Collapse

[Chris]

I'm a quarter of the way through Umair's piece and already depressed. It's not enough to shoot yourself in the foot. You have to cut off your nose to spite your face too!



I recall that many Brits didn't really seem to know what Brexit would do. But I don't recall what the shiny distractions were.



I don't get this. What kind of minds don't want this? I was raised by conservatives who understood the value of this sort of thing. (but they were in the minority amongst conservatives...)



The drive to privatize is fierce here. And we will all pay a heavy price for it. Because the profits, as supported by current law, matter more than people or communities. They have it in writing now.



Well, looks like a great deal of 'misery loves company' is around the corner.



I wonder why? Are they afraid to lose their jobs or base of support? Like here? Can't speak out for fear?

Seems like it's a good idea to look at who's busy singing the praises of Boris and his legacy. Who thinks he's the bees' knees? Because they're not an ally.

I keep hearing the phrase in my mind from Excalibur,

If it makes you feel any better, Hungary is on the same path and has been for decades probably, ever since the neoliberal economists from the US came over here as advisors and started dismantling and privatising everything.

At least in the US you have decent private options, if you can afford it, or have good insurance. Over here, getting any sort of healthcare is increasingly impossible, whether privately or publicly. I sense soon we will have to go back to witch doctors. Covid has absolutely devastated whatever was left of our Healthcare and Education systems.

[Octopus Garden]

God knows how much money those in congress have tied up in private health insurers. That fact alone, will make universal, govt. mandated health care for all, impossible in the U.S. The country needs a clean sweep. Trump supporters think he will do it, but it will only get worse. He may be able to create more jobs though. I have a feeling most of those jobs will be done from debtor's prisons.

As everything is angling towards the right, the propagandists behind the scenes manage to rework everything to have the threat coming from the left. There is a weird veneer of 'leftism' that is tangled up in gender studies, etc..but it isn't a threat to the greater power structures, which will just absorb it, like the Borg. Currently, black lives don't matter, to either party. But the democrats pay it hypocritical homage through their own propaganda machinery.

"At just over $46 million in net worth, Pelosi is herself among the richest members of Congress — ranked fifteenth overall, thanks in part to her husband’s holdings in the likes of Slack, Tesla, Disney, Visa, Salesforce, PayPal, Alphabet, Facebook, and Netflix, all of them major corporations that spend untold millions every year to lobby the government."

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/congr...corruption-aoc

The Dems are neo-liberal and the neo-liberal effect on the world, as Chris has described has been devastating. George Soros, case in point.

[Emil El Zapato]

God knows how much money those in congress have tied up in private health insurers. That fact alone, will make universal, govt. mandated health care for all, impossible in the U.S. The country needs a clean sweep. Trump supporters think he will do it, but it will only get worse. He may be able to create more jobs though. I have a feeling most of those jobs will be done from debtor's prisons.

As everything is angling towards the right, the propagandists behind the scenes manage to rework everything to have the threat coming from the left. There is a weird veneer of 'leftism' that is tangled up in gender studies, etc..but it isn't a threat to the greater power structures, which will just absorb it, like the Borg. Currently, black lives don't matter, to either party. But the democrats pay it hypocritical homage through their own propaganda machinery.

"At just over $46 million in net worth, Pelosi is herself among the richest members of Congress — ranked fifteenth overall, thanks in part to her husband’s holdings in the likes of Slack, Tesla, Disney, Visa, Salesforce, PayPal, Alphabet, Facebook, and Netflix, all of them major corporations that spend untold millions every year to lobby the government."

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/12/congr...corruption-aoc

The Dems are neo-liberal and the neo-liberal effect on the world, as Chris has described has been devastating. George Soros, case in point.

[Emil El Zapato]

I just read about neo-liberal austerity. That is a leftist snippet of philosophy that went out of fashion in the stone Age, circa 2008. I've long been confused by neo-liberalism. Classical 'liberal' economics versus neo-liberalism. In, udder woids, what is what?

[Emil El Zapato]

I just read about neo-liberal austerity. That is a leftist snippet of philosophy that went out of fashion in the stone Age, circa 2008. I've long been confused by neo-liberalism. Classical 'liberal' economics versus neo-liberalism. In, udder woids, what is what?

