"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
o
Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/23/23
"OPEC Warns 'Much Higher Energy Prices';
JPM Warns: More Bank Failures Coming"
Video and comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, May 23, 2023
"Stock Up Now At Meijer! Massive Holiday Sale! Don't Miss This!"
Adventures With Danno, 5/23/23
"Stock Up Now At Meijer!
Massive Holiday Sale! Don't Miss This!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Meijer, and are noticing that they are having a huge sale on holiday baking items this month! We are stocking up and showing the best deals as we take you shopping with us. It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"
Video and comments here:
Monday, May 22, 2023
"Red Alert! US Government Issuing Satellite Phones; Russia Evacuates Nuclear Weapons; F16s Will Be WW3"
Canadian Prepper, 5/22/23
"Red Alert! US Government Issuing Satellite Phones;
Russia Evacuates Nuclear Weapons; F16s Will Be WW3"
Video and comments here:
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Redacted, 5/22/23
"OH SH*T, NATO Escalates War in Ukraine
With Attack in Belgorod Using US Weapons"
"NATO and Ukrainian forces launched a surprise attack inside of pre-war Russia using American armored vehicles and weapons. They attacked civilians and residential buildings in broad daylight in the Russian town of Belgorod."
Video and comments here:
"Government Default Catastrophic; Dave Ramsey Is Very Wrong, Debt Clock Sends Ominous Warning"
Jeremiah Babe, 5/22/23
"Government Default Catastrophic; Dave Ramsey Is
Very Wrong, Debt Clock Sends Ominous Warning"
Video and comments here:
Musical Interlude: 2002, "The End Is a Beginning"
Full screen recommended.
2002, "The End Is a Beginning"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its more familiar outlines are seen in the brighter central region of the nebula in this impressive wide-angle view. But the composite image combines many short and long exposures to also reveal an extremely faint outer halo. At an estimated distance of 3,000 light-years, the faint outer halo is over 5 light-years across.
Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. More recently, some planetary nebulae are found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years. Visible on the left, some 50 million light-years beyond the watchful planetary nebula, lies spiral galaxy NGC 6552.”
○
"Our planet is a tiny porthole, looking over a cosmic sea.
Can we learn what lies beyond our own horizons of perception?"
"In The End..."
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
~ Sydney J. Harris
The Poet: Mary Oliver, “Evidence”
“Evidence”
“Where do I live?
If I had no address, as many people do not,
I could nevertheless say that I lived in the
same town as the lilies of the field,
and the still waters.
Spring, and all through the neighborhood
now there are
strong men tending flowers.
Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue.
But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function -
to excite the viewers toward sublime thought.
Glory to the world, that good teacher.
Among the swans there is none
called the least,
or the greatest.
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
Also in singing,
especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
As for the body,
it is solid and strong and curious and full of detail;
it wants to polish itself; it wants to love another body;
it is the only vessel in the world that can hold,
in a mix of power and sweetness:
words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity,
devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”
- Mary Oliver
•
“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”
"I Urge All Of You..."
“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special. I just got one last thing... I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have.”
- Jim Valvano
"The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Destroyed"
"The Middle Class Is Being Systematically Destroyed"
by Michael Snyder
"If you wanted to destroy the middle class, one way that you could accomplish that goal would be to flood the system with money. Of course that is precisely what we have witnessed over the past few years. Our leaders have pumped trillions of new dollars into the system, and the wealthy have gotten much, much wealthier. But meanwhile, the rest of us have seen the cost of living rise much faster than our paychecks have. As a result, we are getting poorer and the middle class is shrinking.
Over time, our capitalist economy has steadily evolved into a system where almost all of the wealth and almost all of the power are concentrated in the hands of giant institutions. Collectively, big government and big corporations run virtually everything, and this system of “corporate socialism” funnels tremendous amount of wealth into the pockets of a very small minority of the population. If you are in that club, life is good. But if you are not in that club, life can be a struggle.
