Monday, October 17, 2022

"The Long Dark"

"The Long Dark"
by Chris Floyd

"We are in the Long Dark now. Both hope and despair are the enemies of our survival. We must live in the awareness that we might not see the light come back, without ceasing to work - with empathy, anger and knowledge - for its return.

We must be here, in the moment, experiencing its fullness (whatever its horrors or joys), yet be elsewhere, removed from the madness pouring in from every side, the avalanche of degradation. We must be here, now, but also in a future we can’t see or even imagine.

We must see that we are lost, with no clear way forward, no sureties or verities to cling to, no roots to anchor us, no structures within or without that will always keep their coalescence in the chaotic, surging flow.

We must live in discrete moments of illumination and connection, pearls hung on an almost invisible string winding through the darkness. Striving, always striving, but not expecting; striving without hope, without despair, without any certainty at all as to the outcome, good or bad.

These are the conditions of the Long Dark, this is what we have to work with, this is where we find ourselves in the brief time we have in this vast, indifferent, astounding universe. As I once wrote long ago, quoting the old hymn: “Work, for the night is coming.”

So do we counsel fatalism, a dark, defeated surrender, a retreat into bitter, curdled quietude? Not a whit. We advocate action, positive action, unstinting action, doing the only thing that human beings can do, ever: Try this, try that, try something else again; discard those approaches that don't work, that wreak havoc, that breed death and cruelty; fight against everything that would draw us down again into our own mud; expect no quarter, no lasting comfort, no true security; offer no last word, no eternal truth, but just keep stumbling, falling, careening, backsliding, crawling toward the broken light.

And what is this "broken light"? Nothing more than a metaphor for the patches of understanding – awareness, attention, knowledge, connection – that break through our darkness and stupidity for a moment now and then. A light always fractured, under threat, shifting, found then lost again, always lost. For we are creatures steeped in imperfection, in breakage and mutation, tossed up – very briefly – from the boiling, chaotic crucible of Being, itself a ragged work in progress toward unknown ends, or rather, toward no particular end at all. Why should there be an "answer" in such a reality?

What matters is what works – what pulls us from our own darkness as far as possible, for as long as possible. Yet the truth remains that "what works" is always and forever only provisional – what works now, here, might not work there, then. What saves our soul today might make us sick tomorrow.

Thus all we can do is to keep looking, working, trying to clear a little more space for the light, to let it shine on our passions and our confusions, our anger and our hopes, informing and refining them, so that we can see each other better, for a moment – until death shutters all seeing forever."

"This Is Always The Hope..."

“What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time. Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one’s ribs get re-broken again.”
- Inga Muscio

"You Know..."

"You know, we never see the world exactly as it is. We see it as we hope it will be or we fear it might be. And we spend our lives going through a sort of modified stages of grief about that realization. And we deny it, and then we argue with it, and we despair over it. But eventually, and this is my belief, we come to see it, not as despairing, but as vitalizing. We never see the world exactly as it is because we are how the world is." 
- Maria Popova

Bill Bonner, "Louis 14th Has a Toothache"

"Louis 14th Has a Toothache"
A journey back in time to a poorer,
 less dignified, more painful past...
by Bill Bonner

Baltimore, Maryland - "The markets were on edge last week. Up. Down. Sideways. Mr. Market seemed undecided. Unsure. Was the Fed getting ready to ‘pivot?’ Was the recession going to be ‘softer’ than we expected? He didn’t know. But our guess is that the Fed will stick with its rate cuts a while longer… the recession will be deeper than expected… and stock prices have further to fall before finding the bottom.

In the meantime, we’re on our way south… driving down US 95… unarmed. And we’ll take this occasion to develop an old theme… and introduce a new one. We begin, today, by going back in time.

Louis the 14th was the Sun King. He was an ‘absolute monarch’ whose word was law. He was also at the head of what was the 17th century’s richest and most powerful nation: France. Whatever Louis wanted, he got. But he also got things he didn’t want. Dental caries, for example… and a toothache. Charles Spencer, Princess Diana’s brother, describes it: "In the autumn of 1685, Louis developed an agonizing and persistent toothache, and his doctors decided to extract the offending molar."

They did it without local anaesthesia, neither local nor general. And then, with no antiseptic, and limited understanding of post-operative hygiene, an infection soon set it. It spread to the King’s jawbone and threatened his life. The royal sawbones – the best in France – decided on more surgery. Mr. Spencer continues: "They removed all of the teeth from the top layer of his mouth, then punctured his palate and broke his jaw. This was all completed without anaesthetic; the king was awake throughout the procedure."

When the gruesome ordeal was over the medical team cauterized the wounds by placing red-hot coals in his mouth. His life was spared. But not his dignity. When drinking, liquid would sometimes come out of his nose.

Facts of Life: Antiseptics weren’t widely used until 200 years later, when Joseph Lister began applying what we call ‘phenol’ to wounds. Phenol is derived from petroleum distillates. Anaesthetics weren’t in service until a plethora of experiments – also in the 19th century – with chloroform, ether, cocaine and opium led to both general and local pain killing.

Public buildings in France weren’t centrally heated until the 20th century. The Palace of Versailles didn’t get heat until 1956.

Penicillin came on the scene in 1928 when Alexander Fleming extracted it from a laboratory mold. Root canals were done long before the birth of Christ, but the first modern root canal was performed in 1838. They became routine only in the 20th century, with anaesthetic.

At least Louis 14th ate well. For while Louis’s toothache occupied his attention, in the 1690s – 1.5 million people in the world’s richest nation – starved to death. Then, came another famine in 1709, with another 600,000 dead. Famine – like war and slavery – was a ‘fact of life’ in 17th century.

