We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
🇪🇺 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 If China is rising and America stagnating, Europe is gambling with a steep, shocking decline into poverty and irrelevance. | Palladium Magazine
🔶️ Energy scarcity, aging workforces, and institutional paralysis don't combine to create social-democratic utopia but a closed, deindustrializing society:
🔶️ Europe has set itself up to lose the two most basic ingredients for industrial competitiveness and sustainability: cheap energy and cheap labor.
🔶️ You can maybe maintain an industrial society by offsetting one against the other, but to maintain one with neither is ludicrous.
🔶️ China has coal. America has fracking. But Europe's energy strategy is to install solar panels on the world's least sunny continent and build windmills that don't make sense anywhere in the world.
🔶️ This is almost explicitly the opposite of a strategy for cheap energy.
🔶️ European countries have banned fracking and failed to pursue oil and gas exploration opportunities, while the deal for cheap Russian gas has been exploded by war in Ukraine.
🔶️ Meanwhile, Germany shut down its nuclear plants and other countries are planning to follow.
🔶️ That some peripheral European economies like Finland, Poland, or Romania are pursuing new nuclear plants just underscores the problem of a future without nuclear in larger economies like Germany, Italy, and Spain.
🔶️ Except for Japan and South Korea, the world's oldest countries are all European. Nor are European fertility rates anything to brag about.
🔶️ There is no amount of immigration that can make up for such wide and deep aging of the workforce.
🔶️ Aging populations and social democratic entitlements might work with a growing economy, but without it, they just lead to a dysfunctional, extractive political economy where the old oppress the young.
🔶️ The resulting political gridlock and institutional paralysis is perhaps Europe's single biggest problem, because it makes solutions and reforms extremely hard to implement.
🔶️ Europe's energy crisis, for example, could be solved almost literally just with a few strokes of a pen.
🔶️ This looming European decline is not a cause for celebration in America or China. Europe is not a cautionary tale, but the canary in the coal mine for aging industrial societies that do not reform.
https://fxtwitter.com/palladiummag/status/1818979675034501428
📢 🇬🇧 🥫 Britain has urged households to stock enough water, non-perishable food and medicine to be self-sufficient for three days, launching a new “Be Ready” preparedness campaign.
Government guidance recommends about three liters of drinking water per person per day, food that needs no refrigeration or cooking, essential medications, a first-aid kit, a torch, a battery or wind-up radio, a charged power bank and cash.
Officials cited severe storms, wildfires, cyberattacks and supply chain disruptions as the main risks, with Defence Secretary Wes Streeting pointing to “increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks” and scenarios such as supermarket payment systems going down.
Germany has long gone further, recommending households keep emergency supplies for 10 days, including about two liters of liquid per person per day.
📝 ReadyGuidance: "Worth noting the US version of this advice, at Ready.gov, is one gallon of water per person per day, about 3.8 liters, because ...
🇮🇹 Italy Experiences Food and Fuel Shortages After Truckers on Strike Block Roads. 90% of gas stations in Campania are out of fuel
Truckers protesting high gas prices have prevented deliveries to parts of southern Italy, leading to empty shelves and dry pumps.
On Wednesday night in Naples, Italy, a 72-year-old retiree walked into a supermarket to buy himself a snack and found it nearly bare.
It was out of milk, yogurt and eggs. Its shelves of pasta, oils and canned tomatoes were almost empty. The vast produce section was empty save for red onions, chestnuts, two melons and a case of ornamental gourds.
“It’s worse than I expected,” said Giuseppe Crisci, the retiree, who walked out with a bag of biscuits. “And what I expected was exceptional.”
Experiences like Mr. Crisci’s played out repeatedly this week across Naples, a sprawling port city in Italy’s south where residents faced widespread shortages at their gas pumps and grocery stores.
It is the fallout from a week of...
🇺🇸🗳⚡️- RN's Midterm Forecast With A Week And A Half To Go 3/3:
Why we think this election will be the first real nail in the coffin for Trumpism.
It has been said so many times it's become a meme, “the walls are closing in” “No way he wiggles out of this jam!” etc. This time it's not a joke, the armor that Trump has had around him for a decade is clearly slipping off.
Trump’s approval by his own 2024 voters continues to rapidly decline, damaged by the nonstop rampant corruption and the Iran War.
Trump approval within the GOP, despite remaining strong on paper, is actually at its lowest since 2015 before he won the 2016 primary. The Iran War in particular has nuked his bedrock fanatical support within the GOP base when looking at not only surveys but also via multiple anecdotes on AM radio talk shows who get callers every day saying they feel betrayed by the war, and that the corruption is becoming unignorable.
GOP activists at the local level are also reporting to their ...
