Thursday, September 22, 2022

"Massive Price Increases At Whole Foods Market! This Is Ridiculous!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 9/22/22:
"Massive Price Increases At Whole Foods Market! 
This Is Ridiculous!"
"In today's vlog we are at Whole Foods Market, 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!"
Comments here:

"How It Really Is"

 

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Gerald Celente, Andrew Napolitano, "World War III Heating Up"

Full screen recommended.
Gerald Celente, Andrew Napolitano, 9/21/22:
"World War III Heating Up"
"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."
Comments here:

"Walmart Prepares For Big Trouble; FED Ominous Warning, Markets Panic; Housing Market Chaos"

Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 9/21/22:
"Walmart Prepares For Big Trouble; FED Ominous Warning,
 Markets Panic; Housing Market Chaos"
Comments here:

"The Armageddon Gang"

"The Armageddon Gang"
by Addison Wiggin

“Don’t spit down my back and tell me it’s raining.”
- Kami Garcia

"After the Fed announced a .75 point hike in the overnight rate, the Dow gave market watchers whiplash. In the first 20 minutes the index dropped over 330 points. Twenty five minutes after that it had recovered over 500 points. Then, it tanked again… by the close the DJIA has lost 522 points on the day, down 1.7%.

Just goes to show we’re not out of the riptide, yet. In fact, we’re likely getting sucked into deeper water. Rising interest rates in a world full of debt can be deadly. Especially to the corporate moribund. “Look at the large debt ratios of corporations and governments,” wrote the perspicacious Nouriel Roubini – the ominous Dr. Doom – in Bloomberg yesterday. “As rates rise and debt servicing costs increase, many zombie institutions, zombie households, corporates, banks, shadow banks and zombie countries are going to die.”

Persistent inflation in wages and the service sector will mean the Fed will “probably have no choice” but to hike more. “We’ll see who’s swimming naked,” Roubini paraphrases the oft-referenced Warren Buffet.

Not long after the 2008 financial crisis, Bethany McClean, then writing for Fortune magazine, called me on the telephone. Mrs. McClean wanted to know, after the collapse of the housing market, how we fared through it all. She was doing a feature on those who got the story right. One example she used to illustrate her angle was the noteworthy parties Nouriel Roubini was throwing in New York City. Plus, my book, "The Empire of Debt."

Roubini is now forecasting a similar collapse. Only this time it’s worse. Time to giddy-up “The Armageddon Gang.” "At some point, America's debts will be incinerated by inflation," Bill Bonner and I surmised in our co-authored book "Empire of Debt."

Of course, we thought the incineration would begin long before 2022. But, as the saying goes, “What comes around goes around.” In financial markets – like politics and love and other all-too-human relationships – people make the same mistakes over and over (and over) again.

The government and the Fed are “running out of fiscal bullets,” says Roubini. And now “if you do fiscal stimulus, you’re overheating the aggregate demand.” “This is really moving into restrictive monetary policy territory,” comments Diane Swonk, Chief Economist at KPMG US. “We will be moving into no man’s land. Their goal is for a prolonged slowdown that grinds inflation slowly down and only gradually increases the unemployment rate.”

Seems like most economists are hopping on the next wagon out of town. That being said… one truth remains in America today: The consumer will spend.

I call it "The Recession That Wasn't" in the "Demise of the Dollar." In essence, the Fed cannot control prices. They can only attempt to slow down consumer demand in what is coming to be known by an awful oxymoron – “the Growth Recession.” The conflict that Roubini presents... despite Fed rate hikes and the like, the spender will spend. And that only drives inflation higher.

So will we see Dow 20,000? And continue to Fed-watch for the next three years? Regardless of our short term analysis of the markets, we are suffering from what Bill Bonner calls “inflation psychosis.” “This is something bigger,” Bill continues: "You can't analyze this phenomenon the same way you can analyze a financial cycle because it's largely psychological. It's a group think. It's collective impulses, and so on. You end up with a situation where empires inevitably go bad. Then you look to try to find out how they're going bad, why they're going bad, when they're going bad. And that's what you do. And you still don't really know."

But you can see the patterns repeating themselves. “I mean, theoretically,” Mr. Bonner concludes, “we could control it, but we can't really because what happens is an empire becomes powerful, and the power corrupts the people who run the empire.” What a whirlwind Hump Day. More to come this week. Stay tuned. So it goes…"
"So it goes..."

"The Height of Idiocy"

"The Height of Idiocy"
by Doug Casey

"The only element in the universe more
 common than hydrogen is stupidity."
– Einstein

"I’m not a fortune teller. In fact, the only things anybody knows about predicting – even if you gussy the concept up by calling it "forecasting" – are 1.) Predict often and 2.) Never give both the time and the event.

