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https://www.peakprosperity.com/these-are-the-good-old-days/

These Are The ‘Good Old Days’

At tipping points like now, the steps we take in the present determine our future

Bill was 48 when his wife stunned him with a request for divorce. Right up until that moment, he’d thought everything was fine.

He’d been pouring all his energy into his work to provide a very comfortable life for his wife and 2 children. But she was unhappy and fell out of love while Bill wasn’t paying attention to matters at home. He’d taken her for granted and forgot to be present for the most important people in his life, and to be grateful in the moment.

After she was gone, Bill was filled with emptiness and regret. All he wanted was to get her back, but it was too late. The damage had been done. What he had before was now in the past.

This parable of Bill’s loss serves as a reminder to all of us that, with all that’s awry in the world, it’s all too easy for those of us who are paying attention to gripe about everything that’s going wrong.

Yes, there are many trends that are headed on the wrong trajectory. But this tumultuous period of history also affords each of us the fantastic opportunity to contribute positively to the new future that’s on the way.

Please take this article an invitation to be grateful for what you have, and to notice just how wonderful our current lifestyle truly is. It won’t remain this way, as I’ll expound on in a moment.

So take the time to be grateful, hug those that you love, and feed the parts of your life that nourish you most. Maintaining perspective in times such as these is really important.

The truth is that we happen to be alive at a time of peak abundance and technological miracles. It’s never been easier or more comfortable to be a human. On nearly every dimension — longevity, dependable access to food, quality of shelter, personal safety, leisure time, intellectual pursuits, technological advancements — no previous generation of humans have enjoyed the excesses and luxuries that we currently do.

What are you going to do with that good fortune while it lasts?

The ‘Good Old Days’

Once I truly understood the role of net energy in delivering the miraculous abundance we experience, and then connected that to the impending decline of global fossil fuels, I came to a startling conclusion: These are the “good old days”.

This is as good as it gets. This is as easy and wonderful as it’s ever been for the average human on earth. And we’re now at (actually, likely past) the peak. Soon, everyone will fondly reminisce about this soon-to-be-bygone era:

“Remember when you could just hop on a plane and go anywhere in the world for the cost of just a day or two of your income?”

“Or how about walking into a grocery store, anytime of the year, and buying whatever fresh veggies you wanted — at any time of the day or night, no matter what season it was? Remember that?”

Today’s daily miracle of life is insanely good. Simply click a mouse button and in just a day or two the big, brown truck of happiness rolls up your driveway delivering goodies. Or blythely sleep through a painless surgical procedure. Maybe use GPS to navigate the worst Boston commute as you smoothly glide in a well-engineered personal chariot with 150 horses under the hood.

Face it, we have it better than true royalty did just 100 years ago.

But it won’t last. It can’t. The flows of energy that are required to maintain the complexity of our current system simply aren’t there.

These energy systems which make our current global economy run are still 80% reliant on fossil fuels. So are our current alternative energy systems — which are are still mined, refined, built and installed using fossil fuels. There are exactly zero full-cycle alternative energy systems that can be rebuilt using their own energy output. As Nate Hagens wisely says: they are not really renewable energy systems, but replaceable energy systems.

We could and we should be doing things very differently here at this moment in human history. But we’re acting like we always have; ignoring problems up until the point things start breaking badly. This is simply insane with nearly 8 billion people on the planet (quickly heading towards 10 billion) and yet we have no comprehensive plan for weaning ourselves off of fossil fuels.

Looking out at the next 20 years is downright frightening.

By 2040, we’ll be well past the point of Peak Oil if this model is correct (which is running three scenarios based on how much oil there might be, low med, and high):

Oil Shock Model chart

The implications of oil’s inevitable and predictable decline are so profound that it’s a crime you’re only reading about it here and maybe one or two other “fringe” places on the net. Given its importance to everyone living on the planet today, it should be constant front page news everywhere.

Once we’re past peak production of oil, the entire suburban Ponzi experiment folds like a cheap card table, modern industrial agriculture becomes too expensive to continue, and the entirety of the financial system loses its motive power.

But, there’s no plan at all for addressing this. Not from any national government that I’ve seen. And I’ve been tracking this predicament for 15 years now.

Which brings me back to gratitude, which I think will be critical for dealing with the coming grief of losing our current comforts.

Having gratitude for what you do have is infinitely better for your mental well-being than worrying about what you don’t, or won’t, have. When I fly somewhere I’m grateful for the magical speed and ease of the technology. When I fill up my gas tank on my car, I’m grateful for the incredibly complex supply chains and financial systems that have to be in place for that to happen.

‘It’s not having what you want, it is wanting what you’ve got.’

~ Sheryl Crow

We really better appreciate all we have right now. Because our modern lifestyle just can’t last.

Don’t Be Like Bill

Bill made mistakes and now lives with regrets. Don’t be like Bill.

It’s perfectly clear that much of what we take for granted today is the product of multiple unsustainable systems all trundling towards the day when they fail.

We’re in ecological overshoot; which means the birds, bees and big game still around today may be extinct in our lifetime. And along with them, much of our food web.

Imagine the regret we’ll feel then.

We’re also in debt overshoot; which means that a future of economic austerity awaits as companies and households start to fail in large number. Whether the killing blow comes via deflation or inflation is academic at this point. The end result will be the same: less prosperity and opportunity for all — because we splurged today without thought for how we’d pay tomorrow’s bills when they arrived.

Imagine our regret then.

We’re burning through the last dregs of high-net energy oil. And we’re in population overshoot, too. Replacing that oil and feeding so many of ourselves will take energy — lots and lots of energy — but where will it come from? We don’t yet know at this point. And we’re not even yet admitting to ourselves that we have a problem. A big problem. So we’re highly likely to slam head-first into the biggest global ever energy crisis modern man has ever seen.

Imagine our regret when that day arrives....

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51701.htm

What diplomacy? Here are 36 countries the US has bullied this week

It’s been a busy few days for American diplomacy, with three dozen nations ending up at the receiving end of threats, ultimatums and sanctions this week alone. And it’s only Friday.

Mexico is the latest target, slapped with 5 percent tariffs on each and every export, gradually increasing to 25 percent until it stops the flow of Latin American migrants into the US, thus fulfilling one of President Donald Trump’s election promises. Most of those migrants aren’t even from Mexico.

On the other side of the world, India is reportedly about to be forced to face a choice: ditch the purchase of Russian S-400 air defense systems or face sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA, Washington's go-to cooperation enforcement instrument).

Turkey is facing a similar ultimatum: abandon S-400s (something Ankara has repeatedly refused to do) or lose access to the F-35 fighter jet program. This threat was repeated on Thursday by Kathryn Wheelbarger, US acting assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. Ankara has already invested some $1.25 billion into the super-expensive American fighter, but with a lot of its parts being made in Turkey, it’s still an open question who would be the bigger loser.

The entire European Union could be facing punishment if it tries to trade with Iran using its non-dollar humanitarian mechanism to bypass the American embargo. Having worked hard on the 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran, which has repeatedly been confirmed to be working, EU member states are not ready to ditch trade at Trump’s whim – and US Special Representative to Iran Brian Hook on Thursday reaffirmed the threat of CAATSA sanctions.

Cuba, the rediscovered scapegoat of the Trump administration’s newfound anti-socialist drive, is being called out for supporting Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. On his Thursday visit to Canada, US Vice President Mike Pence said Ottawa must stop Havana’s “malign influence” on Caracas’ affairs – despite Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s meek objections that it could play a “positive role” in settling the crisis there.

That’s 32 countries bullied, threatened or sanctioned in one day (counting the 28 EU members). Years’ worth of gunboat diplomacy, packed into a busy few hours in Trump’s signature “my way or the highway” style.

Mentioning Iran (which was “almost certainly” behind a recent inept attack on oil tankers near the Persian Gulf), China (which dares to buy Iranian oil), Russia (which has “probably” restarted low-yield nuclear tests) and Venezuela (where the ouster of its elected president is the only result of long-awaited talks with the opposition that Washington will accept) – is almost an afterthought. There’s hardly a week passing without the Trump administration churning out half-a-dozen accusations and threats against one or all of those – and this week, the gears were grinding as hard as ever.

Here’s a visual aid: every nation the US has threatened this week, colored in on a map.

American influence, built up over decades, is undeniable: even its adversaries depend on the US dollar and are arguably at the mercy of its myriad military bases all over the globe. Trump and his hawkish inner circle have been more than willing to spend that credit by shouting at everyone to get in line.

In the worst-case scenario, he is dragging the world into devastating wars. In the best case, he is throwing that influence away, showing allies and rivals alike that an ugly divorce could be the only way out of this abusive relationship.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/something-think-about-memorial-day/5678773

War is a Racket. Major General Smedley Butler
Smedley Butler on Interventionism

Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a “Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51689.htm

US Master Weaver of False Flags Uses Threadbare Material

It can’t get more absurdly audacious than this. The Trump administration is accusing Syria’s government forces of using once again – allegedly – internationally banned chemical weapons against civilians.

