"Shocking Numbers That Show That The Middle Class In The U.S. Is Being Systematically Destroyed"

"Shocking Numbers That Show That The Middle Class

 In The U.S. Is Being Systematically Destroyed"

by Michael Snyder

"People often wonder why I get so upset about inflation. Well, the truth is that there are many reasons, but one of the big ones is because it destroys the middle class. This has been true for a long time, but here in 2022 prices are rising at a far faster rate than most of our paychecks are. That means that our standard of living is steadily going down. It is taking more out of our incomes to pay for essentials such as housing, food and gasoline, and that is leaving a lot less money for other things. Of course there are many Americans that are going into tremendous amounts of debt in order to maintain the standard of living that they are currently enjoying. But going into debt only brings more pain in the long run.

As our leaders have absolutely flooded the system with new money, those at the very top of the economic food chain have greatly prospered. Meanwhile, the colossal gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us just continues to grow.

Today, almost 52 million American workers make less than $15 an hour… "With an effort by Democrats to boost the national minimum wage stalled, a new report finds that on average one in three U.S. workers is still making less than $15 an hour, while the share of women and people of color earning that amount is even greater.

Nearly 52 million U.S. workers — or 32% of the country’s workforce — earn less than $15 an hour, according to a report published Tuesday by Oxfam America. The data help quantify how many Americans could be impacted by the Raise the Wage Act, which would set a $15 federal hourly minimum and has been pending in Congress since January 2021."

Once upon a time, $15 an hour was a really good wage. But thanks to inflation, in 2022 you simply cannot live a middle class lifestyle in the United States on less than $15 an hour.

The Social Security Administration compiles extremely detailed information about how much money American workers make each year. The final numbers for 2021 won’t be out for a number of months, but for 2020 the median yearly wage in the U.S. was just $34,612.04. In other words, half of all American workers made more than $34,612.04 and half of all American workers made less than $34,612.04.

If you are making less than $34,612.04 per year, life is certainly not easy. When you break that down, that is less than $3,000 a month, and that is before taxes are taken out. That isn’t a lot of money.

In the old days, the vast majority of U.S. adults could look forward to owning a nice home, but now housing prices are soaring to absolutely absurd levels. In fact, we just learned that the average price of a new home in the United States just rose above $500,000 for the first time ever… "New Home Sales are still down 6.2% YoY (down YoY for the ninth straight month)."

And the average new home sales price topped $500k for the first time ever. The primary reason why new home prices are spiking so dramatically is due to building costs. Just about everything that goes into the construction of a new home has become insanely expensive, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

So buying a brand new home is now out of reach for many formerly middle class Americans, and this has caused the inventory of unsold homes to balloon to a very alarming level…"The inventory of new single-family houses for sale rose to 407,000 houses in February (seasonally adjusted), the largest unsold inventory since August 2008, up by 40% from a year ago. This represents 6.3 months of supply at the current rate of sales, according to data from the Census Bureau today."

Of course it isn’t just housing costs that are soaring to unprecedented heights. As I have covered extensively in recent weeks, the price of food and the price of gasoline have both been surging. Our lawmakers in Washington realize that U.S. consumers are deeply suffering, and so some of them want to send out another round of stimulus checks… "Americans already faced searing inflation when gas prices surged to an all-time high earlier this month. Now, some lawmakers want the federal government to offer stimulus payments or rebate checks to help reduce the pain at the pump.

Families with two children could get as much $300 per month as long as the nation’s average gas price exceeds $4 a gallon, according to one new bill proposed by Reps. Mike Thompson of California, John Larson of Connecticut and Lauren Underwood of Illinois. All three lawmakers are Democrats."

When members of Congress were considering the very first round of stimulus checks all the way back in 2020, I warned that if we let the genie out of the bottle we would never be able to put it back in. Every time there is even a bit of pain or discomfort, there will be some that will clamor for more stimulus checks. But every time our lawmakers borrow and spend money that we do not have, that creates even more inflation.

We just can’t keep flooding the system with more cash. It is complete and utter insanity. I really like how one prominent economics professor recently made this point… “They’re flying blind, and are too little, too late,” Steve Hanke says in disbelief, an Applied Economics professor of John Hopkins University. “It’s utter rubbish and nonsense” that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell sees supply chain issues as a root cause for inflation, he tells me, as we decipher the Federal Reserve’s latest official statements on the shape of the U.S. economy.

“The money supply in excess causes inflation, and the Federal Reserve appears to be almost clueless,” Hanke shares with me as we discuss last week’s conversation between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. “Obviously the Chinese know this,” which is why their inflation rating is less than 1%, the former Senior Economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers articulates to me."

Inflation is always destructive. Most of our leaders seem to think that “more money” is the solution to all of our problems, but they are systematically destroying the middle class and they are systematically destroying the reserve currency of the world.

We are literally committing national financial suicide, and so I don’t understand why more Americans are not deeply upset about all of this.

Once upon a time, the U.S. had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the history of the world. Now the middle class is dying, and our politicians seem absolutely determined to speed up that process."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Celente and The Judge: "Is Putin A Member Of The US War Criminal Club?"

Celente and The Judge, 3/23/22:

"Is Putin A Member Of The US War Criminal Club?"

"Don't Buy A House Now; Cars Will Flood Dealer Lots; Build Mental Toughness Now; Mortgage Crisis"

Jeremiah Babe, PM 3/23/22:

"Don't Buy A House Now; Cars Will Flood Dealer Lots; 

Build Mental Toughness Now; Mortgage Crisis"

"Panic Sweeps Across Energy Supply Chains As Shortages Push Prices To Stratospheric Levels"

Full screen recommended.

"Panic Sweeps Across Energy Supply Chains 

As Shortages Push Prices To Stratospheric Levels"

by Epic Economist

"A catastrophic shortage of gasoline, diesel, liquified natural gas, and other fuels is emerging on global markets, and it is going to push already elevated prices to stratospheric levels over the next weeks and months. The shortage is likely to hit U.S. consumers where it hurts them the most. Americans are already severely cost-burdened by soaring living expenses, and given that virtually everything we buy and consume requires transportation, that increase is going to ripple through the entire economy, aggravating the inflation outlook. To make things worse, one industry CEO is warning that gas stations will run dry if the shortages persist for much longer.

