Home » Posts tagged 'war' (Page 17)

Tag Archives: war

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

One-Third of Ukraine Farmland May Go Unplanted As Russia Begins ‘Second Phase’ Of War

April 20, 2022

One-Third of Ukraine Farmland May Go Unplanted As Russia Begins ‘Second Phase’ Of War

About one-third of Ukraine’s farmlands may not be harvested or cultivated this year as Russia begins the second phase of the conflict in the war-torn country.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) noted in a report on Tuesday that the “vast destruction of crops and infrastructure due to the war jeopardizes food production.”

FAO estimates approximately 33% of the crops and agricultural land may not be harvested because of the escalating war.

In March, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged farmers to sow as many fields as possible to protect the food supply, but that appears to be a challenging task considering the displacement of people (labor shortage), bombed-out fields, severely damaged infrastructure, and shortage of everything (diesel, seeds, & fertilizer).

Ukraine is considered the world’s second-biggest shipper of grains and the biggest exporter of sunflower oil. The planting season has already begun — its crop production is vital to the global food supply.

Even if farmers were to sow as many fields as possible, their ability to export crops would be severely impacted during the harvest season due to damaged infrastructure, such as bombed-out rail systems, highways, bridges, and ports. Also, buyers of grains can barely get dry bulk carriers insured to transit the Black Sea to a Ukrainian port because of soaring war risk premiums.

Besides FAO, some private ag forecasters have warned crop harvests could be halved.

Forecast data from ag expert UkrAgroConsult show Ukraine’s corn output could be as low as 19 million tons, about half of last year’s 41 million tons.

There’s no question in our minds the impacts of continuing war will boost global food prices to new record highs. Ukraine is a top producing grains country and what this may spell next is a worldwide food crisis.

 

Destroyed by its own Propaganda: How Italy Lost World War II

April 7, 2022

Destroyed by its own Propaganda: How Italy Lost World War II

Someday, someone will write a history of the covert psyops of the 20th and 21st centuries. It will surely be a difficult story to unravel, because they are, indeed “covert operations.” Yet, it is not impossible to detect certain patterns that repeat all over history’s flow. So, it is an exercise that can help us wade through the tsunami of propaganda we are immersed in, right now. So, rather than delving into the current situation, let me tell you a story of a historical case that we can use as an example. It is a fascinating story, little known outside Italy, but it does tell us how easy it is for a country to self destroy by the wrong use of propaganda, especially with some help from foreign enemy powers. 

Let me tell you the story of how Italy wanted to become a world empire and how it utterly failed at the task, with just a little help from Britain, the Perfidious Albion. We start with the unification of Italy, in 1861, when the Kingdom of Piedmont defeated and annexed the Kingdom of Naples. If that happened, it was because Britain wanted it to happen.

It was a strategic issue. At that time, Britain controlled the Mediterranean Sea by controlling the two connections with the outside oceans, Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, while maintaining a military base on the island of Malta. By the 1830s, Britain had started having problems with France, which was showing ambitions of expanding into the Mediterranean Region. The British had already been shocked by Napoleon’s dash into Egypt, which had threatened their whole domination system. They absolutely wanted to avoid that it could happen again.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Putin Driving Up Oil Prices Is An “Outrageous Lie”: USF Geology Professor Dr. Marc Defant

April 4, 2022

Putin Driving Up Oil Prices Is An “Outrageous Lie”: USF Geology Professor Dr. Marc Defant

“I read a lot of the literature on global warming and for AOC to come out and say 2 or 3 years ago that the world was going to end in 12 years – that’s just hysterical craziness.”

About two weeks ago, I published an interview with Dr. Marc Defant about why he thought President Biden’s oil policies were “bat-shit crazy” and creating more turmoil than they were helping alleviate problems in markets.

This past weekend, I was happy to welcome him onto my podcast for a discussion about the current state of energy in the U.S., including pros and cons of natural gas, fracking, shutting down pipeline projects in the U.S. and the cost benefit analysis of extreme activist environmentalists.

Why We are Alone in the Galaxy | Marc Defant | TEDxUSF - YouTube

Dr. Marc J. Defant is a professor of geology/geochemistry at the University of South Florida. He worked for Schlumberger Well Services and Shell Oil for three years, with two years at Shell working as an exploration geologist.