The worst offenders are those who pretend they know where the economy’s headed. Statistics – so often the basis of conjecture with regard to the economy – are so subject to interpretation, and so easy to take out of context, that most of the time they’re best used as fodder for cocktail party conversations. Still, as potentially wrong-headed and tendentious as the subject is, "the economy" is occasionally worth talking about simply to establish a clear point of view. In fact, I place the phrase "the economy" in quotes because I don’t even accept the validity of the concept, nor that of "the GDP"; they’re both chimeras.

The idea of GDP gives the impression that it is not individuals that produce goods and services, but rather a machine called "the economy." This leaves the door open to all manner of nonsense, like the assertion that what may be good for individuals may not be good for the economy, and vice-versa.

For instance, an advance in the GDP doesn’t necessarily mean increased prosperity: What if the government embarked on a massive pyramid building program, an archetypical example of public works? GDP might rise, but it would add absolutely nothing to the well-being of individuals. To the contrary, the building of the pyramid would only divert capital from wealth-generating activities.

On the other hand, if a scientific breakthrough was made which cut energy consumption by 80% for the same net output, or magically eliminated all disease, the GDP would collapse because it would bankrupt the energy and health industries. But people would be vastly better off.

Entirely apart from that, the whole idea of GDP gives the impression that there actually is such a thing as the national output. In the real world, however, wealth is produced by someone and belongs to somebody. We’re not ants or bees working for the hive. The whole idea of a GDP just allows the "authorities" to bamboozle people into believing they can actually control "the economy," as if it were some giant machine.

The officials pretend to be the Wizard of Oz, and Boobus americanus is trained to think they’re omniscient. Thus whenever the rate of growth slips "too low," officials are expected to give "the economy" a suitable push. Conversely, whenever "the economy" is growing too fast, the officials are supposed to step in to "cool" it. It’s all an embarrassing and destructive charade. 

Nonetheless…I remain of the opinion that we’re headed into the biggest economic smashup in history. That’s an outrageous statement, and it’s always dangerous to say something like that. After all, the longest trend in motion is the Ascent of Man, and that trend is unlikely to change; indeed, it’s likely to accelerate. And it’s usually a mistake to bet against an established trend. Furthermore, science and technology will continue advancing, people will continue working and saving, entrepreneurs will continue to create. And downturns in the economy have always been brief. There’s a good case for staying bullish.

Even most of those who talk of a recession tend to write it off as either a simple reversal of recent "irrational exuberance," or a passing change in people’s psychology, or a temporary shock. Unfortunately, it goes much deeper than that. Those things have very little to do with what recessions are all about.

A recession, according to the conventional parlance, is a period when economic activity declines for two or more quarters. That’s a description of what happens, but it’s really not very helpful, much like saying a fever is a period during which your temperature is above 98.6 F. A better definition of a fever might be a period when the body’s temperature is elevated as a consequence of fighting an infection, in that it gives you some insight into the cause as well as the effect. That’s why I prefer to say a recession is "a period of time when distortions and misallocations of capital caused by the business cycle are liquidated."

What causes the business cycle? Excess creation of credit by a central bank (e.g., the Fed). The injection of artificially created money and credit into a country’s economy gives both producers and consumers false signals, causing them to do things which they otherwise would not do. The longer the upswing of a business cycle continues, the longer and more severe the down cycle will be. A depression is just a really bad recession.

One thing that – contrary to popular opinion – can help get an economy out of a recession is a large pool of savings; savings give people the money to invest in new production, as well as the money to buy that production. That’s why it’s the height of idiocy for pundits to talk about how patriotic it is to go out and shop. It can only deplete the capital that will be needed in the future, and deepen the bottom with more bankruptcies, stealing consumption from the future.

That’s why the Fed’s artificially low interest rates is such a bad idea; it encourages people to save less and borrow more. This engineered decline may well, after a certain lag time, cause a cyclical upturn – but it will only aggravate the underlying problem, guaranteeing yet a bigger bust.

This isn’t just an American problem, because the U.S. is truly the engine of the world’s economy. But a lot of the drive behind the engine is the gigantic trade deficit. The hundreds of billions the U.S. sent abroad in the last year alone, after over a decade of increasing deficits, has caused a lot of capital investment that will become uneconomic, and created a lot of economic activity that will come to a screeching halt when that deficit inevitably reverses. The whole world is levered on what happens in the U.S.

The effect in economies around the world will be devastating. The Smoot Hawley tariff of 1930, which acted to collapse world trade, greatly exacerbated the last depression. It could be that economic conditions in the U.S. alone could do it this time, without the overt "assistance" of the government. I don’t believe we’re looking at just another cyclical downturn this time. We could be – but I don’t think so.

