Chet Raymo, “Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright…”

“Tyger, Tyger Burning Bright…”

by Chet Raymo

“Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet.” You may recall these words from Annie Dillard’s “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.” There is nothing intrinsically cheerful about the world, she says. To live is to die; it’s all part of the bargain. Stars destroy themselves to make the atoms of our bodies. Every creature lives to eat and be eaten. And into this incomprehensible, unfathomable, apparently stochastic melee stumbles… You and I. 

With qualities that we have - so far - seen nowhere else. Hope. Humor. A sense of justice. A sense of beauty. Gratitude. But also: Anger. Hurt. Despair. Strangers in a strange land.

Galaxies by the billions turn like St. Catherine Wheels, throwing off sparks of exploding stars. Atoms eddy and flow, blowing hot and cold, groping and promiscuous. A wind of neutrinos gusts through our bodies, Energy billows and swells. A myriad of microorganisms nibble at our flesh.

We have a sense that something purposeful is going on, something that involves us. Something secret, holy and fleet. But we haven’t a clue what it is. We make up stories. Stories in which we are the point of it all. We tell the stories over and over. To our children. To ourselves. And the stories fill up the space of our ignorance.

Until they don’t. And then the great yawning spaces open again. And time clangs down on our heads like a pummeling rain, like the collapsing ceiling of the sky. Dazed, stunned, we stagger like giddy topers towards our own swift dissolution. Inexplicably praising. Admiring. Wondering. Giving thanks.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

○

“The Tyger”

“Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art.

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”

- William Blake

"The Truth..."

"When we're headed toward an outcome that's too horrible to face, that's when we go looking for a second opinion. And sometimes, the answer we get just confirms our worst fears. But sometimes, it can shed new light on the problem, make you see it in a whole new way. After all the opinions have been heard and every point of view has been considered, you finally find what you're after - the truth. But the truth isn't where it ends, that's just where you begin again with a whole new set of questions."

- "Grays Anatomy"

'If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.'

- Oscar Wilde

The Poet: David Whyte, "The Opening of Eyes"

"The Opening of Eyes"

"That day I saw beneath dark clouds

The passing light over the water,

And I heard the voice of the world speak out.

I knew then as I have before,

Life is no passing memory of what has been,

Nor the remaining pages of a great book

Waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.

It is the vision of far off things,

Seen for the silence they hold.

It is the heart after years of secret conversing

Speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees

Before the lit bush.

It is the man throwing away his shoes

As if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished,

Opened at last,

Fallen in love

With Solid Ground."

~ David Whyte, 

"Songs for Coming Home"

"Promise Me..."

 

“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”

“In The Long Run… We Are All Alive”

by MN Gordon

“In 1976, economist Herbert Stein, father of Ben Stein, the economics professor in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, observed that U.S. government debt was on an unsustainable trajectory. He, thus, established Stein’s Law: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” Stein may have been right in theory. Yet the unsustainable trend of U.S. government debt outlasted his life.  Herbert Stein died in 1999, several decades before the crackup. Those reading this may not be so lucky.

Sometimes the end of the world comes and goes, while some of us are still here. We believe our present episode of debt, deficits, and state sponsored economic destruction, is one of these times.. We’ll have more on this in just a moment. But first, let’s peer back several hundred years. There we find context, edification, and instruction.

In 1696, William Whiston, a protégé of Isaac Newton, wrote a book. It had the grandiose title, “A New Theory of the Earth from its Original to the Consummation of All Things.” In it he proclaimed, among other things, that the global flood of Noah had been caused by a comet. Mr. Whiston took his book very serious. The good people of London took it very serious too. Perhaps it was Whiston’s conviction. Or his great fear of comets. But, for whatever reason, it never occurred to Londoners that he was a Category 5 quack.

Like Neil Ferguson, and his mathematical biology cohorts at Imperial College, London, Whiston’s research filled a void. Much like today’s epidemiological models, the science was bunk. Nonetheless, the results supplied prophecies of the apocalypse to meet a growing demand. It was just a matter of time before Whiston’s research would cause trouble…

Judgement Day: In 1736, William Whiston crunched some data and made some calculations. He projected these calculations out and saw the future. And what he witnessed scared him mad. He barked. He ranted. He foamed at the mouth to anyone who would listen. Pretty soon he’d stirred up his neighbors with a prophecy that the world would be destroyed on October 13th of that year when a comet would collide with the earth.

Jonathan Swift, in his work, “A True and Faithful Narrative of What Passed in London on a Rumour of the Day of Judgment,” quoted Whiston: “Friends and fellow-citizens, all speculative science is at an end: the period of all things is at hand; on Friday next this world shall be no more. Put not your confidence in me, brethren; for tomorrow morning, five minutes after five, the truth will be evident; in that instant the comet shall appear, of which I have heretofore warned you. As ye have heard, believe. Go hence, and prepare your wives, your families, and friends, for the universal change.”

Clergymen assembled to offer prayers. Churches filled to capacity. Rich and paupers alike feared their judgement. Lawyers worried about their fate. Judges were relieved they were no longer lawyers. Teetotalers got smashed. Drunks got sober. Bankers forgave their debtors. Criminals, to be executed, expressed joy.

