Monday, December 27, 2021

"The Great Worker Shortage Is Causing Basic Services To Really Break Down All Across America"

"The Great Worker Shortage Is Causing Basic Services 
To Really Break Down All Across America"
by Michael Snyder

"Where did all the workers go? That is a great mystery that continues to be unsolved. All over America, businesses are literally hiring anyone with a pulse and there are “help wanted” signs all over the place. But the number of people that are actually working is still close to four million below the pre-pandemic peak. What happened to all of those extra workers? They certainly aren’t on unemployment, because claims for unemployment benefits are the lowest that we have seen “in decades”. So where are they? It is almost as if millions upon millions of people have disappeared from the system completely over the past couple of years.

Needless to say, this lack of workers is having a dramatic impact on the delivery of basic services all over the country. For example, some of the biggest banks in the U.S. are “temporarily” closing lots of branches due to a lack of staff… "Big banks are temporarily closing branches across the nation as they cope with labor shortages and ongoing complications from Covid-19, including the arrival of the more contagious Omicron variant. It mirrors widespread branch closures at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 when many thought the economic lockdown would be measured in weeks. The new round of temporary closures - sometimes occurring sporadically - are sparking anger, confusion and angst among customers."

If your local bank branch is now closed, it may be quite a while before it opens again. In fact, Bank of America is telling their customers that some branches may be shut down “for an extended period of time”… “Many of our locations may have reduced hours, alternate days of operations or may have been temporarily closed,” Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC) tells customers on its website. “We are doing everything we can to reopen as soon as possible, though some locations may remain closed for an extended period of time.”

Even more alarming is what staffing shortages are doing to hospitals all across the nation. Without enough qualified personnel, many hospitals are having a really difficult time delivering basic services right in the middle of this pandemic, and the cost of hiring replacements has even pushed some facilities into bankruptcy… "The U.S. health-care profession is suffering its own Great Resignation, pushing more hospitals into financial distress just as a winter surge of the coronavirus hits.

Across the country, hospitals are buckling under the strain of nursing shortfalls and the spiraling cost of hiring replacements. For Watsonville Community Hospital on California’s Central Coast, those costs became too much to bear, and contributed to the facility’s bankruptcy this month, according to a person familiar with the situation."

Because there is such a lack of nurses, any that become available are often the subject of bidding wars, and those with the biggest checkbooks end up winning… "“This is like survival stakes,” said Steven Shill, head of the health-care practice at advisory firm BDO USA. Winners are “whoever’s highest on the food chain and who has the biggest checkbook.” The staffing companies - agencies that provide nurses and other staff on a temporary basis - are “really, really, really gouging hospitals.”

I specifically warned that a lot of these hospitals in blue states were going to be facing severe personnel shortages as a result of the absurd mandates that were being imposed. Now these institutions have been put in an untenable situation right in the middle of a raging pandemic, and the ones that instituted the mandates are the ones that are responsible for this state of affairs.

Meanwhile, patients just continue to pour into our hospitals at an alarming rate. At one hospital in Ventura County, large numbers of people are coming in complaining of “unexplained heart problems, strokes and blood clotting”, and this has pushed the patient census at that hospital to the highest level ever… "Dana, another ICU nurse, says the number of sick, critically ill people in her Ventura County hospital has become “overwhelming,” pushing her facility’s patient census to the highest levels she has ever seen. “It has never been this busy, and none of it is Covid-19,” Dana says. “We don’t normally see this amount of strokes, aneurysms and heart attacks all happening at once. Normally we’ll see six to ten aortic dissections a year. We’ve seen six in the last month. It’s crazy. Those have very high rates of mortality.”

Similar scenarios are playing out at countless other hospitals all across America. And staffing shortages are likely to continue to intensify, because one recent survey found that a lot more nurses plan to leave their posts in the months ahead… "Two-thirds of nurses surveyed by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses said their experiences during the pandemic have prompted them to consider leaving the field. And 21% of those polled in a study for the American Nurses Foundation said they planned to resign within the next six months. Another 29% said they might."

Air travel is another industry that is experiencing unprecedented nightmares due to severe staffing shortages. Over the past week, we have literally seen thousands upon thousands of flights either canceled or delayed due to a lack of workers… "Although Christmas might be over, holiday travelers won’t be able to escape the airport chaos on Sunday as 913 US flights have been canceled and 2,975 more are delayed due to staffing shortages caused by the COVID Omicron surge. The new wave of interruptions comes after nearly 1,000 flights into, out of or within the US were cancelled on Christmas and more than 3,000 were delayed."

What a mess. Sadly, this is a crisis that is not going to be cleared up any time soon. People are dropping dead all around us, and so worker shortages are likely to be a major league headache throughout 2022 and beyond.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the United States grew at the slowest pace ever recorded during the 12 months ending on July 1st… "America’s population grew 0.1% this year, the lowest rate on record, according to Census Bureau figures released Tuesday that show how the pandemic is changing the country’s demographic contours. The U.S. added just 393,000 people in the year that ended July 1 for a total population of 331.9 million."