Of course, since the dollar is by far the biggest market in the world, constituting the reserves of almost every government on the planet, the de facto currency of probably 50 countries, and the savings of hundreds of millions of people around the world, when it collapses, it will cause a financial earthquake, Magnitude 10."

Musical Interlude: Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"

Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"From afar, the whole thing looks like an Eagle. A closer look at the Eagle Nebula, however, shows the bright region is actually a window into the center of a larger dark shell of dust. Through this window, a brightly-lit workshop appears where a whole open cluster of stars is being formed. In this cavity tall pillars and round globules of dark dust and cold molecular gas remain where stars are still forming. Already visible are several young bright blue stars whose light and winds are burning away and pushing back the remaining filaments and walls of gas and dust.
The Eagle emission nebula, tagged M16, lies about 6500 light years away, spans about 20 light-years, and is visible with binoculars toward the constellation of the Serpent (Serpens). This picture involved over 12 hours of imaging and combines three specific emitted colors emitted by sulfur (colored as red), hydrogen (yellow), and oxygen (blue).”

The Poet: John O'Donohue, "In These Times "

"In These Times"

 "In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety,
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down,
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction 
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts 
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage 
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home."

~ John O'Donohue,
from "To Bless the Space Between Us"

"No Special Hurry..."

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry.”
- Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell To Arms”
Freely download “A Farewell To Arms”, by Ernest Hemingway, here:

Gregory Mannarino, "Monkeys And Aliens! Fed Threatens A BIG Slowdown In The Economy And High Unemployment"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 9/21/22:
"Monkeys And Aliens! Fed Threatens A BIG 
Slowdown In The Economy And High Unemployment"
Comments here:
Market Data Center

The Daily "Near You?"

Lawton, Oklahoma, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"For Whom the Bell Tolls"

"For Whom the Bell Tolls"

"No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee."

- John Donne

Canadian Prepper, "Urgent Warning: Prepare to Get Drafted for WW3"

Canadian Prepper, 9/21/22:
"Urgent Warning: Prepare to Get Drafted for WW3"
"Everything just changed as tensions 
escalate to a whole new level. Get Ready."
Comments here:

"Economic Collapse Has Arrived In Germany. Will The U.S. Be Close Behind?"

"Economic Collapse Has Arrived In Germany. 
Will The U.S. Be Close Behind?"
by Michael Snyder

"Things are starting to get really crazy in Germany. The Germans are dealing with the worst inflation crisis that they have seen since the days of the Weimar Republic, and meanwhile economic activity is starting to shut down all over the nation. Of course other European countries are facing similar problems, but Germany was supposed to be the economic rock that the rest of Europe could always depend upon. Unfortunately, the decision by the Russians to cut off the flow of gas through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline is hitting Germany extremely hard. If we could just get both sides to agree to end the war in Ukraine, that would greatly help matters, but that simply isn’t going to happen. In fact, it appears that Vladimir Putin has decided to greatly escalate matters, and the western powers will inevitably greatly escalate matters in response. What this means is that the economic turmoil that we are witnessing in Europe isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

This week, we got some inflation numbers out of Germany that are so high that it is difficult to believe that they are actually real…"German producer prices rose in August at the fastest rate since records began in 1949, data released by the Federal Statistical Office showed today, pointing to a further increase in consumer prices. Producer prices of industrial products rose by 45.8 percent compared to the same month of last year. Compared to July 2022, prices rose 7.9 percent."

Soaring energy prices on the back of Russia’s war against the Ukraine remain the main driver behind rising prices. If we continue to see monthly increases of around 8 percent, next year at this time we could be talking about a yearly jump of close to 100 percent. Wow. How bad do things have to get before we actually start using the term “hyperinflation”?

Energy prices are the biggest reason why inflation has gotten completely out of control, and the German government has been forced to nationalize a huge natural gas company in order to keep it from going under…"The German government is closing in on an agreement to nationalize gas giant Uniper SE, as Berlin moves to stave off a collapse of the country’s energy sector. A provisional agreement between the government, Uniper and its main shareholder, Finland’s Fortum Oyj, has been reached, according to people familiar with the situation. While contracts haven’t been signed, Berlin is aiming for an announcement later this week. According to the CEO of Uniper, the company has been losing about 100 million euros a day during this crisis."

Needless to say, the German government cannot save everyone, and so a lot of firms won’t survive this crisis at all. For example, a manufacturer that has been making toilet paper for Germans for nearly 100 years is now headed into insolvency…"Hakle has been a German household name since 1928, but the Duesseldorf-based toilet paper manufacturer said all it took was this summer’s gas price shock to drive it into insolvency."

