"Big, beautiful spiral galaxy NGC 1055 is a dominant member of a small galaxy group a mere 60 million light-years away toward the aquatically intimidating constellation Cetus. Seen edge-on, the island universe spans over 100,000 light-years, a little larger than our own Milky Way galaxy. The colorful, spiky stars decorating this cosmic portrait of NGC 1055 are in the foreground, well within the Milky Way. But the telltale pinkish star forming regions are scattered through winding dust lanes along the distant galaxy's thin disk.
With a smattering of even more distant background galaxies, the deep image also reveals a boxy halo that extends far above and below the central bulge and disk of NGC 1055. The halo itself is laced with faint, narrow structures, and could represent the mixed and spread out debris from a satellite galaxy disrupted by the larger spiral some 10 billion years ago."
"Life is painful and messed up. It gets complicated at the worst of times, and sometimes you have no idea where to go or what to do. Lots of times people just let themselves get lost, dropping into a wide open, huge abyss. But that's why we have to keep trying. We have to push through all that hurts us, work past all our memories that are haunting us. Sometimes the things that hurt us are the things that make us strongest. A life without experience, in my opinion, is no life at all. And that's why I tell everyone that, even when it hurts, never stop yourself from living."
- Alysha Speer
"The joke was thinking you were ever really in charge of your life. You pressed your oar down into the water to direct the canoe, but it was the current that shot you through the rapids. You just hung on and hoped not to hit a rock or a whirlpool."
- Scott Turow
"Life's funny, chucklehead. You only get one and you don't want to throw it away. But you can't really live it at all unless you're willing to give it up for the things you love. If you're not at least willing to die for something - something that really matters - in the end you die for nothing."
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut, "Mother Night"
"People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they're not enough and not amounting to anything and they don't feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody's pretending it's not true, and we need to break that veneer."
- Eve Ensler
“You go up to a man, and you say, “How are things going, Joe?” and he says, “Oh fine, fine... couldn’t be better.” And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”
"George Graham Vest (1830-1904) served as U.S. Senator from Missouri from 1879 to 1903 and became one of the leading orators and debaters of his time. This delightful speech is from an earlier period in his life when he practiced law in a small Missouri town. It was given in court while representing a man who sued another for the killing of his dog. During the trial, Vest ignored the testimony, but when his turn came to present a summation to the jury, he made the following speech and won the case:
"Gentlemen of the Jury: The best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most. A man's reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us, may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads.
The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog. A man's dog stands by him in prosperity and in poverty, in health and in sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow and the snow drives fiercely, if only he may be near his master's side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer. He will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounters with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings, and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.
If fortune drives the master forth, an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him, to guard him against danger, to fight against his enemies. And when the last scene of all comes, and death takes his master in its embrace and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by the graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad, but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even in death."
"As I compiled the thoughts from geniuses last week, one group of thoughts that I left out – simply because there were so many of them – were the thoughts of geniuses on the subject of regimented education. Thus, today’s list. The brightest men and women reach a surprisingly consistent set of conclusions on education, and a very interesting set of conclusions. And so I’ll share a number of them with you, beginning with Albert Einstein:
Albert Einstein: "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like sergeants. I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam… I felt that my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement. I learned mostly at home, first from my uncle and then from a student who came to eat with us once a week. He would give me books on physics and astronomy. Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school."
Thomas Sowell: "Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: ''What were you doing for the last 12 years before you got here?'' "The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."
Baruch Spinoza: "Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them."
Marshall McLuhan: "Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either."
Ivan Illich: "School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is."
Bertrand Russell: "Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education."
Mary Wollstonecraft: "There is not, perhaps, in the kingdom, a more dogmatical, or luxurious set of men, than the pedantic tyrants who reside in colleges and preside at public schools."
Agatha Christie: "I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: "Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude. In the Press and Encyclopedias, in Schools and Universities, everywhere Error holds sway, feeling happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side. A teacher who can arouse a feeling for one single good action, for one single good poem, accomplishes more than he who fills our memory with rows on rows of natural objects, classified with name and form."
Celia Green: "Education by the State is a contradiction in terms. Intellectual development is only possible to those who have seen through society. It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them equally clever, so teaching methods are adopted which make it practically impossible for anyone to learn anything."
