"Going Broke the Traditional Way"

"Going Broke the Traditional Way"

Capital cannot be consumed; it must be saved and invested

 wisely, skillfully. Everything else is distraction…fraud and fantasy.

by Bill Bonner and Dan Denning

"History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities."

- "Gerontion", TS Eliot

London - "Investors heard the lure of the Lorelei yesterday. So sweet. Irresistible. What lush pleasures they suggested. What otherworldly satisfactions they offered. Yes, word came that inflation was “cool.” Business Insider reports: "Inflation came in softer than expected, with consumer prices remaining flat over the month of May. On a yearly basis, inflation was up 3.3%. That's slightly lower than the 3.4% yearly increase recorded in April, marking the second month in a row that prices have cooled. Bond yields plunged after the report. The 10-year US Treasury dove 11 basis points to 4.287%."

"Wednesday's weaker-than-expected CPI will allow the Fed to start cutting interest rates as soon as September since we have now seen multiple encouraging inflation readings, after the concerning spike in inflation earlier this year," Skyler Weinand, the chief investment officer of Regan Capital, said in a note. "There's a clear path to a soft landing and the Fed may very well be coming to the market's rescue in as little as three months."

Markets Insider followed up: "US stocks rose on Wednesday as investors took in cool inflation data and the Federal Reserve's latest guidance on rate cuts, helping the S&P 500 to another record close."

But then, the Dow gave back all its gains when it became clear that Jerome Powell was not exactly on the rate-cut bandwagon. It was “certainly a better inflation report than almost anyone expected,” he said. But he added that he wanted to be sure inflation was under control before cutting rates. Boo hoo. Investors will have to wait for the lavish satisfaction they crave.

But Fed rate cuts do not magically create more real wealth. Wealth is created by increases in productivity…with more output per unit of labor and resource input. It is the result of hard work…and forbearance. Immediate pleasures must be put off…lessons must be learned. Capital cannot be consumed; it must be saved and invested wisely, skillfully. Everything else is distraction…fraud and fantasy. After revealing the Fed’s decision not to cut rates any time soon, CNN added: ‘That means borrowing costs on everything from car loans to mortgage rates will remain elevated.’

Lowering the cost of credit makes it easier to buy things….but it doesn’t necessarily make it easier to pay for them. As we’ve seen, more credit creates short-term ‘fictitious’ wealth, not long-term real wealth. Sellers record the increase in sales as a plus. The feds record the extra sales as an increase to GDP. But until the bill is settled, the transaction is incomplete.

As debt increases so does the cost of debt service (interest) and the number of debtors who won’t be able to pay – including the biggest debtor in the world, the US government. And so does the amount of wealth that is likely to vanish in the next crisis. This is especially true when the borrowing was done under false pretenses – that is, at interest rates that are unrealistically or artificially low.

And lo…the debt rises. The latest figures are out. The Congressional Budget Office says that the feds’ deficit for the month of May was $348 billion – up $108 billion from last year. Whew. The CBO is forecasting deficits between 5.2% and 6.3% of GDP over the next 10 years. This is a nation going broke in the traditional way…by adding phony wealth and real debt. And here at Bonner Private Research, we’re not the only ones to notice. The Financial Times is on the case:

The IMF’s second-in-command has urged the US to shrink its mounting fiscal burden, saying strong growth in the world’s largest economy gave it “ample” room to rein in spending and raise taxes. Gita Gopinath, the fund’s first deputy managing director, said it was time for advanced economies to “invest in fiscal consolidation” and address how they plan to bring debt burdens back down to pre-pandemic levels.

“For the US, we see ample ground for them to reduce the size of their fiscal deficits, also given the strength of the US economy,” she told the Financial Times in an interview. The warnings come as economists and investors fear that years of fiscal profligacy by both Democrats and Republicans are storing up trouble for the US economy.

Yes, dear reader, there is ‘ample ground’ to cut spending. But fraud is more agreeable than truth…and increasing debt is much more appealing than paying it off. For now, policymakers and investors are enchanted by the song of the Lorelei and the fake wealth it produces. Later, they will crash upon the rocks. Until tomorrow..."

Research Note, by Dan Denning: "Three years and two months ago, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank would like to see sustained inflation over 2% ‘for some time.’ Mission accomplished. Yesterday’s ‘cool’ CPI figure of 3.3% would have been hotter if not for the 9% fall in the used cars and trucks category (repos, perhaps).

