Jeremiah Babe, 3/12/24
"Inflation Report (More Bad News); Americans Are
Going To Lose Everything; Ponzi Scheme Is Crashing"
Comments here:
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
"100% PROOF That The Fast Food Crisis Is About To Hit - $50 Per Meal!"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 3/12/24
"100% PROOF That The Fast Food Crisis
Is About To Hit - $50 Per Meal!"
"Once hailed for its affordability and convenience, the fast-food industry is now facing an undeniable crisis that threatens to reshape the way we eat on the go. The days of grabbing a quick bite for a few dollars seem increasingly distant, with reports of fast-food meals costing as much as 50 dollars. As inflation rates soar, dining out has become a luxury that many cannot afford."
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Musical Interlude: Spirit Tribe Awakening, "Raise Positive Vibrations"
Full screen recommended.
Spirit Tribe Awakening, "Raise Positive Vibrations"
"528Hz Positive Energy, Self Healing with 417Hz Solfeggio frequency. Peaceful, empowering and soothing music and nature to nurture your mind, body, and soul. Supporting and empowering you on your life journey." I can't praise this visually beautiful, and very effective, video enough. In these incredibly highly stressful times, please be kind to yourself and take the time to savor this exquisite work in full screen mode. Headphones suggested but not necessary. It works, as simple as that...
- CP
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex.
About five light-years "tall", the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.”
"The World Rests In The Night..."
“The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb-time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night.”
- John O'Donohue,
o
"Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom"
“On the day when
the weight deadens
on your shoulders
and you stumble,
may the clay dance
to balance you.
And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets in to you,
may a flock of colors,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
in the currach of thought
and a stain of ocean
blackens beneath you,
may there come across the waters
a path of yellow moonlight
to bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
may the clarity of light be yours,
may the fluency of the ocean be yours,
may the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.”
o
John O'Donohue was an Irish author, poet, philosopher and former Catholic priest. He was born in County Clare on January 1, 1956. He died suddenly on January 4, 2008. He is best known for popularizing Celtic spirituality and is the author of a number of best-selling books on the subject.
Directly download "Anam Cara", by John O'Donohue, here:
"Decide..."
“We're all going to die. We don't get much say over how or when, but we do get to decide how we're gonna live. So, do it. Decide. Is this the life you want to live? Is this the person you want to love? Is this the best you can be? Can you be stronger? Kinder? More compassionate? Decide. Breathe in. Breathe out and decide.”
- “Richard”, “Grey’s Anatomy”
Dan, I Allegedly, "No One Has a Job"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 3/12/24
"No One Has a Job"
"It is unbelievable that nearly 107,000,000 people do not have a job right now. Combine that with the fact that you have the largest percentage of men between the ages of 18 and 29 that still live at home with their parents. What are we going to do?"
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Bill Bonner, "Unfair Prices"
"Unfair Prices"
Team Biden attempts to reverse engineer
prices discovery, from the top down...
by Bill Bonner
Youghal, Ireland - Finally, Joe Biden is going to tackle inflation in the time-honored way of despots and crackpots everywhere. CNBC: "President Joe Biden will launch a new strike force jointly led by the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice, to tackle “unfair and illegal” corporate pricing, which he blames for consumers’ continued high costs of living." The FTC and DOJ have been among the central enforcers of Biden’s regulatory agenda over the past three years. In other words, price hikes don’t come from the Fed’s zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) nor from their stimmies, deficits and money-printing. High prices are the fault of evil, greedy corporations. And now, Team Biden is going to do something about it.
‘Uh…like what?’ you might want to know. Easy. It is going to pretend that it knows what a ‘fair’ price should be. And the saintly and all-knowing feds are going to impose their will on those SOBs in the private sector.
