Saturday, March 27, 2021

“Of Time, Turnings, Stars & Wars”

“Of Time, Turnings, Stars & Wars”
by Doug "Uncola" Lynn

"Like nature, history is full of processes that cannot happen in reverse. Just as the laws of entropy do not allow a bird to fly backward, or droplets to regroup at the top of a waterfall, history has no rewind button. Like the seasons of nature, it moves only forward."
- Strauss and Howe: “The Fourth Turning”

"Contemplating the concept of time can be quite confounding, to say the least. In the extreme, considering the paradoxical nature of time’s passage will stretch the mind causing thoughts to invert like taffy in a rolling machine or light yielding to the gravity of an Event Horizon before the edge of a Black Hole in deep space.

Knowing Einstein was right means time stops at the speed of light. Surely then, waves of thought must generate their own specific gravity to capture both light and sound, together. Our eyes and ears record each moment and translate events into high definition digital memories which we can recall upon demand and view as celluloid film stock in a dark room.

However, in this dimension, there is another aspect at play that comes attached to time. Space: The final frontier. These conflagrate together and then separate at any given moment never to coalesce again in quite the same way. Time can be recalled like a ghost, or a spectral hologram, on the mind’s screen, but the space will have changed and dissipated entropically like dust digested in the amorphous bellies of Stephen King’s Langoliers.

To put it another way, time changes everything. A couple of years ago one of my offspring had a milestone birthday so we went to a morning movie matinee followed by an expensive late lunch at a fine dining venue. It was there where I chewed my food and contemplated the confounding conceptual continuations of space and time.

The movie was the Star Wars flick, "Rogue One" and the state-of-the-art theater featured stadium seating and a massive UltraScreen Deluxe® with Dolby® Atmospheric Surround-sound which, according to the advertisements, offered the “ultimate moviegoing experience”. As I watched the story unfold in REAL D 3D® with my 3D glasses in place while eating my popcorn and nestled comfortably in the red leather DreamLoungerTM recliner, I thought to myself how I really am in the future. In the lobby after the movie, I checked Drudge on my smartphone and learned Carrie Fisher had died in Los Angeles.

This made me remember way back to my past when I was a preteen and first saw the original Star Wars. I watched it with several friends in an ornately vintage, and solitary, theater in my small town. Through the patina of time and the opaque looking glass of my mind’s eye, I remember hoping no one would tell my parents, or my orthodontist, that I was eating popcorn and lemon drops with new braces on my teeth. Although I was an avid reader back then with a keen appreciation for science fiction, I had not seen a film before that captivated me like the first Star Wars. The excellent storyline, superior special effects, and the characters in the film really made an impression on me.

If my current self could go back to that day, I would meet the geeky, metal-mouthed kid after the movie and tell him some things. I would also mention how, in 43 years, he will celebrate his progeny’s birthday who, at that time, will be several years older than he is now and how he will be seeing another Star Wars movie on the very same day that Princess Leia died in real life.

The ironic confluence of time and space, indeed.

I am sure the mini-me at that time would have pegged me as a brain-damaged old fool and, in turn, would have attempted to persuade me into buying him and his friends a six-pack of beer, a fifth of peppermint Schnapps, a Playboy and a can of chew. After all, according to "The Fourth Turning," by Strauss and Howe, the year 1977 was two and a half “Turnings” ago. Back then, the future wasn’t set. Or was it?

“We perceive our civic challenge as some vast, insoluble Rubik’s Cube. Behind each problem lies another problem that must be solved first, and behind that lies yet another, and another, ad infinitum. To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime. There’s no fulcrum on which to rest a policy lever. People of all ages sense that something huge will have to sweep across America before the gloom can be lifted – but that’s an awareness we suppress. As a nation, we’re in deep denial.”
- Strauss and Howe, “The Fourth Turning”

Written by the historians William Strauss and Neil Howe, “The Fourth Turning” was published in 1997 and was, at that time, boldly proclaimed by the authors to be an “American Prophecy”. The book is fascinating in that it very thoroughly documents recorded cycles of history across multiple cultures and eras in order to predict the timing of “America’s next rendezvous with destiny”.

Processing almost like a Cliff’s Notes summary, the book identifies the timelines of historical events and matches them to specific life cycles of people in the form of generational archetypes. What is also interesting is how Strauss and Howe quantify and compare the recordings of history of multiple authors throughout the millennia to find uncanny comparisons in both historical and generational cycles.  Ironically, the comparisons stand up not only to the test of time regarding recorded events in history, but the generational turnings and archetypes also translate to ancient literature and other writings as well, ranging from Homer’s Iliad to the Holy Bible.

The concept of time is discussed in the context of both circular and linear perspectives as Strauss and Howe describe what is called the “saeculum”. The saeculum represents a “long human life”, or approximately 80 to 90 years comprising of four turnings each lasting about 20 to 22 years.

Just as there are four seasons consisting of spring, summer, fall and winter, there are also four phases of a human life represented in childhood, young adulthood, middle age and old age, or elderhood. As each phase of human life represents approximately 20 years, so is each generational archetype identified within historical cycles, or turnings, as follows:
Click image for larger size.
The generational archetypes experience the historical turnings according their life stage, or age. Amazingly, history shows a consistent pattern in how the generations both cause and affect historical events.  The patterns develop based upon how each generation interacts with the other and this also has documented consistencies that are delineated by the authors.

At any given “turning” during the saeculum, the set order of the generations on the age ladder is called a “constellation”. For example, during the Fourth Turning Crisis of 1929 through 1945, America experienced a financial crash, a great depression and a world war. During this period, the Prophet generation was entering Elderhood, the Nomad generation were middle-aged and the Hero generation fought WW II as young adults while the Artist generation were children during that time.

