Alan Parsons Project, “Ammonia Avenue”
So, we rise from the rubble...
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Tuesday, December 8, 2020
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Globular clusters once ruled the Milky Way. Back in the old days, back when our Galaxy first formed, perhaps thousands of globular clusters roamed our Galaxy. Today, there are less than 200 left. Many globular clusters were destroyed over the eons by repeated fateful encounters with each other or the Galactic center. Surviving relics are older than any Earth fossil, older than any other structures in our Galaxy, and limit the universe itself in raw age.
There are few, if any, young globular clusters in our Milky Way Galaxy because conditions are not ripe for more to form. Pictured above by the Hubble Space Telescope are about 100,000 of M72's stars. M72, which spans about 50 light years and lies about 50,000 light years away, can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Water Bearer (Aquarius).”
- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120819.html
"A Wise Man Once Said..."
“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”
- “Dr. Meredith Grey”, “Grey’s Anatomy"
Chet Raymo, “On Saying ‘I Don't Know’"
“On Saying ‘I Don't Know’"
by Chet Raymo
"When Charles and Emma Darwin bought the house that would be their family home for forty years, at Downe, sixteen miles south of London, one of Charles' first improvements was to have the flints removed from the property's chalky meadow. The glassy stones were more than an agricultural nuisance; they were a puzzle to be solved. The countryside about Downe is pretty much pure chalk, and Darwin was confident he knew where the chalk came from: the calcerous deposits of the myriad planktonic organisms that lived in a sea that was once superincumbant upon the land. But what was the origin of the flints and how did they find their way into the chalk?
Tramp across any plowed field in England's chalky North or South Downs and these fist-sized nodules of pure, hard, yellow silica are common underfoot. In the white cliffs along the English Channel they can sometimes be seen interspersed in the chalk as dark bands. The flints are chemically very different from chalk, and their presence in the otherwise pure calcium carbonate has long been something of a geological mystery.
Darwin was baffled. The most plausible modern explanation is that the nodules had their origin in siliceous sponges that grew on the sea floor and other siliceous marine microfossils. When these organisms died, their substance dissolved in sea water and was dispersed within the carbonate ooze, then precipitated out around other organic remains in a process called petrification. This modern explanation sounds a little iffy to me. I'm no geologist, but if someone asked me where the flints came from, I'd say with Darwin: "I don't know." Those three little words - "I don't know" - may be modern science's most important contribution to the world. Yes, we have learned an astonishing amount about how the world works, but of equal significance is our growing awareness of how much we don't know. The physician/essayist Lewis Thomas wrote: "The greatest of all the accomplishments of twentieth-century science has been the discovery of human ignorance."
Charles Darwin was certainly not adverse to saying "I don't know," and did so frequently in his many letters to family and friends. He was especially ready to confess his ignorance with regard to the big questions, the questions traditionally addressed by religion. Like Einstein and other great scientific minds after him, he was deeply conscious of the profound mystery of existence, and reluctant to cover his ignorance with myth and fable.
In a letter to the American biologist Asa Gray, Darwin wrote: "I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can."
The physicist Heinz Pagels might have been describing Charles Darwin when he wrote: "The capacity to tolerate complexity and welcome contradiction, not the need for simplicity and certainty, is the attribute of an explorer. Centuries ago, when some people suspended their search for absolute truth and began instead to ask how things worked, modern science was born. Curiously, it was by abandoning the search for absolute truth that science began to make progress, opening the material universe to human exploration."
Consciousness of our ignorance is a very modern thing, and an open door to mystery. Darwin counted himself an agnostic, but in his reverence for the creative agency of nature I would count him a devoutly religious man. "There is a grandeur in this view of life," he famously wrote on the last page of "The Origin of Species"; the grandeur Darwin spoke of has more of the divine about it than did any Olympian diety.
Today, Darwin's home has been lovingly restored to what it was in his lifetime, and a visitor can almost feel the spirit of the great man moving through the rooms that once bustled with happy family life. A collection of flints is arrayed on a table in Darwin's cluttered study, as they might have been when Darwin sat beside them pondering their meaning. Those glassy stones were a adamantine reminder of how rich was the mystery of existence and how little of it he yet understood.”
