Brighton, Colorado, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, November 24, 2022
"You’re Stealing From Me!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 11/24/22:
"You’re Stealing From Me!"
"When do you stand up to injustice? Have you ever had somebody overcharge you or try to take advantage of you? We need to stand up to these people and tell them “You’re stealing from me!"
Comments here:
"You Are (Not) Alone"
"You Are (Not) Alone"
by Mark Manson
"Each week, I send you three potentially life-changing ideas to help you be a slightly less awful human being. This week, we’re talking about loneliness and all of its many repercussions. Let’s get into it.
1. What's the deal with loneliness? Okay, I gotta admit. I totally teased you guys last week. Towards the end of last week’s email I dropped this bomb: “Loneliness is low-key the root of so many of the mental health and social welfare issues today, yet nobody seems to know how to talk about or solve it.” ...and then moved on as if nothing had happened. No less than eight bajillion of you replied to that email asking me to write about loneliness and explain what I meant, so here we go.
Loneliness is a tough topic to tackle. It’s so widespread, yet we still know little about how or why it happens. First, here are things that we know that are probably true: Loneliness is widespread in the western world. In numerous surveys in the US and Europe, anywhere from 30% to 60% of the population self-reports feeling lonely and/or says that they have no meaningful in-person interactions on a daily basis. What’s more surprising is that younger people often report experiencing more loneliness than older people.
• Loneliness is bad for you. There’s a famous stat that gets bandied about claiming that loneliness shortens your lifespan as much as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. I always think it’s pretty ridiculous how they calculate these factoids, but the point remains: loneliness is unhealthy, both physically and mentally. It raises the risk of anxiety and depression. It also harms your physical health. Studies find that people who are lonely experience more heart disease, high blood pressure, and weaker immune systems.
2. What we don't know about loneliness - Okay, so that sounds pretty bad. But wait, there’s more! Here’s what we don’t know: Why this is happening. Loneliness afflicts the western world in a way that it doesn’t appear to affect other cultures. There are many theories for why this is, but we still don’t have any solid answers. Some point to westerners’ more individualistic culture with less emphasis on family or community. Some blame urbanization and cultural norms around owning your own house, living alone, working independently, etc. Some point to demographic changes: people are having fewer children, move from city to city more often, and spend less time with the elderly. Some point to the decline in religiosity, arguing that religion has historically been the core of human community and camaraderie. It could be any or all of these.
• How to fix it. Again, there are a lot of theories, but we know little for sure. Connections online and through devices seem to be a poor replacement for the emotional and psychological sustenance we get from being around others. Social media and video games are like the diet soda of our emotional well-being — it tastes like we’re hanging out with people, but there are no emotional calories. And in this case, no emotional calories is a bad thing… it’s starving us. Loneliness is both a function of quality and quantity of social interactions. Not only do we need to see people we know often, but we also need to feel some degree of intimacy and trust with those we know.
That said, efforts are being made. In 2018, the UK appointed a “minister of loneliness.” Scandinavian countries such as Denmark are having success with “co-housing policies” where a mixture of elderly retired people and young families in need of childcare are “matched” into housing units where they share living spaces and can support each other. But overall, this appears to be a big issue. It’s an issue to the point where the medical world has taken notice and pharmaceutical companies are even questioning if they could develop a drug to treat loneliness much in the same way there are pills to treat depression (sidenote: please f***ing don’t).
3. The dark path from loneliness - But this still doesn’t get at why I think loneliness is “the low-key root” of so many social and cultural issues today. Psychologically speaking, we’re social animals. Most of the meaning and purpose we derive in life comes via our relationships with other individuals or from our perceived role within society, at large. In fact, it appears that our need for human connection is so strong that much of our ability to form functional beliefs about ourselves and the world is tied to our relationships. Like a muscle, you lose empathy if you don’t use it.
And this is why, when people look at what motivates religious fanatics, conspiracy nuts, and political extremists, time and time again, what they find is abiding loneliness. Rejection and social isolation radicalize people. In the absence of affection and understanding, people fall back onto delusional ideas of revolution and saving the world to give themselves a sense of purpose.
