Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 1/6/25
"Alert! 2 Weeks, Iran War, Crash Coming, Bird Flu Spreads,
Trudeau Out! NATO Invades Russia Again!"
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God help us, folks, God help us...
So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, January 6, 2025
Jeremiah Babe, "Economic Booby Traps Being Set, America Will Pay A Severe Price"
Jeremiah Babe, 1/6/25
"Economic Booby Traps Being Set,
America Will Pay A Severe Price"
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
"This fantastic skyscape lies near the edge of NGC 2174 a star forming region about 6,400 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation of Orion. It follows mountainous clouds of gas and dust carved by winds and radiation from the region's newborn stars, now found scattered in open star clusters embedded around the center of NGC 2174, off the top of the frame.
Though star formation continues within these dusty cosmic clouds they will likely be dispersed by the energetic newborn stars within a few million years. Recorded at infrared wavelengths by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, the interstellar scene spans about 6 light-years. Scheduled for launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope is optimized for exploring the Universe at infrared wavelengths."
Chet Raymo, “When The Morning Stars Sing Together”
“When The Morning Stars Sing Together”
by Chet Raymo
“A Chinese proverb: A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song. Which might be an acceptable epigraph for this blog. I can’t imagine anyone coming here looking for answers. Certainly, providing answers is the last thing on my mind. I would like to think you come for song.
We are, I think, by and large, a community who distrusts answers, at least answers that are vehemently held. We are made uncomfortable by stridency. By dogma. By the desire to proselytize. We wear our truths lightly, gaily, as a song bird wears its feathers. We are grateful to those who push back the clouds of ignorance and hold the reins of passion. With Blake, we sing their praises, a song we have spent a lifetime learning. We sing to celebrate. We sing because we have a song.”
"Toxic People..."
"Toxic people systematically destroy others because if they cannot bask in the light then no one else deserves to. Lost people suffer in their darkness, happily dragging your light down into their personal hell so you can listen to all their woes. Soulless people, lacking empathy, suck the light from others to taste that which they can never understand. People can't be helped until they want to be helped. You can't be there for others who need you if any one of these types destroy you. Save yourself... it's not a sin to love from a distance."
- L.M. Fields
"Looking for a Reason to Believe: The Benefit of the Doubt Is Cracking"
"Looking for a Reason to Believe:
The Benefit of the Doubt Is Cracking"
By Paul Rosenberg
"Those of us who pursue positive change are very often frustrated. We see the necessity of change all too clearly, and we can explain how it should come about, but it never seems to happen. The truth, however, is that change does come; it just comes more slowly than we’d like, and in ways that differ from those we imagined.
One real change I like to point out is the passing of blind trust in politicians. In the 1950s and ‘60s, most people spoke of politicians with respect and even with reverence. Now it’s almost standard for people to agree that they’re liars and thieves. That’s a very significant change, even if it did take several decades to unfold.
So, a significant change has occurred in our time, and over a very broad base. Still, most people are hanging on, and often desperately, to old ways that should really be abandoned.
The Automatic Benefit of the Doubt: It’s a bit troubling to see how blindly, and for how long, people give the benefit of the doubt to hierarchy and its operators. They can know that a system is abusing them, and they can complain about it at length, but still they grasp at reasons to keep believing in it. Here’s what I mean:
• During the bad spots of the Middle Ages, people would be abused by the clergy but say, “If only His Holiness knew!”
• During the reign of the USSR, people in the Gulag would often say, “If only Stalin knew!”
• In our time, people hold Political Party A or Political Party B as grave evils, while pretending that the combination of A + B is good and noble.
Still, such blind biases do eventually break. Stalin, after all, is gone, along with his USSR. The Protestant reformation broke the domination of the Church. And the delusions of our time will die as well.
