"The Earth Only Has A 3 Month Supply Of Food – If Production Stops Humanity Has Nothing To Eat 'In 90 Days'”

"The Earth Only Has A 3 Month Supply Of Food – 

If Production Stops Humanity Has Nothing To Eat 'In 90 Days'”

by Michael Snyder

"We are far closer to a potential global cataclysm than most people would dare to imagine. Right now, leaders from all across the political spectrum are openly warning us that a worldwide food crisis is coming. But when people in the western world hear of such warnings, most of them assume that it will just be something that affects poor people in Africa or Asia. Unfortunately, that will not be the case this time around. We truly are in unprecedented territory, and we are going to see things happen in the months ahead that once would have been absolutely unthinkable.

Global hunger had already been steadily rising for the past couple of years due to the COVID pandemic, and now a confluence of events here in 2022 threatens to create a true global nightmare. At this moment, we are still eating food that was previously grown, but it is the food that will not be grown in the months ahead that will be the real problem. Because the truth is that we do not have much of a buffer to work with at all.

David Friedberg is an “early Google executive who started the farming insurance company Climate Corporation”, and he just told the All-In podcast that the Earth operates on “a 90-day food supply”… “The whole planet Earth operates a 90-day food supply, that means that once we stop making food, humans run out of food in 90 days.” It is estimated that approximately 7.9 billion people currently live on the planet, and feeding everyone is a real challenge even if everything goes perfectly.

Unfortunately, global conditions have been much less than perfect for the past couple of years, and Friedberg says that the new global energy crisis has pushed the cost of key fertilizer components to levels that are absolutely insane… “The price of nitrogen has gone from $200 to $1,000, the price in potassium has gone from $200 to $700, and the price of phosphorus has gone from $250 to $700. So now it is so expensive to grow a crop, that a lot of farmers around the world are pulling acres out of production. So they’re going to grow less this year than they would have otherwise because it is so expensive and they can not access fertilizer,” he explained. “Food supplies are going to go down and it is going to be catastrophic.”

Many farmers all over the world will try to grow food without fertilizer this year, but that will result in a whole lot less food being grown. In one of his latest videos, Chris Martenson compared rice plants that were grown with phosphorus to rice plants that were not given any phosphorus. I was absolutely blown away by the difference.

As global food production drops precipitously, there simply will not be enough food for everyone in the months ahead. Of course the wealthy nations will buy up what is available, driving up prices in the process, and the poorer nations will be left out in the cold.

In fact, this is already starting to happen. In March, the global price of food rose at the fastest monthly pace ever recorded…"March’s food price index from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) printed 159.3 points in March, up 19.15 points from February, when it had already reached record highs. The index was up 33.6% from the same time last year."

The March rise in food prices is a stunning 12.64% MoM – almost double the previous record monthly surge…If you are looking for “red flags”, you just found one. Food riots have already begun in some parts of the globe. For example, you can see a clip from the rioting in Peru right here. In the months ahead, it is only going to get worse.

Thanks to the war in Ukraine, the price of wheat was up almost 20 percent last month alone…"The war has helped push cereal prices up 17% over the past month with the closure of ports throttling wheat and maize exports from Ukraine. Russian exports have also been slowed by financial and shipping problems. World wheat prices soared by 19.7% during March, while maize prices posted a 19.1% month-on-month increase, hitting a record high along with those of barley and sorghum."

As I have discussed perviously, Russia and Ukraine normally export enormous amounts of food to the rest of the planet. But that won’t be the case this year. Sadly, it is being projected that corn production in Ukraine will be cut by more than half in 2022… "Ukraine is one of the world’s top exporters of corn, sunflower oil, and wheat. Disruptions stemming from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have stoked fears the war-torn country could experience a 50% decline in crop output this year, according to Bloomberg. Forecast data from ag expert UkrAgroConsult show Ukraine’s corn output could be as low as 19 million tons, about half of last year’s 41 million tons." And the Ukrainians have already announced that they won’t be exporting any of their production at all this year because they need it to feed their own population during the war.

Here in the United States, the bird flu pandemic continues to escalate, and as a result the price of eggs has more than doubled in recent weeks…A deadly and highly infectious avian flu is forcing US farmers to kill millions of egg-laying hens, reducing the country’s egg supply and driving up prices. On Thursday, retailers paid between $2.80 and $2.89 for a dozen large grade A white eggs in the Midwest, according to the USDA’s daily Midwest regional egg report. That’s more than double the roughly $1.25 they cost in March, according to data compiled by Brian Earnest, lead protein industry analyst at Cobank, which provides financial services to agribusiness."

