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In a speech about climate change from April 4th of this year, UN General Secretary António Guterres lambasted “the empty pledges that put us on track to an unlivable world” and warned that “we are on a fast track to climate disaster” (1). Although stark, Guterres’ statements were not novel. Guterres has made similar remarks on previous occasions, as have other public figures, including Sir David Attenborough, who warned in 2018 that inaction on climate change could lead to “the collapse of our civilizations” (2). In their article, “World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency 2021”—which now has more than 14,700 signatories from 158 countries—William J. Ripple and colleagues state that climate change could “cause significant disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies, potentially making large areas of Earth uninhabitable” (3).

The consequences of climate change are likely to be dire—and in some scenarios, catastrophic. Scholars need to start discussing the mechanisms whereby climate change could cause the actual collapse of civilizations. Image credit: Flickr/Spencer.

Because civilization cannot exist in unlivable or uninhabitable places, all of the above warnings can be understood as asserting the potential for anthropogenic climate change to cause civilization collapse (or “climate collapse”) to a greater or lesser extent. Yet despite discussing many adverse impacts, climate science literature, as synthesized for instance by assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has little at all to say about whether or under which conditions climate change might threaten civilization. Although a body of scientific research exists on historical and archeological cases of collapse (4), discussions of mechanisms whereby climate change might cause the collapse of current civilizations has mostly been the province of journalists, philosophers, novelists, and filmmakers…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

The $31 Trillion Dollar Question – Can The Fed Afford to Pivot?

October 8, 2022

The $31 Trillion Dollar Question – Can The Fed Afford to Pivot?

In my other role as a secret apologist for Russia and Vladimir Putin, I was contacted yesterday by Sputnik News to comment on the official US debt number surpassing $31 trillion. I’m always grateful for the opportunity to talk about these issues.

I am, after all, a fiscal hawk extraordinaire,.

At the same time, I’m completely hip to why Sputnik (and RT) wanted to discuss this issue. They are running their own framing campaign, propaganda if you will. I’m no one’s useful idiot when it comes to these matters.

They may have been looking for a dissident American voice to berate the US for its reckless spending, which fits the Russian media narrative that the US cannot sustain its current pressure campaign against Russia.

This is meant to counter the West’s narrative that Russia can’t sustain its military operations in Ukraine.

Hey, everyone’s got a truth to tell. I get it, it’s a war out there. All I can do is make the best use of the opportunities in front of me and tell my version of those truths. Because talking about things truthfully may actually get us one step back on the path towards peace rather than global war. That said, if I see no upside to the opportunity, the best thing to do is turn it down politely and wait for the next one.

At the same time we all have to realize that Russian media outlets have a hard time booking guests at this point due to the massive political pressure. So, as always, I see the opportunity as a way to talk to everyone to further understanding these things, not just feed one side’s attempt to shift the Overton Window.

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

The Alarm Bells of Civilizational Collapse Are Ringing — But Are We Listening?

October 4, 2022

The Alarm Bells of Civilizational Collapse Are Ringing — But Are We Listening?

If Our Civilization Is Going to Survive, It’s Going to Have to Change Like This — Fast

Right about now, you’re probably feeling overwhelmed. With all the chaos out there. This is the Age of Too Much Chaos. Every day brings a new catastrophe, it seems, and with it, an ever-mounting sense of dread, urgency, anger, and helplessness — the weird, upsetting feelings of now. End Times Vibes.

How to make sense of all this? I bet you’re struggling, and that’s OK, because me and a friend are here to help.

My friend? He just gave the most important speech of the 21st century, containing the most crucial idea of the 21st century — only nobody was listening.

I know, I know. You doubt me. Don’t worry, by the end of this, I guarantee — you won’t. Instead, your mind will be blown.

Here’s what he has to say.

We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.

The international community is not ready or willing to tackle the big dramatic challenges of our age. These crises threaten the very future of humanity and the fate of our planet.

Got that? Let’s keep going.

Let’s have no illusions. We are in rough seas. A winter of global discontent is on the horizon. A cost-of-living crisis is raging. Trust is crumbling. Inequalities are exploding. Our planet is burning. People are hurting — with the most vulnerable suffering the most.

Hey, he sounds like a lot like…you, Umair, I bet you’re thinking. So who is my friend? Well, he’s not really my friend. He’s the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres. Those are his opening remarks to the General Assembly, this year. Lol, and you think you have bad mornings.

