Sunday, June 23rd, 2024
Ukrainian forces launch an ATACMS missile bombardment against Sevastopol, Crimea, with missile fragments from intercepted missiles hitting a beach, killing five people and injuring at least 124 others. Russia holds the United States responsible and vows that there will be a response. (Reuters)
At least three people are killed and 38 others are injured when Russian guided bombs hit civilian infrastructure in Kharkiv, Ukraine. (The Washington Post)
In the Russian Republic of Dagestan, unknown terrorists open fire on a synagogue and an Orthodox church in the city of Derbent, while another group attacks a traffic police post in Makhachkala. At least 6 people are killed and 13 are wounded in the attacks. (Al Arabiya)
Over 150,000 people rally and march in Tel Aviv, Israel, to protest against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, members of the Knesset, and calling for a ceasefire to the war. (Al Jazeera)
Eight Palestinians are killed in IDF airstrikes that hit a UNRWA-run vocational college in Gaza City being used to distribute aid. (Reuters)
One person is killed and ten others are injured in Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure in Kharkiv, Ukraine. (Reuters)
The Houthis claim to have carried out a joint military operation with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq to target four vessels in the Port of Haifa, Israel. (Al Jazeera)
The Saudi health minister announces that the death toll during this year’s Hajj pilgrimage has now reached 1,301. (Al Arabiya)
Independence leader Christian Tein and seven other activists are flown to France for pre-trial detention after being arrested for inciting violence and riots in New Caledonia. (Al Jazeera)
On the Grand Duke’s Official Birthday, Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg announces that, in October, the heir to the throne Guillaume will assume the royal duties, as the first step to Henri’s abdication. (Luxembourg Times)
Saturday, June 22nd, 2024
A University of Illinois team lead by Joshua Wurman and Karen Kosiba confirms mobile radar measurements of between 309 mph (497 km/h) and 318 mph (512 km/h) in the tornado that struck Greenfield, Iowa, United States, on May 21. This is the first unambiguous radar confirmation of tornado winds over 300 mph (480 km/h). (NBC News)
At least 42 Palestinians are killed by Israeli airstrikes in northern Gaza. (AP) (Reuters)
Russia launches missile and drone strikes across Ukraine, injuring two people and damaging energy infrastructure. Ukraine says that it shot down 12 of 16 missiles and all 13 drones. (Reuters)
At least 23 people are killed by CODECO militia groups in Ituri Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo. (Reuters)
At least seven people are killed and 100 are kidnapped by unknown gunmen in Katsina State, Nigeria. (Al Jazeera)
The death toll from the tainted liquor incident in Kallakurichi district, Tamil Nadu, India, increases to 54. (Al Jazeera)
The death toll from the storms and heavy rains in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras increases to 30 people, including at least six children. (Reuters)
Three people are missing following thunderstorms and landslides in southeastern Switzerland. (Al Jazeera)
A severe water crisis on the island of Capri, Italy, due to Italian mainland water system failures causes several areas in Anacapri to run dry, and forces the mayor of Capri to suspend tourist arrivals on the island. (AP)
French prosecutors charge a 19-year-old and a minor with planning and collecting arms for a violent “terrorist conspiracy” against Jewish targets. (France 24)
Thousands of people march in a pride parade in Budapest, Hungary, to protest against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán‘s anti-LGBTQ+ policies. (Reuters)
Friday, June 21st, 2024
At least six people die due to heat-related illness in the Phoenix metropolitan area in Arizona, United States, as temperatures reach 115 °F (46 °C). (AP)
President of Tunisia Kais Saied dismisses the Minister of Religious Affairs after 49 Tunisians are reported to have died in this year’s Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. (Al Arabiya)
At least 1,119 pilgrims, more than half of whom are from Egypt, are now confirmed to have died from heat-related causes during the Hajj in Saudi Arabia. (Barron’s)
Niger‘s military junta revokes the operating license of French nuclear fuel producer Orano at the Imouraren uranium mine amid tensions between the two countries. (BBC News)
Twenty-five people are killed and 50 others are injured in Israeli shelling near Muwasi, Rafah. Gaza Strip. (AP)
An IED kills five Pakistan Army personnel in Kurram District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. (Arab News)
The death toll from the floods and landslides in Meizhou, Guangdong, China, increases to 47 people. (Al Jazeera)
At least 21 people are killed by floods in Niger’s Maradi region and the suburbs of Niamey after unusually heavy rainfall in the region. (AP)
A worker is killed and five others are critically injured in an explosion at an aluminium processing plant in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy. (ANSA)
