Lack of water?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/dry-winter-rockies-spring-1.6809994

Cheap abundant energy

That is, and has been, the foundation of civilization. Without this precious resource we humans are shackled to the daily routine of securing food and shelter for ourselves.

Since the advent of the industrial revolution, when coal became the foundation for development, we have been sailing along with a powerhouse in the hold, getting us where we wanted to go at our whim.

But great civilizations have existed in the past. How did they do it?
Sadly, to a great extent, this was accomplished on the back of slaves, captured in war and/or raised in captivity. That goes for the Greeks, Romans, and many others across the world. And it includes North America before the American Civil war.

Slaves provided that cheap abundant energy and were considered tradable assets by their owners.

Like it or not, in practice, we still do, and are, where debt is used instead of chains.

Big Brother watches your messages

https://www.rt.com/news/563670-big-brother-watches-your-messages/

Wokism - communism

Communism failed and so will wokism, for the same reasons. Communism grew into a populist movement based on a sense of injustice in societies where a rich minority exploited a poor majority.

With public support, activists managed to to take control of the movement with the help of background financial manipulators with their own agendas and the outcome was one oppressive ruling class being replaced by another.

Now the process is just repeating itself, under a new label.
Time to take action and put these parasites back in their holes!

Banking confidence game

Or should I say “The Banking con game”? Either way, it amounts to the same thing: The belief that money you deposit with a bank will be available to you on demand. As if money was a physical entity deposited in a box in the bank, to be reclaimed at will.

But it doesn’t work that way. The money you deposit in a bank is simply a number entered into the bank’s ledger as a liability for the bank to you. A promise to pay you upon demand.

On the other side of the ledger the bank will create loans to approved applicants and in the process create money numbers in the accounts of said applicants to the value of the approved loan. These repayable-with-interest loans are then classified as assets for the bank.

This way of operating by a bank is enacted in law in the country in which the bank is situated and there is a snag: Neither the money deposited by savers, nor the money lent out to borrowers, belong to the bank.

In order to be allowed to operate, a bank needs to have legal ownership of a sufficient amount of money, like share capital and operating earnings, to cover day to day cheque clearing operations by the central bank as cheques written on customer loan accounts are processed.

In practice, commercial banks will use short term loans from the central bank to facilitate such day to day operations when needed.

Things can go sideways very quickly if a bank is no longer able to meet its obligations to either depositors or loan customers, creating the conditions for a “banking panic”, where people line up to withdraw their monies.

The banking regulator ought to be aware of this kind of situation well before the “shit hits the fan” and take over the failing bank to prevent a market panic.

That evidently did not happen at an early stage in the case of the Silicon Valley Bank, creating jitters in the whole financial system, due to the interdependency of financial institutions.

Similarities, Ukraine - Taiwan

Conflicts between nations and alliances seem to begin when one party lays claim to territory said to “belong” to it. On 1 September 1939 the Germans attacked the Westerplatte peninsula in the port of Gdańsk. This assault marks the beginning of the Second World War.

The Germans had long laid claim to “Danzig”, as they called it, and it had a 98% German population in 1939. (410,000)

The Russian position in regards to parts of Ukraine is now well known and it is asserting ownership by way of cannon fire at this time.

Xi Jinping just got installed for his third term as President in China and claims Chinese ownership of Taiwan, so far having failed to deliver on that promise.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration in the US asserts that Ukraine and Taiwan are both ‘independent’ nations (with a LOT of help from their friends, i.e. principally the backers of the Biden administration.)

Historically, a well known recipe for war. And WE are asked to pay the price.

In Flanders fields...

... the poppies grow. That poem was written in 1915 by John McCrae as a result of the carnage suffered in the Great War where blood and guts fertilized the fields of war along with nitrogen deposits from the explosives used.

It is a call to keep fighting, on and on, to beat the foe. For what?
Apart from bringing down one empire in order to temporarily bolster another one, what was achieved? A generation of young men was lost and mangled on both sides of the conflict.

The conflict degenerated into a slogging match using artillery shells and whosoever was able to keep up the barrage the longest won the day.

Fast forward 100+ years and we are back in the same hole in Ukraine where two empires are dishing it out using cannon shells and young bodies to fertilize the fields of that country again. Nothing new in the last 1000 or so years.

Smelly cities

Watching a video of Imperial Rome reminded me of an experience I had visiting Singapore in 1971. Staying overnight in a modern hotel on the outskirts of the downtown, I ventured into the heart of the old city where narrow cobblestone streets had an open sewer running down the middle.

In fact, if you approached the downtown from downwind, you could smell it a mile away. Eventually you get used to it but the initial impact is quite powerful.

And so it was in Imperial Rome, a city with some 1 million people, many of whom lived in poverty and squalor. A hive of activity and breeding ground for all manner of infectious diseases.

On the other side of the ledger, I lived in the City of Baghdad in 1961 where dry heat day temperatures in the summer ranged between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius. It did not have open sewers (the water would likely have evaporated) but the smell was so different, and not unpleasant, that I experienced it in my dreams long after having returned to Norway.

Warmongering

Since time immemorial it has been the practice of a minority to sow the seeds of suspicion and fear of “other” in populations they wish to control and dominate.

They identify with “us” vs “them” that are demonized and dehumanized for the purposes of subjugation. That happened to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island when hordes of settlers arrived from Europe and ideology was used to justify their forced removal from their lands.

On a different scale, when both sides are more equally matched in terms of power to wage war, power groups on both sides of the issues will try to mobilize their populations using the same techniques. Media control is essential for this strategy to succeed.

That’s exactly what has happened in Ukraine which has now become a punching ball between the Western Empire and the Russian Empire.

OurFather

“Our Father who art in Heaven...”
So goes the traditional Lord’s Prayer in Christianity and I believe that it has its origins in a time when the sun (Sol) was considered to be the supreme being in our world.

Sol can literally be seen in the heavens as he marches across the sky, is reborn every morning and creates the day which makes our lives possible.

When we die we are purposely laid to rest facing the east and Sol’s re-emergence, in order for us to be reborn into the afterlife.

I have come across plenty of anecdotal evidence that Sol was universally worshipped by peoples all over the world in ancient times, especially here on Turtle Island where the Sundance was a very important event connecting native peoples to a mighty power.

For example, the indigenous name of the Medicine River in my area was “Sundance River”, changed by the colonial authorities.

Question: Why was Sol considered to be so powerful? I mean, he is there every morning, seemingly unchanged.

Answer: That has not always been the case and there is now evidence emerging that massive solar flares may have been a root cause of the end of the last ice age some 12,800 years ago which destroyed an ancient civilization, leaving small remnants in isolated places.

We have now come full circle with a sophisticated but very vulnerable civilization.

“...hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven.”

Kremlin perspective

The prevailing view in the political power structure of Russia is that it is faced with an existential crisis where an external enemy is intent on obliterating it and install a puppet replacement regime.

And they are exactly right because that is the stated aim of Western Empire politicians, including Canada’s Foreign Minister Melanie Joly who, along with colleagues in cabinet, never bothered to ask Canadians whether they agreed or not.

Putin, who represents a country with an imperial past and similar aspirations for the future, sees the Western Empire as a bully with a set of ‘values’ completely antithetical to his own. And he has managed to persuade a lot of Russians to feel likewise.

Very likely, the only way the war in Ukraine will end, is if the Western Empire concedes to Russia the territories it has under control at this time, including Crimea and the eastern areas.

From an intellectual perspective, Putin sees the world as a multipolar place, with several powers, including Russia, dominating the local landscape.

That in contrast to the globalists of the Western Empire who sees the world as their exclusive playground, at any cost.