The wealthy gave their money to beggars. Beggars gave it back to the wealthy. Several rich and powerful gave large donations to the church; no doubt, reserving first class tickets to heaven. Many ladies confessed to their husbands that one or more of their children were bastards. Husbands married their mistresses. And on and on…

The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Wake, had to officially deny this prediction to ease the public consternation. But it did little good. Crowds gathered at Islington, Hampstead, and the surrounding fields, to witness the destruction of London, which was deemed the “beginning of the end.” Then, just like Whiston said, a comet appeared. Prayers were made. Deathbed confessions were shared. And at the moment of maximum fear, something remarkable happened: the world didn’t end. The comet did not collide with earth. It was merely a near miss.

The experience of Whiston, and his pseudoscience prophecy, shows that predictions of the end of the world come and go while people still remain. Sometimes the fallout of these predictions, and the foolishness they provoke, is limited. Other times the foolishness they provoke leads to catastrophe. Here’s what we mean…

“In the long run we are all dead,” said 20th Century economist and Fabian socialist, John Maynard Keynes. This was Keynes rationale for why governments should borrow from the future to fund economic growth today. Of course, politicians love an academic theory that gives them cover to intervene in the economy. This is especially so when it justifies spending other people’s money to buy votes. Keynesian economics, and in particular, counter-cyclical stimulus, does just that.

U.S. politicians have attempted to borrow and spend the nation to prosperity for the last 80 years. Over the past decade, the Federal Reserve has aggressively printed money to fund Washington’s epic borrowing binge. Fed Chair Jay Powell confirmed that the Fed will pursue policies of dollar destruction to, somehow, print new jobs.

The world as it was once known – where a dollar was as good as gold – has come and gone. Today, in life after the end of that world, we are witnessing the illusion of wealth, erected by four generations of borrowing and spending, crumble before our eyes. Moreover, contrary to Keynes, in the long run we are not all dead. In fact, in the long run we are all very much alive. And we are all living with the compounding consequences of shortsighted economic policies.”

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"This Is The Most Hardcore Weather Map We’ve Ever Seen"

DIY Meteorologist: 

"This Is The Most Hardcore Weather Map We’ve Ever Seen"

- https://www.ventusky.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Kansas City, Missouri, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Warning! Recession Ahead and a Plane Crash"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 7/23/22:

"Warning! Recession Ahead and a Plane Crash"

"You can ignore the news all you want. If you buy anything you feel inflation. If are in business you can see that there are major problems with the economy right now. We are in a recession. Plus, I cover the Huntington Beach plane crash."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Massive Price Increases Everywhere! This Is Frustrating!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures with Danno, 7/23/22:

"Massive Price Increases Everywhere! This Is Frustrating!"

"In today's vlog we are noticing massive price increases all over the country! We are here to discuss skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jim Kunstler, "Epic Collapse Is Upon Us"

"Epic Collapse Is Upon Us"

by Jim Kunstler

Editor’s note: The old world order appears to be unraveling before our eyes, greatly accelerated by the war in Ukraine. Where it all ends up remains to be seen. But today, James Howard Kunstler shows you why he believes an “epic crackup is upon us.”

"What’s wrong with the world? Let me count the ways… The Western gambit against Ukraine is a bust, a foolish miscalculation that was obvious from the start. All it accomplished was to reveal the pitiful dependence of our European allies on Russian oil and gas, leaving their economies good and truly scuppered without them. The Russians will likely end up with control of the Black Sea and probably the Ukraine breadbasket as well. So now Europe will starve and freeze.

Did they really want to commit suicide like that? Do the populations of Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the rest just aim to roll into oblivion? Probably not. Rather, we are entering the season of upended governments. Europe is suddenly a magnificent mess with governments falling like duckpins, industry shuttered from lack of fuel and citizens rising up against insane World Economic Forum (WEF) diktats to drastically reduce livestock and shut down farming - in effect declaring food production an unacceptable environmental hazard.

Cutting Your Own Throat: This, of course, after the governments of Euroland cut their own throats by self-sanctioning themselves out of Russian oil and natgas. It’s especially bizarre in Germany, the largest economy of the region, which had just this year conclusively realized and admitted that its “green energy” policy was a complete bust, forcing them to shut down major wind turbine installations and resort to producing electricity with coal. Nice job, greenies. Your idiotic policies are forcing economies to turn to coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. Of course, the governments of Merkel, and then Olaf Scholz, have revealed themselves as the sheerest hypocritical idiots.

The globalist stooges implanted everywhere will probably be overthrown. I can envision a scenario where NATO and the Euro Union will dissolve in impotent ignominy, and the various countries involved will have to renegotiate their destinies, forgoing U.S. advice and coercion. They might even become adversaries of the USA, not allies. Did you forget we fought two wars against Germany not so long ago? And all those countries have been fighting each other since the Bronze Age, too.

History’s a Prankster: It may seem unbelievable, but history never stops reminding us what a prankster it is. A strange and terrible inversion has occurred in this Fourth Turning. Somehow, Mr. Putin’s Russia will be left to represent what remains of international rule-of-law while the Western democracies sink deeper into a morass of deranged despotism. Anyway, they are too busy conducting war against their own people to even pretend to assist their Ukrainian proxies. We can’t forget that “Joe Biden” crammed nearly $60 billion into the Ukraine money-laundering machine since February, which will just spew hallucinated capital back out into increasingly disordered financial markets.

