The Deth Guild

Herschel Smith at The Captain’s Journal reminds our “minders” how precarious their grip on the situation is:

“The most vulnerable structure, system or component for large scale coal plants is the main step up transformer – that component that handles electricity at 230 or 500 kV. They are one of a kind components, and no two are exactly alike. They are so huge and so heavy that they must be transported to the site via special designed rail cars intended only for them, and only about three of these exist in the U.S.”

“They are no longer fabricated in the U.S., much the same as other large scale steel fabrication. It’s manufacture has primarily gone overseas. These step up transformers must be ordered years in advance of their installation. Some utilities are part of a consortium to keep one of these transformers available for multiple coal units, hoping that more will not be needed at any one time. In industrial engineering terms, the warehouse min-max for these components is a fine line.”

“On any given day with the right timing, several well trained, dedicated, well armed fighters would be able to force their way on to utility property, fire missiles or lay explosives at the transformer, destroy it, and perhaps even go to the next given the security for coal plants. Next in line along the transmission system are other important transformers, not as important as the main step up transformers, but still important, that would also be vulnerable to attack. With the transmission system in chaos and completely isolated due to protective relaying, and with the coal units that supply the majority of the electricity to the nation incapable of providing that power for years due to the wait for step up transformers, whole cites, heavy industry, and homes and businesses would be left in the dark for a protracted period of time, all over the nation.”
– Herschel Smith

Peruse the entire post HERE. Absorb. Realize how tenuous the FedGov’s position truly is. Their Buck-shot mouths are starting a fracas their BB gun asses can’t cover.

We wonder – Do these fools realize the danger? Or in their arrogance, do the gentry-class think they can continue to suck blood from the nation once it’s infrastructure has been shredded from beneath it? Perhaps they imagine, (wrongly), the serfs would never “cut off their leg to stop the spread of gangrene.” Whatever mangled thought process they subscribe to, these tyrants need to understand with absolute perfect clarity this:

“When a parasite kills the appendage it feasts from – or the host lops it off – the parasite then dies.”

There is more from Smith:

“…I remarked that “The first bloody corpse dragged from a home invasion by government forces hunting for firearms will be the occasion for some deep soul searching by millions of firearms owners across the country,” directly within the context of the electrical grid vulnerabilities…”
– Herschel Smith

Herschel then reminds us of what Bob Owens wrote:

“Some people seem appalled at the fact that the sort of attacks that American forces have used so successfully overseas (Iraq’s electrical grid is still in the process of recovering from two wars) might be used against American cities… and that is the exact point both Smith and I were trying to make. Neither of us are advocates of such attacks, as both of us probably have a better idea than the layman of the effect such attacks would have. I’d likely lose several people I love very much who have medical conditions were such an attack to affect this region. these aren’t things we want. these are things we fear.”

“Smith and I are pointing out the fact that if states or the federal government is willing to push citizens into a Second Revolutionary War over the natural right to self defense, they will feel the wrath of the right of revolution that is the birthright of ever American.”
– Bob Owens

Without the spark of electricity Summers are long and hot – and winters are cold and longer still. Prepare accordingly folks. Should the Goblins and Trolls serving Sauron’s will get uppity, one of the first things to go will likely be the power.

The juice will probably stay off for a long damn time.

A reader over at the Western Rifle Shooter Association has some terribly prescient thoughts on the nature complicated social structures:

“Imagine a table, say a 4 X 8 foot sheet of plywood, sitting on sawhorses. Imagine you rig a device to trickle grains of sand from four feet above the table, onto the center of the table. You watch to see what happens.”

“The first grains of sand will hit the table and bounce around in random fashion. Eventually, the grains will come to occupy the center surface of the table. Falling grains will hit and dislodge other grains. The sandpile will grow. As the sand pile grows, once in a while one grain will dislodge a bunch of other grains and cause a sluff on one area of the sand pile. The sides of the sandpile will grow steeper and the top taller.”

“Eventually, one falling grain of sand will cause a cascading, catastrophic rearrangement of the entire sandpile. Eventually and ALWAYS.”

