The wisteria season is going out. This post was meant to be out earlier, but my internet started acting up so finishing it got delayed. In any case, redbuds are done, but new flowers are showing up. There were within nearby blocks weird, fluffy white flowered, presumably fruit trees that I have loved to observe for a couple of years already but this year I have been busy and missed the start of their blooming.
The spring was very warm and quick, and it feels like a summer here, though some plants did not get the memo and are still without leaves or flowers. Also, I partially missed spring posting because of internet issues – for some unknown reason my home internet again allowed me to blog dashboard again yesterday. The Liquidambar are full of new leaves and many have new small ‘spiky balls’ growing, light green like the new leaves. The balls began to grow despite many trees had many of their last year’s dark and hardened ‘spiky balls’ hanging, too. Some Liquidambar even had last year’s leaves left among the new growth. Confused about seasons or insufficient winter storms?
Insects had been active, and birds were still singing when I began to draft this post (now the chorus has quieted, presumably they are busy with chicks.) Multiple species of butterflies, not just the wintering monarchs, were flitting around and in flowers. As a testimony of warm weather, I even saw a skipper butterfly, though I do not have photographic evidence – the little beast was too fast.
That was on my walk to a shop and back to get 10lb elbow macaroni. I bought cans of corned beef last weekend and failed to buy canned sprats. By my estimates (based on empirical experience on how many times I can eat the same meal before I lose appetite), I can eat max 1-2lb macaroni boiled with a couple of cans of meat a week (preferably less often than more) thus cutting my grocery bills, should the food situation worsen, either through supply shock (geopolitics), through reduced income (read unemployment) or through inflation (economic collapse.) Adding fresh greens and fruits to stored food to balance the diet should stretch the supplies meant to be a buffer for temporary shocks. There should be at least lemons in Berkeley, CA, barring the most exceptional circumstances. I got 10 more macaroni on my next shopping trip, also keeping my eyes peeled for cheap sprats (protein + fatty acids) and more corned beef or other non-perishable meat products (protein). If the situation lasts over three months, I’ll be in trouble. But then, so will be everyone else.
For the people who are surprised at 3 month preps, rather than a homestead with doomsday bunker, most of the SHTF events are either short term (storms, blips in supply system, specialized economical events) or personal (accidents, injuries, corporate lay-offs) so it makes sense to invest some resources on stuff that might realistically happen to anyone that to invest a lot in case an extremely long tail event like a total thermonuclear war happens.
Remembering the collapse of the Soviet Union, a definite SHTF event for the Soviets, the society remained largely intact, bureaucracies existed, and economy muddled on, as did the regular people. I am expecting similar circumstances in United States, the Obama years reminded me of Brezhnev Era, Biden years of the Andropov/Chernenko years at the twilight of the Soviet Union. I expected Trump to be the Gorbachev of the United States, overseeing the economic collapse and centrifugal tendencies of increasingly assertive states overriding the Federal legislation and enforcement, but apparently our trajectory of failure will resemble more the end of the British Empire, that died by Suez Canal. Meanwhile, canned fish is getting expensive.
But the wisterias were pretty this spring, and I’m happy that I got some pictures.
Wisterias from 2026, March 21. Better late than never.
I was thinking about posting something light but two weeks ago I was not in the mood. I woke Saturday night briefly to the news that USA / Israel had struck Iran and from then on it was missiles all over the Middle-East. I still do not know which all countries are participating, either willingly or dragged into it. I just think this is bad. And it is expanding.
The timing fits, though. Not going into this blood moon – planetary parade interpretation (solar maxima, maybe), the economic situation is very shaky and the release of the documents pertaining a large chunk of our (that is Western in general) elites, political, economical, cultural and even scientific ones, has pretty much removed what is left of their credibility, already in tatter due to decades of civic and economic mismanagement to the detriment of the masses. In short, the system is collapsing and usually the last thing the elites do in such situation is to start a patriotic / holy / justified war to drum up some support for the system, distract the masses (the shortages are due to The War, not the economic collapse, which is also due to The War), and to loot what is left of the treasury via military-industrial complex.
