Steve Bull's Blog, page 1333
August 23, 2017
How the US Deep State Accidentally Forged a Multipolar World Order
How the US Deep State Accidentally Forged a Multipolar World Order
In every nation there are power conglomerates that determine and influence the domestic and foreign policy choices their nations. In the United States, it is important to highlight the concept known as American exceptionalism that accompanies these power centers, often called the deep state. According to this principle, the United States alone has been chosen by God to lead mankind.
After the World War II, a notion very similar to that of Nazi Aryan racial supremacy was born – that of the chosen people. In this case, however, the chosen people were Americans, who emerged victorious at the end of the Second World War II, ready to face the «existential danger» of the USSR, a society and culture that was different from that of the US. With such mental imprinting, the trend over the following decades was predictable. What followed was war after war, the capitalist economic system sustained by the US war machine widening its sphere all over the globe, reaching Southeast Asia, but then being forced back by the failure of the Vietnam War, signaling the first sign of the end of American omnipotence.
As the Berlin Wall fell and eliminated the Soviet «threat», American expansion had almost reached its existential limit. What has been a constant element during all of these US presidencies, during various wars and economic growth thanks to a rising capitalism, has been the presence of the deep state, a set of neural centers that make up real US power. In order to understand the failure of the deep state to achieve its goals to exercise full-spectrum control over the globe, it is crucial to trace the connections between past and the present presidencies from the fall of the Berlin Wall.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Imperial Collapse Clock Ticks Closer to Midnight
As I noted in last Friday’s piece, Donald Trump Finally Comes Out of the Closet, the firing of Steve Bannon represents the most significant event to occur during the Trump administration thus far. For the purposes of this piece, it’s important to review some of what I wrote:
Irrespective of what you think of Bannon, him being out means Wall Street and the military-industrial complex is now 100% in control of the Trump administration. Prepare for an escalation of imperial war around the world and an expansion of brutal oligarchy.
The removal of Bannon is the end of even a facade of populism. This is now the Goldman Sachs Presidency with a thin-skinned, unthinking authoritarian as a figurehead. Meanwhile, guess who’s still there in addition to the Goldman executives? Weed obsessed, civil asset forfeiture supporting Jefferson Sessions. The Trump administration just bacame ten times more dangerous than it was before. With the coup successful, Trump no longer needs to be impeached.
Here’s another prediction. Watch the corporate media start to lay off Trump a bit more going forward. Rather than hysterically demonize him for every little thing, corporate media will increasingly give him more of the benefit of the doubt. After all, a Presidency run by Goldman Sachs and generals is exactly what they like. Trump finally came out of the closet as the anti-populist oligarch he is, and the results won’t be pretty.
Of course, his cheerleaders will remain enthusiastically in denial about what’s happened to their hero, but Trump has been totally brought to heel, a fact that’ll become increasingly crystal clear in the months ahead. This is now your standard Wall Street and military-industrial complex run Presidency.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 22, 2017
The Chinese Economy’s Fatal Flaws
Dr. Per Bylund’s recently published article poignantly states one of the core problems in the Chinese economy and its the state-manipulated Keynesian foundation. I do agree with his opinion. And if we dig deeper into the exact situation of Chinese economy, we will find that it’s a typical failing of the Keynesian, cronyist system.
By using the perspective of Austrian business cycle theory, lets take a look at China’s real estate industry, which is suffering more and more painfully from artificial credit issued by China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBC). During the 2008 global economic crisis, China’s central government issued the famous RMB 4 Trillion Stimulus Package Plan (equaling to $586 billion). Since 2009, the Chinese real estate economy has already suffered from three small economic cycles. As it is becoming more difficult for real estate companies to live on artificial prosperity, the duration of every business cycle has become shorter than the previous one. We also see more and more ghost cities because of the economic boom in every sub-economic cycle. There were at least 12 ghost cities founded in 2013, and the number of them jumped to at least 50 in 2017! Bankruptcy is happening more frequently among Chinese real estate enterprises. Since 2016, at least three real estate companies — with a combined debt of at least RMB 763 million — have gone bankrupt. The story of bankruptcy is continuing, with one of the biggest real-estate-driven enterprises, Wanda Group, facing financing problems. If Wanda no longer has access to cheap debt, it might not be able to refinance or roll over all its debt again. If Wanda has to face bankruptcy, it could possibly accelerate an end of the the current Chinese boom.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Scott Cahill: Collapse Risk At The Oroville Dam Is Still Unacceptably High
Bungled repairs and new concerns at the tallest US dam
Remember the crisis earlier this year at the Oroville Dam?
The overflow from California’s winter of heavy rain threatened to overpower our country’s tallest dam. A cascading failure of the dam’s main gates, its primarily spillway AND its emergency spillway had the world watching hour by hour to see if a catastrophic breach was going to occur.
Fortunately, the rains stopped long enough for the situation to be brought under control. The dam remains in place and repair crews have been working all spring and summer.