In famines, people do not necessarily die from starvation. Many are undernourished and weakened by hunger; then, they die of opportunistic diseases. Crops fail from time to time. Drought, heat, cold, too much rain… too little sun... all can cause a bad harvest. Then too, crops and farm animals are subject to common illnesses, blights and epizootics.

Working as hard as they could, families could usually produce enough to live on (or else they wouldn’t have survived) but they could rarely produce a substantial surplus… or save it ‘for a rainy day.’And even when they could produce more, food was hard to keep. Fruits and vegetables rotted. Grains were eaten by mice and birds. “Food security” as it is called today, was rare.

I, Breakfast: Throughout the middle ages, and up to the 18th century, there was a major famine almost every 10 to 20 years. Some of them were terrifyingly lethal. The great famine of 1315 killed some 7 million people… or about 1 out of every 13 Europeans. Even as late as the 1840s, the Irish famine killed more than a million – or nearly a quarter of the population. But by the middle of the 19th century, there were few famines in Europe.

The last major famine in France occurred in the years just before the French Revolution. Possibly caused by a volcanic eruption in Iceland, the French went hungry in 1787 and 1788. By 1789, they were ready for a change. Soon, they were cutting off heads by the thousands.

Over the years, the number of people who starve to death has dropped dramatically. Modern, civilized countries suffer more from obesity than from hunger. Food is cheap. Plentiful. And extremely varied. A person in Baltimore can sit down for breakfast and enjoy a bowl of muesli with nuts from California… quinoa from Bolivia… other grains from Iowa and South Dakota… dried raisins from Chile and cashews from Brazil. If he wishes to put in some fresh fruit, he will have no trouble cutting up a banana from the Philippines, blueberries from New Jersey, or strawberries from Florida.

What accounts for this dramatic abundance? Why did the number of starvation victims decline? While deaths from starvation have decreased, so have the number of victims from other natural disasters. Though there are far more people on planet earth than ever before, fewer and fewer of them succumb to nature’s torments.

Convenient Untruths: One of the myths from our last hurricane season is that storms are getting worse… and ‘climate disasters’ are becoming more frequent. When Hurricane Ian struck the west coast of Florida earlier this month, for example, the press was quick to point the finger: at climate change. The Financial Times reported that “hurricane frequency is on the rise.” The New York Times added that “storms are becoming more common in the Atlantic.” The Washington Post got the same memo; “climate change is rapidly fueling super hurricanes,” it told readers.

And then the president himself, Joe Biden, added: "I think the one thing this has finally ended is a discussion about whether or not there’s climate change, and [that] we should do something about it.”

But none of it was true. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had already studied the issue and concluded that “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts.” Nor were hurricanes becoming more intense or more dangerous. “We conclude that the data do not provide compelling evidence” the NOAA wrapped up, for neither more storms nor fiercer storms. If the storms were doing more damage, it was only because there was now more development on the Florida coast to do more damage to.

The reporters must have known the truth. You’d think someone would have clued in the president too. But they chose to ignore the facts in favor of the approved fantasy.

An Embarrassment of Riches: In the 1950s, when we were 8 years old, a snow storm closed the roads of Maryland for a full week. We walked for miles to the closest store to get supplies, pulling a sled behind us. Today, the roads are cleared quickly.

In general, people suffer much less from nature than they used to. When they get a toothache, they go to the dentist and have a fairly painless remedy. When it is cold, they have central heating. When it is hot, they turn on the AC. When the wind blows, they stay in their well-built houses, safe and sound. When it snows, they load up on food and toilet paper… and then drive around in 4-wheel -drive automobiles, waiting for trucks to clear the roads. Even floods are much less dangerous. Usually, the warnings come out hours… days… or weeks in advance. People are given plenty of time to get out of harm’s way… or ‘ride out the storm’ in a protected space.

What accounts for these changes? Nature has not changed much. She still has her tempers and her tantrums. But now they are much less lethal. Few people die, from cold, from heat, from tidal waves, from floods, or from wind. Whatever Mother Nature throws at us, we humans are generally able to cope with it fairly well.

In the very old days, nature was always a threat. Humans were hunters… and also prey. But today, few people are killed by wild beasts. Even tiny beasts – viruses, bacteria, and fungi – are no longer anywhere near as dangerous as they used to be. The Black Death in the 14th century killed an estimated one out of every 4 people in Europe. Then, in the summer of 1665, the Great Plague of London killed 15% of the population of the city. But during the Covid Crisis of 2020, the world’s population actually went up. Fewer than 1 person out of every 10,000 died, and he was usually over the average age of death anyway.

What made the difference? Tune in tomorrow."

The Daily "Near You?"

Ellijay, Georgia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"How Did We Get Here?"

"How Did We Get Here?"
by John Wilder

“Dividing and mutating at the same time?”
– "The Andromeda Strain"

"I think it’s fair to look around and ask a very simple question: How did we get here?

Certainly, the United States is in a heck of a mess in almost any way one can look at it. When it comes to cohesion, half of the country is like dad sitting on his easy chair after a hard day working at the PEZ® mines. The other half just wants to pester him because he doesn’t care enough about The Current Thing. They have been careful to not make dad put the paper down. Yet. Because that’s when the spanking hand comes out.

The ability of our economy to manufacture critical goods has been outsourced around the world, because, let’s face it, no one is better at sewing up a soccer ball than an 8-year-old Pakistani kid. And if we took the time to teach them and spent the money to build the factories, no one is better at making iPhones™ than Chinese women who are locked in those factories who have to put up nets to keep people from actually killing themselves when they try to jump off that same factory roof. I think the Chinese even charge the women an “amusement park ride fee” when they jump.