Over the past few days, a number of global traders have started sounding the alarm over a massive squeeze on fuel supplies, especially diesel and distillate fuels on an industry level, while on a consumer level, supplies of gasoline and natural gas are running perilously low. Conditions at global markets are increasing the risk of a “systemic” shortage that could lead to fuel rationing in the weeks ahead. More worryingly, power utilities around the world are likely to struggle to restock natural gas inventories for next winter considering the “paralyzed” state of the spot market.

Meanwhile, analysts at ZeroHedge are warning that fuel inventories could deplete even further if demand from manufacturers and freight carriers continues to outstrip the ability of oil producers and refiners to supply enough fuel. “Needless to say, without diesel, not only will maritime traffic grind to a halt but much if not all U.S. truck-based logistical support and supply chains will soon be paralyzed. The consequences for the global economy will be dire,” they wrote.

Fuel oil inventories in the United States are 30 million barrels – or about 21% - below the pre-health-crisis levels and at the lowest level since 2005, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported. Now, the global shortage of fuels is threatening to create a severe spike in oil prices just as it did in the first half of 2008. The shortage of distillate is already bleeding into the gasoline market. Gasoline inventorieshave dropped 6 million barrels below the seasonal average, And with drivers panic-buying gas, those inventories may be gone soon. A gallon of gas is now averaging $4.32 a gallon on a national level, marking a 51% jump from a year ago.

In some states, such as Florida, people are panic buying fuel in bulk to avoid higher prices and save money while they still can. Others, who cannot afford to pay such expensive prices for gas, have been drilling holes at gas tanks and stealing it from cars parked on the streets. The AAA says that gas theft is on the rise all over the nation, and with each passing day, more cases are being reported. At the same time, the experts are alerting that companies will have to raise gas prices much further to restrain consumption and avoid inventories falling to critically low levels, a phenomenon known as “consumer demand destruction”. In short, a lot more pain is coming for U.S. drivers.

During the 1970s, gas shortages led to incredibly long wait times at the pump, and staggered fill-up days based on license plates as the nation’s gas stations ran dry. As the offensive between Russia and Ukraine worsens and the world braces for further conflict, Americans are about to witness a repeat of what happened in the 70s. With the shortage of fuels intensifying by the day, gas rationing will become our new reality. As long as global leaders continue to weaponize oil-based fuels to ensure their geopolitical interest, the rest of the world will continue to suffer."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com/

Musical Interlude: Disturbed, "The Sound Of Silence"

Full screen recommended.

Disturbed, "The Sound Of Silence"

Singer David Draiman

793,792,931 views

This will touch your soul... it made me cry...

Gregory Mannarino, "Does Something Feel Off? Be Ready For Anything"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/23/22:

"Does Something Feel Off? Be Ready For Anything"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Laguna Indigo"

Full screen recommended.

Liquid Mind, "Laguna Indigo"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Colorful NGC 1579 resembles the better known Trifid Nebula, but lies much farther north in planet Earth's sky, in the heroic constellation Perseus. About 2,100 light-years away and 3 light-years across, NGC 1579 is, like the Trifid, a study in contrasting blue and red colors, with dark dust lanes prominent in the nebula's central regions.

In both, dust reflects starlight to produce beautiful blue reflection nebulae. But unlike the Trifid, in NGC 1579 the reddish glow is not emission from clouds of glowing hydrogen gas excited by ultraviolet light from a nearby hot star. Instead, the dust in NGC 1579 drastically diminishes, reddens, and scatters the light from an embedded, extremely young, massive star, itself a strong emitter of the characteristic red hydrogen alpha light."

- http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap090130.html

"Are People Really Stupid?"

“All of the available data show that the typical American citizen has about

as much interest in the life of the mind as does your average armadillo.”

- Morris Berman

"Are People Really Stupid?"

by Fred Russell

"On the face of things, judging from the general level of knowledge and understanding, not to mention the intellectual pursuits, of most of the human race one is tempted to say that the overwhelming majority of mankind lacks the intellectual capacity, the intelligence, to contribute to human progress. And it is in fact a very small elite that has carried us beyond Neanderthal Man, without whom, if the truth be told, we might still be living in caves. It is, in a word, appalling to contemplate the level at which ordinary people use their minds, what they read, if at all, what they watch on TV, the movies they go out and see, and the ease with which they are seduced and manipulated by the technicians of the psyche, namely, politicians and advertisers.

The impression one gets when contemplating these tens and hundreds of millions of people glued to their TV screens for the reality shows and sitcoms or fiddling with their smartphones from morning till night is of complete empty-headedness. This is not to say that such people cannot be shrewd, resourceful, or, for that matter, simply decent. It is to say that at the average level of intelligence displayed by the human race, the great intellectual achievements of mankind seem to be beyond the scope of the vast majority of men and women. But are people really stupid? And if they aren't, who or what has held them back?

Now one may be inclined to place all the blame for our ignorance on the television producers and gadget makers, but the truth is that by the time they get to us the damage has already been done. All they really succeed in doing is dragging us down a little further. The problem starts in childhood. It starts in the schools with all those empty cells waiting to be filled and no one, not entire educational systems, really knowing how to fill them. In fact, the opposite result is achieved. By the time the child finishes elementary school, unless he is destined to join the intellectual or scientific or economic or political elite and is self-motivated, as the saying goes, he will have developed an aversion to the learning process that will persist for the rest of his life.

