Jeremiah Babe, 7/10/23
"US Cities Look Worse Than Mad Max;
Used Car Market Crash; Churches Have Sold You Out"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
Monday, July 10, 2023
"Food Manufacturers Are Shrinking Products! Shrinkflation Is Everywhere!"
Adventures With Danno, PM 7/10/23
"Food Manufacturers Are Shrinking Products!
Shrinkflation Is Everywhere!"
"We expose the truth on food manufacturers and the massive shrinkflation going on, and explain how all of these major grocery stores are price gouging! We are starting to notice massive shrinkflation everywhere! It's getting rough out here as many families struggle to put food on the table!"
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"A Look to the Heavens"
"Northern winter constellations and a long arc of the Milky Way are setting in this night skyscape looking toward the Pacific Ocean from Point Reyes on planet Earth's California coast. Sirius, alpha star of Canis Major, is prominent below the starry arc toward the left. Orion's yellowish Betelgeuse, Aldebaran in Taurus, and the blue tinted Pleiades star cluster also find themselves between Milky Way and northwestern horizon near the center of the scene.
The nebulae visible in the series of exposures used to construct this panoramic view were captured in early March, but are just too faint to be seen with the unaided eye. On that northern night their expansive glow includes the reddish semi-circle of Barnard's Loop in Orion and NGC 1499 above and right of the Pleiades, also known as the California Nebula."
Free Download: Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet"
"Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are
only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence,
something helpless that wants our love. "
- Rainer Maria Rilke, "Letters to a Young Poet"
"The Restless Heart "
by Chet Raymo
In "Letters to a Young Poet", Rainer Maria Rilke writes: "We should try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue." To which I would add, let us trust the gifts that nature has given us- curiosity, attention, reason- and if our personal lives are destined for oblivion, then know that we have made of ordinary things something grander and more enduring. We are the transformers. We are bestowers of praise. "Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them," Rilke advises the restless young poet, echoing the great Catholic mystics: "And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
Is it enough? In the long history of humanity, no hope has been so enduring as personal immortality. At every time and in every place men and women have assumed they will live forever. It is our solace, our balm for the restless heart. Even Neanderthals, it seems, placed flowers in the graves of their dead, presumably to grace the afterlife.
But the lesson of modern biology is clear: Death is final. Do we lapse then into morbidity? Do we rage, rage against the dying of the light? We have art. We have science. Even a rhyme can thumb its nose at death, says Seamus Heaney. We can each of us try to live our lives as poetry, to add to the world an element of graciousness that is not strictly necessary, to leave behind a spoor of rhymes that marks our passage on the Earth.
Yes, the spirit is flesh, but the spirit is more than flesh. The spirit is flesh in interaction with a universe of almost unimaginable grandeur and complexity. The windows of the flesh are thrown open to the world. The spirit is a wind of awareness, a pool stirred by angels."
Some part of the spirit will linger after the flesh is gone, as memories in other flesh, as words, music, science, rhymes- as a world nudged slightly in its pell-mell course towards good or bad. But the self is mortal: This is the existential fact that agitates the restless heart. "We are biological and our souls cannot fly free," writes Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, summarizing what science has taught us about ourselves. He adds: "This is the essential first hypothesis for any consideration of the human condition."
○
Freely download or read online "Letters to a Young Poet",
by Rainer Maria Rilke, here:
"Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96, On What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives"
"Immortality in Passing: Poet Lisel Mueller, Who Lived to 96,
On What Gives Meaning to Our Ephemeral Lives"
by Maria Popova
“When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan observed as she beheld impermanence and transcendence at the foot of a mountain. “By the grace of random chance, funneled through nature’s laws,” the poetic physicist Brian Greene wrote in his beautiful meditation on our search for meaning in a cold cosmos, “we are here.”
And then we are not.
We die. All of us - atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea - you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales and poems, with general relativity and Nina Simone. It is what puts into perspective just how fleeting and vacant and self-embittering all of our angers and blames and resentments are in the end - what beckons us, instead, to “leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.”
That is what the late, great Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924–February 21, 2020) - one of the most original, deepest-seeing poets of our time - explores with great subtlety and profundity disguised as levity in the poem “Immortality” from her final poetry collection, the Pulitzer-winning masterpiece "Alive Together" (public library).
"Immortality"
"In Sleeping Beauty’s castle
the clock strikes one hundred years
and the girl in the tower returns to the world.
So do the servants in the kitchen,
who don’t even rub their eyes.