When the Crisis (Winter) era of financial hardship and war was over, the Spring of another First Turning began as the Hero generation led America into a season of unparalleled prosperity from 1946 through President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It was then the baby boomer, Prophet, generation began. As young adults, the boomers began to rock the nation with new age flower-power, feminism, guitars and free love. Thus began the Awakening that lasted through Ronald Reagan’s first term that ended in 1984. It was then the Third Turning of the Unraveling began.

In 1997, when the Fourth Turning was published, Strauss and Howe used their generational model to predict with remarkable accuracy, the start of the next Crisis in 2005: “By the middle Oh-Ohs, institutions will reach a point of maximum weakness, individualism of maximum strength, and even the simplest public task will feel beyond the ability of government. As niche walls rise ever higher, people will complain endlessly how bad all of the niches are. Wide chasms will separate rich from poor, whites from blacks, immigrants from native borns, seculars from born agains, technophiles from technophobes. America will feel more tribal. Indeed, many will be asking whether fifty states and so many dozens of ethic cultures make sense any more as a nation – and, if they do, whether that nation has a future.”
- Strauss and Howe:  “The Fourth Turning”

In 1997 there was no way to foresee the sequencing of 911, the Patriot Act, Edward Snowden, government incompetence after Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis of 2007 – 2008, the subsequent TARP bailouts or the election of a mysterious, biracial pied piper to the presidency of the United States.

There is no way anyone could have predicted the ensuing eight years of Obama, the nationalization of healthcare, the orgy of greed hosted by Wall Street at the expense of Main Street, endless wars, unchecked immigration, the TSA, NSA, Homeland Security, the CIA versus the FBI, smart phones, drones, religious discriminations, Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party, the Alt-right, Black Lives Matter and fake news.

Given the accuracy and timing of Strauss and Howe’s predictions, perhaps there is real validity behind their generational theory after all. And, given this, then we are now within the Winter of a Fourth Turning Crisis.

Can you feel it in the air? High powers in dark places are gathering and sides are being chosen as potential treachery and intrigue lurk around every corner. A global empire stands prepared to battle with populist movements and sovereign nations across the globe while rumors of a neo American civil war abound here at home.

Captured corporate media propaganda outlets and deep state government agencies relentlessly shill for a global empire and stoke the fires of war against a free alternative media while simultaneously provoking a nuclear armed Russia.

Half of the nation’s electorate, on the brink of a financial abyss, would rather kneel before an evil empire than to support the outcome of a free election. Of course, there is no unity in America today. Those days are long gone.

“People young and old will puzzle over what it felt like for their parents and grandparents, in a distantly remembered era, to have lived in a society that felt like one national community. They will yearn to recreate this, to put America back together again. But no one will know how.”
- Strauss and Howe, “The Fourth Turning”

Winter is here.  War is coming. Battles will be waged and conflicts will rage. There will be no escape for what is coming and no guarantee as to any outcome, save one: After this Fourth Turning, there will remain only liberty or tyranny. One, but not the other. For this will be a fight unto the death.

Even so, do many Nomads now entering middle-age, and their Hero generation progeniture, actually understand what is about to befall them? Do they even care? And, for those who do understand and do care; do they know how to fight?

Truly, there are many variables to this historical cycle that were absent in the all of the previous Fourth Turnings throughout history. A few examples would include pervasive and devastating technology with the capabilities of either enslaving, or killing, entire generations of people; a global corporatocracy in control of government agencies, mass flows of information, food and resources; entirely misinformed and apathetic populations with no moral bearing, belief system, or willingness to accept truth in order to stand strong against the dark powers now encroaching; and, finally, there are so many who have been trained to embrace the utopian lie of one world under tyranny. Sadly, many of these may be the new Stormtroopers in waiting.

In the end, we must choose. And not choosing, by default, is a choice. Can a rag tag federation of freedom fighters with truth, liberty and history on their side under a flag of 13 stripes and 50 stars, with idea-fueled keyboards, a compromised internet, and semi-automatic weapons prevail against a galactic empire in control of a technocracy more powerful than any fictional Death Star?

We’re about to find out. Everything that has ever happened before has delivered us to where we are now. Hold on to that. Even more importantly, don’t forget to fasten your seatbelts and place your trays in the upright and locked position.The warp drive is about to be engaged. A new journey has begun."
"May the Force be with you."

"Too Soon, Too Soon..."

"I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more – the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort – to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires – and expires, too soon, too soon – before life itself."
- Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924, English writer, "Youth"

"Internet Sacred Text Archive"

"About Sacred Texts"

"All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man, will have their lasting place in the history of mankind, and those who possess the courage, the perseverance, and the self-denial of the true miner, and of the true scholar, will find even in the darkest and dustiest shafts what they are seeking for, - real nuggets of thought, and precious jewels of faith and hope."
- Max Müller, "Introduction to the Upanishads" Vol. II.

"This site is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in the original language.

This site has no particular agenda other than promoting religious tolerance and scholarship. Views expressed at this site are solely those of specific authors, and are not endorsed by sacred-texts. Sacred-texts is not sponsored by any religious group or organzation.

Sacred texts went live on March 9th, 1999. The traffic started to increase when sacred-texts was listed at Yahoo! under 'Society and Religion|Texts'. In its first year of operation sacred-texts had about a quarter million hits. By 2004, it was receiving well over a quarter million hits per day. 

Today, site traffic often exceeds a million hits a day. Sacred texts is one of the top 20,000 sites on the web based on site traffic, consistently one of the top 10,000 sites in Australia, the US and India, and is one of the top 5 most visited general religion sites (source: Alexa.com).

The texts presented here are either original scans from books and articles clearly in the public domain, material which has been presented elsewhere on the Internet, or material included under fair use conditions in printed anthologies.

