"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."
"1,000,000 Russian Troops All The Way Around Ukraine"
"Ukraine news today and in-depth discussion of current geopolitical events in the United States of America. Colonel Douglas Macgregor's Ukraine/Russia war update."
Retail Apocalypse Hits America's Largest Restaurant Chains"
by Epic Economist
"The largest restaurant chains in America are struggling to overcome waning demand as the economy continues to slow down. Even giants like Domino’s Pizza, which operates almost 19,000 stores worldwide, are reporting a series of challenges and financial losses in 2023. The chain is now closing thousands of underperforming locations after recent price hike controversies depressed domestic and international sales and sent its shares plummeting to the lowest level in over a decade. The latest data shows that the pizza company is in far more trouble than we all thought, and experts say that if it fails to fix its problems before the current downturn gets worse, the American pie chain may rapidly become overwhelmed by its debt and fall victim to the Great Retail Collapse.
In February, conditions for the company have gone from bad to worse. In a single day, share prices plunged by a whopping 16%, marking the largest price decline since 2010. From that point on, share prices have continued to trend down, settling around $310 per share, or about 39% lower than during the same period a year ago. Now, thousands of stores have started to close, with Domino’s making the tough decision to shutter its entire operations in some areas due to profitability concerns.
It all started when just like many other US restaurants, the pizza chain started to adjust to the inflationary environment and raise its delivery and menu prices to offset higher labor and commodity costs. In October 2022, executives reported a 7% price hike that prompted many customers to cook at home instead of getting their meals delivered. Overall, the chain’s prices remain 12% higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to Eat This, Not That.
Industry experts argue that its pricing strategy was not efficient given that the company failed to consider changing consumer spending habits and how competitors’ price increases compared to its own. A new report reveals that Americans became very dissatisfied with the new prices, which led sales to sink all across the country.
Delivery problems are also weighing on Domino’s bottom line. The Michigan-based pizza brand is still experiencing a serious shortage of delivery drivers. With workers seeking out higher wages and better working conditions en masse, many just aren't interested in delivering pizzas anymore. Despite this clear shift in the US labor market, Domino's has been hesitant to partner with third-party delivery options like GrubHub or DoorDash, thus, losing customers to other rivals.
In America, the chain is losing ground and market share. Over the past six months, Domino’s significantly underperformed rivals including Pizza Hut and Papa John's, which actually benefited from new menu news and third-party delivery marketing and driver service.
Its unwillingness to adapt to the current market and while rivals get stronger and snap more market share may throw the company over the edge. Considering how high its debt currently is and the depth of its profitability concerns, Domino’s must come up with better strategies to rebalance its finances soon because not even the largest pizza chain in the world is infallible and immune to the impact of recessions and downturns. This could be the beginning of the end for the company as the US retail apocalypse continues to claim more and more struggling businesses that fail to differentiate themselves in this wildy competitive market."
"Look at these homes for sale in Huntington Beach, California. Lennar homes is the builder and I cannot believe what they are getting for these houses."
“To some, the outline of the open cluster of stars M6 resembles a butterfly. M6, also known as NGC 6405, spans about 20 light-years and lies about 2,000 light years distant. M6 can best be seen in a dark sky with binoculars towards the constellation of Scorpius, coving about as much of the sky as the full moon.
Like other open clusters, M6 is composed predominantly of young blue stars, although the brightest star is nearly orange. M6 is estimated to be about 100 million years old. Determining the distance to clusters like M6 helps astronomers calibrate the distance scale of the universe.”
“If you step back and think about it, the normal man can probably list a dozen things he cannot say in public that he grew up hearing on television, usually as jokes. Then the jokes were no longer welcome in polite company and soon they were deemed “not funny” by the sorts of people who worry about such things. The same was true of simple observations about the world. Somehow noticing the obvious became impolite, then it became taboo and finally prohibited.
The reverse is true as well. Middle-aged men can probably think of a dozen things that were unimaginable or unheard of, which are now fully normal. Of course, normal is one of those things that is now prohibited. It implies that something can be abnormal or weird and that itself is forbidden. The proliferation of novel identities and activities that demand to be treated with dignity and respect is a function of the old restraints having been eliminated. When everything is possible you get everything.
The strange thing about all of this is there is seemingly no point to it. The proliferation of new taboos was not in response to some harm being done. In most cases, the taboos are about observable reality. The people turning up in the public square with novel identities or activities demanding respect did not exist very long ago. If they did, not one was curious enough to look into it. The public was happy to ignore people into unusual activities, as long as they kept it to themselves.