When the final numbers come out for the full year of 2021, I believe that they will show a significant population decline for the nation as a whole. So many have already died, and countless more will die in 2022. And of course what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

Our society is in the process of collapsing all around us, and now we have gotten to a point where even our most basic services are starting to fail. I wish that I could tell you that 2022 is going to be better, but I can’t do that, because it wouldn’t be the truth."

Sunday, December 26, 2021

"Live All You Can..."

"Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter
what you do in particular, so long as you have your life.
If you haven't had that, what have you had?"
- Henry James

"The Holstee Manifesto"

 
The Holstee Manifesto

"Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning"

"Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote
 to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning"
by Maria Popova

"A decade ago, when I first began practicing with my mindfulness teacher while struggling to make rent and make meaning out of my borrowed stardust, one meditation she led transformed my quality of life above all others - both life’s existential calibration and its moment-to-moment experience: You are asked to imagine having only a year left to live, at your present mental and bodily capacity - what would you do with it? Then imagine you only had a day left - what would you do with it? Then only an hour - what would you do with it?

As you scale down these nested finitudes, the question becomes a powerful sieve for priorities - because undergirding it is really the question of what, from among the myriad doable things, you would choose not to do in order to fill the scant allotment of time, be it the 8,760 hours of a year or a single hour, with the experiences that confer upon it maximum aliveness, that radiant vitality filling the basic biological struggle for survival with something more numinous.

The exercise instantly clarifies - and horrifies, with the force of its clarity - the empty atoms of automation and unexamined choice filling modern life with busyness while hollowing it of gladness. What emerges is the sense that making a meaningful life is less like the building of the Pyramids, stacking an endless array of colossal blocks into a superstructure of impressive stature and on the back of slave labor, than like the carving of Rodin’s Thinker, cutting pieces away from the marble block until a shape of substance and beauty is revealed. What emerges, too, is the sense that the modern cult of productivity is the great pyramid scheme of our time.

Oliver Burkeman reckons with these ideas in "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" (public library) - an inquiry equal parts soulful and sobering, offering not arsenal for but sanctuary from our self-brutalizing war on the constraints of reality, titled after the (disconcertingly low) number of weeks comprising the average modern sapiens lifespan of eighty (seemingly long) years.

After taking a delightful English jab at the American-bred term “life-hack” and its unfortunate intimation that “your life is best thought of as some kind of faulty contraption, in need of modification so as to stop it from performing suboptimally,” Burkeman frames our present predicament:

"This strange moment in history, when time feels so unmoored, might in fact provide the ideal opportunity to reconsider our relationship with it. Older thinkers have faced these challenges before us, and when their wisdom is applied to the present day, certain truths grow more clearly apparent. Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control - when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about."

In consequence, we lose sight of the fundamental tradeoff that the price of higher productivity is always lower creativity. All of it, Burkeman observes, is the product of an anxiety about time that springs from our stubborn avoidance of the elemental parameters of reality. A century and a half after Emily Dickinson lamented that “enough is so vast a sweetness… it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” he writes:

"Denying reality never works, though. It may provide some immediate relief, because it allows you to go on thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can’t ever bring the sense that you’re doing enough - that you are enough - because it defines “enough” as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life."

This pursuit of efficiency hollows out the fullness of life, flattening the sphere of being that makes us complete human beings into a hamster wheel. Burkeman terms this “the paradox of limitation” and writes: "The more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead - and work with them, rather than against them - the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes."

Echoing physicist Brian Greene’s poetic meditation on how our mortality gives meaning to our lives, he adds: "I don’t think the feeling of anxiety ever completely goes away; we’re even limited, apparently, in our capacity to embrace our limitations. But I’m aware of no other time management technique that’s half as effective as just facing the way things truly are."

At the crux of facing the limits of reality is the fact that we must make choices — a necessity that can petrify us with “FOMO,” the paralyzing fear of missing out. And yet, as Adam Phillips observed in his elegant antidote to this fear, “our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”

We have different coping strategies for managing the melancholy onus of having to choose. I am aware that my reliance on daily routines, unvaried meals, interchangeable clothing items, recursive playlists, and other life-loops is a coping mechanism aimed at automating certain choices in order to allay the anxiety and time-cost of having to make them afresh each day. Others orient orthogonally to the problem, avoiding making concrete choices and commitments, in life and in love, in order to keep their options “open” - an equally illusory escape from the grand foreclosure that is life itself.

But however we cope with the fearsome fact of having to choose, choose we must in order to live - and in order to have lives worthy of having been lived. It is, of course, all about facing our mortality - like every anxiety in life, if its layers of distraction and disguise are peeled back far enough.

With an eye to the etymology of “decide” - which stems from the Latin decidere, “to cut off,” a root it shares with “homicide” and “suicide” - Burkeman considers the necessity of excision: "Any finite life - even the best one you could possibly imagine - is therefore a matter of ceaselessly waving goodbye to possibility… Since finitude defines our lives… living a truly authentic life - becoming fully human - means facing up to that fact.
[…]
It’s only by facing our finitude that we can step into a truly authentic relationship with life."

