$100 Oil Is Solving Russia's Budget Problem

We Want One Solution, But One Solution Can't Solve Our Polycrisis Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via Substack, Whatever the problem, our minds seek one solution--preferably a simple one--to escape the trackless wilderness of complex, inter-connected problems. Problem-solving boils down to identifying the key problem and finding a fix that’s easy to understand and straightforward to apply. Our minds rebel when confronted with polycrisis, a knotted mess of inter-connected problems, and so we apply solutions we already have in hand. As I explained in previous Musings, this leads us to modify our...

We reported earlier that President Trump has again expressed his extreme frustration at lack of direct NATO participation in a plan to open up the Strait of Hormuz. He declared the US has “militarily WON” – and lambasted lack of allied interest in a “simple military maneuver” to open the Strait of Hormuz, calling NATO a “Paper Tiger” without the US. And so […]

Germany's Elites Demand "Location Patriotism" As Green Industrial Policy Unravels Submitted by Thomas Kolbe As social glue and as a bond tying the individual to a higher purpose of existence, patriotism has acquired a dubious reputation in Germany after decades of culture war. The United Left has succeeded in amalgamating this binding and integrating cultural ferment with the historical catastrophes of National Socialism, imperialism, and chauvinism, ultimately banishing it from the nation’s self-understanding. Today, the patriot is regarded as a social outsider, a contrarian, an intolerant antagonist of humanistic values. The mills of...