Of course, none of what we generally call political correctness is intended to be uplifting or inspirational. The commissars of public morality like to pretend it is inspiring, but that’s just a way to entertain themselves. These new identity groups are not demanding the rest of us seek some higher plane of existence or challenge our limitations. In fact, it is always in the opposite directions. It’s a demand to lower standards and give up on our quaint notions of self-respect and human dignity.
In the "Demon In Democracy", Polish academic Ryszard Legutko observed that liberal democracy had abandoned the concept of dignity. This is the obligation to behave in a certain way, as determined by your position in society. Dignity was earned by acting in accordance with the high standards of the community. In turn, this behavior was rewarded with greater privilege and responsibility. Failure to live up to one’s duties would result in the loss of dignity, along with the status it conferred.
Instead, modern liberal democracy awards dignity by default. We are supposed to respect all choices and all behaviors as being equal. There are no standards against which to measure human behavior, other than the standard of absolute, unconditional acceptance. As a result, the most inventively degenerate and base activities spring from the culture, almost like a test of the community’s tolerance. Instead of looking up to the heavens for inspiration, liberal democracies look down in the gutter.
Dignity comes from maintaining one’s obligations to his position in the social order, but that requires a fidelity to a social order. It also requires a connection to the rest of the people in the society. In a world of deracinated individuals focused solely on getting as much as they can in order to maximize pleasure, a sense of commitment to the community is not possible. Democracy assumes we are all equal, therefore we have no duty to one another as duty requires a hierarchical relationship.
In the absence of a vertical set of reciprocal relationships, we get this weird lattice work of horizontal relationships, elevating the profane and vulgar, while pulling down the noble and honorable. The public culture is about minimizing and degrading those who participate in the public culture. In turn, the public culture attracts only those who cannot be shamed or embarrassed. The great joy of public culture is to see those who aspire to more get torn down as the crowd roars at their demise.
The puzzle is why this is a feature of liberal democracy. Ryszard Legutko places the blame on Protestantism. Their emphasis on original sin and man’s natural limitations minimized man’s role in the world. This focus on man’s wretchedness was useful in channeling our urge to labor and create into useful activities, thus generating great prosperity, but it left us with a minimalist view of human accomplishment. We are not worthy to aspire to anything more than the base and degraded.
It is certainly true that the restraints of Christianity limited the sorts of behavior that are common today, but he may be putting the cart before the horse. The emergence of Protestantism in northern Europe was as much a result of the people and their nature as anything else. Put more simply, the Protestant work ethic existed before there was such a thing as a Protestant. The desire to work and delay gratification evolved over many generations out of environmental necessity.
Still, culture is an important part of man’s environment and environmental factors shape our evolution. It is not unreasonable to say that the evolution of Protestant ethics magnified and structured naturally occurring instincts among the people. With the collapse of Christianity as a social force in the West, the natural defense to degeneracy and vulgarity has collapsed with it. As a result, great plenty is the fuel for a small cohort of deviants to overrun the culture of liberal democracies.
Even so, there does seem to be something else. Liberal democracy has not produced great art or great architecture. The Greeks and Romans left us great things that still inspire the imagination of the man who happens to gaze upon them. The castles and cathedrals of the medieval period still awe us. The great flourishing of liberal democracy in the 20th century gave us Brutalism and dribbles of pain on canvas. The new century promises us primitives exposing themselves on the internet.
There is something about the liberal democratic order that seeks to strip us of our dignity and self-respect. Look at what happened in the former Eastern Bloc countries after communism. Exposed to the narcotic of liberalism they immediately acquired the same cultural patterns. Fertility collapsed. Religion collapsed. Marriage and family formation collapsed. These suddenly free societies got the Western disease as soon as they were exposed to western liberal democracy.
The reaction we see today is not due to these societies being behind the times, but due to seeing the ugly face of liberal democracy. It is much like the reaction to the proliferation of recreational drugs in the 1970’s. At first, it seemed harmless, but then people realized the horror of unrestrained self-indulgence. That’s what we see in the former Eastern Bloc. Their leaders still retain some of the old sense of things and are trying to save their people from the dungeon of modernity.
That still leaves us with the unanswered question. What is it about liberal democracy that seems to lead to this loss of dignity? It is possible that such a fabulously efficient system for producing wealth is a tool mankind is not yet equipped to handle without killing ourselves. Maybe we are just not built for anything but scarcity. Want gives us purpose and without it, we lose our reason to exist. Either way, without dignity, we cannot defend ourselves and the results are inevitable.”
