Locations - USA (Live) - Middle East (Upcoming) - Europe (Currently Live) - CDN enabled.You can choose your CDN relay , multiple services worldwide Join us via this website: - https://billing.vpnsaga.com/ Services - Plex Share - Plex Appbox Shared - Dedicated Reseller Appbox - IPTV (included PPV events) (VPN app for android user included) - Google Drive Share - Website disguised as VPN provider. Library - 10k + Tv Shows. - 27k + Movies. - 1500 + 4K Movies - 400+ 4K Tv - 800+ Anime -Few foreign films and tv. Total around 2k ish Payment options: - Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash/Etherium/Litecoin/Dash/XRP/USDT - Paypal Resellers Information(sell my products direcly on your website) - All you have to do is just order my services like normal ! - You buy my service for X amount and up charge it to your clients for X amount ! - You get a dedicated server with a specific amount of appbox.additional appbox can be installed on request - You can sell appbox,plex shares or both as per your wish Information You May Want To Know - Instant scans - We have limited amount of spots. - Auto Requests enabled on appbox - We use GPU for transcoding. - Transcode allowed besides 4k Content. - Instant Setup DISCORD https://discord.gg/QZm8UmQjhY Limited slots.Once we hit our user limits,you will not be able to sign up
Saturday, January 1, 2022
Honesty time - Is anyone else a bit confused
I’m a long term holder and intend to continue to do so. However all the changes since I first bought are confusing me and I’m a bit anxious about potentially losing everything.
When I bought it was through pancake swap and trust wallet and since then I have just held them there. I am not well versed in crypto and tokens but I can buy and sell Bitcoin easily on major exchanges, safe moon still feels like a risky transaction even after all this time.
Now there is an official safemoon wallet, migration to v2, talk of listings on exchanges and everything else.
I still want to hold but I would also like a bit more liquidity in the event of an emergency bill or I’m just running a bit low on cash I can take out what I have (at a big loss as it stands)
Anyone in the same position/feel the same way?
Few more days left for NexonNFT Airdrop to end and presale is starting on jan10th; are you participating?
I was exploring the world of Bitcoin talk and found that there is an Airdrop event held by NexonNFT. NexonNFT's airdrop event has started from 25th December 2021 and there are only a few days left for the airdrop to end. By participating in Airdrop you will have a chance to win around 10000 Nexons for free which is currently worth $100.
NexonNFT is a blockchain based NFT project, it has various exciting things that will amaze you. The list begin with:
Cross-chain NFT marketplace
A payment platform — Nexon Pay
Crypto swapping platform — Nexon Bridge
dApp and Metaverse games — Nexon Games
Nexon Staking
Nexon Lending
And a revolutionary crypto-currency — Nexon Token
All of these together ensure that the user has the best experience of the NFT Marketplace and cryptocurrencies and solves most of the known problems of the NFT Market.
As mentioned on the official website, NexonNFT marketplace has user focused UI and UX, more payment options, more organized listings, and proper customer support.
Nexon Games will host a number of dApp and Metaverse games that will bring a wider audience into the NFT gaming. Nexon game is giving an opportunity to play and earn with NFT games.
Some Important details you should know about:
NexonNFT Airdrop Started from December 25, 2021
Total NexonNFT for all Participants = 25000000 NexonNFT
Total Airdrop Reward Value Per Participant = 10000* 0.01$ = 100$
Airdrop is limited to the first 2500 participants. First come first!
Visit https://www.nexonnft.io/ for more details and check social pages and groups.
Telegram: https://t.me/NexonNFT
Discord: https://discord.gg/RAq27fDGmd
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NexonNFT
Honesty time - Is anyone else a bit confused
I’m a long term holder and intend to continue to do so. However all the changes since I first bought are confusing me and I’m a bit anxious about potentially losing everything.
When I bought it was through pancake swap and trust wallet and since then I have just held them there. I am not well versed in crypto and tokens but I can buy and sell Bitcoin easily on major exchanges, safe moon still feels like a risky transaction even after all this time.
Now there is an official safemoon wallet, migration to v2, talk of listings on exchanges and everything else.
I still want to hold but I would also like a bit more liquidity in the event of an emergency bill or I’m just running a bit low on cash I can take out what I have (at a big loss as it stands)
Anyone in the same position/feel the same way?
Different Bitcoin investing strategies
Let’s keep those god-awful TA charts and drawings and patterns aside. Let’s list some easy to remember and follow approaches to BTC
- Frugalypse Now - 2 jobs, bread & butter, rented house, 1 mattress. 24x7 fiat mining. You take all the pains now, for good gains in the future as you buy bitcoin nonstop. It’s not too late!
- Miner Bro - You like to go against the current. Current wisdom says it’s more profitable to buy bitcoin than mine it, but you put it all in 1 or more ASIC miner and you do whatever it takes to run that shit coz tomorrow BTC is going so high, that these machines will be pure gold, and you’ll have one already running.
- Smoked Out - You quit smoking and just put the amount you spent weekly on smokes into buying sats.
- True HODL - Never selling, so never registering a loss, always stacking sats whenever in the mood or when possible.
- Time Bomb HODL - Setting a timer for a long-term future definite sell date, preferably over 3 years as no one who has held for 3 years has ever had a loss.
- The New Year Party Fund - Allocate what you just spent (last year) between Dec 25 and Dec 31 for Christmas and New Year’s to buy all the BTC you can on Jan 1 this year. Sell it on Dec 25 this year. Repeat year after year to party beyond your means.
- BTC Savings Account - Convert your bank savings account to BTC, treat BTC as your new savings account, adding money to it when you can.
- Inflation Buster - This one is especially for the money-bags and the filthy rich, who see their notes getting stale in a deposit vault or earning peanuts in the stock or bond market. Put most of it on BTC and beat the printer that goes BRRRRRRR.
- Meme Magic - You’re in it for the ride, you don’t really care about the profits, so you have the most fun and zero stress. When the memes are at their highest and you see a kickass meme, you drop in some munneh just to comment “haha I just bought some”.
- Negative Gravity - As in 2019, when you need to pay the bank to store your money, whatchu gonna do? Call inflation buster BTC!
- USD Hater - You just want to see the USD PetroDollar burn so that no more wars can be fought, so you buy and promote BTC as much as you can.
- Drive-By Buyer - Buy with all the cash in your wallet whenever you walk by a BTC ATM.
- All In - Sell everything you can and collect all the fiat you can to go all-in in one stroke.
- The Hourly DCA - Spend like 69 cents or dollar 1 with auto-buy every hour or day or week.