The US has provided no evidence to support its accusations. This time, it seems to have run out of “material”, relying on bombastic assertion and the dubious “word” of Washington alone. Yes, that’s how desperately hard-up the master weaver of false flags has become. “It is because, er, well, we say it is.”

The American claims come (there’s the giveaway clue) just when the Syrian Arab Army and its Russian ally are moving to clear the country of the last-remaining anti-government militant stronghold in northeast Idlib province. These aren’t cuddly “moderate rebels” the Western media would have you believe. They are affiliated to the barbaric, internationally outlawed Al Qaeda network and myriad offshoots. The terrorists who supposedly carried out 9/11 whom the US has been purportedly waging a war against for the past two decades.

Moreover, the Syrian, Russian offensive has been brought on because the terrorists repeatedly broke ceasefire agreements by firing on Syrian citizens in nearby Aleppo city and the Russian airbase at Hmeimim.

So, what the breathless US claims about chemical weapons is really about is to hamper the Syrian, Russian offensive routing the terrorist enclave plaguing Syria. That’s because despite all the rhetoric about fighting terrorism, the Americans and their NATO allies have covertly sponsored the same terrorists over the past eight years to destabilize Syria for regime change. Having an enclave in Syria not under government control is a convenient way for the foreign enemies of President Assad to maintain a destabilizing influence on the country, to ensure that it never fully recovers from the eight-year war that these foreign enemies orchestrated, but for all intents and purposes have lost.

Additionally, the hackneyed old “chemical weapons against civilians” ruse could be used to justify the Americans launching missile strikes on Syria and intervening directly for its regime-change objective. With the buildup of US firepower in the Persian Gulf ostensibly to counter alleged Iranian aggression, Washington has got the military resources in place if it choses to redirect them for aggressing Syria. (Double-think alert!)

What makes this all so brazen is the flagrant nature of false flags with chemical weapons that the Americans and their NATO allies have been complicit in. Just last week it emerged that the UN-affiliated Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) suppressed its own expert opinion which concluded that a chemical weapon incident last year in Syria was most likely contrived by Western-backed terrorists as a false flag. The incident was in Douma near the capital Damascus last April. At the time, the Western media dutifully broadcast the sensational claims that it was the Syrian government forces which had dropped the deadly munitions from the air. Within a week of the alleged atrocity, the Americans, British and French launched a barrage of over 100 air strikes, killing several Syrian civilians, in what they claimed was “retaliation” for Syrian government “barbarity” against civilians. (Sick bag please for the overwhelming double-think.)

Many observers at the time of the Douma incident strenuously pointed out the anomalies of the claim that Syrian government forces were to blame. Witness accounts, including local doctors, testified that the whole scenario was set up by jihadists and their White Helmets accomplices. The chemical munitions were not dropped from the sky by aircraft, it was reliably claimed; they were delivered on the ground by the so-called “rebels”. An OPCW expert corroborated that account. Yet his report was suppressed by the OPCW chiefs. The Hague-based organization seems to have been pressured politically to conceal the truth. Why? Because it would show the US, Britain and France were guilty of a huge war crime by attacking Syria with air strikes based on a complete lie.

Notably and damnably, too, the Western news media have not reported on the OPCW cover-up. Because the corporate-controlled networks, newspapers and state-owned news services like the BBC are part of the propaganda machine. They don’t sell truth, they sell war. And they’re not going to admit that.
The lie over the Douma chemical weapons incident, just like many other such incidents in the past such as in East Ghouta in August 2013 and presently in Idlib, is an expedient. It is expedient for the US and its allies to demonize the Syrian government and its Russian ally, and to lionize “rebels” who in reality are nothing but foreign terrorist mercenaries who have been sent to that country on the errand of regime change for the US and its criminal allies.

The expedient lie extends to the ultimate deception of giving Washington and its NATO accomplices an excuse for attacking a sovereign country. In other words, carrying out a Nazi-like aggression – the supreme war crime – but in the guise of a chivalrous protector of civilians, human rights and international law.

You can’t get more audacious than that, nor more nauseating.

The one upside, however, to all this repeated chicanery is that the American master weaver of false flags has spun so many of them over the years (Havana Harbor, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, 9/11, Iraqi WMD, Syrian CWs, Iranian aggression, and so on) that the lie material has now become threadbare to the point of transparency.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/rumors-of-war/

Rumors of War

The race to economic collapse is an international competition sparking threats and tensions summoning the specter of war. The imploding center of this collapse is that of industrial technocracy based on fossil fuels. All the nations will go through it on differing schedules. It has been playing out slowly, painfully, and deceptively — hence, my term for it: the long emergency.

Following a dumbed-down media unable to parse the delusions du jour, one might think, for instance, that the USA and China are engaged in a symbolic battle for the heavyweight championship of the world. Rather, both are freaking out at a prospective decline in activity that will make it impossible to support their current populations at even close to the levels of comfort they had lately achieved.

For China, that means very lately. Up until the turning millennium, most Chinese lived as though the twelfth century had never ended. For but two decades now, a new and quite large Chinese middle class has been driving cars around freeways, eating cheeseburgers, wearing designer blue jeans, shooting selfies at the Eiffel Tower, and even dreaming of trips to the moon. They’ve barely had time to turn decadent.

Getting to that was quite a feat. China compressed its version of the industrial revolution into a few decades, catching up to a weary, jaded West that took two hundred years achieving “modernity,” and now it is seeming to surpass us — which is the reason for so much tension and anxiety in our relations. The real news is: we’re all already in the climax of that movie. Nobody will surpass anyone.

The reason is the decline of affordable energy to run the stupendously complex systems we have come to rely on. China never had very much petroleum. They import over 10 million barrels a day now, and most of that comes from far far away, having to pass through some very hazardous sea lanes like the Straits of Hormuz and Molucca. They run things mostly on coal, and they’re well past peak — and let’s not get into the ecological ramifications of what they’re still burning. Even some intelligent observers in the West think that the Chinese have made gigantic strides in alt-energy, and will soon be free of old limits, but that’s a pipe dream. They have met the same disappointments over wind and solar as we have. Alt-energy just doesn’t pencil out money-wise or physics-wise. Plus, you absolutely need fossil fuels to make it happen, even as a science project.

The US is smugly and stupidly under the impression that the “shale oil miracle” has put an end to our energy worries. That comes from a foolish nexus of wishful thinking between a harried populace, a dishonest government, and the aforementioned brain-damaged news media. We want, with all our might, to believe we can keep running the interstate highways, WalMart, Agri-Business, DisneyWorld, the US Military, and suburbia just as they are, forever. So, we spin our reassuring fantasies about “energy independence” and “Saudi America.” Meanwhile, the shale oil companies can’t make a red cent pulling that stuff out of the ground. For the moment, ultra-low interest rate loans, riding on the back of all that wishful thinking, keep the racket going and sustain America’s illusions.

The disappointment over that error-in-thinking will be epic. In fact, it already is, considering how many working-age people without work or sense of purpose are ending their lives by opioid OD in Flyover country. The hipsters of Brooklyn and Silicon Valley haven’t gotten to that point because so much of America’s diminishing capital productivity still flows into their bank accounts — enabling a sunny life of caramel cloud macchiatos, farm-to-table suppers, and sexual reassignment surgeries.

The US and China are actually more like two passengers of a sinking ship racing to swim to a single lifebuoy — which is drifting ever-beyond the reach of both desperate parties on a powerful current of history. That current is the one telling nations quite literally to mind their own business, to prepare to go their own ways, to strive somehow to become self-sufficient, to finally face the limits to growth, to simplify and downscale all their operations.

Alas, the US and China — and everybody else — will apparently be dragged kicking and screaming to those transformational recognitions. (Thus, the agonies of Brexit.) In the meantime, we may choose to slug it out in pursuit of that chimerical world championship just because we still have means to go at it. Such a contest would certainly speed up the journey to our fated destination, and not in a good way.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay19/what-will-matter5-19.html

Forget "Money": What Will Matter Are Water, Energy, Soil and Food--and a Shared National Purpose

The status quo measures wealth with "money," but "money" is not what's valuable. "Money" (in quotes because the global economy operates on intrinsically valueless fiat currencies being "money") is wealth only if it can purchase what's actually valuable.

As the world slides into an era of scarcities, what will matter more than "money" are the essentials of survival: fresh water, energy, soil and the output of those three, food. The ability to secure these resources will separate nations that fail and those that survive.

In a world of abundance, it's assumed every essential resource can be bought on the open market. Surpluses are placed on the market and anyone with "money" can buy the surplus.

Things work differently in scarcity: "money" buys zip, zero, nada because nobody with what's scarce can afford to give it away for "money" which can no longer secure what's scarce.

Parachute into a desert with gold, dollars, euros, yen and yuan, and since there's nothing to buy, all your money is worthless. Once you're thirsting to death, you'd give all your money away for a liter of fresh water. But why would anyone who needs that liter for their on survival trade it for useless "money"?

Imagine the longevity of a regime which sold the nation's food while its populace went hungry. Not very long once the truth comes out.

