Protest Crowd Storms Presidential Palace in Sri Lanka as Fuel and Food Shortages Create Desperation, Prime Minister Resigns, President Tries to Hang on


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 9, 2022 | Sundance

It was not long ago when we noted the absence of food will change things.   While Dutch farmers are fighting the government and trying to keep producing food, in Sri Lanka the shortages of food and fuel have reached a boiling point.  Angry citizens have taken control of the presidential palace, set fire to the Prime Minister’s house, and overwhelmed government offices.

Fearing for his life, “Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said he would resign after just two months in office after protesters stormed and occupied the president’s residence and office amid public anger over the country’s deepening sovereign-debt crisis.” (WSJ link)

The U.S. State Department and the ambassador to Sri Lanka, Julie Chung, are asking for protestors to remain peaceful as if their hunger is ‘transitory’.  However, videos from the country highlight the futility of platitudes amid tens of thousands of angry citizens who are desperate.  It is a hot mess that’s likely to surface in other nations quickly.

(Via WSJ) – Braving tear gas and water cannons in the capital, Colombo, protesters—many waving the national flag and wearing helmets—also entered the president’s office on Saturday, in one of the largest antigovernment demonstrations in the country this year.

Television news footage showed large crowds overrunning security barricades before breaching the official residence of President Rajapaksa. Some were later seen taking a dip in the compound’s swimming pool. Videos purportedly filmed by protesters and shared widely on social media showed scores of men rifling through drawers, sitting in chairs and lounging on a four-poster bed inside a bedroom of the residence. One man was shown doing bicep curls in a gym. (more)

The crisis had been building for weeks as the protesting crowds had continued to get larger.

As noted by the Wall Street Journal report, “responding to calls by protest organizers to congregate in Colombo for mass demonstrations this weekend, Sri Lankans from far and wide improvised around acute fuel shortages by piling into semitrailer trucks, trains and overcrowded buses to reach the capital. Some walked miles to join the demonstrations.”

.

This next video shows how large the crowd was just before they stormed the buildings.

.

There is no way to stop a crowd of this size.  I’m not sure how many people are in/around that compound, but it looks like hundreds of thousands.

President Trump MAGA Rally in Alaska to Defeat Senator Lisa Murkowski, Livestream 4pm Local, 8pm ET


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 9, 2022 | Sundance

Decepticon Senator Lisa Murkowski is the primary target and reason for President Trump’s travel to Alaska for a rally.   Murkowski, a leftist in the Republican ranks, must be removed if progress in taking down the UniParty is to continue.  President Trump is rallying in support of Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy, Senate candidate challenging Murkowski, Kelly Tshibaka, and candidate for congress Sarah Palin.

The anticipated start time for President Trump’s remarks is 4:00pm in Anchorage Alaska or 8:00pm ET.  Rumble livestream links below:

Donald J Trump Rumble Livestream – RSBN Rumble Livestream Link – Alternate Rumble Livestream Link

.

.

.

Neil Oliver, The Governing Class Discovers that People Owning Nothing Does Not Make Them Happy


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 9, 2022 | Sundance

In his weekly monologue Neil Oliver gives his perspective on the changing of the guard at #10 Downing Street.  Meet the potential new boss, same as the old boss etc.   While drawing attention to the detached and aloof viewpoints of the self-installed ‘ruling class’, Oliver riffs one of the best lines from this week:

“Two years ago, I gave scant thought to acronyms like WHO, UN, WEF.  Now I watch them with the same attention I give to dogs that look like they might bite.”…

Damned if that isn’t the truth.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – The running of this country has precious little to do with we, the people – that much becomes more obvious every day. Ever more blatantly the powers that be are treating us like the sitting tenants in a property they want to knock down so they can sell the plot for profit to their pals and assorted foreign carpet baggers.

We the people, with our individual opinions and ambitions and dreams are just in the way of their anti-human fantasy of a so-called progressive future. They got fed up waiting for us to die of old age in our armchairs, in front of three bar electric fires we can’t afford to switch on, and have set about demolishing the old place while we’re still living in it.

Love him or loathe him – and I’ve been no fan of him or of any of the leaders we find ourselves saddled with in the West – PM Boris Johnson was brought down last week not by the millions who had voted for him, as might have been appropriate given any meaningful understanding of the concept of democracy – but by a hellish coupling of media and the self-worshipping political class that appointed themselves judge, jury and executioner. Together they wanted Johnson gone, and so he was gone.

The party atmosphere after his resignation – the glee and the gloating by those journalists that had conspired and shared in the taking of his scalp was plain to see. I really don’t think it’s supposed to be that way.