Today I want to share three charts with you. These are the sort I’d normally share in my Friday Research Note for paying subscribers. But if you’re a new reader, you may not have seen them. And all of them are important to BPR’s investment strategy now, and for the rest of the year.

First, a slower rate of change doesn’t mean inflation is going down. It means - assuming it’s even accurate - that inflation is growing less fast (although still above the Fed’s ‘target’). The first chart below shows the entire price level shifted 22.26% higher in four years from May of 2020 to today. It’s this shift that’s killing the quality of life for the American Middle Class (by contrast, the S&P 500 is up 25% since the Fed started raising rates in March of 2022).

Click image for larger size.

Second, the velocity of money is on the uptick. The chart below shows the year-over-year change in broad money supply (M2). Money supply ballooned with the Covid stimmes and giveaways. Then it appeared to contract, even as inflation remained ‘above target.’ Now, the very latest data point shows money supply expanding again. A ‘second wave’ of inflation is building.

Click image for larger size.

When you get high inflation with a recession it’s called stagflation, a throwback to the great monetary policy mistake of the 1970s. But that’s where we may be headed. As the chart below shows, each of the last eleven recessions began either just before or right after the Fed started cutting rates (the recessions are the grey vertical lines on the chart while the blue line is the effective Fed funds rate)."

Click image for larger size.

- https://www.bonnerprivateresearch.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

Free Download: F.A. Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"

"The Road to Serfdom"

by F.A. Hayek

"An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, 'The Road to Serfdom' has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944 - when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program -'The Road to Serfdom' was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy."

Freely download "The Road to Serfdom," by F.A. Hayek, here:

- https://ctheory.sitehost.iu.edu/

"The Corporatization Of Everything - Serfdom In Our Time"

"The Corporatization Of Everything -

Serfdom In Our Time"

by Paul Rosenberg

"I’m quite serious about the serfdom part. Please read on. If you want millions of dollars thrown at your new company, the way to do it is in “tech,” which usually means a new Internet service. If you can find a way to suck a new part of people’s lives from the world of atoms to the world of data, your odds are good… far greater than trying to launch a construction company. For the construction company you’ll have to beg for loans. For a clever new Internet service, Venture Capitalists (VCs) with huge wallets will happily listen to your pitch.

Here, in brief, is how this works: Most of the things VCs fund will fail, but the ones that work (the “unicorns”), can make them fortunes. The VCs end up owning most of the equity in the companies they finance. The people who start and operate the company bleed more equity with each new round of financing.

The VCs cash in when they take companies public. Once listed on the stock exchanges and promoted, people will pay enormous multiples of what those companies actually make. Lots of unicorns have sold billions of dollars worth of shares without ever turning a dollar of profit. The investing psychology of the age is such that people are eager to buy these stocks. For the past generation, this model has worked, and so it continues without any serious examination. This model works by corporatizing activities which were previously personal and private.

Consider these cases:

٭ Facebook corporatized friendship.

٭ Google corporatized finding information.

٭Visa corporatized payments.

And so on, some for the better in ways, but always at the expense of the private sphere. By this model, the corporation gets a cut, where previously there was no cut to be taken.

At this point, corporations are trying to rent you everything. Private ownership, after all, can’t really be corporatized. If a corporation is to make money this way, they need you to rent from them. And so they portray their systems as having some sort of added value, get you to believe that all the cool kids are doing it, and convince you to rent from them, for life. Most people no longer buy DVDs or CDs, for example. Rather they “stream” music and video, never owning anything and forever dependent upon operations like Netflix.

There’s a reason Klaus Schwab blathered on about “You will own nothing and be happy.” That’s what this model produces. This was also the model of serfdom. The Schwabbian model breaks down the populace into owners (“stakeholders”) and renters (“people”). The old words for this relationship were lord and serf.

You can see this in hedge funds buying up the houses of America, then renting them back to the old owner’s family and neighbors. The hedge funds get massively better financing that Joe Shmoe could get, and Joe’s younger relatives aren’t doing terribly well these days anyway. And if corporatization requires some regulations to be made or altered, the corporations can purchase them easily enough… while Joe’s kids can’t.

Where This Goes: Klaus Schwab may have been evil, but he was not entirely stupid. He saw where this would go, and he ran with it. The trajectory of this trend is for you to own nothing… for you to rent everything from stakeholders, leaving you beholden to them for almost everything.

Now, while the Schwab types get off on enserfing you, the corporate types usually don’t: they’re just following a model that works. They’re eager to get rich, and so they turn a blind eye to their roles in enserfing the masses. (“Hey, I’m not holding a gun to their heads.”) They get caught up in the unicorn fetish and become sociopathic in that area of their minds. (See The Mystery of Iniquity for an explanation.)

