Steve Bull's Blog, page 181
October 9, 2022
Escobar: Nord Stream 2 Offers Germany A Date With Destiny
The twists and turns of the Nord Stream 2 (NS2) saga have yielded yet another stunning game-changer…
It started with Gazprom revealing that the Line B string of NS2 is intact; not only it escaped Pipeline Terror but may “potentially” be used to pump gas to Germany.
That confirms once again that NS2 is an engineering marvel. In fact the whole system: the pipes are so strong they were not broken, but merely punctured.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak followed up, with a caveat: restoration of the whole system, including NS, is possible, and “requires time and appropriate funds”. But first, in Russia’s order of priorities, the perpetrators must be conclusively identified.
Sources in Moscow confirmed Gazprom’s assessment of NS2. Even Bloomberg had to report it.
Subsequently in Vienna, attending the Opec+ meeting, Novak remarked the Russian Federation is “ready to supply gas through the second line of Nord Stream 2. This is possible if necessary”.
So we know it’s possible. “Necessary” will depend on a political decision by Germany.
Novak also sharply noted that neither Russia nor the Nord Stream operators are allowed to investigate Pipeline Terror. Russia insists that without its participation the investigation is flawed.
Whatever the modus operandi of Pipeline Terror, incompetence was part of the package. No explosive charges were placed or detonated on Line B of NS2.
That means, as Novak said, it’s virtually ready for business. Line B is capable of pumping 27.5 billion cubic meters of gas a year, which happens to be half of the total capacity of NS.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Declaration Of War Without Rules”: Russian Officials Fume Over Crimea Bridge Blast As Ukraine Celebrates
Update(1435ET): Russia’s state Investigative Committee has put out a statement saying at least three civilians died as a result of the attack on the Crimean Bridge, which was likely a fertilizer-laden truck bombing. “According to preliminary data, three people died as a result of the incident. They were presumably passengers of a car, which was near the exploded track. As of now, the bodies of a man and a women have been recovered from the water, their identities are being established,” the committee said. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova at the same time blasted what she called the “criminal logic” of some NATO officials who are positively cheering the attack.
Ukrainian government sources have owned up to the attack, but this claim of responsibility stopped short of being made publicly or officially: “A Ukrainian government official told The Washington Post that the country’s special services were behind the attack, though Kyiv stopped short of saying it was responsible — even as top officials taunted Moscow.” As for the taunting and trolling, the official Twitter account for the government of Ukraine also tweeted out:
A fire which had raged for hours at the scene, particularly freight which had been on the rail part of the bridge that had burned out of control, now appears to be out – allowing Russian investigators to view the full extent of the damage.
A large section of bridge which has been vital to Russian military supply lines has been totally collapsed, with entire sections of roadway having fallen into the water below.
One or two lanes of the bridge weren’t directly impacted, with reports that this section of bridge has already resumed traffic, with the Kremlin saying ferry traffic is to assist in transporting more.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
October 8, 2022
The $31 Trillion Dollar Question – Can The Fed Afford to Pivot?
In my other role as a secret apologist for Russia and Vladimir Putin, I was contacted yesterday by Sputnik News to comment on the official US debt number surpassing $31 trillion. I’m always grateful for the opportunity to talk about these issues.
I am, after all, a fiscal hawk extraordinaire,.
At the same time, I’m completely hip to why Sputnik (and RT) wanted to discuss this issue. They are running their own framing campaign, propaganda if you will. I’m no one’s useful idiot when it comes to these matters.
They may have been looking for a dissident American voice to berate the US for its reckless spending, which fits the Russian media narrative that the US cannot sustain its current pressure campaign against Russia.
This is meant to counter the West’s narrative that Russia can’t sustain its military operations in Ukraine.
Hey, everyone’s got a truth to tell. I get it, it’s a war out there. All I can do is make the best use of the opportunities in front of me and tell my version of those truths. Because talking about things truthfully may actually get us one step back on the path towards peace rather than global war. That said, if I see no upside to the opportunity, the best thing to do is turn it down politely and wait for the next one.
At the same time we all have to realize that Russian media outlets have a hard time booking guests at this point due to the massive political pressure. So, as always, I see the opportunity as a way to talk to everyone to further understanding these things, not just feed one side’s attempt to shift the Overton Window.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Kirch Strait Bridge Attacked
The Kerch Strait Bridge after an apparent suicide truck bombing Saturday morning.A Major Escalation In The Ukraine War
The Kerch Strait bridge was the only bridge connecting the Crimea peninsula to mainland Russia.
Early on Saturday, the bridge was attacked, by what appears to have been a suicide truck bomb.
According to early photos, the damaged appeared to be extensive, with an automobile span broken and sunk into the water, and the rail span above in flames.