Look: The indexes are up worldwide this morning. Why? Because global business is so good? I don’t think so. Meanwhile, there are reports of huge amounts of Western-supplied weapons turning up on the black market. Apparently, some Ukrainians are even selling these weapons to the Russians!

“An Epic Crackup Is Upon Us”: An epic crackup is upon us. Every place in the world is primed for meltdown, and a few lands in the periphery are already sinking. Sri Lanka is broke and out of gas after being set up as a WEF low-carbon ecostate experiment.

Panama is in revolt over extreme government corruption, food scarcity and the aftereffects of an especially severe two-year-long COVID lockdown that the rest of the world hardly heard about - perhaps because China has operational control over the vital Panama Canal and the CCP has operational control over the World Health Organization, which set up Panama as a lockdown lab project.

In the U.S., moving toward autumn, what we have to look forward to is the blatant desperation of the claque behind “Joe Biden.” Their propaganda machine will probably go all out on climate change and renewed COVID hysteria.

There are always heat waves in midsummer. CNN acts shocked that it’s over 100 degrees in Texas. Really? Never seen that before?

Meanwhile, behind the news about emerging Omicron subvariants, the vaccine injuries and deaths mount and the CDC pretends not to notice. They are just lying as usual. You’re used to it. You pretend it’s to be expected. You’ve forgotten that it wasn’t always so. Soon, it will matter.

Help Is on the Way - A Few Years From Now: Meanwhile, the November midterm elections are only a few months away. Democrats are panicking they’re going to get smoked at the polls. Well, here’s a prediction: A new pandemic is declared in early October, complete with lockdowns, while Google partners with Facebook to roll out a new vote-by-phone app. They’ll say it’s all necessary “to save our democracy.” By some miracle, then, the Democrats add 30 more seats to their house majority and five in the Senate. Then we enter the new frontier of the Green New Deal and Build Back Better. In other words, the USA heads towards complete collapse.

Speaking of “Joe Biden,” whose idea was it to send the wind-up doll president to Saudi Arabia? I can just imagine what went on in the chamber in private with “JB” and MBS (Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman), virtual autocrat of the oil-soaked desert land. And wasn’t that fist pump just priceless? What concessions did “Joe Biden” win from the Saudis? Saudi Arabia graciously agreed to bump up its oil production somewhere in the 2025–2027 time frame - a real triumph for U.S. diplomacy. Nice. Doesn’t really do much for us in the short term, does it?

People, Get Ready: And now the ground is even shifting under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as China’s extravagant matrix of city-building, mortgage debt and banking fraud rattles its financial system. What a surprise!

Potent as it has been in bribing politicians around the world, infiltrating governments and cultural institutions in every land and getting the news media to do their bidding, the CCP is apparently losing its grip on the Chinese people, who are sick of being locked down, tracked and swindled. The tanks are out. This is not the same movie as Tiananmen Square, 1989. This is the CCP bankruptcy, an epic event that will thunder through “the global south,” sending Africa into famine and chaos and South America into yet another rotation of elites.

Pretty soon, it’s going to be every country for itself in this main event of the fourth turning (aka the long emergency). Global unity is a mirage, along with all the preposterous narratives of a world government. And in every country for itself, it’s going to be every community, every family, every person for itself until, emergently and painfully, everyday life can be reorganized from the ground up. People, get ready."

- dailyreckoning.com

Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 7/22/22"

"Weekly News Wrap-Up 7/22/22"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"The Democrats are trying to push a new bill, and openly push the idea of gun confiscation. This bill was originally pushed more than a year ago as an “assault weapons ban.” It’s now being revived, but why now? Even after three reaffirming decisions by the Supreme Court on the 2nd Amendment, the Democrats are not only pushing more gun control, but confiscation of firearms. What is going on for them to be pushing this losing hand at this time. It sounds like they are desperate to stay in control even if the entire financial system comes crashing down as many are predicting.

Rand Paul tried to reaffirm the power of Congress, and only Congress has the right to declare war. That was shot down in the Senate before it even got off the ground this week. So, can NATO declare war for America? Apparently, it can, and that is certainly the direction our feckless leaders are taking us in when it comes to Russia and Ukraine. Heaven help us all if it goes nuclear.

It’s another week, and there are more “unexpected deaths” of young people for no apparent reason. Maybe it’s the bioweapon they have passed off as a vaccine. It clearly does not work well as a vaccine because, just this week, cheated-in President Joe Biden announced he had Covid. He also announced he had cancer, but the White house quickly walked that back.

The economy is in turmoil and going down everywhere.In China, tanks are stopping bank runs. In Italy, former head of the ECB and now former president Mario Draghi has resigned because the economy is foundering under globalist mismanagement. In America, BlackRock hedge fund lost a record $1.7 trillion in the first six months of 2022. Housing is tanking, office space is less than half full as unemployment spikes. Everywhere you look you have third world economic woes because of insolvency. Financial writer Bill Holter says, “The whole world is now a banana republic.”

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these 

stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 7/22/22:

- https://rumble.com/

"How It Really Is"

"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."

- Benjamin Franklin

"It Is Only a Nano-second to Armageddon"

"It Is Only a Nano-second to Armageddon"

by Paul Craig Roberts

The U.S. Government’s “Nuclear Primacy” meta-strategy says that there are “acceptable” levels of destruction of America in a nuclear war against Russia and/or China, so long as America “comes out on top” globally, at the end.

