Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 6/27/23
"Its Been Great, But The Collapse Won't Be"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
"The Damage Is Unrepairable, Things Are Breaking"
Jeremiah Babe, 6/27/23
"The Damage Is Unrepairable, Things Are Breaking"
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"15 Big Box Retailers That Report Massive Grocery Price Increases In 2023"
Full screen recommended.
"15 Big Box Retailers That Report Massive
Grocery Price Increases In 2023"
By Epic Economist
"We’re being told that inflation numbers are going down, but when it comes to food inflation, that’s a whole different story. More than half of US food retailers are still raising prices this year, a nine percentage point jump from last year, according to BDO’s 2023 Retail CFO Outlook Survey. With major food makers, including Procter & Gamble, Nestlé, Unilever, and Coca-Cola signaling their intent to continue to push prices up despite falling sales volumes, retailers are having to pass these higher costs on to shoppers – plus a little extra. At this point, many people argue that big brands are, in fact, price-gouging their customers. Some of these companies are actually facing lawsuits over allegations of abusive price increases over the past year. Unfortunately, big names like Sam’s Club, Kroger, and even discount grocers say that the cost of essential products is about to go up even further in the second half of 2023.
According to GOBankingRates, over the past year, Walmart grocery prices climbed by 22%, and earlier this month, the world’s biggest retailer warned that it might still have to increase prices to deal with higher costs. During an investor’s meeting, Walmart CFO John David Rainey said that the company is still facing significant challenges with its supply chain. “We’re assuming that this year is going to be somewhat anomalous. Still feeling the effects of higher prices,” Rainey said. Consequently, Walmart shoppers’ grocery bills are likely to go up by at least another 10% before the end of the year. That’s quite worrying considering that prices at Walmart stores have risen by 50% since 2020, according to consumers reports. On TikTok, one content creator decided to buy and compare the same items she did in 2020 Her shopping cart included corn mix, flour, 12-gallon nondairy milk, six eggs, two bananas, a small bundle of green Scallion, two potatoes, pinto beans, frozen mixed vegetables, and grain. According to the user, she purchased all of these items for $10.09 in 2020. She claims she made a “week’s worth of meals for one person,” sharing her receipt. As of January 2023, the shopper claims she went back to Walmart to purchase the items yet again and the total came out to $15.10, “a 50%” increase from a couple of years ago. “We need to start calling it what it is: price gouging,” one viewer stressed. “I wish they’d just stop lying to us by calling this inflation, this is 100% price gouging and I am sick of it,” a second agreed. “The ‘cheap’ butter we used to buy a year-ish ago, was 99 cents, now it’s 3 bucks,” another one shared. “I just got hamburger from Walmart for almost $6/lb. I remember it being like $3.50/lb,” another person said. Reports like that are getting increasingly more common as more and more Americans complain about soaring grocery costs at the retailer’s stores.
Food inflation will persist for many months, and that will have a huge effect on our monthly budgets and our purchasing power. We must organize ourselves and always remember to shop consciously. If you haven’t stocked up yet, we advise you to start preparing for these price hikes right now. The rest of the year is going to be very turbulent for those who didn’t get ready for these major changes, so make sure you got your needs covered because prices will only get higher from here on. For that reason, today, we decided to list which grocery stores are reporting another wave of price hikes right now."
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Musical Interlude: Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"
Full screen recommended.
Jefferson Airplane, "White Rabbit"
○
“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
Chet Raymo, “Very, Very, Very, Very, Very...”
“Very, Very, Very, Very, Very...”
by Chet Raymo
"In a short story that was published posthumously in the New Yorker, the inestimable Primo Levi meditated on the limits of language. The story was called “The Tranquil Star.” He writes "The star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous," and realizes immediately that the adjectives have failed him: “For a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. It's a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it's human. It doesn't go beyond what our senses tell us.
Until fairly recently in human history, there was nothing smaller than a scabies mite, writes Levi, and therefore no adjective to describe it. Nothing bigger than the sea or sky. Nothing hotter than fire. We can add modifiers: very big, very small, very hot. Or use adjectives of dubious superlativeness: enormous, colossal, extraordinary. But, really, these feeble stretchings of language don't take us very far in grasping the very, very, very extraordinarily diminutive or spectacularly colossal dimensions of atomic matter or cosmic space and time. We can overcome the limitations of language, Levi say, "only with a violent effort of the imagination."
I spent more than forty years trying to find ways to violently stretch the imaginations of my students (and myself) to accommodate the dimensions of the universe revealed by science. I would project onto a huge screen a photograph of a firestorm on the Sun, then superimpose a scale-sized Earth, which fit comfortably inside a loop of solar fire. I would take the class into the College Quad here near Boston, where I had set up a basketball to represent the Sun, then gathered 100 feet away with a pinhead Earth; we walked together with our pin in the great annual journey of the Earth, and looked through a telescope at the marble-sized Jupiter than I had previously installed at the other end of the long Quad (the next closest star system would have been a couple of basketballs in Hawaii). We walked geologic timelines that took us from one end of the campus to the other.