Hannah Arendt, the mid-20th century philosopher and writer, was a German Jew who successfully escaped the Nazis. After the war, she spent years studying totalitarianism, the rise and fall of fascism, the communist revolutions, the horrors of Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini and Mao—and more importantly, why these leaders became so popular so quickly among their followers despite the terror they invoked.
She then produced a classic book called "The Origins of Totalitarianism". The book stretches to nearly 500 pages in length and in the end, she comes to a startling conclusion: she argued that loneliness makes people susceptible to the contempt and fragmentation that causes functional societies to collapse into extremism and violence. I will quote her at length here and hope her progeny don’t sue me:
“Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, the preparation of its executioners and its victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and [meaninglessness] which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of the imperialism at the end of the last century and the breakdown of political institutions and social traditions in our own time.
[...]
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. [The reasoning] which “seizes you as in a vise” appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradiction that seems to confirm a man’s identity outside the relationships with others.”
Basically, once cut off from empathetic social contact to ground us, the only way we make sense of the world is by adopting radical all/nothing views. And within these views, people begin to see a need for radical overthrow of the status quo. They begin to imagine themselves complete victims or destined saviors of society."
Keep in mind, too, that she wrote this in 1951, long before Trump and woke leftists and Twitter were thought to have ruined everything. And perhaps this is the real threat of social media: it does not necessarily make us lonelier or angrier or more selfish or more spiteful — it simply enables the lonely and angry and selfish and spiteful to self-organize and be heard like never before. It used to be that if you were a radical Marxist who wished for violent revolution or if you were a quack who thought Bill Gates was implanting microchips in millions of African children, you kinda had to keep that shit to yourself. You'd cause a lot of awkward silences and shifty side-glances until you’d realized you weren’t being invited to kids’ birthday parties anymore.
So… you’d shut the f**k up. And eventually, you’d start to realize, hey, most people are all right. Things are going to be fine. But now? There’s a forum somewhere full of people with the exact same batshit crazy you have. And what do all humans who have similar yet strange beliefs do when they get together? That’s right, they convince themselves that they’re going to save the fucking world with their knowledge. That is, they go on a crusade. And you and I and everyone else has to listen to them, emboldened and invigorated by their new internet “friends,” as they explain to us at Thanksgiving why Jesus was a communist and the movie Armageddon was really a coded message from QAnon explaining why Bruce Willis doesn’t just run a pedophile ring, but he is secretly a sixteen-year-old boy being held prisoner against his wishes, and...
(F**k, now I’m really going to get sued.) Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah! Loneliness…
Perhaps another way to look at Arendt’s argument is that we run the risk of extremists taking over when it becomes easier for radicals with fringe beliefs to mobilize and organize than the moderate majority. Historically, this mobilization of the extremes was enabled by economic depressions and famines and (gulp) pandemics and whatnot. Today, perhaps social media and smartphones have inadvertently made that mobilization more possible.
But who knows… I could be wrong about all of this. The fact is, we still don’t know enough to say for sure. Until next week..."
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Related:
The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"
"The Winter of Listening"
"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.
What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.
What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.
All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.
And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."
- David Whyte,
"The House of Belonging"
"Do You Believe..."
“Do you believe,’ said Candide, ‘that men have always massacred each other as they do today, that they have always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels, gluttons, drunkards, misers, envious, ambitious, bloody-minded, calumniators, debauchees, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools?”
“Do you believe,” said Martin, “that hawks have always eaten pigeons when they have found them?”
- Voltaire
"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."
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"A Thanksgiving Nightmare! I Have Been Up For 30 Hours!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 11/24/22:
"A Thanksgiving Nightmare! I Have Been Up For 30 Hours!"
"In today's vlog I have been up for 30 hours after rushing my wife to the hospital. It's Thanksgiving today and we have a lot to be thankful for over the last few days! Thank you so much for watching and we'll see you in the next video!"
Comments here:
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Related, sadly:
"We All Get Plucked in the End"
"We All Get Plucked in the End"
By Bill Bonner
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – "As our friend Nassim Taleb reminds us, there’s a downside to being a turkey. It’s called Thanksgiving. Every day for 1,000 days, it gets its food. The turkey gets used to it. It feels pretty good about things. Around the feed trough, it is common knowledge that the food “always” comes. And there is no turkey alive who can contradict it.
