"A Look to the Heavens"

“This shock wave plows through space at over 500,000 kilometers per hour. Moving toward to bottom of this beautifully detailed color composite, the thin, braided filaments are actually long ripples in a sheet of glowing gas seen almost edge on. Cataloged as NGC 2736, its narrow appearance suggests its popular name, the Pencil Nebula. 

About 5 light-years long and a mere 800 light-years away, the Pencil Nebula is only a small part of the Vela supernova remnant. The Vela remnant itself is around 100 light-years in diameter and is the expanding debris cloud of a star that was seen to explode about 11,000 years ago. Initially, the shock wave was moving at millions of kilometers per hour but has slowed considerably, sweeping up surrounding interstellar gas.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120924.html

"For Nothing Is Fixed..."

"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out."

- James Baldwin

The Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, "Book of Hours II, 16"

"Book of Hours II, 16"

"How surely gravity's law,

strong as an ocean current,

takes hold of even the strongest thing

and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing-

each stone, blossom, child-

is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

push out beyond what we belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again

to learn from the things,

because they are in God's heart;

they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Paulo Coelho, “Dreams: The 12 Steps”

“Dreams: The 12 Steps”

by Paulo Coelho

"When Joseph Campbell created the expression “follow your blessing,” he was reflecting an idea that seems to be very appropriate right now. In “The Alchemist,” this same idea is called “Personal Legend.” Alan Cohen, a therapist who lives in Hawaii, is also working on this theme. He says that in his lectures he asks those who are dissatisfied with their work and seventy-five percent of the audience raise their hands. Cohen has created a system of twelve steps to help people to rediscover their “blessing” (he is a follower of Campbell):

1. Tell yourself the truth: Draw two columns on a sheet of paper and in the left column write down what you would love to do. Then write down on the other side everything you’re doing without any enthusiasm. Write as if nobody were ever going to read what is there, don’t censure or judge your answers.
 

2. Start slowly, but start: Call your travel agent, look for something that fits your budget; go and see the movie that you’ve been putting off; buy the book that you’ve been wanting to buy. Be generous to yourself and you’ll see that even these small steps will make you feel more alive.
 

3. Stop slowly, but stop: Some things use up all your energy. Do you really need to go that committee meeting? Do you need to help those who do not want to be helped? Does your boss have the right to demand that in addition to your work you have to go to all the same parties that he goes to? When you stop doing what you’re not interested in doing, you’ll realize that you were making more demands of yourself than others were really asking.
 

4. Discover your small talents: What do your friends tell you that you do well? What do you do with relish, even if it’s not perfectly well done? These small talents are hidden messages of your large occult talents.
 

5. Begin to choose: If something gives you pleasure, don’t hesitate. If you’re in doubt, close your eyes, imagine that you’ve made decision A and see all that it will bring you. Now do the same with decision B. The decision that makes you feel more connected to life is the right one – even if it’s not the easiest to make.

6. Don’t base your decisions on financial gain: The gain will come if you really do it with enthusiasm. The same vase, made by a potter who loves what he does and by a man who hates his job, has a soul. It will be quickly sold (in the first case) or will stay on the shelves (in the second case).
 

7. Follow your intuition: The most interesting work is the one where you allow yourself to be creative. Einstein said: “I did not reach my understanding of the Universe using just mathematics.” Descartes, the father of logic, developed his method based on a dream he had.
 

8. Don’t be afraid to change your mind: If you put a decision aside and this bothers you, think again about what you chose. Don’t struggle against what gives you pleasure.
 

9. Learn how to rest: One day a week without thinking about work lets the subconscious help you, and many problems (but not all) are solved without any help from reason.
 

10. Let things show you a happier path: If you are struggling too much for something, without any results appearing, be more flexible and follow the paths that life offers. This does not mean giving up the struggle, growing lazy or leaving things in the hands of others – it means understanding that work with love brings us strength, never despair.
 

11. Read the signs: This is an individual language joined to intuition that appears at the right moments. Even if the signs point in the opposite direction from what you planned, follow them. Sometimes you can go wrong, but this is the best way to learn this new language.
 

12. Finally, take risks! The men who have changed the world set out on their paths through an act of faith. Believe in the force of your dreams. God is fair, He wouldn’t put in your heart a desire that couldn’t come true.”

- http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

"Yes..."

"Yes there is a meaning; at least for me, there is one thing that matters-

to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

- Logan Pearsall Smith"

The Daily "Near You?"

Munster, Indiana, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Greg Hunter, "Fight for Freedom or It’s Hell on Earth – Gerald Celente"

"Fight for Freedom or It’s Hell on Earth – Gerald Celente"

by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Gerald Celente, a renowned trends researcher, is back this time to talk about uniting for the fight for freedom. If we don’t, we will all be a “slave on the Slavelandia plantation” or worse. Whether it’s the economic repression or coerced vaccinations, the problem comes from the elite masters and corporations running the world. You are seeing this in the economy that, under the surface, is stalling out. Celente explains, “Drug store chains, grocery chains, stationery chains, hardware chains, chains, that’s all we are. We are run by the chain. So, they don’t care about the general economy. All they are caring about is boosting the equities, and that’s all they are doing. The economy is going down already. It’s not being shown because it not showing up in the markets. Median household income has had its sharpest decline since they have been taking records. The average price of a home now is $365,000, but where is the growth?”