The gap between the rich and the poor has steadily grown, and now it is larger than it has ever been before. Even U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders acknowledges that we have a massive problem on our hands…"Today, half of our people are living paycheck to paycheck, 500,000 of the very poorest among us are homeless, millions are worried about evictions, 92 million are uninsured or underinsured, and families all across the country are worried about how they are going to feed their kids. Today, an entire generation of young people carry an outrageous level of student debt and face the reality that their standard of living will be lower than their parents’. And, most obscenely, low-income Americans now have a life expectancy that is about 15 years lower than the wealthy. Poverty in America has become a death sentence."
Meanwhile, the people on top have never had it so good. The top 1% now own more wealth than the bottom 92%, and the 50 wealthiest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 165 million people. Of course Sanders believes that even more socialism is the answer, but more socialism is never the answer.
Centralizing wealth and power leads to widespread poverty. We have seen this same pattern over and over again all over the globe. Decentralizing wealth and power leads to boundless prosperity like we saw in early America. Unfortunately, our current system is what it is, and the middle class is being absolutely crushed.
Earlier today, I came across a tweet from Mike Cernovich that really resonated with me…"I made $10 an hour as a part timer worker in Home Depot style store. $12.50 on weekends. This was 1990’s in small town. Would be $19 an hour today and $24 on weekends. I checked and same job TODAY is $12.50 an hour."
This is what inflation has done to the working class. This is what so many of the “working poor” are facing today. Wages for many jobs have not moved much at all over the years, but the cost of living has been absolutely soaring.
Cernovich also pointed out that a couple of decades ago hardly anything that we bought on a regular basis “felt expensive”…"Gas was often 99 cents/gallon. Gallon milk was 99 cents to $1.29. This was in 1997-2000 era. Nothing felt expensive other than “nice stuff,” luxuries. Daily living, groceries, sure you had to budget but it didn’t feel like it does now."
Isn’t that so true? I remember that time well. I could fill up an entire grocery cart for just 25 dollars, and that even included an entire cake. Yes, I really liked to eat cake in those days. But now if you fill up an entire cart with food, you will feel like you are making a house payment when you get to the register.
Needless to say, house payments are also much higher than they used to be. In fact, it is being reported that the average existing home actually costs approximately 93,000 dollars more than it did in 2020…You read that right—existing homes cost around $93,000 more than they did in 2020. No wonder so many people feel like they can’t afford a house!
And newly built homes are even more expensive. In fact, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) estimates new homes will cost around $425,786 in 2023. Out of 132.5 million American households, 96.5 million of them won’t be able to afford that median price. So even if we see a ton of new houses being built, 7 out of 10 households will have a tough time paying for one.
$93,000 dollars! In the old days, you could get a really nice home for 93,000 dollars. But now the American Dream is out of reach for millions upon millions of families.
At this stage, many hard working families don’t even make enough money “to cover their most basic needs”…"More than a third of US families that work full-time do not earn enough money to cover their most basic needs, including housing, food and child care, a new study shows. Researchers at Brandeis University found 35% of American families do not meet the “basic family needs budget” — the amount needed to afford rent, food, transportation, medical care and minimal household expenses — despite working full-time year-round."
And thanks to inflation, it is getting worse with each passing month. According to one recent survey, approximately 70 percent of all Americans openly admit “to being stressed about their personal finances”…"Some 70% of Americans admit to being stressed about their personal finances these days and a majority — 52% — of U.S. adults said their financial stress has increased since before the Covid-19 pandemic began in March 2020, according to a new CNBC Your Money Financial Confidence Survey conducted in partnership with Momentive."
A lot of you out there are in the same boat. You are working as hard as you can, but it seems like there is never enough money at the end of the month. That is because the game is rigged. Our system has been so corrupted that now almost all of the economic rewards are being funneled to those at the very top of the food chain. Meanwhile, the middle class is being absolutely eviscerated, and poverty is spreading like wildfire all over the nation."
"15 Common Dynamics Of SHTF Collapses"
"15 Common Dynamics Of SHTF Collapses"
by Fabian Ommar
"When it comes to how we see and prepare for SHTF, thinking in terms of real and probable rather than fictional and possible can make a big difference. Even though SHTF has many forms and levels and is in essence complex, random, diverse and unsystematic, some patterns and principles are common to the way things unfold when it hits the fan. With Toby and Selco’s "Seven Pillars of Urban Preparedness" as inspiration, I came up with a different list of the 15 dynamics and realities of collapses.
