“If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was
a thousand miles away, I'd still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.”
- Abraham Maslow
So, we rise from the rubble...
Saturday, April 27, 2024
"In The Last Few Years..."
"In the last few years, the very idea of telling the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth is dredged up only as a final resort when the
alternative options of deception, threat and bribery have all been exhausted."
- Michael Musto
"Oh! What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive"
- Sir Walter Scott, "Marmion"
Dan, I Allegedly, "People Can’t Find Jobs"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 4/27/24
"People Can’t Find Jobs"
"Facing the harsh realities of 2024's worsening job market? I dive deep into the growing crisis as we explore why finding stable, full-time employment has become a daunting challenge for many. From aging workers to fresh graduates, the struggle is real and it’s impacting everyone. Filmed at the stunning Carl'sbad flower fields, this video isn’t just a feast for the eyes - it’s a crucial conversation starter about our economic future."
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno,, "Grocery Prices At Walmart Are Getting Ridiculous!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 4/27/24
"Grocery Prices At Walmart Are Getting Ridiculous!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Walmart and are noticing a lot of the grocery prices are becoming very unaffordable! Many families continue to struggle to put food on the table, and it's getting harder to find any deals."
Comments here:
o
Meanwhile, elsewhere...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell, 4/27/24
"Russian Typical (German Owned)
Supermarket Tour: Globus"
What does a Russian typical supermarket look like inside? Join me
on a tour of a German owned supermarket in Moscow, Russia.
Comments here:
Just like where you live in America, right Good Citizen? Right?
Look at the people, what do you see? Not one has their face jammed into an iPhone!
Isn't that interesting?
Friday, April 26, 2024
Musical Interlude: Yanni, "The Storm"; "Prelude and Nostalgia"
Full screen recommended.
Yanni, "The Storm"
Full screen recommended.
Yanni, "Prelude and Nostalgia"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"A gorgeous spiral galaxy, M104 is famous for its nearly edge-on profile featuring a broad ring of obscuring dust lanes. Seen in silhouette against an extensive central bulge of stars, the swath of cosmic dust lends a broad brimmed hat-like appearance to the galaxy suggesting a more popular moniker, the Sombrero Galaxy. This sharp optical view of the well-known galaxy made from ground-based image data was processed to preserve details often lost in overwhelming glare of M104's bright central bulge.
Also known as NGC 4594, the Sombrero galaxy can be seen across the spectrum, and is host to a central supermassive black hole. About 50,000 light-years across and 28 million light-years away, M104 is one of the largest galaxies at the southern edge of the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. Still the colorful spiky foreground stars in this field of view lie well within our own Milky Way galaxy. "
The Poet: Carl Sandburg, "Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind "
"Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind "
The past is a bucket of ashes.
1
"The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it,
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.
2
The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold,
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
3
It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.
And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
and the only listeners left now
are the rats and the lizards.
And there are black crows
crying, Caw, caw,
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.
The only singers now are crows crying, Caw, caw,
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are the rats and the lizards.
4
The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats,
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.
And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts,
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was. "
- Carl Sandburg, 1878 -1967
"Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind"
“The 12 Rules of Survival”
“The 12 Rules of Survival”
by Laurence Gonzales
“As a journalist, I’ve been writing about accidents for more than thirty years. In the last 15 or so years, I’ve concentrated on accidents in outdoor recreation, in an effort to understand who lives, who dies, and why. To my surprise, I found an eerie uniformity in the way people survive seemingly impossible circumstances. Decades and sometimes centuries apart, separated by culture, geography, race, language, and tradition, the most successful survivors–those who practice what I call “deep survival” – go through the same patterns of thought and behavior, the same transformation and spiritual discovery, in the course of keeping themselves alive.
Not only that but it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are surviving being lost in the wilderness or battling cancer, whether they’re struggling through divorce or facing a business catastrophe – the strategies remain the same. Survival should be thought of as a journey, a vision quest of the sort that Native Americans have had as a rite of passage for thousands of years. Once you’re past the precipitating event – you’re cast away at sea or told you have cancer– you have been enrolled in one of the oldest schools in history. Here are a few things I’ve learned that can help you pass the final exam.