- Sharp Dip Sniper - This requires patience and vigilance. Keep your USDT (or USDC or any other stablecoin) ready on the exchange to snap up the discounted BTC whenever it goes into a sharp decline before it pulls back to the regular curve.
- BTFD - Keep fiat or USDT ready, but don’t buy. Whenever the market tanks and people are saying Bitcoin is dead and FUD is at the highest, then you buy the f dip!
- Fear & Greed Index - Buy when Fear, Sell when Greed
- Adopted Influencer - Just follow 1 influencer you trust (if you can find one!) and do whatever they say, even if it sounds illogical.
- Interest Hunter - Borrow fiat on low interest and earn higher interest yield/stake by converting it to BTC.
- Payday Percentage - Allocate a fixed percentage of your pay to buy BTC on every payday, whether it is weekly or monthly.
- Shitcoin Genius - If you are one of the few who know that hidden place where the most successful memecoin and shitcoin moons are launched, you put dollar 100 on those and convert the 1000s to BTC at the top.
- Choose The Orange Pill - You’ve read enough, you convert all your other coins to BTC.
- 2x Orange Pill - You’ve read enough, you convert all other coins and stocks and lands and gold to BTC.
- Black Swan Songer - Keep waiting for the biggest black swan event evar, like when BTC goes from 65k to 28k in a blink and then buy buy buy!
- All In Leverage - Gather a percentage of your bitcoin or fiat that you can YOLO, then wait for the worst FUD ever and the worst market crash ever, and then go 125x leverage on Bitcoin rising in the future.
- Banhammerite - Buy big when China or another country bans it, or a few weeks after the ban.
- Legaltenderite - Buy when another country like El Salvador makes it legal tender or passes favorable regulation for it.
- Shitcoin Lottery - Becoming a wholecoiner is not possible for you, being that the BTC price is out of your reach, so you spend dollar 100 every month on a new pump and dump you discover on 4chan biz which allows you to buy early when the price has too many zeroes after the decimal. Keep playing until one goes 1000x or so, then you can buy a whole BTC!
- NFT DayDreamer - Buy some shitty NFT and make its sell price the current value of 1 BTC in ETH OR BNB. Hope that someone buys the shit jpeg and then you get a wholecoin!
- Time Travel - Go back to 2010 and buy 15k Bitcoins for dollar10-100 on Liberty Reserve.
- Elon Apeing - Buy whatever Elon jokes about. Convert it to BTC at the top.
- Saylor Mirroring - Buy whenever Saylor & Microstrategy buy, they usually buy when the price is good.
- Winklevoss Conundrum - These two chads are richer than their nemesis Zuck now thanks to Bitcoin, yet they shill a lot of shitcoins, buy/sell when they’re shilling another coin, DYOR!
- Keiser Inverse - Sell whenever the OG Bitcoin Whale Max Keiser is going batshit crazy with antics, it is usually during the dips. Buy when he is quiet and serene on Twitter and his Podcasts.
Which one’s your favorite? Do you have any other simple strategies to add to this list? Not financial advice, DYOR, yada yada!
Different Bitcoin investing strategies
Let’s keep those god-awful TA charts and drawings and patterns aside. Let’s list some easy to remember and follow approaches to BTC
- Frugalypse Now - 2 jobs, bread & butter, rented house, 1 mattress. 24x7 fiat mining. You take all the pains now, for good gains in the future as you buy bitcoin nonstop. It’s not too late!
- Miner Bro - You like to go against the current. Current wisdom says it’s more profitable to buy bitcoin than mine it, but you put it all in 1 or more ASIC miner and you do whatever it takes to run that shit coz tomorrow BTC is going so high, that these machines will be pure gold, and you’ll have one already running.
- Smoked Out - You quit smoking and just put the amount you spent weekly on smokes into buying sats.
- True HODL - Never selling, so never registering a loss, always stacking sats whenever in the mood or when possible.
- Time Bomb HODL - Setting a timer for a long-term future definite sell date, preferably over 3 years as no one who has held for 3 years has ever had a loss.
- The New Year Party Fund - Allocate what you just spent (last year) between Dec 25 and Dec 31 for Christmas and New Year’s to buy all the BTC you can on Jan 1 this year. Sell it on Dec 25 this year. Repeat year after year to party beyond your means.
- BTC Savings Account - Convert your bank savings account to BTC, treat BTC as your new savings account, adding money to it when you can.
- Inflation Buster - This one is especially for the money-bags and the filthy rich, who see their notes getting stale in a deposit vault or earning peanuts in the stock or bond market. Put most of it on BTC and beat the printer that goes BRRRRRRR.
- Meme Magic - You’re in it for the ride, you don’t really care about the profits, so you have the most fun and zero stress. When the memes are at their highest and you see a kickass meme, you drop in some munneh just to comment “haha I just bought some”.
- Negative Gravity - As in 2019, when you need to pay the bank to store your money, whatchu gonna do? Call inflation buster BTC!
- USD Hater - You just want to see the USD PetroDollar burn so that no more wars can be fought, so you buy and promote BTC as much as you can.
- Drive-By Buyer - Buy with all the cash in your wallet whenever you walk by a BTC ATM.
- All In - Sell everything you can and collect all the fiat you can to go all-in in one stroke.
- The Hourly DCA - Spend like 69 cents or dollar 1 with auto-buy every hour or day or week.
- Sharp Dip Sniper - This requires patience and vigilance. Keep your USDT (or USDC or any other stablecoin) ready on the exchange to snap up the discounted BTC whenever it goes into a sharp decline before it pulls back to the regular curve.
- BTFD - Keep fiat or USDT ready, but don’t buy. Whenever the market tanks and people are saying Bitcoin is dead and FUD is at the highest, then you buy the f dip!
- Fear & Greed Index - Buy when Fear, Sell when Greed
- Adopted Influencer - Just follow 1 influencer you trust (if you can find one!) and do whatever they say, even if it sounds illogical.
- Interest Hunter - Borrow fiat on low interest and earn higher interest yield/stake by converting it to BTC.
- Payday Percentage - Allocate a fixed percentage of your pay to buy BTC on every payday, whether it is weekly or monthly.
- Shitcoin Genius - If you are one of the few who know that hidden place where the most successful memecoin and shitcoin moons are launched, you put dollar 100 on those and convert the 1000s to BTC at the top.
- Choose The Orange Pill - You’ve read enough, you convert all your other coins to BTC.
- 2x Orange Pill - You’ve read enough, you convert all other coins and stocks and lands and gold to BTC.
- Black Swan Songer - Keep waiting for the biggest black swan event evar, like when BTC goes from 65k to 28k in a blink and then buy buy buy!