John Stuart Mill: "A general State education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body."
Ludwig von Mises: "Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of new ideas and creative geniuses. The schools are not nurseries of progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying modes of thought. The mark of the creative mind is that it defies a part of what it has learned or, at least, adds something new to it."
H.L. Mencken: "The plain fact is that education is itself a form of propaganda – a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make ‘good’ citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens."
Sigrid Undset: "I hated school so intensely. It interfered with my freedom. I avoided the discipline by an elaborate technique of being absent-minded during classes."
Abraham Maslow: "We know that children are capable of peak experiences and that they happen frequently during childhood. We also know that the present school system is an extremely effective instrument for crushing peak experiences and forbidding their possibility. The natural child-respecting teacher who is not frightened by the sight of children enjoying themselves is a rare sight in classrooms."
Isaac Asimov: "Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is."
Boris Sidis: "Our young generation is trained by fear into discipline and obedience. We thus suppress the natural genius and originality of the child, we favor and raise mediocrity, and cultivate the philistine, the product of education, ruled by rod, not by thought. It is time that the medical and teaching profession should realize that functional neurosis is not congenital, not inborn, not hereditary, but is the result of a defective, fear-inspiring education in early child life."
Aldous Huxley: "Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education."
Buckminster Fuller: "Education by choice, with its marvelous motivating psychology of desire for truth and the exercise of this desire for truth, will make life ever cleaner and happier, more rhythmical and artistic. Our greatest vulnerability lies in the amount of misinformation and misconditioning of humanity. I’ve found the education systems are full of it."
Ralph Waldo Emerson: "We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing."
Buddha: "Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
"According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 57% of Americans have a reading grade below 9th level, and 13% have a reading grade below 5th level. Only 13% can understand the Declaration or Patrick Henry’s speech, and virtually none can understand the Constitution. And that includes all Americans. Among Generation Z, it’s far worse. They are the least literate generation in American history.
"Gen-Z Can't Answer the Most Basic Questions"
"Insane: Young Americans Don't Know ANYTHING!"
Spenda few minutes on YouTube watching our young people be interviewed on the most basic matters of our history and values. They do not know anything of the good, the true, and the beautiful; and even if they wanted to, they could not learn it because the texts are inaccessible to them. Far too many have been cognitively crippled."
“Life is a refining process. Our response to it determines whether we’ll be ground down or polished up. On a piano, one person sits down and plays sonatas, while another merely bangs away at “Chopsticks.” The piano is not responsible. It’s how you touch the keys that makes the difference. It’s how you play what life gives you that determines your joy and shine.”
Col. Douglas Macgregor states that Hezbollah has 200,000 missiles. Iran has many more, including precise targeting hypersonic missiles, with now admitted nuclear weapons
speculated to total at least 100. Stipendium peccati mors est, Israel...
We need to expect the Primary Trend - towards lower real asset prices,
higher interest rates, inflation... along with chaos and corruption - to continue.
by Bill Bonner
Dublin, Ireland - "A deep, mega-political kind of corruption twists policies away from the well-being of the public and the nation, in favor of elite special interests. Today’s favored industries, pet projects, and key voter groups get money they didn’t earn, and the next generation gets a $35 trillion debt bomb.
Let’s begin with the Russo-Ukrainian war. The Russians appear to be winning. But that is merely a detail. The important thing is that the Ukrainians are losing, and taking the US down with them.
US involvement began as a result of neocon ideologues in Washington, and the firepower industry that funds them and profits from their warmongering. The war in the Ukraine followed the pattern of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. That is, US involvement begins with lies and misconceptions, continues with payoffs, double dealing and overspending, and ends in disgrace. And in the Ukraine, the US goes further. It shows the world that its military strategists are incompetent, its sanctions are impotent, and its modern, high-tech weapons are no match for the Russians.
In other words, supporting the Ukrainians was more than just a waste of money. It revealed to us all that the empire of ‘the West’ is not nearly as strong as it pretends to be…and invites challengers.
Sanctions Fail: The combined resources (GDP) of the NATO allies are 30 times greater than those of Russia. So, there was never any real danger that Russian troops would go boating on the Seine. And stopping Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine looked like a cinch. And when the US first rolled out its sanctions, it was believed that they would cripple the Russian economy, that Putin would soon be gone, and the ‘The West’ would be triumphant.
