Monday, April 10, 2023

"When Empires Die"

"When Empires Die"
by Jeff Thomas

"Years ago, Doug Casey stated, "When empires die, they do so with surprising speed." At the time, that comment raised eyebrows, yet he was quite correct in his observation. Ernest Hemingway made a similar comment when a character in his novel "The Sun Also Rises" was asked how he went bankrupt. The answer was, "Gradually, then suddenly. Again, this sounds cryptic, yet it's accurate.

Any empire, at its peak, is all-powerful, but the fragility of an empire that's in decline is hard to grasp, as the visuals tend not to reveal what's soon to come. Great countries are built upon traditional values – industriousness, self-reliance, honor, etc. But empires are distinctly different. Although it may seem to be a moot point, an empire is a great country whose traditional values have led it to become unusually prosperous. There are many countries, both large and small, that are "great" in their formative values, but only a few become empires.

Yes, the prosperity is brought about through traditional values, but a great country becomes an empire only when its prosperity is sufficient to allow it to branch out – to invade other lands – to plunder their assets and subjugate their peoples. We tend to grasp, through hindsight, that this is what made the Roman Empire possible. And we accept that the Spanish Empire was created through its invasion of the Americas and the plundering of pre-Columbian gold. And we understand that the tiny island of Britain achieved its empire by covering the world with colonies that it had taken by force.

In every case, the pattern was the same – expand, conquer, plunder, dominate. As a British subject, my childhood understanding was that previous empires had come about through nefarious pursuits, but I was encouraged to believe that the British empire was somehow different – that my forefathers sailed the seven seas to liberate distant populations. That, of course, was nonsense.

The British empire is now long over, and the current empire is the United States. Around 1900, the then-great country of the US sought to achieve empire and, at that time, its president, Teddy Roosevelt, was insatiable in his desire to conquer foreign lands, both near (Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama, Puerto Rico, Cuba) and far (Hawaii, Philippines, Japan).

The results of his efforts were mostly successful, and although the countries taken were not called colonies, they were certainly intended to be vassal states. And there can be no question the US government's methods were no kinder than that of the Huns. Some locations, like Hawaii, went fairly peacefully, whilst others, like the Philippines, required brutal slaughter on a grand scale. And such tactics change the nature of a "great" country. Yes, it does allow it to become even greater, in terms of domination, but it ceases to be great in terms of its values.

In most cases, this plants the seeds of empirical collapse. The empire, even as it's growing, is rotting from within, with deteriorating principles and morality – the very traits that created it. This, in turn, causes the empire to develop a habit of subjugation – even over its friends and allies abroad – those countries that got on board to take part in the prosperity. While, to some extent, these loyalties by other nations are genuine, they are treated as lesser nations, eventually causing resentment of the empire. As such, in the latter days of the empire, ally nations become toadies. Their hatred for the empire is palpable, but they maintain their obeisance, grudgingly.

Empires are built upon monetary prosperity. We can understand that an empire, in its heyday, attracts all and sundry to its shores. It builds up the ability to dictate to others since the whole world hopes to gain favour. But, towards the end of the empirical period, it's resented by all those who were once genuine allies.

In its latter days, an empire becomes hollowed out. It's burdened with a costly and top-heavy government. The middle class is expected to provide largess to the masses through bread & circuses, providing fealty for the political class. Traditional values are largely gone, and "everyone seeks to live off everyone else." At this point, the empire is a mere superstructure – one that's becoming increasingly unsound. Importantly, the prosperity that made empire possible is replaced by the illusion of prosperity – debt.

Concurrently, the political class becomes increasingly tyrannical in order to hold the collapsing edifice together. In the final stages, tyrannical efforts increase in both frequency and magnitude in order to maintain the subjugation of the masses for as long as possible. It may be beneficial for the reader to read this last line again, as this development is the most recognizable symptom of the final stage prior to the collapse of empire.

This final period is not only difficult to cope with, it's highly confusing for those living within a dying empire. The edifice still stands. With each election, the electorate hopes that somehow, a champion will spring forth and "put everything back the way it was."