- All In Leverage - Gather a percentage of your bitcoin or fiat that you can YOLO, then wait for the worst FUD ever and the worst market crash ever, and then go 125x leverage on Bitcoin rising in the future.
- Banhammerite - Buy big when China or another country bans it, or a few weeks after the ban.
- Legaltenderite - Buy when another country like El Salvador makes it legal tender or passes favorable regulation for it.
- Shitcoin Lottery - Becoming a wholecoiner is not possible for you, being that the BTC price is out of your reach, so you spend dollar 100 every month on a new pump and dump you discover on 4chan biz which allows you to buy early when the price has too many zeroes after the decimal. Keep playing until one goes 1000x or so, then you can buy a whole BTC!
- NFT DayDreamer - Buy some shitty NFT and make its sell price the current value of 1 BTC in ETH OR BNB. Hope that someone buys the shit jpeg and then you get a wholecoin!
- Time Travel - Go back to 2010 and buy 15k Bitcoins for dollar10-100 on Liberty Reserve.
- Elon Apeing - Buy whatever Elon jokes about. Convert it to BTC at the top.
- Saylor Mirroring - Buy whenever Saylor & Microstrategy buy, they usually buy when the price is good.
- Winklevoss Conundrum - These two chads are richer than their nemesis Zuck now thanks to Bitcoin, yet they shill a lot of shitcoins, buy/sell when they’re shilling another coin, DYOR!
- Keiser Inverse - Sell whenever the OG Bitcoin Whale Max Keiser is going batshit crazy with antics, it is usually during the dips. Buy when he is quiet and serene on Twitter and his Podcasts.
Which one’s your favorite? Do you have any other simple strategies to add to this list? Not financial advice, DYOR, yada yada! My 2022 new year's resolution is 4k and also to post quality OC that gets upvotes!
Avalanche Taps StackOS for DeCloud Capabilities
Decentralized cloud protocol StackOS is joining forces with the Avalanche blockchain platform, after being declared the network’s preferred DeCloud provider for its growing developer ecosystem.
The confirmation follows a poll conducted on the official StackOS Twitter account, one that saw users quizzed about which blockchain they would like to see the protocol become interoperable with. After thousands of followers had their say, Avalanche was named the winner with 75.9% of votes cast, beating out the likes of Cardano, Polygon (formerly Matic), and Solana.
As the first decentralized cloud protocol operating on Avalanche’s fast-growing smart contract platform, developers will have the opportunity to leverage StackOS’ cross-chain Infrastructure Protocol to deploy full-stack applications, high-traffic decentralized applications (dApps), blockchain privatenets and mainnet nodes.
In addition, the DeCloud leader will support future technical Avalanche events by sponsoring compute, rewards, and educating developers on how to anonymously leverage StackOS’ no-code, UI-based application deployment engine in a matter of minutes.
Decentralizing the Cloud
While Bitcoin popularized the idea of decentralized currency, and the defi movement has precipitated the emergence of an open and transparent alternative to legacy tradfi, StackOS is determined to make itself the face of DeCloud.
In doing so, the permissionless protocol hopes to rumble the established big cloud cartel dominated by centralized entities such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, principally by saving clients the hassle of paying for expensive set-ups and ongoing maintenance overheads. Global spending on public cloud services was predicted to grow by 23.1% this year, from $270 billion in 2020 to $332.3 billion.
Unlike existing cloud solutions, StackOS requires no sign-up or infrastructure costs, with computational power and storage provided by third parties (individuals, businesses) who receive cryptocurrency rewards in the form of $STACK tokens. Literally, anyone can join the network and start supplying their computational power.
The Avalanche team has requested for its nodes to be added to the one-click deploy StackOS App Store, thereby creating a network of ‘unstoppable’ Avalanche nodes and giving developers the ability to expeditiously deploy an Avalanche node.
Devs will also be able to take advantage of deploying work-in-progress applications on private testnets before promoting them to the mainnet.
According to StackOS, the number of service requests served on the apps deployed on its platform recently surpassed the three-million mark, a little more than three months since the mainnet launched in August.
A Blockchain Cloud Takeover
The relationship with Avalanche is not the first time StackOS has provided its DeCloud services to a fast-growing Layer-2 blockchain. Other large projects have also adopted StackOS’ decentralized cloud to bring one-click nodes and seamless deployments to their developer ecosystem.
StackOS was previously incubated as the de facto DeCloud solution on the NEO platform, too. Some 250 individual projects now deploy on Stack’s trustless cloud, which is powered by cluster operators scattered around the world.
Within the growing ecosystem, community members can become governors with two tiers – Node Apprentice and Node Authority – corresponding to the number of tokens staked. StackOS governors can variously influence burn rates per resource purchase transaction and the height of annual yield in the governor pool.
Like its new DeCloud provider, Avalanche has enjoyed impressive traction in the market since launching last year. Ava Labs’ layer-2 scaling solution, which supports a glut of DeFi dApps and subnets and is fully interoperable with Ethereum, is now a bonafide top 10 blockchain due to its ultra-low fees and high throughput (4,500+ tps). With a powerful DeCloud provider now part of its armory, Avalanche’s inexorable expansion looks set to continue.
About Avalanche
Avalanche is the fastest smart contracts platform in the blockchain industry, as measured by time-to-finality. Avalanche is blazingly fast, low cost, and eco-friendly. Any smart contract-enabled application can outperform its competition by deploying on Avalanche. Don’t believe it?
About StackOS
StackOS is a cross-chain open protocol that allows individuals and organizations to share their computing resources and collectively offer a decentralized cloud; where developers around the world can deploy any full-stack application, decentralized app, blockchain private nets, and main net nodes.
We aim to provide the world with “The Unstoppable Infrastructure Protocol”, which will allow any person across the world to deploy their application without incurring heavy cloud management costs and freely run any application they wish to run. StackOS furthermore intends to help brick and mortar businesses around the globe, to go online cost-effectively and securely with minimal technical overhead.
What lies ahead for XRP in 2022? Earn free Bitcoin Now, instant payout: https://easybitco.com 2021 was an eventful year for the crypto community, especially for XRP holders given the SEC vs Ripple lawsuit took several bittersweet turns during these past 12 months. While on one hand th...
Flea Market and the "economy" need to be removed. Right now the flea market and making money is the game.
Backer since day one.
I remember the only maps being Customs and Factory and being able to loot up offline.
Way back in the day it was Makarov's Grach's and shotguns galore. I think we had the AKS74U as well.