Many of the texts included here were originally posted in ftp archives or on bulletin boards before the growth of the World Wide Web and have been lost. In some cases, the texts were posted in such a form as to make them unusable by non-technically oriented users. Some of these texts were on the web at some point but have completely disappeared because the site they were posted on has closed. Thus the need for an archive which organizes this material in a persistent location.

From the start, we have had a special focus on remedying the under-representation of traditional cultures on the Internet. The site has one of the largest collections of transcriptions of complete books on Native American, Pacific, African, Asian and other traditional people's religion, spiritual practices, mythology and folklore. While many of these pre-20th century books are flawed due to orientalist or colonialist biases, they are also eye-witness accounts by reliable observers, typically at the moment of contact. These texts are crucial to the study of tribal traditions, and in many cases, the only link with the past. Locked up in academic libraries for decades, sacred-texts has made them freely accessible anywhere in the world.

We have scanned hundreds of books which have all been made freely accessible to the world. A comprehensive bibliography of the texts scanned at sacred texts is available here.

We welcome email regarding typographical or factual errors in any file at sacred-texts. Please write us if you spot an error; include the URL and a few lines of context so we can pin down the location.

While all due care has been taken in the reproduction of the texts here, none of the texts or translations here are represented to be sanctioned by any particular religious body or institution. We welcome advice as to errors of fact or transcription.

Some of the material here may be copyrighted. It is our hope that the copyright holders may allow these texts to be posted here in the public interest. If you are the copyright holder of record of a text which you believe has been archived at this site in error, please contact us at the email address listed at the bottom of this page. We have made a good-faith effort to determine the provenance of each text and apologize if we have posted a text in error. Note: If you are requesting the removal of a file, you must be the copyright holder of the file, and you must specify the exact URL of the file.”
Fabulous, an absolute treasure trove! Enjoy!

"Quit Your Addiction"

"Quit Your Addiction"

“Quit your addiction
to sneer and complaint.
Try a little flaunt,
Call for comrades
who bolster your vim
and offer you risk.
Corral the crones,
Goose the nice nellies,
Hunt the bear that hugs
and the raven that quoths.
Stay up all night
to devise a new dawn...”

- James Broughton,
“Little Sermons of the Big Joy”

The Daily "Near You?"

Thomasville, Georgia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Nonconformity and the Normalcy Bias"

"Nonconformity and the Normalcy Bias"
By Julian Wash

"Today I would like to return to your awareness an aspect of the Human condition that surrenders to a curious state called “normal.” Normal is a cultivated space, fashioned from how we see ourselves and how we’d like others to see us. It’s a weighted measure, balancing self-appraisal against the opinions and judgment of others. It is a dynamic state, subject to change depending on which way society pulls the levers on public opinion and the laws that govern social order. But most of all, normal is an assumed state of cooperation and expectation.

A scant eighty years ago, in the so-called “Bible belt” region of the Deep South, it was considered “normal” to require African Americans to sit in the back of a bus. One can therefore surmise that it must have taken an “abnormal” few to observe and recognize this as wrong. Those that voiced opposition were labeled sympathizers, resistors, agitators and radicals. And those were the nicer words. Of course now it is normal to honor these nonconformists for their courageous efforts in spear-heading the civil rights movement. So you see, “normal” is anything but what it claims to be.

In the following paragraphs we will reexamine the state of normal to see what purpose it serves, if any at all. What is normal now was not necessarily normal yesterday. And what is normal for you may not be normal for me. At any rate, normal is one of the dumbest terms to ever curse the planet. Normally I would not write on such a topic, but I thought I’d make this special exception. After all, it is normal for me to do the unexpected.

Normal This: That’s what I think of normal. The term is a tool. Those who acquiesce to its narrow and ephemeral parameters might also be considered “tools.” Does one seek normalcy because they desire this brand of conformity? If so, then what is their more noble purpose? Is it to go on mirroring and repeating everything they have been told? This regurgitation is what some might call normal - but I call it being complacent and undiscovered. Surely all people have a novel vibration that they wish to share or at least discover within themselves. So why do they insist on merely towing the line and wearing blinders? One could persuasively argue they have little choice. The normal need to earn a living and bucking the system is not the way to do it. So they play along to get along - and many will surrender their hearts ambition for the lure of a paycheck.

Were you ever given the choice to see the world as you like? Probably not. The world as we know it was engineered into our awareness from the moment we uttered our first words. Sad to think perhaps some will never know the feeling of abnormal. A good conformist would never entertain such dirty thoughts anyway. But on the contrary, to label someone as “normal” strikes me as offensive indeed. Normal tells me that one doesn’t really understand their unique place in this world. There is nothing normal about normal. Normal is a conformity stress that can skew and shape the best of us into docile, compliant and mindless little servants. It’s a dead end. There is no need to explore further once normalcy has been achieved.

Yes, we’re all encouraged to operate within templates of normalcy. We go to school, get married, buy a house and hope for normal kids. We work our normal jobs and attend church and maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll have the time and means to take up something truly meaningful and normal - like golf. And just as we begin to get the ever-so slightest inkling of this elusive and artificial state called normal, it’s time for us to retire or to check out of this world all together. You see, on the eighteenth hole we may indeed start asking ourselves what sinking that put was really all about. And though one may take delight in saying they played under par, I can’t help but wonder if the ball somehow played the player and not the other way around. But I’ve digressed.

That which we regard as normal is anything but. The “normal” I see takes the form of an elaborate maze cut though a corn field. We’re not allowed to peak over the stalks because then we might realize it’s all just a game. That would ruin it for you and everyone else. And we’re not allowed to shuck an ear because we might realize the corn is too perfect to be in a natural or organic state. There is something profoundly disturbing about that which is too perfect in this land of normal.