It is not hard to understand why. School bores him, and oppresses him. Its premise, fostered in the West by the Church the virtually exclusive supplier of teachers until fairly recent times, historically speaking is that as a consequence of Original Sin all men are born evil and must therefore be coerced into doing what is good. The result has been rigidly structured frameworks where teachers hammer away at the captive child until his head is ready to explode. Within just a few years, the public school system thus destroys the natural curiosity of the child and dooms him to a life of total ignorance, dependent, for whatever sense of the world he does have, on second rate journalists, who themselves lack the knowledge, understanding, discipline and integrity to be historians or even novelists and therefore shape his perception like the ignorant clerics of the Middle Ages, raining down on his head a disjointed and superficial body of information presented largely to produce effects, and even this is beyond his capacity to retain.

The man in the street may thus be said to have a great many opinions but very little knowledge, mindlessly repeating the half-truths of experts and analysts who reflect his own biases and constructing out of them a credo of dogmatic views that remain embedded in his mind for an entire lifetime like bricks in a brick wall.

Does it matter? After all, we have all the scholars and scientists we need, and besides, a world where everyone became one would be a dull place indeed. It can even be argued that it is better for the race if progress is opposed, since, judging from its products, it mostly expresses itself materially and economically in an unholy alliance of greed and technology. However, progress of this kind cannot be fought if all that people have on their minds is to wire themselves into this technology, and that is what they will be doing until their minds are engaged in less frivolous pursuits. They are thus doubly victimized, first by the schools, whose methods are not attuned to the temperament and capacity of the average child, and then by the economic elites who control the technologies and consequently the flow of information and whose only interest in the man in the street is as a consumer of their products.

Unfortunately, there is very little hope that any of this will change. The wrong people control human society and will continue to do so, because they created the model and are the only ones who know how to operate it. The sad truth is that today's man in the street is neither wiser nor more knowledgeable than a medieval peasant. Calling ourselves Homo sapiens, or even Homo sapiens sapiens, seemed like a good idea once but very few of us have lived up to the billing."

- https://www.counterpunch.org/

"Reality Avoidance"

"Reality Avoidance"

by Morris Berman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- https://morrisberman.blogspot.com/

"Stupidity, Evil and the Decline of the US"

"Stupidity, Evil and the Decline of the US"

by Doug Casey

"It used to be that America was a country of free thinkers. "Say what you think, and think what you say." That’s an expression you don't hear much anymore. It’s much more like the world of 1984 where everything is "double think." You need to think twice before you say something in public. You think three times before you say something when you're standing in an airport line.

Regrettably, the US is no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. It’s become the land of whipped and whimpering dogs that roll over on their backs and wet themselves when confronted with authority. Now, why are Americans this way? Let me give you two reasons - though there are many more.

First, there's a simple absence of virtue. Let’s look at the word virtue. It comes from the Latin vir, which means manly, even heroic. To the Romans, virtues were things like fortitude, nobility and courage. Those virtues are true to the root of the word.

When people think of virtues today they think of faith, hope, charity - which are not related to the word’s root meaning. These may pass as virtues in a religious sense. But, outside a Sunday school, they’re actually actually vices. This deserves a discussion, because I know it will shock many. But I’ll save that for another time.

An absence of virtues and the presence of subtle vices is insinuated throughout society. Worse, overt vices like avarice and especially envy are encouraged. Envy, in particular will become a big vice in the years to come. It’s similar to jealousy, but worse. Jealousy says "You have something I want; I’ll try to take it from you". Envy says "You have something I want. If I can’t take it from you, I’ll destroy it, and hurt you if I can." Jealousy and envy seem to motivate most Democratic Party presidential candidates. No wonder America is in rapid decline.

A second reason is unsound philosophy. The reigning philosophy in the US used to be based on individualism and personal freedom. It's now statism and collectivism. But most people don’t think about philosophy - or even have a consistent worldview. More than ever, they do what seems like a good idea at the time.

The average American has problems. But his rulers are something else again. Most of the people running the US are either knaves or fools. How do we know if we are dealing with a knave or a fool? In other words, are you dealing with somebody who is evil or just stupid? To give a recent, but classic, example, are you dealing with a Dick Cheney or a George W. Bush? Do you prefer the knavish Obama, or the knavish Biden? The foolish Trump, or the foolish Pence. Not much of a real choice anywhere…

At this point, the US resembles the planet Mars, which is circled by two moons, Phobos and Deimos, fear and terror in Greek. The US is also being circled by two moons, Kakos and Chazos, evil and stupidity in Greek. It’s hard to imagine the Founding Fathers having seen that as a possibility.

One of the relatively few laws I believe in is Pareto’s Law. Most people are familiar with it as the 80-20 rule - 20% of the people do 80% of the work, 20% commit 80% of the crime, and so forth. It also applies to character and ethics. Most people - 80% - are basically decent. What about that other 20%? Let's call them potential trouble sources because they can go either way. But 20% of that 20% - 4% - are the sociopaths; they consistently have bad intentions. They’re usually hiding under rocks. But they like to emerge at election time.

In normal times when everything's going along well, they can look normal. They'll deliver the mail, or sell shoes or stocks. They’ll pet the dog, and play softball on weekends. But when circumstances in society get ugly, and reach a certain point, they start evidencing themselves. The rest of the 20% start swinging along with them. That's the place where we are right now in the US. It’s Pareto’s Law in operation.

A lot of people believe in American Exceptionalism. A good argument can be made for America having been exceptional in the past. It’s factually correct that America is the only country founded on the principles of individualism and personal freedom. It was actually different. It was special, even unique. But I don't think it's true anymore.

Of course all the world’s countries like to believe they're special or better than the rest. But they’re only different on the surface, in trivial ways. None - other than America - value individualism and personal freedom as founding virtues. Look at Russia throughout the 20th century. It was a phenomenal nightmarish disaster in Soviet times.

Look at Germany during the ‘30s and ‘40s. China, under Mao for 30 years, was the home of institutionalized, industrial scale mass murder. The same is true in lots of other countries… Cambodia, Rwanda, the Congo. There are dozens of other countries where bloody chaos reigned over the last century. But not the US. It was different.