Wasting Our Time: Of course, the SOBs will always want to charge as much as they can get away with. What stops them is not the price posses of the federal government, but competition. You either compete on price or on quality, usually both. So corporate deciders are always looking for ways to cut prices…not raise them. That is how they hope to keep their customers. But no need to waste our time explaining these things to the Biden Bunch. If there is a lamb left unsheared in the Republic, they go after it…eager to get more wool to pull over voters’ eyes.
We asked yesterday, why does a good system degenerate into a bad one…why does government grow, becoming less democratic, more incompetent and more tyrannical? You might as well ask why doesn’t tomorrow turn into yesterday? Or wine turn back into grape juice? Why doesn’t the president just ‘walk across the street’ …and tell Congress: ‘Enough is enough. No more deficits. That’s it.’?
Outta Shape: You see an old man, bent, shuffling…you might say to him: ‘Just straighten up and walk normally.’ But he can’t do it. His muscles …his bones…his brain – all have taken a new shape. They can never again be what they were. And the US has aged…and matured, too, along with its deciders. Bent by time, now the voters elect Biden or Trump, not Jefferson or even Eisenhower. And Joe Biden is so practiced as skirting the truth, he can’t do anything else. Yes, greedy corporations cause price increases…of course they do. Yes, the firepower industry needs more money to protect our democracy, of course it does. And don’t even think about trimming Social Security, Medicare or other ‘entitlements.’ “Not on my watch,” said the president on X yesterday.
It’s a shame Biden doesn’t have an older, wiser brother. Before his State of the Union Speech last week, he might have talked some sense into him: “Joe. This is your last chance. Your career is almost over. You can go out as a washed-up hack. Or you can go out there and tell the voters something important. Stop carrying water for the special interests who want war and deficits. Stop this mumbly-fumbly double talk. The US can’t afford to keep spending money this way. If it doesn’t make a major course correction, it will soon be as washed up as you are. Tell the truth. Americans will be so shocked and delighted, you might win another 4 years. And even if you lose, you will be remembered, and honored – like Eisenhower – for saying what needed to be said. Go ahead. Give truth a chance.”
Nothing at All: And so, perhaps when the fateful hour arrived, his mind clear…his aim sure…Joe Biden might have given it to the public, straight. Unadorned by mendacity. Undiluted by wishful thinking. And unabridged by lies:
“My fellow Americans, I don’t have time for a lot of BS. So, here’s the story. If we keep spending money the way we’ve been spending it, we will go broke. Of course, there are a lot of people who don’t care about that. The money is headed their way. They’re building their mansions and stocking their bank accounts, at your expense. And the only way to stop it is just to draw a line. I can’t haggle over every line item. Besides, my job is not to protect the special interests…it’s to protect the general interest...the national interest. My job is to make sure we don’t spend too much. So, if I am elected to serve you for 4 more years – and yes, I know I don’t really deserve it – balanced budgets will be non-negotiable. No more deficits. No more money printing. You gentlemen and ladies in Congress…you decide what to spend money on…and send me a balanced budget. I’ll sign it. Otherwise, don’t bother to send me anything at all.”
Yeah... good luck!
"There Are Simply No Answers..."
“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
- Barry Lopez
”The 5 Stages of Economic Collapse”
”The 5 Stages of Economic Collapse”
by Dmitry Orlov
“Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defined the five stages of coming to terms with grief and tragedy as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and applied it quite successfully to various forms of catastrophic personal loss, such as death of a loved one, sudden end to one’s career, and so forth. Several thinkers, notably James Howard Kunstler and, more recently John Michael Greer, have pointed out that the Kübler-Ross model is also quite terrifyingly accurate in reflecting the process by which society as a whole (or at least the informed and thinking parts of it) is reconciling itself to the inevitability of a discontinuous future, with our institutions and life support systems undermined by a combination of resource depletion, catastrophic climate change, and political impotence.