France reports nearly 200 cases of cholera in Mayotte. (Le Monde)
Most of Montenegro and parts of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia experience blackouts as a result of a heavy load on the electrical grid caused by an unexpected increase in power consumption due to high temperatures. (DW)
The death toll from torrential rains in El Salvador increases to 19 people, including at least two children. (AP)
European Union member states agree to begin negotiations on the accession of Moldova and Ukraine to the EU next week. (The Independent)
Moldovan president Maia Sandu signs the decree that begins negotiations on Moldova’s accession to the European Union. Sandu also announces that the first Moldova–EU intergovernmental conference will take place on 25 June. (Anadolu Agency)
Armenia officially recognises the State of Palestine. (Reuters)
Israel and Ukraine mutually impose travel restrictions to each others’ citizens, preventing reciprocal visa-free travel without an authorization permit. (The Kyiv Independent)
Three people are killed and ten others are wounded in a shooting at a grocery store in Fordyce, Arkansas, United States. The suspect is shot and arrested by Arkansas State Police. (AP)
China officially defines Taiwanese separatist behavior as a criminal act. (Financial Times)
The High court in Namibia rules that two colonial-era laws criminalizing sex between men are unconstitutional. (DW)
A court in Geneva, Switzerland, sentences Indian-born billionaire Prakash Hinduja and three of his family members to four years in prison for exploiting domestic workers at their villa in Cologny. (AP)
The End
Zulu Kilo 
quite a handful.
An epic rant today I’d thought I’d share.
The Latest ‘You Deserve It’ Trophy [Comments enabled]
CDK and all the dealerships that use it.
How many times do I have to repeat that there is no “cloud”; there is only “your computer” or “someone else’s computer.”
Now this “wonderful” innovation for car dealerships obviously could not manage to keep its data safe from what appears to be a ransomware attack nor could they roll back to before it happened on a rapid and competent basis. May I note that the latter is part of any sort of efficient IT infrastructure, and that you can do it without losing anything material provided the point in time just before when you got hacked is an acceptable recovery point is clear evidence of wild-eyed incompetence at best. I know of what I speak here because I had a couple of incidents when running MCSNet that weren’t hack-related but rather were due to a hardware failure, one of which was a RAID controller that literally scribbled on every disk it was attached to and destroyed the data on all of them. That was a serious pain in the ass to recover from but recover we did as we had good copies and enough spare hardware. Or would you prefer a somewhat-recent event right here at my house (which incidentally is a backup point for this blog) in which both of a mirrored pair of SSDs failed. That was a few-hour recovery incident even though the data involved was over a terabyte in size as I had both spare hardware (albeit slower until I could have replacements shipped) and again, good copies from before the incident.
Never mind that in my opinion the entire premise of such an entity being able to be hit like this with a “ransomware” or similar attack belies outrageously defective IT practices and lack of competence in the first instance.
As I noted in a recent column that was intentionally less-acerbic we are not, in the main, a serious nation anymore.
One of the alleged “premier” firms in the world in aviation flew a space mission with known defects that could have killed (and still might) everyone on board. When they turned out to be more than the “oh no big deal” they originally propounded them to be instead of aborting what they were doing they continued onward — and now are literally stuck at the ISS. They’re still being dishonest with everyone on the ground here in the public but I suspect those up there know damn well what the facts are.
Make Guillotines Great Again on every single diversity hire at Boeing would be appropriate — but you know damn well nobody will take such a step or even its lesser cousin in the form of felony imprisonment even if the outcome is death because of said stupidity.
Again I remind you that we used to be a serious nation. Prior to the Shuttle (which was filled with bullshit diversity and environmental crap) and willful bending of known constraints for face-saving, otherwise known as “feelings”, which got two shuttles full of astronauts killed with the loss of both hulls we had a serious space program and had never lost a man in space. That doesn’t mean we didn’t fail — it means we followed the rules and listened to engineering standards and thus didn’t fuck up because lives mattered and so did success.
We famously did not have a crap-ton of thalidomide children born without arms and legs in this country because one FDA official spotted a problem in the data with that drug and banned its use in the US. In Europe they didn’t and the disaster occurred.
