“When science discovers the center of the universe,
a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not it.”
- Bernard Baily
So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Sunday, July 9, 2023
"A Mercenary’s Life In Ukraine"
Foreign fighters are expected to survive a mere four hours in battle. Ukrainian servicemen attend a farewell ceremony for an American soldier in Kiev, Ukraine, May 5, 2023
"A Mercenary’s Life In Ukraine"
By Azerbaycan
"The conflict in Ukraine has drawn in thousands of foreign mercenaries, motivated by glory and, in the Kremlin’s words, the chance to “earn money by killing Slavs.” However, those lucky enough to come out alive have described life on the front lines as miserable and short.
Three days after Russian troops entered Ukraine last February, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky put out an appeal for foreigners willing to take up arms against Moscow’s forces. Potential recruits visited Ukrainian embassies across the West and signed up to fight – often with the blessing of their own governments – and made their way to the battlefield.
Losses were immediate, and horrific. Two weeks after Zelensky’s appeal, a Russian missile strike on a training center at Yavoriv, near the Polish border, killed up to 180 foreign mercenaries, whose position was reportedly given away by social media posts. “The Legion was wiped out in one fell swoop,” a Brazilian shooting instructor said in a Twitter video as he fled to Poland after the strike. “I didn’t know what a war was.”
Of the initial recruits who survived the attack, one Briton described how his Ukrainian commanders were “sending untrained guys to the front with little ammo and s**t AKs and they’re getting killed.” Posting on Reddit, the Brit described Ukraine’s ‘International Legion’ as “totally outgunned” and run by “a few crazy Ukrainian leaders.” The International Legion shifted to hiring foreigners with military backgrounds shortly afterwards, and an influx of Western weapons alleviated some of its equipment issues. However, the threat of violent death has remained a constant in the lives of its members.
“I have one word to describe it and it’s just hell,” a Canadian mercenary told CBC News last May. “Every day you’re getting casualties, and every day your friends are getting killed,” he explained, adding that most of his missions in the Donbass region involved recovering bodies fallen in the previous day’s fighting.
For veterans of US wars in the Middle East, adapting to an enemy like Russia has proven difficult. Earlier this year, an Australian mercenary fighting against Wagner Group forces in Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) described the Russian private military company as a “near peer” opponent to any Western military, while several Americans have reported Russian shelling as orders of magnitude more intense than anything they experienced in their previous combat tours. “[The artillery] is nonstop,” a former US Marine told ABC News in February. “It’s been nonstop. All day and night. The life expectancy is around four hours on the frontline.” “This is my third war I’ve fought in, and this is by far the worst one,” another former Marine told The Daily Beast last week. “You’re getting f**king smashed with artillery, tanks. Last week I had a plane drop a bomb next to us, like 300 meters away. It’s horrifying s**t.”
Those behind the front are often just as likely to be killed. As many as 20 foreign mercenaries, including several Colombians and at least one American, died in a Russian missile strike on a temporary brigade base in the Donbass city of Kramatorsk last month. “If we discover such gatherings, for example, as in Kramatorsk, we will destroy them, because these are people who have declared war on us,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after the strike.
By April 2022 there were just under 7,000 foreign mercenaries from 63 countries operating in Ukraine, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. By May of this year, that number had fallen to 2,500. It is unclear how many foreigners have been killed, captured, or deserted since last April.
With the Ukrainian military reportedly unwilling to collect even its own dead along hot sectors of the front line, the families of foreign fighters can wait for months for closure. This was the case for the family of Irishman Finbar Cafferkey, whose remains were found near Artyomovsk this week, three months after he was reported dead. According to the Irish Times, “it may be months” before Ukrainian authorities return Cafferkey’s body to Ireland.
For those captured alive, the situation is no less severe. Mercenaries are not entitled to any protections under the Geneva Convention, as British citizens Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner found when they were captured by Donetsk People’s Republic forces last year and sentenced to death. While both men were eventually repatriated in a prisoner swap, the Russian Foreign Ministry has reminded would-be volunteers that “mercenaries sent by the West to assist the nationalist regime in Kiev are not entitled to the status of prisoner of war under international humanitarian law.”
Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.
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Full screen recommended.
