Wednesday, January 12, 2022

"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

"In Human Society.."

"When a bull is being lead to the slaughter, it still hopes to break loose and trample its butchers. Other bulls have not been able to pass on the knowledge that this never happens and that from the slaughterhouse there is no way back to the herd. But in human society there is a continuous exchange of experience. I have never heard of a man who broke away and fled while being led to his execution. It is even thought to be a special form of courage if a man about to be executed refuses to be blindfolded and dies with his eyes open. But I would rather have the bull with his blind rage, the stubborn beast who doesn't weigh his chances of survival with the prudent dull-wittedness of man, and doesn't know the despicable feeling of despair."
- Nadezhda Mandelstam

"Government’s Grip is Tightening - 15 Signs Of An Abusive Relationship"

Full screen recommended.
Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity,
"Government’s Grip is Tightening - 
15 Signs Of An Abusive Relationship"

Tuesday, January 11, 2022

“It’s Like A Soviet Store”: Americans Are Absolutely Horrified By Empty Shelves From Coast To Coast"

Full screen recommended.
“It’s Like A Soviet Store”: Americans Are Absolutely
 Horrified By Empty Shelves From Coast To Coast"
by Michael Snyder

A year ago, we were promised that the Biden regime would be leading us into a new golden era of prosperity. Obviously, that has not happened. Instead, we are dealing with bare store shelves and painfully high prices from coast to coast. Many are comparing this crisis to the Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s, but we didn’t have persistent shortages for months on end back then. At this point, nobody can deny what is happening. Even the Washington Post is admitting that “social media is swamped with pictures of empty grocery shelves”. The Biden administration promised to resolve our supply chain problems, but they just keep getting worse. When Fox News asked one grocery shopper about the empty shelves, he delivered a chilling response that many of us will not forget any time soon: “It’s like a Soviet store during 1981. It’s horrible.”

Prior to the pandemic, many Americans believed that it was impossible for something like this to ever happen in the United States of America. But it is happening.

Another shopper that was interviewed by Fox News actually used the word “starving” in his response… "Larry, another D.C. shopper, told Fox News: “Whatever it is, I know they need to hurry up and get this straightened out because people will be starving. It’s going to get rough if it keeps on continuing like that.”

Multiple shoppers rattled off a litany of groceries they couldn’t find, ranging from milk to beverages to produce. “Everything, meat, egg, dairy, certain breads were out, most vegetables, it was all fresh items,” one man said as he left a Giant grocery store.
Full screen recommended.
No, nobody in this country is going to be “starving” in the near future, but without a doubt things are starting to get really crazy. In fact, things are so bad that even CNN has been forced to admit that our store shelves are being “wiped clean”… "Grocery store shelves across America are wiped clean, and they’re staying empty as stores struggle to quickly restock everyday necessities such as milk, bread, meat, canned soups and cleaning products. Disgruntled shoppers have unleashed their frustration on social media over the last several days, posting photos on Twitter of bare shelves at Trader Joe’s locations, Giant Foods and Publix stores, among many others."

If fear of Omicron can do this, what would our country look like during a major long-term national emergency? You might want to start thinking about that.

Grocery chains are very much aware that a wave of “panic buying” has erupted around the nation, and so they are trying to do what they can to keep it from getting even worse… "Grocery stores certainly are aware of the empty shelves, Lempert said, and they are trying to mitigate panic buying, which only worsens it the situation. One strategy: Fanning out products. They’re doing this by putting out both limited varieties and limited quantities of each product in an attempt to prevent hoarding and stretch out their supplies between deliveries." But fanning out products isn’t really going to fool anyone. We can all see what is going on, and all of the photos that are going up on social media are just going to fuel the frenzy even more.


The good news is that at least things are better in this country than they are in much of the rest of the globe. For example, people in Cuba are now waiting up to 11 hours in line just to get some food… “I spent almost all night here just to buy something. It is not easy, it is a big sacrifice just to be able to eat,” shopper Edelvis Miranda, 47, told AFP at a market in Havana last week. The homemaker had taken her place in the queue at about 1:00 am, and finally left around 11 hours later, just before noon."

