Thursday, April 18, 2024

Bill Bonner, "The Coming Retirement Income Squeeze"

"The Coming Retirement Income Squeeze"
The average interest rate on US Treasury bonds is near 5%. Priced in gold, the Dow is down 21%. In order to catch up to the December 2021 high, in real terms, the Dow would have to go over 48,000.
by Bill Bonner

“Something will have to give.”
-  IMF warning the US this week about its growing debt.

Dublin, Ireland - "‘Stocks down. Interest rates up.’ That was our message in the autumn of 2020. Amid the falling leaves... and the general gloom of the Covid epidemic... we thought the Primary Trend had shifted.

Music, leaves, lives - there are patterns to everything. A single swallow does not a summer make. But keep your eyes on the flock and you’ll time the seasons. Here in Europe, they migrate to Africa in the winter... and then come back in the Spring. So too, for days, weeks, months... stock market trading seems chaotic. Without rhyme or reason. Maybe an AI program can make sense of it; we can’t. But beneath the surface chop are long patterns that persist over decades.
Click image for larger size.
In July 2020, after 40 years, the interest rate cycle finally hit bottom. The US 10-year Treasury bond yielded all of 52 basis points (0.52 of one percent) - the lowest rate in 500 years. We predicted the obvious; now they would go up!

And if rates were rising, stocks would fall. A year and a half later, they did.

Nothing since then gives us a reason to believe the Primary Trend will not continue - stocks down (inflation adjusted)... interest rates up. Today, the average interest rate on US Treasury bonds is near 5%. Priced in gold, the Dow is down 21%. In order to catch up to the December 2021 high, in real terms, the Dow would have to go over 48,000.
Megapolitics

Meanwhile, there are patterns in political affairs too. Sometimes it is hard to connect the two - finance and politics (a field we call Megapolitics). But the record highs in stocks in 2021 and bonds in 2020 were clearly the product of government policies. Two key policies - debt and war - brought the Dow to over 36,000 and bond yields under 1% (starkly negative when adjusted for inflation).

The stimmies, wars and debts increased, so did consumer prices. And then inflation forced the Fed to abandon its support for the stock and bond markets. Stocks fell. Bond fell too (yields rose). In the stock market, the damage was sharp... but later disguised by inflation. In 2023, prices on Wall Street rose... even though, adjusted for inflation, they were still well below their Dec. 2021 level. Bonds suffered the worst sell-off ever recorded.

But the full impact of the bond market decline has not yet been felt. Pension funds, insurance companies, and banks hold billions in US government bonds. Many were required to buy bonds as “safe” forms of capital reserves. Then, when the bonds lost value, their owners held on... counting them at face value, pledging to hold them to maturity, and pretending that they would not lose money.

This is why there is so much talk of lowering interest rates as soon as possible. There is nothing inherently good about lower interest rates. People pay interest. But they also receive interest on their savings. Interest rates are just information.

But the key players in our financial system - banks, Wall Street and the federal government - all are massive owners and sellers of US bonds. And $7.6 trillion worth of existing US bonds are maturing this year. They need to be refinanced. So do current deficits, bringing the total financing load to nearly $10 trillion.

Bond sellers and refinancers (the borrowers) want lower interest rates. And yet the volume of their borrowing itself naturally drives up interest rates.

When interest rates go up, not only is it harder for them to borrow more money, the value of their bond holdings also goes down. The banks are said to be holding more than $600 billion in unrealized losses on their bond portfolios.

The feds themselves - including the Fed - are the largest holders of US Treasury debt. Total US debt is now over $34 trillion. About $25 trillion of it is in the hands of the public. The rest - $9 trillion - is held by US government agencies.

Squeezing Social Security: The Social Security trust account, for example, has about $2.8 trillion in US bonds. As those bonds lose value to inflation, Social Security gets squeezed on both sides at once. Its outflow - payments to retirees - are adjusted to inflation, but its Treasury bonds are not. The feds then need to raise more money to cover the shortfall in their reserves. This requires more borrowing... which pushes interest rates higher.

Meanwhile, more and more people are retiring... putting further pressure on US government finances. Retired people spend. They depend on Social Security and Obamacare.

This pattern of fiscal and monetary policies tracks the Primary Trend patterns of the markets. Fed policies - notably, extremely low interest rates - tricked up the stock and bond markets to extreme highs. Now... over the decades ahead... their policies - war and debt - will likely push them to extreme lows. Stay tuned."