Brian Berletic walks us through the Rand Corporation’s plan for the Pentagon to attack China during the narrow window until 2025 and perhaps 2030 (3 to 8 years from today) when the US is assumed to still have superiority capable of winning a war that is “unlikely” (undefined and little more than a wishful assumption) to go nuclear. In other words, the assumption on which Washington’s planned military attack on China rests is that China will accept defeat rather than use nuclear weapons. You can read Berletic’s analysis here.

Would a sane government start a war on such a risky assumption?

There are two other highly risky assumptions in the Pentagon’s war plans. One is that the US can dominate the seas from which via airplanes or missiles the US can cause destruction to Chinese industry and social infrastructure. Apparently no attention has been paid to long-range Chinese missiles that make US carrier fleets obsolete.

The other risky assumption is that Russia stays out of it. Considering the confusion in the Kremlin, the inability of the Russian government to give up hope of peaceful cooperation with the West, and the inability of the Kremlin to regard the neoconservative doctrine of US hegemony over the world as anything but a fantasy, and most certainly not an operative doctrine, it is possible that the Kremlin would strand aside and watch a US/China war. The Kremlin misses many opportunities, but it is difficult to believe that Putin would be so stupid as to not gang up with China on the US. In which case the US is history. 

As for the Pentagon’s concern for Americans in the event that the assumption that Washington can conquer China without nuclear weapons being used is mistaken, if such weapons are employed, “the U.S. Government’s ‘Nuclear Primacy’ meta-strategy says that there are ‘acceptable’ levels of destruction of America in a nuclear war against Russia and/or China, so long as America ‘comes out on top’ globally.” The Pentagon’s doctrine doesn’t say how many American cities and how many millions of Americans are among the “acceptable levels of destruction.” But it is enough to show that Americans are regarded as cannon fodder by their rulers.

You see, the only importance in the ruling neoconservative doctrine is US hegemony, not your life. For the neocons, as long as America rules over a wasteland devoid of life, we have won. Neocons are truly insane people, and they are in control of US foreign and military policy.

That should scare you and wake you up. But it won’t. The young can’t stop scrolling their cell phones long enough to have any idea of the reality around them. They already live in a virtual world, disconnected from all reality. Older Americans say they have heard fears of nuclear war all their lives and it is never going to happen because there can be no winners. This is a very unsophisticated understanding, especially in the face of a US war doctrine that says Washington can win a nuclear war as long as it doesn’t wait beyond 2025 or 2030.

Eric Zuesse, stimulated by Berletic, writes that Washington intends to conquer both China and Russia. The opening battlefield of WW III is the war Washington arranged in Ukraine. There is no doubt in my mind that the Russian military is very formidable and is capable of sweeping through NATO in an instant. The problem for Russia is in the Kremlin where hesitancy and confusion rule. The Kremlin is unable to get its mind around the fact that Washington is insane. Putin actually thought that Washington would accept Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine as it was limited to the protection of the Donbass Russians. Putin and his foreign minister are so insouciant that they believed Washington would allow them to conduct a limited operation confined to cleansing Donbass of Ukrainian Nazis.

How does the world’s most predominant military power make such a mistake? The only answer I can come up with is that America’s brainwashing of the Russian intellectual class during the Yeltsin years has made Russian leadership, deaf, dumb, and blind. One is tempted to add stupid. Russia’s leaders - Putin, Lavrov - correctly describe the situation, but they cannot bring themselves to do anything about it. Talk is plentiful but action is rare. Apparently the Kremlin is going to continue to sell the energy to NATO countries so that NATO can continue the war on Russia. To paraphrase Alain de Lille in the 11th century, not sovereignty now, but money is all. This appears to hold for Russia.

Zuesse who is as as honest as a leftlwinger can be, is not always reliable. The left have their own myths about Reagan, and here is Zuesse’s statement of one of them: “I have documented that the plan by America’s Government was instead to fool Russia’s Government [Gorbachev] to believe that America ended the Cold War on our side at the same time when Russia ended its side of the Cold War in 1991, but that the U.S. Government was actually planning instead to surround Russia by increasing NATO, right up to Russia’s borders."

I suppose the truth of Zuesse’s statement depends on who is the US government. Is it the President or the neoconservatives and the military/security complex? If the government is the President as the representative of the people, I know for a fact that President Reagan’s intent was to end, not win, the cold war.

He told us this over and over. He formed a top secret presidential committee with authority over the CIA in order to have independent opinion of the CIA’s assertion that the US would lose an arms race if used to bring Russia with her broken economy to the negotiating table. Reagan’s plan was that once his supply-side policy had eliminated America’s stagflation, America’s restored economy would bury Russia’s broken and unrepairable economy in an arms race. The point of the threatened arms race was to bring Gorbachev to the negotiation table to end the Cold War, not to win an arms race.

We investigated the CIA’s documents and reported to President Reagan that it was a case of the CIA protecting its budget and its power. If Reagan dismantled the Cold War, without an enemy the CIA’a budget along with that of the Military Security Complex’s budget would be defenseless at their high levels.