"Acceptance..."
"Acceptance is a crucial step forward for those who prefer the idea of living this life over simply existing within it. Accept all that you've said and what you've done, because you cannot change your past. Accept the idea of the unknown, because the future is the unknown waiting patiently to reveal itself. Accept the person you have become thus far in your journey, because you are the only person who will be there with you when you finish it. Do all of this so that you may never find yourself having to accept regret that haunts you at two a.m., leaving you sweaty and broken hearted. All you have is this minute; not this hour, or this day, or this year. Live in this minute so that you won't get stuck simply existing with your guilty past, or with nothing but anxiety for the future."
- Margaret E. Rise
"Market Fantasy Updates PM 12/8/20"
"Market Fantasy Updates PM 12/8/20"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Gregory Mannarino, PM 12/8/20:
"Freak Show: Market Hits All-Time New High;
I Reveal A Secret!"
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Updated live.
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Daily Update (Dec. 8th to Dec. 10th)
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Insanity...
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And now... The End Game...
"Science Über Alles"
"Science Über Alles"
by Bill Bonner
"But the Earth does move!"
– Physicist and philosopher, Galileo Galilei,
recanting his recantation, after being tried for heresy.
WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – "Now in its tenth month in the U.S., the coronavirus is becoming as familiar as bad breath. And many of the things we knew for sure about it in March… well… we’re not so sure anymore.
At first, we were told that face masks weren’t important. Later, we were told that the public health officials simply lied scientifically; they were afraid people might buy up all the available masks… thus depriving the “first line defenders” of their precious armor. Then, face masks became compulsory. “The science” tells us that they help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. But if that were so, how come places that require face masks don’t have lower case counts? According to the COVID Tracking Project, there is no difference in caseloads between places where face masks are required by law… and places where they are not. We don’t know whether face masks help or not. But neither do the “scientists.”
Evolving Science: Today, we write with no new information. Instead, we have an old observation: Science is overrated. Every society has its elites – people with brains, ambition, talent, and confidence. These elites turn to government to get power. Then, they use that power to get money.
In the very old days, they claimed a special relationship with God. Today, it is scientific Truth that sits on their shoulders and whispers in their ears. But science is never fixed… never solid… never, ever figured out. Instead, it drifts on a river of uncertainty… picking up useful insights along the way… but never knowing where it is going, and never arriving at its final destination. One hypothesis is put forward. And then, discredited, another takes its place.
Aristotle wrote his essay, "Physics", in the 4th century BC. Then came Ptolemy… Copernicus… Galileo… Newton… and Einstein. And then, leaving Einstein like a baby abandoned in the bullrushes, came Werner Heisenberg, with his quantum physics. Each one brought not just an incremental improvement, but a revolution. Each one came up with a better model. But none discovered the Complete Truth.
Always in Doubt: Only a quack scientist would ever say, “Lockdowns and face masks work.” Real scientists know that lockdowns and face masks are only ways to implement a hypothesis…that the coronavirus can be slowed by putting up barriers, which itself is just part of another hypothesis…that we should slow down the virus rather than let it speed up, a subset of still another hypothesis that it is better not to get the virus than to get it…which is just a subset of a further hypothesis, and so on.
Scientists never know anything for sure. Everything is a hypothesis. And it is only valid until it is disproven. Always and everywhere is doubt. We have only a few pieces of the puzzle. Yes, we add pieces from time to time… And yes, we have a better picture today than we had 100 years ago. But a real scientist knows that a few more pieces might alter the scene completely.
Brightest and Best: Pharaoh claimed to be a god himself. Later kings and queens claimed to have been divinely appointed. And now, we have leaders who think they have the right to boss us around – as long as they get a majority vote in the Electoral College.
When few people could read, the elites were said to have the Truth available to them – and only them – in the sacred books. And then, when reading and writing became ubiquitous, the Truth was made available to all through the public schools. There, children were taught to pledge allegiance to the flag and to the Republic for which it stands. In “civics” class, they learned that democracy inevitably puts the brightest and best in command.
