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Predictions From the Tree of Woe

Just one prediction for 2023, but it’s a grave one about the petrodollar, its fate, and the consequences therefrom:

The petrodollar is the centerpiece of American hegemony. I predict that in 2023, at the latest 2024, that system will end. Its demise may be disguised by the mainstream and financial press, but it will be self-evident in the transactions themselves, and its aftershocks will be mighty.

Now, the end of the petrodollar system has been a long time coming, of course. It’s been a major goal of America’s strategic competitors for years. In 2017, China and Russia created the petroyuan so that its partners could trade for oil without using dollars. However, the petroyuan did not unseat the petrodollar in the six intervening years. 80% of oil transactions remained in USD. Why?

  • Saudi Arabia, the linchpin of the petrodollar system, continued to insist on using dollars in its transactions.
  • The Chinese continued to be reliant on trade with the US to fuel their economy, and thus could not risk destroying the system that made the US dollar valuable.
  • The US has a proven track record of using military force to support the petrodollar, and with Donald Trump in charge — known to Chinese citizens as “Emperor Trump” for his vigorous policies — the Chinese were reluctant to “fuck around and find out.”

Now those conditions have changed.

Read the whole thing there, keeping in mind that while timings are always uncertain, trends are often clear.

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The Losers Lauding the Lame

This, according to the mainstream media, is what passes for a brutal, quick-witted, and savage burn.

Miss Thunberg today issued a brutal comeback in a tweet to her 4.9million followers, saying:

‘Yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalld***energy@getalife.com.’

The teenager’s quick-witted response sparked a social media storm, going viral within minutes – and garnering support from fans online. Miss Thunberg’s tweet roasting Tate surpassed a total of one millions likes in just seven hours – currently standing at nearly 1.7million likes as of 10.30pm.

It would have been funny to see them try to immediately perform a 180 and start shrieking about body-shaming if Andrew Tate was actually half as hard as he pretends to be and had replied with something like:

“I thought your email was notitties@fetalalcoholface.com!”

Can you imagine the outrage of the professional hypocrites? Sadly, he didn’t have the steel, although “How dare you!” wasn’t bad.

What’s even more pathetic than the media pretending that the Gretard’s softball was some sort of amped-up Oscar Wilde zinger is the retards on social media acting as if she threw a 150 MPH heater that broke his jaw.

DISCUSS ON SG (but keep it CS)

The Soft Will Die

Karl Denninger is frustrated about the way foolish people are managing to get themselves killed by winter.

In the late 1970s and early 80s I lived in such a part of the country, near a big lake. There was no fuel injection; our cars had carburetors. By then we had advanced to the point that the choke was electric and “set” itself when it was cold with a slight press of the pedal. There was no electric fuel pump; it was driven by the engine. You got in the car, pumped the pedal once or twice so the accelerator pump would squirt the raw gas in the carb bowl into the intake, pressed it slightly one last time and released to make sure the choke was set and turned the key. If you did it right for the conditions and your battery was in decent shape the car would start, often firing on two or three cylinders originally and running extremely rough for the first few seconds until the rest of them lit up. If you got it wrong and flooded it you were screwed as there was insufficient battery power to keep cranking for very long, and if you left a discharged battery out in that cold it was very likely to freeze and split. Thus if the car failed to start you better either be able to get an immediate jump or have the tools to remove said battery and bring it inside so it wouldn’t freeze!

I didn’t have a garage; that was a luxury and I had no money. I was a young man. I had to park outside. After said car started you cleared the snow off (frequently a foot deep) and then you had to wait until the engine warmed up enough that you had cabin heat. Not for yourself; you had on a winter parka and long underwear under your pants but rather for the defroster because if you didn’t wait the first time you exhaled your breath would freeze on the INSIDE of the windshield and you couldn’t see a damned thing.