But what if America has ceased to exist? What if it’s been transformed into just another nation state called the United States, with very different ideals and values? Why should it have a different fate than those other countries? I don't see any reason why that would be the case. But if 80% of Americans are basically decent, well-intentioned people, what is going wrong and why? Let me give you three reasons… although there are many others.

Number one, as I indicated earlier, Americans no longer have any philosophical anchor. They no longer share a national mythos - individualism, personal freedom, free minds, and free markets are now mocked. They may have some nebulous ideas about ethics that they picked up from the Boy Scouts. But they think all political and economic systems - and certainly all cultures - are equally good. The reigning philosophy is a mixture of cultural Marxism, identity politics, anti-male feminism, and anti-white racism. I suppose it was inevitable in a country where a large plurality of people are dumb enough to spend four years and several hundred thousand dollars to be indoctrinated with those values.

The second thing is fear. It’s a reigning emotion in this country among the diminishing middle class. Desperation and apathy characterize the growing lower classes. No wonder they're cemented to the bottom of society. It's a rare person that rises from the lower class because of those attitudes.

How about the upper classes? Their dominant emotions are avarice and arrogance; they think they're superior because they have more money. In many cases they’re rich not because they produce anything. But because they’re cronies, benefiting from the flood of money coming from the Fed, or the avalanche of laws and regulations coming from the Congress and the President.

America is still basically a middle-class country, although becoming less and less that way almost daily. And fear is the dominant emotion of the middle class. Fear of losing everything they have. Fear of losing their jobs. Fear they won’t be able to meet the credit card payments, the car payments, the mortgage payment. Fear they can't afford to send their kids to college - which is a mistake incidentally. But that’s another story. The whole country is driven by fear… and it’s not a good thing. Deimos and Phobos, those two moons circling Mars are now circling the US, along with Kakos and Chazos.

The third, and perhaps most critical reason the US is going downhill - beyond a lack of a philosophical anchor and an atmosphere of fear -is a reflexive belief in government. The United States used to be more like Switzerland, which is by far the most prosperous country in Europe. When you ask the Swiss, "Who's the president of Switzerland?", It's rare that anyone can tell you. It's academic. However, nobody cares. He doesn't do anything. Politics aren’t a big part of their lives.

But today in the US, people have come to view the government as a cornucopia. People expect it to solve all their problems. And that’s a real problem. Government is a genuine growth industry, and it attracts the worst type of people. Government is inevitably where sociopaths - the 4% and the 20% - are drawn. Washington draws sociopaths like a pile of dog droppings draws flies.

It's perfectly predictable. And why is that? Mao said it best, "The power of the state comes out the barrel of a gun." Government is about some people controlling other people. That's what attracts sociopaths, and that's why they go to Washington.

But enough bad news… what is it that makes things better in the world? Well, there are two things.

One is technology. The good news is there are more scientists and engineers alive today than have lived in all of earth's history previously combined. And they're continually increasing our control of nature. For most people, life is no longer "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short", as Hobbes said. Technology is advancing at the rate of Moore’s law. And that improves the standard of living.

The second thing is savings. Individuals, like squirrels, are genetically wired to produce more than they consume. The difference between production and consumption can be saved. That creates capital. And capital enables technology. That creation of wealth should continue, barring a world war. Or most of the world’s governments acting more like Venezuela or Zimbabwe… Which is quite possible. In the looming Greater Depression, most of the real wealth in the world will still exist. It's just going to change ownership. Hopefully, you’ll be among those who aren’t adversely affected."

- internationalman.com

"Gas Stations Will Run Dry As We Head Into a Depression"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly, AM 3/23/22:

"Gas Stations Will Run Dry As We Head Into a Depression"

"We keep talking about raging oil prices. No one is talking about the fact that Russia is a leading exporter of diesel fuel. There are certain areas in the world that are already rationing diesel fuel. This is going to dramatically affect how things are delivered around the world."

The Daily "Near You?"

Fene, Galicia, Spain. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Only Cure..."

"We're all susceptible to it, the dread and anxiety of not knowing what's coming. It's pointless in the end, because all the worrying and the making of plans for things that could or could not happen, it only makes things worse. So walk your dog or take a nap. Just whatever you do, stop worrying. Because the only cure for paranoia is to be here, just as you are."

- Dr. Meredith Grey, "Grey's Anatomy"

"The Devil’s Work"

"The Devil’s Work"

by The Zman

"There is an old expression that has fallen out of favor in the post-scarcity age, but it may be the key to understanding the current crisis. That expression is, “Idle hands do the Devil’s work.” When people do not have anything productive and useful to do with their time, they are more likely to get involved in trouble and criminality. A variant of this is “The Devil makes work for idle hands.” The idea there is if you want to avoid Old Scratch, then make sure you keep yourself useful to God.

The source of these proverbs is unknown, but variations of them go back to the early middle ages, so it is probable they evolved with Christianity. It is not unreasonable to think the idea is universal to civilization. After all, every human society has had to deal with the idle, lazy, and troublesome. Making sure these people are kept too busy to cause trouble is one of those primary challenges of civilization. Every ruler has known that too many idle young men is bad for his rule.

Even in the smaller context, this is something we instinctively know. In the workplace, people with too much free time get into trouble. If the IT staff has too much free time, they start tinkering around with the stuff that is working and before long that stuff stops working and the system goes down. A big part of what goes on inside the schools is to keep the kids and the teachers busy. Home schoolers have known for years that the learning content is just a few hours a day. The rest is busy work.

The point here is that people of all ages need a purpose, something that occupies their mind and their time. If something useful and productive is not filling that need, then something useless or unproductive will fill the void. For most people this may be a hobby or leisure activity. For others, it often means a useless activity is turned into something important. Elevating the mundane to the level of the critical and then creating drama around the performance of the mundane activity.

This is what we see in our political class. The ruling class of every society has a ceremonial role, a procedural role, and a practical role. Outside of a crisis like a war or natural disaster, the political class is performing its duties in the same way a line worker in a factory preforms his role. In popular government this means the pol shows up at public events. He performs the tasks his office requires like signing papers and casting votes. He helps grease the wheels when they need grease.

