Bill Bonner, "Lock Him Up?"

"Lock Him Up?"

America takes one more step on the road 

to becoming a banana republic

By Bill Bonner

"Yes, we have no bananas,

We have no bananas today..."

~ Louis Prima

San Martin, Argentina - "Lock him up! This headline appeared in The New York Times in December, 2022. "Argentina’s Most Powerful Politician Found Guilty of Fraud." The country’s vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, was sentenced to six years in prison and banned from public office for steering public works contracts to a family friend. Most likely, the case will eventually be heard by Argentina’s Supreme Court. Until then, Mrs. Kirchner can continue to hold office. Without a seat in Congress, Mrs. Kirchner would lose the immunity that protects her from arrest, a fact she was completely clear on. “Put me in jail,” she said."

Three months later, another headline story in the NYT: "Donald Trump Is Indicted in New York." Mr. Trump will be the first former president to face criminal charges. The precise charges are not yet known, but the case is focused on a hush-money payment to a porn star during his 2016 campaign.

One of the hallmarks of banana republics is that the legal system is used as a billy club, to whack political opponents. That’s one reason politicians – such as Danny Ortega in Nicaragua and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina – hang on for so long, even arresting opponents on trumped-up charges, in order to avoid losing an election. Once a politician loses power, his opponents get control of the judicial system and come afterSlip Slidin’ Away

For many years, the US has been lurching towards banana republic status…and now, every step it takes, it steps on another peel. But the US has no bananas. Almost everything concerning Donald J. Trump, for example, is clownish and false, including the charges against him. Even by banana republic standards, the case against him looks like a scam.

The Democrats hate Trump; they pretend he is a threat to their grift. But he never was. Or is. Instead, the Donald plays along – acting like a fool, making enemies of all the Great and the Good – but he is no real disruptor. Yes, he rants and raves – attacking the FBI, the Pentagon, members of Congress – both Republican and Democrat – NATO, trade with China, the New York Times…and so forth. But it is all bummph.

The two keys to elite power in a late, degenerate empire are war and inflation; Donald Trump has always supported both…with big boosts to the Pentagon budget…and the biggest increases to government spending in history.

Nevertheless, while the Democrats pretend to loathe him…the Republicans like him on false pretenses. They take him as a ‘conservative,’ though there is nothing the least bit conservative about him. He favors easy money. He opposes free trade. He pressures the Fed to lower interest rates and Congress to spend more money. On ‘cultural’ issues, too, he is no conservative…as the ‘hush’ money charges show. A real conservative would have only one or at most two mistresses.

Even Trump’s reputation as a shrewd dealmaker is mostly false. His real estate speculations went into bankruptcy 6 times between 1991 and 1992. Then, when New York commercial real estate rose (thanks to the Fed’s ultra-low rates) his fortunes rose too. But now, as interest rates and vacancies go up, so does the cost of rolling over his debt. A crisis in commercial real estate is likely to be the next thing to hit the banks. It is also likely to hit Donald Trump.

Crime and No Punishment: The bottom-line is that Trump is a big mouth, with no fixed or genuine ideas about how a government should function. This makes him an easy mark for the real powers-that-be in the Deep State. Lacking any compass of his own, he goes in the direction of least resistance.

But what’s this? Are his enemies trying to finish him off with thirty-four counts – felonies – for “falsifying business records?” Or, are his friends trying to discredit his opponents? Hard to know. The case is an obvious distraction. Trump had affairs. He tried to keep them under wraps by paying ‘hush’ money. But what, exactly, is the crime? Ms. Kirchner skimmed millions of dollars’ worth of public money…which ended up in her own accounts. A snippet from the press coverage: "One of her co-accused, Jose Lopez — an ex-secretary of public works under both Kirchner governments, was caught in 2016 trying to hide five bags stuffed with $9m and a semi-automatic rifle in a convent..."

That’s a real crime. She stole money from the taxpayers. What is the case against Mr. Trump? In theory, the ‘crime’ is winning the 2016 election by fraudulently presenting himself as a decent man. That is, he ‘hid’ his past by petty paperwork transgressions in order to deceive the voters into voting for him.

Is that it? Is that all there is? Apparently. But was a single voter deceived? Was there any biped in the United States of America who didn’t know, in November 2016, that politicians lie as habitually as most people breathe…all of them try to suppress embarrassing revelations…and that Donald J. Trump was a sleazeball? His opponent, by the way, Hillary Clinton, paid a fine of more than $100,000 for deleting 30,000 emails (public property) and then lying to the FBI about it…and her husband also lied about having an affair, while in the White House, no less. (‘I did not have sex with that woman.’) Neither of them was charged with a crime.

