A Permanent War!!!

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Ken
A return to permanent war is here: First it will bankrupt America, then destroy it.
Opinion by Chris Hedges, Salon, 5/26/22

The United States, as the near-unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable COVID relief program. No respite from 8.3% inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $6 trillion more than the US GDP of $24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.
We are paying a heavy social, political and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’être of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.”
The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

War is the raison d’être of the state.
Extravagant military expenditures are justified for “national security.” The $40 billion allocated for Ukraine mostly goes to weapons manufacturers. Strategists talk of sending $4 billion more every month.
There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Sen. George McGovern, Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. J. William Fulbright, who wrote “The Pentagon Propaganda Machine.” The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Rep. Barbara Lee —who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing an open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else — to Rep. Ilhan Omar are now dutifully lining up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of “The Permanent War Economy” and “Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War.” Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized antiwar movement led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan, as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the “Meet the Press” war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.” 
The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,” multiculturalism and identity politics. Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level.  The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Joe Biden has appointed these warmongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council and the State Department.

Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. War will cripple Russia. War will curb the growing power of China. These are demented and dangerous fantasies of a ruling class severed from reality.
Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.
These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.” 
You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2%, while China’s is 8.1%, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States. U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the U.K.’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said that Biden’s recent visit to Asia was about sending a “powerful message” to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies “stand together to shape the rules of the road.” The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.
But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70% higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides noted in “The History of the Peloponnesian War.”
A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the all-volunteer force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class and military families. This allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam antiwar movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.

The all-volunteer force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the “stop-loss” policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the “backdoor draft.” The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors as well has had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7% of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.
“As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich in “After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed“:
Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history’s indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?

This question, as Bacevich points out, is “anathema.” The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won’t look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos. 
The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multipolar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.” In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity. On Feb. 19, 1998, on NBC’s “Today,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”
This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.

There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.
Donald Trump committed the heresy of questioning the sanctity of American empire, calling the invasion of Iraq a “big, fat mistake.” Told that Putin was “a killer,” he retorted, “You think our country’s so innocent?”
The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big, fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, that the militarists had sold out the American people.
Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trump is the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe … in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”

Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.
The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto-fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and Senate this fall, will be ascendant.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”
“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A U.S. politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Vladimir Putin.
Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

Read more on the Ukraine war and its contradictions:
Russia, the U.S. and the Ukraine war: Dance of death in an age of self-delusion
The-days-of-abundant-resources-farming-inputs-is-over-says-deere-ceo – Search (bing.com)
Ending the Ukraine war is possible, but time is running out: Here’s how the U.S. can help
Is the U.S. in a proxy war with Russia? Sergey Lavrov and Lloyd Austin seem to think so
Wright: Wary of consumer discretionary, because inflation is starting to impact Americans
Dan Patrick: If America does not turn back to God, we are going to be a lost nation

Xi-Li Discord Paralyzes Officials Responsible for China Economy (msn.com)
How Many EVs Are Registered In Your State? You May Be Surprised (insideevs.com)
Current EV registrations in the US: How does your state stack up? – Electrek
Energy policy in the US is ‘disastrous,’ says Rep. Byron Donalds (msn.com)
Cummins Previews Hydrogen Future With 15.0-Liter Engine (msn.com)
See how many electric vehicles are registered in Ohio (msn.com)
How many electric cars registered in each state – Bing video
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Investing Insider speaks out: “Wall Street’s Dark Day is Coming” – Investing Outlook

A New Financial Crisis is Brewing in America 
By Allison Comotto – Search (bing.com)

If Everything Is So Amazing, Why’s Nobody Happy? | VQR Online
If you’re a student of history, you’ve likely already noticed the signs:
We’re suffering the worst inflation since the 1980s…
The worst simultaneous food and energy shortage since the 1970s…
And the worst stock market performance since 1939.
The words “recession,” “crash,” and “bear market” are all over the financial press.
(Even the housing market is starting to look eerily similar to 2007.)

The consensus is clear:
A new crisis is brewing in our nation’s economy.
But if you’re over the age of 50 – it’s not the type of crisis you might expect.
And according to legendary investor, Matt McCall, the ramifications for your wealth could be more severe than any other crisis in history.
McCall likely has the greatest track record of any investor in America.
To date, he’s recommended over 40 stocks that all went on to soar over 1,000%.
He accurately called the day of the market bottom in 2009… recommended Bitcoin before it soared 9,000%… predicted the cannabis and electric vehicle 
trends years before they were on anybody’s radar… and perfectly timed the red-hot rebound after the 2020 COVID crash. Today, he’s stepping forward to issue his next big prediction – and make sure you don’t get left behind.

He told me,
“Millions of Americans are selling their stocks… hoarding cash… and waiting for a repeat of 2008 or 2020.
They don’t know the next financial crisis will be nothing like the last. And they’re making every mistake in the book because of it.”
Matt just took the stage in front of a live audience to explain his new prediction, and what it means for your money.
In fact, he’s summed up exactly what’s happening in just one word.
And he’s even giving away one of his top stocks to take advantage.
Click here to see his new prediction and stock recommendation, 100% free.

“Everything Is Amazing, But No One Is Happy”.

By Kelly Brown

Remember the Jetsons? George and Jane? Of course, you do…
They painted the dream that by 2062 we’d live in a world with video calls, robotic vacuums, smart watches, and tablet computers. And we do, forty years ahead of their timeline.
By most measurements, the world’s doing well for itself.
Global incomes are higher… our lifespan is longer. Literacy is up. Poverty is down. Violent crime has dropped in half since the 1990s. 
Communication is literally 100,000x cheaper than it was 100 years ago.
But simple things – like seeing a doctor or getting your car fixed or simply making more money for the lifestyle you want – are still so frustrating.
It’s as if everything is amazing, yet nothing ever works the way it’s supposed to.
Nothing’s efficient. 
No one can seem to do their job correctly.
The right people are never rewarded.
And everyone’s always mad at each other.
Recently, a renowned technology analyst stepped forward with a surprising explanation.
Matt McCall has appeared in the media over 1,000 times.  He’s published 2 books about investing and has a popular investing podcast with over 400,000 subscribers.

And he said,
“There’s an economic phenomenon happening right now that most people haven’t picked up on. It’s at the root of so many of today’s problems.  It explains why we’re seeing so many issues in the investing markets lately… and so many frustrations in our day to day lives.”
He adds that this phenomenon is what the wealthiest Americans are using to advance right now, while most investors and retirees bear the weight of violent market swings and inevitably get left behind.
In a first-of-its-kind presentation, Matt McCall explains this phenomenon and exactly what you can do to find yourself on the right side of it.

How to keep your cool during market uncertainty:
Learn how to avoid making emotional decisions when markets get choppy.
Both big and small swings in the market are regular parts of the investing experience. So, it’s important to be mindful of your reactions to these ups and downs and take a beat before making drastic money moves.

The high cost of Biden’s bitter partisanship: Inaction (msn.com)
Here are a few things to keep in mind as you ride the stock market roller coaster.

Keep perspective
Downturns are normal and expected. On average since 1926, stock prices have dipped every 6 years with losses averaging almost 40%. * But zoomed out to the full picture, we can see that the market has recovered each time and gone on to reach new heights.

Invest consistently
You can avoid making emotionally driven decisions by setting up monthly recurring investments. This helps ensure you stick to your plan, no matter what the market is doing!
That way when things start to get chaotic, you can remind yourself that you’re staying focused on your goal instead of the short-term volatility.

Take a break
Finally, if you find yourself stressed, anxious, and constantly checking in on how your investments are doing, consider taking a break (that’s if you don’t need your money right away).

Just like the saying “A watched pot never boils,” watching stock prices drop won’t bring them back up. Instead, do something that you enjoy! Get outside, watch a movie, or take a nap. You’ll likely find it’s a better use of your time.
To view the free presentation, click here.

Past performance is not a predictor of future results. All investing involves risk of loss and individual investments may vary. The examples provided are not representative of typical results. Your capital is at risk when you invest — you can lose some or all of your money. Never risk more than you can afford to lose.

About The McCall Report
The McCall Report is a monthly newsletter edited by lead analyst Matt McCall with the belief that the decade ahead of us – the Roaring 2020s – will bring exponential growth to companies that are embracing the monumental changes set to occur over the next 10 years.

“Biden Let The Cat Out Of The Bag”: Steve Forbes Calls Out POTUS’ “Confession”
Mitch McConnell tears into Biden for saying gas prices are going through an ‘incredible transition’ (msn.com)
Elon Musk says upcoming recession is ‘actually a good thing,’ and predicts how long it will last (msn.com)
Biden’s high gas prices and war on fossil fuels proves the president is cold, cruel and callous (msn.com)
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The CDC Has A New Boogeyman To Keep COVID Restrictions Around Even Longer,
Moderna CEO: 30 million COVID jab doses will be tossed ‘because nobody wants them’ 
Fauci’s researchers find natural immunity superior to vaccines – ClarkCountyToday.com
Opinion: Biden’s presidency reveals sour stink of ‘success’ | Opinion | peoriatimes.com
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US Consumers Expect Inflation Shock to Pass, NY Fed Survey Finds (msn.com)
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US truckers talk ‘unprecedented’ diesel price surge (msn.com)
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A CHOATIC WORLD

Posted on May 26, 2022 by Ken
Climate Change is “Widespread, Rapid and Intensifying”

Physicists predict Earth will become a chaotic world, with dire consequences
By Paul Sutter

Hottest Summers United States History

Hottest Summers United States History (1900, 1908, 1936 and 1988 Rate High.)
Humans aren’t just making Earth warmer, they are making the climate chaotic,
a stark new study suggests. The new research, which was posted April 21 to the preprint database arXiv, draws a broad and general picture of the full potential impact of human activity on the climate.

And the picture isn’t pretty. 
While the study doesn’t present a complete simulation of a climate model, it does paint a broad sketch of where we’re heading if we don’t curtail climate change and our unchecked use of fossil fuels, according to the study authors, scientists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Porto in Portugal. . 
“The implications of climate change are well known (droughts, heat waves, extreme phenomena, etc),” study researcher Orfeu Bertolami told Live Science in an email.
“If the Earth System gets into the region of chaotic behavior, we will lose all hope of somehow fixing the problem.”

Related: It’s ‘now or never’ to stop climate disaster, UN scientists say  

Climate shifts
Earth periodically experiences massive changes in climate patterns, going from one stable equilibrium to another. These shifts are usually driven by external factors like changes in Earth’s orbit or a massive surge in volcanic activity. But past research suggests we are now entering a new phase, one driven by human activity. As humans pump more carbon into the atmosphere, we are creating a new Anthropocene era, a period of human-influenced climate systems, something our planet has never experienced before.
In the new study, researchers modeled the introduction of the Anthropocene as a phase transition. Most people are familiar with phase transitions in materials, for instance when an ice cube changes phase from a solid to a liquid by melting into water, or when water evaporates into a gas. But phase transitions also occur in other systems.
In this case, the system is Earth’s climate. A given climate provides for regular and predictable seasons and weather, and a phase transition in the climate leads to a new pattern of seasons and weather. When the climate goes through a phase transition,
this means that Earth is experiencing a sudden and rapid change in patterns. 

Logistics problems
If human activity is driving a phase transition in Earth’s climate,
that means we are causing the planet to develop a new set of weather patterns.
What those patterns will look like is one of the most pressing problems of climate science.
Where is Earth’s climate headed? That depends significantly on exactly what our activity is over the next few decades. Drastically reducing carbon output, for example, would lead to different outcomes than changing nothing at all, the researchers wrote in the study.
To account for the different trajectories and choices that humanity could make, the researchers employed a mathematical tool called a logistic map.
The logistic map is great at describing situations where some variable — such as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere — can grow but naturally reaches a limit. For example, scientists often use the logistic map to describe animal populations: Animals can keep giving birth, increasing their numbers, but they reach a limit when they consume all the food in their environment (or their predators get too hungry and consume them).

Related: The 5 mass extinction events that shaped the history of Earth

Our influence on the environment is definitely growing, and it has been for over a century. But it will naturally reach a limit, according to the researchers. For example, the human population can only grow so large and can only have so many carbon-emitting activities; and pollution will eventually degrade the environment. At some point in the future, carbon output will reach a maximum limit, and the researchers found that a logistic map can capture the future trajectory of that carbon output very well.

 Everything is chaos
The researchers explored different ways that the human logistic map could evolve, depending on a variety of factors like our population, introduction of carbon reduction strategies and better, more efficient technologies. Once they found how human carbon output would evolve with time, they used that to examine how Earth’s climate would evolve through the human-driven phase transition.
In the best cases, once humanity reaches the limit of carbon output, Earth’s climate stabilizes at a new, higher average temperature. This higher temperature is overall bad for humans, because it still leads to higher sea levels and more extreme weather events. But at least it’s stable: The Anthropocene looks like previous climate ages, only warmer, and it will still have regular and repeatable weather patterns.

But in the worst cases, the researchers found that Earth’s climate leads to chaos.
True, mathematical chaos. In a chaotic system, there is no equilibrium and no repeatable patterns. A chaotic climate would have seasons that change wildly from decade to decade (or even year to year). Some years would experience sudden flashes of extreme weather, while others would be completely quiet. Even the average Earth temperature may fluctuate wildly, swinging from cooler to hotter periods in relatively short periods of time. It would become utterly impossible to determine in what direction Earth’s climate is headed.
“A chaotic behavior means that it will be impossible to predict the behavior of the Earth System in the future even if we know with great certainty its present state,” Bertolami said. “It will mean that any capability to control and to drive the Earth System towards an equilibrium state that favors the habitability of the biosphere will be lost.”
Most concerning, the researchers found that above a certain critical threshold temperature for Earth’s atmosphere, a feedback cycle can kick in where a chaotic result would become unavoidable. There are some signs that we may have already passed that tipping point, but it’s not too late to avert climate disaster.

Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying: IPCC report puts the scale of climate risk in perspective (continuitycentral.com)

 Scientists are observing changes in the Earth’s climate in every region and across
the whole climate system, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released today. Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years.
However, strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases would limit climate change. While benefits for air quality would come quickly, it could take 20-30 years to see global temperatures stabilize, according to the IPCC Working Group I report, Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis, approved on Friday by 195 member governments of the IPCC, through a virtual approval session that was held over two weeks starting on July 26.
The Working Group I report is the first instalment of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), which will be completed in 2022. “This report reflects extraordinary efforts under exceptional circumstances,” said Hoesung Lee, Chair of the IPCC. “The innovations in this report, and advances in climate science that it reflects, provide an invaluable input into climate negotiations and decision-making.”

Faster warming
The report provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5°C in the next decades, and finds that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach.
The report shows that emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C of warming since 1850-1900, and finds that averaged over the next 20 years, global temperature is expected to reach or exceed 1.5°C of warming. This assessment is based on improved observational datasets to assess historical warming, as well progress in scientific understanding of the response of the climate system to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
“This report is a reality check,” said IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Valérie Masson-Delmotte. “We now have a much clearer picture of the past, present and future climate, which is essential for understanding where we are headed, what can be done, and how we can prepare.”

Every region facing increasing changes
Many characteristics of climate change directly depend on the level of global warming, but what people experience is often very different to the global average. For example, warming over land is larger than the global average, and it is more than twice as high in the Arctic.
“Climate change is already affecting every region on Earth, in multiple ways. The changes we experience will increase with additional warming,” said IPCC Working Group I Co-Chair Panmao Zhai.
The report projects that in the coming decades climate changes will increase in all regions. For 1.5°C of global warming, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons. 
At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows.
But it is not just about temperature. Climate change is bringing multiple different changes in different regions – which will all increase with further warming. 
These include changes to wetness and dryness, to winds, snow and ice, coastal areas and oceans. For example:
Climate change is intensifying the water cycle. This brings more intense rainfall and associated flooding, as well as more intense drought in many regions.

Climate change is affecting rainfall patterns.
In high latitudes, precipitation is likely to increase, while it is projected to decrease over large parts of the subtropics. Changes to monsoon precipitation are expected, which will vary by region.
Coastal areas will see continued sea level rise throughout the 21st century, contributing to more frequent and severe coastal flooding in low-lying areas and coastal erosion. Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.
Further warming will amplify permafrost thawing, and the loss of seasonal snow cover, melting of glaciers and ice sheets, and loss of summer Arctic sea ice.
Changes to the ocean, including warming, more frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels have been clearly linked to human influence. These changes affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them, and they will continue throughout at least the rest of this century.
For cities, some aspects of climate change may be amplified, including heat (since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings), flooding from heavy precipitation events and sea level rise in coastal cities.
For the first time, the Sixth Assessment Report provides a more detailed regional assessment of climate change, including a focus on useful information that can inform risk assessment, adaptation, and other decision-making, and a new framework that helps translate physical changes in the climate – heat, cold, rain, drought, snow, wind, coastal flooding and more – into what they mean for society and ecosystems.
This regional information can be explored in detail in the newly developed Interactive Atlas interactive-atlas.ipcc.ch as well as regional fact sheets, the technical summary, and underlying report.

Human influence on the past and future climate.
“It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed,” said Masson-Delmotte. Yet the new report also reflects major advances in the science of attribution – understanding the role of climate change in intensifying specific weather and climate events such as extreme heat waves and heavy rainfall events.
The report also shows that human actions still have the potential to determine the future course of climate. The evidence is clear that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the main driver of climate change, even as other greenhouse gases and air pollutants also affect the climate.
“Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions. Limiting other greenhouse gases and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate,” said Zhai.

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Drought ravaged farms during the Great Depression in 1936.

Heat Waves Throughout History Find out what happens when things start to really
heat up with this look back at some of the most infamous heat waves in history.

London’s Great Stink of 1858
This summer heat wave has lived in infamy not only for its soaring temperatures but also for the malodorous stench it unleashed on England’s capital. Many Londoners had recently traded in their chamber pots for water closets, which flushed an unprecedented amount of water and waste into the city’s 200,000 cesspits. As sewage overflowed into the River Thames and its tributaries, the warm weather encouraged the growth of bacteria with an odor so noxious that sheets soaked in chloride of lime were hung from the windows of the newly built House of Commons in an effort to blunt the smell. London’s poor still drank from the Thames, and thousands died that summer from cholera, typhoid and other diseases; these epidemics had yet to be linked to contaminated water and were instead blamed on the reeking air. One newspaper declared that “whoso once inhales the stink can never forget it and can count himself lucky if he lives to remember it.”
Amid public outcry, Parliament resolved to overhaul the city’s antiquated sewer system, enlisting the help of Joseph William Bazalgette, a brilliant and celebrated civil engineer. His sprawling network of drains and pumping stations, designed to handle 420 million gallons of liquid waste a day, officially opened in 1865 and became fully operational a decade later. Many credit Bazalgette with saving thousands of lives–and, of course, sparing countless noses from London’s intolerable stink.

The Great New York Heat Wave of 1896
At the end of the 19th century, New York City was home to some 3 million people, many occupying the notoriously cramped and stifling tenements of the Lower East Side and other low-income neighborhoods. When 10 days of relentless heat baked the Big Apple in August 1896, these abysmal living conditions went from an uncomfortable reality to a death sentence for an estimated 1,300 New Yorkers. Roasting in their jam-packed bedrooms and barred from sleeping in public parks by a citywide ban, many tenement dwellers sought a breath of fresh air on rooftops, fire escapes and piers. A sizable share of the heat wave casualties occurred when people fell asleep, rolled from their perches and plummeted to their deaths; others succumbed to heat stroke and other heat-related ailments. More than 1,000 horses also died during the crisis.
Even as the death toll mounted, the city government did little to address the disaster,
and the heat wave was on the verge of waning by the time the mayor called an emergency meeting. One relatively obscure official emerged as a hero: Theodore Roosevelt, the city’s police commissioner, who had angered New Yorkers earlier in the summer by cracking down on taverns that stayed open beyond the legal closing time. The future president instructed the police force to distribute free ice in tenement neighborhoods and provide ambulance services to the sick. According to some historians, the heat wave salvaged Roosevelt’s faltering political career and ultimately helped propel him to the White House.

The North American Heat Wave of 1936
In the United States, the timing of the 1936 North American heat wave could not have been worse. Battered by the Great Depression, bled dry by years of drought and blinded by perpetual dust storms, the country took yet another debilitating hit when temperatures soared to all-time highs in 12 states, clearing the 120-degree mark in some regions. (The Canadian provinces of Ontario and Manitoba also saw record heat that summer.) Like the blistering summer of 2010, the 1936 heat wave started early and followed an unusually cold winter, leaving Americans unprepared for such a drastic change in weather.
Reports of dramatic and horrific scenes poured in from around the country. The Midwest had been battling a grasshopper infestation for several years, and as temperatures climbed their broiled, lifeless bodies began dropping from the sky like antennae hail. In New York City, which hit a record high of 106 degrees, 75 seamstresses at a single factory fell into a collective, heat-induced swoon. In Detroit, one of the steamiest cities, doctors and nurses collapsed while treating patients, overcome by heat and exhaustion, and the morgues were overrun with bodies. By summer’s end, upward of 5,000 Americans and 1,100 Canadians had died from heat-related causes or drowned while trying to cool off in rivers and lakes.

The Chicago Heat Wave of 1995
Like much of the central and eastern United States, Chicago had suffered through the devastating heat waves of 1980 and 1988, which persisted for weeks and caused tens of thousands of fatalities nationwide. But in the summer of 1995, the Windy City lost approximately 700 residents in just five humid and sweltering days–a staggering mortality rate that exposed the city’s inadequate response system while debunking common assumptions about which groups are most susceptible to heat-related death.
On July 13, the temperature in the city hit 106 degrees and the heat index, which takes humidity into account to gauge how hot it actually feels, surpassed 120 degrees. As the heat lingered, much of Chicago’s urban infrastructure began to break down: excessive air conditioner use maxed out the power grid; relief seekers opened so many hydrants that several communities lost water pressure; and train rails and roads buckled, causing massive commuter delays. 
Paramedics, hospitals and morgues were quickly overwhelmed, and midway through
the heat wave there was a backlog of hundreds of bodies. In the aftermath of the tragedy, researchers found that most of those who died were older men who lived alone, despite the fact that senior women outnumbered senior men in the area; they concluded that women’s stronger social connections to the community had acted as a defense. Four years later, when another heat wave hit the city, better preparation and a more rapid response limited the deaths to just over 100.

The European Heat Wave of 2003
In July and August of 2003, countries across Europe sizzled through what some scientists deemed their hottest summer since 1500 A.D. The scorching temperatures peaked in the last two weeks of August and claimed at least 40,000 victims, taking a heavy toll on the very young, the chronically ill and elderly people living alone or in nursing homes. Forest fires raged in Portugal, Spain and Italy, while melting glaciers triggered flash floods in the Alps and crops withered throughout southern Europe.
France was hit hardest by the crisis, suffering an estimated 14,000 fatalities as temperatures soared to 104 degrees in a country with an aging population and limited air conditioning. In France and elsewhere, the appallingly high death toll revealed a lack of preparedness for extreme weather in regions with historically temperate climates. Reports cited treatment delays, unawareness of heat-related conditions like dehydration and inadequate medical personnel. In the years since 2003, most European governments have developed action plans for extreme heat that emphasize green spaces, public education, warning systems and emergency measures for the most vulnerable.

For more information contact:
IPCC Press Office ipcc-media@wmo.int, +41 22 730 8120
Katherine Leitzell katherine.leitzell@ipcc.ch
Nada Caud (French) nada.caud@universite-paris-saclay.fr
Temperature Breakdown By Decade (weather.gov)

Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I
to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change…
The Working Group I report addresses the most updated physical understanding of the climate system and climate change, bringing together the latest advances in climate science, and combining multiple lines of evidence from paleoclimate, observations, process understanding, global and regional climate simulations. It shows how and why climate has changed to date, and the improved understanding of human influence on a wider range of climate characteristics, including extreme events. There will be a greater focus on regional information that can be used for climate risk assessments.
The Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) as well as additional materials and information are available at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Note: Originally scheduled for release in April 2021, the report was delayed for several months by the COVID-19 pandemic, as work in the scientific community including the IPCC shifted online. This is first time that the IPCC has conducted a virtual approval session for one of its reports.

AR6 Working Group I in numbers
234 authors from 66 countries
31 – coordinating authors
167 – lead authors
36 – review editors
Plus:
517 – contributing authors
Over 14,000 cited references
A total of 78,007 expert and government review comments.

(First Order Draft 23,462; Second Order Draft 51,387; Final Government Distribution: 3,158) More information about the Sixth Assessment Report can be found here.

About the IPCC
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the UN body for assessing the science related to climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide political leaders with periodic scientific assessments concerning climate change, its implications and risks, as well as to put forward adaptation and mitigation strategies. In the same year the UN General Assembly endorsed the action by the WMO and UNEP in jointly establishing the IPCC. It has 195 member states.

Thousands of people from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC.
For the assessment reports, IPCC scientists volunteer their time to assess the thousands of scientific papers published each year to provide a comprehensive summary of what is known about the drivers of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and how adaptation and mitigation can reduce those risks.
The IPCC has three working groups: Working Group I, dealing with the physical science basis of climate change; Working Group II, dealing with impacts, adaptation and vulnerability; and Working Group III, dealing with the mitigation of climate change.
It also has a Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories that develops methodologies for measuring emissions and removals. As part of the IPCC, a Task Group on Data Support for Climate Change Assessments (TG-Data) provides guidance to the Data Distribution Centre (DDC) on curation, traceability, stability, availability and transparency of data and scenarios related to the reports of the IPCC.
IPCC assessments provide governments, at all levels, with scientific information that they can use to develop climate policies. IPCC assessments are a key input into the international negotiations to tackle climate change. IPCC reports are drafted and reviewed in several stages, thus guaranteeing objectivity and transparency. An IPCC assessment report consists of the contributions of the three working groups and a Synthesis Report. The Synthesis Report integrates the findings of the three working group reports and of any special reports prepared in that assessment cycle.

About the Sixth Assessment Cycle.
At its 41st Session in February 2015, the IPCC decided to produce a Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). At its 42nd Session in October 2015 it elected a new Bureau that would oversee the work on this report and the Special Reports to be produced in the assessment cycle.

Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming 1.5
degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty was launched in October 2018.

Climate Change and Land, an IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems was launched in August 2019, and the Special Report
on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate was released in September 2019.

In May 2019 the IPCC released the 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines
for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, an update to the methodology used by governments to estimate their greenhouse gas emissions and removals.

The other two Working Group contributions to the AR6 will be finalized in 2022
and the AR6 Synthesis Report will be completed in the second half of 2022.

For more information go to www.ipcc.ch
The website includes outreach materials including videos about the IPCC and video recordings from outreach events conducted as webinars or live-streamed events.

Most videos published by the IPCC can be found on  
IPCC – YouTube and Vimeo channels.

BONUS INFORMATION: Ukraine Slams Idea of Swapping Land for Peace.

‘How do you shoot my baby?’ Uvalde dad learned from daughter’s friend
that she was killed in shooting (msn.com)

Texas school shooting is America’s latest exercise in ‘child sacrifice,’ says WaPo columnist
Three years after Dayton attack, Texas shooting fuels anger over Ohio inaction on guns
Earth Will Become One Big Supercontinent Again, And It Will Probably Kill Us
Adriana Reyes, Uvalde Shooter’s Mom, Insists They Had a Good Relationship
Grim task at hand after Texas school shooting: planning 19 children’s funerals
‘Good guys with guns’ – do they help stop shooters? Here’s what data says
Jill Biden says she and Joe WILL visit Uvalde after the school massacre
Game Theory Predicts Biden Is About to Make a Big Move with China
Student arrested at Texas high school with pistol, rifle in his vehicle
‘A bad day for … hope’: Another school shooting. More dead kids.
Why gun control advocates see no end in sight.
Police face questions over response to Texas school shooting
The Texas shooting shows the futility of arming teachers

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Texas school shooting: 21 victims named and pictured | US News | Sky News


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The Breakthrough

Posted on May 25, 2022 by Ken
Follow along as this New York Times best-selling author details the astonishing scientific discovery of the code to unleash the human immune system to fight in this “captivating and heartbreaking” book (The Wall Street Journal).