“Still, I Look to Find a Reason to Believe”: If there were such a competition, I’d nominate Rod Stewart’s song, "Reason To Believe," as the Anthem of the Age. Regardless of how badly they are abused, people have a very hard time letting go of their hierarchies; they’ve taken emotional refuge in them, after all. Even when sharp pain forces them to examine the hierarchy that constantly tells them, “Obey or we’ll hurt you,” the impulse to maintain belief erupts. Here’s how the song expresses it:
"If I listened long enough to you,
I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true.
Knowing that you lied,
straight-faced while I cried.
Still I look to find a reason to believe."
Humans have a real problem with that last line: looking for reasons to believe. It flies in the face of both logic and honesty, but people not only do it, but vigorously defend it. As for specific reasons to believe, they’re endless. Seldom are humans quicker and cleverer than when justifying their previous actions.
Why This Is a Good Sign: When people are desperately grasping for reasons to believe, it’s because the benefit of the doubt is cracking beneath them. Otherwise, why would they fight so wildly? The circumstances of our modern world are propelling people toward this break. Every time a ruling system tells gigantic lies, censors the public square, surveils their own people and frightens the masses for their own benefit, belief in their system cracks a little.
More and more people are conceding that it’s not just “one bad actor” here or there, but that Joe Stalin really is evil, that the clergy really is corrupt, and that hierarchies are abusive by nature. The whirlwind of distractions and slogans arrayed against moral clarity are losing their effectiveness. Little by little, humanity’s blind devotion to authority is cracking. Someday, it will break."
o
Rod Stewart, "Reason To Believe"
"What Happens When We Die"
"What Happens When We Die"
by Maria Popova
"When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained half a century of shared life and love, cradled the cranium in which his stubborn and sensitive mind had dwelt, and whispered into the halogen-lit ether: “Where did you go, my darling?”
Whatever our beliefs, these sense-making playthings of the mind, when the moment of material undoing comes, we - creatures of moment and matter - simply cannot fathom how something as exquisite as the universe of thought and feeling inside us can vanish into nothingness.
Even if we understand that dying is the token of our existential luckiness, even if we understand that we are borrowed stardust, bound to be returned to the universe that made it - a universe itself slouching toward nothingness as its stars are slowly burning out their energy to leave a cold austere darkness of pure spacetime - this understanding blurs into an anxious disembodied abstraction as the body slouches toward dissolution. Animated by electrical impulses and temporal interactions of matter, our finite minds simply cannot grasp a timeless and infinite inanimacy - a void beyond being.
Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16
Even Walt Whitman, who could hold such multitudes of contradiction, could not grasp the void. “I will make poems of my body and of mortality,” he vowed as a young man as he reverenced our shared materiality in his timeless declamation that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It was easy, from the shimmering platform of his prime, to look forward to becoming “the uncut hair of graves” upon returning his own atoms to the grassy ground one day.
But then, when that day loomed near as he grew old and infirm, “the poet of the body and the poet of the soul” suddenly could not fathom the total disbanding of his atomic selfhood, suddenly came to “laugh at what you call dissolution.” And then he did dissolve, leaving us his immortal verses, verses penned when his particles sang with the electric cohesion of youth and of health, verses that traced with their fleshy finger the faint contour of an elemental truth: “What invigorates life invigorates death.”
I wish I could have given my grandmother, and given the dying Whitman, the infinitely invigorating "Mr g: A Novel About the Creation" (public library) by the poetic physicist Alan Lightman - a magical-realist serenade to science, coursing with symphonic truth about our search for meaning, our hunger for beauty, and what makes our tender, transient lives worth living.
Toward the end of the novel, Mr g watches, with heartache unknown in the Void predating the existence of universes and of life, an old woman on her deathbed, the film of her long and painful and beautiful life unspooling from the reel of memory, leaving her grief-stricken by its terminus, shuddering with defiant disbelief that this is all. “How can a creature of substance and mass fathom a thing without substance or mass?” wonders Mr g as he sorrows watching her succumb to the very laws he created. “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”
And then, as a faint smile washes across her face, she does die. Lightman writes: "At that moment, there were 3,147,740,103,497,276,498,750,208,327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.
In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.