But it's important to note that, historically, this never occurs. Whilst the average citizen hopes in vain for his political leaders to "wake up" and stop all the nonsense, he fails to grasp that, to the political leader, the most important pursuit is power. He cares not a whit for the well-being of the populace. The political class has no intention of relinquishing even a small amount of power for the good of the people he was elected to represent.

Historically, in every instance, every empire has collapsed from within. Once the apple is truly rotten, it cannot be un-rotted. And so, if we've been observant in the recent years and decades, we'll acknowledge that the present empire has already passed its sell-by date. Its political structure is wholly corrupted on both sides of the aisle; the economy is doomed due to unpayable debt; the population has become unproductive, and it's now in the process of alienating its former friends through increasingly desperate measures.

And here, we return to our opening paragraphs. In its final stage prior to collapse, the empire sells out its toadies and is therefore no longer of any benefit to them. Suddenly, the empire becomes a liability. And, at this point, those who have had to tolerate the indignity of being toadies look forward to a fall, even a partial one, by the empire.

At present, the US empire maintains an illusion of dominance, but it cannot withstand a test. A defeat in warfare, a collapse in finance, the loss of the petrodollar or the reserve currency, or any one of a host of triggers that are now looming would be sufficient to drop the US to one knee overnight. All that's needed is for one of the triggers to be pulled.

It matters little what the event will be; it's sufficient to understand that we are now drawing quite near and that the event is unavoidable. Historically, when an empire dies, all the notes suddenly come due.

The political class of any empire arrogantly depends upon allies to do as they're told, yet, when a decisive blow is dealt to the empire, those who had once been loyal allies are now as ready to abandon the empire as rats would abandon a sinking ship. When this happens, the crutches that the empire has been counting on to hold it up pull away quickly. The collapse will have occurred "gradually, then suddenly."

Once this is understood, the question for the reader becomes where he wishes to be when the edifice falls; whether he has prepared an alternative situation that will increase the likelihood that he will survive the debacle with his skin on."

"How It Really Is"

Oh no we haven't, not even close. 
This is just beginning, and you ain't seen nuthin' yet, but you will...
o
Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/10/23
"The FED. Is Deliberately Causing A 
Credit Collapse With Much Higher Inflation"
Comments here:

"Brace Yourselves For An Economic Avalanche, Because A Major Credit Crunch Has Already Begun"

"Brace Yourselves For An Economic Avalanche,
Because A Major Credit Crunch Has Already Begun"
by Michael Snyder

"This is moving even faster than a lot of us thought that it would. For weeks, I have been warning my readers about the coming credit crunch. When banks get into trouble, they start getting really tight with their money. That means fewer mortgages, fewer commercial real estate loans, fewer auto loans and fewer credit cards being issued. But I thought that it would take some time for the credit crunch to fully kick into high gear. Unfortunately, I was wrong about that. In fact, it is being reported that during the last two weeks of March bank lending in the United States “contracted by the most on record”

US bank lending contracted by the most on record in the last two weeks of March, indicating a tightening of credit conditions in the wake of several high-profile bank collapses that risks damaging the economy. In other words, we have never seen bank lending shrink faster than it did during the second half of March.

Wow.

And it turns out that small banks are getting particularly tight with their money…"Commercial bank lending dropped nearly $105 billion in the two weeks ended March 29, the most in Federal Reserve data back to 1973. The more than $45 billion decrease in the latest week was primarily due to a a drop in loans by small banks. The pullback in total lending in the last half of March was broad and included fewer real estate loans, as well as commercial and industrial loans."

As I have noted previously, small and mid-size banks provide the bulk of the commercial real estate loans in this country. We are already starting to see prices for commercial real estate plunge, and now Morgan Stanley is warning that the drop that we will ultimately see could rival “the decline during the 2008 financial crisis”…"Investors have sharpened their focus on this sector, given regional banks’ significant share in CRE lending. Even before the banking-industry turmoil, however, CRE was facing risks from long-term trends, with remote work threatening the office sub-sector.

What’s more, the sector is now facing a huge “refinancing wall”: More than half of the $2.9 trillion in commercial mortgages will be up for refinancing in the next couple of years. Even if current rates stay where they are, new lending rates are likely to be 3.5 to 4.5 percentage points higher than they are for many of CRE’s existing mortgages.