And so, the case against Trump stacks up with the other great fairytales of our time…weapons of mass destruction…Russiagate …“2 weeks to stop the spread”…the ‘rental yacht that destroyed Nord Stream II’…and banana trees sprout up along Pennsylvania Avenue."

- https://bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/

o

Related, sort of... about bananas anyway, lol... 

Take a break and enjoy!

Harry Chapin, "30,000 Pounds of Bananas"

"How It Really Is"

 

"Truth is weirder than any fiction I've seen."

- Hunter S. Thompson

Jim Kunstler, "The Hero’s Journey"

"The Hero’s Journey"

By Jim Kunstler

“If I run, my top priority will be to end the corrupt merger between state and corporate power that has ruined our economy, shattered the middle class, polluted our landscapes and waters, poisoned our children, and robbed us of our values and freedoms.” - Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

"More proof - as if you needed more - that we live in a mentally ill society is the apparently broad acceptance of the idea that “Joe Biden” will run for president again. It’s so obviously preposterous that you have to wonder whether mRNA “vaccines” really do (as rumored) switch off activity in the frontal lobes. Did you happen to see this degenerate catspaw step up to the White House microphone to deliver scripted remarks on the Nashville school shooting only to drift into several minutes of unscripted badinage about how he came downstairs looking for chocolate chip ice cream? There’s your current Leader of the Free World.

We need not belabor the trail of destruction “Joe Biden’s” regime has cut through our country in just over two years. But you must sense nervously that we’re about to reap what this cabal has sown. America is falling apart. “JB” has allowed a rogue bureaucracy to make us a viciously un-free country. Our sleazy Ukraine project is wrecking Western Civ. The rest of the world has noticed and is fast dissociating from us, especially from using our dollar for trade and investment.

They’re engineering an economic smash-up worse than the Great Depression. They’ve torpedoed the rule of law. The Woke Marxist social nuttery they’ve unleashed has disordered millions of young minds. They work overtime to destroy language so that we don’t know what we’re talking about. Their race and gender hustles have made us a clown nation. The worst of us is valorized and the best cancelled. They’ve perverted the election process. And it’s increasingly clear that they’ve disabled and killed at least a million people with their medical tyranny.

You may have noticed that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced he is running for president as a Democrat. I might be wrong, but just now it seems to me that this changes everything. First, let me tell you something interesting about RFK, Jr. Despite the family name and all the baggage that comes with it, he is not the least bit imperial. He’s unpretentious. He communicates in plain English (and with a damaged larynx). I doubt that he entertained any idea of running for office until the current moment. Sometimes the zeitgeist calls, though, and you have to step up, even understanding very clearly that you might get killed for doing it.

Mr. Kennedy’s life has been a rocky hero’s journey. He was a troubled young man, at times lost in drugs. He had a marriage end as badly as possible (wife’s suicide). He’s dedicated the past twenty-five years to fighting the growing menace of Big Pharma and doing it pretty valiantly, considering the US government assists Pharma’s depredations. He wrote THE book about Dr. Anthony Fauci, and it is a helluva book. He’s running in opposition to just about everything that the Democratic Party stands for these days. This must seem strange, but I suspect a substantial portion of rank-and-file Democrats may be secretly anxious to cast off the Woke/Deep State despotism that cloaks the party like a smallpox blanket. For many, it will be like waking from a nightmare.

Now I’m going to tell you something that will blow your mind, something that maybe lurks in a quiet corner of your own brain, something which for my generation, has been hiding inside there for decades, and it is this: There is a deep, primal wish in the American psyche to correct the damage to our country caused by the murders of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. November 22, 1963 was exactly where this nation went off the rails, and many Americans understand that. RFK, Jr. has stated unambiguously that he believes the CIA killed his uncle, the president. And he recently supported the parole of his father’s killer, Sirhan B. Sirhan, suggesting that there was a whole lot more to Bobby’s assassination than that patsy.

Here’s the heart of the matter: that wish to correct the abominations of history is a sentiment much stronger than anything else currently whirring in the fog of emotion that grips a nation in extremis, certainly stronger than all the bullshit embedded in equity, diversity, and inclusion and the bad faith aspirations of the climate change/Great Reset claque. RFK, Jr., represents a way out of all that. He may be strong enough and honorable enough to make that our new national realty.

