Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

“There has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.” - Sun Tzu

China’s grand strategy to take its turn at dominance over the global scene depends on bogging down the USA in four wars at once. How’s it working so far? Pretty darn well. Amazingly, China hardly had to lift a finger to make it happen - though it did write some bank checks to the soulless old grifter sitting in the White House.  Our country has arranged its collapse and downfall masterfully on its own. War No. 1: There was absolutely no need to start the war in Ukraine, you understand, which has by now not only bled Ukraine’s young male population to the bone, but drained our own military of field weapons and ammunition. After the Soviet collapse, Ukraine existed as a poor backwater in Russia’s orbit, causing no trouble for anyone — except itself, due to world-beating corruption — until the USA started a push to include it in NATO. Our neocons made it clear that the purpose of this was to hem-in and weaken Russia. (Why? “Reasons,” they said.) This policy alarmed and infuriated the Russians who made it clear that NATO membership wasn’t going to happen. The US persisted, engineered a coup in 2014 against the Russian-leaning president Yanukovych, and spurred his replacements, first Poroshenko and then Zelensky, to pound the ethnic Russian provinces of the Donbas with rockets and artillery for years on end. Meanwhile, we trained, armed, and supplied a large Ukrainian army and refused to negotiate the NATO expansion in good faith until Mr. Putin had enough in 2022 and moved to put a stop to all this monkey business. After some initial mis-steps, the Russians began to prevail in early 2023. Now, there is a general consensus that Russia controls the battle space with its superior ordnance and troop strength, and the conflict is close to being over. Our NATO allies are not hiding their disgust over the fiasco. Ukraine is wrecked. What remains is how the “Joe Biden” regime reacts to yet another major overseas humiliation. As I see it, Mr. Putin must do his level best to not rub it in, since our country is in the throes of a psychotic fugue and might be capable of world-ending craziness. War No. 2: Little more than a month ago, the Middle East was thought to have reached a moment of praiseworthy stability, according to White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. We awaited an upgrade of the Abraham Accords normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Then, the savage Hamas operation of October 7 blew it all up. The Israeli-Palestinian quandary seems to have no possible solution. The Palestinians want their own state, of course, but they push to establish it in the entire territory that Israel occupies now. (From the River to the sea….) The Israelis have no intention of being pushed out, and they resist other possible divisions of the land there that might serve to satisfy the Palestinians’ wish for a country of their own. Israel understands that a basic tenet of jihadi Islam, expressed clearly and often, is to exterminate the Jews, and there is no way around that. Israel’s adversaries don’t seem to understand the meaning of “never again.” Israel now must deal with the latest affront to its existence and its clear goal is to disarm and destroy the Hamas terror organization. To the world’s horror, they are going about it brutally in Gaza because Hamas is dug-in in a vast tunnel network under the civilian overlay of houses, shops, schools, and hospitals. What else might Israel do? Probably seal off the tunnel system with Hamas in it, creating a gigantic graveyard of Islamic martyrs — a recipe for future cycles of vengeance. As you can see, there appears to be no way this ends well for anyone. Other big Islamic players wait on the sidelines, making only threatening gestures so far. I doubt that Iran will risk its oil infrastructure and its electric grid to intervene. And despite Mr. Erdogan’s drum-beating and his large army, the Turkish economy and currency (the lira) would collapse if he jumped in. Egypt has zero appetite for war. That leaves Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, on Israel’s northern frontier. If they amp things up enough, Damascus and Beirut could become ashtrays. So, I would expect that Israel grinds on methodically to put Hamas out of business and the region returns to its miserable stalemate status quo until the next generation of angry Palestinians starts a new cycle of violence. Meanwhile, Israel has its own fractious internal political problems to contend with. And also meanwhile, the Palestinians and Israelis compete by birth-rate to out-populate the other side — a contest that might stop suddenly with the economic collapse of the US and Europe, and the end of current global economic relations, including an orderly oil trade, that has produced nearly a century of global super-prosperity allowing populations to expand as they have. (There is also Israel’s 90-percent Covid vaccination rate to consider, with its detrimental effects on health and reproduction.) In a desperate scramble for resources that follows, things that can’t go on, stop. Bringing us to War No. 3: The US Government’s war against its own citizens. This has been going on since Mr. Trump stepped onto the scene, and has included a semi-successful war against Mr. Trump personally — except that not only has it failed to put him out of business as a politician, it has substantiated many of the claims he made about corrupt and perfidious government that resulted in his election in 2016. All of that has only enhanced his polling numbers. And the lawless, bad faith court cases lodged against him have demonstrated the US government’s grievous fall into willful malfeasance that has the DOJ arresting and unfairly persecuting hundreds of innocent Americans that support Mr. Trump. A big part of the government’s war against US citizens has been the bizarre Covid-19 episode and the long-running effort by public officials to deceive the population about it, including lockdowns and destruction of small businesses, the dishonest suppression of viable treatments, gross censorship about the harms of the mRNA vaccines, and trickery around the origins of the vaccines in the back rooms of our Department of Defense. Another front of this war is the wide-open Mexican border, a lawless state of affairs created as deliberate policy by our cabinet secretaries, and done at a time when there is tremendous animus against the US from many other nations who send thousands of sketchy young men into our country with no attempt by our border officials to determine who they are. It looks like “Joe Biden’s” hash will be settled shortly when the House, reorganized under a young and vital new speaker, reveals the Biden family’s bank records and begins the process of impeaching the president for bribery. “Joe Biden’s” party pretends that this is not happening and appears to have no plan to deal with consequences. For the moment, they still stupidly tout him as their candidate for the 2024 election, another arrant falsehood you can add to the thousand-and one affronts against the public that this party has tried to put over. Many Americans suspect there will not be a 2024 election, specifically that whoever is president in the coming year will invoke yet another national emergency order to postpone it on spurious grounds. Many are also far from persuaded that the 2020 election that installed “Joe Biden” was honest and legitimate. Which brings us to War No. 4: The American peoples’ war against a government gone rogue. Obviously, it is not underway yet, but it’s easy to see how it might develop. I think it could commence in the aftermath of a financial calamity that is visibly brewing in the debt markets. The net result will be a collapsed standard-of-living for everyone in the USA, the breakdown of supply lines and daily business, and a very sharp loss of legitimacy for the people who have been in charge of anything in this country. We emerge from this catastrophe a nearly medievalized society with a steeply-reduced population, unable to resist China’s attempt to colonize us. Pretty scary, huh? Just let’s keep doing what we’re doing. *  *  * Support his blog by visiting Jim’s Patreon Page