Market Note, by Dan Denning: "Social Security began running a deficit (paying out more in benefits than it's taking in through taxes and other sources) a few years ago. It was a dangerous ‘cross over’ point. Regular deficits would eventually mean reducing the size of the Trust fund to pay benefits.

The most recent report from the Trustees who manage Social Security was published in November of last year. It says that without any changes, and under current projections, the Trust fund would be depleted by 2034. Or, that benefits will have to be cut to 80% of the expected level to correspond with insufficient FICA tax receipts and interest income.

Before you panic, the same situation happened in 1983. The deckchairs were arranged by Congress to allow the various Trust funds to fund each other in the event one was running a deficit. And immediate crisis averted. And 83 million Baby Boomers were years from retiring anyway. But long-term?
Click image for larger size.
Social Security benefits could always be paid out of a direct transfer of cash from the Treasury to beneficiaries. This would be wildly inflationary, of course, printing money to pay old age pensions. And even before that, taxes on benefits could be increased to generate more income.

More likely is that long before drastic measures are required, the Social Security Trust Fund will be be forced to start selling its $2.8 trillion Treasury stockpile that Bill mentions above (see chart). It won't be a buyer anymore. Without annual surpluses, the Trust fund won’t be able to buy any of that debt Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has to sell to fund annual US deficits and refinance our $34 trillion in debt.

It's not exactly the family silver. Or even the National Silver (or National Treasure). But when the Trust fund has to sell assets to pay benefits, the clock is ticking on US government finances. All of this raises the issue of having enough retirement income to beat inflation in retirement. It’s a problem we have front and center in 2024 and beyond."
o
"The 'Everything Bubble' Expressed in Terms of Gold"
by Tom Dyson

"The Dow/Gold ratio made a new three-and-a-half-year low Monday... it’s now at 15.82. Meaning, it will take you roughly 15 ounces of gold to buy the DJIA. For new readers, a falling Dow/Gold ratio shows gold is beating stocks. The Institute of International Finance tracks the size of the global debt pile. It recently published the figure for 2023. Its finding? In 2023, the global debt pile increased by more than $15 trillion, reaching a new record high of $313 trillion. For every dollar of this debt, there’s also an over-inflated asset somewhere backing it.

What if Earth itself were a single financial entity? Would all these highly valued assets and debts mean Earth Corp. was getting more valuable? The human race works hard every day, building stuff and improving stuff. And the efficiency of our labor goes up slowly over time. So we’re definitely accumulating some real wealth.

But for years, the Fed and other central banks kindled a gargantuan credit inflation by motivating speculators with all kinds of crazy incentives and reassuring them with all kinds of safety nets. And then they printed reserves to make sure it was easy for speculators to write new debts. The rising market value of assets and debts has far outpaced any real value creation or output. This chart shows this phenomenon in the US. Here’s wealth charted against GDP, indexed to 1950 and using a log scale.
Click image for larger size.
A hundred trillion here... a hundred trillion there... these debt and asset values all just look like mountains of overpriced paper to me. If this is true – that it’s all just been massive credit inflation – the forces of debt deflation must now be immense.

Our core position is that asset prices have to collapse, and much of the attached debt will need to be written off and erased. History is pretty clear about this. All credit bubbles deflate and asset valuations return to “fair” and then “cheap.” It’s how nature restores equilibrium. We call the adjustment that’s coming “The Big Loss.”

The critical insight is this: the Big Loss in stocks will occur in terms of gold. A debt deflation... priced in gold. So when you see the price of gold rising on your screen this week, don’t think “gold is going up.” Instead think “the Everything Bubble is deflating” because that’s exactly what’s happening. The world’s pile of debt and equity is deflating... in gold terms. This is why we watch the Dow and other asset prices exclusively in terms of gold. And why we’re recommending such a large allocation to precious metals in our asset allocation model.

This bubble has already started to collapse five times – in 2000, in 2008, in 2018, in 2020 and in 2022 – and each time they doubled down with huge new incentives to speculate and other stimulus to re-inflate the bubble.

Now it’s the most patched-up, bolted-on credit bubble in history... a true mutant. We must be close to another debt bubble zenith. So it goes..."

