Pfizer partnering with Ido Bachelet on DNA nanorobots
OUTRAGED HUMAN
“No, no it’s not science fiction; it’s already happening,” said Ido Bachelet to a somewhat incredulous audience member








https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzLTWU2EqP4 Ido Bachelet - Moonshot Thinking


... when they cause too much damage by mistake...

or intentionally...


5:12

study your biology and activate targeted medication when necessary.


5:36

We also know how to remote-control these robots, using magnetic fields.

5:40

Furthermore, we can control them, as you saw in the clip, with a joystick,

5:43

directing them to a specific part of the body,

5:46

and then activating them with the push of a button.

5:49

We have also connected this joystick to the internet.

5:51

Our robots have a IP address,

5:54

so you can connect with them from afar and activate them online.



6:01

Imagine that in a couple of years,

6:03

your doctor will be able to sit at home with his smartphone,

6:05

and instead of playing "Candy Crush"

6:08

he will connect with the robots inside of you,

6:11

activate a certain medication and possibly even save you, just in time.

AND IMAGINE THAT YOU WOULDN'T EVEN KNOW IT, YOU WOULDN'T BE TOLD ABOUT IT.

AND THAT IN ORDER TO IMPLANT/INJECT IT, YOU WOULD BE TOLD THAT THERE IS A DREADFUL PANDEMIC, AND AT EVERY STEP YOU WOULD BE FORCED TO TAKE IT AS A NECESSARY "VACCINATION." AND A “PCR TEST”.

BY YOUR GOVERNMENT, THE AIRLINES, THE EMPLOYER, THE WAITER AT THE RESTAURANT, THE FDA, THE EMA, THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION...

AND YET IMAGINE THAT MANY PEOPLE WOULD DIE FROM IT, AND THEY WOULD BE YOUR RELATIVES AND FRIENDS.

BUT YOU WOULD BE THE ONE WHO WOULD HAVE TO PROVE THAT IT WAS BECAUSE OF IT.

IMAGINE BEING SURROUNDED BY CENSORSHIP, BEING RIDICULED, HAVING YOUR RIGHTS TO DO YOUR JOB, MOVE AROUND, OR EVEN SPEAK THE TRUTH AT ALL TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU....

ISN’T THIS A BRIGHT FURTURE AND A FANTASTIC REALITY?

ARE YOU AGAINST SCIENCE? AGAINST PROGRESS? AGAINST PREVENTING DISEASES?



https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/05/pfizer-partnering-with-ido-bachelet-on.html

Pfizer is cooperating with the DNA robot laboratory managed by Prof. Ido Bachelet at Bar-Ilan University. Bachelet has developed a method of producing innovative DNA molecules with characteristics that can be used to "program" them to reach specific locations in the body and carry out pre-programmed operations there in response to stimulation from the body. This cooperation was revealed in a lecture by Pfizer president of worldwide research and development (WRD), portfolio strategy and investment committee chairman, and executive VP Mikael Dolstein at the IATI Biomed Conference in Tel Aviv being concluded today.

Research will focus on the possibility that the robots will deliver the medical proteins to designated tissue.

Bachelet came to Bar-Ilan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) several years ago. At a Tedmed event held two years ago, he explained, "In order to make a nanometric robot, we first of all create a selected DNA sequence, and then fold it using a process called DNA origami. With this method, a person can give a command to a computer, which folds the DNA molecule as needed.

"The result is that a DNA sequence can be made in the form of a clam, for example, and containing a drug. The DNA molecule, however, contains a code activated upon encountering certain materials in the body. For example, the clam can be designed to change its shape and release the drug only when it meets a cancer cell or the right tissue.

"In addition, the molecules can receive signals from each other, and can theoretically change their shape according to signals from the body, and can be pre-programmed to attach themselves to one another. In the future, it will be possible to combine each such molecule with a miniature antenna. When the antenna receives an external signal, it will make a small change in the molecule that will make it open or close, and dissipate or connect itself to another molecule."



In a brief talk, Bachelet said DNA nanobots will soon be tried in a critically ill leukemia patient. The patient, who has been given roughly six months to live, will receive an injection of DNA nanobots designed to interact with and destroy leukemia cells—while causing virtually zero collateral damage in healthy tissue.

According to Bachelet, his team have successfully tested their method in cell cultures and animals and written two papers on the subject, one in Science and one in Nature.

Contemporary cancer therapies involving invasive surgery and blasts of drugs can be as painful and damaging to the body as the disease itself. If Bachelet's approach proves successful in humans, and is backed by more research in the coming years, the team’s work could signal a transformational moment in cancer treatment.

If this treatment works this will be a medical breakthrough and can be used for many other diseases by delivering drugs more effectively without causing side effects.

2012 Video with answers from George Church, Ido Bachelet and Shawn Douglas on the medical DNA double helix clamshell nanobucket nanobot



George Church indicates the smart DNA nanobot has applications beyond nanomedicine. Applications where there is any need for programmable and targeted release or interaction at the cellular or near molecular scale.

2014 Geek Time Presentation from Ido Bachelet



“AND THE LAST THING I AM GOING TO SCHOW YOU IS… PANDEMIC.

SO, WE ARE REALLY CONCERNED ABOUT PANDEMICS… ESPECIALLY INFLUENZA PANDEMICS.

SO THE BEST WAY TO AVOID PANDEMICS OR TO HANDLE PANDEMICS, IS SIMPLY TO KNOW WHERE THE VIRUS IS AND NOT TO BE THERE…

IT SOUNDS STUPID, BUT IT IS ACTUALLY THE CASE…

IF YOU COULD IDENTIFY WHERE THE VIRUS IS IN REAL TIME AND YOU CAN CONTAIN THAT AREA, YOU WOULD STOP THE PANDEMIC, YOU WOULD STOP THE DISEASE… OK?


SO, WHAT WE DEVELOPED IS A SENSOR… COMPOSED OF CARBON NANOTUBES FUNCTIONALIZED WITH ALL KIND OF THINGS… THE SENSOR IS EXTREMELY SENSITIVE… WE’VE BUILT THIS APPLICATION… THEY SEND THEIR GPS COORDINATES TO OUR SERVER SO WE CAN SORT OF RECONSTRUCT A REAL MAP…

I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THIS AND UNDESTOOND WHAT BIONICS IS ALL ABOUT…

At the British Friends of Bar-Ilan University's event in Otto Uomo October 2014 Professor Ido Bachelet announced the beginning of the human treatment with nanomedicine. He indicates DNA nanobots can currently identify cells in humans with 12 different types of cancer tumors.

A human patient with late stage leukemia will be given DNA nanobot treatment. Without the DNA nanobot treatment the patient would be expected to die in the summer of 2015. Based upon animal trials they expect to remove the cancer within one month.

Within 1 or 2 years they hope to have spinal cord repair working in animals and then shortly thereafter in humans. This is working in tissue cultures.

Previously Ido Bachelet and Shawn Douglas have published work on DNA nanobots in the journal Nature and other respected science publications.

One Trillion 50 nanometer nanobots in a syringe will be injected into people to perform cellular surgery.

The DNA nanobots have been tuned to not cause an immune response.
They have been adjusted for different kinds of medical procedures. Procedures can be quick or ones that last many days.


