Ambulances in Kansas speed toward hospitals then suddenly change direction because hospitals are full. Employee shortages in New York City cause delays in trash and subway services and diminish the ranks of firefighters and emergency workers. Airport officials shut down security checkpoints at the biggest terminal in Phoenix and schools across the nation struggle to find teachers for their classrooms.
The current explosion of omicron-fueled coronavirus infections in the U.S. is causing a breakdown in basic functions and services โ the latest illustration of how COVID-19 keeps upending life more than two years into the pandemic.
Comment: Or, we could be witnessing greater sickness because of the large number of vaxxed, along with the large numbers of people who've reached a negative tipping point in their health because of a reluctance to get treated early, AND the mere fact that this is also cold and flu season - where cases are deceptively attributed to the Another-con virus by hospitals paid to do so.
This is happening almost everywhere, and it is deeply affecting industry after industry.
Last week, I wrote about how one man in St. Louis had to wait 10 hours for an ambulance to show up.
I still can't get over that.
And once people get to our hospitals, often they can't get treated in a timely manner because there aren't enough workers. Of course hospitals are trying to hire as fast as they can, but finding qualified people is extremely difficult these days. For example, one hospital in Nebraska has been advertising for an ultrasound technician for six months and still has not received one single application...
Isn't that nuts?Troy Bruntz runs Community Hospital, a 25-bed critical access facility in McCook, Nebraska. He's been trying to recruit a third ultrasound technician for at least six months without getting a single application.
For lower-level positions, the hospital competes with the local Walmart store, where wages are rising. He monitors the pay offered by the retailer as well as the other large local employers, a hose manufacturer and an irrigation equipment supplier.
There are more than 10 million open jobs in the United States today, but the U.S. economy only added 199,000 workers during the month of December...
In the old days, adding 199,000 workers would have barely kept up with population growth.The US economy added 199,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department reported Friday. That was the fewest jobs added in any month of 2021.
That was a major disappointment: Economists had forecast jobs growth of double that number.
So how could forecasts be so off again?
But we can't really talk about "population growth" these days, can we?
Our hospitals are being absolutely overwhelmed with the sick and the dying, but most of those same hospitals are now severely undermanned thanks to Biden's absurd mandate for healthcare workers.
As a result, members of the National Guard are being forced to serve hospital duty in quite a few states...
So if you show up at your local emergency room because you are dying, you may get "treated" by a member of the National Guard with no medical training whatsoever.An incoming tide of patients is slowly drowning UMass Memorial Medical Center, and the US military's National Guard is working to plug the gaps. In wave after daily wave, the emergency crews pull up to the ambulance bay, dropping off patients for which there is no room.
"It's just the perfect storm for a nightmare here in the emergency department," says Dr. Eric Dickson, the CEO of the hospital and an emergency physician.
Meanwhile, our nightmarish supply chain crisis just continues to escalate.
In the waning days of 2021, optimists assured us that the computer chip shortage would soon go away, but the numbers are telling us that it has gotten even worse. In fact, the wait time for chip delivery is now the longest that it has ever been...
And thanks to fear of Omicron, we are starting to see very alarming shortages of meat and eggs at supermarkets from coast to coast...Delivery times for chips jumped in December, signaling the semiconductor shortage is worsening into the new year, according to research by Susquehanna Financial Group.
On average, lead times increased six days to approximately 25.8 weeks last month compared with November. This is the longest wait time since the firm began monitoring the data in 2017.
If you are a "meat and potatoes" kind of person, I have some more bad news for you.SEVERAL American supermarkets are reporting incidents of "bare shelves" as fears grow over an imminent meat and egg shortage amid a surge in Omicron cases.
Food chains have been one of the first to be disrupted by the new super strain as workers fall ill and productivity drops.
It turns out that there is a "growing global potato shortage" too...
I tried to warn everyone that this was coming. If you don't want a spoiler about where all of this is eventually headed, then definitely don't read my latest book.There's a growing global potato shortage โ a real problem for a planet addicted to french fries and chips.
A number of popular items, including marmite and cream cheese, have faced scarcities amid supply chain disruptions wrought by the coronavirus pandemic and extreme weather. Potatoes are the latest to join the list, becoming unevenly available in some countries and fast-food chains because of a confluence of factors.
The economic optimists assured us that the shortages would be gone by 2022, but instead we are starting to see truly bizarre things happen.
In Norway, the military is actually issuing used underwear to the troops because shortages have become so intense...
