"Behind the Scenes in Swamptopia"

"Behind the Scenes in Swamptopia"

by Jim Kunstler

"Apart from the soporific side-effects of eating all that leftover turkey for three more days after Thursday’s celebration of gluttony, this holiday weekend was, news-wise, as still as the mummy’s tomb, or, rather, Joe Biden’s basement. Yet these post-election days are gravid with portent. The major newspapers and cable news platforms report nothing beyond their heartwarming narrative of Biden risin’ with Woke times a’comin’ - but the casual observer senses powerful intrigues swirling backstage in Swamptopia. Something tells me the scene is about to liven up this week, even explode.

There is the matter of the Kraken. Perhaps Sidney Powell was not speaking just figuratively about the lurking monster of the deep. The Kraken, apparently, is an actual computer system developed by the Department of Defense (DOD) to ferret out malevolent computer programs as might be deployed in cyber-warfare… or janky elections. Miz Powell has had legal consort all year with General Mike Flynn, the former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency railroaded on a fake charge by the FBI, now pardoned, free to speak and act. Do you suppose that Gen. Flynn does not know about the agency’s cyber-warfare capabilities? Or that he does not know skilled military technicians who can spell out, say, in a court of law, exactly how the Kraken might be put to use? Or how the Kraken intersects with the two CIA proprietary election hacking programs, Hammer and Scorecard?

Next, there is the matter of where these agencies stand with each other these days. It was not for nothing that the president sacked cheeky Sec’y of Defense Mark Esper and replaced him with Christopher Miller, a Special Forces warrior, lately, as Deputy Assistant Sec-Def, in charge of counterterrorism, Military Information Support Operations (MISO), Information Operations, unconventional warfare, irregular warfare, direct action, special reconnaissance, foreign internal defense, counter proliferation, sensitive special operations.

Kind of sounds a little bit like exactly the skill-set you’d need to battle the rogue “resistance” operations across several US government agencies in their four-year quest to overthrow the chief executive climaxing in this election caper - for one example, the CIA. Somehow, when I think of the CIA, I think of the sinister John Brennan, architect of RussiaGate and probably also somehow behind the activation of his protégé, “whistleblower” (and CIA agent) Eric Ciaramella, the impeachment mole who was allowed to retreat back into the CIA fortress with no consequences after his seditious deed was done. Notice, Mr. Brennan has been tweeting like mad in recent days denouncing election skeptics. Is he worried about something? All of which raises the questions: what role did the agency play in the election, with its mystifying vote-tallying irregularities? Does Mr. Brennan still wield influence in the CIA? And is the agency an enemy of the people?

Then, what do you suppose really went down at the computer server farm in Frankfurt, Germany, after the election. Chatter on the web has it that the Frankfurt asset was a CIA installation, and that some kind of Army Special Forces unit bum-rushed the joint after November 3, and took possession of computer servers that were used to receive vote tabulations from Dominion machines back in the USA. There’s even rumor of some people getting hurt in the operation (unconfirmed). Do those servers hold actual evidence of vote-tampering? That would be my guess. Perhaps we’ll find out this week.

And if it were the case that the CIA and other actors - perhaps even in foreign countries -worked to rig the election to make absolutely sure that Mr. Trump was finally expelled from office, would this not amount to something like treason? Is the US government at war with itself? If so, does the president not have a duty to do something about it? Is he in the process of doing something… that the public is not yet aware of through and beyond the holiday week? Did Mr. Biden or Kamala Harris know about any of this? Allegations (with actual evidence) emerged in October that Mr. Biden and his family received large sums of money for services rendered from several countries considered not friendly to the USA. Maybe that’s just a sidebar to the election op, but it sure doesn’t look good, considering. A reasonable authority might designate Joe Biden a national security risk. Such a person would not be permitted to take an oath for the highest office in the land.

So, with Thanksgiving behind us, and Christmas a month away (and a very fraught Covid Christmas, at that), and the deadline for the states’ electoral vote certifications and the actual meeting of the electoral collegians looming in between now and then, we might gird our loins for some very weird doings out of Washington, DC. Unless it’s all just a bad dream… a conspiracy theory… a blather of peevish, deplorable nutters who just refuse to bend over and take it good and hard from their betters, as they deserve to. Standing by… just as you are… on developments."