Phones were connected with wires and the closest one required a quarter to be deposited in the slot and was probably 10 or more miles away once you got in said car and started driving. There was a zero chance of you reaching it if you got out in 0F conditions and attempted to hike that; you were dead if you tried that stunt. If you went off the road and into the piled-high snow, often by February 10′ in height on both sides of said road, that had been previously removed from said road by twin-augur snowthrowers on the front of a dump truck filled with sand you’d be lucky if someone realized that hole was made by a car and the car is still in there; there was no way to call for help so your only hope was another vehicle that noticed as if wherever you were going called in your lack of arrival figuring out where you balled it up in those conditions was not going to be easy. You were quite carful to not have that happen because if it did they’d probably find your dead body in April. The mailboxes on said roads were hung on tall cantilevered chain rigs that would swing out of the way when hit because otherwise the first time said snow removal device came by it would destroy the mailbox.

You never went anywhere without good (ski-style) gloves in the winter months either on your hands or in the car, and you never went anywhere in the winter months without adequate clothing which included a thick knit hat for your head, gloves and emergency supplies in the vehicle, including plenty of blankets or other means of keeping warm (I was a broke young man so a pile of blankets it was; I didn’t have money for a cold-rated sleeping bag/bivvy sack), a source of minor heat (e.g. a candle and means of lighting it), and a small tin or other similar thing plus a set of road flares so IF you were off the road you could lay a trail TO YOU from the road and increase the odds someone driving by would see it, especially at night — assuming you could walk between the points, that is, which was by no means reasonably assured as there were no such things as airbags either so if you crashed odds were high you were BADLY hurt. Why the candle and plenty of matches? The candle wasn’t for heat for you; it was to melt snow in said tin so you could drink it without killing yourself via hypothermia, and the means of keeping warm without energy was so if you had a mechanical breakdown and could not use the engine for heat, or had an extended problem and ran out of gas you didn’t die.

You can’t change a tire in these sorts of conditions without decent gloves or you will lose fingers to frostbite. Never mind that all the other “sharps” risk associated with any sort of car work is always there so what are you doing driving around with no means of fixing that. Oh, you think its cool that modern cars often don’t even have spares? Yeah, that’s nice — what happens if you get a flat and its -10F outside? This sort of lack of preparedness involving a vehicle that is expected to be operated in all seasons is stupid and both can and will get you killed.

You want to virtue signal and drive a Tesla or other EV? That’s a nice sports car suitable for decent conditions. It is utterly unsuitable for use in what is called winter because the range is wildly cut by said cold, you use prime moving power for heat in the cabin, you can’t recharge it in cold conditions as the battery pack cannot accept a charge if it is below freezing and thus if you get stuck in one you’re really in trouble — much more so than with a gasoline powered vehicle.

I think he’s referring to the recent deaths reported in New York, about which I am frankly dubious given the lack of specificity. But he’s right, as growing up in Minnesota required the awareness that winter would absolutely kill you if you were stupid or extremely unlucky. There’s nothing that reminds you of your mortality more than speeding across a frozen lake at 60 MPH on a snowmobile in the dark, knowing full well that your chances of seeing an open patch of water or a sizable log frozen into the ice in time to avoid it are slim to none.

Or spinning out on black ice and doing a 360 on the highway, wondering if you’d cleared enough distance from the semi you’d passed a few moments earlier to let it slow down before it t-boned your rapidly rotating vehicle. Winter is dangerous.

But there is really no excuse for freezing to death inside a vehicle, because that reflects nothing more than ignorance of winter combined with a fundamental lack of preparation for it.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Only Effective Opposition

Cosmonaut explains why it behooves members of the Sane World to support Elon Musk’s antics, even though he is obviously a ticket-taker and a card-carrying member of the Clown World elite.

As discussed in an earlier post, Machiavellian political theory holds that the greatest extent of freedom and justice prevails when the elite is split. That is, when there is a genuine opposition.

Throughout the Western world, official opposition parties have failed to fulfil this role. There has been no sustained, spirited and organized opposition to Woke, trans mania, Covid hysteria or creeping techno-tyranny – nor was there any effective opposition to the War on Terror from the left.

A few local leaders may have resisted here and there, but overall the political parties that ought to have fought policy blunders instead tagged along behind, calling out ‘wait for me!’

Nor has there been any major opposition from the rest of civil society. Large media outlets follow the regime line. Churches are quiet. Unions are tame. Civil rights organizations have mostly been coopted, Wikipedia has been silenced and big business (especially big tech) is going along with it all. Academia is leading the charge.

