Jim Kunstler, "Gags and Jibes"

"Gags and Jibes"

by Jim Kunstler

“My law firm is currently in court fighting for free 

and fair elections in 52 cases across 19 states.” 

- Marc Elias, DNC Lawfare Ninja, punking voters.

"Have you noticed how quickly our Ukraine problem went away, vanished, phhhhttttt? At least from the top of US news media websites. The original idea, as cooked-up by departed State Department strategist Victoria Nuland, was to make Ukraine a problem for Russia, but instead we made it a problem for everybody else, especially ourselves in the USA, since it looked like an attempt to kick-start World War Three. Now she is gone, but the plans she laid apparently live on.

Our Congress so far has resisted coughing up another $60-billion for the Ukraine project - most of it to be laundered through Raytheon (RTX), General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin - so instead “Joe Biden” sent Ukraine’s President Zelensky a few reels of Laurel and Hardy movies. The result was last week’s prank: four groups of mixed Ukraine troops and mercenaries drawn from sundry NATO members snuck across the border into Russia’s Belgorod region to capture a nuclear weapon storage facility while Russia held its presidential election. I suppose it looked good on the war-gaming screen.

Alas, the raid was a fiasco. Russian intel was on it like white-on-rice. The raiders met ferocious resistance and retreated into a Russian mine-field - this was the frontier, you understand, between Kharkov (Ukr) and Belgorod (Rus) - where they were annihilated. The Russian election concluded Sunday without further incident. V.V. Putin, running against three other candidates from fractional parties, won with 87 percent of the vote. He’s apparently quite popular.

“Joe Biden,” not so much here, where he is pretending to run for reelection with a party pretending to go along with the gag. Ukraine is lined up to become Afghanistan Two, another gross embarrassment for the US foreign policy establishment and “JB” personally. So, how long do you think V. Zelensky will be bopping around Kiev like Al Pacino in Scarface?

This time, poor beleaguered Ukraine won’t need America’s help plotting a coup. When that happens, as it must, since Mr. Z has nearly destroyed his country, and money from the USA for government salaries and pensions did not arrive on-time, there will be peace talks between his successors and Mr. Putin’s envoys. The optimum result for all concerned - including NATO, whether the alliance knows it or not - will be a demilitarized Ukraine, allowed to try being a nation again, though in a much-reduced condition than prior to its becoming a US bear-poking stick. It will be on a short leash within Russia’s sphere-of-influence, where it has, in fact, resided for centuries, and life will go on. Thus, has Russia at considerable cost, had to reestablish the status quo.

Meanwhile, Saturday night, “Joe Biden” turned up at the annual Gridiron dinner thrown by the White House [News] Correspondents’ Association, where he told the ballroom of Intel Community quislings: “You make it possible for ordinary citizens to question authority without fear or intimidation.” The dinner, you see, is traditionally a venue for jokes and jibes. So, this must have been a gag, right? Try to imagine The New York Times questioning authority. For instance, the authority of the DOJ, the FBI, the DHS, and the DC Federal District court. Instant hilarity, right?

As it happens, though, today, Monday, March 18, 2024, attorneys for the State of Missouri (and other parties) in a lawsuit against “Joe Biden” (and other parties) will argue in the Supreme Court that those government agencies above, plus the US State Department, with assistance from the White House (and most of the White House press corps, too), were busy for years trying to prevent ordinary citizens from questioning authority. For instance, questioning the DOD’s Covid-19 prank, the CDC’s vaccination op, the DNC’s 2020 election fraud caper, the CIA’s Frankenstein experiments in Ukraine, the J6 “insurrection,” and sundry other trips laid on the ordinary citizens of the USA.

Specifically, Missouri v. Biden is about the government’s efforts to coerce social media into censoring any and all voices that question official dogma. The case is about birthing the new concept - new to America, anyway - known as “misinformation” - that is, truth about what our government is doing that cannot be allowed to enter the public arena, making it very difficult for ordinary citizens to question authority. The government will apparently argue that they were not coercing, they were just trying to persuade the social media execs to do this or that.