He has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Geographic, the American Chemical Society, and the National Academy of Sciences, and has published in many internationally renowned scientific journals including Nature. He has written a book entitled Voyage of Discovery: From the Big Bang to the Ice Age and published several articles for general readership magazines such as Skeptic and Popular Science and appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. You can reach him via this contact form.

First, we talked about how the price of oil got so high to begin with.

Dr. Defant told me: “Gas was up 40% and oil was up 80% before the Ukrainian war started. What got me a little incensed was that Biden is going around saying the price of gasoline is due to to Putin.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What War in Ukraine Means for Energy and Money

April 3, 2022

What War in Ukraine Means for Energy and Money

The Media is the Number One Cause of War Since 1898

March 31, 2022

The Media is the Number One Cause of War Since 1898

In 1895, a 32-year old entrepreneur in New York City bought a failing newspaper and hatched a bold plan to turn it around.

The newspaper industry was cutthroat, especially in New York. There were at least 16 other daily newspapers in circulation, and there was fierce competition for readers’ attention.

But the young entrepreneur had an idea: thrill readers with tales of death, destruction, and brutality in the Cuban War for Independence against Spain.

Cuba was a Spanish colony at the time, but revolutionary forces had been fighting for independence for several years. Few people in the US really cared about Cuba. But the new publisher vowed to make them care.

His name was William Randolph Hearst. And his paper, the New York Morning Journal, constantly thrust Cuba in his readers’ faces.

Their stories were full-blown sensationalism. By early 1898, Hearst’s Journal was printing outright fabrications of atrocities committed by Spanish troops in Cuba, in an effort to whip up public support for the United States to join the war.

The government played along. While ‘war crimes’ did not yet exist, US President William McKinley escalated tensions by accusing Spain of atrocities, saying in a speech that “the civilized code of warfare has been disregarded.”

Then, on February 15, 1898, a US naval vessel known as the Maine exploded and sank in Havana Harbor off the coast of Cuba. 268 sailors died.

Several investigations were conducted, and to this day there is still nothing conclusive explaining how the explosion took place. It’s entirely possible that the explosion was caused by the Maine’s on-board fuel.

But Hearst (along with many other papers) jumped to publish stories claiming the Maine was sunk by a Spanish torpedo, and they continued agitating for the US to join the war.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

World War III is here, but it’s not what we expected

March 20, 2022

World War III is here, but it’s not what we expected

Movies and books have often portrayed World War III as either the final chapter of the human epoch or as a new but primitive restart for those who survive the nuclear conflagration. We cannot know if such prophesies will ultimately come true. For now World War III appears to have started with Russia’s attack on Ukraine, but without nuclear missiles so far.

Make no mistake. The battlefield for this war is worldwide; it’s just that it is primarily an economic battlefield. When Russia attacked Ukraine, the other great powers did not send soldiers and tanks. Instead, they orchestrated one of the most comprehensive economic warfare schemes ever devised.

Measures included cutting Russia out of the international payments system called SWIFT, blocking Russian exports (except most commodities) and discouraging commerce of many kinds with Russia. Many countries froze accounts owned by Russia’s central bank and also accounts owned by prominent wealthy Russians. Wealthy Russians targeted by sanctions also saw yachts moored outside Russian territory seized. The value of the yachts runs into the billions of dollars.

In the wake of these unprecedented sanctions, many non-Russian companies have reduced, suspended or eliminated operations in Russia. Here is a list of over 400. Not all were forced to take action because of the sanctions. But companies expected that doing business inside Russia would become extraordinarily difficult and also did not want to get on the bad side of governments around the world participating in the sanctions.

Russia has responded with an export ban covering more than 200 products. Notably, Russia did NOT include its major exports, energy and other minerals in the ban. It did curtail wheat and sugar exports temporarily…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chris Hedges: Waltzing to Armageddon

March 20, 2022

Chris Hedges: Waltzing to Armageddon

The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter.

Bus burning on a road from Kharkiv to Kiev as Russia invades Ukraine on Feb. 24. (Yan Boechat/VOA)

The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism.

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance.