And these enlightened leaders claim to be guided neither by gods nor by tradition nor by self-interest… but by “The Science.” With their Ph.D. advisers, they can be counted on to make the best decisions in every arena – foreign policy, domestic policy, money matters, public health issues… you name it.
Scientific Socialism: The Nazis claimed, for example, that their master race theories were based on the science of eugenics (improving the human race), which was very popular before Hitler gave it a bad name. Margaret Sanger, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, and Linus Pauling all favored it to one degree or another. Germany’s race laws were supposedly based on California’s eugenics laws of the early 20th century.
Over in the Soviet Union, meanwhile, the Bolsheviks advertised that their whole system was based on science, from the Kremlin to the Gulag Archipelago. “Scientific socialism” they called it. The term was used by German philosopher Friedrich Engels, among others, to describe a society ordered along supposedly rationalist – rather than traditionalist – lines. Why leave it to the capricious “market” to decide who gets what, in other words? The Communist Party elite could decide it themselves.
Constitutional Rights Trump Science: And in today’s America, many people are ready, once again, to bow before the graven image of Science. Here’s Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, claiming that science should overrule the U.S. Constitution: "When it ruled this week against New York state’s decision to limit religious gatherings in a few high-incidence parts of New York City, the court proved the dangers of scientifically illiterate judges overturning government decisions that were based on scientific evidence.
Quick-witted readers will realize that the Constitution clearly gives citizens the right to go to church. The Supreme Court did not say – in this year of The Plague – whether it was a good idea or not. It merely pointed out the obvious fact that observing the fundamental law of the land, as written in the Constitution, is not optional. Neither the mayor, the city council, nor the governor had the right to ignore it."
Dear Readers who have been doing their homework also know that the “science” supporting lockdowns… close-outs… and button-ups is weak, at best. Wearing a mask may or may not prevent you from spreading the virus… or from getting it; we don’t know. But we also know that the Constitution was written to limit the power of the feds – even when there’s a nasty bug going around.
Recall, too, that science worshippers went into hysterics when Amy Barrett, during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, dared to doubt the Global Climate Change creed. Said Ms. Barrett: "I don’t think that my views on global warming or climate change are relevant to the job I would do as a judge. Nor do I feel like I have views that are informed enough, and I haven’t studied scientific data. I’m not really in a position to offer any kind of informed opinion."
Fake scientists cannot tolerate open minds. It is like knocking over tombstones, says Shana Lazerow, a busybody in California: "The people who will be impacted the most are the low-income communities of color who already bear a disproportionate burden of our society’s industrial activities. Striking down our climate protections is a specific act of racism."
Suspend Your Disbelief: But here at the Diary, our beat is money… And that is where we find the most strident and most delusional of the science disciples. There, they must not only suspend their disbelief… they must leave their good sense dangling, too, like a heretic hung from a willow tree. Stay tuned."
"A Resolving Picture"
"A Resolving Picture"
by Jim Kunstler
"Much as Chief Justice John Roberts would like to be the finger down the Deep State’s throat to trigger the up-chucking of Mr. Trump from the nation’s gullet, it looks like he won’t get his chance in the new 6-3 disposition of the US Supreme Court. So far, it is Justice Samuel Alito in the lead, preparing a landing zone for the President’s case against the state of Pennsylvania in its shabby-ass attempt to stuff its ballot boxes with iffy mail-in votes. I believe that case is going to be heard, and Justice Robert’s position will be moot.
The problem over in PA is that its Act 77 bill passed before the election by the state legislature to expand absentee balloting (i.e., mail-in voting) did not comply with the PA state constitution, and required a constitutional amendment, which never happened. Could be pretty cut-and-dried. While the SCOTUS is thought to be reluctant to intervene in state constitutional issues, a case involving federal elections may prove an exception. And then there are other issues with the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona. A lot of electoral votes there.
The virtual takeover of US elections by the Dominion vote tabulation company was a stealth operation probably enabled by the connivance of scores of elected officials at both the federal and state levels - senators, congressmen, governors, and on down. It’s been going on for years due to the secrecy of the op and the complacency of the public, with a little help from the Democratic Party’s friends in the news media. Did money change hands? Potential criminal violations abound.