In the aftermath of Johnson’s defenestration there was a suggestion from former Tory PM John Major that the process of anointing the next leader of the Conservatives should bypass party members altogether – presumably in case troublesome proles with their taste for Brexit and borders, even for Britain itself, picked the wrong person again. Far better, thought the likes of Major, if Tory MPs just exercised their superior intellects and morals and did the choosing for them.

Hoary old Tory and arch-remainer Michael Heseltine’s cage was evidently rattled by all the noise and in predictable style he was instantly crowing that the passing of Johnson should mean the end of Brexit.

Once more the proof that those regarding themselves as our intellectual superiors still regard a decision made by an undeniable majority of British people only as evidence of the stupidity of the great unwashed.

In displays of audacity and temerity that are beyond the reach of adjectives, those that plotted Johnson’s demise are falling over one another to take his place. It’s like looking through a microscope at something revolting happening in a petri dish. Former chancellor Rishi Sunak had his slick and glossy show reel ready for broadcast before his former boss had delivered his resignation speech. I wonder when he performed for that instead of doing more damage to the economy. I don’t feel like having any of their names in my mouth, I really don’t.

So I will just say that for me the thought of any that stood for lockdowns, for damaging children’s physical and mental wellbeing, that oversaw the crashing of the economy, watched uncounted lives physically and mentally destroyed, advocated mask wearing on the street and cheer led the unholy pressure to take experimental injections or lose jobs and or reputations as a consequence … that called for digital vaccine passports or anything like them … that won’t shout from the highest hill that the green agenda and Net Zero are a disaster and must be scrapped immediately … the thought of any that demanded it all, or stayed silent while it all played out, should now occupy No. 10 and contemplate more of the same in the months ahead makes me sick to my stomach.

For me the change of PM is nothing more than a change of drivers on a train. The train we’re on is going where it’s scheduled and timetabled to go, on rails already laid, and in the face of its forward momentum we the people, it would seem, count for nothing.

From behind one podium after another, western leaders and their lackeys talk more and more openly about a liberal world order – even a rules-based liberal world order. The more I hear and see about a world ordered by self-described liberals and their rules, the less I like it. I certainly don’t recall ever being invited to vote for it. Two years ago I gave scant thought to acronyms like WHO, UN, WEF. Now I watch them with the same attention I give to dogs that look like they might bite.

At some point in the past – and I missed that point too, whenever it was, I will freely admit – the governing class decided they were done with serving us and that they own us and rule us instead. That cancerous thought has metastasized in recent years, so that it’s not just governments and their bureaucrats and preferred scientists who presume to lord it over us, to tell us what to do, what to think.

That same deranged thought is there throughout the greediest capitalist corporations now as well. The technocrats took free speech by the throat long ago, so as to preserve and push their own self-described progressive ideologies. Now that same superiority complex is everywhere else as well.

Halifax bank got on their high horse about pronouns and loftily declared that customers who didn’t like seeing staff wearing such on their badges should take their business elsewhere. And so, customers duly did, right enough, taking their hard-earned cash with them.

Since when did money-grubbing corporations decide it was appropriate to start telling customers what to think about sex and gender?

Ice Cream vendors Ben and Jerrys got on their soap box to criticize the British government’s plan to offshore asylum seekers to Rwanda – when surely their time would be better spent learning more about obesity and diabetes and their likeliest causes.

So here we are – we the British people are held in low regard not just by politicians and their ilk, not just by the awkward savants of the search engines and social media platforms, but even by High Street banks and ice cream vendors.

It feels like there is a club somewhere, or a positive feedback loop, in which everyone involved, and it’s definitely not us – politicians of all stripes, faceless bureaucrats, journalists, bankers and corporations – feels entitled to make all the decisions about every aspect of our lives and then to tell us how it’s going to be. We the people are to be downtrodden, demoralized and deceived.

In the wider world, it is farmers who are the latest citizens pushed beyond breaking point. In a replay of the Truckers’ protest in Canada that so captivated many of us, gave us hope however brief that an end to the deliberately destructive madness might be in sight, there are tractor protests in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Italy, in Poland.

When those who grow and raise the food we eat are angry and scared enough to down tools and take to the streets to fight for their very existence, when those who drive the trucks that bring us everything we depend upon for our daily lives have done likewise … perhaps it’s finally time to pay attention to the unfolding catastrophe.

Among the Dutch farmers the anger was pushed above boiling point by government diktats regarding emissions of nitrogen and ammonia into the environment. Plans to reduce those emissions by as much as 70 percent will, farmers say, put many of them out of business altogether. They say it’s not about saving nature, but about leftist government plans to change land use in the Netherlands, forcing farmers to sell their land and to cut the national cattle herd by as much as 50 per cent.