The more intellectual turkeys spin out theories to explain their good fortune. One says it’s because of turkey exceptionalism: “The food always comes because we’re turkeys, not starlings or pigeons. We are special. We don’t have to peck around on the ground trying to find crumbs or scratch in the dirt to find worms. We’re a superior bird; we have access to unlimited food.”
Another has a different hypothesis – better leadership: “We always get fed because our president has figured out how to make the farmers feed us. He’s the best turkey president ever. If the farmer is a little late, he knows how to make turkey life great again. Didn’t you notice? He takes three steps backward and makes a loud gobbling noise. That usually does it. If it doesn’t, he just keeps gobbling until the food comes. Always works. Always.”
And yet another pipes up: “Oh, enough with your fancy theories. We always get fed because that’s just the way it is. It’s nature.” “No, it’s not nature,” offers another. “It’s because the fix is in. The farmer has to feed us, or he’ll be charged with animal abuse. He has to keep the food coming; he has no choice.”
Bad Feather Day: But then, as the fourth Thursday of November approaches, the theories are put to the test. All are proved incorrect. The food doesn’t come. Instead, the turkeys are ushered into a special part of the farm complex where they’ve never been before. There is something disquieting about it. The turkeys begin to whisper among themselves. One says he hears cries coming from the next room. All of them notice the sounds of machinery… heavy machinery… and a few soft feathers floating through the air. “What’s going on…?” they wonder, one to another. And then, they begin to panic, running helter-skelter, hoping to escape.
Up until that day, the food came every day. Day after day… the sun shone… and along came the farmer with more grain. And then, without warning, everything changed for the turkey. Worse than a bad feather day… it was the final scene. The curtain fell. The court adjourned.
Rational and Normal: Meanwhile, over in the stock market, the sun still shines. Heck, the more danger signs we see, the more the market goes up. But as the SEC is quick to add: Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. You may flip a hundred coins and get heads every time. That doesn’t mean that the next one won’t come up tails.
We see the turkey’s life from the farmer’s perspective. It is not all gravy and sweet potatoes. But it is very predictable, with a definite beginning and a certain end. And a purpose. We’re tempted to make an analogy to the stock market. But there is nothing definite about the stock market. It can famously stay irrational a lot longer than you can stay solvent. But it can also stay solvent longer than you can stay irrational.
We assume that as long as the Federal Reserve is adding money to it, it will continue to go up. In other words, with the Fed adding so many fake billions, the turkeys might think higher prices are “rational” and “normal”… and that only rug-chewing doom-and-gloomers would expect it to go down.
Get Plucked: And yet… in the stock market, we’re the turkeys, not the farmers. We spin out our own theories. “Stock prices always go up over the long run,” says one simpleton. “Now, with the enlightened management of the Fed, we’re pretty much assured that nothing will go wrong,” says another. “The fix is in… They have to keep pumping up the stock market or the whole shebang will fall apart.”
But backstage, Mr. Market is sharpening his blades. He’ll decide for himself when we all get plucked. Have a nice Thanksgiving."
"Here’s The Real Story About Thanksgiving You’ve Never Heard"
“Here’s The Real Story About Thanksgiving You’ve Never Heard”
Especially the parts about Squanto the “friendly Indian.”
by Nick Bauman
“The Thanksgiving story you know probably goes a bit like this: English Pilgrims, seeking religious freedom, landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they found a rich land full of animals and were greeted by a friendly Indian named Squanto, who taught them how to plant corn. The true story is more complicated. Once you learn about the real Squanto- also known as Tisquantum- you’ll have a great yarn to tell your family over the Thanksgiving table.
I asked historian Charles Mann, the author of “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus”, and Paula Peters, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe and an expert on Wampanoag history, to tell me the real story. “This is not revisionist history,” Peters promised. “This is history that’s just been overlooked because people have become very, very comfortable with the story of happy Pilgrims and friendly Indians. They’re very content with that- even to the point where no one really questioned how is it that Squanto knew how to speak perfect English when they came.”