If you don’t like where this is heading, the fix is simple: Just drop out of their game. The price of that fix is to let people call you names… just as they did to those who ditched serfdom back in the day."

- https://freemansperspective.com/

"What Being Governed Really Means"

"What Being Governed Really Means"

by Brian Maher

"And to be governed, noted 19th-century philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: "Is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded… registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished… drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed… repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored."

- https://dailyreckoning.com/

"I Am An Outsider: A Story of Freedom"

"I Am An Outsider: A Story of Freedom"

by Tessa Lena

"I am an outsider, and here’s my story of freedom. To keep my humanity, I consistently ran away from systems. Early on, I ran away from the academia even though I was promised a very bright and secure career. I then ran away from the corporate labyrinth because my soul was dying in there. I kept my heart, and because I did, I have immediate and vibrant answers to some of the big questions that Systems People are asking in their high-end keynote speeches. I have peasant senses that make it very easy to grasp the degree of murder that modern systems bring upon the soul – and it’s a Catch 22.

I have functional answers because I ran away from the machine. But because I ran away from the machine, I am not accredited by the machine, and Systems People are skeptical about the answers that come from a Non-Systems person. The things I have to say are not familiar.

It is a classic interface incompatibility problem: Questions and answers live in different dimensions, and if my answers travel to the dimension where the keynote speeches live, they will lose their heart. Real answers about happiness and humanity are humbling, they don’t help anybody’s career-building ambitions, they are so beautiful you can’t describe it, they lie in mystery, and they leave no room for pointless glitter. But simple, peasant humility is uncharted territory for a self-respecting urban educated mind!

When I talk to self-respecting educated minds about this (the famed self-respecting educated minds, the demographic that I used to be a part of – but then I ran away), I hear the following: ‘We will gladly pontificate about lost innocence and we will buy expensive retreats – but we are not going to touch the real thing.’ ‘We want answers but we don’t want to change our idea about ourselves and our self-aggrandizing intellectual paradigms’

The tragedy.

Here is the real problem. The machine annihilates the senses that we are born with, the senses that allow us to find happiness, to be fully present in the primordial state. The Machine beats up and chews up and covers up the context. The soul-eating Machine runs on broken language because language, imperfect as it is, is meant to reflect reality. If our everyday language were straightened out to be more consistent with eternal nature and our physical reality, the Machine would explode. So it keeps blocking us from expressing ourselves like children, from being free–and in the meanwhile, people who were born to be happy, keep getting together at conferences and jerking off about systems.

F*ck!

The ability to find the solution depends on trashing the interface entirely. And that is not an easy thing to do. I am an outsider with a heart, a brain, and a memory of home. I am the little guy who spent a lot of time unlearning the very qualities that make one palatable in a Systems Society.

I know a thing or two about being happy, and I know with absolute, piercing certainty that it has zero to do with what most influencers and futurologists are saying to the masses (using uplifting, accessible language). It has nothing to do with gadgets, slogans, space ships, collective affirmation chanting, pseudo-intellectualism, ’science,’ or ‘technology.’

The future is the same as the present. You are born, you bring with you a magical connection to the universe, your unique feeling that you vividly remember when you are a kid–and then forget–your purpose, your unique sound, your version of love.

You are born, like a song of uttermost beauty – and then the people who have been traumatized before you, try to shame you out of remembering your song. Most of them are not bad human beings, they simply forgot, and they want you to be an important practical goose, for your own good.

Your song that exists for your happiness, doesn’t help the Machine. If you are to remember your song, you will know with absolute, piercing certainly, just like I do, that most of what the influencers and the futurologists are telling you, is a mix of wishful thinking and ego. From A to Z, ego. It adds nothing to happiness except it maybe teaches you how to navigate the labyrinth filled from wall to wall with distorted mirrors and sad, important practical geese.

And branding? I whisper, from the bottom of my heart: ‘I am waiting for the day when people will see branding for what it is (psychic warfare), when goods and services will go back to being just goods and services, and when marketing messages will get the hell out of the sacred space.’ I know it won’t happen for a very long time–but I keep whispering, because I am right.

‘A spiritual message driven by commercial interest dies immediately. They don’t live together, they don’t eat at the same table, don’t you know?’ But it’s hard to blame the practical geese. The Machine is brutal. The problem is that everything is driven by money. The Machine has figured out how to repurpose our in-born desire of being respected to feed itself, and how to make us do unnatural things, to chase the feeling of being important.