And now, suddenly, there is opposition. One small part of Big Tech is openly facilitating the release of information that strongly contradicts the regime narrative. Its leader is openly rejecting the shibboleths expected of his class.

Republicans look on, stunned, as a lone man outside the party does their job for them.

It may be small, but it is effective in breaking the fugue of accepted opinion – a fugue that Trump’s lack of concrete action barely put a dent in, or perhaps strengthened through reaction to his elite-reviled but sadly ineffectual administration.

The regime is embarrassed. Our rulers are mostly too ashamed to respond directly aside from occasional snark. The media ignores or obfuscates the story, as though they are afraid to touch it. Some of the worst offenders have gone strangely quiet. Their sanctimonious arrogance has taken a hit.

This is what an Opposition looks like.

Moreover, as Peter Turchin demonstrates, a revolution only succeeds with the support of a rebel faction of the elite. For example, both Putin and Xi were members of rebel factions within their respective Communist Party elites, but both leaders took their nations in radically different directions after attaining power. And many of the American Founding Fathers were state politicians and men of impressive wealth and influence.

If Americans are fortunate, there will be other members of the US foreign elite besides Musk and Trump who understand that Clown World’s destination is Hell and are willing to disrupt its operations. For all his many flaws, and despite his dubious motivations, one must admit that Musk has done more to conclusively prove the illegitimacy and criminality of the current US regime than any genuine American or anyone to his right to date, and he has done it in a very short period of time.

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Midnight’s War is Go

CAMPAIGN CONCLUDED

% of Goal: 282.6 percent

Backers: 538

Thanks very much to all of the backers who are allowing us to bring one of our more popular comics from the screen to print. What the success of this campaign means is that Arkhaven won’t have to go into the red to produce the 450 pages of art that are required for the three omnibuses. And it will provide enough art to permit MIDNIGHT’S WAR to run on Arktoons for another three years at the current rate of page burn. So, after a long and bruising campaign, Kyle Buckner could certainly use a little downtime.

MIDNIGHT’S WAR

MIDNIGHT’S WAR Episode 61: Downtime

BOB Episode 99: Merry Wokemas

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 174: Four Stories

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 78: Christmas at Greyfriars

BEN GARRISON Episode 85: Biden Gun Control

STONETOSS Episode 150: All Roads Lead To Rome

CHUCK DIXON’S AVALON Episode 87: Responsibilities

DISCUSS ON SG

“Private” Companies

The self-appointed defenders of capitalism very much want you to ignore the fact that every single corporation is a government creation. And as such, not only should they not enjoy the Constitutional protections of the rights possessed by individuals who are posterity of the Founders, they should be subject to the same limits that are imposed on the government.

The necessity of this reinterpretation of what is, and what is not, private, is demonstrated by the latest Twitter documents released by Elon Musk.

All social media platforms work with the US government to censor content, Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday. Documents released by Musk following his purchase of Twitter showed that the platform colluded with the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other government agencies to suppress information on elections, Ukraine, and Covid-19.

“Every social media company is engaged in heavy censorship, with significant involvement of and, at times, explicit direction of the government,” Musk tweeted, adding that “Google frequently makes links disappear, for example.”

Musk was referring to internal Twitter communications published by journalist Matt Taibbi with his approval, which suggested that the platform’s senior executives held regular meetings with members of the FBI and CIA, during which the agencies gave them lists of “hundreds of problem accounts” to suspend in the run-up to the 2020 election.

In addition to Twitter, the government was in contact “with virtually every major tech firm,” Taibbi claimed. “These included Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon, Reddit, even Pinterest.” CIA agents “nearly always” sat in on meetings of these firms with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, Taibbi claimed, explaining that although this task force was convened to fight alleged election interference by foreign states, it made “mountains of domestic moderation requests.”

This is a massive series of constitutional and criminal violations. If, as we expect, it goes entirely unpunished, it will serve as further confirmation of the complete illegitimacy of the current U.S. regime.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Nature of Truth

One of the more important axioms of Veriphysics is the observation that truth is knowable, but it is not fully knowable, by Man. As a result, all decisions must be presumed to have been made on the basis of incomplete information, which renders the concept of fully-informed consent impossible. Therefore, any moral system based on consent is intrinsically flawed and consent cannot serve as a comprehensive justification for any action, agreement, contract, or exchange.

