If 2021 was the year of maximum corruption, political decadence, and
mind-fuckery in US history, 2022 is looking like a convulsive snap-back
to the harrowing rigors of reality, spiked with shocking losses,
reckonings, and not a little retribution for the rogues and reprobates
who drove our country into a ditch. Quandaries abound now in the
wreckage of economy, culture, and polity. The years of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters have
ended — though you might not know it yet, at this very advent of
Twenty-Double-Deuce. Welcome to the banquet of consequences. Soup’s on!
The American people have been played backwards and forwards, inside
and out, through and through, and up and down; driven to the very edge
of national suicide by a combine of enemies within and without. If
China’s CCP wanted to take maximum advantage of a weakened, confused
USA, they couldn’t have found more zealous help-mates than the seditious
Democratic Party, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s treasonous public
health empire, the murderous pharmaceutical companies, the recklessly
dishonest news media, and a demonic host of federal agencies, especially
the three-stooge “Intel Community” — the CIA (Moe), DOJ (Larry), FBI
(Curley) — plus the many secret horror chambers in the Pentagon. Throw
in the Big Tech tyrants, the Marxist mandarins on campus, and the
satanic narcissists of Hollywood. Oh, and let’s not forget the evil
principality of grift and swindling that is Wall Street.
We still don’t know exactly what role the CCP and its Peoples’
Liberation Army played in the origins of Covid-19, and we don’t know
because the US government doesn’t want us to know — because they had a
role in it — and the news media won’t lift a finger to find out, either,
because they are the propaganda arm of the regime in power. We do know
an awful lot about the operations of Dr. Fauci and his colleagues in
funding the development of the virus in Wuhan for the purpose of
introducing a wildly profitable set of “vaccines” which, if anything,
prolonged and exacerbated the pandemic, and harmed or killed millions
all over the world.
We also know that this same set of players in public health and Big
Pharma gamed the clinical trials that preceded the emergency use
authorizations that loosed the “vaccines” on the people, and that they
deliberately obstructed and suppressed proven treatments with
inexpensive off-patent drugs that would have saved many hundreds of
thousands of lives if they had been allowed within so-called
standards-of-practice that rule medicine these days. The same gang
fudged their statistical reporting wherever possible, especially by
failing to fix the kludgy CDC VAERS website for listing adverse
reactions to the “vaccines,” but also in creating conditions that made
it impossible to discern actual Covid deaths from “vaccine” deaths, and
deaths either caused by co-morbidities or extraneous occurrences such as
highway accidents or gunshot killings.
In 2021, a mountain of evidence was accumulated about all this
criminal mischief, capped by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s massive book about
Dr. Fauci’s unholy career at the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a virtual prosecution manual, meticulously
annotated, that will be used in countless lawsuits against Dr. Fauci,
his colleagues who outlive him, and the many agencies and NGOs — and
perhaps in actual criminal trials of these very well-known perps.
This is where things stand at the turning of the new year 2022. Who
doesn’t want to know where this historic game goes from here? A lot of
story-lines are changing and quickly. It’s obvious that the “Joe Biden”
admin wants to run the pandemic for at least one more year, most
particularly to keep in place the “emergency” mail-in ballot scam that
perverted the 2020 election. But more than half the country is onto that
con and I predict that we’ll see more rigorous voting rules and regs in
place — or, if those reforms meet resistance, a battle so fierce over
them that the elections may not even take place on schedule.
Just now, too many Americans are already fed up with being pushed around by public officials supposedly for their own good.
They see through the evils of the Covid-19 racket. They’ve watched the
rape of the public interest. They understand that the “vaccines” were a
disastrous experiment run lawlessly. They’ve witnessed the harms done to
themselves and their loved ones. They’re appalled at the hijacking of
science by people as scientifically profane as the necromancers,
astrologasters, and inquisitors of yore.