Sadly, this is just the beginning. According to the German central bank, the nation is moving into a “broad-based and prolonged decline in economic output”…“Economic activity may pull back somewhat this quarter and shrink markedly in the autumn and winter months,” the central bank said, adding that it didn’t forecast this adverse scenario in a June report. Bundesbank continued: “There are mounting signs of a recession in the German economy in the sense of a clear, broad-based and prolonged decline in economic output.” It said a contraction is expected in the third quarter with deeper declines in economic activity in the fourth. “High inflation and uncertainty with regard to energy supply and its costs affect not only the gas and electricity-intensive industry and its export business and investments, but also private consumption and the service providers dependent on it,” the central bank said."

You can refer to such a scenario as a “recession” or a “depression” if it makes you feel better. I call it an economic collapse. The U.S. economy will soon be experiencing immense turmoil as well.According to billionaire Barry Sternlicht, the Fed’s exceedingly foolish policies are pushing us toward a “serious recession”…"In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday, Barry Sternlicht, the chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital, said he believes Americans are facing a major recession if the Federal Reserve proceeds with several more rate hikes as a means of curbing inflation, which is reportedly the central bank’s plan.

“The economy is braking hard,” Sternlicht told the financial news outlet, according to the Daily Caller. “If the Fed keeps this up, they are going to have a serious recession and people will lose their jobs.”

He is right on target, but instead of saying “people will lose their jobs” he should have noted that lots of people are already being laid off. This is something that I have been documenting on my website for quite some time, and this week we learned that Gap has decided to lay off hundreds of corporate workers…"Gap Inc. is cutting about 500 corporate jobs as the clothing retailer struggles with declining sales. The job cuts, which include open positions, will be primarily at Gap’s offices in San Francisco, New York and Asia and hit various departments, a representative for the retailer confirmed Tuesday. The moves were first reported by The Wall Street Journal."

Ouch. In this environment, very few workers are truly safe. At this point, even the entertainment industry is letting lots of people go…"The struggling TV and film industry continues to run face first into bad news. This week it was reported that Warner Bros. Discovery was firing 100 TV ad salespeople at the same time that Paramount has considered ending offering Showtime as a standalone service, Bloomberg reported. Netflix followed suit with their own layoffs, the report says. The company has reportedly let go hundreds of employees and abandoned some of its office space. At the same time, the firm’s stock price has collapsed and fallen more than 60% from its all time highs."

Back in 2008 and 2009, millions of Americans lost their jobs. Will we see something similar in the months ahead? And just like during “the Great Recession”, the housing market is really starting to slow down. In fact, we just learned that homebuilder confidence has now fallen for nine months in a row…"The confidence of builders of single-family houses fell again in September, the ninth month in a row of declines, “as the combination of elevated interest rates, persistent building material supply chain disruptions, and high home prices continue to take a toll on affordability,” the NAHB report said. With today’s index value of 46, the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index is now below where it had been in May 2006, on the way down into the Housing Bust."

This time around, it won’t just be a few areas of the planet that suffer. At this moment we are literally witnessing economic implosions all over the planet, and the stage is being set for an immensely painful 2023. The one thing that could really turn things around would be peace.

Unfortunately, global leaders on both sides seem absolutely determined to drag us into the type of cataclysmic global conflict that I have been warning about for years. So there isn’t going to be peace, and that means that things are going to get really bad in 2023 and beyond.

But I also believe that you were put at this specific moment in history for a reason. It is when times are the darkest that the greatest good can be done, and that is something that we will all need to remember during the very dark times in front of us."

"It Would Indeed..."

 

"At the Precipice of World War 3"

"At the Precipice of World War 3"
by Akrainer

"Clash of the two systems of governance, as George Soros formulated it in his remarks to the World Economic Forum conference in May, seems to have reached a phase transition. Russian President Vladimir Putin has returned from last week’s summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization conference in Samarkand with a palpable sense of confidence and determination, and it does appear that he has obtained reassurances of support from all the key leaders during the event, including China’s Xi Jinping, India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi, and even the new PM of Pakistan, Shehbaz Sharif.

Russia is ready to shift gears: Now, the leadership of Russia is prepared to shift gears in Ukraine. While annexation of the Donbas region wasn’t part of the objectives set out at the outset of the “Special Military Operation” in February, this could be about to change. Namely, public referendums have been announced and will be held between 23 and 27 September in all the key regions controlled by Russia. The people will be voting on whether they want to become absorbed in Russian federation. This move will have a massive impact and remove any legal strictures the Russian leadership observed by waging war in foreign territory. Soon, this could become Russian territory and any attacks on Kherson, Donetsk, Lugansk or Zaporozhye will be regarded as attacks on Russia proper.

Laws for thee, rules for me: This prospect has triggered quite a consternation in Washington, London and Bruxelles where political and military leaderships are sure to reject any such changes. American Secretary of State Antony Blinken wasted no time to declare that, “Any Russian sham ‘referenda’ in Ukraine would be illegitimate and an affront to the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity…”

Some might disagree, however. In July 2010, the International Court of Justice issued an “Advisory Opinion” on Kosovo (previously part of Serbia) in which it determined a few important points of international law. Namely:

• Unilateral declarations of independence are not illegal under international law.
• People’s right to self-determination supersedes territorial integrity.