In one of my Globe essays I used this analogy: “Imagine the human DNA as a strand of sewing thread. On this scale, the DNA in the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a typical human cell would be about 150 miles long, with about 600 nucleotide pairs per inch. That is, the DNA in a single cell is equivalent to 1000 spools of sewing thread, representing two copies of the genetic code. Take all that thread - the 1000 spools worth - and crumple it into 46 wads (the chromosomes). Stuff the wads into a shoe box (the cell nucleus) along with - oh, say enough chicken soup to fill the box. Toss the shoe box into a steamer trunk (the cell), and fill the rest of the trunk with more soup. Take the steamer trunk with its contents and shrink it down to an invisibly small object, smaller than the point of a pin. Multiply that tiny object by a trillion and you have the trillion cells of the human body, each with its full complement of DNA.”
Or this description from 'Waking Zero': “The track of the Prime Meridian across England from Peace Haven in the south to the mouth of the River Humber in the north is nearly 200 miles. If that distance is taken to represent the 13.7 billion year history of the universe, as we understand it today, then all of recorded human history is less than a single step. The entire story I have told in this book, from the Alexandrian astronomers and geographers to the present-day astronomers who launch telescopes into space, would fit neatly into a single footprint. If the 200 miles of the meridian track is taken to represent the distance to the most distant objects we observe with our telescopes, then a couple of steps would take us across the Milky Way Galaxy. A mote of dust from my shoe is large enough to contain not only our own solar system but many neighboring stars.”
But as hard as one tries, the scale of these things escape us. If one could truly comprehend what we are seeing when we look, say, at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Photo above, which I have done my best to convey to myself and others in a dozen ways, it would surely shake to the core some of our most cherished beliefs. Just as our language is contrived on a human scale, so too are our gods.”
"The Hand We're Dealt...:
“Bad things don’t happen to people because they deserve for them to happen. It just doesn’t work that way. It’s just… life. And no matter who we are, we have to take the hand we’re dealt, crappy though it may be, and try our very best to move forward anyway, to love anyway, to have hope anyway… to have faith that there’s a purpose to the journey we’re on.”
- Mia Sheridan
Free Download: Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet"
"The Prophet: On Good and Evil "
"Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves,
and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.
You are good when you are one with yourself.
Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.
For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.
And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among
perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.
You are good when you strive to give of yourself.
Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.
For when you strive for gain you are but a root
that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.
Surely the fruit cannot say to the root,
Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance.
For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.
You are good when you are fully awake in your speech,
Yet you are not evil when you sleep
while your tongue staggers without purpose.
And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.
You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.
Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.
Even those who limp go not backward.
But you who are strong and swift,
see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.
You are good in countless ways,
and you are not evil when you are not good,
You are only loitering and sluggard.
Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.
In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness:
and that longing is in all of you.
But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea,
carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.
And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and
bends and lingers before it reaches the shore.
But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little,
Wherefore are you slow and halting?
For the truly good ask not the naked,
Where is your garment?
nor the houseless, What has befallen your house?"
- Kahlil Gibran
○
Freely download a PDF version of "The Prophet" here:
"The Ways We Miss Our Lives..."
"A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life."
- Richard Ford
"When I hear somebody sigh, "Life is hard,"
I am always tempted to ask, "Compared to what?"
- Sydney Harris
"9 Big Restaurant Chains That Filed For Bankruptcy"
Full screen recommended.
"9 Big Restaurant Chains That Filed For Bankruptcy"
by Economics Today
"Our favorite restaurants are vanishing from sight as worsening economic conditions continue to squeeze U.S. businesses. With shoppers eating out less and tightening their budgets, even big names in the industry are seeing their operations rot from within. Over the past three years, over 160,000 restaurants have been permanently closed around the country, and unfortunately, that trend is still picking up force in 2023.
It’s hard to believe but even the biggest and most successful fast food chains in the world aren’t immune to bankruptcies among franchisees. Just a couple of months ago, Rice Enterprices LLC declared bankruptcy and shuttered all of the McDonald’s restaurants it operated. Serious labor issues involving minors led the franchisee to face a millionaire lawsuit that affected the brand as a whole. Last month, the company announced hundreds of store closings, not only in America, but all across the globe. Some of its formats have become outdated, executives say. The decision was made after a team of board members discussed the growth potential of certain locations and decided to focus on the ones with higher financial returns, excluding struggling stores from its portfolio."
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Bill Bonner, "Big City Blues"
"Big City Blues"
St. Louis, Baltimore, Oakland, Philadelphia, Newark…
the list is long…and sad...
by Bill Bonner
"When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go downtown.
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know, downtown."