Maybe one of the justices might ask how it came to be that a Chief Counsel of the FBI, James Baker, after a brief rest-stop at a DC think tank, happened to take the job as Chief Counsel at Twitter in 2020. That was a mighty strange switcheroo, don’t you think? And ordinary citizens were not generally informed of it until the fall of 2022, when Elon Musk bought Twitter and delved into its workings."

- https://kunstler.com/

"Economic Market Snapshot 3/18/24"

"Economic Market Snapshot 3/18/24"

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Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...

Only the consequences are real - to you!

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

You and I are not in the Big Club."

- George Carlin

Market Data Center, Live Updates:

- https://www.marketwatch.com/market-data 

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- https://www.asktraders.com/analysis/

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Comprehensive, essential truth.

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

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Financial Stress Index

"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."

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- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

Job cuts and much more.

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- https://www.zerohedge.com/

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- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

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- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

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- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

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- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

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Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

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"The more I see of the monied classes,

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

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Oh yeah... beyond words. Any I know anyway...

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And now... The End Game...

o

Greg Hunter, "Stop All Nanoparticle CV19 Vax Injections Now"

"Stop All Nanoparticle CV19 Vax Injections Now"

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Karen Kingston is a biotech analyst and former Pfizer employee who has been reporting on the nightmare of the CV19 mRNA nanoparticle vax. Kingston proved the CV19 vax was a bioweapon from the very beginning and is now on a team pushing to stop using it in Florida. Kingston says, “We know the mRNA injections never provided any benefit, and because of that, they actually meet the definition of a biological weapon under 18 U.S. Code 175. It’s also a weapon of mass destruction under Florida law 790.166. The statement of facts that was submitted (to the Florida Supreme Court) goes through all the evidence. There was 1.5 million adverse events. The definition of a weapon is any biological agent or device that doesn’t prevent against infection, doesn’t prevent any kind of disease and was not done under bona fide research. We know that research that was done with the Phase 1, 2 and 3 trials, the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) that was given to Americans and the FDA approved product, none of that was legitimate. There was no informed consent. That is criminal biological human experimentation. That, by definition, is biowarfare. There is no benefit. It actually harms people. If you look at Pfizer’s documents, Moderna’s documents and the government’s documents, they knew all along that harms outweighed the benefits of this product in any population.”

Dr. Joe Sansone in Florida has been the driving force to get these CV19 mRNA nanoparticle shots banned in that state. A recent post on Kingston’s Substack says, “Dr. Sansone is seeking for the Florida Supreme Court to issue an order to Governor DeSantis and Attorney General Moody to uphold their duties of enforcing federal and Florida laws by prohibiting the unlawful and criminal distribution, promotion and administration of the engineered mRNA nanoparticle injections on Floridians and to protect Floridians by seizing the injections.”

(Read the entire “Order to Prohibit the Use Of and Seize the mRNA Injections” here.)

Dr. Sansone is not the only one who thinks these CV19 injections should be “banned.” Kingston says, “The Florida Surgeon General and the Florida Department of Health have said these mRNA (CV19) injections should be used in NO human beings. They said these are gene editing technologies that can disrupt the human genome and make permanent changes. According to the DOD, our own government and national security agencies say if you change the genome of any species, including human beings, that is the extermination of that species. This makes it a weapon of mass destruction. The evidence is put together in such a damning way you cannot argue to keep the (CV19 mRNA nanoparticle) shots.”

In closing, Kingston reminds us, “States have the right to block any drug or medical device even if the FDA approves it.” In the not-so-distant future, let’s hope many states follow Florida’s lead and ban the CV19 bioweapon shots." There is much more in the 1-hour in-depth interview.

- https://usawatchdog.com/

Join Greg Hunter on Rumblle as he goes One-on-One with renowned biotech analyst Karen Kingston as she gives an update on the push to stop all CV19 bioweapon mRNA nanoparticle injections.

- https://rumble.com/

"Sorting for Stupidity?"

Sometimes I wonder if the world is being run by smart people

who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it."

- Laurence Peter

"Sorting for Stupidity?"

Thoughts on the state of the federal government.

by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

"Is the federal government sorting for stupidity? I had this thought when I was out for beers with an old friend, who’s a former Senior Executive Service bureaucrat with the federal government. He was remarking that in the old days of Washington, say up through the 1960s or maybe the 1970s, being a senior federal bureaucrat was a plum job, and often even paid more than working in the private sector.