Dollar was already failing through inflation (too many dollars had been printed, not to match the amount of bread to buy with these dollars), which was evident as gold and silver prices shooting up last year, peaking in January before some big players put breaks on it by changing the rules on metal trading. It only helped for a short time, the prices were climbing up again by Friday before the attack on Iran. Whether this uptick was caused by the natural demand on metals (especially the East – West arbitrage and trade war between USA and China), the COMEX halt on technical issue (again) spooking investors, or by big institutions moving metals as cued in on incoming geopolitical instability is irrelevant. The metal prices would not be rocketing up if dollars were as valuable currency as before the massive money printing. Of course, the metals then went down again. Whether this was due to forced liquidation as the private credit system is collapsing (a couple more notable examples of credit failures being Blue Owl and Blackrock) or strengthening of dollar (???) or some other arcane reason is irrelevant. I think many asset classes will now behave in seemingly irrational manner as hordes of panicky investors, or rather, their trading algorithms trigger waves of stop loss sell orders in a cascading series of events. An economic blowback, if I may use such term.
Which brings to the second reason for the war in Middle East, namely oil prices. The chronic US debt requires buyers for US T-bills, but the main reason for anyone to buy T-bills is to buy dollar denominated oil. Gaddafi and Hussein tried to sell in other currencies. Iran, as an embargoed BRICS member, naturally sells in other currencies. United States has used dollar weapon and sanctions too often, reducing the natural demand for dollars, so petrodollar connection needed fortification. Not to mention the Strait of Hormuz being off limits during the exchange of missiles will drive the barrel prices up meaning a boost for T-bill demand. I believe that Iraq War II funded the Greenspan Moderation. I also think that increasing the price per barrel has a good chance of further hurt US economy, while helping Russian economy (remember the war in Ukraine?) But if the Western economies are already circling in a debt spiral down towards the sewer system, why not T-paper the mess with more treasuries? Besides, China will be in trouble, too, having lost Venezuela, and now Iran, and while EU regards Russia as their main opponent, USA is eyeballing The People’s Republic of China.
Meanwhile, some billionaire predicted the AI will increase economic output so that nobody needs to be poor. I doubt this prediction.
For the record, economy has been growing more or less steadily for the 20th century, what with occasional dip during recession or depression. The share of growth, however, stalled for the lower economic layers in early -70’s, meaning that the working class living standards have not increased with the economic productivity. We were promised shorter work weeks through technological advancement, what we got is a baroque bureaucracy plus private sector B*llsh!t Jobs (estimated to be about 40% of private sector work force), with chronic overwork for people struggling to survive on a diminishing share of a productivity pie, and mass unemployment for people who fell off the labor force or never bothered to join. Overworked people in the West are seething at NEETs, whereas the leaders in PRC is trying to discourage “Let It Rot” or Lying Flat mentality.
Considering this historical precedent, I do not expect the AI to increase the living standards of the masses in any meaningful manner, just change the mode of exploitation.
Provide entertainment and distractions, already happening. Control the population by algorithmic feed of ‘information’ (official newstainment and infoganda) and ‘opportunities’ (advertisements of sales and government grants, possibly even jobs, tailored for your planned role as a consumer and a cog in the system), sure. Has anyone else here had experienced the joys of ATS and modern job search? But actual empowerment of the people by allowing resource creation and utilization where the profits do not directly flow into the coffers of the 0.01% that own the AI models but benefit the individual people without creating dependencies? Unlikely.
Having written the above, I am nevertheless curious about utilizing AI as part of my design processes, and may subscribe to some such service this spring. Hypocritical? Maybe.
By Sunday, March 8th, the war against Iran had obviously become the sh!tshow that will define this century. In the Internet there are currently rumors that some official had admitted that the war may continue through September. Maybe, but I would not be so bold as to predict which year. Meanwhile, I think that the oil shock will be the last nail in the coffin of the Western economic hegemony (G7, OECD, World Bank, World Economic Forum, IMF, Basel, European Union, petrodollar, to mention some of the institutions which I expect to collapse or become irrelevant vestiges of bygone world, bit like British Imperial this and that after World War II). Maybe worse is the loss of large fraction of nitrogen fertilizer produced from cheap hydrocarbons with cheap energy in Middle-East. Even if the production is restored soon, the missing fertilizer production during the spring planting in Northern hemisphere is not good.