~ Made famous by Petula Clark
Poitou, France - "Not any more. Who wants to go downtown, now? You go downtown…you lock your car doors. You dodge the junkies…you pay off the squeegee kids so they won’t damage your car…you watch your step to avoid twisting your ankle on the broken pavement…or stepping into something that shouldn’t be there…you skirt the ‘unhoused’ people…and keep an eye out for rats… and then you get out of there as soon as possible!
Yes, America’s downtowns are downers – run down…down at the heels…down and out…and let down by their own governments. For hundreds of years, cities have been centers of production, commerce, education and commerce. It’s where the smart, handsome and rich people went to make their fortunes…and where the out-of-towners went to gawk and have a good time.
Ecumenical Apoliticism: But last week, cometh the Tweet: "You hear about how bad San Francisco is. I was filming a shot of my father, Shelby Steele, and in the ten minutes we were gone our SUV was broken into and nearly $15k of cameras stolen. Called 911 & they hung up twice."
Cities are prominent victims of democracy. In the 1960s, the ‘War on Poverty’ directed billions of dollars to help end ‘urban blight.’ Poor people moved to the cities to get in on the loot. The middle class moved out to avoid rising crime. Politicians found they could win city elections by offering more and more ‘free stuff.’
Democrats tend to be better at pandering to the poor. And probably no democrats were better at it than those of Flint, Michigan. In 2016, filmmaker Michael Moore, visited Flint and tweeted: “Flint has voted for Dems for 84 straight yrs…what did it get us?” We can answer that. It got them undrinkable water and an unlivable city. But Moore, of course, missed his own point. He wanted to arrest Michigan’s Republican governor!
Here at Bonner Private Research we don’t take sides. Our contempt for the political class is ecumenical. But we can’t help but notice how democratic politics has destroyed our own home town – Baltimore – along with many others. As a child, we remember the city as a place to work, to shop, to go to movies, theaters and restaurants. Baltimore had a steel mill…an auto plant…Black & Decker tools…and dozens of nationally-known brands. McCormick spices infused the air around the inner harbor…and the sounds of workmen were everywhere.
Taxes, Crime, Corruption and Incompetence: Now, the factories are closed…the retail shops are closed…and the downtown area often seems like a ghost-town. Even the tourist attraction – the Inner Harbor – seems neglected and shabby. What happened?
Detroit elected its last Republican mayor in 1957. Chicago’s democratic machine has been in control since the 1920s. St. Louis, Baltimore, Oakland, Philadelphia, Newark…the list is long…and sad. Big cities are run for the benefit of their ‘deciders’ and their employees, not for ‘the people’ who live there. Good people leave town…the holdouts fight a lost cause battle against taxes, crime, corruption and incompetence.
Forbes Magazine looked at San Francisco’s payroll back in 2020: "We found truck drivers loaded up with $262,898; city painters making $270,190; firefighters earning $316,306; and plumbing supervisors cleaning up $348,291 every year. One deputy sheriff earned $574,595 last year – including $315,896 in overtime. On average, the city’s 44,526 employees received pay and perks costing taxpayers $131,335 apiece. Four out of ten – 18,749 city workers – received a compensation package exceeding $150,000 per year."
What You Pay For: Typically, cities pay too much for services…and get far too little. Unionized employees end up with chubby checks and fat pensions. But the kids can’t pass normal proficiency tests…the potholes aren’t fixed…and the streets are unsafe. Meanwhile, income earning, tax paying win-win businesses are replaced by nonprofits and government agencies. Then, under the strain of paying for past services, cities cut back on current services…making themselves even less attractive to young families. Tax revenues fall.
The National Bureau of Economic Research calls it the “biggest fiscal problem” facing America’s cities. As the workforce ages, pension promises become harder and harder to keep. But that is just the beginning of the blight now infecting urban centers. Stay tuned..."
"This Will Change It All"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 6/27/23
"This Will Change It All"
"Can you explain any of this? The Economy is in complete turmoil. We are also going to see the effects of two major lawsuit on the real estate industry. Will the real estate industry change forever?"
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"Holiday Sale At Meijer! Stock Up Now! Be Prepared!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 6/27/23
"Holiday Sale At Meijer! Stock Up Now! Be Prepared!"
"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!"
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Monday, June 26, 2023
Jim Kunstler, "Coup Coo"
"Coup Coo"
by Jim Kunstler
“At exactly the point of the AFU’s weakest moment and near-collapse on the battlefield he chose to strike Russia in the back as if obviously driven by a hidden hand.”- Simplicius on Substack
"You’d think that the hapless DC neocons, Antony Blinken and his boss, Victoria Nuland, plus the gang at Spook Central, would have learned a lesson about the diminishing returns of color revolutions: namely, that these bold pranks blow back… and not in a good way.
