Hey, they have something big for you too, Good Citizen...
Same as it ever was, same as it ever will be...
So, we rise from the rubble...
Saturday, December 16, 2023
Dan, I Allegedly, "Wake Up and Smell the Recession"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 12/16/23
"Wake Up and Smell the Recession"
Comments here:
"Intentional Destruction: First Covid, Now Comes 'The Great Taking'"
"Intentional Destruction:
First Covid, Now Comes 'The Great Taking'"
by Matthew Smith
"The Great Depression was a well-executed plan to seize assets, impoverish the population, and remake society. What comes next is worse. A recent book by David Webb sheds new light on exactly what happened during the Great Depression. In Webb’s view, it was a set up.
Webb is a successful former investment banker and hedge fund manager with experience at the highest levels of the financial system. He published "The Great Taking" a few months ago, and recently supplemented it with a video documentary. Thorough, concise, comprehensible and FREE. Why? Because he wants everyone to understand what’s being done. The Great Taking describes the roadmap to collapse the system, suppress the people, and seize all your assets. And it includes the receipts.
You Already Own Nothing: Webb’s book illustrates, among other things, how changes in the Uniform Commercial Code converted asset ownership into a security entitlement. The "entitlement" designation made personal property a mere contractual claim. The "entitled" person is a "beneficial" owner, but not the legal one.
In the event a financial institution is insolvent, the legal owner is the "entity that controls the security with a security interest." In essence, client assets belong to the banks. But it’s much worse than that. This isn’t simply a matter of losing your cash to a bank bail-in. The entire financial system has been wired for a controlled demolition.
Webb describes in detail how the trap was set, and how the Great Depression provides precedent. In 1933, FDR declared a "Bank Holiday." By executive order, banks were closed. Later, only those approved by the Fed were allowed to reopen.
Thousands of banks were left to die. People with money in those disfavored institutions lost all of it, as well as anything they’d financed (houses, cars, businesses) that they now couldn’t pay for. Then, a few "chosen" banks consolidated all the assets in the system.
Centralization and Systemic Risk
As Webb shows, the cake has been baked for years. But this week came a sign it’s coming out of the oven. Last Monday, Bloomberg admitted that measures taken to ostensibly "protect the system" actually amplify risk.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, G20 ‘leaders’ mandated all standardized Over The Counter (OTC) derivatives be cleared through central counterparties (CCPs), ostensibly to reduce counter party risk and increase market transparency. The best known CCP in the US is the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which processes trillions of dollars of securities transactions each day.
Before 2012, OTC derivative trades were bi-lateral and counterparty risk was managed by parties to a transaction. When doing business directly with other firms, each had to make sure it was dealing with reliable parties. If they had a bad reputation or were not creditworthy, counterparties could consider them toxic and shut them out of trades. This, according to the wise G20 leadership, was too risky.
With the introduction of central clearing mandates, counterparty risk was shifted via CCPs away from the firms doing the deal to the system itself. Creditworthiness and reputation were replaced with collateral and complex models.
Brokers, banks, asset managers, hedge funds, corporations, insurance companies and other so-called "clearing parties" participate in the market by first posting collateral in the form of Initial Margin (IM) with the CCP. It’s through this IM and a separate and much smaller Default Fund (DF) held at the CCP that counterparty risk is managed.
To ‘Mutualize’ Losses: Shifting risk from individual parties to the collective is a recipe for trouble. But, as explained in a recent report from the BIS, it’s worse than that. The structure of CCPs themselves can cause "Margin Spirals" and "wrong-way risk" in the event of market turbulence. In flight-to-safety episodes, CCPs hike margin requirements. According to the BIS, "Sudden and large IM hikes force deleveraging by derivative counterparties and can precipitate fire sales that lead to higher volatility and additional IM hikes in so-called margin spirals."
We’ve already gotten a taste of what this can look like. Similar margin spirals "occurred in early 2020 (Covid-19) and 2022 (invasion of Ukraine), reflecting the risk-sensitive nature of IM models."
Government Bonds as a source of trouble: The second area of systemic risk is the dual use of government bonds as both collateral and as underlying assets in derivatives contracts. Volatility in the government bond market can lead to a demand for more collateral underlying the derivatives markets precisely when government bond prices are declining. Falling bond prices erode the value of the existing IM. Collateral demands skyrocket just as the value of current and would-be collateral is evaporating.
Again, the BIS: "Wrong-way risk dynamics appeared to play a role during the 2010–11 Irish sovereign debt crisis. At that time, investors liquidated their positions in Irish government bonds after a CCP raised the haircuts on such bonds when used as collateral. This led to lower prices of Irish government bonds triggering further haircuts, further position closures and ultimately a downward price spiral."
Designed to fail: The BIS doesn’t admit it, but Webb says the CCPs themselves are deliberately under-capitalized and designed to fail. The start-up of a new CCP is planned and pre-funded. When that happens, it’ll be the "secured creditors" who will take control of ALL the underlying collateral.
Once more, the BIS:" …to mutualize potential default losses in excess of IM, CCPs also require their members to contribute to a default fund (DF). As a result, CCPs are in command of large pools of liquid assets."
That "large pool of liquid assets" is the full universe of traded securities. In a market collapse, the stocks and bonds you think you own will be sucked into the default fund (DF) as additional collateral for the evaporating value of the derivatives complex. This is "The Great Taking". Buffett’s famous line rings true: "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out." Most of us are on the verge of learning that we’re the ones without any clothes."