Adventures With Danno, "Items At Kroger Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, AM 4/18/24
"Items At Kroger Everyone Should Be Buying Right Now!"
Comments here:

Dan, I Allegedly, "Proof People Are Not Paying"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 4/18/24
"Proof People Are Not Paying"
"We just heard from Bank of America that defaults on credit cards are rising. It was pretty warm. This is proof that people are not paying their bills. Plus, there’s a ton of their business news in this video. Elon Musk wants a $56 billion payday and we hit $3000 an ounce. Plus much more."
Comments here:

Gregory Mannarino, "Is A Stock Market Crash Imminent?"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/18/24
"Is A Stock Market Crash Imminent?"
Comments here:

Greg Hunter, "Driving America Into a Brick Wall "

"Driving America Into a Brick Wall "
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Back in February, when everyone was predicting a Fed rate cut, precious metals expert and financial writer Bill Holter said rates would be going up and not down. Since that call, the 10-Year Treasury is up more than 30 basis points. It closed today at 4.67%. Now, Holter is still calling for higher interest rates that will coincide with higher gold and silver prices. Why? It’s called inflation, and it’s not temporary. Holter explains, “Foreigners are backing away from buying Treasuries. That is the only thing that has kept the doors open, so to speak, is the fact we are able to borrow an unlimited amount of money because we are the world reserve currency. Foreigners backing away from our debt is going to lead the Federal Reserve to be the buyer of last, and then, only resort. So, you will have direct monetization between the Fed and the Treasury. What that will cause is a currency that declines in purchasing power. It will decline in a big way, and it will decline rapidly. So, what I am describing is inflation that turns into hyperinflation.”

But that is not the end of our problems. Holter points out, “I do think it is going to get worse, and that means interest rates will go higher, and that will put on much more pressure. We are at 4.65% on the 10-Year Treasury now. We went from 3.75% to 4.65% (in a short amount of time). We run through 5% on the 10-year Treasury, and everything blows up. The bottom line here is we are at the end game of a fiat currency. Young people have never experienced high inflation. Where we are this time around, Paul Volker (Fed Head in 1979) was able to raise rates to 16% or 17% and crush inflation. He was able to do that because there was not a ton of debt. The U.S. debt back in 1980 was 35% of GDP. Now, it is 125% plus debt to GDP. If you raise rates to 6% to 8%, you will blow up the entire system because much of this debt was put on during the 1% to 3% interest rate time. The inflation is going to push rates higher no matter what the Fed says.”

Gold is hitting one new record high after another. It’s not greed, but fear, and Holter says, “Big money is buying gold because they are looking for protection.” The other wild card is war, and Holter says, “War is a way to keep the system propped up.”

In closing, Holter contends, what you are seeing is not a series of mistakes by incompetent people. Holter says, “This is too stupid for it not to be the plan. This is not a Republican or Democrat thing. We are being steered directly into a brick wall because the globalists can’t take over the world with the US standing. They have to take the US down, and if they take the US down, so will the western financial system fall. If that happens, the globalists can have their way.”

Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One 
with financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter.

"Gerald Celente: World War Three Has Already Begun"

George Galloway MP, 4/18/24
"Gerald Celente: World War Three Has Already Begun"
"The world went to war in February ’22, they just didn’t admit it. Israel will inevitably retaliate, like a dog with a prostate problem, and WW3 will then escalate."
Comments here:

Wednesday, April 17, 2024

Canadian Prepper, "It's Quiet, Too Quiet; Emergency Action Messages"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 4/17/24
"It's Quiet, Too Quiet; Emergency Action Messages"
Comments here:

Jeremiah Babe, "Most People Will Be Dead Broke By 2025"

Jeremiah Babe, 4/17/24
"Most People Will Be Dead Broke By 2025; 
Student Loan Debt Is Now Your Debt"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Logos, "Cheminement"

Full screen recommended.
Logos, "Cheminement"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.
Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”
"Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in
heaven where the love of our lost ones pours
through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy."
~ Eskimo saying.

Chet Raymo, “To Sleep, Perchance To Dream”

“To Sleep, Perchance To Dream”
by Chet Raymo

“What is more gentle than a wind in summer?
What is more soothing than a pretty hummer
That stays one moment in an open flower,
And buzzes cheerily from bower to bower?
What is more tranquil than a musk-rose blowing
In a green island, far from all men's knowing?
More healthful than the leafiness of dales?
More secret than a nest of nightingales?”

