Spring Preparations

 Spring Preppers,

  Jenny and I are working the spring gardens and replacing fruit trees killed by the deep freeze around Valentine's Day. I've put in 6 fruit trees over the past two weekends in Yoakum and Austin, and the Mexican avocado bed repopulation is still not finished. My Brother, Tom, whose birthday it is today ordered me a tree that is somewhat hard to find, and I'm waiting on a few others, also. Two of the seedlings from a Mysterious California avocado tree, coming through Jenny's cousin, Freddy, in Victoria, have life growing up from the bases. Since they are seedlings, not grafted, that reflects their inherent nature, whatever it may be, so they remain in place, and are being cherished. Jenny is pictured in Yoakum this past Sunday morning, before we started some tree work.

  I'm concerned for this "great reset". We need to make our own provisions to weather this long storm into the world that has less energy and less stuff. Our owners only know to cull the herd. Maybe the secret to that lies in these universal vaccines. That's way above my pay grade, but entirely possible, and that meme is alive.

"China and Russia Launch a Global Resistance Economy", Alastair Crooke

  The $US used to be redeemable for gold, until Nixon effectively ran out in 1971. Even then, dollars were printed far in excess of gold holdings, while they were accepted as equal to god by countries which needed to do international business. The borrowed printed dollars were also paid back at interest, so there was always value extracted from the user, even if the user was not a borrower-at-interest. (Borrowers at variable interest would get the Asian Financial Crisis imposed on them, suffering massive extraction of value periodically.)

  What is proposed here is a global no-extraction monetary-mechanism, which will certainly appeal to countries currently being extracted by the $US.

This will make the $US suddenly much less valuable to the rest of the world. The rest of the world will buy whatever we still make. We in the US will hardly be able to buy anything as dollar prices of domestic goods shoot up and foreign goods just can't be bought.

  America cannot beat this. America will have to join this. Financial-capitalists would rather anything than the loss of their daily rents from global and domestic "investments". They will say we will all lose our retirements. I presume that's inevitable, anyway.

​  ​So here is the essence to ‘a clever combatant moving to impose his will’ – there is no need for China or Russia or Iran to go to war to do this; they just implement ‘it’. They can do ‘it’ – quite simply. They don’t need a revolution to do it, because they have no vested interest in fighting America.
​  ​What is ‘it’? It is not just a trade and investment pact with Tehran; neither is it simply allies helping each other. The ‘resistance’ lies precisely with the way they’re trying to help each other. It is a mode of economic development. It represents the notion that any rent-yielding resource – banking, land, natural resources and natural infrastructure monopolies – should be in the public domain to provide basic needs to everybody – freely.
​  ​The alternative way simply is to privatise these ‘public goods’ (as in the West), where they are provided at a financialized maximum cost – including interest rates, dividends, management fees, and corporate manipulations for financial gain.
​  ​‘It’ is then a truly different economic approach. To give one example: New York’s Second Avenue Subway extension cost $6 billion, or $2 billion per mile – the most expensive urban mass transit ever built. The average cost of underground subway lines outside the U.S. is $350 million a mile, or a sixth of New York’s cost.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/04/05/china-russia-launch-global-resistance-economy/

​This poorly organized presentation states that China continues to advance its Central Bank Digital Currency. That's setting a certain pace.

  China is also beta-testing it's Sovereign Digital Currency, which is to say Chinese smartphone-money that is lossless-for-the-users. 

This smartphone exchange can also be used phone-to-phone, imitating cash, in areas without cellphone service. 

It is not blockchain. It has conventional security features. 

  China is taking steps to eliminate non-governmental digital currencies (That's what is happening to Jack Ma). 

China also wants it's digital currency to really work smoothly and well for Chinese commerce, and to be borderless, as $100 bills are effectively borderless, and anonymous, except when the Bank of China needs to trace a chain of transactions. ​

  This borderless feature will make the Chinese Sovereign Digital Currency on smartphones directly challenge the role of $100 bills in global commerce.

It looks like it has a lot to offer, but once you meet the new boss, will he become the same as the old boss? It's a good gamble, isn't it?

https://www.zerohedge.com/crypto/chinas-digital-yuan-comes-expiration-date

​This is simply the fact in $US amounts. Lots of eggs in that basket.

Investors have put more money into stocks in the last 5 months than the previous 12 years combined

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/09/investors-have-put-more-money-into-stocks-in-the-last-5-months-than-the-previous-12-years-combined.html

"NATO is ready to fight to the last Ukie". Russia has to protect many Russians in East Ukraine, and also avoid directly invading Ukraine.

The deep state/NATO combo's using Kiev to start a war to bury Nord Stream 2 and German-Russian relations... Pepe Escobar

On March 24, Ukrainian President Zelensky, for all practical purposes, signed a declaration of war against Russia, via decree No. 117/2021.
The decree establishes that retaking Crimea from Russia is now Kiev’s official policy. That’s exactly what prompted an array of Ukrainian battle tanks to be shipped east on flatbed rail cars, following the saturation of the Ukrainian army by the US with military equipment including unmanned aerial vehicles, electronic warfare systems, anti-tank systems and man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS).

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-ukraine-redux-war-russophobia-pipelineistan

MOSCOW, April 11. /TASS/. German Chancellor Angela Merkel in her phone talk with Russian President Vladimir Putin did not demand Russia scale down its military presence near the Ukrainian border but voiced concerns about this, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with Moscow. Kremlin. Putin on Rossiya-1 TV channel.
​  ​"No," Peskov said answering a question if Merkel had called on Moscow to scale down its military presence near eastern Ukraine. "Merkel indeed said that Europe is concerned over the concentration of Russian forces near the borders. Yes, she said this and this concern was voiced," Peskov said. The Russian leader gave explanation to this, he stressed.
​  ​Moscow sees that the Minsk peace deal is not being implemented in Donbass and Ukraine is stepping up its provocations, Kremlin Spokesman told. "In Donbass there is a situation when the Minsk agreements are not being fulfilled," Peskov stressed. "And there is a situation in Donbass related to the increased activity of provocations by the Ukrainian armed forces."​ ...

"Since in general there are tensions and there is no de-escalation, tensions are running high and such provocations could one day ignite the fire of this civil war inside the Ukrainian conflict," Peskov stressed.

https://tass.com/politics/1276543

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Russia has called for talks to create a legally binding international instrument that would ban the deployment of any type of weapons in space, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on the 60th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic space flight.

​  ​"We consistently believe that only a guaranteed prevention of an arms race in space will make it possible to use it for creative purposes, for the benefit of the entire mankind. We call for negotiations on the development of an international legally binding instrument that would prohibit the deployment of any types of weapons there, as well as the use of force or the threat of force," Lavrov said in a video message on the anniversary of the first manned space flight.

https://sputniknews.com/russia/202104111082600146-russia-calls-for-talks-on-binding-treaty-to-prohibit-weapons-in-space---lavrov/

A State Supreme Court justice has ordered a Batavia hospital to administer the drug Ivermectin to an 81-year-old Covid-19 patient.   Thanks Jeremy.
  The case involving John W. Swanson, a farmer from Stafford in Genesee County, is the latest of several in which judges have ordered local hospitals to give Ivermectin to patients suffering from the virus. The drug is used to treat other ailments but is not yet approved by the federal government as a Covid-19 treatment.
  Swanson was on a ventilator and “on death’s doorstep,” at the United Memorial Medical Center when doctors there gave him one dose of Ivermectin on April 1, according to an affidavit filed in court by attorneys for Swanson’s wife, Sandra.
  “After that one dose, he started breathing on his own. He was taken off the ventilator and was making great progress,” said attorney Ralph C. Lorigo, who represents the Swanson family with Jon F. Minear. “Then, the hospital refused to give him additional doses.”
State Supreme Court Justice Frederick J. Marshall issued an order on April 2, directing the hospital to give Swanson four more doses of Ivermectin.
  As of late Friday afternoon, his attorneys described Swanson as “stable.”

https://buffalonews.com/news/local/judge-orders-batavia-hospital-to-treat-coronavirus-patient-with-ivermectin/article_53c8b32e-996c-11eb-87cf-2bd34f11d3c2.html

Early Ambulatory Multidrug Therapy Reduces Hospitalization and Death in High-Risk Patients with SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19)

Conclusions: We conclude that early ambulatory, multidrug therapy is associated with substantial reductions in hospitalization and death compared to available rates in the community. Prompt ambulatory treatment should be offered to high-risk patients with COVID-19 instead of watchful watching and late-stage hospitalization for salvage therapies.

https://ijirms.in/index.php/ijirms/article/view/1100

​  ​A study by the Oslo University Hospital has indicated a connection between AstraZeneca's vaccine against COVID-19 and severe blood clots, low platelet counts and haemorrhaging, which previously led to the vaccine being put on hold in dozens of countries.
​  ​The study is peer-reviewed and was published Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The study also indicated that the vaccine-induced platelet deficiency in blood clots may be more frequent than that found in previous studies examining its safety.
​  ​Within 10 days of vaccination, the Oslo University Hospital received five, initially healthy, people with very high levels of antibodies against platelets, which is believed to be the direct reason for the strong immune response. Three of these five are now dead, while two have fully recovered,

https://sputniknews.com/europe/202104121082601099-norwegian-astrazeneca-study-finds-link-between-vaccine-blood-clotting/

‘No Medical Certainty’ Pfizer Vaccine Caused Death of 56-Year-Old Doctor, Medical Examiners Say
​  ​Dr. Gregory Michael developed an autoimmune disorder three days after being vaccinated, and died about two weeks later. Scientists have linked the disorder to the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines, but officials categorized Michael’s death as natural.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/pfizer-vaccine-death-56-year-old-doctor/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=3c7dc8b6-7bf9-4d81-80a0-01b6f5c9839b

​John Ward, digs into some official, recent, but quiet UK COVID findings​: Thanks for the Heads-up, Jeremy.