This game is in a very bad state. Honestly I don't give a shit about guns or attachments or how great the gun play is. I have a problem with the fundamentals.
As the patches get added and stuff gets added to tarkov my fps keeps dropping. the desync. the stutters. This shit has to get sorted asap. I don't give a shit about any new features. I want a stable 120fps experience. I don't want stutters when scavs load in or any of the other mysterious "Tarkovian" shit that happens.
Armor and Ammo
This is and will be my biggest gripe. That scav I shot was running a paca. Level 2 armor I was running 7.62x39 PS rounds. I emptied the mag into him center mass at close range. Yet he was still standing after albeit not long. Long enough to inflict serious injuries onto my character and thanks to me not knowing about heavy bleeds it was a fatal wound.
I can sort of stand the inertia, I can stand the health system and its complexities. What I can't stand is some dipshit taking 10 rounds of 7.62 at close range and able to function while wearing armor meant to stop pistol rounds and buck shot. In real life that guy would be turned to goo.
However lets by some miracle say no rounds made it through (yeah fucking right) he would be on the ground in some severe discomfort.
Traders & Flea Market
I want traders and flea market gone. I want perhaps Prapor and Therapist to be around. They will work on a token / currency system. Every week you can put in ONE requisition order with either of them. This can be anything from meds to ammo and guns each trader gets one order you can put through for gear. Everything else... found in raid or crafted. Thats another thing Get rid of found in raid
The problem with Tarkov is it was never intended to be but by necessity of design became cyclic in nature. Early wipe its a mad dash to get scraps and build up the hide out and eventually you have so much passive income there is no challenge and you end up coming on here and going "GIB WIPE"
My proposal
no more roubles, dollars, euros. No fiat currency. No BITCOIN. No GPU farming. The meta of Tarkov is shove shit in your safe container and try and loot goblin as much crap out and build your hideout or sell for profit so you can use level 6 armor top tier guns and afford BP rounds for your meta gun.
Instead you get:
Access to a trader or two. I like the idea of one. Every week you get one requisition order. (I am not talking actual days I am saying in game days.)
So you go to prapor and you go "I need an SKS, Mosin, some ammo, some of those bandages you got some med kits." This is spent using influence you get this by getting items he needs or through quests or maybe you find his men in game doing an insurance run and you think "do I spare them or do I take the chance to kill them and collect?" realizing if you fail not only do you lose the gear you have on you you also won't get your insured gear back. There is an additional modifier where he keeps some of your insurance return "It got lost fell off a truck." so to speak.
Basic gear.
Once you hit a predetermined level lets say 50. You can PRESTIGE
What will this mean for you? Well, you go back to basic gear and you can use the rep you gained to contact a new trader who do you pick? Do you ask to be introduced to Therapist or Skier? And you continue. And you build your network as you level.
But you can get other things when you prestige.
1) New recipes for your hide out.
2) New modules for your hide out.
3) Access to different tiers of maps (Labs Level 2) Where you have better AI and need to rely more on team work and where it can be really lucrative to back stab people.
4) Maybe for this prestige level you bribe a boss not to shoot you on sight.
5) Unlock some form of cosmetic that can help you in game. Maybe camo face paint and a ghillie suit so you can go be an asshole on woods.
6) Access to end game events / maps.
What you will get is a player economy that is very slow to progress and can be influenced by the devs. The devs need to stop trying to balance and economy and play "Dungeon Master"
Meaning if they notice a surplus of heavily geared players they can incentivize turning that gear into traders for EXP / Tokens some form of currency maybe even rep. Maybe it becomes to the point where if you spawn in with a certain tier of gear the bosses hunt you down and raiders will spawn in to control the system. Perhaps the battlefield becomes too hot and insurance is no longer offered.
Gear in tarkov is the ultimate form of currency and with every game there needs to be a currency sink.
I can't be the only one sick of wipes and the players farming currency. The real reason for hackers and this loot goblin behavior is RMT. It pays to cheat in Tarkov and is very lucrative.
Remove the flea market and start controlling the game stop being controlled by the game.
So many of BSG's design choices revolve around this very thing that hurts the game. What they should be doing is focusing on the following:
1) Removing the idea of "Economy" in the game make it a function of the game not the game. Stop trying to balance something that can't be balanced due to third party interference (Cheaters, No lifers, RMT,)
2) Performance issues: Honestly its what 2-3 years into Beta? This should be priority. When I say performance issues I mean the following:
Frame Dips, Stutter, Desync, Load times (My first match took 7 minutes to find and then another minute to load into)
3) Figuring out what the end game needs to be and start fleshing it out.
4) If you can do twitch drop events, and holiday themed events you can use KPI's from the game and metrics from items in circulation to dictate how the economy will go.
5) Remove the reliance on armor piercing ammo. As it stands you need some form of armor piercing ammo within the first few days of a wipe when you can by L3 armor from traders.
By doing the following and implementing the prestige system it gives you a revolving economy that never needs to be wiped that you can control. It also removes any financial reason to hack on Tarkov. It will keep that fresh wipe feeling indefinitely.
Right now the only thing driving people is rushing to get access to flea and then its farm roubles to trick out that underground base.
When really it should be.
I need to conserve my ammo until I can get that level 1 work bench. But that will only get me access to 9x18 / shotgun shells and some basic hunting cartridges. I got a requisition order with Prapor. Maybe I can order bulk hollow point rounds a deer rifle and some meds and water and use that. I got a Scav run coming up I should do some night runs in shoreline (once its a few months in Scav runs will be pretty safe as all the assholes will be karma'ed out for the most part.) Oh I got a daily quest to kill scavs on interchange as a PMC that will give me a spare rec order + a svd rifle.
Whatever the whole point is this drives people to play the game in a not meta way as the meta is controlled by BSG and it forces you to use team work as going up againsts Rashala with a .366 rifle and a couple shoddy nades is a scary proposition. People will have to use scav runs. Currency is earned via rapport with traders through quests and providing them with goods they need that can in turn be used for requisition. The only way players can get items. Is mutual trade meeting in game. Which is inherently risky.
So what ends up is you can make food and provisions your other buddy he can make meds meanwhile you have the ability to create ammunition. And lets say a 4th friend has some spare body armor.
You all meet up for a woods run dispense the items and then head out and have to work together to survive. You need each other for the raid and you need to each other to survive to get out.
This also creates emergent gameplay and there will be less kill on sight.
Some food for thought. I will see you all next wipe whenever that is. Hopefully that patch I can hit a stable 120FPS and its the "last wipe."