But some restrictions do apply, so these principles don’t extend to the likes of the people of Catalunya. Or Crimea. Or for any people in Ukraine for that matter. You see, there’s international law and then there’s the rules. We use rules to determine which laws we observe and which ones we disregard. So rules must necessarily supersede the law. I think.

Rules based order or bust…: Jest aside, western empire is now overtly and explicitly committed to this “rules based global order,” and Russia is clearly the greatest threat to that order. At last weekend’s NATO’s Military Committee Conference held in Tallinn (16-18 Sep. 2022), Estonia’s Defense Forces Chief Martin Herem delivered a speech stating as follows: “Collectively we must deny Russia the possibility to change today’s rules-based international order.” On that same occasion, the Committee’s chairman Admiral Rob Bauer announced “the biggest overhaul of our military structures since 1949.”

This morning’s news from Russia are more ominous still. Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu made it explicit that, “The time has come when we are at war with NATO and the collective West.” Apparently, Russia is now preparing to mobilize another 300,000 reservists and we know that such a force is not required in Ukraine alone. Another rumor from Russia this morning is that the Governor of the Central Bank of Russia, Elvira Niabullina has tendered her resignation to President Putin.

It appears that we are at the precipice of a major escalation and the channels of de-escalation are falling silent. For reasons that are still unclear, a call between Vladimir Putin and French President Macron failed to even take place yesterday (according to some reports, it was Vladimir Putin who wanted to speak to Macron but Macron declined the call while other reports stated the opposite – Macron tried to get through but Putin declined).

Boris Johnson’s excellent adventure: We should recall that only a few months ago Henry Kissinger warned the collective west to stand down and avoid this conflict even at the price of ceding Ukraine’s territory, but his warnings fell on deaf ears. That was in late May. In fact in April and in July of this year negotiated settlement of the Ukraine crisis was being seriously discussed between Kiev and Moscow. But on both occasions, Boris Johnson intervened to torpedo the negotiations and abruptly flew to Kiev to persuade Ukraine’s President Zelensky to end the talks.

This was the same Boris Johnson who announced the imminent conflict in a speech to the dignitaries in – where else – the City of London last November. On that occasion, he issued a warning to the European governments: “We hope that our friends [in Europe] may recognize that a choice is shortly coming between mainlining ever more Russian hydrocarbons in giant new pipelines and sticking up for Ukraine and championing the cause of peace and stability.”

When the history of this conflict is being written in the future, it will have to answer how it was possible for one deeply unpopular leader to wield such disproportionate influence on events so far from his own nation’s borders, why he acted as he did and on whose behalf he did so. What is certain is that his actions benefited neither the British nor the Ukrainian people."

"No One Has Planned for This - Get Ready to Pay More"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 9/21/22:
"No One Has Planned for This -
 Get Ready to Pay More"
"There are so many things that are going to be affected as a result of the Feds decision with interest rates. It’s going to affect everyone. Get ready to pay more for everything in your life."
Comments here:
Related:

Gregory Mannarino, "Today - Big Day For The Markets!"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 9/21/22:
"Today - Big Day For The Markets!"
Comments here:

"How It Really Is"

 

"Checkmate"

"Checkmate"
We’ve arrived at a watershed moment in history.
by Will Schryver

"It is a foregone conclusion that Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporozhye, and Kherson regions of the former Novorossiya will be re-assimilated into the Russian motherland. Odessa will follow at some point in the not-so-distant future. And the empire’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of these developments will prove utterly irrelevant.

Western media and puppet politicians can scream “Russian aggression” and “sham election” all they want, but the unadorned fact is that these regions are overwhelmingly ethnic Russians whose collective desire is to be reunited with what they view as a powerful and ascendant Russia.

In conjunction with this shrewd maneuver, Vladimir Putin has announced in his September 21st address a major escalation of Russian military action in Ukraine – thereby making available a significant amount of Russia’s as yet untapped military strength and capabilities. This will result in a rapid acceleration in the ongoing process of annihilation of the Ukrainian military, its mountains of NATO weaponry, and its numerous “foreign volunteers”.

This, of course, presents the empire with an existential dilemma. The defeat of NATO’s proxy army, weapons, and leadership in Ukraine at the hands of the Russians will be viewed all around the world as an unprecedented defeat of American hegemony; a watershed moment that will carry with it profound geopolitical consequences.