But then we see that every atom belonging to her - or, rather, temporarily borrowed by her - truly does belong to everything and everyone, just as you and I are now inhaling the same oxygen atoms that once inflated Walt Whitman’s lungs with the lust for life: "Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone.
In a passage evocative of the central sentiment in Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare, stunning poem “Kinship,” he adds: "Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms… Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms. And their children would contain some of her atoms as well. Their minds contained part of her mind.
Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? It is not likely. Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. Will they have some faint sense of her glimpse of the Void? No, it is not possible. It is not possible. But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity.
And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality."
Here we are, you and me, Walt and Alan, my grandmother who is and my grandfather who is no more - each of us a trembling totality, made of particles both absolutely vulnerable and absolutely indestructible, hungering for absolutes in a universe of relatives, hungering for permanence in a universe of ceaseless change, famished for meaning, for beauty, for emblems of existence. Out of these hungers, out of these contradictions, we make everything that invigorates life with aliveness: our art and our music, our poems and our mathematics, our novels and our loves."
"Real Courage..."
"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."
~ "Harper Lee", "To Kill a Mockingbird"
"Stop Believing"
"Stop Believing"
by Jeff Thomas
"In 1776, Thomas Jefferson was asked to create a draft for a founding document for what was to become the United States. In his second paragraph, he said. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." So firm was the vision of America’s founding fathers that this statement represented their collective belief that the twenty-eight signatories accepted it without any change in wording.
Could the same be said today? Do Americans possess a collective belief today? Do Americans perceive the word "rights" collectively? How about "liberty?" Would a random sampling of Americans generate the same definition of such words? Or, considering that most Americans who are unable to answer such simple questions as, "What state is New Your City in," how many Americans would respond to a request to define these words with no more than a blank stare?
But why should this be? Only a generation or two ago, Americans enjoyed educational standards that were exemplary in the world. Yet, today, it’s universally accepted that Americans have been dramatically "dumbed-down" to such an extent that a majority of high school graduates are not even proficient in simple math and grammar skills. More worrisome is the fact that the basic beliefs of Americans have been transformed from relative certainty to being both arbitrary and confused. Let’s look at a few of these:
Religious faith: Most people imagine that they possess a basic understanding of right and wrong. Yet Americans often readily excuse Muslims for crimes against women, as they are merely "practicing their religion." Similarly, rap artists can be forgiven for misogyny, as their endorsement of abuse is classified as "cultural." Therefore, religious "conviction" actually becomes flexible depending upon whom it applies to.
Further, although roughly three-quarters of Americans see themselves as Christians, merely identifying oneself as a Christian may be sufficient to be accused of being antisemitic or racist. No logic is needed to explain this accusation; to be accused is to be guilty.
Family: For decades, welfare has helped to eliminate marriage, as a woman receives more welfare if there is no man present. During the COVID pandemic, parents discovered that their children are being indoctrinated by schools in ways parents never approved. Further, they were routinely told that the schools had greater authority over choice of information than parents. Parents are responsible for paying the expenses of the child, but the school is responsible for deciding what the child believes.
Biology: Here, belief becomes even more confused. Americans are told that men can be women and vice versa. All that’s required is to "identify" as the opposite gender, and it becomes an accepted fact. But it doesn’t stop there. There are no longer two genders; there are scores of them – so many that no one can remember them all, yet young people are continually fearful that they may refer to one of their classmates as one gender, mistaking the classmate’s self-perception and inviting shame from other classmates. LBGTQ+ has become a nightmare of confusion – an ever-morphing labyrinth that no one can get correct at this point.
Equality: Possibly one of the loftiest of beliefs is that of equality. Yes, we are all different in countless ways, but the concept of equality suggests that all people should have equal opportunity. It’s then up to the individual what he does with that opportunity. But equity inserts the word "fair." In practice, this has come to mean that, to be fair, we must ignore equality and embrace preference and prejudice.