But so far, little has been said specifically about the finer structure of these discontinuities. Instead, there is to be found continuum of subjective judgments, ranging from “a severe and prolonged recession” (the prediction we most often read in the financial press), to Kunstler’s evocative but unscientific-sounding “clusterf**k,” to the ever-popular “Collapse of Western Civilization,” painted with an ever-wider brush-stroke.
For those of us who have already gone through all of the emotional stages of reconciling ourselves to the prospect of social and economic upheaval, it might be helpful to have a more precise terminology that goes beyond such emotionally charged phrases. Defining a taxonomy of collapses might prove to be more than just an intellectual exercise: based on our abilities and circumstances, some of us may be able to specifically plan for a certain stage of collapse as a temporary, or even permanent, stopping point.
Even if society at the current stage of socioeconomic complexity will no longer be possible, and even if, as Tainter points in his “Collapse of Complex Societies,” there are circumstances in which collapse happens to be the correct adaptive response, it need not automatically cause a population crash, with the survivors disbanding into solitary, feral humans dispersed in the wilderness and subsisting miserably. Collapse can be conceived of as an orderly, organized retreat rather than a rout.
For instance, the collapse of the Soviet Union – our most recent and my personal favorite example of an imperial collapse – did not reach the point of political disintegration of the republics that made it up, although some of them (Georgia, Moldova) did lose some territory to separatist movements. And although most of the economy shut down for a time, many institutions, including the military, public utilities, and public transportation, continued to function throughout. And although there was much social dislocation and suffering, society as a whole did not collapse, because most of the population did not lose access to food, housing, medicine, or any of the other survival necessities. The command-and-control structure of the Soviet economy largely decoupled the necessities of daily life from any element of market psychology, associating them instead with physical flows of energy and physical access to resources. Thus situation, as I argue in my forthcoming book, Reinventing Collapse, allowed the Soviet population to inadvertently achieve a greater level of collapse-preparedness than is currently possible in the United States.
Having given a lot of thought to both the differences and the similarities between the two superpowers – the one that has collapsed already, and the one that is collapsing as I write this – I feel ready to attempt a bold conjecture, and define five stages of collapse, to serve as mental milestones as we gauge our own collapse-preparedness and see what can be done to improve it.
Rather than tying each phase to a particular emotion, as in the Kübler-Ross model, the proposed taxonomy ties each of the five collapse stages to the breaching of a specific level of trust, or faith, in the status quo. Although each stage causes physical, observable changes in the environment, these can be gradual, while the mental flip is generally quite swift. It is something of a cultural universal that nobody (but a real fool) wants to be the last fool to believe in a lie.
Stages of Collapse:
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost. As local social institutions, be they charities, community leaders, or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity” (Turnbull, "The Mountain People"). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I die tomorrow” (Solzhenitsyn, "The Gulag Archipelago"). There may even be some cannibalism.
Although many people imagine collapse to be a sort of elevator that goes to the sub-basement (our Stage 5) no matter which button you push, no such automatic mechanism can be discerned. Rather, driving us all to Stage 5 will require that a concerted effort be made at each of the intervening stages. That all the players seem poised to make just such an effort may give this collapse the form a classical tragedy – a conscious but inexorable march to perdition – rather than a farce (“Oops! Ah, here we are, Stage 5.” – “So, whom do we eat first?” – “Me! I am delicious!”) Let us sketch out this process.
Financial collapse, as we are are currently observing it, consists of two parts. One is that a part of the general population is forced to move, no longer able to afford the house they bought based on inflated assessments, forged income numbers, and foolish expectations of endless asset inflation. Since, technically, they should never have been allowed to buy these houses, and were only able to do so because of financial and political malfeasance, this is actually a healthy development. The second part consists of men in expensive suits tossing bundles of suddenly worthless paper up in the air, ripping out their remaining hair, and (some of us might uncharitably hope) setting themselves on fire on the steps of the Federal Reserve. They, to express it in their own vernacular, “f**ked up,” and so this is also just as it should be.