#1 SHTF is nuanced and happens in stages: Thinking about SHTF as an ON/OFF, all-or-nothing endgame is a common mistake that can lead to severe misjudgments and failures in critical areas of preparedness. Part (or parts) of the system crash, freeze, fail, or become impaired. This is how SHTF happens in the real world. And when it does, people run for safety first, i.e., resort to more familiar behaviors, expecting things to “go back to normal soon.”
By “normal behaviors,” I mean everything from hoarding stuff (toilet paper?) to rioting, looting, and crime, and yes, using cash – as these happen all the time, even when things are normal. But no one becomes a barterer, a peddler, a precious metals specialist in a week. Society adapts as time passes (and the situation requires). That’s why preppers who are also SHTF survivors (and thus talk from personal experience) insist that abandoning fantasies and caring for basics first is crucial. This is not a coincidence. It is how things happen in the real world.
Recently I wrote about black markets and the role of cash in SHTFs, emphasizing these things take precedence except in a full-blown apocalypse – which no one can say if, when, or how will happen (because it never has?). Now, I don’t pretend to be the owner of the truth, but those insisting changes in society happen radically or abruptly should check this article about the fallout in Myanmar.
#2 Everything crawls until everything runs: Number two is a corollary to #1. SHTF happens in stair-steps, but most people failing to prepare and getting caught off-guard is evidence of the difficulty of the human brain to fully grasp the concept of exponential growth. It bears telling the analogy of the stadium being filled with water drops to illustrate this.
Let’s say we add one drop into a watertight baseball stadium. The deposited volume doubles every minute (i.e., one minute later, we add two more drops, then four in the next minute, eight in the next, then sixteen, and so on). How long would it take to fill the entire stadium? Sitting at the top row, we’d watch for 45 minutes as the water covered the field. Then at the 48-minute mark, 50% of the stadium would be filled. Yes, that’s only 3 minutes from practically empty to half full. At this point, we have just 60 seconds to get out: the water will be spilling before the clock hits 49 minutes.
This is an important dynamic to understand and keep in mind because it applies to most things. Another example: it took over 2 million years of human prehistory and history for the world’s population to reach 1 billion, and less than 250 years more to grow to almost 8 billion.
#3 The system doesn’t vanish or change suddenly: Based on history, the Mad Max-like scenario some so feverishly advocate is not in our near future. The Roman Empire unraveled over 500 years. We may not be at the tipping point of our collapse or the last minute of the flooding stadium, as illustrated in #2 above. But time is relative, and those 60 seconds can last five, ten, fifteen years. Things are accelerating, but there’s no way to tell at which point in the curve we are.
That doesn’t mean things will be normal in that period. A lot has happened to people and places all over the Roman empire during those five-plus centuries: wars, plagues, invasions, droughts, shortages, all hell broke loose. Our civilization has already hit the iceberg, and the current order is crumbling. There will be shocks along the way, some small and some big. But SHTF is a process, not an event.
#4 History repeats, but always with a twist: That’s because nature works in cycles, and humans react to scarcity and abundance predictably and in the same ways. Also, we’re helpless in the face of the most significant and recurring events. But things are never the same. Technology improves, social rules change, humankind advances, the population grows. This (and lots more) adds a variability factor to the magnitude, gravity, and reach of outcomes.
#5 SHTF is about scarcity: A shrink in resources invariably leads to changes in the individual’s standard of living or entire society (depending on the circumstances, depth, and reach of the disaster or collapse). Then it starts affecting life itself (i.e., people dying). Essentially, when things really hit the fan, abundance vanishes, and pretty much everything reverts to the mean: food becomes replenishment, drinking becomes hydration, sleeping becomes rest, home becomes shelter, and so on. Surviving is accepting and adapting to that.
#6 The consequences matter more than the type of event: I’ll admit to being guilty of debating probable causes of SHTF more often than I should, mainly when it comes to the economy and finance going bust. That’s from living in a third-world country, with all the crap that comes with it. It’s what I have to talk, warn, and give advice about. I still find it essential to be aware and thoughtful of the causes. But it’s for the consequences that we must prepare for: instability, corruption, bureaucracy, criminality, inflation, social unrest, divisiveness, wars, and all sorts of conflicts and disruptions that affect us directly.