"Horrible Moment Russian Artillery
Destroys Ukrainian Tank Convoy"
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Meanwhile, as the Russians and Chinese tremble in fear...
total disgrace America has become...
The Poet: John O’Donohue, “In These Times”
“In These Times”
“In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety,
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down,
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home.”
~ John O’Donohue,
from “To Bless the Space Between Us”
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“Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"Some Very Big Problems..."
"We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy. It's only through people making a stand against that tragedy and being doggedly optimistic that we are going to win through. If you look at the plight of the human race it could well tip you into despair, so you have to be very strong."
- Robert James Brown
“10 Painfully Obvious Truths Everyone Forgets Too Soon”
“10 Painfully Obvious Truths Everyone Forgets Too Soon”
The truth does not cease to exist when it is ignored.
by Marc Chernoff
“You know how you can hear something a hundred times in a hundred different ways before it finally gets through to you? The ten truths listed below fall firmly into that category – life lessons that many of us likely learned years ago, and have been reminded of ever since, but for whatever reason, haven’t fully grasped. This, my friends, is my attempt at helping all of us, myself included, “get it” and “remember it” once and for all…
1. The average human life is relatively short. We know deep down that life is short, and that death will happen to all of us eventually, and yet we are infinitely surprised when it happens to someone we know. It’s like walking up a flight of stairs with a distracted mind, and misjudging the final step. You expected there to be one more stair than there is, and so you find yourself off balance for a moment, before your mind shifts back to the present moment and how the world really is.
LIVE your life TODAY! Don’t ignore death, but don’t be afraid of it either. Be afraid of a life you never lived because you were too afraid to take action. Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside you while you’re still alive. Be bold. Be courageous. Be scared to death, and then take the next step anyway.
2. You will only ever live the life you create for yourself. Your life is yours alone. Others can try to persuade you, but they can’t decide for you. They can walk with you, but not in your shoes. So make sure the path you decide to walk aligns with your own intuition and desires, and don’t be scared to switch paths or pave a new one when it makes sense.
Remember, it’s always better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than the top of the one you don’t. Be productive and patient. And realize that patience is not about waiting, but the ability to keep a good attitude while working hard for what you believe in. This is your life, and it is made up entirely of your choices. May your actions speak louder than your words. May your life preach louder than your lips. May your success be your noise in the end. And if life only teaches you one thing, let it be that taking a passionate leap is always worth it. Even if you have no idea where you’re going to land, be brave enough to step up to the edge of the unknown, and listen to your heart.
3. Being busy does NOT mean being productive. Busyness isn’t a virtue, nor is it something to respect. Though we all have seasons of crazy schedules, very few of us have a legitimate need to be busy ALL the time. We simply don’t know how to live within our means, prioritize properly, and say no when we should.
Being busy rarely equates to productivity these days. Just take a quick look around. Busy people outnumber productive people by a wide margin. Busy people are rushing all over the place, and running late half of the time. They’re heading to work, conferences, meetings, social engagements, etc. They barely have enough free time for family get-togethers and they rarely get enough sleep. Yet, emails are shooting out of their smart phones like machine gun bullets, and their day planners are jammed to the brim with obligations. Their busy schedule gives them an elevated sense of importance. But it’s all an illusion. They’re like hamsters running on a wheel.
Though being busy can make us feel more alive than anything else for a moment, the sensation is not sustainable long term. We will inevitably, whether tomorrow or on our deathbed, come to wish that we spent less time in the buzz of busyness and more time actually living a purposeful life.
4. Some kind of failure always occurs before success. Most mistakes are unavoidable. Learn to forgive yourself. It’s not a problem to make them. It’s only a problem if you never learn from them. If you’re too afraid of failure, you can’t possibly do what needs to be done to be successful. The solution to this problem is making friends with failure. You want to know the difference between a master and a beginner? The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Behind every great piece of art is a thousand failed attempts to make it, but these attempts are simply never shown to us.
Bottom line: Just because it’s not happening now, doesn’t mean it never will. Sometimes things have to go very wrong before they can be right.
5. Thinking and doing are two very different things. Success never comes to look for you while you wait around thinking about it. You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do. Knowledge is basically useless without action. Good things don’t come to those who wait; they come to those who work on meaningful goals. Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the courage to build your life around your answer. And remember, if you wait until you feel 100% ready to begin, you’ll likely be waiting the rest of your life.