That was also a time when Washington, D.C. was a comparatively sleepy town where a senior civil servant’s salary was plenty to allow a nice house in the suburbs and meals at the best restaurants (such as they were) that Washington had to offer.

Now, however, you can make much more money outside the government, trying to influence it, than you can make inside the government, trying to do your job. The result is a steady movement of the smartest people out of government. That of course tends to mean that the people who remain are, well, not the smartest. (There are plenty of exceptions on both sides of this, of course, but the overall impact is as described.)

The reason why it’s so lucrative to influence the federal bureaucracy now is that the federal bureaucracy is sweeping and powerful. You would be a fool – as Microsoft learned in the 1980s and 1990s when it bragged about not having a DC office – not to try to influence it, if only out of self-protection. Back when the federal government was much smaller, say in the 1940s, 1950s, and even the 1960s, there was less call to influence it, and so the opportunities for people to earn big salaries by moving from administrating to lobbying were much less. But that changed.

This happened in the early 1970s, during the Nixon Administration. Despite (because of?) Nixon’s conservative reputation, his administration saw an explosion of federal regulatory power, to the point where those years are known among scholars of administrative law as the “regulatory explosion.” New agencies like the EPA and OSHA were created, new statutes like the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, OSHA Act, etc., were passed, and existing agencies were given – or simply assumed – much farther-reaching powers.

As Jonathan Rauch notes in his classic book, "Demosclerosis," in 1929 the federal government made up about three percent of the U.S. economy. Now it’s closer to twenty-five percent. Also according to Rauch, interest-group domination started to take off about the time of World War II. Whereas the number of lobby groups was about 400 in the late 1920s, by 1950 that number was over 2,000, and the mid-1990s the number approached 25,000. It has only expanded since then. A government that. can regulate wages attracts the attention of lobbyists for trade unions and manufacturers; a government that can pass "crime" bills attracts the attention of police unions, local governments, gun-control activists and opponents, and so on. This should come as no surprise.

(Much of this discussion comes from things discussed in Chapter 10 of "The Appearance of Impropriety," coauthored with Peter W. Morgan, where you will find many of the citations for items mentioned below).

And the regulatory explosion facilitated the brain drain in two ways. Even with the post-New Deal expansion, before the 1970s Washington was something of a backwater, famously derided by JFK as a city of northern charm and southern efficiency. Outside of highly regulated industries like railroads, airlines, and broadcasting, few paid it much attention. And although there were Washington journalists, lawyers, and trade associations they were much less important than they would come. Compared to other major cities like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, Washington didn’t matter as much. It was a city of bureaucrats and mediocre but inexpensive restaurants, not a place that catered to the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The regulatory explosion vastly accelerated the trend away from that. As Fred Barnes wrote in The New Republic, the regulatory explosion produced what he calls a “parasite culture of lobbyists, trade associations, journalists, and similar government hangers-on. After the regulatory explosion, says Barnes,

Soon the city was thick with “public interest” outfits pressing for strict enforcement. To combat them and cope with the new regulations, corporations had hired more and more Washington lawyers. Membership in the District of Columbia Bar Association more than doubled between 1975 and 1986, from 20,311 to 44,394.

According to the D.C. Bar’s 2021 annual report, there are now over 111,000 members. And lawyers are only the tip of the iceberg: Washington also became a magnet for lobbyists, trade associations, industry newsletters with names like Candy Industry or Satellite Week that advise readers on regulatory developments and the like. And, most important for our discussion here, Barnes notes that the city became flooded with the kind of money that such interests bring, sprouting luxury car dealerships, expensive restaurants, upscale shops and five star hotels until parts of it looked more like Rodeo Drive than with the Washington of previous years.

The growth of federal power increased the role of special interests because it made lobbying the federal government more attractive to companies and interest groups. If a $100,000 expenditure in lobbying can produce a $100 million return – which is entirely possible in the right industries – then your money is coming back a thousandfold. That’s a much, much better return on investment than any actual business effort can produce.