“This catastrophic rearrangement, the thinkers say, always happens in every complex system. It’s one of the characteristics of complex systems. It is impossible to predict which grain of sand will cause this catastrophe – only that it WILL happen…”
– Reader at the WRSA

Then comes the stinger:

“…it’s impossible to know exactly which random grain of sand will cause the catastrophic rearrangement of the sandpile, we can observe the growing potential for disaster as the sides get steeper and the top gets higher…”
– Reader at the WRSA

Read the entire article HERE and then read the short story by Matt Bracken that prompted it HERE.

We can all see and feel it – in our guts – we can smell in the air. We watch this sand-pile growing more and more unstable with each passing week, the individual grains steadily becoming larger, more erratic. Our society is faltering, not just in the USA, but the world over.

To use another analogy, we are an old growth Forrest packed with timber, decades without a fire. Rather than thinning it, our “civil servants” are air-dropping diesel fuel and dry tinder. The world’s gentry class are undermining every societal strata, either through stupidity or malice. (Please note, as Bill Quick is fond of pointing out, “Stupidity and Malice are not mutually exclusive concepts.”). Whatever the reason, the result is hastening the destruction of law, peace and stability.

It’s going to burn down eventually. Some cigarette tossed from a moving vehicle, some malignant arson deliberately setting the blaze or a bumbling camper leaving a smoldering cooking-pit behind him. Perhaps a black swan will swoop in from nowhere and deliver a lightning strike. However it happens, “the system” has been compromised to point that the smallest event could start a cascade failure of our entire culture.

Still time to stock up on food – the sort you eat, none of the expensive mall-ninja stuff in the survival magazines. The things you buy now, and eat now. Just buy some extra each time you go to the store. A few flats of water is cheap. Don’t miss the boat like you did with firearms and ammunition…

…after all… What happens when a box of Ramen Noodles gets as scarce as a box of .223 Remington? We doubt very much that Wally-World will be an especially pleasant place to be when our society strikes that particular mile-stone…

Hat-tip to Bill Quick at Daily Pundit, who received an image that says everything about the current police state’s attitude towards the peasants – and where our fracturing society stands (hint: the wheels are coming off):

Welcome to your Balkanized authoritarian shit-hole comrades!

Hat-Tip to Bill Quick at Daily Pundit:

Dave over at Classical Values penned this little missive today:

“First they decide Obamacare doesn’t really have to be implemented if the GOP and Democrats agree it doesn’t. Then they decide they can exempt their staff from its legal requirements.”

“Congress is no longer a body of legislators, they’re a council of rulers.”

“Now, Treasury is getting creative, joining the parade of abuses at ATF, IRS, HHS, DOJ, NSA, EPA… pick three letters, it’s probably an Obama admin agency that abused their power.”

“This is what the first tattered threads of an unraveling civilization look like.”
– Dave

Read the entire piece and the comments HERE.

A good synopsis of the situation, but as Quick points out… once the Gods of the Copybook Headings roll into town, riding abreast a flock of black swans, life tends to get newsworthy – and fast – for both peasantry and nobility. T’would be a lamentable shame if power-lines and stout cordage were put to their most patriotic utility while everything burns.

We suppose this is more of that “bad luck” we always hear about?

Looks like Peter and Paul are again making deals behind the scenes. No one wants to tackle the debt ceiling at a time where approval is so low. Solution? Cook the books.

The FMS said that the deficit went up $98 billion ($97,594,000,000) in the Monthly Treasury Statement for July, which it released on Monday.

At the same time, the FMS said the debt stayed at exactly $16,699,396,000,000 in its Daily Treasury Statements, which are published every business day. The Daily Treasury Statements show the daily value of the federal government debt that is subject to a legal limit set by Congress.

At the static $16,699,396,000,000 level that the Treasury reported for every day of July, the debt was just $25 million below the legal limit of $16,699,421,000,000 that was set in a law passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama.

If Treasury’s daily statements were to declare that the government had borrowed an additional net $98 billion to cover the $98 billion deficit the Treasury declared in its monthly statement for July, the Treasury would be conceding that the government had already surpassed the legal limit on the debt–and has been violating the law by continuing to borrowing additional money.