Facing our finitude is, of course, the most challenging frontier of our ongoing resistance to facing the various territories of reality. The outrage we intuitively feel at the fact of our mortality - outrage for which the commonest prescription in the history of our species have been sugar-coated pellets of illusion promising ideologies of immortality - is a futile fist shaken at the fundamental organizing principle of the universe, of which we are part and product. Only the rare few are able to orient to mortality by meeting reality on its own terms and finding in that reorientation not only relief but rapturous gladness.

A generation after Richard Dawkins made his exquisite counterintuitive argument for how death betokens the luckiness of life, Burkeman offers a fulcrum for pivoting our intuitive never-enough-time perspective to take a different view of the time we do have: "From an everyday standpoint, the fact that life is finite feels like a terrible insult… There you were, planning to live on forever… but now here comes mortality, to steal away the life that was rightfully yours.

Yet, on reflection, there’s something very entitled about this attitude. Why assume that an infinite supply of time is the default, and mortality the outrageous violation? Or to put it another way, why treat four thousand weeks as a very small number, because it’s so tiny compared with infinity, rather than treating it as a huge number, because it’s so many more weeks than if you had never been born? Surely only somebody who’d failed to notice how remarkable it is that anything is, in the first place, would take their own being as such a given - as if it were something they had every right to have conferred upon them, and never to have taken away. So maybe it’s not that you’ve been cheated out of an unlimited supply of time; maybe it’s almost incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all."

Our anxiety about the finitude of time is at bottom a function of the limits of attention - that great strainer for stimuli, woven of time. Our brains have evolved to miss the vast majority of what is unfolding around us, which renders our slender store of conscious attention our most precious resource - “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” in Simone Weil’s lovely words. And yet, Burkeman argues, treating attention as a resource is already a diminishment of its reality-shaping centrality to our lives. In consonance with William James - the original patron saint of attention as the empress of experience - Burkeman writes:

"Most other resources on which we rely as individuals - such as food, money, and electricity - are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been."

Annie Dillard captured this sentiment best in her haunting observation that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” - a poetic sentiment that, on a hectic day, becomes an indictment. What makes our attention so vulnerable to distraction is the difficulty of attending to what is consequential in the grandest scheme - a difficulty temporarily allayed by the ease of attending to the immediate and seemingly urgent but, ultimately, inconsequential. (Who among us would, on their deathbed, radiate soul-gladness over the number of emails they responded to in their lifetime?) “People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy,” Rilke admonished a century before social media’s stream of easy escape into distraction, before productivity apps and life-hacks and instaeverything. “But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.”

Burkeman writes: "Whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude - with the human predicament of having limited time, and more especially, in the case of distraction, limited control over that time, which makes it impossible to feel certain about how things will turn out… The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise - to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold."

And so we get to the crux of our human predicament - the underbelly of our anxiety about every unanswered email, every unfinished project, and every unbegun dream: Our capacities are limited, our time is finite, and we have no control over how it will unfold or when it will run out. Beyond the lucky fact of being born, life is one great sweep of uncertainty, bookended by the only other lucky certainty we have. It is hardly any wonder that the sweep is dusted with so much worry and we respond with so much obsessive planning, compulsive productivity, and other touching illusions of control.

Burkeman - whose previous book made a similarly counterintuitive and insightful case for uncertainty as the wellspring of happiness - writes: "Worry, at its core, is the repetitious experience of a mind attempting to generate a feeling of security about the future, failing, then trying again and again and again - as if the very effort of worrying might somehow help forestall disaster. The fuel behind worry, in other words, is the internal demand to know, in advance, that things will turn out fine: that your partner won’t leave you, that you will have sufficient money to retire, that a pandemic won’t claim the lives of anyone you love, that your favored candidate will win the next election, that you can get through your to-do list by the end of Friday afternoon. But the struggle for control over the future is a stark example of our refusal to acknowledge our built-in limitations when it comes to time, because it’s a fight the worrier obviously won’t win.
[…]
And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state - because in each of the moments that you inescapably are, anything could happen, from an urgent email that scuppers your plans for the morning to a bereavement that shakes your world to its foundations. A life spent focused on achieving security with respect - as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you’ve gotten it, in Arnold Bennett’s phrase, “into proper working order.”

The primary manifestation of this - and the root of our uneasy relationship with time - is that, in the course of our ordinary days, we instinctively make choices not through the lens of significance but through the lens of anxiety-avoidance, which increasingly renders life something to be managed rather than savored, a problem to be solved rather than a question to be asked, which we must each answer with the singular song of our lives, melodic with meaning.