But the sanctions didn’t work. Russia’s economy is now thought to be growing three times faster than the US’s. And the financial restrictions brought China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, India - most of the world’s population - closer together to invent their own trading systems. The latest news, from the Straits Times: "Malaysia rebuffs US on Iran oil sales, says it recognizes only UN sanctions."
Then, when sanctions fizzled, the US and NATO allies sent their latest weapons. These were ‘game changers,’ said the press; they would clearly show the superiority of ‘western’ technology. But what happened? AP: "Ukraine has sidelined U.S.-provided Abrams M1A1 battle tanks for now in its fight against Russia, in part because Russian drone warfare has made it too difficult for them to operate without detection or coming under attack, two U.S. military officials told The Associated Press."
Captured US tanks were put on display in Moscow, their technology and construction minutely analyzed by Russian experts. Other US weapons were ‘too sophisticated’ or simply ‘inappropriate’ for the terrain. Or, there weren’t enough of them. The ‘game’ went on, unchanged.
Now, the press reports that Russian forces have regained the initiative and are pushing westward. And the defensive lines, that US aid supposedly paid for, aren’t there. According to press reports, corrupt contractors never did the work, and disappeared with the money.
A reasonable, ‘America First’ foreign policy would have been not to meddle in Ukrainian politics in the first place. US money and weapons were better kept at home. The Pentagon might have benefited from the war as an observer, carefully studying Russian weapons and tactics, rather than getting whupped itself.
Sensible policy was overruled by corruption. Big money from the firepower lobby prevents an honest, reasonable response. (Money sent to the Ukraine, as Joe Biden let us know, ‘comes back to us’... or, at least the part that isn’t stolen... to the Northern Virginia arms industries).
But corruption comes with a fuse attached, and it’s lit. Overseas, it strengthens the empire’s designated ‘enemies’, and hastens the day of its own collapse. And at home, here’s the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget: "In the first seven months of Fiscal Year 2024, spending on net interest has reached $514 billion, surpassing spending on both national defense ($498 billion) and Medicare ($465 billion). Overall spending has totaled $3.9 trillion thus far. Spending on interest is also more than all the money spent this year on veterans, education, and transportation combined. "
The problem is not political... it’s mega-political. Mega-politics tells us that people don’t always say what they want, know what they want, or get what they want. Instead, they think what they need to think... do what they want to do... and get what they deserve. And they end up where they ought to be... carried along by the deep currents of history.
Nobody wants to die, for example, but everybody does. Nobody wants Social Security to go broke. But if not corrected, it will. Both Trump and Biden have pledged not to touch America’s ‘insurance’ programs; so, they can’t be fixed.
And so, it comes to pass that even the greatest empire shuffles towards its own funeral pyre. This happens in plain sight, like an old man dying in a nursing home. It’s a natural, organic corruption, much like the rot that gets into old bones and old trees. They hollow out... they gnarl... and then they break.
The US butts up against $35 trillion in debt... going up at the rate of about $5 billion per day while the interest alone (based on the latest figures, above), tots to $2.4 million per day. Who wants that? Who wants to die? Who wants to saddle his own children with a lifetime of debt? But who can stop it?
Looking out for ourselves, and our Dear Readers, the answer is: probably no one. So, we need to expect the Primary Trend - towards lower real asset prices, higher interest rates, inflation... along with chaos and corruption - to continue. Stay tuned."
"The concept of mass starvation has not been in the forefront of American society for a very long time. Even during the Great Depression the US was majority agrarian and most people knew how to live off the land. In fact, the US has never suffered a true national famine. There have been smaller regional instances of famine (such as during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s), but nothing coming remotely close to the kinds of famines we have seen in Asia, the Eastern Bloc, Africa or the Middle East in the past 100 years.
Even Western Europeans dealt with major famines during the World Wars (like the Dutch Famine) and that experience has left an imprint on their collective consciousness. Most Americans, on the other hand, don’t get it. Because we have lived in relative security and economic affluence for so long the idea of ever having to go without food seems “laughable” to many people. When the notion of economic collapse is brought up they jeer and call it “conspiracy theory.”