Instead, even as the Treasury was running up the $98-billion deficit it reported in the July Monthly Treasury Statement, every one of the 22 Daily Treasury Statements published for July said the Treasury had closed out the previous business day with exactly $16,699,396,000,000 in debt.

On May 17, the first day the Treasury reported that the debt had hit exactly $16,699,396,000,000–and was thus just $25 million below the legal limit–Treasury Secretary Lew sent a letter to House Speaker John Boehner saying he was beginning to implement what he called “the standard set of extraordinary measures” to prevent the Treasury from exceeding the legal limit on the federal debt.

Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge has a wonderful primer on the nature of Tyranny up:

It is a mistake to believe that President Obama (or President Bush) is solely responsible for tyranny. Tyranny is never achieved by one person. Tyranny is a process. After some critical point, it becomes possible for one person to complete the job. The policies of Bismarck began the process that ended in a more than a half-century later in a Hitler.

Obama is not Hitler. Hopefully no one ever sees a monster like that again. However, Obama’s tyranny makes it easier for such a person to arise. His reign has accelerated matters (as did Bush before him).
– Tyler Durden

Read the entire article – and there is a fair bit of it – HERE.

Read, and absorb what we face as a people.

As Hendrix, Quick, Bracken, Misha, Smith, Owens and others have pointed out…

What are you going to do about it?

From Hot Air:

CO lawmakers granted immunity from parking, speeding tickets while happily gouging the little people with them

State lawmakers are getting special perks because of their legislative license plates.

The plates issued to the 100 state lawmakers and representatives elected to serve Colorado are preventing them not only from receiving photo radar tickets but also collection notices from past due parking tickets.

The legislative plates are not entered into the Colorado DMV database, so when photo radar cameras catch these drivers speeding, they never received tickets. That’s because of a loophole that doesn’t allow the City of Denver to electronically cross-reference those plates with a home address.

Click HERE for the cake they want to “let us” eat.

One might almost think “they” are trying to provoke a revolution… and then one asks… how in the hell do “they” think they can WIN?

The answer is of course “they” are all delusional sociopaths, and “they” will take the nation down with them in the end. Prepare accordingly.

Too late now for a garden this year.

Thanks to William Quick at his site Daily Pundit for the link:

The cheap, easy way to make those old game cartridges as good as new
Ars Technica

“Writing about the Nintendo Entertainment System’s birthday a couple of weeks ago put me in the mood for some retro gaming. I didn’t want to dive into the legal grey area that is emulation—my fever can only be cured by the real thing. I wanted to play the original games with the original controllers, so I hopped on eBay and snapped up a few used cartridges to expand my childhood game collection.”

“What I quickly found is that different vintage game vendors have pretty drastically different ideas of what “cleaned and tested” means. I’ve bought “cleaned and tested” games with connectors caked in dust, coated in tarnish, and (once) partially obscured by a dried up old spider carcass.”

“Putting dirty games in your console is bad for it, and a dirty console can go on to infect the clean games in your collection. Luckily, with the right tools and an assortment of chemicals, getting these games back into near-new condition is no trouble at all. Here’s what you need.”

Read the rest HERE and HERE.

Articles like this can make a guy wax nostalgic for the vintage 1980’s “ergonomics” of the NES controller. Or blister box as it was affectionately known around our household. (Boy the parental units hated that thing… never was a Christmas present so regretted).

So who’s up for some SMB2, Contra, Final Fantasy and Ninja Gaiden?

Oh. Scratch the Ninja Gaiden. Seem to recall nearly throwing a T.V. out the window over the Goddamned birds in the last stage.

If ever there was a justification to hang these miserable, useless pieces of shit…

Lawmakers and staff can breathe easy – their health care tab is not going to soar next year. The Office of Personnel Management, under heavy pressure from Capitol Hill, will issue regulations saying that the government can continue to make the employer contribution to the health plans of members and aides, according to several Hill sources.
– The Despicable Left-wing Propaganda Outfit Politico

That’s right peasants. These self-anointed Lords and Ladies in our congress, who are so much better than the commoners, have exempted themselves from the horrid shit-pile that is Obamacare.