But should we breathe easy at this point? Not at all, says dam safety expert Scott Cahill. Our readers will remember Scott from the excellent technical assessment he provided in the thick of the crisis earlier this year. In our earlier podcast with him, he explained how the real tragedy at Oroville was that for many years, small and affordable maintenance projects that easily could have prevented the crisis were diverted (in his estimation, the cost of making the needed repairs was quite small — around $6 million. But for short-sighted reasons, the repairs were not funded; and now the bill to fix the resultant damage will likely be on the order of magnitude of over $200 million. Which does not factor in the environmental carnage caused by flooding downstream ecosystems with high-sediment water or the costs involved with evacuating the 200,000 residents living nearby the dam).
And the pattern appears to be continuing. In this week’s podcast, Scott details a number of concerning structural risks visible at Oroville that are again being de-prioritized, or ignored all-together. And as before, straightforward and inexpensive projects that have high potential to prevent a catastrophic failure of the dam are not being pursued:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Gulf of Mexico DEAD ZONE caused by agricultural runoff from U.S. farms
(Natural News) Every year, a hypoxic zone appears along the Gulf of Mexico. Otherwise known as a “dead zone,” it is an area of water that contains little to no oxygen. The significantly reduced levels essentially makes the body of water a biological desert. Hypoxic zones usually occur around summertime. But while these areas are considered to be a natural phenomenon, scientists fear that increased human activity may be contributing to the number of dead zones being observed worldwide. More disturbingly, human factors may also be causing the hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico to grow. Scientists predict that for this year, the hypoxic zone in the area will cover 10,089 square miles. This is about the size of Vermont. Biologists declare that bold and new approaches need to be made now to prevent a biological crisis. They have expressed a desired target reduction of 59 percent in the amount of nitrogen runoffs in the area. This would shrink the hypoxic zone to the size of Delaware.
Approaches to achieve this end are identified in a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the University of Michigan believe that this goal is achievable, though it would require the adjustment of large scale agricultural practices. The magnitude of the problem prompted an intergovernmental panel to extend the reduction program to 2035. This should give enough time, official spokespeople of the panel say, to achieve the goal of a hypoxic zone with a size of only 1,950 square miles.
What truly causes a hypoxic zone is yet to be fully determined, but scientists believe that the one in the Gulf of Mexico may be due to excessive farmland runoff containing fertilizer and livestock waste.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Quantifying the causes of the recent decrease in US CO2 emissions
Between 2007 and 2015 total annual US CO2 emissions decreased by 740 million tons (12%). An updated analysis shows that 35% of this decrease was caused by natural gas replacing coal in electricity generation, 30% by lower fuel consumption in the transportation sector, 28% by renewables replacing coal in electricity generation and 7% by other factors. The 515-million-ton (20%) decrease in electricity sector emissions between 2007 and 2015 was 50% attributable to natural gas replacing coal, 40% to renewables replacing coal and 10% to other factors. These estimates do not allow for the impacts of the 2008-9 global recession on emissions growth, which could have resulted in annual US CO2 emissions now being as much as a billion tons less than they otherwise would have been. This estimate is, however, speculative.
In previous posts here and here Euan Mearns and I made approximate estimates of how much of the recent decrease in US emissions was caused by what. I came up with this:
Gas replacing coal in electricity generation: 40%
Decrease in gm/mile vehicle CO2 emissions: 30%
Growth in low-carbon renewables generation: 30%
And Euan, using a more detailed approach (and also including the impacts of the 2008-9 recession, which I ignored), came up with this:
Gas replacing coal 55 Mtoe – 20%
Fall in oil consumption owing to high price and recession 100 Mtoe – 36%
Fall in fuel oil consumption 25 Mtoe – 9%
Improved vehicle efficiency 26 Mtoe – 9.5%
Aviation, shipping and unallocated oil savings 29 Mtoe – 10.5%
[Biofuels 8.4 Mtoe]
Growth in wind and solar 40 Mtoe – 15%
These estimates, particularly the “gas replacing coal” and the “growth in renewables” estimates, are a factor of two different. Other summaries to be found on the web range all the way from “fracking did it” to “the global recession did it”.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late
livelifehappy.com
Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late
Preparation only has value if it’s done in advance
He who hesitates is lost.
~proverb
Change, especially a collapse scenario, often happens quite fast. So fast that there’s little to no time to react in the short frenzy between “before” and “after”.
This is true throughout nature. Glaciers that took millennia to form calve off into the sea in a matter of moments. Old-growth forests filled with thousand-year-old trees can be decimated by a single wildfire. The bubonic plague “Black Death” pandemic of the Middle Ages killed one-third of the Earth’s human population within just four short years.
Fast change is also a hallmark of human society. Movements and ideas — oftentimes simmering for years, decades or longer — suddenly reach a critical state in which the populace is swept up into history-making action. The outbreak of World War I. The Civil Rights movement. The dissolution of the USSR. The Digital Age.