​  ​SP-I-MO stands for Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling. It reports into the SAGE/Secretary of State Number Ten Group. Almost nobody in the UK has ever heard of it, and its pronouncements online are stored in an unexpected place under the “assets publishing service”.
​  ​What follows aren’t leaks; they’re representative extracts from the latest SPIMO report, issued on March 31st last, and discussed in Downing Street some ten days ago. As far as can be gleaned the data reports are given sporadically….as in, when SPIMO has something to say.
As you will see, at the end of March, SPIMO had a lot to say.​..

​  This first one below is bare-faced in its admission of failure:

​  ​The explosive statement there is ‘immunisation failures account for more serious illness than unvaccinated individuals’. Five pages later, reference is made to data used to make further modelled projections as follows: ”assuming two doses of AstraZeneca provide only 31% effectiveness against transmission”.
​  ​So in short, SPIMO is working on the basis of a supposed ‘vaccine’ that fails to stop the spread of infection in more than two out of three cases. This is radically different to the impression government publicity has given us – viz, that “even after vaccination, it may still be possible for you to infect others”. It sounds cautionary and responsible, but asking around a sample of acquaintances yesterday, they imagined a figure of around 80% – not 31%. Under 1 in 3 is, let’s face it, a risible result.

​  ​But the initial statement cuts the legs off continuing the vaccination rollout, because it rejects the benefit such might bring with the haunting words, “Immunisation failures account for more serious illnesses than unvaccinated individuals”.
So much for “Don’t be selfish, get the jab”.​..

​  ​56. This shows that most deaths and admissions in a post-Roadmap resurgence are in people who have received two vaccine doses, even without vaccine protection waning or a variant emerging that escapes vaccines. This is not the result of vaccines being ineffective, merely uptake being so high.

​  ​You couldn’t make this up: even without left-field factors, there’ll be a resurgence after lockdown exit, but this is not Astrazeneca’s fault – the “problem” was high uptake. By vaccinating the vulnerable bigtime, we killed more people, but a drug struggling to demonstrate efficacy had nothing to do with it.​..

​  Covid19 is not a deadly pandemic, it is another type of seasonal killer that culls the aged and infirm – but produces, on a global basis, no significant rise in such mortality. It is and always was an excuse to contain and control.

https://therealslog.com/2021/04/11/world-covid-exclusive/

​P.1 is the Brazilian strain.

SARS-CoV-2 variants B.1.351 and P.1 escape from neutralizing antibodies

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(21)00367-6.pdf

The report below is an excerpt from Israel National News
​  ​A front-page article appeared in the FranceSoir newspaper about findings on the Nakim website regarding what some experts are calling “the high mortality caused by the vaccine.”  
​  ​In January 2021, there were 3,000 records of vaccine adverse events, including 2,900 for mRNA vaccines.
Compared to other years, mortality is 40 times higher.
​  ​On February 11, a Ynet article presented data related to vaccination. The authors of the Nakim article claim to have debunked this analysis based on data published by Ynet itself: “We took the data by looking at mortality during the vaccination period, which spans 5 weeks. By analyzing these data, we arrived at startling figures that attribute significant mortality to the vaccine.”​  

​The authors say “vaccinations have caused more deaths than the coronavirus would have caused during the same period.”

Haim Yativ and Dr. Seligmann declare that for them, “this is a new Holocaust,” in face of Israeli authority pressure to vaccinate citizens.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/vaccination-israel-challenging-mortality-figures/5742158

​The really-very-lewd-and-tawdry Hunter Biden laptop pictures and story as a window into the lifestyles of our ruling elites.

Pictures of Hunter's "meth-mouth" teeth at his dentist's office and Hunter posing in running shoes and scarf are memorable...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9445105/What-Hunter-Biden-left-tell-memoir-revealed.html

​Pondering Pawn​

All Power Off

 Self Powered,

  How is power wielded in the Western World? 

Power, as we know it, is the capacity to compel other people to carry out actions which are designated by the powerful. 

There is the carrot of payment in money, goods, services or favors, and the stick of violence and/or deprivation.

  Since WW-2 the financial power of global reserve currency status has rested with the American Federal Reserve banking system.

To participate in global markets, any entity needs to have $US to trade in goods and services.

To obtain $US an entity must provide something of value in trade for them.

To create $US the US Federal Reserve system has to promise to back those dollars up with other dollars later, and the US Federal Government promises to accept those dollars with a promise of paying them back later with a little extra for the privilege. That creates an exponentially expanding stock of $US in the world.

  At some point there are more $US than the world needs or desires, so the world will want something else, like American goods and services.

When those dollars are repatriated to the US, they drive up the price of the goods and services the world wants, and they increase the number of dollars within the US.

If those dollars in the US circulate freely, then other prices are increased in the US. Inflation.

It is in the interests of those holding power to keep the world desirous of $US, or their structure of extracting goods and services from the rest of the world breaks down.

  When President Nixon ran out of gold to back the $US (Vietnam war bled gold from the US) King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was induced to agree to only accept $US in payment for oil, (the Shah of Iran did the same) and to recycle any excess dollars into US Treasury debt. 

The Petro-Buck was created.

  Threats to the Petro-Buck have included The Arab Oil Embargo (dealt with financially), the Iranian revolution (dealt with militarily and by secret agreements, then various forms of overt/covert warfare), the Iraqi sale of oil outside of the $US market (Iraq wars), the Libyan plan for a gold backed African currency outside the $US club (you know what Saddam got), and so on. A whole lot of violence has been needed to maintain demand for $US in the new millennium.

Violence did seem to be working, but more and more tribute-paying countries, tired of being bled are testing the Western Power Structure.

I sense that the time for a global reserve currency change is near. It stands to reason. We don't use the Pound Sterling anymore. 

These regimes don't last.

  Resorting to violence to support a financial empire is a sign of weakness, not of strength.

  Failure of violence is a further sign of weakness. Violence has failed to bring Venezuela back into the fold of blood donors to the Western Empire.

The extractive $US global trade network, the extraction mechanism, is now used as a means of violent coercion, starving the citizens of Venezuela, and depriving them of medicines and tools they need.

  Futile gestures , like $US-sanctioning Russian and Chinese politicians are an embarrassing public display of terminal weakness. 

They announce that the current financial regime is a throw-away, running on fumes, and that these "tough sanctions" are being displayed to convince the folks at home that the $US remains almighty, because they, most of all, need to stay convinced of that.

  The rest of the world, including Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and India, has long been exploring global trade alternatives to the $US regime, and quietly testing them out. The most prudent course for TROTW is to take baby steps, as it is doing, and await a $US financial crisis, like 2008, then to just increase use of the alternative systems, and open them to other participants, free of charge, free of tribute extraction.

  The US won't be able to buy F-35s after that. Americans will have to bid global prices for anything that can be exported, as their wages become almost worthless, like in 1979, but with finality, this time.

  The "Global War On Terror" has failed to solidify the US/Fed. as global hegemon for all time. 

What's Plan-B? 

Oh, that's for our billionaire owners to decide amongst themselves.

Waddaya mean they are "not decision capable"?

Whaddaya mean, "we're on our own"?

Whadday mean, "useless eaters"?

Eleni sends this "explains it all" article from mythbuster Alastair Crooke.

​  The key point here surely is whether the élites’ Great Re-set – to reinvent themselves as leaders of the ‘re-vamped’ values of liberalism, overlayered by a newly up-dated, AI and robot-led, post-modernity – is destined to succeed, or not.

  Continued​ ‘westification’ of the globe – the principal component to ‘old’ liberal globalism – though tarnished and largely discredited, remains mandatory, as made clear in the cogent reasoning recently advanced by Robert Kagan: Absent the justifying myth of ‘seeding democ racy across the world’ around which to organise the empire, the moral logic of the entire enterprise begins to fall apart, Kagan argued (with surprising frankness). He thus asserts that the U.S. empire abroad is required – precisely in order to preserve the myth of ‘democracy’ at home.​ ​An America that retreats from global hegemony, he argues, would no longer possess the cohesive binding to preserve America as liberal democracy, at home either.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/03/15/leviathan-mobilises-for-decisive-battle/

​There's this deeply and extensively researched new book out in Germany, kind of about the insider-trading around 9/11, and some other things. He followed that money, picking up the trails where others left off, when they died or other interruptions took place.