The cook’s right hand, lifted
an exact century ago,
completes its downward arc
to the kitchen boy’s left ear;
the boy’s tensed vocal cords
finally let go
the trapped, enduring whimper,
and the fly, arrested mid-plunge
above the strawberry pie,
fulfills its abiding mission
and dives into the sweet, red glaze.
As a child I had a book
with a picture of that scene.
I was too young to notice
how fear persists, and how
the anger that causes fear persists,
that its trajectory can’t be changed
or broken, only interrupted.
My attention was on the fly;
that this slight body
with its transparent wings
and lifespan of one human day
still craved its particular share
of sweetness, a century later.
- Lisel Mueller
“Immortality” by Lisel Mueller (read by Maria Popova)
(Two centuries earlier, William Blake explored the same eternal subject though the same creature in his short existentialist poem “The Fly.”)
In the front matter of this altogether miraculous book, where an epigraph would ordinarily appear, Mueller offers a short poem that becomes a kind of chorus line for the entire collection, but emerges as an especially harmonizing counterpart to “Immortality” in particular:
Complement these fragments of the wholly transcendent Alive Together with physicist Alan Lightman on our yearning for immortality in a universe governed by decay, Pico Iyer on finding beauty in impermanence, and Marcus Aurelius on mortality as the key to living fully, then revisit Barbara Ras’s bittersweet, buoyant, perspective-calibrating poem “You Can’t Have It All” and Marilyn Nelson’s magnificent ode to how we fill our impermanence with importance, “Faster Than Light.”
○
"The Backdoor to Immortality: Marguerite Duras
on What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death"
“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote as she weighed what gives meaning to our mortal lives in a stunning poem - one of the hundreds that outlived her as she returned her borrowed stardust to the universe at ninety-six. And yet, by some felicitous deviation from logic - perhaps an adaptive imbecility essential for our mental and emotional survival, one of the touching incongruences that make us human - the moment something becomes precious to us, we quarantine the prospect of its loss in some chamber of the mind we choose not to enter. On some deep level beyond the reach of reason, we come to believe that the people we love are - must be, for the alternative is a fathomless terror - immortal.
And so, when a loved one dies, this deepest part of us grows wild with rage at the universe - a rage skinned of sensemaking, irrational and raw, unsalved by our knowledge that the entropic destiny of everything alive is to die and of everything that exists to eventually not, even the universe itself; unsalved by the the immense cosmic poetry hidden in this fact; unsalved by the luckiness of having lived at all against the staggering cosmic odds otherwise; unsalved by remembering that only because ancient archaebacteria were capable of dying, as was every organism that evolved in their wake, we and the people we love and the people we lose came to exist at all."
- Maria Popova
Full article here: https://mailchi.mp/
○
Related, highly recommended:
“‘Bloom’: A Touching Animated Short Film About Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being”
“‘Bloom’: A Touching Animated Short Film About
Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being”
by Maria Popova
“Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands,” the poet May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the cure for despair amid a dark season of the spirit. But what does it take to perch that precarious if in the direction of the light? When we are in that dark and hollow place, that place of leaden loneliness and isolation, when “the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain,” as William Styron wrote in his classic account of the malady – an indiscriminate malady that savaged Keats and savaged Nietzsche and savaged Hansberry – what does it take to live through the horror and the hollowness to the other side, to look back and gasp disbelievingly, with the poet Jane Kenyon: “What hurt me so terribly… until this moment?”
During a recent dark season of the spirit, a dear friend buoyed me with the most wonderful, hope-giving, rehumanizing story: Some years earlier, when a colleague of hers – another physicist – was going through such a season of his own, she gave him an amaryllis bulb in a small pot; the effect it had on him was unexpected and profound, as the effect of uncalculated kindnesses always is – profound and far-reaching, the way a pebble of kindness ripples out widening circles of radiance. As the light slowly returned to his life, he decided to teach a class on the physics of animation. And so it is that one of his students, Emily Johnstone, came to make ‘Bloom’ – a touching animated short film, drawing from the small personal gesture a universal metaphor for how we survive our densest private darknesses, consonant with Neil Gaiman’s insistence that “sometimes it only takes a stranger, in a dark place… to make us warm in the coldest season.”
Complement with Tim Ferriss on how he survived suicidal depression and Tchaikovsky on depression and finding beauty amid the wreckage of the soul, then revisit “Having It Out with Melancholy” – Jane Kenyon’s stunning poem about life with and after depression.”
"Surely..."
"It's 3:23 A.M. and I'm awake because my great great
grandchildren won't let me sleep. They ask me in dreams,
'What did you do while the planet was plundered?
What did you do when the earth was unraveling?
Surely you did something when the seasons started flailing?