- https://kunstler.com/

"Stop Whinin'..."

“We all got problems. But there’s a great book out called “Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart.” Did you see that? That book says the statute of limitations has expired on all childhood traumas. Get your stuff together and get on with your life, man. Stop whinin’ about what’s wrong, because everybody’s had a rough time, in one way or another.”

- Quincy Jones

"Truth..."

“Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees, reminding us that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations. Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality to paper thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp – and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea in all its immensity cannot be embodied in one tidewashed pebble.”

- Dean Koontz

"America’s Pride In The Economy Is About To Be Greatly Shaken As Tens Of Millions Face Eviction In 2021"

"America’s Pride In The Economy Is About To Be 

Greatly Shaken As Tens Of Millions Face Eviction In 2021"

by Michael Snyder

"Unless there is emergency intervention, tens of millions of Americans could be facing eviction once the holiday season is over. We kicked the can down the road throughout 2020, but all of the rent that was originally owed to landlords all over the country is still due, and they are very eager to collect. Countless landlords are on the verge of financial ruin because of the rent moratoriums which were put in place, and kicking the can down the road even more would be absolutely disastrous for them. Of course it would also be absolutely disastrous if the moratoriums are not extended, because in some states more than half of all households are behind on their rent or mortgage payments, and most of them have no way to pay.

One way or the other, we are about to hit a breaking point. The Aspen Institute is telling us that a whopping 40 million people “could face eviction over the next several months”: "According to research by the Aspen Institute, nearly 40 million Americans could face eviction over the next several months. The only thing holding back the flood right now is the CDC’s eviction moratorium order and a patchwork of state and local protections for renters.

But these moratoriums are only kicking the can down the road. Chief economist for Moody’s Analytics Mark Zandi told the Washington Post that tenants could owe nearly $70 billion in back rent by year’s end. And for landlords left holding the bag, there’s been little relief, as they’ve been forced to take on the role of government - subsidizing housing for millions even as their own taxes, mortgage payments, and other expenses are due.

That is about 12 percent of the entire country. If they get evicted, where are they going to go? Into the streets?

Vox recently interviewed a 48-year-old Texas resident named “Kimberly”, and she says that is exactly where she is headed if she gets evicted: "But after Covid-19 hit, she lost hours at her job as a crew trainer at Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers and found herself on the brink of financial collapse. She fell behind on her rent and when she tried to work with her landlord to set up a repayment plan, she told Vox that she was served an eviction notice. Now, the only thing keeping her in her home is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) national eviction moratorium, which prohibits landlords from evicting qualifying tenants for failing to make rent."

If she’s evicted, Kimberly says she has nowhere to go - and will be homeless for the second time in five years. And there are countless others out there that are just like her. According to Zero Hedge, “at least half of households in Arkansas, Florida and Nevada are not current on rent and mortgage payments”.

We have never seen anything like this in modern American history, and the new lockdowns that are being instituted across the nation will just make things even worse.

Of course there are many Americans that will be able to move in with family, and this has already been happening in very large numbers. In particular, young people are moving back in with their parents on a massive scale. According to the Pew Research Center, “a majority of young adults in the U.S. live with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression”.

The phrase “since the Great Depression” has been popping up a lot lately, hasn’t it? That is because this is literally the first economic depression that the U.S. has experienced since that time. Everywhere we look, we can see the sort of economic devastation that I have been warning was coming for a very long time.

In New Jersey, approximately one-third of all small businesses “have closed down in 2020”: "A third of small businesses in New Jersey have closed down in 2020, according to a report from The Star-Ledger newspaper. “It’s really bad… And without federal dollars coming into New Jersey, the Main Street stores and other establishments are not gonna make it through the winter.” said Eileen Kean, the state director of the National Federation of Independent Business."

New Jersey’s number is higher than the national average, but not by very much. Of course Atlantic City has been hit particularly hard because it is so dependent on tourism. At this point, it is being called “the city without a pulse”: "The boardwalk is empty, the beaches are deserted, and the casinos, though partially reopen, are limping into their fifth month of severely curtailed operations after four months of shutdowns. The coronavirus pandemic skewered the economic engine of this beachside town, taking the city’s vibrancy and its residents’ livelihoods out with it."

