A Busy News Week

The collapse is picking up speed and it is hard to keep up with all the happenings. The irony of the week has been not just backfiring western sanctions, but now the boomerang regime changes occurring among those calling for a Putin regime change. Boris and Mario first on the block perhaps followed by Rutte, Scholz, Macron, Trudeau, and Biden. Alex calls it the "elensky curse"...that is all those who went to Kiev and grovelled promising money and weapons are cursed.
...much more below the fold...

This has got to be one of the better headlines that you will ever read.

There's a brewing trade dispute between the U.S. and Mexico on energy policy, and it’s getting ugly fast.

Afternoon folks!

More good stuff for you this week. There are blues albums by Freddie King, James Cotton and Mississippi John Hurt and there are blues rock albums from Savoy Brown, Ten Years After and John Mayall.

Enjoy!

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”
Pablo Picasso

It has been a busy summer and keep falling farther behind. There have been several subjects brought up in diaries I wanted to add a few thoughts.

After the 2008 crash many central banks enacted low and negative interest rates for any financial institution that could borrow directly from the central bank, or indirectly from those favored financial institutions. This cheap money spigot for the wealthy, to the tune of tens of trillions of dollars, never got turned off until this year, when inflation finally crept into the economy.

Happy Friday every one. As always, post any photos you like.

Usually when I visit the Balboa Park rose garden I'm there looking for bugs and insects, but from time to time I focus on the roses instead. These are just a few of the different types of roses in the garden and two views of the garden.

As I sat on the porch the other night awash in an Iron Triangle Gold dream, the stars gazing back at me, my mind wandered back to promises of my youth. My memory was jogged by a jet plane out of Houston drifting northward slowly across the sky, reminding me of the flying car promise from days of yore, not really a promise but an aspiration of the good life prophesied for the future.

As the jet lurched forward enough to the point when the sound caught up, it jarred me back from my dream state, back to the reality of what seems like the present day anti-enlightenment. There are no flying cars and we still struggle for world peace, another broken dream of my youth. Instead of the fantastical flying car as a harbinger of the utopia that may have been, we get this:

Robot dog with machine gun hints of a dystopian future

While Boston Dynamics show off their robot’s dance moves, others turn similar-looking devices into dystopian killing machines.

Much like their flesh-made cousins, robot dogs do not lack attention on the internet. Many have seen the footage of Spot, a high-tech quadruped developed by the US-based company Boston Dynamics, flaunting its dance moves.

However, the latest addition to the robot dog content stream looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Twitter user Sean Chiplock shared a video of someone in Russia firing a gun from a quadruped robot.

Even though the post’s author discusses robots Boston Dynamics make, the one seen in the video is not made by the American company. As Sean Gallagher, a Senior Threat Researcher at Sophos points out, the robot dog is of Chinese origin.