“Many people don’t fear a hell after this life and that’s because hell is on this earth, in this life. In this life there are many forms of hell that people walk through, sometimes for a day, sometimes for years, sometimes it doesn’t end. The kind of hell that doesn’t burn your skin; but burns your soul. The kind of hell that people can’t see; but the flames lap at your spirit. Heaven is a place on earth, too! It’s where you feel freedom, where you’re not afraid. No more chains. And you hear your soul laughing.”
"May Sarton on How to Live with Tenderness in a Harsh World"
By Maria Popova
"This world is radiant with beauty. This world is also capable of bone-chilling brutality and the small, corrosive daily cruelties that salt our days with sorrow. For a sensitive person to live with the duality, to keep the light aflame without turning away from the darkness that needs illumination, may be the most difficult thing in life - and the most rewarding.
What it takes, and how it rewards us, is what the great poet and diarist May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) explores in a journal entry from her altogether dazzling 1977 book "The House by the Sea" (public library). With an eye to the daily reality of teenagers killing with firearms - a reality that, in the decades since, has been magnified from interpersonal violence to mass shootings - she considers the long roots of desensitization, fanged into the body of the world with every war: "What have we done to our children that such indifference is possible? A total disconnection between the act and the human terror and despair involved?"
In a passage of stunning prescience and relevance to our own epoch, she answers: "We are in a period where torture is taken for granted almost everywhere, and where the so-called civilized peoples must go on eating candy and drinking whiskey while millions die of hunger. So one has to extrapolate the morally indifferent boys to the whole ethos in which they live. And at the root of it all is the lack of imagination. If we had imagined what we were doing in Vietnam it would have had to be stopped. But the images of old women holding shattered babies or of babies screaming ended by passing before our eyes but never penetrating to consciousness where they could be experienced. Are we paying for Vietnam now by seeing our children become monsters?"
Sarton offers a cure for this deadly indifference - a cure that honeys this twenty-first-century soul with its poignancy and its potency: "I am more and more convinced that in the life of civilizations as in the lives of individuals too much matter that cannot be digested, too much experience that has not been imagined and probed and understood, ends in total rejection of everything - ends in anomie. The structures break down and there is nothing to “hold onto.” It is understandable that at such times religious fanatics arise and the fundamentalists rise up in fury. Hatred rather than love dominates. How does one handle it? The greatest danger, as I see it in myself, is the danger of withdrawal into private worlds. We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys, all those that have nothing to do with money or affluence - nature, the arts, human love. Maybe that is why the pandas in the London Zoo brought me back to poetry for the first time in two years."
"We have got some very big problems confronting us and let us not make any mistake about it, human history in the future is fraught with tragedy. It's only through people making a stand against that tragedy and being doggedly optimistic that we are going to win through. If you look at the plight of the human race it could well tip you into despair, so you have to be very strong."
"Situated in the center of Moscow, Russia. Paveletskaya Square is concidered one the most complicated construction projects in Moscow's 875 year history of construction. Together with the park, there is also a 3 level shopping centre built under the street level of the park its self. Amazing."
Reader comment: "Very beautiful country, city, vibe, and happy people. No trash, no homeless, no racism, no racists, no creepy drug addicts, no creepy weird multiple gender freaks trying to get attention, no cops. Every city and country should have these nice spirits."
"These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars. The colors in this remarkably deep composite image clearly show the star forming galaxies with a blue tint and galaxies with older stellar populations with a yellowish cast.
The sharp picture spans about 3/4 degree across the cluster center, corresponding to over 6 million light-years at the cluster's estimated distance. Diffraction spikes around brighter foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy are produced by the imaging telescope's mirror support vanes. In the cosmic vista many galaxies seem to be colliding or merging while others seem distorted - clear evidence that cluster galaxies commonly interact. In fact, the Hercules Cluster itself may be seen as the result of ongoing mergers of smaller galaxy clusters and is thought to be similar to young galaxy clusters in the much more distant, early Universe. "
"You shouldn’t have a care in the world. Everything in the economy is absolutely fantastic. Wells Fargo bank says that we are in a Goldilocks situation. Things are not too bad and they’re not too good."
“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
“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” - Roger Waters
“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.” – Dresden James
“A lie gets halfway around the world before
the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
– Winston Churchill
"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.
The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.
But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.
SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.” Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.
Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”
Postman ended his book by writing: “What afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.” A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
"We live in a society where we have been trained not to ask the hard questions. Instead, we are just supposed to relax and let others do our thinking for us. If you do insist on asking pesky questions, you are likely to be labeled a “conspiracy theorist” or something even worse. And even those labels are a form of control. Very few of us are eager to be labeled “one of those people”, and so most of us just go along with the program. You see, the truth is that those in power do not want us to be independent thinkers. They want us to be sheep. But the good news is that more people than ever are waking up to the fact that the elitists that are running things are rotten to the core.
