Monday, December 27, 2021

"1492..."

"Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men, we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. Without a prison, there can be no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society."
- John (Fire) Lame Deer, Sioux Lakota - 1903-1976

"This we know ...
The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.
Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web he does to himself."
- Chief Seattle

 "Only after the last tree has been cut down;
Only after the last fish has been caught;
Only after the last river has been poisoned;
Only then will you realize
that money cannot be eaten."
- Cree Indian Prophecy

"Teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492. The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them. The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
"How Many Native Americans Were Living in 1492?"
"Answer 1: Estimates of the number of Native Americans in 1492 vary widely - from eight million to more than one hundred million."
Answer 2: There have been two estimates done, 1) by the US Government that estimates 25 Million Native Americans (this study was discounted as highly inaccurate) and 2) By independent researchers that show between 75 and 114 million Native Americans."
"Native American Population 2021"
"According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the current total population of Native Americans in the United States is 6.79 million, which is about 2.09% of the entire population. There are about 574 federally recognized Native American tribes in the U.S."

"Untold Stories"

"Untold Stories"
Tales of nonsense, illusion, claptrap and fraud...
by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "It’s Monday. Time to get back to work. This week, in the lull between Christmas and the New Year, we’re going to look at the major news stories from 2021 that the press either denied without bothering to look… or simply failed to report at all.

One of the most important stories involved no more research than looking in the mirror. The corruption of the mainstream media was certainly worth a headline or two. Instead of reporting the news, the press practically became an active shooter itself… taking sides, right or left… scurrilously hiding, bending, or inventing the ‘facts’ to make its case, and gunning down any alternative views. In 2016, for example, the press claimed that the election was defiled by ‘Russian interference.’ Four years later, the election process was virginal again. Miraculous, no?

The World Atlas lists 4,416 cities with more than 150,000 population. The Covid 19 virus first appeared in the very one of them that was conducting research on it (the city of Wuhan in China). A pure coincidence, right?

The Biden administration says that evil corporations are conspiring to raise prices. They say the fastest price rises in 30 years for meat (up 20% for beef and 14.1% for pork - or Meatflation) is the result of a handful of greedy meatpackers. But prices are up just after the federales added about $5 trillion to the US money supply (Fed assets) in the last 24 months. Another coincidence?

You’d think the newshounds would want to know what was going on. But anyone who raises doubts or objections is quickly labeled a nut case or a conspiracy theorist.

Worlds, Old and New: Wait. Before we begin our week’s labor, let’s pause for a cup of coffee and a croissant. Here in France, half the people you meet are in a panic about the new Omicron strain of coronavirus. The other half are fed up with the hysteria and ready to move on. In public places, you are required to wear a mask inside. Restaurants and bars are supposed to check to make sure you are vaccinated or have a recent negative test result. Some do. Some don’t. And the gendarmes come along, occasionally, and ask to see your papers.

“First, the (Covid) tests were free,” says our local source. “Then they were free only if you were vaccinated. And now, they’re planning to eliminate the testing option; so you have to be vaccinated. Even if you have a negative test result, you still won’t be allowed in a restaurant. And even if you are vaccinated, you’ll need a negative test result too. “There’s a lot of faking going on,” our man continues. “You copy someone else’s ‘health pass.’ Shopkeepers are not allowed to ask for identification, so they have no way of knowing if those are your papers or not. Most don’t care anyway. They just want to see a paper so they can say they did their jobs.”

Surely, there’s an under-reported story there too. Or, at least an open question: Would people be better off if the politicians had kept out of it, leaving health issues to patients and their doctors? Again, curious minds will have to wait; the mainstream press won’t touch the story. And yes… life goes on in the Old World, much as it does in the New World – full of nonsense and illusions, claptrap and fraud.

US government debt now 122% of GDP:
Source: US Federal Reserve

And debt. Global debt rose by $20 trillion in the first six months of this year, according to the Institute of International Finance. It was the biggest year-over-year increase in debt since 1970. Total debt is now over $300 trillion.