Having resources is only one component: consumption is the other half of the picture. Having 4 million barrels a day of oil (MBPD) is nice if you're only using 3 MBPD, but if you're consuming 8 MBPD, you still need to import 4 MBPD.

Water and soil are not tradable commodities. Nations which share water resources (rivers and watersheds) have to negotiate (or fight wars over) the division of that scarce resource, but as a generality, fresh water and fertile soil can't be bought and sold like grain and oil.

The number of nations with surplus energy and food to export is small. As I noted in Superbugs and the Ultimate Economic Weapon: Food, there are contingencies in food production which could quickly erase surpluses and exports and trigger widespread shortages that have the potential to unleash social unrest.

Energy exports are also a natural economic weapon with which to reward needy friends or punish desperate enemies (no oil or natural gas for you!).

But energy exports are also contingent: natural gas and oil pipelines can be blown up by non-state players, shipping chokepoints can be closed or mined, regimes can change overnight and so on.

The value of a nation's currency can be understood as a reflection of its essential resources, what I have called the FEW resources (food, energy, water) which I would now amend to FEWS (food, energy, water, soil).

Nations which are frugal about creating currency (either via printing/issuance or borrowing it into existence) while prudently managing their fresh water, energy, soil and food will in effect be "backing" their currency with their surpluses of what will be increasingly scarce.

Nations which borrow into existence or emit currency profligately while having scarce FEWS resources and enormous needs for imported food and energy will find their currency rapidly loses value.

When there's not enough energy and food to go around, who will trade what's scarce and valuable for what's abundant and worthless ("money")? The answer is no one.

If you want to identify tomorrow's superpowers, overlay maps of fresh water, energy, grain/cereal surpluses and arable land: those nations with abundances that can yield sustainable surpluses in food and energy while taking care of domestic needs will have wealth and power.

Those with diminishing resources that are inadequate to meet domestic demand will have very little wealth, no matter how much "money" they print or borrow into existence or how much consumerist "stuff" they produce.

There are two other attributes that matter: being able to defend your FEWS resources from would-be thieves and a widely shared national sense of purpose that enables shared sacrifice for the common good. Without that shared source of unity, the elites with wealth and power will grab more and more, bringing down the house around them with their limitless greed.

Sacrifice either starts at the top or it means nothing. Forcing commoners to suck up sacrifices only exacerbates disunity and national dissolution.

There are two more highly valuable attributes that will separate nation-states that survive an era of scarcity and those that will fail: flexibility and a tolerance for dissent, both of which enable adaptability and social innovation, as I explain in my latest book Pathfinding our Destiny: Preventing the Final Fall of Our Democratic Republic. Rigid regimes that are intolerant of dissent are brittle and incapable of the sort of adaptation and social innovation needed in the cascading crises of scarcity. They are doomed.

There are no guarantees that any nation will be able to assemble all that it will take to survive an era of scarcity. But some have better odds than others. Place your bets accordingly.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-war-racket-continues-84-years-later/5678596

The War Racket Continues… 84 Years Later!

On this Memorial Day weekend all Americans should look back to the great essay written in 1935 by Marine General Smedley Butler. He named it ‘War is a Racket’ and it still resonates nowadays perhaps even more powerfully. His essay should be required reading for all high school American History students. General Butler acknowledged that he became a ‘Gangster’ for the US corporate interests internationally.

Realizing that what we call ‘War’ is many times just an excuse for private business interests to A) make mega bucks from our tax dollars and B) to control the resources and markets of overseas nations, all under the protection of our flag. Has anything changed?

Don’t you who ‘know better’, as to this empire, just love it when you turn on the boob tube lately and see those Army, Marines and Navy commercials?

How about the one that shows soldiers in combat, aiming their weapons and wearing similar gear to what Art Carney wore as a sewer ‘denizen’ on The Honeymooners?

The narrator of the commercial says something to the effect of ‘Warriors wanted’.

The Navy has one that says: Around the world, around the clock, in defense of all we hold dear back home. America’s Navy’.

You drive in your car and see the license tags advertising one of the military branches. How about those bumper stickers saying “Proud Mom of a Marine” or “Proud Grandparent of a Marine” …

Usually right near a ‘Trump 2020’ sticker (Some of the car owners still have their ‘Bush/Cheney’ ones)?

You are watching a major league baseball game on the boob tube and all the players and coaches are wearing camouflage caps and uniforms. Didn’t you know that each Monday is ‘Military Monday’? The worst case scenario is when you tune in to watch any major sporting event. Way before the action begins they will have a giant flag draped across the field of play. Then as the national anthem is sung a color guard appears, dressed to the tees in full uniforms and carrying another flag. Well why not? We’re at War!

In this upcoming 2020 election cycle the overwhelming number of potential candidates, and of course the hypocrite Trump, stand in line to keep this obscene military spending alive and well… for whom? Not of course for the 300 million of us who cannot get the public services we need to live comfortably.

How can we, when over half of our federal taxes goes to some segment of what they label Defense Spending. Oh, they con us by calling most of it Discretionary Spending. It sure as hell does NOT go to the young men and women who serve in those overseas places that we had NO business ever being in! Yet, the phonies and hypocrites, and of course the fools who buy into this lie, lower their heads and give reverence to the ‘fallen heroes’. They were not heroes, in places like Vietnam all the way to the present day concerning our illegal and immoral actions in the Middle East.

Rather, they are Pawns in this empire’s geopolitical War Games!

Yes, many of our military personnel were and are brave and stalwart… but NOT those who sent them!

All those generals with the tons of fruit salad on their chests were not then (in Vietnam) or now considered heroes to this writer. If they had any real conscience they would have said NO to follow the pied pipers over the cliffs of reason!

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51661.htm

Remember the Maine! Also the Arizona and the Maddox!

As the U.S. war drums beat ever louder with respect to Iran, it’s worth remembering the Maine, the Arizona, and the Maddox. They were three U.S. vessels that played instrumental rolls in enabling U.S. officials to embroil the United States into foreign wars.

The Maine was a U.S. ship that that U.S. officials stationed in Havana harbor in 1898 in the hope of embroiling the U.S. in the Spanish-American War. This was a time of empires, with the Spanish Empire controlling Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and others. Spain’s colonial acquisitions were fighting for independence, which was what the war was about.

The U.S. Constitution had called into existence a limited-government republic, one whose founding foreign policy was non-interventionism in the affairs and conflicts of other nations. That foreign policy had lasted about 100 years. By the time the late 1800s came around, however, there were a large number of Americans who favored converting the federal government into an interventionist empire, one that would acquire colonies and intervene in affairs and conflicts all over the world. Empire and intervention was the only way, they said, to make America great.

The plan became to intervene in the Spanish-American War. But there was an obstacle — the U.S. Constitution, which requires a congressional declaration of war before a president can legally wage war. This was a time when U.S. presidents were still complying with this part of the Constitution. Owing to America’s heritage as a non-interventionist limited-government republic, Congress wasn’t willing to declare war on Spain.

After U.S. officials stationed the Maine in Havana harbor, it was hit with a tremendous explosion. No one could trace the cause of the explosion to Spain but it didn’t matter. With all the emotional hype that interventionists, including mainstream newspapers editors and commentators, had built up in people’s minds, it was easy to convince people to blame the explosion on Spain. President McKinley secured his declaration of war from Congress, and the war slogan became “Remember the Maine!” Investigations into the mishap could never attribute the explosion to Spain.

Once Spain was defeated, its colonies received a rude awakening. After being told that the U.S. government was helping them to achieve independence, they learned that they actually had been lied to. U.S. officials informed the former colonies that there were going to still be colonies, only this time colonies of the United States. After all, U.S. imperialists and interventionists maintained, how else could America be great if it didn’t own or control Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and others?

In the race for U.S. president in 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt told the American people that he was on their side in opposing U.S. involvement in World War II. At that time, the overwhelming majority of Americans opposed entry into the European conflict, especially after having been misled by President Woodrow Wilson into the disaster of World War I.

But FDR was lying. He had secretly promised British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that he would do everything possible to get the U.S. into the war. But he faced the same problem that McKinley had faced: the U.S. Constitution. FDR knew that Congress would not give him a congressional declaration of war.

So, FDR began provoking the Germans into attacking U.S. vessels, so that FDR could announce, “We’ve been attacked. It’s a surprise! Now, give me my declaration of war.” But the last thing Germany wanted was another war with the United States and thus it refused to take Roosevelt’s bait.

That’s when the wily FDR took his antics to the Pacific, in the hopes of squeezing and provoking the Japanese into attacking the United States. He imposed a strict oil embargo to ensure that Japan would not have the necessary oil to fuel its ongoing war in China. He seized Japanese assets in the United States. He then did his best to humiliate and demean Japanese officials with peace demands that he knew they could never accept. Careful to remove U.S. carriers from Hawaii, he left U.S. battleships, including the USS Nevada, USS Arizona, and others as bait for the Japanese.

FDR’s scheme worked brilliantly. The Japanese concluded that they had no choice but to try to break out of the strait-jacket that FDR was tightening around them. They took FDR’s bait and undertook a bombing attack at Pearl Harbor, wiping out the destroyers and thousands of American GIs. Japan then went into the Dutch East Indies to get the oil it needed, hoping, erroneously, that the U.S. Navy would not be able to interfere.