Ok, I'm straight ... it is classical versus neo ... liberalism. It's viewed as a rightist philosophy in origin which is perfectly in line with history. It has been in motion for nearly a century but came to fruition starting in the U.S. in the Reagan Era. All Democrat administrations have been run away 'victims' of it due to the perspective of the masses who are for the most part blind beyond 20 feet of their own lives. It's been referred to as a 'stealth' movement.

It is in essence the definition of the 'Corporatist state'

[Dreamtimer]

That's why I have complained about the term. It's misleading and means basically the same thing as neocon. They do the same things. I suppose neocon has a little more war-mongering mixed in.

[Wind]

How Boris Was Even Worse For Britain than Trump Was For America

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkdqR4WKvuU

[Chris]

Kunstler's partisanship does get tiresome, but I though his latest diatribe was rather funny, so I feel it's worth a read. It seems he has gone from a registered Democrat to some sort of far-right MAGA Trumpist lately, but hey, it's a free country.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/death-wish-2/

Death Wish

Reality is the kryptonite of the Left, sapping its superpowers of coercion and persecution which — get this — are the only abilities it cares about. The Left only pretends to want to make the world a better place. It doesn’t care about governing, y’know, managing national affairs, and it wouldn’t know how — as no one has demonstrated better than “Joe Biden” and the shadowy wrecking crew running him behind the scenes. The Left actually just seeks to punish its adversaries, and it generates ever-new adversities and animosities in its quest to lay on more punishments, the more sadistic the better. Thus, the never-ending Covid-19 melodrama, which provides such an excellent excuse for torturing the populace. The Left’s motto: the beatings will continue until morale improves!

Reality is intruding now, though, with the help of its twin sister, Truth. Particular truths are emerging to fortify reality and weaken the Left’s efforts to beat-down the peoples of Western Civ. For instance, the implacable truth that the mRNA vaccines don’t work and that they gravely injure people. In the face of this obvious reality, government and corporations persist in their irrational campaigns to vaxx-up every last man-woman-and-child. Why, at this point, despite all the free Kit-Kat bars you could stuff down your craw, would any sane employee of the Hershey’s Chocolate empire opt for a vaxx that could make you stroke out at your desk? The ridiculous official answer, of course, is: to protect the already-vaccinated. Sshh-yeah, right….

Ditto, the unfortunate, put-upon citizens of Austria, such a tidy little country, too, and so hopelessly lost in its daze of mass formation psychosis. This week, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, the UK, and Ireland are dropping all Covid-19 restrictions and impositions, while Austria makes its vaxx mandate a national law. (How many Austrians are secretly studying Hungarian now?) The cognitive dissonance must be unbearable, like a kind of 5G-induced tinnitus that afflicts an entire population, making them want to bang their heads against the nearest wall.

Likewise, the absurd government of Canada, led by the clueless ponce Justin Trudeau, who refuses to take his patent-leather go-go boot off the neck of Canadian truckers. The truckers aren’t having it anymore, of course, and neither are the towing services that the government is trying to enlist to get rid of the truckers’ trucks. Meanwhile, the premiers of Saskatchewan and Alberta provinces have thrown in the towel on Covid-19 restrictions, leaving Mr. Trudeau in his fortress-of-solitude, exact whereabouts unknown, desperately hurling objurgations at the “racists, Islamophobes, and transphobes” seeking to end his career as a turbaned, cross-dressing, blackface political entertainer.

And also likewise, the “progressive” sadists on the Loudoun County, VA, school board, who refuse to lift their cruel and stupid mask mandate on schoolchildren, despite Governor Glenn Youngkin’s recent executive order to cut it out. The school board sadists surely don’t care about the kids. Everybody from the Johns Hopkins Med School to The Atlantic magazine — to even the lost-in-space CDC —have admitted that wearing face-masks is pointless. Not to mention that Covid-19 has been reduced to the wimpy omicron variant, plus the truth that the incidence of serious illness in children from Covid-19 of any kind is near-zero. So, why keep the kids in masks? For the pleasure of making them miserable and flaunting their power over the kids’ parents. This is how the Left rolls.