The New York Times informs us that US Intel was well aware weeks beforehand of the developing coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his personal army, the Wagner Group. Congressional leaders were briefed a day prior to its roll-out. Well, golly, can you suppose for a New York minute that Russia’s intel agency didn’t know all about it, too?
A vast array of explanations for this bizarre wartime vaudeville can be found in every corner of the Internet. I’ll go with this one: Prigozhin came to bethink himself a Napoleonic figure. Just as Bonaparte wowed revolution-weary France with his military exploits against her enemies, and seized leadership of the nation, Prigozhin’s mercenary army carried the brunt of the action in Ukraine this year, culminating in the heroic victory at Bakhmut. Priggy regarded the Russian Ministry of Defense as oafish, and by extension, his long-time friend and mentor, Vlad Putin, indecisive about it. The moment was ripe to seize power! As a recent US president might have said: he misoverestimated.
It looks like the neocons, the CIA, and Britain’s MI6 did, too, if they helped nudge the event to fruition with assurances and cash - say, some of that $6.2 billion the Pentagon happened to find recently via an “accounting error.” What better time to destabilize Russia than during Ukraine’s vaunted spring offensive (which, let’s face it, was not going too well)? In fact, Ukraine’s whole NATO-assisted project from the get-go looked like a bust. The Bakhmut “meat-grinder” was just the latest fiasco. But then, the irascible, disgruntled, and grandiose field marshal Priggy seemed like the perfect instrument to jazz things up for the demoralized West.
Pretty darn quick, on the road from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Priggy learned the hard way that he had no support in the government, the military, or among the Russian public. The coup fizzled before sundown the very day it started. Some say, any way you cut it, the result is Vlad Putin left looking weak and vulnerable. I don’t think so. His speech to the Russian people that day appeared, if anything, resolute. And the way he seemed to spit out the words “a stab in the back,” you couldn’t think he was play-acting. By evening, with the whole psychodrama concluded, the people of St. Petersburg crowded the quay along the Neva River and busted into patriotic song.
Let’s address one nagging question: why did Mr. Putin allow the Wagner Group private army to play the leading role countering the Ukraine offensive? Answer: because he was saving and building-up the regular Russian army to strength in the further event that NATO might finally jump into Ukraine with all its multi-national feet when all else fails.
We’re left, of course, with the manifold mysteries of the coup’s hasty resolution. Mr. Prigozhin, we’re told, will be turned over to the custody of the Belarus president Lukashenko, to… to be done what with? To be put on the shelf like a bowling trophy? I’m sure…. If they can even find the bugger now. (I’d look in Africa, where sundry Wagner units have been operating - Priggy must have had a plane standing by in Rostov.) In any case, we know the rest: Wagner troops who did not participate in the coup get folded into the regular army, and said regular army takes over duty along the front in Ukraine. Mr. Putin, despite all these insults, will continue to seek a diplomatic end to all this nonsense, and he might get it sooner rather than later. Germany and France, among Euro others, must be sick of these shenanigans.
Can Ukraine even carry on much longer? President Zelensky, the comedian, seems to have gone mad-dog now. He just cancelled next year’s election, which makes him… what? Dictator? So much for America’s democracy export program. He’s also issued warnings to the effect that Russia is about to blow up the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest. Such an act would supposedly trigger direct intervention by NATO, according to the policy promoted by war-hawk US Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal. The nuclear plant is under Russian control. Mr. Zelensky says they have set mines in it. The scenario is pretty absurd. Nobody believes it. Of course, Mr. Zelensky might use some of his NATO missiles to zap it, but Russia has video surveillance and recording equipment at every angle around the joint and the world will know five seconds after how it was blown up.
From his latest photographs, it looks like Mr. Zelensky is in the terminal throes of a cocaine rapture, and his actions are consistent with that state of mind. He must know that he’s not long for this world. And our country, the USA, must know that this Ukraine gambit is another lost cause on our long march of military misadventures. And if the government of our country doesn’t know, the people surely do. Have you noticed, the yellow-and-blue flags are not flying anymore? Even the most hardcore anti-Trump Democrats seem to understand what pounding sand down a rat-hole means when it comes to the many billions of dollars squandered on this stupid project while our cities rot and a whole lot more goes south in our own ailing homeland.
Not to mention the parlous position of the American president himself, the spectral “Joe Biden,” skulking in his demon-haunted White House as evidence of his treasonous turpitudes mounts and mounts. Which leaves us to wonder whether our Intel Community may have stirred up the Russia coup as just another distraction from its own Biden-linked crimes against this nation."