I fueled my little car and bought some canned fish and protein bars to restore what I had recently eaten. Based on above, I expect temporary food shortages due to economic chaos, and permanent food price hikes due to increasing input and transportation costs, but such developments are already the new normal this decade, so there is little that can be done except to prep more, tighten the belt and hope that incomes increase to match the rising expenses.
This week has been very strange, even by 2020s standards.
Sap on a tree trunk, August 22nd, 2025, in evening sun light. Just something pretty.
I have been employed since September, a couple of temp extensions and I got another extension last week. Have been working hard to justify my continued paycheck, so posting has been sparse. It will probably continue to be so, until I get things stabilized.
The inflation is getting out of hand. On Thursday, the gold visited briefly at about 5600$ per troy ounce, silver tested 120+ range before settling below 120$. In the cafeteria, where I often go for lunch, the cheap meal of 2 pieces of chicken, a piece of corn bread and some side was 20$, a bigger meal 35$ and there was an 8-piece 70$ option, too. Then on Friday an incomprehensible double digit collapse of gold and silver prices, some say 8 – 10 sigma event. Also crypto went down, hard. The metal move was some times blamed on nomination of Warsh as the next Chairman of the Fed, but metals don’t move that much for nearly anything, at least they did not used to. People online grumble about market manipulation, but even that does not make sense, unless the economy is very, very fragile. A few years back, I could not imagine an event smaller than WWIII moving metal prices that fast. No, scratch that. A few years back, I could not imagine metal prices to move that fast. Period. However, I doubt the chicken will be cheaper next week.
Greenland forgotten, our troops are amassing near Gulf of Persia. Government is currently under partial shutdown. On the top of the shutdown, the Federal administration is trying to stop disbursements to the states that refuse to investigate various forms of fraud on social services, health care, etc. There is a simmering tension that might flare at any provocation back to armed violence – the states are choosing their sides whether to support the Feds on immigration enforcement or not.
Meanwhile, there is the Moltbook issue. To me, it is unclear if this is a clever community make-believe or whether the AI agents are gaining autonomy or something between. Some in the Internet are screeching about Skynet, but it is the reality of our energy infrastructure that is a kicker. For example, there were over 180k households without electricity in Tennessee after a winter storm, tens of thousands still today, though the repairs are ongoing relatively fast. Even under the best of the weather conditions, many interconnects are under enormous strain between the Green New Leap that has destabilized the grid and the AI server farms which require power of millions of households. If I were a betting person, I would place money on the complexity collapse over the shiny AI future.
So, while charging my phone, I decided to use the time for making a no-context video of clips taken August 22nd, 2025, and then start writing a blog post as a place for that video.
Seed structures fluttering in wind, black ants on a tree (some sap)
I got as a suggestion from a YouTube, a video about moving to chase jobs. A part of the video made me rethink about the whole migration approach to avoid economic failure. Not that I am blaming individual people who choose to rip themselves from their home areas and finding greener pastures, being a migrant myself, that would be hypocritical.
However, people here in West have been relentlessly propagandized to move after better economic opportunities instead of improving their home environment. Specifically, the discussion which states would be the best options made me think about the migration between US states as a scam. People are encouraged to leave states with poor job prospects to chase the increasingly ephemeral employment across the continent. Similar phenomenon is seen within European Union that deliberately adopted the same approach as ‘free movement of labor’.
The free movement of labor proved disastrous in EU. In Eastern Europe, people mass migrated to Western Europe to do unpleasant jobs cheaper and with fewer options to object inhumane treatment than the local working classes. This emptied the poorer parts of EU cramming their peoples into wealthier parts of the EU. At some point, the second biggest Latvian urban population after Riga was London. Polish plumber became a meme. Meanwhile, the working classes of the Western EU began to lose their work to cheaper foreign competitors with fewer de facto rights. Those who remained employed saw their wages stagnate and working conditions worsen.
Eventually, the working and downwardly mobile middle classes of UK, which had been the end of the line for aspiring eastern EU citizens, voted for Brexit to reduce the pressure to their living standards. Aside from job markets, the immigrants increased housing pressure and needed public services. In short, the pie of gross national production may have gotten larger, but did it get large enough to accommodate all the new slices? And who actually benefited for the increase in GNP? Somebodies must have known or guessed the results but gone ahead with it anyway.