#7 Life goes on: Humankind advances through hardship but thrives in routine. We crave normalcy and peace, and over the long term, pursue them. Contrary to what many think, life goes on even during SHTF. And things tend to return to normal after the immediate threats cease or get contained. At least some level of normal, considering the circumstances. For example, in occupied France, the bistros and cafés continued serving and entertaining the population and even the invaders (the Nazi army). It was hard, as is always the case anywhere there’s war, poverty, tyranny – but that doesn’t mean the world has ended.
#8 SHTF pileup: Disasters and collapses add instability, volatility, and fragility to the system, which can compound and cause further disruptions. Sometimes, unfavorable cycles on various fronts (nature and civilization) can also converge and generate a perfect storm. It’s crucial to consider that and try to prepare as best we can for multiple disasters happening at once or in sequence, on various levels, collective and individual – even if psychologically and mentally. And if the signs are any indication, we’re entering such a period of simultaneous challenges.
#9 Snowball effect: Daisy based her excellent article on the 10 most likely ways to die when SHTF on the principle of large-scale die-off caused by a major disaster, like an EMP or other. This theory is controversial and the object of endless discussions. Some say it’s an exaggeration. But in my opinion, that’s leaving a critical factor out of the equation.
Consider the following: according to WPR and the CDC, before COVID-19 and Vaxxes, the mortality rate in the US was well below 1% (2.850.000 per year, or about 8.100 per day). If the mortality rate increases to just 5%, this alone would spark other SHTFs, potentially more serious and harmful than the first. That five-fold jump in mortality would result in more than 16 million dead per year or 44.000 per day. That’s 5% we’re talking about, not 20 or 30. If there’s even a protocol to deal with something like that, I’m not aware. It would be catastrophic on many levels over a shorter period (say, a few months).
Early in the CV19 pandemic, some cities had trouble burying the dead, and the death rate was still below 1%. Sure, other factors were playing. But the point is, things can snowball: consequences and implications are too complex and potentially far-reaching. Think about the effects on the system.
#10 SHTF is a situation, but it’s also a place: Things are hitting the fan somewhere right now. Not in the overblowing media but the physical world: the Texas border, third-world prisons, gang-ruled Haiti, in Taliban-raided Afghanistan, in the crackhouse just a few blocks from an affluent neighborhood, under the bridges of many big cities worldwide, in volcano-hit islands. There are thousands of places where people are bugging out, suffering, or dying of all causes at this very moment. If you’re not in any SHTF, consider yourself lucky. Be grateful, too: being able to prepare is a luxury.
#11 Choosing one way or another has a price: Being unprepared and wrong has a price. However, so does being prepared and wrong. Though some benefits exist regardless of what happens, the investment in terms of time, finance, and emotion to be prepared could be applied elsewhere or used for other finalities (career, a business, relationships, etc.) rather than some far-out collapse.
Since so much in SHTF is unknown and open, and resources are limited even when things are normal, survival and preparedness are essentially trade-offs. We must read the signals, weigh the options, consider the probabilities, make an option, and face the consequences. That’s why striving for balance is so important.
#12 SHTF is dirty, smelly, ugly: This is undoubtedly one of the most striking characteristics of SHTF: how bad some places and situations can be. Most people have no idea, and they don’t want to know about this. Those who fantasize about being in SHTF should think twice. Abject misery and despair have a distinct smell of excrement, sewage, death, rotting material, pollution, trash, burned stuff, and all kinds of dirt imaginable. And insects. The movies don’t show these things. But bad smells and insects infest everything and everywhere, and it can be maddening.
During my street survival training, I get to visit some really awful places and witness horrible things. The folks eventually going out with me invariably get shocked, sometimes even sickened, when they see decadence up and close for the first time. Even ones used to dealing with the nasties – it’s hard not to get affected.
For instance, drug consumption hotspots are so smelly and nasty that someone really must have to be on crack just to stand being there. It’s hell on earth, and I can’t think of another way to describe these and other places like third-world prisons, trash deposits, and many others. Early on, being in these places would make me question why I do this. It never becomes “normal.” We just adapt. But seeing these realities changes our life and the way we see things.
