Monday, October 16, 2023

"Economic Market Snapshot 10/16/23"

"Economic Market Snapshot 10/16/23"
o
Market Data Center, Live Updates:
Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it. 
You and I are not in the Big Club."
- George Carlin
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Financial Stress Index

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

"Canadian Prepper, 10/16/23"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 10/16/23
"Late Night Alert: Ceasefire Ends In Hours; 
Mass Evacuation; Hezbollah, Iran, Syria Enter War Soon"
Comments here:

Sunday, October 15, 2023

"Warning! The Fuse Has Been Lit, The Good Times Are Over. Welcome To Hell On Earth!"

Jeremiah Babe, 10/15/23
"Warning! The Fuse Has Been Lit, 
The Good Times Are Over. Welcome To Hell On Earth!"
Comments here:

"15 Big Restaurants That Will Disappear This Winter"

Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 10/15/23
"15 Big Restaurants That Will Disappear This Winter"

"Trouble is brewing in the restaurant industry, and several brands are now silently closing locations and reducing their operations to cope with a consumer recession that has no end in sight. Managing a restaurant is never easy, and during an economic downturn, conditions get even more complicated because people tend to cut costs and eat out less. Declining sales and guest visits at physical locations are actually some of the main reasons why chains decide to leave a market, or even file for bankruptcy. Not even the biggest companies out there are safe from the trends that are plaguing the industry in 2023. Many of them are being crushed by inflation, labor issues, and rising competition.

For instance, although the Cheesecake Factory was and still is one of the most popular fast-casual dining franchises in the U.S., the brand has been facing some serious financial setbacks in recent years. Founded in 1972, the chain rapidly expanded to over 400 locations in North America. But that number declined to 297 in 2019, and the pandemic triggered the closure of another 10% of its locations. In 2021, 2022, and 2023 more restaurants went dark as foot traffic at shopping malls slowed down. Today, The Cheesecake Factory has just 213 restaurants, and about 13 of those were recently rebranded as Grand Lux Cafe. The company is scrambling to adapt to new market trends and draw in a younger customer base. After more than five decades in business, The Cheesecake Factory has seen competitors rise and fall. But now, the tables have turned and its rivals are watching its gradual decay.

Similarly, one of the oldest fast-casual dining chains in the world is having trouble staying in business in the U.S. Despite marking generations of young Americans, Hard Rock Cafe is finding it difficult to connect with the current public. Consequently, financial results have been deteriorating in its restaurant segment for four consecutive years. The brand also owns a number of other businesses, including hotels and casinos. Citing profitability problems, Hard Rock International has decided to shutter multiple cafes in the country this year, including locations in Houston, Las Vegas, Denver, Seattle, and Memphis.

In this game, only those who know how to adapt will be able to weather the storm. In this video, we compiled chains that seem to be losing ground and falling behind their main rivals. According to analysts, they are at risk of mass closings and can go out of business entirely sooner than people think. If you have a beloved restaurant and you're in a position to support their business, you should visit your favorite spot now. Restaurant closings can happen overnight and without any notice. This is the rockiest market many of these brands have ever seen, and things aren't likely to get better any time soon. When and only when the U.S. consumer regains their economic resilience, non-essential businesses will see growth again. But for now, the outlook remains cloudy, and thousands of locations are going to disappear before you realize that they were gone."
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Velvet Morning"

Liquid Mind, "Velvet Morning"

"A Deep Look to the Heavens"

"The Hubble Deep Field:
The Most Important Image Ever Taken"
"In 2003, the Hubble Space Telescope took the image of a millenium, an image that shows our place in the universe. Anyone who understands what this image represents, is forever changed by it."- YouTube/NASA
Full screen recommended.
Full screen recommended.
"It helps to put things in perspective here on our frenetic little planet with a look at this extraordinarily powerful and moving video of the Hubble Space Telescope mapping of the Universe, whose known size is 78 billion light years across. The video of the images is the equivalent of using a "time machine" to look into the past to witness the early formation of galaxies, perhaps less than one billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang.

The video includes mankind's deepest, most detailed optical view of the universe called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF). One of the stunning images was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) for ten consecutive days. Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime located 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.