But more importantly for our purposes, the growth of federal power made lobbying the federal government a more attractive career for federal workers. When the most expensive restaurant in town comfortably fit within the budget of a senior civil servant, a senior civil servant could feel well off. By the time I was practicing law in D.C., as a fairly junior lawyer, I was making more than any civil servant up to Executive Level III, and expensive places like 21 Federal (a $300 date back in the 1980s) were comfortably within my price range, but pricey for anyone whose salary scale started with GS. And it only got worse. Dining with Roger Simon in DC during the Obama Administration, he pointed out the $140 Wagyu steaks and noted that you used to only see prices like that in Hollywood and New York.

So if you’re a senior civil servant, you were constantly reminded that you could make a lot more money taking the revolving door to an outside interest, and you felt like you needed it because otherwise you felt poor in your own city in a way civil servants hadn’t felt before. When everyone drove Buicks and Fords, you fit in; when BMWs and Benzes became the norm, you didn’t. And, of course, all those incoming lawyers and lobbyists drove housing prices way up too. So why not switch teams? And people – disproportionately the smartest – did.

Thus, my hypothesis is that these factors produced a new kind of sorting among the bureaucrats, in which the brighter ones were more likely to leave meaning that, over time, the people staffing the agencies would become, on average, dumber. And note the double whammy – the agencies are becoming dumber because they were more powerful, since that produced the lobbying dynamic that made the smarter people more likely to leave.

The upshot, then, is that as the federal government got bigger and more powerful, it also became more stupid. All because of the sorting I describe above. There have been various tweaks in personnel and compensation policies designed to hold on to talent, but none have made much difference. So there we are. Well, this is just a hypothesis. But I have to ask: Doesn’t it fit the observed facts pretty well?"

- https://instapundit.substack.com/

"Looking Forward"

"Looking Forward"

by Jeff Thomas

"Since its inception, International Man has offered prognostications about what the future will bring – economically, politically and socially. The principle writers of the publication have been at this for decades. Each one began by studying world economics and politics in order to make the best choices as to where to live, where to invest, where to store wealth, etc. Over the years, each one got better at researching, better at reading the signs and, ultimately, better at predicting future events.

But, today, we’re approaching a worldwide crisis point and the study that we undertook decades ago has become important for literally hundreds of millions of people who, whether they realize it or not, will soon be impacted by events in a major way.

The foremost concern for readers of this publication is that the world’s leading governments have become decidedly fascist and are rapidly heading in a totalitarian direction. There are a number of facets to this development, all of them disturbing: The elimination of personal privacy, the creation of capital controls, confiscation of wealth, the conversion to electronic banking as the sole form of currency, international taxation standards and the creation of a police state. (There are many, many more facets, but these few tend to be at the core of concern.)

We can expect to see all of these concerns come closer to reality in the near future. The events that bring them about will increase in both frequency and magnitude as we get closer. (Historically, this is always the case, as governments that are in trouble race to get controls in place, as their continued ability to control events unravels.)

In these pages, we do our best to provide projections as to “where it’s all headed” and how it will affect the reader. In doing so, we generally discuss events that we believe will occur sometime soon (within a year or two). Often, we delay discussing events that we’ve anticipated many years previously, because they’d appear to most people as being so unlikely that their prediction would seem absurd.

However, we’re getting much closer to the crisis and, consequently, much of what once might have seemed absurd may now look quite possible to more people. But, even now, we tend to confine our prognostications to the international crisis itself. We rarely discuss what the world will look like after the market crashes have occurred, after the currencies have failed, after the governmental systems have broken down.

So, let’s have a snapshot look at what the overall landscape might look like after the dust has begun to settle. What will some of the greatest powers in the world look like in, say, five to ten years’ time?

To begin, we’ll assume that the more catastrophic events of economic collapse have taken place in the world and we’ll be observing the subsequent knock-on effects – the deterioration that would occur thereafter. Historically, any government that’s leading up to a collapse invariably tightens controls to the max, as it’s aware that, following a collapse, it will lose control, either entirely or in part.

Once markets have collapsed, we can expect a deflationary trend that governments will respond to by creating massive inflation, very possibly leading to hyperinflation. At some point, we can expect to see a collapse in currencies, as a result of the unsustainable debt load – the heroin that has kept them going for decades. This is particularly important with regard to the US, as the US presently possesses the world’s default currency. A collapse in the dollar will send other currencies into a tailspin.