For decades, scientists have puzzled over one of medicine’s most confounding mysteries: Why doesn’t our immune system recognize and fight cancer the way it does other diseases, like the common cold? 
As it turns out, the answer to that question can be traced to a series of tricks that cancer has developed to turn off normal immune responses – tricks that scientists have only recently discovered and learned to defeat. The result is what many are calling cancer’s “penicillin moment”, a revolutionary discovery in our understanding of cancer and how
to beat it. 

In The Breakthrough, New York Times best-selling author of The Good Nurse 
Charles Graeber guides listeners through the revolutionary scientific research bringing immunotherapy out of the realm of the miraculous and into the forefront of 21st-century medical science. As advances in the fields of cancer research and the human immune system continue to fuel a therapeutic arms race among biotech and pharmaceutical research centers around the world, the next step – harnessing the wealth of new information to create modern and more effective patient therapies – is unfolding at an unprecedented pace, rapidly redefining our relationship with this all-too-human disease. 

Groundbreaking, riveting, and expertly told, The Breakthrough is the story of the
game-changing scientific discoveries that unleash our natural ability to recognize and defeat cancer, as told through the experiences of the patients, physicians, and cancer immunotherapy researchers who are on the front lines. This is the incredible true story
of the race to find a cure, a dispatch from the life-changing world of modern oncological science, and a brave new chapter in medical history. 

Every year 17 million people are diagnosed with cancer across the world. A further 10 million people die of cancer-related deaths every year. As one notable oncologist politely put it, you’re more likely to get cancer than you are to get married. But those days of trembling at hearing the word cancer or equating it to a death sentence is over.

The Cure For Cancer Has Arrived

By Charles Graeber – Bing video

Traditionally the solution to eliminating this ghastly mutated foe was to either
cut it or burn it out with traditional techniques like chemotherapy or surgery. But a new dawn is upon us and it’s called immunotherapy. Immunotherapy represents a new class of specialized assassin drugs that, to put it simply, allows our immune system to see cancer operating in broad daylight, where it was once cloaked in invisibility.

Thanks to a motley group of genius scientists such as Nobel prize winners Jim Allison
and Tasuku Honjo, they have shown us that cancer can be defeated. The advent of immunotherapeutic drugs has meant that thousands of people worldwide are now finding their way into steady long-term remission. Where we go from here is up to science, but if the author of Breakthrough Charles Graeber would have us believe we can now dream of a day where cancer becomes just another manageable disease much like the flu or even polio. Let the revolution begin.

In terms of where cancer is within the journey of the body.
Can you give us a bit of background and perhaps a bit of context to the disease?
Well, cancer is part of us, it’s an inseparable aspect of our humanity. It’s a mutation that works, and in a sense, that’s us as well. The whole notion of evolution is that mistakes lead to differential reproductive success and some of that differential reproductive success happens on a cellular level, and that’s a tumour.  So this is something that’s plagued us since the very beginning. Usually, because we know our cells are rolling the dice over and over again.
In a sense, we were always busy dealing with microbes and the basic issues of survival; you were more likely to get eaten by a tiger or destroyed by microbes than you were to develop a tumour. It’s a luxury to be able to worry about cancer, but now it is, of course, our second biggest killer.  The main observation made by physicians was that for as long as we’ve had cancer, it was always a disease that was symptomless, that is until it crowded out the other organs.  It was something that was unlike any other condition. It’s different when you have a cold or flu. With cancer, there is no inflammation, no fever, not even a runny nose. And there is nothing to be done about it. Traditionally, the only treatment for cancer has been to cut it out or death.
This leads to the second observation by historians and physicians that occasionally cancer would burst through the skin especially in a crab-like shape, which the writer Siddhartha Mukherjee describes very well in his book The Emperor of All Maladies. It would lead to this infection, and this infection would somehow suddenly reverse the course of the disease to what they called spontaneous remission. 


“The physicians and the researchers I speak to believe that this will render cancer a manageable disease if we don’t cure outright for the vast majority of people within our lifetime.” – Charles Graeber

So to dig a little deeper, what does a tumour get out of differential reproductive success? Because essentially if a tumour is successful it kills
the body and then the tumour doesn’t survive anymore. So what is in it for a tumour to grow there in the first place?

That’s a great question. And this is a fun one to wrestle with.
Within the smaller picture, there’s always a sense that with evolution the point of it is that it had a direction. I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. It’s merely a matter of being able to reproduce yourself and pass on whatever that environment may be. In this case, it doesn’t apply because it’s not an organism, it doesn’t affect us as such. It’s a byproduct of a random mutation, and sometimes that happens on a genetic level which concerns us as a species.
Usually when the cells reproduce or when they divide they make mistakes and are cleaned up pretty quickly, or they are induced to kill themselves which is called apoptosis. It’s just sort of spring cleaning in the body, and we shed the equivalent of our body weight every year in these cells which is why our apartments are so dusty even though we’d like to think it was something else.

So, it’s 2018, and we’re at a pivotal point in the world of cancer.
A breakthrough has been made, is this the revolution we’ve all been waiting for. Is the cut and burn era over?
You have to be so careful with this question because the idea of raising false hope is cruel. We’ve seen this time and time again, where there have been breakthroughs, but it becomes one of the most shopworn headlines out there. The short answer is yes, this is the breakthrough.  This is a penicillin moment for this disease, which is to say we have fundamentally changed our understanding of the disease and of ourselves and how our immune system interacts or has forever failed to interact with cancer.

We understand that cancer takes advantage of the safety mechanism built into our immune system. Cancer uses a secret handshake to shut down the immune system
and to say “I’m cool, I’m a normal body cell, don’t attack me.” We count on these secret handshakes or checkpoints for the body not to be attacking ourselves all the time, to not be in a constant state of autoimmunity. The most dangerous thing in our bodies usually is our defenses, and that has evolved over 500 million years, and they’re really good. And when they go wrong, it’s terrible.

The safety built into them is necessary. We now know cancer takes advantage of those safety checks and now we know we can block that. That understanding has been sought after for well over one hundred and fifty years. It’s something that has puzzled humanity forever. And it was only understood recently.
So this is all fundamental to reimagining what is possible, and already the question is
‘Can we cure cancer or the 200 some diseases we know as cancer?’ And the answer is we already have cured cancer. We haven’t cured everybody but we’ve cured it in certain types of cancers and the subset of patients, that equates to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people.
The physicians and the researchers I speak to believe that this will render cancer a manageable disease if we don’t cure outright for the vast majority of people within our lifetime.


A tray containing cancer cells sitting on an optical microscope in the Nanomedicine Lab at UCL’s School of Pharmacy in London.  REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett 

Essentially you’re saying these drugs called checkpoint inhibitors basically allow the immune system to function as normal and kill a tumour. But are you also saying that over time these checkpoint inhibitor drugs will become not only more intelligent but a lot more precise and they’ll be able to do a much better job at removing the tumour than just carpet bombing as in the current cut and burn process?

Any successful cancer already depends upon the immune system to be successful.
You can cut out the vast number of tumors or you can starve it, you can use any of the techniques that we’ve had such as cut it out, poison it and burn it. But techniques of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are essentially a game of chicken where you hope that you kill the disease before you kill the host, being the patient.
What you’re doing is hoping to change the odds of the fight with the immune system but it has to be an awakened immune system to chase down every last cell. No drug can do it. Cancer mutates, it continues to change. But a drug does not change and we see this all the time with remissions where people are ok for a while and then the disease comes roaring back. This is because the treatments aren’t adaptable and flexible, they don’t dance and the immune system dances. So in a sense, it’s the only path that will work.
These checkpoint discoveries are tantamount to finding invisible breaks that were initially put on the cells that fight our diseases, which are the immune killer cells, the T-cell.
The problem is that the anti- CTL4-A drug which came first acted indiscriminately. It was similar to jamming a brick under the brake pedal. So, for some, it can be a rough ride, it can have a lot of toxicity because you’re creating an auto immunity. But then the anti-PD-1 drug came along which was the next checkpoint inhibitor drug, but this acts as a more precise checkpoint that can be targeted which changed everything.

Cancer therapy was really a science in disgrace. It was discredited underfunded
and it was the laughingstock of the cancer community because everyone knew that the immune system could not see cancer. There was no point in going in that direction.
Even the few immune therapists out there could not point out what was happening,
even though they guessed what was going in. Nothing worked in patients until extremely recently and the big change is that now we know that’s absolutely untrue.
Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies does not mention cancer immunotherapy once and it’s because he is a classically trained chemotherapist/oncologist and then they were trained against it.
That’s why people refer to this as a penicillin moment. It wasn’t just the penicillin
which saved millions of lives – it was the understanding that these drugs could block these little critters that had plagued us for so long. That we could actually control the most basic diseases with a whole class of drugs that fundamentally changed our lives.


Source: National Cancer Institute 

To be honest, reading your book, I was just amazed at how intelligent
cancer really is, its process of hiding in front of the immune system is quite ingenious. We’ve been underestimating the depth of it for so long.
Well, part of that is a failure of imagination and part of it is simply that we didn’t
really have the science to understand what it is. I’d say it’s pretty much the equivalent to exploring the deep ocean in our own bloodstream.
One of my concerns is that once we’ve managed cancer or nearly cured it and it will lead to a more vicious mutation, if cancer is so intelligent surely it will come up with another sophisticated way to attack the system that will evade us?
Yes, our immune system is cancer or rather shall we say they train in the same gym, they were brought up together, they are one and the same.  This is not a disease or a strain of flu, it’s really a matter of allowing our immune system to dance unshackled and also we’re now able to apply other understandings of cancer to other approaches.

We can now make a Robocop version of the T cell.


Nobel prize-winning immunologist Jim Allison. Photo: LeAnn Mueller 
Must Watch: Pluto TV – Jim Allison: Breakthrough 

Synopsis:
Jim Allison: Breakthrough is the astounding, true story of one warm-hearted, 
stubborn man’s visionary quest to find a cure for cancer.
 
Today, Jim Allison is a name to be reckoned with throughout the scientific world —
a 2018 Nobel Prize winner for discovering the immune system’s role in defeating cancer — but for decades he waged a lonely struggle against the skepticism of the medical  establishment and the resistance of Big Pharma.
 
Jim Allison: Breakthrough takes us into the inspiring and dramatic world of cutting-edge medicine, and into the heart of a true American pioneer, in a film that is both emotionally compelling and deeply entertaining.
James Allison, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Medicine, was born on August 7, 1948 in a tiny South Texas town called Alice.  Named for the daughter of the legendary King Ranch owner, Alice has boasting rights as birthplace of a second Nobel winner, Robert F. Curl, Jr., who took the honor for chemistry in 1996. It is also where Tejano, a unique Tex-Mex musical genre, took root in the mid-1940s.  Tejano may have inspired young Jim to take up the harmonica, which he still performs at parties and events, sometimes sharing the stage with fellow Texan Willie Nelson.   

Allison’s father, Albert, was a physician and his mother, Constance, a homemaker and “positive influence” who tragically died of lymphoma when he was eleven years old. 
There were 2 older brothers, Murphy and Mike. Life was difficult for Jim following his mother’s passing.  His father, an officer in the Air Force Reserves, was often away from home, during which time he was fostered by a local family with a son about his own age.  

Even as a kid, Allison displayed a yen for science.  Encouraged by his parents, he toyed around with a Gilbert chemistry set, setting off little bombs in the woods behind their home.  A summer in a NSF-funded science-training program deepened his interest.  
After graduating from high school at sixteen, he entered the University of Texas, Austin where he would earn a B. S. Degree in microbiology (1969) and a Ph.D. in biological science (1973).  He was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. 

But the fierce passion which kindled his interest in curative science, was unquestionably ignited by the early passing of his mother.  His life’s path was set by the time he entered graduate school, when he convinced his PhD advisor to bring cancer study into the lab.  

It was a propitious moment. 
The immune system’s “T-cell” had recently been discovered.  A type of white blood cell,
the T is a front-line soldier in the battle to keep us healthy, its role assigned by nature to distinguish friend from foe.  Though immunology was not even a bona fide science at the time, Allison zeroed in on the immune system’s potential against cancer.

(His dissertation proposed a new approach to treating leukemia,
but decades would pass before a similar drug was patented.) 

Soon after graduation, Allison began crisscrossing the country in a quest to unlock
the mysteries of the T cell.  How do T cells work?  How do they identify an invader? 
Why can they recognize the flu virus, for example, but not cancer? 
In addition to pure knowledge, he sought institutions open to innovative research – 
not a simple matter in a profession tending toward caution and rigidity. 
His first stop was Scripps Clinic & Research Foundation in San Diego (1974-77)
where he did postdoctoral work.  

Married by now to the former Malinda Bell, the couple often joined other Texas
ex-patriots at the port city’s Stingaree bar.  He fondly remembers one night playing his harmonica until the wee hours with Willie Nelson and his band.  “I didn’t have to buy a beer for a couple of years after that,” he recalls. 

LOVE THIS VIDEO: TCU “We Fight Back” Flash Mob for Komen 

That is called CAR T-Cell therapy, right? (A type of treatment in which a patient’s
T cells (a type of immune system cell) are changed in the laboratory so they will attack cancer cells.)

Yes, that spin-off is based on a new understanding of the immune system.
But you’re right, we’ve been underestimating the disease for a long time and failing, but we didn’t have much of a choice, it beat us every time.
What I found interesting was that in the end, the best thing you could do was to personify it and to give it some Majesty, hence Siddartha Mukherjee’s famous book, the Emperor of All Maladies if you will, so that you were vanquished by a worthy foe. That was the best we could offer, a noble death and now we’ve got other options.
“It’s really a matter of allowing our immune system to dance unshackled.”