So, how did we get here? The United States has always had an ornery streak. I think Andrew Jackson would have happily had every single central banker in the United States executed – of course, the central bankers retaliated by putting his face on the $20 bill, but I assure you they waited until they were certain he was dead.

How, then, do you take a country that has divided in a massive War Between The States, been brought back (mostly) together, and divide the nation again? In many ways the three items I’ll bring up are intertwined and feed off of each other, but I’ll take each one in turn.

Propaganda. The first part is to skew the definition of America. America was a nation even up into the 1960s, where most (85%-90%) of people had a common ancestry in northwestern Europe, with Great Britain having the largest contribution. Scots may have had problems with the Irish, and the Irish with the English, they might have been neutral about the Swiss, and all of them might have been irritated by the French and Germans, but the common bounds of country and culture were there.

What changed? The idea that if you came to America, it would be expected that you would assimilate to America. Sure, your name might have been Giuseppe, but your grandkid’s name might be Colin, or Brandon, or Brayden. You left that old world behind and consciously gave it up for the new culture. The American culture.

The first lie is the lie that there is no American culture. I can understand that from the point of view of most of the world. How would a fish know about water when he’s swimming in it? American culture (with due credit to Great Britain for kickstarting it) became the most pervasive in the world, spinning off ideas and music and clothes and food at an amazing rate.

Now, of course, propaganda would tell us that we have no culture, and it is evil for us to expect people who come to our country to learn our language, and respect our culture first. No, that’s inverted. It does no good to a person who would divide a country for that to happen. Instead? It’s evil to ask people to learn English. If they kill chickens to sacrifice to Gorbo and marry off their eight-year-old kids to 32-year-old first cousins? We are expected to celebrate that.

No. That’s an inversion. They came here. If they can’t assimilate into American culture and American norms? Out. And take the chickens.

Other ways that propaganda has hurt America are numerous, probably enough for a book. One that’s still hurting us is the idea that nuclear power is evil. It isn’t. It’s funny that all the Green® power seems to be either more polluting or require those 8-year-old kids in Pakistan to learn how to mine lithium rather than sew up soccer balls to make batteries for cars fueled on pure Hopium. No, if you don’t like oil and gas, the only real solution is either condemning the country to an unending abject poverty or to build nuclear power plants.

The warfare culture post 9/11 has also been difficult. What, exactly, were we doing in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden assumed ocean temperature? Don’t know. Why did we go into Iraq? Don’t know. Why did we overthrow governments in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?

Don’t know. But the propaganda that accompanied all of those divided the country, though it’s not nearly as bad as the race grievance industry that’s been in full tilt in the last two decades – but I’ll save that for a future post.

Pathological Altruism. If I have a puppy, and it piddles on the floor and everyone laughs and it’s cute, well, when it’s a big dog no one laughs. Then the dog wonders why I’m beating it for something I was laughing about. No one wants to be the bad guy and say, “No, you have to be punished for your actions so you won’t do it again.” Everyone wants to give people another chance.

A friend of mine had his house broken into. They were able to catch the criminals, and he attended the trial. Result of them stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of his property? A suspended sentence for one guy (who had multiple prior felony convictions) and two years for the other. What message, exactly, is that sending?

The Hart-Cellar Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (plus the amnesties that have followed and will follow) are horrifying in their pathological altruism and use of propaganda. The composition of the country has changed - it's no longer a nation. Where once there was a central culture, now every viewpoint is expected to be equally valid, and (I’m not making this up) the incoming medical school class pledged to honor “all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”

Let’s go kill some chickens, because that will get rid of the gunshot wound. Oh, right, don’t forget the Ouija® board.

Corruption. The United States has always been corrupt, let’s get that out first. But the beauty of the corruption early on is that, mostly, it was limited because the scope of the Federal government was limited. Sure, Sheriff Smith over in Mount Pilot would take bribes, but he’d eventually be caught. And did several members of the state legislature take bribes to get the “right” senator into office?

Sure. That happened, too. Three events ushered in eras of nearly unfettered power for the Federal government: the Civil War, the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the New Deal. The Civil War ended the idea that the Several States were sovereign – they became mere political subdivisions of the United States. The 16th and This level of corruption concentrated power at the Federal level and made the farces we see today where people who are on the Right receive massive sentences at the Federal level for minor crimes, but people on the Left are not even indicted, and almost anyone who has power has a free pass for anything but killing someone on-screen at halftime during the Superbowl™, and that only counts as a delay of game penalty.

Amendments made it possible to tax and ended the appointment of Senators. Now, Senators became Representatives with six-year terms, rather than appointed representatives of the Several States – a huge difference.

I originally had more items here, but had to delete them because otherwise this could become a book. I’m certain, though, that the top three cover it well enough for now. I do think that America is getting ready to get out of the easy chair. And the spanking hand is getting ready. "

"Shopping At Walgreens! Crazy High Prices! This Is Ridiculous!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 10/17/22:
"Shopping At Walgreens!
 Crazy High Prices! This Is Ridiculous!"
"In today's vlog we are at Walgreens, and are noticing very high prices! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and find ways to save money! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Comments here:

"This Is The New Normal"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 10/17/22:
"This Is The New Normal"
"Experts from several different banks are telling us that we need to get ready for a prolonged inflationary spike and interest rates to explode. Business will never be the same because we are in a recession right now and this will turn into a depression."
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "Factory Activity Craters As Economic Freefall Worsens"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 10/17/22:
"Factory Activity Craters As Economic Freefall Worsens"
Comments here:

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"

"Has Our Luck Finally Run Out?"
by Charles Hugh-Smith

"Long-term cycles escape our notice because they play out over many years or even decades; few noticed the decreasing rainfall in the Mediterranean region in 150 A.D. but this gradual decline in rainfall slowly but surely reduced the grain harvests of the Roman Empire, which coupled with rising populations resulted in a reduced caloric intake for many people. This weakened their immune systems in subtle ways, leaving them more vulnerable to the Antonine Plague of 165 AD. The decline of temperatures in Northern Europe in the early 1300s led to “years without summer” and failed grain harvests which reduced the caloric intake of most people, leaving them weakened and more vulnerable to the Black Plague which swept Europe in 1347.