#13 The Grid is fragile: It’s baffling how this escapes so many. Most people I know are in constant marvel with modern civilization. They look around, pointing and saying, “Are you crazy? Too big to fail! There’s no way this can go away! Nothing has ever happened!“.
We have someone to take our trash, slaughter, process our food, treat our sick, purify our water, treat our sewage, protect us from wrongdoers and evil people (and keep them locked), control the traffic, and defend our rights. Peeking behind the curtains is a red pill moment. What keeps The Grid up and running is not something small, but it’s fragile. The natural state of things is not an insipid, artificially controlled environment. On the positive side, it makes us feel more grateful, humble, and also more responsible.
#14 The frog in the boiling water: That’s you and me and everyone around us. There’s no other way around it. We’re the suckers who get squeezed and pay the bill whenever something happens, anywhere and everywhere. It’s always our freedom, rights, money, and privacy that gets attacked, threatened, stolen.
Not only because the 1% screws us at the top, but because we’re the big numbers, the masses. And only those who work and produce something can bear the brunt of whatever bad happens to society and civilization. Make no mistake: whenever the brown stuff hits the fan, it will fall on us. It’s no reason to revolt but to acknowledge that, ultimately, we’re responsible for ourselves.
#15 People can make things worse: Just have a look around and see what’s happening. Selco himself will tell you that the most dangerous thing about the SHTF is other people.
Conclusion: Sometimes, the mechanics, brutality, and harshness of SHTF end up in the background of personal narratives and emotional accounts. Being more knowledgeable and cognizant of some general aspects of collapses may allow flexibility, creativity, improvisation, adaptation, resiliency, and other broad and effective strategies. Or, simply provide material for reflection and debate, really.
Either way, even those who haven’t been through collapse can still learn from history, from others’ experiences, from human behavior, from the facts. Just be sure to see the world for what it is and not from what you think. Because it will go its own way, and reality will assert itself all the same.
What are your thoughts about the dynamics of an SHTF scenario? Are there any you want to add? Does this match up with your personal expectations? Let’s discuss it in the comments."
"Whatever Your Fate Is..."
“Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment - not discouragement - you will find the strength there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow. Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures, followed by wreckage, were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”
~ Joseph Campbell
"Knowing..."
“Knowing can be a curse on a person’s life. I’d traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn’t know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around? It was a ridiculous question, though, because once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is yours now.”
- Sue Monk Kidd
"It's Official! Putin Just Entered The Most Dangerous Phase Of The War"
Redacted, 5/22/23
"It's Official! Putin Just Entered
The Most Dangerous Phase Of The War"
"The Eastern city of Bakhmut is now known as the Russian name Artyomovsk after Russia claimed that it has taken full control of the battleground city. Ukrainian President Zelensky has been reluctant to admit it. When asked if Ukraine still controlled the city he said, “I think no.” He wouldn’t know first hand because he has been out of Ukraine since the Kremlin attack in early May. Bakhmut is in the Donetsk region, which voted to join Russia last September. Ukraine has been fighting to change their mind even as must of the city’s 70,000 residents have since fled. President Biden says that the Russians have suffered over 100,000 casualties in Bakhmut but no one knows where that number came from. He also said that Ukraine has "been able to lock down the Wagner group" but the head of the Wagner group says that the group will leave the area on Thursday and hand over control to the Russian military. No Western tanks or F-16s were used to defend Bakhmut and President Biden says that they wouldn’t have helped anyway. This is an important loss for Ukraine and the West and even still they say that a counteroffensive is coming. The Wall Street Journal reports that Ukraine didn’t fight very hard in Bakhmut anyway because they instead “used that time to rearm and to bulk up its military.” Do you buy that? Weapons, sure. The West has kept ‘em coming. But where do these extra personnel come from?"