Into the 20th century, most of our political offices were part-time jobs. State legislatures met for a short period during the year. Otherwise, the legislators were back home doing their jobs. Executive positions like governor and president were fulltime jobs, as they were in charge of the civil service and in the case of president, commander-in-chief of the military. Within living memory, Washington DC would empty out in the spring and remain empty until the fall when Congress returned.

What we see today is politics at all levels has become a full-time job, but one with less to do when it was considered a part-time job. Congress, for example, is something close to a 24-hour drama now. The politicians and their retinues are now doing politics as a full-time obsession. Yet almost all of what they do is unnecessary. In fact, much of what they do is harmful. Very few things passed by Congress enjoy the support of the majority of the people or even a large plurality.

It is not just that these part-time jobs have been made into full-time obsessions. It is that much of what we used to need from government is now filled by individuals, ad hoc networks, and the private sector. Much of what government does is actually done by private contractors on government contracts. One of the ironies of the post-Cold War world is that the federal workforce has declined relative to the population, while the number of people employed in politics has gone up.

Then there is the fact that much of what government does could be automated or simply eliminated entirely. The services that are required like renewing licenses and paying fees can all be automated. In many cases they have been, but that did not result in fewer people, as we see in the dreaded private sector. Instead, it resulted in more idle hands looking for a purpose. On the political side, much of what Congress does could also be eliminated or automated.

What has happened in the last 30 years is we have grown the idle class at the top of our society and while decreasing their necessity. Much of what goes on in our politics is make work designed to get public attention. Think about it. If the cable news channels were shuttered and the social media platforms run by the oligarchs were closed, what would change in America? Nothing of practical importance. Our world would get quieter and there would be a boom in forgotten hobbies.

American political culture evolved during the Cold War to fight communism and prevent a nuclear war. Those were important tasks that occupied the minds and hands of the political class. Once those things went away, those idle hands searched about for a new crisis. Health care, Gaia worship, Islam and now invisible Nazis have been used to keep the idle hands of the political class busy. In the process, the political class has been driven mad and is threatening the rest of society."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Massive Price Increases At Walmart! What Now?"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures with Danno, AM 3/23/22:

"Massive Price Increases At Walmart! What Now?"

"In today's vlog we are at Walmart and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"

Gregory Mannarino, "Take Action Now! Expect Commodity Prices To SURGE Along With Energy And Food Shortages."

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/23/22:

"Take Action Now! Expect Commodity Prices To 

SURGE Along With Energy And Food Shortages."

- https://traderschoice.net/

"How It Really Is"

 

"The Life You Have Left..."

“The life you have left is a gift. Cherish it.

Enjoy it now, to the fullest. Do what matters, now.”

~ Leo Babauta

"If They Keep Pushing For WW3, They Might Get It"

"If They Keep Pushing For WW3, They Might Get It"

by Martin Armstrong

"One must wonder when Zelensky will stop sacrificing his people for no reason. He has done his best to drag the world into World War III trying to visit devastation upon the entire world. Both China and Russia have hypersonic missiles. The US has admitted that China’s hypersonic missile flew around the world and then hit its target. The US has been unable to create an equivalent and these type of weapons are FIRST STRIKE meaning they cannot be defeated.

This is not about supporting Zelensky v Putin. This is about preventing World War III. For indeed, as Einstein said, he did not know what weapons would exist for World War III. We are witnessing that with supersonic missiles and biological weapons that can terminate specific ethnic groups on a grand scale (see latest James Bond Movie). But Einstein imagined that World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones.

Zelensky went on Ukrainian television channels and said he would be willing to discuss a commitment from Ukraine to not seek NATO membership in exchange for a cease-fire, the withdrawal of Russian troops and a guarantee of Ukraine’s security. While that complies with the Belgrade Agreement of 1991 when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons promising to not join NATO and remain neutral, he is still refusing to comply with the Minsk Agreement of 2014 where he was to honor the democratic right of the Donbas to vote on their own sovereignty since they were Russians and Ukraine was merely created by the Soviet Union in drawing borders.

Zelensky said: “It’s a compromise for everyone: for the West, which doesn’t know what to do with us with regard to NATO, for Ukraine, which wants security guarantees, and for Russia, which doesn’t want further NATO expansion.”

Why he just refuses to comply with the Minsk Agreement seems to be a matter of Ukrainian Nazi pride that they simply hated Russians, Jews, and everyone in Poland? The refusal to allow democratic solutions in Ukraine appears to be instigated by the American Neocons have been pushing for war since they instigated the Cuba Missile Crisis with the failed Bay of Pigs. Cuba then struck a deal with Russia for nuclear weapons to prevent the Neocons from invading Cuba again. It has long been suspected that Kennedy was assassinated for standing up against the Neocons.

The hypocrisy of the Neocons is just in your face. On March 21st, 2022, spokesman Ned Price said in justifying war against Russia: ”the principle that each and every country has a sovereign right to determine its own foreign policy, has a sovereign right to determine for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances, its partnerships, and what orientation it wishes to direct its gaze. In this case, Ukraine has chosen a democratic path, a path – a Western-looking path, and that is something that, clearly, President Putin was not willing to countenance.”

The Neocons had no problem violating that very principle with the excuse to invade Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, their attempted invasion justification against Syria and Cuba. Allowing Ukraine to join NATO would be no different than Russia supplying nukes to Cuba. Perhaps these Neocons were addicted to Battleship as kids and then want to play that on a real world level. The scary part is that both China and Russia have their versions of Neocons who are all striving to create World War III.

Then Japan wonders why after following the West down this Neocon rat hole imposing sanction on Russia, why would Russia then break off all peace treaty talks with Japan? Do we have the same level of incompetent Japanese politicians as in the rest of the West? Are all of these politicians plain outright stupid? Do they really thing they can punish Russia and there will be no response? I have never in my 40 year career dealing with governments have I EVER witnessed such incompetence."