It’s a grinder. Nobody – not the janitor, not the president, and sadly, not even the artist – is free to say what she knows in her heart of hearts, as long as she cares about having a social status of any sort, and a source of income. Blessed be the ones who don’t think too much about any of it.

It’s a grinder, yo. 

People at the bottom of society have more freedom to talk and have dissenting opinions – but that’s only because there is almost nowhere to fall from where they already are.

If you own stock, if you are looking for a job, if you want to keep a job, if you want to get published, if you want to get a prestigious interview, and sometimes if you want to stay alive – you have to say just the right thing, palatable enough, harmless enough so as not to alert the gatekeepers of the Machine to your inadequacy or your sudden uncontrollable freedom. And it would be just fine if people with ears knew that you are using your mouth in jest, that you are just doing what you have to do, if they sympathized with your unfreedom… Unfortunately, most people with ears are trained to take the spectacle literally.

Blessed be the ones who don’t think too much about any of it. When the words that are coming out people’s mouths are polluted with self-preservation (be it basic bread or a high social status), the words are going to be distorted.

We all follow our instincts, and self-preservation takes over. When we are under pressure, we are all practical geese.

It’s a grinder.

Alas, in a world driven by financial self-preservation, truth-telling is a commercial affair. You can tell the truth – but only from a media-friendly angle, and only in a way that doesn’t piss off the sponsor, the donor, and the advertiser – and that meets the linguistic habits of your target demographic, of your very own echo chamber that feeds you. Truth, the edited version, hello.

Hello.

Can you hear me crying?

F*ck, I am an outsider.

I am married to my song, and the world is beautiful but ill.

I am an outsider.

I ran away from every machine, even though it gave me nice grades. But I can’t be running anymore. My brothers and sisters are all in here.

I was an outsider.

I was an outsider, and I still have a heart."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Have You Ever Felt Like an Outsider?"

o

Hat tip to Glock-N-Load and 

the Burning Platform for this material.

"Jaw Dropping Kroger Sales, The Best Deals I've Seen In Years!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 6/13/24

"Jaw Dropping Kroger Sales, 

The Best Deals I've Seen In Years!"

"In today's vlog, we are at Kroger and are noticing some unbelievable sales going on. Groceries have been ridiculously overpriced, but we are seeing Kroger have some of the best deals we've seen in years! Shop with me at Kroger as we discover these great savings together!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Travelling with Russell, 6/13/24

"Russian (German Owned) Supermarket 

After 2 Years of Sanctions"

"What does a Russian supermarket look like inside? 

Join me on a tour of Globus, a German owned supermarket." 

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Big Things Are Happening, Time's Almost Up"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 6/12/24

"Alert! Big Things Are Happening, Time's Almost Up"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"

Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"

"It's a mystery to me, the game commences,

For the usual fee, plus expenses.

Confidential information, it's in a diary.

This is my investigation, it's not a public inquiry.

I go checking out the reports, digging up the dirt.

You get to meet all sorts in this line of work.

Treachery and treason, there's always an excuse for it,

And when I find the reason, I still can't get used to it.

And what have you got at the end of the day?

What have you got to take away?

A bottle of whiskey, and a new set of lies,

Blinds on the windows, and a pain behind the eyes.

Scarred for life, no compensation.

Private investigations..."

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. 

Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen at the right of the starry field of view. Inside the nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation. With the eerie hue of dust reflecting bluish light from hot young stars of NGC 7023, the Iris Nebula stands out against the dark just left of center. In the broad telescopic frame, these fertile interstellar dust fields stretch almost seven full moons across the sky."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet: On Good and Evil "

"The Prophet: On Good and Evil"

 "Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves,

and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

You are good when you are one with yourself.

Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.

For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.

And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among

perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.

Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.

For when you strive for gain you are but a root

that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.

Surely the fruit cannot say to the root,

 Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance.

For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.

You are good when you are fully awake in your speech,

Yet you are not evil when you sleep

while your tongue staggers without purpose.

And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.

You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.

Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.

Even those who limp go not backward.

But you who are strong and swift,

see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.

You are good in countless ways,

and you are not evil when you are not good,

You are only loitering and sluggard.

Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.

In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness:

and that longing is in all of you.

But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea,

carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.

And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and

bends and lingers before it reaches the shore.

But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little,

 Wherefore are you slow and halting?

For the truly good ask not the naked,

 Where is your garment?

nor the houseless, What has befallen your house?"