Video and comments here:
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Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 5/22/23
Col. Doug Macgregor,
"Bakhmut in Russian Hands, Now What? "
Video and comments here:
"Gregory Mannarino, 5/22/23"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/22/23
"There Are 4 Stages Leading To A Total Meltdown,
We are Now In Stage 3"
Video and comments here:
Gregory Mannarino, PM 5/22/23
"Enter The Danger Zone, Global Bond Market Sell-Off
Worsening. If This Keeps Up It's Over"
Video and comments here:
"Fade To Black In Ukraine"
"Fade To Black In Ukraine"
by Jim Kunstler
“Following the ouster of Mr. Trump in 2020, this new-new-left had exactly what it had been clamoring for, a liberal Democrat in the White House. Given the sense of impending catastrophe at present, it may be difficult to remember precisely how much sniveling bullshit went into selling Joe Biden.” - Rob Urie
Have you noticed that the president of Ukraine (or, governor of America’s fifty-first state), Mr. Zelensky, has been globe-trotting for weeks: London, Helsinki, Paris, Hiroshima? That’s because this is one of those months when years happen; the world is changing at hyper-speed. He seems to be running scared, a little bit, trying to keep ahead of the changing game. What sounded like a great idea to a certain claque of so-called neo-cons in our country - to use Ukraine as a bear trap - has instead rather suddenly revealed Europe’s and America’s manifold bankruptcies and revolted the whole rest of the world outside of Western Civ. Oh, the wonder and nausea!
Try to imagine Mr. Zelensky’s predicament. Mighty America and redoubtable Europe conned the former comedian to thinking that if he went along with a genius scheme to ruin Russia and knock Vlad Putin off the global gameboard, his sad-sack country would be transformed into something like Ukro-Disneyworld, while he, Mr. Z, would be lionized and made rich beyond his wildest imaginings. His backup was the greatest hegemonic power the world has ever seen. The game was called Let’s You and Him Fight.
The poor schlemiel fell for it. He let NATO (that is, the USA) set-up, equip, and train the largest army in Europe, including battalions of bad-ass, hard-core Ukro-Nazis - who had previously been so useful in the American-sponsored 2014 Maidan “color revolution.” Mr. Z followed the US State Department’s orders to rain down rockets and artillery on Russian-speakers who lived in his own eastern provinces. He formally applied for membership in the NATO club. His country received billions of US dollars without audit oversight, just screaming to be creamed off by Ukraine’s leadership - who, after all, deserved a little something for all these goings-along. What could go wrong?
Thus, Western Civ kicked off Europe’s biggest hot war since the 1940s. So, in February, 2022, Mr. Putin had enough of the monkey business on his “front porch” and sent in a clean-up crew. Game on! The US neo-cons were ready to feed countless Ukrainian troops into a meat grinder that would, theoretically, exhaust the will and resources of the execrable bear and yield countless benefits reinforcing our dominant position in the world. Our hapless NATO “partners” went along with the program, despite being asked to commit economic suicide for the greater good of the alliance (or something like that). Anyway, they didn’t need that filthy Russian nat-gas. They were going “green” (Klaus Schwab said so, didn’t he?)
Meanwhile, the citizens of our country were groomed to perfection by the US Propaganda-Industrial Complex screaming “Russia, Russia, Russia,” at the behest of opinion-leader Hillary Clinton, a wannabe president. The news media demanded crucifixion for her opponent, Mr. Trump, who had idly tossed out the heinous idea that The USA and Russia could cultivate a friendly relationship, seeing as how the bear was no longer flying the red flag. Aye-yi-yi!!! He actually said that!?! The clueless orange boob!
Well, the folks running things in America - that is, the scores of unelected bureaucratic satraps guarding their nests throughhout the Okefenokee inside-the-Beltway, especially the gator-pit known politely as the Intel Community - decided to subject Mr. Trump to a one-man version of the exquisite torment intended for Russia, Russia, Russia: pain, ignominy, and ruin. They’re still at it six years later, since the relentless Mr. Trump will not give up his crusade to take back the White House and defenestrate all those attempting to defenestrate him. His enemies have captured all the levers of legal power, and yet, amazingly, they can come up with nothing but the most rinky-dink charges to railroad him in captured jurisdictions.
This internal political conflict in the USA has driven the populace plumb insane, while it has rendered our institutions rancid and left us subject to a pathocracy hiding behind a laughably fake chief executive. After a year-plus of America’s genius scheme to maintain world dominance, Russia is doing really well, thank you, in constructing a geo-economic framework for trade that will not be subject to the pranks of USA-led Western Civ. Russia is a nation of people who regard themselves as men and women, the toils of gender confusion happily absent. Ditto race hustles. Ditto banking Ponzis.