The government response to this could be to offer some helpful homilies about “the wages of sin” and to open a few soup kitchens and flop houses in a variety of locations including Wall Street. The message would be: “You former debt addicts and gamblers, as you say, ‘f****d up,’ and so this will really hurt for a long time. We will never let you anywhere near big money again. Get yourselves over to the soup kitchen, and bring your own bowl, because we don’t do dishes.” This would result in a stable Stage 1 collapse – the Second Great Depression.
However, this is unlikely, because in the US the government happens to be debt addict and gambler number one. As individuals, we may have been as virtuous as we wished, but the government will have still run up exorbitant debts on our behalf. Every level of government, from local municipalities and authorities, which need the financial markets to finance their public works and public services, to the federal government, which relies on foreign investment to finance its endless wars, is addicted to public debt. They know they cannot stop borrowing, and so they will do anything they can to keep the game going for as long as possible.
About the only thing the government currently seems it fit to do is extend further credit to those in trouble, by setting interest rates at far below inflation, by accepting worthless bits of paper as collateral and by pumping money into insolvent financial institutions. This has the effect of diluting the dollar, further undermining its value, and will, in due course, lead to hyperinflation, which is bad enough in any economy, but is especially serious for one dominated by imports. As imports dry up and the associated parts of the economy shut down, we pass Stage 2: Commercial Collapse.
As businesses shut down, storefronts are boarded up and the population is left largely penniless and dependent on FEMA and charity for survival, the government may consider what to do next. It could, for example, repatriate all foreign troops and set them to work on public works projects designed to directly help the population. It could promote local economic self-sufficiency, by establishing community-supported agriculture programs, erecting renewable energy systems, and organizing and training local self-defense forces to maintain law and order. The Army Corps of Engineers could be ordered to bulldoze buildings erected on former farmland around city centers, return the land to cultivation, and to construct high-density solar-heated housing in urban centers to resettle those who are displaced. In the interim, it could reduce homelessness by imposing a steep tax on vacant residential properties and funneling the proceeds into rent subsidies for the indigent. With plenty of luck, such measures may be able to reverse the trend, eventually providing for a restoration of pre-Stage 2 conditions.
This may or may not be a good plan, but in any case it is rather unrealistic, because the United States, being so deeply in debt, will be forced to accede to the wishes of its foreign creditors, who own a lot of national assets (land, buildings, and businesses) and who would rather see a dependent American population slaving away working off their debt than a self-sufficient one, conveniently forgetting that they have mortgaged their children’s futures to pay for military fiascos, big houses, big cars, and flat-screen television sets. Thus, a much more likely scenario is that the federal government (knowing who butters their bread) will remain subservient to foreign financial interests. It will impose austerity conditions, maintain law and order through draconian means, and aid in the construction of foreign-owned factory towns and plantations. As people start to think that having a government may not be such a good idea, conditions become ripe for Stage 3.
If Stage 1 collapse can be observed by watching television, observing Stage 2 might require a hike or a bicycle ride to the nearest population center, while Stage 3 collapse is more than likely to be visible directly through one’s own living-room window, which may or may not still have glass in it. After a significant amount of bloodletting, much of the country becomes a no-go zone for the remaining authorities. Foreign creditors decide that their debts might not be repaid after all, cut their losses and depart in haste. The rest of the world decides to act as if there is no such place as The United States – because “nobody goes there any more.” So as not to lose out on the entertainment value, the foreign press still prints sporadic fables about Americans who eat their young, much as they did about Russia following the Soviet collapse. A few brave American expatriates who still come back to visit bring back amazing stories of a different kind, but everyone considers them eccentric and perhaps a little bit crazy.
Stage 3 collapse can sometimes be avoided by the timely introduction of international peacekeepers and through the efforts of international humanitarian NGOs. In the aftermath of a Stage 2 collapse, domestic authorities are highly unlikely to have either the resources or the legitimacy, or even the will, to arrest the collapse the dynamic and reconstitute themselves in a way that the population would accept.