As I have argued for months now, it will mean the end of NATO as a credible military alliance. It will mean the end of the European Union as presently constituted. In other words, a decisive defeat of the empire’s aspirations in Ukraine will be viewed in Washington, London, and Brussels as an existential threat – which it is. And, as such, it is difficult for me to envision them submissively acquiescing to the outcome.

Therefore we have, as I wrote a few weeks back, now well and truly arrived at 'The Moment of Greatest Danger.'"
Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.

Greg Hunter, "FDA Covered Up CV19 Vax Biological Catastrophe"

"FDA Covered Up CV19 Vax Biological Catastrophe"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Dr. Peter McCullough is a renowned cardiologist who fought the accepted government CV19 vax narrative from the beginning. Dr. McCullough said, “The injections should have been halted in February of 2021.” Instead, the government mandated the clot shots, and the CDC and FDA covered up the problems. The FDA is still covering up massive deaths and injuries from the mRNA shots. Dr. McCullough explains, “It’s the great gamble of the Covid19 vaccine program. It was the gamble of a lifetime, if not a gamble of all-time. The vaccines install the genetic code for the lethal Wuhan spike protein that was engineered in a bio-security lab in Wuhan, China. This is the worst idea ever to install a fatal protein and have it installed for an uncontrolled duration and an uncontrolled quantity in the human body. This is a biological catastrophe in unspeakable proportions. Nobody wants these shots now, and they are still mandating them and forcing them on people.”

According to Dr. McCullough, the FDA admits the shots cause fatal heart damage, Fatal blood clotting, strokes, neurological injuries and other problems. When the evidence mounted on how deadly and debilitating the CV19 injections were, the FDA covered it all up instead of pulling them off the market. Dr. McCullough says, “Now, we have the additional deaths from the CV19 vaccines. The CDC shows 14,000 died the next day, and that is a gross under-reporting. The World Council for Health points out four agencies, including VAERS with 40,000 certified deaths, and that may be an under-reporting of 100 to 1. It’s a vast number, and no governments are doing investigations. The United States should be doing a full stop on this. Pfizer knew about 1,223 deaths within 90 days of release of their product. Pfizer logged all these deaths, but they didn’t pull their product off the market, and the FDA’s lawyer wanted to block that information from Americans for 55 years. So, the FDA is involved in a cover-up with Pfizer, and almost certainly with Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. It’s an ongoing biological catastrophe.”

McCullough contends that Covid is waning but warns, “What we are left with is just the vaccine injuries and damage itself. I can tell you we are going to have to be quite vigilant. The blood clots and heart damage, I have never ordered so many cardiac MRIs and ultrasound tests for blood clots. People need to be hyper-vigilant. They have put a foreign genetic code in their bodies. It’s produced the lethal Wuhan spike proteins. It’s in their brains, and it’s in their hearts. People can’t feel good that have taken this into their bodies. They have to know they have taken an extraordinary risk. There are over 1,000 papers in the peer-reviewed literature. Not a single paper shows a benefit of these vaccines. 100 percent of it is bad news." There is much more in the 47-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he interviews top 
cardiologist and CV19 expert Dr. Peter McCullough.
Related truth:
"The Vaccine Death Report"
"The data suggests that we may currently be witnessing the
 greatest organized mass murder in the history of our world."



May God have mercy on you if you've taken this shot...

"I Know Not..."

 

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Canadian Prepper, "Its Starting... The Next 24 Hrs. Are Crucial"

Canadian Prepper, 9/20/22:
"Its Starting... The Next 24 Hrs. Are Crucial"
"Everything just changed. In the next 24 hours 
tensions escalate to a whole new level. Get Ready."
Comments here:
Here comes World War III...
A must-read related article:
"God help us."
Update 9/21/22, 12:01 AM:
"Putin Announces Partial Mobilization In Ukraine War 
Escalation, Says West Wants To 'Destroy Russia'"
by Tyler Durden

"In a nationwide address that was delayed from its prime-time Tuesday delivery and ahead of votes in four Ukraine regions to join Russia, on Wednesday morning Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a partial military mobilization, while vowing to use all means necessary to defend Russia and pledged to annex the territories already occupied by Russia, raising the stakes in the seven-month-old conflict.

Calling the moves “urgent, necessary steps to defend the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Russia,” Putin said that Russia is fighting the full might of NATO. The US and its allies, he said, are seeking to “destroy” Russia.

The partial mobilization means that reservists will be drafted into military service, Putin said, starting immediately. Calling up the reserves adds about 300,000 men to Russia's forces. The Armed Forces will draw on military reservists only, and those who have completed national service, the president said promising that they will be provided with additional training along with all the benefits due to people involved in active duty. The measure is "sensible and necessary" under the circumstances, Putin stated, adding that he has already signed an order for the call-up to start immediately.