These vermin no longer have any mandate to “rule,” (have not for some time), and to be positively frank, lack the legitimacy to continue wasting perfectly good air. They are vile, sub-human mockeries of life who betray the Constitution with their every stuttering syllable. The traitorous filth are not even deserving of a proper firing squad.

Damn each and every one of them to the deepest, blackest pit of hell, and God-willing, may they all get what they so richly deserve, each in turn.

Garbage.

No.

We take that back.

After all – Garbage was at some point useful. Near as we can tell, these varmints lacked all redeeming qualities from the second they were torn screaming from their mother’s rancid wombs.

Today’s quote brought to you by Fred Reed of “Fred on Everything:”

Today’s schools are run by women for girls. Fine. Girls should be in schools run for girls. Boys should not. Female teachers want decorum and good behavior, dislike competitiveness, rambunctiousness and cutting up in class. Boys will engage in these unless heavily, and now chemically, restrained. Thus the drive to keep boys doped up. Men as teachers can handle boys without having them led from class in handcuffs and subjected to psychotherapy because they drew a soldier with a rifle. Women cannot.
– Fred Reed

Welcome to Feminazi hell. Read the rest HERE.

We don’t claim to see everything… or to be infallible arbiters of character… but we know with certitude that – Ol’ Remus of The Woodpile Report is a genius and a gentlemen – sit back and let him blow some sunshine up your ass:

Making predictions is like dressing in a clown costume and handing meringue pies to passers by. We all do it even though the future is not merely unknown but unknowable. Ask the dinosaurs of 66 million and 33 years ago—Alvarez’s date was published in 1980—how the beach party scheduled for the next day at Chicxulub worked out. Oh that’s right, you can’t, they were all flash-barbequed. So much for simple continuity, much less long term extrapolation. That said, we can predict with sufficient confidence that a truck falling off a cliff will hit bottom, and pretty much when and where. If it doesn’t, we have bigger problems than a predictive miss.

Predictions, if they’re to be understood at all, are to be understood backwards. They comment on the present without directly, you know, commenting on the present. The commenting part is not optional. It is in fact inescapable. Most science fiction is also commentary, the time displacement or alternate reality being bedazzlement to reorient the reader. It’s calculated to evade his prepositioned defenses long enough for The Message to get through intact. Movies are less subtle, we willingly check our disbelief at the door, and it remains suspended unless something blatant disquiets it.

Plain ol’ predictions are more simple minded, more the “trouble with a T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for POOL” school of commentary, an exercise in connecting dots most of which don’t actually exist. Finally, predictions are like subatomic particles, each one has its anti-particle, both spring from the same source, both are equally valid—and equally not valid. Pollyannas and noble thinkers hew to the one, the pragmatists and battle scarred the other. With all this in mind, or not, we begin.

Constitutional fundamentalism will dominate the 21st century like the New Deal and the New Left dominated the 20th. The one party two-party system is already understood to be profoundly incestuous and irredeemably corrupt. Worse, DC’s actions say it believes the populace to be its enemy. The populace finds less reason to doubt them every day, so DC’s blatant disregard for natural rights and Constitutional guarantees is being challenged as never before, and mere accommodation at the margins is laughably insufficient for the growing ranks of the newly converted.

The movement grossly underestimates itself. To their credit, DC knows better. The ruling class understands this administration may be the last of the wooly mammoths. They’re not looking to defeat constitutionalism, they’re looking to survive it and dominate it. Look for the patricians to decorate the lampposts with their own cadets in a dramatic lunge for absolution and acceptance.

The next Great Depression is happening now. As in the ‘thirties, everything is getting better with the single exception of everything. The stock market as a price discovery mechanism is defunct, Detroit and three dozen or so smaller municipal bankruptcies have shown Munis are no longer credible, and the Federal Reserve has gone about as far into the marshlands as it can and found—more marshland. Now the final notice is in the mail.