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

An Oil Supply Shock May Be Imminent

September 28, 2022

An Oil Supply Shock May Be Imminent

Oil demand has remained resilient in the face of a multitude of challenges.
OPEC+ has fallen behind more than 3.5 million bpd on its output goals.
The DoE has no immediate plans to start refilling the SPR.
The risk of a supply shock grows as China’s economy re-opens while Russian oil is being forced off the market.

When the chief executive of Aramco said earlier this week that years of underinvestment had damaged the balance between supply and demand in the oil market, it should have been a wake-up call to those in decision-making positions. Instead, the secretary-general of the UN bashed the oil industry once again for “feasting” on record-high profits and urged governments to make them pay for this.

Meanwhile, OPEC’s production shortfall last month reached 3.58 million bpd—a figure equal to some 3.5 percent of global demand—and the United States continued to sell oil from its strategic petroleum reserve.

These seemingly unrelated news reports do have something very important in common. Both clearly suggest a supply shortfall on a global level is imminent. Throw in the news that Russia’s oil exports could fall by some 2.4 million bpd after the EU embargo enters into effect in December, and an oil shortage becomes more or less unavoidable.

Oil demand has remained resilient in the face of a multitude of challenges, and even prices of over $100 per barrel failed to curb it in any significant way earlier this year. Now, prices are somewhat tempered, but the embargo is still about two months away. Once this kicks in, prices are bound to jump because alternative supply is limited. And the U.S. will need to start refilling its SPR at some point because it is getting depleted.

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

The Washington Post Dabbles in Orwell

September 27, 2022

The Washington Post Dabbles in Orwell

In scrubbed piece about Edward Snowden, the Bezos Post offers a preview of how history will be re-written

Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship on Monday to Edward Snowden, a former security consultant who leaked information about top-secret U.S. surveillance programs and is still wanted by Washington on espionage charges.

The story added:

Snowden’s disclosures, published first in The Washington Post and the Guardian, were arguably the biggest security breach in U.S. history. The information revealed top-secret NSA surveillance as part of a program known as PRISM and the extraction of a wide range of digital information.

Snowden is America’s most famous revealer-of-secrets, and the way he’s talked about has evolved to an extreme degree in less than a decade, showing how quickly a story about security overreach can be flipped into an argument for more vigilance. The press, which once worked with Snowden in its proper role as a bulwark against government excess, is effectively an arm of the state now, as is shown again in this absurd episode.

This article began as an aggressive rewrite of history and the Post’s own views, but underwent numerous alterations after it attracted criticism online yesterday.

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

New Zealand Prime Minister Calls for a Global Censorship System

September 27, 2022

New Zealand Prime Minister Calls for a Global Censorship System

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest liberal leader to call for an international alliance to censor speech. Unsatisfied with the unprecedented corporate censorship of social media companies, leaders like Hillary Clinton have turned from private censorship to good old-fashioned state censorship. Speech regulation has become an article of faith on the left. Ardern used her speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly to call for censorship on a global scale.

Ardern lashed out at “disinformation” and called for a global coalition to control speech. After nodding toward free speech, she proceeded to lay out a plan for its demise through government regulation:

But what if that lie, told repeatedly, and across many platforms, prompts, inspires, or motivates others to take up arms. To threaten the security of others. To turn a blind eye to atrocities, or worse, to become complicit in them. What then?

This is no longer a hypothetical. The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old.

We recognized the threats that the old weapons created. We came together as communities to minimize these threats. We created international rules, norms and expectations. We never saw that as a threat to our individual liberties – rather, it was a preservation of them. The same must apply now as we take on these new challenges.

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

World population is growing faster than we thought

August 4, 2022

World population is growing faster than we thought

We’ve all heard the aphorism ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics.’ Statistics are an invaluable tool for understanding and responding appropriately to the world, but when the numbers say one thing and the headlines say another, it’s a cause for concern. TOP takes a dive into World Population Prospects 2022.

The world’s population has grown more than anticipated in the past three years.

That should have been the headline when the United Nations released its latest revision of world population data (World Population Prospects 2022) on 11 July. Instead, the headline was that global population would peak in 2086 at 10.4 billion, about 15 years earlier and half a billion fewer than projected in 2019.

Is this fake news? Why should greater-than-anticipated growth yield lower future growth projections? Let’s look at the data they have given us. Apologies if this article is a bit nerdy, but the UN projections play an important role in government planning throughout the world. Any criticism of them needs to be thoroughly justified.