Most of the galaxies are so faint (nearly 30th magnitude or about four-billion times fainter than can be seen by the human eye) they have never before been seen by even the largest telescopes. Some fraction of the galaxies in this menagerie probably date back to nearly the beginning of the universe. "The variety of galaxies we see is amazing. In time these Hubble data could turn out to be the double helix of galaxy formation. We are clearly seeing some of the galaxies as they were more than ten billion years ago, in the process of formation," said Robert Williams, Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute Baltimore, Maryland. "As the images have come up on our screens, we have not been able to keep from wondering if we might somehow be seeing our own origins in all of this."

"But I Can Pretend..."

“I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here I can pretend... I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come and Gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend...”
- Olethros, in “Sandman”

"I Have Accepted The Fact..."

“One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless… I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.”

“There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.”
- Henry Miller

The Poet: Mark Strand, "The End"

"When the Sky Is No More Than Remembered Light:
 Reads His Poignant Poem '”
- by Maria Popova

“Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing,
when the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.”

“It’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention,” the Pulitzer-winning poet Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 - November 29, 2014) observed in contemplating the artist’s task to bear witness to the universe. And yet this universe in which we live is predicated on impermanence, and the lucky accident of our existence is crowned with the certitude of its end from the start. Why, then, are we always so shocked by the finitude of all we hold dear and, above all, by our own mortality? Few are those who can say with sincerity, like Rilke did an exquisite 1923 letter, that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.” Instead, we spend our lives shuddering at any reminder of our inevitable end, unsalved by the miracle of having lived at all.

Montaigne articulated the central paradox of being perfectly in 16th-century meditation on death and the art of living: “To lament that we shall not be alive a hundred years hence, is the same folly as to be sorry we were not alive a hundred years ago.” Still, lament we do, and some of our greatest art gives voice to that lamentation. That paradox is what Strand explores with transcendent courage and curiosity in his poem “The End,” found in his "Collected Poems" (public library) - the trove of truth and beauty that gave us Strand’s love letter to dreams.

In this hauntingly beautiful recording, courtesy of The New York Public Library, an aged Strand reads his poignant poem shortly before he repaid his own debt to mortality:

"The End"
by Mark Strand
"Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.

When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.

When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end."

Complement with the lyrical "Duck, Death and the Tulip", Marcus Aurelius on mortality and the key to living fully, and the great Zen master Seung Sahn Soen-sa’s explanation of death and the life-force to a child, then revisit Strand’s celebration of clouds and everything they mean."

"Our True Friends..."

“Our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their own miserable lives.”
- Paulo Coelho, "The Zahir"
Bob Dylan, "Positively 4th Street"

The Daily "Near You?"

Oromocto, New Brunswick, Canada. Thanks for stopping by!

"It Matters A Great Deal..."

In the movie “The Lion in Winter”, when the sons, in the dungeon, think they hear Henry coming down the stairs to kill them...
Richard: "He's here! He'll get no satisfaction out of us! Don't let him see you beg...Take it like a man!"
Geoffrey: "You chivalrous fool! As if the way one falls down matters!"
Richard: "Well, when the fall is all that's left, it matters a great deal."

"A Time of Unimaginable Sorrow is Upon Us"

"A Time of Unimaginable Sorrow is Upon Us"
By Stucky

"It was a nice cool sunny morning with some blue birds soaking up the sun, all in a row on the high wire. It took some time to figure out what happened. There were a few low rumbles, they seemed to be coming from north of here. We live on a farm out in the wooded hills of southern Missouri, and north would be up towards St Louis. Soon as the booming sounds started the power went off. At first, I didn’t pay much attention, but with all the military stirrings going on in the world these days, you just don’t know what to expect.

I went inside the house, but with the power off there’s no internet, so no way to find out what’s going on. At least until the power comes back on, or until I get the generator started up. More distant thunderous booms that echo now less like thunder and more like tremendous explosions – and I’m starting to get worried. My kids are at work and the grandkids are in school. I swear I‘m seeing sparks and smoke coming from under the hood of my car, but it’s not running. Now the power line where those bluebirds were singing looks like it’s getting really hot and smoke is coming from the bucket transformer on the poles. Wow! The transformer just blew up sending a shower of sparks and molten metal flying all around the pole! I can hear blasts all over the countryside from more pole transformers exploding. All the fences are sparking and smoking. The woods around the power lines and transformers are starting to go up in extremely violent flames. And the cars are now on fire – all of them! Even the old broken-down ones out in people’s pastures. Our emergency generators are smoking – I’ve got to get them away from the houses before they burn up.