Look for rising interest rates to tank the economy, and suddenly so. It’s the same leverage used for the bogus rampup, except working in reverse with a gravity assist. Look for a 25 to 35 per cent drop in real GDP from here, an unexampled calamity. Also expect dollar emergencies to come closer together until they drag it into outright repudiation. DC’s clout and credibility rest squarely on the dollar. Where it goes, they go. All else is blather. Even telephone tappers don’t work for nothing.
– Ol’ Remus

This man is incredible. But he’s not finished…

It’s said every agency wants to be a police force, and every police force wants to be an army. This is a spectacularly bad idea. In the beginning the municipal police were manned with casual labor in the lower reaches, little more than bailiffs with street duty. Professional law enforcement meant the sheriff—originally: the shire reeve—one of two ancient offices inherited from England, the other being the coroner. There were no police when the Constitution was ratified. Over time they’ve come close to the internal standing army art-link-symbol-tiny-grey-arrow-only-rev01.gif the founders feared and warned against, and with creeping federal captivity, an army of national occupation.

The schisms within the police over this, and between the populace and the police, are deepening proportionally. In DC’s mind the necessity for an open transformation is getting urgent. Look for a Night of the Long Knives during some crisis or another, to purge rogue elements and promote efficiency, natch. Then look for trouble when the people understand the thin blue line has melded with the thick blue line and “protect and defend” means protecting and defending DC—from them.

There’s every reason to believe the 21st century will be as eventful as the 20th. It’s foolish to expect good outcomes, much less depend on them. Even this little distance in time shows the last century was about Great Leaders building make believe worlds and forcing everybody to live in them until they either died from the consequences or the regime did. It’s no coincidence modern states use prodigious resources to count heads and keep tabs, or that survivalists think a lot about escape and evasion.

In the west the first years of the 21st century have been about disengagement. Much of “collapse” doomers point to is disengagement without sanctioned reengagement elsewhere. The slo-mo dissolution of the EU and back-to-the-land survival communities are examples from the macro and micro ends of the scale. But a trend does not a future make. The future is made the same way a glacier is made, one snowflake at a time. From there on, where it goes is up to the glacier.
– Ol’ Remus

Read all of the rest, the history, and the art…. HERE. Now. Go. If The Woodpile Report is not on your blog-roll, and a part of your weekly reading… it SHOULD be.

This one comes in courtesy of Hershel Smith at The Captain’s Journal:

If the attitude of the regime in Washington D.C. towards their “underlings” has yet to be crystallized casual readers, allow us aid in the petrification process, courtesy of Ray Kelly – the number one pick to replace “Big Sister” at the DHS:

“I don’t think it ever should have been made secret. I think the American public can accept the fact if you tell them that every time you pick up the phone it’s going to be recorded and goes to the government…”
– Ray Kelly

Yeah that’s right -you’re not suffering from glaucoma – you actually did just read that. Welcome to “The Home of the Free and the Brave.” Serfs. (Remember when last that turn of the phrase was not used sarcastically? We can, but Fess Parker was still playing was playing Davey Crockett on the television…)

So then…. Just sit the fuck back all docile-like and accept the reality that your betters are spying on and recording your every hissed breath. It’s for your own protection you know.

And besides… who can forget this oldie but a goodie….

The best political weapon is the weapon of terror. Cruelty commands respect. Men may hate us. But, we don’t ask for their love; only for their fear.
– Heinrich Himmler

These people are totalitarians, and they mean to enslave. Respond accordingly.

Fred Reed of Fred on Everything has done such a good job of categorizing and explaining the entire Zimmerman farce that we shall defer to him on the matter:

“But what persuaded me that humanity really did descend from monkeys, and would do well to ascend back to them, was the public´s near-perfect lack of grasp of anything involved in this national soap opera. From the vacant visages of over-coiffed network babes, from the empty minds and overhanging orbital ridges of anchor men, came a veritable Pacific of incomprehension. I was fascinated. Reasonable behavior is not very amusing.”

“For example, from these clouded minds there drizzled drastic drivel to the effect that Zimmerman “profiled” Martin. By this is meant that Zimmerman noticed that Martin closely resembled the young black males who had been burgling homes in the neighborhood, it being the duty of a neighborhood watch to notice exactly this.”