Lies Taste Good: The term “normal” follows us everywhere we go. Our doctor might say our lab test results were normal. They might also say our blood pressure is normal. Well those are the words we want to hear. Normal is good. Abnormal is bad, very bad. I was once told I had abnormally high cholesterol levels and that it was likely a “genetic” anomaly. Surely I was a walking heart attack and I was only in my early twenties. Blood thinners were recommended as were statin drugs. A genetic anomaly indeed and so I thought to do some research.

Turns out I had elderly relatives with the same condition. They took nothing for it and yet they were otherwise healthy and in their eighties. And so I chose to take nothing for my condition. My basis for normal was therefore quite different than the medical assessment. I questioned the well-meaning entity with the white coat and germ laden stethoscope. That was not the normal thing for me to do. I did not take his advice. All these years later, I’m so happy I didn’t. The very latest research now shows higher cholesterol might actually be a good indicator, whereas very low cholesterol could be a serious cause for concern. I take zero medications. Is that normal?

The normal person’s modus of operandi is to never challenge the status-quo. Eat lies like they were made of candy. Believe what we are told about JFK, 9/11, GMO’s, flu vaccinations, fluoridated water and a whole host of other yummy little fictions. Do not ask about “false flag” invasions, chemtrails, printed paper currency, or whether the “Federal” Reserve is indeed federal. Ask not these questions. Remain in this insulated cocoon called normalcy and it will protect you. Step outside of normalcy and expect to be mowed down by flag waving, Bible thumping, hypnotized, zombified lynch mobs that would swear to you that they are the normal ones. Yes, they will call you a kook - or worse. After all, that’s what they called Rosa Parks, Dr. King and so many other prominent and benevolent people of great courage and strength. If this is what being a “kook” is all about then count me in. It’s the sort of company I’d like to keep anyway.

Then there’s the normal behavior thing. A schoolteacher might tell the parents of little Johnny or Amy that their child is behaving normally in class and has a healthy and normal attitude. You should be proud. Your child is normal. What! Why would I find this so disturbing? Did the school suck away the defining aspect that made this child unique as an individual? Perhaps I would ask the teacher if they would mind defining what is meant by normal. Then I would ask if Albert Einstein was normal, if perhaps Nikola Tesla was normal, if Mother Teresa was normal, if Mahatma Gandhi was normal, if Leonardo da Vinci was normal… and anyway I think I’ve made my point. So why would I want little Johnny or Amy to be your little normal? No thank you. Class dismissed!

I understand that some may think I’m taking this whole “normal” thing out of context. I assure you I am not. Unlike the more inert and discretionary term of “typical,” normal belies an acceptable assumption of truth or fact. When the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant radiation levels were spiking during the early months of the tsunami disaster, governmental agencies were compelled to redefine what “normal” meant in terms of radiation exposure. Their solution was to simply raise the old level to a much higher one and called it safe. So now people in the Fukushima Prefecture could breathe a deep sigh of relief and relax after being told that radiation levels had been restored to normal. The “typical” readings were way off from where they had been, of course - but “normal” had been redefined to satisfy immediate concerns. Can you see why I don’t care much for that word?

Where Do We Go From Here? There’s a road less traveled that beckons those who seek higher truth. It can be a lonely road indeed. The nonconformist takes the long way home and questions all things along the path. In doing so, they may often feel lost and vulnerable at times. But as their journey continues, they begin to acquire great wisdom. They will question all things synthetic in nature. They will question government and how it controls the masses. They will question organized religion and how it culls the population. They will question education and how is syncopates the minds of children. They will question mass media and its dubious exploitations. So where does the road go from here? Simple. One must remain in a state of knowing. One must continue to question and yet still manage to live their lives with a smile on their face and with love in their heart.

One must allow “normal” people to see you in a proper light. One should be polite and courteous and lend a helping hand. If we are angry and overly-aggressive in our views, we’ll be relegated to that “kook” category of nonconformity. But for those who are highly principled and self-aware, they can usually articulate their views in an open and benevolent manner. Such people live by example. I’m a big fan of civility and the Gandhi-esque manner of peaceful noncompliance, love and tolerance. The most beautiful form of rebellion is to simply fold ones arms and say no. If people of all nations could muster their power and resolve to do this, there would never be another bullet fired upon another. Such a deplorable act would be considered grotesquely insane and absolutely inhuman. So there’s a glimpse of a “real” normal world as I see it. Seems we’ve got a ways to go to get there.

And so to the powers that (think you are) I want to say I am not your “normal” product; I do not believe in your NDAA. I do not believe in your Patriot Act. I do not believe in your torture and preemptive wars. I do not accept this as normal by any definition of the term. And so I say no! And I say it with authority and I say it with conviction. I am one person, but I’m awake and aware and that makes me powerful indeed. I am free to speak my mind and state my cause. I am not your minion. I possess free will and a free mind. I am not ensnared by your tainted vision of a new world order. And as testimony of the Divine, others are now waking from their slumber and are asking questions of a probing nature. I’ve come to this world to know peace - and so I do not accept the guns you hide behind your velvet curtains of deception.

Final Thought: I’m unable to digest this non-organic meatball called normal, so don’t wave it in front of me. What in the heck is rolled up in it anyway? One should think twice before putting that in their body. It pretends to be something it’s not. So what’s it all about? I sense that people have a hunch that they’ve been repeatedly lied to for a very long time. But try as they might, most just can’t quite get a grip on it. Meanwhile, the PTB keep throwing everything they’ve got at us with the hope of keeping us in some kind of a normalizing, mind swept stupor. But why?

There are many who are feeling fearful or panicky for no obvious reason. Chronic fear turns into anxiety. Anxiety may turn into depression. Depression often turns into a doctor’s visit. The doctor’s visit turns into a prescription for an antidepressant. The antidepressant appears to help but soon more is needed. The doctor prescribes a second antidepressant to be taken along with the other. Soon additional meds are sought and delivered. They are “needed” so that one can deal with their depression along with a whole host of other medical issues that seem to be cropping up. Soon one can find themselves quite dependent on that normal person in the white coat who knows better than we do.