That is extremely alarming. So what is going to happen if this pandemic continues to wipe out millions of chickens every month? Meanwhile, certain shortages that have been simmering for a long time are now reaching critical levels. For example, Walgreens has announced that it is going to start rationing baby formula…"A national shortage of baby formula brought on by pandemic-related supply-chain issues has forced US retailers such as Walgreens to ration the all-important product. The company – the second-largest pharmacy store chain in the United States behind CVS – said Friday that amid the supply-chain crunch, it is limiting customers to three infant and toddler formula product purchases at a time, at its 9,021 US locations."

This wasn’t supposed to happen. According to the optimists, things were supposed to be getting back to normal by this point. But instead things are getting even worse. According to the Daily Mail, “29 percent of all top-selling formulas are out of stock at stores across the nation” right now. Unfortunately, this is just the beginning.

Everyone agrees that the global food crisis is going to intensify in the months ahead, and David Friedberg is trying to warn us about what could happen if widespread panic sets in…“I don’t know about death, there will be famine. Famine is to be short of calories. There will be strategic reserves released, but it won’t be enough. We won’t have enough. The way supply chains are set up, there will not be enough,” he said. “As you know with any market, when there is scarcity, people come in and buy at a faster pace. So this is a market dynamic. It is not like people are physically hoarding loaves of bread, but commodity traders, countries, strategic reserves start buying up what they can get to prepare for the famine… prices go even higher and it kicks other people out of the market. The whole thing gets ugly fast.”

We have been warned over and over again that this was coming, and now it is here. You may have noticed that my articles have been longer than usual lately, and that is because there is so much more information that I need to share with you each day.We truly are entering a full-blown planetary emergency, and I am trying to do my best to sound the alarm. Unfortunately, most of the population is still not taking this crisis seriously. So many people out there are fully convinced that they will always be able to rely on the system, and a lot of them will continue to believe that even as the system literally collapses all around them."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Bill Bonner, "Bluff and Bluster"

"Bluff and Bluster"

by Bill Bonner

San Martin, Argentina - "A quick update from the ranch: “Carlos was murdered,” said our informant. “Because the Originarios want to take over the valley. “ Speaking to us behind closed doors, in a dusty storeroom… “His wife had hooked up with ‘Fat Mary.’ She was going to move in next to them. They were building another house for her. The only reason she’s not there now is because her son got struck by a car; he’s in the hospital in a coma. Otherwise, she’d already be living there…”

Our head swirled and ached. Too many issues to deal with. We doubt that Carlos was murdered. But we don’t know what happened. This farm is like nothing we’ve ever had to deal with. We are meant to be judge, accountant, priest, social worker, engineer, banker – and yet, we have neither the authority, nor the expertise, to do any of these things. The Originarios keep attacking, encroaching, squatting, building houses, stealing water and rustling cattle… And more and more, this looks like a battle we will lose.

Lost Causes: Wars are hard to win; often, they’re not worth fighting. During the Cold War, for example, a candidate for prime minister of Denmark came up with a novel and refreshing idea. He proposed to replace the entire defense budget with a single recording – ‘We surrender’ – in Russian.

But now we have another war. And our blood is up. This is no time to wave the white flag. Here’s Ron Estes: "The international community has rarely been as united as it is today to apply sanctions against Russia for its invasion and occupation of sovereign Ukrainian territory."

Oh yeah? The Financial Times reports: "Two weeks after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa held a phone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. On the same day, European leaders meeting in Versailles warned democracy itself was at stake. Yet Ramaphosa struck a very different tone. “Thanking His Excellency President Vladimir Putin for taking my call today, so I could gain an understanding of the situation that was unfolding between Russia and Ukraine,” he wrote on Twitter. Ramaphosa, who has blamed Nato expansion for the war, said Putin “appreciated our balanced approach”."

There is nothing ‘balanced’ about the US approach… or its media accounts. The Ukraine and Russia have lived cheek by jowl for centuries… sharing a similar Slavic language… a similar culture… and very similar politics. Both were parts of the Soviet Union for 70 years… of which many leaders – Nikita Krushchev, Leonid Brezhnev and Konstantin Chernenko – were Ukrainian, not Russian. So too were many of its jailers, its soldiers, and its executioners. During WWII, when the Nazis invaded, many Ukrainians took the German side, collaborating with the Wehrmacht and even surpassing the SS in its viciousness towards the Jews.