Today’s enlightened democracies, all over the world, have extensive ‘nets’ meant to save Wall Street speculators, protect large corporations, and cushion the fall for anyone who can’t, or won’t, earn his own way in life... and, incidentally, keep the ruling elites in power by paying off the proles and insiders.

Over the Top: But nets cost money. And social distancing, lockdowns, and bailouts have taken trillions of dollars out of the global economy. To replace that, the feds everywhere have printed up new money – and spent it. And it’s led to huge deficits (tax receipts go down, ‘transfer’ payments go up)… and much more debt.

The whole planet produces goods and services (GDP) of about $90 trillion. In 2007, it already had huge debts, of nearly $150 trillion. But now, after the Wall Street and Covid bailouts, world debt is more than three times GDP. That alone tells you why ‘normal’ is no longer possible. At a normal-ish interest rate of 5%, just the interest on this debt would cost $15 trillion – or one-sixth of GDP – annually. Not possible.

In the US, public (government) debt has more than tripled since the beginning of the Wall Street Bailout after 2008. In the last two years alone, $5 trillion was added. And now, at nearly $29 trillion, and 122% of GDP, America’s government debt is fast approaching the bourne from which no monetary traveler returns.

That is, a country may be able to support an infinite amount of claptrap. But not an infinite amount of debt. And at a government debt/GDP ratio of 130% or more, a nation is almost guaranteed to crack up – with high rates of inflation, military takeover, depression, revolution… or some other man-made calamity.

And what’s this? The Congressional Budget Office says Biden’s Build Back Better Boondoggle program would add $4.7 trillion to the debt. That should do it! It should put us over the top… over the debt/GDP rate that spells doom.

One other thing the press has missed? The Fed’s so-called taper! The Fed’s balance sheet has grown by $125 billion since December 8th, according to its own data. Yet in early November it announced it would begin ‘tapering’ asset purchase by the end of the year. The total balance sheet is now at $8.79 trillion - up 107% since March of 2020.

Stay tuned… for more of the coincidences, oddities and time-bombs of 2021 that the press has largely failed to notice."

The Poet: Joaquín Arcadio Pagaza, “Twilight”

“Twilight”

“Slowly the sun descends at fall of night,
And rests on clouds of amber, rose and red;
The mist upon the distant mountains shed
Turns to a rain of gold and silver light.

The evening star shines tremulous and bright
Through wreaths of vapor, and the clouds o'erhead
Are mirrored in the lake, where soft they spread,
And break the blue of heaven's azure height.

Bright grows the whole horizon in the west
Like a devouring fire; a golden hue
Spreads o'er the sky, the trees, the plains that shine.
The bird is singing near its hidden nest
Its latest song, amid the falling dew,
Enraptured by the sunset's charm divine.”

 - Joaquín Arcadio Pagaza (1839-1918)

“Bad Things Do Happen..."

“Bad things do happen; how I respond to them defines my character and the quality of my life. I can choose to sit in perpetual sadness, immobilized by the gravity of my loss, or I can choose to rise from the pain and treasure the most precious gift I have - life itself.”
- Walter Anderson

"Christmas Shopping Season Suffered from Crime, Supply Shortages and No Crowds"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 12/27/21:
"Christmas Shopping Season Suffered from Crime,
 Supply Shortages and No Crowds"
"The numbers we are being told just don’t add up. We are being told that this was an amazing retail season. There were massive supply shortages, retail crime and no one shopping in the stores. But you add this all up and we’re supposed to believe that the numbers are up this year in 2021."

The Daily "Near You?"