This was just the economic side of it. I wonder if much attention has been paid to the psycosocial and cultural costs to the immigrants themselves, when they leave their social support networks and familiar traditions and customs. The increasing atomization and hyperindividualization of the subjects, or objects of governance, of course benefits elites who do not really worry about lone ranters in the internet (those can be shadowbanned) but are sweating over mass movements not paid by and organized by themselves. Even though their biggest actual threat is mass passivism (NEETism, or as the Chinese say, lying flat), but that was not what I had been thinking this time.
The biggest problem after the exploitation of the migrants is that free movement allows exportation of the various regions socioeconomical problems, thus shielding their governments from the consequences of their policies. In United States, California, New York and Illinois are regularly trotted as examples of exporting refugees of liberal policies but as a Californian, I am rather tired of red staters sneering smugly at our homeless problem after having exported their drug addicts and mentally ill using what is here known as bus therapy: i.e., buying them a one way bus ticket hoping that the Californians will take care of their social issues.
Meanwhile, in California, UK, European Union, and other mismanaged territories, bad regulatory environment combined with excessive taxation and misallocation of government resources (encouraging further taxation) kills the economy, including employment. People with means (money, education, passport) and initiative will vote with their feet. And as the recent decade has shown, apparently the only thing you actually need for emigration is initiative, though money and passport will be huge advantages.
In the current narrative, as far as I understand it, emigration is supposed to punish the local administrations, they are losing tax base. Except that thanks to Federal or EU government and their funds transfers between the regions, the internal emigrants will still subsidize their original administrations with their taxes. While burdening the infrastructure from roads to social services somewhere else. Win-win for the local mismanagers. There are whole developing countries whose economies depend on remittances from their expatriate populations, which on surface seems more benign than the interstate welfare / subsidy parasitism, but which on one hand means at least a temporary loss of labor force that is building another country, while on the other hand creating distortions on the labor market of country they have emigrated into. And the psychosocial costs, again, were borne by the migrant labor and their families.
What happens if all regions export their economic problems and no region can handle the masses seeking better life any more? Or if one region exports the labor to be exploited in another region?
Well, the EU economy is collapsing, and though some blame the migrant crisis, I think the mass migration is a symptom of a deeper rot within the system that relies on imported people to exploit. Except that the current batch of immigrants did not arrive to be exploited but to figure out the greatest personal benefits. The massive immigration industrial complex that relies on government subsidies flowing to the ‘NGOs’ is definitely a drain on government budgets, but if it were not the immigrants, some other cause with swarms of ‘NGOs’ would take their place. EU has now two competing narratives, War in Ukraine and the Climate Change, which also demand lots of money, but the real reason why the elites are after all these years slowly beginning to turn off the money spigot on the immigration is that the economy (the big corporate, not just the little bourgeoisie or working classes) is dying. After the job market had already began to contract (in case you had not looked at the job search situation during the past couple of years), there was a brief attempt to use the immigrants to cook the government books by adding consumers to GDP, but this consumption was mainly driven by government handouts, and governments, as mentioned above, had also other places which needed the printed money.
The bigger issue that is destroying the economy is the all suffocating tangle of red tape and directives sprouting from Brussels, that has nearly destroyed all initiative within EU. As a child, I used to giggle at the Moscow lead Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Now large fraction of NATO is lead by equally insane Brussels. Among these directives are the dictates of the more cultishly fanatical supporters of various Veblen ideologies.
Veblen ideologies are impractical and costly to adhere, and mostly for virtue signaling among the peers, just like Veblen goods are mainly bought to show that the buyer can afford them and is sophisticated enough to know which expensive goods to buy. Anyway, the Veblen ideologies of the EU elites demanded destruction of nuclear power stations and building wing mills and solar panels instead, thus gutting their industrial base and small consumers’ electricity budgets.