But mirabile dictu… the Ukrainians have all been bleached white by the Western press. We see the photos of the ‘freedom fighters’… and their poor families, driven from their homes. We are invited to mourn the dead Ukrainians as if they were dear friends. But when we are told of Russian casualties, it is with a tone of delight. Ukrainian lives matter; Russian lives don’t.

Psychic Satisfaction: There are good guys. And bad guys. Black and white. Saints and sinners. We don’t wonder that the Russians are devils; the surprise is that the Ukrainians – who have so much in common with their Russian cousins – have all sprouted wings. It must be one of the most dramatic redemptions in history.

If there is another side to the story, you won’t find it in the US media. But what then is it that the rest of the world sees? The Financial Times continues: "The South African president is not alone in pursuing a “balanced” position to the war. “We will not take sides. We will continue being neutral and help with whatever is possible,” Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro said after Russia invaded Ukraine. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador also declined to join the sanctions being imposed on Russia. “We are not going to take any sort of economic reprisal because we want to have good relations with all the governments in the world,” he said. And, then, there is China: an increasingly close ally of Russia. The world’s second-largest economy has scrupulously declined to criticize the invasion of Ukraine."

How come most of the world’s people – China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Brazil – are either on the other side… or neutral? How come they have refused to join the crusade? Even in the “west” support for America’s sanction war is more bluff and bluster than reality. Here’s ‘RealityCheck:’"Is the European Union Really Standing with Ukraine?" "Europe’s purchase of Russian energy supplies since it invaded Ukraine: $38 billion. Amount of European Union aid to Ukraine to help it resist the Russian invasion: $1.09 billion.

We have no insight into which side God is on… or whose victory would make the world a better place. We’d be just as happy to see both sides lose. Because, Tolstoy was mostly right; war is a scam: "The Government and all those of the upper classes near the Government who live by other people’s work, need some means of dominating the workers, and find this means in the control of the army. Defense against foreign enemies is only an excuse. The German Government frightens its subjects about the Russians and the French; the French Government frightens its people about the Germans; the Russian Government frightens its people about the French and the Germans; and that is the way with all Governments... They stir up their own people and some foreign Government, and then pretend that for the well-being, or the defense, of their people they must declare war: which again brings profit only to generals, officers, officials, merchants, and, in general, to the rich. In reality war is an inevitable result of the existence of armies; and armies are only needed by Governments to dominate their own working classes."

Tolstoy overlooks the great joy and pride the working classes get out of seeing their boys kick foreign butt. It brings them a psychic satisfaction that is hard to measure. And now, goaded by their ‘upper classes,’ they cheer on the Ukrainians as if it were the home town in the SuperBowl. But war is no game. And the sanctions war is no more likely to end well than the wars in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. More to come…"

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

"How It Really Is"

 

Jim Kunstler, "The Riptide"

"The Riptide"

by Jim Kunstler

"Have you stopped to ask yourself: what exactly are the USA’s interests in Ukraine? The answer: just about none whatsoever if you discount all the effort and capital expended there the past decade to make it a problem for our designated hobgoblin, Russia. During these eight years Ukraine was an ATM for “Joe Biden’s” family, an inconvenient embarrassment for the US State Department, which has not been able to cover it up.

In fact, their first attempt to do so - the seditious maneuvers leading to Trump impeachment no. 1 - only shined a light onto the dishonest activities of US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch and her State Department colleagues, in collusion with George Soros’s Atlantic Council, to conceal their involvement in Ukraine’s corrupt political affairs. This gang included agent provocateur’s rotating in-and-out of government such as Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken, now the two top foreign policy officers in “Joe Biden’s” government (National Security Advisor and Secretary of State).

Donald Trump enabled more mischief by sending what he proudly called “lethal aid” in the form of Stinger missiles and other arms to Ukraine in a foolish attempt to out-hawk his predecessor, Mr. Obama, whose main weapon against Ukraine was Vice-president Biden and his grifting family. Poor Mr. Trump apparently had to do something to prove that he was not “Putin’s puppet,” and that something was to give Ukraine tacit permission to bombard the breakaway Donbas region on Russia’s border. Was that supposed to not have consequences?