Medicine or treatment released based upon molecular sensing - Only targeted cells are treated

Ido's daughter has a leg disease which requires frequent surgery. He is hoping his DNA nanobots will make the type of surgery she needs relatively trivial - a simple injection at a doctor's office.

We can control powerful drugs that were already developed

Effective drugs that were withdrawn from the market for excessive toxicity can be combined with DNA nanobots for effective delivery. The tiny molecular computers of the DNA nanobots can provide molecular selective control for powerful medicines that were already developed.

Using DNA origami and molecular programming, they are reality. These nanobots can seek and kill cancer cells, mimic social insect behaviors, carry out logical operators like a computer in a living animal, and they can be controlled from an Xbox. Ido Bachelet from the bio-design lab at Bar Ilan University explains this technology and how it will change medicine in the near future.

Ido Bachelet earned his Ph.D. from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and was a postdoctoral fellow at M.I.T. and Harvard University. He is currently an assistant professor in the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Nano-Center at Bar Ilan University, Israel, the founder of several biotech companies, and a composer of music for piano and molecules.


Researchers have injected various kinds of DNA nanobots into cockroaches. Because the nanobots are labelled with fluorescent markers, the researchers can follow them and analyse how different robot combinations affect where substances are delivered. The team says the accuracy of delivery and control of the nanobots is equivalent to a computer system.

This is the development of the vision of nanomedicine.
This is the realization of the power of DNA nanotechnology.
This is programmable dna nanotechnology.

The DNA nanotechnology cannot perform atomically precise chemistry (yet), but having control of the DNA combined with advanced synthetic biology and control of proteins and nanoparticles is clearly developing into very interesting capabilities.

"This is the first time that biological therapy has been able to match how a computer processor works," says co-author Ido Bachelet of the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials at Bar Ilan University.

The team says it should be possible to scale up the computing power in the cockroach to that of an 8-bit computer, equivalent to a Commodore 64 or Atari 800 from the 1980s. Goni-Moreno agrees that this is feasible. "The mechanism seems easy to scale up so the complexity of the computations will soon become higher," he says.

An obvious benefit of this technology would be cancer treatments, because these must be cell-specific and current treatments are not well-targeted. But a treatment like this in mammals must overcome the immune response triggered when a foreign object enters the body.

Bachelet is confident that the team can enhance the robots' stability so that they can survive in mammals. "There is no reason why preliminary trials on humans can't start within five years," he says

Biological systems are collections of discrete molecular objects that move around and collide with each other. Cells carry out elaborate processes by precisely controlling these collisions, but developing artificial machines that can interface with and control such interactions remains a significant challenge. DNA is a natural substrate for computing and has been used to implement a diverse set of mathematical problems, logic circuits and robotics. The molecule also interfaces naturally with living systems, and different forms of DNA-based biocomputing have already been demonstrated. Here, we show that DNA origami can be used to fabricate nanoscale robots that are capable of dynamically interacting with each other in a living animal. The interactions generate logical outputs, which are relayed to switch molecular payloads on or off. As a proof of principle, we use the system to create architectures that emulate various logic gates (AND, OR, XOR, NAND, NOT, CNOT and a half adder). Following an ex vivo prototyping phase, we successfully used the DNA origami robots in living cockroaches (Blaberus discoidalis) to control a molecule that targets their cells.

Nature Nanotechnology - Universal computing by DNA origami robots in a living animal


44 pages of supplemental information

Ido Bachelet's moonshot to use nanorobotics for surgery has the potential to change lives globally. But who is the man behind the moonshot?

Ido graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a PhD in pharmacology and experimental therapeutics. Afterwards he did two postdocs; one in engineering at MIT and one in synthetic biology in the lab of George Church at the Wyss Institute at Harvard.

Now, his group at Bar-Ilan University designs and studies diverse technologies inspired by nature.

They will deliver enzymes that break down cells via programmable nanoparticles.
Delivering insulin to tell cells to grow and regenerate tissue at the desired location.
Surgery would be performed by putting the programmable nanoparticles into saline and injecting them into the body to seek out remove bad cells and grow new cells and perform other medical work.


Research group website is here.












SOLVE FOR DISEASE X?

https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-pfizer-to-collaborate-on-bar-ilan-dna-robots-1001036703


Pfizer is cooperating with the DNA robot laboratory managed by Prof. Ido Bachelet at Bar-Ilan University. Bachelet has developed a method of producing innovative DNA molecules with characteristics that can be used to "program" them to reach specific locations in the body and carry out pre-programmed operations there in response to stimulation from the body. This cooperation was revealed in a lecture by Pfizer president of worldwide research and development (WRD), portfolio strategy and investment committee chairman, and executive VP Mikael Dolstein at the IATI Biomed Conference in Tel Aviv being concluded today.

Bar-Ilan Research & Development Co. CEO Orli Tori said, "This is Pfizer's first cooperative venture with someone in Israeli higher education. The technology is fairly new for a drug company, but Pfizer has agreed to take up the challenge and support this technology, in the hope that it will make a contribution to the company at the proper time.

"As in all of our research agreements, the company coming from the industry has the right to negotiate the acquisition of the technology at the end of the process." The financial volume of the deal was not disclosed, but most such agreements amount to several hundred thousand dollars at most. The medical sector in which cooperation will take place was also not disclosed,

but it appears that research will focus on the possibility that the robots will deliver the medical proteins to designated tissue.

Bachelet came to Bar-Ilan from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) several years ago. At a Tedmed event held two years ago, he explained, "In order to make a nanometric robot, we first of all create a selected DNA sequence, and then fold it using a process called DNA origami. With this method, a person can give a command to a computer, which folds the DNA molecule as needed.

"The result is that a DNA sequence can be made in the form of a clam, for example, and containing a drug. The DNA molecule, however, contains a code activated upon encountering certain materials in the body. For example, the clam can be designed to change its shape and release the drug only when it meets a cancer cell or the right tissue.

"In addition, the molecules can receive signals from each other, and can theoretically change their shape according to signals from the body, and can be pre-programmed to attach themselves to one another. In the future, it will be possible to combine each such molecule with a miniature antenna.

When the antenna receives an external signal, it will make a small change in the molecule that will make it open or close, and dissipate or connect itself to another molecule."

Tori adds, "What is special about the robots is that they open and close according to signals from the surroundings, and that makes it possible to manage the disease. The robot exposes the drug to the target site according to biological signs within the body. For example were we to develop a product for diabetes, although that is not the purpose of this cooperation, it would be possible to develop a robot that would release insulin only when it sensed a rise in the blood sugar level."

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 14, 2015

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2015/03/ido-bachelet-dna-nanobots-summary-with.html

Disadvantages

1. Designing of nanorobot is very costly and complicated

2. Stray field might be created from electrical systems which can trigger bioelectric based molecular recognition system in biology

3. Electrical nanorobots remain vulnerable to electrical interference from other sources like radiofrequency or electric fields, electromagnetic pulse and stray fields from other in-vivo electronic devices.