There are currently as far as I understand almost a thousand immunotherapeutic drugs being tested by more than half a million patients. and another thousand drugs in the preclinical stage.  Where do we go from here? What happens to all the people reading this that have been touched by cancer that wants to understand more?

Well, the fight is on, and in a sense, it’s on for the first time. And that’s exciting.
The excitement needs to be tempered a bit though. There was this initial flush of enthusiasm and rightly so because some major successes happened. But we could use another breakthrough. We’re awaiting results on a weekly basis.
We used to have medical journals with updates on cancer only intermittently
now have new cancer immunotherapy updates on a weekly or bi-weekly basis.

It will be exciting to see what comes off first, all the combinations that are being tried
and those are just starting to tick out.  Personalized vaccines are hugely exciting, which is basically where you go and typify your cancer that relates to your immune system.
You then figure out the version of a drug that’s going to hurt you the least and cancer the most.  That’s science fiction stuff that’s now the clinical trials phase and continue to.
One of the hot areas right now is based on biomarkers and various means to figure out who will best benefit from what.
But in reality, it’s the economic toxicity that kills more people than anything.
We need to allow patients to be able to make better choices faster, based on what they need because if the drug works in just 40% of people, we’re just wasting your valuable time.  
But we also see for the first time an influx of talent from fields beyond the very narrow crosshairs of cancer and immunity. And thinkers from outside that space are coming into this space. It is sort of a sort of medical renaissance.

To temper this excitement down, some in the field have noted that Immunotherapy works on roughly 20 percent of people and that they have a variable survival benefit.  Some patients get to live long and productive lives, but many don’t. That it works well in some cancers and not at all for others and we are still finding ways to distinguish the two.
I‘m very very cautious. It’s a subset of patients and a subset of cancers. We’ve not arrived at a full and total cure. The door in a sense has only just opened, and there is a great hope that this will amount to a cure and treatment for a larger and larger group of patients. The notion of a total cure for all cancer is obviously the goal. I also think the idea that it’s all or nothing is a false goal.
It’s certainly not the way we treat mortality. The reality is, what you get with these is an immediate therapeutic response which is fundamentally different than the extra months
of life often that were given from front-line therapies.
What we’re looking at now is either it works, or it doesn’t.
There are remissions – and it doesn’t work in all patients. But for those whom it does work that is 20 percent of a hundred million people. It’s not right to just throw away those numbers. It’s 20 per cent success rate in some cancers, it’s 40 per cent in others, and it’s closer to 98 per cent in certain forms of childhood leukemia.


“We’ve blown open a whole door to a new wave of understanding diseases and treating it as so much of that.” – Charles Graeber 

Lastly, do you think immunotherapy could be deployed to fight other diseases other than cancer as well?  I’m aware of the AIDS epidemic and its relation to the immune system, and how it could have potentially been deployed early on had they the means.
How do you see that happening?
Yes, that’s a fascinating aspect of this, we’ve blown open a whole door to a new wave of understanding diseases and treating it as so much of that. It’s interesting you know so much of cancer immunotherapy came out of the AIDS epidemic.

Many of the researchers had experience with the failure of immunity.
Now that we know cancer therapy was considered a fringe science or some alternative treatment as did other “alternative therapies” which were looked at sideways by the mainstream scientific establishment.  We’re now understanding the role the immune system has in diseases like schizophrenia. It looks like diabetes and Alzheimer’s. We always thought of these as being outside diseases that perhaps the immune system failed to pick up on that.
We’ve failed to realize that perhaps we need to treat the immune system
rather than the disease. And the patient rather than the disease if you will and that that’s the breakthrough. It’s changed the horizons for a whole generation of scientists and
for us of course as humans.

The Breakthrough: immunotherapy and the race to cure cancer is out now through Scribe.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity purposes
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Praying for Uvalde

Posted on May 25, 2022 by Ken
SCHOOL SHOOTINGS: It’s not just Uvalde, Texas — gunfire on school grounds is at historic high in the US

21 dead in ’84 McDonald’s massacre a distant memory for border community.
The First Shooting I can recall is the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre which was an act of mass murder occurring at a McDonald’s restaurant in the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego, California, on July 18, 1984.

The perpetrator, 41-year-old James Huberty, fatally shot 21 people and wounded 19 others before being killed by a police sniper approximately 77 minutes after he had first opened fire. At the time, the massacre was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history, being surpassed seven years later by the Luby’s shooting.

For five years, they were co-teachers. Then they were gunned down. (msn.com)
It’s an all-too-common scene in the U.S., where gunfire on school grounds is at historic levels. And it’s not just after mass shootings — smaller-scale incidents at schools are also happening at alarming rates. Indiscriminate attacks at a school make up a small portion
of the more than 2,000 school shooting incidents since 1970.

Gunfire on school property is at an all-time high, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database. Children on lockdown. Armed officers rushing into a school. Parents and loved ones in tears waiting anxiously outside. Firearms became the leading cause of death among children and teens in the U.S. in 2020.

Uvalde mother living near school shares teacher’s heroic actions during the shooting…
Uvalde 4th Grader Didn’t Want to Go to School on Tuesday. She Died Next to Her Cousin.
Mother talks moment her son came face-to-face with Uvalde school shooter (msn.com)
Daughter of teacher killed in Texas shooting posts tribute: ‘I will forever say your name’.
After Texas school shooting, teachers weigh in on how to stop the violence (msn.com)
It’s not just Uvalde, Texas — gunfire on school grounds is at historic high in the U.S.
They hoped she was hiding in the Uvalde school. Instead, she was gone. (msn.com)
What we know so far about Salvador Ramos, the suspected Texas school shooter.
Details on how gunman entered Texas Classroom, killing 19 students 2 teachers.
Trauma surgeon recounts operating on victims of school shooting (msn.com)

This the deadliest school shootings in the United States since Columbine.
At least 554 children, educators, and school staff have been killed or injured in school shootings since the 1999 Columbine High massacre, The Washington Post reported. According to The Post, the shootings left 185 people dead and another 369 injured.
During that period, 311,000 children have been exposed to gun violence at school.

Gunman kills 19 children in Texas school rampage, as of Tuesday night.
The Post wrote that 331 schools have suffered from such attacks since the mass shooting at Columbine High School in 1999 when two students killed 13 people and injured 20 others. The frequency of shootings has also surged recently, with 34 incidents in 2021 — the highest in any year since 1999, The Post reported. Overall, an estimated 311,000 schoolchildren in the US have been affected by shootings or were exposed to gun
violence at their school since the 1999 Columbine shooting.

The outlet aggregated these numbers by analyzing news reports, open-source databases, law enforcement reports, and calls to schools and police departments, it said. Its findings only count gunfire incidents that happened on campus immediately before, during, or just after classes, and do not include shootings at colleges or universities.

It also excluded shootings after hours or accidental discharges where no one was hurt. Robb Elementary School had two days left in school year before deadly mass shooting that left 19 students dead and two teachers. Seven in 10 school shootings in the US were carried out by children under 18.

When It Comes to School Shootings, America Really Has a Deeply Tragic Problem.
Since 1999, the median age of school shooters on K-12 campuses is 16, per the outlet.
At least 70% of all school shootings since 1999 have been carried out by people under
the age of 18, when counting cases where the age of the shooter was recorded.

The youngest of these was a six-year-old male first grader, who shot his classmate in 2000 with a .32-caliber handgun after saying he didn’t like her. Based on incidents during that period, the median age of school shooters on K-12 campuses is 16, excluding 86 cases where the shooter’s age is unknown.

In cases where the source of the firearm used could be determined, more than 85% of shooters brought them from home or got them from friends or relatives, Combined, the figures point to the role adult negligence has played in allowing underaged children to obtain lethal firearms.

What we know about the gunman.
One of the deadliest attacks happened on Tuesday — a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. With 19 children & two adults had died as of Tuesday night.
The suspect was an 18-year-old local resident, who was shot dead by a border patrol
officer who rushed into the school without backup and was wounded in the process, 
a law enforcement officer told The Associated Press. 

Authorities told the Houston Chronicle the suspect purchased the two AR-15-style rifles the day after his 18th birthday. According to The Post, 311,000 children in 331 schools have been exposed to gun violence in their schools since the 1999 Columbine High shooting. The outlet reached these figures by aggregating records from news reports, open-source databases, law enforcement reports, and calls to schools and police departments, it said.

The Post’s findings only factor in gunfire incidents that happened on campus immediately before, during, or just after classes, and excluded shootings at colleges or universities.
It excluded shootings after hours or accidental discharges where no one was hurt.

The Last Thing: Remembering the lives stolen (msnbc.com)

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Large signs outside rural Colorado schools warn that teachers may be armed with guns.

119 school shootings since 2018
According to the website ‘Education Week,’ which has been tracking school shootings since 2018, there have been a total of 119 shootings in American schools since tracking began.

212 mass shooting in 2022
In addition, the Gun Violence Archive, an independent data collection organization, reports that there have been 212 mass shootings in the United States so far this year.
The shooter was only 18 and had a semi-automatic rifle

“Rifles should not be easily available to all.”
Eva Mireles’s aunt spoke to the press, as reported by The Independent, who said she
was “furious that these shootings continue,” adding: “These children are innocent.”

900 incidents of gunfire at schools in past 10 years
The American President seemed upset and frustrated as he continued, “It’s been 3,448 days — 10 years — since I stood up at… a grade school in Connecticut where another gunman massacred 26 people, including 20 first-graders at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. Since then, there have been over 900 incidents of gunfire reported on school grounds.”

“What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone?”
In his speech, Joe Biden expressed what many people outside of America often think when they learn about American gun laws: “The idea that an 18-year-old kid can walk into a gun store and buy two assault weapons, it’s just wrong. What in God’s name do you need an assault weapon for except to kill someone? Deer aren’t running through the forest with Kevlar vests on, for God’s sake.”

Biden blames gun manufacturers
Biden then took a moment to call out gun manufacturers, saying, “It’s just sick. And the gun manufacturers have spent two decades aggressively marketing assault weapons, which make them the most and largest profit. For God’s sake, we have to have the courage to stand up to the industry.”

Changing gun laws isn’t easy in America
While Biden may be eager to make changes to the gun laws in the United States, it is much easier said than done. A ban on assault-style weapons or high-capacity magazines faces steep odds at the federal level.

Is bipartisan agreement enough?
However, there are some areas of bipartisan agreement. It is hard to say if that will be enough to make the changes the country needs. Only time will tell; however, if Biden somehow manages to improve gun laws in the US, he will accomplish what many presidents have attempted and failed at before.

LATEST UPDATES:
/first-responder-learned-his-daughter-was-among-the-dead-in-school-shooting
At least 19 children and 2 adults dead in Texas school shooting at Robb Elementary.
Live updates: Texas elementary school mass shooting was the deadliest since Sandy Hook
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted in 2015 that he was ’embarrassed’ that Texas was No. 2
in gun purchases and told Texans to ‘pick up the pace’

One place you won’t find guns in the wake of the Texas school massacre.
The NRA’s upcoming leadership conference in Houston this week.

Who Is Salvador Ramos?
Uvalde Police gather outside the home of suspected gunman 18-year-old Salvador Ramos (inset). 

Shooter worked at a local Wendy’s.
The teenage gunman accused of killing 19 students and two teachers at a Texas elementary school Tuesday opened fire at random, according to local police. Ramos worked the day shift at a local Wendy’s, a manager at the restaurant told CNN.

Adrian Mendes, evening manager at the Wendy’s, said Ramos “kept to himself mostly.”
“He felt like the quiet type, the one who doesn’t say much. He didn’t really socialize with the other employees,” Mendes said. “He just worked, got paid, and came in to get his check.”
Mendes didn’t know Ramos on a personal level and didn’t see him most of the time because they were on different shifts, he said. Ramos worked from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
or 5 p.m., five days a week, and was already working there when Mendes started in February, he said.

“The suspect made entry into the school and as soon as he made entry into the school he started shooting children, teachers, whoever’s in his way,” Department of Public Safety
Lt. Christopher Olivarez told KENS 5. Texas Gov. Greg Abbot identified the suspect  Tuesday as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, an Uvalde resident who was killed by police during the rampage. At least 19 children, 2 adults killed in shooting at Texas elementary school, teen gunman also dead

What we know so far:
At least 19 children and two adults were killed in a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday afternoon, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Texas school shooter allegedly threatened classmates, cut scars into his face!
Texas school shooter identified as 18-year-old Uvalde resident (msn.com)
“They will drill down into his background”: Ed Davis breaks down police
proceedings after Texas school shooting (msn.com)

Millions from Biden’s COVID relief bill went to museum, university programs pushing social, climate justice (msn.com)
After Buffalo, Trump threatens “civil war”: Mainstream media refuses to connect the dots.
A ‘Potentially Hazardous’ Asteroid Is Approaching Earth (msn.com)
Biden, like Obama, promises unity but doesn’t deliver (msn.com)
Why Is There a Baby Formula Shortage? (bloomberg.com)

Published April 7, 2022, 9:22am EDT ‘The Ingraham Angle’ on Biden’s open borders.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin: We are not equipped to handle this flood of illegal immigrants. This is a public safety problem, a public health problem, and a humanitarian crisis. This administration is doing nothing about it.