Ronald Reagan was an outsider to the Republican Establishment, represented at that time by George H. W. Bush, vice president and former director of the CIA. Reagan was seen as a challenge to the Republican Establishment’s control of the Republican Party. Eight years of Reagan followed by eight years of Jack Kemp meant the end of the Republican Establishment that serves organized interests. Political parties are concerned with power and control, not with the national interest. Here was Reagan, and his few supporters in his administration, challenging the power and profit of the vested interests for the sake of world peace.

The American media, whores to the CIA, started on us. But it didn’t fit. The narrative wasn’t yet constructed. James Baker, the principal operative of George H. W. Bush, admitted that he promised Gorbachev no movement east of NATO. But there is no written signed document, so the story was changed by later Washington administrations.

Zuesse misses the true story, because he succumbs to ideology and is unable to understand that Reagan, like Trump, was an outsider who brought hope that the political system could be restored to the people’s control. The American media and the American leftwing made sure that this did not happen. Consequently, we now face nuclear Armageddon. It is only a tick away unless Putin decides to surrender.

The US today is much more divided than in 1860. The Democrats regard white people as racists and barriers to social justice and the rule of the oppressed blacks and sexually perverse. Throughout the media and educational systems white Americans are demonized more than Jews were in Nazi Germany. Once white Americans become a minority, which is the principle goal of the Democrat Party, their fate will be the same as the French in The Camp of the Saints. The Republicans are helpless. Their goal is to make America great again, which plays into the neoconservatives’ agenda of US hegemony.

To deal with the challenges America faces requires awareness of the facts, but facts are no longer politically correct. They don’t fit the narratives and, therefore, are untrue and dismissed as misinformation. In my lifetime I have watched my country descend into degeneracy, ignorance, and evil. The nation into which I was born does not exist except as a geographical location."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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• "US Signals Ukraine It Can Use HIMARS Against Russian Targets In Crimea"

• "If US Declares Russia State Sponsor Of Terrorism, Ukraine Will Cease To Exist."

We're just begging for what's coming, and we'll get it, too...

Musical Interlude: Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"

Jason Mraz, "I Won't Give Up"

And don't you ever give up!

"Blackstone Prepares To Take Your Home; Build A Financial War Chest Now; Distressed Real Estate"

Jeremiah Babe, 7/22/22:

"Blackstone Prepares To Take Your Home; 

Build A Financial War Chest Now; Distressed Real Estate"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Brace For Energy Supply Shortages And Chaos In The Streets! Prices Being Pushed Higher On Purpose"

Full screen recommended.

"Brace For Energy Supply Shortages And Chaos In The Streets!

 Prices Being Pushed Higher On Purpose"

by Epic Economist

"Energy supply shortages are getting worse by the day. The American energy crisis has entered an ominous new chapter. People often say that “energy is the economy,” and in many aspects that statement is true. Large nations with a very high level of economic activity like the United States tend to use a great deal of energy, and as the population continues to expand, so does the demand for more energy supplies. However, production is struggling to keep up with the growing demand, and now we’re being warned that our major energy supply chains, which are responsible for the generation of power, as well as the processing of oil-based products such as diesel and gasoline, and the extraction of natural gas, are reaching a breaking point where it won’t be possible to produce enough energy supplies for everyone. And the consequences of this impending energy supply chain breakdown are going to be catastrophic for our country.

Last month, the national average price of gasoline surpassed $5 a gallon for the first time. Since then prices edged down by a few cents, but remain well above the historic norm. The massive and sudden increase in gas prices that has been weighing on Americans’ budgets is a result of a much deeper problem: the country is facing a huge shortage of refining capacity. Industry executives have said earlier this year that refineries were nearing peak production and that this issue wouldn’t be resolved any time soon.

In total, the U.S. permanently lost 5 facilities and another 14 remain closed for maintenance and other internal issues. The vast majority of open refineries are extremely overwhelmed right now. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), they are already operating above 90% capacity and are expected to run at 95% for the rest of the summer.While Americans mostly noticed the sky-high prices for gasoline, the lesser-known increase in diesel costs is particularly concerning for our economy. In fact, industry executives say that the shortage of diesel and elevated prices could be what drive the U.S. economy into a deep recession.

But that’s not all of it. The other side of the energy supply chain is also facing nightmarish disruptions. A brutal continental heatwave is pushing the price of natural gas to levels never before seen. In the past month alone, natural-gas futures jumped by 48%. This past Wednesday alone, prices surged by 10%, to $8.007 per million British thermal units (btu).

The heat is also testing aging power grids, as consumers turn up their air conditioners and use record amounts of electricity. According to Daniel Turner, the founder, and executive director at Power the Future, the whole country is at risk. "I think the entire country is incredibly vulnerable because the entire country is facing a huge energy shortage and I don’t think there is any place that is truly safe," he said during an interview with Fox News. The blackouts can have disastrous consequences, as seen in the 2021 Texas winter power crisis when millions of people were left without energy and access to basic supplies for weeks.