Speaking at the sidelines of Bloomberg's New Economy Forum in Singapore, Sara Menker, founder and CEO of Gro Intelligence, cautioned that the current food crisis surpassed the one in 2007-08, which ultimately sparked Arab Spring across the Middle East a few years later. This is primarily due to elevated crop prices and steep declines in local currencies against the dollar. Bloomberg's Yvonne Man asked Menker: "When we talk about where we see food prices - come off from the record highs of last year. What drives food insecurity is wars, climate change, and economic shocks. And we're feeling that on all fronts right now... So what worries you the most?" Menker responded: "It's actually the narrative that food prices have come off the highs, which has been the narrative we're using because we're all following future markets that are all dollar-denominated as a gauge of where food prices are." She said, "Year-on-year food prices have come off quite substantially." "But what has happened in most other parts of the world that import food - is that food prices continue to go up because local currencies are weakening significantly against the dollar," she said, adding, "People eat in local currency and not in US dollars." She pointed out, "While wheat futures are down double digits year on year - it's up double digits year on year in Egypt because the price of importing wheat has gone up just due to the decimation of the Egyptian pound." Menker said in Syria, food inflation is up 2,000%, 1,200% in Lebonan, and 700% in Argentina. She said the food crisis "is far from over for most people in the world." Later in the interview, Man asked Menker: "Where are we headed now? Obviously, we look at the 2007-08 food crisis at that time. Are we getting closer to that scenario?"  Menker's response was apocalyptic: "Actually, I think we are much worse."  She explained again, "Where food prices are in a lot of countries - if you take it in a local currency basis - food prices are significantly higher when compared to 2007-08." Here's the interview. For some context, after global food prices spiked in 2007-08, in late 2010 and early 2011, discontent over soaring prices triggered the Arab Spring. In late 2020, SocGen's Albert Edwards started to warn about the Federal Reserve blowing bubbles during the Covid pandemic and how it could spark a rise in food prices and the usually ongoing risks, such as social-economic instabilities. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently warned the world food import bill jumped to nearly $2 trillion in 2022 as many poor countries are on the brink of crisis. This time, unlike a decade ago, the Western world has been battered with food inflation crushing tens of millions of low-income folks.