As the mammals, reptiles and birds were all dying?
Did you fill the streets with protest?
When democracy was stolen, what did you do once you knew?
Surely, you did something...'"
- Drew Dellinger
"Gregory Mannarino, 7/10/23"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 7/10/23
"Corporate Bankruptcies Skyrocket;
Household Net Worth Drops"
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o
Stansberry Research, 7/10/23
"The Fed's New Feudal System Will Wipe Out the Middle Class"
“We are existing in an environment of lies, upside-down, backward, and sideways, where nothing makes sense,” says Greg Mannarino, founder of traderschoice.net and financial strategist. He stresses that people should remain skeptical of what the Federal Reserve is telling them because “the polar opposite is true.” Mannarino sees de-dollarization as a real risk and warns that that “America is on borrowed time and the current system is in free-fall.” He argues that the U.S. has had the privilege of having the world reserve currency for many years, which has “allowed the U.S. to live a lifestyle that it’s not entitled to” due to its ability to impact inflation around the world. Mannarino concludes that the Fed is trying to establish “a new feudal system” that wipes out the middle class. “Things are changing very very rapidly,” he warns."
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"Hit The Road Jack"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 7/10/23
"Hit The Road Jack"
"People are fleeing the big cities. Crime is a huge problem. Homelessness is getting worse by the day. Plus, these cities don’t wanna protect people and prosecute crime. Now we hear that people want to leave Seattle."
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Since you insist...
Bill Bonner, "The Hardest Landing"
"The Hardest Landing"
Plus rocketing rates, labor market revisions,
$100 million yachts and plenty more...
by Bill Bonner
Taormina, Sicily - "Wealth, power, status…and love. Those are the things we all want. Love is in a class of its own – immeasurable and imponderable. But the others are all relative. So, we felt sorry for the owner of a huge mega-yacht that came into the harbor yesterday. Sleek and long…with its own starched-white crew and chef…worth maybe $50-$100 million. The rule of thumb is that annual operating expenses come to about 10% of the purchase price.How proud the owner must have been! His friends and family aboard…all impressed by his floating palace…But then, mooring in the Taormina bay…the poor owner must have felt like he needed a second job and a penis enhancement; the yacht was dwarfed by other super-super yachts already in the harbor. Welcome to the world of the rich…in Taormina, Sicily.
Rates Rocket: We are in Sicily attending a wedding. Despite all the advances in technology – AI, cryptos, and luggage with wheels…and all the advances in public policy – the Patriot Act, war in the Ukraine, removing statues, and almost 13 years of negative real interest rates…and progress in society itself – using ‘they’ to describe a single person, taking pride in things that used to be unmentionable and unpardonable, and recognizing that we are all hopeless racists…people still hitch themselves, one to another, like plow-horses.
And sometimes they want to do it in exotic locations…which is why we are here. The wedding went smoothly, elegantly. And then we spent the weekend exploring the countryside…including the towns of Castiglione di Sicilia and Troina, where we heard they were giving away houses. More about that…tomorrow.
Today, let us look at the most important thing to happen in the financial markets. Benzinga reports: "10-Year Treasury Yields Rise Above Inflation For The First Time In Three Years." "In a significant market development, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note surpassed the rate of inflation for the first time in more than three years. With the current yield at 4.04% and inflation recorded at 4% year-on-year in May 2023, this milestone signals a crucial market shift."
When bond yields surge above inflation, the dynamics change dramatically. And here’s the Reuters’ report: "US two-year Treasury yield surges to 16-year high after employment data." "The two-year U.S. Treasury note yield rose to its highest level since June 2007 on Thursday after news that private payrolls jumped in June, showing that the labor market remains surprisingly strong despite risks of recession from higher interest rates."
‘Piping Hot’: What sent interest rates shooting up was news, last week, which told us that the labor market is ‘piping hot.’ We don’t believe it really is; most of the new jobs are actually second jobs, taken by people who are desperate to keep up with rising costs. But the news, along with chatter from the Fed, convinced traders that the Fed will stick with its rate hikes a while longer. Stocks sold off as a result. But not nearly as much as they need to. By our reckoning, the Primary Trend in interest rates has turned up…which means asset prices must go down a lot more.
Interest rates have been increasing for the last 3 years – since July of 2020. That is the Primary Trend. And after 40 years of lower and lower borrowing costs, in which mortgage rates fell from over 15% to under 3%, our economy is not prepared for such an important change. Too many people borrowed too much money that must now be repaid…refinanced…and/or supported at much higher rates. But so far, so good. The Nasdaq had its best first half in 40 years. The S&P 500 rose 16%. Jobs are still plentiful (though, not necessarily good jobs). And the economy is still growing at 2% per year.