Now I’ve got an idea of what’s happening, because I’ve heard of what an EMP event could do to electrical circuits. Electromagnetic Pulse. That’s what happens when a nuclear weapon explodes. The only other thing I can think of that would do this is a coronal mass ejection from a solar flare. It happened back in 1859 and it was named the Carrington Event. Fortunately, the world did not have much electrical infrastructure back then, just telegraphs, and the induced currents caused the wires to catch fire – sort of like what’s happening to the power lines out here right now. I don’t think it’s a solar event either, because the warmongers in Washington have been beating the nuclear drums for a while, and I’ve been afraid the Russians were going to get spooked and do a first strike. I guess this is it.

A big problem for those of us who might survive a while because we live in areas that aren’t targets is that we lose all sources of information. We don’t have any way of knowing what’s happening. Don’t know if it’s a first strike or a retaliatory strike. Does Washington DC even exist anymore, or is it just a huge radioactive smoking crater? Are those beautiful, magnificient buildings of the Kremlin still standing?

How many of our big cities are destroyed? I remember seeing pictures of the devastation that was Nagasaki and Hiroshima when that monster Truman murdered all those Japanese civilians, and thinking that those bombs were tiny compared to what the psychopaths have in their arsenals today – the Russians have bombs that could literally flatten New York City and/or Houston. I cannot, nor can anyone else, begin to fathom the destruction of a 10 or 20 megaton thermonuclear weapon could wreak on a major city.

Lights go off and then nothing. No TV; no internet. No football – the treasury department that writes all the government checks is gone. Fear-crazed citizens make runs on Wal Marts and grocery stores and take everything they can. No one tries to stop them; the store employees are in a panic to get home. Problem is, with no operable vehicles, the only things people can take are what they can carry by hand. Everyone has to walk, even the police are stranded out on the highways. All troopers, city cops, and sheriff deputies are trying desperately to get home to their loved ones. No cops on duty anymore. No traffic moving anymore. Just lots of people running, screaming, hoping they can just get home, and that there still is a home.

Fires are blazing everywhere from the powerlines and transformers exploding. All electrical substations in the country are smoldering and blazing chaos. Forest fires are rampant and out of control all over the nation and there are no operable fire trucks. No firefighting planes or helicopters are available to fight the fires. Houses hundreds of miles away from the many ground zeros are burning both from the unchecked wildfires, and from EMP induced electrical shorts in home wiring. Almost every building in every town is on fire with no way to put them out. And these towns are far away from the targeted places where the bombs actually hit. 

This is truly a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, the like of which has never been witnessed in all of human history. There will never be electricity in this country again. Let that sink in. Freezers will thaw out and food will ruin. Untold thousands of people will perish, starting with those vaporized, then those being burned up in their homes, and there are no fire departments available to help anyone. No hospitals; doctors and nurses are gone, understandably abandoning useless smoldering medical facilities. No industry, no UPS deliveries, no more dog food for the pups. If your house didn’t burn to the ground, at least you may (for a while) have a (dark) shelter from the elements.

Huge blasts of radioactive winds blow hundreds of miles from the explosions, of which there have been many. The first wave was intended to take out the military establishment. No way of knowing, but there’s no reason to believe that anything remains of the Pentagon, DC or Langley, Norfolk, San Diego, Chicago, Houston, or any of the coastal cities where there are refineries. All cities with military infrastructure of any kind will be destroyed. The joke that has been for years a missile defense system has been exposed. The sick joke that a nuclear war could be “winnable” has also been exposed. The numbers of people succumbing to radiation sickness is beyond belief. There will be no schools, no stores, no food, and no government services; no disaster relief will be forthcoming. All banks will have ceased to function, so even if there is any money left, it won’t be worth anything. The bankers never were.

If you take medications to stay alive, you’d best have a good supply, because there won’t be any more. All livestock will either be dead from radiation, burned to a crisp in the fires, or promptly slaughtered by starving survivors, and it doesn’t matter to whom they belonged. Same with property. People will no longer obey private property signs, they will go anywhere they think there might be resources, food, water, at the risk of their lives, which aren’t worth much right now anyway. There will be no law!