If you haven’t read "The Great Taking" or watched the documentary,
I recommend you pour yourself a stiff drink and watch it now:
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, "Strange Prices At Macy's! This Is Ridiculous!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 12/16/23
"Strange Prices At Macy's! This Is Ridiculous!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Macy's and are finding some very expensive prices on clothing however, we are also finding some great holiday deals as well. We also give a bit of a walk-through at Florence Mall, in Florence Kentucky!"
Comments here:
Friday, December 15, 2023
"IDF Is Retreating From Gaza, They Are Afraid, Urban Warfare With Hamas Is Suicidal"
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 12/15/23
"IDF Is Retreating From Gaza, They Are Afraid,
Urban Warfare With Hamas Is Suicidal"
Comments here:
"Alert! Zelensky Evacuated! NYC Power Outage! Russia Hits NATO Bunker; Global Shipping Crisis!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 12/15/23
"Alert! Zelensky Evacuated! NYC Power Outage!
Russia Hits NATO Bunker; Global Shipping Crisis!"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Justin Hayward, "I Dreamed Last Night"; "Celtic Heart"
Full screen recommended.
Justin Hayward, "I Dreamed Last Night"
○
Full screen recommended.
Justin Hayward, "Celtic Heart"
"A Look to the Heavens"
Full screen recommended.
"Space Ambient Music,
Pure Cosmic Relaxation, Mind Relaxation"
Relaxation Ambient Music presents prefect Space Ambient Music. It was made for dreamers, also for persons which like to meditate, to imagine deep space with its nebulas and exoplanets. Fly between galaxies, nebulas and planets with our relaxing ambient space music. This music video will help you relax your mind, stop thinking and have a rest."
"It May Be Then..."
"Passion doesn't count the cost. Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that reason takes no account of. If he meant what I think, he meant that when passion seizes the heart it invents reasons that seem not only plausible but conclusive to prove that the world is well lost for love. It convinces you that honor is well sacrificed and that shame is a cheap price to pay. Passion is destructive. It destroyed Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Parnell and Kitty O'Shea. And if it doesn't destroy it dies. It may be then that one is faced with the desolation of knowing that one has wasted the years of one's life, that one's brought disgrace upon oneself, endured the frightful pang of jealousy, swallowed every bitter mortification, that one's expended all one's tenderness, poured out all the riches of one's soul on a poor drab, a fool, a peg on which one hung one's dreams, who wasn't worth a stick of chewing gum."
- W. Somerset Maugham
"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;
it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."
- Sydney J. Harris
Free Download: Viktor Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning"
"Man's Search for Meaning"
by Viktor Frankl
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
"Some details of a particular man's inner greatness may have come to one's mind, like the story of a young woman whose death I witnessed in a concentration camp. It is a simple story. There is little to tell and it may sound as if I had invented it; but to me it seems like a poem.
This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. 'I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,' she told me. 'In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.' Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, 'This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.' Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. 'I often talk to this tree,' she said to me. I was startled and didn't quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. 'Yes.' What did it say to her? She answered, 'It said to me, "I am here - I am here - I am life, eternal life."
Freely download "Man's Search for Meaning", by Viktor Frankl, here:
“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space, and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”
“Hannah Arendt on Time, Space,
and Where Our Thinking Ego Resides”
“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”
by Maria Popova
“In Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ the White Queen remembers the future instead of the past. This seemingly nonsensical proposition, like so many elements of the beloved book, is a stroke of philosophical genius and prescience on behalf of Lewis Carroll, made half a century before Einstein and Gödel challenged our linear conception of time.
But no thinker has addressed how the disorienting nature of time shapes the human experience with more captivating lucidity than Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975), who in 1973 became the first woman to speak at the prestigious Gifford Lectures. Her talk was eventually adapted into two long essays, published as ‘The Life of the Mind’ (public library) – the same ceaselessly rewarding volume that gave us Arendt on the crucial difference between truth and meaning.
In one of the most stimulating portions of the book, Arendt argues that thinking is our rebellion against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude. Noting that cognition always removes us from the present and makes absences its raw material, she considers where the thinking ego is located if not in what is present and close at hand:
“Looked at from the perspective of the everyday world of appearances, the everywhere of the thinking ego – summoning into its presence whatever it pleases from any distance in time or space, which thought traverses with a velocity greater than light’s – is a nowhere. And since this nowhere is by no means identical with the twofold nowhere from which we suddenly appear at birth and into which almost as suddenly we disappear in death, it might be conceived only as the Void. And the absolute void can be a limiting boundary concept; though not inconceivable, it is unthinkable. Obviously, if there is absolutely nothing, there can be nothing to think about. That we are in possession of these limiting boundary concepts enclosing our thought within (insurmountable) walls – and the notion of an absolute beginning or an absolute end is among them – does not tell us more than that we are indeed finite beings.”