Kerch Strait Bridge Damage. Photo via social media.As Elon Musk noted in his proposal to end the Ukraine War (and possibly prevent a nuclear war), Crimea had been part of Russia since 1783, until Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukrainian Soviet Republic from the Russian Soviet Republic. Crimea’s port city of Sebastopol has also historically been the home port of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and is populated by primarily by ethnic Russians. It was re-annexed by Russia in 2014, after a U.S.-supported color revolution deposed Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who had agreed to extend Russia’s lease on the naval base at Sebastopol.
If, as seems likely, this was a Ukrainian attack (In August, one of President Zelensky’s advisors vowed that they would attack the bridge), it represents a major escalation in the war, and comes on the heels of the U.S. Government acknowledging that the Ukrainian government was behind the assassination of Daria Dugina in Russia.
Oleg Morozov, deputy of the State Duma from ruling United Russia party, told RIA Novosty that the attack on the bridge was an act of “terrorist war”:
An undisguised terrorist war is being waged against us. Moreover, the long-announced terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge is no longer just a challenge, it is a declaration of war without rules
Google translation via RIA Novosty
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Telling the ‘Truth’
April 2019The ‘Truth’ will always vary depending on your perspective. Many people in Pakistan and Africa are fully aware that global ecological collapse is well underway and is already challenging their ability to comfortably survive. Whereas most people in Europe and the USA would be surprised to learn this, most people in the affluent countries are unaware of this collapse, because the media do not dwell on this uncomfortable truth.
Global ecological collapse is a result of ecocidal growth economics, and the most developed countries are by far the biggest culprits. Environmental scientists agree that the ecological footprint for an individual person can be roughly calculated as a product of their affluence, and the technology that they use (I=PAT). One can easily see how the pursuit of GDP growth has now become ecocidal, for we are continually striving to increase our wealth and technology. The Preface in this paper elaborates this case.
The ongoing ecological collapse can never be fully arrested, because numerous tipping points are now past, and climate breakdown is changing the local weather patterns; the biodiversity within ecosystems will have to adjust very rapidly, and in many cases that may not happen. This is the ‘Truth’ of which many scientists are currently aware, we are already a long way down the slippery slope of ecological collapse.
In 2019 Extinction Rebellion (XR) raised my awareness about tipping-points with their Heading for Extinction talk. At a very early XR meeting, I got talking with a lovely gentleman called John Guillebaud, who is an Emeritus Professor in reproductive health, it was he who made me aware of the insights of the I=PAT equation and the organisation Population Matters.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Chris Hedges: ‘The Greatest Evil is War’
Tomas was crippled for a war that should never have been fought. He was crippled for the lies of politicians. He was crippled for war profiteers. He was crippled for the careers of generals.
Excerpts from the author’s new book, The Greatest Evil is War.
I flew to Kansas City [in 2013] to see Tomas Young. Tomas was paralyzed in Iraq in 2004. He was receiving hospice care at his home. I knew him by reputation and the movie documentary Body of War. He was one of the first veterans to publicly oppose the war in Iraq. He fought as long and as hard as he could against the war that crippled him, until his physical deterioration caught up with him.
“I had been toying with the idea of suicide for a long time because I had become helpless,” he told me in his small house on the Kansas City outskirts where he intended to die. “I couldn’t dress myself. People have to help me with the most rudimentary of things. I decided I did not want to go through life like that anymore. The pain, the frustration.…”
He stopped abruptly and called his wife. “Claudia, can I get some water?” She opened a bottle of water, took a swig so it would not spill when he sipped, and handed it to him.
“I felt at the end of my rope,” the 33-year-old Army veteran went on. “I made the decision to go on hospice care, to stop feeding and fade away. This way, instead of committing the conventional suicide and I am out of the picture, people have a way to stop by or call and say their goodbyes. I felt this was a fairer way to treat people than to just go out with a note…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Renewable Energy ‘Paradox’: A More Costly Way Forward
Michael Shellenberger, eco-modernist and author of “Apocalypse Never,” speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Sydney, Australia on Oct. 1, 2022. (Horace Young/Epoch Times)The Renewable Energy ‘Paradox’: A More Costly Way ForwardA California-based leading eco-modernist has disputed the widespread claim that renewables are a cheap and clean energy source, arguing that it’s the opposite.
Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, said one of the “most misleading ways that renewable salespeople sell their technology” is they claim the electricity produced by wind and solar is cheaper.
However, the paradox about renewable energy is when deployed at scale, they actually make electricity production more expensive, Shellenberger told CPAC Australia in Sydney on Oct. 1.