Commercial property prices have already turned down, and Morgan Stanley analysts forecast prices could fall as much as 40%, rivaling the decline during the 2008 financial crisis. These kinds of challenges can hurt not only the real estate industry, but also entire business communities related to it." A lot of people thought that I was exaggerating when I stated that we are heading into the worst commercial real estate crisis in our history. But I was not exaggerating one bit. 

Of course the credit crunch that we are now experiencing will have enormous ramifications for the entire economy. When consumers have access to less credit, they spend less money. And when consumers spend less money, businesses bring in less revenue and they start laying off workers. And when workers get laid off, they get behind on their debts. And that creates even more stress on the banks.

This new credit crisis threatens to spiral out of control, but Fed officials insist that everything is just fine. In fact, James Bullard seems convinced that interest rates should go even higher… “Financial stress seems to be abated, at least for now,” Bullard told reporters Thursday after speaking at an event in Little Rock, Arkansas. “And so it’s a good moment to continue to fight inflation and try to get on that disinflationary path.”

The St. Louis Fed chief said he doesn’t think tighter credit conditions stemming from the recent banking turmoil will be substantial enough to tip the US economy into recession, noting that demand for loans is still strong. Demand for loans may be strong, but the supply of credit is starting to dry up really quick.

Meanwhile, Americans continue to pull money out of the banks at a staggering rate…Friday’s report also showed commercial bank deposits dropped $64.7 billion in the latest week, marking the 10th-straight decrease that mainly reflected a decline at large firms. Every week that this happens, it is just going to cause banks to get even tighter with their money. But I was not exaggerating one bit.

And bank economists surveyed by the American Bankers Association expect credit conditions to continue to tighten during the months ahead…

o The Headline Credit Index fell in Q2 to 5.8, decreasing 6.7 points to its lowest point since the onset of the pandemic. The reading indicates broad-based expectations for weaker credit market conditions over the next six months among bank economists, and banks are likely to grow more cautious about extending credit.

o The Consumer Credit Index fell 7.9 points to 5.8 in Q2. EAC members expect credit availability to deteriorate more than credit quality, though almost all expect both to decline. The sub-50 reading indicates that consumer credit conditions are likely to weaken over the next six months.

o The Business Credit Index fell 5.6 points to 5.8 in Q2. All EAC members expect business credit availability will deteriorate in the next six months, and most expect business credit quality to deteriorate. The sub-50 reading indicates that EAC members expect that overall credit conditions for businesses will continue to weaken over the next two quarters."

Just look at those numbers. Any figure under 50 is bad, and those numbers are in the single digits. In all the years that I have been writing, I have never seen anything like this. So I am encouraging all of my readers to brace themselves for a massive economic avalanche. A major credit crunch is already here, but most Americans still don’t understand that severe economic pain is dead ahead."

Jim Kunstler, "A Nervous Hiatus"

"A Nervous Hiatus"
By Jim Kunstler

“Having lived through a reality-optional period of history, it will come as an ecstatic shock to learn that the world requires us to pay attention to what is really happening and to act accordingly.” - JHK

"On Easter Sunday, fate put me on the Jersey Turnpike at 5:30 in the morning. I was motoring home from our nation’s capital where I traveled for the memorial service of a favorite aunt who passed away last month at ninety-five after a richly rewarding life. Her husband, my favorite uncle, enjoyed a long and colorful career in America’s Intel Community, and passed-on back in 2002. They recruited him at the founding of Spooks Inc in the late 1940s, since he came out of the army intel corps in Southeast Asia during World War Two.

In the 1950s, Uncle “B” and his family were posted to Africa, first Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. In the early 1960s, with colonialism crumbling, “B” operated all over Africa, making subtle arrangements in one new country after another for things to come out in America’s favor. For all his spookish doings, “B” was an artistically inclined soul. On one assignment to West Africa, he noticed the hotel staff were pilfering some of his belongings. He took some rocks up to his hotel and, cognizant that magic ruled in the region’s culture, painted eyes on the rocks and deployed them around the room. The pilfering stopped. “B” was famous for such insights about world’s exotic peoples. (He also played piano capably, specializing in the tunes of Gershwin and Cole Porter.)