De Pere, Wisconsin, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Gregory Mannarino, "Important Updates! Stay Ahead Of The Curve"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 12/27/21:
"Important Updates! Stay Ahead Of The Curve"

"What You Should Know About Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, Monoclonal Antibodies, Paxlovid, Molnupiravir, and BioNTech and Pfizer’s Comirnaty Jab...And Why Democrats May Be Fresh Out of Monsters

"What You Should Know About Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine,
 Monoclonal Antibodies, Paxlovid, Molnupiravir, 
and BioNTech and Pfizer’s Comirnaty Jab...
And Why Democrats May Be Fresh Out of Monsters"
by Jim Kunstler

"You understand, of course, that Western Civ’s mass formation psychosis, like a horror movie franchise, requires the constant re-invention of its monsters and hobgoblins, and a constantly refreshed arsenal of weapons to defeat them. Covid is our mutating monster, but Big Pharma’s silver bullets and wooden stakes have proven quite lame. So, the resourceful superhero, Dr. Fauci (“The Science”), has induced his magic messenger, Santa Claus (a.k.a. the FDA), to deliver two brand-new light-sabers to humankind to keep millions of disordered minds churning with hope of slaying the object of their fear.

Enter stage-right-and-left: Paxlovid from Pfizer and Molnupiravir from Merck. The names alone sound like mysterious invocations from a druidical rite of redemption. How many times have you muttered Mol-Nu-Pir­-a-vir opening the fridge in hopes of finding at least one last beer tucked away behind the mayonnaise and miso?

Molnupiravir, you see, works as a DNA polymerase inhibitor, the same as (sshhhhh) ivermectin, except that, unlike ivermectin - which is considered about the safest drug in the world, and which won a Nobel prize for its inventor - Molnupiravir is hardly tested at all.

The FDA calls it an “investigational drug,” meaning it is subject to Murphy’s Law, as the “vaccines” have proved to be. Nor has it passed through any approval process so far. It’s being released under an FDA emergency use authorization, which relieves Merck of any liability problem if people are harmed by it. Molnupiravir will cost $700 for a five-day course of treatment (ten pills) compared to $20 for a course of ivermectin. The US government bought $2.2 billion worth of Molnupiravir. Pfizer’s Paxlovid, is actually a two-drug treatment, requiring the HIV-drug ritonavir to give it a buddy-boost. The US government bought $5-billion worth of Paxlovid.

And so now we see why US public health officialdom and the non compos mentis “Joe Biden” & Co. worked so hard, along with social media and cable news, to outlaw all the other cheap and highly-effective Covid early treatment drugs on the scene. Not just ivermectin but fluvoxamine, hydroxychloroquine and so on. They’ve even interfered with deliveries of monoclonal antibodies to stifle its use. You can see clearly what a racketeering operation this has been all along between the FDA, the CDC, Dr. Fauci’s NIAID and the pharmaceutical industry.

There is also the shell game currently being played by Pfizer and its two “vaccines” - the one still under an emergency use authorization called BioNTech, and Pfizer’s replacement for that, Comirnaty, which has received an FDA approval under shady circumstances. The catch is, Pfizer refuses to release Comirnaty in the USA because approved drugs do not enjoy that shield against liability. Pfizer’s BioNTech vaxx has injured and killed many thousands of people in the past year. If the two vaxxes are the same, you can expect Comirnaty to kill and injure plenty of victims, and Pfizer will be sued up its pfizoo.

Therefore, Pfizer is also working hard to confuse the public about whether the two drugs are actually the same or not. Ohio University tried to pull a switcheroo with its vaxx mandate, saying they’d made Comirnaty available to students, which is obviously untrue, since Pfizer won’t release it. They are using the unapproved BioNTech. Ohio law (HB 244, in effect this past October) prevents Ohio public schools from mandating vaccines not approved by the FDA. Hence, students at Ohio University are suing the school over its vaccine mandate

Alas, the Omicron variant has turned into the Grinch that is stealing their Christmas. Omicron is so mild an illness that there has been perhaps one death from it in America - and who knows how chronically ill that patient was? (They won’t say, of course.) All week long, as it became increasingly evident Omicron was nothing to get worked-up about, the “Joe Biden” regime went into overdrive trying to cow the nation into another round of submission and more booster shots.