Then there is Mr. Trump. He’s been on his own even stranger hero’s journey, considering his origins in real estate and showbiz, and his personal peccadillos. Mr. Trump also recognized the evil afoot in our country and he set out to correct all that. He was attacked unfairly and incessantly by people of bad character and ill intent, even to this day as he faces an absurd political prosecution in Manhattan. You have to admire his fortitude and resilience in the face of such massed official bad faith. His first time around in the White House, though, Mr. Trump kind of muffed the job. He had many opportunities to disarm and fire antagonists like Christopher Wray and the perfidious generals who kept backstabbing him, but he just didn’t do it. He got played on the whole Covid fraud and still hasn’t renounced the killer “vaccines” developed in the Warp Speed flimflam.

While I consider the New York case brought by DA Alvin Bragg to be a disreputable shuck and jive, over which Mr. Trump will prevail, and while I recognize him as the current leader in the battle against a Globalist putsch, I think Mr. Kennedy would be a far better choice to clean up the mess that has been made of us. I was particularly unnerved by Mr. Trump’s speech at Mar-a-Lago the night of his indictment. I know many find his manner charming, but to me his mode of speaking seems childish and weirdly inarticulate - and the last thing this country needs is more rhetorical confusion. And I’m also disturbed by the histrionic trappings that went with it - the grandiose music, the myriad flags and seals. It actually has a banana republic flavor.

Mr. Kennedy, on the other hand, brings a solemn humility to the scene. Even in his quavering voice, he speaks clearly and with insight. He’s an excellent writer. He reminds me much more of what was good about our country and the men it once produced than the flamboyant Golden Golem of Greatness. I’m aboard for the ride. It’s going to be goshdarn interesting and I hope the bastards don’t try to kill him, because that will really be the end for us. In his own words:

- https://kunstler.com/

o

"The Hero’s Journey & Spiritual Life in 12 Stages"

o

"RFK Jr. For President, Celente Called It"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Imperial Washington - The New Global Menace" (Excerpt)

"Imperial Washington - The New Global Menace"

by David Stockman

Excerpt: "There is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington - not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or the rubble of what remains of Raqqa. Imperial Washington has become a global menace owing to what didn’t happen in 1991 (when the USSR collapsed). At that crucial inflection point, Bush the Elder should have declared “mission accomplished” and parachuted into the great Ramstein Air Base in Germany to begin the demobilization of America’s war machine.

So doing, he could have slashed the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $250 billion (2015 $); demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; reduced the United States’ standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s.

Unfortunately, George H. W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even middling intelligence. He was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who singlehandedly blew the peace when, in the very year the 77-Years’ War ended with the demise of the Soviet Union, he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the gluttonous emir of Kuwait. But that was none of George Bush’s or America’s business.

Furthermore, George H. W. Bush should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and their neocon pack of jackals to come to power - even if he eventually denounced them in his doddering old age. Alas, upon his death, Bush the Elder was deified, not vilified, by the mainstream press and the bipartisan duopoly. And that tells you all you need to know about why Washington is ensnared in its Forever Wars and is the very reason there is still no peace on earth.

Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991, Washington opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation with Islam and nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today save for forces unleashed by George H. W. Bush’s petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.

We will momentarily get to the 52-year-old error that holds that the Persian Gulf is an American lake and that the answer to high oil prices and energy security is the Fifth Fleet. Suffice it to say here that the answer to high oil prices everywhere and always is high oil prices - a truth driven home in spades by the oil busts of 2009, 2015 and 2020, and the fact the real price of oil today (2022 $) is no higher than it was in the mid-1970s.

But first it is well to remember that in 1991 there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield, MA, Lincoln, NE, or Spokane, WA, when the Cold War ended.

The Warsaw Pact had dissolved into more than a dozen woebegone sovereign statelets; the Soviet Union was now unscrambled into 15 independent and far-flung republics from Belarus to Tajikistan; and the Russian motherland would soon plunge into an economic depression that would leave it with a GDP about the size of Philadelphia. And China’s GDP was even smaller and more primitive than Russia’s. Even as Mr. Deng was discovering the People’s Bank of China’s printing press, which would enable it to become a great mercantilist exporter, an incipient Chinese threat to national security was never in the cards."

Full article is here:

- https://internationalman.com/

"There 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

"I've Been Warned About What Happens Next..."