But here is what I have found to be true. It is not entirely correct to call it “their” depression. It is “our” depression. If our brothers and sisters are feeling depressed for no apparent reason, then I might suggest we reexamine what is called normal. Society is a seriously flawed, screwed-up, sad state of affairs that tries to pass itself off as normal. We consistently attempt to attune ourselves with this “normalized” societal standard because we’ve been trained to do so. But this creates an asymmetrical tension that can spawn a boat-load of psychological incongruities within - a sort of internal tug-of-war between what we know to be right and what society dictates as normal. So how does one manage this? Well, we can try taking the long way home.”
"The long way home" you say? Ok!
Supertramp, "The Long Way Home"

"One Needs To Learn The Difference..."

"One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference."
- Robert Fulghum

"Reality Avoidance"

"Reality Avoidance"
by Morris Berman

"It’s quite amazing how the news is endlessly about race or gender. Filler, is what I call it. Very little of this has anything to do with reality, which the Mainstream Media and the American people avoid like the plague. What then is real?

1. The empire is in decline; every day, life here gets a little bit worse; all our institutions are corrupt to varying degrees; and there is no turning this situation around.

2. A crucial factor in this decline and irreversibility is the low level of intelligence of the American people. Americans are not only dumb; they are positively antagonistic toward the life of the mind.

3. Relations of power and money determine practically everything. The 3 wealthiest Americans own as much as the bottom 50% of the population, and this tendency will get worse over time.

4. The value system of the country, and its citizens, is fundamentally wrong-headed. It amounts to little more than hustling, selfishness, narcissism, and a blatant disregard for anyone but oneself. There is a kind of cruelty, or violence, deep in the American soul; many foreign observers and writers have commented on this. Americans are bitter, depressed, and angry, and the country offers very little by way of community or empathy.

5. Along with this is the support of meaningless wars and imperial adventures on the part of most of the population. That we drone-murder unarmed civilians on a weekly basis is barely on the radar screen of the American mind. In essence, the nation has evolved into a genocidal war machine run by a plutocracy and cheered on by mindless millions.

Most Americans hide from these depressing, even horrific, realities by what passes for ‘the news’, but also by means of alcohol, opioids, TV, cellphones, suicide, prescription drugs, workaholism, and spectator sports, to name but a few. This stuffing of the Void is probably our primary activity. In a word, we are eating ourselves alive, and only a tiny fraction of the population recognizes this."

"How It Really Is"

 

"Sleepy Joe's Next $3 Trillion Boondoggle"

"Sleepy Joe's Next $3 Trillion Boondoggle"
by David Stockman

"Leave it to the New York Times to remind us why prosperity is not right around the corner. That’s regardless of whether or not the $6 trillion of Everything Bailouts that were fed into the US economy over the past year causes the 2021 GDP stats to make up for the 2020 plunge brought on by the Virus Patrol. We are referring to the recent "leak" to the NYT presaging Sleepy Joe’s upcoming $3 trillion infrastructure plan and the following bolded sub-heading that heralded it: "A pair of proposals would invest in infrastructure, education, work force development and fighting climate change, with the aim of making the economy more productive." And just in case the reader didn’t connect the dots to the "more productive" bit, the NYT thoughtfully provided a picture to explain.


Of course, we say no thanks. Indeed, the NYT’s write-up of this latest Biden Boondoggle tells you all you need to know about why we do not have just a standard-size economic slump ahead but a veritable calamity.

The reason is as simple as it is ominous. We now have in the United States an all-of-government campaign to fix problems that

1. Are invented by political activists and that require a vast expansion of state power, like climate change;
2. Are real but have been caused by state action, such as the drastic increase in wealth and income inequality stemming from decades of Fed money-printing;
3. Are not real but are presumed to exist to justify interventionist policies that benefit their advocates, such as the endless flow of easy money and free stuff from government fiscal and monetary "stimulus" measures.

Thus, the lead paragraph of the NYT story captured all three of these baleful vectors in one breath: "President Biden’s economic advisers are pulling together a sweeping $3 trillion package to boost the economy, reduce carbon emissions and narrow economic inequality, beginning with a giant infrastructure plan that may be financed in part through tax increases on corporations and the rich."

The point here is not just that 30-years of hyper-stimulus have failed to boost the economy but instead have caused the trend growth rate to drastically atrophy, or climate change has been going on for 4.5 billion years, and warming epochs have generally been more beneficent than the ice ages, or upwards of 90% of the stock is owned by the top 10% of households - so that the Fed’s misbegotten asset inflation policies have inherently caused rising inequality.

In fact, you can dispatch the whole statist agenda item-by-item in this manner, but what lies beneath needs also be understood. Namely, Washington has become the most dangerous and destructive Imperial City in history because there no longer exists an opposition party dedicated to thwarting its endless aggrandizement both at home and abroad.

The powerful principles - free-market economics, personal liberty, minimal state intervention, sound money, fiscal rectitude and non-intervention in foreign affairs - that historically have kept big government at bay no longer have any effective voice in the nation’s capital.

Yet it is the lack of a true opposition party in the spirit of Grover Cleveland, Carter Glass, Howard Buffett, Robert Taft, Harry Byrd, Barry Goldwater, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan that permits today’s all-of-government projects and ministrations to mushroom, intensify, envelope and smother every semblance of outside-the-beltway resistance.

In effect, Washington has become leviathan unbound. There is hardly any political force left capable of giving effective resistance to the continuous flow of new fades and self-serving crises that are alleged to require ever more expensive, intrusive and plenary government action. These state-expanding projects are teed up by an immense beehive of lobbies, think tanks, law firms, NGOs, consultants and PACs.