Those with darker skin must receive greater entitlement, and those with lighter skin must experience shame. Those who are male must be diminished socially unless they identify as women, in which case, they may enjoy an advantage in sporting competitions. Those who are from a racial or ethnic minority must be given preference or even sole access to designated job opportunities. As George Orwell famously stated in his book "Animal Farm", "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
So, what’s happening here? Is it simply that people are questioning traditional beliefs more than before? Are they becoming more open-minded and willing to consider alternative perceptions? Well, no. If that were true, then those who held a conventional view would not be shamed by those who did not. Students who defend conventional beliefs are expelled from their schools. Employees who defend conventional beliefs have been fired from their jobs merely for thinking "incorrect" thoughts. Those who decide not to get vaxxed can expect to have their basic rights removed.
There is a concerted movement, led by the media but supported by much of the public, to question conventional beliefs and eliminate them. So, is there a new set of beliefs that are meant to supplant the old beliefs? Well, not really. Last week, there were 52 genders; this week, there are 74. How about next week?
At this point, the average individual, try as he may (I hope that’s an acceptable pronoun), is likely to say, "Jeez, I don’t know what to believe anymore." And there we have it… the entire point of the re-education of belief. The point is to create such a level of confusion that people not only cease to voice their beliefs but eventually do away with their beliefs, agreeing with whatever they’re told to believe… for the moment. In doing so, a compliant populace is created. If totalitarian rule is to be accomplished, people must, above all, be compliant. They must willingly (and immediately) agree with whatever belief is being foisted upon them.
But for what purpose? Well, without belief, the individual is, in fact, not an individual. He is merely a useful tool of the state. Let that thought sink in a bit. This is the point at which it becomes necessary to step back and take in the big picture. When any state has reached the point that it grooms its people to cease to have beliefs, it has already gone far beyond the point of validity.
At such a point, the populace is faced with a very unpleasant choice of possible ways forward: The first is to rebel against the state in some form. The second is to bail out – to leave one’s country in hopes of finding greener pastures elsewhere. If both of these choices are too daunting to consider, there is a third choice. Submit."
Dan, I Allegedly, "Shocking Stats Will Make You Panic"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 1/6/25
"Shocking Stats Will Make You Panic"
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"Walking The Streets of Philadelphia, USA"
Full screen recommended.
Kensington Ave Philadelphia, 1/6/25
"Walking The Streets of Philadelphia, USA"
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o
Full screen recommended.
Bruce Springsteen, "Streets of Philadelphia"
"Thanks To Years Of Inflation, The Price Of Breakfast In America Is Now Obscene"
"Thanks To Years Of Inflation,
The Price Of Breakfast In America Is Now Obscene"
by Michael Snyder
"They have officially ruined breakfast. Once upon a time, breakfast was the least expensive meal of the day, but now everything has changed. Eggs, butter and coffee have all become extremely expensive, and there is no relief in sight in 2025. When I went to the grocery store on Friday, I spent about 45 dollars for just nine tubs of butter. I could hardly believe my eyes, but after doing some digging I discovered that five dollars for a pound of butter is very close to the national average at this stage.
Of course in some areas it is even more expensive. During an exchange on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program, Joe Scarborough was astounded to learn that the price of butter has reached 7 dollars in some stores in his area…“It’s $7… I’m just saying it’s 7,” Brzezinski interrupted. “Butter is $7… What, is it framed in gold?” Scarborough replied incredulously, with a look of shock on his face. “It’s seven bucks…. it depends where you go,” Brzezinski stated somberly.
Europe is facing a similar crisis. In fact, the price of butter in Europe jumped by an average of 19 percent during the 12 month period ending in October…"Across the 27-member states of the European Union, the price of butter rose 19% on average from October 2023 to October 2024. That included a rise of 49% in Slovakia, and 40% in Germany and the Czech Republic, according to EU figures with reports indicating the cost has continued to rise." But they keep telling us that inflation is under control. Yeah, right.
Egg prices have been rising even more rapidly. In some areas of California, a carton of 12 eggs will now cost you 9 dollars…"Egg prices in California have reached unprecedented levels, with some areas reporting costs as high as $9 per dozen. This surge is largely attributed to the ongoing impact of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), commonly known as bird flu, which has significantly disrupted egg supply across the United States.