Periodically the family sojourned in New York. With each US presidential election, the IC brought some spooks back to the homeland as the new team reassessed the global game-board. One Thanksgiving around 1961 after JFK came in, we were all gathered in the family’s rented Greenwich Village townhouse when three mysterious African gentlemen, ostensibly “from the UN,” were admitted briefly to the proceedings for a confab with “B”. I learned later that they were a delegation from Angola, where a war of independence from Portugal was catching fire. The men were in New York seeking help from our side (that is, weapons).

After that year, Uncle and the family enjoyed long deluxe postings in Rome and Paris, where “B” followed a career, he would tell me, in “public relations.” My three younger cousins were privileged with colorful childhoods overseas. After Richard Nixon came in, “B” was permanently brought home and posted to Spook Central in Washington, where he completed his career. In retirement, he turned to painting full-time and often played piano for his fellow retired spooks and diplomats at their hangout, the Cosmos Club on Mass Avenue, Washington’s Embassy Row.

My cousins, all aging baby boomers now, all turned up, of course, at Auntie’s memorial service, a warmly graceful affair, well-attended by the network of friends she maintained so late in life, and my cousin’s children with their own children, and all the flowering trees in bloom, and lovely spoken remembrances of the great lady. The crowd was very largely of the Washington insider liberal Democrat persuasion, you understand, but there was close-to-zero political chitchat in the cocktail session that followed. Back during the 2020 election, all three cousins had sent me archly opprobrious emails objecting to my support of Mr. Trump against the charming and dynamic “Joe Biden.” They were super-pissed off that their writer-cousin had turned into a right-wing extremist. But all that was put aside, possibly even forgiven, this day of sweet memoriam.

That out of the way, my more pertinent point du jour is about the journey from where I live in upstate New York to Washington DC and back. I made the trip by car because the affordable airplane routes all involved absurd hours-long connecting layovers in far-flung cities at fantastic prices, and there were no seats left on the soviet-grade Amtrak train service at any times that worked. It’s been a while since I traveled the New York to Washington corridor on-the-ground in a car, and the experience was maximally horrifying.

The various Departments of Transportation of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland are working out there at heroic scale to upgrade their stretches of the interstate highways involved. The amount of concrete, steel, and asphalt getting laid down now boggles the mind, considering the essential bankruptcy at all levels of government. But more to point, they are doing this at the very time when the age of mass-motoring is drawing to close.

Government itself is now militating against it, with its poorly thought-out crusade against the internal combustion engine and its promotion of electric cars that Americans can’t afford to buy, while the electric grid can’t possibly support all that proposed battery-charging at the mass scale. (Let’s leave aside for now whatever nefarious influence the World Economic Forum exerts on all this). In any case, the standard of living is crashing in Western Civ now. Incomes are down, or lost altogether, inflation is up, and with it the price of cars. The car industry has reached its limit for trick loan schemes that enable the tapped-out middle-class to regularly replace their vehicles. Not to put too fine a point on it, the system is f**ked.

And yet, here we are, building ever more motoring infrastructure as if none of this is happening. The reason, naturally, is that immense bureaucracies like the DOTs have minds of their own. They are not responding to conditions as they are; they are carrying out plans that were made years ago when conditions and assumptions were different. Those plans have implacable momentum. You can see how all this is going to end badly.

Now, I planned my return trip with a layover night outside Philadelphia, so I could leave before the crack-of-dawn Easter Sunday, when few other cars would be on the road. That proved to be the case. But even nearly alone on the highway, and with pretty good navigational skills of my own, plus the help of GPS, I made several wrong turns. This was mostly because the signage contradicted the lady robot’s voice issuing instructions, as well as my own geographical heuristics, especially in the long stretch north up the whole length of New Jersey. There were a few times I felt I barely escaped getting killed making last-second turns. There were extended moments when I thought: I’m in Hell.

Anyway, I made it home alive and undamaged. I’d never want to do that trip again, and the way things are going, I may not have to. The Easter holiday was a strange hiatus in a year that promises fantastic turbulence in public affairs, including especially American politics and our wobbling economy. Financial markets and banks managed to levitate through the first weeks of springtime, but there is a bad odor of imminent failure in the air, at the same time that government’s war against its own citizens shows signs of hardening into the threat of digital currency, renewed efforts at censorship, persecution of political opponents, and a growing awareness of “vaccine” caused death. The natives are restless, the animals are stirring. Events creep toward criticality."