Here’s what really happened. In 1614, six years before the Pilgrims landed in modern-day Massachusetts, an Englishman named Thomas Hunt kidnapped Tisquantum from his village, Patuxet, which was part of a group of villages known as the Wampanoag confederation. (Europeans had started visiting the northeast of what is now the United States by the 1520s, and probably as early as the 1480s.) Hunt took Tisquantum and around two dozen other kidnapped Wampanoag to Spain, where he tried to sell them into slavery.
“It caused quite a commotion when this guy showed up trying to sell these people,” Mann said. “A bunch of people in the church said no way.” Tisquantum escaped slavery- with the help of Catholic friars, according to some accounts- then somehow found his way to England. He finally made it back to what is now Massachusetts in 1619. As far as historians can tell, Tisquantum was the only one of the kidnapped Wampanoags to ever return to North America, Peters notes.
As far as historians can tell, Tisquantum was the only one of the kidnapped Wampanoags to ever return to North America. But while Tisquantum was in Europe, an epidemic had swept across New England. “The account that’s recorded by Gov. Bradford of Plymouth Plantation is that there’s a shipwreck of French sailors that year on Cape Cod,” Mann said. “One of them carried some disease and it wiped out a huge percentage of the population in coastal new England. The guess is it was some kind of viral hepatitis, which is easily communicated in water. It exploded like chains of firecrackers.”
When Tisquantum returned to Patuxet, he found that he was the village’s only survivor. “Into this bumbled the Pilgrims,” Mann said. “They had shown up in New England a few weeks before winter. Up until the Pilgrims, the pattern had been pretty clear. Europeans would show up, and Indians would be interested in their trade goods, but they were really uninterested in letting [Europeans] permanently occupy land.” Often, armed native people would even force Europeans to leave if they attempted to stay too long.
This time, the Europeans wanted to stay, and the disease that had decimated Patuxet ensured that they had a place to settle. “Patuxet ultimately becomes Plymouth,” Peters explained. “They find this cleared land and just the bones of the Indians. They called it divine providence: God killed these Indians so we could live here.” A website Peters helped create for the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims’ arrival puts it even more bluntly: “The graveyard of [Tisquantum's] people became Plymouth Colony.”
Massasoit, a local Wampanoag leader, didn’t trust Tisquantum. “He looks at this guy and smells trouble,” Mann said. Massasoit kept Tisquantum under what was essentially house arrest until the Pilgrims showed up and promptly started starving to death.
Patuxet wasn’t the only native village decimated by the plague. The entire Wampanoag confederation had been badly hit – as much as 75 percent of the Wampanoag population was wiped out, Mann said. But the Narragansett, a rival neighboring group, basically weren’t affected by the disease at all. That put the Wampanoag in a precarious strategic position. Massasoit had an idea. “He decides we’ll ally with these guys, set up a good trading relationship, control supply of English goods, and the Narragansett won’t be able to attack us,” Mann said. On March 22, 1621, Massasoit went to meet with the Pilgrims. He brought Tisquantum along to translate.
Mann described the meeting in a 2005 article in Smithsonian Magazine: “Tisquantum most likely was not the name he was given at birth. In that part of the Northeast, tisquantum referred to rage, especially the rage of manitou, the world-suffusing spiritual power at the heart of coastal Indians’ religious beliefs. When Tisquantum approached the Pilgrims and identified himself by that sobriquet, it was as if he had stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, I’m the Wrath of God.”
Massasoit was right not to trust Tisquantum, who soon tried to pit the Pilgrims against him. But the plan didn’t work: Massasoit “is just pissed off and demands the Pilgrims hand him over because he’s gonna execute him,” Mann said. The Pilgrims didn’t. Instead, Tisquantum stayed in the colony with them, helping them prepare for the next winter.
“Never did the newcomers ask themselves why he might be making himself essential,” Mann wrote in Smithsonian. “But from the Pilgrims’ accounts of their dealings with him, the answer seems clear: the alternative to staying in Plymouth was returning to Massasoit and renewed captivity.”