4. Nanorobots are difficult to design, and customize

5. These are capable of molecular level destruction of human body thus it can cause terrible effect in terrorism field. Terrorist may make usage of nanorobots as a tool for torturing opponent community

6. Other possible threat associated with nanorobots is privacy issue.

As it dealt with designing of miniature form of devices, there are risks for snooping than that exist already.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20200718043030/https://pharmascope.org/ijrps/article/download/2523/5031]

[https://web.archive.org/web/20150911233849/http://www.nanosafe.org/home/liblocal/docs/Nanosafe%202014/Session%201/PL1%20-%20Fran%C3%A7ois%20TARDIF.pdf]

NANOROBOTS:

SOCIETAL CONCERNS: INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM, TRANSHUMANISM!!!

http://immortality-roadmap.com/nanorisk.pdf










http://jddtonline.info/index.php/jddt/article/download/891/533

There are several drawbacks with this technology like toxicity, contamination. Sometime human body generates strong immune response against them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20051218111931/http://teknologiskfremsyn.dk:80/download/58.pdf


“Nanotubes can be highly toxic”

Fifteen percent of the rats treated with carbon nanotubes suffocated to death within twenty-four hours due to clumping of the nanotubes that obstructed the bronchial passageways.








Toxicity- the issue of toxicity of nanoparticles was raised as an area in which more research is needed, particularly in terms of whether the regulatory system is sufficient.




…

And it's injected into people, soldiers, children, even infants…

Thank you Zz for this link.



Pfizer partnering with Ido Bachelet on DNA nano robots.

“No, no it’s not science fiction; it’s already happening,” said Ido Bachelet to a somewhat incredulous audience member, displaying a test tube in which he says just one drop contains approximately 1,000 billiard robots.

https://outraged.substack.com/p/pfizer-partnering-with-ido-bachelet?utm_source=cross-post&publication_id=1087020&post_id=143153580&utm_campaign=956088&isFreemail=true&r=1sq9d8&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Follow @zeeemedia
Website | X | Instagram | Rumble

https://telegra.ph/Pfizer-partnering-with-Ido-Bachelet-on-DNA-nanorobots-04-03

Sodium fluoride is toxic.
It should not be added to drinking water.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13059969/Millions-fluoride-added-tap-water-biggest-expansion-controversial-scheme-1980s.html

#Kevin_Mitnick
Kevin Mitnick is a former computer hacker turned cybersecurity consultant and author. Born on August 6, 1963, Mitnick gained notoriety in the 1980s and 1990s for his hacking activities. He was involved in a series of high-profile cyber intrusions into various computer systems, including those of major corporations and government agencies.

Mitnick's hacking exploits included gaining unauthorized access to computer networks, stealing proprietary software, and intercepting sensitive communications. His actions led to him being pursued by law enforcement, including the FBI. In 1995, he was arrested and charged with multiple counts of computer and wire fraud.

After serving five years in prison, including eight months in solitary confinement, Mitnick was released in 2000. Following his release, he shifted his focus to a legal career in the field of computer security. He became a respected cybersecurity consultant, helping companies identify and address vulnerabilities in their systems.

Mitnick has also authored several books, sharing his experiences and insights into computer security. Some of his notable books include "The Art of Deception" and "The Art of Intrusion," which explore social engineering and various hacking techniques.

As of my knowledge cutoff in January 2022, Mitnick continues to be active in the cybersecurity industry, providing training and consulting services to organizations worldwide. Please note that developments in his life or career beyond that date are not known to me.

Were the Hamas Attacks in Israel a False Flag?
activistpost (78)


By Scott Lazarowitz

The October 7th Hamas attack on Israelis has been referred to as "Israel's 9/11," which gives us good reason to believe that it was probably another false flag psy-op.

Some people really do believe it was a false flag, i.e., that the Israeli regime allegedly knew that it was being planned and let it happen.

As Paul Craig Roberts notes, how could Israel's Mossad intelligence agency not know this was being planned? Don't Israeli intelligence and military have the most sophisticated and comprehensive monitoring and surveillance of the Israeli sheeple and of Palestinians and of Hamas?

The planning allegedly was going on for 2 years. Really?

And there were warnings from other countries or intelligence agencies, including Egypt who had warned the Israelis of a terrorist attack being planned, warnings ignored.

In any event, the official narrative of "surprise" attack is just not believable. A possible motive for a false flag op as reported by Jonathan Cook is a planned expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai which is controlled by Egypt, an ethnic cleansing plan allegedly under way since at least 2007, according to Cook.

Many people dismiss such allegations as "conspiracy theory." But would it really be that surprising that government-employed losers would intentionally allow a terrorist attack to occur, and for the sake of implementing a plan of ethnic cleansing of an entire population whose presence is inconvenient?

After all, government bureaucracies generally attract psychopaths. The worst of the worst, as F.A. Hayek had noted.

And now we are learning that there is a high probability that many of the Israelis killed on October 7th were killed by the Israeli military (IDF) itself, possibly as high as 80% of the Israeli deaths, according to Scott Ritter. And Ron Unz described the IDF as possibly "trigger-happy Apache pilots". It has also been difficult for Israeli authorities to distinguish between many killed Israeli and Palestinian bodies.

But there is some history that is important here. The fact that Israel contributed to the creation of the Hamas organization is quite relevant to the allegation of false flag ops.

Justin Raimondo noted that the Israelis promoted the organization that later became Hamas for the purposes of discouraging Palestinians from supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat as well as to cause blowback.

In a conscious effort to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and the leadership of Yasser Arafat, in 1978 the government of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin approved the application of Sheik Ahmad Yassin to start a “humanitarian” organization known as the Islamic Association, or Mujama. The roots of this Islamist group were in the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, and this was the seed that eventually grew into Hamas – but not before it was amply fertilized and nurtured with Israeli funding and political support.

Begin and his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, launched an effort to undercut the PLO, creating the so-called Village Leagues, composed of local councils of handpicked Palestinians who were willing to collaborate with Israel – and, in return, were put on the Israeli payroll. Sheik Yassin and his followers soon became a force within the Village Leagues. This tactical alliance between Yassin and the Israelis was based on a shared antipathy to the militantly secular and leftist PLO: the Israelis allowed Yassin’s group to publish a newspaper and set up an extensive network of charitable organizations, which collected funds not only from the Israelis but also from Arab states opposed to Arafat.

...

This “blowback” principle applies to Hamas not only insofar as Israel was involved in funding and encouraging Mujama, but also, after the consolidation of Hamas as an armed group, due to Israeli military policy. The much-touted “withdrawal,” which amounts to Israel giving up Gaza while strengthening its hand elsewhere in the occupied territories, has been grist for the radical Islamist mill, as has the Wall of Separation and the attempt to quash the vote in East Jerusalem. Israel’s relentless offensive against its perceived enemies – first Fatah, now Hamas and Islamic Jihad – has created a backlash and solidified support for fundamentalist extremist factions in the Palestinian community.

And see this and this.

Besides the Israeli regime helping to foster an Islamic extremist terrorist group, Hamas, Al-Qaeda was also partially trained and funded by CIA.

See "MI6 'halted bid to arrest bin Laden'" on the Guardian and "Mainstream Media Finally Reports on U.S. Funding of Terror" on The New American for info.

Those examples of government-employed buffoonery have been a decades-long part of Western governments' history of exploiting the more primitive Islamic cultures toward the end of Western regimes' foreign policy goal of "creating monsters to destroy" to justify the expansion of the national security (sic) state and all its tax-funded largess.