Dumpster Fire Blazing on the Frontier of a Dark Age
December 31, 2021
Forecast 2022 — Dumpster Fire Blazing on the Frontier of a Dark Age
If 2021 was the year of maximum corruption, political decadence, and mind-fuckery in US history, 2022 is looking like a convulsive snap-back to the harrowing rigors of reality, spiked with shocking losses, reckonings, and not a little retribution for the rogues and reprobates who drove our country into a ditch. Quandaries abound now in the wreckage of economy, culture, and polity. The years of anything-goes-and-nothing-matters have ended — though you might not know it yet, at this very advent of Twenty-Double-Deuce. Welcome to the banquet of consequences. Soup’s on!
The American people have been played backwards and forwards, inside and out, through and through, and up and down; driven to the very edge of national suicide by a combine of enemies within and without. If China’s CCP wanted to take maximum advantage of a weakened, confused USA, they couldn’t have found more zealous help-mates than the seditious Democratic Party, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci’s treasonous public health empire, the murderous pharmaceutical companies, the recklessly dishonest news media, and a demonic host of federal agencies, especially the three-stooge “Intel Community” — the CIA (Moe), DOJ (Larry), FBI (Curley) — plus the many secret horror chambers in the Pentagon. Throw in the Big Tech tyrants, the Marxist mandarins on campus, and the satanic narcissists of Hollywood. Oh, and let’s not forget the evil principality of grift and swindling that is Wall Street.
We still don’t know exactly what role the CCP and its Peoples’ Liberation Army played in the origins of Covid-19, and we don’t know because the US government doesn’t want us to know — because they had a role in it — and the news media won’t lift a finger to find out, either, because they are the propaganda arm of the regime in power. We do know an awful lot about the operations of Dr. Fauci and his colleagues in funding the development of the virus in Wuhan for the purpose of introducing a wildly profitable set of “vaccines” which, if anything, prolonged and exacerbated the pandemic, and harmed or killed millions all over the world.
We also know that this same set of players in public health and Big Pharma gamed the clinical trials that preceded the emergency use authorizations that loosed the “vaccines” on the people, and that they deliberately obstructed and suppressed proven treatments with inexpensive off-patent drugs that would have saved many hundreds of thousands of lives if they had been allowed within so-called standards-of-practice that rule medicine these days. The same gang fudged their statistical reporting wherever possible, especially by failing to fix the kludgy CDC VAERS website for listing adverse reactions to the “vaccines,” but also in creating conditions that made it impossible to discern actual Covid deaths from “vaccine” deaths, and deaths either caused by co-morbidities or extraneous occurrences such as highway accidents or gunshot killings.
In 2021, a mountain of evidence was accumulated about all this criminal mischief, capped by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s massive book about Dr. Fauci’s unholy career at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a virtual prosecution manual, meticulously annotated, that will be used in countless lawsuits against Dr. Fauci, his colleagues who outlive him, and the many agencies and NGOs — and perhaps in actual criminal trials of these very well-known perps.
This is where things stand at the turning of the new year 2022. Who doesn’t want to know where this historic game goes from here? A lot of story-lines are changing and quickly. It’s obvious that the “Joe Biden” admin wants to run the pandemic for at least one more year, most particularly to keep in place the “emergency” mail-in ballot scam that perverted the 2020 election. But more than half the country is onto that con and I predict that we’ll see more rigorous voting rules and regs in place — or, if those reforms meet resistance, a battle so fierce over them that the elections may not even take place on schedule.
Just now, too many Americans are already fed up with being pushed around by public officials supposedly for their own good. They see through the evils of the Covid-19 racket. They’ve watched the rape of the public interest. They understand that the “vaccines” were a disastrous experiment run lawlessly. They’ve witnessed the harms done to themselves and their loved ones. They’re appalled at the hijacking of science by people as scientifically profane as the necromancers, astrologasters, and inquisitors of yore.
They won’t submit to any more lockdowns, to any more attempts to interfere with and destroy small business. They’ve had enough of the race-and-gender hustles that have disordered society, ruined cities that were already struggling, traduced the basic principle of public safety, and forced people to play pretend around obvious psychopathology and depravity. They are not going to play along anymore. They are going to resist and fight — in the city councils, in the school boards, in the courts, and on battlefields, if it comes to that.
Ol’ Man Pandemic
He just kept rollin’ along. The weaker but more infectious Omicron variant of coronavirus currently ripping through global populations looks like a signal that the end of this vicious melodrama is in sight. Let’s predict that the actual disease phase of Covid-19 burns itself out by spring at the latest, unless malign actors have more lab-grown monsters they can release into the general population whenever they feel like it. But the demonically-installed harms built into the vaccines will keep killing and disabling people for a long time to come.
We know that the spike proteins have been clinically observed lurking in human bodies as much as fifteen months after a shot of mRNA, and that they induce a lot of damage to blood vessels, organs, and immune systems. We’re just coming into the first anniversary of the vaccines — not to mention that millions have gotten additional shots and then boosters right up to this week — so those harmful spike proteins will be working their hoodoo all of 2022 and beyond.
As the Thai-German doctor Sucharit Bhakdi warned recently, the compromised immune systems of the vaxxed may provoke a large-scale revival of age-old killer diseases like tuberculosis that are ever-present in small amounts in our bodies and usually suppressed. The people of Asia and Africa are particularly susceptible because public sanitation and clean water there is sketchier. The vaccines are also said to provoke the expression of lurking cancers, especially among those in remission from illness. The residual mortality from the vaccines may end up being greater than the deaths from the virus itself.
In the background of all that lurks that ominous prediction made by the Deagle military analysis company several years ago that estimated the population of the USA would crash to 99-million in 2025 — down from over 330-million now. Deagle never even explained that, and they took down the web page last year when their alarming forecast suddenly started looking plausible. Just sayin’.
Any way you cut it, the Covid-19 episode will thunder through the lives of many millions of people, especially in the nations of Western Civ, which has taken the hardest hits in terms of self-destructive government policy. The pandemic has accelerated the collapse of industrial economies, a process I call the long emergency, and eventually it will end up affecting all nations, even if the West happens to go down first. Societies will be propelled through a period of disorder, surely longer and more difficult in some places than others, depending on local resources. The destination of this journey is a place where the human project is run at much lower scale and pitch than we have gotten used to in our time, with far fewer “modern” comforts and conveniences, and shocking losses in knowledge and applied science. It won’t be the first time this has happened in human history, but the wreckage will be much greater.