"What indeed? The poet Keats answers his own questions: Sleep. Soft closer of our eyes. I've reached an age when I find myself occasionally nodding off in the middle of the day, an open book flopped on my chest. Also, more lying awake in the dark hours of the night, re-running the tapes of the day. And, in the fragile moments of nighttime unconsciousness, dreaming dreams that reach all the way back to my childhood.

I've read the books about sleep and dreaming. There has been lots of research, but not much consensus about why we sleep or dream. Sleep seems to be pretty universal among animals. Who knows whether animals dream. Do we sleep to restore the soma? To knit the raveled sleeve of care? Process memories? Find safety from predators? After 50 years of work, the sleep researcher William Dement opined: "As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy."

The Latin poet Martial supposed that sleep "makes darkness brief," a worry-free way to get through the scary hours of the night when wolves howl at the mouth of the cave (and goblins stir under the bed). That hardly explains my dropping off after lunch into a dreamless stupor that I neither desire nor welcome.

“Low murmurer of tender lullabies!
Light hoverer around our happy pillows!
Wreather of poppy buds, and weeping willows!”

Not quite! There are the nightmares too. The tossing and turning. The hoo-has. But enough of this idle speculation. I'm getting sleepy...”

"A Perpetual Illusion..."

"Human life is thus only a perpetual illusion; men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does of us in our absence. Human society is founded on mutual deceit; few friendships would endure if each knew what his friend said of him in his absence, although he then spoke in sincerity and without passion. Man is then only disguise, falsehood, and hypocrisy, both in himself and in regard to others. He does not wish any one to tell him the truth; he avoids telling it to others, and all these dispositions, so removed from justice and reason, have a natural root in his heart."
- Blaise Pascal

Viktor Frankl, "Life Changing Quotes"

Full screen recommended.
Viktor Frankl, "Life Changing Quotes"
 ("Man's Search For Meaning")
"Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of the logotherapy method and is most notable for his best-selling book Man's Search for Meaning."
Freely download "Mans Search For Meaning", by Viktor Frankl, here:
Highest recommendation:

"The Great Thing..."

"The great thing about the internet is that you get to meet people you
would otherwise only meet if you were committed to the same asylum."
- Robert Brault

"We Do Choose..."

"All men and women are born, live suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live."
- Joseph Epstein
"George Harrison knew something most of us didn't and still don't: there is a reality beyond the material world and what we do here and how we treat others affects us eternally. As he sings in "Rising Sun":
"But in the rising sun you can feel your life begin,
Universe at play inside your DNA.
You're a billion years old today.
Oh the rising sun and the place it's coming from
Is inside of you and now your payment's overdue."
Lyrics here:
"Death twitches my ear. 'Live," he says, 'I am coming.'"
~ Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)

The Daily "Near You?"

Ottawa, Illinois, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Here And Now..."

"That we can never know," answered the wolf angrily. "That's for the future. But what we can know is the importance of what we owe to the present. Here and now, and nowhere else. For nothing else exists, except in our minds. What we owe to ourselves, and to those we're bound to. And we can at least hope to make a better future, for everything."
- David Clement Davies

"The Most Honest Three Minutes In Television History"

Strong language alert!
Full screen recommended.
"The Most Honest Three Minutes In Television History"
Comments here:

"Total Defeat: Israeli Media Say Israel Is Beaten & Terrified Of Iran"

Full screen recommended.
by KernowDamo, 4/17/24
"Total Defeat: Israeli Media Say
 Israel Is Beaten & Terrified Of Iran"

"At least two mainstream Israeli publications have outlined how breathakingly screwed their own government is over Gaza and Iran. This is an interesting story, not only because it nails on just how breathtakingly ruined Israel is reputationally, militarily and internationally, but because this comes from an Israeli news source, the Israeli version of the Guardian, Haaretz, using Benjamin Netanyahu’s oft used ‘Total Victory’ phrase against him in an article headlined ‘Total Defeat.’ If Bibi was fed up with Haaretz before, with threats to shut them down, this story will have him climbing the walls, but there is so much to agree with in it. There really is no way out of this that will restore Israel’s standing on the world stage and any nations associating with them, defending them and expressing their loyalty towards them are only damaging their own reputations at the same time. You can take a stand for what is right and finally deal with this appalling administration, or you can go down with them in Total Defeat.