So be thankful for the blessings that we still have. Hopefully we will get some short-term relief and store shelves will start to look better once this wave of Omicron fades and warmer temperatures arrive.

But nothing is going to keep inflation from continuing to spiral out of control. According to CNBC, the median income in this country has actually fallen over the past two years even as the cost of living has risen substantially… "As consumers pay more for everything from groceries to gasoline, household income is failing to keep pace with a higher overall cost of living, according to recent reports. Over the past two years, median income fell 3% while the cost of living rose nearly 7%, due, in part, to rising housing and medical costs."

In an attempt to keep making ends meet, U.S. consumers have now gone into more debt than ever before… The average U.S. household with debt now owes $155,622, or more than $15 trillion altogether, including debt from credit cards, mortgages, home equity lines of credit, auto loans, student loans and other household obligations - up 6.2% from a year ago.

In America today, most people are just barely scraping by from month to month. Living paycheck to paycheck is not a good place to be, but that is reality for the vast majority of our population. So when economic conditions get extremely bad in this country, most Americans are not going to have any sort of a financial cushion to fall back on. And since the vast majority of our population is not “prepping” in any way, shape or form, any sort of long-term food shortage would get exceedingly painful very, very quickly.

For years, I have been encouraging my readers to make common sense preparations for the time when economic chaos would rock our nation. Now that time has arrived, and most of our fellow citizens are completely and utterly unprepared for what is happening. But if you think that this is the worst that can happen to us, just wait, because the truth is that what we have experienced so far is just the tip of the iceberg."

“You Have No Money Left; Banks Are Ripping You Off; IRS Issues”

Jeremiah Babe, PM 1/11/22:
“You Have No Money Left; Banks Are Ripping You Off; IRS Issues”

Gerald Celente, "Chock Full Of Nuts" - "Trends Journal"

Full screen recommended.
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, "Chock Full Of Nuts" - "Trends Journal"
"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."

"Food Industry Insiders Are Warning That Supplies Will Get Even Tighter In The Weeks Ahead"

Full screen recommended.
"Food Industry Insiders Are Warning That Supplies 
Will Get Even Tighter In The Weeks Ahead"
by Epic Economist

"This is where we are again. In December, the US government stood in front of the American people and bluntly announced that they had defeated the supply chain crisis. But of course, now it is clear that they have lied to us once again. We have been facing persistent shortages for months on end. Some of them emerged during the first wave of panic buying in 2020 and were never resolved up until this point. And now, the emergence of a new variant and the threat of lockdowns and businesses shutdowns are pushing things to an entirely new level.

US consumers have been increasingly frustrated with the bare shelves they see, and many have resorted to social media to expose the situation of their local supermarkets. From coast to coast, shortages continue to spread at an alarming pace all across the country. But our leaders keep insisting that this is just a "temporary" crisis that will be gone soon. That was the same thing they said when nationwide shortages first began to pop up in early 2020. So we shouldn't hold our breaths waiting for them to fix these bottlenecks and turn things around because that probably won't happen.

The truth is that executives and experts in the food industry are sounding the alarm over more shortages and rising prices in the coming weeks as food supplies get tighter and tighter. For instance, in a recent interview with Fox News, the billionaire supermarket CEO John Catsimatidis is alerting that more supply chain disruptions are occurring as we speak, and food retailers are going to pass along increased transportation and logistics costs to consumers in the weeks ahead. The United Refining Company owner revealed that The United States, in particular, is seeing the price of a wide range of products, such as eggs, poultry, and beef soar to record levels because of low supply and high demand.

Egg Innovations CEO John Bruunquel echoed Catsimatidis’ sentiment and cautioned that a surge in demand coinciding with labor, freight, and vendor issues is about to hamper the national egg supply and push prices to skyrocket. According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, last month, the price of beef jumped nearly 21 compared to a year prior, while pork and chicken prices rose 16.8 and 9.2 percent, respectively. A new report published by ZeroHedge has compiled dozens of photos that Americans have been posting on social media to expose the bare shelves they're witnessing in recent days.