Then there are the endless identity politics, which can only exist if divisions between peoples are carefully cultivated, and if necessary, invented. Problem being that increasing mistrust between people requires increasing regulatory layers to prevent them from doing unto the society before the society does it unto them. Thus, low trust societies are less efficient and require more top down enforcement (to replace the missing natural cohesion) but I suspect that is precisely the reason why many of the elites seem to promote identity politics – fracturing the masses into mutually hostile tribes prevents populist uprisings.
However, aside from being bad for the economy by the added bureaucratic drag, the conflict between ethnic or ideological tribes can be used for driving the opponents of the regime away. Every conservative chased away is a reward for the progressive administrative state of California. Even if reducing the dissidents diminishes the likelihood for corrective action instead of economic collapse due to runaway Veblen ideology cults.
But why do Brussels and Washington DC allow epic failures like Germany or California? Without resorting to conspiracy theories about shapeshifting lizard people, I hypothesize that firstly, both California and Germany are too big to fail, and secondly, when they do fail this presents the central governance an opportunity to gain bigger grip on regions (thus, ironically, further entrenching the collapse of the whole rather than just some of its parts.)
Both California and Germany used to be the industrial backbones of their respective organizations, and enormously wealthy and powerful, so it will be easier to pretend nothing is amiss than to actually try to do something about them. Because of their sizes and their remnant wealth, and their heritage of numerous bureaucratic positions within the System, California and Germany still wield great power in Washington DC and Brussels, respectively, thus preventing anything done to them without their permission.
Meanwhile, as both regions do their best to dictate the policies of the larger collective, or in case of California, at least ignoring / defying the edicts from the capital, the factions aiming for more centralized control are waiting for a useful crisis to exploit for further power consolidation.
And what does this have to do with the locust economies? As the systemic polycrisis deepens, individual people and families will frantically try to find a place to survive. Survival is no longer just a problem of the Third World. Thanks to reductions in food and energy production (not to mention the oligopolistic squeeze on healthcare resources, especially in United States), the struggle for survival is returning to the First World.
California being pretty much the last shore of the West, I do not know what shape or form the mass migration within the First World will take, but I believe it will not be many years from now when the powers that be finally begin to slam the borders shut, not to keep immigrants out but to keep emigrants in, just like East Germany used to do and North Korea (and to a lesser degree People’s Republic of China) still do.
Prepare for the Fall. The season is nearly gone, but the civilization will take a bit longer to finish.
Long time no write. I got employed (at will, contract until the end of November) and have been working since last week’s Monday. Still learning the ropes, enough of that.
Federal government
Secretary of War, Hegseth, had called all generals, 1-star and up for an all hands meeting. This includes those who have ‘active situations’ going. Very unusual. The rumors online ranged from imminent intensification of WWIII, invasion of Venezuela, an alien arrival, a complete reorganization of US military, or mass lay offs to clean out our top heavy military organization chart. The official explanation was pep talks telling the armed forces to merit base up, go on diet, and concentrate on learning how to efficiently win wars rather than having rainbow events and PC talk. It is generally thought that the pep talks were a cover for something else, though what that might be is unknown to public.
The mass lay offs in military would have dovetail nicely with the threatened imminent mass lay offs of Federal bureaucracy in general, due to government shutdown, because congress cannot (again) pass a budget, or as the case has been for quite a few years, a continuing resolution. Trump has been itching to take a machete or a flamethrower at our bureaucratic jungle and to cut our budget deficit (our current Federal debt has ballooned since the summer 36 trillion to today’s over 37.5 trillion and keeps rising)or at least the funding to his political opponents. Instead of putting the Federal workers on furlough with back pay when the continuing resolution has been passed, the president proposes to simply fire the non-essentials (or a fraction of them) to reduce Federal complexity and expenses. Considering the recent increase in debt levels, methinks, this is an opportunity for a political purge, any savings would be incidental.
This is, of course, ‘to combat the illegal immigration’ (much encouraged by successive Labour and Tory governments alike.) Exactly how the UK government believes forcing digital ID on people who do not use even paper IDs is going to help, but I think the digital ID for legitimate, as in taxable, work and other economic activity will collapse what is left of UK finances. Or the people will revolt (though at this point I think that less likely than finding metabolically active extraterrestrial life.) In any case, immigrants without ID could presumably still access welfare and healthcare, even if they cannot work legally.