So Israel is facing Total Defeat according to Haaretz newspaper and an op-ed article written by Chaim Levinson and this article, "Saying What Can't Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat" is anything but pro Hamas, but definitely anti-Netanyahu and puts a large amount of the focus on him and the bats**t coalition regime he has assembled about him as the reason for it as this excerpt shows:

"After half a year, we could have been in a totally different place, but we're being held hostage by the worst leadership in the country's history – and a decent contender for the title of worst leadership anywhere, ever. Every military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit – the military action should lead to a better diplomatic reality. Israel has no diplomatic exit.

It has a scoundrel for a leader, someone with no capacity for leadership or decision-making, a person who loses his sense of good judgment over a free cigar. Yet the electorate put its faith in the current prime minister to the tune of 32 Knesset seats." Caustic description but true and I daresay many of us would be significantly less polite about Netanyahu here.

Reputationally, Israel has gone from playing the world’s biggest professional victims, a nation so many sympathized with, that uses antisemitism to get whatever it wants, arguing it is racist to oppose them doing what they like and people being too afraid of being labelled as such to disagree, to now being seen as a global pariah state, having been attacked by Hamas and having hostages taken, to now no longer being seen as the victim but the aggressor and instigator of genocide against the entire population of the Gaza Strip and not just Hamas. That isn’t a genie that is going to go back in its bottle, frankly there is no way back from that with the eyes of the world having been opened to save for the government of Netanyahu to fall, Netanyahu and his cabinet being brought up on war crimes as I think they should be and the withdrawal of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territories with borders being redrawn at least on 1967 lines."
Comments here:

Adventures With Danno, "Cinnamon 'Lead Poisoning' Outbreak!"

Adventures With Danno, 4/17/24
"Cinnamon 'Lead Poisoning' Outbreak!"
Comments here:

"How It Really Is"

 

"Where All the Time Went"

"Where All the Time Went"
by David Cain

"Time always feels like it’s speeding up, but you might feel like time has been going exceptionally quickly these past few years. The first few days of a new month quickly become the 11th, then the next day it’s the 23rd, and then your credit card is due and it’s a new month again. It might also be hard to remember, when people ask, what you did with those weeks and months. “Oh, I’ve just been, uh, working and stuff, I guess” you might say, when you bump into an acquaintance at the grocery store.

For some of us, the 2020s have also come with a certain lingering mental fog, or poor memory, which is another reason it can be hard to generate an interesting report about what you’ve been up to. Naturally I have a theory about this, maybe even a cure. The hypothesis I’m about to share is not entirely crackpot -  there is some scientific evidence behind this, but I’m mostly going off of my own intuitions here. Tell me what you think.

Basically, I believe the time acceleration and mental fog are mostly symptoms of the same problem: a lack of a certain life ingredient that suddenly became rare, virtually overnight, about four years ago. This ingredient is much more available now than it was then, so the problem can be remedied, but you do have to go out and get it.

As I write this, we just passed the four-year mark since the coronavirus pandemic blew everything up, beginning on that surreal week in March 2020 when they canceled the NBA season and told us to immediately stop touching our faces. In the following days there were mass closures, layoffs, and drastic new rules for everything. Each day of that month there was a new development, and each day our lives changed. As many have said, it felt like the longest month in history. Then the “new normal” set in, and the pages started flying off the calendar. The next four years went by in what felt (to me at least) like about eighteen months, and here we are.

People have always remarked that time seems to speed up as you age, which I’ve written about before. The sense of time accelerating is usually explained away with the idea of proportionality - a year to a one-year old is a lifetime, while to a centenarian it’s 1% of a lifetime.

I don’t buy that explanation. Time’s apparent “speed” changes with conditions, as we’ve all experienced. A week spent in a foreign city feels much longer than a routine week spent at home. In an unfamiliar place everything is novel, so it has to be engaged with more care and attention. In order just to manage everyday tasks, such as buying lunch or crossing the street, your mind has to do a lot more than it does at home. More details must be noticed, evaluated, and marked by memory for later. Less of what you experience can be navigated by habit or reflex, so you can’t spend much of your day preoccupied with your familiar and repetitive thoughts. Such a week simply can’t pass by unnoticed and unremembered.

In other words, periods of time that contain more novelty and variety pass slower and leave bigger, brighter memories. That’s why the more “foreign” the destination city is, the longer a one-week visit feels. An American tourist could walk down Dundas Street in Toronto while entirely preoccupied with their usual thoughts about home and work, remembering little of the experience; walking down Bangkok’s Khao-San Road while barely noticing it would be almost impossible.