- Kahlil Gibran

○

Freely download a PDF version of  "The Prophet" here:

- https://www.kahlilgibran.com/

"Is It Any Wonder..."

"Thomas Edison said in all seriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking" - if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think - and ignore all the others! We want only the facts that justify our acts - the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices. As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage." Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems? Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, if we went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot of people in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that two plus two equals five- or maybe five hundred!"

- Dale Carnegie

Scott Ritter, "Israel is Being Humiliated and the IDF’s Defeat is Coming Fast"

Scott Ritter, 6/12/24:

"Israel is Being Humiliated 

and the IDF’s Defeat is Coming Fast"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Owen Jones, 6/12/24

"Israel Confesses Genocidal Intent"

Comments here:

-  https://www.youtube.com/

"Israel is Evil personified. Israel Is Evil embodied."

- Scott Ritter

Stipendium peccati mors est, Israel. And it's coming...

Inshallah! So be it...

Gerald Celente, "Judge Napolitano: Political Parasites Never Met A War They Didn't Want Someone Else To Fight"

Gerald Celente, 6/12/24

"Judge Napolitano: Political Parasites Never Met 

A War They Didn't Want Someone Else To Fight"

"'The Trends Journal' is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."

- https://trendsjournal.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other -

instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.” 

- Edward Abbey

"40 Million Americans Can't Pay Their Bills And All Hell Is About To Break Loose"

Full screen recommended.

Epic Economist, 6/12/24

"40 Million Americans Can't Pay Their Bills 

And All Hell Is About To Break Loose"

"All hell is breaking loose in America as more and more people can't keep up with their bills, and new reports show that many are resorting to desperate measures to be able to get by. The cost of living in the United States is rising much faster than workers’ paychecks, and our standard of living is rapidly deteriorating. Our country has reached a stage where only the elites are thriving while everyone else is being financially eviscerated.

For most people, it's been a real fight just to be able to put enough food on the table to feed their children. At this point, the majority of the population is deep in debt, and record high interest rates are only adding to people's problems. Millions of hard-working Americans feel like they're drowning. Sadly, many of them don’t even realize that the game was designed against them and in benefit of the few.

At the moment, about two-thirds of Americans considered middle class say they are facing economic hardship and don’t anticipate a change for the rest of their lives. That's according to a recent poll commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition. In the study of 2,500 adults, 65% of people who earn more than 200% of the federal poverty level - that’s at least $60,000 for a family of four, often considered middle class - revealed they are struggling financially in 2024.

A sizable share of higher-income Americans also feel financially insecure. The survey shows that a quarter of people making over five times the federal poverty level - an annual income of more than $150,000 for a family of four - are worried about paying their bills on time. “Many Americans are still gasping for air financially,” highlights Jennifer Jones Austin, chief executive officer of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies. “They simply don’t have the breathing room to plan beyond their present needs.”

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "The Middle Class Is Done, R.I.P."

Jeremiah Babe, 6/12/24

"The Middle Class Is Done, R.I.P. - 

The Catastrophic Death Of The Middle Class And Small Business"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Gregory Mannarino, PM 6/12/24

"Epic Disaster: The Economy Is Being Destroyed 

From Within, FED In Full Control"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Germiston, Gauteng, South Africa. Thanks for stopping by!

"Where Your Gaze Lingers..."

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that has nothing to do with you, this storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.

You have to look! That’s another one of the rules. Closing your eyes isn’t going to change anything. Nothing’s going to disappear just because you can’t see what going on. In fact, things will be even worse the next time you open your eyes. That’s the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won’t make time stand still.”

- Haruki Murakami

“Closing your eyes won’t make the awfulness go away. It may be that nothing will. But dwelling on it, dreading the evil, playing out the misery in your head – doesn’t this feed the monster? You can’t close your eyes to life, but you can choose where your gaze lingers.”

- Richelle E. Goodrich

"​This Is What You Belong To"

"​This Is What You Belong To"

By Ryann Holiday

"In 1950, a man grieving his young son who had just died of polio got a letter from Albert Einstein. Now, one might think that as a man of science, Einstein would have had a rather resigned view of the tragic nature of the human condition. We’re born. We’re buffeted by forces beyond our control, beyond our comprehension, and then we die. Often for no reason, leaving profound suffering in its wake.

Given the immensity of the events of the middle of the twentieth century - the Holocaust and the violence of the atomic age - it was quite reasonable that Einstein might be inured to the loss of a single child to whom he had no relation.

Instead, Einstein’s letter was one of profound and philosophic condolence. “A human being,” he wrote, “is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.”