So, comes the question: is our theory wrong? Can the US economy…and its asset prices…continue to grow and prosper, even as interest rates go up? Or not?
Hard Landing: Our grandfather lived through the crash of ‘29 and the Great Depression. His bank failed and he lost all his savings. We may have told you this story before, but we’ll tell you again; he reported: "It was rough. After the Black Friday crash, the stock market bounced back a bit. People thought the worst was over. But then, the banks failed. I had an office in one of the tall buildings downtown [Baltimore]. We didn’t have air conditioning back then, so we left the windows open. And one day a guy jumped out of one the offices above me. I heard him say as he passed by my window: ‘All right so far.’" (One of the things we most admired about our grandfather was that even though he had lost all his money, he never lost his good humor.)
David Rosenberg must see the bodies coming down, too. On TV news over the weekend, he said it was ‘totally ridiculous’ to think that there would be no hard landing. He went on to say that the next 12 months will tell the tale, as Adjustable Rate Mortgage payments approximately double…and the federal government’s own bill from interest on the national debt goes over $1 trillion per year. We don’t know for sure what tale the coming months will tell, but we expect it will end with a thud."
"Joe Biden And His Warmongering Minions Seem Absolutely Determined To Drag America Into World War III"
"Joe Biden And His Warmongering Minions Seem
Absolutely Determined To Drag America Into World War III"
By Michael Snyder
"When the nukes start falling, nobody will be able to say that they weren’t warned. Thanks to Joe Biden and his warmongering minions, we are steamrolling toward World War III, but most Americans don’t seem to care. Most of us just continue to party our lives away, but meanwhile our leaders seem absolutely determined to drag us into an apocalyptic conflict. The Biden administration is constantly provoking China and constantly escalating the war in Ukraine, and one of these days they could cross a line that will never be able to be uncrossed. They are literally playing with fire, but they won’t be the only ones that get burned if they push things too far.
This week, we learned that the Biden administration has decided to give cluster munitions to Ukraine as part of a new $800 million military assistance package. If you don’t know what cluster munitions are, here is a pretty good explanation from NBC News…"The dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICMs, are surface-to-surface warheads that explode and disperse multiple small munitions or bombs over wide areas — bringing more widespread destruction than single rounds. The rounds can be charges that penetrate armored vehicles, or they can shatter or fragment to be more dangerous for people." Some human rights groups oppose their use because of concerns that unexploded bomblets, or duds, could explode after battle, potentially injuring or killing innocent civilians.
These weapons are considered to be extremely dangerous to civilians, because many of them fail to go off initially and end up getting detonated by civilian activity much later…"As the bomblets fall over a wide area, they can endanger non-combatants. In addition, somewhere between 10% to 40% of the munitions fail, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The unexploded munitions can then be detonated by civilian activity years or even decades later. The Cluster Munition Coalition, an activist group trying to get the weapons banned everywhere, says potentially deadly cluster submunitions still lie dormant in Laos and Vietnam 50 years after their use."
As you can see, there is a reason why so many countries have banned the use of such weapons. In fact, at this point more than 120 nations have agreed to ban them…"A convention banning the use of cluster bombs has been joined by more than 120 countries who agreed not to use, produce, transfer or stockpile the weapons and to clear them after they’ve been used. The United States, Russia and Ukraine are among the countries that have not signed on.
But even though there is such an international consensus, the Biden administration is sending them to Ukraine anyway…"But White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the munitions were critical for Ukraine to sustain its military operations against the Russian invaders. “We will not leave Ukraine defenseless at any point in this conflict, period,” he said."
Why aren’t more people talking about Jake Sullivan? He is a warmongering nutjob, and Joe Biden does pretty much whatever Jake Sullivan tells him to do. And so when Jake Sullivan suggests provoking China again, Joe Biden goes along with it.
Zero Hedge is reporting that the U.S. will now start providing Volcano Vehicle-Launched Scatterable Mine Systems to Taiwan…"Taiwan has finalized a new defense deal with the US worth $146 million to acquire Volcano Vehicle-Launched Scatterable Mine Systems, seen as crucial for defense of the self-ruled island in the event of a Chinese military invasion. This comes the same week the State Department announced approval for $440 million more in ammo and logistics deals for Taiwan.
The pending Volcano mine-laying systems deal had first been previewed by the US Defense Security Cooperation Agency in December 2022. It additionally included M977A4 trucks, M87A1 anti-tank mines, as well as M88 and M89 training munitions."