On Tuesday, the worked-up so-called president rolled out the phony trope that this latest act in the melodrama is a “crisis of the unvaccinated” - despite the fact that both vaxxed and unvaxxed are equally susceptible to Omicron, and the additional fact that Omicron spreads so effectively that in just a month it is displacing all the previous and more deadly Covid variants. Notice, though, that “Joe Biden” didn’t dare lay any lockdowns on the country, while the Supreme court is preparing to give “JB” his second colonoscopy of the season when they reconvene after New Years to hear the cases against his vaxx mandate.

You can infer that this might mean the end of the Covid 19 pandemic extravaganza that has so benefited the party in power. It has given them free rein to the only policy exercise they know: pushing people around. If there’s any lesson that Americans need to draw about the Democratic Party’s motives during this two-year Covid horror show it is that “progressives” are determined to punish, coerce, and persecute the people of this land, while stealing as much of their wealth as possible, and driving our culture into a ditch.

So, with Omicron on the scene like an unexpected reality-test, the Democrats may be fresh out of monsters to terrify the populace. As the horror movie ends and the screen fades to black, the audience is apt to walk out from under that mass formation spell into the winter sunlight, blinking and gasping at the insane ordeal they’ve been subjected to. It’s already happening in a bunch of blue cities whose Democratic bosses have discovered that de-funding the police was a shuck-and-jive they now have to answer for.

Plenty of other matters await answering too, including, perhaps the fate of Dr. Fauci and his many co-conspirators in the operation to kill more than a million Americans - when you figure in both Covid deaths and vaxx-related deaths, not to mention suicides and deaths by drugs and despair, not to mention countless injuries that people will not recover from. Robert F. Kennedy’s excellent book, "The Real Anthony Fauci," is a comprehensive manual for bringing Dr. Fauci and dozens of his cohorts and accomplices into a court-of-law.

Get this: the SARs Covid-19 episode has been an engineered mind-f**k from start to finish. Western Civ has been taken for a ride, fleeced, shot in the head, and left in the trunk of a car abandoned on a lonely stretch of highway. As we turn the corner into 2022, millions of surviving, de-programmed Americans may get a little worked-up about what has been done to our country and just who is responsible for it.

This Christmas, we can’t omit great thanks to some of the other brave medical researchers and doctors across the country who have sacrificed livelihoods to fight for both the peoples’ health and against the torrents of bad faith and dishonesty spewed out against the people of this land by their own government and its propaganda legions. Kudos to Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCollough, Dr. Scott Atlas, Dr. Chris Martenson, Dr. David Martin, Dr. Steve Kirsch, Dr. Brett Weinstein, Dale Bigtree, Alex Berenson, Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, and many many others who are standing up against tyranny and coercion."

"Kroger After Christmas! Empty Shelves!? - What's Coming?"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno,
"Kroger After Christmas!
Empty Shelves!? - What's Coming?"
"In today's vlog we are at Kroger with a lot of empty shelves. We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and to get a few items. It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"

“Modern Society Is Seriously Sick”

“Modern Society Is Seriously Sick”
by Sofo Archon

“One of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, Jiddu Krishnamurti, once said: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I agree with Jiddu. Society is seriously sick. Yet most of us aren’t aware of it. That’s because we’re so conditioned to our society that the idea of something being terribly wrong with it usually doesn’t cross our minds.

Well, it did cross mine – in fact, it does and has every single day for the last 15+ years. And I write about it so that it might cross yours too (if it hasn’t already). Not because I want to disappoint you, but because I want you to know what’s truly going on so that you can perhaps help make some change.

There are some crystal clear signs that reveal the sickness of our society, and certainly one of them is consumerism – that is, the compulsive buying of stuff. Look around you attentively and you’ll see almost everywhere people chasing products they think will bring them happiness, only to feel sadder a few moments after acquiring them. Yet they keep on getting more and more of them, without ever realizing their addictive behavior.