1. Perceive and Believe: Don’t fall into the deadly trap of denial or of immobilizing fear. Admit it: You’re really in trouble and you’re going to have to get yourself out. Many people who in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, died simply because they told themselves that everything was going to be all right. Others panicked. Panic doesn’t necessarily mean screaming and running around. Often it means simply doing nothing. Survivors don’t candy-coat the truth, but they also don’t give in to hopelessness in the face of it. Survivors see opportunity, even good, in their situation, however grim. After the ordeal is over, people may be surprised to hear them say it was the best thing that ever happened to them.
Viktor Frankl, who spent three years in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, describes comforting a woman who was dying. She told him, “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard. In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” The phases of the survival journey roughly parallel the five stages of death once described by Elizabeth Kubler Ross in her book "On Death and Dying": Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In dire circumstances, a survivor moves through those stages rapidly to acceptance of his situation, then resolves to do something to save himself. Survival depends on telling yourself, “Okay, I’m here. This is really happening. Now I’m going to do the next right thing to get myself out.” Whether you succeed or not ultimately becomes irrelevant. It is in acting well – even suffering well – that you give meaning to whatever life you have to live.
2. Stay Calm – Use Your Anger: In the initial crisis, survivors are not ruled by fear; instead, they make use of it. Their fear often feels like (and turns into) anger, which motivates them and makes them feel sharper. Aron Ralston, the hiker who had to cut off his hand to free himself from a stone that had trapped him in a slot canyon in Utah, initially panicked and began slamming himself over and over against the boulder that had caught his hand. But very quickly, he stopped himself, did some deep breathing, and began thinking about his options. He eventually spent five days progressing through the stages necessary to convince him of what decisive action he had to take to save his own life.
When Lance Armstrong, six-time winner of the Tour de France, awoke from brain surgery for his cancer, he first felt gratitude. “But then I felt a second wave, of anger… I was alive, and I was mad.” When friends asked him how he was doing, he responded, “I’m doing great… I like it like this. I like the odds stacked against me… I don’t know any other way.” That’s survivor thinking. Survivors also manage pain well. As a bike racer, Armstrong had had long training in enduring pain, even learning to love it. James Stockdale, a fighter pilot who was shot down in Vietnam and spent eight years in the Hanoi Hilton, as his prison camp was known, advised those who would learn to survive: “One should include a course of familiarization with pain. You have to practice hurting. There is no question about it.”
3. Think, Analyze, and Plan: Survivors quickly organize, set up routines, and institute discipline. When Lance Armstrong was diagnosed with cancer, he organized his fight against it the way he would organize his training for a race. He read everything he could about it, put himself on a training schedule, and put together a team from among friends, family, and doctors to support his efforts. Such conscious, organized effort in the face of grave danger requires a split between reason and emotion in which reason gives direction and emotion provides the power source. Survivors often report experiencing reason as an audible “voice.”
Steve Callahan, a sailor and boat designer, was rammed by a whale and sunk while on a solo voyage in 1982. Adrift in the Atlantic for 76 days in a five-and-a-half-foot raft, he experienced his survival voyage as taking place under the command of a “captain,” who gave him his orders and kept him on his water ration, even as his own mutinous (emotional) spirit complained. His captain routinely lectured “the crew.” Thus under strict control, he was able to push away thoughts that his situation was hopeless and take the necessary first steps of the survival journey: to think clearly, analyze his situation, and formulate a plan.
4. Take Correct, Decisive Action: Survivors are willing to take risks to save themselves and others. But they are simultaneously bold and cautious in what they will do. Lauren Elder was the only survivor of a light plane crash in high sierra. Stranded on a peak above 12,000 feet, one arm broken, she could see the San Joaquin Valley in California below, but a vast wilderness and sheer and icy cliffs separated her from it. Wearing a wrap-around skirt and blouse, with two-inch heeled boots and not even wearing underwear, she crawled “on all fours, doing a kind of sideways spiderwalk,” as she put it later, “balancing myself on the ice crust, punching through it with my hands and feet.” She had 36 hours of climbing ahead of her– a seemingly impossible task. But Elder allowed herself to think only as far as the next big rock. Survivors break down large jobs into small, manageable tasks. They set attainable goals and develop short-term plans to reach them. They are meticulous about doing those tasks well. Elder tested each hold before moving forward and stopped frequently to rest. They make very few mistakes. They handle what is within their power to deal with from moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day.
