The Post-Partisan Emporium

How Vulnerable Is Your Personal Supply Chain? Charles Hugh Smith How vulnerable is your personal supply chain? For the average American, the answer is: very. Americans consider abundance and ready availability as birthrights so basic they're like the air we breathe.  The idea that shelves could become bare and stay bare is incomprehensible. yet that is the world we're entering, for a number of complex reasons. One is that the world added not just another billion humans (now 7.9 billion), but one billion middle-class consumers, consumers who use about 100 times more energy per person than poor people.  These additional billion middle-class consumers doubled the number of high-energy consuming humans in a few decades, and this enormous expansion of demand has consumed all the easy-to-extract resources of the planet. There are no cheap, easy-to-extract resources left; all that's left is expensive to reach, extract, transport, etc., and since energy is the master resource, as i

A Hinge Moment of History by  Mark Steyn Mark Steyn. (Image source: Mark Blevis/Flickr) It was certainly the weirdest year. It began with a supremely weird decision by the entire world, except China and Sweden, to tank the global economy. No one has ever done that before. The only major economic power to grow last year was China whose GDP is up by, I think, about 2.5 percent compared to declines everywhere else, including some actually catastrophic ones, such as 11% in the UK. This decision to tank the entire global economy is something that strengthened China, the creator of the virus, and the exporter of the virus, and weakened any opposition to China -- and that is how they began. This first year of the new weirdness ended with the United States government pretending that its principal threat is a domestic terrorism movement that does not exist. This is the characterization of the so‑called insurrection on January 6th. We were told two weeks later that there were going to be mass in