6. You don’t have to wait for an apology to forgive. Life gets much easier when you learn to accept all the apologies you never got. The key is to be thankful for every experience – positive or negative. It’s taking a step back and saying, “Thank you for the lesson.” It’s realizing that grudges from the past are a perfect waste of today’s happiness, and that holding one is like letting unwanted company live rent free in your head. Forgiveness is a promise – one you want to keep. When you forgive someone you are making a promise not to hold the unchangeable past against your present self. It has nothing to do with freeing a criminal of his or her crime, and everything to do with freeing yourself of the burden of being an eternal victim.
7. Some people are simply the wrong match for you. You will only ever be as great as the people you surround yourself with, so be brave enough to let go of those who keep bringing you down. You shouldn’t force connections with people who constantly make you feel less than amazing. If someone makes you feel uncomfortable and insecure every time you’re with them, for whatever reason, they’re probably not close friend material. If they make you feel like you can’t be yourself, or if they make you “less than” in any way, don’t pursue a connection with them. If you feel emotionally drained after hanging out with them or get a small hit of anxiety when you are reminded of them, listen to your intuition. There are so many “right people” for you, who energize you and inspire you to be your best self. It makes no sense to force it with people who are the wrong match for you.
8. It’s not other people’s job to love you; it’s yours. It’s important to be nice to others, but it’s even more important to be nice to yourself. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. So make sure you don’t start seeing yourself through the eyes of those who don’t value you. Know your worth, even if they don’t. Today, let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as incomplete as you think you are. Yes, let someone love you despite all of this, and let that someone be YOU.
9. What you own is not who YOU are. Stuff really is just stuff, and it has absolutely no bearing on who you are as a person. Most of us can make do with much less than we think we need. That’s a valuable reminder, especially in a hugely consumer-driven culture that focuses more on material things than meaningful connections and experiences.
You have to create your own culture. Don’t watch TV, don’t read every fashion magazine, and don’t consume too much of the evening news. Find the strength to fill your time with meaningful experiences. The space and time you are occupying at this very moment is LIFE, and if you’re worrying about Kim Kardashian or Lebron James or some other famous face, then you are disempowered. You’re giving your life away to marketing and media trickery, which is created by big companies to ultimately motivate you to want to dress a certain way, look a certain way, and be a certain way. This is tragic, this kind of thinking. It’s all just Hollywood brainwashing. What is real is YOU and your friends and your family, your loves, your highs, your hopes, your plans, your fears, etc.
Too often we’re told that we’re not important, we’re just peripheral to what is. “Get a degree, get a job, get a car, get a house, and keep on getting.” And it’s sad, because someday you’ll wake up and realize you’ve been tricked. And all you’ll want then is to reclaim your mind by getting it out of the hands of the brainwashers who want to turn you into a drone that buys everything that isn’t needed to impress everyone that isn’t important.
10. Everything changes, every second. Embrace change and realize it happens for a reason. It won’t always be obvious at first, but in the end it will be worth it. What you have today may become what you had by tomorrow. You never know. Things change, often spontaneously. People and circumstances come and go. Life doesn’t stop for anybody. It moves rapidly and rushes from calm to chaos in a matter of seconds, and happens like this to people every day. It’s likely happening to someone nearby right now.
Sometimes the shortest split second in time changes the direction of our lives. A seemingly innocuous decision rattles our whole world like a meteorite striking Earth. Entire lives have been swiveled and flipped upside down, for better or worse, on the strength of an unpredictable event. And these events are always happening.
However good or bad a situation is now, it will change. That’s the one thing you can count on. So when life is good, enjoy it. Don’t go looking for something better every second. Happiness never comes to those who don’t appreciate what they have while they have it.”
"Just A Theory"
"Just A Theory"
by Robert W. Malone, MD, MS
"Where does the infamous son of a president, who happens to be an addict, get his drugs? When he has the Secret Service protecting him 24/7? In fact, chances are those officers are even directed to keep him away from trouble. Therefore, Hunter can’t go out on the DC streets to buy or even contact old dealers via a phone. So, where to get a fix? Well, we have all watched enough crime movies to figure this one out.