They won’t submit to any more lockdowns, to any more attempts to
interfere with and destroy small business. They’ve had enough of the
race-and-gender hustles that have disordered society, ruined cities that
were already struggling, traduced the basic principle of public safety,
and forced people to play pretend around obvious psychopathology and
depravity. They are not going to play along anymore. They are going to
resist and fight — in the city councils, in the school boards, in the
courts, and on battlefields, if it comes to that.
Ol’ Man Pandemic
He just kept rollin’ along. The weaker but more infectious Omicron
variant of coronavirus currently ripping through global populations
looks like a signal that the end of this vicious melodrama is in sight.
Let’s predict that the actual disease phase of Covid-19 burns itself out
by spring at the latest, unless malign actors have more lab-grown
monsters they can release into the general population whenever they feel
like it. But the demonically-installed harms built into the vaccines
will keep killing and disabling people for a long time to come.
We know that the spike proteins have been clinically observed lurking
in human bodies as much as fifteen months after a shot of mRNA, and
that they induce a lot of damage to blood vessels, organs, and immune
systems. We’re just coming into the first anniversary of the vaccines —
not to mention that millions have gotten additional shots and then
boosters right up to this week — so those harmful spike proteins will be
working their hoodoo all of 2022 and beyond.
As the Thai-German doctor Sucharit Bhakdi warned recently, the
compromised immune systems of the vaxxed may provoke a large-scale
revival of age-old killer diseases like tuberculosis that are
ever-present in small amounts in our bodies and usually suppressed. The
people of Asia and Africa are particularly susceptible because public
sanitation and clean water there is sketchier. The vaccines are also
said to provoke the expression of lurking cancers, especially among
those in remission from illness. The residual mortality from the
vaccines may end up being greater than the deaths from the virus itself.
In the background of all that lurks that ominous prediction made by
the Deagle military analysis company several years ago that estimated
the population of the USA would crash to 99-million in 2025 — down from
over 330-million now. Deagle never even explained that, and they took
down the web page last year when their alarming forecast suddenly
started looking plausible. Just sayin’.
Any way you cut it, the Covid-19 episode will thunder through the
lives of many millions of people, especially in the nations of Western
Civ, which has taken the hardest hits in terms of self-destructive
government policy. The pandemic has accelerated the collapse of
industrial economies, a process I call the long emergency, and
eventually it will end up affecting all nations, even if the West
happens to go down first. Societies will be propelled through a period
of disorder, surely longer and more difficult in some places than
others, depending on local resources. The destination of this journey is
a place where the human project is run at much lower scale and pitch
than we have gotten used to in our time, with far fewer “modern”
comforts and conveniences, and shocking losses in knowledge and applied
science. It won’t be the first time this has happened in human history,
but the wreckage will be much greater.
Economy, Finance, and Money
Our economy is hitched to our energy resources. The business model
for providing fossil fuels to the global economy is broken in many ways,
and therefore the business model of a high-tech industrial production
economy is also broken. The shale oil industry was launched on a high
tide of near-zero financing and over a decade since then it produced an
enormous quantity of oil (though less-than first-rate, short on heavy
distillates such as diesel and heating oil). In the process, shale oil
producers proved they could not make any money on these very expensive
operations, and we now enter a period of capital scarcity that will make
it harder for them to attract new investment and continue performing.
Besides that, they are exhausting the “sweet spots” for drilling and
fracking.
What’s left after you subtract shale oil are the conventional fields
that were in steep decline in 2008 when the shale campaign got underway.
In 2022, expect US oil production to fall below 9,000 barrels a day. We
consume just under 20-million barrels-a-day, and import the difference.
You would have every reason to expect that a more disorderly world
scene may interfere with our pool imports in 2022. Expect consumption to
drop too, as economic activity weakens. Let’s predict consumption will
fall to 15-million barrels-a-day. The oil markets will therefore be
disorderly, with price oscillation as shortages and demand destruction
push and pull each other. Remember the basic equation: oil over $75-a-barrel weakens economies; oil under $75-a-barrel crushes oil companies.