The price escalation in California is particularly notable. While the national average for a dozen Grade A large eggs hovers around $3.20, in California, the average price for a carton of white cage-free eggs has hit $5.11. However, in certain regions, consumers are seeing prices nearly double that amount."
I vividly remember when you could buy a carton of 12 eggs for less than a dollar. Sadly, those days are long gone and they aren’t coming back. It is being reported that egg prices have risen 160 percent since 2019, and they are expected to go substantially higher in 2025 because of the bird flu.
If you love coffee, you should be aware that coffee prices are also being projected to continue to rise at an exponential rate in 2025. Can you imagine paying 8 dollars for a single cup of coffee? Well, those that live in Australia could be doing exactly that by the end of this calendar year…"Coffee lovers could soon not be able to justify buying their caffeine fix daily with experts warning single cup could cost from $8-$12 by the end of 2025."
A confluence of factors has pushed Arabica bean prices into the stratosphere. If you can believe it, the price of a pound of Arabica beans jumped more than 80 percent in 2024…"The warning comes as the price of Arabica beans, the world’s most popular variety, continues to rise. Buying a pound of the bean variety topped US $3.44 on December 10, having risen more than 80 per cent in 2024."
Chocolate prices are entering unprecedented territory as well. In 2024, cocoa futures actually tripled in price…"Prices for chocolate’s main ingredient have almost tripled since the start of 2024 as faltering production in West Africa - the world’s biggest growing region - led to massive supply shortages, the publication wrote, citing exchange data. In early January, cocoa futures traded at around $4,000 per ton. In mid-December they peaked at $12,700 per ton, according to data from Trading Economics."
As this price shift starts filtering down to the consumer level, a lot of us won’t be able to afford to eat as much chocolate as we once did. In fact, we have already reached a point where chocolate is being referred to as a “luxury” item.
If you love beef, I have more bad news for you. According to Zero Hedge, cattle futures just hit another new all-time record high…"Cattle futures in Chicago surged to fresh record highs on Friday, driven by severe winter weather forecasts for the Central Plains and Midwest, two key regions home to the nation’s cattle belt. Analysts warn that the harsh conditions could reduce herd sizes and impact carcass weights, further tightening the nation’s cattle supply. “While cattle can tolerate cold weather, extreme cold forces them to expend more energy, directly impacting feed conversion rates and ultimately reducing carcass weights,” Daily Livestock Report wrote in a note on Friday, warning that cattle weights fell 3% during last year’s cold blast across the Lower 48."
Demand for beef remains very robust, but the size of the U.S. national cattle herd just keeps shrinking. At this point, it is the smallest that it has been since 1961. So beef prices will just keep escalating in 2025. You could try switching to chicken or turkey, but they are both becoming more expensive thanks to the bird flu.
The bottom line is that we are transitioning into an entirely new environment. We were quite accustomed to living in a society that produced enormous quantities of extremely inexpensive food. But now global food supplies are steadily getting tighter, and global food prices are steadily marching upwards.
Hunger is on the rise all over the world, and demand at food banks in the United States is higher than ever before. Years in advance, I explained to my readers in excruciating detail where global food production trends would be taking us. Sadly, it will not be possible for our leaders to reverse those trends. Horrifying global food shortages are in our future, and I would suggest that you prepare accordingly."
Judge Napolitano, "Ray McGovern: How Deep is the Deep State?"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 1/6/24
"Ray McGovern: How Deep is the Deep State?"
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "A Permanently High Plateau"
The Potala Palace on the Tibetan Plateau
"A Permanently High Plateau"
There’s always some cause for a parade. In the 1990s it was the
internet and a new crop of tech geniuses. They were the young hustlers
who ‘got it.’ They understood how the internet would make us rich.
by Bill Bonner
"Happy New Year, ‘Cause We’re All Going to Get Really Rich."