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper 4/6/23

"I've Been Warned About What Happens Next..."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Small Businesses File For Bankruptcy At Record Pace, Surpassing COVID Crash"

"Small Businesses File For Bankruptcy At Record Pace,

 Surpassing COVID Crash"

by Liam Cosgrove

"Small businesses across the United States are experiencing a surge in bankruptcies, surpassing levels not seen since 2020. According to a UBS note reviewed by The Epoch Times, conditions could become worse as the knock-on effects from the recent banking crises begin to manifest.

The note from UBS Evidence Lab shows private bankruptcy filings in 2023 have exceeded the highest point recorded during the early stages of the COVID pandemic by a considerable amount. The four-week moving average for private filings in late February was 73 percent higher than in June 2020. “We believe one of the more under-appreciated signs of distress in U.S. corporate credit is already emanating from the small and mid-size enterprises sector,” Matthew Mish, head of credit strategy at UBS, wrote in a recently published research note. “The smallest of firms are facing the most severe pressure from rising rates, persistent inflation and slowing growth.” Industries hit hardest by the wave of bankruptcies include real estate, health care, chemicals, and retail outlets, according to the Swiss Bank’s report.

The Federal Reserve’s monetary tightening to combat inflationary pressures has been largely behind the uptick in bankruptcies. UBS indicated that the fear of a credit crunch has further worsened the rise in defaults. Credit conditions are tightening across the spectrum. Large businesses and individual borrowers are feeling the heat as well.

As of February 2023, the monthly bankruptcy filings exceeded 31,000, an 18 percent rise from the 25,564 bankruptcy filings reported in February 2022, according to data provided by the American Bankruptcy Institute. The increase in Chapter 11 bankruptcies—typically used by larger businesses—rose by 83 percent over the same period, with 373 total filings in February of this year.

The White House has downplayed the current economic challenges and their impact on small businesses. Last week, for example, President Joe Biden cited higher rates of new business formation over the past three years—without acknowledging the issues entrepreneurs face. “When I came into office, this economy was reeling. Small businesses were hurting. Literally hundreds of thousands of small businesses had closed across the country. Millions of Americans, many of whom worked in small businesses, lost their jobs through no fault of their own,” he said. “To jumpstart American economic recovery, we needed to help the small businesses, and we needed to help them fast. So we got to work.”

The president claimed that the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 helped the economy by providing emergency loans to millions of businesses. Still, the administration is set to raise the corporate income tax to 28 percent sometime in the coming months. The tax hike will affect small businesses at a time when credit conditions continue to tighten."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

"Cars Will Be Half Off Soon"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 4/7/23

"Cars Will Be Half Off Soon"

"We are hearing from car manufacturers that have such an over abundance of inventory that there are going to be huge problems in maintaining high prices. Car companies are going to have to dramatically lower their prices to get rid of the inventory."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"A San Francisco Tragedy; Are You Ready To Lose Your Job? Walmart Closing"

Jeremiah Babe, 4/6/23

"A San Francisco Tragedy; 

Are You Ready To Lose Your Job? Walmart Closing"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"The Retirement Crisis Financially Destroys The Entire Baby Boomer Generation"

Full screen recommended.

"The Retirement Crisis Financially Destroys 

The Entire Baby Boomer Generation"

By Epic Economist

"The Baby Boomer retirement crisis is a whole lot worse than we’re being told. Thousands of Baby Boomers hit retirement age every day, but less than half of them are financially ready for retirement. Economists argue that by the end of the decade, Social Security will have gone bankrupt, both the stock market and the economy will take a massive hit, our healthcare system will be completely overwhelmed and our workforce will see a huge gap all due to this crisis. Ultimately, it is going to have a detrimental impact on all of our lives, and the most worrying part of it all is that older Americans predict that conditions are going to get even worse for them in the short and longer term. That’s what we’re going to expose today.

Baby Boomers are going to completely change our economic and financial landscape by the end of this decade. The problem is that economists predict this will be a change for the worse. A generation of this size transitioning out of the workforce will inevitably impact the U.S. economy in many more ways than we’re actually being told right now. With more and more boomers elected to begin receiving Social Security benefits, the outlook for the financial health of the fund is concerning.

Amid an ongoing banking collapse that is forcing the government to bail out huge banks, economists question whether politicians will also bail out its citizens. Considering how shockingly large is our current debt load, with the U.S. national debt surpassing $31 trillion, or $246,868 per taxpayer, it’s not unwise to assume that Social Security is likely to go bankrupt.