While I unfortunately did not find a reference, I recall that during COVID, Sweden discussed banning cash, but the government retreated when they realized that large enough fraction of of their economy functioned on informal basis to sink the rest of the economy(sarskillt utsetta omraden would have exploded or become even less governable than currently. While the White Hall may know their people better than I and are banking on them being hopelessly obedient (rebels having left during 17th and 18th century), lots of White Hall mandarins are clueless elites that live separate from normal life and consequences of their actions.
In South Korea, there was a big fire in a government data center, which crippled many of the government services, including things requiring digital ID. The fire started from a lithium battery (the batteries were being replaced because they were getting old) and it is unknown how much actual data the South Korean government lost.
While I was anticipating hackers having a fiesta with people’s IDs online, and rolling blackouts and other such infrastructure misery making them unpracticable (the Indian Aadhar system has reportedly led to deaths by starvation due to lack of access to government social security), I had forgotten about the vulnerability of the data centers. TietoEVRY, which is a major PPP contractor for various data base services to Finnish government (including the election vote results, at least once in collaboration with Scytl when still known as TietoEnator) managed to years ago (when it was known just as Tieto) totally mess up multiple Swedish databases. Considering this and the South Korean example, I expect any digital ID to result in Kafkaesque nightmare for the subjects and massive confusion and potentially paralyzing dysfunction to the governments. But perhaps that is not a bug but a feature – maybe it will allow greater variety for financial oppression while reducing the citizens’ ability to defend themselves against the governmental predators, the profits of which are then calculated to outweigh the cost of national collapses.
Local news
California has on November 4th special elections about redistricting. The cost estimates range from 250+ to 280+ million dollars, that is over quarter of billion dollars to invest on Democrats (maybe) taking Congress (and US budget.) Nevertheless, as a California tax payer, I am annoyed. I have gotten two mailings of official election information. I suppose that is my tax dollars at work.
War and Troubles
Drone attacks and air space violations of NATO countries are intensifying. Involved parties: at least Poland, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Estonia, Hungary, Romania, and, of course, Russia and Ukraine. I probably have missed countries – these days the news come too fast for me to follow. Also who did what to whom is unclear, including to many of the targets. Meanwhile, I am more worried about cyber attacks and domestic terrorists.
As mentioned in the previous Restless Times posting, France just changed their prime minister.
But so did Nepal. Their parliament burned, and the prime minister fled on helicopter. People were teed off by the government decision to shut down all social media because the companies refused to censor content that Nepalese government did not like (no, I don’t have any details) and then the pro-social media demonstrators were met with a hail of bullets, and then it turned out that the number of teed off citizens exceeded the government firepower and willingness to use it. Some people are suspicious about the social media companies’ unwillingness to censor in Nepal, after all, the social media have been over the years been weaponized for color revolutions and some interests may have wanted the Nepalese government out. However, the people of Nepal have probably been thoroughly disgusted by their leaders and corruption so I think the uprising was organically powered, with social media companies merely allowing the people to egg each other on.
In Qatar, Israeli airstrike is claimed to have taken out Hamas leadership. There are dissenting reports. The news have within the last decade become a fun-house mirror maze, where people hear what they are supposed to think and then are left to figure out if anything happened let alone in the manner the news present the events.
Gold prices are shooting up. I am waiting to get some money to buy gold and silver. The physical metals, not the futures. Currently, as I type, I read that each silver ounce in the COMEX vaults has been overbooked by 36 times, i.e., there are 36 paper contract ounces to each physical ounce, which means that in case of a panic, the first / strongest to assert their claim will get the nuggets. Whether the rest will get even the cash value of their paper metals will depend on whether the vault on which you have claims has money to cover the debts. In other words, the same logic as in Resolution Weekend.
Europeans are busy with military exercises. There were at least six simultaneous ones within Finnish territory, including joint force exercises and urban warfare exercises, and Finland also participated in the CBNR exercise in Sweden. Poland had massive exercises, and aside from Quadriga exercise, Germany has moved a panzer brigade to Baltics. The French and UK orders regarding hospital readiness in case of mass casualty event I may have already mentioned earlier. I had so hoped that the United States 2024 election results would have brought peace, but depressingly it looks like this will not happen.