​  Lars shows in detail how 9/11 enabled a state of emergency, a permanent Continuity of Government (COG) in the U.S. and mass surveillance of U.S. citizens – connecting the dots all the way from missing trillions of dollars in the Pentagon to NSA data mining and leading U.S. neocons. The latter had been praying for a “Pearl Harbor” to reorient US foreign policy since 1997. Their prayers were answered beyond their wildest dreams.
  The investigation eventually displays a startling road map: the war on terror as a business model. However, as Lars also shows, in the end, much to the despair of U.S. neocons, all the combined sound and fury of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, in nearly two decades, ended up bringing about a Russia-China strategic partnership in Eurasia.

http://thesaker.is/bombshell-book-in-germany-revives-9-11-as-a-business-model/

Tessa softens the blow. 

We are living, breathing, touching, feeling, loving human beings, after all.

Love and Unity During the Ugly Attempt at the Great Reset
This story is about being grounded as we push back against the Grand Bulldozer.

https://tessa.substack.com/p/unity

Beans and Rice Powered

Political COVID

 Illuminating Mechanisms,

  If we look at the weakening of immune system effectiveness from low vitamin-D, things make more sense. 

Florida, less locked down, and California, are similar in our minds, but Florida's North is at the same latitude as California's South. 

Vitamin-D from sunlight does not exist above the 35th parallel in winter. 

California also has a higher packing density in major cities, which puts people in closed spaces and close proximity.  

  Open Florida has more cases this spring, but closed California has more deaths.  

It's not all political. It's more biological, as I see it.

https://www.aier.org/article/californias-failed-response-to-covid/

Thanks to all who sent this:

​  ​Dr. Ryan Cole is the CEO and Medical Director of Cole Diagnostics, one of the largest independent labs in the State of Idaho. Dr. Cole is a Mayo Clinic trained Board Certified Pathologist.
He is Board Certified in anatomic and clinical pathology. He has expertise in immunology and virology...
He has seen over 350,000 patients in his career, and has done over 100,000 Covid tests in the past year.
​  ​He recently was invited to speak at the “Capitol Clarity” event in Idaho, apparently sponsored by the Lt. Governor’s office, where he discussed successful outpatient treatments for COVID...
​  ​Dr. Cole begins by showing statistics that prove Idaho is no longer in a “pandemic,” but an “endemic.” He states that the highest risk factors for contracting COVID are advanced age, obesity, and low Vitamin D levels.
​  ​He also explains that coronaviruses have historically always followed a 6-9 month life cycle. He gives previous examples such as SARS-1, MERS, etc.
One very interesting statistic that he pointed out is that in the U.S. the average annual age of death is 78.6 years old, and the average age of death during COVID has also been 78.6 years old.
​  ​Dr. Cole is very adamant that proper levels of Vitamin D are essential to fight coronaviruses. He states:
There is no such thing as “flu and cold season,” only low Vitamin D season.

https://healthimpactnews.com/2021/medical-doctor-and-director-of-diagnostics-laboratory-presents-cures-for-covid-and-exposes-dangers-of-covid-vaccines/

​This news from Russia! Today!

​  ​Ron Paul MD has warned that Covid-19 vaccine passports could be used by the US government to restrict freedoms, stirring up an already heated debate over whether such IDs are necessary.
​  ​The former US congressman and physician said on Monday that requiring certificates to verify vaccination for international travel or daily activities would “solidify the whole idea that our lives belong to the government.”
​  ​“They own liberty and now you are going to get permission to use a little bit of it. They are going to divvy it out a little bit. You'll never get back what you should have,” he said while speaking on his program, the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
​  ​The Biden administration has acknowledged that it is collaborating with tech companies to develop a variety of potential vaccine passport apps. At the state level, New York has already created its own digital certificate that grants entry to venues.

https://www.rt.com/usa/520208-ron-paul-vaccine-passport/

​More Russian Texas News (We are still waiting patiently for the "third wave". Maybe that Brazilian strain will beat some sense into us.):​
  Texas Governor Greg Abbott has announced a ban on so-called vaccine passports, becoming the second US governor to officially do so, just a few days after Florida’s Ron DeSantis. The issue has largely broken along political lines.
  Abbott made an announcement on Tuesday declaring that no Texas government agencies or political entities would be permitted to require “vaccine passports” in the state...
  The Biden administration’s medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, seemed almost displeased with Texas’ refusal to slide down its predicted Covid-streaked death spiral, where “the restaurants and the bars are full and open, the ballparks are full, and yet we’ve seen cases and hospitalizations since then continue to tick downward,” as an MSNBC host put it.
  “It looks like 2019,” he said in shock, noting that bars and restaurants in Florida and Texas were thronged with people celebrating their long-dormant right to gather outside their homes.
  Attempting to explain why Texas and Florida’s case counts had dropped despite their having some of the least strict virus regulations, Fauci blamed a “lag,” arguing that the undesirable data everyone was waiting for was still coming – it was just a few weeks down the line".

https://www.rt.com/usa/520295-texas-bans-vaccine-passports-florida/

This is a substantial article, and voices the same concerns that I have. 

This could be the big solution that our owners desire. Thanks Luc.

Former Pfizer VP to AFLDS: ‘Entirely possible this will be used for massive-scale depopulation’​  ​

https://www.americasfrontlinedoctors.com/exclusive-former-pfizer-vp-to-aflds-entirely-possible-this-will-be-used-for-massive-scale-depopulation/#

​Resisting Arrest​

Being Alive

 Self Aware,

  We had a family garden party in Yoakum Saturday, with kids, beer, Easter-eggs, Frisbee-throwing and a barbecue grill. A contingent ended up spending the night, which was safer for them than driving, and we had the bed space as part of the plan. 

Everybody just came and engaged the space, the food, drink, and each other. We didn't have to explain anything to anybody. The plan seems to be self-explanatory.

"Thing One and Thing Two" who are very active brothers, aged 2 and 4 got a tutorial on the big vegetable garden, and did comparative tasting of the green bits of purple and yellow onions.. 

They like the garden a lot, and are interested in how food grows. 

Phoenix and Hendrix went home with some black beans to plant.

  It's not that I don't want to drill down into the news and post it, but I am often forced to choose between life in the flesh, and searching abstract information for emerging threats to life, and possibilities for enhancing the meaning of life. It's hard to work out the enhancement of life in the abstract, and doing it in person demands complete engagement, at least for me.

  I can think about things when I mow the lawn for 4-5 hours, but I still have to pay attention to all of the corners, edges of gardens, borders around 45 fruit trees, those stumps and the drip hoses, while my mind muses, and my heart reaches out.

  Jenny was back at her library this morning, so I dropped her off there at the school and drove down to Yoakum, to plant more replacements for dead fruit trees, make coffee for her sister, who is spending the week there, and make sure that she is able to cook things, and shower, and we didn't forget something. She's doing fine.

  The thought rolls over and over that this-is-human-life. We are living as humans, social animals with the capacity for abstract reason. 

We live and die as social animals, not as abstract-reason. 

In crisis, we save each other, and kill each other in person, not in abstract.

There are killer drones, though, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were abstractions of killing for a few people, who gave orders, but did not need to attend.

 

  I feel that we have gone way too far into abstraction of life and all of the essentials of life. I feel that we are simplified and abstracted into confusion and frustration. This past year of isolation has taken people away from each others' breath, warmth, tone of voice and tingle of touch. Social media, Google and Amazon have placed themselves between us, controlling our inputs of abstract information, our food delivery and our social prerogatives and group beliefs. 

Masks and electronic interface-distancing have atomized us. We are not whole. We are not "individual-humans". Humans die in isolation.

  What am I? Who are we? 

We have to know with certainty, like we know when we'll hit the ground when we jump those last two steps, not like we know the alphabet.

You are bound to know what I mean. Life is the living, the engagement. 

This is what our kind of animal does together, and we need to do it, because our owners are abstracting us out of existence.

  Pictured below is the self-organizing party, with Jim adjusting the line tension for the kiddy swings that he, Steve and Tommy just put up.

Yellow T-shirt Guy

Misconceptions

 Unbelievers,

Do You Believe in Magic?​  James Kunstler​
​  ​The people pretending to run the world’s financial affairs do. The more layers of abstract game-playing they add to the existing armatures of unreality they’ve already constructed, the more certain it becomes that they will blow up all the support systems of a sunsetting hyper-tech economy that now has no safe lane to continue running in.
​  ​Virtually all the big nations are doing this now in desperation because they don’t understand that the hyper-tech economy is hostage to the deteriorating economics of energy, basically fossil fuels, and oil especially. The macro mega-system can’t grow anymore. We’re now in the de-growth phase of a dynamic that pulsates through history, as everything in the universe pulsates. We attempted to compensate for de-growth with debt, borrowing from the future.
​  ​But debt only works in the youthful growth phases of economic pulsation, when the prospect of being paid back is statistically favorable. Now in the elder de-growth phase, the prospect of paying back debts, or even servicing the interest, is statistically dismal. The amount of racked-up debt worldwide has entered the realm of the laughable. So, the roughly twenty-year experiment in Central Bank credit magic, as a replacement for true capital formation, has come to its grievous end.
​  ​Hence, America under the pretend leadership of Joe Biden ventures into the final act of this melodrama, which will end badly and probably pretty quickly.​...