Throughout all this, NATO has acted as a conduit for arming and training a 400,000-troop Ukrainian army, a violation of several formal agreements between Russia and the West. NATO, otherwise, does not have the will, or even the means, to engage militarily with Russia. And America, at the head of NATO, has so far refrained from starting World War Three by way of sending US troops or war-planes into Ukraine. So, Russia has gone about the plodding business of neutralizing Ukraine’s trouble-seeking military and rearranging the map so that Ukraine won’t be able to act as a proxy antagonist in America’s ill-conceived campaign to destroy Mr. Putin and his country.

The operation will probably end this month. My guess is that Mr. Zelensky will be allowed to remain president of what remains on the map, minus Donbas and the region along the Black Sea coast from Mariupol to Odessa. Mr. Zelensky will not have a functioning military to make trouble with. Other patches of Western Ukraine may be distributed among Poland, Moldova, Romania, and Hungary, leaving a large rump of Ukraine between Lvov and the Dnieper River devoted mostly to the growing of wheat. A stable, agricultural Ukraine will be a benefit to a hungry world, while it will no longer be in a position to launch hostilities or be of much use as a money-laundering facility. In short, with some luck, Ukraine will cease to be a threat to world peace.

Ukraine may have been “Joe Biden’s” last opportunity to screw things up on the world scene. As the military conflict resolves, Ukraine can’t be used by the White House as a shield to divert America’s attention from the political cancer of Biden family corruption, and the systemic illness of the nation’s institutions. Merrick Garland may not be able to contain the open case against Hunter Biden to mere rinky-dink tax violations - and if he tries to limit the US Attorneys in charge of the case, he will be setting himself up for an obstruction of justice rap some months from now. The laptop is out now, too many people have copies of the hard drive, and some are working diligently to make the mess of it more easily searchable. So, expect much more to come.

It won’t be easy for the Democratic Party to get rid of “Joe Biden.” Nobody can feature Kamala Harris in the oval office, and were she to somehow gracefully remove herself from the scene, next-in-line would be Nancy Pelosi who, in addition to being long-in-the-tooth, seems to be literally drunk half the time in her public appearances. And behind her: Patrick Leahy, Senate President Pro Tem, who is nearly as senile and incoherent as “Joe Biden.”

Lots of other spooky things are churning meanwhile in the zeitgeist. Overnight, with his blundering sanctions, “Joe Biden” killed the little credibility left in the shreds of Bretton Woods and gave a green light for Russia to start a world-wide move to gold-backed currencies. That could easily turn the current US dollar inflation from an annualized 8 percent to a runaway hyperinflation, where prices double in weeks or days. It’s becoming ever clearer that special counsel John Durham means business and many a swamp creature must be quivering in its burrow awaiting indictment. The controversy over the 2020 election will prove to be not as over as many have hoped and imagined. And we await developments on the after-effects of all those vaxxes and boosters carried out all over Western Civ. These dangerous currents amount to a huge riptide in global events that will carry many people and whole societies out to sea."

- https://kunstler.com/

"The Bank Warnings Are Nothing Compared To What Real People Are Telling Me"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 4/11/22:

"The Bank Warnings Are Nothing Compared

 To What Real People Are Telling Me"

"We have all seen it. One bank after another has a warning for us about the economy and inflation. They are trying to be novel and telling us what we are headed for. This is great, but nothing compares to what real people are experiencing and the economic downturns that they are living through."

"Massive Price Increases At Walmart! Empty Shelves Everywhere! - What's Next?"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures with Danno, 4/11/22:

"Massive Price Increases At Walmart! 

Empty Shelves Everywhere! - What's Next?"

"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, "FED Now Admits! 'Inflation Will Persist!"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/11/22:

"FED Now Admits! 'Inflation Will Persist!"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Gerald Celente, Peter Schiff, "Economy Headed for Dramatic Collapse, Prepare Now"

Full screen recommended.

The Atlantis Report, 4/11/22:

"Peter Schiff: Inflation Is Exploding & 

Leaving U.S. Economy Sitting On A Time Bomb"

"Peter Schiff talks about rising inflation, painful cost of living, 

wiped out middle class."

○

Full screen recommended.