The wish persists that we can run the complex systems of modern life
on alternative energy sources, but that wish is just not panning out.
The realization that this is so will spread through western civ in 2022
and create more anxiety, more disordered thinking, cultish behavior, and
breakdown of social norms. For now, the public arena is entirely
occupied by the mass formation psychosis that first erupted around
Donald Trump and then shifted to Covid-19. The stresses and tension of
these demoralizing dynamics may lead in 2022 to the outbreak of
political violence that will make it even harder to reach consensus on a
way through our economic quandaries.
Let’s agree to compress our recent economic history, since I’ve
rehearsed it many times in weekly blogs at Clusterfuck Nation: We
replaced our on-the-ground goods manufacturing activities with so-called
financialization, essentially the manufacture of debt —
borrowing from the future to run our complex systems today, to
compensate for the losses accrued by our broken energy business model.
It was all a swindle, since you can’t create prosperity with the sheer
management of instruments purporting to represent wealth if there is no
real production of material wealth behind it. Debt is not wealth. You
can play games with it in financial markets, buy and sell it, manipulate
interest rates and prices to give the appearance of things functioning.
But that only goes so far — specifically to the point where reality
overcomes artifice, and that’s where we are now. Substituting debt for
wealth introduced perversities into the economy. Now you can’t tell the
real value of anything — “price discovery” is disabled — and that bleeds
into socio-economic behavior, too. Now, many business activities,
including the supposedly self-consciously ethical fields of higher-ed
and medicine, have become dreadful rackets, which is to say efforts to
make money dishonestly. We can’t pretend that all this okay anymore.
We’re left with a gigantic edifice of debt that will never be paid back
and a whole lot of bad behavior that is corroding our humanity.
After two decades of papering over our inability to pay for running
our society, the Federal Reserve has finally achieved old-school
inflation — the destruction of money itself — not just the pumping up of
share prices, their specialty for so many years. They kept inflation at
bay all that time by exporting it to other countries who sent us real
stuff in exchange for our paper promises: treasury bills, notes, bonds.
Covid lockdowns and the destruction of business finally killed that
longstanding equilibrium and then growing ill feeling between the US and
China starting killing supply chains. Now, globalism is on the ropes
and with it our ability to export US treasury paper. All the “helicopter
money” flushed into the system during Covid now chases goods that have a
tougher journey to their points-of-sale. Parts of machines, cars, and
many other things become hard to get. Prices go up. Systems break down
and their failures ramify in other systems.
With inflation running officially around 8 percent, and unofficially more like 15 percent, the real interest
rate on a ten-year treasury bond is the nominal 1.49 percent minus
between 8 and 15 percent, a deeply negative number. Owning that paper is
a dead loss. If the rate of inflation continues merely apace of 2021 in
2022, the loss will steepen. If inflation continues greater than
apace of 2021, treasury paper will be like so many smallpox blankets on
the global bond market and America will be verging on Weimar-style
runaway inflation. We won’t be able to offer any more bonds in return
for stuff. The Fed will have to eat them. We’ll be importing inflation, the prices of goods will keep going up. America is in a hole of our own digging. What can be done?
The Fed has two choices, both of them unpromising. 1) “Tightening.”
By measured increments, the Fed quits QE, (quantitative easing, buying
bonds, a.k.a. “monetizing debt”) not just US treasury paper, but also
corporate bonds, and mortgage-backed securities. They move to raise
interest rates to above par with real inflation rates to give people
back the old reality-based incentive for buying bonds in the first
place, which is a reliable stream of interest greater than inflation.
The last time inflation threatened America, 1981, Fed Chairman Paul
Volker jacked up fed fund (short-term) rates to 20 percent, which put
the schnitz on borrowing for a time, caused a recession, but got-er
done. The catch is, the national debt and the balance sheet of the Fed
were minuscule then compared to the incomprehensible trillions on-board
now. And there was still a lot of actual productive industry left in the
country.