Playing the innocent and claiming that the attack was a “surprise,” FDR got his declaration of war from Congress and, at the same time, secured his “back door” into the European conflict.

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and especially after the 1964 presidential election, President Lyndon Johnson reversed JFK’s plans to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union and Cuba and withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam. Like the U.S. national-security establishment, Johnson was convinced that the communists were coming to get us as part of a worldwide communist conspiracy based in Moscow. If the Reds weren’t stopped in Vietnam, Johnson, the Pentagon, and the CIA believed, the dominoes would fall to the communists, with the final domino being the United States.

In August 1964, U.S. military officials stationed U.S. vessels off the shores of North Vietnam. They announced that North Vietnam had suddenly attacked the USS Maddox. Of course, no one bothered to ask why U.S. vessels were stationed at that particular location instead of back in the United States. All that mattered was the commies had attacked the United States and were now coming to get us.

It turned out to be a complete lie, a concoction designed to secure approval from Congress to send hundreds of thousands of troops, many of them conscripted, to Vietnam to ensure that the Reds didn’t come and take over the United States. By this time, U.S. presidents were openly ignoring the congressional declaration-of-war requirement in the Constitution. But Johnson, the Pentagon, and the CIA still wanted congressional approval and funding for their war. The fake attack at the Gulf of Tonkin enabled them to secure the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution” from Congress, which enabled them to embroil the U.S. in a land war in Asia that they ultimately lost, at the cost of almost 59,000 American men.

As the U.S. war drums beat louder with respect to Iran, Remember the Maine! Remember the Arizona! Remember the Maddox!

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-golem-strikes-back/

The Golem Strikes Back

Not long ago, few Americans of the thinking persuasion might have imagined that such a well-engineered republic, with its exquisite checks and balances, sturdy institutions, and time-tested traditions would end up as so much smoldering goop in a national dumpster fire, but such is the sad state-of-the-union moving into the fateful summer of 2019. The castle of the permanent bureaucracy is about to be torched by an uprising of deplorable peasants led by a Golden Golem made furious by relentless litigation. It’s Game of Thrones meets the Thermidorian Reaction with a Weimar-flavored cherry on top — really one for the ages!

There’s perhaps a lot to dislike about Donald J. Trump, US President No. 45. Despite all the grooming and tailoring, there’s little savoir faire there. He tweets not like a mellifluous songbird, but in snorts like a rooting aardvark. His every predilection is an affront to the refined Washington establishment: his dark business history, his beloved ormolu trappings, his Mickey-D cheeseburgers, the mystifying hair-doo.

Even so, the bad faith of his antagonists exceeds even Mr. Trump’s defects and vices. The plot they concocted to get rid of him failed. And, yes, it was a plot, even a coup. And they fucked it up magnificently, leaving a paper trail as wide as Interstate-95. Now all that paper is about to fall over the District of Columbia like radioactive ash, turning many current and former denizens of rogue agencies into the walking dead as they embark on the dismal journey between the grand juries and the federal prisons.

Hence, the desperate rage of the impeachment faction, in direct proportion to their secret shameful knowledge that the entire RussiaGate melodrama was, in fact, a seditious subterfuge between the Hillary Clinton campaign and a great many key figures in government up-to-and-including former president Barack Obama, who could not have failed to be clued-in on all the action. Even before the declassification order, the true narrative of events has been plainly understood: that the US Intel “community” trafficked in fictitious malarkey supplied by Mrs. Clinton to illegally “meddle” in the 2016 election.

Most of the facts are already documented. Only a few details remain to be confirmed: for instance, whether international man-of-mystery and entrapment artist Josef Mifsud was in the employ of the CIA, and/or Britain’s MI6, and/or Mrs. Clinton’s Fusion GPS contractor (or Christopher Steele’s Orbis Business Intelligence company, a subcontractor to both Fusion GPS and the FBI). Questions will now be asked — though not by The New York Times.

The evidence already public indicates that Robert Mueller must have known as early as the date of his appointment (and likely before) that the predicating evidence for his inquiry was false. After all, his soon-to-be lead prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, was informed of that in no uncertain terms by his DOJ colleague, Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, in 2016. Justice may seek to know why Mr. Mueller did not inform the target of his inquiry that this was so. The answer to that may be that Mr. Mueller’s true mission was to disable Mr. Trump as long as possible while setting an obstruction of justice trap — which also failed tactically.

Notice that Mr. Mueller declined to testify before the House Judiciary Committee last week. Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) was a fool to invite him. Did he not know that minority members of his committee get to ask questions too?

In an interesting turn of the screw last week, polling showed that a majority of those asked were in favor of investigations into the origin of the RussiaGate story. The FBI, being an agency under the direct supervision of the Attorney General, will be hosed out for sure. The CIA, on the other hand, has a sordid history of acting as a sovereign state within the state — hence the derivation of the Deep State. They are renowned for protecting their own. Remember, the Senate Minority Leader, Mr. Schumer, snidely told the incoming President Trump at the get-go that the Intel community “has six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” I guess we’ll finally get to see about that because the CIA’s former director, the wicked Mr. Brennan, is grand jury bound. I suspect he will not be protected by his former colleagues. His downfall may presage a more thorough cleanup, and perhaps a major reorganization, of this monstrous agency.

The indictment of Julian Assange adds a big wrinkle to these upcoming proceedings. Apart for what it means to First Amendment protection for a free press (no small matter), Mr. Assange is the one person who actually knows who handed over the “hacked” DNC emails to Wikileaks. Perhaps getting the answer to that question is the real reason that the DOJ is throwing the book at him. The trial of Mr. Assange is sure to be a humdinger.

I’m convinced, personally, that all this melodrama will play out against the background of a cratering global economy, tanking financial markets, and epic disruption of the established international order. Consider laying in some supplies.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/free-for-all/

Free For All

WASHINGTON — House Democrats, frustrated by President Trump’s efforts to stonewall their investigations and eager to stoke public anger about the president’s behavior, are pinning their diminishing hopes on Robert S. Mueller III yet again…. Mr. Mueller, who was invited to testify by the chairmen of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees a month ago, has not agreed to do so. — The New York Times

Oh? Is that so? Do you wonder why Mr. Mueller might not want to open his aching heart to any House committee in the desperate, last-ditch effort to wring some impeachment joy juice from the already wrung-out narrative of his disappointing report? For the excellent reason that the minority Republican members of said committees get to ask questions too, and they are sure to be embarrassing questions, perhaps placing the Special Counsel in legal jeopardy.

For instance: why did Mr. Mueller not reveal publicly that his team, and the FBI, both knew from the very start that the predicating “corpus of evidence” for the two-year inquisition was cheap fiction written by Glenn Simpson and his hirelings at Fusion GPS, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s disinformation contractor — including “Russia specialist” Nellie Ohr, wife of the then Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr? I could go on, but the above fact-nugget alone is enough to inform any sentient adult that the Mueller Investigation was an entirely political act of seditious subterfuge, and there are many other actionable nuggets of blatant mendacity in the 444-page report to inspire the convening of grand juries against a great many officials in orbit around Mr. Mueller. So, don’t expect Mr. Mueller to show up in any congressional witness chair, though he may occupy one in a courtroom around the time that the next major election is in full swing.

Here’s what will actually happen. These House majority committee chiefs are going to quit their blustering over the next week or so as they discover there is no political value — and plenty of political hazard — in extending the RussiaGate circus. In the meantime, a titanic juridical machine, already a’grinding, will discredit the whole sordid affair and send a number of hapless participants to the federal ping-pong academies. And by then, the long-suffering citizenry will barely give a shit because we will have entered the climactic phase of the Fourth Turning (or Long Emergency, take your pick), in which the operations of everyday business and governance in this country seriously crumble.

The Golden Golem of Greatness will be blamed for most of that. The internal contradictions of Globalism were already blowing up trade and financial relations between the US and China. The Trump tariffs just amount to a clumsy recognition of the fatal imbalances long at work there. As a 25 percent tax on countless Chinese products, the tariffs will punish American shoppers as much as the Chinese manufacturers. Trade wars have a way of escalating into more kinetic conflicts.

The sad truth is that both China and the US are beset by dangerous fragilities. Both countries have borrowed themselves into a Twilight Zone of unpayable debt. Both countries are sunk in untenable economic and banking rackets to cover up their insolvency. China’s fate hangs on distant energy supply lines that run through bottlenecks like the Straits of Hormuz and the Straits of Molucca. The US has been producing torrents of shale oil at a net financial loss — a business model with poor long-term prospects. The temperament of the Chinese people is conditioned historically by subservience to authority, which tends to blow into anarchic rage quickly and catastrophically when things go wrong. The US populace, sunk in decadence, despair, distraction, and delusion, moves sluggishly toward unrest — and for the time being expresses its discontent only in ceremonial narcissistic grievance.