But why exactly do we fall victims to consumerism? And how could we free ourselves from it? Well, that’s exactly what my newest article is all about. So if you’re interested in knowing the answers to those questions, then be sure to check it out. It’s a bit lengthy compared to most articles you come across online, but I’d highly suggest you to dedicate some of your time to it, as I consider it to be one of the best pieces of writing I’ve published so far.”

"Now, There's One thing..."

 

"Sleepwalking Into the Abyss in 2022"

"Sleepwalking Into the Abyss in 2022"
by Charles Hugh Smith


"The most sacred liturgy of American culture is to always be positive and optimistic. The greatest taboo is breaking this sacred duty to say something upbeat and optimistic; it is acceptable (barely) to make awkwardly negative observations, but only if you immediately follow up the negative comments with a treacly, double-serving of sugary optimism: for example, inflation is transitory, the economy is growing strongly, wages are rising, etc.

And so we sleepwalk into 2022, ill-prepared to deal with reality which most annoyingly continues responding to systemic dynamics no matter how much sugary optimism is spread around. The endless servings of sugary optimism serve several purposes:

1. They create an appealing illusion that systemic problems can be solved without materially changing the status quo or demanding any sacrifices.

2. They mask the inconvenient reality that the status quo is incapable of solving systemic problems because doing so would demand sacrifices of those skimming the vast majority of the benefits of the status quo, i.e. the wealthy and powerful.

3. They mask the enormous sacrifices being imposed on the bottom 90% to keep the status quo unchanged, i.e. benefiting the few at the expense of the many.

4. The demand to always be sugar-high optimistic is a handy tool to bludgeon critics who point out the systemic failure of the status quo as alarmists, doom-and-gloomers, etc.

In other words, you're only allowed to point out a critical systemic flaw if you also parrot a completely unrealistic, impractical "solution" that fits the sugar-high optimism requirement: fusion: unlimited energy for everyone forever! Modern Monetary Theory: free money for everyone forever! And so on, in an endless gush of detached-from-reality "solutions" that all magically solve all problems without changing anything in the power structure of who benefits from the existing arrangement or demanding any reduction in our waste is growth Landfill Economy.

We no longer solve the hard problems because they require changing a system that benefits the wealthy and powerful to the exclusion of everyone else. Only the debt-serfs and tax-donkeys suffer, but since they're passive and powerless, who cares?

The sugary optimism also masks the destructive nature of the easy fixes that are so beloved by the political class: debt, inflation and narrative control. All are politically and economically painless at first, and but the systemic consequences eventually erode the entire status quo, which collapses in a putrid heap of lies, artifice, fakery, profiteering, delusion and deception.

Making everyone feel warm and fuzzy by borrowing and distributing "free money" works wonders more or less like a sugar-cocaine speedball. The cost of the new debt is spread over years in the future, and a Federal Reserve beholden to those reaping the profits from debt (banks, financiers, the wealthy) is always ready to lower interest rates to ease the pain of servicing debt as a means of enabling ever-greater borrowing going forward.

What could be better? Borrow and spend now, pay in installments stretching far into the future. Alas, the advance of time is inexorable, and the future soon becomes the present. And despite the declining rate of interest, all that rapidly expanding debt is now sucking the income well dry, leaving insufficient income to borrow more or spend more.

Oops. Don't you hate it when the system works so well and then it suddenly implodes due to its self-reinforcing, self-destructive structural incoherence? A system dependent on debt for "growth" is self-liquidating, meaning that the debt eats the system alive by siphoning off income while malinvestment, waste and speculative gambling destroys the "capital" funded by the debt.

Inflation is equally beloved by the political class for the same reasons: it's painless at the start and everyone loves the illusion that assets are rising without anyone actually creating any additional value or productivity--it's all magic. Just print a few trillion dollars and pump the "free money" into stock buybacks and speculative bets, and voila, everyone who already owns assets gets richer without doing anything but being a genius.

All the fun stuff eventually generates real-world inflation and inflates assets into insane bubbles that eventually pop at the least opportune time, right when everyone watching their wealth swell like clockwork starts beleiving not just in their own genius but in the perpetual-motion machine of Fed-printing and rapidly expanding debt.