Here is the thing about addicts. They find each other, and there must be long-time friends and colleagues of Hunter’s in and out of the White House. These people would be only too glad to help out the President’s son. Put two and two together. It seems to me, no one “leaves” a bag of coke just laying around in the White House (or anywhere). That the location where the coke was found was probably an agreed upon drop off point. Whoever left it there, did so purposefully and that was to supply the “Prodigal Son” with his secret sin. That is, drugs to feed his addiction. Because who else would need to hide drugs inside the White House?"
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"Russian Forces and U.S./NATO Forces Will Collide Directly"
Colonel Douglas Macgregor, Straight Calls, 7/9/23
"Russian Forces and U.S./NATO Forces Will Collide Directly"
"Analysis of breaking news and in-depth discussion of current geopolitical events in the United States of America and the world."
Comments here:
"How It Really Is"
Full screen recommended.
And we, folks, are the band.
It has been a privilege playing with you...
"The 'Titanic' Analogy You Haven't Heard: Passively Accepting Oblivion"
"The 'Titanic' Analogy You Haven't Heard:
Passively Accepting Oblivion"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"You've undoubtedly heard rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as an analogy for the futility of approving policy tweaks to address systemic crises. I've used the Titanic as an anology to explain the fragility of our financial system and the "glancing blow" of the pandemic:
"Why Our Financial System Is Like the Titanic" (March 15, 2015)
"Coronavirus and the "Unsinkable" Titanic Analogy" (January 29, 2020)
But there's a powerful analogy you haven't heard before. To understand the analogy, we first need to recap the tragedy's basic set-up.
On April 14, 1912, the liner Titanic, considered unsinkable due to its watertight compartments, struck a glancing blow against a massive iceberg on that moonless, weirdly calm night. In the early hours of April 15, the great ship broke in half and sank, ending the lives of the majority of its passengers and crew. Of the 2,208 passengers and crew onboard, 1,503 perished and 705 survived. The lifeboats had a maximum capacity of 1,178, so some 475 people died unnecessarily. Passengers of the Titanic (Wikipedia)
The initial complacency of the passengers and crew after the collision is another source of analogies relating to humanity's near-infinite capacity for denial. The class structure of the era was enforced by the authorities - the ship's officers. As the situation grew visibly threatening, the First Class passengers were herded into the remaining lifeboats while the steerage/Third Class passengers - many of them immigrants - were mostly kept below decks. Officers were instructed to enforce this class hierarchy with their revolvers.
Two-thirds of all passengers died, but the losses were not evenly distributed: 39% of First Class passengers perished, 58% of Second Class passengers lost their lives and 76% of Third Class passengers did not survive.
Rudimentary calculations by the ship's designer, who was on board to oversee the maiden voyage, revealed the truth to the officers: the ship would sink and there was no way to stop it. The ship was designed to survive four watertight compartments being compromised, and could likely stay afloat if five were opened to the sea, but not if six compartments were flooded. Water would inevitably spill over into adjacent compartments in a domino-like fashion until the ship sank.
What did the authorities do with this knowledge? Stripped of niceties, they passively accepted oblivion as the outcome and devoted their resources to enforcing the class hierarchy and the era's gender chivalry: 80% of male passengers perished, 25% of female passengers lost their lives. The loading of passengers into lifeboats was so poorly managed that only 60% of the lifeboat capacity was filled.
What if the officers had boldly accepted the inevitability of the ship sinking early on and devised a plan to minimize the loss of life? It would not have takes any extraordinary leap of creativity to organize the crew and passenger volunteers to strip the ship of everything that floated - wooden deck chairs, etc. - and lash them together into rafts. Given the calm seas that night and the freezing water, just keeping people above water would have been enough.
Rather than promote the absurd charade that the ship was fine, just fine, when time was of the essence, the authorities could have rounded up the women and children and filled every seat on lifeboats. Of the 1,030 people who could not be placed in a lifeboat, 890 were crew members, including about 25 women. The crew members were almost all in the prime of life. If anyone could survive several hours on a partially-submerged raft, it would have been the crew. (The first rescue ship arrived about two hours after the Titanic sank.)
Would this hurried effort to save everyone on board have succeeded? At a minimum, it would have saved an additional 475 souls via a careful loading of the lifeboats to capacity, and if the makeshift rafts had offered any meaningful flotation at all, many more lives would have been saved. Rather than devote resources to maintaining the pretense of safety and order, what if the ship's leaders had focused their response around answering a simple question: what was needed for people to survive a freezing night once the lifeboats were filled and the ship sank?