- https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

"Bonfire of the Governments," Part Two

"Bonfire of the Governments," Part Two

by Robert Gore

Part One

"Think of an activity that’s essential for a government bent on subjugation: censorship and the suppression of expression. Governments on both sides of the present conflict have further jacked up their efforts to control expression from the plateau reached with Covid. Russia just passed a law imposing a 15-year prison sentence for anyone spreading “fake news” about its invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. and European governments and lapdog legacy and social media have blanketed populaces with official propaganda. Just as with Covid, questions and deviations from the approved narrative are stifled, censored, and punished.

It was all so much easier back in the post World War II, pre-internet good old days. In the U.S. and Europe, there were several “papers of record” that had been infiltrated by intelligence agencies, and state-licensed radio and television stations. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t even that, just a few official propaganda organs.

Yet even with that degree of control, government repression wasn’t wholly effective. In the U.S. the truth got out about the Vietnam War. The Soviets could stop everything but people talking with each other, albeit in hushed tones. The cynical humor became legendary. (“They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”) Humor always contains an element of truth, which is why statists can’t do humor. The number of citizens red-pilled to Soviet corruption and incompetence and the comparative freedom and wealth of the West reached critical mass and the government fell. It took way too long, but it happened.

Today, there are billions of potential journalists and video producers - anyone with a cell phone and access to the internet - and trillions of text and email communications. People still occasionally engage in face-to-face conversations. The infrastructure needed to monitor all this is complex, gargantuan, and costly. Only algorithms and artificial intelligence can sort through it to identify threats to the state. Once identified, a separate infrastructure is necessary to apprehend, arrest, process, incarcerate and perhaps execute those engaged in wrongthought, wrongspeak, wrongwrite, and wrongact.

Repression’s seen costs are dwarfed by its unseen costs. Neither the jailers or the jailed are doing anything productive. Persecuting people for telling the truth amounts to cutting off a society’s eyes, ears, and tongue. Deliberate ignorance imposes costs of which the ignorant will, to their detriment, remain forever ignorant.

There is a meaningful cost imposed even on those who escape state persecution. Through fear or cupidity they trim their own sails, conforming, flattering, and propagating the party line. There are undoubtedly capable journalists in today’s legacy media, but they’ve smothered themselves as it’s become a purveyor of state propaganda.

The best and brightest have migrated to the alternative media, perhaps the freest endeavor left on the planet. From its cacophony - freedom is never quiet - has emerged 99 percent of disclosed truths and counter-narrative analyses these past few years.

The legacy media is comatose, having lost all credibility and whatever control it had of the narrative. Its dwindling though still sizable audience is simple-minded sheep and predatory wolves. The alternative media will continue to expose mainstream depredations, but it has other concerns as well.

Covid threw a curveball. It posed complex issues of medicine and science and evoked widespread fear - even within the alternative media - amplified by the barrage of propaganda. The alternative media was on its back foot until it became apparent that Covid wasn’t going to be the predicted scourge; most people who got it recovered.

The trickle of articles that questioned and debunked became a flood. Junk science was exposed. More importantly, so was Covid tyranny as alarms sounded about the totalitarian design behind masks, physical distancing, lockdowns, job loss, mandatory vaccinations, quarantine camps, vaccine passports, digital IDs, and digital currencies. In many instances exposure amounted to telling readers what the designers themselves were saying.

Debunking Ukraine propaganda will take some work, but it’s less demanding than Covid and will be punctured in far less time. There’s the historical record that runs counter to the “narrative”: the U.S.-backed 2014 coup, the government’s corruption, payola to American political figures and their children, neo-Nazis, the war on eastern Ukraine’s Russians, the failure of the Minsk accords, and U.S. supported bioresearch labs. These are facts, and while the mainstream media is ignoring them, the alternative media isn’t.

For all its ramifications Ukraine is also easier to understand than Covid’s scientific complexities and unknowns. The Covid commissars hid behind them and peddled fear: You could die! That gave everyone a personal stake in Covid that’s lacking with Ukraine, which most Americans can’t find on a map.

The Russians’ methodical military strategy drains the drama from the Ukraine story. An invasion with indiscriminate attacks on cities and civilians would have been over in a week or two and would have been far more spectacular. The Russian strategy has been the boa constrictor’s slow strangulation, not the viper’s venomous quick kill. The Russians want to break Ukraine and achieve their objectives, but they don’t want to own it.

Skepticism that they can do so is warranted. Invasions are easy, withdrawals difficult. Regardless, the butcher’s bill from laying waste to the country and slaughtering civilians would be far higher than it will be if Russia hews to its present course and the outcome will be the same - Ukraine will capitulate.

By then the West will have grown bored with the story, assuming Western leaders don’t do something stupid - military intervention or nuclear weapons deployment. Provided they don’t (not a sure thing), Ukraine flag emojis will be replaced by ones suitable for the next manufactured crisis, maybe Cyber Polygon.

Meanwhile, the West’s sanctions against Russia will bite... the West. The Russian-Chinese alliance can cut off natural resources, minerals and materials vital for agriculture, industrial production, and high tech, although in Russia’s case the West has - suicidally - already cut itself off. De-dollarization will continue, and perhaps payment in gold will be demanded for whatever trade remains. Rubles, yuan or both could be backed with gold - Russia and China have plenty - instantly making them more attractive money than the West’s fiat crap.

It’s been suggested that Ukraine is merely the opening salvo, and a relatively minor one, in the alliance’s war against the West. The real war, according to this view, is the economic and financial one. With the Belt and Road initiative and related multilateral arrangements Russia and China are consolidating an Eurasian federation encompassing half the world’s population and a substantial share of its natural resources and production. Western sanctions on Russia have received little support from the federation or across the global South. Notwithstanding Western propaganda to the contrary, Russia is hardly “isolated.”

If such a war is in store, economic and financial salvos may be followed by military ones. China could invade Taiwan and consolidate control of its own neighborhood and Russia might do the same, perhaps conducting another “special military operation” in Georgia.