Those expecting assets to bubble higher forever and real-world costs to deflate have it backward: it's the assets which have inflated that will deflate back to starting levels of valuation and it's real-world inflation that will gather momentum and shred the economy and political structure.

Those depending on earned income will see the purchasing power of their earnings drop precipitously while those who were counting on their vastly enlarged unearned "wealth" in asset bubbles to fund their lifestyle and lavish retirement will experience 80% declines in the "wealth" they presumed was permanent.

It will be a great shock to the political class, but controlling the narrative to protect your interests won't actually stop the systemic momentum careening over the cliff. Demanding that everyone disavow problems doesn't actually solve the problems.

Alas, expedient speedball fixes to systemic problems only create new instabilities while fueling the instabilities of the problems left unsolved. Sleepwalking in a fantasy-dream of free money forever, free energy forever and endlessly expanding asset bubbles of "wealth" will take us to the edge of the clioff and then into the abyss.

What would be truly optimistic would be to surrender our dependence on asset bubbles and malinvested debt to prop up an unstable delusion of effortless "wealth" and an unsustainable waste is growth Landfill Economy.”
Related:

"How It Really Is"

 

"US Debt of $30 Trillion Visualized in Stacks of Physical Cash"

Full screen recommended.
"US Debt of $30 Trillion Visualized in Stacks of Physical Cash"

"A Colossal Theft In Pain Sight" (Excerpt)

"A Colossal Theft In Pain Sight" (Excerpt)
by Larry McDonald

"What have we done with the $11 Trillion? We have clients in 23 different countries, but most reside within the continental United States – in recent weeks, we keep hearing countless stories of self-proclaimed 24-hour turnaround testing centers to do a PCR test, then taking more than 80 hours to get the results back. Friends in New Jersey tell us not one pharmacy or walk-in clinic in a 100-mile radius has appointments available in the next week. Home testing has improved but for those traveling overseas – it is a PCR test that is needed.

The question that haunts us now is that, almost two years into this crisis and an $11 Trillion U.S. Fiscal and Monetary spending deluge, we still don’t have an adequate testing infrastructure? It blows us away – we are still dealing with endless waiting lines, no availability of testing appointments, shortages of at-home tests and overwhelmed testing labs scrambling to process vials. Where did all that money go?

In the US, the corona crisis started on January 29, 2020, when the White House initiated its coronavirus task force. Since then, the US has gone from crisis to crisis and the media and our politicians have been obsessed with this epidemic and its consequences ever since. Amidst all the turmoil, the US government has left no stone unturned to throw money at this disaster. The Fed kicked off in early March by lowering interest rates to zero and shortly after began rolled out an alphabet soup of emergency programs. From buying high yield debt to bankrolling bailout checks (PPP loans), nothing was left on the table for our adroit stewards at the Fed. The byzantine maze of fiscal stimuli has left everyone confused.

Nevertheless, the total amount of support the Fed has pumped into the economy is best measured by the expansion of its balance sheet. When the Fed finishes its asset tapering program in March of 2022, its balance sheet will have expanded by $5 Trillion. In less than two years the Fed deployed more money than during, and in the 10 years after, the great financial crisis ($3.5TR). This monetary support alone is also more than that of the entire GDP of Japan, the third-largest economy in the world.

Not to be outdone, the Federal government opened the floodgates by quickly passing spending bill after spending bill. After less than two years, the total amount of fiscal stimulus, as measured by the fiscal deficit spending, has reached a mind-blowing $6 Trillion. U.S. Federal debt has reached $29 Trillion and $32 Trillion if you add State and Local debt. At this point, US debt is a whopping 134% of GDP, giving the U.S. the dubious honor of being among top ten most indebted countries worldwide. This is a spot the erstwhile creditor to the world shares with the likes of Italy and Venezuela."

"Where did all the money go?"

Please view this complete article here:

"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"