Just consider three of the most egregious expressions of these unopposed pretexts for government aggrandizement in recent years - the RussiaGate Hoax, the Lockdown Folly and the endless regime of QE and ZIRP promulgated from the Eccles Building. What these have in common, besides resting on bogus predicates, is that they were only opposed by a corporal’s guard of Republicans centered on Senator Rand Paul, with boosts from Congressman Jim Jordan, Thomas Massie, and a few others.

That’s right. The lone political ranger in Washington who has articulately and forcefully confronted Fed Chairmen, Dr. Fauci and the Deep State peddlers of the RussiaGate Hoax specifically and the Forever Wars generally is Senator Rand Paul. Most of his so-called conservative GOP colleagues have either been AWOL completely on these deeply symptomatic matters or joined the fray after it was way too late or had become a matter of Trumpian loyalty-signaling.

Where were they last year at this time when the Donald disastrously anointed a 52-year Federal apparatchik, publicity-hound and scientific lightweight to be the Covid-czar? And then, they permitted him to host his own daily reality TV show which sparked the calamity of Lockdown Nation and impregnated the national psyche with unhinged hysteria about a respiratory virus that was not appreciably more virulent than many which had come before.

There were plenty of scientific voices at the time who said this was a giant folly, but even a brief acquaintance with the history of respiratory diseases and the principles of constitutional government was all that was required to deliver a loud, no!

Senator Rand Paul was one of the few who did from the very beginning, and now that the data is in and the visible pandemic is fast fading, he has been fully vindicated. Indeed, we have rarely seen anything which more powerfully discredits the Covid-as-Black Plague Myth and the resulting depredations of the Virus Patrol than the chart below.

Click image for larger size.

It shows the age-adjusted death rate from all causes for the 120 year span since 1900. As such, it takes all the noise and misdirection out of the daily Covid counts blared across the screen by the cable TV chyrons, and actually embeds the matter in real science.

That is to say, it’s age-adjusted so that the rapidly increasing population of the very elderly with inherently high mortality rates does not bias the picture. Nor do the squirrely death certificate coding conventions promulgated by the CDC last March distort the metric. That’s because it includes deaths from all causes - including the hundreds of thousands where the deceased succumbed to multitudinous causes and co-morbidities but also tested positive under the radically flawed PCR test for Covid.

Needless to say, when the age-adjusted mortality rate from all causes oscillated at about 7 per 1,000 population in recent years and then blipped up to about 8 per 1,000 in 2020 (green bar), you do not have a Black Plague or even a deathly pandemic. What you have is a bad flu season that unfortunately resulted in a modest excess death rate - and one overwhelmingly centered in the nursing homes and the very elderly population beset with weak immune systems. Also, you have an all-causes death rate that was actually no higher than what was taken as a standard outcome as recently as 2004–2006.

The point is, the chart above tells you that there should never have been a Covid hysteria or a lockdown, which caused previously unthinkable economic repercussions such as 70 million newly filed unemployment claims. That’s to say nothing of the crash of whole industries such as air travel and restaurants, the loss of lifetime investments by several millions of small businessmen and entrepreneurs, and the calamity of $6 trillion of Everything Bailouts that were recklessly stood up to compensate for the lockdown carnage.

A few decades from now, the blip represented by the green bar will hardly be visible with even a magnifying glass. That’s because several subsequent years will show a small dip in the annual mortality rates owing to the fact that the Grim Reaper came a few months early when medical treatments and therapeutic protocols failed to become available to the most vulnerable in the initial months of the pandemic.

More importantly, the reason for the sweeping folly of 2020 will become readily apparent. It wasn’t "the science." On the contrary, it was the result of an old-fashioned power grab by a camarilla of public health bureaucrats, their overlords in the pharma industry and the state and local officials who suddenly had a chance to wield dictatorial powers over the daily lives of their constituents. No rational government in a free society with a healthy opposition party would have wreaked the havoc brought upon America during the last year owing to the tiny blip reflected in the green bar below.

Senator Rand Paul and a few intrepid colleagues - plus an occasional on-point anchor on Fox News like Tucker Carlson - tried as they might, but they simply could not thwart the ceaseless aggrandizement of an Imperial City that has become the living embodiment of Leviathan.

The chart above puts us in mind of our own youth on a rural Michigan farm. At our one-room school, we all wanted to get measles, mumps and chickenpox so that we would have the natural immunities going forward; and when it came along, we wanted to get Dr. Salk’s vaccine because we didn’t wish to get polio. But either way, no one thought we were living in a world beset by deathly plagues and medical pestilence; this includes the virulent Asian flu that came along in 1957, which resulted in 116,000 deaths among a population half today’s size.

Still, the age-adjusted death rate from all causes in 1957 was about 14 per 1,000 or double the rate recorded for the Year-of-the-Covid in 2020. The fact that US economic and social life has been monkey-hammered by unhinged government interventions is evidence that there is not much left in Washington to thwart the on-going metastasis.

Sleepy Joe’s restoration projects mentioned above are not merely the ideological hobby horses of the so-called Progressive Left. They are the business of Washington writ large. Even the so-called conservatives fail to understand what Rand Paul has cogently explained to his colleagues to no avail.

The Dems are riding to increased political power on the back of the income/wealth inequality issue, which is being exacerbated by the Fed’s insane $120 billion monthly purchases of government, GSE debts and the resulting fuel it provides to even more asset price inflation. Not surprisingly, Sleepy Joe’s next $3 trillion plan proposes making permanent the free-stuff-for-nearly-all embodied in the stimmy checks and $3,600-per-child tax credits. As we have said repeatedly, those were just a backdoor route to a permanent form of UBI (universal basic income). UBI is a horrible notion being justified on the grounds of righting the drastic and artificial wealth maldistribution caused by the Fed.