5. Celebrate your success: Survivors take great joy from even their smallest successes. This helps keep motivation high and prevents a lethal plunge into hopelessness. It also provides relief from the unspeakable strain of a life-threatening situation. Elder said that once she had completed her descent of the first pitch, she looked up at the impossibly steep slope and thought, “Look what you’ve done…Exhilarated, I gave a whoop that echoed down the silent pass.” Even with a broken arm, joy was Elder’s constant companion. A good survivor always tells herself: count your blessings– you’re alive. Viktor Frankl wrote of how he felt at times in Auschwitz: “How content we were; happy in spite of everything.”
6. Be a Rescuer, Not a Victim: Survivors are always doing what they do for someone else, even if that someone is thousands of miles away. There are numerous strategies for doing this. When Antoine Saint-Exupery was stranded in the Libyan desert after his mail plane suffered an engine failure, he thought of how his wife would suffer if he gave up and didn’t return. Yossi Ghinsberg, a young Israeli hiker, was lost in the Bolivian jungle for more than two weeks after becoming separated from his friends. He hallucinated a beautiful companion with whom he slept each night as he traveled. Everything he did, he did for her. People cannot survive for themselves alone; their must be a higher motive. Viktor Frankl put it this way: “Don’t aim at success– the more you aim at it and make it a target,the more you are going to miss it.” He suggests taking it as “the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.”
7. Enjoy the Survival Journey: It may seem counterintuitive, but even in the worst circumstances, survivors find something to enjoy, some way to play and laugh. Survival can be tedious, and waiting itself is an art. Elder found herself laughing out loud when she started to worry that someone might see up her skirt as she climbed. Even as Callahan’s boat was sinking, he stopped to laugh at himself as he clutched a knife in his teeth like a pirate while trying to get into his life raft. And Viktor Frankl ordered some of his companions in Auschwitz who were threatening to give up hope to force themselves to think of one funny thing each day. Survivors also use the intellect to stimulate, calm, and entertain the mind.
While moving across a near-vertical cliff face in Peru, Joe Simpson developed a rhythmic pattern of placing his ax, plunging his other arm into the snow face, and then making a frightening little hop with his good leg. “I meticulously repeated the pattern,” he wrote later. “I began to feel detached from everything around me.” Singing, playing mind games, reciting poetry, counting anything, and doing mathematical problems in your head can make waiting possible and even pleasant, even while heightening perception and quieting fear. Stockdale wrote, “The person who came into this experiment with reams of already memorized poetry was the bearer of great gifts.”
Lost in the Bolivian jungle, Yossi Ghinsberg reported, “When I found myself feeling hopeless, I whispered my mantra, ‘Man of action, man of action.’ I don’t know where I had gotten the phrase… I repeated it over and over: A man of action does whatever he must, isn’t afraid, and doesn’t worry.” Survivors engage their crisis almost as an athlete engages a sport. They cling to talismans. They discover the sense of flow of the expert performer, the “zone” in which emotion and thought balance each other in producing fluid action. A playful approach to a critical situation also leads to invention, and invention may lead to a new technique, strategy, or design that could save you.
8. See the Beauty: Survivors are attuned to the wonder of their world, especially in the face of mortal danger. The appreciation of beauty, the feeling of awe, opens the senses to the environment. (When you see something beautiful, your pupils actually dilate.) Debbie Kiley and four others were adrift in the Atlantic after their boat sank in a hurricane in 1982. They had no supplies, no water, and would die without rescue. Two of the crew members drank sea water and went mad. When one of them jumped overboard and was being eaten by sharks directly under their dinghy, Kiley felt as if she, too, were going mad, and told herself, “Focus on the sky, on the beauty there.”
When Saint-Exupery’s plane went down in the Libyan Desert, he was certain that he was doomed, but he carried on in this spirit: “Here we are, condemned to death, and still the certainty of dying cannot compare with the pleasure I am feeling. The joy I take from this half an orange which I am holding in my hand is one of the greatest joys I have ever known.” At no time did he stop to bemoan his fate, or if he did, it was only to laugh at himself.
9. Believe That You Will Succeed: It is at this point, following what I call “the vision,” that the survivor’s will to live becomes firmly fixed. Fear of dying falls away, and a new strength fills them with the power to go on. “During the final two days of my entrapment,” Ralston recalled, “I felt an increasing reserve of energy, even though I had run out of food and water.” Elder said, “I felt rested and filled with a peculiar energy.” And: “It was as if I had been granted an unlimited supply of energy.”