Dutch farmers are among the most productive in the world – exporting 100 billion dollars worth of dairy and crops every year. Their banners say No farmers, no food.

The world is in a time of food insecurity and still governments would apparently prefer to contemplate a future in which people will suffer in every conceivable way. And in the future presently shaping up, people will most definitely suffer. Those governments are plainly not in the business of fixing anything, rather making matters worse.

Canadian PM Justin Trudeau – he that forcibly shut down the truckers’ protest in his own county and seized their bank accounts – has his country on a similar path to that of the Dutch. In a time of global food insecurity – blamed in part on war in Ukraine – ideologically driven administrations are stamping their metaphorical boots down upon their farmers’ backs.

In Holland, shots have been fired – allegedly by police, at one tractor. This is how basic things are becoming, how near the bone. Here in the west, in the 21st century, we are being prepared not just for a future without cars, but a future of less energy… less warmth… and even less food.

I knew there was something badly wrong with all that’s going on when I realized my response to what was happening, to all that we were being told, was physical. All of this actually makes me feel ill, to my bones.

I have never in my life before listened to government policy – and to the policies of governments all around the world – and felt endangered. But I do now. If you feel that too – a deep physiological response to the last two years, and a growing sense of something malevolent – then you are not alone. Sometimes it feels like society itself has been poisoned – and that all that society is being offered is yet more poisonous nonsense.

We should notice that it is from among us, the ordinary people, that the farmers and the truckers come – so that it is we who really have the power that matters in the end.

In Sri Lanka, they’re quite a bit further down the line than us – although hardly out of sight. Thousands of people, driven beyond endurance by economic collapse and the worst food and fuel shortages in living memory, found they had nothing left to lose. I read this morning about protestors there storming and occupying their president’s official residence in the city of Colombo.

Desperate people and desperate measures. It’s interesting to note that, contrary to what Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum might think … it turns out that when some people find they actually do own nothing anymore – they’re really not very happy at all. (LINK)

Philadelphia Police Looking for 7 Teens Who Beat 73-Year-Old to Death with Traffic Cone


Posted originally on the conservative tree house July 9, 2022 | Sundance

It has been many years since CTH made the decision to stop documenting the predatory attacks from within the Safari confines of Atlanta, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Oakland, New York City, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Austin and several major metropolitan areas. {Go Deep} It became almost impossible to report on the Safari because even a decade ago the politically correct internet police were scrubbing content faster than Nina Jankowicz would sing about disinformation.

However, in the decade that’s passed; and as expected throughout the rise of the Dream Defenders and BLM; things have gotten much worse.  The most recent example of danger within a regional safari zone comes from Philadelphia. A group of seven “teens” beat a 73-year-old man to death with a traffic cone.

A traffic cone.

PHILADELPHIA – Security video released Friday by Philadelphia police shows a group of teens fatally beating a man in his early 70s with a traffic cone.

In a statement, the Philadelphia Police Department said authorities were searching for seven teens seen in the video, which was recorded on the morning on June 24.  The victim, who was not identified in the statement and who police blurred in the video, fell to the ground after being struck with “objects,” the department said. He died the next day.

In the video, the department said a reward of $20,000 was being offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case.  The department said the group appeared to be in their early to mid-teens.

The man was identified by NBC Philadelphia as 73-year-old James Lambert Jr., who went by “Simmie,” according to his family. The video showed the man crossing a street north of downtown Philadelphia before one of the teens can be seen hurling a cone at him. It isn’t clear if the teens knew the man or what occurred before the apparent assault. (MORE)

The attack took place at 2:00am, and as expected the immediate response from the local safari defenders is to ask why the victim violated a key safari rule and went outside after dark.

Within the confines of the Safari Zones the rules clearly state you should not be there; it is specifically emphasized that if a traveler must transit near a Safari Zone, there should be no travel into, through or within the zone after sunset.  The predators are most active at night.

Most of the time the safari incidents show up on page 5 or 6 of the newspaper.  Ten years ago, the common lingo was to identify the ‘incidents’ as kids playing the “Knock Out Game”, or shooting people for “Thrill Kills”, or if people accidentally talked to them, well, the safari residents were allowed to jump in/out of the car and attack without consequence.

The empowerment rules within the safari, commonly known as racial equity efforts, have spread in the last decade.

Inside the Safari, the predator’s rape little girls during their adolescence, smash bricks in the faces of others as teens, enjoy lighting people on fire while they are alive, and sometimes they will order a pizza or Chinese food so they can shoot the delivery driver for a viral YouTube video.