Every military ship on and under the ocean, with the likely exception of a few submarines, will be sunk. All of the nuclear-powered ships will go to the bottom with reactors likely damaged, spewing radioactive contamination. Like dozens, maybe hundreds, of Fukushimas. Even the reactors that aren’t damaged will undergo meltdowns with no controls. The bible says that something will kill all of the fishes in the oceans, maybe this is how that happens.

The USSR detonated a bomb of around 50-megaton yield back in 1961. It was called the Tsar Bomba. The weapon had a 100-megaton capacity, but for safety they modified the yield. Awe inspiring is just too mild of a description of what that looked like. Since the bomb was so powerful, they calculated that the plane that dropped it had only a 50 percent chance of surviving – that is even after the plane released the weapon several thousand feet up in the air with a parachute to slow it down while the plane flew away from the scene at full speed. It did almost destroy the plane – they said the blast wave overtook the plane some 45 miles from the explosion and it lost over a kilometer of altitude before the pilot, Andrey Durnovtsev, could regain control and keep it from crashing. That thing made a mushroom cloud 37, yes 37 miles, (60 km) high! An uninhabited village, Severny, 34 miles (55 km) from ground zero was obliterated, and buildings 100 miles away were damaged! The blast would have caused third degree burns 62 miles (100 km) from the explosion. I would expect if they still have these in their arsenal, they would use one on Cheyenne Mountain. It would probably take out Denver and Amarillo, TX and certainly everything in between. Instantly vaporized. What are our “leaders” thinking?

It sounds crazy, but if this happens, I want to be at one of the ground zeros. As bad as being vaporized sounds, it would be infinitely better than surviving into the nightmarish existence that would ensue. There will be marauding gangs of survivors, undoubtedly armed, in various stages of hunger, disease, emaciation, and injury. It will probably be a situation where anyone you encounter will be apt to kill you. For one thing, they won’t know whether you are out to kill them too, or maybe you have something they want/need to survive. A can of tuna or a bowl of beans might cost your life.

The landscape will be nightmarish. Imagine a few days or weeks after the event. There will be burned out stumps on land that was beautiful forest, now riddled with stagnant pools of black muddy radioactive slime, full of human and animal bones, charred flesh, and entrails. Few buildings will exist intact, and many will perish fighting over them. There will be no light at night. Light would attract unwanted guests. No music. No one will have any idea what’s going on. There may be a few survivors in places like subway tunnels, abandoned train cars, or in remote wilderness areas, but such people will have resorted to the basest of behavior, including cannibalism, in short order. Imagine! Human beings who once inhabited a civilized nation and lived decent lives will have to worry about being killed and eaten by other human beings! Zombie apocalypse, just with regular people, not zombies, although with burns and wounds, hair falling out and all out of sorts with radiation poisoning, they probably will look the part.

I have heard people talking like they plan to survive and stay healthy by hunting and foraging. Well, if a nuclear winter follows a nuclear apocalypse, foraging is going to be slim pickings. And the deer won’t last long if they manage to survive the bombs, radiation, and fires, there’ll probably only be a few very unhealthy specimens left, but if a gunshot rings out, I’m pretty sure it will attract whatever starving people hear it, so there might be more to deal with than just dressing a deer.

Bedraggled survivors will wander in shock around former cities in hopes of disaster relief which will never come. Desperate people will offer anything – gold, jewelry, ammunition, their own bodies, for sustenance. Helpless parents will watch in horror as their children starve, hoping against hope that they will awaken from this nightmare, but when this all comes down, it’ll be too late for them.

And we still won’t know what happened. Who decided that a nuclear war would be a good idea? Who “won” the war? Did any of our leaders survive to sign a surrender, and to whom? Or did Russia or China surrender? Will there be hordes of soldiers from some faraway land invading our country after the radiation dies down?

And what of the wealthy folk who built the magnificent bunkers filled with the necessities of life in which to wait out the nuclear winter? Do they actually believe they will emerge into a second garden of Eden complete with succulent fruit trees and minstrels singing their praises? First of all, the bible speaks of a great earthquake, such as has not occurred since people have been on earth, so I think a big part of those individuals will be entombed in those lavish bunkers. So maybe a few do survive, and after some months, maybe a few years tucked away, they stumble blindly onto the surface, a hardly recognizable landscape littered with human skulls, burned out cars and buildings, and destroyed terrain. When they went into the holes, they were wealthy, but after what has transpired, of the few commoners left, no one will be interested in their gold – and those old bank accounts? Well the digital age has completely and utterly vanished, and all those millions or billions they had on their ledgers is now squat. 