Celente says that since the Covid crisis, mom and pops have been driven out of business leaving market share for big companies. Celente also says, “Once upon a time, America was called the land of opportunity. That’s gone, finito, finished. The bigs are in control of everything. They run our government. They run our lives. It’s banksters, the drug dealers (Big Pharma), the Military Industrial Complex and Big Tech. So, the markets have nothing to do with reality.”

This is what I am concerned about. The markets are going to crash, and the economy is in crash mode. You look at the numbers and you look at the data, and the rich are getting richer. The rich only got $8 trillion richer in 2020. So, they are going to take us to war because this thing is going to collapse. It’s collapsed already.”

There is only one way to fight this evil taking away our rights and forcing vaccines and poverty upon us. Celente explains, “If we don’t unite under one umbrella to fight this, ‘United we stand, divided we fall,’ it’s the end. I have been crying my heart out because as a visionary, I see the future, and it’s Hell on earth. We have to unite, and we can’t stop. That’s the only way I see it because the future that I see now is Hell on earth.”

- https://usawatchdog.com

Video will be posted asap.

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One 

with the publisher of The Trends Journal, Gerald Celente. 

(There is much more in the 41 min. interview.)

-https://rumble.com/

- https://trendsresearch.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/26/21: "Markets, A Look Ahead"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/26/21:

"Markets, A Look Ahead"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"Worldwide Supply Chain Problems - The Fed Says You are on Your Own"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly, PM 9/25/21:

"Worldwide Supply Chain Problems - 

The Fed Says You are on Your Own"

"The international problems with supply chains is getting worse by the week. The latest is with gasoline in the UK. Not only do we have to deal with inflation everywhere, but now we don’t even know if the products that we want will be available. The Fed has just announced that business will not get back to normal for years and that we’re on our own."

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Children In Time"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Children In Time"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Can the night sky appear both serene and surreal? Perhaps classifiable as serene in the below panoramic image taken last Friday are the faint lights of small towns glowing across a dark foreground landscape of Doi Inthanon National Park in Thailand, as well as the numerous stars glowing across a dark background starscape. Also visible are the planet Venus and a band of zodiacal light on the image left.

Click image for larger size.

Unusual events are also captured, however. First, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, while usually a common site, appears here to hover surreally above the ground. Next, a fortuitous streak of a meteor was captured on the image right. Perhaps the most unusual component is the bright spot just to the left of the meteor. That spot is the plume of a rising Ariane 5 rocket, launched a few minutes before from Kourou, French Guiana. How lucky was the astrophotographer to capture the rocket launch in his image? Not lucky at all- the image was timed to capture the rocket. What was lucky was how photogenic- and perhaps surreal- the rest of the sky turned out to be.”

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

The Poet: David Whyte, "The Winter of Listening"

"The Winter of Listening"

"No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.
All this petty worry while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious inside us does not
care to be known by the mind
in ways that diminish its presence.
What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,
what disturbs and then nourishes
has everything we need.

What we hate in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.
Even with the summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those
who had nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its own voice to make itself heard.
All those years forgetting how easily
you can belong to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything
is born from an opposite
and miraculous otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that otherness.
So let this winter of listening
be enough for the new life
I must call my own."

- David Whyte,

"The House of Belonging"

Chet Raymo, "The Dot and the Abyss"

Click image for larger size.

"The Dot and the Abyss"

by Chet Raymo

"Let's take a stroll around the neighborhood. Nearby. Not very far. Let's say 20 light-years from the Sun. A typical neighborhood, for our neck of the galaxy. About a hundred stars. If we travel to the nearest one on, say, a Voyager spacecraft, it will take us upwards of thirty thousand years to get there. So our neighborhood amble will take a while.

First we'll pop in on Alpha Centauri and its two companions. Alpha is a twin of our Sun, a yellow star. In our 20-light-year neighborhood there are half-a-dozen Sunlike stars. Not many stars are bigger or brighter. Sirius, Altair, Procyon. Nothing really hot and bright like Rigel in Orion, and no red giants. All things considered, our Sun is one of the big shots on the block. A dozen or so orange stars, somewhat cooler and less bright than the Sun. A passel of red dwarfs. And a handful of white dwarfs make up the mix. About a hundred in all.

Now let's put the neighborhood in perspective. Imagine the 20-light-year-radius sphere with its hundred stars is the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Then the Milky Way Galaxy would be about the size of your desktop, a great wheeling whirl of stars with our neighborhood dot about two-thirds of the way out from the center.

Click image for larger size.

The next spiral galaxy? Andromeda? Another circular tabletop of a hundred billion stars at the other end of the house. How many galaxies? Well, tens of billions that we can potentially see with current technology, spread out around us in every direction for hundreds of miles. And our sweet little Sun and its one hundred neighboring stars are in this period.

We know all of this. But there is a sense in which we don't know it. Psychologically we still live in the cosmic egg universe of Dante, our cozy planet with the Empyrean just up there above the clouds. We have lived through the most breathtaking transformation of human knowledge and we haven't begun to grasp what it means. It’s as if the transformation never happened. We know and we don't know. Maybe we don't want to know."