- George Gilder and Richard Vigilante
Baltimore, Maryland - "Hope springs eternal...Oh bright flame of promise...Could it be that Gilder and Vigilante are right? Maybe AI will make us all ‘really rich?’ Eugene Doyle writes: "2025 is set to be the ‘break-out year’ for artificial intelligence. Mark Zuckerberg says we will see the arrival initially of thousands but soon billions of AI ‘agents’ who, via the major tech companies, will integrate themselves into our lives and perform an increasing number of tasks for us. An agent can be defined as “a software-based entity powered by artificial intelligence designed to perceive its environment, make decisions, and take actions autonomously or semi-autonomously to achieve specific goals”. Some are calling it the dawn of the Age of AI or the Agentic Age. "
Almost every day here at Bonner Private Research we look at how the US is headed for a debt crisis. It’s coming. And the Trump team won’t stop it. But what about AI? We posed the question to the AI souped-up Microsoft co-pilot in our computer: "Hey, AI... you’re so smart... how can the US avoid going over the fiscal cliff?" The answer: "Work on long-term economic solutions in collaboration with scholars and policymakers. Recognize that current statutory fiscal rules have failed to solve the debt crisis. Explore options to cut spending and raise revenues."
Well, that’s helpful! But wait... what about the tech breakthroughs themselves? We’ll ask again: "Will AI make us rich?" The answer: "AI has the potential to significantly impact wealth creation, but it's not a guaranteed path to riches for everyone. Here are a few ways AI can contribute to financial success:
Business Efficiency: AI can automate repetitive tasks, optimize operations, and improve decision-making, leading to cost savings and increased productivity.
Investment Opportunities: AI-driven tools can analyze vast amounts of data to identify investment opportunities and manage portfolios more effectively.
New Business Models: AI enables the creation of innovative products and services, opening up new markets and revenue streams."
Note that the world is a competitive place. Businesses compete to deliver new products and services. Consumers compete to get the most for their money. And since everyone, more or less, has access to the same AI tools, no one has an enduring advantage. Businesses will still compete with each other, keeping profit margins slim. Investors, by and large, will get the same hit-or-miss returns they’ve always gotten. And an AI-powered prestidigitation is unlikely to raise us up so we can ‘grow our way out’ of the debt hole.
Back in the 1920s, many people were convinced that new tech wonders - automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances - would make us all rich. They would raise the value of stocks to a new ‘permanently high plateau,’ said the nation’s leading economist, Irving Fisher. It didn’t work out. Asset prices rose in the ‘20s. Then, they fell in the ‘30s. And meddling by Hoover and Roosevelt led to the Great Depression. The tech improvements kept coming.
The next great hope was the “Nifty Fifty’ stocks of the 1960s. Pfizer, Phillip Morris, IT&T, Xerox and Eastman Kodak represented the best in American technology and marketing. Investing was simple. You could buy these stocks and just forget about doing anything else. They were the best... they could hire the best talent... and borrow at the lowest rates to build the future. Alas, the future happened... and many of these ‘buy-it, forget-it’ companies weren’t in it. Overall, after hitting a high in 1966, stocks lost value to inflation over for the next 16 years
But there’s always some cause for a parade. And in the 1990s it was the internet and a new crop of tech geniuses. They were the young hustlers who ‘got it.’ They understood how the internet would make us all rich.
Michael Saylor - now famous for investing his whole wad, and more, on bitcoin - was then dead certain that these ‘information’ companies would soon reach some kind of ‘escape velocity’ that would allow them to create more and more wealth, without the need for more capital investment. But in 2000, came the rain. Saylor was forced to restate the last two years of his company’s financial results... his stock fell 60% in one day... and the dot.com bust was underway.
As we now know, most of the goofy dot.coms disappeared. Only a very few people got rich. And instead of speeding up, GDP growth limped along... even more slowly than before. Will the AI bubble be any different? We wouldn’t bet on it."
Jim Kunstler, "Prank-O-Rama"
"Prank-O-Rama"
by Jim Kunstler
"They found a cure for gluttony. Now do narcissism."