Following a currency collapse, it will no longer be possible for governments to continue to expand their debt loads, as there will no longer be any takers. In addition, government income streams will be diminished. As businesses decline, the tax revenue will be greatly diminished. Whether they like it or not, for the first time in their careers, political leaders will be forced to cut costs, and cut them dramatically.

So, where will they cut? In the US, Social Security represents 15% of recurrent expenditure; Medicare and Medicaid represent another 15%; poverty entitlements are another 10% and a further 15% goes to “defense,” or more accurately, “foreign aggression.” Together, that’s 55%, yet, to diminish any of these (with the possible exception of foreign aggression) would make the blood of Americans boil.

Interest on national debt represents another 9%, but that would quickly be defaulted on. Next to be cut would be the “non-essentials” – the departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Immigration, plus prisons, drug control, conservation and national parks. Cuts in each of these would cause less civil unrest than diminishing the “big four” that make up 55% of the budget.

They would likely keep funding for Homeland Security, the IRS, and the Capitol Police and, in fact, would be likely to increase funding for all three. (Bear in mind that the Capitol Police is unlike any other police force; it is a virtual army, designed to protect legislators within the beltway from what will soon be classified as “domestic terrorism.”)

Along the way, those states that are net receivers of largesse from the federal government will find their allowances cut dramatically. This will mean that, for state and city governments, roads, garbage collection and departments such as Fire and Motor Vehicles, will all receive cuts, along with state and city police departments. This latter move will not only result in increased lawlessness, but will result in police themselves becoming more lawless, or a law unto themselves, sometimes acting in sympathy with the public against the central government, sometimes acting with aggression towards the public.

But these cuts will only be the beginning, as they will be insufficient to address the shortfall. Confiscations of bank accounts will take place, but they too will be insufficient. Cuts in Medicare and Medicaid will eventually be put into effect, along with cuts in Social Security (primarily through inflation). For the over 50% of people who are presently recipients of these mainstays of collectivism, the cuts will quickly create anger, unrest, then riots.

As stated above, veterans (some 10% of the population) will be unceremoniously dumped. They will react by joining those who protest the cuts. Those still employed in the armed forces and Homeland Security will be torn as to whom to side with. (Remember, the invasion of ancient Rome by the barbarians was made possible when the mercenary Roman soldiers simply walked away.)

In total, what we’re looking at is a government that will no longer have the level of control to operate an effective tax collection service, capital controls, or outbound migration, let alone to continue to aggress against other nations. The U.S., more than any other nation, is therefore most greatly at risk of holding itself together following a collapse. As stated in The Art of War, by Sun Tzu in the fifth century BC, “Those who are waging war should get rid of all the domestic troubles before proceeding to attack the external foe.” Essential advice today, as it was then.

It’s clear there are some ominous social, political, cultural, and economic trends playing out right now. Many of which seem to point to an unfortunate decline of the West. As space here is limited, we can only offer a thumbnail sketch of these events; however, it’s not essential that we labor over the fine details of conditions that will exist after the collapses have taken place. A sketch suffices to allow us to plan our own agenda – to locate ourselves geographically away from the hot spots and shift our investments into those things that might be likely to be more depression-proof. And we can move whatever wealth we might have to jurisdictions where its safety is most assured. Those concerns are more urgent than ever and the time remaining is decidedly uncertain."

- https://internationalman.com

"Iran and Hezbollah Want To Destroy Israel, And Gaza War Is Their Trap For Israel"

Full screen recommended.

Scott Ritter & Larry Johnson, 3/17/24

"Iran and Hezbollah Want To Destroy Israel, 

And Gaza War Is Their Trap For Israel"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Memory Of The Sky"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Memory Of The Sky"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.

The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160728.html

"It'll Do..."

Deputy Wendell: "It's a mess, ain't it, sheriff?"

Sheriff Bell: "If it ain't, it'll do till the mess gets here."

- "No Country For Old Men"

"He Cannot Help Doubting Himself..."

"A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet for sale, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing, cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity."