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

South Jordan, Utah, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

“Too Much Rain Will Kill Ya”

“Too Much Rain Will Kill Ya”

by Bruce Krasting

"My first week on Wall Street was in August of 1973. I was newbie to NYC. My office was on the south side of 100 Wall, on the second floor, looking out over Front Street. There was a tremendous thunderstorm one afternoon. I looked out the window as the street filled with water. The flood poured into a street gutter and overwhelmed it. With the gutter flooded, the rats were drowning. They came out of every hole. In twenty minutes, 500 came out of the one gutter I was watching. The rain stopped and the flooding abated. The rats on the street followed the receding water back into their holes. A memorable first impression of life in the financial district."

- http://www.zerohedge.com/

"What Can We Know?"

"What can we know? What are we all? 

Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, 

with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Jim Kunstler, "The Perfect Storm Is Bearing Down"

"The Perfect Storm Is Bearing Down"

by Jim Kunstler

"Time, the saying goes, is nature’s way of making sure that everything doesn’t happen at once. So now, maybe, we’re at the event horizon where nature is suspended because everything seems to be happening at once. The weeks ahead could determine whether we are a coherent society that can function on the basis of a firm consensual reality or just a collection of battling narratives designed to conceal anything that quacks like truth, all veering toward failure.

This is a very nervous country, and for a good reason. The collective sense of reality has commenced a momentous shift, the compass is spinning wildly, things are shaking loose in the national brain-pan, the gaslight has lost its sheen and the once-solid narrative is turning to vapor, starting with the unspooling riddles of COVID-19. The COVID-19 engineered bioweapon is being used internationally to suppress formerly free citizens of formerly democratic republics. It becomes more obvious each day that everything connected to this extravaganza is other than it appears to be.

The numbers don’t add up, starting with the fact that when you combine the official registered COVID cases (people with acquired natural immunity) with the people who already had some kind of immunity from previous lifelong coronavirus encounters with the number of people vaccinated, you have a population supposedly way beyond herd immunity. Who’s getting sick now? Mostly people who are all vaxxed up.

A Ticking Time Bomb? Contrary to the behavior and statements of public health officials and politicians, the news is out that the spike proteins produced by the vax’s mRNA genetic reprogramming are toxic agents that create disorder in the major organs and blood vessels.

Chiefly, the vaccine is not a vaccine, and it will probably end up killing more people than the COVID-19 disease and its variants. A lot of those deaths will be caused in the months ahead by damage to people’s hearts and other organs from these spike proteins. The reported official numbers are all lies of one kind or another, issued by agencies primarily concerned not with public health but with covering asses at the highest level, so do not trust them. If you haven’t had a vax shot, better seriously consider steering clear of your government’s desperate attempts to get the job done.

The news is also out, despite strenuous suppression, that early treatment of COVID-19 with a kit of cheap drugs defeats the disease. People must conclude that there is a malevolent purpose behind the suppression of early treatment. They may also conclude that the vaxes are poison.

Mandating the vaxes was an easily predicted tactical blunder. Did “Joe Biden” and company not realize that threatening the livelihoods of 100 million people might generate a whole lot of anger and resentment? Especially since those people have good reasons to believe the vax is harmful to them?

Is Fauci Desperate or Crazy? Last week, an FDA advisory panel ruled against distributing mRNA booster shots among the general population over age 16 - with exceptions for the vaguely defined “high risk” individuals over 65. In spite of that, COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci keeps pushing for boosters. On Sunday, he told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We’re waiting for data on natural immunity. We know that if you have natural immunity and also get the shot, immunity dramatically increases.”

Oh, really? Even though it’s known for sure (i.e., established in science) that natural immunity is way more potent, comprehensive and permanent than anything the vaccine pretends to offer, while it is becoming clear that the vaxes disable people’s immune systems - hence, the impressive number of the vaxxed getting sick?

Is Dr. Fauci desperate or just plain crazy? The question may be moot, because it looks like he’s out of running room on his whole crusade, COVID-19, vaxes, authoritative nonsense and all. The story has fallen apart. t looks an awful lot like the government is trying to harm people healthwise while it destroys jobs and small business and ruins households financially, and that counterstory is spreading faster now than COVID-19. Or maybe they’re just idiots. Who knows?

It’s fair to ask whether all that has destroyed the legitimacy of the people in charge - but that is only one of several issues converging to detonate the people’s faith in their own government.

Bad News for Biden: Biden had a bad week on the family grift front as the story broke, first on Politico and then elsewhere like a brushfire, that the trove of incriminating memoranda on Hunter Biden’s laptop was for-real and that the concerted effort to hide all that muck from the voters during last year’s election campaign was a completely dishonest operation. Add up all the memos and emails on Hunter’s hard drive and you have a pretty clear digital trail of a major racketeering operation that can no longer be denied. So will Merrick Garland’s DOJ keep ignoring it?

Meanwhile, the crisis on the U.S./Mexican border has suddenly gotten so bad that even the mainstream media had to report on it. The shantytown of Haitians and other foreign nationals moiling under the freeway bridge at Del Rio, Texas, grew by thousands each day, to around 15,000 as of Sunday.