I’ve mentioned the book "The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire" a number of times as a source for understanding the impact of natural cycles on human civilization. It’s important to note that the natural cycles and pandemics of 200 AD didn’t just cripple the Roman Empire; this same era saw the collapse of the mighty Parthian Empire of Persia, the kingdoms of India and the Han Dynasty in China.

In addition to natural cycles, there are human socio-economic cycles of debt and decay of civic values and the social contract: a proliferation of parasitic elites, a weakening of state finances and a decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor. The rising dependence on debt and its eventual collapse is a cycle noted by Kondratieff and others, and Peter Turchin listed these three dynamics as the key drivers of decisive discord of the kind that brings down empires and nations. All three are playing out globally in the present.

In this context, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a political expression of long-brewing discontent with precisely these issues: the rise of self-serving parasitic elites, the decay/corruption of the social contract and state finances and the decades-long decline in the purchasing power of wages/labor.

Which brings us to karma, a topic of some confusion in Western cultures more familiar with Divine Retribution than with actions having consequences even without Divine Intervention, which is the essence of karma. Broadly speaking, the U.S. squandered the opportunities presented by the end of the Cold War 30 years ago on hubristic Exceptionalism, wars of choice, parasitic elites and an unprecedented waste of resources on unproductive consumption.

Now the plan – for lack of any real plan – is to borrow trillions of dollars to fund an even more spectacular orgy of unproductive consumption, on the bizarre belief that “money” can be conjured out of thin air in essentially infinite quantities and squandered, and there will magically be no consequences of this trickery in the real world.

Actions have consequences, and after 30 years of waste, fraud and corruption being normalized by the parasitic elites while the purchasing power of labor decayed, the karmic consequences can no longer be delayed by doing more of what’s hollowed out the economy and society.

Which brings us to luck. As a general rule, historians seek explanations which leave luck out of the equation. This gives us a false confidence in the predictability and power of human will and action and cycles. Yes, cycles and human action influence outcomes, but we do a great disservice by shunting luck into the shadows as a non-factor.

If Emperor Pius had chosen someone other than Marcus Aurelius as his successor, someone weak, vain and self-absorbed like so many of Rome’s late-stage emperors, then Rome would have fallen by 170 AD as the Antonine Plague crippled finances and the army, and the invading hordes would have swept the empire into the dustbin of history. It can be argued that only Marcus Aurelius had the experience and character to sell off the Imperial treasure to raise the money needed to pay the soldiers and spend virtually his entire term in power in the front lines of battle, preserving Rome from complete collapse. That was good judgement by Pius but also good luck.

As we ponder luck, consider the estimate that had the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago struck the Earth 30 minutes earlier or later, it would not have generated the Nuclear Winter that destroyed the dinosaurs. (A direct hit in deep water would have spawned a monstrous tsunami, but no dust cloud. A direct hit on land would have raised a dust cloud but without the water vapor/steam generated by the vaporization of millions of gallons of sea water, the cloud wouldn’t have risen high enough to encircle the planet.) That was bad luck for the dinosaurs, and good luck for the mammals who replaced them.

The global economy has been extraordinarily lucky for 75 years. Food and energy have been cheap and abundant. (If you think food and energy are expensive now, think about prices doubling or tripling, and then doubling again.)

In our complacency and hubris, we attribute this to our wonderful technologies, which we assume guarantee us permanent surpluses of energy and food. The idea that technology has reached hard limits or that it could fail doesn’t occur to us. We’ve taken good luck to be our birthright because it’s all we’ve known. We attribute this good fortune to things within our control – technology, wise investments and policies, etc. The possibility that all these powers that we consider so godlike are insignificant doesn’t occur to us because we’ve enjoyed the favorable winds of luck without even being aware of it.

We are woefully unprepared for a long run of bad luck. My sense is the cycles have turned and the good luck has drained from the hour-glass. Energy and food will no longer be cheap and abundant, our luck in leadership will vanish, and our vaunted technologies will fail to maintain an abundance so vast that we can squander the finite wealth of soil, water, resources and energy on mindless consumption.

I’m reminded of a line from an Albert King song, "Born Under a Bad Sign" (composed by Booker T. Jones and William Bell): “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” The next five years might have us singing this line with feeling."
Albert King, "Born Under a Bad Sign"

"We Don't Have A Clue..."

“We don’t have a clue what’s really going down, we just kid ourselves that we’re in control of our lives while a paper’s thickness away things that would drive us mad if we thought about them for too long play with us, and move us around from room to room, and put us away at night when they’re tired, or bored.”
- Neil Gaiman

Jim Kunstler, "American Inquisition"

"American Inquisition"
by Jim Kunstler

"The world turns and things change. Everybody knows that. But the turnings and changings throw off sparks, which light fires. The intellectual turnings of the European Renaissance lit fires in the lumbering bureaucracy of Roman Catholicism, burdened as it was with abstruse theology larded with lingering, age-old superstition. Witch hunts, inquisitions, and persecutions ensued, even as the authority of the old order wobbled and frayed. The gross cruelties of the people in charge didn’t bolster their prestige, and a few centuries later you see the result: belief is dead.