Sadly, things are inevitably going to get worse in the months ahead thanks to the new lockdowns. The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment has risen significantly for the past two weeks, and more bad weeks are almost certainly ahead. Needless to say, rising unemployment will mean more Americans being pushed out of their homes and more Americans being pushed into poverty. According to a survey that was released in October, the number of Americans living in poverty has risen by 8 million since May:

"The number of Americans living in poverty grew by 8 million since May, according to a Columbia University study, which found an increase in poverty rates after early coronavirus relief ended without more to follow. Although the federal Cares Act, which gave Americans a one-time stimulus check of $1,200 and unemployed workers an extra $600 each week, was successful at offsetting growing poverty rates in the spring, the effects were short-lived, researchers found in the study published Thursday." Of course that number is more than a month old, and so the true number of Americans that have been forced into poverty is substantially higher by now.

This is what an economic collapse looks like, and even worse days are ahead of us.

The good news is that those that were warned in advance that an economic collapse was coming had time to make preparations for this sort of a scenario. But most Americans never wanted to listen to the warnings, and so now they find themselves in the middle of a storm without an umbrella. Unfortunately, what we have experienced so far is just the leading edge of the storm, and most people still do not realize that."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

“This Collapse Will Devour Millions; Great Depression 2.0; Economic Skillset; Drug Addiction Soars”

Jeremiah Babe,

“This Collapse Will Devour Millions; Great Depression 2.0; 

Economic Skillset; Drug Addiction Soars”

"Hotel Industry Apocalypse: 7 Of 10 US Hotels Say They Will Be Out Of Business In Six Months!"

"Hotel Industry Apocalypse: 7 Of 10 US Hotels 

Say They Will Be Out Of Business In Six Months!"

by Epic Economist

"Hotel owners and retailers have seen their businesses dramatically collapse throughout the current economic recession. Amid a holiday season marked by a critical spike in confirmed viral infections - which previously used to be the most crowded time of the year for both brick-and-mortar retailers and hoteliers - in addition to social distancing rules and the shift to online shopping and remote working, these industries are on the brink of a major a financial catastrophe. 

Since several anchor stores have been closing doors for good to switch to virtual platforms, and the home office trend is considerably intensifying, the empty retail space on malls and vacant hotel rooms are setting the stage for a change in the landscape of both industries, as their owners fall behind on loans and have accumulated billions in debt. Now, every day it passes by, we see an increasing number of permanent store closures, and on the other hand, a recent survey alerted that 7 in 10 hoteliers are going out of business within less than 6 months. In this video, we're going to uncover the apocalyptic state of the hotel and retail industry.

A new survey from the American Hotel and Lodging Association forecasts that seven in ten hoteliers are likely to be out of business in six months. To be precise, 71% of all hotel owners across the country affirmed that without federal aid their businesses wouldn't survive for much longer. The sector, which has been the most impacted by social distancing regulations and the consequent economic downturn, has become a major financial liability since owners couldn't afford to pay their mortgages for months now. 

The federal response of imposing strict lockdowns and letting businesses die will bring enormous financial damage. Several historic and iconic properties continue to be shut down all over the U.S. In the New York area, the owners of 43 New York hotels are delinquent on loans backed by $1.5 billion in bonds. 

Shopping malls and hotels of the nation's biggest cities are struggling to meet their accumulated loan payments. Nationwide, considering that more than a thousand hotel and retail borrowers have defaulted on their loans, over $35 billion in delinquencies were piled up ever since travel and tourism stalled due to virus-related protocols and visits to shopping malls became unappealing and unsafe, particularly now that consumers have an easier online alternative.

At this point, almost 20% of all hotel loans and over 14% of all retail loans generated by commercial real estate lenders and packaged into securities that are sold to investors are currently delinquent. We just had Black Friday, which used to be the kickoff of the frenetic shopping period leading up to Christmas, producing half of a year’s sales for several non-food retailers. But this year, while brick-and-mortar sales were lower than expected, e-commerce has experienced significant growth. 