Massively over-indebted Western economies and governments are vulnerable, an avalanche awaiting the one-too-many snowflake. Russia and China have avalanche guns that can leave the West buried in its own debt and ruins, which all the central banks’ horses and central banks’ men won’t put back together again. Their proposed digital currencies will be no panacea. They’re just another mechanism for control and will be the same worthless fiat as what they replace.

If that’s the victory Russia and China seek, it will be Pyrrhic. Western financial and economic collapse will be a black hole that sucks in the entire world. The debt daisy chain is global and will unravel as it did in the last financial crisis. The U.S. and EU economies are the first and third largest in the world. If they are prostrate, where’s the replacement market for Russian natural resources and Chinese manufactured goods? The “Stans” don’t quite cut it.

The Belt and Road Initiative is a better approach to Eurasia than the U.S.’s bullets, bombs, and bribes, but it’s still a debt-funded, top down, state-directed project. It supposedly doesn’t infringe on the sovereignty of member nations, but every one of those nations heavily infringes on the sovereignty of their own people and bear the ever-increasing costs of repression.

In throwing out the bathwater of the West, they also throw out the baby that was the foundation of its advancement: the still radical idea of individual rights protected rather than infringed by the state. The evolution of the British common law’s protection of contract and property, the gradual acceptance of the once heretical notion that the state is to be subordinate to its people, and the ideal of protected, individual, inalienable rights - never fully realized and now abandoned - served as the philosophical springboard for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ innovation and progress.

Progress and the fulfillment of human potential require much more than just population and natural resources. How many people immigrate to Russia or China? Millions did so to the U.S. during its heyday of freedom, drawn by the opportunity to live their lives as they saw fit. Nowadays such opportunity is unavailable in Russia, China, the U.S., or anywhere else. Most of the immigrants now flooding the U.S. are here for the handouts rather than for its residual and dwindling freedom.

It’s been argued that Russia and China are not the counterweights to the New World Order crowd and the Great Reset they appear to be, that they’ll eventually stand revealed as integral components of the nefarious design. It doesn’t matter whether or not that’s the case. For ordinary citizens anywhere on the planet, it’s enough to know that would-be tyrants intend to exercise full control over their expression, actions, and thoughts. Their lives will be state property, regardless of who’s running the state.

The globalist plan is order emerging from the ashes of a world in ruins, built back better per their totalitarian design. By whom? With what? There’s that crucial contradiction: the chaos they will have fomented will destroy the energy, resources, and production necessary to control it.

The globalists’ slaves will neither build much beyond their own barracks nor produce much beyond their own subsistence. Innovation is out of the question. The transhuman fantasy is that they’ll be programmed to be highly productive and innovative, but docile and obedient - Einsteins under a social credit system. Good luck with that. Einstein escaped the social credit system of his day. Our money is on a world where the energy, resources and production needed to monitor, terrify, control, and murder the slaves, even transhuman ones, will be far greater than anything they collectively produce. The totalitarians will never be able to make subjugation and murder paying propositions - nobody ever has - even when, or more correctly, particularly when their power is absolute.

If human energy, thought, creativity, expression, individuality, and freedom are enemies of the state, the state is doomed. If that means every government on the planet is doomed, so be it. Welcome to the bonfire of the governments, history’s greatest conflagration.

Fully incinerated will be the idea that humanity is unfit for freedom but some humans are fit to exercise power over others. Somebody, somewhere is going to get it right, because freedom is the only system that works. It is noisy and dynamic, but it has its own organic and adaptive order, based on enlightened self-interest and private, mutually beneficial cooperation and arrangements. It is the one order that unleashes rather than chains or destroys human potential.

Freedom, not subjugation, will build back better. It will be a beacon for the best and brightest. They’ll be roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over the embers from the bonfire of the governments."

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

- https://straightlinelogic.com/

Greg Hunter, "Millions Get AIDS From Vax By Fall – Dr. Elizabeth Eads"

"Millions Get AIDS From Vax By Fall – Dr. Elizabeth Eads"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Dr. Elizabeth Eads is on the frontline of medicine, treating patients who have been injected with the experimental CV19 so-called “vaccines.” Dr. Eads is now seeing first-hand Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, commonly referred to as AIDS. Let that sink in. Dr. Eads explains, “Yes, we are seeing vaccine related acquired immunodeficiency in the hospital now from the triple vaxed. It is a vax injury, and we are not really certain how to treat this. We are kind of throwing the kitchen sink at it. We are trying to use everything we can think of to boost up the CD4 and CD8 counts and reverse this collapse or calamity of this immune collapse. It’s very stunning.”

Dr. Eads says it is particularly bad in the double CV19 vaxed and boosted. She calls the third injection “The Kill Shot, the Money Ball or whatever you want to call it. It is just devastating to the immune system, and I’ll tell you why. If you look at the recent Stanford study, and I am just going to read a couple of sentences from the Stanford study: ‘The spike protein in the CV19 vaccines that everyone is talking about is called the Lentivirus. The Lenti contains a combination of HIV, types one through three, SRV/1, which is AIDS, MERS and SARS. In the Stanford study, the best-known Lentivirus is the human immune deficiency pathogen, which causes AIDS. This is why we are seeing autoimmune and neurodegenerative decline after the Covid 19 (Vax) especially the booster. It permanently changes the genome of the cell. That is why this is so terrifying to us in the medical community. We just don’t know how to attack this.”

There is a similar report out last week by the UK government that also points to the triple vaxed getting AIDS. So, the CV19 vaccines are actually injecting people with AIDS? Dr. Eads says, “That is exactly what I am telling you. That is what the Spike Lentivirus is. It is made up of HIV and AIDS along with SARS and MERS. That’s why the vaccinated and boosted are so sick. That’s why they dominate the hospitalizations regarding Covid illness as well.”