Doesn't that sound fun?Coronavirus supply chain issues have hit fuel supplies, led to shortages of masks, vaccines and electronic components, and snarled up holiday gift deliveries. In Britain, truck driver shortages led to fears last summer of pubs running dry.
Now, Norway's military is facing a supply shortage that is particularly personal: New recruits are being asked to wear previously used undergarments - including socks, bras and underwear - returned by conscripts after they complete their service.
Unfortunately, if you are in the military you have to do what you are told to do.
Of course our politicians seem to think that they can treat all of us like we are in the military these days.
They just keep imposing more rules, more restrictions and more mandates.
And the more they clamp down, the more our society is going to break down.
2022 is certainly off to an inauspicious start, and the weeks ahead certainly do not look very promising at all.
And that means that the United States has finally arrived at the preparatory stage for total collapse. Let's see it in detail.
Barbara has been studying political instability for 30 years, most recently as part of a CIA task force (which has given her access to some "politically sensitive data," that the rest of us only hear about occasionally). Her assessment is not based on an impressionistic sense of the animal mind, but on specific measures refined by application to politically unstable countries around the world. And, according to her, the United States is now at high risk of civil war, political instability and political violence.
To use a term coined by Fareed Zakaria, the US has become an "illiberal democracy." Another term he uses is "anocracy," which can be defined as a form of government that is partly democracy and partly dictatorship or a regime that mixes democratic and autocratic characteristics. โWe're closer to the civil war than any of us want to believe,โ Barbara says bluntly.
In my work, I have divided collapse into five distinct stages or phases, which can totally or partially overlap, occur asynchronously or even anticipate each other depending on local circumstances. These phases are: financial, commercial, political, social and cultural. This taxonomy offers a good way to make sense of this huge mess and to measure its progress.
In the case of the United States, the financial meltdown is developing quite well; no one knows what particular drop in public debt will overflow the camel's back, but we can be sure the drop will come. We also know what will happen next: loss of access to imported goods and resources, economic collapse and political dissolution.
The commercial collapse is also well underway. The trend has been to replace the diversity of local commerce with one or a few large stores (ultimately, usually a Walmart) that suck all the wealth from the local community and ship it to East Asia, after which Walmart closes. , leaving a shell and an empty parking lot. What remains (for those who still have some cash) is online shopping, but then it turns out that many items are out of stock or simply not available.
In the context of the United States, social and cultural collapse is a special case. Most social activities have been absorbed by social media (mediated, i.e. by private companies). These social media companies profit from selling their users' data, and once that data becomes worthless (because users are broke), the artificially constituted company will dissolve. Likewise, culture has been reduced to a set of commercial cultural services, and once commerce is gone, so too will culture. The end result is a population of mental misfits, of strangers to each other, who cannot communicate properly or make common cause with anyone, but who are heavily armed (with lots of ammunition, mostly Russian-made. despite trade sanctions!).
And now the political collapse is reaching them. According to Barbara, one of the telltale signs of impending political instability is the rise of ethnic entrepreneurship. In the United States, examples include BLM, Antifa, Qanon, and the Proud Boys. LGBTQ +, while not strictly ethnic, can be seen as a politically divisive force; on the other side of the expanding political no man's land, mined and bombed by bullets, they are called Sodomites and, in case you don't know the Bible well, this is not an affectionate term. Various other "havens of iniquity," whether they are west coast devil worshipers or elite east coast pedophile gangs, are in the same category and also seem destined to receive their fix of fire and brimstone. .
As we approach 2022, the United States is poised for a total collapse. The financial markets are rigged to perfection and ready to explode, commerce is in logistical failure mode, society has been reduced to a set of social media silos, culture is an ephemeral commercial product, and now politics is ready to adopt the principle of a bullet - one vote.
So it's no surprise that the Russians, fully backed by the Chinese, are making their own list of non-negotiable demands and double-checking it: return your nuclear weapons to your territory, stop sailing or fly anywhere near Russia, retire yours. weapons and your โexplosive beltโ troops, which would be Eastern Europe, and make sure someone is on the phone 24/7, in case we need to give you further instructions. The Russians are probably looking at the same set of CIA data that Barbara studied and they see the same thing: the collapse of the United States has finally happened. This is not an exercise! Hence the urgency to have the documents signed before the firefight begins. They really want to fix all the safety issues before celebrating the new year and then enjoying the winter holidays in peace and quiet.
Dmitry Orlov
Source: cluborlov.wordpress.com
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