This last time around with so-called “public health” we put money in front of facts, data and competence and a million Americans are dead as a result — and yet we still have not dusted off the guillotine and used it despite now knowing that the claims made by myriad parties were knowingly false. We knew goddamn well that viral respiratory infection rarely kills directly but often results in secondary bacterial infections which does kill, especially without the prompt use of antibiotics. We knew this is exactly what happened in 1918 (antibiotics hadn’t been invented yet!) and we also knew it happened with AIDS where PCP killed a crap-ton of gay men despite our knowing how to prevent PCP in immune compromised people yet we refused to use Bactrim in said persons, on purpose, despite knowing it worked as we’d been using it in leukemia patients for several years at that point. The same drunk-on-grant-money jackass who cockblocked Bactrim pulled basically the same bullshit with Covid, got away with it both times, and we got the same results — a pile of dead bodies.
Oh by the way nobody’s paid any attention to who was in the NIH ethics review path. I pointed it out at the time — have you heard one word out of our much-vaunted congressional committees about that little problem and any role it might have had in all of this?
What’s worse is that virtually every single medical professional went along with it and got paid for their personal and institutional failures which, if they were competent at all or read any medical history, knew goddamn well was very likely to happen if they followed said “protocols.” Nobody has guillotined any of them either and yet on a doctors-per-dead-body basis you could reasonably apportion one such dead person to each physician in the country. Indeed a decent percentage of the population actually still considers said persons as some variety of GOD!
If those people are God then I’ll take the Devil because he’s less-likely to kill me.
I am personally alive because I was prepared for that possibility and had sourced appropriate drugs for it; I was thus able to stick up the middle finger to the medical establishment. Budesonide stopped a progression that was potentially fatal in my person within 12 hours and within 24 hours I knew I would be fine. My long-term impact from that series of events is literally zero and I can prove it in cardiovascular terms as due to my physical activity and tracking of same I have the data to do so. Post that event I told many other people what I had in preparation, what I did and when — and one of them, in particular, did not take that advice (after all the so-called “experts” said I was “full of shit”) and he got covid, wound up in the hospital and died. While no drug is 100% effective, ever, he was convinced by these cocksucking charlatans to not attempt said remedies, all of whom were involved in his “care” got paid including bonuses for, in his case, proved worthless treatments because despite their use on him HE DIED. If you think I will ever forgive or forget any of that system in this nation or anyone involved in his demise or those who attacked me during those years when I was ultimately proved right you’re clinically insane.
Remember that Zuckerfucker’s mantra was for many years touted as “move fast and break things.” Must be nice to have the luxury of being able to assrape people and get away with not having your neck stretched or severed. You know, like by exploiting children and addicting them to dopamine hits from your social media, as just one of many examples, never mind telling people who decide to give you the finger at some point that they don’t exist as they “failed your authenticity validation” (which is flat-out bullshit) and an active fraud. But, should you “misgender” someone (that is, tell the truth about their sex) why that is an offense as well — that’s right, his “enterprise” insists that others lie and in fact enforces said lies by throwing out anyone who refuses. Indeed the word “misgender” is a lie. as it is the act of referring to someone using their factual gender. Of course our government doesn’t consider forced lying a criminal act even when said force is applied to children, who lack the legal capacity to consent, yet are forced to lie both on social media and on actual public property, such as in school, at a library or public park.
We have a Treasury Secretary who claims to actually believe that not only do deficits not matter but our entire Congress believes this as well. Incidentally if you think that is confined to the Democrats may I point to Trump who has threatened to fire Powell and put in place a Fed Chair that will support unlimited deficit spending and not even pretend to give a crap about the inflationary impact of doing so! Spare me the faux outrage aimed at Biden’s administration in this regard as there are multiple reports that the GOP intends to pass a CR before the end of September continuing the fiscal insanity they are not only part of today but are cheering on and supporting with their votes.
That very same Congress and Administration also don’t believe that competence matters when it comes to things like forest management (NM fires they admit they intentionally started during a high wind warning not long ago) and that we can have an open border with both massive welfare to attract anyone and everyone without murderous fuckheads and wild-eyed child rapists being embedded in said flows of people. What other group of people might be in there too — you know, perhaps state-sponsored saboteurs? We have no idea but we do know that in the last few weeks multiple murders and rapes were committed by said “fine people.”