"Thousands Of German Troops To Russian Border; 8,000 Wagner In Belarus; Ukraine Nuke Drill"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 6/26/23
"Thousands Of German Troops To Russian Border;
8,000 Wagner In Belarus; Ukraine Nuke Drill"
Comments here:
"I Got Some Bad News From Ford Today; You Could Lose Your Job Tomorrow; Get Out Of Debt Now"
Jeremiah Babe, 6/26/23
"I Got Some Bad News From Ford Today;
You Could Lose Your Job Tomorrow; Get Out Of Debt Now"
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"A Look to the Heavens"
"Why doesn't the nearby galaxy create a gravitational lensing effect on the background galaxy? It does, but since both galaxies are so nearby, the angular shift is much smaller than the angular sizes of the galaxies themselves. The featured Hubble image of NGC 3314 shows two large spiral galaxies which happen to line up exactly. The foreground spiral NGC 3314a appears nearly face-on with its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. Against the glow of the background galaxy NGC 3314b, though, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust can also be seen tracing the nearer spiral's structure. Both galaxies appear on the edge of the Hydra Cluster of Galaxies, a cluster that is about 200 million light years away.
Gravitational lens distortions are much easier to see when the lensing galaxy is smaller and further away. Then, the background galaxy may even be distorted into a ring around the nearer. Fast gravitational lens flashes due to stars in the foreground galaxy momentarily magnifying the light from stars in the background galaxy might one day be visible in future observing campaigns with high-resolution telescopes."
Chet Raymo, “As Time Goes By”
“As Time Goes By”
by Chet Raymo
“Is time something that is defined by the ticking of a cosmic clock, God’s wristwatch say? Time doesn’t exist except for the current tick. The past is irretrievably gone. The future does not yet exist. Consciousness is awareness of a moment. Or is time a dimension like space? We move through time as we move through space. The past is still there; we’re just not there anymore. The future exists; we’ll get there. We experience time as we experience space, say, by looking out the window of a moving train. Or is time…
Physicists and philosophers have been debating these questions since the pre-Socratics. Plato. Newton. Einstein. Most recently, Lee Smolin. Without resolution. What makes the question so difficult, it seems to me, is that time is inextricably tied up with consciousness. We won’t understand time until we understand consciousness, and vice versa. So far, consciousness is a mystery, in spite of books with titles like “Consciousness Explained”. Will consciousness be explained? Can consciousness be explained? If so, will it require a conceptual breakthrough of revolutionary proportions? Or is the Darwinian/material paradigm enough? Are we in for an insight, or for a surprise?
As I sit here at my desk under the hill, looking out at a vast panorama of earth, sea and sky, filled, it would seem, infinitely full of detail, so full that my awareness can only skim the surface, I have that uneasy sense that it’s going to be damnably difficult to extract consciousness, as a thing, from the universe in its totality. I think of that word “entanglement,” from quantum theory, and I wonder to what extent consciousness is entangled, perhaps even with past and future.
Who knows? Perhaps consciousness, or what I think of as my consciousness, is just a slice of cosmic consciousness, in the same way that the present is a slice of cosmic time. As a good Ockhamist, I am loathe to needlessly multiply hypotheses. But time will tell. Or consciousness will tell. Or something.”
"We're All Mad Here..."
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the cat.
"We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."
- Lewis Carroll,
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
Oh, I know, I know, some days...lol
The Poet: Theodore Roethke, "In A Dark Time"
"In A Dark Time"
"In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood -
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rock - is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is -
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind."
- Theodore Roethke
"The Competence Crisis, Or, Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason"
"The Competence Crisis, Or,
Why Society Will Collapse For A Silly Reason"
by John Wilder
“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – "Idiocracy"
I’ve written about Idiocracy before. It’s a good movie, and Mike Judge has a great sense of humor and timing. I would probably pay money to listen to him to read his phone list in Butthead’s voice. Unless Disney® got the money.
Anyway, Idiocracy was a funny movie. Unfortunately, it has proven to be prophetic in more ways than one. Recently, and article is making the rounds on /places/ about the topic of Idiocracy titled "Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis" (LINK). It’s by Harold Robertson, who I assume is not related to Robert Haroldson. His bio on Palladium lists him as an “asset class head and institutional investor at a multi-billion dollar pool of capital”. That makes me think he’s totally using a made up name or has all the money he can eat, since the thing he says in the article are so against The Narrative.
There are some difficult truths there. First, no matter how much everyone would like unexceptional people to be able to perform at exceptional levels, it’s simply not the case that that can happen. One of my favorite stories of Lee Iacocca was about his first day leading Chrysler®. Like most folks, on their first day, he was shown his office. Unlike most folks on their first day, he was informed that he had a personal chef, and he should request what he’d like to have for lunch. Lee said, “Oh, I dunno. How about a hamburger?” When you’re the boss, you can have a hamburger.
The hamburger was delivered, right on time. Iacocca took a bite. It was the very best hamburger that he had ever had in his life. He requested to talk to the chef. “This was the best hamburger that I’ve ever had. How did you do it?” The chef smiled, pulled a ribeye out of the fridge, and put it into the meat grinder.