After two-plus years of “Joe Biden” - well, our country is bypassing the banana republic stage of dissolution and depravity and steaming quickly into a Hieronymus Bosch dystopia of financial, social, psychological and moral ruin. Every official utterance is a lie. Everything’s broken or breaking. And seemingly, on-purpose. The nagging question, of course, is on whose purposes?
And why is Mr. Zelensky flitting from one country to another the past month? Because the game of Let’s You and Him Fight is drawing to a close and Mr. Z may find himself fatally unpopular back on the home-front. He has managed to send upward of a hundred-thousand young Ukrainian men to their deaths in the meat-grinder, and perhaps a million more have hightailed it for other countries. Ukraine will now be a land of mostly women, children, and old folks - with just enough surviving soldiers left looking to hunt down the comedian who turned Ukraine into another one of history’s sick jokes."
"Food On A Budget! Hot Dogs, Hamburgers and Corn On The Cobb!"
Adventures With Danno, 5/22/23
"Food On A Budget!
Hot Dogs, Hamburgers and Corn On The Cobb!"
"In today's vlog, we are grilling out some budget friendly food! We take you with us to the grocery store to pick up some Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, and some corn on the cobb, and show how to make a great meal with very little money."
Video and comments are here:
"Is Your Head in The Sand?"
Dan, I Allegedly 5/22/23
"Is Your Head in The Sand?"
"We are seeing more companies go bankrupt in the first quarter of this year than we have seen in almost 15 years. Peoples pensions are in big trouble here and abroad. People don’t want to look at this, are you ignoring the madness?"
Video and comments are here:
"Birds, Bees and AI"
"Birds, Bees and AI"
Another technology promising to deliver us
from evil, ignorance and bad manners...
"Another bride, another June,
Another sunny honeymoon,
Another season, another reason,
For makin' whoopee..."
~ Ella Fitzgerald
Youghal, Ireland - "Are we there yet? Do our cars fly? Have we cured cancer and obesity? Are our politicians still scoundrels? Do we still grow old and die? Maybe not, but we still fall head-over-heels from time to time.
Tech breakthroughs offer solutions…progress. And some of them – such as the internal combustion engine and painless dentistry – have taken much of the discomfort out of life. But most innovations – like genetic mutations – turn out to be dead ends and time wasters.
Often, new tech is just a nuisance. You go to a nice hotel, outfitted with the latest technology; it can take 15 min. to figure out how to turn on the hot water in the shower or turn off the lights. In our own home in Maryland, we’ve never been able (or willing to take the time) to master the HVAC controls.
The internet proved a huge disappointment. It brought all the information to all the people all the time. At the speed of light, we could take our money out of a failing bank…organize a flash mob...or find out who put the “sha” in “sha na na…” But the ‘information’ often turned out to be faulty, sordid or classified. Edward Snowden, for example, had to go into exile in Russia after delivering thousands of pages of documents to the public, via the internet, that the feds didn’t want you to see. There was so much ‘information’ – good, bad, and ugly – we weren’t able to tell what was what. Disinformation…misinformation…lies…wrong-think – it was impossible to keep up with it.
But now…thank God!... we are saved. A new technology promises to comb, sort, and organize information in ways that will be useful to us. And it is ‘trained’ not to be disrespectful, traitorous, blasphemous, or obscene. And not to give you any ‘bad’ ideas. Want to know how bees find the right flowers…who was Richard Nixon’s running mate…how to tell a poisonous mushroom from an edible one? Just ask and it shall be delivered unto you – in seconds.
Yes, a new kind of intelligence is out and about – Artificial Intelligence. Engadget reports: "Public infatuation with ChatGPT since its release last November has opened the floodgates… Heavyweights including Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Baidu are already jockeying their Large Language Models (LLMs) for market dominance, while everybody else, from Adobe and AT&T to BMW and BYD, scrambles to find uses for the revolutionary technology.
NVIDIA's newest cloud services offering, AI Foundations, will allow businesses lacking the time and money to develop their own models from scratch to "to build, refine and operate custom large language models and generative AI models that are trained with their own proprietary data and created for their unique domain-specific tasks."