Economy, Finance, and Money
Our economy is hitched to our energy resources. The business model for providing fossil fuels to the global economy is broken in many ways, and therefore the business model of a high-tech industrial production economy is also broken. The shale oil industry was launched on a high tide of near-zero financing and over a decade since then it produced an enormous quantity of oil (though less-than first-rate, short on heavy distillates such as diesel and heating oil). In the process, shale oil producers proved they could not make any money on these very expensive operations, and we now enter a period of capital scarcity that will make it harder for them to attract new investment and continue performing. Besides that, they are exhausting the “sweet spots” for drilling and fracking.
What’s left after you subtract shale oil are the conventional fields that were in steep decline in 2008 when the shale campaign got underway. In 2022, expect US oil production to fall below 9-million barrels a day. We consume just under 20-million barrels-a-day, and import the difference. You would have every reason to expect that a more disorderly world scene may interfere with our oil imports in 2022. Expect consumption to drop too, as economic activity weakens. Let’s predict consumption will fall to 15-million barrels-a-day. The oil markets will therefore be disorderly, with price oscillation as shortages and demand destruction push and pull each other. Remember the basic equation: oil over $75-a-barrel weakens economies; oil under $75-a-barrel crushes oil companies.
The wish persists that we can run the complex systems of modern life on alternative energy sources, but that wish is just not panning out. The realization that this is so will spread through western civ in 2022 and create more anxiety, more disordered thinking, cultish behavior, and breakdown of social norms. For now, the public arena is entirely occupied by the mass formation psychosis that first erupted around Donald Trump and then shifted to Covid-19. The stresses and tension of these demoralizing dynamics may lead in 2022 to the outbreak of political violence that will make it even harder to reach consensus on a way through our economic quandaries.
Let’s agree to compress our recent economic history, since I’ve rehearsed it many times in weekly blogs at Clusterfuck Nation: We replaced our on-the-ground goods manufacturing activities with so-called financialization, essentially the manufacture of debt — borrowing from the future to run our complex systems today, to compensate for the losses accrued by our broken energy business model. It was all a swindle, since you can’t create prosperity with the sheer management of instruments purporting to represent wealth if there is no real production of material wealth behind it. Debt is not wealth. You can play games with it in financial markets, buy and sell it, manipulate interest rates and prices to give the appearance of things functioning. But that only goes so far — specifically to the point where reality overcomes artifice, and that’s where we are now. Substituting debt for wealth introduced perversities into the economy. Now you can’t tell the real value of anything — “price discovery” is disabled — and that bleeds into socio-economic behavior, too. Now, many business activities, including the supposedly self-consciously ethical fields of higher-ed and medicine, have become dreadful rackets, which is to say efforts to make money dishonestly. We can’t pretend that all this okay anymore. We’re left with a gigantic edifice of debt that will never be paid back and a whole lot of bad behavior that is corroding our humanity.
After two decades of papering over our inability to pay for running our society, the Federal Reserve has finally achieved old-school inflation — the destruction of money itself — not just the pumping up of share prices, their specialty for so many years. They kept inflation at bay all that time by exporting it to other countries who sent us real stuff in exchange for our paper promises: treasury bills, notes, bonds. Covid lockdowns and the destruction of business finally killed that longstanding equilibrium and then growing ill feeling between the US and China starting killing supply chains. Now, globalism is on the ropes and with it our ability to export US treasury paper. All the “helicopter money” flushed into the system during Covid now chases goods that have a tougher journey to their points-of-sale. Parts of machines, cars, and many other things become hard to get. Prices go up. Systems break down and their failures ramify in other systems.
With inflation running officially around 8 percent, and unofficially more like 15 percent, the real interest rate on a ten-year treasury bond is the nominal 1.49 percent minus between 8 and 15 percent, a deeply negative number. Owning that paper is a dead loss. If the rate of inflation continues merely apace of 2021 in 2022, the loss will steepen. If inflation continues greater than apace of 2021, treasury paper will be like so many smallpox blankets on the global bond market and America will be verging on Weimar-style runaway inflation. We won’t be able to offer any more bonds in return for stuff. The Fed will have to eat them. We’ll be importing inflation, the prices of goods will keep going up. America is in a hole of our own digging. What can be done?
The Fed has two choices, both of them unpromising. 1) “Tightening.” By measured increments, the Fed quits QE, (quantitative easing, buying bonds, a.k.a. “monetizing debt”) not just US treasury paper, but also corporate bonds, and mortgage-backed securities. They move to raise interest rates to above par with real inflation rates to give people back the old reality-based incentive for buying bonds in the first place, which is a reliable stream of interest greater than inflation. The last time inflation threatened America, 1981, Fed Chairman Paul Volker jacked up fed fund (short-term) rates to 20 percent, which put the schnitz on borrowing for a time, caused a recession, but got-er done. The catch is, the national debt and the balance sheet of the Fed were minuscule then compared to the incomprehensible trillions on-board now. And there was still a lot of actual productive industry left in the country.
An end to quantitative easing combined with raising interest rates would recalibrate markets to equilibrium — which is to say, crash them, because the end of near-zero interest would mean no more using leverage (borrowed money) to buy stocks, which are wildly overvalued after years and years of these shenanigans. The bid on stocks would end. Not enough buyers to meet sellers. Markets go down. That prompts more selling… a rush to the exits… look out below….
Tightening would crash the value of bonds, too, because bond value has an inverse relationship to interest rates — as they rise, the tradable price of bonds goes down. So, bond-holders would take a bath. Tightening actually makes money disappear — phhhtttt! — because it causes defaults (people not paying off their debts). In our system, money is loaned into existence and welshed-on loans sends money out of existence. People and corporations go broke. Higher interest rates also will make corporations default on their bond payments. Without access to more debt, many big companies may have to shut down, go out of business, perhaps forever. Government, buried under massive debt, would choke on higher interest payments. As money goes out of existence, capital becomes scarce and small business, which desperately depends on revolving credit, goes broke. The net effect of all this damage in financial markets is of deep economic depression, in this case, the long emergency case, probably a depression that becomes permanent since the basis of this particular high-energy economy, the oil industry, collapses along with everything else.
The Federal Reserve’s choice number 2) is: Don’t tighten. Rather, continue to print money like crazy, maybe even more than before, and keep trying to suppress interest rates. Keep buying bonds, notes, whatever debt paper the system pukes up. This is just the tired old scheme called kicking the can further down the road. The problem is, we’re at the end of the road. Old-school inflation had already kicked off in 2021 from two decades of QE, which was then greatly aggravated by the massive government spending to mitigate Covid. There’s no more jiggering with bond-buying and finagling the interest rates, and playing hide-the-salami with bank reserves, and stashing money in “special purpose vehicles” and other banking hidey-holes that will avail to keep things stable and happy. From here on, printing money like crazy only destroys the value of our money. You’ll have plenty of money, only it’ll get more worthless by the day — which is just another way of going broke.