Compared to the Great Depression, the US population today is completely removed from agriculture and has no idea what living off the land means. These are not things that can be learned in a few months from books and YouTube videos; they require years of experience to master.
I will say that things have changed dramatically in the past two decades I have been writing for the liberty media. When I started back in 2006 the preparedness movement was incredibly small and often people were afraid to broach such topics in public forums.
In the past several years preparedness culture has EXPLODED in popularity. Millions of Americans are now dedicated survival experts with extensive preps and firearms training. Prepping and shooting is no longer the realm of tinfoil hat “crazies”, now it’s considered cool.
The credit crash of 2008-2009 certainly helped wake people up to the reality of economic instability in the US. Then the covid pandemic, the lockdowns and the attempts at medical tyranny really shocked Americans out of their stupor. Everything we “conspiracy theorists” have been warning about was suddenly confirmed in the span of a couple of years. Every time globalists and governments create a crisis they only inspire more preppers.
The greater problem in terms of famine is not that individual Americans are not aware of the threat; many of them are. The problem is that our infrastructure and logistical systems are designed to fail and there’s not much the average citizen can do about it.
The just-in-time freight system is perhaps one of the worst ever devised in terms of community redundancy. Any disruption no matter how minor could cut off supplies to a town or city for days or weeks. Then there’s the interdependency that comes with food being produced outside most states. If your state does not have a solid agricultural base then it will be reliant on outside food sources during a crisis. What guarantees are there that your region will be able to secure food from elsewhere?
Furthermore, most of the populace, even those that are preparing, have never experienced large scale starvation events before. It’s difficult to adapt mentally to a threat that one has never seen.
I suggest people who want to know what starvation feels like practice it from time to time. Try fasting for 24 hours, then try fasting for 48 hours. See how many days you can go without eating (just be sure to drink plenty of water). My maximum was seven days (after months of practice), and what I found was that after day three the hunger pangs actually stop altogether. You don’t go crazy, you don’t get violent; at most you might get tired, but you will also be surprised at how heightened your thinking becomes and how much energy you still have.
The human body can survive for three weeks or more without a single bite of food. My suspicion is that initial panic over potential hunger is the thing that causes the most violence during famines. People encounter starvation and lose their minds within the first three days. First-stage stomach pains and fogginess causes them to react without thinking and this leads to the widespread riots and other crisis events we are used to seeing in history during food shortages.
Fasting is a way to educate yourself on what it means to starve; it’s not as bad as it seems as long as you have some fat stores in your body. When you hit the point of muscle loss and organ deprivation, that’s when things change and the possibility of death arises. Having some familiarity with the feeling of true hunger will help you to avoid panic should the real thing ever occur in the future.
The greater problem is not what you can endure, though. Watching people you care about starve is much more difficult. This is not something you can practice for and it could be a far more powerful motivator when it comes to looting and crime during a crash.
The goal of course is to avoid famine altogether. Food storage is the foundation of any survival plan. Anyone who claims that jumping right into agriculture and hunting and wild edibles is the solution has never actually had to survive off the land in their lives. The reality is, finding enough food and growing enough food to live on is difficult for most people even in normal times.
During collapse crops are often difficult to plant safely. They can be stolen or destroyed easily and require large communities of people to maintain and protect. Even smaller gardens can draw attention from undesirables and are hard to hide.
Hunting might be useful initially if you live in a rural area, but you won’t be the only person with the same idea and animals will move out of a region quickly if they are being hunted on a daily basis. You’ll have to go further and further out to find them and that’s risky during a crisis.
Wild edibles are nice in spring and summer when they are plentiful, but then again, if you’re hiking around expending more calories that you can get from these plants then the entire exercise is pointless. I tend to find that wild edibles proponents are the most delusional when it comes to the logistics of survival. Survivalists who think they’re going to run to the woods and live off of the random plants they find will probably die.
Growing food, hunting food and foraging food are all supplemental measures, especially in the first years of any crisis event. Without a primary emergency supply most people will not make it. Food storage has been a mainstay of civilization for thousands of years for a reason – It works. When larger secure communities are established then agriculture can return and self sustaining production makes food storage less important. Until then, what you have in your basement or your garage is the only thing that’s going to keep you alive.