10. Surrender: Yes you might die. In fact, you will die – we all do. But perhaps it doesn’t have to be today. Don’t let it worry you. Forget about rescue. Everything you need is inside you already. Dougal Robertson, a sailor who was cast away at sea for thirty-eight days after his boat sank, advised thinking of survival this way: “Rescue will come as a welcome interruption of… the survival voyage.” One survival psychologist calls that “resignation without giving up. It is survival by surrender.” Simpson reported, “I would probably die out there amid those boulders. The thought didn’t alarm me… the horror of dying no longer affected me.” The Tao Te Ching explains how this surrender leads to survival:
“The rhinoceros has no place to jab its horn,
The tiger has no place to fasten its claws,
Weapons have no place to admit their blades.
Now, what is the reason for this?
Because on him there are no mortal spots.”
11. Do Whatever Is Necessary: Elder down-climbed vertical ice and rock faces with no experience and no equipment. In the black of night, Callahan dove into the flooded saloon of his sinking boat, at once risking and saving his life. Aron Ralston cut off his own arm to free himself. A cancer patient allows herself to be nearly killed by chemotherapy in order to live. Survivors have a reason to live and are willing to bet everything on themselves. They have what psychologists call meta-knowledge: They know their abilities and do not over–or underestimate them. They believe that anything is possible and act accordingly.
12. Never Give Up: When Apollo 13′s oxygen tank exploded, apparently dooming the crew, Commander Jim Lovell chose to keep on transmitting whatever data he could back to mission control, even as they burned up on re-entry. Simpson, Elder, Callahan, Kiley, Stockdale, Ginsberg – were all equally determined and knew this final truth: If you’re still alive, there is always one more thing that you can do. Survivors are not easily discouraged by setbacks. They accept that the environment is constantly changing and know that they must adapt. When they fall, they pick themselves up and start the entire process over again, breaking it down into manageable bits. Survivors always have a clear reason for going on. They keep their spirits up by developing an alternate world, created from rich memories, into which they can escape. They see opportunity in adversity.
In the aftermath, survivors learn from and are grateful for the experiences that they’ve had. As Elder told me once, “I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. And sometimes I even miss it. I miss the clarity of knowing exactly what you have to do next.” Those who would survive the hazards of our world, whether at play or in business or at war, through illness or financial calamity, will do so through a journey of transformation. But that transcendent state doesn’t miraculously appear when it is needed. It wells up from a lifetime of experiences, attitudes, and practices form one’s personality, a core from which the necessary strength is drawn. A survival experpierience is an incomparable gift: It will tell you who you really are.”
○
Laurence Gonzales is the author of “Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why” (W.W. Norton & Co., New York) and contributing editor for “National Geographic Adventure” magazine. The winner of numerous awards, he has written for Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Conde Nast Traveler, Rolling Stone, among others. He has published a dozen books, including two award-winning collections of essays, three novels, and the book-length essay, “One Zero Charlie” published by Simon & Schuster. For more, go to www.deepsurvival.com
"Dave Ramsey Giving Dangerous Advice Again; New Economic Crash Will Make 2008 Look Like A Picnic"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/26/24
"Dave Ramsey Giving Dangerous Advice Again;
New Economic Crash Will Make 2008 Look Like A Picnic"
Comments here:
"The Dunning-Kruger Effect - Cognitive Bias - Why Incompetent People Think They Are Competent"
Full screen recommended.
"The Dunning-Kruger Effect - Cognitive Bias -
Why Incompetent People Think They Are Competent"
"I Seek The Truth..."
“If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed.”
- Marcus Aurelius
"The Curse of Interesting Times"
"The Curse of Interesting Times"
Things are the most interesting they've been
in 80 years, 250 years, and, well, ever.
by Contemplations on the Tree of Woe
"The Chinese curse their enemies with the phrase “may you live in interesting times.” Or, rather, Americans think that Chinese curse their enemies like that; according to Infogalactic, “despite being widely attributed as a Chinese curse, there is no equivalent expression in Chinese.”
Fortunately, there’s an actual Chinese phrase that’s much more interesting. It’s found in a 1627 short story collection by Feng Menglong called "Stories to Awaken the World," and it states "better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic times.” And to be a dog in 17th China didn’t mean being a beloved fur baby with your own YouTube channel. It meant being a workbeast that got eaten when times were lean. The Chinese still have an annual dog meat festival.
Whichever adage you prefer, our times are both chaotic and interesting. In fact, they are monumentally interesting - they are so interesting as to beggar coherent description, to put to shame historical comparison, so remarkable that every single one of us would be justified in screaming from the rooftops in shock and awe. And yet we don’t. We keep calm and carry on, sturdily gripped by our bias for normalcy, by our human ability to adapt to even the most bizarre circumstances. It’ll be fine, we tell ourselves. This is fine.