Leaning on Carl Jung’s perceptive advice on how to live, Burkeman makes poetically explicit the book’s implicitly obvious and necessary disclaimer: "Maybe it’s worth spelling out that none of this is an argument against long-term endeavors like marriage or parenting, building organizations or reforming political systems, and certainly not against tackling the climate crisis; these are among the things that matter most. But it’s an argument that even those things can only ever matter now, in each moment of the work involved, whether or not they’ve yet reached what the rest of the world defines as fruition. Because now is all you ever get.
[…]
If you can face the truth about time in this way - if you can step more fully into the condition of being a limited human - you will reach the greatest heights of productivity, accomplishment, service, and fulfillment that were ever in the cards for you to begin with. And the life you will see incrementally taking shape, in the rearview mirror, will be one that meets the only definitive measure of what it means to have used your weeks well: not how many people you helped, or how much you got done; but that working within the limits of your moment in history, and your finite time and talents, you actually got around to doing - and made life more luminous for the rest of us by doing - whatever magnificent task or weird little thing it was that you came here for.

In the remainder of the thoroughly satisfying and clarifying "Four Thousand Weeks," drawing on a wealth of contemporary research and timeless wisdom from thinkers long vanished into what Emily Dickinson termed “the drift called ‘the Infinite,'” Burkeman goes on to devise a set of principles for liberating ourselves from the trap of efficiency and its illusory dreams of control, so that our transience can be a little more bearable and our finite time in the kingdom of life a little less provisional, a lot more purposeful, and infinitely more alive.

Complement it with Seneca on the Stoic key to living with presence, Hermann Hesse on breaking the trance of busyness, artist Etel Adnan on time, self, impermanence, and transcendence, and physicist Alan Lightman’s poetic exploration of time and the antidote to life’s central anxiety, then revisit Borges’s timeless refutation of time, which Burkeman necessarily quotes, and Mary Oliver - another of Burkeman’s bygone beacons - on the measure of a life well lived."

Musical Interlude: Disturbed "The Sound Of Silence"

Full screen recommended.
Disturbed "The Sound Of Silence"

"A Look to the Heavens"

 “Large, dusty, spiral galaxy NGC 4945 is seen edge-on near the center of this rich telescopic image. The field of view spans nearly 2 degrees, or about 4 times the width of the Full Moon, toward the expansive southern constellation Centaurus.

About 13 million light-years distant, NGC 4945 is almost the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy. But X-ray and infrared observations reveal even more high energy emission and star formation in the core of NGC 4945. The other prominent galaxy in the field, NGC 4976, is an elliptical galaxy. Left of center, NGC 4976 is much farther away, at a distance of about 35 million light-years, and not physically associated with NGC 4945.”

"Eventually You Understand..."

"That's where it all begins. That's where we all get screwed big time as we grow up. They tell us to think, but they don't really mean it. They only want us to think within the boundaries they define. The moment you start thinking for yourself- really thinking- so many things stop making any sense. And if you keep thinking, the whole world just falls apart. Nothing makes sense anymore. All rules, traditions, expectations- they all start looking so fake, so made up. You want to just get rid of all this stuff and make things right. But the moment you say it, they tell you to shut up and be respectful. And eventually you understand that nobody wants you to really think for yourself.”
- Ray N. Kuili, “Awakening"

"Dazed Lemmings Can't Bridge The Reality Gap"

"Dazed Lemmings Can't Bridge The Reality Gap"
by Zen Gardner

"Ever wonder why people can't make the leap to real awareness of what's going on? Why do so few people seem to care about the dangers of the unreported Fukushima radiation levels and toxic debris washing across the pacific? As the Orwellian American police state sweeps into place, the economy crumbles, Americans celebrated their entry into a brave new 2020 with minimal awareness of the true dangers already dissolving their health, wealth and chances for survival in an engineered conflagration of mythic proportions that is already descending on their heads.

As the gap between reality and manipulated public perception grows, it may just be too big a leap for many at this point. Having been dumbed-down and unresponsive for so long, it's too much for them to take in. Sad, but again, that's reality. Hey, why wake up when everything's such a bummer? That's the underlying mentality. The thing is, this is a conditioned response. Overload and recoil. And it's been going on a long, long time.

Why? Like the dumbing down effect of fluoride and chemtrails and adulterated food, it eventually suppresses natural responses. When the real alert presents itself, the subject will not be able to react and protect himself. Why all the dramatic end of the world sci-fi movies? Why the emphasis on violence and horror movies and graphic, destructive wars? Why does the news major on the bad events of the day? Why the combative gladiator sports, emphasis on technology instead of humanity, and mind-numbing crass consumerism and sexualization of society? This is deliberate social engineering, and that's the biggie. It's all engineered..and that's the last thing most people want to realize. And it usually is.

The Power of Cognitive Dissonance: The world has become essentially schizophrenic in outlook. Being told one thing while the exact opposite is happening before their eyes for so long, the "dissonance" created by this conflict causes humanity to shut down. America is the perfect example. Ostensibly fighting for "freedom and liberty" we commit genocide and destroy nation after nation. To protect our liberties the government has overturned the Bill of Rights and made the Constitution a mockery. Yet the populace sits and takes it. Why? Too big of a leap. If it turned out they've been completely conned by a massive manipulated agenda they may just completely break down. And subconsciously the horror of that reality is therefore a "no". Even if it were true they're at the point they'd rather not know.