At the same time, the Baby Boomer retirement crisis will probably disrupt the U.S. job market in a major way. Economists say that they’re paving the way for what is now called "The Great Retirement," which will likely surpass The Great Resignation as the most significant trend in the labor market in the 21st century. By the fall of 2022, almost 30 million Boomers had retired, an increase of 213% from the previous year, the firm reported.

A recent study by Pew also found that one in four workers in the United States is a boomer, amounting to 41 million in total. “The mass retirement likely will lead to an even wider workforce gap as companies will need to fill positions made available after the Boomers' retirement. These workers generally hold higher positions, making the need for recruiters even more critical,” the researchers highlighted.

Given the incredibly large number of retirements, there will be a huge shift in the balance between supply and demand in the overall economy. In other words, we must brace for a significant decrease in consumer spending, which is a decisive component of GDP. On top of all that, experts anticipate the influx of retiring baby boomers will soon lead to healthcare expenses that will outstrip what most retirees have in savings. That’s why many healthcare providers are warning about deteriorating affordability and accessibility for millions of Americans.

At the end of the day, this isn’t simply a retirement crisis, but an economic and financial crisis that will be felt by all of us. All of this means that the future of our younger generations is being stolen from them as our leaders fail to assist older Americans. In fact, at this point, the future in America no longer looks prosperous and promising, but rather worrying and grim."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Adiemus, "In Caelum Fero"

Full screen recommended.

Adiemus, "In Caelum Fero"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"As far as ghosts go, Mirach's Ghost isn't really that scary. Mirach's Ghost is just a faint, fuzzy galaxy, well known to astronomers, that happens to be seen nearly along the line-of-sight to Mirach, a bright star. Centered in this star field, Mirach is also called Beta Andromedae. 

About 200 light-years distant, Mirach is a red giant star, cooler than the Sun but much larger and so intrinsically much brighter than our parent star. In most telescopic views, glare and diffraction spikes tend to hide things that lie near Mirach and make the faint, fuzzy galaxy look like a ghostly internal reflection of the almost overwhelming starlight. Still, appearing in this sharp image just above and to the right of Mirach, Mirach's Ghost is cataloged as galaxy NGC 404 and is estimated to be some 10 million light-years away."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Chet Raymo, “Silk Dawn”

“Silk Dawn”

by Chet Raymo

“A magical morning. Warm and still. The hillside is cloaked in a fine, soft mist that will burn away by ten. I walk down the drive to open the gate. The field is carpeted with silk. Silk made visible by dew. 

The spiders were there all along, of course. Their webs too. Everyday as I walked through the grass, they were there, unseen. Unknowingly, I crushed them with my footfalls. A field full of snares, each silken net flung across the grass, each net with its tunnel lair where the predator waits, patiently, for dinner. And now they are made visible in all their arachnoid glory, each grass tuft slung with Chinese silk, each furze bush as finely draped in silk as a pasha’s palace.”

- http://blog.sciencemusings.com/

Gerald Celente, "Trends In The News"

Strong language alert!

Gerald Celente, 4/6/23

"Trends In The News"

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

- https://trendsresearch.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"World De-Dollarization Will Lead To Global War, Count On It"

Gregory Mannarino, 4/6/23

"World De-Dollarization Will Lead To Global War, Count On It"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Market Data Center, Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data 

"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

“Too Much Rain Will Kill Ya”

“Too Much Rain Will Kill Ya”

by Bruce Krasting

"My first week on Wall Street was in August of 1973. I was newbie to NYC. My office was on the south side of 100 Wall, on the second floor, looking out over Front Street. There was a tremendous thunderstorm one afternoon. I looked out the window as the street filled with water. The flood poured into a street gutter and overwhelmed it. With the gutter flooded, the rats were drowning. They came out of every hole. In twenty minutes, 500 came out of the one gutter I was watching. The rain stopped and the flooding abated. The rats on the street followed the receding water back into their holes. A memorable first impression of life in the financial district."

- http://www.zerohedge.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

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

Paulo Coelho, “Dreams: The 12 Steps”

“Dreams: The 12 Steps”

by Paulo Coelho

"When Joseph Campbell created the expression “follow your blessing,” he was reflecting an idea that seems to be very appropriate right now. In “The Alchemist,” this same idea is called “Personal Legend.” Alan Cohen, a therapist who lives in Hawaii, is also working on this theme. He says that in his lectures he asks those who are dissatisfied with their work and seventy-five percent of the audience raise their hands. Cohen has created a system of twelve steps to help people to rediscover their “blessing” (he is a follower of Campbell):

1. Tell yourself the truth: Draw two columns on a sheet of paper and in the left column write down what you would love to do. Then write down on the other side everything you’re doing without any enthusiasm. Write as if nobody were ever going to read what is there, don’t censure or judge your answers.
 