ZeroHedge analysts reminded of the President's statement issued right before Christmas eve, declaring that his administration’s efforts to eliminate supply-chain bottlenecks ahead of the holiday season had succeeded. "Ten days into the new year, we can firmly say that is not the case," they wrote. If only we had enough workers to keep things running nice and smooth in our supply chains, this crisis could be solved much faster than anticipated. But that's not the case. In industry after industry, a huge number of workers seems to have disappeared from the system, and their absence is causing a myriad of problems.

Many people out there want to believe that a prosperous future is awaiting us, particularly considering that the last couple of years have been extremely distressing. A new poll analyzed the words Americans used to describe what they experienced over the past 12 months. 23% of the respondents used the terms "awful, terrible, or bad", while 12% described it as "chaos, confusion, or turmoil", 11% said it was "challenging, hard, or rough", 6% saw it as a "disaster, train wreck, or catastrophe".

While more and more shelves go empty, once again, the President's job approval rating continues to sink. People are extremely dissatisfied with unbearable shelter, power, and food inflation. Our population wants and needs the supply chain crisis to be resolved, inflation to fade away, and life to return to the way that it used to be. Sadly, none of these things are within our reach, and it has become exceedingly clear that our leaders are utterly and completely incapable of defeating our problems, controlling the virus outbreak, and readjusting monetary policy to start putting our country back on track.

At this point, it honestly seems like they do not care about fixing the economy. And if you think that things are chaotic now, just wait a few more months and you'll see real chaos. If you are waiting for the government to save us from this mess, you are going to be waiting forever. Decades of very reckless decisions have brought us where we are now, and it would take a miracle to turn things around."

Gregory Mannarino, "Today The Fed. Set The Stage For The Economy And Markets: This Is What You Need To Know"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/11/22:
"Today The Fed. Set The Stage For The Economy
 And Markets: This Is What You Need To Know"

Musical Interlude: Mecano, "Hijo de la Luna"

Mecano, "Hijo de la Luna"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex.
About five light-years "tall", the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.”

Chet Raymo, “A Sense Of Place”

“A Sense Of Place”
by Chet Raymo

“It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together. As far as I know, that never happened. But let’s imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty’s essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944) and from Abbey’s essay “The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them.

“This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.”

“This desert, all deserts, any deserts.”

“On the shady stream banks hang lady’s eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging.”

“Oily growths like the poison ivy – oh yes, indeed – that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.”

“All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats.”

“Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.”

“Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias.”

“Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.”

“The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place.”

“In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don’t. In the Mojave Desert, it’s Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise…”

“The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned – they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood.”

“…the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers.”

“Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people’s faces are good.”

“Californicating.”

“To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee.”

“Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?”

“I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen.”

“Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.”

“Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking.”

“In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving.”

“There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.”

“A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see – only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.”

“Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.”

“In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable…”

“New life will be built upon these things.”

“…an unrequited and excessive love.”

“It is this.”

“That’s why.”

The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Geranium”

“The Geranium”

“When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine -
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she’d lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me -
And that was scary -
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.
But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.”

- Theodore Roethke

Free Download: Jiddu Krishnamurti, “The Book of Life”

"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it.
That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies,
that is why you must sing and dance,
and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freely download “The Book of Life”, by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

"A Long March..."

"The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair."
- Bertrand Russell

"The Real Threat to Democracy is Corrupting Wealth Inequality"

"The Real Threat to Democracy is Corrupting Wealth Inequality"
by Charles Hugh Smith

"Imagine a town of 1,000 adults and their dependents in which one person holds the vast majority of wealth and political influence. Would that qualify as a democracy? Now imagine that 100 of the 1,000 adults own 90% of all the wealth, collect 97% of all the income from capital and have virtually all the political power. How can a society in which 90% of the populace is decapitalized, disenfranchised and demoralized by political powerlessness be a democracy?