What on earth was Canada-based Dominion, with its grotty Smartmatic software - connected to Venezuela and to George Soros’s would-be world-changing Open Society Foundation, and very possibly to China’s ruling party - doing in charge of counting our votes? Perhaps serving something other than America’s national interest. We’ll soon find out in a way that will make a lot of heads explode.
An awful lot has been churning in the deep background for months before the election. Mr. Trump was onto the mass write-in vote scam enabled by the media-assisted hysteria over Covid-19. The wheels of genuine US intel against national security threats still turned in spite of whatever Deep State perfidy had been aimed at Mr. Trump himself from Day One in office, and the president made use of his own private counter-intel hackers to suss out the game - which was finally to overthrow him by ballot fraud. The result was Executive Order 13848 issued in September 2020, which specified foreign interference in elections as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security” and laid out some pretty stringent remedies.
The main one was a requirement for the top executive agencies - DOJ, DOD, Homeland Security, Treasury plus the Director of National Intelligence (Mr. Ratcliff) - to deliver an assessment within 45 days of the election. We’re now in the sweet-spot of that 45-day delivery period when something has to pop. Looks a little like the AG, Mr. Barr, has been dithering and wriggling painfully over this, and even making noises about resigning. But he may have already surrendered his credibility, with the foot-dragging of the FBI under Christopher Wray and the agency’s apparent lack of interest in election fraud. The consequences of EO 13848 will roll out with him or without him.
The real action was over at the Department of Defense, where the President hastily cleaned house this fall and installed the trustworthy Christopher Miller as SecDef, along with top aide Kash Patel and Joshua Cohen-Watnick as Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Mr. Cohen-Watnick had been an assistant to General Michael Flynn, former Director of Defense Intelligence, in his brief tenure as National Security Advisor before getting sandbagged by Barack Obama and James Comey.
Both Mr. Cohen-Watnick and General Flynn are intimately familiar with the apparatus of Defense Intelligence, of course, and have been actively using it to identify DNC and Joe Biden activists who played a role in election irregularities as well as foreign actors. This wasn’t any RussiaGate type bullshit; it was the real deal. EO 13848 includes this provision:
"The report shall identify any material issues of fact with respect to these matters that the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security are unable to evaluate or reach agreement on at the time the report is submitted. The report shall also include updates and recommendations, when appropriate, regarding remedial actions to be taken by the United States Government, other than the sanctions described in sections 2 and 3 of this order.”
The “remedial actions” are interesting. They include pretty severe sanctions against any “persons” (entity or company) involved in or enabling foreign interference in elections: attaching property in the US, blocking trade, and an array of financial restrictions and penalties. The EO does not spell out criminal penalties that might fall under the sedition and treason statutes, but expect these to be activated as the law provides. Quite a few political celebrities and figures in the news and social media may have exposed themselves to liability in this. If it doesn’t mean the end of Facebook or Twitter, it may spell the end of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey running them. Also include the less-well-known execs at The WashPo, The New York Times, and several cable news networks.
Eventually, Mr. Trump will have to personally deliver the bad news to Joe Biden that he and Dr. Jill won’t be attending the inaugural ball on January 20 (live or on Zoom). Sound too wild to be true? Well, stand by on it. We’ll know soon enough."
"Covid Is Toppling America's 'Points of Failure' Dominoes"
"Covid Is Toppling America's 'Points of Failure' Dominoes"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"America's many points of failure - leverage points where a break brings down the entire system - are falling like dominoes, a process catalyzed by Covid. These systemic points of failure have been masked for the past 20 years by the widespread distribution of trillions of dollars, either printed or borrowed. There's no point of failure that can't be glued together or covered up a bit longer with fountains of cash. That's the American way of solving problems: just throw more money at it.
Unfortunately for America, substituting borrowed trillions for real problem-solving generates its own set of problems, problems that increase the system's vulnerability to collapse. Healthcare/sickcare is a leading example of this: as the corruption, pay-to-play and profiteering deepened, the federal government's endless borrowed trillions boosted healthcare/ sickcare from 5% of the nation's economy to roughly 20% today. "Covid Is Revealing the Cancerous Underbelly of U.S. Healthcare".