Joe Biden owns the open border, and everybody knows it, and the actual citizens of the USA are getting alarmed and sore about it. On Sunday night, the White House announced “plans” to fly at least 10,000 of the Haitians to Haiti, despite the fact that most of them had been living in Brazil, Chile and other nations before entering the USA. Haiti, of course, is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and only recently suffered a massive earthquake, not to mention the assassination in July of its president. Does this airlift sound like a plan?

Maybe check the “No” box on that. U.S. citizens might have also registered that “Joe B.” unloaded 37,000 Afghanis in five states since we bailed on that country Aug. 31, and plans to bring in almost 100,000 by the end of 2022 (BBC).

All this at a time when millions of Americans have lost their businesses and lost their jobs and are under threat of losing more jobs for not getting vaxxed. Wait, there’s more…

Events Are Converging: Think this is enough to cause a national attitude adjustment? China’s financial system has tripped into a liquidity crisis with the insolvency of its colossal Evergrande real estate Ponzi. Coincidentally - and on rather a separate track - we have China’s latest export to the advanced economies of the world: The meltdown of its bond market as signified in the wreck of super-gigantic real estate conglomerate Evergrande. Behold the broken daisy-chain of obligations stretching to the furthest reaches of global finance and the deleterious effect of that on capital markets everywhere to follow.

The central banks are pulling out the last stops now to prevent a general meltdown of hallucinated “wealth” around the world, and you can probably measure the success of that last-ditch effort in days as we enter the cursed month of October, when skeletons dance on the graves of lost fortunes.

The stage managers behind “Joe Biden” look forward to that as they would to so many stakes driven through their degenerate hearts. Isn’t this a great time for a global financial crisis? Maybe you’re saying, no, not so much. That’d probably be a good call.

Events are converging. Everything is happening at once. Narratives are in collapse. Governments may soon commence to fall. Food and critical supplies of parts for things needed to run advanced societies are up next. What will you decide to do about yourself, your community and your country?"

- dailyreckoning.com

"The Mainstream Media Is Using Terms Like 'Worsening' And 'Foreseeable Future' To Describe The Shortages"

"The Mainstream Media Is Using Terms Like

 'Worsening' And 'Foreseeable Future' To Describe The Shortages"

by Michael Snyder

"Yes, these shortages are really happening, and now the mainstream media is warning us to brace ourselves because they are going to get even worse. After the article that I posted yesterday, emails came pouring in from people all around the country. There were a few that didn’t want to believe that things are as bad as I was saying, but there were lots of other emails that confirmed that conditions are at least as bad as I described. In fact, there was one extremely alarming email from someone that works in the supermarket industry that I hope to share with all of you in the coming days once I get permission to do so.

For most of us, we have lived our entire lives without ever having to be concerned about shortages. In fact, just a few years ago it would have seemed crazy to suggest that we were on the verge of widespread shortages here in the United States. But now here we are, and we are being told that the shortages are going to continue to intensify. In fact, the Washington Post is telling us that the global chip shortage is showing signs of “worsening”…

"The global semiconductor shortage that has paralyzed automakers for nearly a year shows signs of worsening, as new coronavirus infections halt chip assembly lines in Southeast Asia, forcing more car companies and electronics manufacturers to suspend production. A wave of delta-variant cases in Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines is causing production delays at factories that cut and package semiconductors, creating new bottlenecks on top of those caused by soaring demand for chips."

That is really bad news, because the chip shortage is affecting thousands of other industries. For example, global vehicle production is way down due to the chip crisis, and this has resulted in a growing shortage of new vehicles on dealer lots all over the nation…"The chip famine is starving the global auto industry and putting car buyers on a strict diet. So far this year, seven million cars that were supposed to be produced haven’t been, according to IHS Markit data. Auto companies are shutting down production lines for weeks at a time and furloughing employees as a result of the chip shortage. Toyota has slashed its production 40% in September."

All this is hitting consumers. Car dealers’ lots across the U.S. are sparse. The inventory of new cars in the U.S. is only about 30% of pre-pandemic levels, and buyers snap up used cars as soon as they find them.

Of course we aren’t facing a shortage of everything. There are certain products that are still quite plentiful. And there are some areas that are being affected a lot more than others. So what you are seeing in your neck of the woods may differ from what other people are experiencing. But there are some shortages that are definitely being felt all over the country.

When the COVID pandemic first started to sweep across the U.S. last year, it sparked a huge run on toilet paper, and now it is starting to happen again…"Costco Wholesale is having trouble fulfilling toilet paper orders. The membership-only warehouse retail chain is issuing a warning to customers that have purchased the common household item online, saying they may face delays in receiving their orders."

Unfortunately, this could potentially be just the beginning. According to one expert that was interviewed by Fox Business, there will soon be another “massive shortage” of toilet paper… "The U.S. will experience another “massive shortage” of toilet paper soon as supply chains continue to suffer due to pandemic-related issues, one retail expert warned. “Product shortages as bad as they were in the beginning of COVID are coming back,” Burt Flickinger said on FOX Business’ “Mornings with Maria.”