Big Whoop: Investors have new hope. Another tech breakthrough will open the door to unprecedented profits. Whoopee! Look at what has happened to NVIDIA. The stock is the priciest thing on the pricey NASDAQ. The median stock on the index sells for 5.4 times sales. NVIDIA is priced at 29 times sales.
Yes, first it was the irrational exuberance caused by the internet at the end of the ‘90s. Then there was the crypto madness. And now, another season…another reason…to get giddy. NVIDIA is ‘priced for perfect’ at 182 times earnings. Not since 1999 have investors lost their minds so completely. But so what? Now, they have AI. They don’t need their minds any more. Want an opinion? A fact? An answer? Just ask ChatGPT.
But wait, NVIDIA has already paid off, even without AI. Over the last 10 years, the stock has gone up 8,000%. And now, with AI in its boardroom…and available to every employee with a keyboard, what the company might do next staggers the imagination. If the stock could just repeat the performance of the last 10 years (without AI assist!) it would put the value of the company at $61 trillion – or about half of the anticipated GDP of the entire planet. That seems unlikely to us.
Recall that nearly identical claims were made for the internet. It was going to ‘change everything’ and boost economic output so much that we were all going to be wealthy. With unlimited access to information, mistakes would be a thing of the past. Capital would no longer be wasted on projects that wouldn’t work. Knowledge – at our fingertips – would make us all smarter, healthier and more productive.
Didn’t happen. Instead, productivity is now negative…real wages are going down…life expectancies are falling…and GDP growth rates so far this century are barely half to a third of those before 1999. As for NVIDIA, recall too that when the dot.com bubble burst in 2000, it took NVIDIA down with it. The stock lost 90% of its value. It took 14 years for it to recover. What’s ahead? A glorious AI-enhanced future? Or another floppy disappointment? Tomorrow…we’ll ask the smarty pants at AI."
o
Joel’s Note: Speaking of zippy new (and old) tech, the Nasdaq has positively flown out the gate this year, notching nearly 22% gains so far for 2023. This, while the S&P 500 is up less than half (+9%) and the Dow is pretty much flat. What gives? Is AI powering a new future… or pointing us to lessons from the not so distant past?Bonner Private Research’s macro analyst, Dan Denning, reckons it’s about time to “sound the alarm,” or, as Bill used to say, “raise the crash flag.”
Here, a salient snippet from his note to BPR members this past Friday…"When you look at the year-to-date performances of some of the tech stocks–Apple up 34%, Amazon up 41%, Facebook up 102%, Nvidia up 112%–it all feels very March 2,000. That’s when the Nasdaq Composite peaked at over 5,000.
It fell 80% over the next two years. It took 15 years to make a new all-time high. That’s what happens to a decade of returns when you ‘bring them forward’ in a credit bubble through cheap interest rates and sky-high valuations. First you lose money. Then you lose time.
What’s hard to see in the chart is that in the spring and summer of 2000, the Nasdaq 100 rallied by almost 33%. I remember that summer in Baltimore, working with Bill on the first version of his daily diary (The Daily Reckoning). The bulls were in denial and loud about it. Arrogant even. We were sure the Great Reckoning had begun. But the rally convinced most people that happy days would be here again. Or had never really left. They were wrong. Those days were long gone.
If past really is prologue, and the tech bubble was merely a prelude to the even larger “everything bubble,” it may take more than artificial intelligence to steer clear of disaster. Maybe even actual intelligence."
o
Ella Fitzgerald, "Making Whoopee!"
"Economic Market Snapshot 5/22/23"
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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
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"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
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A comprehensive, essential daily read.
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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: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Job cuts and much more.
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Commentary, highly recommended:
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"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...
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And now... The End Game...
Sunday, May 21, 2023
"Stockpile Survival Food Now; All Hell Is About To Break Loose; Surviving A Debt Default In The US"
"Stockpile Survival Food Now; All Hell Is About To
Break Loose; Surviving A Debt Default In The US"
Video and comments here:
o
"Top Ukraine General 'In Hospital'; Tactical Nukes On F-16s?; Belarus Border Alert; WW3"
Canadian Prepper, 5/21/23
"Top Ukraine General 'In Hospital';
Tactical Nukes On F-16s?; Belarus Border Alert; WW3"
Video and comments here:
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