​  ​The idea behind “Build Back Better” is to renovate the infrastructure of a hyper-tech economy that actually no longer exists because we are in the contraction phase of an historic pulsation or cycle, leaving us with lots of tech and less production, tending toward zero. Nobody flogging this slogan actually knows what it ought to mean under the circumstances, which is to go with the flow of the reality of this contraction: to downsize, downscale, and re-localize all our activities to bring them back into sync with actual productivity — that is, raising food, making real stuff, and trading it. Again, it’s the energy dynamic, stupid.
To get to that point, we’re going to shed the massive over-burden of financial game-playing that has pretended to represent our economy.​..

​So, whatever energy you actually can marshal to Build Back Better, save it for your town or your local community

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/do-you-believe-in-magic/

​Finian Cunningham interviews​ Norwegian Professor specializing in Russian Affairs

Glenn Diesen: U.S. policies aim to prevent the emergence of a multipolar order. In my opinion, this is a misguided objective as Washington must adjust to the changing international distribution of power. I have argued that the U.S. is confronted with a dilemma – it can either facilitate and shape a multipolar system where the U.S. is the “first among equals”​ (yeah, maybe), or it can aim to contain rising powers to extend its hegemonic position although then a multipolar system will emerge in direct opposition to the U.S. By containing the rise of both Russia and China, the U.S. encourages Moscow and Beijing to define their partnership often in opposition to the U.S.
​  ​The global economy is subsequently fragmenting. The geoeconomic dominance of the U.S. has rested on its leading technologies that buttress its strategic industries, control over the maritime corridors of the world, and control over the main development banks and the world’s trade/reserve currency. Russia and China have therefore developed a strategic partnership to develop their own technological ecosystems, new Eurasian transportation corridors by land and sea, and new financial instruments such as banks, payment systems and de-dollarizing their trade. The U.S. will therefore discover that the effort to isolate China and Russia will result in the U.S. isolating itself.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/03/30/washington-hegemonic-ambitions-defy-multipolar-reality-risking-catastrophic-conflict/

​COVID-19 has distracted us, all of us, from economic realities for over a year now, and we should stop being distracted. If we had not gotten the huge fear campaign, we would not have had the huge fear. Vitamin-D adequacy greatly reduces vulnerability to catching and getting badly sick from COVID, and dying from it.

Be adequate. Take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D. It's cheap and available. Just do it.

​  ​We assessed the association between vitamin D and risk, severity, and mortality for COVID-19 infection, through a review of 43 observational studies. Among subjects with deficient vitamin D values, risk of COVID-19 infection was higher compared to those with replete values (OR = 1.26; 95% CI, 1.19-1.34; P < .01). Vitamin D deficiency was also associated with worse severity and higher mortality than in nondeficient patients (OR = 2.6; 95% CI, 1.84-3.67; P <  .01 and OR = 1.22; 95% CI, 1.04-1.43; P <  .01, respectively).
​  ​Reduced vitamin D values resulted in a higher infection risk, mortality and severity COVID-19 infection. 

Supplementation may be considered as preventive and therapeutic measure.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960076021000765

There is rapid testing available now, and you can order and hold ivermectin based treatment from India. 

Treat Your Own COVID:  ​http://www.johndayblog.com/2021/02/treat-your-own-covid.html

In Texas, we have 5.2% test positivity rate for COVID, the lowest ever (scroll to percent positive graphic) but the rapid test positivity rate is 2/3 of that, 3%, and that is the rate I believe, because when you test a lot of asymptomatic people with PCR tests, people who are not actually infected show up as more and more of the "positive results".

https://apps.texastribune.org/features/2020/texas-coronavirus-cases-map/

If you already got a COVID vaccine and are reading this, you are not in the small percent who got fatal side effects. People at low risk of dying from COVID should really do everything other than get vaccinated first.

Germany says AstraZeneca Covid shot should only be given to people over 60 as country tallies 9 deaths from blood clots

https://www.rt.com/news/519598-germany-astrazeneca-deaths-vaccine/

​I am "standing my ground", not getting vaccinated, not getting a vaccine passport to fly from Texas to New York. 

I'll stay local. 

This is a desperate measure, taking away the basic human rights of the "unvaccinated".

 Fortunately for me, Texas is not taking that route.

​  ​So, the New Normals are discussing the Unvaccinated Question. What is to be done with us? No, not those who haven’t been “vaccinated” yet. Us. The “Covidiots.” The “Covid deniers.” The “science deniers.” The “reality deniers.” Those who refuse to get “vaccinated,” ever.
​  ​There is no place for us in New Normal society. The New Normals know this and so do we. To them, we are a suspicious, alien tribe of people. We do not share their ideological beliefs. We do not perform their loyalty rituals, or we do so only grudgingly, because they force us to do so. We traffic in arcane “conspiracy theories,” like “pre-March-2020 science,” “natural herd immunity,” “population-adjusted death rates,” “Sweden,” “Florida,” and other heresies.
​  ​They do not trust us. We are strangers among them.​..

  I​​n contrast to the “vaccine” and the “test” themselves, the forced choice between them is not at all meaningless. It is no accident that both alternatives involve the violation of our bodies, literally the penetration of our bodies. It doesn’t really matter what is in the “vaccines” or what “results” the “tests” produce. The ritual is a demonstration of power, the power of the New Normals (i.e., global capitalism’s new face) to control our bodies, to dominate them, to violate them, psychologically and physically.

​https://consentfactory.org/2021/03/29/the-unvaccinated-question/

Oops.  15 million doses of Johnson and Johnson COVID vaccine were mixed up with a wrong ingredient and can't be used.​

​New team at the factory. Other batches are probably fine.​

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9424827/15-million-doses-J-J-vaccine-ruined-ingredient-mix-up.html  

​This "class traitor" has the temerity to say that only people at high risk of morbidity and mortality from COVID should get vaccinated. 

The great majority of people should not submit to current vaccines. 

He's a high priest of science. How dare he?

​Twitter Censors Famed Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff

https://www.aier.org/article/twitter-censors-famed-epidemiologist-martin-kulldorff/

​Even Naked Capitalism (financial blog) is ready to talk about ivermectin now. 

(Also look at what happened to Peru when the new government stopped ivermectin-based treatment.)

​  ​I’d like to start this article with a couple of disclaimers and a caveat. First of all, I am not a medical doctor. This article is not intended as medical advice. It’s a layman’s account of how an extremely cheap, safe and widely available off-patent medicine called ivermectin appears to be saving the lives of countless Covid-19 patients across Latin America and beyond. Yet hardly anybody is talking about it.
​  ​On December 29th of last year, Mexico’s Institute of Socal Security (IMSS) allowed ivermectin to be prescribed to outpatients with Covid. On the same day the Secretariat of Health of Mexico City and the State of Mexico decided to adopt a protocol in which anyone testing positive at any one of the city’s 250 rapid testing sites would be given ivermectin. As you can see in the graphs below, courtesy of Juan Chamie, a data scientist from EAFIT University in Colombia, based on data provided by Mexico City authorities, the number of hospitalizations due to Covid and excess deaths peaked shortly after the New Year and have been falling sharply ever since. They are now almost back to their prior base line.

​  ​Mexico City is the first major global city to adopt what amounts to a test-and-treat approach to covid-19 involving ivermectin. But it was the largely indigenous southern state of Chiapas that led the way last summer. In July 2020, as Mexico was buckling under its first wave of the pandemic, the state decided to distribute ivermectin as a Covid-19 treatment, having already deployed the medicine in its battle against mosquito-borne RNA viruses such as Zika and Chikungunya. Since October Chiapas has consistently occupied the lowest risk level on the federal government’s coronavirus stoplight map.
​  ​Thanks to ivermectin’s apparent success in Chiapas, IMSS allowed the medicine to be prescribed nationwide. It also helped launch the pilot program in Mexico City, for which it received a barrage of criticism. An official group of health experts argued that there’s no scientific evidence that the drug is effective, and called for the immediate repeal of its use. To their credit, both the Secretariat and IMSS have stuck to their guns.​                                       ​              https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2021/03/its-time-to-talk-about-ivermectin.html

Ivermectin prophylaxis leads to 73 per cent reduction in Covid infection: AIIMS-Bhubaneswar study

https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/odisha/2020/nov/05/ivermectin-prophylaxis-leads-to-73-per-centreduction-in-covid-infectionaiims-bhubaneswar-study-2219438.html

​The WHO tries to pretend that nobody knows if ivermectin based treatments are effective against COVID. The WHO prefers fear, sickness and death. WHY?    https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-2019-nCoV-therapeutics-2021.1

​Factual Alternative​

Life Support Ruminations

 Grazing Ruminants,

  I keep ruminating upon the next step in the decline and fall of Globo-Cap. The Hudson/Escobar interview is very long, but this starts "part-2" in my mind.
http://thesaker.is/in-quest-of-a-multipolar-economic-world-order-with-michael-hudson-and-pepe-escobar/

Michael Hudson: [01:11:30] 

  I can’t give you hope. I am all in favor of public banking and I’m on Ellen Brown’s board of directors for her group. However, supposing you had a public bank in Baltimore and the public bank said, we want to provide credit for Baltimore people to be able to afford homes. They would still have to out create enough credit and enough debt to outbid what commercial banks are lending other people that want to buy houses there. So, you can’t have an Island of efficiency and public banking in a system that basically is still financialized. The problem is systemic.