I'll Take Conscious Reality. "Why all the negativity?" is what you'll hear a lot of the time when you bring these things up. The answer, as David Icke often says, is that ignorance is negative. Truth is empowering, no matter how awful it may be sometimes. And at this point in history the more you learn the more negative it may seem, with the Controllers' agenda in full final-phase swing. But so what. Things haven't changed all that much. The purpose of life is to rediscover who you truly are, and that wonderful awakening makes everything else pale in comparison. Our mission then becomes to inform and empower, share and encourage. The same one it always has been. That it's taking this kind of extreme compression to awaken the slumbering masses is really no surprise, and ultimately a gift from the Universe to help people back into the real world.....that of conscious loving awareness."

"Awaken from slumber, one and all..."

"How, Then..."

"How, then, shall we face the future? When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars. Why? Because they are faithful..."
- Soren Kierkegaard

"We Deserve Better..."

"We are the world. We are the people and we deserve better,
not because we're worth it, but because no worth 
can be put on the incalculable, on the infinite, on life."
- Nick Mancuso

The Daily "Near You?"

Saint Petersburg, Saint Petersburg City, Russian Federation.
Thanks for stopping by!

"We Tell Ourselves..."

“Maybe we accept the dream has become a nightmare. We tell ourselves that reality is better. We convince ourselves it’s better that we never dream at all. But, the strongest of us, the most determined of us, holds on to the dream or we find ourselves faced with a fresh dream we never considered. We wake to find ourselves, against all odds, feeling hopeful. And, if we’re lucky, we realize in the face of everything, in the face of life the true dream is being able to dream at all.”
- Dr. Meredith Grey, "Grey's Anatomy"

"Resolutions and Goal Setting Are Not Just for the New Year. Set Goals Year Round"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 12/26/21:
"Resolutions and Goal Setting Are Not Just for the New Year.
 Set Goals Year Round"
"New Years Resolutions are something that should not just be set for January. New Year’s resolutions and goalsetting should be something you do throughout the year. Start small with daily, weekly and monthly goals. Write things down and before you know it you’ll get more things done."

"The Biggest Stock Market Crash Of Our Time Is About To Burst With Brutal 80% Collapse"

Full screen recommended.
"The Biggest Stock Market Crash Of Our Time
 Is About To Burst With Brutal 80% Collapse"
by Epic Economist

"With inflation soaring to the highest level in 40 years, the yield curve flattening, and economic conditions worsening, the U.S. stock market is not prepared for what is coming next. The carnage has already begun, with some investor favorites such as Rivian falling by 80 percent in a matter of days. But still, traders keep desperately trying to fuel the bubble and push valuations to extraordinary levels. Unfortunately, those who are thinking that the downfall is over will be caught by surprise once they realize that, under the surface of the market, the bullish trend is starting to reverse.

The last Consumer Price Index report carried a hidden message, signaling trouble for the bond market. Yields across the curve are dropping, with the two-year rate declining from five base points to 65 base points. The 10-year also is plunging from around four base points to 1.45%. This comes as a surprise to most investors who thought that inflation would fade by itself and expected a strong economy. The flattening yield curve, with the front-end rising and the back-end falling, in addition to higher inflation expectations, tells us that the bond market is getting exceedingly worried about an economic slump, or even worse, the growing probability of an imminent recession.

Another serious issue is that financial conditions are tightening because the Fed has announced that it will start tapering its bond purchases and rising interest rates before the end of 2021. And when the financial conditions index goes up, it sparks a lot of volatility in the stock market. This is the nightmare scenario that led the Fed to decide to accelerate its tapering on November 26 due to scorching hot inflation, the threat of a global economic slowdown, and at a time when the bond market is concerned about a depressed growth for the U.S. economy.

While indexes are either peaking or within a few percent of their peak, the most speculative areas of the market are already in bear market territory. Top-tier investors are shifting their portfolios away from risky assets and looking for forms of wealth protection, given that there is much more weakness to come. Speculative market sectors such as tech, growth stocks, and crypto are under serious pressure as the current valuations are significantly higher than their historical average. Stock market peaks are typically a process rather than an event. They often happen after some areas of the market have already suffered large pullbacks. And that's precisely what we're witnessing right now.

Therefore, with the yield curve flattening, global growth slowing, the Fed starting its taper, and financial conditions tightening, the time for a massive stock market sell-off has arrived and the vast majority of market experts are saying that the countdown for a brutal crash has begun. A recent survey conducted by Bankrate found that most market veterans agree that an up to 80 percent correction is coming. Bankrate’s Fourth-Quarter Market Mavens survey exposes that 70 percent of analysts think a stock market crash is looming, and it also explains why these experts think so.

Bankrate’s survey showed a broad-based belief that the S&P 500 Index would catastrophically drop in the near term. The study found that a staggering 70 percent of respondents said the market is overdue for a sizable crash any day now, while 10 percent said that a crash will happen within the next year, and 20 percent of respondents said they didn’t know or provided another response. There are many reasons why these insiders are expecting the market to collapse. The most cited, of course, are rising interest rates and the overvaluation of stocks. Since last year's sell-off, the S&P 500 has recorded an almost uninterrupted run, but the true growth of many companies isn't keeping up with the pace of the rise of their stock prices.