Evidently, large corporations such as Amazon, Walmart, and Target were the biggest beneficiaries. For the fourth quarter, Amazon's revenues are forecasted to top $100 billion for the first time. By contrast, small business owners that have managed to keep their stores open in the hope to compensate for this year's massive losses with the revenue of the holiday season are coming to the realization that their downfall is inevitable.

As a result, shopping malls are becoming obsolete a lot faster than analysts previously predicted. Experts suggest that hundreds of America's 1,100 malls are likely to shut down. As for the hotel industry, in New York alone, 20% of its hotel rooms could close before the current crisis is over. That accounts for 6,800 rooms that will have to be converted to some other use. 

Countrywide, occupancy rates declined to 33% from 70% during the same time last year, while average room prices fell to $83 per night from $133, reported Cushman & Wakefield. The outcome of this sharp rates drop and the upsurge in vacant rooms, led to 738 borrowers defaulting on hotel loans backed by about $17 billion in bonds as of October 31.

The arrival of a widely accepted vaccine may help, but it won't fix the financial wound opened throughout this crisis. All these businesses are being smashed and wiped out of the map. Indeed, the worst is yet to come, and as a tidal wave of bankruptcies and foreclosures of hotels and retail stores is still forming, when the crash happens - don't be mistaken: it will drag whatever is left of our economy with it.

KEYWORDS: hospitality industry apocalypse, retail apocalypse, hotel industry downfall, economic collapse, economic recession, Great Recession, loan delinquency, Big Short 3.0, store foreclosure, bankruptcy, financial catastrophe, economic downturn, mortgage default, financial damage, economic meltdown, hotel closure, mall closure, financial crisis."

-  https://www.epiceconomist.com

Musical Interlude: Suzanne Ciani, "Anthem"

Suzanne Ciani, "Anthem"

Full screen mode suggested.

"A Look to the Heavens"

“NGC 253 is not only one of the brightest spiral galaxies visible, it is also one of the dustiest. Discovered in 1783 by Caroline Herschel in the constellation of Sculptor, NGC 253 lies only about ten million light-years distant. 

NGC 253 is the largest member of the Sculptor Group of Galaxies, the nearest group to our own Local Group of Galaxies. The dense dark dust accompanies a high star formation rate, giving NGC 253 the designation of starburst galaxy. Visible in the above photograph is the active central nucleus, also known to be a bright source of X-rays and gamma rays.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111220.html

"Dwell on the beauty of life.

Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them."

- Marcus Aurelius

"If Only We Would Listen To It..."

"How do the geese know when to fly to the sun? Who tells them the seasons? How do we, humans, know when it is time to move on? As with the migrant birds, so surely with us; there is a voice within, if only we would listen to it, that tells us so certainly when to go forth into the unknown." 

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

"What Are The Facts?"

“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what 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

And always remember...

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,

however improbable, must be the truth."

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Sherlock Holmes"

"The 'Smartest Man In The Room' Just Joined Sidney Powell's Team"

"The 'Smartest Man In The Room' Just Joined Sidney Powell's Team"

by Andrea Widburg

"In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught.

In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity." 

- Hunter S. Thompson

"In her Georgia complaint, Sidney Powell included the declaration of Navid Keshavarz-Nia, an expert witness who stated under oath that there was massive computer fraud in the 2020 election, all of it intended to secure a victory for Joe Biden. Dr. Kershavarz-Nia's name may not mean a lot to you, but it's one of the weightiest names in the world when it comes to sniffing out cyber-security problems.

We know how important Dr. Kershavarz-Nia is because, just two and a half months ago, the New York Times ran one of its Sunday long-form articles about a massive, multi-million-dollar fraud that a talented grifter ran against the American intelligence and military communities. Dr. Kershavarz-Nia is one of the few people who comes off looking good:

Navid Keshavarz-Nia, those who worked with him said, "was always the smartest person in the room." In doing cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I., he had spent decades connecting top-secret dots. After several months of working with Mr. Courtney, he began connecting those dots too. He did not like where they led.

Not only does Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have an innate intelligence, but he's also got extraordinary academic and practical skills in cyber-fraud detection and analysis. The reason we know about his qualifications is that it takes seven paragraphs for him to list them in the declaration he signed to support the Georgia complaint.