Now, as a general proposition, you can bet that the reason the Left wants to keep the Covid-19 scare going as long as possible is in order to keep in place the “emergency” mail-in voting allowances that so easily enable ballot harvesting and other election frauds. Alas, the timing on this doesn’t look good for them. The rapid omicron up-spike has turned into a rapid down-spike. The goldurned thing is vanishing in the winter mist. By early March there may be no actual Covid on-the-scene… omigosh… and then what? The midterms are yet months away, and if there’s no emergency….

Well, I dunno. It’s not beyond imagining that the Left and its mysterious sponsors out there in the mythical matrix of sinister global interests will send yet another new coronavirus variant down the chute to keep the worldwide scare going so as to complete the ruin of Western Civ. It’d have to be a humdinger, though, something, say, that made folks bleed out of their ears, nostrils, and eye sockets — because otherwise, at this point, the people are done with lockdowns, forced vaxxes, mask mandates, green passes, and other social control nonsense, and would opt to just get on with what remains of normal life in this twilight of empire.

Looks like the backup plan is for “Joe Biden’s” geniuses in the foreign affairs and intel bureaucracy to start a war with Russia over Ukraine, our dearest ally in the whole wide world (not). Yesterday, State Department spox Ned Price floated up a raggedy balloon about Russia pulling a “false flag” stunt in Ukraine’s Donbass frontier to get things going. It sounded like he was just making shit up. And he was conspicuously short on details. “Our intel people something something, blah blah….” Skeptical reporters shot the balloon down with a few barbed remarks — the darn thing just zinged around the press room with the air rushing out and crashed on the spox’s podium — suggesting that even the news media is tired of its role in the controlled demolition of our country.

More likely, though, the financial scaffold of Late Modernity gives way under the burden of rackets and Ponzis it has been asked to support. This week, Facebook (a.k.a. Meta) scored the world record for biggest single-day market value drop ever, shedding $232-billion in capital losses. You go, Zuck! The Everything Bubble has achieved supernova scale and everybody knows she’s gonna blow as soon as Jay Powell lifts the Fed Funds rate twenty-five basis points. When that finally happens, things get realer than real and Truth comes marching in like the saints with bells on. It’ll be the Left’s Masque of the Red Death… ashes, ashes, all fall down.

The actual global economy itself — the thing that sends, you know, products from one place to another — is seizing up like the engine on a beater 1998 Buick Regal. Long about right now, lots of things are not going from point A to Point B, including stuff of a food nature. It’s starting to irk the home-folks. When all that goes south, you’ll hear no more about Covid-19, systemic racism, the patriarchy, the drag queen story hour, and all the other hobgoblins that infest the Left’s gospel garden of Wokery. The kryptonite is coming on hard. They are done… and for the moment we are stuck with them running the country.

[Dreamtimer]

It's a free country for now...

[Emil El Zapato]

Kunstler's partisanship does get tiresome, but I though his latest diatribe was rather funny, so I feel it's worth a read. It seems he has gone from a registered Democrat to some sort of far-right MAGA Trumpist lately, but hey, it's a free country.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/death-wish-2/

Death Wish

This doesn't even read like Kunstler. The madness, its source being a great mystery for the ages, has chewed him up and swallowed. He has certainly dropped his mask and I could have predicted it happening. I saw the inklings of dishonesty in his past presentations. Now we know.

It occurred to me that neoliberalism is the hint that foreshadows the new world order. PA can take that and shove that down its throat too!

[Dreamtimer]

Timely phrase, BOB. Dropping the mask.

[Dreamtimer]

A personal collapse is occurring. And the fallout could be problematic for the nation. Trump's accounting firm has now disavowed the last ten years of Trump's financial records. Banks will not loan to him. Which means he will become more desperate for cash. He's called himself the King of Debt, and if he can't grift enough he's gonna need to go to some shady characters to cover his loans...

“This explodes the national security risk by a factor of 10, because now he's going to be desperate for new loans,” Joseph Cirincione, a fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told The Daily Beast. “Legitimate banks are not going to touch him. So it expands the universe of shady characters who could offer him loans in return for favors that might include disclosing U.S. national security secrets.”

Cirincione continued: “Whether it is the Saudis, Russians, narcoterrorists—anybody with access to hundreds of millions would be in the running for Donald Trump’s new loan officer. That is why you don’t give security clearance to people who are financially compromised.”

Some of them were 'unclearable'. And they had their hands all up in Lady Liberty's skirts.