Why bother with alleged “standards” (e.g. the CDL requirement to operate a commercial heavy vehicle) if you’re not going to enforce it? We just had reported that a man, deported several times and thus a felon as he re-entered the United States afterward, wreck a Class 8 heavy truck while hauling a load of steel that wound up in the road and on other vehicles, causing both serious injuries and death. His booking information says he didn’t have a CDL so how did (1) he get the truck (e.g. who hired him and owns said truck), (2) who had him haul that load without verifying anything including his license and presumably, lack of insurance and (3) how did he get through the various weigh stations and ports of entry between the source of said load and where he wrecked without having to show said credentials where you are asked for both if you’re stopped for speeding? Additionally we have no less than three illegal immigrants standing accused of serious felonies in the last few days all of whom are recent illegal immigrants; two are accused of murder and one of raping a 13 year old at knife-point. All three apparently were caught on entry and released by our government so spare me the “we didn’t know” bullshit and explain why we don’t immediately jail every single government person involved for life along with everyone who aided, abetted and housed said criminals, all of which is in fact a felony and in the case of an illegal immigrant who causes death in the United States, a life sentence felony at that. This crap continues because we allow the law to remain unenforced so spare me the “we need a new law” crap as that is a wild-eyed lie.
Why bother calling something a felony and passing laws to make it so (e.g. 8 USC 1324 for anyone who assists or harbors illegal aliens, or 15 USC Chapter 1 as pertains to myriad industries including the entire medical and pharmaceutical industry) if you will never bring charges and enforce same? If the law has become no more than a political cudgel to be used to abuse and silence those not in political favor on any given day we’re well past the point where the otherwise-peaceable citizens of the nation should have hoisted the black flag and gotten down to business taking out the trash themselves. The entire reason we and any other allegedly-civilized nation have criminal laws is so the people don’t have to do that and that is a good thing from a societal point of view as due process of law is extremely important to the integrity of justice.
But WHEN the government intentionally, over the space of decades, refuses to enforce said laws, and that both has been been and is the case today, then the choices remaining to citizens are to die, be robbed or raped at the hands of said malefactors whenever they feel like it or take care of the problem themselves including on a preemptive basis and accept that mistakes will be made since due process, which relies on the government doing the job they are paid for is being deliberately refused and thus justice is obviously and systematically impossible. Further you can’t use the democratic process to resolve the problem because no political party has changed it when elected and this has been conclusively proved over decades. In this circumstance it is not the people who have destroyed the integrity of justice it is the government who has done so deliberately and with malice aforethought so if the people decide they’ve had enough of that crap after several decades of patience and maliciously false promises and decide to turn against them they and their family members deserve it.
Why bother with a definition of any sort of public corruption statute when it is ignored as soon as actual lawmakers are dual citizens or have spouses who are and they ride on said coattail and get into policy-making but unelected positions, as is the case with Mitch McConnell. Is his wife a citizen? Yes, but she was in fact born in Taiwan and, incidentally, he married her eight years after being elected to the Senate! Incidentally her start in public policy positions came under Bush in 2001 and yet in those years, and the years since, we have ceded more and more labor to both Taiwan AND mainland China despite her position in Bush’s government being advancement of AMERICAN labor interests.
Gee, how convenient that US high-tech labor has deteriorated every year since then despite her being allegedly “American” and whereit deteriorated to and to the benefit of is in fact focused within and to the greatest benefit of where she was born.
How about Trump? Remember 2016? No? Well I do — he promised to end H1b visas as a cheap labor program and require, on an absolute basis, hiring Americans first. He didn’t do that, by the way and now has stated that any illegal who graduates from any college, even a 2 year Community College, will have a Green Card stapled to their degree. Might I also note that actual competence is no longer a requirement to get a degree: Simply put in the money and out it comes, even if you go wildly into debt in order to do so. Or should we discuss Trump’s three platform planks in 2016 to put a stop to the medical monopolists all three of which disappeared on election night and were never seen again? Those three planks were in fact malicious lies.
You think this sort of bullshit is unique to one or two among the top officials in our government? Go count up the dual nationals who have Israeli citizenship in our government and then explain to me why that disparity on a basis of population representation exists, why we permit it to exist and why we are involved in a dispute that is some seventy years old on their land and yet we’re both funding and arming them. Is this our government or is it Bibi’s government and if the latter who the fuck voted to cede our national sovereignty to Israel because I sure as Hell never saw that on ANY ballot and I’ve been voting for more than 40 years.