As stage 3 collapse runs its course, the power vacuum left by the now defunct federal, state and local government is filled by a variety of new power structures. Remnants of former law enforcement and military, urban gangs, ethnic mafias, religious cults and wealthy property owners all attempt to build their little empires on the ruins of the big one, fighting each other over territory and access to resources. This is the age of Big Men: charismatic leaders, rabble-rousers, ruthless Macchiavelian princes and war lords. In the luckier places, they find it to their common advantage to pool their resources and amalgamate into some sort of legitimate local government, while in the rest their jostling for power leads to a spiral of conflict and open war.
Stage 4 collapse occurs when society becomes so disordered and impoverished that it can no longer support the Big Men, who become smaller and smaller, and eventually fade from view. Society fragments into extended families and small tribes of a dozen or so families, who find it advantageous to band together for mutual support and defense. This is the form of society that has existed over some 98.5% of humanity’s existence as a biological species, and can be said to be the bedrock of human existence. Humans can exist at this level of organization for thousands, perhaps millions of years. Most mammalian species go extinct after just a few million years, but, for all we know, Homo Sapiens still have a million or two left.
If pre-collapse society is too atomized, alienated and individualistic to form cohesive extended families and tribes, or if its physical environment becomes so disordered and impoverished that hunger and starvation become widespread, then Stage 5 collapse becomes likely. At this stage, a simpler biological imperative takes over, to preserve the life of the breeding couples. Families disband, the old are abandoned to their own devices, and children are only cared for up to age 3. All social unity is destroyed, and even the couples may disband for a time, preferring to forage on their own and refusing to share food. This is the state of society described by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull in his book “The Mountain People.” If society prior to Stage 5 collapse can be said to be the historical norm for humans, Stage 5 collapse brings humanity to the verge of physical extinction.
As we can easily imagine, the default is cascaded failure: each stage of collapse can easily lead to the next, perhaps even overlapping it. In Russia, the process was arrested just past Stage 3: there was considerable trouble with ethnic mafias and even some warlordism, but government authority won out in the end. In my other writings, I go into a lot of detail in describing the exact conditions that inadvertently made Russian society relatively collapse-proof. Here, I will simply say that these ingredients are not currently present in the United States.
While attempting to arrest collapse at Stage 1 and Stage 2 would probably be a dangerous waste of energy, it is probably worth everyone’s while to dig in their heels at Stage 3, definitely at Stage 4, and it is quite simply a matter of physical survival to avoid Stage 5. In certain localities – those with high population densities, as well as those that contain dangerous nuclear and industrial installations – avoiding Stage 3 collapse is rather important, to the point of inviting foreign troops and governments in to maintain order and avoid disasters. Other localities may be able to prosper indefinitely at Stage 3, and even the most impoverished environments may be able to support a sparse population subsisting indefinitely at Stage 4.
Although it is possible to prepare directly for surviving Stage 5, this seems like an altogether demoralizing thing to attempt. Preparing to survive Stages 3 and 4 may seem somewhat more reasonable, while explicitly aiming for Stage 3 may be reasonable if you plan to become one of the Big Men. Be that as it may, I must leave such preparations as an exercise for the reader. My hope is that these definitions of specific stages of collapse will enable a more specific and fruitful discussion than the one currently dominated by such vague and ultimately nonsensical terms as “the collapse of Western civilization.”
- http://www.energybulletin.net/
o
Download "The Collapse of Complex Societies",
by Joseph A. Tainter, here:
"Nearly 107 Million Americans Do Not Have A Job Right Now"
"Nearly 107 Million Americans Do Not Have A Job Right Now"
by Michael Snyder
"A lot of people are really confused about the state of the U.S. economy right now. Large employers are conducting mass layoffs all over the country, and those that are searching for work are having a very difficult time. But meanwhile, the Biden administration and the mainstream media continue to insist that the unemployment rate is low and everything is just fine. So what can account for such incongruity? Hopefully by the time you are done reading this article you will have a much clearer view of what is really going on out there.