Even by this time, there will undoubtedly still be a few scroungy survivors, but instead of the fawning proles these rich folks were used to in the old world, those survivors will undoubtedly have a taste for some well-fed and plump upper crust brisket, so thanks for preserving some. It won’t help their situation any when they discover that some of the survivors actually know they caused, or at least played a part in causing the disaster. The scenario described does not take into account the likelihood that hapless survivors will undoubtedly spend their time searching for air vents to the bunkers in which to pour gasoline or whatever else they can find to upset living conditions in said refuges down below. Any who survive this carnage will be on a mission and will not easily be placated!

Who knows what the final outcome will be. How many millions, or hundreds of millions of people will be counted among the slain? When this calamity happens, it will obviously involve the deaths of millions. This destruction, I believe is prophesied as the destruction of the modern Babylon in Revelation 18, and most people I’ve heard seem to think (as I do) that the place named as Babylon is the United States, and it is utterly destroyed in the space of one hour, by fire! Completely devastated to the point that (verse 22) “the music of harpists and musicians, pipers and trumpeters, will never be heard in you again,” and “no worker of any trade will ever be found in you again,” this decadent place will cease to be! According to scripture, it’s not a bad thing that this evil place is destroyed. “Rejoice over her, you heavens! Rejoice, you people of God! Rejoice apostles and prophets! For God has judged her with the judgement she imposed on you.” Time will tell, but I’m afraid we don’t have much."
Hat tip to Stucky and The Burning Platform for this material.

"This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen"

"This Way for the Genocide, Ladies and Gentlemen"
by Mr. Fish

"I have been in urban warfare in El Salvador, Iraq, Gaza, Bosnia and Kosovo. Once you fight street by street, apartment block by apartment block, there is only one rule — kill anything that moves. The talk of safe zones, the reassurances of protecting civilians, the promises of “surgical” and “targeted” air strikes, the establishment of “safe” evacuation routes, the fatuous explanation that civilian dead were “caught in the crossfire,” the claim that the homes and apartment buildings bombed into rubble were the abode of terrorists or that errant Hamas rockets were responsible for the destruction of schools and medical clinics, is part of the rhetorical cover to carry out indiscriminate slaughter.

Gaza is such a small area - 25 miles in length and about 5 miles wide - and so densely populated that the only outcome of an Israeli ground and air assault is the mass death of those Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant calls “human animals” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls “human beasts.” Israeli Knesset member Tally Gotliv suggested dropping “doomsday weapons” on Gaza, widely seen as a call for a nuclear strike. Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Friday dismissed calls to protect Palestinian civilians. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible… this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true,” Herzog said. “They could’ve risen up, they could’ve fought against that evil regime that took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” He added, “We will break their backbone.”

The demand by Israel that 1.1 million Palestinians - nearly half of Gaza’s population - evacuate northern Gaza, which will become a free fire zone, within 24 hours, ignores the fact that given the overcrowding and sealed borders there is no place for the displaced to go. The north includes Gaza City, the most densely populated part of the strip, with 750,000 residents. It also includes Gaza’s main hospital and the Jabalia and al-Shati refugee camps.

Israel, by employing its military machine against an occupied population that does not have mechanized units, an air force, navy, missiles, heavy artillery and command-and-control, not to mention a U.S. commitment to provide a $38 billion military aid package for Israel over the next decade, is not exercising “the right to defend itself.” This is not a war. It is the obliteration of civilians trapped for 16 years in the world’s largest concentration camp. Gaza is being leveled, flattened, destroyed, reduced to rubble. Hundreds of thousands of its impoverished residents will be killed, wounded or left homeless without food, fuel, water and medical help. Nearly 600 children are already dead.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been forced to close 14 food distribution centers leaving half a million people without food relief. Gaza’s only power plant has run out of fuel. The United Nations says 12 of its staff have been killed by Israeli air strikes, 21 out of 22 UNRWA health facilities in Gaza have been damaged and hospitals lack basic medicines and supplies.

Israel, as it has in the past, will block the dissemination of independent reporting and images once some 360,000 soldiers launch a ground assault. It cut internet service in Gaza on Saturday. The brief glimpses of Israeli atrocities that make it out will be dismissed by Israeli leaders as anomalies or blamed on Hamas.