I love that story. What you get depends on what you start with. Sure, you could grind up an old catcher’s mitt or that opossum that roots around in the garbage and cook it into a burger, but it wouldn’t be great chow. The material that you start with determines the end results.
In that article by Harold Robertson, he discusses a point I’ve been trying to make for years here – complex systems and societies are exceptionally fragile things – the more complex, the more fragile. Civilization is a house of cards – it takes millions of people doing their jobs exceptionally well every day just to keep it going.
It’s like the Red Queen and Alice from "Through the Looking Glass." "Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
The people running the complex systems we depend upon every day have to run, looking out and maintaining just what we have installed to make it work. Miss a scheduled maintenance? An entire city can have a power outage. An example in real time is South Africa. Currently, many locations have no electricity for sixteen hours a day, and regular supplies of fresh, clean water are a dream of a distant path.
Can’t happen here? What about California with the nearly annual cascading power outages? What about the city of Jackson, Mississippi being mis-managed to the point of collapse? What about Flint, Michigan, making the water acidic and leaching the lead out of the pipes? Or the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?
None of these technologies are under 100 years old. Sure, there have been advances in the way that they are done, but trains have been around longer than your mom, and clean drinking water has been around ever since we figured out that we should keep the lepers with typhoid away from the wells.
As the article notes, for a long time in the 20th century there was a relatively ruthless winnowing process in life for competence and intelligence. The young men who ran NASA in the 1960s were young, sure, but also amazingly competent. Gene Kranz, the “failure is not an option” guy, was only 35 when he was the Chief Flight Director for Apollo 11. The “Kranz Dictum” is simple: Tough and competent.
That was another time. Tough is replaced with Trigger Warnings and Competent is replaced with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Now we find ourselves in Idiocracy. Promotions aren’t based on competence, they’re based on...other factors. The armed forces of the United States, for instance, is top-heavy in white men. That is, people who were actually born men.
Since there are too many of them, regardless of competence, the new officers that will be promoted will be promoted by criteria other than competence. This is why I advised both The Boy and Pugsley to avoid .mil. Incompetence at a Pizza Hut® ends up with really crappy pizza delivered poorly. Incompetence in the military results in everyone being killed. The use of low IQ troops in Vietnam (at the time called the “Moron Corps”) resulted in triple the death rate, despite what Forrest Gump might indicate.
We’re now doing the very same thing. We’re pulling the spark plugs from the engine, and wondering why it doesn’t run. Don’t believe me?
Looks like there’s no IQ test to get into Congress. Look at Fetterman or Feinstein, who have the mental function of a three- or four-year-old. Yet? They’re Senators. Look at AOC, who thinks that, if Congress passes a law that defies the law of physics, like making electric cars mandatory, that water will run uphill, dropped plates will unbreak themselves, and everyone will have prosperity.
Competence is crucial to our way of life, and it is, sadly, not evenly distributed. I won’t opine as to why, because I don’t know why. But to doom civilization because the idea that competence and intelligence can be created because we really, really, really, want competence to be there? That’s Idiocracy in action."
"How It Really Is"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 6/26/23
"Urgent Need For More Debt, Expect
Huge Entitlement Program Expansion And More War!"
Comments here:
"When In Rome"
"When In Rome"
by Jeff Thomas
• Over its last one hundred years, the State steadily devalued the currency by 98%
• The high cost of government - particularly, growing entitlements and perpetual warfare, coupled with a diminished number of taxpayers, led the government to massive debt, to the point that it could not be repaid.
• Those citizens that were productive began to exit the country, finding new homes in countries that were not quite so sophisticated but offered better prospects for the future.
• The decline in the value of the currency resulted in ever-increasing prices of goods, so much so that the purchase of them became a hardship to the people. By governmental edict, wage and price controls were established, forcing rises in wages whilst capping the amount that vendors could charge for goods. The result was that vendors offered fewer and fewer goods for sale, as the profit had been eliminated.
If the reader is a citizen of the EU or US, the above history may seem quite familiar, with the one exception that strict wage and price controls have not (yet) been implemented. Still, the history is accurate; it is the history of Rome.
The Roman denarius pictured above features the profile of the emperor Diocletian, circa 301 AD, at the time when he issued the edict mentioned above. Like the US dollar that followed 1700 years later, the denarius was the most recognised and most respected currency of its day, as it was almost 100% silver. However, it was steadily devalued by successive emperors during the Era of Inflation from 193 to 293 AD. This was done by diminishing the amount of silver in the coin until it was made entirely of base metal, with a thin silver wash. Just as the US Federal Reserve devalued the US dollar 98% between 1913 and 2023, Rome devalued the denarius over a similar period of time.
Still, there will be those who will claim that, as the dollar is the world’s default currency, it must regain its former strength. I’m afraid not. In 193 AD, the denarius enjoyed a similar position to that of the US dollar today. Yet, having been devalued, it never regained its worth - in fact, not to this very day, even as a relic. The denarius pictured above was recently offered on eBay for the ‘Buy Now’ price of $28.80. Not a very impressive increase in value for a coin that has survived for 1700 years.