It’s all a lot more complicated – Machiavellian, even – than the story you might have learned. Mann in Smithsonian again: “By fall the settlers’ situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with “some ninety men,” Winslow later recalled, most of them with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.”
So what does this all mean? “While it was by far not the first occasion of human trafficking conducted by European explorers to the new world, the capture of Squanto and his fellow tribesmen would forever alter the course of history for people on two continents,” Peters wrote on the anniversary website. “We learn about Columbus landing in 1492 and it’s as if nothing happened for over 100 years until the Pilgrims landed,” Mann added. “But the Tisquantum story gives you this tiny peek into that all the people involved had been interacting for more than a century. And today, of course, the Wampanoag are still around.”
Wednesday, November 23, 2022
"Breaking: ALL Ukraine Nuclear Reactors Shut Down, Nationwide Blackouts, Europe Gets Ready for War"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 11/23/22:
"Breaking: ALL Ukraine Nuclear Reactors Shut Down,
Nationwide Blackouts, Europe Gets Ready for War"
"All of Ukraines nuclear power plants have been disconnected from the grid. Germany moves closer to conflict, Czech Republic gets ready for conflict with Russia. Russia assembles hundreds of thousands of troops and new equipment for winter offensive. Bird flu is OUT OF CONTROL, China is stockpiling gold as biggest outbreak of virus to date is forcing lockdowns; Chinese are rioting in response. The Canadian government amends bill to practically take ALL of Canadians semiautomatic firearms. Dystopia or Mad Max? Get ready for both!"
Comments here:
"Customers Are Pulling All Their Money Out Of The Banks, Is It Time For You?"
Jeremiah Babe, 11/23/22:
"Customers Are Pulling All Their Money Out
Of The Banks, Is It Time For You?"
Comments here:
"The Day America Died, the Government Killed It"
Full screen recommended.
Gerald Celente, Judge Andrew Napolitano, 11/23/22:
"The Day America Died, the Government Killed It"
"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."
Comments here:
"Amazon Retail Stores Are Closing Down As Jeff Bezos Warns Hard Times Are Coming"
Full screen recommended.
"Amazon Retail Stores Are Closing Down As
Jeff Bezos Warns Hard Times Are Coming"
by Epic Economist
"As the holiday season approaches, fears of a deep recession continue to grow, and now the world’s largest e-commerce retailer, Amazon, has started to close several brick-and-mortar locations, shut down warehouses, sharply downsize its headcounts and abandon expansion plans amid declining sales. Founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos recently shared an ominous warning telling consumers and business owners that hard times are coming. Now it is time to hope for the best but prepare for the worst, according to Bezos, who is urging people to start holding off their purchases and save money to navigate through the downturn that is ahead. More and more high-profile executives are sharing their concerns about the challenges we will be facing as we enter 2023. The numbers are grim and the outlook is even grimmer.
The holidays are a time when American consumers typically prepare for making some big-ticket expenses amid retail discounts and big sales events such as Prime Day and Black Friday. But according to one of the world’s richest men and founder of e-commerce giant Amazon, Jeff Bezos, that might not be a good move this year. As economic conditions in the United States continue to deteriorate, the billionaire is telling shoppers and business owners that intend to make big purchases in the coming months to postpone their spending plans for the time being because holding a balance right now may throw them into trouble later on.
Bezos said American families should avoid big-ticket purchases such as cars and televisions not to compromise their finances as we head to a period of economic uncertainty. "If you are an individual and you are thinking about buying a large-screen TV, maybe slow that down, keep that cash, and see what happens. Same thing with a refrigerator, a new car, whatever. Just take some risk off the table,” the billionaire advised.
Amazon, which will update investors early next month, is grappling with a decline in its e-commerce sales. In October, weaker-than-expected earnings results led the company’s shares to crash by 20% in a single day. The e-commerce retailer has started to tighten its belt, too. Under the command of new CEO Andy Jassy, the company has made some cutbacks, including a hiring freeze and canceled or delayed new projects. All in all, the company is closing almost 70 retail stores, with 66 of them located in the US.