Also Belarus says they shot down stray drones (either Ukrainian or Russian) and warned Poland about the arriving drones. However, there are too many reports for me to follow but it sure looks bad.
In Vilnius, there were LNG rail car explosions. In the report I read, they were attributed to OHSA violations, but the cause is still being investigated.
Secretary of War Hegseth gave a speech to military in Puerto Rico telling the soldiers that this was not training but to end poisoning of the American people.
Economy will not improve, either. Layoffs are increasing, but the hirings (at least in the USA) keep getting revised down. On Tuesday, I saw in LinkedIn feed a discussion about even recruiters finding new careers (sorry no link or screenshot.) I have been actively looking for a job since last year, and based on my job listing feeds the job market has been getting crazier by month.
Needless to say, I am doubtful about the idea of getting a job. At least a job matching my skills and work experience. Why I get advertisements for ‘CDL-A drivers needed’ is anyone’s guess, I don’t have a commercial trucking license, but based on recent news, maybe that is not a hard barrier in California.
A recent credit card outage in France was blamed on botched payments system update. The reason for ATM failure in Scotland was not clear from the same post.
Considering the banks are claiming it was just a botched update, my paranoia instinct would tend to cyber attack (private or foreign public sector) or frenzied preparations for Central Bank Digital Currencies supposedly becoming to EU this October.
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It is speculated that French government will collapse in this budget crisis. Belt tightening proposals include removal of two holidays: Easter Monday and May 8th (celebrating victory of WWII) to ‘increase the productivity’ by making people work more for the good of the country (who decides how the extra profits are used?). Aside from reducing the well-being of working people, I think this to be an arrogant display of cultural insensitivity, especially the claim that Easter Monday does not have any religious significance.
There is also chatter that France is going to need IMF bailout next week.
Crude claims that USA just wants Venezuelan oil again, just like in the past 20+ years of regime change attempts, seem somewhat plausible.
It might be the Venezuelan threats against Guyanan oil fields in Essequibo that are currently exploited ExxonMobil that triggered the latest action.
An infographic shown by X user placed Canada among the high oil resource countries – most of which were either destabilized, contested, under hybrid warfare / influence campaigns, or Western sock puppets. Kazakhstan may have been the only exception in the list, but that may be just US being more remote than Russia and China. Bouts of sanity, like recognizing the limits of former ‘hyperpower’ are extremely rare, rarer than pacifism, in Washington DC.
But a grim fact is that the Western technocivilization is running out of energy, among other resources. Whether for AI powered surveillance dystopia or utopistic popst-scarcity dream, reality is reasserting itself crushing them all with resource scarcity.
Looks like the oil wars (including hybrid warfare), this time north and south, are back on menu. With War on Drugs joining hands with War on Terror as casus belli.
I just saw a video on YouTube by a gentleman who seems to be into Bitcoin. Aside from the Bitcoin part, there were interesting little news.
Bank of England has published a bail-in guide. The term of note is ‘resolution weekend’. That’s when the peoples’ bank accounts will be converted into bank stocks at some fraction of value.
I had already become aware that millionaires and billionaires are fleeing the UK by their thousands, an exodus greater than that afflicting PCR, despite PRC having vastly larger population. I was surprised at the claim that the departing assets are equal to 4% of UK GDP. Dividing the 91.8B$ cumulative wealth of the departees by 3640B$ estimated GB GDP gives only about 2.5% in mu calculator. It will be interesting to see if the UK government will go full DDR and slam the exit doors shut at this hemorrhage. They already have the hate crime reporting lines and speech crimes police (in case someone could post something UK government does not approve) so why not go for the full experience, complete with empty shops?
Meanwhile, EU has made a deal of the decade (this century is too young to claim that something even weirder would not be coming through the pipes) agreeing to: 15% export and 0% import tariffs with US, 750 billion euros worth of US fossil fuels while banning all the Russian fossil fuel imports (which had continued despite the war, including quite a lot of natural gas transiting in pipelines through Ukraine), and 600 billion euros of private direct investment to US.