“But “profiling,” whatever network marsupials may think they think they mean by it, assuming that they think at all, is not a crime, and Zimmerman was not charged with it. “Following” is not a crime, and Zimmerman was not charged with it. Having attitudes that CNN doesn´t like is not yet a crime. Second-degree murder is a crime, and that, and only that, is what Zimmerman was charged with. The rest is irrelevant.”

“As best I could tell, this was far too difficult a concept for the talking heads.”

“Or was it? My Mexican wife, having compared the testimony in the trial to what the American media were saying, commented that the latter seemed to be trying to start a race war. Granted, she is not qualified to comment on the case, as she is not an idiot. Despite this debility, she appeared to be on to something.”

“Watching as much of the television coverage as I could bear, I saw that Zimmerman was being heavily packaged as guilty—of exactly what not being specified—with the strong implication that should he not be convicted, it would constitute a racially motivated miscarriage of justice. The duty of the jury was not to try him, but to convict him.”

“The coverage was so craftedly witless and dishonest that it was easy to suspect a conspiracy. Stupidity beyond a certain point can only be a work of intelligence. It was certainly dangerous behavior. In the cities there are large black populations who get all their news from television. These can easily be incited to violence. In California, someone called Zulu Shabazz, of the New Black Panther Party, is indeed calling for a race war against whites. The strategic brilliance of declaring war on those who grow your food and sign you checks might be lost on Sun Tzu. Oh well.”
– Fred Reed

Read every last syllable HERE.

The only point to add is that we now understand what it felt like to live in the last days of Rome’s empire as she crumbled away.

Enjoy the bread and circuses while you can folks – For tomorrow, the Saxons sharpen their blades.

Bill Quick at Daily Pundit and Mike Hendrix of Cold Fury have a powerful exchange regarding the omnipresent Tyranny consuming American Liberty – and those Sheeple who willingly lick the hands of those grasping their chains:

I’ve had folks e-mail me now and then complaining about my too-shrill tone here as regards this sort of thing, saying that FederalGovCo shouldn’t be regarded as tyrannical because “nobody is actually going into gulags yet,” and that “it’s not as if we’re actually like Nazi Germany, with people being sent to the ovens” and such-like. If that’s the standard by which tyranny is to be measured–rather than the one laid out by the Founders, say–then it’ll be a very long time indeed before any real changes are demanded. And an awful lot of us are going to be way too quiescent, so to speak, to demand it.
– Mike Hendrix

Hendrix is right – Alexis de Tocqueville would have – correctly – labeled our current society a form of Soft Despotism. Our Federal Taskmasters wrap their fists in supple velveteen gloves, and incrementally pick away at our liberty, believing a series of “small” usurpations will pass unnoticed. Or individually not merit they revolution they so badly deserve.

To those callow Dogs Mr. Hendrix, we recommend you point out the Nazis did not erupt onto the world stage in full jack-boot glory. No, they grew quietly and incrementally, like colon cancer – and not until the end of things was their depravity manifest. Just as it shall be in America – and sleep lightly, for just as Hitler has his devout, so too shall Mordor on the Potomac have their willing zealots, gnashing at the bit and ready to load the next generation’s cattle-cars.

Small, evil little toads all – people motivated by the belief in the absolute purity of their actions, unlimited greed, fits of envy and fear of what they can’t control. Such types shall be enabled at every step by worthless cowards that bend a knee and surrender to their “masters.”

In response to Hendrix, Bill Quick opines:

I pay such people no attention. They are the ones who will eventually slink away, to Canada or somewhere else, hoping their chains will continue to rest lightly on their bowed shoulders.

In their own way they are worse than the active, obvious tyrants, because they enable such monsters in the name of pragmatic reason. They are both cowardly and stupid, and the penalty for both crimes against nature is often, as it should be, death or enslavement.
– Bill Quick

Read and absorb it all HERE and HERE.

The most horrible evil spawned from World War II was not the Nazi Party or the slaughter of millions. It was the German Citizenry which sat back and allowed that hell to manifest in the first place. Their obedience, apathy and cowardice empowered the tyrants to build their empire of bones. The “pragmatic” “go-along-to-get-along” sheeple are the ones who bear the weight of Hitler’s butchery. For they tolerated and condoned all the horrors the 1930’s birthed – through their silent obedience.