"Economic Market Snapshot 4/10/23"

"Economic Market Snapshot 4/10/23"
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: creditequity valuationfunding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United Statesother advanced economies, and emerging markets."
Job cuts and much more.
Commentary, highly recommended:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
And now... The End Game...

"Is This For Real?

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 4/10/23
"Is This For Real?"
"Is this for real? A congressman and a senator have stepped forward with a plan to put the United States back on the gold standard. What do you think? We have seen so many changes happen with small businesses that it’s just a matter of time until more are out of business."
Comments here:

Sunday, April 9, 2023

"Costco Reports 50% Price Hikes On Thousands Of Different Items As CEO Warns Of Difficult Times"

Full screen recommended.
"Costco Reports 50% Price Hikes On Thousands 
Of Different Items As CEO Warns Of Difficult Times"
by Epic Economist

"Costco has gained popularity over the years due to its affordable prices on everything from pantry staples to household essentials. Its warehouse club members are often attracted by the value and the quality of its huge product range. Although the company tried to limit the impact of inflation by not passing along unnecessary price increases to its customers in recent years, there was only so much it could do before its bottom line started getting hurt. Now, multiple reports reveal that shoppers are seeing some outrageous price hikes at the retailer’s stores. According to its executives, unprecedented challenges hitting supply chains and its internal operations left the wholesale corporation no choice but to raise costs on thousands of different items, and retail experts say that even more double-digit markups are coming this summer.

Complaints about surging prices at Costco stores are piling up on social media. On Reddit, one user reported that in February his "favorite" Kirkland-brand smoked salmon had crept up from $19.99 to $20.99 — and is now $23.99 at the warehouse. "Costco prices have become insane, to the point where I prefer other places for basic items," he noted.

On top of that, four-pound packs of Costco's Kirkland Signature Sliced Bacon surged in price to $21.99 compared to a more reasonable $16.99 just a year ago. That's definitely too pricey for some critics. "I can find it on sale much cheaper," wrote one commenter. Coffee lovers are experiencing sticker shock at Costco too. In January, Kirkland Colombian coffee sold for $9.99, now it's $15.99. And another Redditor revealed that they're paying about $20 for it at their local warehouse.

A similar price increase is being reported for its Kirkland-brand butter, which the warehouse club tends to sell in two- to four-pound bundles. One shopper noted the cost had jumped from $8 to $14.99. "Yeah, I about cried in the store a couple of days ago over the price of butter," griped another.

In March, SheFinds exposed that both Costco’s muffins and croissants had increased by $1 to $8.99 and $5.99, respectively. Many other bakery items have also suffered price hikes, so it’s important to want to double-check what you're adding to your cart. For instance, one Redditor says, "I found an old container that held Cinnamon loaves I kept to use for Christmas cookies, and it said $8.99. Currently, the same item is $14.99." The fruit and produce sections are also disappointing loyal consumers.

"Produce in general, both fruits and vegetables, is of questionable quality, and we can usually do better at the local produce-focused market," one comment reads. One Twitter user also mentioned the heightened prices on Costco salads over the past year: "As a working person, I have to buy my salad from Costco double the price. It was $2.99 1.5 years ago, and now it's $4.99. My wage is the same as 2.5 years ago."

But the most significant Costco price increase to watch out for in 2023 isn’t a specific food item. It’s the cost of membership, which is expected to go up this year for both tiers. During an earnings call, Costco CEO Walter Craig Jelinek and CFO Richard Galanti pointed to “unprecedented challenges” impacting the food supply chains and the company’s operations. Sticky inflation is also one of the catalysts of recent price hikes, they revealed. So if you haven’t made preparations yet, it is not too late to start. But don’t wait too long because from now on essentials will only get pricier while the value of our dollars continues to go down."
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Runrig, "Running to the Light"

Full screen recommended.
Runrig, "Running to the Light"

A Look to the Heavens"

“Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on the sky. Each of these fuzzy blobs is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. The cluster is seen through a foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. 
Near the cluster center, roughly 250 million light-years away, is the cluster's dominant galaxy NGC 1275, seen above as a large galaxy on the image left. A prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission, NGC 1275 accretes matter as gas and galaxies fall into it. The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies, also cataloged as Abell 426, is part of the Pisces-Perseus supercluster spanning over 15 degrees and containing over 1,000 galaxies. At the distance of NGC 1275, this view covers about 15 million light-years.”