The quarrel between the US and China now threatens to suck the rest of the world into a global business depression, which is what you might expect when globalism seizes up and the global players start scrambling desperately to keep any kind of economy going. The danger then will be that the disgruntled populations of these many lands could become as delusional as Americans, and equally inclined to international violence. There could be all kinds of fighting in all sorts of places while everybody goes broke and hungry. And meanwhile, Robert Mueller meets his protégé Jim Comey for the ping-pong championship of Allenwood federal penitentiary.

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51656.htm

Trump’s Annihilation Threat to Iran and WWI Déjà Vu

The erratic US president has gone from wishing for peace with Iran to, a few days later, making a veiled threat of nuclear annihilation against the Islamic Republic.

Donald Trump got on his twitter pulpit at the weekend, warning about the “official end of Iran”.

The configuration of military power in the Persian Gulf, the heightening of tensions between the US and Iran, and the unhinged aggressive rhetoric all make a tinderbox situation.

At times, the protagonists have each said they don’t want war. But just like the slippery slope towards the First World War (1914-18), the eruption of hostilities can take on a logic of its own.

Paradoxically, assurances last week from President Trump and his top diplomat Mike Pompeo that the US “is not fundamentally seeking a war with Iran” are not in fact all that reassuring.

Neither, it must be said, are assurances from the Iranian leadership that they also do not want war with the US. Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif said there was “no appetite for war”. That may be so, but it’s no guarantee there won’t be one, especially because the circumstances are so precarious.

In the run-up to the First World War, European leaders were similarly adamant that war could be avoided. They thought their rationality and modernity would spare them from catastrophe. Nevertheless, the Europeans quickly plunged into a conflagration through a chain reaction beyond their control.

What bodes particularly grave today is the erratic and incendiary nature of Trump’s rhetoric. At the end of last week he was telling media that “he hoped” there would not be war with Iran. Indeed, he even alluded to the possibility of future diplomatic talks with Tehran. Then, over the weekend, Trump flipped as always and tweeted that if Iran threatened the US “it will be the official end of Iran”.

“If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran. Never threaten the United States again!” tweeted the US Commander-in-Chief.

It’s not clear what set him off. Maybe reports of rocket attacks on the American embassy in Baghdad, fingering Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. Or maybe someone overcooked his hamburger.

There can be no doubt that Trump was invoking the use of nuclear weapons against Iran if any war were to break out. What else to deduce from the words “the official end of Iran”?

A senior Republican Senator, Tom Cotton, who is an arch war hawk on Iran, also appeared to endorse nuclear strikes if any conflict were to arise. He told Fox News that the US could defeat Iran with just two strikes, cryptically calling them “the first strike and the last strike”. That again leaves little doubt that nuclear annihilation is on the mind of Washington politicians with regard to prosecuting a war with Iran.

Such thinking is, of course, despicable. To contemplate the genocidal destruction of another nation demonstrates the barbarity and iniquity of American rulers. But we should not be surprised by such depravity. After all, the Americans are the only people who ever used atomic weapons when they dropped two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing over 200,000 civilians. Washington has always reserved the infernal “right” to use nuclear force preemptively to “defend its vital interests”.

During the Cold War decades, US strategists had drawn up plans to launch pre-emptive nuclear attacks on both the Soviet Union and China, knowing full well that millions of innocents would be obliterated.

Trump has previously warned North Korea with nuclear destruction, bragging about “a fury like the world has never seen before”. He even made a similar threat of annihilation against North Korea while addressing the UN General Assembly in September 2017. The arrogant criminality knows no bounds. Imagine, before the UN in brazen violation of its founding charter outlawing aggression, Trump actually seemed to relish genocide. (He has since gone on to embrace North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with diplomacy, but the psychotic American power could revert to barbarous aggression at any time, if talks don’t appease its dictates.)
Trump’s latest rhetorical broadside against Iran is as provocative as it gets. To crow about wiping out an entire nation is all but declaring war. It’s one tweet away from sparking a conflagration. It’s insane and criminal. Why has Twitter not shut down Trump’s account?

To return to our First World War analogy, that horrendous event, resulting in up to 20 million deaths and the arrival of industrial-scale killing, was largely opposed by the public at the time. Political, military and imperial leaders went to war in spite of assurances beforehand there would be no war. It was like the nations stumbled into a conflagration.

However, it wasn’t entirely unprecedented. What made the violence inevitable was the configuration of military forces and international tensions had been put in place over several years like a powder keg. One spark – the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 – led to a chain reaction of disaster.

That’s why vows from this American president that he doesn’t want war are rather disconcerting. The complacency is alarming. The Trump administration has done everything possible to lay down an explosive fuse in the Persian Gulf. From trashing the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran, to ratcheting up economic terrorism through illegal sanctions, from sending aircraft carrier naval armada and B-52 bombers, to hinting at nuclear annihilation.

Washington is fully culpable for the explosive configuration. For Trump and other American politicians to talk about “not wanting war” is ludicrous naivety or duplicity.

Rockets fired at the American embassy in Baghdad, or Yemeni drones attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, or suspicious sabotage of tankers in the Persian Gulf. The sparks are flying at the powder keg.

The repetition of history is not inevitable. But Washington has surely done its fiendish utmost to make history repeat – a century after the First World War.

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https://www.peakprosperity.com/theyve-stolen-our-future-2/

They’ve Stolen Our Future!

Collapse is in the cards

It’s time to have a serious conversation. I know we’ve been having it, but maybe there’s another glove hidden beneath the one we’ve already taken off.

Put bluntly, there doesn’t seem to be any hope of avoiding a collapse of civilization. The forces of the Business-As-Usual crowd are just too strong, the narrative machine too honed, the interests too entrenched to allow any sort of meaningful course correction at this time.

But is that the case?

Writing about the outcomes of the recent Australian elections which saw a pro-business, conservative government elected, Australian based reader-member ezlxq1949 said:

“They’ve stolen our future!”

That was the wail of the 11-y.o. daughter of a Greens candidate who cried herself to sleep the night after the astonishing election results came in. It couldn’t be worse; the public have sold themselves into almost complete captivity to the neoliberal élites called the Liberal Party. (Liberal = Conservative. Go figure.) It was supposed to have been a climate change election but became a jobs ‘n growth election.

Mind you, it wouldn’t have been much better if the opposition Labor Party had won; they’ve moved so far to the right that like the US we really have only one party with two heads. For instance, Labor would not commit to stopping the monster Adani coal mine.

So it’s goodbye to:

the ABC (the excellent government broadcaster which has the gall and temerity to criticise the government of the day; the government badly wants to get even)
renewable energy (fossil fools rule ok)
the Great Barrier Reef (sliced and diced to let coal ships cross it)
our river systems (suck them dry, privatise the water, send the profits to the Cayman Islands — as is already happening)
the Great Artesian Basin (world’s largest and deepest, to be contaminated by coal mines and fracking)
public services (cut back yet again to create a damaging government budget surplus)
public health (to be Americanised)
public education (to be privatised; maybe high schools this time)
the Great Australian Bight (a pristine area which may have oil under it; damn the pollution, full greed ahead)
southern ocean fish stocks (they’ll let the supertrawlers in now).

The environment is completely expendable. All resources are permanently abundant and all will be fed into the growth machine. Climate change is NOT HAPPENING. It’s fake, right? Bah. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we fry.

There’s one ray of hope. Steve Keen predicts a severe recession, Depression really, within 6 months to a year from now. Our economy is indeed wobbling already. This will happen on the Liberals’ watch and they will be blamed for mismanaging the economy. This isn’t supposed to happen. Only Labor does that. Only Labor mismanages the economy. That’s what the Murdoch press drums into our heads. The Libs will panic. The Murdoch press won’t know what to say. Maybe this will shake up people’s belief and confidence in mainstream economics.

I’m not sleeping well at the moment. I wonder why.

I feel your pain and anguish ezlxq1949! You’d think by now people could have and would have gotten the message that Business-As-Usual (BAU) is a killing machine.

But, no, sadly they have not speaking to the power of the BAU narrative machine to spew out complete rubbish unchallenged in either deed or thought.

I wish I shared the hope that elections might do something, but I have no data to support this idea. Whatever parties you have in your country, no matter how they differ at the margins, they are both, or all (depending on your country’s system), in agreement on the need for jobs, economic growth, and keeping things more or less headed exactly where they are now going.

For example, we might note that under Obama what few binding agreements came from Kyoto were set aside for another generation.

This piece captures that well, and speaks to the necessity of having some sort of a rebellion:

Social collapse and climate breakdown

A huge number of people – 350,000 and counting – have downloaded Jem Bendell’s paper Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.

Here I want to develop one thing that Bendell talks about: social collapse.

But first, for those who have not read his research paper, there are three key truths Bendell tells.

Three truths

Firstly, climate change has been moving much faster than scientists predicted. Things are going to get very bad within the lifetime of some of us now living. We don’t know and can’t know how bad, or how quickly this will happen.

Everyone that Bendell speaks with bases their predictions on their political beliefs. That’s true of everyone I talk to too.

Bendell chooses to think that social collapse is inevitable, catastrophe probable and extinction possible. That’s my guess too.

A second truth: scientists have, for many reasons, been under constant pressure to downplay the dangers and extent of climate change, and not to scare the mob.