Gerald Celente, Peter Schiff, 

"Economy Headed for Dramatic Collapse, Prepare Now"

"Peter Schiff, the chief economist at Euro Pacific Capital, told Gerald Celente in an interview published Thursday that Americans need to be prepared for a “dramatic collapse” of the economy. “Interest rates are going substantially higher from here. They’re still much too low,” he said. “We’re now kind of approaching three percent yields on U.S. treasuries, we’re not quite there yet.”

"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."

- https://trendsresearch.com/

Musical Interlude: Disturbed "The Sound Of Silence"

Full screen recommended.

Disturbed, "The Sound Of Silence" [Official Music Video]

Singer David Draiman

798,496,806 views

Full screen recommended.

Disturbed, "The Sound Of Silence", CONAN on TBS

130,365,833 views

You'll feel this song in your soul...

I'm speechless, in tearful awe, simply no words...

Musical Interlude: Mecano, "Hijo de la Luna"

Mecano, "Hijo de la Luna"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"A gorgeous spiral galaxy some 100 million light-years distant, NGC 1309 lies on the banks of the constellation of the River (Eridanus). NGC 1309 spans about 30,000 light-years, making it about one third the size of our larger Milky Way galaxy. Bluish clusters of young stars and dust lanes are seen to trace out NGC 1309's spiral arms as they wind around an older yellowish star population at its core.

Not just another pretty face-on spiral galaxy, observations of NGC 1309's recent supernova and Cepheid variable stars contribute to the calibration of the expansion of the Universe. Still, after you get over this beautiful galaxy's grand design, check out the array of more distant background galaxies also recorded in this sharp, reprocessed, Hubble Space Telescope view.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130116.html

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything"

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s

Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and

Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning"

by Maria Popova

“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.” Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.

That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by reading. Some through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.

A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing "Man’s Search for Meaning."

As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure - especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame - these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered - as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past - they are now published in English for the first time as "Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything" (public library).

Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes: "We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this."

Generations and myriad cultural upheavals before Zadie Smith observed that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Frankl considers what “progress” even means, emphasizing the centrality of our individual choices in its constant revision: "Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age."

Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims: "Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism! How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?

[…]

Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity."

Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:

"What remained was the individual person, the human being - and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down - the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one - the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self."

In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds: "Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being."

Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless - the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:

"Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us."

He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore - the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:

"I slept and dreamt

that life was joy.

I awoke and saw

that life was duty.

I worked - and behold,

duty was joy."

In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation - an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity - Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point: "So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down."

In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo two decades later in his superb forgotten essay on the antidote to the hour of despair and life as a moral obligation to the universe, Frankl turns the question unto itself: "At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?"

Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life - it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to - of being responsible toward - life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.

Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance - triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization: "The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.

We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?"

What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms - terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:

"One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions."

With this symphonic prelude, Frankl arrives at the essence of what he discovered about the meaning of life in his confrontation with death - a central fact of being at which a great many of humanity’s deepest seers have arrived via one path or another: from Rilke, who so passionately insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” to physicist Brian Greene, who so poetically nested our search for meaning into our mortality into the most elemental fact of the universe. Frankl writes:

"The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.

[…]

Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it - or leave unfulfilled - that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness."

In the remainder of the slender and splendid "Yes to Life", Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival."

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

"Know What's Weird?"

"Know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change,

but pretty soon... everything's different."

- Calvin, from "Calvin and Hobbes"

"To Really Ask..."

“Very few beings really seek knowledge in this world – few really ask. On the contrary, they try to wring from the unknown the answers they have already shaped in their own minds – justifications, confirmations, forms of consolation without which they can’t go on. To really ask is to open the door to a whirlwind. The answer may annihilate the question and the questioner.”

- Anne Rice, “The Vampire Lestat”

"15 Financial Facts That Just Might Scare The Living Daylights Out Of You"

Full screen recommended.

"15 Financial Facts That Just Might Scare 

The Living Daylights Out Of You"

by Epic Economist

"Bad financial news doesn't seem to stop coming these days. The compounding effects of the health crisis, the Russian aggression on Ukraine, broken supply chains, soaring inflation, rising interest rates, and a chaotic commodity market are threatening to provoke what some investors are calling "a bone-dry recession," and a full-scale stock market crash. The global economy and the financial sector are recording massive losses as conditions continue to deteriorate by the day. A widespread meltdown is on the horizon, and things could run off the tracks sooner than most people think. According to Business Insider, Wall Street just issued its first official recession and stock market crash warning amid rising interest rates as the Fed starts to roll back its bond purchasing program. All major Wall Street banks are predicting a ‘significant decline’ in the months ahead, and all the way into 2023.