Echoing Thomas Mann’s assertion that “the perishableness of life…imparts value, dignity, interest to life,” Arendt adds: “Man’s finitude, irrevocably given by virtue of his own short time span set in an infinity of time stretching into both past and future, constitutes the infrastructure, as it were, of all mental activities: it manifests itself as the only reality of which thinking qua thinking is aware, when the thinking ego has withdrawn from the world of appearances and lost the sense of realness inherent in the sensus communis by which we orient ourselves in this world… The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”
T.S. Eliot captured this nowhereness in his exquisite phrase “the still point of the turning world.” But the spatial dimension of thought, Arendt argues, is intersected by a temporal one – thinking invariably forces us to recollect and anticipate, voyaging into the past and the future, thus creating the mental spacetime continuum through which our thought-trains travel. From this arises our sense of the sequential nature of time and its essential ongoingness. Arendt writes:
“The inner time sensation arises when we are not entirely absorbed by the absent non-visibles we are thinking about but begin to direct our attention onto the activity itself. In this situation past and future are equally present precisely because they are equally absent from our sense; thus the no-longer of the past is transformed by virtue of the spatial metaphor into something lying behind us and the not-yet of the future into something that approaches us from ahead.”
[…]
In other words, the time continuum, everlasting change, is broken up into the tenses past, present, future, whereby past and future are antagonistic to each other as the no-longer and the not-yet only because of the presence of man, who himself has an “origin,” his birth, and an end, his death, and therefore stands at any given moment between them; this in-between is called the present. It is the insertion of man with his limited life span that transforms the continuously flowing stream of sheer change – which we can conceive of cyclically as well as in the form of rectilinear motion without ever being able to conceive of an absolute beginning or an absolute end – into time as we know it.”
Once again, it is our finitude that mediates our experience of time: “Seen from the viewpoint of a continuously flowing everlasting stream, the insertion of man, fighting in both directions, produces a rupture which, by being defended in both directions, is extended to a gap, the present seen as the fighter’s battleground… Seen from the viewpoint of man, at each single moment inserted and caught in the middle between his past and his future, both aimed at the one who is creating his present, the battleground is an in-between, an extended Now on which he spends his life. The present, in ordinary life the most futile and slippery of the tenses – when I say “now” and point to it, it is already gone – is no more than the clash of a past, which is no more, with a future, which is approaching and not yet there. Man lives in this in-between, and what he calls the present is a life-long fight against the dead weight of the past, driving him forward with hope, and the fear of a future (whose only certainty is death), driving him backward toward “the quiet of the past” with nostalgia for and remembrance of the only reality he can be sure of.”
This fluid conception of time, Arendt points out, is quite different from its representation in ordinary life, where the calendar tells us that the present is contained in today, the past starts at yesterday, and the future at tomorrow. In a sentiment that calls to mind Patti Smith’s magnificent meditation on time and transformation, Arendt writes: That we can shape the everlasting stream of sheer change into a time continuum we owe not to time itself but to the continuity of our business and our activities in the world, in which we continue what we started yesterday and hope to finish tomorrow. In other words, the time continuum depends on the continuity of our everyday life, and the business of everyday life, in contrast to the activity of the thinking ego – always independent of the spatial circumstances surrounding it – is always spatially determined and conditioned. It is due to this thoroughgoing spatiality of our ordinary life that we can speak plausibly of time in spatial categories, that the past can appear to us as something lying “behind” us and the future as lying “ahead.”
[…]
The gap between past and future opens only in reflection, whose subject matter is what is absent – either what has already disappeared or what has not yet appeared. Reflection draws these absent “regions” into the mind’s presence; from that perspective the activity of thinking can be understood as a fight against time itself.”
This elusive gap, Arendt argues, is where the thinking ego resides – and it is only by mentally inserting ourselves between the past and the future that they come to exist at all: Without [the thinker], there would be no difference between past and future, but only everlasting change. Or else these forces would clash head on and annihilate each other. But thanks to the insertion of a fighting presence, they meet at an angle, and the correct image would then have to be what the physicists call a parallelogram of forces.
These two forces, which have an indefinite origin and a definite end point in the present, converge into a third – a diagonal pull that, contrary to the past and the present, has a definite origin in the present and emanates out toward infinity. That diagonal force, Arendt observes, is the perfect metaphor for the activity of thought. She writes:
“This diagonal, though pointing to some infinity, is limited, enclosed, as it were, by the forces of past and future, and thus protected against the void; it remains bound to and is rooted in the present – an entirely human present though it is fully actualized only in the thinking process and lasts no longer than this process lasts. It is the quiet of the Now in the time-pressed, time-tossed existence of man; it is somehow, to change the metaphor, the quiet in the center of a storm which, though totally unlike the storm, still belongs to it. In this gap between past and future, we find our place in time when we think, that is, when we are sufficiently removed from past and future to be relied on to find out their meaning, to assume the position of “umpire,” of arbiter and judge over the manifold, never-ending affairs of human existence in the world, never arriving at a final solution to their riddles but ready with ever-new answers to the question of what it may be all about.”
“The Life of the Mind” is one of the most stimulating packets of thought ever published. Complement this particular portion with Virginia Woolf on the elasticity of time, Dan Falk on how our capacity for mental time travel made us human, and T.S. Eliot’s poetic ode to the nature of time.“
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Full screen recommended.
Hans Zimmer, "Time"
Stunningly beautiful...
The Poet: James Baldwin, "Amen"
"Amen"
"No, I don't feel death coming.
I feel death going:
having thrown up his hands,
for the moment.
I feel like I know him
better than I did.