Non-governmental organisations have constantly colluded with governments and corporations to conceal the scale of the catastrophe, and to push solutions that will not solve it. Scientists and NGOs do this because their funders demand that.

A third truth: Bendell says it is hard, at first, to accept what is coming. I have found that too.

Climate politics

I first got involved in climate politics because I’m a freelance writer and in 2004 I decided to write a book about climate change. I thought it would be interesting and there would be a market, God forgive me.

I got involved with a climate action group – the Campaign against Climate Change – and started reading. Several months later I began having the same nightmare most nights for months. In that nightmare I was trying to tell some people something, and they were not listening.

What was happening is that I was understanding the implications of what I was reading. One reason is that I take science seriously, and I understand numbers. The other is that I already understood social collapse.

That was bad enough. For the next four years I knew what would happen if we did not act. Then at the end of the UN climate talks in 2009, on a Friday lunchtime in Copenhagen, I read the text of the agreement Barack Obama had just made the other governments agree to.

That text ended the Kyoto agreement and said that henceforward no government would have to make compulsory cuts in emissions. Every government could choose what cuts or increases they wanted. The Paris talks in 2015 extended that to 2035.

I understood what Obama had done immediately. That text ended the possibility of action for a generation. Since then, I have understood social collapse is coming.

The Extinction Rebellion is capturing that energy of those who realize that we may well yet have to go down swinging.

The powers that be would like us to continue with the fantasy that politics could, may, might, possibly offer a sliver of a chance…if only we could elect the right sorts of people! (Spoiler alert, those sorts of people are never placed on offer to be elected…they are comprehensively weeded out well before then, as we see with Tulsi Gabbard currently in the US for merely daring to offer an alternative to the Bomb First crowd).

In the end, it may simply be that humans cannot rise above their brain stems. Collapse is already baked in the cake. So then the question becomes who you wish to be in these times? How will you act? What sorts of decisions are you going to make?

That’s what I asked in my most recent pieces entitled From Survival to Significance and Creating a World Worth Inheriting.

The continued ““market”” jamming efforts (as well underway today, again) are just attempts to ignore the inevitable. The continued efforts of the mainstream media to heavily promote completely irrelevant items while totally ignoring extremely important topics are best understood through the lens of evolutionary biology.

Humans, you see, are with few bright exceptions, wired wrong to manage connecting complex dots. When given the choice between basic biology (eating, reproducing, and staying safe & warm) and engaging in a bit of temporarily difficult introspection or thought, nearly everybody defaults to basic biology.

Our leaders know that dynamic well, as do advertisers and media moguls and so they give the people what they want. It’s dreadfully simple, easy and popular.

It takes a rare individual to buck that trend. The young tend to be far more facile at it than the old. That’s why rebellions usually begin with the youth.

But meanwhile, the unthinkable is forcing its way into our collective consciousness. The ecosystems of the world that have gently held civilizations over the past 10,000 years are collapsing.

Rains no longer fall where they should, or too much where they shouldn’t. The careful food webs developed over hundreds of millions of years are being suddenly upended. What will it mean that phytoplankton numbers are dropping like a rock, or that insects are 80% depleted? Nobody knows. What happens next is completely unpredictable. Such is the nature of complex systems.

Let me quote again from the above piece of writing, which goes on to speculate how the power structures will go about dealing with the inevitable crises. After writing about the many tens of millions killed during various state imposed famines, wars, and pogroms he writes:

All these numbers are approximate, you understand. No one was counting properly.

Almost none of those horrors were committed by small groups of savages wandering through the ruins. They were committed by States, and by mass political movements.

Society did not disintegrate. It did not come apart. Society intensified. Power concentrated, and split, and those powers had us kill each other. It seems reasonable to assume that climate social collapse will be like that. Only with five times as many dead, if we are lucky, and twenty-five times as many, if we are not.

Remember this, because when the moment of runaway climate change comes for you, where you live, it will not come in the form of a few wandering hairy bikers. It will come with the tanks on the streets and the military or the fascists taking power.

Those generals will talk in deep green language. They will speak of degrowth, and the boundaries of planetary ecology. They will tell us we have consumed too much, and been too greedy, and now for the sake of Mother Earth, we must tighten our belts.

Then we will tighten our belts, and we will suffer, and they will build a new kind of gross green inequality. And in a world of ecological freefall, it will take cruelty on an unprecedented scale to keep their inequality in place.

These formerly “unthinkable” thoughts are now popping up all over the place in print, word and deed. The students on strike in Europe, the Yellow Vests, and the Extinction Rebellion are all examples.

I hinted at these things in The Crash Course, and purposely did not expound upon them because I was trying to gently wake those who were close to waking already. I did not want to scare people back to sleep by drawing the conclusions to the many possible ends. For those with the ability to add and subtract, and to connect dot A to dot B, the implications were clear enough.

A global civilization that is expending 10 or even 20 calories of fossil fuels to grow and deliver a single food calorie, yet has no plans on the books for how it will feed everyone once that source of energy runs down, has a predicament on its hands. The author quoted above takes the next step and connects the dots through history to conclude that we’ll probably just ignore that predicament until we can’t and then be rather unpleasant about it all with each other when the time comes.

He’s got history on his side, and the 11-year old quoted at the top has managed to rightly conclude “they’ve stolen out future!” Indeed, they have.
Sustaining the Unsustainable

I would hazard that about 99% of everything in the mainstream media is dedicated to sustaining the unsustainable, and 100% of everything in the financial “markets” is geared towards the same.

Politicians seem to have a near complete inability to grasp these issues while in office, and a stunning ability to “get it” once they’ve left.

Would it surprise you to learn that most of the financial titans who spend their every waking hour promoting and leveraging the system for their own private gain also have but out plans and escape holes readied?

This idea of sustaining the unsustainable is really so popular that it’s never examined.

I did recently when I observed that if the US Federal Reserve gets its way, and somehow magically manages to create 3% real GDP growth for the next century, what will it have done? Will it have saved us all and delivered to us some awesome future?

Well, if we take the US economy as being $20 trillion now, it will be $385 trillion after 100 years of 3% growth.

That would make the US economy alone nearly 5 times larger than the entire world economy right now. Need we point out again that even 1x current world GDP is killing the planet? Is it not self-evident that it’s not possible for the US alone to be 5x larger than the entire current world economy without destroying everything that even makes having an economy possible (or worth it) in the first place?

Or what if we magically held world population steady from here, but then delivered the equivalent of an Australian standard of loving to everybody? Well, then we’d increase consumption by the planet’s citizens by a factor of more than 20. Oops. Another unworkable idea.

These are very simple thoughts to entertain but let me list for you know every single question of this sort posed by every journalist covering the Federal Reserve’s hearings and press announcement: 0

None. Nada. Zilch.

How is this even possible? How can the most powerful entity in the world, charged with steering the economy to ever larger levels never, not once, be asked a question along the lines of “tell us please, if you are as successful over the next 100 years as you have been over the past 100, what sort of world do your models indicate for us?”

How is this not a legitimate question to ask? Every one of us has an interest in the answer, including every single journalist, but the question is never asked.

Why?

Probably because the answer would be too disturbing to the average sensibility (or brain stem)

And yet, the pressure grows. The natural world that sustains us all, the immature space fantasies of Bezos and Musk aside, is the most important thing there is. Destroy that, and all the rest matters not one tiny bit.

Someday, I predict, your choices will narrow down to “join the young” or “become one of them.” Rebel, or suppress the rebellion. This side, or that. Agent of change, or victim of circumstances.

Same as has been true every time throughout human history when the rains did not come, and resource became tight.

Once things have gone too far in one direction, then collapse is in the cards.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-assangemanning-cases-discredit-humanity/5677971

The Assange/Manning Cases Discredit Humanity

The rule of law has given way to law as a weapon in the hands of government

Everyone who is aware of the US government’s extraordinary criminal actions at home and abroad bears a heavy weight. The millions of peoples murdered, maimed, orphaned, widowed, and displaced by gratuitous American military aggression comprise a Holocaust of deaths based entirely on lies and false accusations in order to advance secret American and Israeli agendas. I suspect that the heavy burden of responsibility for mass murder and destruction committed in our name is the reason most Americans prefer the fake news fed to them about how good and wonderful and exceptional we are and how hard our government works to protect us from the nasty folks elsewhere. This storyline converts the illegal brutal war crimes of the US government against women, children, defenseless citizens, schools, wedding parties, funerals, and farmers in their fields into glorious and brave defenses of our liberty and virtue. If you want the truth watch the video leaked by Manning of US troops enjoying themselves while from the air they machine-gun reporters and innocent civilians walking along a street and follow up by machine-gunning a father and his two young children, babies, who stopped to help the wounded bleeding in the street. The leak of the video that showed the true picture of Washington’s wars is the reason Manning was tortured and imprisoned. It is the person who told the truth, not the criminals who committed the murders, who was punished.