Other random examples have highlighted the “cap-a-joggers-ass” for jogging in/near the safari or smashing faces with bricks for more giggles. The safari residents develop alternate monikers like No-Limit-Nigga, and if you exit your vehicle during your drive through their region, well, you are requesting a beating.

If you describe the adult version of the teen predators honestly you are labeled a racist. However, if you put your head down and ignore the warning signs you risk becoming a victim. A tenuous choice.

To distract attention away from the Safari Zones the congressional black caucus claims to legitimize occupants with representation. If you defend yourself against them, you are hunting in the safari, regardless of the reason for your presence.  Safari regulators Al Sharpton and Benjamin Crump call the residents “constituents” while Malik Shabazz calls them “footsoldiers”, Eric Holder calls them “his people”, and President Obama says they are just like his kids: “if I had a son.”

So, you are taught threatened to tread carefully when honestly identifying anyone who lives in the Safari zones.  All of the commonalities must be ignored and the scope of any police investigation near the Philadelphia Safari Zone must include the possibility that Amish residents of Pennsylvania are suspects; that way the media pretending -needed to advance the financial objectives of the Safari regulators- can continue.

In each of the cases in/around the Safari Zones the victim was usually targeted because they were vulnerable or disposable; customarily because the victim violated one of more of the rules of the safari.  In this example Mr. Lambert was outside his home at 2:00am.

.

Tucker Carlson Outlines How the COVID-19 Pandemic Reset Everything and asks, Was it Done on Purpose?


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 9, 2022 | Sundance

During his opening monologue Friday evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson went into great detail outlining the current evidence of how the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated.

As a direct consequence of the COVID-19’s global impact, a geopolitical reset has taken place.  Carlson asks the questions of whether this reset was done purposefully, and why is there no one looking at how the virus originated?   WATCH:

Wharton Finance Professor Looks Deeper into June Jobs Data, Outlook Not So Good – Hours Worked Dropped Equivalent to 450,000 Lost Jobs


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 8, 2022 | sundance

University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Business, Finance Professor Jeremy Siegel, takes a closer look at the June jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  Professor Siegel notes a .01% drop in average hours worked is the labor equivalent of losing 450,000 jobs.

With factory demand dropping, and with inventories climbing, and with FTE’s (Full-Time Equivalents) dropping, the jobs report takes on additional context that aligns with the overall decline we feel in Main Street activity.  Essentially, regardless of how many jobs are “created” within the economy, the overall economic activity -as measured by the value of products & services generated- is declining.

Additionally, as noted by Professor Siegal, the current best estimate as reviewed by the several data points, is a current drop in overall GDP in the -2% range.   Seigal points this information out because the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates into an economy that has declining (demand side) consumer activity, which, correctly as he states, only makes the contraction more severe.  WATCH:

The core supply side costs (all based on energy policy) continue to increase and drive consumer prices upward.  Simultaneously, consumer demand is dropping because the goods and services impacted by the increased costs (most of which are unavoidable) are more expensive.  This creates a downward spiral.  Consumer prices are increasing on housing, energy, food and gasoline (supply side impacts), at the same time discretionary spending contracts.

In this scenario there is no way to avoid a steep recession.  However, the real priority of Joe Biden surrounds whether Jill will allow his favorite pudding, and if the shoes on the pancake mix keeps making sparkly rabbit noises.

COVID Came from a Lab Said Lancet Chairman


Armstrong Economics Blog/Disease Re-Posted Jul 9, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Interview: Prepare for War, Higher Energy Prices & Significant Civil Unrest


Armstrong Economics Blog/Armstrong in the Media Re-Posted Jul 9, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Click here to read Greg Hunter’s summary of the interview and view other content on USAWatchdog.

Schwab’s Puppet Falls?


Armstrong Economics Blog/Humor Re-Posted Jul 8, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Former PM of Japan Assassinated


Armstrong Economics Blog/Japan Re-Posted Jul 8, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been assassinated in a rare violent attack in Japan. He was shot while delivering a speech in Nara. He was pronounced dead at 5:03 p.m. local time at the hospital. The assassin was captured, Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, who may have served in the Maritime Self-Defense Force back in the 2000s. He apparently used a homemade gun, which shows that in a country with some of the strictest gun laws in the entire world, it still does not prevent such acts.

Violent crime in the United States peaked in 1991 and bottomed in 2014 with our model on civil unrest and the war cycle. It appears that because of the lockdowns, this may have pushed many on-the-edge people over the edge for we are witnessing mass shootings and senseless violent crimes like people killing someone over a parking spot. This appears to be unfolding worldwide. In this case, the guy made his own gun. This is a trend that is starting to appear in the United States where guns are not traceable.