Figure 1 shows the world population as it was estimated in each revision of World Population Prospects (WPP) from 2010 to 2022. The pink line connects each revision’s estimate of the current population, i.e. the mid-2010 population as estimated by WPP2010 connected to the mid-2012 population as estimated by WPP2012 etc. Using this rolling-current estimate avoids any bias in the UN’s model that might be influencing the slope of the projected line.

In blue dashed lines are the projected growth anticipated in each of those revisions. With the exception of 2019, where recent past estimates closely matched what was expected in 2017, each new revision has concluded that growth since the last update was greater than they anticipated.

The world population estimates for each successive revision of World Population Prospects from 2010 to 2022 have been higher than the previous years'

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

UN Secretary-General Blames Global Economic Crisis On Ukraine War

August 4, 2022

UN Secretary-General Blames Global Economic Crisis On Ukraine War

NATO governments and globalist institutions have put on a good show acting as if they hate Putin and the Russian advance in Ukraine, but the reality is that the war acts as an all encompassing distraction from the greater agenda at hand. It offers globalist organizations, western politicians and central banks a perfect scapegoat for the ongoing economic instability caused by THEIR policies.

As anyone that follows alternative economic knows, the stagflationary crisis that is escalating today was triggered well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Price inflation was hitting 40 year highs in December of 2021, months before the war started. Gas prices were skyrocketing long before sanctions on Russia were ever implemented, climbing from an average of $2.20 per gallon in November of 2020 to $5 per gallon in June of 2022. That’s more than a 100% increase in less than two years and most of it occurred before Ukraine was an issue.

What really caused stagflation? It’s a process initiated by central bank stimulus that the alternative media has been warning about for many years. The real culprits are central bankers and the politicians that align with them. The world has been awash in fiat money as a means to prolong economic corrections that should have been allowed to run their course a long time ago. Instead, bankers sought to artificially prop up the system and funnel money into “too big to fail” corporations along with the too big to fail stock markets. Now, of course, things are changing.

The inevitable Catch-22 dynamic has come into play – Central banks can continue to print and keep interest rates near zero, but inflation will rapidly expand, making all their efforts pointless as rising costs lead to plummeting demand…

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

UN, World Economic Forum Behind Global ‘War on Farmers’: Experts

July 30, 2022

A sign of the World Economic Forum (WEF) is seen at the Congress centre during its annual meeting in Davos on May 23, 2022. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)

US NEWS

UN, World Economic Forum Behind Global ‘War on Farmers’: Experts

They say ‘Agenda 2030’ development goals at root of sustainability policies that could lead to food shortages

The escalating regulatory attack on agricultural producers from Holland and the United States to Sri Lanka and beyond is closely tied to the United Nations’ “Agenda 2030” Sustainable Development Goals and the U.N.’s partners at the World Economic Forum (WEF), numerous experts told The Epoch Times.

Indeed, several of the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are directly implicated in policies that are squeezing farmers, ranchers, and food supplies around the world.

High-level Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members within the U.N. system helped create the SDGs and are currently helping lead the organization’s implementation of the global plan, The Epoch Times has previously documented.

If left unchecked, multiple experts said, the U.N.-backed sustainability policies on agriculture and food production would lead to economic devastation, shortages of critical goods, widespread famine, and a dramatic loss of individual freedoms.

Epoch Times Photo — Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), is seen at the opening of the WEF Davos Agenda in Cologny, Switzerland, on Jan. 17, 2022. (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)

Already, millions of people worldwide are facing dangerous food shortages, and officials around the world say those are set to get worse as the year goes on.

There is an agenda behind it all, experts told The Epoch Times.

Even private land ownership is in the crosshairs, as global food production and the world economy are transformed to meet the global sustainability goals, U.N. documents reviewed by The Epoch Times show.

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

UN Warns of ‘Total Societal Collapse’Due to Breaching of Planetary Boundaries

June 2, 2022

UN Warns of ‘Total Societal Collapse’Due to Breaching of Planetary Boundaries

A landmark report by the United Nations concludes that ‘global collapse’ is becoming more likely. But was it watered-down before being published?

When the United Nations published its 2022 ‘Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction’ (GAR2022) in May, the world’s attention was on its grim verdict that the world was experiencing an accelerating trend of natural disasters and economic crises. But not a single media outlet picked up the biggest issue: the increasing probability of civilisational collapse.

Buried in the report, which was endorsed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, is the finding that escalating synergies between disasters, economic vulnerabilities and ecosystem failures are escalating the risk of a “global collapse” scenario.

This stark conclusion appears to be the first time that the UN has issued a flagship global report finding that existing global policies are accelerating toward the collapse of human civilisation. Yet somehow this urgent warning has remained unreported until now.