- Peachy Keenan
"Poor “Joe Biden” can’t help himself as the suns sets on his ignominious career. He ordered the American flag to fly at half-staff into January 20, inauguration day, to signal grief and distress at Donald Trump’s swearing-in - not realizing, apparently, that Mr. Trump’s first act in office will be to order the flags raised back up, signaling symbolically the end to America’s grief and distress under “Joe Biden.”
You might wonder: what other sort of vicious mischief the Party of Chaos has in store in the final ramp-up to a momentous change of government? Well, no sooner had ol’ “JB” draped the Wegovy-slenderized neck of Hillary Clinton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, than Bill Clinton went on ABC’s The View to declare he was “open to talking with [‘President Biden’]” about a preemptive pardon for Hillary.
Say, whu..? What crimes did Bill have in mind that such a pardon might avail? Skokovo? Uranium One? The Clinton Foundation’s sketchy activities in Haiti after the earthquake there? Bill preemptively mentioned the old emails bidness as a ruse. Nothing to see there, folks, he protested. (Just don’t look anywhere else!)
You must imagine that the incoming Solicitor General, John Sauer’s, first act in office will be to ask SCOTUS for a ruling on the legitimacy of preemptive pardons - blanket pardons for crimes alive perhaps in guilty consciences but nowhere extant as yet in the legal system. The justices might detect a certain logical incoherence in that proposition. “Joe Biden” should have just draped wreaths of garlic around the necks of Mrs. Clinton, Liz Cheney, and Alex Soros (standing in for ol’ George).
Judge Juan Merchan did not get a medal. He’s warming up for his January 10 stunt of sentencing of Mr. Trump for the “felony” of recording a payment to lawyer Michael Cohen as a “legal expense” (times thirty-four) so Democrats can holler “nyah nyah, felon!” as Mr. Trump re-enters the Oval Office. Judge Merchan himself has racked-up an impressive list of federal offenses around deprivation of Mr. Trump’s civil rights and due process issues as well as judicial misconduct, obstruction of justice, and abuse of power. Justice may await the judge.
Today, January 6, of course, is electoral vote certification day in a joint session of Congress. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has been making noises about contesting certification on the grounds that Mr. Trump is an “insurrectionist” under the disqualification clause in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Don’t be surprised if Jamie makes a show of it to justify all his loose talk, but it will only be a performance. He might as well bring a chicken into the chamber and bite its head off.
The shadowy claque behind “Joe Biden” has been super-busy cooking up documents for the demented old bird to sign before leaving office, anything that supposedly might discommode the incoming Mr. Trump. “JB” is like a bandit fleeing the scene of a crime, throwing his stolen booty into the road off the back of his truck to trip up the police closing in. Close down offshore oil drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts for evermore...ban gas-powered water heaters... any old thing to make life more uncomfortable for the people of this land. The shadowy claque seems oblivious to the fact that the people won’t appreciate these pranks, that they just give more reasons for them to drive a wooden stake through the heart of the Democratic Party - as if it even had one.
Prank-of-the-week, though, goes to Tony Blinken’s State Department. No sooner had Congress defunded his agency’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) - that is, its censorship coordination hub - than the muppets at State redistributed GEC’s personnel to other corners of the agency and scared up new funding for their censorship activities from some dark hidey-hole of sequestered money. Do they suppose no one will find out where these employees went? All that’s necessary is to look up who was on the GEC’s payroll in 2024, and earlier in the hub’s heyday, and see if they remain on the State Department’s payroll now - and then fire the whole lot of them for cause: abrogating Americans’ First Amendment rights. Buh-bye...
You are not out-of-order worrying, of course, that the political Left and the deep state blob behind them might look, in desperation, for other ways to prevent Donald Trump from getting sworn in. There’s the president-elect’s rally in DC the night before the inauguration. Not a few MAGAs are wondering if that’s really a good idea. And the recent garish drone swarms around the USA have put folks ill at ease about a swearing-in on the west front of the US Capitol, out in the open air. I’d even be a little concerned about the mechanicals of Mr. Trump’s airplane as he flies north from Mar-a-Lago to the big event in Washington.