Then, as the dollar purchases less and less stuff, dollars held overseas get dumped in exchange for whatever stuff is on offer: ores, grain, finished products, US real estate, precious metals, other less-damaged currencies, what-have-you. Better to own things of actual value than dollars that are fast-losing their purchasing power. Foreigners dump US treasury bonds, too, since inflation destroys their value. As foreigners do this, the dollars return home to the US provoking yet more inflation. Before long, America is awash in dollars and short on goods that you can buy with those dollars. You’re rich in dollars yet broke at the same time.
The outcome in both cases is substantially the same: the standard-of-living in America goes way down. What I predict for 2022 is that the Federal Reserve will embark on a much-heralded tightening program — and then abandon it at the first sign of trouble, the inevitable stock market downturn. Then the Fed will be back to buying our own debt paper and attempting to stuff interest rates back down, if they can, which may not be possible anymore. The Fed soon loses all control over American money. They may try to retire “old” dollars and replace them with “new” dollars backed by something, gold and silver being the obvious candidates. That will lead to a severe upward re-pricing of both metals. Let’s predict gold at $5,000 and silver at $200 by the end of 2022.
There may be a half-assed attempt to establish some kind of official US digital currency (this has been rumored for years.) The experiment will fail. Americans will resist being herded into that corral where their every financial transaction is traceable, taxable, and punishable. They will have learned their lesson about that from the Covid-19 tyrannies. They are sick of being pushed around. They no longer trust the authorities in money, government, medicine, or anything else. Anyway, as a practical matter, too many Americans operate on the fringes of the system already and depend on cash for doing all their business. Many of these are what’s called “un-banked.” They cannot participate in computerized payment systems. They will remain outside the digi-loop doing business with silver, gold, or various kinds of stuff. They’ll operate like 14th century Venetians.
I kind of doubt Bitcoin and its imitators will survive a whole lot longer after the financial system is forced to recalibrate to reality. They have thrived solely as targets of speculation. The block-chain is very clever, but ultimately Bitcoin and its ilk represent… nothing… no-thing(s). They attracted a lot of money that was just sloshing around the system during the years of artificial pseudo-prosperity, and that’s over. Anyway, they depend utterly on a stable Internet and electric grid to function and you’d be surprised at the fragility lurking in both those systems. Early 2022 may be your last chance to get out of Bitcoin with anything to show for your adventures in it.
Politics and Society
The mass formation psychosis described by Mattias Desmet of the University of Ghent is behind much of what we’ve been seeing in US politics for some years now. It was apparently triggered by the election of Donald Trump. But it seems to me the syndrome was groomed and cultivated by America’s “deep state” security, surveillance, and intelligence apparatus for decades before. Liberal Democrats didn’t have to go batshit crazy over Trump. Rather, they were manipulated into it by the deep state’s agents in the major media, starting with the preposterous RussiaGate collusion psy-op and extending through four years of nefarious schemes to disable and oust Mr. Trump. Though portrayed as the arch-enemy of the pets and pet projects of the Left — identity Marxism, open borders — as president, Mr. Trump was really much more a threat to the deep state itself, and to its matrix of wealth, power, and privilege, and they pulled out all the stops except assassination to shove him off the game-board.
His perseverance and resilience in the face of all that, was remarkable. But in the end, his enemies engineered an election marinated in various flavors of fraud, and managed to get rid of the Golden Golem of Greatness. How “Joe Biden,” the empty husk of a grifting, ward-heeling pol, came to be nominated by the Democratic Party is one of the abiding mysteries of modern times. His victory in the Super Tuesday primary, which cinched the nomination for him, was surely rigged by the DNC. His campaign, from start to finish, was a sham of hiding from the public. If the voters had been allowed to see the material on his son, Hunter, and the slime-trail of bribes recorded in hundreds of emails, contracts, and other documents on the “laptop from Hell,” “Joe Biden” would be in federal prison rather than the White House. But Facebook, Twitter, and Google conspired to censor all mention of that, and the people never got the news. So, now what?
Well, moving into the early winter of 2022, Americans are discovering just how badly they have been played on Covid-19, and how badly “Joe Biden” & Co. have handled economic matters and other things, like the daily invasion across the Mexican border, and how poorly “JB” & Co. have managed our foreign relations — the Afghan withdrawal fiasco, etc — and generally what a pathetic a figure “JB” presents to the world… and all this is looking like the ghost dance of the Democratic Party. Let’s predict the party will not survive the 2022 midterm elections intact as a coherent political faction.
I’ll give 70 / 30 odds that “Joe Biden” steps aside “for health reasons” well before the midterm election. He’s falling apart before our eyes. He can barely utter a comprehensible sentence. He embarrasses himself and the country every day. His poll numbers are in the sub-basement…. So, okay, he basically takes a dive and retires from the scene. Kamala Harris is sworn in. President Harris nominates Barack Obama as vice-president. Say, what…!
Mr. Obama is back in charge — like, was he ever not in charge since Jan 20, 2021, really? — going so far as to brazenly occupy the Oval Office as Veep for daily business — consigning Ms. Harris to a broom closet. Democrats clamor for Ms. Harris to resign and officially hand the reins to Mr. Obama. (Presidents are limited to two elected terms in office, but the constitution does not stipulate such a circumstantial appointment to office.) Kamala graciously steps aside. For the sake of “unity” and gender balance, Mr. Obama nominates Liz Cheney as the new vice-president. That’s one possible scenario. Rewrite that play with Hillary Clinton instead of Barack Obama. The Democrats are going to have to try some desperate move to retain power.
Even so, it’s hard to imagine any circumstances in which the Democratic Party retains effective control of the government. In the event that the midterm election is actually held, let’s predict Republicans regain majority control of the House and Senate, with many new faces of the MAGA persuasion among them. The Dems hopes and dreams for transformative change get flushed down the toilet. Government at the national level becomes impotent, ineffectual, unable to discharge its duties or manage anything — all this predicted explicitly, by the way, in The Long Emergency (Grove-Atlantic, 2005). Will our foreign adversaries take advantage of the situation? Can the fifty states manage their affairs without subsidies from Washington DC? Governors had better be planning for strange times.