The Fed has caused enormous distortions in the economy and inflated an “everything bubble" over the past two years, but the situation is rapidly reaching a breaking point. According to Bloomberg, the former president of the powerful New York Fed, William Dudley, says that the central bank will not be able to inflation that’s running at a 40-year high without making investors suffer. Meanwhile, several market veterans are warning that stock returns are set to hit the lowest level since the Great Depression, and that a wide-reaching global stock market crash of humongous proportions has already begun.

Investors are becoming increasingly more risk-averse and selling off the stocks of companies that relied on cheap debt to fuel speculative growth, especially in the tech sector. It is known that the tech bubble has started to burst in November 2021, and since then, investors have been walking away en masse from risky assets, leading a series of high-flying stocks to fall back to Earth. Wealthy investors already know that a sizable stock market crash is coming and they have been monitoring the risks and taking defensive positions to prevent further losses. If you doubt it, just check the Short Seller Index.

On the other side of the globe, the outlook isn't good either. China, seen as one of the main engines for global economic growth, is facing numerous financial and economic challenges. On top of that, new virus outbreaks and lockdowns are impacting the production of goods and overseas shipping, which has been sparking severe consequences on global markets and aggravating the ongoing supply chain crisis. China's domestic problems are likely to have a spillover effect on several economies, including the UK and the US, and fuel a full-scale stock market crash as financial conditions continue to worsen across the globe. The signs of a devastating economic and financial collapse are everywhere. It's only a matter of time before we find ourselves in the middle of the worst financial disaster of modern history, and considering the pace at which things are falling apart, we will not have to wait that long.

That's why, today, we compiled warnings, indicators, and recent data shared by Wall Street's top strategists that expose the dire state of the global economy and financial markets, and explain why a huge downturn is ahead."

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5P4CnhJVOE

"Restaurants Serving Frozen Dinners; Time To Sell Your House; Blind To Economic Collapse; Shortages"

Full screen recommended.

Jeremiah Babe 4/9/22:

"Restaurants Serving Frozen Dinners; Time To Sell Your House; 

Blind To Economic Collapse; Shortages"

The Daily "Near You?"

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Thanks for stopping by!

“Mutiny of the Soul”

“Mutiny of the Soul”

by Charles Eisenstein

"Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new. When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm. Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I'm not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive.

The notion of a cure starts with the question, "What has gone wrong?" But there is another, radically different way of seeing fatigue and depression that starts by asking, "What is the body, in its perfect wisdom, responding to?" When would it be the wisest choice for someone to be unable to summon the energy to fully participate in life?

The answer is staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, "Is life as I am living it the right life for me right now?" When the soul-body is saying No to participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, "Does the world as it is presented me merit my full participation?"

What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? Withdrawal, followed by a reentry into a world, a life, and a way of being wholly different from the one left behind?

The unspoken goal of modern life seems to be to live as long and as comfortably as possible, to minimize risk and to maximize security. We see this priority in the educational system, which tries to train us to be "competitive" so that we can "make a living". We see it in the medical system, where the goal of prolonging life trumps any consideration of whether, sometimes, the time has come to die. We see it in our economic system, which assumes that all people are motivated by "rational self-interest", defined in terms of money, associated with security and survival. (And have you ever thought about the phrase "the cost of living"?) We are supposed to be practical, not idealistic; we are supposed to put work before play. Ask someone why she stays in a job she hates, and as often as not the answer is, "For the health insurance." In other words, we stay in jobs that leave us feeling dead in order to gain the assurance of staying alive. When we choose health insurance over passion, we are choosing survival over life.

On a deep level, which I call the soul level, we want none of that. We recognize that we are here on earth to enact a sacred purpose, and that most of the jobs on offer are beneath our dignity as human beings. But we might be too afraid to leave our jobs, our planned-out lives, our health insurance, or whatever other security and comfort we have received in exchange for our divine gifts. Deep down, we recognize this security and comfort as slaves' wages, and we yearn to be free.