Chet Raymo, “Living In The Little World”

“Living In The Little World”
by Chet Raymo

"My wisdom is simple," begins Gustav Adolph Ekdahl, at the final celebratory family gathering of Ingmar Bergman's crowning epic “Fanny and Alexander.” I saw the movie in the early 1980s when it had its U.S. theater release. Now I have just watched the five-hour-long original version made for Swedish television. Whew!

But back to that speech by the gaily philandering Gustav, now the patriarch of the Ekdahl clan and uncle to Fanny and Alexander. The family has gathered for the double christening of Fanny and Alexander's new half-sister and Gustav's child by his mistress Maj. A dark chapter of family history has come to an end, involving a clash between two world views, one - the Ekdahl's - focussed on the pleasures of the here and now, and the other - that of Lutheran Bishop Edvard Vergerus, Fanny and Alexander's stepfather - a stern and joyless anticipation of the hereafter.

It is not the habit of Ekdahls to concern themselves with matters of grand consequence, Gustav tells the assembled guests. "We must live in the little world. We will be content with that and cultivate it and make the best of it."

The little world. I love that phrase. This world, here, now. This world of family and friends and newborn infants and trees and flowers and rainstorms and- oh yes, cognac and stolen kisses and tumbles in the hay. The Ekdahl's are a theatrical family; we will leave it to the actors and actresses to give us our supernatural shivers, says Gustav. "So it shall be," he says. "Let us be kind, and generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world."

"The Lives They Lead..."

 

"Tale Control Of Your Money Now, Dollar Is About To Go Extinct; Eviction Crisis"

Jeremiah Babe, 4/9/23
"Tale Control Of Your Money Now, 
Dollar Is About To Go Extinct; Eviction Crisis"
Comments here:

Greg Hunter, "Attacked for Telling Truth About Deadly CV19 Vax – Dr. Mark Skidmore"

"Attacked for Telling Truth About Deadly 
CV19 Vax – Dr. Mark Skidmore"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

"An expert in public finance and policy evaluation at Michigan State University, Economics Professor Mark Skidmore revealed in a recent study that the CV19 bioweapon vax was debilitating and deadly from the very beginning. His troubles began when the study he conducted showed nearly 300,000 CV19 vax deaths in just the first year of injections. The report went viral, and it was a top trending study on social media that 17 million people read. Dr. Skidmore has published dozens of peer-reviewed scientific papers, but this peer-reviewed study is now being retracted by a top scientific publication. On top of that, Dr. Skidmore is being investigated academically for essentially telling the truth about the deadly CV19 vax. Dr. Skidmore says, “I have never had anything happen like this in my career. I have published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers and never had a retraction or anything like this. Peer review is rigorous. An editor (at BMC Infectious Diseases) made a decision to publish, and she was courageous. She had to have known this had potential to cause controversy, and it has. That’s okay. There are people attacking me personally, and attacking the integrity of the process and my integrity. They are challenging the methods. I asked about Covid illness issues, and there was not one inquiry about that. But, if I asked about Covid vaccine issues, it’s just the questions about that, and was it legitimate?”

The paper was scientifically peer reviewed and published in late January 2023. Now, for some unknown reason, BMC Infectious Diseases has recently retracted Dr. Skidmore’s study that showed a huge number of deaths that proved the CV19 vax program was an obvious global disaster from the very beginning. (Dr. Skidmore refutes the retraction here.) Did Dr. Skidmore get it right, or is his study dramatically flawed? Dr. Skidmore points out, “Right now, you can go on the CDC website, and you will learn that the federal government and the CDC has acknowledged a total of nine fatalities from the Covid vaccines - nine. I have, what I think, is a rough estimate of 280,000 (deaths from the CV19 bioweapon/vax in 2021). One of my mentors in graduate school said it is better to be generally correct than precisely incorrect. I think I am generally correct. Nine is very precise. I think I am a lot closer to being right than the CDC.”