[Dreamtimer]

"Losing the monopoly on violence is one of the signs of a failed state. Next is erosion of the ability to collectively make decisions for the country. Next is the inability to provide public services. Last is the inability to interact with other nations on the international scene."

The inability to make collective decisions also has to do with the loss of the monopoly on violence. Most governments rely on violence to achieve control. This loss is a huge warning sign.

The government is giving away its monopoly on violence. Willingly. At 2:45 Beau points to folks being able to legally run over protestors as an example. It's encouraging people not associated with the state to mete out punishment. This is really bad.

At 3:06 Beau straight out says, "For those wanting to preserve the Republic, a lot of the Republican agenda, you're going to find out, is guaranteed to destroy it."

"The legislatures are ceding normal judicial systems...and it's literally a party platform."

As to the inability to provide public service, (at 5:00) "We can all just look a Texas for a moment and move on from there."

As to the international scene, we still have the military dominance. The danger shows up when the military is used in a way that it shouldn't be and then other nations
might decide not to interact with us.

So three out of four are actively occurring in the United States. The problem is that they are part of a political party's platform and that platform is designed to make all of these problems worse.

So is the United States a failed state? No. Is one political party actively trying to make it a failed state? Well, yes.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUqIgH64PaQ



One of the bird's wings still wants to fly. The other wants to commit suicide.

[Wind]

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b0JrnNVA64


With food prices climbing, the U.N. is warning of crippling global shortages

Fears of a global food crisis are growing due to the shock of the war in Ukraine, climate change and rising inflation.

Kristalina Georgieva, the International Monetary Fund managing director, told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Monday that "the anxiety about access to food at a reasonable price globally is hitting the roof" as food prices continue "to go up up up".

Last week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned of "the specter of a global food shortage in the coming months" without urgent international action.

The U.N. estimates that in the past year, global food prices have risen by almost one third, fertilizer by more than half and oil prices by almost two thirds.

According to U.N. figures, the number of severely food-insecure people has doubled in the past two years, from 135 million pre-pandemic to 276 million today. Now, more than half a million people are experiencing famine conditions, according to the U.N., an increase of more than 500% since 2016.

In Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya, the number of people facing extreme hunger has more than doubled since last year, from roughly 10 million to more than 23 million today, according to the report. Across the three countries, the report notes, one person is likely dying every 48 seconds from acute hunger-related causes stemming from armed conflict, COVID-19, climate change and inflationary pressures worsened by the war in Ukraine.

In India, a devastating heatwave has upset the nation's wheat harvest, driving up prices around the world for the staple commodity. Earlier this month, as temperatures in the capital of Delhi hovered near 120 degrees Fahrenheit, the government announced a ban on wheat exports. The announcement helped push wheat prices to record levels.

Wheat prices were already hit hard by the war in Ukraine. Ukraine and Russia are some of the world's biggest wheat producers, combining to produce around 25% of global supply. Global wheat prices surged in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They had already risen an estimated 80% in just over a year before December 2021, according to the IMF.

International shocks have brought some countries into near breakdown. In Sri Lanka, rising inflation has led to a wholesale economic emergency, with extreme shortages of food, medicine and fuel.

Humanitarian agencies have warned that Afghanistan has been close to famine for months, while Lebanon has been in economic crisis for over a year.

In the U.S., consumer prices in April were up 8.3% from a year earlier, according to data from the Labor Department. Food costs were up 9.4%, with prices for things like meats, poultry, fish and eggs up 14.3% from the previous year. In March, around 65% of the 200 food banks in the Feeding America network, the nation's largest food recovery organization, reported a greater demand for assistance month on month.

In China, prices of fresh vegetables are 24% higher than a year ago, according to data released from the country's National Bureau of Statistics. China's "zero COVID" policy has meant an economic slowdown, and added to inflation around the world and global supply chain issues.

The U.N.'s Guterres has urged a five step plan to help confront the challenges: increasing supplies of food and fertilizers; social protection systems within countries; more access to international finance; further government help for smallholder food producers; and better funding for humanitarian operations to reduce famine and hunger.

[Dreamtimer]

Here is Umair Haque interviewed by Anthony Davis.

Top Economist Umair Haque chats with veteran broadcaster Anthony Davis about America’s Mass shooting crisis, American Exceptionalism, and why climate change is the number one issue facing humanity today.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHzxTQo4O_s