2. Start slowly, but start: Call your travel agent, look for something that fits your budget; go and see the movie that you’ve been putting off; buy the book that you’ve been wanting to buy. Be generous to yourself and you’ll see that even these small steps will make you feel more alive.
 

3. Stop slowly, but stop: Some things use up all your energy. Do you really need to go that committee meeting? Do you need to help those who do not want to be helped? Does your boss have the right to demand that in addition to your work you have to go to all the same parties that he goes to? When you stop doing what you’re not interested in doing, you’ll realize that you were making more demands of yourself than others were really asking.
 

4. Discover your small talents: What do your friends tell you that you do well? What do you do with relish, even if it’s not perfectly well done? These small talents are hidden messages of your large occult talents.
 

5. Begin to choose: If something gives you pleasure, don’t hesitate. If you’re in doubt, close your eyes, imagine that you’ve made decision A and see all that it will bring you. Now do the same with decision B. The decision that makes you feel more connected to life is the right one – even if it’s not the easiest to make.

6. Don’t base your decisions on financial gain: The gain will come if you really do it with enthusiasm. The same vase, made by a potter who loves what he does and by a man who hates his job, has a soul. It will be quickly sold (in the first case) or will stay on the shelves (in the second case).
 

7. Follow your intuition: The most interesting work is the one where you allow yourself to be creative. Einstein said: “I did not reach my understanding of the Universe using just mathematics.” Descartes, the father of logic, developed his method based on a dream he had.
 

8. Don’t be afraid to change your mind: If you put a decision aside and this bothers you, think again about what you chose. Don’t struggle against what gives you pleasure.
 

9. Learn how to rest: One day a week without thinking about work lets the subconscious help you, and many problems (but not all) are solved without any help from reason.
 

10. Let things show you a happier path: If you are struggling too much for something, without any results appearing, be more flexible and follow the paths that life offers. This does not mean giving up the struggle, growing lazy or leaving things in the hands of others – it means understanding that work with love brings us strength, never despair.
 

11. Read the signs: This is an individual language joined to intuition that appears at the right moments. Even if the signs point in the opposite direction from what you planned, follow them. Sometimes you can go wrong, but this is the best way to learn this new language.
 

12. Finally, take risks! The men who have changed the world set out on their paths through an act of faith. Believe in the force of your dreams. God is fair, He wouldn’t put in your heart a desire that couldn’t come true.”

- http://paulocoelhoblog.com/

"Happily Men Don't Realize..."

"Happily men don't realize how stupid they are, or half the world would commit suicide. Knowledge is a will-of-the-wisp, fluttering ever out of the traveller's reach; and a weary journey must be endured before it is even seen. It is only when a man knows a good deal that he discovers how unfathomable is his ignorance. The man who knows nothing is satisfied that there is nothing to know, consequently that he knows everything; and you may more easily persuade him that the moon is made of green cheese than that he is not omniscient."

- W. Somerset Maugham

○

“It takes considerable knowledge just to

realize the extent of your own ignorance.”

- Thomas Sowell

"Surely..."

"It's 3:23 A.M.

"And I'm awake because my great great grandchildren won't let me sleep.

They ask me in dreams,

' What did you do while the planet was plundered?

What did you do when the earth was unraveling?

Surely you did something when the seasons started flailing?

As the mammals, reptiles and birds were all dying?

Did you fill the streets with protest?

When democracy was stolen, what did you do once you knew?

Surely, you did something...'"  

- Drew Dellinger

"Tales From The Calchaqui Valley"

Cuesta del Obispo, "Bishop's Slope",Valles Calchaquíes, 

Salta, Argentina

"Tales From The Calchaqui Valley"

Murder, intrigue and hard luck farming from

 high in Argentina's great northwest...

By Bill Bonner

San Martin, Argentina - "Valley Tales…“The valley is a special place,” commented a neighbor, whose family has been farming here for generations. “It drives some people crazy. Everything is so hard to do…it’s almost impossible to make any money. When new people come in, they bring up experts who tell us how to improve our herds or how to manage our fields. They’re always a disaster. Things that work in other places don’t work here. And things that sound good on paper never work at all. And maybe it’s the isolation…or the altitude…but the valley is full of eccentrics, dreamers, and nuts.”