The political right has been careful and cautious since the debacle of the January 6, 2021 march on the Capitol building. The poor boobs cajoled by FBI plants to break into the joint have been treated abominably by their government, and probably extra-legally. But mainly, the Jan. 6th caper put a damper on any more right-wing street action during “Joe Biden’s” year in office. That may change in 2022. The mood of politically-motivated people on either side of the spectrum has got to be aggravated by the tanking economy. And as the year rolls on, it will just be hungry, angry Americans of all sorts raising hell because they don’t know what else to do.
All the anxiety driving the mass formation psychosis that had first focused on Trump, and then on Covid-19 (and the unvaccinated), may now finally shift its energy at the actual source of our woes and sorrows: the DC establishment. The decline and fall of Covid-19 is going to leave a big hole in the nation’s anxious, wasted soul, and it will have to be filled with something. We’re thrust into a scene that resembles Civil War, but it becomes harder and harder to determine who is on what side, or what the sides even are — or as Mick Jagger famously hollered at Altamont CA in. ’69, “Who’s foit-ing an’ whut faw?” It’s sheer clusterfuck. Murphy’s Law meets Zombieland during Seven Days in May.
Geopolitics
Gawd, who knows…? The Russians are sorely pissed because thirty years ago after the Soviet system clocked out, and eventually Vlad Putin tried to paste some kind of functioning nation back together out of the debris, we promised them in plain talk to not expand NATO, and then, year after year, we proceeded to add more countries to NATO including former Soviet Republics hedging right up to Russia’s border. Then, the US under Mr. Obama ran the “color revolution” in Ukraine, attempting to strong-arm that pathetic punching bag of a state to come over to our side… and having done that, we’re now threatening to bring them into NATO, meaning we would like to station rockets and perhaps troops and all kinds of other military stuff on what has been the doormat for every attempted invasion of Russia in modern history. Are you surprised that Russia has drawn a line in the sand there?
One can’t have a whole lot of confidence in Anthony Blinken’s State Department or in General Milley’s Woked-up, transsexual army that calling Russia’s bluff on this might work out well for the USA. Considering how economically weak we are now, how tragically disunited we are, how pussified and squishy we’ve become, maybe starting a war over Ukraine isn’t such a hot idea. One can only hope.
On the other side is China, Uncle Xi’s re-born Middle Kingdom, with gleaming skyscrapers, dazzling new airports and highways, the fabulous social credit system for controlling her huge population Orwell-style. China has a lot going for her, but what’s going against her isn’t so obvious, starting with the fact that she’s hurting for long-term fossil fuel supplies. China just doesn’t have that much oil or natgas, and she’s using ever-lower quality coal to drive her industry. Her oil imports have to travel through two global choke-points, the Straits of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca. In short, despite China’s great strides moving from the twelfth century into dazzling modernity, she might stumble on the energy quandary — like all the other “advanced” nations.
It’s no secret that under the ambitious Marxist emperor Xi Jinping, China wants to occupy the World Hegemon role that America is struggling not to abandon. Hegemon-ship usually requires geographical expansion. We’re certainly concerned about a takeover of Taiwan, which is, effectively, America’s offshore microchip facility. China could conceivably gain control over Taiwan by a thousand tiny steps without firing a shot — as the CCP has infiltrated US politics, media, and education — or by force, if only to make a theatrical point, but why invite the possibility of a nuclear exchange?
China has been adventuring in many remote parts of the world for years without drawing much international attention, buying farmland and mining sites throughout East Africa, and now she is eyeing openings in several resource-rich South American nations that recently elected friendly socialist presidents. China was awarded contracts to operate ports at both ends of the strategically important Panama Canal over twenty years ago, and Panama signed a memorandum of agreement to join China’s Belt-and-Road initiative in 2017. That got the attention of the Trump administration, which was meeting China’s expansionism with tariffs and sanctions. Mr. Trump caused several Chinese infrastructure projects for bridges, high-speed rail, and port improvements in the Canal Zone to be suspended. “Joe Biden,” a major Chinese client, is now looking the other way.
Can China actually control the unruly lands of Central Asia vital to her Belt-and-Road ambitions. For instance, Afghanistan, where China looks to establish giant mining operations, but has yet to tangle with the feisty Taliban. Let’s predict that China in 2022 is stymied in expansion and hamstrung by her energy problems. And add to that trouble in her export markets of the USA and Europe, as they begin to implode financially and the demand for Chinese manufactured goods declines.
Then there is China’s banking morass, bazillions of loans gone bad, giant businesses wobbling, and collateral in the form of a thousand skyscrapers built out of cement so inferior that it’s a miracle the buildings still stand up. How will China’s fragile banking system contend with contagion from the financial problems of the US and Europe? Let’s predict that China finds herself in enough economic difficulty that domestic disorder breaks out, the government over-reacts to it, and she becomes too paralyzed with internal political problems to make any mischief beyond her border for now.
Finally, Europe. Oh, lovely Europe, the tourist theme-park of my lifetime with its beautiful cities, tidy landscapes, its cafes, cathedrals, girls on motorbikes, its fabulous deep culture. Looks like the whole shebang is going down the chute now, with intimations of a return to 20th century political upheaval. Somehow, Covid-19 has provoked Austria and Germany to return to behavior that smells a little bit like what went on in the Hitler years. Hard to believe, I know, but look at them! Police state tactics! Forced vaccinations! Lockdowns! Harsh punishments for those who resist. It’s sickening, and looks like it’s getting entrenched.
Euroland’s economy is a mess. Its energy problems are worse than China’s. Except for Norway, with its dwindling North Sea oil fields, and some played-out coal mines, Europe has next to nothing for fossil fuels. Germany’s feckless “green” wind-and-solar project hasn’t worked out. She is more and more dependent on Russian oil and gas, and Germany’s position in NATO subjects her to the machinations of the USA against Russia, which has stymied the opening of Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea. They may end up freezing this winter, and starving the following winter. The European banking system is a laughable fraud, since the EU has no control of the fiscal decisions made by member governments that issue increasingly worthless bonds. It’s going to be a rough year there with governments coming and going — stumbling as they go. Perhaps France gets a little lucky. The maverick journalist Éric Zemmour wins the election as president and spurs a revival of French national spirit. He’s still stuck with the rot in financials, but at least he bolsters the country’s morale. And unlike the Germans, France did not choose to close down its nuclear power industry, so the lights stay on there.
There you have it, ye denizens of Clusterfuck Nation. I can do no more with this. I wish you all fortitude in the twelve months ahead, and courage, and kindness, and all the good things that we are capable of. We’ll need that. There is still a lot to cherish about this country of ours, the good old USA, and I believe we’ll rediscover that in Double-deuce, along with some ability to tell ourselves the truth about things that matter and act consistently with it! Excelsior, brave hearts!