Likewise in Western Civ today. Our authorities have disgraced themselves behind a new theology of degenerate “science” that veers back into superstition and necromancy. Proof that they don’t believe their own story shows in their desperate efforts to hide the data, confabulate numbers, ignore true facts, and lash out viciously at anyone who discloses their zealous deceits.

Case in point: the persecution of Meryl Nass, MD, in the state of Maine by its Board of Licensure in Medicine. Dr. Nass is an internal medicine physician and a recognized expert in bioterrorism who famously uncovered the origin of the mysterious “Gulf War Syndrome” as a reaction to the US Army’s own anthrax vaccine. She has testified before Congress and in many state legislatures about vaccine safety. After the emergence of Covid-19, Dr. Nass spoke out and blogged about the dangers of the new vaccines, and in favor of early treatment protocols using ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Her outspokeness attracted the ire of Maine Governor Janet Mills, and Mills’s sister, Dora Ann Mills, the “Chief Improvement Officer” at Maine Health, a huge network of twelve hospitals, 1,700 doctors, and 22,000 employees, deeply invested in the Covid vaccine program.

In January of this year, Dr. Nass’s license was suspended by the Licensure Board based on complaints by two “activists” that she was “spreading misinformation” and for her use of early treatment protocols with her own patients. The board compelled Dr. Nass to undergo a neuropsychological evaluation to determine if she was a drug abuser or suffered from mental illness. (Flag that, since it implies official defamation of her character.) The board accused her of “fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” in her practice, “conduct that evidences a lack of ability or fitness,” and being “an immediate jeopardy” to public health.

For most of this year, the board refused to entertain any defense by Dr. Nass for her suspension until a hearing held last week, October 11, when she appeared before the Licensure Board with her attorney, Gene Libby. The hearing in its entirety can be watched on video at Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense website. (The first two-thirds the board prosecutes its case; the last hour Dr. Nass presents her defense.) Days before the hearing, the Licensure Board withdrew all the “misinformation” charges against Dr. Nass without explanation and now bases its case on Dr. Nass’s use of early treatment protocols.

The hearing was highly instructive on the tactics and strategies for defeating official persecutions against doctors in America (and broadly across all of Western Civ these days), since the Maine licensure Board acted with obvious ignorance and malice that is easily revealed. Dr. Nass’s attorney Gene Libby deftly got the Board on-record attesting to their own deliberate misconduct. For instance, he repeatedly invoked their charges against “spreading misinformation,” forcing the chair, an eye doctor named Maroulla S. Gleaton, to affirm that the charges had been precipitously dropped days before. There was also some lively discussion of the board’s imputations against Dr. Nass’s mental health and insinuations of drug abuse — Dr. Nass testified that she’d never been treated for mental health issues, had never taken pharmaceuticals for them, never took illicit drugs or been accused of it, and, where alcohol was concerned, enjoyed “about five drinks a year.”

Watch the video. I think you can see that the Licensure Board members begin to realize in the proceeding that Dr. Nass is fixing to sue the living sh*t out of them, and that just about everything they’ve said implicates them in a malice-driven campaign to defame her. In fact, it may be appropriate as events move forward for a court to recommend suspending the medical license of board chair Maroulla S. Gleaton, and the several other board members who are doctors (some are not) for official misconduct, as well as paying damages to Dr. Nass.

The archbishops, confessors, and torturors in the Inquisitions of yore had, in retrospect, at least one excuse for their misdeeds (what we might call today “crimes against humanity”): empirical science was then in its infancy and their ideas about how the world worked were still largely driven by myth, fear, and occultism. Until fairly recently, when Western Civ went off-the-rails, the thinking classes of America would have easily labeled the activities of the old Inquisition as a form of group insanity.

Alas, the thinking classes across Western Civ have now gone insane. Today, they are the ones perpetrating real crimes against humanity. They have given themselves permission - as elites will - to behave cruelly, unjustly, and idiotically against the public interest and against the inherent rights of individuals to fair treatment. They’ve subjected millions to injury and death. They’ve maintained the fraudulent “Emergency Use Authorization”(EUA) for hugely profitable, ineffective, and dangerous drugs by prohibiting treatments with proven effective drugs - the use of which would nullify the EUA and the legal protections it affords the drug-makers. They’ve concealed the statistics that would show all that. And they appear to be acting with arrant malice driven by political actors offstage.

Dr. Nass is demonstrating how they can be effectively opposed. There should be thousands of heroic figures like her among the doctors of Western Civ. Ask them why they are not standing up in places like California, with its new, idiotically-written law against doctors speaking freely with their patients for the sake of informed consent (“spreading misinformation”). These reprobate lawmakers - and the depraved Governor Gavin Newsom who signed the act - need a lesson in what it means to be civilized. The people running the CDC, the NIH, and the FDA deserve severe floggings in the civil and criminal courts. They all know it now, too, and they’re running scared."

"It'll Do..."

Deputy Wendell: "It's a mess, ain't it Sheriff?"
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: "Well, if it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here."
Apologies to "No Country For Old Men"

Oh, the mess is here alright...and you ain't seen nothin' yet...
Brace for impact.

"How It Really Is"

 

Greg Hunter, "Fed Defending Dollar No Matter What Crashes"

"Fed Defending Dollar No Matter What Crashes"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Catherine Austin Fitts (CAF), Publisher of "The Solari Report" and former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Admin.), says what is coming for the economy is pain–and lots of it. CAF explains, “We are either in a major correction or we are going to go into a bear (market), and a lot of it depends on many different politics. If you look at the money being pumped out on climate change, on green energy, environment and all these different new sort of scams, it depends on how they inject money. It’s either a major correction or it could turn into a bear (market). There is no way to tell because it is purely political.”