Another example, in 2017 Islamic State or ISIS claimed responsibility for the London stabbing attack that killed 8 and injured 48 people. According to British historian Mark Curtis, author of Secret Affairs: Britain's Collusion with Radical Islam, one of the 3 attackers had allegedly been "trained by U.K. and U.S. ‘liaison’ officers,” as part of a "covert" op in Libya, as other terrorists get trained to fight in Syria against the regimes the U.S. and U.K governments don't like. Western regimes train would-be terrorists, who then go on to commit acts of ... terrorism. And on and on.

So Western government bureaucrats, especially in the U.S. and U.K., have a history of radicalizing Muslims. As I wrote in this 2017 blog post,

In this article, Curtis states that the Manchester bombing was blowback from “overt and covert actions of British governments.” And Nafeez Ahmed in this article says that the “terrorists who rampaged across London on the night of 3 June were part of a wider extremist network closely monitored by MI5 for decades. The same network was heavily involved in recruiting Britons to fight with jihadist groups in Syria, Iraq and Libya.”

You see, this government bureaucrat-type of idiocy, attempting to manipulate and control hostile factions in society, seems to result in blowback.

Do bureaucrats never learn from their past mistakes? Or do "intelligence" and "national security" bureaucrats just like blowback?

Why would bureaucrats like blowback? Because of the bureaucrats' extravagant government budgets at taxpayer expense. As I have maintained especially in this article, the involuntary, confiscatory income tax is the biggest enabler of government criminality ever. Removing the involuntary income tax is an "existential threat" to said government "security" apparatchiks.

Other examples of murderous Western government actions that have resulted in catastrophic blowback include President George H.W. Bush's 1991 starting a whole new war of aggression against Iraq, even though Iraq was not a threat to the U.S.

In 1991 the U.S. military bombed and destroyed Iraqi civilian water and sewage treatment centers and then imposed sanctions on the Iraqis, which prevented the Iraqis from rebuilding, which forced the Iraqi civilian population to have to use untreated water, which led to skyrocketing disease and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents by the mid-1990s, and then hundreds of thousands more by the year 2000.

The September 11th attacks in 2001 were clearly blowback from the decade of violence, bombings and murders by U.S. military in Iraq and the U.S. government's other invasions, occupations and support of repressive regimes leading up to that time.

So, my question is, was the George H.W. Bush regime starting a whole new war in the Middle east in 1991 intentionally to cause the blowback of a 9/11 nature? Are bureaucrats that insane?

What do you think is going to happen when you bomb and destroy people's water supply and sewage treatment centers? (Which the Israelis are doing to Gaza right now, by the way.)

Another example of that insane motive could be that after 9/11, and after the younger President George W. Bush followed in his father's warmongering footsteps by starting another war of aggression in Iraq as well as a war in Afghanistan, during the mid-2000s the Bush administration helped Iraq and Afghanistan concoct new Constitutions.

Not a Constitution promoting freedom and individual rights, mind you. Nope. The new Iraq Constitution, still in place, declared Iraq to be an Islamic state under repressive Sharia Law. Why would the Bush administration agree to this?

The new Afghanistan Constitution was the same, although since 2021 Afghanistan now has no Constitution and an even more repressive society. Thanks, George W. Bush.

Prior to the 1990s, the U.S. government armed Iraq and helped Saddam Hussein gas Iranians during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War. (If only the rulers had listened to George Washington!)

Even further back, there were the hostilities between the U.S. and Iran. American "conservatives," foreign interventionists and neocons are still angry at Iran for taking Americans hostage in 1979 at the time of the Iranian Revolution, which itself was blowback for the CIA's supporting the Shah of Iran's repressive SAVAK police state and torture, which followed CIA's 1953 "Operation Ajax" coup in Iran (that was partly in the name of expropriating Iran's oil for the British).

The U.S.-backed SAVAK police state kept Iranians in fear of their own government, much like what many Americans fear now thanks to the gestapo-like tactics of the Obama/Biden DOJ and FBI in Amerika.

So, did U.S. government bureaucrats, CIA and Pentagon, intend to cause the radicalization of Islam believers in Iran during the 1950s, '60s and '70s?

Iranians living in such repressive conditions in society as imposed by the American CIA-supported SAVAK had to have been a major contributor to the radicalizing of Iranians' Islamic religion, from the 1950s coup leading up to the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution.

Since 1979 the Iranian opposition to the repressive Islamic regime, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MeK), during the earlier years following the 1979 Revolution had been involved in terrorist acts of assassinations and bombings, and was listed as an official terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.

That is worth noting here, because U.S. government bureaucrats and their hangers-on had been caught giving paid speeches on behalf of the Iranian MeK, while the MeK was on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations.

Meanwhile, other people mainly non-involved Muslims had been imprisoned for the crime of providing "material support for terrorism," as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in 2012.

But some of the American statist lackeys who were supposedly "providing material support" for the officially designated terrorist organization MeK included, according to Greenwald, "Rudy Giuliani, Howard Dean, Michael Mukasey, Ed Rendell, Andy Card, Lee Hamilton, Tom Ridge, Bill Richardson, Wesley Clark, Michael Hayden, John Bolton, Louis Freeh -- and Fran Townsend," a bunch of neocons, interventionist apparatchiks and "national security" swamp creatures.

And get this. In his subsequent article on the red-faced U.S. government's 2012 de-listing of the MeK as an official terrorist organization, Greenwald notes,

What makes this effort all the more extraordinary are the reports that MEK has actually intensified its terrorist and other military activities over the last couple of years. In February, NBC News reported, citing US officials, that "deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by [MEK]" as it is "financed, trained and armed by Israel's secret service". While the MEK denies involvement, the Iranian government has echoed these US officials in insisting that the group was responsible for those assassinations. NBC also cited "unconfirmed reports in the Israeli press and elsewhere that Israel and the MEK were involved in a Nov. 12 explosion that destroyed the Iranian missile research and development site at Bin Kaneh, 30 miles outside Tehran".

In April, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh reported that the US itself has for years provided extensive training to MEK operatives, on US soil (in other words, the US government provided exactly the "material support" for a designated terror group which the law criminalizes).

In other words, your tax dollars at work, folks.

More info on the U.S. and Iranian MeK here.

And if the October 7th Hamas attack really was an intentional false flag from the blowback of Israel's "open air imprisonment" of Gazans for 15 years, it could also have been allowed as an excuse for the government to expand even further the police state, the surveillance state cracking down even more on speech and on "disinformation," and on people who question the government's official narratives or who criticize the regime. And I mean in the U.S. not just Israel.

Throughout the history of the West, the U.S., Israel, and other governments, false flag acts of violence have been planned and committed in order to blame the violence on others or effect in some desired central planning outcome.

Washington's Blog, which apparently no longer exists, had this very detailed list (Wayback Machine link) of the many false flag ops admitted to by governments and militaries. For instance,

The British government admits that – between 1946 and 1948 – it bombed 5 ships carrying Jews who were Holocaust survivors attempting to flee to safety in Palestine right after World War II, set up a fake group called “Defenders of Arab Palestine”, and then had the pseudo-group falsely claim responsibility for the bombings...

Israel admits that in 1954, an Israeli terrorist cell operating in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including U.S. diplomatic facilities, then left behind “evidence” implicating the Arabs as the culprits (one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to identify the bombers, and several of the Israelis later confessed)...