Did you ever imagine that we would be talking about such a thing in late 2021? A lot of optimists out there had assumed that the economy would be “booming” by now. But instead, the machinery of our economy has gotten gummed up really badly. At this point, there is even a growing shortage of alcoholic beverages… "The Pennsylvania state board in charge of consumer liquor sales announced last week that it was limiting customers to two bottles of certain alcoholic beverages per day. The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board said the purchase limit on select items — including Hennessy Cognac, Buffalo Trace bourbon and Patrón tequila — will be in place for the “foreseeable future.” Liquor store customers in North Carolina are encountering “out of stock” signs instead of their favorite spirits, local TV station WTVD reported, amid an ongoing supply shortage there, too.

Of course so many of these problems could be solved if we simply had enough workers. As I discussed the other day, we are in the midst of the worst labor shortage that we have ever experienced. All over the nation critical labor shortages are crippling the ability of organizations to get things done, and now Joe Biden’s new mandates threaten to make things a lot worse.

If you can believe it, even NPR is running stories about how Biden’s mandates are going to cause gigantic headaches for employers… “I can’t afford to lose anyone,” says Ted LeNeave, CEO of Accura HealthCare, which operates 34 nursing homes and assisted living facilities in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota. Because of staffing shortages, they’ve had to limit admissions, turning down patients coming from hospitals.

With about 1,000 of his employees - 38% of his workforce - unvaccinated, LeNeave is calling on the federal government to provide a testing option for health care workers. Sadly, if Biden does not change his approach, that one company alone will have to let about a thousand workers go… “I just don’t see how I can lay off a thousand people,” says LeNeave. “I’d have no one to take care of the patients, and there’s nowhere to send the patients.”

Biden’s mandates should start going into effect around the end of the year, and that could represent a real turning point for the economy. We are moving into such troubled times, but most people desperately want to believe that better times are just around the corner.

Through good times and bad, the U.S. economy has always been highly resilient, and most of us would like to assume that it will continue to be highly resilient. But the truth is that things are starting to break down on a very basic level, and the outlook as we head toward the end of the year is not good at all."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"How It Really Is"

"The Blind Indifference..."

Must Watch! “Full Blown Property Crisis Coming; Grocery Store Shock”

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe, PM 9/24/21:

“Full Blown Property Crisis Coming; 

Grocery Store Shock”

○

“This day of reckoning is going to be so lethal… 

it’s going to be so catastrophic…” 

$60 trillion in real estate; $2.4 QUADRILLION in derivatives.

How much of an effect will this have on the entire global economy and America?

A reasonably accurate video metaphor for where we are now, 

and what’s coming…

Full screen recommended.

This is no joke, folks. God help us…

"Rental Market Apocalypse Pushes 4 Million Americans To Face Foreclosures And Evictions As Prices Soar"

Full screen recommended.

"Rental Market Apocalypse Pushes 4 Million Americans 

To Face Foreclosures And Evictions As Prices Soar"

by Epic Economist

"The United States is facing a painful housing crisis. While home prices soared to unprecedented levels, having surged by roughly 20 percent compared to a year ago, those who decided to turn to rent instead are witnessing similarly shocking increases. According to Realtor.com, median national rents rose a whopping 12% between August 2020 and August 2021, while rent applications went up as much as 95% in some cities, according to apartment listing platform RentCafe. The average rent is now at $1,633 a month - $169 more than this time last year and nearly $200 more than 2019’s numbers.

Millions of potential first-time homebuyers have been completely priced out of the market by now, and their only alternative is to keep paying inflated prices to live in a home they'll never own. Housing advocates argue that much of the increase in the cost of housing can be attributed to the buying frenzy initiated by those affluent buyers. They have snatched all the affordable homes they could find and frequently started bidding wars to get desirable properties, which pushed home prices to extraordinary levels. According to a new report released by Harvard Housing Studies Center, low-income households have significantly more difficulty reclaiming financial footing, and millions of them are at risk of foreclosure or eviction in the coming weeks and months.

As more and more potential buyers get burned-out, tired of bidding wars, skyrocketing prices, and limited options, they have been left with no other choice rather than renting. However, the rental market is facing its own crisis. Some call it "the rental market apocalypse," referring to the growing imbalances within the market: while millions remain at the brink of eviction, hordes of frustrated buyers who have been forced to give up the competitive housing market are now finding an equally frenzied rental scene - one where soaring rents and shrinking supply are growing concerns.

But with many Americans still struggling to financially recover from the recession, and at least 4 million households at risk of eviction, these cautionary demands may make it even more difficult for people to rent. At the moment, a devastating eviction and foreclosure crisis is fast spreading all across the country. This mounting catastrophe happening right before our eyes is worsening despite the $46 billion allocated in rental and mortgage relief programs by the federal government. These programs are failing to keep people out of the streets given that the application process is extremely bureaucratic and many people only get approved to receive help after it's too late.

According to an updated analysis of U.S. census data by Goldman Sachs, nearly 4 million households still are behind on their rent, and at least 750,000 are expected to be pushed out of their homes by the end of the coming month. Despite the record influx of government funding, states have failed to allocate 89 percent of the billion-dollar rental assistance program, according to the US Treasury Department. That is effectively putting America at the brink of a homelessness crisis of devastating proportions.