An end to quantitative easing combined with raising interest rates
would recalibrate markets to equilibrium — which is to say, crash them,
because the end of near-zero interest would mean no more using leverage
(borrowed money) to buy stocks, which are wildly overvalued after years
and years of these shenanigans. The bid on stocks would end. Not enough
buyers to meet sellers. Markets go down. That prompts more selling… a
rush to the exits… look out below….
Tightening would crash the value of bonds, too, because bond value
has an inverse relationship to interest rates — as they rise, the
tradable price of bonds goes down. So, bond-holders would take a bath.
Tightening actually makes money disappear — phhhtttt! — because it
causes defaults (people not paying off their debts). In our system,
money is loaned into existence and welshed-on loans sends money out of
existence. People and corporations go broke. Higher interest rates also
will make corporations default on their bond payments. Without access to
more debt, many big companies may have to shut down, go out of
business, perhaps forever. Government, buried under massive debt, would
choke on higher interest payments. As money goes out of existence,
capital becomes scarce and small business, which desperately depends on
revolving credit, goes broke. The net effect of all this damage in
financial markets is of deep economic depression, in this case, the long emergency case,
probably a depression that becomes permanent since the basis of this
particular high-energy economy, the oil industry, collapses along with
everything else.
The Federal Reserve’s choice number 2) is: Don’t tighten. Rather,
continue to print money like crazy, maybe even more than before, and
keep trying to suppress interest rates. Keep buying bonds, notes,
whatever debt paper the system pukes up. This is just the tired old
scheme called kicking the can further down the road. The
problem is, we’re at the end of the road. Old-school inflation had
already kicked off in 2021 from two decades of QE, which was then
greatly aggravated by the massive government spending to mitigate Covid.
There’s no more jiggering with bond-buying and finagling the interest
rates, and playing hide-the-salami with bank reserves, and stashing
money in “special purpose vehicles” and other banking hidey-holes that
will avail to keep things stable and happy. From here on, printing money
like crazy only destroys the value of our money. You’ll have plenty of
money, only it’ll get more worthless by the day — which is just another
way of going broke.
Then, as the dollar purchases less and less stuff, dollars held
overseas get dumped in exchange for whatever stuff is on offer: ores,
grain, finished products, US real estate, precious metals, other
less-damaged currencies, what-have-you. Better to own things of actual
value than dollars that are fast-losing their purchasing power.
Foreigners dump US treasury bonds, too, since inflation destroys their
value. As foreigners do this, the dollars return home to the US
provoking yet more inflation. Before long, America is awash in dollars
and short on goods that you can buy with those dollars. You’re rich in
dollars yet broke at the same time.
The outcome in both cases is substantially the same: the
standard-of-living in America goes way down. What I predict for 2022 is
that the Federal Reserve will embark on a much-heralded tightening
program — and then abandon it at the first sign of trouble, the
inevitable stock market downturn. Then the Fed will be back to buying
our own debt paper and attempting to stuff interest rates back down, if
they can, which may not be possible anymore. The Fed soon loses all
control over American money. They may try to retire “old” dollars and
replace them with “new” dollars backed by something, gold and silver
being the obvious candidates. That will lead to a severe upward
re-pricing of both metals. Let’s predict gold at $5,000 and silver at
$200 by the end of 2022.
There may be a half-assed attempt to establish some kind of official
US digital currency (this has been rumored for years.) The experiment
will fail. Americans will resist being herded into that corral where
their every financial transaction is traceable, taxable, and punishable.
They will have learned their lesson about that from the Covid-19
tyrannies. They are sick of being pushed around. They no longer trust
the authorities in money, government, medicine, or anything else.
Anyway, as a practical matter, too many Americans operate on the fringes
of the system already and depend on cash for doing all their business.
Many of these are what’s called “un-banked.” They cannot participate in
computerized payment systems. They will remain outside the digi-loop
doing business with silver, gold, or various kinds of stuff. They’ll
operate like 14th century Venetians.
I kind of doubt Bitcoin and its imitators will survive a whole lot
longer after the financial system is forced to recalibrate to reality.