But what if we put aside our normalcy bias for a moment and look at how just how “interesting” our times really are? What do we see then?
Once Every 80 Years…Once every 80 years, a country enters a crisis. That is, at least, the assertion of Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. According to Strauss and Howe, human history is organized into repeating patterns marked by four “turnings”: the High, the Awakening, the Unraveling, and the Crisis. Each turning is approximately 20 years long, and an entire cycle of four turnings is therefore about 80 years long. According to Strauss and Howe, American history looks something like this:
○ American Revolutionary Crisis, 1765 - 1785
○ American Civil War Crisis, 1855 - 1875
○ Great Depression and World War II Crisis, 1930 - 1950
○ You Are Here, 2010 - 2030
If we believe Strauss-Howe Generational Theory, we are in the midst of what they call a Fourth Turning - a moment of Crisis.
Are we in a Fourth Turning? I certainly believe so. As I documented in "Running on Empty," the United States now stands at a financial precipice. US inflation is at its worst in 40 years because the monetary system we established under Truman and rejuvenated under Nixon is now about to collapse. With that crisis have come challenges from a resurgent Russia and burgeoning China that could lead to a Third World War or, at best, a post-American world order. The Thucydides Trap has never been so close to springing. It’s no wonder then that US fears of nuclear war have surged to levels not seen since the Cold War. But unlike the Cold War, no one wants to ‘ask what they can do for their country’ anymore. US Army recruitment is at its worst in 50 years. And why would they want to serve? Our nation is divided into warring camps. US partisan distrust of the opposing party is at its worst in 30 years.
All right. That all sounds bad. But if Strauss-Howe Generational Theory is true, the Fourth Turning will be over in about 5-10 years and we’ll move into the next Turning, the High. And those are awesome! But what if we won’t be heading into another high?"
Full, fascinating, most highly recommended article is here:
○
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, "Weekly Intel Wrap-Up RoundTable"
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 4/26/24
"Weekly Intel Wrap-Up RoundTable"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "This is More Than a Warning Sign"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 4/26/24
"This is More Than a Warning Sign"
"We just got our gross domestic product numbers for the first quarter of 2024. They were an absolute disaster. Plus, we got the personal consumption expenditure numbers. Inflation is going nowhere but up."
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "A Different Kind of Dumb," Part Two
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"A Different Kind of Dumb," Part Two
The patterns of Megapolitics suggest that this sort of excess spending and meddling
in the affairs of others will grease the skids for the decline of of the US empire.
by Bill Bonner
Dublin, Ireland - "First up: the GDP came in at half what was supposed to be... and inflation was hotter than expected. Bloomberg reports: "US Economy Slows and Inflation Jumps, Damping Soft-Landing Hopes." "First-quarter core inflation measure accelerates to 3.7% rate. Gross domestic product increased at a 1.6% annualized rate, below all economists’ forecasts, the government’s initial estimate showed. The economy’s main growth engine - personal spending - rose at a slower-than-forecast 2.5% pace. A wider trade deficit subtracted the most from growth since 2022."
And here we see the inflate or die trap clearly. The Fed wants to cut rates. Banks want lower rates. Wall Street wants lower rates. The US government desperately needs lower rates. But inflation is looking over the Fed’s shoulder. At 3.7%, it’s nearly twice the Fed’s target. So, a cut would likely cost the Fed its remaining credibility... signal higher levels of inflation in the future... and might send the bond market into a tizzy, making it even harder for the feds to roll over their $34 trillion in debt and fund trillions more in new deficits.
The US growth rate is barely a third of Russia’s GDP growth. But if the Fed cuts rates to try to boost GDP, it risks bringing on higher levels of inflation and a collapse of the bond market... forcing it to ‘print’ more money to cover the feds’ deficits.
Death of the Bubble: If it doesn’t cut rates, it risks a recession/depression of unknowable severity... and the death of the bubble economy that its ultra-low interest rates, 2009-2021, created. Inflate or die. Our high confidence guess is that it will die a little... doing nothing until the pain of a dying bubble becomes unbearable. In earlier editions of this commentary, we’ve seen that climbing down the debt mountain, more or less safely, is possible. Jamaica did it. Greece seems to be doing it. Argentina has begun to do it. But you only do it by cutting spending... sharply. Emphatically. Enough to run a surplus that you use to reduce your debt. As Javier Milei puts it: a balanced budget is “non-negotiable.”