I think you see the analogy to the present. Our leadership, such as it is, is devoting resources to maintaining the absurd pretense that everything will magically re-set to what was normal if we just print enough money and bail out the financial Aristocracy.
Whether we realize it or not, we're responding with passive acceptance of oblivion. The economy and social order were precariously fragile before the pandemic, and now the fragilities are unraveling. We need to start thinking beyond pretense and PR."
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Full screen recommended.
"Allegorical Intermezzo"
"Allegorical Intermezzo"
By Jim Kunstler
” If, however, as Pareto suggested… a governing elite is inevitable, then we are certainly under the wrong elites. Whether a circulation of elites can be completed in time to save the world economic system from ruin and the majority from destitution and veritable slavery is a question of no little urgency.” - Michael Rectenwald
Imagine that on an April evening in 1912, the captain of the RMS Titanic had announced a grand ball at which the male passengers were asked to wear their wives’ clothing and vice-versa. That was approximately the condition of Western Civ verging on springtime in 2023: preoccupied with silliness while the iceberg awaits.
But who would have thought the sinking of civilization would occur with such fantastic comic ornamentation? Men, in more ways than mere costuming, pretending to be women…incompetence honored, feted, even worshipped…intellect reduced to anti-thinking…anything of value thrown overboard in some weird post-modern potlatch ceremony of twisted moral righteousness…? But the hour is late, the party is near its end, and the iceberg is struck. The rest of the story will be you holding onto a few valuables, including your life, while the lifeboats get lowered.
From here forward, things get pretty interesting. And from here on, nobody is really in charge. The vacuum of leadership we’ve been living in becomes impossible to ignore, and nature (it’s rumored) hates a vacuum. For the moment, circumstances are in charge, not personalities.
Look no further than the fiasco in Ukraine, engineered by geniuses of the US foreign service in some daft exercise to show the world who’s who and what for. And, remind me: what was the basic idea there? To hamstring and hogtie Russia so badly that her people would overthrow the only rational head-of-state in Christendom, a figure who makes the presidents, chancellors, and prime ministers of Western Civ look like a troop of gibbering mandrills, with painted faces and blue butts, the ass-clowns of geopolitics.
Something tells me that this gang will not make it to the lifeboats. They’ll be left on deck gripping bottles of single malt scotch whiskey, singing Don’t Cry for me Argentina as the band plays, while the whole wicked colossus slides beneath the moonlight-tinted green waves. All of which is to say: these perilous and confounding times we live in are coming to a climax. Events are afoot now, choices must be made, truths will emerge, no one will be untouched, be careful who your friends are.
We’re waiting for financial markets, banks, and monies to blow, as an engine will when submerged in water. It can’t not happen, though every known device has been deployed to keep up appearances. The credibility of finance was thrown overboard a long time ago. Capital was sloshing around in the bilges as the ship heaved and pitched in the angry waters, and it had to go somewhere. The next turn will be when you go looking for where it went and you discover to your nauseated chagrin that the capital is just…gone! Through some legerdemain of physics, it disappeared…turned into a kind of anti-matter…fell through a black hole (possibly ripped by that iceberg), or up the smokestacks, like it was never there at all.
When that happens, our collective attention finally gets galvanized as by no shock before. When capital is truly gone, transmogrified into a whole lot of nothing, the time for standing by making faces and whining is over. By the way, this is the way the world ends for the vacuum known as “Joe Biden” and the Party of Chaos he is propped up to represent. Chaos, we will be astounded to learn, is not your friend, is not the solution to anything, least of all a polity that is floundering in lifeboats over cold, dark, deep water a thousand leagues from dry land. What’s more, there are no ships coming to the rescue. Guess why they put oars in the boats. Get set to pull, me hardies!
Yes, we’re at sea now, without a compass. Yet the stars sparkle dazzlingly above, and some aboard can actually read what they say and what they point to. If safety and sanity will not find us, maybe we can pull together toward wherever they wait. My gawd, it’s going to be a long haul, but have a little faith - remember what that is? (It’s the conviction that all of us together stand in some meaningful relation to existence.) Even if you’re too mentally drained to believe it, act as if it is so. Or, in post-modern parlance, fake it till you make it.