We weren’t sure which category he put us in. But after 15 years, we had to acknowledge that the valley takes its toll. “Poor Fermina came to visit,” Elizabeth reported. The role of the landowners (those who actually spend time here) is complex. We keep people employed. We bring money into the valley (all of the farms lose money). We come with new machinery and new ways of operating…always hoping for a breakthrough that will finally justify our investments. But we also act as intermediaries between the special life of the valley, its families, its customs and its rituals…and the outside world.

Broken Hearts: Fermina’s son – Fernando – was the second of the mysterious deaths on our farm. Two years ago, Carlos inexplicably and improbably drowned, accidentally, in a reservoir. At least, that’s what they say. Nobody believed it. More recently, Fernando, a gardener, died for no apparent reason at all. “Fermina says he died of a heartbreak,” Elizabeth told us. “That family has so many problems. She’s now alone. Fernando, who must have been about 40 years old, lived with her all his life.

There are other members of the family…and she has at least two grandchildren. But something went very wrong. She never sees them. The grandchildren’s father is in jail…he got a 5-year sentence for beating his wife. And the wife – the mother of the children, Fernando’s sister – is in prison for murdering her youngest child.”

“Well, how can we help Fermina?” we wanted to know. “She has to go to Salta for treatments for breast cancer. She asked if we could help find somewhere she could stay. I told her we’d ask Sergio to look for a hostel near the hospital.”

Broken hearts aren’t the only danger. One of our distant neighbors is a smart agricultural engineer who came from Australia more than 20 years ago. He bought a large farm up in the mountains and put in an extensive system of irrigation. He planted onions. He tried quinoa. He tried alfalfa. He tried grapes. Nothing worked as he hoped.

Maybe it’s the loneliness or the frustration, but then, he took up drinking. That led him to drive off a cliff into the river. He broke a leg and was stuck in his car, while the river water was rising. He was only saved because a faithful friend went looking for him, and found him trapped in the wrecked car.

Lately, he’s turned to tourism. We had our doubts about it when we drove up to visit. Like Gualfin, his ranch is far away and is only accessible by a treacherous, narrow road winding along the side of the mountain. Another friend, who drove up a couple years ago, was so terrified by the road, he couldn’t go on. His wife had to complete the drive. And even we, who are accustomed to the roads of the area, and equipped with 4-wheel drive, still don’t dare to look down as we drive to the Australian’s place. “You don’t understand,” he explained. “Tourists love it. It’s the highlight of their trip. They don’t get that kind of thrill in Paris or New York. They tell their friends back home.”

The Paris of the South: Among the other dreamers in the valley are a “French” couple who got excited about high altitude wine and bought a small vineyard about an hour up the river. Neither is actually French, but they live in Paris…and we enjoyed visits with them when we were both ‘locked down’ during the pandemia. They were staying at a local hotel, with nowhere else to go. So, the management of the hotel, ordered to close its doors, simply handed them the keys and told them to make themselves at home. When we realized they were there, we went to visit.

It was strange, almost spooky, the four of us dining alone in the abandoned hotel. He, Orlando, is a neurologist. More importantly, she, Virginia, is a psychiatrist. Both are witty and charming. And now we have someone to call if either of us starts barking at the moon. Orlando comes here on his vacations to make wine. The bottles are shipped to Paris, where he sells them at very high prices – visiting the finest restaurants in person.

“Our wine is much richer than French wine,” says Orlando. “It’s the soil…the sun…the altitude. Everything is more intense.” Orlando is intense, too. He sneers at other wines…and regards oak barrels – a staple of most high-priced winemakers – as a sin. His wine is excellent. But making it is not easy. One year there is a drought. Another year is an early frost. And this year? “It was a nightmare; the grapes were ready to pick and we couldn’t find any cosecheros (pickers) to pick them. Everybody had grapes to pick…and the pickers were all in town, getting their welfare checks and getting drunk.”

The intensity seems to affect everything and everyone. Sergio is our own “administrador.” He comes every week, bringing news, spare parts, and food, from the city. His roundtrip is about 15 hours, over bumpy…often impassable…roads, while listening to the Grateful Dead.

“I came through the pass…at the Colorados (a stretch of red hills),” he reported yesterday. “It almost never rains here…but it was raining yesterday…just enough to put a slick layer of mud on the road. There were a couple big trucks there. They couldn’t make it up the hill. Their wheels just spun around. They are just going to stay there until the sun comes out. Tomorrow, I guess.”