This is America: a kleptocratic autocracy that serves the few at the expense of the many, stripmining the bottom 90% under the guise of a fraudulent "democracy" in which only the few wield real power. Recall Smith's Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

That our elected government responds only to the super-wealthy and corporations has been well-established: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens."

It's also a fact that the top 10% get virtually all the gains from the nation's capital, and this wealth is concentrated in the top 0.1%: "Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age."

Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.

Exactly how can a system of governance that is nothing but an invitation-only auction of political favors in which the top 0.1% own more than the bottom 80% be a functional democracy? The answer is it cannot. Politics and government have been reduced to protecting and enriching a neofeudal autocracy while claiming to serve the stripmined public.

This extreme concentration of wealth and power is not accidental; the government's policies have generated this concentration of wealth which has hollowed out democracy. The super-wealthy didn't siphon $50 trillion from those earning their living from labor on their own; government policies aided and abetted this vast transfer of wealth.

Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018: $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

The catastrophic consequences of this systemic concentration of wealth and power are also well documented. For example, Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies. Extreme inequality brings down societies, and America is now a society dominated by extreme inequality.

America is nothing but a vast moral cesspool that the public is told is a pristine pond of "democracy". Self-enrichment is cloaked as "doing God's work," profiteering is sold as "value," fraud is packaged as "finance" and rapacious monopolies are marketed as "enterprise."

Institutions have become little more than rackets enriching insiders and the wealthiest few; they have lost moral legitimacy which is the fundamental foundation of democracy and a market-based economy.

As I explain in my new book "Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States", moral legitimacy is the foundation of social cohesion. Once moral legitimacy has been lost, social cohesion unravels and the nation falls.

It wasn't just bad luck that financialization and globalization hollowed out America's economy and democracy and turned the bottom 90% into debt-serfs and tax donkeys; it was government policies implemented by elected officials and the appointed handmaidens of the super-wealthy. Virtually every major policy implemented by either party served the interests of the super-wealthy and corporations: tax cuts had trivial impacts on the bottom 90% while vastly increasing the wealth of the super-wealthy; the Supreme Court's rulings in favor of corporate "personhood" and "free speech" (a.k.a. the best government we can buy), and the evisceration of the rule of law for corporate fraud, collusion and embezzlement ("too big to fail, too big to jail").

The Federal Reserve's free money for financiers distributes gains on the order of 20-to-1 in favor of the super-wealthy: $2 trillion in gains for the bottom 90%, $40 trillion for the top tier. The list is long and painful proof that the elected government of the United States serves the interests of the top few - a reality masked by expert PR and partisanship.

Partisanship reflects a core structural dynamic: America is now a two-tier society and economy. If you're an executive at a big Wall Street investment bank, you can rig markets and embezzle billions and you'll never face any personal legal consequences such as being indicted, convicted and imprisoned. (Bernie Madoff's conviction was a classic Soviet-style show trial to mask the fact that thousands of other white-collar criminals kept their ill-gotten gains and faced no consequences.)

But try being an employee at a local credit union and embezzle $5,000 - a prison sentence is very predictable. If a spoiled-rotten rich kid gets caught with drugs, Mommy and Daddy's lawyer kicks into gear and gets a suspended sentence plea bargain. The kid from the bottom 90% gets a tenner in the Drug War Gulag. And so on.

America is also a regional two-tier economy/society. When a society kneels down and worships financialization and globalization, it gives all the political and financial power to the already-super-wealthy and corporations who get 97% of the gains from financialization and globalization.

Since the majority of already-super-wealthy and corporate managers reside in coastal metropolitan areas, the tide of new wealth flooding into the hands of the few boosts the economies of these select regions. The real polarization is economic-financial: there are two economies in America and there's very little commonality in the two economies. One benefited greatly from financialization and globalization, and the other was hollowed out and brought to its knees by financialization and globalization.