So, the soul rebels. Afraid to make the conscious choice to step away from a slave's life, we make the choice unconsciously instead. We can no longer muster the energy to go through the motions. We enact this withdrawal from life through a variety of means. We might summon the Epstein-Barr virus into our bodies, or mononucleosis, or some other vector of chronic fatigue. We might shut down our thyroid or adrenal glands. We might shut down our production of serotonin in the brain. Other people take a different route, incinerating the excess life energy in the fires of addiction. Either way, we are in some way refusing to participate. We are shying away from ignoble complicity in a world gone wrong. We are refusing to contribute our divine gifts to the aggrandizement of that world.

That is why the conventional approach of fixing the problem so that we can return to normal life will not work. It might work temporarily, but the body will find other ways to resist. Raise serotonin levels with SSRIs, and the brain will prune some receptor sites, thinking in its wisdom, "Hey, I'm not supposed to feel good about the life I am living right now." In the end, there is always suicide, a common endpoint of the pharmaceutical regimes that seek to make us happy with something inimical to our very purpose and being. You can only force yourself to abide in wrongness so long. When the soul's rebellion is suppressed too long, it can explode outward in bloody revolution. Significantly, all of the school shootings in the last decade have involved people on anti-depression medication. All of them! For a jaw-dropping glimpse of the results of the pharmaceutical regime of control, scroll down this compilation of suicide/homicide cases involving SSRIs. I am not using "jaw-dropping" as a figure of speech. My jaw literally dropped open.

Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. "The system has to be sound - after all, it validates my professional status - therefore the problem must be with you."

Unfortunately, "holistic" approaches are no different, as long as they deny the wisdom of the body's rebellion. When they do seem to work, usually that is because they coincide with some other shift. When someone goes out and gets help, or makes a radical switch of modalities, it works as a ritual communication to the unconscious mind of a genuine life change. Rituals have the power to make conscious decisions real to the unconscious. They can be part of taking back one's power.

I have met countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe themselves as "conscious" or "spiritual", who have battled with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically incapable of living the old life in the old world. That is because, in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands, cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on this planet.

A related syndrome comprises various "attention deficit" and anxiety "disorders" (forgive me, I cannot write down these words without the ironic quotation marks) which reflect an unconscious knowledge that something is wrong around here. Anxiety, like all emotions, has a proper function. Suppose you left a pot on the stove and you know you forgot something, you just can't remember what. You cannot rest at ease. Something is bothering you, something is wrong. Subliminally you smell smoke. You obsess: did I leave the water running? Did I forget to pay the mortgage? The anxiety keeps you awake and alert; it doesn't let you rest; it keeps your mind churning, worrying. This is good. This is what saves your life. Eventually you realize - the house is on fire! - and anxiety turns into panic, and action.

So if you suffer from anxiety, maybe you don't have a "disorder" at all - maybe the house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to "Something is dangerously wrong and I don't know what it is." That is only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. "Nothing is wrong, just you" is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to fix you. I disagree with that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic sinks. Unfortunately, the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your brain.

Similarly, Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD, and my favorite, Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) are only disorders if we believe that the things presented for our attention are worth paying attention to. We cannot admit, without calling into question the whole edifice of our school system, that it may be completely healthy for a ten-year-old boy to not sit still for six hours in a classroom learning about long division and Vasco de Gama. Perhaps the current generation of children, that some call the Indigos, simply have a lower tolerance for school's agenda of conformity, obedience, external motivation, right-and-wrong answers, the quantification of performance, rules and bells, report cards and grades and your permanent record. So we try to enforce their attention with stimulants, and subdue their heroic intuitive rebellion against the spirit-wrecking machine.

As I write about the "wrongness" against which we all rebel, I can hear some readers asking, "What about the metaphysical principle that it's 'all good'?" Just relax, I am told, nothing is wrong, all is part of the divine plan. You only perceive it as wrong because of your limited human perspective. All of this is only here for our own development. War: it gives people wonderful opportunities to make heroic choices and burn off bad karma. Life is wonderful, Charles, why do you have to make it wrong?

I am sorry, but usually such reasoning is just a sop to the conscience. If it is all good, then that is only because we perceive and experience it as terribly wrong. The perception of iniquity moves us to right it.