- Erich Fromm

Jeremiah Babe, "Catastrophic Events Coming Soon To America"

Jeremiah Babe, 3/17/24

"Catastrophic Events Coming Soon To America"

"Prepare now for catastrophic events to take place in 

America, take the time that you have left to insure your survival."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Pepe Escobar: Putin and China Send Devastating Warning to NATO as Germany, Macron Threaten WW III"

Danny Haiphong, 3/17/24

"Pepe Escobar: Putin and China Send Devastating 

Warning to NATO as Germany, Macron Threaten WW III"

"Geopolitical analyst and journalist Pepe Escobar gives his assessment of major escalations NATO is engaging in with Russia and China and how World War III is fast approaching despite numerous warnings from Putin and Xi Jinping’s top political brass. Buckle up because this video explains the wild ride humanity is going to take as unipolarity and multipolarity collide!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"The Daily "Near You?"

Maintal, Hessen, Germany. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Czeslaw Milosz, "Hope"

“Hope”

“Hope is with you when you believe

The earth is not a dream but living flesh,

That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,

That all things you have ever seen here

Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

You cannot enter. But you’re sure it’s there.

Could we but look more clearly and wisely

We might discover somewhere in the garden

A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,

That there is nothing, just a seeming,

These are the ones who have no hope.

They think that the moment we turn away,

The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,

As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.”

- Czeslaw Milosz,

“Hope”, from “The World”

"The 'Titanic' Analogy You Haven't Heard: Passively Accepting Oblivion"

"The 'Titanic' Analogy You Haven't Heard: 

Passively Accepting Oblivion"

by Charles Hugh Smith

"You've undoubtedly heard rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic as an analogy for the futility of approving policy tweaks to address systemic crises. I've used the Titanic as an anology to explain the fragility of our financial system and the "glancing blow" of the pandemic:

"Why Our Financial System Is Like the Titanic" (March 15, 2015)

"Coronavirus and the "Unsinkable" Titanic Analogy" (January 29, 2020)

But there's a powerful analogy you haven't heard before. To understand the analogy, we first need to recap the tragedy's basic set-up.

On April 14, 1912, the liner Titanic, considered unsinkable due to its watertight compartments, struck a glancing blow against a massive iceberg on that moonless, weirdly calm night. In the early hours of April 15, the great ship broke in half and sank, ending the lives of the majority of its passengers and crew. Of the 2,208 passengers and crew onboard, 1,503 perished and 705 survived. The lifeboats had a maximum capacity of 1,178, so some 475 people died unnecessarily. Passengers of the Titanic (Wikipedia)

The initial complacency of the passengers and crew after the collision is another source of analogies relating to humanity's near-infinite capacity for denial. The class structure of the era was enforced by the authorities - the ship's officers. As the situation grew visibly threatening, the First Class passengers were herded into the remaining lifeboats while the steerage/Third Class passengers - many of them immigrants - were mostly kept below decks. Officers were instructed to enforce this class hierarchy with their revolvers.

Two-thirds of all passengers died, but the losses were not evenly distributed: 39% of First Class passengers perished, 58% of Second Class passengers lost their lives and 76% of Third Class passengers did not survive.

Rudimentary calculations by the ship's designer, who was on board to oversee the maiden voyage, revealed the truth to the officers: the ship would sink and there was no way to stop it. The ship was designed to survive four watertight compartments being compromised, and could likely stay afloat if five were opened to the sea, but not if six compartments were flooded. Water would inevitably spill over into adjacent compartments in a domino-like fashion until the ship sank.

What did the authorities do with this knowledge? Stripped of niceties, they passively accepted oblivion as the outcome and devoted their resources to enforcing the class hierarchy and the era's gender chivalry: 80% of male passengers perished, 25% of female passengers lost their lives. The loading of passengers into lifeboats was so poorly managed that only 60% of the lifeboat capacity was filled.

What if the officers had boldly accepted the inevitability of the ship sinking early on and devised a plan to minimize the loss of life? It would not have takes any extraordinary leap of creativity to organize the crew and passenger volunteers to strip the ship of everything that floated - wooden deck chairs, etc. - and lash them together into rafts. Given the calm seas that night and the freezing water, just keeping people above water would have been enough.