On Friday, the BLS released the employment numbers for the month of February. Zero Hedge is calling it “the most ridiculous jobs report in history”…"Last month we though that the January jobs report was the “most ridiculous in recent history” but, boy, were we wrong because this morning the Biden department of goalseeked propaganda (aka BLS) published the February jobs report, and holy crap was that something else. Even Goebbels would blush.
We were told that the U.S. economy added 275,000 jobs last month. But if you dig deeper into the report, you will find that the number of native-born workers actually fell by 560,000 last month. And over the past 3 months, the number of native-born workers has fallen by a whopping 2.4 million…
But wait there’s even more, because now that the primary season is over and we enter the heart of election season and political talking points will be thrown around left and right, especially in the context of the immigration crisis created intentionally by the Biden administration which is hoping to import millions of new Democratic voters (maybe the US can hold the presidential election in Honduras or Guatemala, after all it is their citizens that will be illegally casting the key votes in November), what we find is that in February, the number of native-born workers tumbled again, sliding by a massive 560K to just 129.807 million. Add to this the December data, and we get a near-record 2.4 million plunge in native-born workers in just the past 3 months (only the covid crash was worse)!"
So where is the “job growth” coming from? If you can believe it, the BLS is claiming that 1.2 million foreign-born workers were added during the month of February alone…"The offset? A record 1.2 million foreign-born (read immigrants, both legal and illegal but mostly illegal) workers added in February!"
Are we actually supposed to believe such nonsense? I find it hard to believe that more than a million foreign-born workers were added to the system in a single month when layoffs are at such extremely high levels. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas we just witnessed the highest number of layoffs during the month of February since the Great Recession…"Layoff announcements in February hit their highest level for the month since the global financial crisis, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The total of 84,638 planned cuts showed an increase of 3% from January and 9% from the same month a year ago, with technology and finance companies at the forefront. From a historical perspective, this was the worst February since 2009, which saw 186,350 announcements as the worst of the financial crisis was seemingly coming to an end."
We really do have an employment crisis in this country, but those in positions of power are trying to convince us that what we can see with our own two eyes isn’t actually real. In other words, they are gaslighting us really hard. One of the ways they do this is by how they classify those that are not working.
When an adult is not working, they are classified as either “unemployed” or “not in the labor force”. In February, 6,458,000 Americans were considered to be officially “unemployed”. If that number was accurate, that would be good news. But another 100,285,000 Americans were considered to be “not in the labor force” in February. When you add those two numbers together, you get a grand total of 106,743,000 Americans that are not working. In other words, nearly 107 million Americans do not have a job right now.
Let me try to put that number into proper perspective. During the Great Recession, that number never even reached 90 million. So right now, the number of Americans not working is far higher than it was at any point during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, conditions continue to get even rougher for those that are actually working. The cost of living has been rising much faster than our paychecks have, and that is putting enormous stress on households from coast to coast. Recently, I was stunned to learn that a 160 square foot home in Las Vegas is renting for 950 dollars a month…"A tiny home in the Las Vegas Valley is creating a big stir. Nestled between two apartment blocks, the 160 sq ft tiny home, listed for $950 a month, has received more than 113 inquiries from eager renters."
That is absurd. But this is what years of reckless money printing have done to us. Housing has become more unaffordable than ever before, and this isn’t just happening in our heavily populated metropolitan areas. If you can believe it, an average home in Bozeman, Montana now sells for more than a million dollars…"Bozeman, Montana, a small city of about 56,000 people, has seen home prices soar on the back of increased migration to the area, catapulting demand for properties. A single-family home in the area rose by nearly 40 percent to more than $1.16 million as of February, according to the Bozeman Real Estate Group."