Einstein was expressing one of the few things that physics and philosophers and priests seem to agree on: That everything and everyone is far more connected than we are prone to think. We share an animating force, an energy, a unity that no matter what happens or how different things seem is always there. Even in our suffering, in our grief, we are tapping into something eternal and vast, something that makes us realize we are very much not alone.

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world,” James Baldwin wrote, “and then you read.” It was books, history, philosophy, Baldwin said, that taught him that “the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

We are all one. It’s so easy to forget it, but it’s true.

The virtue of justice - what my new book "Right Thing, Right Now" is all about - is this idea that because of interconnectedness and interrelatedness, we have an obligation. Stoicism is not lone-wolfness. It’s the understanding that we are one single organism and that the fate of one is the fate of all.

As I wrote in "Stillness is the Key," no one has felt this more profoundly than the astronauts who had the unique experience of seeing the Earth from space. Whether they were American or Russian or Chinese, they were all overwhelmed by what has been called the “overview effect,” an instantaneous global consciousness, an inescapable sense that everyone is in the same boat, no matter where they live or what they believe.

What they experienced looking at the “Blue Marble” that is our planet was the exact thing that Hierocles, the 2nd century Stoic, was trying to teach people about two thousand years ago. Yes, we naturally think of ourselves and the people we love first, but with work, we can expand that circle of concern larger and larger until we see everything that is alive as one enormous organism. Astronauts experience the exact same thing that Gandhi, who never even flew in a plane, never saw humanity from above more than a few stories up in a building, called the great oneness.

Realizing this, letting it wash over us, sitting in awe of it - it’s more than just humbling. It also makes us more generous, more courageous, more committed to what’s right. It makes us less concerned with petty nonsense, with meaningless distinctions, with grudges or our own pain. It’s euphoric. It can also be existentially devastating.

The actor William Shatner, after a lifetime of exploring space on film, finally visited the cosmos at age ninety. He thought he’d marvel at the beauty of all that he beheld. Instead, looking at the Earth from afar, all he felt was sadness. Because, he realized, everything that mattered was down there on Earth and everyone was taking it for granted. They were destroying this thing of beauty, abusing it, stealing it from generations unborn.

The garment of interdependence, the great bundle of humanity that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper spoke of, it’s real. But what kind of shape is it in these days? The environment is reeling. Billions live in poverty. Millions perish of totally preventable causes. Injustice tears at the fabric that binds us together. How long can it go unchecked before everything comes apart?

I am convinced that people are much better off when their whole city is flourishing than when certain citizens prosper but the community has gone off course. When a man is doing well for himself but his country is falling to pieces, he goes to pieces along with it, but a struggling individual has much better hopes if his country is thriving. Is that the lament of a modern politician? The manifesto of some early-twentieth-century socialist revolutionary? No, it’s Pericles in 431 BC.

The whole point of government and the social contract is built around this idea. All government, it was said by one of the Founders, have as its sole goal the common welfare. What good is our success if it comes at the expense of others? How safe are we if our safety leaves others vulnerable? What good are we if we can’t help others? We are all bound up in this thing called life together. We share this planet together. When we forget that or lose track of how our actions affect others, that’s when injustice flourishes.

Marcus Aurelius’s line that “what’s bad for the hive is bad for the bee” could just as easily be a quip in an upcoming political debate as it could be a New York Times op-ed. It’s something that he needed constant reminders of, just as we do. He strove to see the world “as a living being - one nature and soul... [where] everything feeds into that single experience, moves with a single motion. And how everything helps produce everything else. Spun and woven together.” Did his policies and decisions always reflect that? No. And his biggest failings - the persecution of the Christians by the Romans at that time - are a reflection of what happens when we lose track of that ultimate north star.

“I am not conscious of a single experience throughout my three month stay in England and Europe,” Gandhi observed after one of his visits, “that made me feel that after all East is East and West is West. On the contrary, I have been convinced more than ever that human nature is much the same, no matter what clime it flourishes.”

This was why he couldn’t hate. Why he couldn’t turn his back. Why he dreamed of a better world with fewer divisions, where problems were never solved by violence or domination. “Life will not be a pyramid with an apex sustained by the bottom,” he explained, sounding like Hierocles. “But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual always ready to perish for the village, the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages, till at last the whole becomes one life composed of individuals, never aggressive in their arrogance but ever humble, sharing the majesty of the oceanic circle of which they are integral units.”

This is what the last years of his life were dedicated to, why he was willing to die not just for independence but for equality for the untouchables and for Muslim and Hindu peace. “I am a Muslim,” he said, “a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Christian, a Jew, a Parsi.”