The CIA admits that it hired Iranians in the 1950s to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its democratically-elected prime minister...

The British Prime Minister admitted to his defense secretary that he and American president Dwight Eisenhower approved a plan in 1957 to carry out attacks in Syria and blame it on the Syrian government as a way to effect regime change...

The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s through the 1980s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people’s support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism.

As one participant in this formerly-secret program stated: “You had to attack civilians, people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security”...[Washington's Blog further expands on this item with several more links.]

As admitted by the U.S. government, recently declassified documents show that in 1962, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up AMERICAN airplanes (using an elaborate plan involving the switching of airplanes), and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba. See the following ABC news report; the official documents; and watch this interview with the former Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings...



A Mossad agent admits that, in 1984, Mossad planted a radio transmitter in Gaddafi’s compound in Tripoli, Libya which broadcast fake terrorist transmissions recorded by Mossad, in order to frame Gaddafi as a terrorist supporter. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya immediately thereafter...

The U.S. falsely blamed Iraq for playing a role in the 9/11 attacks – as shown by a memo from the defense secretary – as one of the main justifications for launching the Iraq war.

Even after the 9/11 Commission admitted that there was no connection, Dick Cheney said that the evidence is “overwhelming” that al Qaeda had a relationship with Saddam Hussein’s regime, that Cheney “probably” had information unavailable to the Commission, and that the media was not ‘doing their homework’ in reporting such ties. Top U.S. government officials now admit that the Iraq war was really launched for oil … not 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction...

Washington's Blog included many more false flag ops by many countries' governments on the long list there.

Israeli rulers allegedly seeking to expel the Arabs from their Jewish State is a possible motive for a false flag op. And possible motive by the Western central-planning regimes in keeping Gaza, Iran, Iraq and other Islamic-based cultures "oppressed," poor, primitive and repressive, and their populations angered and enraged at Western governments' manipulations and false flag ops, in my view, might be so that the U.S. and the West would continue to dominate economically and culturally, as well as for the greedy parasites in those governments to expropriate the oil and natural resources of those lands.

And to justify the continuation of the greedy Western government bureaucrats' extravagant tax-funded budgets and high-off-the-hog largess, of course.

Image: Anthony Freda Art

Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog.

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https://ispringmedia.blogspot.com/2023/11/gods-favor.html
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Al Shefa is the main hospital in besieged Gaza! The Zionist terrorists have no mercy!

#IsraelWarCrimes

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/8/why-is-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-at-the-heart-of-israels-war

Why is Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital at the heart of Israel’s war?
It’s Gaza’s largest hospital, sheltering and treating thousands of Palestinians even as Israel attacks it.

Lorraine Mallinder
An injured Palestinian boy is carried from the ground following an Israeli airstrike outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City
For Palestinians in Gaza, it’s the “house of healing”. For Israel, it’s Hamas’s main command centre.

Al-Shifa, the biggest hospital in the enclave, is now at breaking point, battling to treat thousands of patients as it comes under direct attack from the Israeli military.

Last week, the Israeli army bombed an ambulance outside the hospital, part of a convoy that was meant to carry patients from Gaza City to the Rafah border crossing, so they could be treated in Egypt. Fifteen people were killed in the attack, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which had coordinated the journey with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said the attack, which killed people inside and around the ambulance, should be investigated as a possible war crime.



On Monday, it was reported that Israeli forces had again targeted the hospital, this time hitting a solar panel system that provided electricity to its main departments. With barely any fuel left in its tanks to keep its one generator running, it’s now only a matter of time before the hospital is forced to switch off vital equipment like ventilators and dialysis machines, leaving patients to die.

Here’s what you need to know about al-Shifa and why is it being targeted:

What is al-Shifa?

Dar al-Shifa, literally translated as “house of healing”, is the largest and most extensive medical complex in the strip, comprising three specialised facilities: surgical, internal medicine, and obstetrics and gynaecology.

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Week in the Middle East


Located in the northern Remal neighbourhood, close to the port, the site originally housed British Army barracks. It became a hospital in 1946, undergoing successive expansions under Egyptian rule and during the Israeli occupation in the 1980s.

The hospital has become a lifeline for people seeking urgent medical intervention. Like all hospitals in the besieged strip – bar the Jordanian field hospital, which received an airdrop of medical aid at midnight on Sunday – it has been denied urgently needed supplies of medicine and fuel.

It has the capacity to treat 700 patients, but right now doctors are treating approximately 5,000, according to a recent report by Doctors Without Borders, known by its French initials MSF. Thousands of people who have lost their homes are living in the hospital corridors and in the courtyard.

INTERACTIVE_GAZA_al-Shifa_NOV8_2023-1699442409

Already overwhelmed, the hospital has been flooded with bodies and wounded patients since last week’s bombing of the Abu Assi school, run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Casualties mounted on Sunday, following one of the heaviest nights of bombardment seen so far, which saw the Israeli military hit 450 targets in the north – including the nearby Shati refugee camp.

Dr Marwan Abusada, the hospital’s head of surgery, said that al-Shifa can offer 210 beds on normal days. Currently, 800 patients are waiting to be admitted, he said in a statement relayed to Al Jazeera by NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP).

The hospital is also low on personnel. Israeli air attacks have killed 150 medical staff in the strip.

What are conditions like right now?

“At all levels, we are dealing with a health disaster,” said Dr Abusada.

MSF, which supplied al-Shifa with the medicines and equipment that it still has in its stock, has reported that surgeons at the hospital are operating on patients without painkillers. Short on beds, surgeons have amputated limbs as patients lie on the floor.

With nowhere to keep patients in the unhygienic conditions, patients who have undergone surgical procedures run a high risk of infection. “We have a type of worm, called white flies, covering the wounds after the surgery. They appear after one day,” said Dr Abusada.

Running on empty, the hospital is barely able to deliver needs, conserving its electricity supply for its emergency unit, intensive care and operating rooms. “We are trying hard to continue delivering services to the patients who need kidney dialysis, urgent catheterisation and … incubators, but we are delivering the bare minimum,” said the doctor.

On Monday, an Al Jazeera report depicted scenes of chaos outside and inside the hospital, with bloodied patients lining the corridors. Having just pronounced a man dead, surgeon Sara Al Saqqa spoke of living, sleeping and waking at the hospital, working as many as 72 consecutive hours.

“Every day, we say today was the worst ever, then the next day is worse,” she said, adding later that there aren’t enough freezers to keep the corpses.

At the weekend, the hospital was forced to transfer its maternity ward to the private Al Helou International Hospital in Gaza City. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women are caught up in the conflict, according to the United Nations Population Fund in Palestine. Premature births and miscarriages are on the rise, owing to the fear and panic caused by bombardment.

In northern Gaza, where the hospital is located, the main sources of water – a desalination plant and the pipeline from Israel – have been shut down since the start of the war. At present, the hospital only receives salty groundwater, unsuitable for drinking and hygiene. According to the UN, only 5 percent of Gaza’s water needs are being met.

A Palestinian man mourns
A Palestinian man mourns as civil defense teams and residents conduct a search and rescue operation for Palestinians stuck under the debris of a demolished building following Israeli airstrikes hit al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City on October 24, 2023. [Ali Jadallah/Anadolu via Getty Images]
Why is it under attack?

