The corporate media in America aren't printing anything except what their political and oligarchical masters tell them to print. True, in-depth analysis of the news simply isn't happening in Big Media. We're very fortunate that independent journalists and smaller media outlets are still providing it . . . but for how long? That's a very good question.
We hear a lot about fertilizer shortages, and its impact on the farming community, and its potential to make the current, growing famine situation a lot worse. We've discussed those issues in these pages several times before. However, nobody's talking about their actual impact on First World nations. We all know what happens to Third World countries: they can't get their regular supplies, and they can't afford to pay higher prices for supplies that are suddenly in greater demand all over the world, so their farmers can't produce food and their people must tighten their belts - if not worse. However, what about European nations? What about Canada? What about the USA? What's coming for us?
For a useful predictor, look at Germany. Michael Yon wrote yesterday:
This does not feel like the Germany I lived in. The Germany I remember was clean, safe, orderly. Today, Germany feels like a Blue State in America. Going broke while preparing to freeze and starve. Still waving rainbow and Ukrainian war flags from the windows.
Germany is running amok. Flinging open the barn doors to invasion. Hitching crucial energy dependence to the Russian wagon after being warned by President Trump, as if adults should have needed to be warned.
And now I am in Ludwigshafen. Home of a massive BASF chemical facility on the Rhein River.
The destruction of Germany has reached advanced stage. Millions of incompatible aliens from afar. The cancer of woke. A long and perpetual series of national errors that mere epic incompetence cannot possibly explain.
BASF is a massive chemical company manufacturing, among other things, nitrogen-based fertilizers using natural gas and air.
And now Nord Stream 1 pipeline trickles natural gas from Russia at roughly 20% capacity. At this rate, Germany likely will run dry in roughly January or February during dead of winter. Nord Stream 2 rests silent and dry.
German winters are cold. Very cold.
More than a century ago, German Chemist Fritz Haber invented the Haber Process for converting natural gas and air into fertilizer. The Haber Process is one of the most important inventions of mankind. Few people seem to realize that the fertilizer generated from the Haber-Bosch Process materially contributes to the population explosion that sustains billions of people who never would have been born.
German Chemist Carl Bosch led pioneering efforts to take the Haber Process to an entirely new level, in Oppau, Germany. Just a short distance from where I write these words.
Bosch took Haber’s Process to stratospheric heights and thus is called the Haber-Bosch Process.
BASF grew massive in large part by using the Haber-Bosch Process to manufacture and sell fertilizer globally. The gargantuan plant sits directly on the Rhein River where ships come and go.
And now, the natural gas flow into Germany has been squeezed. Russia is blamed but that is a lie. The German government had and has at its disposal numerous tools which could be used to mitigate or even evaporate the problem.
Yet it charges forward into the fire. Weimar-Republic-Style. The German Way. The Ragnarök-Process: Transmuting Chance into Catastrophe for which, mythologically, a cold winter is required.
A man who is fulfilling his myth is the epitome of focus.
The cold winter is coming. The Germanic tribes are collecting wood as quickly as possible.
Germany is an authoritarian state. Normal citizens cannot just venture into the woods to collect firewood. This is a job for specialists. And now, Germans are signing up on waiting lists for professional wood collectors to fetch their firewood.
Recently, BASF said they are prepared to sell their natural gas back to the German grid so that Germans do not freeze this winter. ‘Heating islands’ are being prepared to keep the huddled masses from freezing.
These heating islands will offer wonderful opportunity for German tribes to meet and greet Somali tribes.
Imagine the next steps. As BASF and other fertilizer manufacturers run dry, so too will massive amounts of nitrogen-based fertilizer and massive numbers of people will starve to death. And there will be long winters, famine, and war, Ragnarök-style. All these things have been known across the world.
The mind burst is done for today. Good night from Germany.
How many of those same warning signs can we see in this country? A lot, if you look for them - but don't look in the mainstream media, because they won't tell you. They deliberately gloss over much of what's happening. They prefer the sheep to be placid rather than alarmed.
Find out what's happening to the economy in your field of work; in your city; in your state; across the nation. Do you work in a warehouse or consumer fulfilment center? Did you know that Amazon laid off 100,000 workers in its fulfilment centers just last quarter? What does that say about the security of your current employment? Do you need to start looking for alternative employment or re-training now, to beat the rush? Those are very important questions.
Do your own investigations into where you currently live and work. Don't take the word of others for what's happening (or not happening) - find out for yourself. What's the crime rate? What do the last ten years' figures for crime tell you? Don't trust the official numbers, because too many police forces deliberately under-report or mis-classify crime in an attempt to make the statistics look better. District Attorneys do likewise, "plea-bargaining" charges down from a felony to a misdemeanor, in order to both save time and make their offices look better by the number of convictions obtained. You won't learn about such things from most of the news media. Dig deeper, and find sources such as HeyJackass in Chicago. Talk to individual cops and emergency response personnel, and ask them what they're seeing every day on the streets. Examine hospital ER admissions and the injuries they're treating - and what caused them. Look for housing information - prices paid, delays in selling, problems in obtaining mortgages in certain areas, and so on. Ask about local "food deserts", and find out why they exist. Try to find input such as that provided by a nurse I know in these pages yesterday. Put all that together. That's where you'll find the facts.
Forewarned is forearmed. Read as widely as you can. Get advance warning of what's coming down the pike. It'll pay dividends.
Peter
And the long term effects of NOT having fertilizer for the next years will have a global impact due to selling the natural gas.
ReplyDeleteThe ranches near me are running the smallest herds they can survive with.