Which makes the $95 billion in ‘foreign aid’ - to people who don’t need it (Israel)... can’t achieve anything with it (the Ukraine)... or have no real use for it (Taiwan) - even more out-of-line. George Will claims that opposing the ‘foreign aid’ package is “ignoble.” Others say that it ‘promotes US security.’ Still others believe it will help ‘protect democracy,’ somehow. Whether those things are true or not... we have no idea. They are not the sort of claims that can be fact checked.
Wages of Debt: The contrary point of view is that the wages of this spending will be starkly negative. Americans will be blamed for the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza. In the Ukraine, Americans will be blamed by some for not giving the Ukrainians enough firepower to win... and by others for promoting a losing war with hundreds of thousands of casualties. And in Asia, America will cut itself off from friendly trade with the most innovative and productive economy on the planet. Instead of gaining the benefits of win-win trade with China, the US will reap the bitter costs of win-lose rivalry.
Whichever point of view you choose, what is indisputable is that in the US as in Argentina ‘no hay dinero’ (there is no money). So, the $95 billion will have to be borrowed. US debt will increase... and the Primary Trend towards lower real asset prices, higher interest rates, higher levels of inflation, and spreading poverty will be enhanced.
The patterns of Megapolitics also suggest - but leave much room for interpretation and argument - that this sort of excess spending and meddling in the affairs of others will grease the skids for the decline of the US empire. Fish gotta swim. Birds gotta fly. And empires gotta decline. As if guided by an invisible hand, the feds do what they have to do... when they have to do it…wrecking America’s financial position, undermining its moral position, and ultimately destroying its position as the world's leading hegemon.
But Monday we’ll look back at Francis Fukuyama... the reprise of history... and what might replace the Post-WWII order. The humans in it will be every bit as dumb as those who run things today. But maybe... a different kind of dumb. Stay tuned."
Jim Kunstler, "Emergency-O-Rama"
"Emergency-O-Rama"
by Jim Kunstler
“We’ll certainly never forget the dark days
of June 6 - January 6th, excuse me.”
- President “Joe Biden”
"The plum blossoms are ready to pop here. You can feel your blood rising. The evening sun lingers a little longer every day. Normally you’d celebrate, but not this year of roaring portents and evil juju. History doesn’t stop to catch its breath for a moment. The tiny glowing diode deep in “Joe Biden’s” brain dims a bit more each day (pause) while low men and women in high places trifle with the fate of the nation. Everyone dreads what’s coming.
Which, judging by events of the week just past, looks like a worse summer of civil chaos than 2020 was. Some entity - say, the checkbook of George and Alex Soros, maybe? - has funded the spring mustering of student mobs in support of Hamas seeking to drive wicked Israel into the choppy Mediterranean. What you’re seeing, though, is probably not what you think you are seeing in all that. The kids are mere digits in a cultural algorithm playing out as New Age dumbshow.
I doubt that three-quarters of them actually give a flying fugazy about the Palestinians, and even fewer could find Gaza on a map if you water-boarded them. They affect to be intersectional victims of the universal oppressor, but in so far as many of the rioters are girls of the Ivy League, or comparable redoubts of privilege - little blue-eyed, blonde-haired muffins raised on pony club, Hermes, and artisan granola - there must be something else going on. That something else is probably sex, which is so problematical now in any traditional frame of a man getting it on with a woman that the American birth-rate is going to zero.
How does a young woman get it on with so many collegiate men vying for gay brownie points these days, or going for the grand prize in transitioning? Why, it’s a non-starter. So, instead, you go slumming among the savages, those hairy, dumb brutes on twerk-alert, dripping testosterone - illegal aliens, student third-worlders, BLM alumni, hardcore hoodlums. They don’t know nuthin ‘bout no pony club, but they will rut like Bilberry rams until the ladies fall away crosseyed. Affecting to be a lesbian only makes the game more piquant. And if you forgot your birth control, for some reason, there’s always the abortionist.
Any time there are brownie points at stake, you know the game is actually for status, and where status is the game, fashion is the currency. Thus, the dress-up in Arab keffiyehs, the charming head-scarf denoting allyship with Hamas. Beats the heck out of those flitty N-95 masks from the 2020 Covid nights of roistering in the Seattle CHOP and trying to burn down the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse in Portland.