Damn them all.

So it always has been.
So it always shall be.

Human history is a wheel.

With all the news coming out of Egypt of its second revolution and military coup, it would be easy to let some other important news pass us by. Reuters reports HERE a high possibility of a collapse by the Portugal majority coalition. Lets take a look at what this may look like in the next 48 hours….

From Greece to Cyprus, Slovenia to Spain and Italy, and now most pressingly Portugal, where the finance and foreign ministers resigned in the space of two days, a host of problems is stirring after 10 months of relative calm imposed by the European Central Bank.

Portuguese Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho told the nation in an address late on Tuesday that he did not accept the foreign minister’s resignation and would try to go on governing.

If his government does end up collapsing, as is now more likely, it will raise immediate questions about Lisbon’s ability to meet the terms of the 78-billion-euro bailout it agreed with the EU and International Monetary Fund in 2011.

Coming soon after the near-collapse of the Greek government, which has been given until Monday to show it can meet the demands of its own EU-IMF bailout, the euro zone may be on the brink of falling back into full-on crisis.

During a meeting of finance officials from the 17 euro countries on Tuesday, there was agreement that the “optimism in the euro zone is not justified, that we are in worse shape than it seems,” according to one source at the meeting.

The situation in Portugal was a particular concern, said JP Morgan economist Alex White.

“The announcement this afternoon that Paulo Portas, the foreign minister, has resigned significantly escalates our near-term concerns,” he said in a note to clients. “At the moment risks appear elevated.”

Portuguese 10-year bond yields spiked up to eight percent on Wednesday with reports of further ministerial resignations throwing the coalition government’s future into peril.

While Ireland’s problems are likely to blow over, those in Portugal, Greece and Cyprus, which also has tough bailout conditions to meet, are clear and present, and those in Italy and Spain show few signs of disappearing.

EU institutions effectively shut down in August. but that might not prevent a restless summer as the slumbering crisis reawakens agitated.

Agitated indeed.

..were scared to write articles like this:

http://thecommonsenseshow.com/2013/07/01/americas-coming-guerrilla-war/

Please remember… at the time, they had NO reason TO be scared to speak like that. The government was not spying on them, collecting their every intimate detail and hounding through their every business transaction like the SS.

Nowadays, the people HAVE a legitimate reason to be fearful of such expression, and yet, are so enraged they let fly the deplorable words heedless of the “examples” the Feds and our Militarized police force make of the other uppity peasentry.

This is the escalation constant readers. What you are witnessing now is the mental preparations being made by people for revolt. The resolve is hardening, the players are dehumanizing one another, and both sides are tuning strategy, preparing supplies, stocking ordinance, and seeking a proper pretext for a first move.

It’s going to get interesting as all parties seek the proper flashpoint – after all, everybody wants the moral high-ground in Civil War.

Hat-tip to the Western Rifle Shooters Association for the link:

As each day passes, more and more people smell the burning refuse – the sad realization that our event horizon has already been breached. There is no direction now except forward into the doom of our age.

Roger Simon of PJ Media:

“As we approach July 4, 2013, is America in a pre-revolutionary state? Are we headed for a Tahrir Square of our own with the attendant mammoth social turmoil, possibly even violence.”

“Could it happen here?”

“We are two-thirds of the way into the most incompetent presidency in our history. People everywhere are fed up. Even many of the so-called liberals who propelled Barack Obama into office have stopped defending him in the face of an unprecedented number of scandals coming at us one after the other like hideous monsters in some non-stop computer game.”

“And now looming is the monster of monsters, ObamaCare, the healthcare reform almost no one wanted and fewer understood.”

“It will be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, an organization that has been revealed to be a kind of post-modern American Gestapo, asking not just to examine our accounting books but the books we read. What could be more totalitarian than that?”
– Roger Simon

Read the entire thing HERE.

“Welcome to the party pal.”

The older posts from 2012 are available in the News Archives Section. Here you can read old updates and articles from years long past - which is rather interesting for seeing the evolution of people's thoughts and opinions over time.

‣ Click HERE to read more.