They have thrived solely as targets of speculation. The block-chain is
very clever, but ultimately Bitcoin and its ilk represent… nothing…
no-thing(s). They attracted a lot of money that was just sloshing around
the system during the years of artificial pseudo-prosperity, and that’s
over. Anyway, they depend utterly on a stable Internet and electric
grid to function and you’d be surprised at the fragility lurking in both
those systems. Early 2022 may be your last chance to get out of Bitcoin
with anything to show for your adventures in it.
Politics and Society
The mass formation psychosis described by Mattias Desmet of the
University of Ghent is behind much of what we’ve been seeing in US
politics for some years now. It was apparently triggered by the election
of Donald Trump. But it seems to me the syndrome was groomed and
cultivated by America’s “deep state” security, surveillance, and
intelligence apparatus for decades before. Liberal Democrats didn’t have
to go batshit crazy over Trump. Rather, they were manipulated into it
by the deep state’s agents in the major media, starting with the
preposterous RussiaGate collusion psy-op and extending through four
years of nefarious schemes to disable and oust Mr. Trump. Though
portrayed as the arch-enemy of the pets and pet projects of the Left —
identity Marxism, open borders — as president, Mr. Trump was really much
more a threat to the deep state itself, and to its matrix of wealth,
power, and privilege, and they pulled out all the stops except
assassination to shove him off the game-board.
His perseverance and resilience in the face of all that, was
remarkable. But in the end, his enemies engineered an election marinated
in various flavors of fraud, and managed to get rid of the Golden Golem of Greatness.
How “Joe Biden,” the empty husk of a grifting, ward-heeling pol, came
to be nominated by the Democratic Party is one of the abiding mysteries
of modern times. His victory in the Super Tuesday primary, which cinched
the nomination for him, was surely rigged by the DNC. His campaign,
from start to finish, was a sham of hiding from the public. If the
voters had been allowed to see the material on his son, Hunter, and the
slime-trail of bribes recorded in hundreds of emails, contracts, and
other documents on the “laptop from Hell,” “Joe Biden” would be in
federal prison rather than the White House. But Facebook, Twitter, and
Google conspired to censor all mention of that, and the people never got
the news. So, now what?
Well, moving into the early winter of 2022, Americans are discovering
just how badly they have been played on Covid-19, and how badly “Joe
Biden” & Co. have handled economic matters and other things, like
the daily invasion across the Mexican border, and how poorly “JB” &
Co. have managed our foreign relations — the Afghan withdrawal fiasco,
etc — and generally what a pathetic a figure “JB” presents to the world…
and all this is looking like the ghost dance of the Democratic Party.
Let’s predict the party will not survive the 2022 midterm elections
intact as a coherent political faction.
I’ll give 70 / 30 odds that “Joe Biden” steps aside “for health
reasons” well before the midterm election. He’s falling apart before our
eyes. He can barely utter a comprehensible sentence. He embarrasses
himself and the country every day. His poll numbers are in the
sub-basement…. So, okay, he basically takes a dive and retires from the
scene. Kamala Harris is sworn in. President Harris nominates Barack
Obama as vice-president. Say, what…!
Mr. Obama is back in charge — like, was he ever not in
charge since Jan 20, 2021, really? — going so far as to brazenly occupy
the Oval Office as Veep for daily business — consigning Ms. Harris to a
broom closet. Democrats clamor for Ms. Harris to resign and officially
hand the reins to Mr. Obama. (Presidents are limited to two elected terms in office, but the constitution does not stipulate such a circumstantial appointment
to office.) Kamala graciously steps aside. For the sake of “unity” and
gender balance, Mr. Obama nominates Liz Cheney as the new
vice-president. That’s one possible scenario. Rewrite that play with
Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama. The Democrats are going to have
to try some desperate move to retain power.