Those arms held me,
for a while,
and, when we meet again,
there will be that secret knowledge
between us. "
- James Baldwin
"95 Questions to Help You Find Meaning and Happiness"
"95 Questions to Help You
Find Meaning and Happiness"
by Marc
"At the cusp of a new day, week, month or year, most of us take a little time to reflect on our lives by looking back over the past and ahead into the future. We ponder the successes, failures and standout events that are slowly scripting our life's story. This process of self-reflection helps us maintain a conscious awareness of where we've been and where we intend to go. It is pertinent to the organization and preservation of our long-term goals and happiness. The questions below will help you with this process. Because when it comes to finding meaning in life, asking the right questions is the answer.
1. In one sentence, who are you?
2. Why do you matter?
3. What is your life motto?
4. What's something you have that everyone wants?
5. What is missing in your life?
6. What's been on your mind most lately?
7. Happiness is a ________?
8. What stands between you and happiness?
9. What do you need most right now?
10. What does the child inside you long for?
11. What is one thing right now that you are totally sure of?
12. What's been bothering you lately?
13. What are you scared of?
14. What has fear of failure stopped you from doing?
15. What will you never give up on?
16. What do you want to remember forever?
17. What makes you feel secure?
18. Which activities make you lose track of time?
19. What's the most difficult decision you've ever made?
20. What's the best decision you've ever made?
21. What are you most grateful for?
22. What is worth the pain?
23. In order of importance, how would you rank: happiness, money, love, health, fame?
24. What is something you've always wanted, but don't yet have?
25. What was the most defining moment in your life during this past year?
26. What's the number one change you need to make in your life in the next twelve months?
27. What's the number one thing you want to achieve in the next five years?
28. What is the biggest motivator in your life right now?
29. What will you never do?
30. What's something you said you'd never do, but have since done?
31. What's something new you recently learned about yourself?
32. What do you sometimes pretend to understand that you really do not?
33. In one sentence, what do you wish for your future self?
34. What worries you most about the future?
35. When you look into the past, what do you miss most?
36. What's something from the past that you don't miss at all?
37. What recently reminded you of how fast time flies?
38. What is the biggest challenge you face right now?
39. In one word, how would you describe your personality?
40. What never fails to frustrate you?
41. What are you known for by your friends and family?
42. What's something most people don't know about you?
43. What's a common misconception people have about you?
44. What's something a lot of people do that you disagree with?
45. What's a belief you hold with which many people disagree?
46. What's something that's harder for you than it is for most people?
47. What are the top three qualities you look for in a friend?
48. If you had a friend who spoke to you in the same way that you sometimes speak to yourself, how long would you allow that person to be your friend?
49. When you think of home,what, specifically, do you think of?
50. What's the most valuable thing you own?
51. If you had to move 3000 miles away, what would you miss most?
52. What would make you smile right now?
53. What do you do when nothing else seems to make you happy?
54. What do you wish did not exist in your life?
55. What should you avoid to improve your life?
56. What is something you would hate to go without for a day?
57. What's the biggest lie you once believed was true?
58. What's something bad that happened to you that made you stronger?
59. What's something nobody could ever steal from you?
60. What's something you disliked when you were younger that you truly enjoy today?
61. What are you glad you quit?
62. What do you need to spend more time doing?
63. What are you naturally good at?
64. What have you been counting or keeping track of recently?
65. What has the little voice inside your head been saying lately?
66. What's something you should always be careful with?
67. What should always be taken seriously?
68. What should never be taken seriously?
69. What are three things you can't get enough of?
70. What would you do differently if you knew nobody would judge you?
71. What fascinates you?
72. What's the difference between being alive and truly living?
73. What's something you would do every day if you could?
74. At what time in your recent past have you felt most passionate and alive?
75. Which is worse, failing or never trying?
76. What makes you feel incomplete?
77. When did you experience a major turning point in your life?
78. What or who do you wish you lived closer to?
79. If you had the opportunity to get a message across to a large group of people, what would your message be?
80. What's something you know you can count on?
81. What makes you feel comfortable?
82. What's something about you that has never changed?
83. What will be different about your life in exactly one year?
84. What mistakes do you make over and over again?
85. What do you have a hard time saying "no" to?
86. Are you doing what you believe in, or are you settling for what you are doing?
87. What's something that used to scare you, but no longer does?
88. What promise to yourself do you still need to fulfill?
89. What do you appreciate most about your current situation?
90. What's something simple that makes you smile?
91. So far, what has been the primary focus of your life?
92. How do you know when it's time to move on?
93. What's something you wish you could do one more time?
94. When you're 90-years-old, what will matter to you the most?
95. What would you regret not fully doing, being, or having in your life? "
From the wonderful "Marc and Angel Hack Life" blog:
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Fire Alarm is Going Off in the Economy"
Dan, I Allegedly, 12/15/23
"The Fire Alarm is Going Off in the Economy"
"Jeffrey Gundlach, the Bond king is telling us that there is a fire alarm that is about to go off in our economy. You’re going to see banks, get crashed, and the stock market collapse. Plus you have to prepare for power outages. New York City just had a power outage. Are you ready?"
Comments here:
Bill Bonner, "Pivot Fervor"
"Pivot Fervor"
Plus, mounting corruption, armored cars,
DoD 'program increases' and the road to Buenos Aires...