Oh, Hunter and his foreign pals? Yeah, that too. Gee, what a coincidink. Can I have some crack with that line of bullshit so I can believe, for a while anyway, there’s no outright corruption there and by the way, how many tens of billions of American taxpayer resource has been blown as a direct and indirect consequence of it? Isn’t perversion of our government by Ukraine, including Zelenskyy personally, sedition and why is it that everyone involved in that isn’t rotting in prison or even waiting for a ride on Ole Sparky ala the Rosenbergs? While we’re at it can we discuss the intentional complicity of our media and government agencies in that it is now admitted (by the government, no less!) that the “laptop from Hell” is in fact authentic since they introduced and thus directly authenticated it in court when prosecuting Hunter?
Ukraine just hit Russian civilians with American missiles which cannot fly without active involvement and targeting assistance from American military assets. Of incidentally public flight transponder data proves that indeed one of our Global Hawk drones that are used for exactly purpose was loitering in the area required to perform those functions. That’s right — the American military appears to have been directly involved in shooting at Russian children. War sucks and civilians being shot is part of the suck but did you sign up for, and are you willing to have, a war with Russia if and when they shoot back at civilians — possibly including YOUR kids?
Better ask yourself that and decide if you’re going to let our government get away with that sort of thing because Russia just might shoot back and since our military is under civilian control per our Constitution the responsibility for every one of our military’s actions is personally yours.
Why is it that any foreign-linked “PAC” can exist in the United States when the entire point of a PAC is to influence elections. Should not any such attempt, control, influence or involvement be considered sedition and lead to the instant confiscation of all assets and imprisonment plus a permanent bar on entry into the US of any foreign national connected with same? YOU BET IT SHOULD in each and every case. Oh by the way what the FUCK are the CEOs of Pfizer, Palantir and Oracle doing lobbying US Senators on Israeli issues?
Why is it that when we know foreign governments, including Israel, fund and operate influence operations in the United States including on college campuses and elsewhere (and by the way Israel isn’t the only one — how about Confucius?) said “institutes” and “operations” are not subject to immediate criminal sanction, arrest and expulsion of every single foreign national involved along with asset seizure and prosecution of any US entity that accepts said funds, grants and otherwise cooperates with same, given that their entire purpose is to influence policy and elections, the latter of which is, by law, expressly forbidden.
Why is it that when you are effectively forced to let entities have personal information they then store (e.g. cellphone companies, health care and insurance firms, car dealers, banks and similar) when they get hacked and the data is stolen this isn’t considered a criminal event and given that the scope of same is usually in the millions who get screwed their executives are not subject to summary execution? If there was choice you could argue that you in fact made that decision of your own free will but there isn’t when collusion or even government mandate is involved, and it usually is.
Why is it that the medical industry backed by government force in many places, including schools, has been allowed to deliberately mislabel drugs, which I remind you under existing law (21 USC Chapter 9, Sub III and V) is a criminal felony, yet this has not resulted in myriad 10 year+ prison sentences and ruinous fines? I am specifically referring to the labeling of various shots “vaccines” when they are not. A vaccine is a preparation that provides statistically the same or superior immunity from future infection as would otherwise be gained from said infection, including specifically and as a requirement protection from contracting and transmitting, when the disease is transmissible between humans or between humans and other animals, said disease. The vast majority of current so-called “vaccines” offered today are legally not vaccines; they are personal prophylaxis (that is, pre-exposure treatment) and do nothing to prevent you personally acquiring and transmitting that infection to others. Every single time I walk into the local Kroger store I am assaulted by this lie offering me these alleged “vaccines” on their signage which are legally not as described and which should expose every single member of said corporation, manager and pharmacy employee to a decade in prison and criminal liability for any and all harm that comes to said customers and anyone infected as a result of contact with said “vaccinated” person who is not sterile with respect to that disease but, as a result of said fraud, believed they were. As was recently found by the 9th Circuit all such mandates rest on a ruling known as Jacobson from 1905, which in fact defines the word “vaccination” and any mandate following from same to require the induction of said sterile immunity as the core justification for any such compulsory statute. THIS IS WHY, INCIDENTALLY, IT WAS FOR DECADES CALLED THE “FLU SHOT” AND NOT THE “FLU VACCINE” BECAUSE THE INDUSTRY KNOWS THIS IS A PERSONAL-ONLY PROTECTION AND THUS IT IS WITHIN YOUR LEGAL RIGHT TO PERSONALLY DECIDE, JUST AS IT IS TO TAKE (OR NOT) A BIRTH CONTROL PILL IN AN ATTEMPT TO PREVENT PREGNANCY. The actions of the US Government along with the FDA, CDC and every mandating private and public entity (e.g. schools) were and are directly and intentionally in violation of Jacobson and in fact no less than Deborah Birx admitted both on national television and in her memoir she knew in advance in the context of the Covid shots that this was the case and as a government employee directly in the path of the decision and advocacy she had personal and severable liability for same, as did Fauci and dozens if not thousands of others.
