Steve Bull's Blog, page 52
April 22, 2024
Kick Back, Watch It Crumble
Monetarily and fiscally there seems to be no other way to describe our government’s actions other than willingly and excitedly driving the country full speed ahead toward the death of the dollar.
The title to this post comes from one of my favorite NOFX songs, Dinosaurs Will Die.
While I’m sure the band in absolutely no way agrees with most, if not all, of my political leanings, the critiques they raise about the music industry in the song could serve just as well as many of the questions I want to ask of legacy mainstream media and politicians from both sides of the aisle in our government.
Leading those questions, for me, is this one: Doesn’t it elicit a hopeless feeling sometimes that we always have to learn the hard way in this country?
Few things are surer than taxes and death, but one of them is that our powers that be will make up any excuses necessary, scapegoat anything possible, and generally exercise every single possible wrong decision before reluctantly realizing that a consequential, uncomfortable yet important, proactive adult decision needs to be made and/or communicated to the American public.
Nobody ever wants to fess up to doing something wrong and nobody has a tolerance for even an ounce of discomfort, even when it accompanies an obvious decision that is in the best interest of our nation.
There have been too many examples in recent memory to name, but one of the latest bouts of us acting like a scared 6 year old with an aversion to reality was the farce of the Fed and Biden administration constantly telling the nation that inflation was transitory, when that has turned out to be the polar opposite of the truth.
Janet Yellen, unable to ascertain a clue in the real world, looking for one in the virtual world.…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
April 21, 2024
Among the ancestors
Note to Substack readers. I replicate the essays that I publish on my chrissmaje.com site here on Substack. I’ve switched comments off here because I don’t want to juggle two parallel conversation threads, but if you’d like to discuss my essays feel free to join the conversation over on my website. Currently, all my content is free, but if you’d care to support my writing by becoming a paid subscriber on Substack, I’d be super appreciative!
I mentioned in a recent post that my mother died at the end of last year. This has imposed a certain amount of emotional and bureaucratic labour on me – one reason why I’ve been a bit less active on this blog of late. But now that she’s with the ancestors, I want to write something about ancestral connection in present times, taking my mother’s life as my starting point.
My mother was the eleventh and youngest child of Mary and James. James spent his working life as a coalminer in South Yorkshire. His great grandfather, John, was born in 1799 and farmed eight acres near Aberdeen – the last of my direct ancestors to my knowledge who worked primarily on the land. Mary’s father died in the Peckfield Colliery Disaster of 1896 when she was a month old. His name was William Sheldon. You can read about him here.
The Wikipedia entry about the disaster doesn’t mention this and I don’t know if it’s true, but a story handed down to me from my mother is that the colliery owners paid off the widows of the dead men up to the point in their shift when they were killed, and then left them to pick up the pieces (though it seems they stumped up 5% of the relief money later collected for the families. Thanks guys).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Down with Big Brother: Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution
“Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.”—George Orwell, 1984
The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.
The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.
What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.
Read the fine print: it’s a doozy.
Just as the USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.
Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government’s spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.
Basically, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Israel’s strike on Iran: Crisis shows how badly Iran and Israel understand each other
ReutersIsrael says it will defend itself against Iran – but its allies want to avoid a wider Middle East warIsrael’s attack on Iran was not the fierce response that US President Joe Biden and other western leaders had feared.
They have been urging Israel to draw a line under the dangerous series of events that started with Israel’s assassination of a senior Iranian general in Damascus on 1 April.
More than six months after the Hamas attacks on Israel, war continues in Gaza and has spread to the area either side of the Lebanon-Israel border and to the Gulf.
The fear is that the Middle East is on the brink of an all-out war, with global as well as regional dangers.
The Iranians are playing down the significance of what’s happened in Isfahan.
Initial reports said there had been no attack. Later, an analyst on state TV said air defences had knocked out drones that had been launched by “infiltrators”.
Official media outlets have posted jokey photos of miniature drones.
Israel was responding to the attack last Saturday from Iran. Despite years of enmity and threats it was the first time since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979 that Iran had launched a direct strike from its territory onto Israel’s.