When it comes, change happens swiftly. And life after — for better or worse — is forever different.
I’ve witnessed this time and time again since co-founding PeakProsperity.com. And in pretty much every instance, I notice that the vast majority of people — including even many of the the watchful and preparation-minded folks who read this site — are caught by surprise.
Fukushima
A good example of this was the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March of 2011. Of course, no one could have foretold the timing and scale of the tsunami, and virtually nobody expected that it could overwhelm the facility as spectacularly as it did. So in the immediate aftermath of the plant’s failure, the world looked on in sympathy, not fear.
But on March 12th, that changed as the first of several hydrogen explosions was observed among the reactors. And then my phone rang.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Family Life Without Fossil Fuels—Slow and Satisfying
I stepped off the train in the farm town of La Plata, Missouri, with my 9-year-old son, Zane. Thomas was waiting to meet us with two well-maintained bikes, one with a trailer for our backpacks, the other with a long wooden seat for passengers, to make the 6-mile trip to the Possibility Alliance.The PA is a 110-acre homestead run by Ethan and Sarah Hughes, who have two young daughters. Their reliance on fossil fuels is limited to trains for long-distance trips, municipal water, and a telephone landline. They purchase bike parts, bulk grains, and tin roofing, as needed—but that’s about it. No electricity, no gas, no cars, no planes. With the imminent release of my book on how life using radically less fossil fuel turns out to be more satisfying, I’d been curious to visit the PA both to glean technical knowledge and—more importantly—to see whether their experience of increased joy and satisfaction matched my own.
While my stay was brief, it felt full in terms of the ingenuity, beauty, and love I experienced. The sun set as we biked from the train. A bit later, the land lit up with fireflies. With only candles to light the darkness, the stars and the quiet took center stage. The next morning at dawn, I walked through the lush greens of gardens, orchards, pastures, and forests, then joined Ethan and other members of the community for an hour of meditation.
In addition to the Hughes family, the PA is home to two permanent members, Dan and Margaret, as well as two long-term visitors, Thomas and Maggie. Thousands of other visitors have come and gone over the years.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Beware of the “dark side” of humanity during any collapse
While there have been countless books, movies and television shows about life after some type of apocalyptic event, chances are none of us will ever actually be forced to experience what its like trying to rebuild society from the ground up. More than likely, the majority of us will never be so hungry that we’re forced to get food from somewhere other than the local supermarket, craft our own tools and weapons just to make it through the day, or make decisions that are a matter of life or death. All that being said, there is still a burning question that millions of Americans across the country find themselves asking every now and then: what if?
What if society really did crumble like a house of cards? What if we really were forced to rebuild from the ground up? What would that look like? Would mankind be able to set aside our differences for the greater good, or would the ensuing chaos and fear bring out the worse in us?
All of these can be answered by addressing one more overarching question: are human beings good or evil by nature? It would appear that when reduced to their natural state as a species, humans possess the will and desire to work together with one another; if the opposite were true, then society would never have had the opportunity to be built in the first place. (Related: These are the top ten cities that would be rebuilt first after a societal collapse.) However, it would be inaccurate to say that human beings are entirely good in nature because, as demonstrated through people like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, our species clearly has a dark side.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How to Build a Low-Carb Prepper Stockpile
Does your health require a diet that is low in sugar and carbohydrates but high in protein? If that’s the case, you may have found that building a low-carb prepper stockpile is pretty difficult. After all, “beans and rice” is the prepper standby. And those buckets of food? Forget it if you’re watching carbs. The meals are all based on rice, pasta, and potatoes.
So how do you create pantry full of freeze-dried food for a low-carb prepper?
Why people are eating lower carbohydrate diets
There are many health concerns that require a diet that is high in protein and low in carbohydrates. To name a few:
Diabetes
Arthritis
Cardiovascular disease
Metabolic Syndrome
Obesity
Colitis/Irritable bowel syndrome
The list goes on and on. Some folks simply feel better when they lower their starch and sugar intake.
Regardless of the reason that you’ve chosen a low-carb lifestyle, going off it abruptly could result in gastrointestinal distress, a recurrence of symptoms, bloating, sluggishness, and joint pain. An emergency would be the worst possible time to deal with that.
Here’s how to build your own low-carb prepper food supply.
At this point, there aren’t really any buckets of food that will meet your needs, so you’ll have to choose an “ala carte” style supply by ordering specific freeze dried foods. A diet of protein, vegetables, and fruit is ideal.
Protein:
Beef
Chicken
Meat combo bucket
Whole eggs
Milk (This may be too high-carb for some diets)
Vegetables:
Tomato Powder
Broccoli
Asparagus
Green Beans
Carrots (this may be too high carb for sensitive people)
Chopped Onion
Fruits:
Some people on lower carb diets restrict fruits, while others consider them “good” carbs. Here are some freeze-dried fruit options.
Apple
Strawberries
Raspberries
Blueberries
Peaches
Pineapple
What would a low-carb prepper menu look like?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