Lambs to the Slaughter: Sergio comes with dreams too. “I have an idea,” he said, at last night’s dinner. “Sheep.” Ours is a cattle ranch. But along with Sergio at the table, an empty bottle of wine in front of him, was a veterinarian who made the case.

“Sheep are not a commercial enterprise around here. There are a lot of them. But there is no real market. People sell one or two, especially during Holy Week. [The custom is to eat a lamb for Easter Sunday.] But we’re trying to find ways to give the local people something to do…ways that they can earn money. The mayor of Seclantas [a nearby town], for example, is building a licensed slaughterhouse…so they can sell their sheep. And he got a refrigerated truck that will take it to the city.”

“Everybody knows that things from here taste better,” interrupted Sergio. “The wine…the fruit..and the meat too. You get a lamb from down on the pampas and it is not at all the same taste as a lamb from up here. Because the grass is richer. The idea is to develop a breed and a brand – Calchaqui Lamb…or Gualfin Sheep – so we could sell good animals in quantity at a good price.”

You can learn marketing and brand management in business school. Or you can learn it by going into business yourself. Sergio didn’t bother with either. Just as well; real knowledge probably would have quashed the plan. “If it’s alright with you, we’ll start with 50 animals. We’ll get a breed that gives both good wool and good meat. We’ll sell the meat in the city. And we’ll sell the wool to local artisans to make ponchos.”

“Three to one,” was the cryptic remark from Sebastian, the vet. “You can feed three times as many sheep per acre…maybe 5 times. A cow weighs 10 times as much as a sheep. But you get 2 lambs per year, not just one calf. And with three times as many sheep, you end up with 6 times as many young animals. I believe you can make 3 times as much money, too, if you manage it right. Because sheep only take half as much labor.”

Our heads spinning with single digits, it was left to Elizabeth to come up with a plan of action. “Yes…let’s raise sheep. And we can sell them like Orlando sells his wine. We’ll get a 3-legged lamb and lead him around from restaurant to restaurant. Nice and fluffy. Cute. And when people ask how come the leg is missing we’ll explain...This is a Calchaqui lamb. Not a normal lamb. It is so tasty, we didn’t have the heart to eat him all at once.”

- https://bonnerprivateresearch.substack.com/

"They Are Coming After You"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 4/6/23

"They Are Coming After You"

"Janet Yellen has just spoken and said that more people are going to be audited. It looks like a slew of people will be audited that make less than $400,000 a year. This is most of us."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"How It Really Is"

 

“The Myth of Human Progress”

Full screen recommended.

“The Myth of Human Progress”

By Chris Hedges

“Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth – intellectually and emotionally – and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury – as well as unrivaled military and economic power – for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada.

“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today – about 2 billion – is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.

If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

Wright explained this further on our call. “The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. 

We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”

As Wright told me: “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable – the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun – would disappear.

We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we let oil and gas exploration rip when we knew that expanding the carbon economy was suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.

If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”

- https://www.planetaryphilosophy.com/

"Sometimes..."

"Sometimes even to live is an act of courage."

- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether 

it is worth living is whether you have had enough of it."

- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

That ultimately is the question...

"Will Civilization Collapse?"

Full screen recommended.

Academy of Ideas,

"Will Civilization Collapse?"

- https://theacademyofideas.substack.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

"The Collapse Of Complex Societies"

"Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses."

Freely download “The Collapse of Complex Societies” here;

- http://risk.princeton.edu/

"The Uncensored Truth about Inflation - How Inflation Enriches Politicians and the 1%"

Full screen recommended.

Academy of Ideas,

"The Uncensored Truth about Inflation - 

How Inflation Enriches Politicians and the 1%"

- https://theacademyofideas.substack.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

o

Full screen recommended.

Academy of Ideas,

"How Inflation Precipitates Societal Collapse"

- https://theacademyofideas.substack.com/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Critical Alert: The System Has Been Fully Weaponized; Economic Collapse And Hyperinflation"

Gregory Mannarino, 4/6/23

"Critical Alert: The System Has Been Fully Weaponized; 

Economic Collapse And Hyperinflation"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Massive Price Increases At Publix! This Is Crazy! Not Good!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 4/6/23

"Massive Price Increases At Publix! This Is Crazy! Not Good!"

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

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Laguna Indigo"

Full screen recommended.

Liquid Mind, "Laguna Indigo"