During that attack Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones. Almost all of them were destroyed by Israel’s air defences, augmented by forces from the US, UK and Jordan.
The Iranians had made their intentions clear, giving Israel and its allies time to prepare themselves, and quickly issued a statement at the UN in New York that their retaliation was over.
Mr Biden urged Israel to “take the win” but Israel insisted it would hit back.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…A World At War (Again)
World War III has already begun, and not much can stop it. That is an unpopular statement, for several reasons. Chief among them is the denial people are afflicted with when it comes to considering uncomfortable truths. But no matter what, the coming years will change the face of the earth forever, and we need to stop denying the reality of it. Instead, we need to wake up to the changes and begin preparing physically and mentally for the collapse of the civilization that we have known for so long. For a post-collapse world that brings into question our place in on this planet.
WE ARE ALREADY AT WAR
It does not have to feel like there is a global conflict for there to be one. In fact, such a war could already be set for kinetic manifestation at a moment’s notice, only waiting for a single small spark to ignite an undeniable conflagration. Some crazy nationalist shot Archduke Ferdinand back in 1914 and started the First World War, at least on paper. In reality, that war was already being fought, but that spark was the shock that everyone notes as the beginning. In our uniquely American understanding of it, World War II kicked off after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but there were plenty of places in Europe at the time that would say confidently that the war was already raging before that. We Americans just hadn’t gotten involved officially yet, that’s all. The marks of tension and brewing conflict had been there all along, and in hindsight, we can plainly see the ‘world domination’ goal of the aggressors.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
California cracks down on water pumping: ‘The ground is collapsing’
Farm region near Tulare Lake has been put on ‘probation’ as overpumping of water has caused faster sinking of ground
Even after two back-to-back wet years, California’s water wars are far from over. On Tuesday, state water officials took an unprecedented step to intervene in the destructive pumping of depleted groundwater in the state’s sprawling agricultural heartland.
The decision puts a farming region known as the Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin, which includes roughly 837 sq miles in the rural San Joaquin valley, on “probation” in accordance with a sustainable groundwater use law passed a decade ago. Large water users will face fees and state oversight of their pumping.
California zombie lake turned farmland to water. A year later, is it gone for good?Read moreThe move, which water officials reassured farmers would be lifted if local agencies progress on developing stronger sustainability plans to mitigate issues, is the first of its kind – but has been years in the making. Over-pumping of groundwater in this region has caused the land to collapse faster than in almost any other area in the country, in some places sinking more than a foot every year. Officials say the Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin failed for years to provide adequate plans to mitigate their well-known water problems.
Such plans are required under California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a landmark law that required local agencies to come up with their own long-term strategies to curb over-extraction and empowers the state to supervise and enforce them. Probation is a compulsory step to set lagging local agencies back on track to achieve sustainability goals that must be met by 2040.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Living on Uneasy Street
Yes, the market will rally if World War III didn’t start last night. The market will also rally if World War III does start, because the Federal Reserve will surely lower interest rates.
We chuckle uneasily at gallows humor here on Uneasy Street because we’re still required to maintain an upbeat veneer of endlessly cheerful optimism even as we sense that the forces currently in play are beyond the control of individuals or groups, no matter how powerful they may be, and that these forces will follow a course to an end no one can predict with any degree of upbeat confidence.
Back when we lived on Easy Street, things were getting better for everyone in varying degrees and the ladder of social mobility was available to all: anyone could improve their prospects by putting in the effort.
Fortunes were being minted, lists of reasons to be optimistic proliferated like overfed rabbits and spots of bother ran off the road on their own, requiring nothing of us.
Life on Uneasy Street is, well, different. The lists of reasons to be optimistic are still everywhere, but they now ring hollow, as those conjuring the lists sound increasingly frantic: come on, people, get with the program, it’s all gonna be wunnerful, AI, AI, AI, Roaring 20s, blah blah blah.