Needless to say, this is yet another move that has greatly angered the Chinese. And our trade war with China just went to another level. In response to new restrictions imposed by the U.S., China has just implemented export controls on two absolutely critical raw materials…"A trade war between China and the United States over the future of semiconductors is escalating.
Beijing hit back Monday by playing a trump card: It imposed export controls on two strategic raw materials, gallium and germanium, that are critical to the global chipmaking industry. “We see this as China’s second, and much bigger, counter measure to the tech war, and likely a response to the potential US tightening of [its] AI chip ban,” said Jefferies analysts. Sanctioning one of America’s biggest memory chipmakers, Micron Technology (MU), in May was the first, they said."
Ever since Joe Biden entered the White House, our relations with China have gone into the dumpster. And I think that there is a chance that the Chinese could actually choose to invade Taiwan before Joe Biden’s time in the White House is over. If that happens, it would be a complete and utter catastrophe for the global economy…"A military conflict over Taiwan would set the global economy back decades because of the crippling disruption to the supply chain of crucial semiconductors, according to the head of one of the island’s leading makers of microchips. Taiwan, a self-ruling democracy about 100 miles off China, makes the world’s most advanced microchips - the brains inside every piece of technology from smartphones and modern cars to artificial intelligence and fighter jets."
We simply cannot afford for such a war to happen, because we must have access to those chips. Without the chips that Taiwan produces, we would be in a world of hurt…"The island is a microchip fabrication hotbed, producing 60% of the world’s semiconductors — and around 93% of the most advanced ones, according to a 2021 report from the Boston Consulting Group. The U.S., South Korea and China also produce semiconductors, but Taiwan dominates the market, which was worth almost $600 billion last year."
So why don’t we just start building more chips in the United States? Well, a 40 billion dollar factory is going to be constructed in Arizona, but it is many years away from completion…"The U.S., which produces about 10% of the world’s semiconductor chips and none of the most advanced ones, is also trying to boost domestic manufacturing, offering tax incentives for projects like the $40 billion factory being built in Arizona by the Taiwanese chip giant TSMC. But building such a complex industry will take time, Wu said. “I would say 10 years,” he added."
If our leaders were smart, they would be trying to find a way to maintain peace. But instead they just keep antagonizing both Russia and China, and that is just pushing them closer to one another…"China said it wants closer ties with Russia’s military, a sign Moscow still has Beijing’s support after the aborted Wagner mutiny. Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu said in a meeting Monday with Nikolai Yevmenov, commander-in-chief of Russia’s navy, that “with the joint efforts of both sides, the relations between the two militaries will continue to deepen and solidify, constantly make new progress and reach a new level.”
If we end up fighting Russia and China at the same time, it would be a nightmare. And needless to say, such a conflict would inevitably go nuclear, and a full-blown nuclear war would have the potential to kill billions of people…So let us pray for peace. Unfortunately, our leaders don’t seem interested in peace at all. Joe Biden and his warmongering minions are playing a very dangerous game, and the fate of humanity hangs in the balance."
o
Full screen recommended.
"What would happen if a nuclear war were to be sparked between Russia and the United States today? Who would survive? In our most scientifically realistic simulation to date, we show what a nuclear war between Russia and the United States might look like today. It is based on detailed modeling of nuclear targets, missile trajectories, and the effects of blasts, EMPs, and smoke on the climate and food resources."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
"What Would Happen If A Nuclear Bomb
Was Dropped On a UK City?"
"It's a question that was once incredibly important, then became less relevant, but with current global politics has come back to the fore – What would happen after a nuclear strike? Mike Fernie investigates this brutally apocalyptic subject matter by visiting Scotland's secret bunker in the Kingdom of Fife, diving into the science and engineering behind both atomic and hydrogen weapons."
Comments here:
o
The psychopaths are absolutely determined to get us all killed in a nuclear war. It all seems horrifyingly unstoppable and inevitable. It's just a matter of time...God help us, God help us all...
Jim Kunstler, "The Blob Begins to Quiver"
"The Blob Begins to Quiver"
By Jim Kunstler
“…the Permanent State lacks the courage to take hard decisions – to say to Moscow, ‘Let us put this unfortunate episode (Ukraine) behind us. Dig out those draft treaties you wrote in December 2021, and let’s see how we can work together, to restore some functionality again to Europe’.” - Alasdair Crooke
"When you deny what is self-evident, you are at war with reality, and that never ends well. This is the ultimate disposition of our country’s years-long misadventure in maximum dishonesty. The American administrative Blob has not just lied about everything it does, but used the government machinery at hand to destroy everything it touches in a terminal-hysterical effort to cover up its misdeeds - including especially its crimes against its own people.