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - "A curious ad appeared on our computer screen this morning: “Armored cars…don’t wait.” An armored car was not something we thought we needed. Is there something we’re missing? Gun sales have been strong for several years. Dan tells us that there are now 125 guns for every 100 men, women, and children in the country. Maybe we need an armored car too…to protect us from guns! And hand grenades. The ad shows a Mercedes 4x4 surviving a bomb attack.
As Argentine economics minister, Luis Caputo, reminds us, the real problem of a wayward, crisis ridden, hyperinflation-bound government is not the choice of personal pronouns, nor funding ‘gender affirming’ surgery, nor even its immigration policies. Instead, it’s the government’s “addiction to fiscal deficits.” Whether it wastes money on welfare or war, weasley misfits or parasitic cronies…doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it spends more than it can afford. Over time, the deficits mount up. The debt from the past drags on the here-and-now spending. Corruption increases. Lawlessness too.
Argentina owes $400 billion it can’t pay. The US owes $34 trillion that it can’t pay either.
“Pivot Fervor”: Inflate or Die, is the choice that confronts them both. Either they continue funding the make-believe economy with more make-believe money. Or watch it die. That’s what this week’s ‘pivot fervor’ is all about; Wall Street expects the Fed to inflate. (And it’s probably right.)
The gauchos are way ahead of us. Inflation is the easier choice for policymakers, with deficits and money-printing, rather than tough budget cuts. But the Argentines have seen what it can do. They’ve watched as it has turned the economy into a nightmare of soaring prices, chaotic exchange rates and financial ‘mistakes’ that undermined the nation’s prosperity and destroyed its middle classes.
Inflation rose over 50% in 1973…and then over 700% in 1976. Between 1974-1983, Argentina’s malcontents – mostly Marxist dreamers – kidnapped rich people…robbed banks…and fought pitched battles with the police and the army. That was when you needed an armored car. Then, a coup d’etat, led by law-and-order generals, in 1976, brought with it a wave of violence against leftist activists, students, and more than a few completely innocent by-standers. As many as 30,000 people are said to have been ‘disappeared,’ with many of their bodies dropped into the ocean.
The generals tried to distract the public by starting a war with Britain, over the Falkland Islands. They were humiliated, lost power and, years after, put on trial. The Junta leader, Jorge Rafael Videla, died in prison many years later.
And now, after 70 years of addiction to deficits, Argentina has entered rehab. Javier Milei aims to kick the habit of overspending. He says he will force the nation to go ‘cold turkey’…not just letting the bubble economy deflate, but cutting it to pieces himself.
Guns Out: The US is not even close. No one worries about fiscal deficits in the US. Already, the federal deficit is headed for $2 trillion for 2024. Do the newspapers shout the alarm? Do the influencers – from the pulpits and podcasts – warn Americans that they had better change course? Do the politicians panic…and rev up the chainsaws?
Nah. They give more money to the gun-makers. ResponsibleStatecraft.org: "Congress stuffs $25 billion into Pentagon contractor stockings." It would seem little elves have added over 1,200 'program increases' to the DoD budget for 2024." It’s that time of year, and despite all the budgetary drama unfolding on Capitol Hill, lawmakers have already finished most of their holiday shopping for their favorite children: Pentagon contractors. Through cryptic “program increases” to the defense budget appropriations for fiscal year 2024, most with no listed author and little to no justification, Congress has added more than $25 billion to the Pentagon’s procurement and research accounts for fiscal year 2024.
In private life, mistakes are corrected – swiftly. Find out for yourself. Tell your wife how much you like her new dress… ‘because it doesn’t make her look so fat.’ Or take all your savings to Las Vegas and ‘invest’ them by playing the slots. Then, on the drive home…be sure to give the finger to guys in big pickups.
Unfit for Office: But chainsaws don’t often work where they are most needed – in the public sector. In America today, there are two million people in jail…and another 3 million ‘under supervision’ by the criminal justice system. But not a single one of them is there because he started a deadly war…wasted millions of the public’s money…or lied to the voters. You can work for Amtrak…or the War on Drugs…spending billions of dollars with nothing to show for it, year after year…and still expect a budget increase next year. You can sit in Congress and vote for every misbegotten, woeful, wasteful piece of legislative claptrap that comes down the pike…and you still might be elected president.
The half-life of the average business start-up is only about three years. Half of all new businesses are history before year number 5. But the half-life of a law, a regulation, an agency, a department…etc…is forever. Or until a revolution, war, hyperinflation, or other calamity blows up the whole system.
This is more than a harmless feature of government. It is the reason governments are such a drag on human progress…and why, if they can get away with it, they create bigger and bigger problems. This is also our guess – very grosso modo – about ‘what went wrong’ in that dreadful 40-year stretch, from 1980 to 2020. And it’s why the market for armored cars may get better."
"12 Big Restaurants Are Being Wiped Out Completely"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 12/15/23
"12 Big Restaurants Are Being Wiped Out Completely"
"The restaurant industry is no stranger to challenges, and as we step into 2024, several major restaurant chains find themselves in precarious positions. Factors such as changing consumer preferences, economic uncertainties, and the aftermath of global events have left these establishments grappling with financial difficulties and declining popularity. Here are 12 major restaurant chains that are currently facing big trouble."
Comments here:
"The Great Thing About The Internet..."
"The great thing about the internet is that you get to meet people you
would otherwise only meet if you were committed to the same asylum."