A group of students was watching a Disney movie as part of their year-end celebration when the Texas school shooting began, says a teacher: report (msn.com)
The stock prices of the top 5 US gun- and ammo-makers rose the morning after a Texas school shooting that left at least 21 people dead (msn.com)
What we know about mass school shootings in the US – and the gunmen who carry them out | The Conversation | bozemandailychronicle.com
Law Enforcement Broke Windows to Let Children And Teachers Escape During The Uvalde School Shooting, An Official Said (msn.com)
How-the-Uvalde-shooter-made-it-into-the-school-after-engaging-with-an-armed-school-resource-officer – Search (bing.com)
Columbine And Parkland School Shooting Survivors Are Posting Their Support For Uvalde Shooting Survivors (msn.com)
Texas school shooting victims: Third grader, 4 fourth graders, 2 teachers among those killed at Uvalde elementary (msn.com)

At least 3 of the children killed in the Texas elementary school shooting earned honor roll certificates that morning (msn.com)
The spouse of a Robb Elementary School worker brought his wife flowers to celebrate her retirement – Search (bing.com)
Two 10-year-old-cousins in the same class were among the students killed in Texas school shooting (msn.com)
Uvalde native Matthew McConaughey says ‘we are failing’ after school shooting in hometown (msn.com)
The Texas elementary-school gunman bought 2 guns right after he turned 18, authorities say (msn.com)
Americans Have More Guns Than Anywhere Else in the World and They Keep Buying More (msn.com)
AR-style rifles like the one used in Uvalde shooting often leave victims unrecognizable, experts say

Texas school shooting: all victims were in the same classroom, official says – latest update.
Texas school shooting victims include 4th graders, girl killed in same classroom as cousin
‘Surprised’ mother of Texas elementary school shooter says he ‘wasn’t a violent person’
Parents begged police for upwards of 40 minutes to stop Texas school shooter: Report
After mass shooting, the small Texas town of Uvalde gathers to mourn and remember
Amanda Gorman’s poem on Texas shooting has captivated the Internet. Here’s why.
All victims of Texas elementary school shooting were in one classroom, official says.
Texas gunman left home after fight with mom about Wi-Fi, mother’s boyfriend says.
Salvador Ramos Bought Firearm on 18th Birthday due to Texas Gun Law Change.
Texas school shooting: Who are the victims killed at Uvalde elementary school?

Our baby formula crisis has roots in the WIC program that cannot be ignored
World leaders ‘horrified’ by ‘murder of innocent children’ in Texas shooting
Texas school killing, deadliest in a decade, prompts Biden call for action
Authorities-investigate-actions-and-mindset-of-texas-school-gunman
Explainer – Can U.S. gunmakers be liable for mass shooting (msn.com)
‘Complete evil’: Texas gunman kills 19 children, 2 teachers (msn.com)
Uvalde 10-Year-Old Was Shot as She Called 911, Grandmother Says
Video shows scene outside of elementary school shooting in Texas
Texas school shooting suspect’s grandfather speaks out (msn.com)
The victims of the tragic Texas school shooting (msn.com)
Morning of horror: the Texas shooter’s path
There is a sickness in America (msn.com)
Eliajha Cruz Torres. – Search (bing.com)

Biden slammed for gas prices, inflation comment: ‘Saying quiet part out loud’

BONUS: Columbine survivor speaks out on Robb Elementary School shooting:
‘You just kind of keep reliving the unthinkable’ (msn.com)

Source: Records show 70% of school shootings since 1999 have been carried
out by people under 18: report (msn.com)

My son was a Columbine shooter. This is my story | Sue Klebold.
A look at some of the deadliest US school shootings (msn.com)
Gunman kills 19 children in Texas school rampage (msn.com)
List of school shootings in the United States – Wikipedia
Mass Shootings in 2022: A Partial List (msn.com)

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What causes a Kundalini Awakening?

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Ken
Can it happen spontaneously with no prior training?

Yes, it can happen spontaneously. Others will tell you “No” but it happened
(is happening) to me.
As far as “no prior training” goes, I wasn’t preparing specifically for an awakening
(at least not consciously)
I’ve answered questions like this before so please forgive me if I repeat myself
(and I will link the previous related answers in the comments)
I guess you could say that I’ve been unknowingly preparing all my life. I’ve meditated and practiced yoga off and on, and I’ve trained in and practiced polarity therapy, craniosacral therapy and other forms of energetic/vibrational/sound healing for the last 25 years. These modalities require a level of awareness and presence that certainly has helped smooth the rough edges of awakening, both Kundalini and spiritual
That said, I still wasn’t prepared. Kundalini ruled me and created sensations and Kriyas that were powerful and often overwhelming for the first 1.5 years of my awakening.

Now 2.5 years in and I’m able to function better.  


I hope this helps 🙏🏼♥️

We have this human concept of rules and regulations – that “the soul takes this many days/hours to travel” and “this many days is what it takes to incarnate again” or “if we behave, we will go to this place, if we don’t, we won’t.” It’s what humans do – box and open, box and open, store more boxes, argue about boxes, go to war over boxes.

What the research shows – and by research I’m referring to the thousands of clinical case studies from Dr. Wambach, Dr. Weiss, the thousands of reports from Michael Newton and the Newton Institute – is that we plan our journeys. So that would include people “opting out” or saying, “I’m not ready to go back” or “I’m having too much fun on the flipside to go back and be bothered with incarnating.” It’s what people report consistently – they can choose to opt out, or defer a lesson.

So then we have to figure out what time means to folks on the flipside.
In terms of the research (speaking to 100s of people no longer on the planet via a number of methods, including hypnotherapy, mediumship or meditation) people claim that we bring a portion of our conscious energy to the planet, and the rest stays home. When the curtain falls – we return home. “25 years on the planet feels like five to ten minutes back here.” That’s reported consistently. So if someone doesn’t return to the stage for 250 years, that still feels like 100 minutes to the person offstage. (a few hours ago.)

But how do people plan their journeys?
They do it in concert with guides, teachers, classmates, council members – everyone weighs in. No one “comes alone” and “leaves alone.” We’ve been doing this for a long
time now, and all the key players know about the play. The brain has filters that block this information for “survival” but now that we’re poisoning the theater, destroying the stage, the “survival” is relative to our realizing that we need to leave behind fresh water, air and earth not only for our children, but our own possible return.

And possible is also operative – as 35% of the reports from the Newton Institute include memories of lifetimes “off planet.” We don’t have to return here – but I know quite a few people who like it here, like coming here and would like to be able to breathe upon returning.

Focus on “birth.” We spend time talking about “reincarnation” when we haven’t got
a handle on incarnation yet. Focus on incarnation. How does it work?
At what point in time does the conscious energy enter the fetus?

In terms of data, in the 2750 clinical case studies from Dr. Wambach, she never had a report “prior to six months.” That is – the conscious energy, the portion brought to a lifetime, didn’t enter the womb of the mother until six months.

In Michael Newton’s interview for “Flipside” he said that in his 7000 cases, he never had anyone report “entering the fetus” until the 4th month. (The first trimester.) That’s not opinion – theory – or belief. It’s data. It’s what is reported. And I’m reporting it as well.

So, when one examines the process of “birth” – of how conscious energy chooses a lifetime, chooses parents, chooses the path or journey and then chooses the vehicle to drive around the planet in – and when they actually jump into the driver’s seat – that needs to be examined before we start discussing why anyone might want to return.

What is the dark side of spiritual awakening that most people never talk about?
If the bright side of spiritual awakening is remembering the blissful truth of our unified and all-loving existence, then the dark side is the horrific realization that we are colluding in a life that is totally out of alignment with the truth of who we are.

The depth of our horror is proportional to the depth of our awakening experience. The dark side is the recognition of our ‘evil twin’ who operates in the shadows and resides in our blind spot. When evil twins are disowned, unharnessed, and left to their own devices in the world, the horror they inflict is what we call evil. Waking up to the presence of evil and its Machiavellian ways is nothing short of devastating.

Reclaiming and harnessing our evil twin is the only way to prevent it from creating
merry hell in the shadows of our lives. This is what is meant by the term ‘shadow work’
and it is a necessary and essential part of integrating and embodying our spiritual awakening.
We cannot transform our consciousness without reclaiming our evil twin and cleaning up the mess it has made in our ignorance of it.

Waking up to Truth is not all love & light.
I’ve been experiencing some sort of spiritual awakening, but I have become fearful at
what is happening and I know I’ve gone off course somewhere, can someone shed some light/advice? 

I can absolutely feel you dear Sarah. During the spiritual process the persona (ego) becomes just experience. Being the persona before the awakening and then becoming
just an experience may feel very dissociating. It may still feel like the persona is trying to achieve something, to get something or to go somewhere. The persona always remains in the realm of time and space.

It may feel very painful after the insights in much deeper reality.
Realizing that you are not the persona (ego) but being not established in the Truth yet may feel very anxious and fearful. You are losing the old identity, but you have not the new one yet. You may experience the phase of “no self”, this was very scary for me and I am sure it is for everyone.

But let the “job” be done by itself. There is nothing to lose.
That feeling that you were the persona has never been real. So you are just walking
out of the dream, watching the dream from “the other side”, till the dream will vanish
completely. After that you will be sure what you are and fear will disappear.

Are synchronicities proof of a spiritual awakening?

Yes! It’s a sign you’re growing and becoming more aware of your spiritual nature.
We’re all spiritual beings. It’s our birthright. We’re all born as a recent incarnation of God, the divine in material form. Just look into someone’s eyes. Just look into your own eyes.
Only we forget this at different stages of our life.
“Normal memory” starts to kick in, which buries our birthright by layer and layers of childhood conditioning and material society that wants to imprint the notion on us that
we are separate from the Universe and separate from each other.

We are not taught that we are one with the Universe when we are young.
This 3D material reality is just a veil blocking us from the realization of our true nature, our oneness to the whole. Synchronicities are messages from the Universe ensuring you of this once forgotten truth. They are the signs that you are opening up to your spiritual path.
When a synchronicity or serendipity happens in my life, I write it down. I want to keep track of them. I want to be conscious of them. Are multiple people mentioning the same book to you?

HALLELUJAH – guitar inspiration from the most beautiful song by Rock Milady.

Are you running into people from your past or the same person frequently?

Did you meet someone in a chance encounter, and have a mutual friend or
on a similar life path?

Were you thinking of a person and then that person called you a few seconds later?

Did a random person help you with something?

These may seem like common random occurrences…
But they’re not random and they’re not common (to the untrained spiritual eye).
The “trained spiritual eye” is common and they will happen more and more in your life!

The more we cultivate “inner stillness and an inner space” in our minds and hearts,
we begin to live in gratitude more. Living in gratitude is where the abundance begins
to flow from us — that natural and infinite wellspring of love, pure source.

Pure source, love and abundance within, reflect outward into
our life circumstances and the people who come into our lives.

It’s magic!
It’s waking up.

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Democracy versus Republic

Posted on May 23, 2022 by Ken
How many times does ‘democracy’ appear in the US Constitution?
This article appeared in the February 2011 issue of Globe Asia.

Since Biden has cost the American People between 7 to 8 trillion dollars of their real life and boundless stress due to The Biden and Bernie’s 110 page Manifesto. In which Biden believes all property is owned by the Government in unrealized gains. I remember reading this “Professor Steve Hanke article which provides one of the most insightful analyses of the Founding Fathers and their documents that I have ever read. Instead of considering the Founders’ documents with our present views, biases and prejudices, he focuses on their essential, original meaning. Many will be shocked to learn that the word “democracy” was neither used in the Declaration of Independence nor in the Constitution. 
Indeed, the Founding Fathers were anxious and fearful of allowing any form of tyranny, including the tyranny of the majority. This essay should be read and meditated on by all those who think they have a right to influence society. A real gem!” In the aftermath of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson set out to make the world safe for democracy. Since then, U.S. Presidents have marched to the drumbeat of Wilsonian idealism. Indeed, most U.S. foreign policy is carried out under the pretext — and in some cases perhaps the genuine belief — that America is delivering democracy to the rest of the world. President Barack Obama’s rationale for foreign engagements is, therefore, neither new nor unusual.
Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised to learn that the word “democracy” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Constitution of the United States of America (1789). They would also be shocked to learn the reason for the absence of the word democracy in the founding documents of the U.S.A. Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy. They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.

The Constitution divided the federal government into legislative, executive and judicial branches. Each branch was designed to check the power of the other branches.
The Founders did not want to rely only on the voters to check government power.
As a result, citizens were given very little power to select federal officials. Neither the President, members of the judiciary nor the Senate were elected by direct popular vote. Only the members of the House of Representatives were directly elected by popular vote. Even in this case, the franchise was quite restricted. If the Framers of the Constitution did not embrace democracy, what did they adhere to? 
To a man, the Framers agreed that the purpose of government was to secure citizens in John Locke’s trilogy of the rights to life, liberty and property. The Framers wrote extensively and eloquently. On property, for example, John Adams wrote that “the moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
The Founders’ actions often spoke even louder than their words. Alexander Hamilton, a distinguished lawyer, took on many famous cases out of principle. After the Revolutionary War, the state of New York enacted harsh measures against Loyalists and British subjects. These included the Confiscation Act (1779), the Citation Act (1782) and the Trespass Act (1783). All involved the taking of property. In Hamilton’s view, these Acts illustrated the inherent difference between democracy and the law. Even though the Acts were widely popular, they flouted fundamental principles of property law. Hamilton carried his views into action and successfully defended — in the face of enormous public hostility — those who had property taken under the three New York state statutes.

The Constitution was designed to further the cause of liberty, not democracy. 
To do that, the Constitution protected individuals’ rights from the government, as well as from their fellow citizens. To that end, the Constitution laid down clear, unequivocal and enforceable rules to protect individuals’ rights. In consequence, the government’s scope and scale were strictly limited. Economic liberty, which is a precondition for growth and prosperity, was enshrined in the Constitution. After European settlement, America consisted of thirteen English colonies. They benefited from a rather light administration from London and salutary neglect. This contrasted with the French colonies, which were controlled from Paris, and the Spanish colonies, which had entire institutional superstructures imposed from Spain.
Everything did not go well in the American colonies, however. One major colonial problem centered on money. Officially, British silver coins were the coin of the realm in America. But there were problems. The Navigation Acts prohibited the export of silver coins from England. There was also a prohibition against any of the colonies establishing mints. As a result, there was an endemic shortage of silver coins in the colonies. To fill this large gap, bills of credit were issued and circulated freely during the first half of the eighteenth century.
This resulted in high inflation, which forced most of the colonies to abandon fixed exchange rates and a specific standard. Things finally deteriorated to such an extent that the British Board of Trade imposed the Currency Acts of 1751 and 1764. These prohibited the issuance and use of bills of credit not fully backed by specie. The prohibitions against paper money created an enormous source of resentment in the colonies. Coupled with the better‐known Stamp Act of 1765, the prohibitions on bills of credit set the stage for the Declaration of Independence and the ensuing Revolutionary War.