Since income and political power flow to capital, the disparity/inequality far exceed the 70/30 split depicted in this chart. The soaring wealth of billionaires is a more accurate reflection of inequality in America. Is there any wonder that stripmined Americans who sense their powerlessness are attracted to virulent partisanship? The more extreme the pendulum swing of wealth-power inequality, the more extreme the political blowback.

America's political class has no plan to reverse this destructive tide. Our leadership's "plan" is something they know well first-hand: bribery and complicity: just send a monthly stipend of bread and circuses to all the disempowered, decapitalized households, urban and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not bother the elites' profitable pillaging of America and the planet.

The insurrection and coup happened long ago, when financialization and globalization hollowed out the real economy and disempowered the bottom 90%. When the whole rotten palace of corruption collapses in a putrid heap, look no further for the cause than the extremes of wealth-power inequality that rendered "democracy" a convenient facade for the stripmining of the bottom 90%.

Try to find a developing-world kleptocracy in which the top few collect more than 97% of the income from capital. There aren't any that top the USA, the world's most extreme kleptocracy. We're Number 1."

The Daily "Near You?"

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Thanks for stopping by!

"You Better Decide..."

“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"
“So, how do you beat the odds when it’s one against a billion? You’re just outnumbered. You stand strong, keep pushing yourself against all rational limits, and never give up. But the truth of the matter is despite how hard you try and fight to stay in control, when it’s all said and done, sometimes you’re just outnumbered.”
- “Meredith”, “Gray’s Anatomy”
"Our world is not safe. It is a toxic swamp populated by predators and parasites. The odds are stacked against us from the moment of conception. We survive only because we fight the elements, hunger, disease, each other. And, although civilization promises us safe harbor, that promise is a fairy tale. Only the storm is real. It comes for each of us. And we cannot win. We can only choose how we will suffer our defeat. We can meekly take our beatings, and die like lemmings, finding solace in the belief that we shall one day inherit the earth. Or, we can plunge into the chaos with eyes wide open, taking comfort instead from the bruises, scars, and broken bones which prove that we fought to live and die as gods."
 - J.K. Franko, "Life for Life"

"Believe Them..."

"When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you."
- Maria Popova

"Light It Up!"

"Light It Up!"
by Jim Kunstler

"We are at a strange pass in The Saga of Covid. It seems the spikey virus wants to leave center stage… is weary of all the attention… wants to fade into the eternal parade of microorganisms that cozily coexist within the human life-stream - like Tony Fauci’s HIV, a fellow traveler in the old-time throng of human viruses, now semi-retired, and yet still every bit as mysterious in the actual mechanism of AIDS as it was when Dr. Fauci pinned his NIAID distinguished service medal on its elusive bosom, so to speak (but you’d have to read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci to get the drift of that).

Omicron is sweeping the country, as love once did in George Gershwin’s day. (We are a different country now, as anyone tuned into the Turner Classics Movie channel can discover.) Omicron: the 36-hour head cold that Covid-19 has been demoted to. Omicron: a mere wise-cracking gecko compared to the roaring dragon that was Covid-19 in the winter of 2020. Omicron: kind of an embarrassment to “vaccine” tyrants who still seek to jab every arm on earth, and at ever-shortening intervals - like a med school version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, only with syringes running amok instead of brooms.

The Party-of-Chaos (the one headed by the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden”) does not want to let go of Covid-19, its Swiss army knife of destruction. With Covid-19, you can push people around and mess with their lives every which way, shut down their businesses, lock them in their homes, screw them out of their livelihoods, delete their reputations, board-up their social venues, cancel their careers, revoke their licenses, drag them into court, fine them into penury, cram them into prison camps, and much more.