In closing, Dr. Skidmore says, “We don’t need any more surveys. I think we need actual data to fatalities linked to the CV19 vaccines, and we need pathology reports on people on a large scale. We need more transparent clinical work. One last thing, zero dollars have been distributed from the federal government for vaccine injury or death claims - zero. We know these people who have been harmed and their families need help, and zero dollars for vaccine injury claims have been dispersed so far. So, we need help for these families.”

Dr. Skidmore has been blowing the whistle on deaths and injuries from the CV19 bioweapon/vax since the beginning. He did so on USAW more than a year ago in a post called “FDA, CDC Lying About Vax Deaths & Injuries – Mark Skidmore.” There is much more in the 49-minute interview.

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with Michigan 
State University Professor Mark Skidmore, founder of Lighthouse Economics."
o
May God have mercy on you if you've taken this shot...

The Daily "Near You?"

Union, Kentucky, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: David Whyte, “Sometimes”

Full screen recommended.
“Sometimes”

“Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.”

- David Whyte
o
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for! To quote from Whitman, ‘O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless - of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?’ Answer: That you are here - that life exists, and that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”
- “Dead Poets Society”

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything"

"Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s 
Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and 
Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning"
by Maria Popova

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims: "Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism! How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?
[…]
Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked - and behold,
duty was joy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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 - that 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
“Reality is what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is what we believe.
What we believe is based upon our perceptions.
What we perceive depends upon what we look for.
What we look for depends upon what we think.
What we think depends upon what we perceive.
What we perceive determines what we believe.
What we believe determines what we take to be true.
What we take to be true is our reality.”
- Gary Zukav

"How it Really Is"

“Just look at us. Everything is backwards, everything is upside down. Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, psychiatrists destroy minds, scientists destroy truth, major media destroys information, religions destroy spirituality and governments destroy freedom.”
- Michael Ellner

"It’s Going to Zero"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly 4/9/23
"It’s Going to Zero"
"Kevin, O’Leary has stepped forward and said that cryptocurrencies could go to zero. It’s just a matter of time until we see another exchange fail."
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: This Is An Extermination"

Gregory Mannarino, 4/9/23
"Markets, A Look Ahead: This Is An Extermination"
Comments here:

Saturday, April 8, 2023

Happy Easter

 

Musical Interlude: Andrew Lloyd Webber, "Jesus Christ Superstar"

Andrew Lloyd Webber, "Jesus Christ Superstar"
Play on YouTube so songs automatically play sequentially.
"Overture" 4:00
"Heaven on Their Minds" 4:23
"What's the Buzz/Strange Thing Mystifying" 4:13
"Everything's Alright" 4:36
"This Jesus Must Die" 5:11
"Hosanna" 2:09
"Simon Zealotes/Poor Jerusalem" 4:49
"Pilate's Dream" 1:28
"The Temple" 4:43
"Everything's Alright (reprise)" 0:34
"I Don't Know How to Love Him" 3:41
"Damned for All Time/Blood Money" 4:36
"The Last Supper" 7:10
"Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say)" 5:33
"The Arrest" 3:24
"Peter's Denial" 1:27
"Pilate and Christ" 2:46
"King Herod's Song" 3:02
"Judas' Death" 4:17
"Trial Before Pilate (Including the 39 Lashes)" 5:13
"Superstar" 4:16
"The Crucifixion" 4:04
"John Nineteen Forty-One"

"China Surrounds Taiwan; USA on Alert; Russia Moves Nukes Toward Finland; US Nuke Subs"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/8/23
"China Surrounds Taiwan; USA on Alert; 
Russia Moves Nukes Toward Finland; US Nuke Subs"
Comments here:

"Buying A New BMW With 22 Cents In The Bank; Fast Food Becomes A Luxury; Banks Are In Survival Mode"

Jeremiah Babe, 4/8/23
"Buying A New BMW With 22 Cents In The Bank; 
Fast Food Becomes A Luxury; Banks Are In Survival Mode"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: 2002, "We Meet Again"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "We Meet Again"