Various Fed presidents are repeatedly saying the central bank is going to continue raising interest rates. Why? CAF says, “I think they are going to keep raising interest rates. If you are Federal Reserve, you are playing a global game, and what you have to do is protect the reserve currency status. It looks like to me they have decided that all the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) members need to be in the dollar channel. They are doing everything they can to collapse the market share of the euro and then move that into the dollar syndicate. I think they have to keep driving the dollar up. The U.S dollar index is up to 113, and at one point, it was at 114. One analyst said it was going to 120. 

 They have the entire frontier market and the emerging markets in a bear trap, and that is very significant power. If you are going to go into the woods and shoot the bear, you can’t wound the bear, you have to kill the bear. So, I think the Fed is going to keep doing this for some time now. They don’t mind, as you learned from the pandemic, collapsing the small business side of the economy or collapsing the middle-class... 

They are implementing the ‘Going Direct Reset.’ They are doing a currency reset. What you are looking at is a fundamental reengineering of the governance system on planet Earth. Most of the benefits in the dollar system come from the benefits of having the reserve currency and being able to swap money you print out of thin air for real labor and real commodities worldwide. That’s an enormous benefit, and they are going to protect that benefit. If they don’t protect that benefit, they run the risk of everybody moving out of the channel. This is what the Chinese and Russians are trying to do. They are trying to move out of the dollar channel and trying to create economic resiliency and trade outside the channel. What the Fed is trying to do and the dollar syndicate is trying to do is protect that channel. It’s global government reengineering. It’s 100% power politics, and it’s a war.”

In short, the Fed will defend the dollar and the world reserve currency status no matter how hard the stock market crashes, no matter how much the economy crashes, no matter how much the bond market crashes and no matter how much the housing market crashes.

In closing, CAF says, “Stop helping them. Don’t bank at the big banks, use cash whenever you can, and pray. This is first and foremost a spiritual war, and prayer is the best navigation tool possible. With this level of uncertainty and change, there is no way there is enough experts to help you and enough time to listen to them all. You have to focus on what is important. You have to decide, are you here to be free or are you here to be a slave? There is no more middle of the road. There are two sides, one leads to freedom and one leads to slavery. You have to choose.” There is much more in the 58-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One
 with the Publisher of "The Solari Report," Catherine Austin Fitts.

Sunday, October 16, 2022

"Warning: Major Evacuations Underway, Governments Prepare For Panic And Unrest"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 10/16/22:
"Warning: Major Evacuations Underway, 
Governments Prepare For Panic And Unrest"
"Government insider indicates planning underway to manage nuclear panic, mass evacuations out of Ukraine, China and USA on the brink, Moscow building bunkers and more."
Comments here:

"People Will Be Insane When Food Prices Double Or Triple In The Dark Winter Ahead"

Full screen recommended.
"People Will Be Insane When Food Prices
 Double Or Triple In The Dark Winter Ahead"
by Epic Economist

"Americans are going to get furious when they hear this. After a year of paying the highest food prices in nearly four decades, industry insiders are warning that your grocery bill is set to shoot up even higher this winter – and the coming round of increases is going to be extremely painful! Fifty, sixty, and even seventy percent price hikes are no longer a threat but a reality millions of households in the United States are already facing. At this point, more than one in five American families is reporting food insecurity due to the skyrocketing costs, according to the results of a survey released yesterday by the Urban Institute. 

Our domestic food production took a massive hit this year, and farmers are fuming with the situation, saying that things are definitely “not going to be okay”. Meanwhile, supermarket CEOs and restaurant chains are telling the public to buy and stock up on supplies while they still can because conditions are only going to get more complicated from here on. In other words, it’s time to get ready for a cold dark winter while our hard-working population gets increasingly fed up with the oppressive cost of living, and the abusive surge in food inflation may send some people over the edge. 

Winter is coming, and so is another price shock at grocery stores. Tens of millions of Americans are already struggling with empty shelves and inflated prices, and according to ReadyWise, an emergency food supply company, U.S. consumers shouldn’t ignore food shortage warnings because these alarming trends are expected to continue and worsen in 2023. What consumers are seeing when they go to the supermarket is deeply disturbing. A new report published by the New York Times revealed that shoppers are reporting 50 to 70 percent price increases at their local supermarkets.

Susan Pollack, a property manager from Marina del Rey, Calif., said that at her local Costco, a 5-pack of short ribs is almost 70% higher than a year ago, jumping from around $60 to $200 last month. I told my husband, ‘We’re never having short ribs again,’” she said. The bad news is that the next wave of price increases is expected to reflect the ripple effect of over 24 months of disruptions on our food supply chain and our domestic agricultural production. In plain English: prepare your wallets because another blow is coming.

Some of the nation’s leading food suppliers, farmers, industry insiders, supermarket CEOs, and restaurant chains are all sounding the alarm about winter price hikes. Food-maker and processor, Hormel Foods, shared an even more alarming forecast: Given that prices for corn and soybean meal for livestock feed surged more than 125% and 40%, respectively, prices at the store are going to go up accordingly this winter. If prices of grain, grain-based meals, and meat at our local supermarkets absorb even a fraction of these spikes, this means we are all in deep trouble.

“Food, at its basic level, is not discretionary,” Mark Hamrick, a senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com. “That’s the challenging aspect of the circumstances we are in. Consumers are prepared for high prices to persist in the foreseeable future, and it’s prudent for individuals to continue to be cautious with their household budgets,” he advised. “It’s belt-tightening time and has been for a while,” Hamrick said.

Unfortunately, the mess has been made. The damages done to our food supply chain can’t be undone overnight, and right now, no matter what actions the government takes, life is going to get more expensive for all of us, and a lot more difficult for millions of low-income families out there."
Comments here:
If they'll do this over a TV what happens when there's no food?
We'll find out...