His qualifications include a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in various areas of electrical and computer engineering. In addition, "I have advanced trained from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), DHS office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) and Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT)."

Professionally, Dr. Kershavarz-Nia has spent his career as a cyber-security engineer.  "My experience," he attests," spans 35 years performing technical assessment, mathematical modeling, cyber-attack pattern analysis, and security intelligence[.]" I will not belabor the point. Take it as given that Dr. Kershavarz-Nia may know more about cyber-security than anyone else in America.

So what does the brilliant Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have to say? This:

1. Hammer and Scorecard is real, not a hoax (as Democrats allege), and both are used to manipulate election outcomes.

2. Dominion, ES&S, Scytl, and Smartmatic are all vulnerable to fraud and vote manipulation — and the mainstream media reported on these vulnerabilities in the past.

3. Dominion has been used in other countries to "forge election results."

4. Dominion's corporate structure is deliberately confusing to hide relationships with Venezuela, China, and Cuba.

5. Dominion machines are easily hackable.

6. Dominion memory cards with cryptographic key access to the systems were stolen in 2019.

Although he had no access to the machines, Dr. Kershavarz has looked at available data about the election and the vote results. Based on that information, he concluded:

1. The counts in the disputed states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia) show electronic manipulation.

2. The simultaneous decision in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia to pretend to halt counting votes was unprecedented and demonstrated a coordinated effort to collude toward desired results.

3. One to two percent of votes were forged in Biden's favor.

4. Optical scanners were set to accept unverified, un-validated ballots.

5. The scanners failed to keep records for audits, an outcome that must have been deliberately programmed.

6. The stolen cryptographic key, which applied to all voting systems, was used to alter vote counts.

7. The favorable votes pouring in after hours for Biden could not be accounted for by a Democrat preference for mailed in ballots. They demonstrated manipulation. For example, in Pennsylvania, it was physically impossible to feed 400,000 ballots into the machines within 2–3 hours.

8. Dominion used Chinese parts, and there's reason to believe that China, Venezuela, Cuba interfered in the election.

9. There was a Hammer and Scorecard cyber-attack that altered votes in the battleground states, and then forwarded the results to Scytl servers in Frankfurt, Germany, to avoid detection.

10. The systems failed to produce any auditable results.

Based on the above findings, Dr. Keshavarz-Nia concluded with "high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred to Vice President Biden."

This is going to be tough evidence for Democrats to counter. Back when the naïve Democrats thought Trump would be the one to commit fraud, they held congressional hearings and wrote articles about the voting machines' vulnerability. And with the New York Times touting Dr. Keshavarz-Nia's brilliance and his ability to sniff out fraud, they'll struggle to assert that he's not a reliable expert. Things are getting fun."

- https://www.americanthinker.com/

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

○

Securing the actual servers which were used 

in this massive fraud gives credence to this report:

"US Special Forces Raid and Capture CIA 

Server Farm in Frankfurt, Germany?"

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"Hammer and Scorecard Explained with General Thomas McInerney"

"Charlie is joined by Lt. General Thomas McInerney to detail the shocking allegations surrounding Hammer and Scorecard, weaponized digital tools that allegedly allow our intelligence agencies to alter election results, including those in the United States. Are these tools actually real? Were they deployed in this most recent election? Can we know who is behind these treasonous acts if they did in fact occur? In what might be one of the most important interviews ever conducted on the show, Gen. McInerney lays out an election fraud scheme in extensive detail on a scale never before experienced in America or the world."

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"How They're Stealing the Election - Hammer and Scorecard"

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"700,000 MORE “mail in” ballots were received and counted, than were mailed out to PA residents. PA Senator Doug Mastriano’s joint Resolution will give PA’s Electoral College votes to Trump"

"That's Why..."

"That's why crazy people are so dangerous. 

You think they're nice until they're chaining you up in the garage."

- Michael Buckley

The Daily "Near You?"

Martinez, California, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Have It Done..."

”Never explain. Never apologize. Have it done and let them howl.”

- Winston Churchill

"Market Fantasy Updates 11/29/20"

"Market Fantasy Updates 11/29/20"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

Gregory Mannarino, “Markets: A Look Ahead”

- https://traderschoice.net/

But always remember, folks...