- Robert Brault
- Robert Brault
"The Good News? It’s Up To You"
"The Good News? It’s Up To You"
by John Wilder
“Winners always want the ball when the game is on the line.”
– "The Replacements"
"One of the freeing things about what’s going on in the world right now, especially with respect to the current breakdown of American (and perhaps Global) society is the fact that many are coming to one of the biggest realizations they’ll ever have: most people don’t care about us, and there’s probably no one that’s going to come and save us.
I remember the first time I came to that conclusion, that it was all on me. – I believe I was a sophomore in college, and realized that to the college, I was just a number measured in GPA and how much I had to pay beyond what my scholarship paid for. Sure, I had friends at school, and I do know that several professors liked me, but I was on my own. Well, with the exception of student loans: for a long time, I didn’t think I could ever figure out how to repay them.
Sink or swim, it was up to me. It was a cold winter day. I was having a beer with my roommate. I remember looking at him and saying, “No one really cares about us, do they?” “Nope.”
Like I said, this was good news. I got to survive or thrive or fail based on my own efforts. This realization was a winner – my GPA actually went up afterwards, and it wasn’t all that horrible to begin with, though I hear the minimum GPA needed to go to USC is $500,000.00.
We are at that point in society as well. Many of the legacy institutions that were created by our forefathers are no longer in the business of serving actual American citizens who love freedom and have no idea how to have a complicated Starbucks™ order. Here’s a partial list:
• Immigration: Right now, ICE is on the side of the illegals streaming across the border. Not you. You can apply this to most government (both federal and big city) agencies. Disagree? Ask the January 6 Protestors if they think they got a fair deal from the DOJ and FBI. The only reason the FBI isn’t spelled KGB is because they don’t know Russian.
• Most Colleges: I can post academic after academic engaged in the vilest hate speech. Do they lose their jobs? Because it’s directed at you and me, which is okay and is covered under policy 364.3.d. But make a joke about a trans-GPA 4.0 student living in the body of a 2.0 student? That’s not allowed.
• The Military: The officers on the Right have been under attack since (at least) Obama. Good luck being promoted if you don’t agree with the Left. With things like illegal alien lesbian mom recruiting videos and mandatory Vaxxing, well, they’ve done their best to filter out people in the lower ranks, too. Thankfully the most reliable fighting force in the history of the United States is vaxxed illegal alien lesbians.
• Most Government Schools: Yesterday, read a story about a history teacher that marked a student incorrect on the question, “All men have a penis (T/F)”. Apparently, this is now indoctrination that is deemed worthy of history class where I recall spending a lot of time talking about George Washington’s penis. Oh, wait, I never heard the word penis a single time in history, except when my teacher was talking about FDR. Today? They’re not on our side.
• Mainstream News Media: Without the Internet, there would be very little division in the country because The Narrative is agreed to by almost all (including Fox™) news organizations. Without the Internet, there would be exactly one opinion, and it would be presented in crayon.
• Mainstream Entertainment: Why does Disney® make movies for kids that their parents find to be objectionable? Because their investors don’t care – they have an agenda that goes beyond making money.
I could keep going on and on, but my laptop is running out of ink, and you already know all of this. And, this is the good news: these institutions aren’t going to save us. They actively despise us and are doing everything they can to destroy us and erase us from memory. I mean, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the people on the Right ever created?
Like I said, that’s the good news. Why? Because, just like I discovered in college, it should change everyone’s mindset. Our fate isn’t in their hands, but instead it’s in our hands. When I see people like Andrew Torba building out GAB™, I know that he’s out of the victim mentality, and is building a future that doesn’t depend on the Left. Vox Day is doing something similar with multiple initiatives, from his Arktoons® to Arkhaven Comics™ to Castalia House© (publishing) to Infogalactic© (Wikipedia® without the Leftist Overlords).
These institutions that people are actively creating show that they’re intent not on relying on the institutions that the Left has subverted, but instead on building their own. In truth, that’s the first step. The second is to make sure that the culture of each of these organizations that we’re creating is rooted in freedom and the ideology of the Right. Why? Because any institution that isn’t explicitly Right becomes Leftist over time, as John O’Sullivan’s First Law states. O’Sullivan cited the ACLU™, the Ford Foundation© and the Episcopal Church.
Why? Since Leftists aren’t good at creating much besides starvation and misery, they look to insinuate themselves into institutions that others have made. And they don’t do it in a good way, building something new – no, they’re like termites, gradually eating away at everything they find until they end up destroying what they’ve infiltrated. Then they blame those that built the institution they subverted in the first place for the failure.
Lather, rinse, repeat. No, it’s time we take the future into our own hands and build the structures that we need. Homeschooling is one bright example of how the Right has built something out of the ashes of public schools. We’re building our own social networks, our own entertainment. We don’t need the Left – or what they produce. There’s a bright future ahead once we realize that no one is coming to save us. All we have to do is make it."
Jim Kunstler, "Money for Nothing and Nothing for Money"
"Money for Nothing and Nothing for Money"
by Jim Kunstler
“Society lives and acts only in individuals… Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. ” - Ludwig von Mises
"Remember, you are a sovereign individual and the blob in our nation’s capital city is an undifferentiated mass of feckless protoplasm. You contain a cosmos of ideas and aspirations. The blob is an agglomeration of sham and failure. The blob stands for itself, not for our country. You and I can stand for our country.
Remember, also, that the economy of our country at its best was the sum of choices made by sovereign individuals, while the economy of the blob is a gelatinous buildup of unsound hypothesis having nothing to do with the pursuit of happiness. We sense this in the menacing rumors of a Federal Reserve digital currency, which entails the rehypothecation of our hopes and dreams into the blob’s waste-stream, turning everything we do - it can’t be put delicately - into shit.
The Fed digital currency will be used to cover-up the failure of end-state financialization of the economy. Finance, you understand, used to be a module of the economy, with a particular role to play. The purpose of finance, formerly, was to marshal surplus wealth from prior productive activity to make new productive activity possible. Financialization, however, does not do that. Financialization was an effort to replace the economy of real production with a hologram of production. Financialization is a racket - and a racket, remember, is an effort to get something for nothing, that is, dishonestly. The blob feeds and thrives on dishonesty, its favorite food.
Financialization seeks to replicate value not from wealth-producing activity but from things that only claim to represent wealth: stocks, bonds, currencies, and anything else that can pretend to hold value, clear up to notions and wishes. Its operations are based on “derivatives” because they aim to derive additional “wealth” from things that signify wealth, but which are not wealth itself. Each iteration of a derivative further abstracts its value from the real things originally signified, such as revenue-producing businesses, interest-bearing loans, leases, and contracts for delivery of commodities. Derivatives can be understood as false wealth, and when enough of them accumulate in a financialized economy, they will blow up the economy, spewing wreckage across an economic landscape.
Many observers of that landscape await such a blow up at any time now. They say it can take the form of a stock market crash, a bond market failure, bank shut-downs, and disorders in money (currencies). All of that can impoverish and immiserate a lot of people. We are living through a corrosive early phase of that now, the overture of a big blow up itself. The effects are felt keenly through the middle classes, who struggle in futility to pay their bills, keep their cars running, and feed their children.
The financialized economy was primed to blow up in September of 2019 when symptoms of severe distress materialized in an arcane corner of the system known as the reverse repo market where banks loan each other money on extremely short term, usually overnight, to provide so-called “liquidity” - meaning the appearance of solvency. The crisis expressed itself as a dangerously sharp rise in interest rates. The Fed came up with enough liquidity to paper over the crisis, and then, miraculous to relate, the Covid-19 “emergency” a few months later gave them cover to “print” trillions of dollars and distribute the “money” rapidly into the on-the-ground economy where people bought the things of daily life.
The result of that monetary mischief was today’s inflation. Inflation, of course, is one way of going broke. You have a lot of money that is increasingly worthless. The other way of going broke is deflation, where you have no money. In the aggregate of a deflation, nobody will have any money, so at least you’ll have company in the misery of being broke. My guess is that a grievous deflation is where the current situation is headed. Deflations are provoked when people and companies can’t meet their debt obligations - can’t “service” their loans (pay interest), or pay back contracted sums of borrowed money, or simply can’t pay their bills. Every loan that goes bad causes some money to disappear - poof! - and when a whole lot of that happens there is no money.
The Federal Reserve digital currency is a kind of last resort way around that. It is a simple way for the system to pretend there is a lot of money around when there really isn’t any. It has the huge additional advantages, by way of computerized accounting, to allow the authorities to control what everybody spends their money on, especially the ability to block the purchase of this or that: a train ticket, gasoline, meat, if the authorities feel like it. It also enables the authorities to extract taxes, duties, and penalties at will, without any cooperation from the citizen. A Fed digital currency would be a giant step into the worst kind of exquisitely targeted tyranny. The excuse, of course, would be a “national emergency.”
A digital currency would likely first be tested among the most indigent in society, those with little or no income. It already is, actually, in the debit cards currently issued to illegal border-jumpers. Their card accounts are refilled monthly, making this the equivalent of a guaranteed basic income. Next, this privilege will be extended to the lower economic ranks of American citizens, and so on upward, until the whole middle-class and even the higher levels are enlisted, and then the authorities will have the ability to push everyone around.
That’s the hypothesis, anyway. I don’t believe it’s going to work. The authorities have underestimated the number of citizens who know what it means to be sovereign individuals. They will decline to be pushed around. They might even push back, start stomping on the blob’s tentacles as it reaches across the land. The citizens of one region or another of our country might go so far as to establish their own money, which would make them sovereign regions of sovereign individuals. That is going to be a problem that the blob and blobism cannot overcome."
o
o
Dire Straits, "Money for Nothing"
"Crazy Things Going On At Walmart And Aldi! This Is Unreal!"
Adventures With Danno, AM 12/15/23
"Crazy Things Going On At Walmart
And Aldi! This Is Unreal!"
"We go over different things going on at Walmart and Aldi and some other stores. We also go over some online options that might be worth checking out for yourself."
Comments here:
Prepare Yourself For An Inflationary Nightmare Situation, And There's No Stopping It!"
Gregory Mannarino, 12/15/23
"Prepare Yourself For An Inflationary Nightmare Situation,
And There's No Stopping It!"
https://traderschoice.net/
Comments here:
"Honey Badgers"
"Honey Badgers"
Scott Ritter has humorously described the Yemeni Houthis as 'the honey badgers of the Middle East, absolutely fearless and relentlessly ferocious.' They just simply don't care. They've declared war on Israel while all the other Muslim states except Algeria just talk, and daily send missiles and drones to attack Israel. They totally control the 12 mile wide Bab-el-Mandab ("Gate of Grief") strait connecting the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, which transits 40% of the world's oil. Closing that would have catastrophic consequences on global economies, and the Houthis know it.
Full screen recommended.
Geopolitics TV, 12/15/23
"Yemen's Houthis Launch Missile Attack
On A Norwegian Tanker On Road To Israel!"
"Recently, the Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility for targeting a Norwegian commercial tanker named the STRINDA with a missile. This act was presented as a form of protest against Israel's ongoing military actions in Gaza. The Houthi military spokesperson, Yehia Sarea, explained that they attacked the STRINDA because it was reportedly involved in transporting crude oil to an Israeli terminal. According to their account, the crew of the tanker allegedly disregarded multiple warnings issued by the Houthi forces before the missile strike occurred."
Comments here:
o
And so it is...
Full screen recommended.
Wildacious, 12/15/23
"Honey Badger Takes Savagery to a Whole New Level"
"Honey badgers are the Italian mafia of the animal kingdom. No one, and I mean no one, wants to mess with these savages. They literally woke up and chose violence on the daily. They are regarded as the most fearless animal in the wild and they back that up every day, all while looking like a ferret on steroids.
Honey badgers woke up and chose violence. They'll combat anything from lions, leopards, hyenas and even cobras and pythons. But how did they become so fearless? How do these compact sized danger-weasels take on the deadliest predators like it was a regular Sunday’s brunch with the girls? These are moments of honey badgers being straight up savages. Let's get into it."
Comments here:
Thursday, December 14, 2023
Jeremiah Babe, "Emergency Rate Cuts Won't Stop What's Coming; Historic Housing Correction"
Jeremiah Babe, 12/14/23
"Emergency Rate Cuts Won't Stop What's Coming;
Historic Housing Correction"
Comments here:
Canadian Prepper, "Everything Is About To Change, Right Now"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 12/14/23
"Everything Is About To Change, Right Now"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Peder B. Helland, "Deep Space"
Full screen recommended.
"Deep Space: Ambient Meditation
and Sleep Music from Soothing Relaxation"
"Deep ambient music for meditation and sleep composed by Peder B. Helland.
Turn the volume down and relax while you fly through space."
Comments here:
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Large galaxies grow by eating small ones. Even our own galaxy practices galactic cannibalism, absorbing small galaxies that get too close and are captured by the Milky Way's gravity. In fact, the practice is common in the universe and illustrated by this striking pair of interacting galaxies from the banks of the southern constellation Eridanus, The River.
Located over 50 million light years away, the large, distorted spiral NGC 1532 is seen locked in a gravitational struggle with dwarf galaxy NGC 1531 (right of center), a struggle the smaller galaxy will eventually lose. Seen edge-on, spiral NGC 1532 spans about 100,000 light-years. Nicely detailed in this sharp image, the NGC 1532/1531 pair is thought to be similar to the well-studied system of face-on spiral and small companion known as M51.”
Chet Raymo, “Universal Constants, Universal Consensus”
“Universal Constants, Universal Consensus”
by Chet Raymo
“I once received a book in the mail, as I sometimes do, for potential review on this blog, James Stein's “Cosmic Numbers: The Numbers That Define Our Universe”. I often write here about books I read, but I don't review. I did glance at Stein's book, however. It has an audience, but it's not for me; been there, done that. The subtitle is provocative, however. The idea that a dozen or so numbers "define the universe." That's a mind-blowing concept.
The gravitational constant. The speed of light. Absolute zero. Planck's constant. The Hubble constant. And so on. Familiar to every introductory physics student. Built into the very structure of the Earth. And every other earth in the universe.
The gravitational constant. The speed of light. Absolute zero. Planck's constant. The Hubble constant. And so on. Familiar to every introductory physics student. Built into the very structure of the Earth. And every other earth in the universe.
Look again at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph. above Those myriad of galaxies. Those yawning light-years. That infinitude of worlds. And, as far as we know, the fundamental constants are the same everywhere,
The human mind has thrown a net across the cosmos. And as we have brought the galaxies into our ken, so have we come to realize that we too are part and parcel of the fabric of cosmic space and time. Exceptional clarity. Impenetrable mystery.
So what do we make of the news so breathlessly reported in the media of neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light? This is surely a bit of heroic physics, pitting what we believe to be true against the refining fire of experience, but I wouldn't make too much of it yet. Tom suggested that perhaps the researchers unwittingly measured the distance from CERN in Switzerland to Gran Sasso in Italy with greater accuracy. That's the kind of whimsy the result calls for now. The real story- for the time being- is as an illustration of the way the engine of scientific knowing grinds inexorably toward consensus.”
The human mind has thrown a net across the cosmos. And as we have brought the galaxies into our ken, so have we come to realize that we too are part and parcel of the fabric of cosmic space and time. Exceptional clarity. Impenetrable mystery.
So what do we make of the news so breathlessly reported in the media of neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light? This is surely a bit of heroic physics, pitting what we believe to be true against the refining fire of experience, but I wouldn't make too much of it yet. Tom suggested that perhaps the researchers unwittingly measured the distance from CERN in Switzerland to Gran Sasso in Italy with greater accuracy. That's the kind of whimsy the result calls for now. The real story- for the time being- is as an illustration of the way the engine of scientific knowing grinds inexorably toward consensus.”
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