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Globalization Taketh Away

A small town in Switzerland discovers the downside of going global, as a profitable local business is shut down after more than a century in operation:

British American Tobacco (BAT) will close a cigarette manufacturing factory in north-western Switzerland next year and lay off the 220 employees working there, it has been confirmed. This decision will have a major impact on the region, the Jura government said on Wednesday. In a statement, BAT confirmed that cigarette production would be transferred from Boncourt to bigger factories in Europe and that Boncourt would be closed.

Following the closure of the factory, the commune of Boncourt (1,200 residents) will lose its biggest taxpayer – around CHF 2 million in annual tax – from its yearly budget of CHF 9 million.

The Boncourt factory was founded by the Burrus family in 1814 and was taken over by Rothmans International in 1996, before merging with tobacco multinational BAT three years later. The site has produced Parisienne cigarettes since 1887, the second best-selling brand in Switzerland.

I’m sure the little town that has lost nearly one-quarter of its tax revenue and more than half of its jobs will be reassured by the knowledge that the cigarettes that it formerly manufactured will henceforth be produced more efficiently elsewhere in Europe.

Homo economus is not human, but vampire.

Strangely enough, it may be the NFL that provides one potential solution to the economic problem of Clown World. Green Bay is one of the oldest and most successful franchises in the NFL, and it not only survives, but thrives, in a small town because it is not owned by rent-seeking pirates, but by the community. The team cannot be sold or moved without the consent of the public.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Manufactured

It will surprise absolutely no one here to learn that evidence of Ben Shapiro’s “popularity” and “success” being entirely manufactured has surfaced.

Facebook Gives Ben Shapiro ‘Shadow-Boost’ To Make More Users See His Content

A report seems to confirm that Ben Shapiro was “shadow-boosted” by Facebook’s algorithm, meaning his content enters the feeds of people otherwise unlikely to interact with the personality. The report from Buzzfeed, which mostly erroneously focuses on claims that Facebook is somehow a safe-haven for supporters of Alex Jones and Infowars, revealed that Ben Shapiro had been pushed into the feeds of Facebook users who had not interacted with his content.

The report details changes made to a Facebook feature called In Feed Recommendations, which would insert posts into the Facebook feeds of people that they didn’t follow, but were similar to content they liked already. Buzzfeed gives the example of someone who followed the page for a specific football team, who may then see content from the NFL put into their feed.

However, the IFR was not meant to recommend political content, yet users began complaining that they were seeing posts from Ben Shapiro in their news feeds, “even though they had never engaged with that type of content”:

When the issue was flagged internally, Facebook’s content policy team warned that removing such suggestions for political content could reduce those pages’ engagement and traffic, and possibly inspire complaints from publishers. A News Feed product manager and a policy team member reiterated this argument in an August post to Facebook’s internal message board.

It is unclear who else may have been subject to the “shadow-boosting” by Facebook, as opposed to being shadow-banned, which many conservatives were subject to on Facebook and other Big Tech platforms, such as Twitter. Shapiro, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Wire, is a long-time critic of President Donald Trump and America First conservatives, and as such, Facebook’s actions may raise eyebrows on the right.

Facebook has been doing this for years. Much the same thing has been taking place on YouTube on behalf of Shapiro, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris, and Jordan Peterson, among others, as well. Shapiro is perhaps unique in having been a complete fraud from the very start, when he was being pushed as a child prodigy on WorldNetDaily and through the Creators Syndicate, but it’s clear that he wasn’t the only “conservative” being mysteriously protected and promoted by Facebook.

“In the US it appears that interventions have been almost exclusively on behalf of conservative publishers,” they wrote, attributing this to political pressure or a reluctance to upset sensitive publishers and high-profile users. As BuzzFeed News reported last summer, members of Facebook’s policy team — including Kaplan — intervened on behalf of right-wing figures and publications such as Charlie Kirk, Breitbart, and Prager University, in some cases pushing for the removal of misinformation strikes against their pages or accounts.

Anyhow, the truth is inevitable. The Noticing will continue.

DISCUSS ON SG