Again it is a FELONY to mislabel drugs or offer, prescribe and give them to a person if you know that their label is FALSE.
We aren’t just an unserious nation we’re chock full of corruption and outrageous examples of black-letter violations of laws by the “privileged few” that have allegedly stood in guard against such conduct for decades and in some cases for more than 100 years. Not a single one of those bastards, whether in government, health care or any other line of business gives a shit if you are bankrupted, get seriously and permanently injured or die so long as they can take all your Benjamins.
So cry me a river when car dealers get assraped after they served up a bunch of price-increasing bullshit for both acquisition and repairs on vehicles through ever-increasing mandates claimed to “improve highway safety and reduce crashes” when the data is conclusive that all that actually happened is that the cost of ownership, operation (e.g. insurance) and repair of said vehicles has skyrocketed as the choice to buy one without all that crap in and on it has disappeared, a fact that is trivially proved by ever-increasing prices for both vehicles and collision insurance on them.
They all participated, colluded together and feasted on fucking us all up the ass just as has the medical system so if you think I’m in any way “concerned” that they got it in the poop chute due to their own hubris you’re dead wrong.
I hope they are and stay fucked to the point of bankruptcy and the ruination of their entire genetic line just as I will and do publicly cheer and offer toasts if and when any member of law enforcement or law-making entities has their DAUGHTER or WIFE raped and/or murdered by an illegal immigrant or some medical practitioner or their family member is killed by the very “magic shots” they advocated for and in some cases tried to legally force others to take in violation of decades-old laws or Supreme Court decisions which they have all willingly and intentionally ignored.
I’ll return to giving a shit and being outraged about such things when and if, and only when and if, people go to prison for all of these crimes and all of it is reversed with those who have feasted on these criminal acts are forced to disgorge all of those funds and, in the case of illegal immigrants, every single one is forced to leave, the legal penalties due anyone who who has harbored, employed or assisted them are imposed as required by long-standard federal law and all false-claim medically-related items result in instant arrest, prosecution, imprisonment and treble-damage fines of every penny gained on a gross-revenue basis from same.
Until that day arrives my “Give A Fuck” meter is pegged at zero.
I read some good portion of this. It probably can be summed up in the one sentence: We are not a serious nation anymore.
nice post by Ugo:
https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/china-a-story-in-three-commercial
i’ve always thought it interesting that FDR’s father made a fortune for the Roosevelt family by selling opium to the Chinese. talk about ethically challenged.
black bikini girl.
I thought that this was a pretty good explanation of the whole “petrodollar” deal.
https://www.rt.com/business/599637-us-dollar-oil-deal/
overall a good job. could have mentioned it was the French and Charles deGaul that forced the 1971 retreat of the dollar from gold backing. they simply showed up with a bunch of dollars and demanded some gold, which the US apparently didn’t have.
also, the origin of the petrodollar arrangement goes back to an agreement made by FDR with the Saudis shortly after some US geologists confirmed the size of the Ghawar super giant oil field.
also, i recall when they took the US currency off the “silver certificate” standard and began replacing the silver in “silver dollars” and the half, quarter and dime coins. that was in 1965. i know, because i was a coin collector at the time.
so the process of currency debasement had started in the mid-1960s, just as the US began to sink into the quagmire of Vietnam.
Art Berman has a new post that may be of interest.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/metacrisis-getting-honest-about-the-human-predicament/
also, Gail T. has a new post up, which thaws out her comment section.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/06/22/the-advanced-economies-are-headed-for-a-downfall/