The West refuses to intervene, as 2.3 million people, including 1 million children, are deprived of food, fuel, electricity and water, see their schools and hospitals bombed and are butchered and rendered homeless by one of the most advanced military machines on the planet.

The gruesome images of Israelis gunned down by Hamas is the currency of death. It trades carnage for carnage, a macabre dance that Israel initiated with the massacres and ethnic cleansing that allowed for the creation of the Jewish state, followed by decades of dispossession and violence meted out to the Palestinians. The Israeli army, before the current assault, had killed 7,779 Palestinians in Gaza since 2000 including 1,741 children and 572 women, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. This figure does not include Gazans who died due to drinking contaminated water or being denied access to medical treatment. Nor does it include the rising number of Gazan youth who, having lost all hope and struggling with deep depression, have committed suicide.

I spent seven years reporting on the conflict, four of them as the Middle East Bureau Chief of The New York Times. I stood over the bodies of Israeli victims of bus bombings in Jerusalem by Palestinian suicide-bombers. I saw rows of corpses, including children, in the corridors in Dar Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. I watched Israeli soldiers taunt small boys who in response threw rocks and were then callously shot in the Khan Younis refugee camp. I sheltered from bombs dropped by Israeli warplanes. I climbed over the rubble of demolished Palestinian homes and apartment blocks along the border with Egypt. I interviewed the bloodied and dazed survivors. I heard the soul crushing wails of mothers keening over the corpses of their children.

I arrived in Jerusalem in 1988. Israel was busy discrediting and marginalizing the secular, aristocratic Palestinian leadership of Faisel al-Husseini and driving Jordanian administrators from the occupied West Bank. This secular and moderate leadership was replaced by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Yasser Arafat. But Arafat, very likely poisoned by Israel, and the PLO were also ruthlessly pushed aside by Israel. The PLO was replaced by Hamas, which Israel openly fostered as a counterweight to the PLO.

The escalating savagery of Israel against the Palestinians is reflected in the escalating savagery of the Palestinians. The resistance groups are Israel’s doppelgängers. Israel believes that with the eradication of Hamas the Palestinians will become docile. But history has shown that once one Palestinian resistance movement is destroyed, a more virulent and radical one takes its place.

The killers feed off each other. I saw this in the ethnic wars in Bosnia. When religion and nationalism are used to sanctify murder there are no rules. It is a battle between light and dark, good and evil, God and Satan. Rational discourse is banished.

“The sleep of reason,” as Francisco Goya said, “brings forth monsters.”

The Jewish extremists, fanatic Zionists and religious bigots in the current Israeli government need Hamas. Revenge is the psychological engine of war. Those targeted for slaughter are rendered inhuman. They are not worthy of empathy or justice. Pity and grief are felt exclusively for one’s own. Israel vows to eradicate a dehumanized mass that embodies absolute evil. The maimed and dead in Gaza, and the maimed and dead in Israeli towns and kibbutzim, are victims of the same dark lusts.

“From violence only violence is born,” Primo Levi writes, “following a pendular action that, as time goes by, rather than dying down, becomes more frenzied.”

The Biden administration has promised unconditional Israeli support and weapons shipments. The USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group has been deployed to the eastern Mediterranean Sea to “deter any actor” who might widen the conflict between Israel and Hamas. The carrier group includes the U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford; its eight squadrons of attack and support aircraft; the Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser USS Normandy; and the Arleigh-Burke class guided missile destroyers USS Thomas Hudner, USS Ramage, USS Carney and USS Roosevelt, according to a Pentagon statement.

The U.S., as in the past, ignores the far greater death and destruction, as well as the illegal occupation, meted out by Israel to the Palestinians or the periodic military campaigns - this is the fifth major military assault by Israel on Gaza in 15 years - against civilians.

Israel says it recovered 1,500 bodies of Hamas fighters after the incursion. This is a number greater than the 1,300 Israeli victims. Nearly all the dead Hamas fighters, I suspect, were young men born inside the Gaza concentration camp who had never seen the outside of the open-air prison until they burst through the security barriers erected by Israel. If Hamas fighters possessed Israel’s technological arsenal of death, they would be able to do their killing more efficiently. But they do not. Their tactics are cruder versions of those Israel has used against them for decades.