The truth is that the average American is going to be the hardest hit by these energy supply shortages. If we are at or near peak energy production right now, what will our country look like once we get past the peak and energy production actually starts steadily declining? If you think that gasoline, diesel, and electricity prices are expensive now, just wait until we get to that stage. By the end of the summer, everyone will understand that we truly have entered a nightmare with no end in sight. The energy supply chain collapse has just begun, and things are about to get even worse from this point on."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com

"Let Them Eat Bugs"

"Let Them Eat Bugs"

One step before cannibalism…

by Jeffrey Tucker

"A study earlier this year from four prestigious institutions proclaimed that you should eat bugs and spiders. And not only that. The study - conducted by BI Norwegian Business School (BI), Chuo University, Miyagi University and Oxford University - also said that the way to convince people to do this is to have celebrities do it on YouTube videos. Like clockwork, they are suddenly everywhere. You are welcome to look them up. I personally find them revolting. As in they make me want to revolt. These are the same folks who pushed for lockdowns, masking, jabs and a war with Russia. Now they say we have to get used to eating bugs because all the other policies they pushed have dramatically increased world hunger. Indeed, it is reaching a crisis point. For many people, bug eating will soon be the only answer.

One Step Before Cannibalism: I’m going to take it as a given that the evolution of society selected against bug eating. It is not something people prefer over, for example, eating chicken, fish, beef and vegetables. I would further postulate that most people, in general, would not eat bugs unless they had to. I’m sure there are many venerable bureaucrats at the UN who would dispute the above, but I don’t care.

There is a name for bug eating: entomophagy. Sounds fancy, but ultimately it means living as if there is a famine going on. It is one step before cannibalism and finally eating tree bark. Sometimes it happens. We call those periods of history deeply tragic. It’s not what we want. The difference this time is that entomophagy is being pushed by top Hollywood influencers. When it arrives, the famine will be celebrated on social media.

Food Is Already Scarce: Already you have probably observed the changes that are happening. Restaurants are worried about their profit margins and figuring out ways to work around the squeeze. They are serving mounds of bread and pasta and ever less meat. Even vegetable portions are getting skimpy. They can’t raise prices the way gas stations can. This is because they have a regular clientele that watches menu prices very carefully. Even a 50-cent increase can prompt consumer protest. Then customers end up tipping less, which is a huge disaster for the server staff that make far less than the minimum wage. Then the server staff quits at a time of huge shortage. As a result, many are trying to find other ways.

In addition, we are hip-deep into the substitution phase of the great inflation. The pricier items at the store are selling much less while the cheaper stuff is selling well. Out with steaks and in with ground beef. Chicken is the going thing and not the best cuts but the cheap ones.

Another trend: home gardening. People very naively imagine that they will beat inflation by growing their own food. What they discover is that this takes more time than one might expect, and it costs too: the tools, fertilizer, water, nets to keep the bugs off and so on. It all adds up. And yes, there are moments of great delight but it hardly makes a dent in the grocery bill.

A Hungry World: Meanwhile, people in the First World forget how lucky they really are. Many parts of the world today are facing true food and health crises combined. The world’s largest and most established humanitarian organization to deliver food has sounded the alarm: The world faces a global hunger crisis of unprecedented proportions.

In just two years, the number of people facing, or at risk of, acute food insecurity increased from 135 million in 53 countries pre-pandemic to 345 million in 82 countries today… We are at a critical crossroads. We need to rise to the challenge of meeting people's immediate food needs at scale, while at the same time supporting programs that build long-term resilience at scale. The alternative is hunger on a catastrophic scale.

We’ll Be Paying the Price for Years: Of course, the elites want to blame climate change and war but the real culprit traces to lockdowns and the supply chains that were shattered as a result of government actions. What a disaster. We’ll be paying for many years to come for this mess. And while it is easy to dismiss problems around the world as their issues and not ours, I wouldn’t be so confident. The food supply in the U.S. has been profoundly affected by the labor shortage, regulatory overreach, inflation and massive problems in the transportation sector.

Federal crop insurance makes its own contribution to lessening supply. This is a program that pays farmers whether they produce or not. It was designed to mitigate against weather risk but it can also create a situation in which it is more profitable to take fields out of production rather than deal with the soaring costs of fertilizer, gas and labor.

There are zero attempts right now in legislation to do anything about this. In addition, there are massive restrictions written in legislation that prevent private farmers and ranchers from selling their products commercially unless they use a federal government-approved meat processor. This is simply incredible. Thomas Massie of Kentucky (one of the few really brilliant statesmen in the U.S. today) has tried to introduce legislation to fix this but it is getting no traction.

Get a Cow: You don’t need this advice because you already know it: It’s a good time to get a large freezer and stock up. Many of my own friends have done this. They are also finding ways around the crazy regulations. This is how people get when they start to fear the future. No regulation will stand between us and the desire to eat.

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room: whether and to what extent all of this is deliberate. I resist conspiracy theories but it is undeniable that many of the elite members of the World Economic Forum believe that the world is overpopulated. And not by just a little but by billions.

Is it possible that this food crisis is all being engineered to reduce global population? Maybe. We know that Bill Gates has long championed population reduction. He has had his way on everything else, so why not this? One does get the feeling these days of a civilization being wrecked by force. Our longevity has been falling for some 10 years, with life spans shrinking for the first time in centuries. This is a terrifying reality. Combine that with an overall health crisis and a food crisis that seems certain to get worse.

Two nights ago, I watched the movie "Mr. Jones" that covers the Stalin-created famine in Ukraine. Utterly terrifying. It can happen. Famines are nearly always created by governments. When they come, there is no way out. Not even the bug population is large enough to meet our food needs.

