz next year to take down Orban. Their unusual — some would say desperate — bid has been billed in some corners as the “last chance” to save the country’s democracy and, potentially, its future within the European Union. We know which side Carlson will be cheering.

[Dreamtimer]

Aragorn's post here is about the collapse of an important climate system which would lead directly to human systems collapse.

[Chris]

Aragorn's post here is about the collapse of an important climate system which would lead directly to human systems collapse.

No doubt that is already happening.

We are soon going to find out what the historic Dust Bowl conditions in the Western United States, coupled with extreme weather events elsewhere are going to do to the complex systems our daily lives depend on. Inflation is already out of control and a climate that is becoming unstable and unpredictable, isn't helping matters.

[Wind]

Get your Mad Max outfits ready.

[Emil El Zapato]

pftuh, we're talking the final Ice Age ... for us. And you know I'm never wrong ...

[Wind]

pftuh, we're talking the final Ice Age ... for us. And you know I'm never wrong ...

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnD1IGd0mas

[Dreamtimer]

Ahhhhhnold. Icy.

Yeah, if the Gulf Stream stops there will be some new, very icy conditions for folks in Europe. It's not good. They're not set up for that. Just like Germany was not prepared for such flooding. It was never a thing until now.

Texas never expected the arctic troughs and polar vortexes. Although, to be fair, they did deliberately set up their system to operate on the margins. Much more profit there. And the little folks get hurt but they're too busy trying to repair and get their lives back together to stop the energy moguls.

So it keeps happening. Rolling blackouts in the summer so families can roast, ruined pipes in the winter because cracker boxes are cheaper to build and the homeowners can pick up the expense of making the homes able to withstand weather.

And the energy moguls can get more rich. On the backs of the state's citizens.

Isn't it grand.

[Dreamtimer]

I really hope the murderous conspiracy theories collapse. Most recently, a surf instructor went down to Mexico and killed his two young children because he read into the theories and became convinced his wife was reptilian and his children would grow up to be monsters. This Qanon insanity is taking a great toll.

Current best intel is that the Q conspiracy material is ‘indigenous’ to the USA, but that Russia has been amplifying it relentlessly.

The same pattern probably obtains here.

Russia’s goal is to destabilize and erode the US on all fronts (geopolitically of course, also culturally and economically), leading to the ultimate breakup of the US. Russia would get Alaska back, cementing its control of North America. Russia would also become the dominant superpower.

For more, keyword search the name Ivan Ilyin and the name Aleksandr Dugin.

Let's get crackin'!

(I'd sure rather just have some good craic)