This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of U.S. troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

World Economy Braces For Supply Chain Chaos As COVID Closes China  

March 16, 2022

World Economy Braces For Supply Chain Chaos As COVID Closes China  

The global economy is in disarray as the war in Ukraine unleashed a commodity shock with increasing risks of stagflation. Adding to the turmoil is an outbreak of COVID-19 in China that may unleash another supply chain crisis.

News from China over the last day shows a new outbreak of the highly contagious omicron variant has infected more than 5,000 people, the most since the early days of the pandemic in early 2020. China’s zero-tolerance approach has shuttered factories and placed some 51 million people into some form of lockdown.

As of Tuesday, omicron variant infections have been reported in 21 provinces and municipalities nationwide, including the capital of Beijing. According to CNN, five cities are in lockdown, including Changchun, Jilin, Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Langfang.

Lockdowns have forced factories to idle production and risk snarling production from Apple iPhones to Amazon Echo & Alexa devices to Toyota SUVs to smart television to all sorts of other electronic devices. Disruptions to exports may induce shortages and drive up inflation, just as the Federal Reserve embarks on hiking interest rates to control inflation at four-decade highs.

A Bank of America Corp. survey of fund managers published on Tuesday showed confidence in global growth this year is the lowest since July 2008, and stagflation expectations have jumped to a whopping 62% of respondents.

“You take all these little paper cuts and you start to add them up and you could be looking at a potential significant slowing of the global economy,” said Jay Bryson, chief economist at Wells Fargo & Co.

China’s zero-tolerance policy has reminded us that supply chains are still subjected to massive disruptions. The lockdowns couldn’t come at a worse time, as spring tends to be one of the busiest shipping seasons of the year.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What War in Ukraine Means for Energy and Money

March 14, 2022

What War in Ukraine Means for Energy and Money

World War III Has Already Started, and It’s an Economic War

March 11, 2022

World War III Has Already Started, and It Is an Economic War

Image © Chekov_UA. All rights reserved.

In an article I published in April of 2018, World War III Will Be An Economic War, I outlined a number of factors that portend a large scale conflict between East and West and why this war would be mainly economic in nature. I investigated how this conflict would actually benefit globalists and globalist institutions seeking to bring down multiple nations’ economies while hiding the engineered crisis behind a wall of geopolitical chaos and noise.

The goal? To convince the masses that national sovereignty was a plague that only leads to mass death, and that the “solution” is a one-world system – conveniently managed by the globalists, of course.

One issue which I used to get a lot of arguments over was the idea that countries like Russia and China would end up so closely aligned. People claimed there were too many disparities and that the countries would ultimately turn on each other in the middle of a financial crisis.

Well, it’s four years later and now we’re going to see if that is true or not. So far, it looks like I was correct.

My position has long been that certain nations have been preparing for a collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency (the primary currency used in the majority of trade around the world). My belief is that America’s top economic position is actually an incredible weakness; the dollar’s hegemony is not a strength, but an Achilles heel. If the dollar was to lose reserve status, the whole of the U.S. economy and parts of the global economy would implode, leaving behind only those who prepared – those who saw the writing on the wall and planned ahead.

The dollar crash coalition

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ukraine and the Next Wave of Inflation, Part I

March 11, 2022

Ukraine and the Next Wave of Inflation, Part I

Inflation from Useless Ingredients

The cause of rising prices is not always monetary. Before Covid, we wrote a lot about mandatory useless ingredients. This is when regulators and taxinators force producers to add things to their products, which buyers do not care about (and often do not know about).

There has been a steady march of added useless ingredients over the decades. But, like watching a child grow taller every day, you may not always think about the big change compared to five years ago (or 50 years ago, in the case of useless ingredients). It would be very difficult to estimate how much useless ingredients have added to the prices of each good.

How much do all the required airbags add to the cost of every new car? How many costs are added by all the emissions gizmos, and safety devices? The same is going on, in the fuel you pump into the car, the tires you drive on, and everything you put in the trunk when you go shopping.

The cost of these useless ingredients is high and rising. Before Covid, this was the biggest driver of inflation.