“We’ll see a lot of renters out on the streets,” highlighted Michelle Dempsky, a staff attorney for Legal Aid of Southeastern Pennsylvania, noting that she has already seen a significant increase in the number of eviction cases she has been assigned since the moratorium was lifted. As Fran Quigley, a housing law professor at the IU McKinney School of Law, points out, the eviction crisis is only a symptom of a larger problem."We’ve taken something that most people agree is a human right - having a safe and secure place to live - and made that available only to people who can afford to pay a price that makes a profit for someone else," Quigley emphasizes.

As the housing and rental markets face worsening crises, a foreclosure and eviction tsunami has begun. Our leaders, who were supposed to assist our people, don't seem to be bothered with the risks of letting millions of people fall into a spiral of systemic poverty and homelessness. Needless to say, this will rapidly evolve into a major national crisis. A few years ago, it would be hard to imagine that the wealthiest country in the world would allow a significant part of its population to be pushed out of their homes. Yet, this is where we are right now. Unfortunately, this catastrophic situation is only a hint of what is coming for us. As our nation gradually collapses into chaos, the worst is yet to come."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com​

Musical Interlude: Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

Full screen recommended.

Deuter, "Along the High Ridges"

Beautiful!

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Have you contemplated your home galaxy lately? If your sky looked like this, perhaps you'd contemplate it more often! The featured picture is actually a composite of two images taken from the same location in south Brazil and with the same camera - but a few hours apart. The person in the image - also the astrophotographer - has much to see in the Milky Way Galaxy above.

Click image for larger size.

The central band of our home Galaxy stretches diagonally up from the lower left. This band is dotted with spectacular sights including dark nebular filaments, bright blue stars, and red nebulas. Millions of fainter and redder stars fill in the deep Galactic background. To the lower right of the Milky Way are the colorful gas and dust clouds of Rho Ophiuchi, featuring the bright orange star Antares. On this night, just above and to the right of Antares was the bright planet Jupiter. The sky is so old and so familiar that humanity has formulated many stories about it, some of which inspired this very picture."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap191015.html

Chet Raymo, “The Seeds of Contemplation”

“The Seeds of Contemplation”

by Chet Raymo

“Do a Google search for “Cuthbert” and you’ll get two main hits: a stunning blonde Canadian actress who I never heard of, and the 7th-century Anglo-Saxon monk I was looking for. Make that an image search and poor Saint Cuthbert gets washed away in a sea of unclad sexiness that would probably have rattled the poor abbot/bishop to his core.

Well, we don’t really know, do we? We don’t really know what was on Saint Cuthbert’s mind. Certainly he had an impressive career as a Church administrator, but be seems to have been irresistibly drawn to the life of an anchorite. For a while he was prior at the famous abbey of Lindisfarne on the coast of Northumbria, then bishop of the same place, but he gave all that up for a solitary cell on the nearby island of Farne. According to tradition, his severe abode had no windows or doors, and no views of scenery or humans. It was circular and open only to the sky. There Cuthbert lived, like a mouse at the bottom of a coffee can.

Was his mouse-eye view of the sky enough to feed his soul? Presumably he didn’t see rainbows, since rainbows don’t appear near the zenith. He was far enough north (56° 37′) not to see the sun at all, even in summer, depending on how wide was the angle of his view of the sky. Only a few bright stars illuminated his night: Capella, Vega, and Deneb (taking into account the 18 degrees of precession since his time). In late summer the Milky Way would have been draped overhead, although- alas- the least bright part of the galaxy. The aurora would have entertained him on occasion, and “shooting stars.”

How much is enough? Thoreau had his pond, and dinner at the Emersons whenever he wanted. Henry Beston had the whole wide sea crashing outside his “outermost” house on Cape Cod. Annie Dillard’s Tinker Creek was in a valley, but her patch of sky was supplemented by woods and fields and the always changing theater of the creek itself. Many of us have longed at one time or another for greater simplicity, for a life lived deliberately, for the intensely-experienced few rather than the trivialized many. It’s all a matter of finding the balance, between the harsh parsimony of the anchorite’s cell and the rush and clutter of 21st-century, media-saturated overload.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

"Our Task..."

“We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as humans is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that’s all.

Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. “Tragedy,” D.H. Lawrence said, “ought to be a great kick at misery.” This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick.”

- Albert Camus

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/24/21: "ALERT: Be Ready People. Expect A Second LARGER Wave Of Inflation To Hit"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/24/21:

"ALERT: Be Ready People. 

Expect A Second LARGER Wave Of Inflation To Hit"

- https://traderschoice.net/

The Daily "Near You?"

Tofino, British Columbia, Canada. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Last Time Always Happens Now"

"The Last Time Always Happens Now"

by David Cain

"William Irvine, an author and philosophy professor I’m a big fan of, often tries to point people towards a little-discussed fact of human life: "You always know when you’re doing something for the first time, and you almost never know when you’re doing something for the last time."

There was, or will be, a last time for everything you do, from climbing a tree to changing a diaper, and living with a practiced awareness of that fact can make even the most routine day feel like it’s bursting with blessings. Of all the lasting takeaways from my periodic dives into Stoicism, this is the one that has enhanced my life the most. I’ve touched on it before in my Stoicism experiment log and in a Patreon post, and I intend to write about it many more times in the future (but who can say?)