Exactly what this private investment is and how EU Commission can agree to seems unclear. According to the document description page on EU side, the agreement is not legally binding. I suspect that the tariff and energy deals were a bribe to US to let EU still continue their war – I further suspect large amounts of US military gear to be included in that 0% import tariff. Also, I suspect that EU will rather soon have a resolution weekend for bank accounts as they are already talking about mobilizing funds laying in peoples’ bank accounts to fund plans that are excessive for the public purse. Pension funds are joining the arms bonanza. Bonus points if these ‘privately funded’ imports/investments will count towards the 5% of GDP funding target for non-US NATO members.
Joker in the game: EU CBDCs, denied by European Central Bank to be programmable with expiration dates (not to mention blocking or sin fees for non-approved uses, which would similarly depend on programmability.) (There are also privacy questions.) I wonder what the actual utility of EU CBDCs for the small people would be, and how CBDCs (programmable or non) would affect application of a Resolution Weekend?
I have followed the recent discussions about Jeffrey E., a dead criminal whose suspicious passing away in custody has caused years of speculation (including that he was taken secretly away and is now living somewhere nice.) Namely, he is known to have committed his crimes with lots of people and suspected of blackmailing the said people, which tend to be the very wealthy and powerful type. Which is why he was rumored to have been self-deleted.
The current administration has loudly and repeatedly promised to publish the list of Jeffrey’s associates, until about a week ago an FBI memo was leaked(?) to Axios claiming: he offed himself, there is no list of people, and he did not blackmail anybody. The administration is trying to sweep the issue under the metaphorical carpet. Then the officials published a video of his cell from the night of his death. Except the video contained about 1 minute gap (or maybe more than 1 minute). It had been stitched together so badly that aside from the gap in the timestamp, the aspect ratios were subtly off. As Asmongold pointed out, there could be legitimate reasons for this blooper, but with all the other circumstatial evidence, to me this points towards a conspiracy concerning Jeffrey E.’s demise, the reasons for it, and the existence of more rot in the circles of power.
As I keep on watching the government stumble from narrative fail to a narrative fail, with people becoming increasingly convinced that something is off with the official story (which has presented already by the previous administration), I have began to suspect that all this furor is deliberately fanned to distract the hoi polloi from something really important, possibly even more insidious than the idea that we are being governed by a huge criminal blackmail network, until it is too late to do something about it. This is quite a common tactic by the powers that be. For example, in Finland, I have imprecise memories on how government starts making noises about changing regulations or taxes on selling beer, and people get upset. Huge discussions rage over newspaper opinion columns and on-line boards, pro and con, while the government passes something else, much more important for people’s lives. The beer issue can be resolved, or if necessary, retreated from, people will calm down, and meanwhile something actually nasty was done to them.
While the incompetence of governments can be stupendous, it stretches my credulity to have so many bloopers in the narrative management coming one after each other, and I am beginning to suspect we are being purposefully distracted. Whether it is from the coming (proxy) war against China (maybe started between Thailand and Cambodia, maybe still waiting for the Iran situation to worsen), the ongoing (officially proxy) war against Russia, the economic collapse (US consumers sentiment has been reportedly low earlier this year, though Goldman Sacks just reassured that everything is merely returning to normal), the incoming digital surveillance grid (brought to you in collaboration with Musk and Thiel under the guise of tracking immigrants – spoiler alert: to track immigrants they will “need to” also map the non-immigrants), or something possibly worse, it must be humongous to merit this level of egging of the masses. I don’t think Obama’s referral to Department of Justice for suspicion of having ordered narrative to be manufactured for the Russia Collusion quite qualifies, more likely it is just more noise to distract the masses. By the way, US just moved nukes to UK, but that’s probably a nothing-burger (I am still sitting on the fence about whether to link and comment to the article on the subject in aviationnews.eu.)
I am also currently sitting on the fence on whether our government truly is this incompetent at narrative management or whether there is some obscure Department of Narrative Management, who are gloating about their latest glorious success in psyop against the people. Or maybe the Department of Narrative Management has gone rogue and is actively fighting against the current administration.
Although considering the everyday dysfunction I live in due to the ongoing complexity crisis infecting all aspects of modern society and worsened by the ongoing incompetence crisis fanned by the decades of education crisis, I still think that, yes, they really could be that incompetent. Maybe.
PlanktonPunkt 