It’s an unjust smear of Marie Antoinette that she ever said, “Let them eat cake.” But there is no question that many elites and Hollywood celebs are now telling a world dealing with a serious food crisis: “Let them eat bugs.”

- dailyreckoning.com

Canadian Prepper, "Look Out: The Next Phase Is Going Be Much Worse"

Canadian Prepper, 7/22/22:

"Look Out: The Next Phase Is Going Be Much Worse"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Slave Planet: People Are Continuing To Take On More Debt As Inflation Surges"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 7/22/22:

"Slave Planet: People Are Continuing 

To Take On More Debt As Inflation Surges"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Are You Prepared For The Next Avalanche?"

"Are You Prepared For The Next Avalanche?"

by Jim Rickards

"I began studying complexity theory as a consequence of my involvement with Long Term Capital Management, LTCM, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998 after derivatives trading strategies went catastrophically wrong. After the collapse and subsequent rescue, I chatted with one of the LTCM partners who ran the firm about what went wrong. I was familiar with markets and trading strategies, but I was not expert in the highly technical applied mathematics that the management committee used to devise its strategies.

The partner I was chatting with was a true quant with advanced degrees in mathematics. I asked him how all of our trading strategies could have lost money at the same time, despite the fact that they had been uncorrelated in the past. He shook his head and said, “What happened was just incredible. It was a seven-standard deviation event.”

In statistics, a standard deviation is symbolized by the Greek letter sigma. Even non-statisticians would understand that a seven-sigma event sounds rare. But I wanted to know how rare. I consulted some technical sources and discovered that for a daily occurrence, a seven-sigma event would happen less than once every billion years, or less than five times in the history of the planet Earth!

I knew that my quant partner had the math right. But it was obvious to me his model must be wrong. Extreme events had occurred in markets in 1987, 1994 and then 1998. They happened every four years or so. Any model that tried to explain an event as something that happened every billion years could not possibly be the right model for understanding the dynamics of something that occurred every four years.

From this encounter, I set out on a 10-year odyssey to discover the proper analytic method for understanding risk in capital markets. I studied physics, network theory, graph theory, complexity theory, applied mathematics and many other fields that connected in various ways to the actual workings of capital markets.

In time, I saw that capital markets were complex systems and that complexity theory, a branch of physics, was the best way to understand and manage risk and to foresee market collapses. I began to lecture and write on the topic including several papers that were published in technical journals. I built systems with partners that used complexity theory and related disciplines to identify geopolitical events in capital markets before those events were known to the public.

Finally I received invitations to teach and consult at some of the leading universities and laboratories involved in complexity theory including Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, The Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Applied Physics Laboratory. In these venues, I continually promoted the idea of interdisciplinary efforts to solve the deepest mysteries of capital markets. I knew that no one field had all the answers, but a combination of expertise from various fields might produce insights and methods that could advance the art of financial risk management.

I proposed that a team consisting of physicists, computer modelers, applied mathematicians, lawyers, economists, sociologists and others could refine the theoretical models that I and others had developed and could suggest a program of empirical research and experimentation to validate the theory. These proposals were greeted warmly by the scientists with whom I worked, but were rejected and ignored by the economists. Invariably top economists took the view that they had nothing to learn from physics and that the standard economic and finance models were a good explanation of securities prices and capital markets dynamics.

Whenever prominent economists were confronted with a “seven-sigma” market event they dismissed it as an “outlier” and tweaked their models slightly without ever recognizing the fact that their models didn’t work at all.

Physicists had a different problem. They wanted to collaborate on economic problems, but were not financial markets experts themselves. They had spent their careers learning theoretical physics and did not necessarily know more about capital markets than the everyday investor worried about her 401(k) plan.

I was an unusual participant in the field. Most of my collaborators were physicists trying to learn capital markets. I was a capital markets expert who had taken the time to learn physics. One of the team leaders at Los Alamos, an MIT-educated computer science engineer named David Izraelevitz, told me in 2009 that I was the only person he knew of with a deep working knowledge of finance and physics combined in a way that might unlock the mysteries of what caused financial markets to collapse.

I took this as a great compliment. I knew that a fully developed and tested theory of financial complexity would take decades to create with contributions from many researchers, but I was gratified to know that I was making a contribution to the field with one foot in the physics lab and one foot planted firmly on Wall Street. My work on this project, and that of others, continues to this day. This approach stands in stark contrast to the standard equilibrium models the Fed and other mainstream analysts use.

An equilibrium model like the Fed uses in its economic forecasting basically says that the world runs like a clock. Every now and then, according to the model, there’s some perturbation, and the system gets knocked out of equilibrium. Then all you do is you apply policy and push it back into equilibrium. It’s like winding up the clock again. That’s a shorthand way of describing what an equilibrium model is. Unfortunately, that is not the way the world works. Complexity theory and complex dynamics explain it much better.

Distress in one area of financial markets spread to other seemingly unrelated areas of financial markets. In fact, the mathematics of  are exactly like the mathematics of disease or virus contagion. That’s why they call it contagion. One resembles the other in terms of how it’s spread.

What are examples of the complexity? One of my favorites is what I call the avalanche and the snowflake. It’s a metaphor for the way the science actually works but I should be clear, they’re not just metaphors. The science, the mathematics and the dynamics are actually the same as those that exist in financial markets.