The company also announced that it is scrapping plans to build dozens of warehouse facilities across the United States as sales slow down. In the second quarter, Amazon disclosed plans to reduce its workforce by 99,000 after consumers started to back off from discretionary spending, CNBC said. A couple of weeks ago, the e-commerce behemoth announced that it will start to lay off about 10,000 this month. The job cuts are expected to target retail, human resources departments, and tech jobs, even as the holiday shopping season gets underway.
On Thursday, Amazon said it will continue to lay off employees in the coming year as the company is still in the middle of its annual operating planning process, and business leaders are still determining the need for further job cuts. According to Bezos, it’s difficult to predict when this massive downturn will end, so “you just have to try and be reasonable about it, and take as much risk off the table as you can for yourself”. “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,” the billionaire stressed because very challenging times are coming for all of us."
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
"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."
"For Nothing Is Fixed..."
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."
- James Baldwin
Free Download: R.D. Laing, "The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness"
"The Divided Self:
An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness"
by R.D. Laing
"Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label. Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left..”
"First published in 1960, this watershed work aimed to make madness comprehensible, and in doing so revolutionized the way we perceive mental illness. Using case studies of patients he had worked with, psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that psychosis is not a medical condition but an outcome of the 'divided self', or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world.”
Freely download “The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness”,
by R.D. Laing, here:
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"Insights Of R.D. Laing"
"Decades ago, psychiatrist R.D. Laing developed three rules by which he believed a pathological family (one suffering from abuse, alcoholism, etc.) can keep its pathology hidden from even its own family members. Adherence to these three rules allows perpetrators, victims, and observers to maintain the fantasy that they are all one big, happy family. The rules are:
Rule A: Don't talk about the problems and abject conditions;
Rule A1: Rule A does not exist;
Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A1, and/or A2."
“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.”
“Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.”
“We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”
“Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
“We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.”
"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent."
“Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
“We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.”
"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent."
The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke ,"A Walk"
"A Walk"
"My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces."
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Warning: Stock Up Now, They Are Coming for Everything"
Canadian Prepper, 11/23/22:
"Alert! Warning: Stock Up Now,
They Are Coming for Everything"
"This Is Unbelievable! They finally did it,
this is your last chance before the bill goes through."
Comments here:
A Must View! "Where Does It Go From Here?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 11/23/22:
"Where Does It Go From Here?"
"There’s so much happening in the economy that’s absolutely amazing. Just when you think you’ve heard it all there’s more stuff to talk about."
Comments here:
"Trillions Upon Trillions Of Dollars Of Wealth Is Being Wiped Out As The 'Everything Collapse' Accelerates"
Full screen recommended.
"Trillions Upon Trillions Of Dollars Of Wealth Is Being
Wiped Out As The 'Everything Collapse' Accelerates"
by Michael Snyder
"Have you checked on the health of your investments lately? If not, you may be surprised to find out where things currently stand. As the “everything collapse” accelerates, trillions upon trillions of dollars of wealth is being wiped out. Many that thought that they were financially set for the rest of their lives are now in panic mode as asset values rapidly crumble. Just look at what happened to Sam Bankman-Fried. He was worth 16 billion dollars coming into this month, and now the value of his assets has been “reduced to zero”. In fact, when you factor in all the money that he owes to creditors, it is likely that his net worth is actually less than zero. That is how fast it can happen.
Overall, the cryptocurrency industry “has lost more than $1.4 trillion in value this year”…"The cryptocurrency market has lost more than $1.4 trillion in value this year as the industry has been plagued with problems from failed projects to a liquidity crunch, exacerbated by the fall of FTX, once one of the world’s largest exchanges."
FTX wasn’t the first domino to fall, and it certainly won’t be the last. In fact, now we are being warned that Genesis “may need to file for bankruptcy”…"Digital-asset brokerage Genesis is struggling to raise fresh cash for its lending unit, and it’s warning potential investors that it may need to file for bankruptcy if its efforts fail, according to people with knowledge of the matter."