Unfortunately, there are some people out there who think they don’t need to store supplies because they plan to take from other people. Firstly, anyone who makes this their Plan A is probably a psychopath and I have zero empathy for them. Secondly, such people won’t stay alive very long. With every violent encounter the risk of injury or death increases; looters and raiders will be whittled down rather quickly as they get picked off by people defending their resources. It’s not like the movies, folks; marauders will disappear swiftly during a crash. After the first year I would be surprised if any of these individuals or groups still exist.
In the meantime, the initial stages of collapse are going to be a shock for many Americans. It could be a grid down event, an economic collapse, a supply chain collapse, etc., but the panic associated with hunger will be ever present. People who understand the nature of famine can avoid panic and organize for safety. They will survive and thrive. People who don’t understand famine will freak out in the first week without food and make detrimental mistakes.
Mental preparedness is just as important as physical preparedness. Keep that in mind as we move forward into uncertain times."
"America and the world are in a battle with evil godless demons for control. This is where all of the problems we face are coming from. It is that simple. Award winning meteorologist, newsman and best-selling author Brian Sussman lays out the plan for total tyranny and domination of everyone’s life in an upcoming book called “Climate Cult: Exposing Their War on Life, Liberty & Property.” Sussman explains, “I know the title to the book is an attention getter, but the ‘climate change’ agenda has all the facets of a cult. The first is doom. They keep telling us if the temperature rises another half degree, it’s going to be the end of the earth as we know it.
If we go back to The Industrial Revolution, which basically got rolling in 1850, we had the use of fossil fuels. We have had billions more people on the planet, countless cars, trucks, planes and rockets. Since the 1850’s, we have only warmed one degree–one degree! That is perfectly in keeping with temperatures as we know it based on geological records. They say another half degree and it’s over. So, they are scaring the pants off people. Then, just like all cults, they look at you as the problem. They say, ‘You are a carbon sinner,’ especially if you live in the United States of America. Shame on you! You are a carbon sinner. Oh, but there is atonement. You can atone by reducing your carbon footprint. You can atone by becoming an activist. You can atone by planting a tree. Then they promise you utopia. These people have partnered with the UN and the World Economic Forum. I have the documents. This climate change agenda will give us no more social injustice. There will be no more social inequity, and we will all live in peace in a brand-new world. These are their plans. It’s frightening, but that is how they get people into this cult.” Sussman contends, the “Climate Cult” wants Marxist control.
Sussman says big business is involved with something called ESG (Environment, Social Governance). Sussman says, “These companies want to play by their ESG scores, and this has become a multi-trillion dollar investment business. People are picking their investment based on a company’s ESG score. The problem is as these companies attempt to fulfill their ESG status and raise their ratings, they are doing it at the expense of the investors. So, it’s really bass- ackwards, and it is biting investors in the shorts. It’s a loser, but the climate change agenda is all in on this.”
Sussman says, “The Biden Administration is full of the ‘climate cult’ idiots, and they are carrying the torch to go forward, not just to end global warming and climate change, it is to end the way we live in America. They believe as Karl Marx did. They believe in the ‘Laws that Matter.’ The Laws that Matter basically say some people are born with a better brain than others. Those with a better brain have a responsibility to rule over those with a lessor brain. Otherwise, those with the lessor brains will kill one another and destroy the planet. That’s what Marx believed, and that’s what the modern-day liberal Democrat party believes to this day. For example, that stupid ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ that recently passed Congress, there is $250 billion to be spent on climate change. This goes to line the pockets of people with degrees that are worthless. It’s stupid.”
Sussman says he wrote the book to try and get young people out of the “Climate Cult,” and he points out, “We have to do something to wake people up. Just like prior to the American Revolution, there was a shining light of truth that went forth. There was an old-fashioned revival that took place, and it gave the people courage to stand up to the biggest military in the history of the world, and guess what, they won, and we are up against a big enemy right now.”
“Two Purple Hearts – Leningrad and Siberia. Youngest man to be decorated by the president. You robbed the Federal Reserve Depository. Life sentence, New York Maximum Security Penitentiary. I’m ready to kick your ass out of the world, war hero.” – "Escape From New York"
"I’m a bit under the weather (sniffles). The good news is that some of the memetic content/graphs I found on the Internet about the current economy probably speak mostly for themselves. So, comments may be shorter than usual. I guess I’ll offer you this shorter post and an IOU for a longer one sometime in the future when I sober up get better.