And so are you. We all are. We are one and the same. All mortal. All flawed. All gifted with incredible potential. All deserving of justice and respect and dignity. All unique individuals and yet an inseparable part of humanity, of the past, present, and future. Truman kept a line from a Milton poem in his wallet that read simply: "The parliament of Man, the federation of the world." That’s what we belong to. That’s what we must protect."

- https://ryanholiday.net/

o

“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of Infinity. Life is Eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in Eternity.”

- Paulo Coelho

"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

"The Dispersion of Moral Energies"

"The Dispersion of Moral Energies"

by Paul Rosenberg

"Humans have long been, and remain, deeply attached to morality. Even confirmed criminals will routinely say things like “That ain’t right,” which is purely a moral judgment. This focus on morality holds firm across the panorama of human of life. Examine any workplace and you’ll find a long stream of moral judgments: “He didn’t treat me right,” “She’s arrogant,” “That’s a man you can respect,” and so on.

This moral focus of ours is a good thing, and says a great deal good about us. That said, we’ve allowed our moral energies to be wasted. And the crucial aspect of this isn’t that our moral energies have been suppressed (though that sometimes happens), but that they’ve been dispersed; so widely dispersed that they are often of no use at all.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: Humans have limited amounts of energy, and that includes energy for willpower and moral concerns. Disperse them and there’s insufficient energy for the important uses. This is precisely what has been happening to us, and especially to people who spend their time on TV and social media.

There are many systems in this world which can only endure if insulated from moral scrutiny. That’s something of a frightening fact, but it remains a fact. And so, this is a natural consequence: Systems that would lose legitimacy if held to clear moral standards (like the Golden Rule) must redirect the moral energies of the populace into non-threatening directions. If what you want requires that people don’t turn a moral eye toward you, it’s best to spread their moral energies every which way, so that they don’t have much left in reserve. (Naked suppression backfires over time.)

The internal energies of a mainstream couple, for example, are almost fully directed away from serious moral issues. This couple likely devotes their emotional and moral strength toward whatever terror is in the news that day, to sports teams, to hating one or the other political party, to complaints about all the small moral failures they saw that day, and so on. After all that, they’re simply tired; it easier to spit out a slogan and roll into bed. And so the morally questionable entities of this planet have learned to disperse moral energies, leaving people too depleted to focus.

Finally… It’s important to understand that we (all normal humans, as best I can tell) were born vulnerable to this. We are easy marks for anyone who uses our attachment to morality as a tool. We need to recognize this. Our moral energies are precious; we must direct them to where they matter, and not be tricked into throwing them every which way."

- https://freemansperspective.com/t

And then there's us...

"All Earthly Empires Die"

"All Earthly Empires Die"

by Bill Bonner

"'Amor fati' was Nietzsche’s famous expression. It is a Latin phrase with connections to the Stoic writings of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Literally translated, it means “love of fate.” It is a white shoe yearning for mud. It is a turkey looking forward to Thanksgiving. Or an investor stoically preparing for a bear market.

We use the term to describe the grace and courage you need to meet a complex, unknowable, and uncontrollable future. You don’t know whether the Earth is warming or cooling… whether it is good or bad… or whether you can do anything about it. You don’t know who’s doing “equal work.” You don’t know what equality is… how to measure it… or what to do about it. You don’t know who the bad guy is. It may even be you. It recognizes that we are all God’s fools, living in a world of ignorance, headed towards we don’t know where. Using our brains, we can make progress in our physical, material world. Technical thinking yields pyramids and Eiffel Towers.

Ignorance Everywhere: But there is another part of life, which has a mind of its own. It does not bend readily to our desires or yield to our intelligence. It is the part of life whose purposes are unknown. The first and most important Commandment, according to Jesus, was not to fight it, but to love it.

But ignorance can be a charm. You just have to take it seriously. And appreciate it. Recognizing your own ignorance will inform your newfound modesty. You will be aware of it. And fiercely proud. Nobody will be humbler than you are! And since you are so chummy with ignorance, you will see it everywhere – in every headline, every public announcement, every speech on the floor of the Senate… and every crackpot comment from every dummy voter in the empire.

In private affairs, you reduce uncertainty by getting as close to the subject as possible. That is, you avoid secondhand “news” and try to find out for yourself. The more you know about a company, for example, the more confident you can be about investing in it. That’s why the insiders always have the inside track, an advantage that is increased by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s phony “level playing field” propaganda. In public affairs – policy discussions, economics, politics – as you get closer, you become less cocksure. That is, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.