At the same time, paychecks are stagnating or even falling in some cases. In fact, it is being reported that “48% of 2,000 US companies surveyed lowered pay for certain roles” in 2023… But some are finding an unwelcome surprise as they scan listings for open roles. A salary bump is all but impossible; in many cases, wages seem lower than their previous pay – even for the same jobs. They aren’t imagining things. A 2023 report on pay trends from ZipRecruiter showed 48% of 2,000 US companies surveyed lowered pay for certain roles.
The middle class is being systematically ripped to shreds. With each passing day, more Americans are joining the ranks of the poor, and homelessness and hunger are absolutely exploding all over the nation. What we are experiencing is the direct result of years of very foolish policies. Unfortunately, much worse is on the horizon. The remainder of 2024 will be excruciating, and 2025 will be even more painful."
Gregory Mannarino, "Seeing Is Believing! 100% Proof That The FED Is Deliberately Destroying The System"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/12/24
"Seeing Is Believing! 100% Proof That
The FED Is Deliberately Destroying The System"
Comments here:
"World War III Prelude, 3/12/24"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 3/12/24
"Alert! Russia Being Invaded! Shots Fired!
High Alert/Lockdown; National Guard Nuclear Dry Run!"
Comments here:
o
Judge Napolitano - Judging Freedom, 3/12/24
"Col. Douglas Macgregor:
Europe Crumbling, Middle East Exploding"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Times Of India, 3/12/24
"Hezbollah's Biggest Rocket Attack On Israel:
100 Katyusha Rockets Assault Iron Dome In Bekaa"
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno, "Food Shortage Updates March 2024! Prepare For The Worst!"
Adventures With Danno, 3/12/24
"Food Shortage Updates March 2024!
Prepare For The Worst!"
"Food shortages that are affecting grocery stores around the U.S. and around the world. It's getting rough out here as many products continue to disappear from store shelves!"
Comments here:
o
Meanwhile, elsewhere...
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell , 3/12/24
"I Went to a Russian Farmers Fair in Provincial Russia"
"I had the chance to attend a Farmers Fair in Provinical Russia. Held annually the conference “A big shelf for small businesses!” was held in Kaluga, Russia. The farmers fair and conference was attended by small business entrepreneurs, representatives of government authorities, business associations and me."
Comments here:
Monday, March 11, 2024
“'Hundreds More Banks To Fail' As Chase Bank Employees Lose BIG"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 3/11/24
“'Hundreds More Banks To Fail'
As Chase Bank Employees Lose BIG"
Comments here:
Canadian Prepper, "It's About to Get Real Wild. Prepping for Social Chaos."
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 3/11/24
"It's About to Get Real Wild. Prepping for Social Chaos."
Comments here:
Part 1 here:
Jeremiah Babe, "America is Producing Dead Beats; China Is Producing The World's Goods"
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, 3/11/24
"America is Producing Dead Beats;
China Is Producing The World's Goods"
"Parents are supporting their adult children teaching them to be dependent not independent while China continues to produce a majority of world goods. We are in big trouble."
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Musical Interlude: Michael Bolton, "When I'm Back On My Feet Again"
Full screen recommended.
Michael Bolton, "When I'm Back On My Feet Again"
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Can the night sky appear both serene and surreal? Perhaps classifiable as serene in the below panoramic image are the faint lights of small towns glowing across a dark foreground landscape of Doi Inthanon National Park in Thailand, as well as the numerous stars glowing across a dark background starscape. Also visible are the planet Venus and a band of zodiacal light on the image left.
Unusual events are also captured, however. First, the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy, while usually a common site, appears here to hover surreally above the ground. Next, a fortuitous streak of a meteor was captured on the image right. Perhaps the most unusual component is the bright spot just to the left of the meteor. That spot is the plume of a rising Ariane 5 rocket, launched a few minutes before from Kourou, French Guiana. How lucky was the astrophotographer to capture the rocket launch in his image? Not lucky at all - the image was timed to capture the rocket. What was lucky was how photogenic - and perhaps surreal - the rest of the sky turned out to be.”