Get this: there is no way that Ukraine can avoid defeat in its US-provoked struggle with Russia. Russia has every advantage. It is next door to Ukraine. It has robust arms production capacity. The terrain of the war is its own historic “borderland,” which it has controlled since the 18th century, except for the past thirty years when Ukraine functioned as Grift Central for US military contractors and their political enablers. Despite massive arms assistance from the US and grudging contributions from the NATO contingent in Europe, there is almost nothing left of the Ukrainian military in troops, equipment, and munitions. Ukraine will return eventually to demilitarized “borderland” status.
What are NATO’s alternatives now? It can try to return to negotiation. Russia has no reason to trust that process, given how the Minsk 1 and 2 accords worked out (NATO and the US willfully and dishonestly voided them). The US and NATO could send their own troops into Ukraine, but that would be suicide, considering the alliance’s arms and munitions drawdown and America’s feminized army. The US could go a little further and provoke a nuclear exchange (suicide by other means) - and given the level of terminal-hysterical insanity in the US Blob, that’s not out of the question.
One likely, reality-based alternative is to stand by and let Russia complete its Special Military Operation to pacify and neutralize Ukraine. The prevailing theory is that this would be the end of America’s world dominance militarily, and effectively the end of NATO, but also the end financially for the US, as the non-West abandons the dollar. In that scenario, the BRICs dump their trillions in US bond holdings, sending all that putative “money” back to America, stoking a king-hell inflation, effectively bankrupting us. It would be the final fruit of the disastrous “Joe Biden” regime imposed on us via election fraud by the Blob: the US reduced in a few short years to a broke, socially disordered, marginalized power susceptible to its own political breakup - not a tantalizing outcome, but perhaps better than turning the planet Earth into a smoldering ashtray.
That outcome would force our country to turn inward and face its own stupendous failures of honor, decency, and integrity. It would be the end of the Blob’s hegemony inside the USA. The question is whether the Blob sets America’s house on fire in the attempt to save itself and escape a legal accounting for its crimes. One kindling stack already burning is the pile-up of jive prosecutions aimed at Mr. Trump. You know that the attempt to kick him off the game-board using Special Counsel Jack Smith may easily lead to severe civil disorder, and possibly a counter-coup, a US first!
The current Mar-a-Lago “Doc Box” case is as much a complete fabrication as were RussiaGate and Impeachment Number One - Mr. Trump’s telephone inquiry to Ukraine about the Biden family grifting operations there, now firmly documented to be true. An upright judge would summarily dismiss the Mar-a-Lago case and slam sanctions on the US attorneys involved, including disbarment and criminal investigation for mounting a maliciously fraudulent prosecution. AG Merrick Garland and his deputy, Lisa Monaco, obviously would have some ‘splainin’ to do, possibly before juries.
A long list of public figures populating the Blob await a reckoning: Hillary and Bill Clinton and their retainers, Barack Obama and retinue, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Christopher Wray (plus Rosenstein, Strzok, McCabe, Carlin, Ohr, Mueller, Weissmann, Horowitz, Atkinson, Ciaramella, Vindman), Rep. Adam Schiff, Senator Mark Warner, William Barr, Avril Haines, Marie Yovanovitch, William Burns, James Boasberg, Marc Elias, Michael Bromwich, David Laufman, Alejandro Mayorkas, Xavier Baccera, Anthony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, Francis Collins, Lloyd Austin. Mark Milley, Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Ron Klain, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney… the list goes way on, but there’s a start.
The weeks of summer 2023 are the fulcrum for a great public attitude adjustment. The Blob’s psy-ops are finally failing among just enough of the formerly mind-f**ked to tip the national consensus against the gang behind all this treasonous political depravity. Even the so-called mainstream media is running scared. If they happened to turn in a desperate act of self-preservation, it will be all over for the Blob."
- https://kunstler.com/
"Power Grid Down: Could We Survive A Critical Infrastructure Collapse?"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 7/10/23
"Power Grid Down:
Could We Survive A Critical Infrastructure Collapse?"
"We discuss what life would be like if the entire power grid went down. If our critical infrastructure ever collapses, this would be catastrophic! We go over many different scenarios and how we should prepare for this kind of event."
Comments here:
o
Meanwhile, elsewhere...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell, 7/10/23
"Russian IKEA Has Finally (Re)Opened: Good LAKK"
"Good Lakk (Good Luck) is the Russian answer to IKEA. In this video go inside the first store in Russia to see what its really like. How will Good Lakk compare to a Russian IKEA store? What are the differences?"