Rioting gives young men of the toxic persuasion opportunities to flaunt their moxie in acts of derring-do, brawling with the cops, dancing on top of cars, ripping down chain-link fences, flinging gasoline bombs. So much the better for getting the ladies’ attention. Look what I can do! And the keffiyeh accessorizes well with black bloc riot garb. For the muffins, wearing it is great practice for the utopia-to-come when they must don burkas under submission to Sharia. Will Hermes put out a burka?
So far, the spring rioting has mostly been fun for the rioters. Unlike the J-6-21 “paraders,” locked up in the putrid DC jail for years pending trial, the Hamas frolickers are at near-zilch risk of any serious consequences. Few will even be suspended from school. They are doing exactly what the schools trained them up for: destroying Western Civ, one acanthus leaf at a time. According to the shadowy stage-managers behind “Joe Biden,” this will save our democracy.
That and stuffing Donald Trump in jail for the rest of his natural life. Alas, the lawfare cases cooked up toward that end appear defective to a spectacular degree. It really says something about the true authors of these beauties brought by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Fani Willis, and Jack Smith. I speak of the behind-the-scene blob lawfare ninjas Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, Matt Colangelo, and Mary McCord, who wrote the scripts for all four of this year’s big elephant trap cases against the former president. You have to wonder how that bunch made it through their law boards. The current extravaganza in Manhattan that centers on alleged book-keeping errors in furtherance of an unstated federal offense is due to go on a few more weeks. The howling errors of both the prosecution and Judge Juan Merchan are so extravagant that the proceeding looks like it was cribbed from the pages of Lewis Carroll.
Yet, there is near unanimous sentiment that the Trump-deranged New Yawk jury will convict, no matter how much more idiotic the case turns out to be. By then, we will be verging on summer. The college campuses will be shuttered and the youth-in-revolt action will necessarily move to the regular streets. Whichever way the verdict goes in the Alvin Bragg case, epic looting and rioting will commence.
Sometime this summer, I predict, the Mar-a-Lago documents case will get tossed on something like malicious prosecution. Jack Smith’s DC case, kneecapped by SCOTUS, won’t start before the November election (or maybe ever) and ditto the Fani Willis fiasco in Atlanta. George and Alex Soros will pour millions into box lunches for the kids burning down what’s left of the cities and the demure gals of the Ivy League Left will find plenty of love in the ruins.
The two major party conventions in July (Republican) and August (Democrat) are sure to out-do the 1968 lollapalooza in Chicago (I was there) in mayhem and property damage. “Joe Biden” - really the blob behind him - will ache to declare a national emergency, perhaps even a second emergency after the recently unveiled “climate emergency” supposedly pending any day. The USA will be in an historic horror movie you could call Emergency-O-Rama. If you think the financial system, and the US economy that has become the tail on the finance dog, can survive all this, you will be disappointed. The army may have to step in and put an end to these shenanigans. Don’t think it can’t happen."
Greg Hunter, "Weekly News Wrap-Up 4/26/24"
"Weekly News Wrap-Up 4/26/24"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"President Trump’s so-called immunity case is in front of the Suprem Court. Who knows how it will turn out, but the first day of argument did not go well for the Biden Administration lawyers. The High Court is not going to dismiss the case, and likely some sort of immunity will be decided upon. At the very least, this case will delay other Trump cases in New York, Florida and Georgia until after the 2024 November Election, and that would be a big win in and of itself.
Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs just vetoed a bill that would “require proof of residency for voting.” All I can say is Hobbs and other Democrats in power are clearly protecting the voter fraud. With an 8% actual approval rating for President Biden, the swamp knows they will be forced to cheat and cheat big. My questions are: Can they cheat enough to pull it off again? Can they find enough people to help them cheat when the very people that helped them in 2020 are now struggling to survive? It’s not going to get better before election day.
You know the economy is in trouble when the CEO of one of the biggest banks in the world starts sounding the alarm about “higher interest rates and higher inflation.” A few months ago, Jamie Dimon praised Donald Trump’s economic policies at the World Economic Forum. People were shocked!! Today, Dimon is preparing his bank for higher interest rates caused by massive government spending, a skidding GDP and spiking inflation. It appears many would like Trump back in office to fix and run the economy. Maybe we can defeat the Deep State cheaters and get our wish. I pray Jehovah please help us in the name of Christ Jesus. There is much more in the 52-minute newscast."
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks about these
stories and more in the Weekly News Wrap-Up for 4/26/24.