I know this disease, the exaltation of race, religion and nation, the deification of the warrior, the martyr and violence, the celebration of victimhood. Holy warriors believe they alone possess virtue and courage, while their enemy is perfidious, cowardly and evil. They believe they alone have the right to revenge. Pain for pain. Blood for blood. Horror for horror. There is a fearsome symmetry to the madness, the abandonment of what it means to be humane and just. T.E. Lawrence calls this cycle of violence “the rings of sorrow.” Once these fires are lit they can easily become a conflagration.

Israeli tanks and soldiers, to thwart an attack by Hezbollah in support of the Palestinians, have been deployed to the border with Lebanon. The Israeli forces killed fighters from Hezbollah, as well as a Reuters journalist, which saw Hezbollah fire a salvo of rockets in retaliation. Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir announced he would distribute 10,000 assault rifles to Israeli settlers, who have carried out murderous rampages in Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Israel has killed at least 51 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank since Hamas launched its attack on October 7.

Psychologist Rollo May writes: "At the outset of every war…we hastily transform our enemy into the image of the daimonic; and then, since it is the devil we are fighting, we can shift onto a war footing without asking ourselves all the troublesome and spiritual questions that the war arouses. We no longer have to face the realization that those we are killing are persons like ourselves. The killing and torture, the more they endure, contaminate the perpetrators and the society that condones their actions. They sever the professional inquisitors and killers from the capacity to feel. They feed the death instinct. They expand the moral injury of war."

Israel taught the Palestinians to communicate in the primitive howl of hatred, war, death and annihilation. But it is not Israel’s assault on Gaza I fear most. It is the complicity of an international community that licenses Israel’s genocidal slaughter and accelerates a cycle of violence it may not be able to control."

"Darkness On The Edge Of Town"

"Darkness On The Edge Of Town"
by Jim Quinn

"Poor man wanna be rich,
Rich man wanna be king,
And a king ain’t satisfied
‘Til he rules everything...
"Badlands", Bruce Springsteen

"I know Springsteen has aged into a far-left establishment shill who fell for the Covid scam, got his jabs and boosters, and is now clearly vaxx injured, as he had to cancel his world tour because of “illness”. During the covid scamdemic he made his audiences prove they were vaxxed, and then had to cancel multiple concerts because band members tested positive for covid. He and Neil Young, the anti-establishment bad boys during the early 1970’s, are now a laughing-stock to any critical thinking person who didn’t buy the government and media propaganda about a non-lethal flu bug.

Be that as it may, Springsteen’s 1975 album – "Darkness on the Edge of Town" – is my favorite, probably because most of the songs are dark and angry, matching my personality. Times in this country were not good in 1975. A president resigned over Watergate. Inflation was raging due to central bank and government incompetence.

The OPEC oil embargo due to the U.S. support for Israel created supply shortages and long lines at gas stations across the badlands of America. It seems support for Israel hurting America has been a constant theme over the last 50 years. As a 12 year old kid, I remember waiting in those gas lines with my dad. There were no smart phones to kill the time, maybe just my latest edition of "Sports Illustrated" to read.
The four lines above from "Badlands" pretty much sum up how the world works and how it has always worked. Everyone on this earth has 80 to 100 years, if they are lucky, to make their mark. We know a virtuous decent person would just want to work hard, earn a fair wage, marry, raise honest upstanding children, teach them morals, be a benefit to their community, and leave the world a better place than when they entered. But we know the forces of evil will not allow this path for most people.

The American Dream was a glorious fantasy, to keep the masses sedated and malleable, as those behind the scenes, pulling the strings of society, as documented by Edward Bernays in his 1928 book "Propaganda", would never allow the dream to be realized by most.

“The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” – James Truslow Adams – "The Epic of America ", 1931

The American Dream has always been a fallacy, with a brief period during the 1950s and 1960s where some of the poor were able to elevate their status to the middle class. Since the 1970s, the poor have gotten poorer, even though they have been convinced by their overlords they are richer through the use of seemingly limitless debt. Driving expensive sports cars and living in McMansions while up to your eyeballs in debt is not getting richer. Buying shit you don’t need with one of your ten credit cards, to keep up with the Joneses, while paying 24% interest on the balance is not getting richer. The only ones getting richer are the already rich bankers.
Strong language alert!
George Carlin, "The American Dream"
There are many rich men in this world, and they aren’t satisfied with those riches. They want to use their wealth to gain more wealth, power and control over others. Life is a game to many of these psychopaths, and they want to win at all costs. Millionaires want to be billionaires. Billionaires want to be the wealthiest billionaire. And these soulless greedy accumulators of wealth want to be king and rule everything. Gates and Soros are poster boys for Springsteen’s description. They do not want to build a better world. They want to remake the world, unleashing a darkness that will engulf and destroy the planet. These are evil men who have a vast army of equally evil men working to fulfill their satanic agenda.