If Covid-19 actually does make that move to exit the scene, the Party-of-Chaos will have to find a new focus for its anxiety-driven lunacy. And if the front page of The New York Times is the party’s id, a signifier of intent, then the focus will shift to fomenting war with Russia. Notice today’s lead headline, top left above the fold (as we used to say when the darn thing was printed on paper).
“…in a bid to avert war in Ukraine…” the headline declares. Dunno about you, but to me that suggests the USA sees war as a possibility, something we’ve already gamed into our plans, like it would be something we could… handle. Forgive the rather glum reality-test, but war with Russia over Ukraine is for sure something that the USA probably can’t handle. The most likely outcome would be a king-hell embarrassment on the battlefield, not just because we would be fighting on Russia’s door-sill where sheer logistics favor our adversary (with ready re-supply and all), but because our pussified military - with gal bomber pilots in pregnancy flight-suits and other novelties of “diversity & inclusion” - will result in the most ignominious ass-kicking in our history… following a 50-year string of prior embarrassments. The second most likely outcome of this face-off with Russia would be that old familiar nuclear World War Three, with everything from Bangor to Pacific Heights turned into one big smoldering ashtray.

Underlying this lunacy is The USA’s perverse wish to enlist Ukraine in NATO - Ukraine, that mighty economic powerhouse (not). What Ukraine is… is a super-sized version of Detroit, a hollowed-out shell of place whose mojo left on the 9:10 train to Palookaville decades ago, and has been on international life-support since the DC Deep State ran its 2014 “color revolution” in the Maidan Square. The Russians object to American huggermugger in Ukraine because following the implosion of the Soviet Union, we promised the Russians no expansion of NATO in the direction of their border. Yes, we did. We said that.

Well, sure, you may be thinking, countries make all kinds of insincere cockamamie agreements all the time, in the darkness of bad faith, and so what? This is geopolitical hardball. Grow up! We want Ukraine on our side now and Russia can just go pound sand…. Okay, forgive me… that may be what Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his genius deputies in Foggy Bottom are thinking… not you. But is it really a good idea? Ukraine, when not actually a part of greater Russia, has been in its acknowledged sphere-of-influence since before George Washington even thought about chopping down any cherry trees. Russia, which has been invaded and torched by European invaders twice in modern history (Napoleon, 1812; Hitler, 1941), does not want NATO lodging missiles, troops, and Gawd-knows-what-all else right on its border.

And, by the way, does the USA need another faraway failed state to support? We can’t even take care of the junkies, psychotics, and misbegotten lining the sidewalks of a dozen American cities, and now we propose to adopt the poorest country in that remote corner of the world? While beating down our own once-productive people, inflating away our savings, taking away our natural liberties to work, move about in a free society, and the right to decide what pharmaceuticals we can decline to put in our bodies?

Which brings us back to the virus. In The Saga of Covid there is a monster under the bed. The ballyhooed and mandated vaxxes apparently have the ability to kill and maim people who have taken them long after Covid-19 exits stage-left. We don’t really know how this works out, but we have plenty of clues: kids dropping dead of heart attacks, pro athletes, ditto, the VAERS numbers reporting over 21,000 vaccine-implicated deaths (out of a grossly under-reported actual figure) plus over a million adverse reaction reports (ditto under-reported). The time may not be far off when we make the ghastly discovery that the “vaccines” actually killed more Americans than the virus did.

Meanwhile, a report out of Indianapolis-based the OneAmerica Life Insurance company, a $100-billion outfit, announced last week that all-causes deaths in working age Americans between 18 and 64 were up 40 percent in the third quarter of 2021 and keeping the same pace in the fourth quarter. The number was described as “huge, huge… greater than a three-sigma event… unheard of,” according to company CEO Scott Davison, who added that even those figures are probably under-reported. What’s killing these people? Could it be Dr. Fauci’s prescription for vaxxing up everyone in the land? I guess, sooner or later, we’re going to find out."

"Empty Shelves At Family Dollar! - What's Coming!? - Rising Prices!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 1/11/22:
"Empty Shelves At Family Dollar! - What's Coming!? - Rising Prices!"
"In today's vlog we are at Family Dollar witnessing a lot of empty shelves. We are here to check out value items, but all we are finding are very high prices! It's getting rough out here as stores are struggling with getting in products!"