To explain why someone might want to start thinking seriously about last times, Bill Irvine asks us to imagine a rare but relatable event: going to your favorite restaurant one last time, knowing it’s about to close up for good.

Predictably, dining on this last-ever night makes for a much richer experience than almost all the other times you’ve eaten at that restaurant, but it’s not because the food, decor, or service is any different than usual. It’s better because you know it’s the last time, so you’re apt to savor everything you can about it, right down to the worn menus and tacky napkin rings. You’re unlikely to let any mistakes or imperfections bother you, and in fact you might find them endearing.

It becomes clearer than ever, in other words, how great it was while it lasted, and how little the petty stuff mattered. On that last dinner, you can set aside minor issues with ease, and appreciate even the most mundane details. Anything else would seem foolish, because you’re here now, and this is it. It might even occur to you that there’s no reason you couldn’t have enjoyed it this much every time you dined here – except that all the other times, you knew there would be more times, so you didn’t have to be so intentional about appreciating it.

That’s an exceptionally rare situation though. Almost always, we do things for the last time without knowing it’s the last time. There was a last time – on an actual calendar date – when you drew a picture with crayons purely for your own pleasure. A last time you excitedly popped a Blockbuster rental into your VCR. A last time you played fetch with a certain dog. Whenever the last time happened, it was “now” at the time.

You’ve certainly heard the heart-wrenching insight that there’s always a last time a parent picks up their child. By a certain age the child is too big, which means there’s always an ordinary day when the parent picks up and puts down their child as they have a thousand times before, with no awareness that it was the last time they would do it.

Ultimately there will be as many last times as there were first times. There will be last time you do laundry. A last time you eat pie. A last time you visit a favorite neighborhood, city, or country. For every single friend you’ve ever had, there will be a last time you talk, or maybe there already has been.

For ninety-nine percent of these last times, you will have no idea that that’s what it is. It will seem like another of the many middle times, with a lot more to come. If you knew it was the last-ever time you spoke to a certain person or did a certain activity, you’d probably make a point of appreciating it, like a planned last visit to Salvatore’s Pizzeria. You wouldn’t spend it thinking about something else, or let minor annoyances spoil it.

Many last times are still a long way in the future, of course. The trouble is you don’t know which ones. The solution, Irvine suggests, is to frequently imagine that this is the last time, even when it’s probably not. A few times a day, whatever you’re doing, you assume you’re doing that thing for the last time. There will be a last time you sip coffee, like you’re doing now. What if this sip was it? There will be a last time you walk into the office and say hi to Sally. If this was it, you might be a little more genuine, a little more present.

The point isn’t to make life into a series of desperate goodbyes. You can go ahead and do the thing more or less normally. You might find, though, that when you frame it as a potential last time, you pay more attention to it, and you appreciate it for what it is in a way you normally don’t. It turns out that ordinary days are full of experiences you expect will keep happening forever, and of course none of them will.

It doesn’t matter if the activity is something you particularly love doing. Walking into a 7-11 or weeding the garden is just as worthy of last-time practice as hugging a loved one. Even stapling the corner of some pages together can generate a sense of appreciation, if you saw it as your final act of stapling in a life that’s contained a surprising amount of stapling.

Irvine uses mowing the lawn as an example, a task he doesn’t love doing. If you imagine that this is the last time you’ll mow the lawn, rather than consider it a good riddance, you might realize that there will be a time when you’ve mown your last lawn, and that there were a lot of great things about living in your lawn-mowing, bungalow-maintaining heyday. A few seconds later, it dawns on you that you still are.

You can get very specific with the experiences you do this with. The last time you roll cookie dough between your palms. The last time you get rained on. The last time you sidestep down a crowded cinema aisle. The last time your jeans smell like campfire smoke. The last time your daughter says “swannich” instead of “sandwich.” Virtually everything is a worthy candidate for this reflection.

It always brings perspective to your life as it is now, and it never gets old. It’s an immensely rewarding exercise, but it not a laborious one. It takes only two or three seconds - allowing yourself “a flickering thought,” as Irvine put it - to notice what you’re doing right now, and consider the possibility that this is indeed the last escalator ride at Fairfield Mall, the last time you put on a Beatles record, the last time you encounter a squirrel, or the last time you parallel park in front of Aunt Rita’s building."

- https://www.raptitude.com/

○

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "What I Have Learned So Far"

"What I Have Learned So Far"

"Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I

not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,

looking into the shining world? Because, properly

attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.

Can one be passionate about the just, the

ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit

to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a

story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.

Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of

light is the crossroads of - indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone."

~ Mary Oliver

"And Never, Never To Forget..."

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget."

- Arundhati Roy

"When Anything Goes, Everything Goes"

"When Anything Goes, Everything Goes"

by Bill Bonner

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – "What we’ve been looking at this week is “how the world ends.” And today, we meet a woman who intends to kill it – the exterminating angel herself – Saule Omarova. Born in Kazakhstan, educated in Moscow, Madison, and Chicago, and now nominated by the Biden Team to head up its OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency). Ms. Omarova makes no effort to disguise what she is up to. She says she aims to “effectively ‘end banking’ as we know it.” That is, she wants to replace an entire industry – one that evolved over hundreds of years, thanks to the efforts of thousands of innovating, competing bankers… who served millions of willing customers – with some monster of her own invention.

