Another Fix

"Abbie-Normal",

There is No Normal, Jim Kunstler
Imagine living through the very start of all that, the blinding, fantastic newness of modernity! Look back at the stories and images around Teddy Roosevelt and his times, and the confidence of that era just astonishes you, An emergent cavalcade of wonders: electricity, telephones, railroads, subways, skyscrapers! And in a few more years movies, cars, airplanes, radio. Even the backstage wonders of the day were astonishments: household plumbing for all, running hot water, municipal water and sewer systems, refrigeration, tractors! It’s hard to conceive how much these developments changed the human experience of daily life.
Even the traumas of the 20th century’s world wars did not crush that sense of amazing progress, at least not in North America, spared the wars’ mighty wreckage. The post-war confidence of American society achieved a level of in-your-face laughable hubris — see the USA in your Chevrolet! — until John Kennedy was shot down, and after that the delirious moonshot euphoria steadily gave way to corrosive skepticism, anxiety, acrimony, and enmity. My generation, booming into adulthood, naively thought they could fix all that with Earth Day, tofu, and computers, and keep the great wheel rolling down into an even more glorious cybernetic nirvana.
Fakeout. That’s not where the wheel is going. We borrowed all we possibly could from the future to pretend that the system was still working, and now the future is at the door like a re-po man come to take away both the car and the house. The financial scene is an excellent analog to our collective psychology. Its workings depend on the simple faith that its workings work. So, it is easy to imagine what happens when that faith wavers.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/there-is-no-normal/

Tom Luongo discusses the rapidly evolving power relationships in the Persian Gulf:
  Iran knows where the fulcrums are. They know which of Trump’s buttons to push. And the Houthis just pushed a big one.
The Saudis have money and the ear of the U.S. political elite and not much else. They are living on borrowed time as they still run big budget deficits thanks to low oil prices, which will continue to go lower, because of this attack.
Why? Because, the markets will again trade on the lack of response from the U.S. not the incident itself. It will further hasten the collapse in the global oil price as the end of the Yemeni war will take that threat of war with Iran further off the table in the long run.
This is especially true as we approach the end of the grace period Iran gave the European Union to get back into compliance with the JCPOA. Because once they are done legally withdrawing from the agreement per its terms, then Iran will be free to pursue Russia’s offer to buy and resell up to 1 million barrels of Iranian oil per day, stabilizing exports.
Trump has already proven he’s unwilling to blow up the oil markets, and, by extension, the larger financial markets to bring Iran to heel. Everyone has their price. And the price of these low-tech drones from from Iran create the ultimate in asymmetric warfare. A few thousand bucks to paralyze trillions in capital.
https://tomluongo.me/2019/08/18/saudis-iran-houthi-yemen/

More on Gulf power relationships from Alastair Crooke, who also points out that this is part of the process global regime change, to something...
 But suddenly, the Gulf chimaera of Trump retarding a resurgent Iran through inflicting a couple of generations worth of missile damage on its infrastructure faded under the desert heat. When Iran took the initiative with its counter-pressures, the US finally did not react, either to Hormuz, or to the loss of its high-spec drone.
 It’s not over yet: Iran remains a grave flash-point, but in the region it is understood that the US neither has the political will, nor the capacity, for protracted military action (as opposed to a quick ‘one and done’, to which Iran has promised substantial retaliation). This sense of a ‘shift’ has been reinforced by Trump’s repeat last month of his call for withdrawal from Syria, and by his almost indecent haste in trying to exit Afghanistan. The omens are plain: America is on its way out from the Middle East.
 Gulf States need to re-position – and they are. They are repositioning into the security architecture being led by China and Russia. Ten days ago, via a document officially approved by the United Nations, the Russian Foreign Ministry advanced a new concept of collective security for the Persian Gulf. The Russian initiative should be interpreted as a sort of counterpart of, and mostly a complement to, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/14/great-switch-old-ways-fade-and-irrecoverable/

Zach seems like a good and principled man of conscience, who feels relief to be outcast and harrassed by Google, taking steps to "ruin his life", because he was true to his conscience, and he can live with himself.
(Impressive video of his "wellness check", being handcuffed on the sidewalk at the point of multiple guns.)
 On Wednesday, former Google employee Zachary Vorhies went public as the whistleblower who spoke with Project Veritas in June, revealing the political bias in Google's "Machine Learning Fairness" program. He also told the story of police storming his home to perform a "wellness check" after he was outed as a "leaker" and after Google had sent him a demand letter.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/retaliation-google-whistleblower-claims-fbi-swat-bomb-squad-appeared-at-his-home/  

"Putin did it"...
All but four of the 30,490 emails from Hillary Clinton’s unauthorized email server were forwarded to a private Google email address featuring a name similar to a Chinese company, according to documents released by a Senate committee on Aug. 15.
Virtually every email that was sent to and from the Clinton-email server was forwarded to “carterheavyindustries@gmail.com,” which raised concerns that a foreign actor gained access to Clinton’s emails after an intelligence community inspector general (ICIG) investigator searched Google for “Carter Heavy Industries” and came up with a result for Shandong Carter Heavy Industry Co., Ltd, according to the documents (pdf).
 Shandong Carter Heavy Industry is a Chinese manufacturer of excavators and heavy machinery.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/hillary-clintons-emails-were-sent-to-gmail-address-with-a-chinese-companys-name_3043380.html  

 Former CIA Officer and whistleblower Kevin Shipp says the Russian hoax and attempted coup of President Trump and the sex trafficking case against Jeffery Epstein are linked together by the same Deep State players...
 So, there is a lot of damning information the FBI has now on certain people. At the top of the list, and the one who flew the most, was Bill Clinton. Then he lied about it. They are intertwined in that regard and with the Clinton Foundation that we know is a fraud. It is known around the world, and you’ve got these two intersections with Bill and Hillary Clinton. Of course, Hillary Clinton is tied to the dossier in an attempt to get rid of Donald Trump. So, these webs interlocked with each other, and these people interlock with each other. Welcome to the global elite. Welcome to human trafficking. These things are connected, and with Epstein dead, there are a lot of prominent people breathing a sigh of relief—for now.  
https://usawatchdog.com/russia-hoax-coup-and-epstein-interlocked-kevin-shipp-part-1/  

Advertisers Blacklisting News, Other Stories with “Controversial” Words Like “Trump”
"Trump" falls between "suicide" and "crash" on the list, well below "murder", "gun" and "rape".
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/advertisers-blacklisting-news-other-stories-with-controversial-words-like-trump.html

AG Barr Fires Prisons Chief After Epstein Case Leaves Country Hanging
(It looks like we'll just get "heads rolling", no answers, no video, nada.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-19/ag-barr-fires-prisons-chief-after-epstein-case-leaves-country-hanging  

 Real cost-of-living inflation in 10 big US cities over the past 5 years has averaged 8.0% to 13.2%.
Would somebody please tell Social Security that, so they can adjust their inflation index for retirees?
http://www.chapwoodindex.com/

Here is an interesting story about our widespread physiologic maladaptions to chronic stress, by an Ophthalmologist.
It starts with an ophthalmologist going partly blind in the O.R. under a grueling surgical schedule, and the changes found were only "in his head" to the degree that they were in his retina.
Of course it talks about how to think right so your frontal lobes don't shrink, because we can't really do more than that, can we?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190813-burnout-anxiety-stress-proof-relief  

Fracking boom has been jacking up measured levels of atmospheric methane, a very potent greenhouse gas.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/fracking-boom-tied-to-methane-spike-in-earths-atmosphere/

Fixing Things Wrong