Yet some see reasons to think rising inflation, sparked in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has peaked. That could, as some business leaders hope, presage a soft economic landing. Alternatively, another rise in interest rates could lead to a more prolonged downturn. "The mood is somber,” said Nick Studer, CEO of the Oliver Wyman Group consultancy, who has attended meetings in Davos for years.

China’s state-run Global Times on Monday said the WEF being held in person for the first time in three years “marks that the world economy and people’s social lives are gradually walking out of the shadow of the pandemic.” “As image and voice of China at the WEF always attract high global attention, the world is looking forward to China’s constructive role at a time when global economic risks are intensifying,” the article boasted.

The 79-year-old Democrat opened his remarks by questioning how “allegedly wise adult humans” such as CEOs and Senators could, as he put it, “ignore our science and want to ignore mathematics and want to ignore physics and somehow cannot bring themselves to do what we need to do.”

The billionaire politician, who married into the wealthy Heinz family, heaped praise on those who attended the meeting in the Swiss ski resort town, saying how “extraordinary that we select human beings… are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”

“I mean it’s so almost extraterrestrial to think about quote ‘saving the planet’. If you said that to most people, they think you’re just a crazy tree-hugging Lefty liberal do-good… but really that’s where we are.”

Escorts are booked into the same hotels as high-powered bosses and their employees during the five-day summit, which started on January 16. One sex worker named Liana said she dresses in business attire so she doesn't stand out among the executives, despite prostitution being legal in Switzerland.

She told Bild she regularly sees an American who visits Switzerland multiple times a year and is among the 2,700 conference attendees. Liana charges around €700 ($760) for an hour and €2,300 ($2,500) for the whole night, plus travel expenses.

Leading up to the conference, the WEF issued a “global risks report”, and in that report they actually created a brand new term to describe the extreme chaos that is gripping our world right now…The collective vocabularies stored in the world’s great dictionaries didn’t appear to hold a single world to sum up all this strife.

So here’s a new one: POLYCRISIS.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 uses the term, to explain how, “present and future risks can also interact with each other to form a ‘polycrisis’ – a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part”.

We are definitely facing “a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part”. Unfortunately, virtually every “solution” that will be on the agenda at Davos will be bad for humanity. The globalists don’t seem to realize that the system that they have worked so hard to carefully construct is rapidly failing, and many in the general population are sick and tired of the self-destructive policies that they have been trying to push on all the rest of us.

In a report titled "Survival of the Richest", Oxfam said billionaires had doubled their wealth over the last 10 years, with the wealthiest one percent gaining 74 times more than the bottom 50 percent. Food and energy companies, it noted, had more than doubled their profits last year. Oxfam said higher taxes on dividends as well as "one-off solidarity" wealth and windfall taxes should be introduced "to stop crisis profiteering".

Citing a report by the US investigative news group ProPublica, Oxfam said many of the world's richest people paid hardly any taxes, with Tesla boss Elon Musk facing a "true tax rate" of just 3.2 percent between 2014-2018 and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paying less than one percent. In a stark comparison, a market trader in Uganda who works with Oxfam pays 40 percent of her profits in tax, the charity said.

"They should be addressing endemic corruption, ending tax evasion and aggressive tax avoidance, tackling inequalities – including racism and sexism – at their very root, starting with their own board rooms and cabinet offices. The stakes are too high for more empty gestures.”

“Regrettably, many of the globally staged gatherings set up to solve these problems have merely become forums for virtue signalling with few or no concrete outcomes." Agnes Callamard will be attending Davos from 16th January.

The agency estimated farmers harvested 79.2 million acres, a decline of 1.6 million acres versus the previous estimate — the smallest acres harvest since 2008.

The unexpected cut to US harvested corn acres means grain supplies are a lot tighter than realized. A report Thursday showed the corn area in the world's largest producer is at the smallest since 2008 with crops failing in states such as Texas and Nebraska. That's due to persistent drought conditions in the western part of the country that could also hit harvests for wheat plants that are currently dormant for the winter.