The report does not suggest that this outcome is inevitable or specify how close to this possibility we are. But it does confirm that, without radical change, that’s where the world is heading.

Planetary Boundaries

The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai Framework are a set of social, economic, legal, political and institutional measures to reduce “disaster risk and losses” – both involve targets to 2030 which the world is in danger of failing to meet.

That failure, however, is directly linked to the rate at which human activities are interfering with natural systems, in particular, ‘planetary boundaries’.

The planetary boundaries framework was developed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre in 2009 to provide what it calls a “science-based analysis of the risk that human perturbations will destabilise the Earth system at the planetary scale”…

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

World Has Just ’10 Weeks’ of Wheat Supplies Left in Storage, Analyst Warns

May 24, 2022

A combine drives over stalks of soft red winter wheat during the harvest on a farm in Dixon, Illinois, on July 16, 2013. (REUTERS/Jim Young)

World Has Just ’10 Weeks’ of Wheat Supplies Left in Storage, Analyst Warns

The world has only about 10 weeks of wheat supplies left in storage amid the conflict in Ukraine and as India has moved to bar exports of wheat in recent weeks, a food insecurity expert says.

Sara Menker, the CEO of agriculture analytics firm Gro Intelligence, told the United Nations Security Council on May 19 that the Russia–Ukraine war “simply added fuel to a fire that was long burning,” saying that it is not the primary cause of the wheat shortage. Ukraine and Russia both produce close to about a third of the world’s wheat.

“I want to start by explicitly saying that the Russia–Ukraine war did not start the food security crisis. It simply added fuel to a fire that was long burning. A crisis we detected tremors from long before the COVID 19 pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains,” Menker said, according to a transcript.

“I share this because we believe it’s important for you all to understand that even if the war were to end tomorrow, our food security problem isn’t going away anytime soon without concerted action.”

In providing data, Menker said that due to price increases in major crops this year, it’s made another 400 million worldwide “food insecure,” adding that with wheat, the world “currently only [has] 10 weeks of global consumption sitting in inventory around the world.

“Conditions today are worse than those experienced in 2007 and 2008,” she said. “It is important to note that the lowest grain inventory levels the world has ever seen are now occurring while access to fertilizers is highly constrained, and drought in wheat-growing regions around the world is the most extreme it’s been in over 20 years…

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

Advancing interconnected solutions to the food, energy and finance crises

May 18, 2022

The governing body of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) met in Rome on April 8, 2022 in an Extraordinary Session to examine the “impact of the Ukraine-Russia conflict on global food security and related matters under its mandate” and advise on how it should proceed. Meanwhile, just two days earlier, the Civil Society and Indigenous People Mechanism (CSIPM) at U.N. Committee on World Food Security (CFS) called for an Extraordinary Plenary Session of the CFS.

We must consider these developments along with a new initiative from the U.N. and against the background of the FAO’s global food prices index reaching its highest level ever.

In response to the immediate crises provoked by the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, on March 14 the U.N. Secretary General (SG) António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres announced the establishment of the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy and Finance (GCRG). On April 5, he released the GCRG’s initial recommendations. According to remarks made by the U.N. SG at the U.N. Security Council Meeting, these initial recommendations are for the consideration of the member states, international financial institutions and others. In brief, they are:

On food: To avoid the risk of hunger and famine spreading further, the GRCG urges all countries to keep markets open, resist unjustified and unnecessary export restrictions, and make reserves available to countries at risk of hunger and famine.
On energy: While some countries’ plans to release strategic reserves of fossil fuels in an attempt to reduce their dependence on Russian stocks could help ease the current crisis in the short term, the only medium and long-term solution is accelerated deployment of renewable energy, which is not impacted by market fluctuations. Renewable energy deployment is the best option in most cases and will allow the progressive phaseout of coal and all other fossil fuels.

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

Ukraine Grain Strain: Almost 25 Million Tonnes Blocked From Export

May 8, 2022

Ukraine Grain Strain: Almost 25 Million Tonnes Blocked From Export

A massive backlog of grain shipments is piling up in Ukraine to the tune of nearly 25 million tonnes due to ‘infrastructure challenges’ and blocked ports in the Black Sea, including Mariupol, Reuters reports, citing a UN food agency official.’

Ukraine was the fourth-largest exporter of maize (corn) in the 2020/21 season, and the sixth-largest wheat exporter in the world, according to the International Grains Council.