It goes to the courts. You talk about seceding. Then of course it’s possible. And people in Texas were talking about seceding in the 1840s when it was largely a German population. There were more publishers publishing German language books in Texas than there were English language books. But now, I think the way Texans think, if they were to succeed it is not going to be along the lines of public banking that you want . It would be a private bank owned by the oil companies that calls itself, a public bank. We’re in a world of Orwellian rhetoric.

What can the Americans do? They already have voted. We have democracy, they’ve voted for what they wanted to do. What did they vote for? They want shorter lifespans, lower wages, less education and less public services. Their choice is to get these things by a Democrat or by a Republican. But that’s the only choice they have. Other countries have a choice to emigrate, as the Ukrainians and the Greeks and Latvians have done. But I have no idea where Americans can emigrate to.

John again: I personally think Hudson is drawing a bleak, no-way-out picture to avoid drawing attention to what he may see as possible paths out. The military-industrial-financial complex DID use "Super Imperialism" as their cookbook, after all...

  There is (as yet) no way out of the financialized, extractive vampire capitalist bleeding box that encloses America. 

Hudson talks of "revolution" as the only way, and in broad terms. He goes into the current regime being incapable of keeping any contractual obligation, which includes domestic social-contracts with Americans. 

Social Security has been gutted already. It is still paying out claims, but it is bled dry. It is no longer a cash cow for globo-cap. It keeps Americans placated. 

As long as American "consent" is needed by globo-cap, Social Security entitlements need to keep going out every month.

  The extractive system has to extract from somewhere to keep paying maintenance expenses like S.S.
The rest of the world has been accepting $US, backed by US credit, for stuff they make, and shipping that stuff to Americans, which supports Americans every day. It's not so much "trade" as extraction, since the US does send some grain, and licensed intellectual property, but mostly military enforcers.
  The rest of the world knows it is paying to be enslaved, supporting the system which enslaves and bleeds it. Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and India and Pakistan all know the score.
  So do Germany and Japan, but they are regional intermediaries of the imperial system. The intermediaries are important bellwethers. They need to maintain a favorable position in global economy as the hegemony of Western Global Capitalism under the Petrodollar regime is replaced. This transition needs to be "peaceful", at least not WW-3.

 
  Monetary transition needs a parallel trade and finance system. There is always gold.
"Digital gold" is gold. Physical gold has done more ocean travel in recent years, but it mostly travels conceptually via the internet.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a working parallel trade organization, which Hudson and Escobar discuss.  
"The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) is an intergovernmental organization founded in Shanghai on 15 June 2001. The SCO currently comprises eight Member States (China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), four Observer States interested in acceding to full membership (Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia) and six “Dialogue Partners” (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey)."
​https://dppa.un.org/en/shanghai-cooperation-organization#:~:text=The%20SCO%20currently%20comprises%20eight,Cambodia%2C%20Nepal%2C%20Sri%20Lanka%20and

  Within those nations, trade is increasing in various non-dollar accounting instruments.  The use of the $US as both a means of extraction and a means of bullying-exclusion from global trade has thrust the imperative upon China, Russia, pariah-states and tribute-states alike to build a parallel global trade and finance system. Trust is shot these days, so I think gold-backed cryptocurrency will have to be the fallback.
  The Fed can't print gold, so the Fed loses out. The rest of the world can't be bled, so "TROW" gets a better trade position going forward. 

There will be massive disruption of trade and accounting, but maybe that will come first. 

Maybe disruption of global financial accounting will happen, and the world will be forced into some degree of debt jubilee and financial reset. 

The technology exists.

  A non-extractive global financial regime would not really need central bankers, but maybe just trade accounting at a national level. The rationale for such an arrangement has existed longer than any living human, and was broadly seen as inevitable before the 1980s, as Hudson lays out. Keynes understood trade balances well. So does Hudson.

  In the best case scenario the American people will get less consumer-stuff, and more agency and autonomy. 

Less cheap stuff will come into the Port of Los Angeles, but we will again be able to devise and create, not merely "comply". 

We will work out local economies efficiently, as we, and all of our ancestors have always done. 

We will need to focus a lot more locally. 

The $US has also kept Americans divided and conquered at the local and regional levels. 

At least Americans, some Americans, can still vote with their feet. (I see lots of out-of-state-plates in Austin.)

That stands to really hurt the people who cannot move away from places like Chicago and Detroit.

 
  American cities and states will need broad debt-forgiveness, but those trapped people still need food, water, shelter, fuel, community and medical care. 

Debt payments fund "retirements". How will retired-people be supported and cared for? They need physical protection, too.

  Parasitic gangs need productive-economy options, decent jobs. Parasitic-gang members have the same needs as everybody else, and need a better job-offer. A national infrastructure and public works project has been the historical answer. 

Some people will be abrasive, lazy, scheming and will do crap work. They still need to be rehabilitated from outright criminality. 

Grow vegetables together.

  I think that local money, community banking can come in at this point. A gold-backed $US will be forced upon the current seat of empire. 

No more free-printing.

There could be national reserve currency, backed by gold and silver, and local credit money, through community banking. 

 The local credit money should  stay local. Distant extraction of rents should really be eliminated, since it "kills the host".

Local communities would create local credit for local projects, as Ellen Brown sees in the Bank of North Dakota, and Hudson mentions.

Land/housing rents and natural monopolies , like utilities should be community property, not modes of capital extraction to distant power centers.

Bank mortgages are rent extraction to distant financial power centers.

There is a lot in the interview and transcript which is worthy of careful consideration. 

Pepe Escobar brings a lot of focus to Brazil, to the Amazon. 

Globo-cap really wants to chew up and burn and extract the Amazon.

Little Guy

Lost Opportunities

 Renting Life,

  Everything that made industrial capitalism rich, everything that made America so strong in the 19th century, through its protective tariffs, through its public infrastructure investment all the way down through world war two and the aftermath, was that we had a mixed economy in America. Europe also had a mixed economy, and in fact, every economy since Babylon has had a mixed economy.
  But in America you’ve had something entirely different since 1980. Something that was not foreseen by anybody, because it seemed to be so disruptive: namely, the financial sector saying, “We need liberty – for ourselves, from government.” By “liberty” they meant taking planning and subsidy, economic and tax policy, out of the hands of government and put into the hands of Wall Street. The result was libertarianism as a “free market.” In the form of a centralized economy that is concentrated in the hands of the financial centers – Wall Street, the City of London, the Paris Bourse. What you’re having today is an attempt by the financial sector to take on the role that the landlord class had in Europe, from feudal times through the 19th century. It’s a kind of resurgence of feudalism.
  If you look at the last 200 years of economic theory from Adam Smith and Marx, onward, everybody expected a mixed economy to become more and more productive, and to free itself from the landlords – and also to free itself from banking...
  But in the United States and England, you have finance becoming something completely different. Banks don’t lend money to build factories. They don’t create money to make means of production. They make money to take over existing assets. Some 80% of bank loans are mortgage loans to transfer the ownership of real estate.
  But of course, that’s what created a middle class in the United States. The middle class was able to buy its own housing. It didn’t have to pay rent to landlords or absentee owners, or to warlords and their descendants as in England and Europe. They could buy their own homes. What nobody realized is that if you borrowed the money to take a mortgage, there’s still an economic rental value. Most of it is no longer paid to the landlords. It’s paid to the banks. And so in America and Europe, the banks now play the role that landlords played a hundred years ago...

​  ​The fight really is against government that would do anything that is not controlled by the 1%, and by the banks. Essentially, the merger between Finance, Insurance and Real Estate – the FIRE sector. So, you have a relapse of capitalism in the West back into feudalism, but feudalism with a financialized twist much more than in medieval times.

​ The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that we’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let them run everything. Then Americans will lend them the money or buy them out and thus control them financially. China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. The fury in the West is that the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources and foreign agriculture.​..

  What’s is ironic now is what has happened in the last few years in the fight against Russia and China. America has killed the free lunch. It said, okay, now we’re going to have sanctions against Russia and China. We’re going to grab whatever money you have in foreign banks, like we grabbed Venezuela’s money. We’re going to excommunicate you from the SWIFT bank clearing system. So, you can’t use banking. We’re going to put sanctions against banks that deal with you.
​  ​So Russia and China have seen that they can’t deal with dollars anymore, because the United States just unilaterally rejected their use by any country that does not follow its military and financial diplomacy. If countries do have dollars as reserves and lend them back to the United States, it’s going to spend them on building more military bases around Russia and China, to make them waste their money on military defense spending. So, America itself has ended the free lunch, by the way in which it’s fighting against China and Russia.
​  ​And now Russia and China, as you pointed out, are de-dollarizing. They’re trading in each other’s currency. They’re doing the opposite of what Bretton Woods tried to create. They’re inspiring monetary independence from the United States.​..