Al-Shifa is a prime target for Israeli forces, which claim the hospital is located above the headquarters of Hamas, the armed group that has governed Gaza since 2007.

Last month, the Israeli military released a video that used a combination of satellite imagery and animated graphics to claim that it had intelligence-based proof of Hamas’s purported use of the hospital below ground, with tunnels, facilities and meeting rooms. Hamas has rejected those claims, which it said is sheltering more than 40,000 displaced people.

It’s not the first time that links have been drawn between Hamas and al-Shifa. Following Israel’s 2014 ground offensive in Gaza, Amnesty International accused Hamas of committing “spine-chilling” atrocities against political rivals in abandoned areas of the hospital to extract confessions of collaboration. In an earlier report, the rights group had also accused Israel of war crimes during its incursion, which killed more than 2100 people.

Back then, too, the hospital had come under attack. Israel and Hamas traded blame for an explosion at the hospital that reportedly killed at least 10 children. Hamas blamed the blast on an Israeli drone attack, while Israel claimed it had been caused by a failed Palestinian rocket. The episode had shades of a similarly disputed, but much deadlier explosion at al-Ahli Arab Hospital last month.

In the current conflict, Israel has accused Hamas of storing fuel for its own operations, preventing more supplies from entering in the limited number of humanitarian convoys crossing into the strip. With no power, 16 out of the 35 hospitals in the Gaza Strip have stopped working.

Smoke rises following Israeli strikes, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Gaza City, November 7
Smoke rises following Israeli attacks, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestinian group Hamas, in Gaza City, November 7, 2023 [Mohammed Al-Masri/Reuters]
What next for al-Shifa?

As Israeli forces close in, the outlook is bleak for al-Shifa. At the time of writing, Israeli troops had severed northern Gaza from the rest of the enclave and were engaging Hamas fighters in the heart of Gaza City.

Israel has insisted that it wants to rout Hamas, destroy the alleged headquarters below the hospital and hunt down the group’s fighters. It has also said it wants to assume control of the strip’s security for the foreseeable future.

The Age of Megathreats
Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022
op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images
NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.”

Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies.

Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries.

Goodbye to All That

Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII.

There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb.


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With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea.

Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any.

Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy.

There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia.

Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.”

But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate.

Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind.

Hard Choices, Hard Landings

The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks.

While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession).

What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant).

History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies.

Sticky Stagflation

In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral.

Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction.

This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth.

Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc.

Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade.

On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable.

The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods.

Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise.

The Worst of All Possible Economies

When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing.

Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.

While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent.

The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture.

Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate.

With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates.

How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates.

For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage.

The Moment of Truth

In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one).

And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters.

How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.

The Age of Megathreats
Nouriel RoubiniNov 4, 2022
op_roubini3_Getty Images_worlddisaster Getty Images
NEW YORK – Severe megathreats are imperiling our future – not just our jobs, incomes, wealth, and the global economy, but also the relative peace, prosperity, and progress achieved over the past 75 years. Many of these threats were not even on our radar during the prosperous post-World War II era. I grew up in the Middle East and Europe from the late 1950s to the early 1980s, and I never worried about climate change potentially destroying the planet. Most of us had barely even heard of the problem, and greenhouse-gas emissions were still relatively low, compared to where they would soon be.

Moreover, after the US-Soviet détente and US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in the early 1970s, I never really worried about another war among great powers, let alone a nuclear one. The term “pandemic” didn’t register in my consciousness, either, because the last major one had been in 1918. And I didn’t fathom that artificial intelligence might someday destroy most jobs and render Homo sapiens obsolete, because those were the years of the long “AI winter.”

Similarly, terms like “deglobalization” and “trade war” had no purchase during this period. Trade liberalization had been in full swing since the Great Depression, and it would soon lead to the hyper-globalization that began in the 1990s. Debt crises posed no threat, because private and public debt-to-GDP ratios were low in advanced economies and emerging markets, and growth was robust. No one had to worry about the massive build-up of implicit debt, in the form of unfunded liabilities from pay-as-you-go social security and health-care systems. The supply of young workers was rising, the share of the elderly was still low, and robust, mostly unrestricted immigration from the Global South to the North would continue to prop up the labor market in advanced economies.

Against this backdrop, economic cycles were contained, and recessions were short and shallow, except for during the stagflationary decade of the 1970s; but even then, there were no debt crises in advanced economies, because debt ratios were low. The kind of financial cycles that lead to crises were contained not just in advanced economies but even in emerging markets, owing to the low leverage, low risk-taking, solid financial regulation, capital controls, and various forms of financial repression that prevailed during this period. The advanced economies were strong liberal democracies that were free of extreme partisan polarization. Populism and authoritarianism were confined to a benighted cohort of poorer countries.

Goodbye to All That

Fast-forward from this relatively “golden” period between 1945 and 1985 to late 2022, and you will immediately notice that we are awash in new, extreme megathreats that were not previously on anyone’s mind. The world has entered what I call a geopolitical depression, with (at least) four dangerous revisionist powers – China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – challenging the economic, financial, security, and geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after WWII.

There is a sharply rising risk not only of war among great powers but of a nuclear conflict. In the coming year, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine could escalate into an unconventional conflict that directly involves NATO. And Israel – and perhaps the US – may decide to launch strikes against Iran, which is on its way to building a nuclear bomb.


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With Chinese President Xi Jinping further consolidating his authoritarian rule, and with the US tightening its trade restrictions against China, the new Sino-American cold war is getting colder by the day. Worse, it could all too easily turn hot over the status of Taiwan, which Xi is committed to reuniting with the mainland, and which US President Joe Biden is apparently committed to defending. Meanwhile, nuclear-armed North Korea has once again been seeking attention by firing rockets over Japan and South Korea.

Cyberwarfare occurs daily between these revisionist powers and the West, and many other countries have adopted a non-aligned posture toward Western-led sanctions regimes. From our contingent vantage point in the middle of all these events, we don’t yet know if World War III has already begun in Ukraine. That determination will be left to future historians – if there are any.

Even discounting the threat of nuclear Armageddon, the risk of an environmental Apocalypse is becoming increasingly serious, especially given that most of the talk about net-zero and ESG (environment, social, and governance) investing is just greenwashing – or greenwishing. The new greenflation is already in full swing, because it turns out that amassing the metals needed for the energy transition requires a lot of expensive energy.

There is also a growing risk of new pandemics that would be worse than biblical plagues, owing to the link between environmental destruction and zoonotic diseases. Wildlife, carrying dangerous pathogens, are coming into closer and more frequent contact with humans and livestock. That is why we have experienced more frequent and virulent pandemics and epidemics (HIV, SARS, MERS, swine flu, bird flu, Zika, Ebola, COVID-19) since the early 1980s. All the evidence suggests that this problem will become even worse in the future. Indeed, owing to the melting of Siberian permafrost, we may soon be confronting dangerous viruses and bacteria that have been locked away for millennia.

Moreover, geopolitical conflicts and national-security concerns are fueling trade, financial, and technology wars, and accelerating the deglobalization process. The return of protectionism and the Sino-American decoupling will leave the global economy, supply chains, and markets more balkanized and fragmented. The buzzwords “friend-shoring” and “secure and fair trade” have replaced “offshoring” and “free trade.”