Ouch. If Genesis fails, that is going to hurt. So why is Genesis in so much trouble? Well, it turns out that Genesis had “$175 million locked in an FTX trading account”…"Genesis has spent the past several days seeking at least $1 billion in fresh capital, said the people, who asked not to be identified because discussions are private. That included talks over a potential investment from crypto exchange Binance, they said, but funding so far has failed to materialize. The rush for funding was precipitated by a liquidity crunch at the lender after the sudden collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. Genesis halted redemptions shortly after revealing on Nov. 10 that it had $175 million locked in an FTX trading account."
Needless to say, that 175 million dollars is now gone and it isn’t coming back. Meanwhile, Coinbase continues to spiral downhill as well. According to Axios, the market cap for Coinbase has now fallen under 10 billion dollars…"The market capitalization of Coinbase just dropped below $10 billion. This time last year, it was more than $70 billion."
Of course it isn’t just the crypto industry that is in enormous trouble. For years, Tesla’s stock price just kept going higher and higher. But now Tesla’s market value is about 670 billion dollars lower than it was at this time last year…"Business Insider reports that Tesla’s market valuation has plummeted by nearly $700 billion from its peak a year ago. Insider notes that the $670 billion decline is equivalent to the market value of three Disneys, four Nikes, or six Starbucks."
Meanwhile, ordinary U.S. consumers are losing a tremendous amount of wealth as well. According to the New York Post, U.S. homeowners “lost a staggering $1.3 trillion in home equity in the third quarter”…"US homeowners lost a staggering $1.3 trillion in home equity in the third quarter during a major slump in the housing sector, according to data published by mortgage analytics firm Black Knight on Tuesday."
Home equity – broadly defined as the value of a homeowner’s property minus what is still owed on their mortgage – has plummeted during a rapid market correction. The equity losses in just three months were “by far the largest quarterly decline on record by dollar value and the largest since 2009 on a percentage basis,” according to Black Knight data & analytics president Ben Graboske. We have never seen a quarter like that before. Not even during the crisis of 2008 and 2009 did we see such a huge quarterly loss.
A new housing crash is here, and it has already gone global. In fact, Spain has already developed a plan to offer “mortgage support relief” to over a million Spanish households…"Spain’s cabinet on Tuesday gave its approval to mortgage relief support for more than one million vulnerable households and help for middle-class families a day after the government and banks reached an agreement in principle. The measures are subject to final negotiations with banking associations, Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said, adding that banks had a month to sign up ahead of their planned implementation next year."
Sadly, we will see much more government intervention all over the western world as this nightmare gets even worse in the months ahead. The pace of layoffs is really starting to pick up, and there is a lot of fear out there right now. Just about everyone can feel that very tough times are in front of us, and some experts are now issuing bold pronouncements that are quite chilling.
For example, Nouriel Roubini is warning that what we are facing is probably going to be “as bad as during the Global Financial Crisis”… “History suggests it’s going to be near mission impossible to avoid a hard landing. You’re going to get not only inflation, not only a recession, but what I call the ‘Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.’ So it’s much worse than the ’70s, and it’s probably as bad as during the Global Financial Crisis.”
Actually, if all we go through is a repeat of what we experienced in 2008 and 2009 we would be extremely fortunate. Because the truth is that it isn’t just the economy that is failing. As I have repeatedly warned my regular readers, what we are now witnessing is literally the collapse of everything. Our entire society is slowly but surely coming apart at the seams all around us, but most people still expect that conditions will eventually return to “normal”. Unfortunately, “normal” has left the building, and a tremendous amount of pain is ahead."
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Related:
Bill Bonner, "Beyond Turkey"
"Beyond Turkey"
The fate of fake meat, SBF's woke dynasty,
the meme stock mess and plenty more...
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - "We saw yesterday that – like it or not – leaves fall in the cool autumn air. Like it or not, the stocks that rise the most in the bubble…tumble furthest in the bust. And, boo hoo, the greatest geniuses of the low-interest era turn out to be the biggest dumbos when rates revert to normal.
We watched the meteoric rise of SBF, for example. Readers wondering who, exactly, is in the ‘elite’ that we keep talking about, have to look no further than Sam Bankman-Fried. James Kuntsler explains: "The Bankman-Fried extended family is the quintessence of Woke aristocracy. Dad Joe Bankman and mom Barbara Fried are both law professors at Stanford. She also acted as a money-bundler for the Democratic Party and ran two non-profit “voter registration” orgs (against the IRS laws which only permit non-partisan organized voter registration).