Didn’t think it would come to this when you signed on to the voyage? I guess so. You were comfortably ensconced one winter night in the mini-McMansion, on the overstuffed sofa, entertained by some Netflix inanity, scarfing down the microwaved cheeze morsels…when the wife said, “Hey, let’s book a cruise!” Seemed like a good idea at the time, which is what everything in the annals of history is and was. And now, look at where you are!"
"More Than 105 Million Working-Age Americans Do Not Have A Job Right Now"
"More Than 105 Million Working-Age Americans
Do Not Have A Job Right Now"
by Michael Snyder
"Our long slide toward economic oblivion continues, and survey after survey has shown that most Americans are deeply unsatisfied with the current state of the U.S. economy. Inflation is out of control, most Americans are getting poorer due to the rapidly rising cost of living, the housing bubble has started to burst, and the commercial real estate market is a giant mess. But employment is supposed to be our bright spot. The Biden administration continues to tell us that the unemployment rate is less than 4 percent and that there are lot of jobs available for those that want them. But is this really true?
To answer that question, it is imperative to understand that our government places unemployed persons into one of two categories…
Jobless people are classified into one of two categories by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) - either unemployed or not in the labor force. To be classified as unemployed in the month they are surveyed, people must be actively looking for work. If they are not actively looking, they are classified as not in the labor force.
Over time, the definition of “officially unemployed” has gotten more restrictive, and today only 6.097 million working age Americans are considered to be in that category. Meanwhile, a staggering 99.800 million working age Americans are considered to be “not in the labor force”. When you add both categories together, you get a total of 105.897 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now.
Let me try to put that into perspective. During the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, that number never even got up to 90 million. So that means that the number of working age Americans that are not employed at this moment far surpasses anything that we witnessed during the Great Recession.
Please do not believe the garbage that the federal government is trying to sell you. Unemployment is not low. In fact, John Williams estimates that the real rate of unemployment in this country is somewhere around 25 percent. If you are out of work at this moment, please realize that you are not alone.
In April, 37-year-old North Carolina resident Al Brown lost his job, and now his family is really struggling…"Al Brown and his fiancée faced a tough call in May when reviewing their weekly budget: What’s a higher priority, more food or dish soap? Based in Concord, North Carolina, Brown was the main breadwinner for his fiancée and their two children. Then in April, he was let go from his job as a global director of business development at software company Cascade.
He’s since quit his gym membership and sold miscellaneous items around his home, including a computer and yard furniture, to make ends meet. His 13-year-old son quit the basketball team. While losing the family’s source of income has taken a financial toll, it’s also resulted in a mental one.
Since he was laid off, Brown has submitted more than 600 job applications, but that has produced only a few interviews and no job offers…Brown, 37, now spends his days scouring the internet for jobs or reaching out to potential connections. After filing over 600 applications, only a handful have produced interviews, he says."
If jobs are easy to get, why hasn’t Al Brown been able to find one? Can anyone out there explain that to me? Perhaps I am just a little slow, because what the Biden administration is telling us about the economy does not seem to correspond with reality at all.
54-year-old Nina McCollum has applied for “hundreds of jobs” since losing her position in March, and she is still jobless as well…"Nina McCollum, 54, was laid off from her writing gig at jobs site Glassdoor back in March. She hasn’t found a new role since, despite applying to hundreds of jobs. She’s been living off her savings, selling her blood plasma and frequenting food pantries just to get by - all while taking care of a teenage son. Her domestic partner helps out, but he can’t make up for her lost income."
Why can’t these people find work? What is wrong with them? Of course the truth is that there is nothing wrong with what they are doing. They are diligently searching for jobs, but the reality of the matter is that the employment market has gotten very tight.
Meanwhile, the cost of living just continues to rise, and that has resulted in a “collapse of household savings”…"In February, the U.S. personal savings rate was estimated to be around 4.6 percent—much below the decades-long average of about 8.9 percent, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But what does this mean?
Some economists think that the collapse of household savings could lead to a spending slowdown and trigger a recession. The Biden administration may never admit that we have entered a major economic downturn, but that is precisely what we are witnessing.