Similarly, Jim Paulsen from The Leuthold Group is predicting a major pullback to rattle investors due to high valuations and less accommodative Federal Reserve policies. “We are way overdue for a correction, and we’re going to get one,” the firm’s chief investment strategist said in an interview with CNBC last week. “I would be trying to diversify away from the S&P 500, which I think might take the brunt of it,” he added. Needless to say, that isn't good news for the stock market. At the current stage, all of the pieces are starting to fall into place, and it has become a matter of when the market will finally break down. An 80 percent drop is coming. The time has come for a devastating stock market crash. And the next pullback is going to be the most painful we have ever witnessed in modern history."

"How It Really Is"


"We Are About To See Something Big Happen; Your Job Will Be Gone; America Is Going Out Of Business"

Jeremiah Babe, 12/26/21:
"We Are About To See Something Big Happen; 
Your Job Will Be Gone; America Is Going Out Of Business"

"Hope..."

“Hope is the great deceiver.
Hope is the piper who leads us sleepy to our slaughter.”
- Brent Weeks, "The Broken Eye"

Musical Interlude: Michael Franti, "Hey World (Don't Give Up)"; Away For A week

Full screen recommended.
Michael Franti, "Hey World (Don't Give Up)"
I'll be away and offline most of next week, moving from Arizona to Florida.
Have a wonderful New Year folks, see you on the other side!

Friday, December 24, 2021

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas folks, thanks for stopping by!

"Traditional Christmas Classics🎄 Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby"

Full screen recommended.
"Traditional Christmas Classics🎄 
Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby"

"O Holy Night"

Full screen recommended.
Peder B. Helland, "O Holy Night"

André Rieu, "Home for Christmas"

Full screen recommended.
André Rieu, "Home for Christmas"

"Relaxing Fireplace & The Best Instrumental Christmas Music"

Full screen recommended.
"Relaxing Fireplace & The Best Instrumental Christmas Music"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier's famous 18th century list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, debris from the death explosion of a massive star, witnessed by astronomers in the year 1054. This sharp, ground-based telescopic view combines broadband color data with narrowband data that tracks emission from ionized sulfur, hydrogen, and oxygen atoms to explore the tangled filaments within the still expanding cloud. 
One of the most exotic objects known to modern astronomers, the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star spinning 30 times a second, is visible as a bright spot near the nebula's center. Like a cosmic dynamo, this collapsed remnant of the stellar core powers the Crab's emission across the electromagnetic spectrum. Spanning about 12 light-years, the Crab Nebula is a mere 6,500 light-years away in the constellation Taurus."

"If You Look..."; "Can You See The Signs That Are Happening All Around Us?"

"We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy. It's only through people making a stand against that tragedy and being doggedly optimistic that we are going to win through. If you look at the plight of the human race it could well tip you into despair, so you have to be very strong."
- Robert James Brown
Full screen recommended.
"Can You See The Signs That Are Happening All Around Us?"
by Epic Economist

"Most people remain terribly unaware of the dangerous events that are coming for us. We are living at a time when massive disasters are happing all around us, but the vast majority of our society isn't paying attention to what's going on. Our world is being shaken by economic and financial troubles, widespread social disorder, pestilence, and many other natural catastrophes, but many of us are still thinking that life will eventually get back to "normal". Sadly, that isn’t going to happen. As we approach 2022, global events will continue to accelerate and most of our population is going to be caught by surprise by what is coming because they just don't want to believe that things will ever get so chaotic.

But with each passing day, more disasters emerge around the world. For instance, on Monday the California coast was hit by a magnitude 6.2 earthquake that brought significant shaking and serious damages to the area. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, initial economic losses totaled more than $10 million, but officials are still evaluating the true scope of the damages. Seismic activity continues to increase all over the planet, and that's particularly worrying because, along the Ring of Fire, where 75 percent of the Earth’s active volcanoes are located, new tremors are reported on a daily basis. The region accounts for more than 80 percent of all global earthquakes and the fact that it is becoming active right now means that we're basically sitting on a ticking time bomb.

On top of that, late last week, extreme winds and brutal tornadoes erupted right in the middle of the nation. Last Wednesday, a widespread windstorm, severe weather outbreak, and unusual heat from the Rockies and Plains into the upper Midwest was recorded. Needless to say, such high wind speeds can fuel wildfires to spin out of control. And that's what happened in the state of Kansas, where hundreds of thousands of acres were burned in less than three days.

On Thursday, the Forest Service exposed that nearly 400,000 acres had burned and hundreds of homes have been destroyed. Darin Myers, fire department chief in Ellis County, revealed that some of his firefighters saved a resident from her burning home just before the flames became uncontrolled. They said that the blaze has “erased” the house. “Usually it takes 30 minutes to an hour to burn a house down,” Myers explains. “It was just like within a minute. The fire was past the house and the house was gone.”

The catastrophe also led many farmers to lose everything. In some cases, the flames moved so fast that it was impossible to move all of the animals out of the way. Unfortunately, the whole world has been hit by a series of tragedies over the past few years, and that has resulted in the destruction of millions of acres of agricultural land. Now, we're once again at the brink of a global food crisis.