In his speech, Putin accused Kiev of backing away from peace talks, acting on direct orders from its Western allies. Instead of negotiating, the Ukrainian government has beefed up its military with NATO-trained troops, many of whom are neo-Nazi extremists, he said. Putin also accused the west of using "nuclear blackmail" against Russia noting that "if its territorial integrity is threatened Russia will definitely use all the means at its disposal." to defend Russian territory. "This is not a bluff."

Russian forces sent to Ukraine in February have secured a large portion of territory claimed by the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as well as parts of Ukraine, and the resulting frontline stretches over 1,000km, according to the Russian president.

Putin also commented on the upcoming referendums in the two Donbass republics and two regions of Ukraine currently controlled to a large extent by Russian troops. The territories which include Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia provinces, have announced plebiscites on whether become part of Russia, with the ballots scheduled to start on Friday. Putin said his government will respect the outcome of the four referendums, and provide security for the voting process.

Following Putin's address, Russia's minister of defense Sergei Shoigu also delivered a nationwide TV address, in which he said that the battlefield conditions in Ukraine as "difficult." "We are not fighting with Ukraine, but with the collective west " he said, noting mobilization will be gradual, not one-time. He also added more nuclear threats: "All types of arms, including the nuclear triad, are fulfilling their tasks."

"Walmart And Other Retailers Canceling Billions Of Dollars In Orders As Fears Of A Dark Winter Rising"

Full screen recommended.
"Walmart And Other Retailers Canceling Billions
 Of Dollars In Orders As Fears Of A Dark Winter Rising"
by Epic Economist

"Something really strange is happening in the U.S. retail sector. Walmart, Target, and other major retailers are literally canceling billions of dollars in orders right ahead of the busiest shopping season. Do they know something they aren’t telling us? We’ve never seen such a large-scale order cancellation happening before. Under normal conditions, this wouldn’t make any sense. The holiday season is typically the time when retailers record the highest sales volume in the entire year, and this time in 2021, everyone in the industry was extremely worried about whether there would be enough inventory to meet consumer demand due to global supply chain disruptions. But it seems that things have been turned upside down, and all of a sudden, big retail chains are cutting back and calling off a massive number of orders – and this would only make sense if they could tell that a severe economic downturn was imminent.

Earlier this month, Walmart’s EVP and CFO, John David Rainey, revealed that the company had cleared most of its summer inventory, and now it was reducing exposure in electronics, home, and sporting goods, and canceling billions of dollars in orders to realign inventories. That seems like an extremely odd decision for Walmart to take considering that, not long ago, shoppers were flooding social media with images of bare shelves and thousands of complaints about product shortages at several Walmart stores from all over the nation. Canceling billions of dollars in orders means that we will be seeing many more inventory holes in the coming months.

This week, Target also announced that it was chopping a massive amount of orders in preparation for the months ahead. In a note, Target said it had reduced its “inventory exposure in discretionary categories” by canceling more than $1.5 billion of orders in these categories and marking down products. The chain is much smaller than Walmart, which means that cutting so many orders all at once is a really big deal.

A few days ago, we just learned that Kohl’s and Under Armour have also followed the same move. In a nutshell, all of these retailers are getting really scared about the prospect of being stuck with massive amounts of inventory they cannot sell. They can already see that sales are dropping and economic conditions continue to worsen for consumers, which consequently indicates that economic activity is likely to get much lower than originally anticipated over the next few months.

One corporate executive that recently came forward and publicly admitted that he sees a deep economic downturn on the horizon is FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam. During an interview with CNBC, the CEO actually said he believes we’re “going into a worldwide recession,” and that every sector of the industry is already feeling the early effects of it. The chief executive also highlighted that weakening global shipment volumes drove FedEx’s disappointing results. “We’re seeing that volume decline in every segment around the world, he exposed. “The weekly numbers are not looking so good, so we just assume at this point that the economic conditions are not really good. We are a reflection of everybody else’s business, especially the high-value economy in the world,” he emphasized.

Sadly, that’s the reality many businesses are facing right now. But none of this should come as a surprise. For months, economic numbers have been telling us that big trouble was on the way, and now it’s here for everyone to see it. We must remember that we are already in the midst of a raging economic crisis, and every piece of evidence is telling us that this is just the beginning of something even bigger."
Comments here:

"Broke Americans Buying Halloween Costumes With Credit Cards; Markets Could Be Shocked Tomorrow"

Jeremiah Babe, 9/20/22:
"Broke Americans Buying Halloween Costumes With 
Credit Cards; Markets Could Be Shocked Tomorrow"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Walter Murphy, "A Fifth of Beethoven"

Walter Murphy, "A Fifth of Beethoven"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“This pretty, open cluster of stars, M34, is about the size of the Full Moon on the sky. Easy to appreciate in small telescopes, it lies some 1,800 light-years away in the constellation Perseus. At that distance, M34 physically spans about 15 light-years. Formed at the same time from the same cloud of dust and gas, all the stars of M34 are about 200 million years young.
 