​  At issue is what kind of an economy we need in order to raise living standards and, wages and self-sufficiency and preserve the environment. 

What is needed for the ideal world that we want?​    [Description follows...]

​  The banks fear this because they see that Modern Monetary Theory no longer gives them control. They want the rich One Percent to be able to have a choke point on the economy, so that that people cannot survive without borrowing and paying interest. They want to control the choke points to extract economic rent. So you have the West turning into a rent-extractive economy, a rent-seeking economy. The ideal of Russia, China, and other countries is that not only of Mar​x,​ but also of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and even Ricardo in the sense that the aim of classical economics was to free economies from economic rent. The American economy is all about extracting rent through the real estate sector, the financial sector, the health insurance sector, monopolies and the infrastructure sector.

  The US economy has been Thatcherized and Reaganized. The result is a fight of rentier economic systems against China and Russia.​..

​ Industrial capitalism was evolving toward socialism. It was socialized medicine, socialized infrastructure, socialized schooling. 

So, the fight against socialism is also a fight against what made industrial capitalism so successful in the United States and Germany.

​  ​What you’re seeing now is a fight for what direction civilization will follow.​..

...And it was expected that once you had capitalism free of the landlord class, free of something that wasn’t really industrial capitalism at all (it was a carry-over from feudalism), you wouldn’t have this overhead of the idle 1%, only consuming resources and going to war.
​  ​World War I changed all that. Already in the late 19th century the landlords and the banks fought back. They fought back largely through the Austrian School of individualism and the English marginalists, and they euphemized it as free markets. That slogan meant giving power to the monopolists, to the oppressors, to violence. A free market was where armies can come in, take over your country, impose a client dictatorship like Pinochet in Chile or the neo-Nazis in Ukraine. Americans call that a free market. The Free World was a world centrally planned by the American military and finance. So, it’s Orwellian double-think.​..

  Well, as opposed to that, you have economies that are not run by a rentier class, and that do not have a banking class and landlord class controlling the economy. The kind of arrangement that you had in Germany in the late 19th century: government, industry and labor coordinated. The question was how to provide the financing for industry so that banks can provide not only industrial capital formation, but public funding to build infrastructure and uplift the population.
​  ​China is doing just what made America rich in the 19th century, and what made Germany rich. It’s the same logic of industrial engineering. This plan is based on economic expansion, environmental preservation and economic balance instead of concentration, so this is going to be a growing economy. So, you’re having a growing economy outside of the United States and a shrinking economy in the States and its satellites in Europe.
​  ​Europe had a choice: Either it could shrink and be an American satellite economy, or it could join the growth. Europe has decided unanimously to forego growth and become a set of client oligarchies and kleptocracies. It is willing to let its financial sector take over just as in America. That’s a “free market,” because I’m told by American officials that they can just buy the European politicians, they’re bribable.​

http://thesaker.is/in-quest-of-a-multipolar-economic-world-order-with-michael-hudson-and-pepe-escobar/

How did these guys trust each other back then? What was the secret? They were clearly murderous scoundrels. 

Secret societies? Help me out.​  Samo Burja:

​  With a handshake and a reputation at stake, you could sail to the other end of the world, spending years out of contact with your business partners, yet secure in knowing they would honor their word. This trust at a distance provided the conditions for ocean-based commodity markets to beat regional commodity markets. After this material transformation, the plantations in the New World and workshops in India became logistically closer to a city than shepherds living in geographically nearby hills. 

​  ​Before this point, city-based labor markets had the highest impact on society, while the role of markets in exchanging the raw resources of the countryside for the finished products of the city was minor and easily replaced by customary trade. With the social technologies of long-distance commerce, the labor market of a city became connected to a commodity market that could match its pace, opening massive potential to make the city a center of material production.
​  ​Creating those markets involved mass dislocation. Armies rip people from their homes and turn them into soldiers; this was well understood in antiquity. During industrialization, the shock of dislocation from previous social ties combined with a newly institutionalized environment to produce distress not too dissimilar from the shock of incarceration or hazing.​..

​  ​The strange spiritual practices, scientific exploration of human psychology, and at times outright ideological cults of the founding cohort gave way to a more shallow type of knowledge. This was a knowledge of levers and buttons, rather than the first principles which built those levers and buttons.
​  ​When times change—and you don’t need or can’t sustain the full pace of industrialization anymore—the vast masses of the industrial population prove themselves difficult to demobilize from their war of production. They can’t be returned to the social fabric of agricultural society, since the urban environment that enabled the agricultural hinterland to function no longer exists. The countryside has become an industrial resource base, rather than the setting for a pre-industrial way of life.

​  ​The solution of overproducing white-collar jobs is at first natural and then dysfunctional. Bureaucracies decay in a way that is much less visible than the decay of factories. 

​ ​The real upward mobility of dysfunctional agriculturalists to functional industrial workers is replaced by the on-paper upward mobility of functional industrial workers to dysfunctional knowledge economy workers. Despite these measures, the real downward mobility is eventually made apparent.​ 

(I see it, peekaboo!​ Hey, where do competent workers go, now?​)​ ...​

​  ​If this is correct, then post-industrial society isn’t our name for the next stage of civilizational progress. Instead, the term is true in its most literal and pessimistic interpretation: a society after and without industrial civilization. Such a society doesn’t even have the social infrastructure of agricultural civilizations. This means it cannot even mint the preliminary social capital needed to reindustrialize. Likewise, we have lost the implicit knowledge upon which our industrial systems functioned even as recently as a few decades ago. That knowledge cannot be regained absent the people who actually built and understood those systems.
​  ​What then follows is slow decay, first of production and then of advanced technology itself. At a macro scale, this is the deep root of civilizational collapse.​..

​Mostly, the adjustment to decline would just be an invisible lowering of expectations. When political incentives at all layers of the government pyramid go against ascertaining the truth of a situation, the truth isn’t ascertained.
​  ​Social scientists wouldn’t see it coming, since official numbers would be about as reliable as public health messaging during a pandemic. Wealth can shrink by 1% per year for a century, while measures such as GDP can show continued growth by 2% per year. The Soviet Union’s era of stagnation had 30 years of solid growth according to their metric of NMP (Net Material Product). American economists only noticed and revised our GDP estimates for the Soviet Union after its collapse.​..

  ​Whatever solution our civilization might find to escape the post-industrial trap, it will require social technologies of production and knowledge very different from anything we’ve seen before. A good place to start would be a new basis for friendship that defeats atomization, and a truthfulness that is compatible with political loyalty.​ 

​{Spiritual ​honesty​?}

https://palladiummag.com/2021/03/24/the-end-of-industrial-society/

Why Putin's Pipeline is Welcome in Germany:​  (l​ower​ rent)

  In his meeting with Stoltenberg in Brussels, Blinken warned that Western companies participating in building Nord Stream 2, which is 90% complete, would face sanctions mandated by Congress:
​  ​“President Biden has been very clear in saying that he believes the pipeline is a bad idea; it’s bad for Europe, bad for the United States,” said Blinken, adding, U.S. law “requires us to sanction companies participating in the efforts to complete the pipeline.”
​ ​What is behind American opposition to Russian natural gas going to Germany, and from there to NATO Europe?
​​First, the pipelines bypass Ukraine and Poland, cutting those countries out of the transit revenue. 

Second, we want NATO Germany to buy our own shale-produced natural gas.

https://buchanan.org/blog/why-putins-pipeline-is-welcome-in-germany-148200

​Better refloat that boat! Russia does already have a fleet of icebreakers...

Russia Pitches Frosty Arctic Sea Route As Superior Alternative To Blocked Suez Canal

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-pitches-frosty-arctic-sea-route-superior-alternative-blocked-suez-canal

"Biden" floats a rival plan for global trade to counter China's Belt-and-Road initiative, "New Silk Road" to Boris Johnson. 

Both of these men are titular heads of government within the rentier globalist/Atlantacist financial capitalist order. 

What can this rentier new-world-order have to offer that is not rentier extraction? 

This is a head-fake, a narrative-adjustment.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/biden-floats-rival-plan-chinas-belt-road-call-uks-johnson

But, but, but what else can there possibly be? This is the riddle of the Sphinx.

Monetary adaptation to planetary emergency: addressing the monetary growth imperative

Conclusion: In any economy where money hoarding and accumulation is not curtailed, and where most of the money in circulation is issued by private banks as debt, with or without interest, there will be a system-wide scarcity of money available to people and organisations to service their debts – unless, that is, there is continual economic growth. To avoid the deleterious implications of a shortfall of money in an economy, policies are used to maintain economic growth, which is therefore a form of imperative on society. This MGI may be accentuated, at a system-wide level, by the practice of full-reserve re-lending of money. Interest is not the main driver of the imperative, but because it increases the transfer of money to those who are wealthy and more likely to hold that money in a stagnant form that is not available for debt servicing by others, interest charges may indeed exacerbate the MGI. We conclude that the debt-money system creates a competition for money between debtors and savers which is resolved through creation of more debt-money, which in turn drives growth and the resulting ecological and climate emergency.

http://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/5993/

Adam Gaertner on the use of ivermectin against COVID. Thanks Jeremy.