Everything is fine ... ???????????? pic.twitter.com/hEpZZ3moUE

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) November 9, 2023

"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy," American investigative journalist Alfred Henry Lewis stated in 1906.

Authored by Raymond Ibrahim via AmericanThinker.com, What is ultimately behind so many of the (manufactured) ills currently plaguing the West, from leftist lunacy and gender insanity to unnecessary lockdowns and wars? In a word, the ultra-rich -- the billionaire elite.  So argues bestselling author Hanne Nabintu Herland in her latest book, The Billionaire World: How Marxism Serves the Elite. In a series of brisk chapters, Herland -- a historian of religions and founder of The Herland Report -- traces all the world’s major problems back to the billionaire elite and their use of Marxist repression and social engineering.  While this may seem counterintuitive, Herland makes -- and documents -- several powerful arguments. The fact that a tiny elite control much can be seen in that  even seemingly opposing and competing brands, such as Coke and Pepsi, are usually owned by the same company, says Herland.  The same applies to supposedly opposing “leftist” and “rightist” media. Six corporations control 90% of all U.S. media. As for the political arena, the “richest 0.01% have accounted for 40% of all campaign contributions through corporate donations.” In short, “These mastodonte private companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear, and who we vote for.” Little wonder that, no matter what happens in the world, and no matter how such developments are detrimental to the average person, the ultra-rich tend to only get richer. According to Herland, “82% of all wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1% among us, while the poorest world population of 3.7 billion saw no increase in wealth.” But it’s worse than that; there seems to be a direct correlation between how much poorer the average man gets and how much richer the billionaires get.  Writes Herland,

[T]he richest among us made billions of dollars on the COVID-19 world tragedy, while the world’s poor plunged into unimaginable poverty…  The shutdown strategy made the billionaires’ profit soar.  In the span of just a few months in 2020, Bill Gates made $75 billion, Jeff Bezos $67.9 billion, Mark Zuckerberg $37.8 billion, and Elon Musk $33.6 billion.

Meanwhile, 48% of small business owners in America experienced severe economic turmoil -- with fully one-third of them going bankrupt, and with Black-owned businesses suffering disproportionately -- due to this lockdown that otherwise profited the billionaires. From a macro-historic perspective, the  West is slowly regressing, and the ultra-rich are becoming “the globalist version of feudal lords, as the new Western slave class emerges beneath them.” But how did this lamentable state of affairs comes to pass in the first place?  Marxism -- in its myriad forms and iterations -- is Herland’s answer.  Since the 1960s, beginning with the “free sex and drugs” movement, Marxism, especially in the guise of godless materialism, has wormed its way into Western culture, poisoning, corrupting and destroying everything that originally made the West great, and therefore making it ripe for the most powerful -- meaning the richest -- to manipulate and control.   Writes Herland,

The Marxist attack on historic Western values has weakened the very core of our culture, destroyed social stability and the family, quenched free speech and silenced the people -- and thereby removed the obstacles for the billionaire class to gain centralized control… The combination of strong private corporations coupled with political socialist ideologies has pushed for a radical groupthink model in which the population is expected to agree with the consensus -- not unlike that which we witnessed during National Socialism in Germany before and during World War II.”

Marxism is especially apt at exploiting any environment where freedom and liberty erode and are replaced with groupthink.  In the words of Vladimir Lenin:

We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth... We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion and scorn towards those who disagree with us.

It needs no great expounding to say that these tactics dominate all social and political discourse today -- more than a century after they were first written down. There is much more to recommend Herland’s Billionaire World. Almost every pressing topic -- including the politicization of science, the rise of (openly Marxist) groups such as Black Lives Matter (BLM), the global persecution of Christians, the stoking of racial tensions, and the rewriting of history -- is connected to the overlooked role of the billionaire elites and their self-serving agendas. *  *  * Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.