Since last year, global hunger faced an unprecedented spike and started affecting an additional 768 million people worldwide. According to the UN, the number of people living with food insecurity -- or those forced to compromise on food quantity or quality -- skyrocketed by 318 million, to 2.38 billion. And experts are warning that while drought, geopolitical conflicts, and inflation intensifies, a global food crisis seems to be fast approaching.

At this point, global food supplies are getting increasingly tighter. And the great solution global leaders are coming up with is for people to start eating insects. In Europe, officials just allowed house crickets, yellow mealworms, and grasshoppers to be sold as food at supermarkets. The main question now is: how many households will be able to afford traditional food and how many will have to resort to substitutes to save money?

Right now, millions of Americans are having trouble affording essential goods as inflation soars higher. An almost 7 percent surge in consumer prices is making it more difficult for people to make ends meet because wages haven't kept pace with inflation. The same is happening all over the globe. In essence, those who can no longer afford meat might resort to bugs and worms to feed their families.

These are extremely unusual times, and with each passing day, more strange things happen all over the world. Yet, most of the population wants to believe that things are improving and we're heading to a state of normality. Of course, it would be great if that was true, but it isn't. We must wake up from this collective numbness because the changes that we are facing right now will be proven permanent, and the pace of change is only going to intensify during the months and years to come."

"The Elves of Capitalism"

"The Elves of Capitalism"

By Jeffrey Tucker


One reason that the Brothers Grimm fairy tales have such appeal - more so than the folklore that came before - is that they deal with a world that is familiar to us, a world that was just being invented in the early 19th century, when these stories were first printed and circulated. They deal with people, scenes and events that affect what we call the middle class today, or the bourgeoisie.


Yes, the stories feature kings, queens, princes and princesses - this was not yet the age of democracy - but most often our sympathies as readers rest with the plain people and their triumphs, which the stories feature most poignantly.


Both Karl Marx and free market economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) agreed that what we call the middle class was a new creation in the history of the world, and it was brought about by capitalism. The caste chasms that once persisted between the peasants and the lords, those privileged by title and land grants and those fated to serve them, were melted away by the advent of commercial society.


Universal possession of property and money replaced servitude and barter, and exchange relationships of people’s own choosing gradually replaced the required lifetime associations of birth and happenstance. The distinguishing mark of this new middle class was the prospect of social advance through rising prosperity. Fluid classes replaced fixed castes.


This was the world that serves as the backdrop to the tales of the Brothers Grimm. A great example of this is the very short story called “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” A cobbler and his wife worked very hard at their craft, making shoes all day. But leather was expensive, and no matter how hard they worked, they could not put their business in the black. They were selling some shoes, but they couldn’t make enough fast enough. They were getting poorer, rather than richer.


One night, the shoemaker left his cut leather out on a table and went to bed. The next morning, a fantastic pair of shoes made out of that leather awaited him. The craftsmanship was impeccable. They were of the finest style. He was able to charge a very high price to a customer who was very impressed by them.


This same series of events repeated themselves again the next day and the next. Some months later, the shoemaker and his wife were financially secure and part of the rising middle class. All their financial worries were gone, and they were comfortable and happy.


At this point, the shoemaker said to his wife: “I should like to sit up and watch tonight, that we may see who it is that comes and does my work for me.” The wife agreed, and they stayed up to watch what was happening in the night.


Now, to be sure, this turn of events strikes me as rather strange. One might think that curiosity would have caused them to examine this long before. Why didn’t they stay up after the second or third time that leather had become shoes? Why did they wait so long to investigate the cause of their prosperity?


In any case, they did stay up and look, and they found two naked elves there working away, turning scraps of leather into fine shoes. The wife thoughtfully decided to return the favor and make them tiny little clothes. When the elves found the clothes, they put them on and ran away with great delight. They never returned, but the story assures us that this was just fine because the shoe business stayed in the black. The shoemaker and his wife lived a long and prosperous life.


We can see in this one story an archetype of what was then a new type of middle-class success story in the framework of a commercial society. The couple went from poverty to wealth in relatively short order. This came about not because of favors from the king or the discovery of gold, much less from stealing or piracy, but purely by virtue of work and commerce, combined with the assistance of some benefactors in the night whose favors they never sought, but nonetheless came to deeply appreciate.


Apply this story in our times: We are all in the position of poor shoemakers with benefactors. In a state of nature, we would be struggling for survival as most all of humanity did from the beginning of recorded history until the late Middle Ages, when the first lights of capitalism as we know it began to appear on the horizon. Over the next several hundred years, and especially during the 19th century, life itself was transformed. The state of nature was vanquished, and the world completely re-made in the service of human well-being.


As William Bernstein summarizes the situation: “Beginning about A.D. 100, there had been improvement in human well-being, but it was so slow and unreliable that it was not noticeable during the average person’s 25-year life span. Then, not long after 1820, prosperity began flowing in an ever-increasing torrent; with each successive generation, the life of the son became observably more comfortable, informed and predictable than that of the father.”