Even so, it’s hard to imagine any circumstances in which the
Democratic Party retains effective control of the government. In the
event that the midterm election is actually held, let’s predict
Republicans regain majority control of the House and Senate, with many
new faces of the MAGA persuasion among them. The Dems hopes and dreams
for transformative change get flushed down the toilet. Government at the
national level becomes impotent, ineffectual, unable to discharge its
duties or manage anything — all this predicted explicitly, by the way,
in The Long Emergency (Grove-Atlantic, 2005). Will our foreign
adversaries take advantage of the situation? Can the fifty states manage
their affairs without subsidies from Washington DC? Governors had
better be planning for strange times.
The political right has been careful and cautious since the debacle
of the January 6, 2021 march on the Capitol building. The poor boobs
cajoled by FBI plants to break into the joint have been treated
abominably by their government, and probably extra-legally. But mainly,
the Jan. 6th caper put a damper on any more right-wing street
action during “Joe Biden’s” year in office. That may change in
2022. The mood of politically-motivated people on either side of the
spectrum has got to be aggravated by the tanking economy. And as the
year rolls on, it will just be hungry, angry Americans of all sorts
raising hell because they don’t know what else to do.
All the anxiety driving the mass formation psychosis that had first
focused on Trump, and then on Covid-19 (and the unvaccinated), may now
finally shift its energy at the actual source of our woes and sorrows:
the DC establishment. The decline and fall of Covid-19 is going to leave
a big hole in the nation’s anxious, wasted soul, and it will have to be
filled with something. We’re thrust into a scene that resembles Civil
War, but it becomes harder and harder to determine who is on what side,
or what the sides even are — or as Mick Jagger famously hollered at
Altamont CA in. ’69, “Who’s foit-ing an’ whut faw?” It’s sheer
clusterfuck. Murphy’s Law meets Zombieland during Seven Days in May.
Geopolitics
Gawd, who knows…? The Russians are sorely pissed
because thirty years ago after the Soviet system clocked out, and
eventually Vlad Putin tried to paste some kind of functioning nation
back together out of the debris, we promised them in plain talk to not
expand NATO, and then, year after year, we proceeded to add more
countries to NATO including former Soviet Republics hedging right up to
Russia’s border. Then, the US under Mr. Obama ran the “color revolution”
in Ukraine, attempting to strong-arm that pathetic punching bag of a
state to come over to our side… and having done that, we’re now
threatening to bring them into NATO, meaning we would like to station
rockets and perhaps troops and all kinds of other military stuff on what
has been the doormat for every attempted invasion of Russia in modern
history. Are you surprised that Russia has drawn a line in the sand
there?
One can’t have a whole lot of confidence in Anthony Blinken’s State
Department or in General Milley’s Woked-up, transsexual army that
calling Russia’s bluff on this might work out well for the USA.
Considering how economically weak we are now, how tragically disunited
we are, how pussified and squishy we’ve become, maybe starting a war
over Ukraine isn’t such a hot idea. One can only hope.
On the other side is China, Uncle Xi’s re-born Middle Kingdom, with
gleaming skyscrapers, dazzling new airports and highways, the fabulous
social credit system for controlling her huge population Orwell-style.
China has a lot going for her, but what’s going against her isn’t so
obvious, starting with the fact that she’s hurting for long-term fossil
fuel supplies. China just doesn’t have that much oil or natgas, and
she’s using ever-lower quality coal to drive her industry. Her oil
imports have to travel through two global choke-points, the Straits of
Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca. In short, despite China’s great
strides moving from the twelfth century into dazzling modernity, she
might stumble on the energy quandary — like all the other “advanced”
nations.
It’s no secret that under the ambitious Marxist emperor Xi Jinping,
China wants to occupy the World Hegemon role that America is struggling
not to abandon. Hegemon-ship usually requires geographical expansion.
We’re certainly concerned about a takeover of Taiwan, which is,
effectively, America’s offshore microchip facility. China could
conceivably gain control over Taiwan by a thousand tiny steps without
firing a shot — as the CCP has infiltrated US politics, media, and
education — or by force, if only to make a theatrical point, but why
invite the possibility of a nuclear exchange?