First off – the dollar and gold used to have (depending on the era) a very similar volatility – at one point dollars were gold. What if the dollar was more volatile than gold, for the first time in 45 years?
How bad has Biden been? Median mortgage payments (average selling price and current interest rates) are higher than Hunter Biden at a Burning Man®.
Click image for larger size.
Homeowners aren’t the only ones paying huge interest payments. Here’s what’s happening on the national debt.
Click image for larger size.
But it didn’t have to be that way. If someone remotely intelligent was in charge at Treasury, it wouldn’t be an issue at all. Don’t know where this snip came from, but it’s spot on:
Janet should be managing a grade school lunch kitchen. How deep does the rot run in the Banking Industrial Complex? O’Keefe tells us tons with one of his people hacks:
When that happened, I really expected that the vibrations would shake the system into a bigger failure by that October – this stuff takes a while to propagate. Instead, the Fed pulled a very cunning move: it printed buttloads of cash, allowed the banks to deposit the crap they had with the Fed™ and then the Fed™ took the losses. Of course, since they haven’t sold the crap the banks gave them, those are “realized” yet, so those losses are like a girlfriend so ugly you make her hide in the closet when your friends come over.
Back in the Before Time, the Fed™ never bought the debt of the United States. Why would they? They debt of the United States was to Ma and Pa Citizen, central banks all around the world, and, (oddly) to the United States when it spent the Social Security funds on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides. Yup, the United States would spend the Social Security cash, and then write itself an IOU and put it (seriously!) into a filing cabinet in D.C.
Can you imagine a job that’s more futile? It’s like I wrote myself an IOU for stealing money from my kid’s college fund to buy beer, and then made my kid file the IOU, knowing full well that the file would experience “surprise combustion” in the backyard fire pit when I sobered up.
You really should be concerned. Unless you want to send me your cash so I can send you an IOU. I promise I won’t blow it on Popcorn, PEZ™, Pantyhose, and Pachyderm Rides."
"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."
"The American retail landscape isn't the same as it was just a few years ago. Businesses that used to be a synonym of success are dying at a pace that is simply astonishing. Brands that used to have thousands of stores across the U.S. are going out of business after struggling for years. Many of them have done everything they could to prevent this from happening, or at least, delay their disappearance. But the economic decline gripping our nation has been unforgiving.
Over the past few years, we've lost more purchasing power than at any other point since the 1970s. We've seen the income gap get wider, with many middle-class Americans falling into the cracks and straight into poverty. The soaring cost of living has made it almost impossible for average U.S. households to save for their future. People are being very careful about their spending because, with each passing month, the cost of bare necessities like rent, food, and gas is getting higher.
That's why seeing boarded up storefronts has become the new normal. In this environment, American retailers are literally fighting for their survival. Now, they are taking every step to streamline their operations and cut costs. That includes reducing their store count even further in order to improve profitability and save their businesses from bankruptcy.
Although for some of them that's too little, too late, others are acting fast before conditions deteriorate any further. If you have a favorite brand or store, make sure to visit it while you can, because the truth is that it might not be there a few months from now. Today, we listed 15 big retailers that announced mass store closings or are going out of business in 2024. Without further ado, let's check out this list."
“Massive stars, abrasive winds, mountains of dust, and energetic light sculpt one of the largest and most picturesque regions of star formation in the Local Group of Galaxies. Known as N11, the region is visible on the upper right of many images of its home galaxy, the Milky Way neighbor known as the Large Magellanic Clouds (LMC).
The above image was taken for scientific purposes by the Hubble Space Telescope and reprocessed for artistry by an amateur to win the Hubble’s Hidden Treasures competition. Although the section imaged above is known as NGC 1763, the entire N11 emission nebula is second in LMC size only to 30 Doradus. Studying the stars in N11 has shown that it actually houses three successive generations of star formation. Compact globules of dark dust housing emerging young stars are also visible around the image.”
"All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there. Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home."
- Rumi, "The Tavern," Ch. 1:, p. 2, from "The Essential Rumi"