The only true believers are those paid to shill the optimism by those seeking to maximize their profits via selling the sizzle rather than the actual steak. The entire exercise of trying to convince us that we still live on Easy Street is simply more evidence that Easy Street is a figment of imagination.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Oh, The Irony: Congress Passes FISA-702 Extension, Allowing Warrantless Document Searches & Electronic Surveillance Of Americans, On Patriots Day 2024
Authored by ‘Sundance’ via TheConservativeTreehouse.com,
The fourth amendment to the United States constitution says:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Late last night, early this morning (after midnight), the United States Senate passed a FISA reauthorization bill that directly and specifically violates every tenant of the 4th amendment.
The senate voted to authorize warrantless federal government searches of every American’s private papers, effects, emails, electronic data records, cell phone calls, contact lists, text messages, buying habits, purchases, banking records, social media posts, direct messages, private communications and every keystroke of every electronic device in your life.
All of it continues to be subject to the capture, review and surveillance of an unelected opaque law enforcement mechanism, and congress supports it.
The issue is magnified because the Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of the FISA-702 data collection system, because the Supreme Court also says no American has standing to challenge the federal government violation of their 4th Amendment right to privacy. It’s all infuriating… It’s all FUBAR!
Oh, and if you are reading this… you’re likely on the list.
Last night Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) teamed up with Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and added an amendment that would have required the government to get a warrant before reviewing any communications incidentally collected from Americans.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Markets Are Biting Their Lips over Global Chaos
And Fed Chair Powell is joining them because suddenly nothing is going right for his soft-landing plans!
Rising Middle-East tensions are driving up the price of crude oil and driving down the price of stocks and value of bonds. Analysts are saying oil could go to $100/bbl if the conflict between Israel and Iran goes any further. If Israel responds to the recent attack by Iran, some think Iran is likely to fight back with the West in a variation of what it has already done via its proxies. In the worst-case scenario for oil, Iran will block the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic, using its proxies to do there as they have already done on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula (or doing that directly, themselves, from Iran). That could raise oil to $130/bbl, which would blow the doors off inflation. Societe Generale puts the risk at $140/bbl if the US gets involved. For now, however, the oil market is just biting its lips … like this:
Well, that’s Fed Chair Jerome Powell, but he is biting his, too, as everything turns against his flight plans for a soft landing at the end of his own war … with inflation.
That’s because the Fed pumped so much money into the economy during the Covid lockdown fiasco that he can’t get the surplus money out quickly enough. As noted yesterday, and caught in the news again today, Powell has clearly pushed rate cuts back once again. In fact, Bank of America is now resetting its calendar for the first cut to March of next year (going for a different March than the one most analysts originally thought they would get…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Hidden threat: Global underground infrastructure vulnerable to sea-level rise
Dr. Shellie Habel of the University of Hawai’i measures the salt concentration of emerging groundwater in a basement in Waikiki. Credit: Chloe Obara, University of Hawai’iAs sea levels rise, coastal groundwater is lifted closer to the ground surface while also becoming saltier and more corrosive. A recent study by Earth scientists at the University of Hawai’i (UH) at Mānoa has compiled research from experts worldwide showing that in cities where there are complex networks of buried and partially buried infrastructure, interaction with this shallower and saltier groundwater exacerbates corrosion and failure of critical systems such as sewer lines, roadways, and building foundations.
The research is published in the journal Annual Review of Marine Science.
“While it has been recognized that shallowing groundwater will eventually result in chronic flooding as it surfaces, what’s less known is that it can start causing problems decades beforehand as groundwater interacts with buried infrastructure,” said Shellie Habel, lead author and coastal geologist in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) at UH Mānoa. “This knowledge gap often results in coastal groundwater changes being fully overlooked in infrastructure planning.”
The research team aimed to create awareness about these issues and offer guidance from world experts on managing them. Habel and co-authors reviewed existing literature to examine the diverse effects on different types of infrastructure. Additionally, by employing worldwide elevation data and geospatial data that indicate the extent of urban development, they identified 1,546 low-lying coastal cities and towns globally, where around 1.42 billion people live, that are likely experiencing these impacts.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