Because the immune system is depleted, many kinds of disease such as cancer can spread like wildfire. Dr. Ryan Cole says he’s seeing cancer up as much as 2,000% from the vaccines. Eads says, “I have some stunning numbers from the Defense Medical Epidemiology Database (DMED). I am just going to read a few cancers: malignant neo-plasma of the esophagus up 794%. malignant neo-plasma of the stomach, colon and pancreas up 524%. Breast cancer up 387%. Ovarian cancer up 537%, Testicular cancer up 269%. These are numbers from 2021. When they found out attorney Thomas Renz and the whistleblower had the data, they scrubbed the data and altered it, which is totally against the law.”

Dr. Eads is treating vaxed and unvaxed in her practice. She will tell you what you can do to help yourself, especially if you have been vaxed. Dr. Eads talks about the ongoing propaganda to get you to take the so-called boosters. Dr. Eads explains why you should stop all CV19 shots now. Dr. Eads also contends there is a huge disinformation campaign going on to make you think the CV19 shots are safe and not causing blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, cancer and a host of other diseases–including AIDS."

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he talks to 25-year veteran Dr. Elizabeth Eads as she continues to highlight the real unreported effects of the CV19 bioweapons and the dangerous lies by Big Pharma, the FDA, CDC and mainstream media. (There is much more cutting edge, frontline medical information in the nearly 53-minute interview.)

- https://rumble.com/

○

Related:

"Unthinkable Thoughts"

"Here’s What the 'Experts' Are Missing"

"Here’s What the 'Experts' Are Missing"

by Jim Rickards

"We’ve all followed the cascade of financial and economic sanctions the U.S. and its allies have piled upon Russia in the past few weeks. The assets of the Central Bank of Russia (about $600 billion) have been frozen. Major Russian banks have all been kicked out of the global financial telecommunications system called SWIFT. High-tech and luxury exports to Russia have been banned. Meanwhile, Western banks are not allowed to trade Russian securities. The assets of Russian oligarchs from superyachts to multimillion-dollar townhouses in London are being seized.

The list goes on. That all sounds draconian (it is) and possibly even effective (it isn’t), but it begs the question of who bears the losses. If I’m a debtor and you tell me I’m not allowed to pay my debts, I might say, “Thank you, that’s a relief.” In those circumstances, the loser is not the debtor. It’s the creditor who was expecting to be paid and now he finds that’s impossible.

All of these Russian banks and borrowers were doing business with investors in the West. When you freeze Russian payments, some Western bondholder is not getting paid, and some investor will end up taking the loss. That investor could even be you. If you look inside your 401(k), you might find an emerging-markets ETF or fund that just happens to hold some Russian debt. Russia has about $100–150 billion of dollar-denominated debt, about half of which is owned by investors outside of Russia.

If only part of that defaults, it could be $50 billion or more in direct financial losses to ETFs, mutual funds and even small holders in 401(k)s who may not know what’s inside the products that Wall Street cooks up. Mega-asset manager BlackRock has already lost $17 billion of its investors’ money with bad Russian stock and bond bets.

Still, Russia is trying to pay. The head of the Central Bank of Russia is Elvira Nabiullina, who’s one of the smartest central bankers in the world and perhaps the only one who understands how to do her job. She’s trying to pay the debt in rubles even if she is not allowed to pay in dollars. Despite the sanctions, she still controls Russia’s ruble printing press and could create enough money to pay the debt. Still, if this ruble work-around does not work, we’re looking at massive losses for Western investors.

But it gets worse. In addition to outright bondholders, there are billions of dollars of derivatives linked to the bonds. This means that actual losses can be many times the losses on the bonds themselves.

This is exactly what happened in the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. There were about $1 trillion in subprime mortgages at the time. A 20% default rate, which is sky-high compared with usual default rates of less than 5%, implied $200 billion in losses. That’s a huge loss but manageable in the financial system. What most analysts missed is that there were $6 trillion of derivatives written on the $1 trillion of subprime mortgages. This meant that actual losses were more on the order of $1.2 trillion than $200 billion once derivatives were taken into account.

Something similar is at play with regard to Russian bonds. The exact identities of the holders and the scope of derivatives are almost completely opaque. No one really knows how far the financial distress may spread. The point is that it’s easy to slap on sanctions, but it’s almost impossible to ascertain exactly where the losses will fall and how great they’ll be. This phenomenon is called “contagion.” It works exactly like a virus. One creditor loses money, and that causes him to default to another creditor, and so on. It’s exactly the way a virus spreads from one victim to another.

The most famous case of this also involved a Russian default. That was in 1998. That financial crisis started in Thailand in 1997, spread to Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea before hitting Russia. From there, the next victim was not another country but a hedge fund in Greenwich, Connecticut, called Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). The Fed had to organize a $4 billion bailout to save world markets. I negotiated that bailout on behalf of LTCM.

Now it’s happening again. Russia is on the brink of defaulting on its debt. Then contagion takes over. There will be some initial losers, but those losses could cascade out of control as they did in 1998. Banks, brokers and hedge funds are all at risk. The best advice is to expect the unexpected. You can get ahead of that by reducing equity exposure and increasing allocations to cash and gold now."

- dailyreckoning.com

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Related:

"The Truth About The 2.5 QUADRILLION Derivatives Bubble"

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feels So Bad" (Ben E-dit)

Full screen recommended.

Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feels So Bad" (Ben E-dit)

"A Look to the Heavens"

“The dark Horsehead Nebula and the glowing Orion Nebula are contrasting cosmic vistas. Adrift 1,500 light-years away in one of the night sky's most recognizable constellations, they appear in opposite corners of the below stunning mosaic.

 

The familiar Horsehead nebula appears as a dark cloud, a small silhouette notched against the long red glow at the lower left. Alnitak is the easternmost star in Orion's belt and is seen as the brightest star to the left of the Horsehead. Below Alnitak is the Flame Nebula, with clouds of bright emission and dramatic dark dust lanes. The magnificent emission region, the Orion Nebula (aka M42), lies at the upper right. Immediately to its left is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man. Pervasive tendrils of glowing hydrogen gas are easily traced throughout the region.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap101005.html