That plan would also extend or make permanent two temporary provisions of Mr. Biden’s recent relief bill: expanded subsidies for low- and middle-income Americans to buy health insurance and tax credits aimed at cutting poverty, particularly for children.

The mainstream GOP has no plans to attack any of the state-aggrandizing predicates behind Sleepy Joe’s next multi-trillion boondoggle. When it comes to climate change, they will propose tax credits rather than point out that carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant and that the slightly warming climate that has been unfolding since the end of the Little Ice Age after 1850 is likely to be beneficial, not the phony climate catastrophe narrative endemic in the Imperial City and in the mainstream narrative.

Moreover, as the damage to free-market prosperity from all of this statist intervention mounts, it will be claimed that more stimulus is needed to boost economic performance. That is to say, more growth-stunting government spending, borrowing and monetization are on the way to compensate for the immense damage already being done.

As we said, the next Sleepy Joe boondoggle will be a killer, yet Rand Paul and his corporal’s guard will be hard-pressed to rouse an opposition sufficient enough to stop it. Then again, miracles do happen, and at certain times in history, sweeping political realignments do occur. We can only hope that the 2020s will prove to be one of them."

"Let Them Eat Woke"

"Let Them Eat Woke"
by Simon Black

"On October 6, 1789, a group of French peasants surrounded the country estate of King Louis XVI of France and demanded that he and his family relocate to Paris. The people were sick and tired of the king living the luxurious palace lifestyle at their expense. And, fearing what might happen if he refused, Louis consented to their demand.

The French Revolution was already well underway at that point, sparked in large part by people’s disgust with their out-of-touch aristocracy. France had been rendered bankrupt by the late 1700s; decades of costly foreign wars, coupled with endless extravagances by the nobility, had completely depleted the treasury.

The government’s solutions alternated between pretending their financial problems didn’t exist, to raising taxes at every possible turn. The nobles hardly noticed. They lived lavishly while passing on the inflation and tax increases to the peasants. French aristocrats were either completely clueless, or didn’t care one bit, that their policies were ruining people’s lives. The Queen, Marie Antoinette, is rumored to have summed up this attitude when she said “Let them eat cake”, in response to hearing how countless peasants were starving. Most likely that story is just urban legend. However there is plenty of historical evidence that she cared far more about her hair and royal gardens than any plight of the French people. Her lavish spending was so famous, in fact, that the French used to refer to her as “Madam Déficit”.

And yet - the king, the queen, the nobles - they were the elites. They knew best, and they were in charge of making decisions for everyone else. You know the rest of the story: the royal couple eventually paid for their conceit with their heads. But that didn’t solve France’s problems.

Soon a wave of radicals took over and formed a new elite (which became known as the Reign of Terror). And just like the old elite, they knew best, and they were in charge of making decisions for everyone else. This new elite encouraged the population to rat each other out for petty crimes. They printed stupifying quantities of paper money and engineered hyperinflation across the country. France’s revolutionary history is an incredible example of what happens when a tiny, out of touch group of elites manages to seize power and set the priorities for an entire nation.

We’re experiencing a version of this today in the West. Prominent media personalities, politicians, tech companies, and self-absorbed social media celebrities, have appointed themselves our cultural nobility and seized the power to dictate just about everything, from how tax dollars are spent, to the words that we’re allowed to say, to how our children are to be educated. It’s astonishing how quickly it happened, and how much has changed.

For example, it wasn’t that long ago that the entire purpose of the US military was to fight and win wars… and to be the most lethal fighting force in the history of the world. But today our new elites have changed the priorities. So now instead of the latest weaponry and unit readiness, senior military leaders brag about maternity flight suits, or reducing physical fitness standards in order to be more inclusive. Twenty years ago the military was about shock and awe. Today the priority has become diversity and inclusion.

Here’s another example: once upon a time, politicians at least paid lip service to fiscal responsibility. In fact there were numerous government shutdowns and debt ceiling crises in the United States, i.e. political battles to prevent excessive spending, as recently as 2011, 2013, 2018, and 2019.

Today, the new elites have changed the priorities. They tell us that the debt doesn’t matter, and the government can spend as much as it wants. And with every new massive spending bill, they’re emboldened to spend even more money. It’s been two weeks since the $1.9 trillion ‘Covid’ bill was passed, and they’re already planning a $3 trillion ‘infrastructure’ bill. Basic fiscal responsibility is simply no longer a priority.

Then there’s education, which used to be about - you know - EDUCATION. But now that the new elites have taken control, teachers have kids praying to Aztec gods of human sacrifice in order to expunge their whiteness. Critical Race Theory abounds in schools to teach children they are either victims or oppressors. And the new elite tells us that grading students based on getting the right answer in math class is White supremacy.

Then there’s the media - a once-trusted source of news and information. Today, under the new elites, the priority is no longer truth. It’s about force-feeding the narrative they want you to believe, whether about Covid, race, politics, climate change, or anything else.

For example, when a deranged lunatic went on a rampage and killed 10 people last week in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian, the media immediately reported that the shooting was due to White supremacy. Yet the FBI said there was no evidence to suggest a racial motivation, and even the killer himself stated that he was motivated by his sex addiction. But the media kept pounding the White Supremacy story anyhow. Yahoo News immediately told its audience in a reprinted article entitled “Whiteness is a Pandemic” that "Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people..."

Naturally this is considered to be perfectly acceptable content, and not racist in any way. In 18th century France, people were starving, but the elites who ruled them were so out of touch that the prevailing attitude was, let them eat cake! Today there’s a new elite that makes all the rules. They’ve completely corrupted western civilization. They are fanatics who embrace Marxism, violence, racism, and censorship. And like the French elites before them, they’re completely out of touch with how much they’re destroying the country and people’s lives. Let them eat woke!"
Related:

Friday, March 26, 2021

Musical Interlude: Juzzie Smith, "Bluesberry Jam"

Juzzie Smith, "Bluesberry Jam"
The amazingly, ridiculously talented one-man-band! lol

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth's sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula's central regions.
In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light."