"Lots Of Pain Coming To The Economy; RV Industry Apocalypse; FED Playing With Fire"

Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 10/16/22:
"Lots Of Pain Coming To The Economy;
 RV Industry Apocalypse; FED Playing With Fire"
Comments here:

"You better pray to God for a miracle..."

Musical Interlude: The Traveling Wilburys, "End Of The Line"

The Traveling Wilburys, "End Of The Line"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"To some, it looks like a giant chicken running across the sky. To others, it looks like a gaseous nebula where star formation takes place. Cataloged as IC 2944, the Running Chicken Nebula spans about 100 light years and lies about 6,000 light years away toward the constellation of the Centaur (Centaurus). 
The featured image, shown in scientifically assigned colors, was captured recently in a 12-hour exposure. The star cluster Collinder 249 is visible embedded in the nebula's glowing gas. Although difficult to discern here, several dark molecular clouds with distinct shapes can be found inside the nebula."

"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"

"Three Things..."

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special. I just got one last thing... I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have.”
- Jim Valvano

Chet Raymo, “Why Cranes Fly”

“Why Cranes Fly”
by Chet Raymo

"There were a few Comments here recently about herons, from right around the world. What is the power of this bird to touch our minds and hearts? The naturalist Aldo Leopold was intimately familiar with the cranes of Wisconsin, cousins of our New England great blue heron, the Irish gray heron, and Adam2's aosagi from Japan, and wondered about their ability to move us so deeply. In A Sand County Almanac he watches as a crane "springs his ungainly hulk into the air and flails the morning sun with mighty wings." Our ability to perceive beauty in nature, as in art, begins with the pretty, he says, then moves into qualities of the beautiful yet uncaptured by language. The beauty of the crane lies in this higher realm, he proposes, "beyond the reach of words."

Words may fail, but poets have tried to capture the ineffable.

John Ciardi sees "a leap, a thrust, a long stroke through the cumulus of trees" and stops to praise "that bright original burst that lights the heron on his two soft kissing kites."

Theodore Roethke observes a heron aim his heavy bill above the wood: "The wide wings flap but once to lift him up. A single ripple starts from where he stood."

In Chekhov's "The Three Sisters", sister Masha refuses "to live and not know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why the stars are in the sky. Either you know and you're alive or its all nonsense, all dust in the wind."
Kansas, "Dust in the Wind"

"Here We Are..."

"The human race is a herd. Here we are, unique, eternal aspects of consciousness with an infinity of potential, and we have allowed ourselves to become an unthinking, unquestioning blob of conformity and uniformity. A herd. Once we concede to the herd mentality, we can be controlled and directed by a tiny few. And we are."
- David Icke

The Poet: Joy Harjo, "Eagle Poem"

"Eagle Poem"

"To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty."

~ Joy Harjo

The Daily "Near You?"

South Jordan, Utah, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Thin Red Line: NATO Can’t Afford to Lose Kabul and Kiev"

"The Thin Red Line: 
NATO Can’t Afford to Lose Kabul and Kiev"
by Pepe Escobar

"Let’s start with Pipelineistan. Nearly seven years ago, I showed how Syria was the ultimate Pipelineistan war. Damascus had rejected the – American – plan for a Qatar-Turkey gas pipeline, to the benefit of Iran-Iraq-Syria (for which a memorandum of understanding was signed). What followed was a vicious, concerted “Assad must go” campaign: proxy war as the road to regime change. The toxic dial went exponentially up with the instrumentalization of ISIS – yet another chapter of the war of terror (italics mine). Russia blocked ISIS, thus preventing regime change in Damascus. The Empire of Chaos-favored pipeline bit the dust.

Now the Empire finally exacted payback, blowing up existing pipelines – Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Steam 2 (NS2) – carrying or about to carry Russian gas to a key imperial economic competitor: the EU.

We all know by now that Line B of NS2 has not been bombed, or even punctured, and it’s ready to go. Repairing the other three – punctured – lines would not be a problem: a matter of two months, according to naval engineers. Steel on the Nord Streams is thicker than on modern ships. Gazprom has offered to repair them – as long as Europeans behave like grown-ups and accept strict security conditions.

We all know that’s not going to happen. None of the above is discussed across NATOsan media. That means that Plan A by the usual suspects remains in place: creating a contrived natural gas shortage, leading to the de-industrialization of Europe, all part of the Great Reset, rebranded “The Great Narrative”.

Meanwhile, the EU Muppet Show is discussing the ninth sanction package against Russia. Sweden refuses to share with Russia the results of the dodgy intra-NATO “investigation” of itself on who blew up the Nord Streams.

At Russian Energy Week, President Putin summarized the stark facts. Europe blames Russia for the reliability of its energy supplies even though it was receiving the entire volume it bought under fixed contracts. The “orchestrators of the Nord Stream terrorist attacks are those who profit from them”. Repairing Nord Stream strings “would only make sense in the event of continued operation and security”.

Buying gas on the spot market will cause a €300 billion loss for Europe. The rise in energy prices is not due to the Special Military Operation (SMO), but to the West’s own policies. Yet the Dead Can Dance show must go on. As the EU forbids itself to buy Russian energy, the Brussels Eurocracy skyrockets their debt to the financial casino. The imperial masters laugh all the way to the bank with this form of collectivism – as they continue to profit from using financial markets to pillage and plunder whole nations.

Which bring us to the clincher: the Straussian/neo-con psychos controlling Washington’s foreign policy eventually might – and the operative word is “might” – stop weaponizing Kiev and start negotiations with Moscow only after their main industrial competitors in Europe go bankrupt. But even that would not be enough – because one of NATO’s key “invisible” mandates is to capitalize, whatever means necessary, on food resources across the Pontic-Caspian steppe: we’re talking about 1 million km2 of food production from Bulgaria all the way to Russia.