But on the domestic front, advances in AI, robotics, and automation will destroy more and more jobs, even if policymakers build higher protectionist walls in an effort to fight the last war. By both restricting immigration and demanding more domestic production, aging advanced economies will create a stronger incentive for companies to adopt labor-saving technologies. While routine jobs are obviously at risk, so, too, are any cognitive jobs that can be unbundled into discrete tasks, and even many creative jobs. AI language models like GPT-3 can already write better than most humans and will almost certainly displace many jobs and sources of income. In due course, some scientists believe that Homo sapiens will be rendered entirely obsolete by the rise of artificial general intelligence or machine super-intelligence – though this is a highly contentious subject of debate.

Thus, over time, economic malaise will deepen, inequality will rise even further, and more white- and blue-collar workers will be left behind.

Hard Choices, Hard Landings

The macroeconomic situation is no better. For the first time since the 1970s, we are facing high inflation and the prospect of a recession – stagflation. The increased inflation in advanced economies wasn’t “transitory.” It is persistent, driven by a combination of bad policies – excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies that were kept in place for too long – and bad luck. No one could have anticipated how much the initial COVID-19 shock would curtail the supply of goods and labor and create bottlenecks in global supply chains. The same goes for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, which caused a sharp spike in energy, food, fertilizers, industrial metals, and other commodities. Meanwhile, China has continued its “zero-COVID” policy, which is creating additional supply bottlenecks.

While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that the supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters for the economic outlook, because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk that monetary-policy tightening will produce a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession).

What will follow from the US Federal Reserve and other major central banks’ current tightening? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street belonged to “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible, that a soft landing will be “very challenging,” and that everyone should prepare for some “pain” ahead. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s model shows a high probability of a hard landing, and the Bank of England has expressed similar views about the United Kingdom. Several prominent Wall Street institutions have also now made a recession their baseline scenario (the most likely outcome if all other variables are held constant).

History, too, points to deeper problems ahead. For the past 60 years in the US, whenever inflation has been above 5% (it is above 8% today), and unemployment has been below 5% (it is now 3.5%), any attempt by the Fed to bring inflation down toward its 2% target has caused a recession. Thus, a hard landing is much more likely than a soft landing, both in the US and across most other advanced economies.

Sticky Stagflation

In addition to the short-term factors, negative supply shocks and demand factors in the medium term will cause inflation to persist. On the supply side, I count eleven negative supply shocks that will reduce potential growth and increase the costs of production. Among these is the backlash against hyper-globalization, which has been gaining momentum and creating opportunities for populist, nativist, and protectionist politicians, and growing public anger over stark income and wealth inequalities, which is leading to more policies to support workers and the “left behind.” However well-intentioned, such measures will contribute to a dangerous wage-price spiral.

Other sources of persistent inflation include rising protectionism (from both the left and the right), which has restricted trade, impeded the movement of capital, and heightened political resistance to immigration, which in turn has put additional upward pressure on wages. National-security and strategic considerations have further restricted flows of technology, data, and talent, and new labor and environmental standards, as important as they may be, are hampering both trade and new construction.

This balkanization of the global economy is deeply stagflationary, and it is coinciding with demographic aging, not just in developed countries but also in large emerging economies such as China. Because young people tend to produce and save more, whereas older people spend down their savings and require many more expensive services in health care and other sectors, this trend, too, will lead to higher prices and slower growth.

Today’s geopolitical turmoil further complicates matters. The disruptions to trade and the spike in commodity prices following Russia’s invasion were not just a one-off phenomenon. The same threats to harvests and food shipments that arose in 2022 may well persist in 2023. Moreover, if China does finally end its zero-COVID policy and begin to restart its economy, a surge in demand for many commodities will add to the global inflationary pressures. There is also no end in sight for Sino-Western decoupling, which is accelerating across all dimensions of trade (goods, services, capital, labor, technology, data, and information). And, of course, Iran, North Korea, and other strategic rivals to the West could soon contribute in their own ways to the global havoc.

Now that the US dollar has been fully weaponized for strategic and national-security purposes, its position as the main global reserve currency could eventually begin to decline, and a weaker dollar would of course add to inflationary pressures in the US. More broadly, a frictionless world trading system requires a frictionless financial system. But sweeping primary and secondary sanctions have thrown sand in what was once a well-oiled machine, massively increasing the transaction costs of trade.

On top of it all, climate change, too, will create persistent stagflationary pressures. Droughts, heat waves, hurricanes, and other disasters are increasingly disrupting economic activity and threatening harvests (thus driving up food prices). At the same time, demands for decarbonization have led to underinvestment in fossil-fuel capacity before investment in renewables has reached the point where they can make up the difference. Today’s large energy-price spikes were inevitable.

The increased likelihood of future pandemics also represents a persistent source of stagflation, especially considering how little has been done to prevent or prepare for the next one. The next contagious outbreak will lend further momentum to protectionist policies as countries rush to close borders and hoard critical supplies of food, medicines, and other essential goods.

Finally, cyberwarfare remains an underappreciated threat to economic activity and even public safety. Firms and governments will either face more stagflationary disruptions to production, or they will have to spend a fortune on cybersecurity. Either way, costs will rise.

The Worst of All Possible Economies

When the recession comes, it will not be short and shallow but long and severe. Not only are we facing persistent short- and medium-term negative supply shocks, but we are also heading into the mother of all debt crises, owing to soaring private and public debt ratios over the last few decades. Low debt ratios spared us from that outcome in the 1970s. And though we certainly had debt crises following the 2008 crash – the result of excessive household, bank, and government debt – we also had deflation. It was a demand shock and a credit crunch that could be met with massive monetary, fiscal, and credit easing.

Today, we are experiencing the worst elements of both the 1970s and 2008. Multiple, persistent negative supply shocks have coincided with debt ratios that are even higher than they were during the global financial crisis. These inflationary pressures are forcing central banks to tighten monetary policy even though we are heading into a recession. That makes the current situation fundamentally different from both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 crisis. Everyone should be preparing for what may come to be remembered as the Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.

While central banks have been at pains to sound more hawkish, we should be skeptical of their professed willingness to fight inflation at any cost. Once they find themselves in a debt trap, they will have to blink. With debt ratios so high, fighting inflation will cause an economic and financial crash that will be deemed politically unacceptable. Major central banks will feel as though they have no choice but to backpedal, and inflation, the debasement of fiat currencies, boom-bust cycles, and financial crises will become even more severe and frequent.

The inevitability of central banks wimping out was recently on display in the United Kingdom. Faced with the market reaction to the Truss government’s reckless fiscal stimulus, the BOE had to launch an emergency quantitative-easing (QE) program to buy up government bonds. That sad episode confirmed that in the UK, as in many other countries, monetary policy is increasingly subject to fiscal capture.

Recall that a similar turnaround occurred in 2019, when the Fed, after previously signaling continued rate hikes and quantitative-tightening, stopped its QT program and started pursuing a mix of backdoor QE and policy-rate cuts at the first sign of mild financial pressures and a growth slowdown. Central banks will talk tough; but, in a world of excessive debt and risks of an economic and financial crash, there is good reason to doubt their willingness to do “whatever it takes” to return inflation to its target rate.