There is so much going on in our world right now, and the pace of change just keeps getting faster and faster. I tend to write a lot about our ongoing economic problems, but I am going to take a break from that today and focus on some of the other things that are happening. The following are 10 very important questions that I believe we should all be asking right now…
#1 Why is the mainstream media so quiet about the fact that Joe Biden and his family received tens of millions of dollars from foreign nationals in an influence-peddling scheme that went on for many years while Biden was vice-president…James Comer expects to uncover $20-30 million in illicit payments made to the Biden Crime Family: “This is going to be hard to Biden to explain, this is not going to go away, and I think eventually the mainstream media is going to start asking the real questions.”
#2 Who was behind the absolutely massive cyberattack that just hit U.S. government agencies?…"Several US federal government agencies have been hit in a global cyberattack that exploits a vulnerability in widely used software, according to a top US cybersecurity agency. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “is providing support to several federal agencies that have experienced intrusions affecting their MOVEit applications,” Eric Goldstein, the agency’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity, said in a statement on Thursday to CNN, referring to the software impacted. “We are working urgently to understand impacts and ensure timely remediation.”
#3 Should we be concerned that hail “the size of baseballs” is hammering some areas in the middle of the country?…"Much of Oklahoma was under a “moderate” risk for severe storms Thursday. That’s level 4 out of 5 on the severe storm risk scale. The National Weather Service in Norman, Oklahoma, warned of a “significant severe weather” outbreak. People “should be prepared for hail up to the size of baseballs and winds up to 80 mph with the stronger storms,” the weather service said."
#4 Why is New York City introducing vending machines where addicts can get crack pipes for free?…"First, we had Joe Biden sending out free “safe smoking kits” AKA crack pipes and accessories, and now New York is placing these same types of “safe” smoking kits in their “public health” vending machines. The machine also has Narcan, an overdose rescue drug, condoms, nicotine gum, and other “health” related items."
#5 One recent survey found that 42 percent of U.S. CEOs believe that AI “has the potential to destroy humanity five to ten years from now”. Why aren’t more people sounding the alarm about the danger that AI poses to our society?…"Many top business leaders are seriously worried that artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat to humanity in the not-too-distant future.
Forty-two percent of CEOs surveyed at the Yale CEO Summit this week say AI has the potential to destroy humanity five to ten years from now, according to survey results shared exclusively with CNN. “It’s pretty dark and alarming,” Yale professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld said in a phone interview, referring to the findings."
#6 Why has the U.S. government been “secretly stockpiling dirt” on American citizens by purchasing it from data brokers? Isn’t that sort of thing supposed to be illegal?…"The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago.
The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members."
#7 Scientists are creating “synthetic human embryos” without using human eggs or human sperm. Why is this being allowed, and what are the dangers if this sort of “research” is not stopped?…"Scientists have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, in a groundbreaking advance that sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm. Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage. However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries."
#8 Why is a Republican member of the California legislature named Scott Wilk telling parents to flee the state if they love their children?…“In the past when we’ve had these discussions and I’ve seen parental rights atrophied - I’ve encouraged people to keep fighting,” the senator added. “I’ve changed my mind on that.” “If you love your children, you need to flee California. You need to flee,” he said."
#9 Why are Americans so depressed? According to a brand new report from the CDC, nearly 20 percent of all Americans have been formally diagnosed with depression during their lifetimes…"The proportion of US adults who have ever been diagnosed with depression ranges greatly depending on where they live. A new report published Thursday by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that in 2020, 18.4% of US adults reported having ever been diagnosed with depression in their lifetimes – but, state by state, that percentage of adults ranged from an estimated 12.7% in Hawaii to 27.5% in West Virginia."
#10 Why is there an “epidemic” of cancer among our young people…"This “early-onset cancer epidemic,” as one recent study published in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology dubbed it, comprises a surge in the incidence of over a dozen different cancers in younger people since the 1990s in countries around the world.
In the U.S., the rate of early-onset cases rose by almost 18 percent between 2000 and 2019, even as cancer declined slightly in older adults, according to data from the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Among Americans between 15 and 39 years old, an age group cancer researchers refer to as adolescents and young adults (AYAs), the surge was more pronounced still, topping 20 percent."
If you want to be successful in life, you can’t be afraid to ask questions. Because good questions often lead to good solutions. Unfortunately, much of the population has been trained to no longer think for themselves, and so we all need to try to do what we can to wake them back up."
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