Redesigning Finance: But destroying “banking” is just the beginning of her ambitions. She has never worked for a bank, never run a business… never satisfied a customer, started a company, or “made payroll” for one…and never even held a job outside of academia or the law (we’re not counting her time as “special adviser” for Regulatory Policy to the Under Secretary for Domestic Finance in 2006-2007 as a real job). And yet, she thinks she knows what is best for you, and 330 million other Americans (and perhaps the whole world)… and intends to give it to us, whether we want it or not. She explains:

"My new working paper […] advocates a comprehensive reform of the structure and systemic function of the Fed’s balance sheet as the basis for redesigning the core architecture of modern finance. It offers a blueprint for transforming the Fed’s balance sheet into what it calls the People’s Ledger: the ultimate public platform for generating, modulating, and allocating sovereign credit and money in a democratic economy."

Holy moly. She thinks modern finance was “designed”… and that she has the right to redesign it, allocating money as she sees fit. Yes, she proposes to be the decider, not just for the government, but for the private sector, too.

In particular, she proposes setting up something similar to the Gosplan in the Soviet Union, a “National Investment Authority,” (NIA) that would be responsible for “formulating, financing, and executing a coordinated strategy of sustainable and socially inclusive economic development.” In other words, the feds have made such wonderful investments these many years… let’s give them more money to invest!

Soviet-Era Import: But wait, there’s more… "The NIA “would act directly in financial markets as a lender, guarantor, securitizer, and venture capitalist with a broad mandate to mobilize, amplify, and direct public and private capital to where it’s needed most.”

Yes, she’s proposing a Gosbank, the Soviet Union’s central bank, too. And why not? Central planning worked so well in the Soviet Union. How nice of Ms. Omarova to bring it with her – to America. And now, like kudzu or the spotted lanternfly, it’s taking over. How’s that for the End of the World As We Have Known It?

Anything Goes: Of course, the world itself is not really ending. So what if inflation goes to 3% or 5%… or 10%, for that matter? So what if the feds waste a few trillion dollars more? And who cares if another moron goes to Washington?

We Diary readers are mostly older and mostly white; we have our savings, our stocks, our pensions, our insurance policies… and even Social Security to support us. And our houses are much more valuable than they used to be. So we won’t be too hurt in the next crisis, will we?

Besides, we’ve already been through three crises so far this century… What's another one, more or less? And yet, here we are… on the other side of the Rubicon. The fundamental principles that guided the American Republic – the rules and institutions we grew up with – are being chucked in the river.

Now, it’s “anything goes.” And when anything goes… everything goes with it. The next major selloff will probably give Ms. Omarova the crisis she is looking for. And it may not be far off. The Chinese are facing a 1929-style debt crisis. The U.S. is up against its own debt ceiling; if it isn’t raised, experts say the results will be “catastrophic.” There will be panic and hysteria. Then, the OCC chief – and other elite world-improvers who created the problem – will tell us how capitalism and free markets have failed…and roll out their cockamamie solution.

Gates of Hell: Let’s look at how it might play out. Inflationary increases of 3%… or 5%… won’t mean much – in themselves. But house prices are already rising at 18% year-on-year. Producer prices are up at an annual 8% rate. And now that inflation is out of the bag, it will be impossible to stuff it back in. In the next crisis, this inflation will add a critical new dimension to the Federal Reserve’s problems. That is, as in the last three crises of this century, the Fed will come riding to the rescue. It will “print” more money and try to boost stock prices – just as it did in 2001, 2009, and 2020.

But in none of those cases was inflation a problem, too. And when investors see the Fed supporting the economy with more money – as it must – it will be obvious that the Fed is trapped. Inflate or die. The Fed will inflate… and let the dollar (and bonds) die.

Obituaries for the bond market will appear in every financial publication. An even greater panic will take hold. Different political factions will clash in the streets. And the masses will turn their tired eyes to Washington, pleading… “Help us… Save us… Touch us… Heal us.”

And then, like Vladimir Lenin arriving in Petrograd in 1917… or Fidel Castro washing up on the shores near Niquero, Cuba, in 1956, Ms. Omarova’s hour will come around at last. And guided by crackpots and grifters… the U.S. will step gingerly through the gates of Hell, like so many nations before it. More to come…"

- www.rogueeconomics.com

"Decide..."

“We're all going to die. We don't get much say over how or when, but we do get to decide how we're gonna live. So, do it. Decide. Is this the life you want to live? Is this the person you want to love? Is this the best you can be? Can you be stronger? Kinder? More Compassionate? Decide. Breathe in. Breathe out and decide.”

- “Richard”, “Grey’s Anatomy”

"Fiscal Cliffs will Impact the Markets - This is the Time to Play It Safe"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly, AM 9/24/21:

"Fiscal Cliffs will Impact the Markets - 

This is the Time to Play It Safe"

"There are so many fiscal cliffs that are out there. Some have ended and some end soon. The next one is Mortgage Forbearance. It ends September 30th, 2021. People need to realize this is going to affect so much of our financial system as well as the real estate markets."