Rather than promote the absurd charade that the ship was fine, just fine, when time was of the essence, the authorities could have rounded up the women and children and filled every seat on lifeboats. Of the 1,030 people who could not be placed in a lifeboat, 890 were crew members, including about 25 women. The crew members were almost all in the prime of life. If anyone could survive several hours on a partially-submerged raft, it would have been the crew. (The first rescue ship arrived about two hours after the Titanic sank.)

Would this hurried effort to save everyone on board have succeeded? At a minimum, it would have saved an additional 475 souls via a careful loading of the lifeboats to capacity, and if the makeshift rafts had offered any meaningful flotation at all, many more lives would have been saved. Rather than devote resources to maintaining the pretense of safety and order, what if the ship's leaders had focused their response around answering a simple question: what was needed for people to survive a freezing night once the lifeboats were filled and the ship sank?

I think you see the analogy to the present. Our leadership, such as it is, is devoting resources to maintaining the absurd pretense that everything will magically re-set to September 2019 if we just print enough money and bail out the financial Aristocracy.

Whether we realize it or not, we're responding with passive acceptance of oblivion. The economy and social order were precariously fragile before the pandemic, and now the fragilities are unraveling. We need to start thinking beyond pretense and PR."

- http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com

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Full screen recommended.

"All We Have To Decide..."

 

"How It Really Is"

 

"Alert! It's Much Worse Than We're Being Told, Expect Extreme Events In Next Few Months"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 3/17/24

"Alert! It's Much Worse Than We're Being Told, 

Expect Extreme Events In Next Few Months"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Check out Leon Simons here:

- https://twitter.com/LeonSimons8

Dan, I Allegedly, "Home Builders Are Going Bust"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, I Allegedly 3/17/24

"Home Builders Are Going Bust"

"We are starting to see something that is going to be eerily familiar. Homebuilders are starting to go bust. People are purchasing homes, and they are only halfway finished and the builder has taken their deposit and not completed the homes."

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Outrageous Prices At Family Dollar! Multiple Stores Closing!"

Full screen recommended.

Adventures With Danno, 3/17/24

"Outrageous Prices At Family Dollar! 

Multiple Stores Closing!"

"In today's vlog, we are at Family Dollar and are noticing some outrageous price increases on many items, including groceries. With many stores set to close in our area soon, people are concerned this may raise the prices even higher!"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

"Alert! H.R. Bill 7521, The War With China Is About To Start; Martial Law Trojan"

Full screen recommended.

Canadian Prepper, 3/16/24

"Alert! H.R. Bill 7521, The War With China Is About To Start; 

Martial Law Trojan"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

God help us, God help us all...

Scott Ritter, "Russia's Retaliation Will Be Extremely Catastrophic! NATO Directly Confronts Putin"

Full screen recommended.

Scott Ritter, 3/16/24

"Russia's Retaliation Will Be Extremely Catastrophic! 

NATO Directly Confronts Putin"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Jeremiah Babe, "'Civl War' The Film Is A Masterpiece Scary As Hell - Is Something Ominous Coming To America?"

Jeremiah Babe, 3/16/24

"'Civl War' The Film Is A Masterpiece Scary As Hell -

 Is Something Ominous Coming To America?"

Comments here:

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Chuck Wild, "Liquid Mind, Dream Ten”

Full screen recommended.

Chuck Wild, "Liquid Mind, Dream Ten”

"Liquid Mind" (aka Chuck Wild) originally wrote this music to deal with the anxiety and stress of overwork and the serious illness of friends. The gentle ebb and flow of the music has an immediate "slowing down" effect, providing a serene escape from tension-filled days. Ideal for stress relief, falling asleep at night and to enhance meditative and therapeutic practices. There are few composers with as much love for slowness in their music as Wild. Chuck draws from classical and pop influences as varying as Beethoven and Brian Eno, Bartok and Rachmaninoff, Bach, Chopin and Fauré, Duruflé and Brahms."