In an interesting university study, people were asked to pick out Ukraine on a map… and whether they approved of military intervention in that country. Curiously, the further off they were on the geography (the average guess was 1,800 miles off), the more they favored forceful intervention. In public affairs, ignorance and confidence vary inversely.

Moral Certainty: When we first moved to Baltimore in the 1980s, we noticed this phenomenon in another context. Baltimore was a disaster. Crime, drugs, poverty, venereal disease, broken homes, unwed mothers, corruption – name a social problem; Baltimore had it. And while its leaders had been noticeably unable to solve any of these problems right in their own back yard, the city’s politically correct politicians were loud and clear on one issue: apartheid had to end… in South Africa. Had they ever visited South Africa? Could they find it on a map? Probably not. But they were sure they knew how to make it a better place.

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority,” wrote Baltimore’s own H.L. Mencken. “The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on ‘I am not too sure.’”

“I am not too sure,” would eliminate many of the world’s myth-driven, self-inflicted ills – pointless wars, dumb arguments, pogroms, persecutions, and lynchings. And reckless spending of other people’s money.

Imagine a wise Hitler entertaining the idea of building Auschwitz as a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem.” “Hmmm… I’m not too sure that would solve it… In fact, I’m not too sure there is a problem!”

Imagine Simon de Montfort readying to attack the town of Albi to exterminate the “heretics.” When told that half the people in the town were good Catholics, de Montfort replied: “Kill them all. God will recognize His own.” Suppose he had thought twice… “Hmmm… Maybe this is not such a good idea… Maybe killing people is not what Christianity is all about… Maybe the heretics aren’t so bad… Maybe I’ll take the afternoon off.”

Unwarranted Confidence: The barroom blowhard… so sure he is right about everything… is generally the dumbest guy in the place. And the most dangerous. He’s the one who will stir up a mob… and get himself elected president. The whole system of modern public policy is built on false knowledge and unwarranted confidence. The elite claims to know what is best for you. That is how every politician can claim his proposals would “benefit the American people.” But the only program that would benefit the American people would be to let them decide for themselves what would benefit them. Give them back their money. Stop bossing them around. End the wars. Stop the empire. But who would suggest such a thing?

A book that appeared in 2018, "Psychology of a Superpower: Security and Dominance in U.S. Foreign Policy", by political scientist Christopher Fettweis, argued that power really does corrupt, and that when a nation or an empire gets too much power, its elite develops new opinions.

Rather than seeing itself as one of many nations that must get along with each other, its elites begin to see that they have a special role to play. They become the one, “indispensable” nation, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it. They are the world’s only hope in combatting evil, which they do, as then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo elaborated, with “the righteous knowledge that our cause is just, special, and built upon America’s core principles.”

Thus endowed with a special mission and special powers, and subject to the special rules of the only nation with a trillion-dollar-per-year military/empire budget, the elite develop, in Fettweis’s judgment, a fatal combination of unrestrained hubris, unrealistic paranoia, and unrepentant ignorance. They see danger everywhere, without undertaking any serious study (they assume knowledge comes automatically with raw power). And they think they have not only the right, but the means, to do something about it, even if the danger is largely fantasy.

Damned to Hell: But people always come to think what they need to think when they need to think it. “All earthly empires die,” wrote St. Augustine in 413, a few years before the Vandals destroyed his city and finally brought down the Roman Empire in the West.

The elite contribute, by taking up the myths that help it die. Certainty and ignorance vary proportionally, both on the individual and on a national level. The surer a nation is of its myths… its exceptionalism… its manifest destiny… its policies… and its position at the right hand of God… the more it is damned to Hell."

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"How It Really Is"

 

"What Are The Facts?"

"What are the facts? Again and again and againwhat are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what the stars foretell, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the un-guessable verdict of history - what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"

- Robert A. Heinlein

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,

however improbable, must be the truth."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Sherlock Holmes"

And always remember...

"When a learned man argues with an idiot two fools debate."

- Fu-shi

Travelling with Russell, "Russian Typical (Luxury) Supermarket: Would You Shop Here?"

Full screen recommended.

Travelling with Russell, 6/12/24

"Russian Typical (Luxury) Supermarket: 

Would You Shop Here?"

"Take a tour with me of a Russian luxury supermarket in Moscow, Russia. Azbuka Vkusa has more than 150 stores in Russia, all of which sell luxury, imported and locally made products. Would you shop here based the quality or the price?"

Comments here:

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