Thursday, April 25, 2024
Canadian Prepper, "Emergency Update! Massive Attack On USA Imminent?"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/25/24
"Emergency Update! Massive Attack On USA Imminent?
Texas Warns Citizens, Snipers On Rooftops"
Comments here:
Jeremiah Babe, "The Stagflation Nightmare Rocks Markets, GDP Crushed; Rate Cuts Are Just A Dream"
Jeremiah Babe, 4/25/26
"The Stagflation Nightmare Rocks Markets, GDP Crushed;
Rate Cuts Are Just A Dream"
Comments here:
"Amazon Grocery Stores Are Falling Apart All Around Us As Business Face Massive Challenges"
Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 4/25/24
"Amazon Grocery Stores Are Falling Apart All
Around Us As Business Face Massive Challenges"
"People from all over the U.S. are getting outraged by the price increases they're seeing at grocery store chains operated by Amazon. The behemoth retailer is also raising service fees, and shutting down more unprofitable locations this month, even after laying off almost 30,000 employees over the last year, and reporting record profits for the fiscal year ended in March 2024.
Though official agencies and corporate CEOs cite improving economic conditions in their latest reports, most U.S. consumers have yet to report experiencing some financial relief this year. In fact, a LendingClub survey found that 66% of Americans are still feeling the pinch of higher food prices on their monthly budgets, and that may be especially true for Whole Foods' and Amazon Fresh customers.
A few weeks ago, one Amazon customer went viral on TikTok for exposing some of the insane prices for everyday staples she had seen at her local Whole Foods store in Boston. The woman, who goes by the username @via..li on the social media platform, posted a video about her expensive purchases, which has been shared by hundreds of thousands of users, and re-shared on various websites."
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Josh Groban, “Gira Con Me Questa Notte”
Josh Groban, “Gira Con Me Questa Notte”
○
English lyrics:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“How far do magnetic fields extend up and out of spiral galaxies? For decades astronomers knew only that some spiral galaxies had magnetic fields. However, after NRAO's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope (popularized in the movie Contact) was upgraded in 2011, it was unexpectedly discovered that these fields could extend vertically away from the disk by several thousand light-years. The featured image of edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 5775, observed in the CHANG-ES (Continuum Halos in Nearby Galaxies) survey, also reveals spurs of magnetic field lines that may be common in spirals.
Analogous to iron filings around a bar magnet, radiation from electrons trace galactic magnetic field lines by spiraling around these lines at almost the speed of light. The filaments in this image are constructed from those tracks in VLA data. The visible light image, constructed from Hubble Space Telescope data, shows pink gaseous regions where stars are born. It seems that winds from these regions help form the magnificently extended galactic magnetic fields.”
'Two Possibilities Exist..."
"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the
Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
"I'm sure the universe is full of intelligent life.
It's just been too intelligent to come here."
- Arthur C. Clarke
"I Am Done"
"I Am Done"
by OHMama
"I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.
My 1940s born Dad raised me to be patriotic and proud, to love the war bird airplanes of his era as much as he does, and to respect our flag and our country as a sacred thing. I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift a person could have. I grew up thinking that our country was as strong, and honest and true as my Dad. I grew up thinking I was free.
As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from under us.
I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.
We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year without going into debt.
At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.
I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the medicine cabinet.
I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.
I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility.
Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence.
And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.
And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They’re probably relieved that upstart Trump is gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.
I will not vote again; they’ve made it abundantly clear that my voice doesn’t matter. Whatever irrational, suicidal lunacy the nanny states thinks is best is what I’ll get. What it decided I need is a geriatric pedophile who shouldn’t be charged with anything more rigorous than choosing between tapioca and rice pudding at the old folks home, and a casting couch skank who rails against racism while being a descendant of slave owners.
I’m free to dismember a baby in my womb and kill it because “my body my choice”, but God help me if I won’t cover my face with a germ laden Linus-worthy security blanket or refuse let them inject genetically altering chemicals into my body or my child’s. I can be doxed, fired, shunned and destroyed for daring to venture that there are only 2 genders as proven by DNA, but a disease with a 99+% survival rate for most humans is a deadly pandemic worth murdering an economy over. Because science. Idiocracy is real, and we are living it. Dr. Hannibal Lecter would be an improvement over Fauci.
I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heartbreaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.
I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to or from the society they live in.
I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but f**k these motherf**kers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all, mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all."
Soon, OHMama, soon...
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