Nonetheless, it would be ignorant and fruitless to pass judgment upon those who do not see anything wrong, who, oblivious to the facts of destruction, think everything is basically fine. There is a natural awakening process, in which first we proceed full speed ahead participating in the world, believing in it, seeking to contribute to the Ascent of Humanity. Eventually, we encounter something that is undeniably wrong, perhaps a flagrant injustice or a serious health problem or a tragedy near at hand. Our first response is to think this is an isolated problem, remediable with some effort, within a system that is basically sound. But when we try to fix it, we discover deeper and deeper levels of wrongness. The rot spreads; we see that no injustice, no horror can stand in isolation. We see that the disappeared dissidents in South America, the child laborers in Pakistan, the clearcut forests of the Amazon, are all intimately linked together in a grotesque tapestry that includes every aspect of modern life. We realize that the problems are too big to fix. We are called to live in an entirely different way, starting with our most fundamental values and priorities.

All of us go through this process, repeatedly, in various realms of our lives; all parts of the process are right and necessary. The phase of full participation is a growth phase in which we develop gifts that will be applied very differently later. The phase of trying to fix, to endure, to soldier on with a life that isn't working is a maturation phase that develops qualities of patience and determination and strength. The phase of discovering the all-encompassing nature of the problem is usually a phase of despair, but it need not be. Properly, it is a phase of rest, of stillness, of withdrawal, of preparation for a push. The push is a birth-push. Crises in our lives converge and propel us into a new life, a new being that we hardly imagine could exist, except that we'd heard rumors of it, echoes, and maybe even caught a glimpse of it here and there, been granted through grace a brief preview.

If you are in the midst of this process, you need not suffer if you cooperate with it. I can offer you two things. First is self-trust. Trust your own urge to withdraw even when a million messages are telling you, "The world is fine, what's wrong with you? Get with the program." Trust your innate belief that you are here on earth for something magnificent, even when a thousand disappointments have told you you are ordinary. Trust your idealism, buried in your eternal child's heart, that says that a far more beautiful world than this is possible. Trust your impatience that says "good enough" is not good enough. Do not label your noble refusal to participate as laziness and do not medicalize it as an illness. Your heroic body has merely made a few sacrifices to serve your growth.

The second thing I can offer you is a map. The journey I have described is not always linear, and you may find yourself from time to time revisiting earlier territory. When you find the right life, when you find the right expression of your gifts, you will receive an unmistakable signal. You will feel excited and alive. Many people have preceded you on this journey, and many more will follow in times to come. Because the old world is falling apart, and the crises that initiate the journey are converging upon us. Soon many people will follow the paths we have pioneered. Each journey is unique, but all share the same basic dynamics I have described. When you have passed through it, and understood the necessity and rightness of each of its phases, you will be prepared to midwife others through it as well. Your condition, all the years of it, has prepared you for this. It has prepared you to ease the passage of those who will follow. Everything you have gone through, every bit of the despair, has been necessary to forge you into a healer and a guide. The need is great. The time is coming soon.”

- https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/mutiny/

"Signs Of Distress" (Excerpt)

  

  "Signs Of Distress" (Excerpt)

by Chris Martenson

"Signs Of Distress: In ways conscious and subconscious, we're becoming aware of the signs of growing instability around us. Like a flock of sheep catching the scent of an unseen predator, right now we’re collectively becoming increasingly nervous and stressed. People’s tempers are short with each other, criticisms fly easily, and stances are becoming hardened to ludicrous levels. Many don’t know why they're unhappy. And because they're unable to identify the source, they blame themselves. Instead of acting out, they act in.

[...]

The truth is that the lifestyle we're living today is vastly distant from the one humans evolved to value. Sebastian Junger explained to us in a podcast that returning veterans commit suicide at the rate of 22 per day largely because they experience such 'emptiness' upon reintegrating into civilian life. Unit cohesion in the military was so much more fulfilling and enriching that the prospect of a permanent return to what we call “US culture” leads many of them to conclude that suicide is the better option. If there's a more damning indictment of the current culture in the US, I don’t know of it.

The data is clear: in the US, people are as unhappy, overmedicated and overweight than ever before. Our society's current plan is just not working. So why not square up to that reality, take charge and fix things while we still can? Why would we agree to persist in this dangerously broken state of affairs?

We, each of us and all of us, have the power to pursue a different path. A better path. We can and we should change everything that needs changing. We must rebel against this state of affairs, and withdraw our consent from a toxic system rather than let that system break us down. The data is telling us that from here, the extreme changes the world is experiencing will only accelerate. Those who can see this and adapt will fare far better than those who cannot, will not, or won’t. Some will thrive, some will survive, many will do neither. The time for a quiet revolution has arrived. One that begins with, and within, you.”

Please view this complete, highly recommended, article here:

- http://www.zerohedge.com/