- http://www.liquidmindmusic.com/

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Dwarf galaxies NGC 147 (left) and NGC 185 stand side by side in this sharp telescopic portrait. The two are not-often-imaged satellites of M31, the great spiral Andromeda Galaxy, some 2.5 million light-years away. Their separation on the sky, less than one degree across a pretty field of view, translates to only about 35 thousand light-years at Andromeda's distance, but Andromeda itself is found well outside this frame. 

Brighter and more famous satellite galaxies of Andromeda, M32 and M110, are seen closer to the great spiral. NGC 147 and NGC 185 have been identified as binary galaxies, forming a gravitationally stable binary system. But recently discovered faint dwarf galaxy Cassiopeia II also seems to be part of their system, forming a gravitationally bound group within Andromeda's intriguing population of small satellite galaxies."

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

The Daily "Near You?"

St. Charles, Missouri, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Arthur O’Shaughnessy, "Music and Moonlight"

"Music and Moonlight"

"We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone seabreakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world forever, it seems…

We, in the ages lying

In the buried past of the earth,

Built Ninevah with our sighing,

And Babel itself in our mirth;

And o’erthrew them with prophesying

To the old of the new world’s worth;

For each age is a dream that is dying,

Or one that is coming to birth."

- Arthur O’Shaughnessy

○

"The Dreamers Of Dreams..."

"The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so nearly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain."

- Iris Murdoch

"Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse On The March" (Excerpt)

"Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse 

On The March" (Excerpt)

by Jim Quinn

“The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s. The worst-case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence, and death.” - Kenneth S. Deffeye

“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” 

- Eric Hoffer

Excerpt: "I don’t pretend to be a biblical scholar or have any particular expertise in interpreting scriptures, and certainly not the Book of Revelation, supposedly written by John of Patmos during the reign of Roman emperor Domitian sometime between 81 AD and 96 AD. But I did suffer through twelve years of Catholic school, with plenty of time reading the bible for homework assignments. I know many people take everything in the bible literally. I do not adhere to that understanding. I believe most, if not all, of the bible is parables and symbolism written by men as a means to guide early Christians in how they should live their lives. The wisdom imparted by these writers is vast and deep. The Book of Revelation is the most apocalyptic, mysterious, and prophetic.

I would agree with scholars who say Revelation does not refer to actual people or events but is an allegory of the spiritual path and the ongoing struggle between good and evil. But, as our modern-day world seems to be coming apart at the seams, the battle between good and evil is reaching a zenith, only seen at crucial turning points in history.

The scale of propaganda designed to mislead the public, scope of deceit exhibited by our hand-picked leaders, level of wickedness in the purposeful destruction of economic systems based on climate crisis lies, purposeful infliction of pain and suffering upon the masses through destruction of conventional food and energy structures, implosion of the financial system due to incompetence and/or willfully malicious motivations, and incessant provocations of Russia and China designed to ignite a global conflagration, are all part of one demonic plan.

Knowing we are reaching the most violent phase of this Fourth Turning and this kind of horrendous whirlwind has occurred during the fall of previous empires, does not make it any easier to confront or endure.

As the stock market implodes, draining the retirement savings of working men and women once again, inflation rages out of control, pushing lower and middle class families to the brink, our senile Trojan horse president, implements a country destroying agenda at the behest of his globalist handlers designed to incite a civil war, and the Deep State/Military Industrial Complex attempts to monetize Ukraine and Taiwan to fill their coffers with billions in war profits, the world teeters on the brink of a collapse which will make the Great Depression/World War II era seem like a walk in the park.

And very few people see it coming or are prepared in any way for the consequences. They have spent too much time in government school indoctrination centers, soaked up too much propaganda spewed by the corporate legacy media doing the bidding of those in power, have been misinformed and misled by the left wing Silicon Valley social media conglomerates, and are too distracted by their gadgets, social media likes, fake reality TV, and modern day sports circuses.

I’m certainly not predicting the end times or second coming of Christ, but the parable of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sure seems applicable in this modern-day Crisis – the latest times that try men’s souls. We are in a time of Crisis, just as we were in the 1780’s, 1860’s, and 1940’s, all 80 years apart. The 2020’s will also go down in history as a time of fateful decisions, great battles, heroes, villains, and ultimately a purging of the existing social order - to be replaced by something better or far worse."

Full article is here:

 - https://www.theburningplatform.com/