Dan, I Allegedly, "People Are Financing Food"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 3/11/24
"People Are Financing Food"
"By now, pay later has been a big thing. Now people are doing this to eat. They were paying their utility bills earlier with it and now it’s gotten worse. They are using it to eat."
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno, "Items That Are Disappearing From The Grocery Stores Right Now!"
Adventures With Danno, 3/11/24
"Items That Are Disappearing From
The Grocery Stores Right Now!"
Comments here:
"The Poet: Wendell Berry, "Leavings"
"Leavings"
“In time a man disappears
from his lifelong fields, from
the streams he has walked beside,
from the woods where he sat and waited.
Thinking of this, he seems to
miss himself in those places
as if always he has been there.
But first he must disappear,
and this he foresees with hope,
with thanks. Let others come.”
- Wendell Berry
○
“Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him – his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition – no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him - neither name nor money to bequeath – a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “Tomorrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.”
- William Makepeace Thackeray, “Vanity Fair”
"What Is The Point Of You?"
“What is the point of you? What is your worth? And by worth I am not talking about your financial value, I am talking about something much more significant than that. So, I ask again - what is your worth? And you won't find the answer in any scripture or church - you won't find it even in this book. Because no external power can give you the answer to something so incredibly existential in nature.
If you want to know your worth, ask yourself, what are you without your bank account? The worth of a person lies in character. The same goes for a nation and the same goes for a world. Therefore, a nation's worth lies not in the value of its currency, but in the character of its people. And it all begins with the individual - it all begins with you. Your character holds not just the worth of your own life, but that of the lives of your people as well. So, feel like it's the feeling of your society and act like it's the action of your society.
But mark you, here I do not mean, feeling and acting like the society, rather, I am asking you to feel, think and act as an original, brave and conscientious human being, so that you become the very emblem of humanhood in front of others, for them to draw their life’s inspiration from. Doing what the society wants, makes you a second hand human - wanting the society to do what you want, makes you a narcissistic bigot - but being an embodiment of humanhood without any expectation from others, is what makes you a sentient human.”
- Abhijit Naskar
“Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward an unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be poorer if I leave it?”
- Arthur C. Clarke, “Glide Path”
"I Am Done"
"I Am Done"
by OHMama
"I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.
My 1940s born Dad raised me to be patriotic and proud, to love the war bird airplanes of his era as much as he does, and to respect our flag and our country as a sacred thing. I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift a person could have. I grew up thinking that our country was as strong, and honest and true as my Dad. I grew up thinking I was free.
As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from under us.
I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.
We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year without going into debt.
At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.
I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the medicine cabinet.
I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.
I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility.
Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence.
And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.
And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They’re probably relieved that upstart Trump is gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.
I will not vote again; they’ve made it abundantly clear that my voice doesn’t matter. Whatever irrational, suicidal lunacy the nanny states thinks is best is what I’ll get. What it decided I need is a geriatric pedophile who shouldn’t be charged with anything more rigorous than choosing between tapioca and rice pudding at the old folks home, and a casting couch skank who rails against racism while being a descendant of slave owners.
I’m free to dismember a baby in my womb and kill it because “my body my choice”, but God help me if I won’t cover my face with a germ laden Linus-worthy security blanket or refuse let them inject genetically altering chemicals into my body or my child’s. I can be doxed, fired, shunned and destroyed for daring to venture that there are only 2 genders as proven by DNA, but a disease with a 99+% survival rate for most humans is a deadly pandemic worth murdering an economy over. Because science. Idiocracy is real, and we are living it. Dr. Hannibal Lecter would be an improvement over Fauci.
I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heartbreaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.
I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to or from the society they live in.
I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but f**k these motherf**kers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all, mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all."
Soon, OHMama, soon...
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