With governments unable to reduce high debts and deficits by spending less or raising revenues, those that can borrow in their own currency will increasingly resort to the “inflation tax”: relying on unexpected price growth to wipe out long-term nominal liabilities at fixed interest rates.

How will financial markets and prices of equities and bonds perform in the face of rising inflation and the return of stagflation? It is likely that, as in the stagflation of the 1970s, both components of any traditional asset portfolio will suffer, potentially incurring massive losses. Inflation is bad for bond portfolios, which will take losses as yields increase and prices fall, as well as for equities, whose valuations are hurt by rising interest rates.

For the first time in decades, a 60/40 portfolio of equities and bonds suffered massive losses in 2022, because bond yields have surged while equities have gone into a bear market. By 1982, at the peak of the stagflation decade, the average S&P 500 firm’s price-to-earnings ratio was down to eight; today, it is closer to 20, which suggests that the bear market could end up being even more protracted and severe. Investors will need to find assets to hedge against inflation, political and geopolitical risks, and environmental damage: these include short-term government bonds and inflation-indexed bonds, gold and other precious metals, and real estate that is resilient to environmental damage.

The Moment of Truth

In any case, these megathreats will further contribute to rising income and wealth inequality, which has already been putting severe pressure on liberal democracies (as those left behind revolt against elites), and fueling the rise of radical and aggressive populist regimes. One can find right-wing manifestations of this trend in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the US (under Donald Trump), post-Brexit Britain, and many other countries; and left-wing manifestations in Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and now Brazil (which has just replaced a right-wing populist with a left-wing one).

And, of course, Xi’s authoritarian stranglehold has given the lie to the old idea that Western engagement with a fast-growing China would ineluctably lead that country to open itself up even more to markets and, eventually, to democratic processes. Under Xi, China shows every sign of becoming more closed off, and more aggressive on geopolitical, security, and economic matters.

How did it come to this? Part of the problem is that we have long had our heads stuck in the sand. Now, we need to make up for lost time. Without decisive action, we will be heading into a period that is less like the four decades after WWII than like the three decades between 1914 and 1945. That period gave us World War I; the Spanish flu pandemic; the 1929 Wall Street crash; the Great Depression; massive trade and currency wars; inflation, hyperinflation, and deflation; financial and debt crises, leading to massive meltdowns and defaults; and the rise of authoritarian militarist regimes in Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, and elsewhere, culminating in WWII and the Holocaust.

In this new world, the relative peace, prosperity, and rising global welfare that we have taken for granted will be gone; most of it already is. If we don’t stop the multi-track slow-motion train wreck that is threatening the global economy and our planet at large, we will be lucky to have only a repeat of the stagflationary 1970s. Far more likely is an echo of the 1930s and the 1940s, only now with all the massive disruptions from climate change added to the mix.

Avoiding a dystopian scenario will not be easy. While there are potential solutions to each megathreat, most are costly in the short run and will deliver benefits only over the long run. Many also require technological innovations that are not yet available or in place, starting with those needed to halt or reverse climate change. Complicating matters further, today’s megathreats are interconnected, and therefore best addressed in a systematic and coherent fashion. Domestic leadership, in both the private and public sector, and international cooperation among great powers is necessary to prevent the coming Apocalypse.

Yet there are many domestic and international obstacles standing in the way of policies that would allow for a less dystopian (though still contested and conflictual) future. Thus, while a less bleak scenario is obviously desirable, a clear-headed analysis indicates that dystopia is much more likely than a happier outcome. The years and decades ahead will be marked by a stagflationary debt crisis and related megathreats – war, pandemics, climate change, disruptive AI, and deglobalization – all of which will be bad for jobs, economies, markets, peace, and prosperity.

The US Army War College’s recent journal includes a disturbing essay, which states that “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

I just watched this music video after i read this article about "We Are the World," the 1980s pop collaboration that brought together some of the world's biggest artists to perform a single that raised millions for famine relief in Ethiopia. Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, two of the most famous artists in the world at the time, teamed up to write the song, which reportedly took a lot of coordination, because they were unsure which artists would show up to the recording session. Several of the artists involved, like Bruce Springsteen, took time off of their tours to fly to Los Angeles to record. Once singers heard about who was participating, many of them reportedly called Richie's manager, Ken Kragen, begging to be included. Soon, big names like Diana Ross and Willie Nelson were attached to the project.

https://youtu.be/9AjkUyX0rVw

By the late 1980s, Zantac was worth a whopping $2 billion, making it one of the most profitable drugs ever. It accounted for about half of Glaxo's sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer medications.

Japan’s Borrowing: The Reasons Behind the Country’s High Debt Levels.

Japan is one of the most indebted countries in the world, and it’s a surprising fact that they continue to borrow money despite their massive debt burden. The reasons behind Japan’s high levels of debt are complex and multifaceted, but there are some key factors that explain why this nation continues to take on more debt.

One reason for Japan's large amount of national debt is its aging population. As people live longer lives and birth rates remain low, fewer workers exist to pay taxes into government coffers while elderly citizens require more medical care than ever before. This means that the Japanese government must find new sources of revenue or increase borrowing in order to fund social programs for its aging citizens.

Another factor contributing to Japan's growing debts has been its reliance on public works projects as an economic stimulus measure since the 1980s recession hit hard in Asia following World War II ended up leaving many Japanese companies bankrupted or struggling financially . These projects have often been expensive investments with little return which has caused further strain on public finances over time leading them having no choice but taking out loans from abroad lenders like China & US banks etc., resulting even higher level of foreign debts piling up each year .

Last but not least , another major contributor towards rising national debts can be attributed due largely by expansive monetary policy adopted by Bank Of japan (BOJ) during past two decades especially after 2008 Global Financial Crisis where BOJ was forced into quantitative easing program causing unprecedented surge liquidity across markets which led investors seeking higher yield elsewhere such as buying bonds issued by central governments thereby driving down yields & increasing cost interest payments thus making it difficult for country make ends meet without additional funds coming from outside sources i-e global financial institutions/lenders .

Despite all these challenges , however , thanks prudent fiscal management along with strong export based economy still able maintain relatively healthy balance sheet when compared other nations around world so far allowing them access capital needed finance current expenditures while also keeping inflation under control at same time ensuring sustainable growth future generations come .

This morning a man in #Lebanon shot at a bank and took hostages to get his own money.

All banks in lebanon have metal doors and windows now that they stole people’s money.

This is what happens when you trust the banks.

1980s: 1USD = 2.8 Lebanese pounds
Today: 1$= 46,000LBP

#bitcoin fixes this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivDP6Si-e8A

Those black things in the sky are birds I have witnessed this once before in 2020 here in the ???? city Chapman Elementary School to be exact one hour before sunset thousands of Vaux’s Swifts gather overhead as they prepare to roost for the night this population has been returning to Chapman since the 1980s and is one of the largest known roosting sites of migrating Vaux’s Swifts truly an Incredible sight to witness brought by our amazing mother Nature

The best with Synthwave Music is that the ones doing fan videos going all in with 80's stuff . Like this one from Miami Vice and Hawaiian Tropic model contest as an example. Good weekend pump! 2.1 million views
1980s https://youtu.be/HoenTP_QdJs