“There is much to suggest that this war is far from over. Therefore, it is necessary for us to plan for the long term,” Ischinger stressed in an interview with Germany’s Welt newspaper. “All the military experts I know are saying that stocks of old Soviet weapons and respective ammunition are running out.”

Ukraine is forced to fire as much ammunition per day as we are producing in half a year. The end of our stocks is in sight. What comes next? Who handles replenishment? A war economy means that we [Germany] – within NATO and in coordination at a European level – take the initiative and call on European armaments companies to produce more weapons and more ammunition as a result of the war.

Unlike the livestock industry, where rearing is typically separate, this entire bug-based operation is under one roof. “We are in full control of the chain of production. That gives us strength in terms of quality, security and safety,” says Benjamin Armenjon, general manager of Ynsect, according to a statement from SWNS.

They can be turned into protein powders, shakes, burgers, cereal bars, and even cooking oils at a fraction of the environmental cost of traditional farming. For every one kilogram of protein, Ynsect uses 98 percent less land and emits 40 times less carbon than beef. It also uses 40 times less water than pork production. The mealworms are fed by-products from wheat processing. Mixed with sugar, the beetles supposedly taste just like real meat. They could also become alternatives to sausages or chicken nuggets.

“This course will provide you with insights and equip you with strategies for exploring inclusion for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning learners in your specific professional context,” the description also says. Notably, the approach is deliberately intended to encourage “social action” among students in order to turn them into activists for leftist causes.

In level three of the process, a teacher “Alters the structure of the curriculum to encourage students to view concepts, issues, events, and themes from multiple perspectives.” Level four is specifically focused on turning students into activists. Level four “Encourages students to make decisions about important social issues and take actions to help address them,” the article reads.

In preparation for the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, which runs from 16–20 January 2023, the WEF’s “Global Coalition for Digital Safety” has laid out the organization’s goals for online censorship.

On its website, the WEF describes the initiative as: “The Global Coalition for Digital Safety aims to accelerate public-private cooperation to tackle harmful content online and will serve to exchange best practices for new online safety regulation, take coordinated action to reduce the risk of online harms, and drive forward collaboration on programs to enhance digital media literacy.”

The organization uses vague terms such as “misinformation” and “harmful content” quite frequently but never thoroughly defines what information it wants to censor. The WEF also claims that “tackling” the “harmful online content” would help protect children from abuse, stop terrorism and hate speech, and also deal with self-harm and suicide. However, it never says how it will do that. The WEF also lays out plans to form an online “army” to censor content.

The post-Cold War era, dominated by the idea that Western liberal democracy and free-market capitalism held all the answers, is over. This was the very ethos of Davos. It must now pivot to the new reality provoked by the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, the growth of extreme inequality and aggressive Russian and Chinese autocracies.

If the old is gone, the new order is not yet born. Power is shifting away from the United States as China’s military and economic heft grows, but the shape of an alternative international system is unclear.

“We know that wars do not usually end on the battlefield,” the faction said in a nine-page foreign policy outline, adding that keeping the door open for diplomatic solutions is no less important than supporting Ukraine.

“Diplomatic talks must remain possible” even if trust in Moscow is extremely low now, the faction insisted, adding that the regular talks Chancellor Olaf Scholz – himself a Social Democrat – held with Russian President Vladimir Putin “are right and necessary.”

Cumbersome energy regulations that have promoted inefficient alternative green energy sources have left countries like Germany in a precarious economic situation. It’s undeniable that oil and natural gas are more efficient energy sources that allow for people of all economic backgrounds to economically thrive and participate in a modern economy.

On top of that, loose monetary policies characterize the economies of virtually all nations in the Collective West. The combination of these factors create a nasty inflationary cocktail that most countries aren’t prepared to handle. Once great economic powers such as Germany will be humbled by their defiance of basic economics if they don’t correct course. The laws of economics are an equal opportunity punisher when it comes to nations who dare violate them.