Look at the graph of what Niceragua did with ivermectin. 

Ivermectin use continues to be suppressed by hook, crook and threats.​ 

Do take 5000 units per day of vitamin-D, won't you?

https://covexit.com/the-adam-gaertner-interview-part-1/

Surgeon Warns Vaccinating People Infected With COVID Could Cause ‘Avoidable Harm’
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm says we’re taking the COVID pandemic problem, where a half-percent of the population is susceptible to dying, and compounding it by vaccinating people who are already infected.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaccinating-people-infected-covid-cause-avoidable-harm/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=cc4fbf8a-fef7-446e-b013-777366a5330a

​Gilad Atzmon has more on that story, with a focus on the relationships between Pfizer, the Israeli government, and Israeli vaccine trial subjects without informed consent.

​  ​In Israel yesterday, an independent legal body that calls itself the Civilian Probe (CP)* published its finding regarding the catastrophic impact of the Pfizer vaccine on the nation.
​  ​In their report, which they submitted to the Attorney General and the Health Minister, the committee listed a chain of critical legal and ethical failures that point at a possible attempt to mislead not just Israelis but also the entire world. Since the beginning of January I have been reporting on an undeniable correlation between vaccinations, cases and deaths (here , here, here and here ). The CP confirms my suspicions but their study also presents alarming medical findings regarding the scale of lethal side effects. 
​  ​In the document the CP points at a government attempt to conceal its dealing with Pfizer.​..​
​  ​“What do we learn from the facts on the ground?” the CP report asks. “An examination of mortality data published by the government shows that there is a correlation between number of vaccinations and the number of deaths. The excess mortality is noticeable among people up to 70 and also among adults over the age of 70, and remains even after offsetting the deaths attributed to Corona. In the population over the age of 70 - in January 2021 an excess mortality of 19.5% was observed compared to October 2020 - the month when the corona data were highest, and 22.4% compared to January 2020. In the younger population - an excess mortality of 7% was observed in January 2021 compared to the month October 2020 - the month in which the corona death numbers were the highest, and 7% compared to January 2020. It should be noted that this trend continues in the following month as well.”
​  ​As mentioned above I have been writing about the devastating correlation between vaccines and deaths since early January. In Britain and the USA, we detect identical correlation between mass vaccination and death. However, far more problematic is the realm of side effects, something which governments, the WHO, the corrupted pharmaceutical industry, and of course social media giants attempt to suppress in the most Orwellian manner. The Israeli CP seems to have produced the first robust report on Pfizer’s vaccine side effects. They published a table of their findings, which they summarize here:
​  ​“As one can detect looking at the table - there are close to 200 deaths, and this - only by examining about 800 reports of cases of serious side effects. As mentioned, the CP is still working on analyzing side effects and we have hundreds of additional reports that are subject to analysis. Our study so far indicates that about 25% of deaths are from people under the age of 60. About 15% of them are under 50 years old. 7 of the deceased are at young ages - below age 30. Also, the study identified 27 cases of heart problems in people under the age of 60, of which 24 cases are among young people aged 17-30.  Regarding the issues to do with female medical complications (including labor-complication, delayed menstruation or irregular menstruation, etc.) - it should be noted that the committee has about 200 additional reports that have not yet been included in the final list of our findings.”

​[We tried to report vaccination side effects in a patient ​at our clinic ​last week. It was extremely cumbersome, an intimidating process, and we are not sure that we were successful.​ The RN left a recorded message.​ No organization can afford what it takes to report mild-to-moderate side effects within this ​US ​format.]

https://gilad.online/writings/2021/3/23/the-probe-into-the-israeli-vaccine-policy-and-its-outcome-is-beyond-damning

​Major vaccine-industry advocate... ​

White House health adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci declared Sunday that children either need to be vaccinated or must wear face masks if they want to play together.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/watch-fauci-says-kids-need-wear-face-masks-play-together

​Look at these graphics. Texas is sliding into natural herd immunity. 

This was happening already before vaccinations started. 

Peak cases were in mid January. 

Spring break didn't even cause an uptick.

12% of Texans are fully vaccinated.​ 

Kids are mostly back in school.

https://www.texasobserver.org/tracking-covid-19-in-texas/

A​t least the threat of global shipping through the arctic with Russian icebreakers is now forestalled!​ 

The Ever Given is out of the Suez Canal, thanks to full (super) moon, high tide, big tugs and dredging.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/megaship-blocking-suez-canal-80-partially-refloated

​Unmoored​

False Targets

 Shell-Gamed,

Was this intentional? Whose interests might be served? 

Pepe Escobar looks at the nation-state chessboard, but who are the real players?

​  ​It took 18 years after Shock and Awe unleashed on Iraq for the Hegemon to be mercilessly shocked and awed by a virtually simultaneous, diplomatic Russia-China one-two...
Yet it was the Hegemon who first crossed the diplomatic Rubicon. The handlers behind hologram Joe “I’ll do whatever you want me to do, Nance” Biden had whispered in his earpiece to brand Russian President Vladimir Putin as a soulless “killer” in the middle of a softball interview...
​  ​Then came Putin’s cool, calm, collected – and quite diplomatic – response, which needs to be carefully pondered. These sharp as a dagger words are arguably the most devastatingly powerful five minutes in the history of post-truth international relations.
​  ​In For Leviathan, it’s so cold in Alaska, we forecasted what could take place in the US-China 2+2 summit at a shabby hotel in Anchorage, with cheap bowls of instant noodles thrown in as extra bonus.
​  ​China’s millennial diplomatic protocol establishes that discussions start around common ground – which are then extolled as being more important than disagreements between negotiating parties. That’s at the heart of the concept of “no loss of face”. Only afterwards the parties discuss their differences...
​  ​Oh dear. There was not a single State Dept. hack with minimal knowledge of East Asia to warn the amateurs you don’t mess with the formidable head of the Foreign Affairs Commission at the CCP’s Central Committee, Yang Jiechi, with impunity.
​  ​Visibly startled, but controlling his exasperation, Yang Jiechi struck back. And the rhetorical shots were heard around the whole Global South.
They had to include a basic lesson in manners:
​  ​“If you want to deal with us properly, let’s have some mutual respect and do things the right way”.
But what stood out was a stinging, concise diagnostic blending history and politics:
​  ​The United States is not qualified to talk to China in a condescending manner. The Chinese people will not accept that. It must be based on mutual respect to deal with China, and history will prove that those who seek to strangle China will suffer in the end.​..

​  ​The incompetence of the “diplomatic” arm of the Biden-Harris administration beggars belief. Using a basic Sun Tzu maneuver, Yang Jiechi turned the tables and voiced the predominant sentiment of the overwhelming majority of the planet. Stuff your unilateral “rules-based order”. We, the nations of the world, privilege the UN charter and the primacy of international law.
​  ​So this is what the Russia-China one-two achieved almost instantaneously: from now on, the Hegemon should be treated, all across the Global South with, at best, disdain.​..

​  And yet nobody is trembling in their boots. Right on cue with Russia-China, Iran has stepped up the game, with Ayatollah Khamenei issuing the guidelines for Tehran’s return to the JCPOA.
1. The US regime is in no position to make new demands or changes regarding the nuclear deal.
2. The US is weaker today than when the JCPOA was signed.
3. Iran is in a stronger position now. If anyone can impose new demands it’s Iran and not the US.
​  ​And with that we have a Russia-China-Iran triple bitch slap on the Hegemon.
​  ​In our latest conversation/interview, to be released soon in a video + transcript package, Michael Hudson – arguably the world’s top economist – hit the heart of the matter:
​  ​The fight against China, the fear of China is that you can’t do to China, what you did to Russia. America would love for there to be a Yeltsin figure in China to say, let’s just give all of the railroads that you’ve built, the high-speed rail, let’s give the wealth, let’s give all the factories to individuals and let the individuals run everything and, then we’ll lend them the money, or we’ll buy them out and then we can control them financially. And China’s not letting that happen. And Russia stopped that from happening. And the fury in the West is that somehow, the American financial system is unable to take over foreign resources, foreign agriculture. It is left only with military means of grabbing them as we are seeing in the near East. And you’re seeing in the Ukraine right now.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/escobar-welcome-shocked-awed-21st-century-geopolitics

Bush: 'You Are Either With Us, Or With the Terrorists' - 2001-09-21

https://www.voanews.com/archive/bush-you-are-either-us-or-terrorists-2001-09-21

​Thanks Eleni.  A Wilderness Of Lies

​  ​Similarly, the militarization of Washington is becoming another topic for regime experts to analyze. The bizarre reaction of the inner party to the very peaceful demonstrations in January makes no sense at face value. There must be another reason for why they are telling the citizens that they will shoot the next demonstrators who come into the city to petition their rulers for redress. The question is, what are they plotting next?
​  ​That is the problem with black-box government. When Brezhnev was in control of the party, people did not need to know what was going inside the Kremlin, because the Kremlin was predictable. It is why Russians who remember those days look back fondly on those times. It was a time relatively free of politics. They woke up every day knowing the rules were going to be the same as they were yesterday. When the black box became unstable, no one could be sure of anything.
​  ​This is the state of the American regime. No one knows what is really going behind the razor wire and Army troops patrolling it. We are left to analyze video of Biden falling down the stairs of Air Force One and reading the body language of his handlers. Amateur linguists try to tease meaning out of his incoherent mutterings on Zoom sessions. The other geriatrics running the party are scrutinized by regime analysts, looking for clues to contextualize their behavior.
​  ​Like the Soviet empire, the American empire is now a confusing black box. It does things and makes noises, but none of it can be accepted on its face, so the world is left to guess. As citizens, we are forced to rely on private networks and create our own narratives to explain what we are seeing. There is the public truth and then millions of private truths. This is the result of black-box government. It is a wilderness of lies.