Comments here:
And how are the malls and stores where you are, Good Citizen?
Sunday, July 9, 2023
"72 Hours Until We Find Out: USD Collapse Or Nuclear Armageddon!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 7/9/23
"72 Hours Until We Find Out:
USD Collapse Or Nuclear Armageddon!"
Comments here:
"Middle Class Can't Afford Walmart Prices As Massive Increases Hit Stores"
Full screen recommended.
"Middle Class Can't Afford Walmart Prices
As Massive Increases Hit Stores"
by Epic Economist
"Walmart prices are rising at a brisk pace in 2023. While consumers are seeing the cost of everyday essentials go through the roof, the company’s executives say that food inflation is likely to persist for much longer than expected, At the same time, the retail giant’s profits are reaching new records But the vast majority of Americans haven’t seen their incomes rising accordingly, and that’s especially true for middle-income households. Right now, middle-class workers are coping with the highest cost of living in decades, and many of them can no longer afford to shop at Walmart and are flocking to discount stores instead. In fact, the chain’s CEO Doug McMillion revealed that 75% of Walmart's new customers are upper-income Americans, who make over $100,000 a year. That indicates there’s something extremely wrong with the American middle class right now. This group is known worldwide for its purchasing power and economic strength, and for years, it actively contributed to the growth of the megaretailer. The most notable revelation comes from a new study that exposes Walmart has everything to do with the decline of the US middle class.
Despite reporting a 7.33% profit growth. the world’s biggest retailer is warning about weaker sales volume for the rest of 2023 and shared a gloomy forecast last month, noting that abnormally high food inflation is likely to drive away low and middle-income shoppers from its stores. According to an analysis by GOBankingRates, over the past 12 months, grocery prices have risen at Walmart stores by an average of 27.2%. The biggest increases happened in the meat category, followed by produce, and dry goods.
During the past three quarters, most of Walmart’s growth in the grocery segment was fueled by customers with annual household incomes higher than $100,000 the company’s chief financial officer John David Rainey told CNBC.
Meanwhile, inflation has prompted middle-class shoppers to rethink their consumption strategies. Over the past couple of years, many Americans started to feel substantially poorer whenever they shop for groceries or hit the gas pump. Data released by the Pew Research Center shows that 71% of middle-class workers say their incomes aren’t keeping up with the rising cost of living, and now these consumers are currently looking for value to save money. The Wall Street Journal reported that average spending on grocery products at discount chains increased 71% from Oct. 2022 to June 2023. The survey also revealed that dollar store sales went up by 14% in the past quarter.
The truth is that this company we’ve grown to love has done a lot to destroy the American middle class. “Walmart’s history is the story of what has gone wrong in the American economy. Wages have stagnated. The middle class has shrunk. The ranks of the working poor have swelled. Whatever we may have saved shopping at Walmart, we’ve more than paid for it in diminished opportunities and declining income,” Mitchell stresses.
At this point, it’s clear that this group is losing access to the empire they helped to create. In many ways, Walmart’s ascension led to the collapse of the US middle class, and as the retailer attracts shoppers with a lot more money to spend, they no longer seem to care about the needs of everyday Americans, who are still the backbone of our entire economy."
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"Eating From Dollar Store Dumpsters In The Booming US Economy; US Consumers Getting Desperate"
Jeremiah Babe, 7/9/23
"Eating From Dollar Store Dumpsters In The
Booming US Economy; US Consumers Getting Desperate"
Comments here:
"They Really Regret This"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 7/9/23
"They Really Regret This"
"So many people have spent over $70,000 in an electric car. And who can afford this? Now people are admitting that they really regret these purchases."
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Musical Interlude: Juzzie Smith, "Bluesberry Jam"
Juzzie Smith, "Bluesberry Jam"
The amazingly, incredibly talented one-man-band! Enjoy! lol
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.
Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”
"The Center Of The Universe..."
“When science discovers the center of the universe,
a lot of people will be disappointed to find they are not it.”
- Bernard Baily
"A Mercenary’s Life In Ukraine"
Foreign fighters are expected to survive a mere four hours in battle. Ukrainian servicemen attend a farewell ceremony for an American soldier in Kiev, Ukraine, May 5, 2023
"A Mercenary’s Life In Ukraine"
By Azerbaycan
"The conflict in Ukraine has drawn in thousands of foreign mercenaries, motivated by glory and, in the Kremlin’s words, the chance to “earn money by killing Slavs.” However, those lucky enough to come out alive have described life on the front lines as miserable and short.