I agree that the fake story of America’s moral worthiness is much easier to live with than it is to bear the shame of the true story. But in the end the fake story destroys our liberty even more completely than would conquest by a foreign opponent. People are more suspicious of an occupying power than they are of their own government and are less likely to believe foreign occupiers when they lie to them. In contrast, a people’s own government can trap them in a false consciousness and keep them there with fake news.

Wherever one looks at the behavior of Americans today, from airline flight attendants to police to national security advisors and secretaries of state, one sees people devoid of moral conscience, integrity, compassion, empathy, and self-control. For unreasonable and petty spite alone, a female airline attendant on a long-delayed Southwest Airline flight called police and had a man to whom she took a dislike arrested and taken off the airplane. All of the passengers protested to the police that the arrested person had done nothing, but the cops didn’t listen. They had another victim to abuse. Was the victimization of this person the result of Identity Politics teaching women to hate men? See this.

Recently, a black woman pushed an elderly white male off a bus into the street simply because he interrupted her harangue of other passengers by telling her she should be nicer to people. He died from his injuries. Was this murderous act the product of Identity Politics teaching black Americans to hate white Americans? See this.

Trump’s crazed war criminal national security adviser, John Bolton, and the idiot secretary of state, Pompeo, want to cause massive civilian deaths in Iran and Venezuela. Iran is to be overthrown for Israel, and Venezuela for US oil companies. The motives are blatant and obvious, but Bolton and Pompeo are not denounced and forced to resign for their shameful murderous intentions. Yet, if they used the n-word or sexually harassed a woman, they would have to resign. This demonstrates the twisted and sick state of American morality today. Bombing people is acceptable, but words might really hurt them.

Washington’s case against Julian Assange is so contrived and so weak, that the corrupt US attorney assigned to frame-up Assange has resorted to persecution of Manning in an effort to coerce false testimony against Assange from Manning. After being tortured and serving seven years in prison for revealing a US war crime, as Manning was required to do under the US military code, Manning was pardoned by President Obama. Now Manning is back in prison for a second time after being pardoned, because Manning will not cooperate in the frame-up of Assange by giving false testimony to a grand jury. Without false testimony, the corrupt US attorney hasn’t a case that could get a conviction from even the typical insouciant American jury, normally a collection of gullible people easily manipulated by the prosecutor.

When Manning was imprisoned for 63 days for refusing to tell lies about Assange, Manning spent 28 of those days in solitary confinement. Why?
The Persecution of Julian Assange

A week after Manning was released, the corrupt US attorney called Manning again before the grand jury that the corrupt US attorney is using to contrive a case against Assange. Again Manning refused to cooperate in the frame-up, and was again held in contempt and again remanded into federal prison. This time a corrupt US federal district judge, Anthony Trenga, added to Manning’s jail time a daily fine of $500 rising to $1,000 daily after 60 days. In other words, the corrupt judge is helping the corrupt US attorney to coerce Manning into cooperating in a frameup of Assange. Americans need to understand that their judges are not judges. They are operatives of the American police state.

When I characterize the US attorney and judge as corrupt, I don’t mean that they are taking money, although that cannot be ruled out. I mean that they are corrupt in the sense that they have abandoned the rule of law and do not see their function as serving justice. The US Constitution and its amendments establish law as a shield of the people against coercive and arbitrary actions of government, but the US attorney and judge are using law as a weapon against individuals against whom authorities want revenge. For years we have been witnessing the rule of law being attacked from every level, from the president to the local police. See Roberts and Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions. See this.

No one has protested the open and highly visible effort to force Manning to commit perjury that can be used to build a case against Assange or otherwise be imprisoned for “contempt” and fined into penury. The despicable liberal-progressive-left whores that comprise the US print and TV media and NPR will not protest the injustice. They hate Manning and Assange for having more integrity than all of them together. The conservative talk radio hosts won’t protest the attempt to coerce Manning, because they love Trump, Washington’s wars, and hate “anti-Americans,” which is everyone who dares tell the truth about the US. On conservative talk radio on May 17, I heard one popular host say “I am happy Manning is in prison.”

No US senators or representatives and neither the Senate or House judiciary committee sees anything untoward in forcing an American citizen to produce the needed lies for framing up the world’s best journalist. Law schools and bar associations are not demanding the corrupt US attorney to be disbarred for violating every precept laid down by US Attorney General, Supreme Court Justice, and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson. Nor are they demanding the impeachment of the corrupt federal district judge, who perhaps has his eye on appointment to the appeals court for his cooperation in finishing off the First Amendment.

The American people are too insouciant and brainwashed to know what is happening. Regardless, they are as powerless as third world peasants who have a dictator’s boot on their necks.

The “Western democracies”—what a joke—have not raised a voice at the US government’s public display of intimidation of a witness, at the US government’s use of imprisonment and coercive fines in a public display of forcing a person to lie in order that the US government can get revenge on a journalist who published leaked materials that show conclusively that the US government is a deranged war criminal, a liar and deceiver of its dumbshit allies and population, and the greatest threat to peace and stability in the world.

Assange might be saved by prosecutors with a guilty conscience in Sweden, the country in which Assange’s troubles began. Assange’s troubles began in Sweden where two women enthralled with his celebrity separately invited him into their beds. One of them became alarmed when he did not use a condom. To reassure herself that he did not have a sexually transmitted disease, she asked him to take a test. He foolishly refused. She went to the police, not to report a rape but to inquire if Assange could be forced to submit to testing. The other woman found out about the other woman, and was angry that she was not the only woman in his sexual life.

It was the police and a feminist prosecutor taught to hate men who made it into a rape investigation. But as the women said it was consensual sex, the charges were dropped. Assange was released and free to leave Sweden.

His second mistake was to go to England, an American puppet state. Once Assange was in Britain, he was as good as in Washington’s hands. Washington encouraged a second Swedish feminist prosecutor to reopen the case. As there were no charges against Assange, all the feminist prosecutor could do was to try to extradite Assange for more questioning. Once Sweden had him, the expectation was that Washington would pay the bribe for his extradition to the US. Normally, extradition requires formal charges, but Sweden had none. Normally, there is no extradition for questioning. But a corrupt British court, perhaps well paid by Washington, agreed to the extradition for questioning and placed Assange under house arrest under a large bond paid, if memory serves, by Sir James Goldsmith’s daughter.

Whether or not Sir James’ daughter understood it, Assange and his lawyers understood that he was in line to be delivered to Sweden and from there to the Washington torturers. Therefore, asylum was arranged for Assange in the Ecuadoran Embassy where he lived seven years until a Washington-compliant and corrupt Ecuadoran president, well paid with an IMF loan, gained power and revoked Assange’s asylum. The British police then did Washington’s bidding and dragged Assange out of the embassy and placed him in a maximum security prison as if he were some sort of dangerous criminal.

The second Swedish prosecutor had eventually consented to interviewing Assange in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London and afterward dropped her extradition request, and the case was closed for the second time. But the corrupt British legal system, which is almost as corrupt as the American one, put Assange in jail for 50 weeks based on “bail jumping” despite the fact that the extradition request from Sweden on which the bail was based was withdrawn.

Now Washington’s British vassal is considering the request from Britain’s Washington master to hand over Assange for torture, confession, and death or long-term imprisonment. But suddenly Sweden has found that there is “still probable cause” that not using a condum could be a sexual offense and have again requested Britain to hand Assange over to Sweden.

Is this a rescue attempt on Sweden’s part to make up for having ruined the life of the world’s best journalist? Or is it Washington’s insurance policy against the British coming to their senses and, on the basis of justice, refusing Washington’s extradition order?

In England the decision is up to the Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, who is not of British ethnicity. Hopefully, he is an immigrant from one of the abused colonies and will stick his finger in the UK/US eye and turn Assange over to Sweden where he is unlikely to be convicted for engaging in unprotected sex. Hopefully, Assange will not be so stupid as to then travel to another Washington puppet state. If he does, he will experience his tribulation again.

But Washington pays so well I doubt Assange can escape. The corrupt Western media is against him because Assange shows them up as devoid of an ounce of integrity and devoid of the practice of journalism. The American presstitutes don’t care about the First Amendment. As they never tell the truth, they don’t need First Amendment protection.

Washington, which claims to represent the American people, is for war and more war. Bolton intends that the US will, for Israel, attack Iran and create chaos there as was created in Iraq and Libya, and also in Syria prior to the Russian intervention.

Under neoconserative and Israeli leadership, America has become a deranged country, distrusted by other governments and considered the primary threat to peace and life on earth.

Every American should be ashamed. But they are not. At some point, the Russians, Chinese, Europeans, Iranians, and everyone else will finally realize, hopefully before it is too late, that Washington is overwhelmed by evil, capable only of destruction, and a dangerous threat to life on earth.

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https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2019/05/14/the-united-states-of-aggression-war-with-iran-would-spell-the-end-of-the-republic/

The United States of Aggression: War With Iran Would Spell the End of the Republic

Who do we think we are? Truly. The latest reports that the Trump administration is considering plans for deploying 120,000 troops to the Middle East – presumably to strike Iran – demonstrates how Washington’s foreign policy has finally gone off the rails. Crazier still, the impending war with Iran isn’t even the today’s biggest news story – what with all the nonsense, soap opera hullabaloo about the Mueller Report – on mainstream media outlets. What the proposed plan constitutes is nothing less than the most important, and disturbing, global issue of the day. This is how it should be reported by a truly adversarial media: The United States is preparing for an aggressive, illegal, and unwarranted war against another sovereign power thousands of miles from its shores. Again! All true citizens should be beyond appalled and screaming dissent from the rooftops.