Imagine you’re on a mountainside. You can see a snowpack building up on the ridgeline while it continues snowing. You can tell just by looking at the scene that there’s danger of an avalanche. You see a snowflake fall from the sky onto the snowpack. It disturbs a few other snowflakes that lay there. Then the snow starts to spread… then it starts to slide… then it gains momentum until, finally, it comes loose and the whole mountain comes down and buries the village.

Some people refer to these snowflakes as “black swans,” because they are unexpected and come by surprise. But they’re actually not a surprise if you understand the system’s dynamics and can estimate the system scale.

Question: Whom do you blame? Do you blame the snowflake, or do you blame the unstable pack of snow? I say the snowflake’s irrelevant. If it wasn’t one snowflake that caused the avalanche, it could have been the one before or the one after or the one tomorrow. The instability of the system as a whole was a problem. So when I think about the risks in the financial system, I don’t focus on the “snowflake” that will cause problems. The trigger doesn’t matter. In the end, it’s not about the snowflakes; it’s about the initial critical-state conditions that allow the possibility of a chain reaction or avalanche. Are you prepared for the next avalanche?"

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

"Your Neighbor… the Sex Offender"

"The Dru Sjodin National Sex Offender Public Website (NSOPW) is an unprecedented public safety resource that provides the public with access to sex offender data nationwide. NSOPW is a partnership between the U.S. Department of Justice and state, territorial and tribal governments, working together for the safety of adults and children."

"Your Neighbor… the Sex Offender"

"This is the national sex offender registry. All you have to do is enter your address and search radius. There are 23 registered perverts within 2 miles of my home! Bastards! The site shows pictures of these monsters and their address. Sure, some of them look like creepy thugs. But, some look like normal people, like your neighbor, or this perv below - a teacher! America just may be the most perverse country in human history. How many are in your neighborhood?"

- https://www.nsopw.gov

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"Update: 181 American K-12 educators have now been 

charged with child sex crimes in 2022, keeping pace at one arrest per day."

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"Middle School Teacher Comes to Meet I4 Y/O at 2 AM,

Meets Military Dad Instead"

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Hat tip to Stucky at The Burning Platform for this material.

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Separated by about 14 degrees (28 Full Moons) in planet Earth's sky, spiral galaxies M31 at left, and M33 are both large members of the Local Group, along with our own Milky Way galaxy. This narrow- and wide-angle, multi-camera composite finds details of spiral structure in both, while the massive neighboring galaxies seem to be balanced in starry fields either side of bright Mirach, beta star in the constellation Andromeda. Mirach is just 200 light-years from the Sun. But M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is really 2.5 million light-years distant and M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, is also about 3 million light years away.

Although they look far apart, M31 and M33 are engaged in a gravitational struggle. In fact, radio astronomers have found indications of a bridge of neutral hydrogen gas that could connect the two, evidence of a closer encounter in the past. Based on measurements, gravitational simulations currently predict that the Milky Way, M31, and M33 will all undergo mutual close encounters and potentially mergers, billions of years in the future.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150926.html

○

"Everything passes away- suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the earth. There is no man who does not know that. Why, then, will we not turn our eyes towards the stars? Why?"

- Mikhail Bulgakov, "The White Guard"

"Try?"

- Steve Jobs

"Try? What is try? Do or do not do."

- Yoda

The Poet: Neil Gaiman, "What You Need To Be Warm "

"What You Need To Be Warm"

by Neil Gaiman

 "A baked potato of a winters night to wrap

your hands around or burn your mouth.

A blanket knitted by your mother's cunning fingers.

Or your grandmother's.

A smile, a touch, trust, as you walk in from the snow

or return to it, the tips of your ears pricked pink and frozen.

The tink tink tink of iron radiators waking in an old house.

To surface from dreams in a bed,

burrowed beneath blankets and comforters,

the change of state from cold to warm is all that matters, and you think

just one more minute snuggled here before you face the chill. Just one.

Places we slept as children: they warm us in the memory.

We travel to an inside from the outside.

To the orange flames of the fireplace

or the wood burning in the stove.

Breath-ice on the inside of windows,

to be scratched off with a fingernail, melted with a whole hand.

Frost on the ground that stays in the shadows, waiting for us.

Wear a scarf. Wear a coat. Wear a sweater.

Wear socks. Wear thick gloves.

An infant as she sleeps between us. 

A tumble of dogs, a kindle of cats and kittens.

Come inside. You're safe now.

A kettle boiling at the stove. 

Your family or friends are there.

They smile.

Cocoa or chocolate, tea or coffee,

soup or toddy, what you know you need.

A heat exchange, they give it to you, 

you take the mug and start to thaw.

While outside, for some of us, the journey began

as we walked away from our grandparentshouses

away from the places we knew as children:

changes of state and state and state,

to stumble across a stony desert, or to brave the deep waters,

while food and friends, home, a bed, 

even a blanket become just memories.

Sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place,

to hold out a badly-knitted scarf, to offer a kind word, 

to say we have the right to be here,

to make us warm in the coldest season.

You have the right to be here. "

- Neil Gaiman

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"Compassion is not at all weak. It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. To develop this mind state of compassion... is to learn to live, as the Buddha put it, with sympathy for all living beings, without exception."

- Sharon Salzberg

"There Was A Tale He Had Read Once..."

“There was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries. The story had never made sense to him as a boy. It did now.”

- Neil Gaiman