We were born into a world of amazing prosperity that our generation did not create. We have the expectation of living to old age, but this is completely new in the sweep of history, an expectation we can only have had since about 1950. The shift in population reflects that dramatic change, too.


There were most probably 250 million people alive 2,000 years ago, and it took until 1800 for the 1 billion mark to be reached. One hundred and twenty years later, that was doubled. Three billion people lived on the planet by 1960, and there are 7 billion today. Charting this out, you gain a picture of a world of stagnation and stasis from the beginning of recorded history until the Industrial Revolution, when life as we know it today was first experienced by humankind.


If we are shoemakers in this story, the prosperous world in which we live - the world that grants us smartphones, healthcare, gasoline to power our cars and the ability to communicate in real-time video with any living soul on the planet with the click of a button - might be regarded as the elves that came in the night to turn our leather into a marketable product. Most of us never did anything of our own merit to cause us to benefit from this amazing world. At our birth, we woke up in the morning and found a finished and beautiful pair of shoes given unto us.


Earlier, I said that it strikes me as strange that the shoemaker and his wife waited so long to become curious about who or what was nocturnally turning their leather into shoes. How could they have gone for months without wanting to know what was causing their poverty to turn to riches? How could they have treated the magic in their shop as something helpful but rather normal, and only decided to look into the cause as an afterthought?


Yet this is how most everyone behaves in the world today. We are surrounded by bounty in this man-made world, a world completely unlike anything that has existed in 99.9% of the rest of the history of the world. And how very few bother to investigate the causes! We take it all for granted.


We use our technology, eat foods from all over the world available for sale a few blocks from our home, hop on planes that sweep us through the air to any destination on the planet, instantly communicate with anyone anywhere and have the expectation of living to the age of 80 and beyond, yet we are remarkably indifferent and incurious about what forces operate within this world to have turned the cruel state of nature into an earthy paradise.


Actually, the situation is worse than that. Many are openly hostile to the institutions and ideas that have given rise to our age of plenty. We’ve all seen the protests on television in which mobs of iPhone-carrying young people are raising their fists in anger against commercial society, capitalism and capital accumulation and demand just the type of controls, expropriation and regimentation that are guaranteed to drive us back in time to the restoration of castes, poverty and shortened lives. They are plotting to kill the elves.


In the fairy tale, there are only two elves. In the real world, scholars have discerned that there are actually six, and they go by the following names…


First, there is private property, without which there can be no control of the world around us. It would not be necessary if there were a superabundance of all things, but the reality of scarcity means that exclusive ownership is the first condition that permits us to improve the world. Collective ownership is a meaningless phrase as it pertains to scarce resources.


Second, there is exchange. So long as it is voluntary, all exchange takes place with the expectation of mutual benefit. Exchange is a step beyond gift giving because the lives of both parties are made better off by the acquisition of something new. Exchange is what makes possible the formation of exchange ratios and, in a money economy, the development of the balance sheet for calculation profit and loss. The is the foundation of economic rationality.


Third, there is the division of labor that permits us all to benefit from cooperating with one another toward mutual enrichment. This is about more than dividing up productive tasks. It is about integrating everyone into the great project of building civilization. Even the master of all talents and skills can benefit by cooperating with the least skilled among us. The discovery of this reality is the beginning of true enlightenment. It means the replacement of war with trade and the replacement of exploitation with cooperation.


Fourth, there is risk-taking entrepreneurship that bravely pulls back the veil of uncertainty that hides the future from us and takes a step into the future to bring us every manner of material progress. Uncertainty over the future is a reality that binds all of humanity; entrepreneurs are those who do not fear this condition, but rather see this as an opportunity for improving the lives of others at a profit.


Fifth, there is capital accumulation, the amassing of goods that are produced not for consumption, but for the production of other goods. Capital is what makes possible what F.A. Hayek calls the “extended order,” that intertemporal machinery that stabilizes the events of life over time. Capital is what makes planning possible. It makes the hiring of large workforces possible. It allows investors to plan for and build a bright future.


The sixth elf is not an institution, but a state of mind. It is the desire for a better life and the belief that it can happen if we take the right steps. It is the belief in the possibility of progress. If we lose this, we lose everything. Even if all the other conditions are in place, without the intellectual and spiritual commitment to climb higher and higher out of the state of nature, we will slip further and further into the abyss. This state of mind is the essence of what came to define the Western mind, and which has now spread to the entire world.


Together, these elves constitute a team with a name, and that name is capitalism. If you don’t like that name, you can call it something else: the free market, free enterprise, the free society, liberalism or you can make up your own. What matters is not the team name but the constituent parts that make up that team.


The study of economics is much like the decision of the shoemaking couple that stayed up overnight to find out the cause of their good fortune. They discovered these elves and found that they had no clothes. They decided to make clothes for them as a reward for their service. So too should we clothe the institutions that made our world beautiful in order to protect them against the elements and their enemies. And even after they scurry off into the night, we must never lose consciousness of what they have done for us.


Happy holidays!"

dailyreckoning.com