The Revolutionary War added to America’s money problems. 
The best estimates place the cost of the Revolutionary War at about 15 to 20 percent of the colonies’ GNP. Roughly 85 percent of it was financed with fiat money. During the 1775–80 period, annual inflation was about 65 percent. Subsequently — and prior to the Constitutional Convention (1787) — the economic situation was one in which individual states increased taxes and regulations dramatically and money remained unstable. In addition, there was a great deal of political corruption and scandal. And to top it off, the economy was in a general slump which was punctuated by the crisis of 1787.
As a reaction to the overall political‐economic situation, the Constitutional Convention convened in 1787 in Philadelphia. In due course, the Constitution was crafted and ratified in 1789. It is a short, clear, intelligible document. The Constitution’s preamble contains only 52 words which are followed by seven short articles and ten amendments known as the Bill of Rights (1791).

The Original Constitution established the rule of law and limited government.
It is noteworthy that about 20 percent of the Constitution itemizes things that the federal and state governments may not do, while only 10 percent of the Constitution is concerned with positive grants of power. In total, the legitimate powers granted by the Constitution were less than those that had existed. The bulk of the Constitution — about 70 percent — addresses the Framers’ conception of their main task: to bring the United States and its government under the rule of law.
The Constitution is primarily a structural and procedural document that itemizes
who is to exercise power and how they are to exercise it. A great deal of stress is placed
on the separation of powers and the checks and balances in the system. These were not a Cartesian construct or formula aimed at social engineering, but a shield to protect the people from the government. In short, the Constitution was designed to govern the government, not the people.
The Bill of Rights establishes the rights of the people against infringements by the State. The only thing that the citizens can demand from the State, under the Bill of Rights, is for a trial by a jury. The rest of the citizens’ rights are protections from the State. For roughly a century after the Constitution was ratified, private property, contracts and free internal trade within the United States were sacred. The scope and scale of the government remained very constrained. All this was very consistent with what was understood to be liberty.

A remark about the Framers and the public is in order. 
There were 55 Framers and 35 had attended college. The college entry standards in
those days were very high and strict. At the age of 14 or 15, the normal college entry age, students were required to be fluent in both Latin and Greek and proficient in the Classics. They were skilled at the art of rhetoric and were keenly aware of the necessity of garnering public support for their constitutional project. For the Framers, policies needed to be developed from the bottom up.
At the time, Americans were literate and well informed, via pamphlets and manuscripts, about the political debates of the day. There were four times as many newspapers in the United States as there were in France, which was the center of continental thinking and debate on many constitutional and philosophic matters. The Federalist Papers were published in 1787 and 1788 in New York City’s Independent Journal, an ordinary newspaper. These important essays — written under pseudonyms by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay — were of very high quality and set the stage for the Constitutional Convention and the resulting product.

 In passing, it is worth mentioning that Hamilton organized this project, wrote most of the essays, and of all the Founding Fathers, performed most of the intellectual work for the least historical credit. That said, two notable economists have given Hamilton his due. Lionel Robbins thought the Federalist Papers were “the best book on political science and its broad practical aspects written in the last thousand years.” And if that were not enough, Milton Friedman wrote in 1973 that Federalist Paper 15, written by Hamilton, “contains a more cogent analysis of the European Common Market than any I have seen from the pen of a modern writer.”
After the Constitution was ratified and George Washington was elected President, the new federal government lacked credibility. Public finances hung like a threatening cloud over the government. Recall that paper money and debt were innovations of the colonial era, and when the Revolutionary War began, Americans used these innovations to the maximum. As a result, the United States was born in a sea of debt. A majority of the public favored a debt default.

Alexander Hamilton
Acting as Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, was firmly against default. As a matter of principle, he argued that the sanctity of contracts was the foundation of all morality. And as a practical matter, Hamilton argued that good government depended on its ability to fulfill its promises. Hamilton won the argument and set about digging the country out of its financial debacle. Among other things, Hamilton was — what would today be called — a first‐class financial engineer.
He established a federal sinking fund to finance the Revolutionary War debt. He also engineered a large debt swap in which the debts of individual states were assumed by the newly created federal government. By August 1791, federal bonds sold above par in Europe, and by 1795, all foreign debts had been paid off. Hamilton’s solution for America’s debt problem provided the country with a credibility and confidence shock. The state of economic affairs in the United States, roughly until World War I, was in the spirit of the Constitution.
The economy flourished, with large increases in labor and capital inputs as well as strong productivity growth. There was, of course, one near fatal interruption during this period: the Civil War. The war consumed 15 to 20 percent of GNP, about the same proportion as during the Revolutionary War. War finance was somewhat similar in the Confederacy (the South) as it was during the Revolutionary War. About 60 percent of the financing for the southern effort was paper money. The North also resorted to fiat money financing, but at only a 13 percent rate. Consequently, there was an inflationary surge.

In addition to the major disruption caused by the Civil War.
It is worth mentioning one major anomaly in the U.S. economy: lands owned by the federal, as well as state and local, governments. Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, wanted to sell the public lands as fast as possible. This did not happen. In consequence, the government still owns a huge amount of real estate. Its surface area is about six times larger than the total area of France. This is a state-owned enterprise. As you might expect, it is also unproductive. Detailed studies of SOE lands indicate that they are only about 25–30 percent as productive as comparable private ones.
America’s SOE lands have been the center of repeated debates about the free market system in the United States. Indeed, the American Economic Association put itself at the center of one of these debates. One, possibly the major, motivation for establishing the American Economic Association was as a protest against laissez‐faire attitudes in the United States. Not surprisingly, the May 1885 American Economic Review contains three papers justifying the retention of government‐owned timberlands!

On the Eve of World War I
Government expenditures were less than 2 percent of GNP and 99 percent of the population paid no income tax. The income tax had just been introduced, but the top rate was only 7 percent and applied to incomes exceeding $500,000. The federal government had around 400,000 employees, less than 1 percent of the labor force. About 165,000 troops were on active duty. No federal regulations of capital or labor markets existed. Agricultural production and distribution were also unregulated. There was no minimum wage rate and no social security. One area where there was a rather aggressive interference in the economy concerned the rates and tariffs that the railroads charged. Antitrust was also strong.
The conflagration of World War I marks a violent break with the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Property rights were suspended on a large scale. There were wide‐scale nationalizations of rail, telephone, telegraph and to a lesser degree ocean shipping. Over 100 manufacturing plants were nationalized. The government got involved in labor‐management relations under the Adams Act in 1916. Conscription was instituted. The Espionage Act was passed in 1917. The Sedition Act of 1918 imposed penalties for anti‐government expression, subverting the Bill of Rights. The novelist, Upton Sinclair was actually arrested for reading the Bill of Rights and Roger Baldwin, one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, was arrested for reading the Constitution. President Woodrow Wilson accomplished all this under emergency powers granted to him by Congress in 1916.

Much of this anti‐Constitutional apparatus was scrapped after World War I. However, residues remained and eventually resurfaced. All it took were other national emergencies — the Great Depression, World War II, the Vietnam War, and so on. With each, laws were enacted, bureaus created and the budgets enlarged. In many cases, these changes turned out to be permanent. The result is that crises acted as a ratchet, shifting the trend line of government size and scope up to a higher level. It comes as no surprise that governments spend more money and regulate more actively during crises — wars and economic bailouts are expensive and complicated. 
But a more active government also attracts opportunists, who perceive that a national emergency can serve as a useful pretext for achieving their own objectives. The U.S. and other countries seem no more aware of this today than they were in the past. And yet history has provided many examples to illustrate how damaging it is. Take the Great Depression. At that time, the organized farm lobbies, having sought subsidies for decades, took advantage of the crisis to pass a sweeping rescue package, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, whose title declared it to be “an act to relieve the existing national economic emergency.”

Almost 80 years later.
The farmers are still sucking money from the rest of society and agricultural policy has been enlarged to satisfy a variety of other interest groups, including conservationists, nutritionists and friends of the Third World. Then, during World War II, when the government accounted for nearly half the U.S. GDP, virtually every interest group tried to tap into the vastly enlarged government budget. Even bureaus seemingly remote from the war effort, such as the Department of the Interior (which is in charge of government lands and natural resources), claimed to be performing “essential war work” and to be entitled to bigger budgets and more personnel. Within the U.S. government, the war on terrorism has given cover to a multitude of parochial opportunists, whose proposals range from bailing out the airlines to nationalizing vaccine production. 
As a result, former President George W. Bush — a so‐called conservative — ushered in a record‐setting expansion of government. This trend continues with the interventionist President Barack Obama. What lessons can we learn? First, “democracy” and “freedom” are not interchangeable words. Second, only the first century of the American experience represents a standard for freedom. Expanding democracy is a slogan which requires great caution. It can easily result in elected tyranny. Freedom is the concept. Our challenge is to persuade every citizen that benefits flow from freedom’s practical applications. 

Freedom might flourish in very diverse and unexpected forms.
Democracy versus Constitutional republic
Democracy: What is a Banana Republic?

Democracy versus Autocracy
              Democracy versus Capitalism

  Democracy versus Communism
  Democracy versus Socialism

 Democracy versus Dictatorship
             Democracy versus Democratic Republic

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve H. Hanke Senior Fellow and Director, Troubled Currencies Project

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EcoSocial Collapse

Posted on May 22, 2022 by Ken
The cover page of a May 2015 National Geographic feature on Mekong dams titled
“Harnessing the Mekong or Killing It?” Image courtesy of manhhai/Flickr

How Asia’s Brown Cloud influence California’s Drought!!!

TRICK QUESTION: Are electric cars bad for the environment?
 Left: The Mekong River and its watershed. The river originates in the Tibetan Plateau of China, where it is known as the Lancang River; it then proceeds through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Right: The lower Mekong basin. The river empties into the South China Sea. Images courtesy of Wikipedia and Penprapa Wut/Wikimedia Commons
Left: The Mekong River and its watershed. Right: The lower Mekong basin.
Images courtesy of Wikipedia and Penprapa Wut/Wikimedia Commons

36 | KHONE PHAPHENG FALLS | LARGEST WATERFALL IN SOUTHEAST ASIA (Southeast Asia Travel VLOG) – Bing video

The Mekong River is the lifeblood of mainland Southeast Asia. It flows through six countries and affects the lives of some 60 million people. China and Laos are damming the river in many places. And Thailand is planning a large-scale diversion of water that could further affect its flow.

It’s still an open question whether the dams in Laos can be financed. Will Beijing step in?

This is the second article of an in-depth, four-part series exploring threats facing the Mekong Delta and how they might be addressed. Read the first, third and fourth installments.

Eco Social Collapse – Search (bing.com)
Nothing that influences the future of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta induces more angst than the hydroelectric dam projects on the mainstream of the Mekong, upriver from the Delta. A handful of Vietnamese experts have been sounding the alarm for years. That hasn’t translated to effective diplomacy by the government in Hanoi, which may have concluded — perhaps correctly — that resistance is futile.
Seven dams are already operating on the Lancang River (the Chinese portion of the Mekong) in the steep gorges of Yunnan province. Another mainstream dam is nearing completion in upper Laos, construction will soon begin on yet another at the Don Sahong rapids just north of the Laos-Cambodia border, and nine more are projected — seven in Laos and two in Cambodia.

Imagine a future in which Mekong Delta farmers can no longer rely on the river’s annual flood pulse to flush out salt intrusion and bring new fertility in the form of silt washed down from mountains far to the north. That future has already arrived. It is manifesting in a lower and later annual flood crest and a sharp reduction, perhaps already as much as one-half, in the river’s sediment load. As these dams are built upstream, their impact on the fertility of agriculture downstream and on the river’s fish stocks will be progressively devastating. There is simply no doubt of this.
Consider, for example, the dam cascade’s impact on the Tonle Sap, Southeast Asia’s largest freshwater lake. Its seasonal flooding is a hydrological wonder. The lake lies in a huge depression in central Cambodia. It is connected to the Mekong mainstream by the 120-kilometer Sap River.

During the dry season, from December through June, the Sap drains the lake. Then, when the monsoon rains come and the Mekong rises, the Sap’s flow reverses, and 20 percent of the Mekong’s floodwaters pour into the Tonle Sap. The area of the lake expands from 2,700 square kilometers to 16,000 square kilometers and its volume increases by 80 times.
In this manner, the Tonle Sap has regulated the supply of water to the Delta downstream for as long as people have farmed there (and doubtless for eons before), smoothing and extending the flood pulse. As dams are built in the Mekong’s middle reaches, however, the Tonle Sap may no longer fill as usual in the wet season nor drain properly in the dry season. If, or more likely when, that happens, the Delta’s hydrological rhythm will be undone, and with that, the highly engineered foundations of its agriculture.

A fully loaded boat in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. Photo by mariusz kluzniak/FlickrA riverboat in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Photo by mariusz kluzniak/Flickr

A slowly unfolding manmade disaster
Although Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam pledged in 1995 to “cooperate in the maintenance of flows on the mainstream…and to enable the acceptable natural reverse flow of the Tonle Sap to take place during the wet season,” as a matter of international politics, the Lao have the whip hand; the Thai are ambivalent; and the downstream countries, Vietnam and Cambodia, can only protest ineffectively.
Matters came to a head in 2011. Back then, in meetings of the Mekong River Commission (MRC), senior diplomats and ministers from the riparian states considered the imminent start of construction of a 1,285-megawatt dam and hydropower plant near Xayaburi, a northern Lao town. Supported by Cambodia, Vietnam argued that construction should be deferred for 10 years pending further study of the downstream impacts of the dam.

Thailand’s representatives squirmed uneasily. Though conscious of protests by environmentalists and farmers’ groups in their nation’s northeastern provinces, the Thai officials were also heavily lobbied by Xayaburi’s Thai developer and its intended customer, the Thai national power company. Lao officials listened, objected and at length declared that, having discharged their nation’s obligations under the MRC’s prior consultation process, they would greenlight the project.
Thus, Laos proved impervious to Western pressure, whether from governments, multilateral banks or the international media. Behind the representatives of the Lao regime, it has been easy to discern the hulking shadows of their Chinese patrons. The rest of the world has turned away from mega dam projects, but dam builders are a formidable sector of China’s state industrial complex. Their quest for new business in the middle Mekong dovetailed nicely with their government’s pursuit of dominant influence in mainland Southeast Asia. Lao leaders were charmed by the idea that their poor and landlocked nation could become “the battery of Southeast Asia,” and use revenues from power sales to fund economic development. Chinese companies’ free-spending lobbying efforts rendered the Lao officials blind to negative impacts on the environment and rural communities, even in Laos itself.