It’s an almost grotesque situation we see at the moment in Ukraine with nearly 25 mln tonnes of grain that could be exported but that cannot leave the country simply because of lack of infrastructure, the blockade of the ports,” said FAO Deputy Director Josef Schmidhuber during a Geneva press briefing via Zoom.

According to Schmidhuber, the full silos could result in storage shortages for this year’s July and August harvests.

“Despite the war the harvest conditions don’t look that dire. That could really mean there’s not enough storage capacity in Ukraine, particularly if there’s no wheat corridor opening up for export from Ukraine.”

He alluded to destroyed grain storage as a result of the Russian invasion, without elaborating.

CNN, however, reports from ‘multiple sources’ that Russian forces have allegedly plundered farm equipment and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grains from Ukraine, with the Ministry of Defense estimating on Thursday that 400,000 tonnes of grain had been stolen to date.

[And given the source(s), the usual ‘grain of salt’ disclaimer applies as to the extent and accuracy of claims.]

Oleg Nivievskyi at the Kyiv School of Economics told CNN the thefts of farm equipment, such as tractors and harvesters, by Russian forces have been absolutely devastating for Ukrainian farmers.

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

Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine As “Imminent Famine” Risks Plague The World

March 19, 2022

Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine As “Imminent Famine” Risks Plague The World

On Friday, Jakob Kern, an emergency coordinator at the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP), warned Ukraine’s food supply chains were collapsing as Russia bombed key infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and trains.

“The country’s food supply chain is falling apart. Movements of goods have slowed down due to insecurity and the reluctance of drivers,” Kern told a Geneva during a video conference from Krakow, Poland.

“Inside Ukraine our job is in effect, to replace the broken commercial food supply chains,” he added, describing the rebuilding task as a “mammoth” one.

Ukraine’s top agricultural export products are corn and wheat. Before the invasion, Ukraine was the second-largest supplier of grains for the European Union and one of the largest suppliers for emerging markets in Asia and Africa. Breaking down the numbers, Ukraine produced 49.6% of global sunflower oil, 10% of global wheat, 12.6% of global barley, and 15.3% of global maize.

Estimates via Black Sea research firm SovEcon show Ukraine’s 2022 corn harvest could plunge as much as 35% from 41.9 million tons last year to 27.7 million tons this year because of all the disruptions. Farmers are already reporting diesel and fertilizer shortages. Wheat harvests are also expected to decline. Some have even pointed total crop output in the country could be halved.

“With global food prices at an all-time high, WFP is also concerned about the impact of the Ukraine crisis on food security globally, especially hunger hot spots,” he said, warning of “collateral hunger” in other places like Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Turkey that rely heavily on Ukraine imports.

All of this has fueled the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization to warn global food prices could rise another 8-20% from current levels due to the deteriorating situation in Ukraine.

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

US Charged With Trying To Provoke Russian Military Action At UN: “You Want It To Happen”

January 31, 2022

US Charged With Trying To Provoke Russian Military Action At UN: “You Want It To Happen”

At a rare UN Security Council debate Monday, which was urged by the US but slammed by Russia as a publicity stunt – in order for Moscow to “explain itself” over what Washington has for weeks asserted are “imminent” plans to “invade” Ukraine – Russia’s ambassador charged the US with seeking to provoke Russian action.

“They themselves are whipping up tensions and rhetoric and are provoking escalation,” Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said of US and NATO motives. “The discussions about a threat of war is provocative in and of itself. You are almost calling for this. You want it to happen. You’re waiting for it to happen.”

*Russia’s ambassador to the UN, via Atlantic Council*

Just prior to the meeting at UN headquarters in New York, the Kremlin once again charged the US and and some allies, especially Britain, of stoking “hysteria”: “To our dismay, American media have lately been publishing a very large amount of unverified, distorted and deliberately deceitful information about what’s happening in Ukraine and around it,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

“Hysteria hyped up by Washington is causing hysteria in Ukraine, almost to the point that people are packing their bags for the front. It’s a fact,” he added. Last week Ukrainian leaders surprisingly made similar statements, seeking to calm their own population amid reports of people raiding grocery stores and taking out all their cash from banks. There have also been reports that average Ukrainians are stockpiling weapons in preparation for a Russian onslaught and occupation.

During the UN back-and-forth, US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield accused Russia of not just building up forces near the Ukrainian border, but of a massive force build-up in Belarus. She said Russia aims to send at least 30,000 troops to its closest former Soviet satellite state ally:

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

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If Our Civilization Is Going to Survive, It’s Going to Have to Change Like This — Fast

In scrubbed piece about Edward Snowden, the Bezos Post offers a preview of how history will be re-written

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