Judo in Kharkov: The SMO has swiftly transitioned into a “soft” CTO (Counter-Terrorist Operation) even without an official announcement. The no-nonsense approach of the new overall commander with full carte blanche from the Kremlin, General Surovikin, a.k.a. “Armageddon”, speaks for itself. There are absolutely no indicators whatsoever pointing to a Russian defeat anywhere along the over 1,000 km-long frontline. The spun-to-death withdrawal from Kharkov may have been a masterstroke: the first stage of a judo move that, cloaked in legality, fully developed after the terrorist bombing of Krymskiy Most – the Crimea Bridge.

Let’s look at the retreat from Kharkov as a trap – as in Moscow graphically demonstrating “weakness”. That led the Kiev forces – actually their NATO handlers – to gloat about Russia “fleeing”, abandon all caution, and go for broke, even embarking on a terror spiral, from the assassination of Darya Dugina to the attempted destruction of Krymskiy Most.

In terms of Global South public opinion, it’s already established that General Armageddon’s Daily Morning Missile Show is a legal (italics mine) response to a terrorist state. Putin may have sacrificed, for a while, a piece on the chessboard – Kharkov: after all, the SMO mandate is not to hold terrain, but to demilitarize Ukraine. Moscow even won post-Kharkov: all the Ukrainian military equipment accumulated in the area was thrown into offensives, just for the Russian Army to merrily engage in non-stop target practice. And then there’s the real clincher: Kharkov set in motion a series of moves that allowed Putin to eventually go for checkmate, via the missile-heavy “soft” CTO, reducing the collective West to a bunch of headless chickens.

In parallel, the usual suspects continue to relentlessly spin their new nuclear “narrative”. Foreign Minister Lavrov has been forced to repeat ad nauseam that according to Russian nuclear doctrine, a strike may only happen in response to an attack “which endangers the entire existence of the Russian Federation.”

The aim of the D.C. psycho killers – in their wild wet dreams – is to provoke Moscow into using tactical nuclear weapons in the battlefield. That was another vector in rushing the timing of the Crimea Bridge terror attack: after all British intel plans had been swirling for months. That all came to nought. The hysterical Straussian/neocon propaganda machine is frantically, pre-emptively, blaming Putin: he’s “cornered”, he’s “losing”, he’s “getting desperate” so he’ll launch a nuclear strike. It’s no wonder the Doomsday Clock set up by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 is now placed at only 100 seconds from midnight. Right on “Doom’s doorstep”. This is where a bunch of American psychos is leading us.

Life at Doom’s doorstep: As the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder is petrified by the startling Double Fail of a massive economic/military attack, Moscow is systematically preparing for the next military offensive. As it stands, it’s clear that the Anglo-American axis will not negotiate. It has not even tried for the past 8 years, and it’s not about to change course, even incited by an angelic chorus ranging from Elon Musk to Pope Francis.

Instead of going Full Timur, accumulating a pyramid of Ukrainian skulls, Putin has summoned eons of Taoist patience to avoid military solutions. Terror on the Crimea Bridge may have been a game-changer. But the velvet gloves are not totally off: General Armageddon’s daily aerial routine may still be seen as a – relatively polite – warning. Even in his latest landmark speech, which contained a savage indictment of the West, Putin made clear he’s always open for negotiations.

Yet by now, Putin and the Security Council know why the Americans simply can’t negotiate. Ukraine may be just a pawn in their game, but it’s still one of Eurasia’s key geopolitical nodes: whoever controls it, enjoys extra strategic depth. The Russians are very much aware that the usual suspects are obsessed with blowing up the complex process of Eurasia integration – starting with China’s BRI. No wonder important instances of power in Beijing are “uneasy” with the war. Because that’s very bad for business between China and Europe via several trans-Eurasian corridors.

Putin and the Russian Security Council also know that NATO abandoned Afghanistan – an absolutely miserable failure – to place all their chips on Ukraine. So losing both Kabul and Kiev will be the ultimate mortal blow: that means abandoning the 21st Eurasian Century to the Russia-China-Iran strategic partnership.

Sabotage – from the Nord Streams to Krymskiy Most – gives away the desperation game. NATO’s arsenals are virtually empty. What’s left is a war of terror: the Syrianization, actually ISIS-zation of the battlefield. Managed by braindead NATO, acted on the terrain by a cannon fodder horde sprinkled with mercenaries from at least 34 nations.

So Moscow may be forced to go all the way – as the Totally Unplugged Dmitry Medvedev revealed: now this is about eliminating a terrorist regime, totally dismantle its politico-security apparatus and then facilitate the emergence of a different entity. And if NATO still blocks it, direct clash will be inevitable.

NATO’s thin red line is they can’t afford to lose both Kabul and Kiev. Yet it took two acts of terror – on Pipelineistan and on Crimea – to imprint a much starker, burning red line: Russia will not allow the Empire to control Ukraine, whatever it takes. That’s intrinsically linked to the future of the Greater Eurasia Partnership. Welcome to life at Doom’s doorstep."

"The Most Expensive House - Real Estate Lunacy"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 10/16/22:
"The Most Expensive House - Real Estate Lunacy"
"Here it is. The most expensive house in Southern California. It is $36 million which averages out to be $9663 per square foot.This is insane. This is real estate lunacy."
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: Screw-Us-All"

Gregory Mannarino, 10/16/22:
"Markets, A Look Ahead: Screw-Us-All"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: 2002, “Remember Now”; “We Meet Again”

Full screen recommended.
2002, “Remember Now”
Full screen recommended.
2002, “We Meet Again”