An image from National Geographic's May 2015 feature on Mekong Dams shows the Miaowei dam under construction in 2012. Image courtesy of manhhai/Flickr
A page from the National Geographic feature depicts the Miaowei dam under construction in China in 2012. Image courtesy of manhhai/Flickr

Western readers who have followed the Mekong dams issue understand it mainly as a matter of preserving the world’s richest freshwater fishery. That’s not a surprise; the Western media depends on fish-focused, Cambodia-based Western NGOs for information. And indeed, the impact of dam construction on migratory fish is a serious concern. Cambodians rely on the annual catch for 80 percent of the animal protein in their diets. Researchers agree that at least half that catch is at risk.
The implications of the Xayaburi Dam for Mekong Delta agriculture meanwhile got little attention outside Vietnam, and in Vietnam only belatedly. Hanoi had put too much trust in the MRC’s consultation mechanisms and the benign engagement of Western governments. Reflecting on the climactic MRC meeting, a Vietnamese journalist wrote in 2011 that “the Xayaburi business has reached a dead end….Now Vietnam must urgently make a plan of action to cope with the worst that can happen.”

Beijing’s dilemma
No political process currently gives hope, but economics may yet avert the worst case scenario for the downstream countries. Specifically, the middle Mekong dam cascade looks less bankable now than it once did. Citing environmental and social costs, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank decided in 2004 that they would no longer finance big dams on the Mekong or anywhere else. More recently, the region’s commercial banks, pondering the uncertainty of baseload electricity demand many years in the future and the political issues associated with the massive dams’ construction, have also shown considerably less interest in financing them.

The enormous Nuozhadu Dam in China's Yunnan province. The dam was built by an arm of the China Huaneng Group, a state-owned enterprise. Photo by International Rivers/Flickr
The enormous Nuozhadu Dam in China’s Yunnan province. The dam was built by an arm of the China Huaneng Group, a state-owned enterprise. Photo by International Rivers

Public policy analysts at the Stimson Center, a Washington-based think tank, concluded after conversations with Chinese bankers and construction company executives in mid-2015 that these, too, have become increasingly wary of risks, and more inclined to resist Chinese government pressures to finance dam construction on the Mekong. Finally, the Lao government is simply unable to guarantee the investments that it hopes will make Laos “the battery of Southeast Asia.”
Whether more mainstream dams are built seems therefore to depend on whether Beijing is ready, either directly or indirectly via the newly formed Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to guarantee its state-owned enterprises against losses. There’s no evidence that China is ready to give up the game. They have considerable ability to build dams and can leverage a dominant position in Laos to squeeze Vietnam while drawing other Southeast Asian nations further into the rising superpower’s political and economic orbit.

Diversions
Just a cloud on the horizon, meanwhile, is the Kong-Loei-Chi-Mun superproject, a Thai Royal Irrigation Department (RID) proposal to divert part of the Mekong’s flow. Water would be pumped from the Mekong’s junction with the Loei River, an insignificant tributary on the Thai side of the river about 125 kilometers upstream from the Lao capital, Vientiane. The waters so diverted would pass over and through a small mountain range and into the headwaters of northeast Thailand’s Chi-Mun river system. Newspaper reports say the project’s supposed to cost $75 billion, take about 16 years to complete, and irrigate 5 million hectares. That is, coincidentally, an area as vast as the lower Delta, including the Cambodian part, and so probably worth the cost of construction.
The Irrigation Department’s diversion scheme surfaced a few years ago and then was pulled back, whether for further tinkering or because Bangkok was daunted by the negative reaction of neighboring nations. It didn’t stay gone, however.

This spring there was serious drought in northeast Thailand as well as in the lower Mekong. When things got desperate in March, the newswires hummed with reports that the Thai government had authorized diversion of 47 million cubic meters of water from the Mekong. That’s just a drop in the bucket, so to speak, the equivalent of a mere 18,000 Olympic swimming pools, just enough to test the over-the-mountains pumping concept and Bangkok’s chances of facing down Hanoi, Phnom Penh and maybe also Laos.
An RID official downplayed matters, saying that it would have “no significant impact” downstream and, “anyway, large-scale diversion is at least two years’ off.”

If fully implemented, the super project is supposed to divert 4 billion cubic meters of water annually into Thailand’s dry northeastern provinces. Four billion cubic meters is four cubic kilometers, one percent of the Mekong’s average annual discharge into the Delta.
The Thai have promised to consult. They’re dead wrong if they think the Vietnamese won’t raise a fuss.
In the wake of the epic drought that decimated the winter-spring rice crop, Delta farmers are apt to blame upstream diversions and dams, rather than climate change, for an unprecedented bout of saline intrusion. Farmers are acutely aware that the customary rhythm of the seasons has been disrupted.

These are nervous times in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta.

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MONKEYPOX

Posted on May 22, 2022 by Ken
 Joe Biden is visibly concerned about the growing spread of monkeypox. RIGHT?

Terminating Title 42 would worsen the border crisis (WashingtonExaminer.com)
During his visit to Osan Air Base in South Korea, Biden spoke about the disease,
saying the United States is looking into whether vaccines could be available.
He also expressed concerns about the virus’s effects if it were to spread.
Health advisers “haven’t told me the level of exposure yet, but it is something that everybody should be concerned about,” Biden said.

“It is a concern in that if it were to spread, it would be consequential.”
FOOTNOTE: Diseases of the Poxviridae Virus Family: Smallpox, Cowpox & Cancer.
Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters that Biden was “being apprised of this on a very regular basis” and that the U.S. had vaccines available to treat the disease.
The U.S. confirmed its first case of monkeypox this year on Wednesday after an adult man traveled to Canada and caught the disease. There are 92 confirmed cases of the disease and 28 suspected cases across 12 nations, the World Health Organization said on Saturday.
Monkeypox is typically found in the tropical forests of Central and West Africa and is carried by animals, including primates. The illness usually begins with a fever, muscle aches, chills, and swollen lymph nodes and then grows into a full-blown rash of pox-like blisters. The virus’s similarity to smallpox allows doctors to administer the smallpox vaccine as a method to stop the virus. Smallpox vaccines currently have an 85% effectiveness rate against monkeypox infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The current risk to the public is “very, very low,” Johns Hopkins Center
for Health Security Director Tom Inglesby told the Washington Post.

Latest stats show Marin County’s homeless population rising; officials blame pandemic.
It’s no secret that there are great income disparities in Marin County; in fact, it is among the top three counties in the state where the gap between rich and poor is the most pronounced. According to this year’s Point in Time (PIT) count of people experiencing homelessness in Marin County, that gap has gotten larger.
The 2022 PIT preliminary report reveals an 8.4 percent increase in homelessness over 2019, from 1,034 people to 1,121. Marin has also seen a 34 percent increase in the number of families experiencing homelessness. The county said last week that the rise in families experiencing homelessness is “of significant concern to county officials.” There was some good news in the report. The number of homeless veterans has decreased from 99 to 65,
or 34 percent. 

County officials say they have made concentrated efforts in this “key” population.
Gary Naja-Riese, Marin’s Director of Homelessness and Whole Person Care Division, cited previous reductions in homelessness from 2017 to 2019 due to the county’s embracing of a Housing First model, which maintains that giving people who are experiencing chronic mental illness or homelessness (or both) a roof over their head increases their chances of stabilizing and being able to the better tackle their challenges.
Naja-Riese claims that Marin saw a 28 percent decrease in homelessness over those
two years prior to the pandemic. Unlike other countries which are reporting less-than-expected rises in homelessness due to the pandemic, Marin points a finger squarely at COVID for its increase.

Panning the pandemic
In a statement about the county’s numbers released May 16, the header reads,
“Latest Homeless Count Reflects Pandemic’s Toll.” Still, the county says that things
could have been a lot worse due to “skyrocketing rents, inflation and a once-in-a-
lifetime worldwide pandemic.”
“While we’re disappointed in the increased numbers despite all our efforts, we’re not surprised,” said Board of Supervisors President Katie Rice. “We’re just beginning to recover from a pandemic emergency in which those the least suffered the most.”
Most counties are reporting that they dodged a homelessness bullet pandemic-wise,
with expectations of much larger counts not coming to fruition.
However, eviction moratoriums and other safeguards put into place in California are coming to an end soon and some individuals and families could see themselves tossed out of their housing this summer, which is the timeframe outlined in Assembly Bill 2179, which extended the moratorium through June 30.

Homelessness Getting Worse
“While we’re disappointed in the increased numbers despite all our efforts, we’re not surprised. We’re just beginning to recover from a pandemic emergency in which those
the least suffered the most.”  ~ Katie Rice, Marin County Board of Supervisors.
Indeed, Marin County credits funding it received during the pandemic that it says staved off a larger increase in homelessness. One million came from the county general fund,
$2.5 million came from the Marin Community Foundation, and over $35 million came from state and federal emergency COVID rental assistance funds, according to the county.
Authorities in the county are now talking about solutions. Since 2020, Marin has received $24.6 million in Project Home key funds, a state program to shelter those living with chronic homelessness and other issues.

From Homekey to controversy!!!
But Project Homekey faced backlash in Larkspur this year, after supervisors approved
the conversion of a former assisting living center for seniors into a housing complex
with wrap-around services for chronically mentally ill and homeless individuals.
A petition entitled “Save Our Children” was circulated via Change.org to halt the project;
it gathered 3,044 signatures.
Dozens of residents also called into Larkspur City Council meetings to express their opposition. Ironically, the county’s only crisis center for people experiencing mental
illness already exists across the street from the planned supported housing project.

In addition to Project Homekey sites, Marin has pledged to increase the amount
of permanent supported housing units by 10 percent in 2022, with 714 units by the
end of the year.
The county said the likely reasons for the rise in homelessness among families is due to pandemic conditions, affordable housing shortages, and “an intentional change in method designed to improve our understanding of this vulnerable population.”
Asked to clarify the comment about the change in method, Senior Homelessness Policy Analyst Carrie Sager said, “For the 2022 PIT count, we made an intentional change in the method we use to count families. While it was partially responsible for making our count higher, we believe it made it more accurate.” Sager said Marin County will continue to employ this method going forward.

The post Latest stats show Marin County’s homeless population rising;
officials blame pandemic appeared first on Local News Matters.

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HERE’S THE LINK: to a 20 min video Vitamin D and immunity – YouTube
Where Dr. John Campbell discusses this study based on 10,000 participants showing optimal Vitamin D levels were linked to preventing bacterial & viral respiratory disease! IT’S PROOF Big Pharma knew!

It’s proofed our governments knew!
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  Ask yourselves why he didn’t inform the public!

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Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The End 0f The World is Near…(again!)

Posted on May 20, 2022 by Ken
Wuhan-400: was coronavirus predicted four decades ago?

Mind-blowing book predictions that actually came true
A writer’s imagination is a powerful tool. Not only can it create fictional universes, but it can also sometimes even predict the future. Don’t believe it? The creepiest prediction has just been brought to light by the internet, stemming from a 1981 novel by horror writer Dean Koontz.
It appears to have predicted the outbreak of a killer virus known as “Wuhan-400,”
which happens to be the name of the city where coronavirus originated.  Curious for more?
Click through to page 307 — for some amazing examples of how a writer’s imagination can manifest itself into real-life events. Dean Koontz – \(1981\) – The Eyes Of Darkness – PDFDrive.com (xperimentalhamid.com)


The Eyes 0f Darkness Dean Koontz pdf – Bing video

Conspiracy theorists suggest American novelist predicted coronavirus four decades ago
Washington D.C. [USA], Feb 28 (ANI): Time to put on your tin-foil hats as conspiracy theorists are now speculating that the best-selling American author Dean Koontz foresaw the coronavirus disease nearly 40 years ago in his novel “The Eyes of Darkness”. 

According to Fox News Koontz’s 1981 thriller novel mentioned a deadly pathogen called “Wuhan-400”, whose name is strangely similar to the Chinese province of Wuhan, which is the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak. A Twitter user named Nick Hinton shared an image of the page from the novel that describes the fictional “Wuhan-400” virus.

The Eyes 0f Darkness Dean Koontz on 312 page – Search (bing.com)

In the caption, he wrote: “A Dean Koontz novel written in 1981 predicted the outbreak
of the coronavirus!” The post incited several responses from shocked and puzzled users.

“That’s creepy,” commented one user.

Another commented:
“That’s crazy. He probably didn’t have a clue when he was writing it”.
Meanwhile, a gentleman — seemingly an avid conspiracy theorist — went into some more depth and explained: “The coming of a plague from China has been forecast for decades now. That it would be created in a bioweapons lab has also been stated by various fiction authors. Whether this is because it was preplanned by elites or those who foresaw tapped into some Jungian race-conscious”.

However, to the dismay of conspiracy theorists, the similarity between the two bugs just stops at the term “Wuhan”. The virus depicted in Koontz’s novel is vastly different from the actual strain in terms of its attributes and characteristics, reported Fox News.
“For instance, `The Eyes of Darkness’ describes that the “Wuhan-400” has a fatality
rate of 100 percent, whereas the coronavirus only kills 2 percent of its patients”, said the report. (ANI)   

BOOK REVIEWS:  The Eyes of Darkness by Dean Koontz  (goodreads.com)

The original 1981 edition of Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness made no reference to Wuhan-400, according to Snopes. callmestormy.net

Koontz’s novel, The Eyes of Darkness, is eerily centered around a virus outbreak that begins in Wuhan, China, and is used as a bio-weapon during wartime.