https://www.takimag.com/article/a-wilderness-of-lies/

​Up to half of us might be domestic-terrorists, or at least sympathetic to domestic-terrorists.​

​Glenn Greenwald:  The U.S. Intelligence Community, Flouting Laws, is Increasingly Involving Itself in Domestic Politics

 Involvement of the intelligence community in the domestic activities of U.S. citizens is one of the most dangerous breaches of civil liberties and democratic order the U.S. Government can perpetrate. It was after World War II when the CIA, the NSA and other security state agencies that wield immense and unlimited powers in the dark were created in the name of fighting the Cold War. Legal and institutional prohibitions on wielding that massive machinery against the American public were central to the always-dubious claim that this security behemoth that operates completely in the dark was compatible with democracy. As the ACLU noted, “in its 1947 charter, the CIA was prohibited from spying against Americans, in part because President Truman was afraid that the agency would engage in political abuse.”
  Since then, Truman’s fear has been realized over and over. Some of the worst post-WW2 civil liberties abuses have been the result of breaches by the CIA and other agencies of this prohibition. As the ACLU documents, the CIA in the 1960s was caught infiltrating and manipulating numerous domestic political activist groups. Under the auspices of the War on Terror, entire new bureaucracies (such as the Department of Homeland Security) and new legal regimes (such as the Patriot Act and the FISA Amendments Act) were designed to erode these long-standing limitations by dramatically increasing surveillance powers aimed at U.S. citizens. And by design, the infiltration of these security state agencies in U.S. domestic politics has dramatically escalated.

​  ​As the first War on Terror was escalating, The Washington Post — under the headline “CIA Is Expanding Domestic Operations” — reported in October, 2002, that “The Central Intelligence Agency is expanding its domestic presence, placing agents with nearly all of the FBI's 56 terrorism task forces in U.S. cities.” ​...

  ​In the years following, two NSA whistleblowers — William Binney and Edward Snowden — both cited their horror over the turning of the surveillance machinery against American citizens as the reason for their decision to denounce their agency. One of the aspects that most disturbed me about the Russiagate conspiracy theory from the start was that it was created and disseminated by the CIA and related agencies with the intent, first, to alter the outcome of the 2016 election, and then to undermine the elected president with whom they were at war.​..

​ The head of the Church Committee, Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), made clear in his iconic quote on Meet the Press in 1975 that those reforms were primarily motivated by fears that the U.S. Government would one day turn its vast intelligence powers onto the American people, rendering core civil liberties an illusion.​..

...the Biden administration, along with leading Democrats such as Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), have been stating explicitly that one of their top priorities is the adoption of new laws designed to import the Bush/Cheney/Obama War on Terror onto U.S. soil for domestic purposes.

​https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-intelligence-community-flouting

Old & New media: the many roads to perdition​ , John Ward, The Slog​

​  ​Some examples from this weekend. The Telegraph runs a piece saying scientists are “excited” about a new type of test that can ‘help senior citizens get treatment more quickly’. It was so exciting, in fact, that the bedazzled journo forget to tell us what it is. Or how it works. Or why it might be better than simply giving the over 60s Ivermectin whether they have symptoms or not. It’s pure virtue signalling, designed to distract from the unsolved mystery of why experimental not-quite-vaccines that import mRNA (and kick other nasties down the road) have been preferred to HCQ/Zinc and Ivermectin….both of which were targeted by a concerted smear campaign from health bureaucrats, most notably the US and French.​..

​  Above all, the golden rule is no opeds or speculation about the bigger game in play.
You can mention that Covid has made Rishi Sunak’s life difficult. You can express the view that Biden’s spending splurge and opened borders may have risks attached. You can suggest that the EU has some existential problems. But don’t mention what the IMF is up to, don’t ask why “temporary” Zirp is still with us nine years later, and under no circumstances suggest that the Gigarich have everything to gain from a virus that miraculously appeared within months of them all hinting at ‘the danger’.
Because that sort of non-violent terrorism, of course, is also wild conspiracy theory.

https://therealslog.com/2021/03/21/old-new-media-the-many-roads-to-perdition/?unapproved=967490&moderation-hash=790b6d00a0723a8ce57d3b3c6e09cefd#comment-967490

​So what is the use of lockdowns? Really? To what interests are lockdowns useful? 

They keep going on and on. They don't reduce "excess deaths". They must do something right.

​Lockdown One Year On – It doesn’t work, it never worked & it wasn’t supposed to work

https://off-guardian.org/2021/03/23/lockdown-one-year-on-it-doesnt-work-it-never-worked-it-wasnt-supposed-to-work/

​Consolidation of power at the top. Does that end up hurting anybody? 

What does "power" do? What is "power"?​ Do Google, the CIA and NSA have a "thing"?

Leaked Docs Show Obama FTC Gave Google Its Monopoly After Google Execs Helped Obama Get Re-Elected
Leaked documents from the FTC's 2012 investigation of Google show exactly what is wrong with the state of American antitrust enforcement.

​  ​Records and reporting about the 2012 investigation suggest the FTC did so while bending to political pressure from the Obama White House — which was, in turn, bending to political pressure from Google. William Kovacic, a former FTC chair under President George W. Bush, reviewed the more than 300 pages of documents leaked to Politico and concluded the agency overlooked “what many experts and regulators would consider clear antitrust violations,” calling the specificity of issues outlined “breathtaking.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/22/leaked-docs-show-obama-ftc-gave-google-its-monopoly-after-google-execs-helped-obama-get-re-elected/

​The interests who Angela Merkel serves cannot afford to let her lose power​ just yet. 

She has to backtrack and take the blame as lockdowns crumble against German's sense of their unfairness.

"I Take Full Responsibility": Merkel Cancels Draconian Easter Lockdown Amid Backlash From Furious Germans

Merkel is dropping the plan after it inspired an intense public backlash and resistance by politicians in the opposition and Merkel's coalition.

https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/merkel-cancels-draconian-easter-lockdown-amid-backlash-furious-germans

​Is Pfizer more powerful than Argentina on the global chessboard? 

Where are the actually powerful humans, whose interests are served?

The game is certainly not what we envision it to be when a vaccine maker can take military bases of "sovereign nations" as "collateral" against future-lawsuits from vaccine-injured citizens.​

https://odysee.com/@januszkowalskii1979:e/The-Truth-about-Pfizer---Pfizer's-Corporate-Takeover-of-the-World:9

This was inevitable, and it looks bad, so don't let people look at it. Oops.

Now, what is Plan-B?

Border Facility Photos Leak Revealing Hundreds Of Children Huddled In "Terrible Conditions"

​(​I​ humbly submit that giving these teenagers ivermectin prophylaxis from COVID, and flying them "home" with some money in their pockets, and some money for the home-government, is the cheapest and most expeditious option to the current American administration.)​

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/border-facility-photos-leak-revealing-hundreds-children-huddled-terrible-conditions

A Yale Oncologist had to care for immunocompromised cancer-chemotherapy patients,as they languished with COVID. Thanks Jeremy.

​  ​“When you have people that can’t breathe for five, six, eight, nine months and they tried multiple drugs and supplements with no success, and you give them ivermectin,” Dr. Santin said of long-haul patients, “and you see that they start immediately feeling better, this is not placebo. This is real.”
​  ​The majority of patients improved within one to three days, he said, particularly those with breathing problems, debilitating fatigue and chest pain. Two draft studies from Peru have reported improvement with ivermectin in long-haul patients; several physicians, like Santin, have also had anecdotal success.
​  ​Beyond his outpatients, Santin has treated family members and friends infected with COVID in both his home community in Connecticut and in his native Italy via telemedicine. There, he prescribed ivermectin to more than 15 families, in which parents, children or others had became infected; the goal was both to treat early and prevent severe COVID, as studies have shown ivermectin does.
​  ​“I have not a single one that right now had to go to the hospital to receive oxygen,” he said. “I have no doubt ivermectin saved my 88-year-old father’s life.” His father survived COVID despite high blood pressure, cardiac disease that led previously to seven stents and open heart surgery, and lung problems. “If I can save you,” he said referring to his father, “I can tell you, I save anybody.”

https://trialsitenews.com/top-yale-doctor-researcher-ivermectin-works-including-for-long-haul-covid/

False Spirituality Is The Friend Of Corrupt Power. True Spirituality Is Its Enemy.  Caitlin Johnstone

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/03/25/false-spirituality-is-the-friend-of-corrupt-power-true-spirituality-is-its-enemy/#comment-59704

​Repeatedly Misled​