But like any open star cluster orbiting in the plane of our galaxy, M34 will eventually disperse as it experiences gravitational tides and encounters with the Milky Way's interstellar clouds and other stars. Over four billion years ago, our own Sun was likely formed in a similar open star cluster.”

"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”

The Poet: William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

"The Second Coming"

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

- William Butler Yeats, January 1919

“There Is No Reality Anymore…”

“There Is No Reality Anymore…”
by Thad Beversdorf

“I‘d love to change the world, but I don‘t know what to do,
so I’ll leave it up to you…” 

“What a great lyric that is from the late 60′s, early 70′s English band “10 Years After.” I believe this describes that uneasy feeling of discontent that sits deep in the stomach, beneath the day to day exteriors, of so many people today. The world is like a black hole in that it seems to be getting smaller and smaller as the years go by but also heavier and heavier with each passing day.

When I was a teenager and my friends and I were taking reality obscuring substances, one of my buddies (this means you Nichol) would stop us at certain points throughout the night for a reality check. This was just a few moments where we ‘d all gather our senses to make sure the world was still right and then we’d venture back into obscurity. I feel that reality is an old world term. There is no reality anymore. With advances in technology came unending possibilities of if you can dream it they can make it so. The ubiquitous flow of information ensures that the truth is always available but never known with certainty. It means there is no such thing as a reality check. It’s like that dream inside a dream inside a dream. Which reality is real anymore? How deep does the rabbit hole go?

We are raised with pretty standard ideals of what the world is meant to be but these ideals seem to take place only in the movies. It must be incredibly difficult for our young people to reconcile the two worlds, I know it is for me. That which they learn as a child and that which they find has replaced it as a young adult. Our leaders are despicable, arrogant and egotistical fools who pretend we elect them because we don’t see them for what they are. But we elect them because we feel we have no choice. We know what we want the world to be. We know what it should look and feel like. And we know it is not the world in which we live today. I know I’d love to change the world but I don’t know how and so I’ll leave it up to you. And so we continue to move forward down this path, each step uneasy as though something ungood is lurking just around the next corner.

We are able to put that feeling out of our minds for the most part but our subconscious is always aware that things are off. We have all kinds of self help books and new age theories that attempt to make sense of it all and explain why we just aren t happy the way we envision happy should be. Perhaps the only reality is the reality that the world isn’t what we had hoped it would be and we don’t know how to make that right. I’d love to say that if we just stand up and do the right thing, act from our hearts and have good intentions that it could change the world. But quite honestly there are ill-intentioned people that are constructing this new world in which we sub-exist.It is them and us, but they’d never say it that way. Certainly though their intention is not for us to co-exist along side them.

But so we carry on and we, move forward, to the best of our abilities. We accept the good with the bad and acknowledge that everything is a trade off. We believe that if we go to college we stand a better chance in life and so we borrow our first 10 years of post college wages to get an edge over the next guy who is doing the same. When we get out of school we know that it is time to buckle down and get serious. We put our lives on hold in order to focus on the future with the idea that one day we will be sitting on the porch with the person we love, the one we put on hold for all those years, and we will then enjoy our life’s work then.

But then we get further in debt because we need a sleeker car and we need a bigger house but it’s ok because we can just work a little more. And then the kids come and as far as we got to know them they are great, I think. But it’s ok because they just finished college and now they’ve moved back in as the job market is tough out there and so we’re paying off their student loans. Eventually they get away and begin their life’s journey and they take their debt with them. And then we realize, god I’m almost 60. But it feels great because that means soon I’ll be there on the porch getting to know the one I love again and life will be grand at that point.

But then we turn 65 and we realize all those policies that were implemented by all those well-intentioned decision makers have actually left us with very little. And we say it’s ok because we’d be bored anyway just sitting on the porch. And so we take a job waving at people in Walmart but feel like OMG how did I get here. But the shift ends and we go home anxious to spend time with the one we love because, although it’s a terrible thought, we are aware we’re both getting long in the tooth. And so we arrive home only to realize the one we love is now sick and that it’s too late for our days sitting on the porch getting to know each other again. We do everything we can but we cannot afford to help that person who stood quietly behind us all those years as healthcare costs are unrealistically out of touch with reality. And then it hits us that despite taking all the right steps to ensure we have a great life we failed to ever really be happy, to really love and to really accept love. And then it really hits us, this world provides but one shot.

Well, then that feeling of uneasy discontent that shadowed us when we were young is now an intense pain in our heart. And we look out at the world and we ask ourselves how could this have happened? I did everything they told me I was supposed to do, I did everything right! And it becomes clear that life was a chance to change the world, but we didn’t know what to do, and so we left it up to…”