China has been adventuring in many remote parts of the world for
years without drawing much international attention, buying farmland and
mining sites throughout East Africa, and now she is eyeing openings in
several resource-rich South American nations that recently elected
friendly socialist presidents. China was awarded contracts to operate
ports at both ends of the strategically important Panama Canal over
twenty years ago, and Panama signed a memorandum of agreement to join
China’s Belt-and-Road initiative in 2017. That got the attention of the
Trump administration, which was meeting China’s expansionism with
tariffs and sanctions. Mr. Trump caused several Chinese infrastructure
projects for bridges, high-speed rail, and port improvements in the
Canal Zone to be suspended. “Joe Biden,” a major Chinese client, is now
looking the other way.
Can China actually control the unruly lands of Central Asia vital to
her Belt-and-Road ambitions. For instance, Afghanistan, where China
looks to establish giant mining operations, but has yet to tangle with
the feisty Taliban. Let’s predict that China in 2022 is stymied in
expansion and hamstrung by her energy problems. And add to that trouble
in her export markets of the USA and Europe, as they begin to implode
financially and the demand for Chinese manufactured goods declines.
Then there is China’s banking morass, bazillions of loans gone bad,
giant businesses wobbling, and collateral in the form of a thousand
skyscrapers built out of cement so inferior that it’s a miracle the
buildings still stand up. How will China’s fragile banking system
contend with contagion from the financial problems of the US and Europe?
Let’s predict that China finds herself in enough economic difficulty
that domestic disorder breaks out, the government over-reacts to it, and
she becomes too paralyzed with internal political problems to make any
mischief beyond her border for now.
Finally, Europe. Oh, lovely Europe, the tourist theme-park of my
lifetime with its beautiful cities, tidy landscapes, its cafes,
cathedrals, girls on motorbikes, its fabulous deep culture. Looks like
the whole shebang is going down the chute now, with intimations of a
return to 20th century political upheaval. Somehow, Covid-19
has provoked Austria and Germany to return to behavior that smells a
little bit like what went on in the Hitler years. Hard to believe, I
know, but look at them! Police state tactics! Forced vaccinations!
Lockdowns! Harsh punishments for those who resist. It’s sickening, and
looks like it’s getting entrenched.
Euroland’s economy is a mess. Its energy problems are worse than
China’s. Except for Norway, with its dwindling North Sea oil fields, and
some played-out coal mines, Europe has next to nothing for fossil
fuels. Germany’s feckless “green” wind-and-solar project hasn’t worked
out. She is more and more dependent on Russian oil and gas, and
Germany’s position in NATO subjects her to the machinations of the USA
against Russia, which has stymied the opening of Russia’s Nord Stream 2
natural gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea. They may end up freezing
this winter, and starving the following winter. The European banking
system is a laughable fraud, since the EU has no control of the fiscal
decisions made by member governments that issue increasingly worthless
bonds. It’s going to be a rough year there with governments coming and
going — stumbling as they go. Perhaps France gets a little lucky. The
maverick journalist Éric Zemmour wins the election as president and
spurs a revival of French national spirit. He’s still stuck with the rot
in financials, but at least he bolsters the country’s morale. And
unlike the Germans, France did not choose to close down its nuclear
power industry, so the lights stay on there.
There you have it, ye denizens of Clusterfuck Nation. I can do no
more with this. I wish you all fortitude in the twelve months ahead, and
courage, and kindness, and all the good things that we are capable of.
We’ll need that. There is still a lot to cherish about this country of
ours, the good old USA, and I believe we’ll rediscover that in
Double-deuce, along with some ability to tell ourselves the truth about
things that matter and act consistently with it! Excelsior, brave
hearts!
Source: Clusterfuck Nation
Disgruntled
mobs. Martial law. A populace under house arrest. A techno-corporate
state wielding its power to immobilize huge swaths of the country. A
Constitution in tatters.