The reason time seems to speed up over the years is that novelty naturally declines as we age. Life’s elements become increasingly familiar and routinized. You take fewer risks, become less adventurous, move house less often, change jobs less, meet fewer people, stay home more, and so on.

You can probably see where I’m going with this. When the pandemic emergency was declared, we were at first catapulted into the unfamiliar. Over only a few weeks, we had to adopt all new ways of living, working, socializing, sanitizing, entertaining ourselves, and thinking about the world. That few weeks felt very long and was very memorable. This is what happens when novelty spikes.

After that, novelty plummeted. Lockdown quickly made life very samey. There was so much less we could do, physically and legally. We interacted with fewer people, moved around less, and canceled new endeavors. We stayed much closer to home, in every sense.

For some of us, this sameyness came along with a certain mental fog: cognitive dullness and poor memory. People have suggested many explanations for it: too much screen time, additional stress, long-term effects of the virus itself, culture-war-induced despair, lack of exercise, and others.

It might be partly those things, but I suspect much of it is just what happens when variety and novelty disappear from life. A mind that is essentially being prevented from encountering new people, spaces, and sensory experiences isn’t going to remain at its sharpest. Under my pet theory, as the variety and novelty of day-to-day experience go down, mental sharpness declines with them, while time seems to speed up. If you graphed the last five years of this phenomenon, it might look like this:
My layperson’s grasp of the science behind this relationship is that novel experiences induce dopamine release into the hippocampus, which triggers the formation of memories. That makes evolutionary sense: if you discover something useful, like the location of a food source, you want to remember it.

There are two kinds of memories, however: semantic memories and episodic memories. Semantic memories are about factual information. Reference material. What color grass is, what temperature paper ignites at, what the flag of Italy looks like. This is information anyone could know, and exchange with others.

Episodic memories are the autobiographical ones, and they’re stored in a different place in the brain. These memories concern what happened in your life, as it relates to you: that you rode a gondola in Venice, that you gave birth to a baby girl, that you studied ancient languages, that you once saw James Gandolfini at a restaurant.

According to the study linked above, episodic memories form as a result of distinctly novel experiences — ones that “bear minimal resemblance to past experiences.” When the mind encounters a whole new category of experience like this — as a result of trying rock climbing, meeting new people, or walking unfamiliar streets — it encodes a lot of new information, and changes something about who you feel like you are. It adds to your story. You now feel like a person who has climbed granite slabs, knows Wendy G, and ate street food from a paper cone in Bangkok.

If you’re living a more routine and constrained life than you did five years ago, perhaps absorbing a lot of content and information but having fewer distinctly unfamiliar experiences, you’ve probably been forming fewer episodic memories. Consequently, life during that time might seem thinner and less significant in retrospect. It will seem to have gone by faster, and will be harder to recall. It might seem like you just got older and little else changed.

Most of us probably still haven’t made it back to pre-pandemic levels of novel experience. For many people, life got permanently smaller and less varied, with a smaller social circle, fewer events attended, less travel, less going out, less genuinely new material encountered by the mind. You may have become more cautious, more routinized, more of a homebody, and stayed that way. I know people that haven’t even gone to a restaurant in four years.

The remedy then, if you feel like time’s going too fast and the mind is foggy, is to try to get the variety level back to where it was, or as close to it as you can. That could mean reconnecting with some people, meeting new people, attending events, traveling, moving stalled projects forward, or taking on entirely new ones. Anything but the same things you’ve been doing.If my hunch is right, you just need to get life back to a state where new experiences happen regularly again, and then the weeks and months will be unable to slip by unnoticed."

The Poet: Henry Austin Dobson, “The Paradox Of Time”

“Time passes in moments. Moments which, rushing past, define the path of a life, just as surely as they lead towards its end. How rarely do we stop to examine that path, to see the reasons why all things happen? To consider whether the path we take in life is our own making, or simply one into which we drift with eyes closed? But what if we could stop, pause to take stock of each precious moment before it passes? Might we then see the endless forks in the road that have shaped a life? And, seeing those choices, choose another path?”
- Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully, “The X-Files”
o
“The Paradox Of Time”

"Time goes, you say? – ah no!
Ours is the eyes’ deceit
Of men whose flying feet
Lead through some landscape low;
We pass, and think we see
The earth’s fixed surface flee:-
Alas, Time stays, – we go!