“There are basically two reasons,” he said, “It requires more machines, more backup power generators, more transmission systems, and more people to manage the chaos of an electrical grid with a large amount of unreliable weather-dependent energy.”
Shellenberger pointed to a prediction by German economist Leon Hirth that the economic value of wind and solar declines significantly as they take up a larger proportion of the electricity grid.
In a paper for Energy Policy in 2013, Hirth estimated that when wind turbine power generation comprises 30 percent of the grid, its value declines by 40 percent; while solar power’s value declines by 50 percent when it reaches 15 percent.
“The reason is easy to understand,” Shellenberger noted, “Solar and wind produce too much energy when you don’t need them and not enough energy when you do, and both of those impose costs on the electrical grid.”
Steam rises from cooling towers of the Neurath coal-fired power plant as wind turbines spin over a field of rapeseed on May 05, 2022 near Bedburg, Germany. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)He said the ideal situation was for the electricity supply to keep up with demand at “all times.”
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October 7, 2022
The Cult of Civilization
From Pixabay/KELLEPICS
I recently watched a Netflix documentary series about fundamentalist Mormons, exposing along the way a number of beliefs that seem bizarre from the outside, but that are accepted as perfectly normal within their insular community. Though the term “cult” is not used in the series, it is hard not to see the sect in this light. It would be nearly impossible to convince any one of its members that they are deeply in error, in part because doing so threatens the salvation that has been dangled in front of them. If they are pure enough in their faith, resisting external evils that try to knock them off the one true course, eternity is theirs. In today’s world, one need not look far to find other groups whose beliefs are at once bonkers and seemingly immune to attack.
Hearing the perspectives of ex-members of these cults never fails to be fascinating, providing a window into how they could have swallowed all the lies and goofy stories. Also important to know: it is possible to escape, and to suddenly see the magnitude of the deception. Once out, there’s no going back.
Cult beliefs look insane from the outside, so why don’t its adherents detect the lunacy? Why is it so hard to convince them of their folly? One possible answer—as a tangent—is that cults offer a deeply satisfying sense of identity, belonging, and (seemingly) unconditional acceptance/support within its community that we have otherwise lost in today’s society, but that in times past were central offerings of tribal life to which humans are intimately adapted. It is remarkable how quickly tribal cohesion instincts of mutual help resurface as soon as core elements of civilization (provision of food, water, electricity, for instance) fail in a natural disaster. We’ve still got it, underneath the veneer.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peter Schiff: A Massive Fiscal Time Bomb
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell knew fighting inflation would cause big problems in a bubble economy loaded up with debt. He put it off as long as he could, calling inflation “transitory.” But once inflation became a huge problem, the central bank had no choice but to get into the fight and start tightening monetary policy. The problem is, the Fed’s plan won’t work. And one reason it won’t work is the massive national debt.
Peter Schiff talked about it in this clip from his podcast.
The federal government already spends about $500 billion per year on interest payments on the $31 trillion debt. Peter noted a CNBC discussion where they speculated that in 10 years, the US government could be paying $1 trillion per year on interest alone.
Ten years? We could be paying $1 trillion in interest in one year! How are these guys getting 10 years?”
Four percent of the $31 trillion debt is $1.25 trillion. The average maturity on the debt is under five years. A third of the debt will mature in the next year. Meanwhile, the debt continues to skyrocket. The national debt grew by $1 trillion in just eight months even with pandemic spending programs winding down.
Five years from now, the national debt will be over $40 trillion, and we’re going to have to pay an interest rate probably more than 5% on that. So, a $1 trillion tab for interest on the national debt isn’t a decade away. It’s a year, maybe two away. That’s how close this crisis is.”
That raises an important question: where is the government going to get the money to pay for this? It will cost something like 30% of all tax revenue just to pay the interest on the debt. Huge interest payments will mean even more borrowing.
This is a massive fiscal time bomb.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
All of Us Are in Danger: When Anti-Government Speech Becomes Sedition
“If you can’t say ‘F@#k’ you can’t say, ‘F@#k’ the government.’”— Lenny Bruce, comedian
Anti-government speech has become a four-letter word.
In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.
Things are about to get even dicier for those who believe in fully exercising their right to political expression.
Indeed, the government’s seditious conspiracy charges against Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, and several of his associates for their alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol riots puts the entire concept of anti-government political expression on trial.
Enacted during the Civil War to prosecute secessionists, seditious conspiracy makes it a crime for two or more individuals to conspire to “‘overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force’ the U.S. government, or to levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.”
It’s a hard charge to prove, and the government’s track record hasn’t been the greatest.
It’s been almost a decade since the government tried to make a seditious conspiracy charge stick—against a small Christian militia accused of plotting to kill a police officer and attack attendees at his funeral in order to start a civil war—and it lost the case.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