Brother Gabe Bankman-Fried headed a non-profit named Guarding Against Pandemics (funded by Sam), which lobbies Congress to construct new platforms for medical tyranny. Aunt Linda Fried is Dean of Columbia U’s Public Health school, and is associated with Johns Hopkins, which ran the October 2019 Event 201 pandemic drill (sponsored by the Gates Foundation) months before the Covid-19 outbreak.
Sam’s girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, ran the Alameda Investments arm of the FTX empire (that is, FTX’s own money laundromat). Her dad, Glenn Ellison, is chair of MIT’s Econ School. His former colleague on the MIT Econ faculty, Gary Gensler, who specialized in blockchains there, is now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that Sam Bankman-Fried was attempting to rope into a regulation scheme to eliminate FTX’s crypto-currency competitors."
But all those illustrious, Deep State connections didn’t stop Mr. Market from kicking SBF in the pants. And lo! Mr. Market now has his butt-kicking boots on.
Beyond Hope: Yesterday, the major indexes rose; the bounce continues. But it won’t save the disruptors. They’re getting disrupted anyway. Bankman is bankrupt. Carvana crashed when used car prices went back to normal. Zillow was wrecked when its algorithm failed to notice mortgage rates heading back to normal. Meme stocks – like GameStop – are being un-memed. And Beyond Meat – the turkey’s great hope – is almost beyond hope.
During its heyday…which was only about a year ago…GameStop lovers would buy the stock just to show themselves how cool they were. All it took was a suspicion on Reddit that a big, savvy investor – preferably a hedge fund – was selling the stock short and they were on the case like flies in an outhouse. The little, un-savvy guys bought the stock. The price soared. And the ‘short’ lost money. (Or, the ‘short’ had merely given out the word that he was short, while actually having a big long position, and made a lot of money as the stock went up.) Now, we’re still far from ‘normal,’ but we can see it from here. GameStop has lost 70% from its peak. And in ‘normal’ times investors don’t buy stocks just to spite the pros. They buy them because they think they offer good value.
Which brings us to Beyond Meat. Anytime a company advertises itself as doing good…rather than merely trying to make a buck (such as FTX, which claimed to be only making money so it could contribute to charities)…watch your wallet. Beyond Meat makes plant-based food that looks like meat. For people who like meat but don’t want to eat dead animals…it offered a solution. And for investors who worried about the flatulence of bovines…or the energy required to raise animals…or the cruelty of slaughtering them, Beyond Meat offered an opportunity. They could put their money where their mouths were.
Beyond Reason: The trouble was…they didn’t seem to want to put their mouths where the Beyond products were. But we’ll come to that in a minute. The Wall Street Journal reports: "In May 2019, Beyond launched one of the most successful initial public offerings by a major company in more than two decades…Then…While Beyond’s sales grew 56% to $465 million between 2019 and 20121, its costs and debt grew far faster.
In May, 2019, the stock was trading at $66. By July it was over $200. Another Bubble Epoch success story. Beyond was disrupting the whole animal protein business. Why go to all the trouble – not to mention incurring the environmental costs – of raising, feeding, and slaughtering animals if you could get the same taste and nutrition from something produced in a factory?
But while the Bubble Epoch sows success stories, the Bust Era reaps failures. WSJ continues: "US grocery sales of plant-based meat substitutes are declining, and rival imitation-meat makers are capturing market share. Beyond’s stock is down 83% in the last 12 months. Beyond’s losses deepened from $12 million to $182 million while its debt climbed to $1.1 billion between 2019 and 2021. The company’s losses in the nine months that ended Oct.1 were $299 million…"
Let’s see… Falling sales. A profit margin of about NEGATIVE 80% (for every $1 in sales, the company loses 80 cents). More than a billion in debt. The sales and margin figures make Beyond’s debt very high risk. And the carrying cost of high-yield business debt is rising fast. Too bad for the turkeys, but Beyond Meat may soon be dead meat."
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