"We Were There..."

"Someday stars will wind down or blow up. Someday death will cover us all like the water of a lake and perhaps nothing will ever come to the surface to show that we were ever there. But we WERE there, and during the time we lived, we were alive. That's the truth - what is, what was, what will be - not what could be, what should have been, what never can be."
- Orson Scott Card

"Now the voices and the sound of movement were gone, and the stream could be heard running quietly under its banks. The air was full of the scent of water and of flowers. She walked, quiet, while the house began to reverberate: a band had started up. She walked beside the river while the music thudded, feeling herself as a heavy, impervious, insensitive lump that, like a planet doomed always to be dark on one side, had vision in front only, a myopic searchlight blind except for the tiny three-dimensional path open immediately before her eyes in which the outline of a tree, a rose, emerged then submerged in dark. She thought, with the dove's voices of her solitude. Where? But where. How? Who? No, but where, where… Then silence and the birth of a repetition. Where? Here. Here? Here, where else, you fool, you poor fool, where else has it been, ever…?"
- Doris Lessing

"Did You Ever Wonder..."

"Did you ever wonder if the person in the puddle
 is real, and you're just a reflection of him?"
~ Calvin and Hobbes

"In All Seriousness..."

"Thomas Edison said in all seriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking"- if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think- and ignore all the others! We want only the facts that justify our acts- the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices. As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage." Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems? Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, if we went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot of people in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that two plus two equals five - or maybe five hundred!"
- Dale Carnegie

"Suez Canal Blocked! $10 Billion In Losses And Gasoline Shortages Spark Chaos On Global Supply Chains"

Full screen recommended.
"Suez Canal Blocked! $10 Billion In Losses And Gasoline 
Shortages Spark Chaos On Global Supply Chains"
by Epic Economist

"If things were already chaotic for global supply chains due to the ravaging effects of the health crisis, now that an enormous container ship is blocking both directions of the Suez Canal, global traders are in total "panic-mode," as shipping delays and widespread supply chain disruptions have been quickly worsening due to traffic jams at both entrances of the canal. The blockage is causing prices of commodities, including oil and gas, to skyrocket while triggering shortages of several other products, such as food and clothing. That’s what we’re going to expose in this video.

In what seemed to be an abrupt accident, the Panama-flagged container ship called the Ever Given, owned by Evergreen Marine Corp., has run aground inside the Suez Canal, the world's most important shipping lane, which connects the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. Considering the "megaship" is even larger than the Eiffel Tower, analysts say it might take weeks to unstuck the vessel and clear the path for other ships that have been blocked in there for days.

Shipping experts are stressing that this unexpected turn of events was "the worst-case scenario for global trading," with refiners, operators, and producers risking to lose billions of dollars of time-sensitive products, while multiple countries across Europe, as well as the United States, are on the verge of experiencing a massive inflationary spike in prices of several other goods over the next few weeks.

The 120-mile long canal is the most trafficked waterway in the world and a chokepoint for the global oil trade. It is the main passage for chemical tanker ships to haul crude and other crude products from the Middle East to Europe and the United States. Nearly 12% of global trade and 10% of liquefied natural gas cross the waterway every day.

At a time when shipping companies have already been struggling for a prolonged period with distribution strains provoked by the sanitary outbreak, the current maritime transportation halt may have catastrophic effects on the overall inflation outlook, especially considering the world was already dealing with a containership shortage that has pushed the cost of shipping up as much as 400 percent. While ports remain overwhelmed, slowing down the pace of global trade, American consumers' demand for products foreign-made products keeps reaching unprecedented highs, which in turn, is causing prices of several goods to skyrocket.

Over the past few weeks, the cost of transporting goods from Asia to the U.S. East Coast has increased to over $5,000 per FEU compared to $2,775 per FEU in March last year. Considering that the cargo ship blocking the Suez Canal is holding up traffic that carries approximately $10 billion worth of goods every day, losses of time-sensitive and perishable products, such as food and medicine, will not only cause a devastating economic fallout but also trigger shortages over the coming weeks.

Right after the incident, oil prices surged, with Brent crude oil increasing by 5.77 per cent to $64.3 per barrel. On the average day, 1 million barrels of crude and 1.4 million barrels of gasoline flow through the canal, just as other refined petroleum products such as jet fuel. The blockage will inevitably make energy concerns worse, as the delivery of liquified natural gas has been delayed, several refineries and manufacturing plants may have to slow down production and even shut down some facilities for the time being.

On top of that, the report emphasizes that car manufacturers will be tremendously impacted as there is an ongoing shortage of auto parts. Over the past few months, automakers predicted there would be a slump in demand and did not order or canceled orders for chips. However, recently, consumer demand fueled by the massive amounts of government relief and stimulus money has remarkably increased, and car manufacturers "were caught short and their efforts to catch up have been complicated, and made more expensive, by the messy state of their supply chains”.

The multiple - and unsuccessful - attempts to refloat the ship are the perfect example of how we aren't prepared to deal with unexpected disturbances, and therefore, bound to face panicked reactions and chaotic breakdowns as there are no alternative plans or safety measures to avoid the occurrence of generalized supply collapses.

And the longer the blockage lingers, the worse the impacts will be. That is to say, we must all get ready for a new reality that involves constant shortages, continuous collapses, and extremely inflated prices. As the world jumps from one crisis to the other, the only thing we can do is prepare for the storm. Dark clouds are on the horizon, and you should keep tuned to the next global developments here on Epic Economist channel."