 

Image via rte.ie

Inflation from Trade War

For a few years prior to the virus, another driver began to emerge. Trade war. For us, this is a broader term than just tariffs. Though, there have been many tariffs added in recent years. Some readers may assume these are targeted at China due to its military threat, but there have been American tariffs imposed on Scotch whiskey, Canadian lumber, and many other things. Like useless ingredients, the consumer is often unaware of tariffs and how they drive up the price of the 2×4’s they buy. So they assume that the cause is simple money printing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Global Monetary & Commodity Inferno of Nuclear Proportions

March 11, 2022

A GLOBAL MONETARY & COMMODITY INFERNO OF NUCLEAR PROPORTIONS

When the sh-t hits the global fan, it often does it at the optimal time for the maximum amount of damage and with the worst kind of sh-t to soil the world.

For years I have been clear that the world is reaching the end of an economic, financial and monetary era which will affect mankind catastrophically for decades.

The world will obviously blame Putin for the catastrophe which will hit every corner of our planet. But we must remember that neither Putin nor Covid is the reason for the economic cataclysm that we are now approaching.

These events are catalysts which will have a major effect because they are hitting a gigantic debt bubble of a magnitude that has never been seen before in history. And it obviously takes very little to prick this epic bubble.

What is unequivocal is that all currencies will finish the 100+ year fall to ZERO in the next few years. It is also crystal clear that all the asset bubbles – stocks, bonds and property – will implode at the same time leading to a long and deep depression.

We had the warning in 2006-9 but central banks ignored it and just added new worthless debt to existing worthless debt to create worthless debt squared – an obvious recipe for disaster.

So as is often typical for the end of an economic era, the catalyst is totally unexpected and worse than anyone could have forecast.

WAR CYCLES

Yes, I and a few others have pointed out that we are in a war cycle currently, and recent events have clearly confirmed this and hit the world with a vengeance.

Just as nobody paid any serious attention to the warning that the Great Financial Crisis in 2006-9 gave the world, few people have taken Putin’s warnings seriously since the 2014 Maidan revolution in Ukraine.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This War Marks the End of Cheap Resources

March 10, 2022

Image credit: Miguel Bruna via Unsplash

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ukraine Is A Sacrificial Pawn On The Imperial Chessboard

March 7, 2022

Ukraine Is A Sacrificial Pawn On The Imperial Chessboard

Listen to a reading of this article:

❖

The war is not going well for Kyiv, and it would be unreasonable to expect that to change. As a vastly superior military force overwhelms the US client state, reality is in the process of crashing down hard in the face of western liberals who bought into the war propaganda that the brave, sexy comedian was leading an upset victory to kick Putin’s ass out of Ukraine.

Zelensky is now raging at NATO powers for refusing to intervene militarily against Russia, apparently having previously been given the impression that the US-centralized empire might risk its very existence defending its dear friends the Ukrainians from an invasion.

“Unfortunately, today there is a complete impression that it is time to give a funeral repast for something else: security guarantees and promises, determination of alliances, values that seem to be dead for someone,” Zelensky said Friday.

“All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you,” Ukraine’s president added. “Because of your weakness, because of your disunity.”

It must be hard, the process of learning that you were never actually a valued partner in western civilization’s fight for freedom and democracy. That you were always just one more sacrificial pawn on the imperial chessboard.

In a new article titled “U.S. and allies quietly prepare for a Ukrainian government-in-exile and a long insurgency“, The Washington Post reports that US officials anticipate Russia will reverse its early losses and successfully drive the Zelensky regime out of the country, after which “a long, bloody insurgency” is planned against the invaders backed by billions of dollars in US funding. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

All Hell Breaks Loose On Russian Oil Embargo Fears: Futures, Stocks Plunge As Oil Soars To $139, Gold Hits $2,000

March 7, 2022

All Hell Breaks Loose On Russian Oil Embargo Fears: Futures, Stocks Plunge As Oil Soars To $139, Gold Hits $2,000

All hell is breaking loose in the Sunday evening session where S&P equity futures and Asian markets tumbled, while havens such as sovereign bonds and gold soared amid fears of an inflation shock in the world economy as oil soared on the prospect of a ban on Russian crude supplies.

Emini futures were down 1.6% as of 9:00pm ET, while Nasdaq 100 futures plunged 2% and European futures were down 3%.

Post navigation

← Older posts Newer posts →

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress