“More to Come…”

“More to Come…”

By Jeff Thomas

“Years ago, when visiting the US, I’d often watch late night television. Just prior to each interval, in order to ensure that viewers would sit through the adverts, the show would run a panel that said, “More to Come.” This, of course, was effective, as the viewer would be anticipating that the best part of the program would come in a later segment and would be more likely to continue watching.

Today, we’re looking at the reverse of that situation. The program we’re watching is The Decline and Fall of the American Empire and those who recognize the decline are viewing with ever-increasing trepidation, the developments that are unfolding there. Even those of us who are not American and don’t live there are glued to our screens, as we’re aware that were viewing the early stages of a collapse that promises to be the greatest social, political and economic event that we’re likely to see in our lifetimes.

Following World War Two, the US was in a boom beyond anything the world had ever seen. The Americans came to the war late, after having built up their manufacturing capacity for war dramatically, at the expense of the Allied powers in Europe. And they did this, essentially for free. It was paid for with the gold from the vaults of the European allies. After the war, Europe was trashed and it would take decades for them to get on their feet again. Meanwhile, the US had been going flat out in production, had first-rate modern factories and, most important, held the majority of the world’s gold.

The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement ensured that the US dollar would become the world’s default currency and, later, become the petrodollar, ensuring American hegemony over much of the rest of the world. There can be no doubt that, in the first decades after the war, the US had an amazing run and was, arguably, one of the best places to live in the world.

But, unfortunately, as so often happens, American political and industry leaders became full of themselves and couldn’t resist going out on limb to gain even more for themselves. In so doing, they turned the US from the world’s foremost creditor nation into the world’s foremost debtor nation. Worse, when they reached this unprecedented point, they opted to just keep going.

Worse still, it would appear that today’s leaders are aware that the mother of all bubbles that they’ve created is going to pop sometime in the near future, as they’re preparing themselves for the mother of all pushbacks from the populace when the crashes come.

The FBI, CIA, NSA, and a host of other authorities have either been created or expanded, allowing the creation of the world’s foremost police state. And, beginning in 2001 with the Patriot Act, have created a host of laws to assign authority to any of those bodies to exert ever-increasing control over the population. Capital controls, migration controls, higher taxes, confiscation of deposits in banks and quite a bit more have been passed in legislation, including the ability to declare the US in its entirely to be a “battle zone,” through which habeas corpus and the court system can be suspended nationally.

Yipes. (Or, blimey, depending on where you’re from.) At this point, any American who’s paying attention could be forgiven if he’s genuinely frightened at where his government is going with all this.

And so, we come back to the title of this essay – “More to Come.” A regular flow of proposed laws is now coming down the pipeline that would have been considered the stuff of a bad movie a few decades ago, but is now only too real and threatening to the freedoms of the average citizen. Instead of “more to come” meaning that the best is still on the way, the opposite would appear to be the case, and the worst is here, now.

But, how can this be, we ask ourselves. Surely those in power – the politicians, the industrialists, the central bankers, etc., must have seen this coming and, if that’s so, surely they’d have done something to stop it. Well, historically, that’s never been the case. Those in the greatest positions of power have never suddenly reversed an empire when it was about to self-destruct. What they tend to do instead is to guard against becoming casualties of the disaster they’ve created.

So, is that what’s happening this time around? In a word, yes.

The Bernie Madoffs of the world go to jail. However, those who commit the same fraudulent acts from within the system never go to jail. For example, if the heads of a bank commit massive fraud, the bank pays an enormous fine. The fine is then paid by the stockholders. And should the fine be large enough to crash the bank, the bankers can appeal to the government to bail them out, as they’re “too big to fail.” Thus, the taxpayers pick up the bill.

At this point, what we’re witnessing is an era in which laws are regularly being passed to ensure that the creators of the bubble will get a “Get Out of Jail Free” card and others will sustain the losses.

This is the very essence of what happens in an endgame run. Just as a hitman who places a bomb in a building makes his exit before the bomb can go off, the creators of bubbles safeguard themselves before the economic bomb can go off. They have no intention of being around to live with the resultant devastation that they’ve put into play.

Pete Townshend wrote prophetically, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” in 1971, in which he hopes that the latest gang of leaders will be better than the last. In the final line of the song, he grimly announces, “Meet the new boss – same as the old boss.”

And, in fact, this is the usual outcome. Perhaps the reason why empires collapse much in the same way, time and again, and their citizens consistently fail to see it coming, is that empires general last a long time before collapsing. The Venetian Republic lasted 200 years. The Spanish Empire lasted just over 120 years. Holland lasted 130 years, Russia – 200, the UK, just under 120. And it’s been much the same for the others. In every case, they last longer than a single lifetime, so it’s rare that any individual sees more than one empire collapse in his own lifetime and doesn’t understand that empires don’t end with a whimper. They end with a crescendo, not unlike the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”

We are witnessing the collapse of the world’s foremost empire. This is not mere conjecture. The US has all the symptoms that we’re now coming close to the final stages. And, if history plays out yet again, as it has repeatedly, we can expect that, in the lead-up to the collapse, the controls by governments will become increasingly draconian. As we consider, “more to come,” we should be braced for the likelihood that the worst controls are yet to be revealed.”

- http://www.swpcayman.com/

"This Life..."

 

“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.“

- https://www.brainpickings.org/

"How It Really Is"

 

Dan, I Allegedly, "Is Your Money Really Safe?"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, 2/25/24

"Is Your Money Really Safe?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Adventures With Danno, "Outrageous Price Increases At Walmart!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, AM 2/25/23

"Outrageous Price Increases At Walmart! 

This Is Ridiculous! What's Coming?"

In today's vlog, we are at Walmart and are noticing some outrageous price increases on grocery items! It's getting rough out here as food continues to get more and more unaffordable!

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- https://www.youtube.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: The System Is Hyperinflating"

"It's a Big Club, and you ain't in it.

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

Gregory Mannarino, AM 2/25/24

"Markets, A Look Ahead: The System Is Hyperinflating"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Humanity: Where Conspiracies Come To Die" (Excerpt)

"Humanity: Where Conspiracies Come To Die"

by Alex Krainer

Excerpt: "Conspiracies do exist; they arise in pursuit of specific objectives. Usually, the greater the objective, the more people must be organized to carry out the plan. The organization will shape up in some form of command and control hierarchy. People at the top of that hierarchy, those who originated and planned the conspiracy are usually the only ones who know what the plan is about. Lower rungs of the hierarchy must include individuals who may not know what the plan is about, but whose competence and operational capabilities are essential to the plan's success. In addition to competence however, these individuals must be willing to carry out the tasks necessary for the plan's execution. To make sure that they’re willing, conspirators regularly deceive them.

Competence trumps obedience: But this is where conspiracies run into unpredictable headwinds and often fail. In my experience, the more capable an individual is, the more difficult it is to deceive them. They tend to be engaged in their occupations and have a good understanding of the purpose and importance of their work. They also tend to have a high degree of personal and professional integrity and usually care about the quality of their work. If they're asked to work toward potentially nefarious ends, they may refuse to carry out their tasks, perform them poorly, sabotage them or even quit their positions. It is often exactly the most capable individuals who have those choices because their service could be in high demand elsewhere.

Google’s Project Maven: For example, when the US Department of Defense launched its drone assassinations program under the Bush-Cheney administration, the pilots they trained did not like the idea of killing unknown people around the world for unknown reasons. The pilots started quitting in large numbers or reporting incapacity due to moral injury, conflict of conscience or depression. Their superiors tried simply commanding them to follow orders, but this couldn’t reverse their unwillingness. The DOD sought to overcome the problem by resorting to artificial intelligence (AI). In April 2017, Google launched "Project Maven," or Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT). The idea was to develop AI targeting software and replace the unwilling human pilots. But as it turned out, Google's engineers weren't keen on the idea of killing people either. Many were outraged and about a dozen of their top engineers quit.

In the process, they compiled a master document of personal accounts detailing their decisions to leave, prompting nearly 4,000 employees to sign a petition opposing the company's involvement in the program. The company management tried to salvage the project by claiming that their AI won't be used to actually kill anyone, but apparently this reassurance wasn't sufficient. In addition to the petition circulating inside Google, the Tech Workers Coalition launched a petition in April 2018 demanding that Google abandon its work on Maven and that other tech companies, including IBM and Amazon refuse to work with the US DOD: "We can no longer ignore our industry's and our technologies' harmful biases, large-scale breaches of trust, and lack of ethical safeguards. These are life and death stakes," the petition read. Who knew? It turns out that trust and ethical safeguards are important to people.

The brightest and the best leaving the NSA: The National Security Agency (NSA) was about to learn that same lesson. In a January 2, 2018 article, The Washington Post reported that "NSA is losing its top talent at a worrisome rate as highly skilled personnel, some disillusioned with the spy agency's leadership... Since 2015, the NSA has lost several hundred hackers, engineers and data scientists..." Apparently, WaPo wrote, "the potential impact on national security is significant." "Some synonym of the word 'EPIDEMIC' is the best way to describe it," said one Ellison Anne Williams, former senior researcher at the NSA: "The agency is losing an amazing amount of its strongest technical talent, and to lose your best and brightest staff is a huge hit." Some groups within the NSA have lost almost half of their staff, another former official stated.

It is important to recognize how real and how powerful dissent and noncompliance can be. Often, only a small handful of dissenters armed with nothing more than truth and courage, can bring down colossal conspiracies of the world’s most powerful people. Theranos was the perfect example of this."

Full article is here:

- https://alexkrainer.substack.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "Another Mysterious Balloon Flying Over America; Society Keeps Collapsing"

Jeremiah Babe, 2/24/24

"Another Mysterious Balloon Flying Over America; 

Society Keeps Collapsing"

Comments here:

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"And It Was Pointless..."

“And it was pointless… to think how those years could have been put to better use, for he could hardly have put them to worse. There was no recovering them now. You could grieve endlessly for the loss of time and for the damage done therein. For the dead, and for your own lost self. But what the wisdom of the ages says is that we do well not to grieve on and on. And those old ones knew a thing or two and had some truth to tell… for you can grieve your heart out and in the end you are still where you were. All your grief hasn’t changed a thing. What you have lost will not be returned to you. It will always be lost. You’re left with only your scars to mark the void. All you can choose to do is to go on or not. But if you go on, it’s knowing you carry your scars with you.”

- Charles Frazier

"Never be ashamed of a scar. 

It only proves you were stronger than what tried to hurt you."

- Unknown

Musical Interlude: Gnomusy, "Dolmen Ridge"

Gnomusy, "Dolmen Ridge"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Stars are sometimes born in the midst of chaos. About 3 million years ago in the nearby galaxy M33, a large cloud of gas spawned dense internal knots which gravitationally collapsed to form stars. NGC 604 was so large, however, it could form enough stars to make a globular cluster. 

Many young stars from this cloud are visible in the above image from the Hubble Space Telescope, along with what is left of the initial gas cloud. Some stars were so massive they have already evolved and exploded in a supernova. The brightest stars that are left emit light so energetic that they create one of the largest clouds of ionized hydrogen gas known, comparable to the Tarantula Nebula in our Milky Way's close neighbor, the Large Magellanic Cloud.”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap121211.html

The Poet: David Wagoner, "Getting There"

"Getting There"

"You take a final step and, look, suddenly

You're there. You've arrived.

At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:

This common ground

Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.

What did you want to be? 

You'll remember soon.

You feel like tinder under a burning glass,

A luminous point of change.

The sky is pulsing against the cracked horizon,

Holding it firm till the arrival of stars

In time with your heartbeats.

Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression

On the self you were,

By having come all this way through all this welter

Under your own power,

Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising

Meandering lifeline.

What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,

Telling it haltingly like a dream,

That lost traveler's dream under the last hill

Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind

To unburden yourself

Of elements along elementary paths

By the break of morning.

You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight

Called Here and Now.

Now, what you make of it means everything,

Means starting over:

The life in your hands is neither here nor there

But getting there,

So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another

Journey without regret

Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,

The end of endings."

~ David Wagoner

"The Prophet: On Good and Evil "

"The Prophet: On Good and Evil"

 "Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves,

and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

You are good when you are one with yourself.

Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.

For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.

And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among

perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.

Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.

For when you strive for gain you are but a root

that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.

Surely the fruit cannot say to the root,

 Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance.

For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.

You are good when you are fully awake in your speech,

Yet you are not evil when you sleep

while your tongue staggers without purpose.

And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.

You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.

Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.

Even those who limp go not backward.

But you who are strong and swift,

see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.

You are good in countless ways,

and you are not evil when you are not good,

You are only loitering and sluggard.

Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.

In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness:

and that longing is in all of you.

But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea,

carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.

And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and

bends and lingers before it reaches the shore.

But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little,

 Wherefore are you slow and halting?

For the truly good ask not the naked,

 Where is your garment?

nor the houseless, What has befallen your house?"

- Kahlil Gibran

○

Freely download a PDF version of  "The Prophet" here:

- https://www.kahlilgibran.com/

The Daily "Near You?"

Lancaster, South Carolina, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Life Changing Poems for Hard Times"

Full screen recommended.

RedFrost Motivation, 

"Life Changing Poems for Hard Times"

Read by Shane Morris

Poems:

 "Defeat" by Khalil Gibran

 "A Psalm of Life" by H. W. Longfellow

"If" by Rudyard Kipling

 "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley

 "Desiderata" by Max Ermann

"A Dreamer..."

"And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you’re a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love.”

- Eldridge Cleaver

"Looking for a Reason to Believe: The Benefit of the Doubt Is Cracking"

"Looking for a Reason to Believe: 

The Benefit of the Doubt Is Cracking"

by Paul Rosenberg

"Those of us who pursue positive change are very often frustrated. We see the necessity of change all too clearly, and we can explain how it should come about, but it never seems to happen. The truth, however, is that change does come; it just comes more slowly than we’d like, and in ways that differ from those we imagined.

One real change I like to point out is the passing of blind trust in politicians. In the 1950s and ‘60s, most people spoke of politicians with respect and even with reverence. Now it’s almost standard for people to agree that they’re liars and thieves. That’s a very significant change, even if it did take several decades to unfold. So, a significant change has occurred in our time, and over a very broad base. Still, most people are hanging on, and often desperately, to old ways that should really be abandoned.

The Automatic Benefit of the Doubt: It’s a bit troubling to see how blindly, and for how long, people give the benefit of the doubt to hierarchy and its operators. They can know that a system is abusing them, and they can complain about it at length, but still they grasp at reasons to keep believing in it.

Here’s what I mean: During the bad spots of the Middle Ages, people would be abused by the clergy but say, “If only His Holiness knew!” During the reign of the USSR, people in the Gulag would often say, “If only Stalin knew!” In our time, people hold Political Party A or Political Party B as grave evils, while pretending that the combination of A + B is good and noble.

Still, such blind biases do eventually break. Stalin, after all, is gone, along with his USSR. The Protestant reformation broke the domination of the Church. And the delusions of our time will die as well.

“Still, I look to Find a Reason to Believe”: If there were such a competition, I’d nominate Rod Stewart’s song, "Reason To Believe," as the Anthem of the Age. Regardless of how badly they are abused, people have a very hard time letting go of their hierarchies; they’ve taken emotional refuge in them, after all. Even when sharp pain forces them to examine the hierarchy that constantly tells them, “Obey or we’ll hurt you,” the impulse to maintain belief erupts. Here’s how the song expresses it:

"If I listened long enough to you,

I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true.

Knowing that you lied,

straight-faced while I cried.

Still I look to find a reason to believe."

Humans have a real problem with that last line: looking for reasons to believe. It flies in the face of both logic and honesty, but people not only do it, but vigorously defend it. As for specific reasons to believe, they’re endless. Seldom are humans quicker and cleverer than when justifying their previous actions.

Why This Is a Good Sign: When people are desperately grasping for reasons to believe, it’s because the benefit of the doubt is cracking beneath them. Otherwise, why would they fight so wildly? The circumstances of our modern world are propelling people toward this break. Every time a ruling system tells gigantic lies, censors the public square, surveils their own people and frightens the masses for their own benefit, belief in their system cracks a little.

More and more people are conceding that it’s not just “one bad actor” here or there, but that Joe Stalin really is evil, that the clergy really is corrupt, and that hierarchies are abusive by nature. The whirlwind of distractions and slogans arrayed against moral clarity are losing their effectiveness. Little by little, humanity’s blind devotion to authority is cracking. Someday, it will break."

- https://freemansperspective.com/

o

Rod Stewart, "Reason To Believe"

"How It Really Is"

 

Dan, I Allegedly, "College is a Waste of Money"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly, AM 2/24/24

"College is a Waste of Money"

"Here’s an amazing statistic. In a world where colleges become more expensive than ever, we find out the over half of the college grads out there are not using their degrees that they got. They are unemployed."

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Adventures With Danno, "My Second Trip To Kroger This Week! 'Non-Food' Item Sales"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, AM 2/24/24

"My Second Trip To Kroger This Week!

 'Non-Food' Item Sales"

"In today's vlog, I take you shopping with me at Kroger to find the best deals. We go over different prices on paper products, medicines, oral hygiene, baby products, and many other non food items. The unfortunate thing is that all of these items seem to have gone up in price."

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"There Are No Solutions"

"There Are No Solutions"

by Brian Maher

“There are no solutions,” intones economist Thomas Sowell - “there are only trade-offs.” Preserving Earth is a trade-off to shame all trade-offs…For the cost of preserving Earth may consign its American inhabitants to a poorhouse.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, so-called: "Last April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule for stricter vehicle emissions standards starting in model year (MY) 2027… At the time of passage, the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy and climate spending and tax breaks would cost about $400 billion through fiscal year (FY) 2031…

Since then, the combination of higher inflation, greater demand for credits and looser-than-expected regulations significantly boosted the cost of those credits. Last June, we estimated the cost of the IRA energy provisions had grown by two-thirds, to $660 billion through 2031. Assuming the new vehicle emissions rule proposed by the EPA is finalized, we now estimate the cost of the provisions will more than double to $870 billion…"

A $470 billion doubling - $870 billion in all! We begin to suspect the Inflation “Reduction” Act is nothing other than a sad, sad jest upon the American people. Meantime, the Dis-United Nations informs us of the following: "Climate initiatives will touch the American taxpayer for $2,026 each year through 2030."

How do you like it? Yet Earth should take heart… for the Federal Reserve is with it. Were you aware the Federal Reserve has labeled climate a menace to financial stability? A risk - ostensibly - greater than even itself? Well, friends, it has.

The method by which the monetary authority can break an Earthly fever… remains somewhat dark to us. Yet we let it go for now. We too are heart and soul for Earth’s endurance. Yet we are not half so convinced of humanity’s capacity to hold Earth in siege.

The central bugaboo of the climactic drama is the carbon dioxide molecule. It is a “greenhouse gas.” It imprisons heat within the atmospheric penitentiary. Humankind’s carbon dioxide gushings have increased notably across decades. Yet are they capable of inducing a fever?

We once instructed our minions to ransack the scientific literature. From them we learned that: Carbon dioxide represents a vanishing 0.04% portion of Earth’s atmosphere. Consider Earth’s atmosphere a 100-story building. How high does the human CO2 contribution stack? The human contribution stacks to the linoleum layer upon the ground floor. That is, the human contribution cannot be measured in stories. The human contribution cannot be measured in feet, in inches, in centimeters. The human contribution must be measured in millimeters - against 100 stories of height.

This trifle is scorching Earth? The authenticated documentation, please - chapter, verse and line. And will you please include the footnotes?

Our minions further inform us that Earth has endured carbon dioxide quantities 25 times or greater than today’s. Yet the carbon dioxide fever never took. What is more, the carbon dioxide theory may not only prove incorrect - but 180 degrees incorrect.

A certain Ian Clark professes earth and environmental sciences at Canada’s University of Ottawa. From whom: "Solar input… creates ice ages and interglacial periods — which we’re in now. And CO2 tracks that. So we’ll see enormous temperature changes, going from ice ages to interglacials, and CO2 gets very low during ice ages and very high during interglacials. And that gives the appearance that CO2 is driving the climate, but it’s actually following. It lags by about 800 years. That is, carbon dioxide is the product of heat. It is not the initiator of heat. And it arrives on station eight centuries after heat’s onset."

Have we confused the wagon cart for the horse that hauls it? Evidently we have. Yet the American taxpayer is cowhided and dragooned under the theory that the wagon cart hauls the horse. Thus he is cowhided and dragooned under a likely fiction. He is the victim of humbug. “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”

A fellow can endure a trade-off that spares him a greater evil. In the case under consideration, the evil of climate calamity. Yet what if the evil is phantom? What if the evil lacks all existence? Then the trade-off to tackle the phantom evil… the non-existent evil… becomes itself the evil…"

- https://dailyreckoning.com/

"The Average U.S. Household Is Spending $1,019 More A Month Just To Buy The Same Goods And Services It Did 3 Years Ago"

"The Average U.S. Household Is Spending $1,019 More

 A Month Just To Buy The Same Goods And Services It Did 3 Years Ago"

by Michael Snyder

'It seems odd to talk about 2021 as “the good old days”, but the truth is that the cost of living was far lower just three short years ago. Earlier today, I did an interview with Sam Rohrer of Stand In The Gap Today in which we discussed how food prices have gotten wildly out of control. One example that I brought up was the fact that a Big Mac “value meal” can cost up to 18 dollars in some parts of the country. There is no way that I would shell out 18 bucks for a burger, some fries and a drink at McDonald’s. But this is the economic environment that we live in today.

Has your income gone up by more than a thousand dollars a month over the past three years? If not, you are falling behind.

According to economist Mark Zandi, the average U.S. household is now shelling out an additional $1,019 a month just to purchase the exact same goods and services that it did three years ago…"The typical U.S. household needed to pay $213 more a month in January to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation, according to new calculations from Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. Americans are paying on average $605 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,019 more compared with three years ago, before the inflation crisis began."

In the old days, I actually enjoyed going to the grocery store. But now it has become such a painful experience. I am sure that many of you can identify with that statement.

On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published an article that explained that George H.W. Bush was in the White House the last time Americans were spending such a high proportion of their incomes on food…"The last time Americans spent this much of their money on food, George H.W. Bush was in office, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” was in theaters and C+C Music Factory was rocking the Billboard charts."

Do you remember what life was like in 1991? It was a good year for me, but it was so long ago…"According to the Wall Street Journal, Americans were spending 11.4 percent of their disposable incomes on food in 1991, and in 2022 that figure was sitting at 11.3 percent…

In 1991, U.S. consumers spent 11.4% of their disposable personal income on food, according to data from the U.S. Agriculture Department. At the time, households were still dealing with steep food-price increases following an inflationary period during the 1970s. More than three decades later, food spending has reattained that level, USDA data shows. In 2022, consumers spent 11.3% of their disposable income on food, according to the most recent USDA data available."

I can already tell what a lot of you will be thinking when you read that. 2022 was two years ago. Food prices have continued to soar since that time, and so how high would that number be today? Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Americans are now spending 15 percent of their disposable incomes on food. But if you think that is bad, just wait until it gets into the 30 or 40 percent range eventually. Because that is where things are heading.

Of course grocery prices are already at absurd levels. On a very popular Internet forum, one user recently complained that his grocery bill for the week has now hit $250…"$100 used to be the total, when we really stocked up or picked some extras. Prices started climbing and we trimmed the extras, it hit $120-130. At $150 we started bitching. A month ago it hit $180. Hell it may have only been two weeks since we hit $180. Today it was $250 and we didn’t even get everything."

Actually, if you can get out of the grocery store for just $250, you are doing really well. For many others, a grocery cart full of food can run a lot higher than that. And major companies are openly warning us that more price hikes are on the way…

"Oreo maker Mondelez said in January it would continue raising prices on some of its products this year, largely because of cocoa prices, which earlier in February surged past a 46-year record. Hershey said this month it expects more expensive cocoa to cut into the company’s profit this year. Kraft Heinz said inflation is moderating but that its costs are still higher, driven in part by pricier tomatoes and sugar."

Let’s talk about the price of cocoa for a moment. Global supplies of cocoa have gotten very, very tight, and we are being warned that the price of cocoa “could reach as high as $10,000 per ton”…"The commodities analysts said some forecasts suggest the cost of cocoa in New York could reach as high as $10,000 per ton. What’s imminent is the West African cocoa shortage will be felt across supermarkets worldwide." If you love chocolate, you should try to hoard as much as you can while prices are still relatively low. I am quite serious about this. Because chocolate prices are going to accelerate quite rapidly from this point forward.

Sadly, car insurance rates are going up even faster than food prices are…"If you think your food bill is high, take a look at your car insurance. The average cost of full coverage car insurance increased by 26% to $2,543 in 2024, up $529 from a year earlier, Medora Lee reports. That’s six times faster than overall inflation and more than any food item at the grocery store, including eggs, over the past three years."

I honestly don’t understand how most people can afford to pay such exorbitant rates. Just making it from month to month has become such a struggle for tens of millions of Americans.

Needless to say, things are particularly rough for young people that are just starting out in life. A video in which one young woman complains about how oppressive the cost of living is has already been viewed more than 18 million times…“Why is it that I have to work 40 hours a week just so I can have a place to live?” A young woman’s TikTok video, in which she makes a now familiar complaint about young people having to spend most of their time working for just a sliver of free time which they then have barely enough money to enjoy, is now going viral.

“40 hours a week makes me $2,000 a month and my rent is $1,660,” the woman continued in a video that has amassed 18 million views on Twitter. “So I work 40 hours a week so I can have a 2 bedroom apartment and an extra $300 a month that doesn’t cover my phone or my internet or food.” She doesn’t have the time, energy, or cash to enjoy her life outside of work. 

She feels trapped, and I can totally get that. But what she doesn’t understand is that what she is going through right now is the direct result of literally decades of incredibly bad decisions. Of course many of our politicians want to strangle our economy even more. For example, Barbara Lee actually wants to increase the minimum wage to 50 dollars an hour…"Despite liberal media cheerleading and Biden’s assurances of a strong economy, Americans feel much different. Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-CA), a U.S. Senate candidate, complained in a recent debate about the “affordability crisis” in her state. She referred to a survey that showed “$127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough.” While she is right about the “affordability crisis” facing Americans, her solution is ludicrous. Lee proposes a minimum wage of $50 per hour."

Such a minimum wage would create massive unemployment as companies would lay off non-essential workers. It would also lead to higher prices for consumers and an even higher inflation rate, which has been a persistent problem during the Biden administration. Why don’t we just raise it to 100 dollars an hour? Then everyone would be swimming in money, right? Unfortunately, that is not the way the real world works.

More money is not the answer, and more debt is definitely not the answer. What we need is a productive economy that makes stuff of real value. Getting people to consume as much as possible will not lead to anywhere good. But getting people to produce at a high level will lead to lasting wealth.

The historic debt bubble that we have been enjoying has created an illusion of short-term prosperity, but now it has almost reached an end. Everyone knows that a crash is coming, and that crash is going to create a tremendous amount of chaos throughout our society.

It appears that Jeff Bezos understands that things are about to change, because he has been selling off tens of millions of Amazon shares…"Jeff Bezos has been busy this month selling a massive amount of Amazon stock. The Amazon founder and executive chairman’s sales have occurred in three separate sales and involved nearly 36 million shares to date, filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed. The shares in the e-commerce giant were collectively worth $6.15 billion after Bezos sold them at a range of prices across six different days."

Why would he do that if he thought that bright days are ahead for the U.S. economy? It would not make any sense at all. Of course the truth is that very challenging economic times are in our immediate future. I understand that things are not good for many of you right now, but it won’t be too long before economic conditions become much more harsh than they are at this moment."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

Familiar?

"A Blues Musical Interlude: John Campbelljohn, "Knocked Down"

John Campbelljohn, "Knocked Down"

And we all get knocked down...

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Wings II, Return To Freedom"

2002, "Wings II, Return To Freedom"

Over 1 hour of soothing, relaxing music for studying, meditation, 

yoga, and sleep. These are peaceful, soothing, instrumental compositions.

"A Look to the Heavens"

"In silhouette against a crowded star field along the tail of the arachnalogical constellation Scorpius, this dusty cosmic cloud evokes for some the image of an ominous dark tower.

In fact, clumps of dust and molecular gas collapsing to form stars may well lurk within the dark nebula, a structure that spans almost 40 light-years across this gorgeous telescopic portrait. Known as a cometary globule, the swept-back cloud, is shaped by intense ultraviolet radiation from the OB association of very hot stars in NGC 6231, off the upper edge of the scene. That energetic ultraviolet light also powers the globule's bordering reddish glow of hydrogen gas. Hot stars embedded in the dust can be seen as bluish reflection nebulae. This dark tower, NGC 6231, and associated nebulae are about 5,000 light-years away."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap210715.html