History Repeats: We would like to think that, even though some current governments are following the Roman road to ruin with remarkable similarity, the outcome will somehow be brighter - that we will not witness the Fall of the Empire in our modern world. Surely, this time around, political leaders will ‘do the right thing,’ and place their own personal ambitions below the need to salvage the mess that they have created.
Again, I’m afraid not. As stated in Kershner’s First Law, historically, "When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take money from some and give it to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare."
Here’s a similar insight, this time from G. Edward Griffin: "When it is possible for people to vote on issues involving the transfer of wealth to themselves from others, the ballot box becomes a weapon with which the majority plunders the minority. That is the point of no return, the point where the doomsday mechanism begins to accelerate until the system self-destructs. The plundered grow weary of carrying the load and eventually join the plunderers. The productive base of the economy diminishes further and further until only the state remains."
Still, it will be argued that modern political leaders have the histories of previous empires to look back on and will therefore not repeat their mistakes. But, again, this is not the case. There have always been those who warned the State away from this pattern of self-destruction, as the following quote, attributed to Cicero, 55 BC, attests: "The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."
The pattern has existed for over 2000 years, and historically, empires have followed the pattern to ruin with extraordinary consistency, regardless of warnings.
Continuing Examples: But before we finish here, the observant reader may point out that his country has not instituted wage and price controls, as in ancient Rome, and that the present Empire may therefore not experience the predictable collapse that such controls would bring about.
In considering this question, it would be helpful to look at Venezuela and Argentina, two countries that are following a path very similar to the EU and the US, but happen to be a bit further along in the pattern. They have, in fact, instituted such controls, with the result that their economies are nearing collapse.
Still, in a last ditch effort to avoid realizing the inevitable, we may argue that Venezuela and Argentina are third world countries, and therefore we might still expect a more positive outcome. Not so, unfortunately. The US has also trod this ground before. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, a last ditch effort by the US to stave off depression, triggered similar tariffs in Europe, assuring a deeper depression on both sides of the Atlantic. The US will continue to follow the pattern; it just hasn’t reached the tariff stage yet. We might therefore list such a tariff under "Coming Attractions."
An ever-greater number of people are coming to the realization that the EU and US have become runaway trains, trains that are headed for a cliff. More troubling, the firemen are clearly shovelling the coal into the engine at an alarming rate, speeding up the train rather than slowing it.
Most of us would prefer not to acknowledge that the train is headed for the cliff. This is understandable, as no one relishes the idea of jumping off a moving train. It’s not a pleasant choice to have to make. The reader may consider whether jumping off the train now may be preferable to the alternative."
o
"A runaway train... no way to slow down..."
Jethro Tull, "Locomotive Breath"
"Ready to Rumble"
"Ready to Rumble"
Cage-fighting ultra-billionaires, smug complacency,
the debt time bomb and plenty more...
by Bill Bonner and Joel Bowman
Poitou, France - "What an exciting weekend…with the fight of the century! On Saturday, the Wagnerians were on the road to Moscow to confront Putin. By Sunday, a ‘deal’ had been worked out. But we’re talking about something much more amusing, the upcoming battle between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The two ultra-billionaires, both serious martial art enthusiasts, were set to square off after Musk – supposedly prompted by Zuckerberg’s move to compete with Twitter – issued a challenge.
It was probably a joke; Musk proposed a “cage match.” The Zuck shot back “send me location.” So, the fight is on…maybe. We hope so. It would be entertaining. And extremely lucrative for everyone involved – ringside seats, hotel bookings, broadcast rights, T-shirts and memorabilia…it would probably be the single most profitable event in history. Vegas odds-makers are going 3-2 for Musk.
Gentlemanly Combat: Settling rivalries with a battle of champions is a venerable way to spare the money and lives that would be lost in a real battle. It’s also much more honorable. In the Bible, David and Goliath faced each other single handedly. So did Achilles and Hector in Homer’s Iliad.
Typically, the cost of war is borne by those who are least responsible for it – taxpayers and draftees. Instead, why not just let the deciders settle it on live TV…and make a profit on it? Zelenskyy and Putin, for example, are fighting over who controls the eastern section of the Ukraine, traditionally a “borderlands” area. How about a cage match?
While disputes between nations are often resolved by force, elections are usually a matter of fraud. “He’ll keep us out of war,” promised supporters of Woodrow Wilson. “He’ll create a Great Society,” they pledged for Lyndon Johnson. “He’ll make America great again,” they vouchsafed on Donald Trump’s behalf. Once elected, the president then undertakes to reward his campaign donors. Voters are often forgotten or stabbed in the back.
Think about how much expense, corruption and bombast could be avoided by replacing national elections with cage matches. Hillary vs. Donald…Donald vs. Joe. Who knows which way these rumbles would go…but they could hardly be worse than the verdict of the voters.