“Koontz puts his readers through the emotional wringer!”
Associated Press More Praise for Dean Koontz

“Dean Koontz is a prose stylist whose lyricism heightens malevolence and tension.
The Seattle Times

“Tumbling, hallucinogenic prose….‘Serious’ writers…might do well to examine his technique.” The New York Times Book Review

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image.png
Here’s the page, from the book, where the Wuhan-400 is mentioned…

A virus called Wuhan-400 makes people terribly ill … in a Dean Koontz thriller from 1981

The Eyes of Darkness, a 1981 thriller by bestselling suspense author Dean Koontz, tells of a Chinese military lab that creates a virus as part of its biological weapons programme. The lab is located in Wuhan, which lends the virus its name, Wuhan-400. A chilling literary coincidence or a case of a writer as an unwitting prophet?
In The Eyes of Darkness, a grieving mother, Christina Evans, sets out to discover whether her son Danny died on a camping trip or if – as suspicious messages suggest – he is still alive. She eventually tracks him down to a military facility where he is being held after being accidentally contaminated with man-made microorganisms created at the research center in Wuhan.
In another strange coincidence, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses China’s only level four biosafety laboratory, the highest-level classification of labs that study the deadliest viruses, is just 32km from the epicentre of the current coronavirus outbreak.
The opening of the maximum-security lab was covered in a 2017 story in the journal Nature, which warned of safety risks in a culture where hierarchy trumps an open culture.
Fact or Fiction? Did a 1981 Chinese Novel Really Predict the Coronavirus Outbreak?

 Theory widely shared on social media claims that American author Dean Koontz predicted the 2019-2020 Coronavirus outbreak in 1981. 

Most of the claims circulating on social media show the book’s cover and a page in the book mentioning a virus called “Wuhan-400”. The widely circulated photo of Koontz’s book page includes some highlighted text reading: “They call the stuff ‘Wuhan-400’ because it was developed in a at their RDNA labs outside of the city of Wuhan, and It was the four-hundredth viable strain of man-made microorganisms created at that research center”.
Some claims circulating also include an additional page that mentions the year 2020 and the outbreak of a “severe pneumonia-like illness”.  This is partly false. While it is true that Koontz wrote about a fictional virus in his novel and that its name “Wuhan-400” refers to the Chinese city in which the 2019 Coronavirus outbreak (COVID-19) actually started, the illness in his book doesn’t share more traits with COVID-19.

 In his novel, Koontz described “Wuhan-400” as “China’s most important and dangerous: new biological weapon in a decade”. He also wrote it was developed by labs outside of the city of Wuhan.
 There is no proof that the new coronavirus was created in a lab. The virus is believed to have originated late last year in a food market in Wuhan that was illegally selling wildlife. Health experts think it may have originated in bats and then passed to humans, possibly via another species.

 Reuters looked at further references of “Wuhan-400” in Koontz’s book.
 The symptoms and behavior of Koontz’s “Wuhan-400” are very different to COVID-19.
In the novel, the virus has an incubation period of “only four hours”.
COVID-19’s incubation period is between 1-14 days. According to the World Health Organization, the most common incubation time is around five days.
 Koontz also describes “Wuhan-400” as a disease with a “kill-rate” of 100%.
“Once infected, no one lives more than twenty-four hours. Most die in twelve”, he writes. COVID-19’s death rate is far from this, according to the WHO, the case-fatality rate is between 2% and 4% in Wuhan and 0.7% outside Wuhan.

 The symptoms described by Koontz are different to COVID-19. In his novel, “Wuhan-400” causes the secretion of a “toxin that literally eats away brain tissue” causing loss of control of bodily function. “The victim simply ceases to have a pulse, functioning organs, or any urge to breathe”, writes Koontz. Meanwhile COVID-19 infections have a wide range of symptoms, including fever, coughing, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. Mild cases can cause cold-like symptoms, while severe cases can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory illness, kidney failure and death.
 In the novel, “Wuhan-400” is described to be “infinitely worse” than Ebola (EVD),
but COVID-19 is less threatening than EVD. According to the WHO, the average EVD case fatality rate is around 50%, while case fatality rates have varied from 25% to 90% in past outbreaks. The new coronavirus deathrate is between 2% and 4% in Wuhan and 0.7% outside Wuhan.

 It is worth noting that in the first edition of “The Eyes of Darkness” in 1981, the fictional virus was not named after the Chinese city, but after a Russian locality named “Gorki” (Gorki-400). In the original version of the novel, the virus was developed outside of “Gorki” and it was meant to be the “Soviet’s most important, dangerous new biological weapon in the decade”. This is confirmed by a Google Books’ search of the word “Wuhan” in the 1981 edition. In this edition “Wuhan-400” brings no results.
 According to the South China Morning Post, the name of the virus was changed on
the re-release of the book in 1989, toward the end of the Cold War. Their article includes photographs of the previous edition that references “Gorki-400”.

In this edition, Koontz also published his novel under his real name instead of using his pseudonym “Leigh Nichols”. Some of the posts on social media also share a third image of a book page without any attribution, wrongly suggesting it is part of the same book. This page reads: “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments”.


 This page does not belong to “The Eyes of Darkness”. It comes from the 2008 book
“End Of Days: Predictions and prophecies about the end of the world Paperback” by
Sylvia Browne, an American author who claimed to be a psychic.

 This claim is therefore partly false. Dean Koontz did write about a fictional virus called “Wuhan-400” in the 1989 re-release of his 1981 novel “The Eyes of Darkness”, however, symptoms and effects of the disease do not match the official description of COVID-19. The additional page present in some claims suggesting an outbreak “around 2020”
is from a different book.

American Novelist Dean Koontz Predicted Coronavirus Four Decades Ago, Suggest Conspiracy Theorists |  Latest LY
No, Dean Koontz did not predict coronavirus in 1981 thriller novel | Dean Koontz.
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What is Stagflation

Posted on May 20, 2022 by Ken
What Assets Do Well During Stagflation?
Stagflation – The Financial Pandora

As inflation soars, one-third of Americans are experiencing financial stress: Survey
Economist Stephen Roach warns stagflation is coming to the US (msn.com)
4 Strategies the 1% Use to Deal With Inflation | FinanceBuzz
World broke four major climate records in 2021.

The mainstream media is focused on comparing the 2020 economy to the Great Recession and Great Depression. It’s because these events sound so great that they become the focal point of everyone’s economic fears. The reality is we’re more likely to face a long period of stagflation. Understanding what that means, and which assets do well in stagflation are the keys to outlasting this rough market.
Consumers should treat their finances like a small business. That involves keeping track of operational and overhead costs, along with tracking revenue versus spending. Increased prices and decreased wages equate to razor-thin margins. The working class is presumably in a bind, and the government’s economic stimulus is unlikely to change that.
If you’re looking for a path forward in this economy, this guide is for you. We’ll explain what stagflation means, how it’s caused, and which assets perform well under these economic conditions. Let’s start by defining the term, so you understand what we’re talking about. What Is Stagflation? – YouTube

Stagflation – Search (bing.com) is a combination of several factors that all point toward a difficult economy. It occurs when prices are affected by inflation alongside unemployment and other economic output factors. This means people are earning less money while spending more on everything from housing and utilities to food, medicine, and consumer products.
The term “stagflation” was initially coined in the 1960s, when a politician in the U.K. The House of Commons described the combination of employment stagnation and inflated prices. As the U.S. entered recession in the 1970s, the country adopted the stagnation concept to describe the situation. Until that time, stagnation was viewed as an impossible economic theory.
Employment and inflation were often connected in early macroeconomic data, but that isn’t necessarily the one-to-one causal relationship it was painted to be. Over the past 50 years, every recession aside from the 2008 Financial Crisis and proceeding Great Recession was accompanied by inflation. Even then, the market was split, as consumers continued spending through the economic dip.
Because the 2020 economy is unprecedented, it’s important to examine how stagflation was initially caused. Let’s look back at the American economy in the 1970s to determine the root cause of the phenomenon.
image.png
What Caused Stagflation in the 1970s?

If stagflation boomed in the 1970s and is now commonplace, the economic and geopolitical climate of the era should be examined. President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the United States involvement in the Vietnam War, and quadrupling of oil prices caused a chain of events that caused the stock market to plummet while prices climbed higher.

The weakened economy caused double-digit unemployment, which was, at the time, unheard of, and fewer had money to afford rising interest rates and prices.
It began in 1972 and stretched into the 1980s, showing the failure of American monetary policy. Nixon already inherited a recession when he took over from Lyndon Johnson in 1969 due to increased social welfare and war spending.
It was during Nixon’s first term that Social Security was expanded by Congress and the White House in time for the 1972 presidential election. Despite being fiscally conservative, Nixon also implemented wage and price controls in 1971 that, once removed in his reelection, sparked another recession.
The Nixon era is also notable to cryptocurrency enthusiasts as the time when the White House unlinked the U.S. dollar’s gold backing, turning it into a modern fiat currency. This move ignited a run on the dollar, which was devalued and hurt the Arabian oil barons who held large stocks during America’s automotive boom.
Foreign confidence in U.S. currency was at an all-time low, which meant buying oil (and anything else) from overseas started to cost more.

People who were alive at the time incorrectly associate the stagflation with countries in the Middle East raising oil prices, but that’s only a surface-level observation. The root cause remains the underlying issues in economic policy that devalued the dollar. So, what assets can you depend on when the U.S. dollar’s value goes down?
What Assets Do Well in Stagflation?
The first lesson Wall Street investors learned during the 1970s stagflation was they couldn’t keep up with inflation by depending solely on U.S. stocks. The U.S. market had unemployment dragging down its productivity.
Stocks were extremely volatile, while inflation continued a straight upward curve. If the dollar is down, investment in the government is risky. That leaves three solid investments to consider.

1. Seek Stronger Foreign Bonds and Cryptos
The fundamental issue with stagflation is you have access to fewer dollars, and those you do have access to don’t go as far.
When the dollar isn’t worth as much, it’s time to start looking outside the box to see the bigger picture. Comparing the dollar to stronger investments is crucial to outperforming the dollar on the market. Essentially, if the dollar is getting weaker, invest in whatever it’s weaker than.  Value is all relative, so stagflation will inevitably affect some investments more than others. Each country’s government, citizen, and industry responses will differ, and that will put some currencies in a better position to rise faster than the U.S. dollar.
On top of this, there are thousands of cryptocurrencies that cross borders and can potentially outperform fiat currencies exponentially in the future (as they’ve proven in the past).

2. Purchase Hot Commodities
Not every investment needs to be in security for a company. Commodities like precious metals, industrial metals, and other industrial and agricultural goods can help you weather a stagflation period.
Exposures to commodities are much easier to access in modern times than they were
in the 1970s, and the crypto industry has currencies, securities, and commodities too.
When the Covid-19 crisis began, toilet paper, bleach, and isopropyl alcohol became hot commodities. No matter which direction currencies go, we will always have a need for commodities. That segues to the last investment.

3. Locate High-Performing Stocks
Just like each country is affected in a different way, companies are too.
The global coronavirus lockdown forces mass furloughs in industries like retail, media, and healthcare. Meanwhile, tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Netflix soared.  Performing due diligence and investing ahead of the market is necessary to survive stagflation. Think of it as extreme couponing for securities. With all this talk about stagflation, it may come off as fear mongering, so let’s address how stagflation compares to recession.

4. Is Stagflation Worse Than Recession?
The short answer is that yes – stagflation is worse than a recession. It’s because stagflation combines the bad economic effects of a recession (stock declines, unemployment increases, housing market dips) with inflated prices. When this is dragged out over the long term, it becomes a problem that can have a big impact on societal habits.
Inflation devalues anyone on a fixed income and crushes margins for personal finances.
In response, consumers spend only on the necessities, and that starts to create stress fractures in the economy. Imagine not having a job, waiting anxiously on your unemployment payments to come in, and prices continue going up.
That’s exactly what’s happening right now, and that’s why many analysts believe the 2020s will be marked by an extended period of economic stagflation.

Are We Entering a Period of Stagflation?
While world leaders are doing their best to mitigate the problems caused by the 2020 novel coronavirus pandemic, the fact is our country spent over 60 days in a state of lockdown. Both small business owners and unemployed citizens are scrambling to find money to pay bills, and most of the stimulus funds promised in the CARES Act have already run dry.
Taxes are going to need to be raised to pay for public programs that can’t be stopped. In the U.S. alone, there have been over 20 million unemployment claims since the beginning of the shutdowns. Both foreign markets and cryptocurrencies are struggling as well. The option to invest outside of the Covid-19 impact zone is gone – everyone was affected.

And prices are already increasing.
Whether it’s groceries, cleaning supplies, video game consoles, or even medical marijuana during a month-long 4/20 cultural holiday, businesses are removing deals. Retail margins are already razor thin, so you won’t find the same sale prices on staples or luxury goods that you used to. It’s not a question of when we enter stagnation, because it’s already happening.
Only this time, it isn’t oil taking the heat. In fact, gas prices plunged during the lockdowns, with fewer cars on the road. Just like in the 1970s, it’s likely that monetary policy will continue these problems for a long time to come.
  
Zionism as a national movement that rebelled
against historical Judaism who is mainly atheistic.
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Roe v. Wade ruling has Biden administration bracing for nationwide wave of violence.
DHS Preparing for Wave of Violence ahead of Potential Roe vs Wade Reversal (msn.com)
Households are now spending an estimated $5,000 a year on gasoline (msn.com)
Oil Inventories Unexpectedly Drop by 2.4M Barrels Last Week: API (msn.com)
Sweltering summer heat in Texas to swell into eastern U.S. (msn.com)

Video-feds-find-drug-smuggling-tunnel-between-San-Diego-Mexico.
Northvolt Begins Shipments Of Batteries For EVs (msn.com)

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Pelosi-is deplorable: she states democrats-don’t-consider-formula-shortage-political.
Was César Chavez a communist – Search (bing.com)
Was César Chavez a socialist – Search (bing.com)
Was César Chavez Mexican — Search (bing.com)
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Cesar Chavez – Search (bing.com)

Biden administration begins easing restrictions on Venezuelan oil,

BREAKING: El Paso to declare immigration emergency (msn.com)

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