ReplyDeleteThe county DA lost the primary to someone who has been run out of 3 other counties for misconduct because he isn't prosecuting crime.
The sheriff is likely to lose the general election for the same reason.
Even out here there is a mood for change and a push back against lax enforcement.
Yon wrote: "the fertilizer generated from the Haber-Bosch Process materially contributes to the population explosion that sustains billions of people who never would have been born."
ReplyDeleteThat, according to Deep Ecology is the whole problem.(This thinking was once an extreme fringe of the environmental movement but its seductive and poisonous doctrines have been propagated from the fringes of the environmental movement and merged with critical race and gender theory, so that there is what amounts to critical environmental theory. The "natural carrying capacity" of the Earth, over and above which humanity becomes a cancer polluting the environment, is said to be under a billion people. To restore the planet those "billions who [otherwise] never would have been born have got to go.
Because immiserating and then killing off the proles seems like a good idea to the global elites anyway, the Deep Green death cult has captured the minds and hearts of some of the wealthiest and most influential people on the planet and is a key part of their new transhumanist religion.
Basically for Deep Green, famine and plague would be better for the planet than nuclear war, but nuclear war is less bad for the environment than too many human beings
"What does that say about the security of your current employment? Do you need to start looking for alternative employment or re-training now, to beat the rush?"
ReplyDeleteWell... from where I'm sitting, it looks like there should be plenty of ongoing opportunities in the skilled trades, as the supply of tradesmen appears to have evaporated.
Hire a licensed contractor for a building project, and he'll hire a Spanish-speaking foreman, who'll round up a bunch of hard-working but unskilled day laborers and drop them off with minimal supervision.
Some of this is the result of contractors trying to do things on the cheap - the unskilled workers don't get paid a lot per hour, but on the other hand it takes them a lot of hours to get the job done. But you'd think there would be contractors with their own stables of skilled workers; maybe they only cater to the very wealthy? Or have all the workers retired / died / burned out / moved to Fiji?
Is this perhaps an example of Gresham's Law applying to labor, and to labor-intensive businesses?
(This, by the way, is a horrible time to have a home built. Aside from the costs of building materials, the quality you get may make you wish you'd hired the Three Stooges to do the job. Some of these "builders" are worse at basic masonry than I am, which is saying something.)
Sign of the times - The rural Midwest county to which I moved a couple years ago hadn't had a murder in the previous ten years. There have been five so far this year.
ReplyDeleteThings don't seem to have hit us too bad way up in my AO. They haven't be flying illegals up here and there are a couple boarders that are actually enforced between us and them (at least some countries are enforcing their boarders). Food prices are going up, meat is about twice what it was two years ago but availability is still good.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I've noticed over the last few months is CostCo's monthly discounts are including far less food items then they did in the past.
Still shopping sales and canning what is cheap,in terms of meat. Jars are a problem, I found a store in a very small grocery chain that gets some in now and then. Canned meat doesn't need electricity. I don't like canned vegetables so I am going back to drying them for long term storage. I think we have at least 2 years of hell coming and I am putting away as much as I can. My precious metal dealer is buying a lot as people need money for daily living, how long can people run at a deficit?
ReplyDeleteWe're living in a Third World country now. You have Third World Quality standards and Third World customer service. But labor is cheap and good for Short-term profits.
ReplyDeleteSomeone I know bought a new $2M "McMansion" back in '04 in San Jose CA. The builders (big project, 600+ units) hired only Spanish speaking workers, paid $5/hour. Their electricians were paid $8/hour. All temps from Mexico. PG&E electrician told us that when he turned on power to their temporary power pole at each site, it was 50/50 if it exploded. The builder went bust, I think due to warrantee claims. (A few years later, houses on his street were listed for $600k.) Lots of problems in that house. He's still dealing with them.
ReplyDeleteYep, been working on Third World Country status for some time now. Welcome to the future!
Seven years of feast, seven years of famine. Except for this time, people think gardens are something you grow in containers or wall decorations on the patio. They have no concept of how to do without things, like cable TV, streaming services and the Internet. A lot of them can't cook a meal from ingredients. Lord help them if the power goes out for a few days, let alone a few weeks.
ReplyDeleteThis is not going to be fun. Not for anyone.
When looking at crime statistics, also pay attention to the changing demographics, especially if you are moving to escae crime. Many times the demographics change rapidly as the FedGov moves people from bad areas to good ones to dilute the crime...and they might just move crime to the area you live or are moving to.
ReplyDeleteA curious thing....
ReplyDeleteI found a crime-stats map for this area. We're still in a dark-green patch, among the mostly-green countryside. Parts of the cities are various shades of red, especially the tourist zones.
Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one huge blob of dark red. Wut? I'm guessing that it's based on crimes per 100K population, and the population of the park is zero, so it's all one divide-by-zero statistical zone.
Always need to fact check Yon - I recall following him when he was a war correspondent and thinking that I was now getting the "real" story. Then he bought into the gun-walking theory hook line and sinker - it brought all of his prior reporting into question for me (along with all of his reporting since then). After all, if he is willing to run with the gun walking story without checking it out, what else is he fabricating or not fact checking.
ReplyDeleteIn this story, he says that Russia is blamed for the lack of gas, but then says that isn't true - but gives no basis for WHY it isn't true. Well, it isn't true only if you blame Russia for cutting off the gas supplies in reaction to Germany participating in the economic sanctions. So yeah - Germany doesn't have a ready supply of gas because Russia is reducing the amount that they are sending through the pipeline.
The news reports this coming winter for Germany are not going to be good. There will be a lot of pressure to bail them out somehow.
ReplyDelete