Nobody will surprised if “Joe Biden” does not show up on the dais at the Capitol that fateful day. He at least has one final snub left for Mr. Trump as “JB” departs office with the pardon he will preemptively lay on himself in the wee hours of January 19 - in case anyone might inquire into all those shadow companies that First Son Hunter was running over the years to receive money from China, Ukraine, Russia, Romania, and Gawd knows who else, to be redistributed (i.e., laundered) through the innumerable bank accounts of Biden family members. There is that to consider."
"Economic Market Snapshot 1/6/25"
"Economic Market Snapshot 1/6/25"
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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
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Market Data Center, Live Updates:
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Comprehensive, essential truth.
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Job cuts and much more.
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
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And now... The End Game...
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Scottish Guy in Moscow, "Russia’s Biggest Mall Under Sanctions!"
Full screen recommended.
Scottish Guy in Moscow, 12/26/24
"Russia’s Biggest Mall Under Sanctions!"
"Aviapark is not only Russia’s biggest mall but also the biggest mall in Europe. Come with me as I take you on a tour of this enormous shopping center. What shops do Russians have to choose from? Which are not here anymore? Watch to find out!"
Comments here:
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Full screen recommended.
Scottish Guy In Russia, 2/28/24
"Russia’s Biggest Hypermarket - Shocking!"
"Welcome to Russia’s largest supermarket, Ashan located in Avia Park Mall. I will take you inside and show you around both levels of this enormous store. Come with me and see what products Russians can buy and which ones have disappeared from shelves."
Comments here:
Sunday, January 5, 2025
"Russia Tells NATO To Prepare For War, Ukraine's Army Crushed"
Danny Haiphong, 1/5/25
"Russia Tells NATO To Prepare For War,
Ukraine's Army Crushed"
"In this huge livestream, geopolitical analysts Scott Ritter, Larry C. Johnson, and Andrei Martyanov join to respond to Russia's warning that NATO targets are on the table in response to the latest round of Ukrainian strikes into Russian territory. It's about to be a massive year of geopolitical turmoil and change in 2025 and we cover what comes next as we enter Trump 2.0."
Comments here:
"If Nobody Can Afford A Home...Who's Going To Buy Them?"
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bordenaro, 1/5/25
"If Nobody Can Afford A Home...
Who's Going To Buy Them?"
"If nobody can afford a home who is going to buy them? The answer is increasingly becoming nobody as we see transactions in the housing market now hitting 30 year lows. For a while, the narrative in the housing market was that home prices will continue to rise forever because we have a major housing shortage in this country. But looking at where the current inventory stands at the beginning of 2025 we know that there is no housing shortage, and there never was."
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
"A mere seven hundred light years from Earth, toward the constellation Aquarius, a sun-like star is dying. Its last few thousand years have produced the Helix Nebula (NGC 7293), a well studied and nearby example of a Planetary Nebula, typical of this final phase of stellar evolution. A total of 90 hours of exposure time have gone in to creating this expansive view of the nebula.
Combining narrow band image data from emission lines of hydrogen atoms in red and oxygen atoms in blue-green hues, it shows remarkable details of the Helix's brighter inner region about 3 light-years across. The white dot at the Helix's center is this Planetary Nebula's hot, central star. A simple looking nebula at first glance, the Helix is now understood to have a surprisingly complex geometry."
"I Can't Convince Myself..."
“I can’t convince myself that it does much good to try to challenge the everyday political delusions and dementias of Americans at large. Their contained and confined mentalities by far prefer the petty and parochial prisons of the kind of sense they have been trained and rewarded for making out of their lives (and are punished for deviating from them). What it costs them ultimately to be such slaves and infants and ideological zombies is a thought too monstrous and rending and spiky for them even to want to glance at.”
- Kenneth Smith
“If you want to tell people the truth,
make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
- Oscar Wilde
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