Three days after Russian troops entered Ukraine last February, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky put out an appeal for foreigners willing to take up arms against Moscow’s forces. Potential recruits visited Ukrainian embassies across the West and signed up to fight – often with the blessing of their own governments – and made their way to the battlefield.
Losses were immediate, and horrific. Two weeks after Zelensky’s appeal, a Russian missile strike on a training center at Yavoriv, near the Polish border, killed up to 180 foreign mercenaries, whose position was reportedly given away by social media posts. “The Legion was wiped out in one fell swoop,” a Brazilian shooting instructor said in a Twitter video as he fled to Poland after the strike. “I didn’t know what a war was.”
Of the initial recruits who survived the attack, one Briton described how his Ukrainian commanders were “sending untrained guys to the front with little ammo and s**t AKs and they’re getting killed.” Posting on Reddit, the Brit described Ukraine’s ‘International Legion’ as “totally outgunned” and run by “a few crazy Ukrainian leaders.” The International Legion shifted to hiring foreigners with military backgrounds shortly afterwards, and an influx of Western weapons alleviated some of its equipment issues. However, the threat of violent death has remained a constant in the lives of its members.
“I have one word to describe it and it’s just hell,” a Canadian mercenary told CBC News last May. “Every day you’re getting casualties, and every day your friends are getting killed,” he explained, adding that most of his missions in the Donbass region involved recovering bodies fallen in the previous day’s fighting.
For veterans of US wars in the Middle East, adapting to an enemy like Russia has proven difficult. Earlier this year, an Australian mercenary fighting against Wagner Group forces in Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) described the Russian private military company as a “near peer” opponent to any Western military, while several Americans have reported Russian shelling as orders of magnitude more intense than anything they experienced in their previous combat tours. “[The artillery] is nonstop,” a former US Marine told ABC News in February. “It’s been nonstop. All day and night. The life expectancy is around four hours on the frontline.” “This is my third war I’ve fought in, and this is by far the worst one,” another former Marine told The Daily Beast last week. “You’re getting f**king smashed with artillery, tanks. Last week I had a plane drop a bomb next to us, like 300 meters away. It’s horrifying s**t.”
Those behind the front are often just as likely to be killed. As many as 20 foreign mercenaries, including several Colombians and at least one American, died in a Russian missile strike on a temporary brigade base in the Donbass city of Kramatorsk last month. “If we discover such gatherings, for example, as in Kramatorsk, we will destroy them, because these are people who have declared war on us,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said after the strike.
By April 2022 there were just under 7,000 foreign mercenaries from 63 countries operating in Ukraine, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. By May of this year, that number had fallen to 2,500. It is unclear how many foreigners have been killed, captured, or deserted since last April.
With the Ukrainian military reportedly unwilling to collect even its own dead along hot sectors of the front line, the families of foreign fighters can wait for months for closure. This was the case for the family of Irishman Finbar Cafferkey, whose remains were found near Artyomovsk this week, three months after he was reported dead. According to the Irish Times, “it may be months” before Ukrainian authorities return Cafferkey’s body to Ireland.
For those captured alive, the situation is no less severe. Mercenaries are not entitled to any protections under the Geneva Convention, as British citizens Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner found when they were captured by Donetsk People’s Republic forces last year and sentenced to death. While both men were eventually repatriated in a prisoner swap, the Russian Foreign Ministry has reminded would-be volunteers that “mercenaries sent by the West to assist the nationalist regime in Kiev are not entitled to the status of prisoner of war under international humanitarian law.”
Hat tip to The Burning Platform for this material.
o
Full screen recommended.
"Horrible Moment Russian Artillery
Destroys Ukrainian Tank Convoy"
o
Meanwhile, as the Russians and Chinese tremble in fear...
total disgrace America has become...
The Poet: John O’Donohue, “In These Times”
“In These Times”
“In these times when anger
Is turned into anxiety,
And someone has stolen
The horizons and mountains,
Our small emperors on parade
Never expect our indifference
To disturb their nakedness.
They keep their heads down,
And their eyes gleam with reflection
From aluminum economic ground,
The media wraps everything
In a cellophane of sound,
And the ghost surface of the virtual
Overlays the breathing earth.
The industry of distraction
Makes us forget
That we live in a universe.
We have become converts
To the religion of stress
And its deity of progress;
That we may have courage
To turn aside from it all
And come to kneel down before the poor,
To discover what we must do,
How to turn anxiety
Back into anger,
How to find our way home.”
~ John O’Donohue,
from “To Bless the Space Between Us”
○
“Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.”
– Clarissa Pinkola Estes
"Some Very Big Problems..."
"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."
- Robert James Brown
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