Back on the Beat: But let’s move on…the Fed has paused. Stocks are still high. Unemployment is still low. And the credit catastrophe, if there is one, is still ahead. As to the coming catastrophe…David Rosenberg, former head economist at Merrill Lynch, is on the case. DNyuz: "He… cautioned that investors appear overly optimistic today, just as they were nearly 25 years ago. For example, they’ve roughly tripled Nvidia’s stock price this year, lifting its market capitalization to north of $1 trillion. They’ve also more than doubled the stock prices of Tesla, Meta, and other popular tech names too. “The smug complacency in 2000 looks eerily similar to what we have on our hands today,” Rosenberg said, adding that a recession is “coming sooner than you think.” He noted the inverted yield curve is signaling a 99% chance of a recession, and based on past economic cycles, that may mean the downturn arrives before the end of this year.
Speculators so loved US commercial real estate …and were so sure that the lowest interest rates in 5,000 years would stick around for years more…that they looked to make easy money buying property in the heart of America’s most dynamic cities. For an entire generation, they were in-the-money. Interest rates went down. The players could refinance…and refinance…even ‘taking out equity’ as the price of the buildings went up while interest rates went lower. Then, in 2009, the Fed began a “zero interest rate” policy…holding its key lending rate below the rate of inflation for most of the next 14 years. It was a dream come true for leveraged real estate speculators.
‘Extend and Pretend’: But now, they face a ‘whole new ballgame.’ Bloomberg reports: "The World’s Empty Office Buildings Have Become a Debt Time Bomb." "In New York and London, owners of gleaming office towers are walking away from their debt rather than pouring good money after bad. The landlords of downtown San Francisco’s largest mall have abandoned it. A new Hong Kong skyscraper is only a quarter leased.… the trouble in property is set to play out for years."
Bloomberg continued: "The ‘Extend and Pretend’ Real Estate Strategy Is Running Out of Time." "It’s not that the market participants had forgotten the lessons of the global financial crisis that followed the 2000s boom. It’s that they remembered them. Faced with delinquent loan payments, lenders decided to be patient: Instead of foreclosing on properties whose value was plummeting, they lengthened loan terms and ignored short-term valuations. They called it “extend and pretend” …
In the commercial property slump of 1992, for example, Donald Trump was nearly ruined. He was as much as $900 million in the hole. But extending and pretending worked for him as it did for others. The Fed was committed to low interest rates…and the bull market in bonds (with lower and lower yields) that began in 1982 was only about half over. As rates went down, the value of properties went up – especially in New York. By 2016, when he ran for president, Mr. Trump said he was worth $10 billion. So, it was no accident that he told the Fed to cut rates when he got into the White House. He was a “low interest rate guy,” he said."
As long as the bear market in yields (falling interest rates/rising bond prices) continued, you could survive a tight real estate market just by maintaining your cool. You refinanced…and waited for the buyers/renters to come back. But what about now? Stay tuned…"
o
Joel’s Note: “Commercial property may be facing an even more treacherous correction.” That was from Bill… looking around the corner back in April. And now, the rest of the mainstream news is catching on, too…A “debt time bomb” screamed Bloomberg on Friday… A “financial storm” chorused yesterday’s Financial Times. “‘Zombie’ buildings abandoned during commercial real estate ‘apocalypse’” added the New York Post over the weekend.
And here’s Fortune, piling on…"The office real estate crash will be so sharp and deep that Capital Economics thinks office values are unlikely to recover by 2040 According to Morgan Stanley, almost $3 trillion in commercial mortgages will be up for refinancing in the next couple of years. That’s a lot of debt to roll over at higher rates. (For perspective, $3 trillion is larger than the entire GDP of the United Kingdom – $2.7 trillion.)"
And now, stress is mounting…"Commercial Real Estate (CRE) mortgage delinquencies rose to 3% in the first three months of 2023, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. A report from MSCI Real Assets reckons “troubled CRE assets” (that is, properties that are forced to be sold as owners can't afford to pay their mortgages), jumped by 10% in the first quarter, to about $64 billion. Another $155 billion it labeled as “at risk.”
Who will bear the brunt of the impact, should a full-blown crisis emerge? Smaller, regional banks finance around 60% of all commercial real-estate debt in the country…"We are very focused on commercial real estate situation,” Jerome Powell told the House Committee on Financial Services last week."
Hmm… just like the Fed was focused on “transitory” inflation? What if the failures of Signature Bank, Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic were not the end of the crisis, but just the tip of the proverbial iceberg?"
"Has Any Of It Been Right?"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 6/26/23
"Has Any Of It Been Right?"
"Has any of the economic news been right? We have heard so much information over the last two years. That just doesn’t seem right. Everything they tell us doesn’t come true. What do you think?"
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