In fact, the Institute for Supply Management’s manufacturing purchasing managers index has now been below 50 for eight months in a row…"The U.S. manufacturing sector fell deeper into recession territory in May, extending a multimonth slump as experts warn that the economy faces “clear challenges.”
The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said in a report Monday that its manufacturing purchasing managers index dropped to 46.0 last month, the lowest reading since May 2020 and the eighth consecutive sub-50 reading. Any readings below 50 represent recession, with all key sub-components in contraction, including the employment index, suggesting layoff pressures are building. It’s really happening.
Other than for a brief period during the pandemic, we have not seen economic turmoil of this magnitude since 2008 and 2009. Unfortunately, we are still only in the very early chapters of this crisis. The economic outlook for the remainder of 2023 is very bleak, the outlook for 2024 is even worse, and the long-term outlook is nightmarish.
But you have to give our leaders credit for propping things up for as long as they did. By flooding the system with money, they were able to delay our moment of reckoning for a long time. Of course their gimmicks were also making our long-term problems even worse, and now our long-term problems have become our short-term problems. There is so much pain ahead of us, and our country is not prepared to handle it."
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"Corporate Bankruptcies Reach Highest Level Since 2010"
"Epiq Bankruptcy, a U.S. bankruptcy filing data provider, confirmed that 2,973 total commercial Chapter 11 bankruptcies were filed in the first half of 2023, up 68 percent from the same period in 2022."
And as they go all their jobs go with them...
"15 Signs Walmart Is Falling Apart Before Our Eyes"
Full screen recommended.
The Finance Corner, 7/9/23
"15 Signs Walmart Is Falling Apart Before Our Eyes"
"Walmart's empire is quietly disintegrating as the United States heads toward another recession. When you're the biggest retailer in the world, even a 1% decline in sales can result in billions of dollars in losses. However, profits are down nearly a quarter from a year ago, indicating that the big-box retailer's problems are much worse than anyone could have anticipated. Walmart was the business rivals dreaded most for decades, but recent data indicates that the retailer has been slipping behind. Walmart has started to lose consumer favor, and significant gaps are beginning to appear in its revenue stream. Because the issues it faces differ globally, the company has largely kept its financial struggles out of the news, allowing the superstore chain to go unnoticed in the big picture.
Worse news is released. It turns out that Walmart's issues are not as serious as its "profits." The retailer spent $3.8 billion in the most recent quarter rather than producing any cash from operations. Walmart's free cash flow for the third quarter was a depressingly negative $7.3 billion after accounting for capital expenditures of $3.5 billion. According to historical data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence, the company hadn't had negative cash from operations since Q3 1995, more than 25 years ago.
Additional monetary losses for Walmart may be on the way Earnings have actually decreased over the last three quarters by an average of 4.5%, according to the IBD Stock Checkup. This falls far short of the investors' desired 25% growth. The retail chain's monthly sales have increased on average by 10% over the last three years. Its predicted 4% sales growth for the last quarter of 2022 appears so unimpressive because of this. In other words, investors currently consider Walmart stock to be a no-buy.
Both domestically and internationally, the traditional Walmart business model continues to show signs of weakness. Walmart may be crushed by e-commerce competitors and pushed into the same downward spiral that so many other retailers have experienced in recent years if the retail behemoth fails to adapt to changing market trends. Will the scene's largest retailer fall prey to the relentless retail apocalypse? That is still up in the air. However, the outlook isn't good right now, and the most recent earnings report was a disaster that caused significant losses just after the retail chain went on a really bad losing streak. In the end, a company's failure is merely a reflection of a failing economy, and the setbacks Walmart, American consumers, and our entire economy have already experienced are just the beginning.
When we read between the lines, as Motley Fool's Travis Hoium observed, we can quickly identify a company in serious trouble and speculate that it may be the "latest in a long line of leading retailers to go from boom to bust in the blink of an eye." Since Walmart's best days are behind it, we've gathered a number of figures, statistics, and facts to support this claim in the video above."
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"10 Food Shortages Coming This Fall And Winter! This Is Not Good!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/9/23
"10 Food Shortages Coming This
Fall And Winter! This Is Not Good!"
"In today's vlog, we are going over 10 major food shortages that are coming in Fall of 2023 and into 2024. We explain how if these food items disappear, it will be absolutely devastating all around the world. We are facing more shortages than ever, and must prepare ourselves!"