The gathering gloom you are feeling is real. As most people go about their daily lives, rooting for their football teams, posting drivel on facebook and twitter, buying tickets to Taylor Swift’s concert movie, staring at their i-gadget prisons, and wondering why their standard of living keeps going down, psychopaths in suits are pushing the world toward World War 3. Time to get right with the lord and be prepared for the worst. There truly is a darkness on the edge of town and it is bearing down on us like a locomotive. The dream is real and it should be waking you up at night with a fear so real. Welcome to the badlands.
"Talk about a dream,
Try to make it real.
You wake up in the night
With a fear so real.
You spend your life waiting
For a moment that just don’t come,
Well, don’t waste your time waiting..."
Springsteen, "Badlands"
Hat tip to Jim Quinn and 
The Burning Platform for this material.

"How It Really Is"

 

Dan, I Allegedly, "What Are You Afraid Of?"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, AM 10/15/23
"What Are You Afraid Of?"
"There is a fear of everything. It’s called Panto phobia. People need to move forward and understand how bad the economy is, and that they need to take matters into their own hands. This is not just in their business life, but in their personal life. Plus,  Bank of America, once the golden child of the industry, is now facing troubling times. Their stock health, the future of their investors and the looming financial crisis is something we can't ignore."
Comments here:

"Endgame"

Gregory Mannarino, 10/15/23
"Markets, A Look Ahead: 'Endgame.' 
The Final Stage Has Begun"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 10/15/23
"12 Fast Food Chains Are Shutting 
Down Restaurants Immediately"
"As the new year approaches, the fast food industry is undergoing a significant transformation with businesses reviewing their operations and making decisions about the sustainability of their outlets. Intense competition coupled with economic conditions force brands to adapt to changing market trends and close underperforming branches to safeguard future success. Here is a list of 12 fast food chains that are closing restaurants right now."
Comments here:

Canadian Prepper, "Emergency Alert: Israeli Nuclear Facility Alert, Mass Evacuation; Iran Is Mobilizing; USA Going War"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper 10/14/23
"Emergency Alert: Israeli Nuclear Facility Alert, 
Mass Evacuation; Iran Is Mobilizing; USA Going War"
Comments here:

Saturday, October 14, 2023

Musical Interlude: Medwyn Goodall, “Eyes of Heaven”

Full screen recommended.
Medwyn Goodall, “Eyes of Heaven”

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Namibia has some of the darkest nights visible from any continent. It is therefore home to some of the more spectacular skyscapes, a few of which have been captured in the below time-lapse video. We recommend watching this video at FULL SCREEN (1080p), with audio on. The night sky of Namibia is one of the best in the world, about the same quality of the deserts of Chile and Australia.
Full screen recommended. 
Visible at the movie start are unusual quiver trees perched before a deep starfield highlighted by the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy. This bright band of stars and gas appears to pivot around the celestial south pole as our Earth rotates. The remains of camel thorn trees are then seen against a sky that includes a fuzzy patch on the far right that is the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy to the Milky Way. A bright sunlight-reflecting satellite passes quickly overhead. Quiver trees appear again, now showing their unusual trunks, while the Small Magellanic Cloud becomes clearly visible in the background. Artificial lights illuminate a mist that surround camel thorn trees in Deadvlei. In the final sequence, natural Namibian stone arches are captured against the advancing shadows of the setting moon. This video incorporates over 16,000 images shot over two years, and won top honors among the 2012 Travel Photographer of the Year awards.”

"Man's Nature..."

"Man has one name, and many more than two natures. 
But the essential two are these:
that he shall strive to impose order on chaos, 
and that he shall strive to take advantage of chaos…
A third element of man's nature is this: 
that he shall not understand what he is doing."
- John Brunner