As I've noted for a decade, this has created an enormous fragility: healthcare is now so immense that it will bankrupt the nation all by itself. Once the corrupt, pay-to-play, profiteering sectors such as healthcare and banking become "too big to fail," then the Federal Reserve and Treasury are obliged to bail them out or continue funding their spiraling-out-of-control demands.
Speaking of "too big to fail," look at the voracious monster the Fed's endless monetary goosing has incentivized - a financial system addicted to Fed "free money," soaring debt, accelerating leverage and near-infinite speculation.
Given that the Fed has effectively promised to backstop all of Wall Street's bets, bail out every major player and never let the stock market falter for longer than three weeks, the Fed has created this incentive structure: there is no risk at all in borrowing billions, leveraging it into tens of billions and then dumping these multiplying billions into the most speculative bets available. And so that's what every fund manager, hedge funder, punter, gambler and guru has done, and been richly rewarded for doing so.
There's just one tiny little second-order consequence of the Fed's incentivizing debt, leverage and speculation: wealth and income inequality have reached such extremes that they've unraveled the social order. Social cohesion: gone. The social contract: shredded. Social disorder: in the first inning of a very long game.
Now the Fed is backtracking while it laughingly claims its policies didn't have anything to do with America's skyrocketing wealth/income inequality. That the Fed is well aware of the destructive consequences of its endless quantitative easing is evidenced by their recent proposals (FedNow) to start sending "free money" directly to households via a new system of household accounts at the Fed. (Look for an initial rollout by 2022.)
Sorry Fed, it's too late. The dominoes are already toppling, and every point of failure is being exploited by the catalyzing effects of Covid, either first-order or second-order effects. Every weak point - corruption, incompetence, bureaucratic sclerosis, self-serving insiders, counterproductive complexity, regulatory thickets, clinging to the past, and most especially doing more of what's failed spectacularly - will give way, bringing down existing systems with a momentum that will surprise all those who thought every system in America was rock-solid and forever.
Two words will define 2021: acceleration and amplitude. The catalyzing effects will accelerate throughout all the interconnected systems like wildfire and the consequences will move rapidly from linear (predictable) to non-linear (geometric, unpredictable) as each weakness is amplified by the self-reinforcing dynamics unleashed as every point of failure triggers another failure in a connected system."
Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/8/20: "Be Ready For An EPIC Engineered Crisis In The Debt Market To Hit"
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/8/20:
"Be Ready For An EPIC Engineered
Crisis In The Debt Market To Hit"
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“Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid. It was an experience for which the captains of industry were not entirely prepared; they had forgotten the public. It was like some great convulsion of nature, which made mockery of all the powers of men, and left the beholder dazed and terrified. In Wall Street men stood as if in a valley, and saw far above them the starting of an avalanche; they stood fascinated with horror, and watched it gathering headway; saw the clouds of dust rising up, and heard the roar of it swelling, and realized it was only a matter of time before it swept them to their destruction... But it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair, "The Moneychangers"
"How It Really Was, And Is"
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Related:
DEC 8, 2020 12:55 PM: "Rand Paul: No Scientific Evidence "Tyrannical" Lockdowns Work"
DEC 8, 2020 9:54 AM: "Admiral Giroir Slams Bans On Outdoor Dining As Without Scientific Basis"
"The Most Beautiful Lies..."
"Memories and feelings of nostalgia are nothing more than cruelties; they are the most beautiful lies we will ever convince ourselves to believe. We chase the false hope so fiercely that we nearly push ourselves past the edges of our sanity, longing for that which can never be in our possession again. These edges are blurred by our regrets and desperation all throughout the darkest hours of the night, until finally we are set free from the illusions and the ghosts of our past with the rising of the sun... and we are changed in some small, yet permanent way."
- Margaret E. Rise
Monday, December 7, 2020
"Hedge Funds Wait For Housing Crisis; Real Estate Utopia; Food Is A Luxury; Signs Of Uncertainty"
Jeremiah Babe,
"Hedge Funds Wait For Housing Crisis; Real Estate Utopia;
Food Is A Luxury; Signs Of Uncertainty"
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