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We're in big trouble, folks...
Saturday, July 8, 2023
MUST VIEW! Canadian Prepper, "I Wasn't Going To Upload This: Some Very Bad News"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 7/8/23
"I Wasn't Going To Upload This: Some Very Bad News"
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"Alert! Your Drinking Water Is Poisonous, Get A Water Filter Now; American Society Is Collapsing Fast"
Jeremiah Babe, 7/8/23
"Alert! Your Drinking Water Is Poisonous,
Get A Water Filter Now; American Society Is Collapsing Fast"
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"No More Homes"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 7/8/23
"No More Homes"
"Arizona has just announced that you cannot get a building permit for any new homes. No more homes!. The Airbnb market is collapsing. Real estate is falling apart. You are saying hotel owners give the keys back to the banks what’s next?"
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Musical Interlude: Two Steps From Hell, "Downstream"
Full screen recommended.
Two Steps From Hell, "Downstream"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“What powers are being wielded in the Wizard Nebula? Gravitation strong enough to form stars, and stellar winds and radiations powerful enough to create and dissolve towers of gas. Located only 8,000 light years away, the Wizard nebula, pictured above, surrounds developing open star cluster NGC 7380. Visually, the interplay of stars, gas, and dust has created a shape that appears to some like a fictional medieval sorcerer.
The active star forming region spans 100 about light years, making it appear larger than the angular extent of the Moon. The Wizard Nebula can be located with a small telescope toward the constellation of the King of Aethiopia (Cepheus) Although the nebula may last only a few million years, some of the stars being formed may outlive our Sun.”
"Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have"
"Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have"
by John Wilder
"Time. Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list. Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me. The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control. Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially. We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.
Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power. We have used technology to shrink the world. The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days. Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality. Now? The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.
Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom. We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.
We can see at night. We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away. My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance. Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.
But time remains fixed. It flows only one way. And it is the most subjective of our senses. Even Pugsley notices it: “This summer was so short!” He’s in high school. That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood. I’ve long felt that I understood why this was. Let me give it a shot.
For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life. For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more. It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%. For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years. If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years. 1/8 versus 1/20? It’s amazingly different. We don’t perceive life as a line. We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives. Each day you live is smaller than the last.
But that’s not everything. As we age, novelty decreases. When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily. New words. New thoughts. New ideas. That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing. They don’t realize that I can reattach it. Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents. Ever drive a new route somewhere? When I do it, I have to focus my attention. It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.
I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years. I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.
There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive. Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.
Work is similar. Over time, we gain experience. Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them). But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.
The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims. I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life. Finding a new one is... difficult. Life goes faster, day by day for me. Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.
And yet... Each day is still 24 hours. I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling. Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness. I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life. I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.
Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against. Does the flow of time vary? Certainly. But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.
I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this: Time is all we have – it is what makes up life. We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life. We have the hours we have. The only difference is what we do with that time.
I mentioned in a previous post that (during the week) I often get by on scant hours of sleep. That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days. I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.
Maybe I can settle for that definition of time: a gift. Each moment is a gift. Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them. Just make each moment count. Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time. It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away."
o
Full screen recommended.
Hans Zimmer, "Time"
"The Essence Of Human Existence..."
"Curiosity is the essence of human existence.
'Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?'
I don't know. I don't have any answers to those questions.
I don't know what's over there around the corner. But I want to find out."
- Eugene Cernan
The Poet: Edward Hirsch, "I Was Never Able To Pray"
"I Was Never Able To Pray"
"Wheel me down to the shore
where the lighthouse was abandoned
and the moon tolls in the rafters.
Let me hear the wind paging through the trees
and see the stars flaring out, one by one,
like the forgotten faces of the dead.
I was never able to pray,
but let me inscribe my name
in the book of waves
and then stare into the dome
of a sky that never ends
and see my voice sail into the night."
- Edward Hirsch
Free Download: Aldous Huxley, “Brave New World"
“O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is!
O, brave new world, That has such people in't!”
- William Shakespeare, “The Tempest” (V, 1)
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“Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too - all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides - made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions...”
- “Brave New World: Suggestions from the State”
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Freely download “Brave New World", by Aldous Huxley, here:
"You Finally Find What You're After..."
"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"
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