The proposed plan comes on the heels of Iran’s decision – prompted by U.S. hostility – to withdraw from certain, though not all, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, better known as the Iran nuclear deal) requirements. This shouldn’t come as any surprise. In fact, it’s incredible that Iran stayed in compliance with the treaty as long as it did. After all, it was the United States that unilaterally scuttled the deal – with which its own intelligence services admitted Iran had complied with – against the advice of its European allies and even Secretary of State Tillerson. By reimposing sanctions on a compliant Iran, the US acted aggressively and actually vindicated any Iranian counteraction. Indeed, President Rouhani had some justification for his claim that Tehran’s move didn’t violate the agreement, per say, but that actually the JCPOA permitted it since reimposition of sanctions was "grounds to cease performing its commitments under this JCPOA in whole or in part."

This staggering military plan is only the latest escalation in a dangerous tit-for-tat game of chicken between Iran and the US. Furthermore, it is Washington which has most often been the aggressor. The US, not Iran, recently deployed an aircraft carrier strike force and B-52 bombers to the Persian Gulf. The US, not Iran, needlessly began a provocative semantic battle when it designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terror organization. So aggressive and unnecessary was this move that Iran’s subsequent retort that the real terror outfit in the region is USCENTCOM seemed disconcertingly accurate. Moreover, Washington has long exaggerated the level, and significance, of Iranian support for various regional proxies, such as the Houthis in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq, and Hamas in Gaza. Bottom line: Iran currently presents no existential, strategic threat to the US

The whole sordid saga bears a striking, and disturbing, similarity to the worst foreign policy decision of the 21st century – America’s last war of choice waged in Iraq. Both were justified by inflated, vague, and alarmingly secretive intelligence reports. How’d that work out in 2003? Now, with the New York Times reporting that the magic number is again 120,000 troops – close to the number that invaded Iraq – we can deduce that even if war were warranted, the US military wouldn’t have the troops necessary to win.

The specter of war with Iran bears both hallmarks of terrible military adventures: Washington is again overestimating Iran’s bellicose intent and underestimating its capacity to defend itself. Make no mistake: war in the Persian Gulf will bloody, indecisive, and nearly impossible to disengage from. It’d be Iraq War 2.0, only worse – since Iran is bigger, more mountainous, and has a more nationalistic population than even Iraq.

The absurdity of even considering a major war with Iran demonstrates how truly Orwellian US foreign policy has become. Mr. Trump (correctly) chooses to reduce tensions with Russia and North Korea, but he still needs an enemy, a useful villain. Since loading up his administration with recycled neocons like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo – both obsessive Iranophobes – it should’ve been obvious that Iran would play the scapegoat for, and justification of, America’s massive defense budget and apparent intention to maintain a military vice grip on the Mideast.

The American people hardly care about, and are excluded from, US foreign policy. A cabal of neocon Washington insiders, Trumpian buffoons, an all-powerful corporate arms dealing clique, and a compliant media seem to run America’s global affairs. Congress is hardly even consulted, as evidenced on Tuesday morning when Senator Bob Melendez – a highly placed member of the Senate Foreign Relations committee – admitted on CNN that he hadn’t been fully briefed, and didn’t fully understand, the oh-so-secretive intelligence that allegedly justifies this new military escalation in the Persian Gulf. That’s scary!

It is war that the unelected hyper-hawks like Bolton and Pompeo want, and, with an apathetic citizenry, uniformed Congress, and pliable president, it is war they may just get. Such a fight would be bloody, difficult, costly, and hard to end. It would shatter any remnants of regional stability and only serve to empower the two hidden hands behind this bellicosity – Saudi Arabia and Israel. To invade and/or attack Iran would, once and for all, spell the end of any fiction of the US remaining a representative republic governed by the popular will and international norms. Instead it’d be exposed for what it has long been becoming – a rogue, hegemonic empire bent on power and destruction.

If I were still in uniform, and I thank my lucky stars that I am not, I’d likely file as a conscientious objector. Indeed, I can hardly understand why most servicemen will not take such a drastic step. Though, admittedly, I too failed to do so during the horrific Iraq War.

Still, if loyal foot soldiers, a vacuous media, and an indifferent Congress march along to war in Iran, Roman history would repeat itself – as the empire finally swallows the republic whole.

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http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/total-catastrophe-for-u-s-corn-production-only-30-of-u-s-corn-fields-have-been-planted-5-year-average-is-66

Total Catastrophe For U.S. Corn Production: Only 30% Of U.S. Corn Fields Have Been Planted – 5 Year Average Is 66%

2019 is turning out to be a nightmare that never ends for the agriculture industry. Thanks to endless rain and unprecedented flooding, fields all over the middle part of the country are absolutely soaked right now, and this has prevented many farmers from getting their crops in the ground. I knew that this was a problem, but when I heard that only 30 percent of U.S. corn fields had been planted as of Sunday, I had a really hard time believing it. But it turns out that number is 100 percent accurate. And at this point corn farmers are up against a wall because crop insurance final planting dates have either already passed or are coming up very quickly. In addition, for every day after May 15th that corn is not in the ground, farmers lose approximately 2 percent of their yield. Unfortunately, more rain is on the way, and it looks like thousands of corn farmers will not be able to plant corn at all this year. It is no exaggeration to say that what we are facing is a true national catastrophe.

According to the Department of Agriculture, over the past five years an average of 66 percent of all corn fields were already planted by now…

U.S. farmers seeded 30% of the U.S. 2019 corn crop by Sunday, the government said, lagging the five-year average of 66%. The soybean crop was 9% planted, behind the five-year average of 29%.

Soybean farmers have more time to recover, but they are facing a unique problem of their own which we will talk about later in the article.

But first, let’s take a look at the corn planting numbers from some of our most important corn producing states. I think that you will agree that these numbers are almost too crazy to believe…

Iowa: 48 percent planted – 5 year average 76 percent

Minnesota: 21 percent planted – 5 year average 65 percent

North Dakota: 11 percent planted – 5 year average 43 percent

South Dakota: 4 percent planted – 5 year average 54 percent

Yes, you read those numbers correctly.

Can you imagine what this is going to do to food prices?

Many farmers are extremely eager to plant crops, but the wet conditions have made it impossible. The following comes from ABC 7 Chicago…

McNeill grows corn and soybeans on more than 500 acres in Grayslake. But much of his farmland is underwater right now, and all of it is too wet to plant. Rain is a farmer’s friend in the summer but in the spring too much rain keeps farmers from planting.

The unusually wet spring has affected farmers throughout the Midwest, but Illinois has been especially hard hit. Experts say with the soil so wet, heavy and cold, it takes the air out and washes nutrients away, making it difficult if not impossible for seeds to take root.

Right now, soil moisture levels in the state of Illinois “are in the 90th to 99th percentile statewide”. In other words, the entire state is completely and utterly drenched.

As a result, very few Illinois farmers have been able to get corn or soybeans in the ground at this point…

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s crop progress reports, about 11% of Illinois corn has been planted and about 4% of soybeans. Last year at this time, 88% of corn and 56% of soybeans were in the ground.

I would use the word “catastrophe” to describe what Illinois farmers are facing, but the truth is that what they are going through is far beyond that.

Normally, if corn farmers have a problem getting corn in the ground then they just switch to soybeans instead. But thanks to the trade war, soybean exports have plummeted dramatically, and the price of soybeans is the lowest that it has been in a decade.

As a result there is very little profit, if any, in growing soybeans this year…

Farmers in many parts of the corn belt have suffered from a wet and cooler spring, which has prevented them from planting corn. Typically when it becomes too late to plant corn, farmers will instead plant soybeans, which can grow later into the fall before harvest is required. Yet now, planting soybeans with the overabundance already in bins and scant hope for sales to one of the biggest buyers in China, could raise the risk of a financial disaster.

And if the wet conditions persist, many soybean farms are not going to be able to plant crops at all this year.

Sadly, global weather patterns are continuing to go haywire, and much more rain is coming to the middle of the country starting on Friday…

Any hopes of getting corn and soybean planting back on track in the U.S. may be washed away starting Friday as a pair of storms threaten to deliver a “one-two punch” of soaking rain and tornadoes across the Great Plains and Midwest through next week.

As much as 3 to 5 inches (8 to 13 centimeters) of rain will soak soils from South Dakota and Minnesota south to Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, according to the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.

We have never had a year quite like this before, and U.S. food production is going to be substantially below expectations. I very much encourage everyone to get prepared for much higher food prices and a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the months ahead.

Even though I have been regularly documenting the nightmarish agricultural conditions in the middle of the country, the numbers in this article are much worse than I thought they would be at this point in 2019.

This is truly a major national crisis, and it is just getting started.