Once in the days of old,
Your locks were curling gold,
And mine had shamed the crow.
Now, in the self-same stage,
We’ve reached the silver age;
Time goes, you say? – ah no!

Once, when my voice was strong,
I filled the woods with song
To praise your ‘rose’ and ‘snow’;
My bird, that sang, is dead;
Where are your roses fled?
Alas, Time stays, – we go!

See, in what traversed ways,
What backward Fate delays
The hopes we used to know;
Where are our old desires?-
Ah, where those vanished fires?
Time goes, you say? – ah no!

How far, how far, O Sweet,
The past behind our feet
Lies in the even-glow!
Now, on the forward way,
Let us fold hands, and pray;
Alas, Time stays, – we go!”

- Henry Austin Dobson
o
Full screen recommended.
Hans Zimmer, "Time"

"For This Is What We Do..."

"What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, 'What life can I live that will let me breathe in and out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?'"
- Barbara Kingsolver
o
“For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. For so long as fate keeps waiting, we live on. God help us. God forgive us. We live on.”
- Gregory David Roberts, “Shantaram”
o
Justin Hayward, "Doin' Time"

"This Is The Weapon That Is Being Used To Destroy America’s Middle Class"

"This Is The Weapon That Is Being Used 
To Destroy America’s Middle Class"
by Michael Snyder

"The middle class in the United States has been steadily shrinking, and the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us has grown to absurd proportions. But it wasn’t always this way. When I was growing up in the 1980s, it seemed like almost everyone was middle class. Of course there were wealthy people and poor people in the 1980s too, but the vast majority of the population was comfortably somewhere in the middle. Sadly, things have changed so much since that time. Today, most of the people that I know are struggling. According to a report that was just released, in all 50 states it now takes an income of more than $100,000 in order for a family of four to live “the American Dream”…

"A new report from GOBankingRates used that framework to analyze how much money a family of two adults and two children would need in each state to own a home, a car and a pet. The report tallied estimated annual essential expenses for such a family and then doubled that figure. Using that framework, GoBankingRates found that all 50 states require more than a $100,000 annual income, according to the report, with 38 states needing more than $140,000."

Is your family bringing in more than $100,000 a year? If not, “the American Dream” is not for you. Sorry. Our leaders purposely pursued policies that they knew would cause inflation, and when new money enters the system most of it tends to flow into the hands of those at the top of the economic food chain. So the ultra-wealthy have been doing very well in this economic environment, but high inflation is absolutely eviscerating all the rest of us.

At this point, it takes the average U.S. household an extra $1,069 per month just to purchase the same goods and services that it did three years ago…"Inflation is once again gaining steam, forcing the average American to shell out a lot more money for everyday necessities. The typical U.S. household needed to pay $227 more a month in March to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation, according to calculations from Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi shared with FOX Business. Americans are paying on average $784 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,069 more compared with three years ago, before the inflation crisis began."

What we are witnessing is the collapse of the middle class. The cost of living has been rising faster than incomes have been, and that is putting an extraordinary amount of financial stress on U.S. households. For example, the cost of auto insurance has risen more than 22 percent over the past 12 months…"The cost of auto insurance rose 2.6% in March, bringing the total annual gain to 22.2% - the fastest yearly rate on record. When compared with the beginning of 2021, before the inflation crisis began, motor vehicle insurance is more than 50% more expensive."

Housing costs have been increasing at an even faster pace. If you can believe it, the average monthly mortgage payment on a newly purchased home has risen by 96 percent in just four years…"The real estate firm Zillow reports that since January 2020, the monthly mortgage payment on a typical U.S. home has nearly doubled. It’s up 96% in just four years. According to Zillow, a typical buyer will now pay nearly $2,200 a month, with a 10% down payment. Meaning, homeownership now costs well above the 30% of median income that was once thought to equate to “affordable” housing cost in America." Home ownership is now out of reach for a huge chunk of the population.

Needless to say, that isn’t a good thing. Why aren’t the American people more upset about all of this? In a desperate attempt to maintain a middle class standard of living, many Americans are piling up enormous amounts of debt. According to CNBC, some economists believe “that debt growth has become a substitution for income growth”…

"Economists have suggested that debt growth has become a substitution for income growth. Student loan debt reached an all-time high of $1.77 trillion in the first quarter of 2023 and Americans collectively owe $1.13 trillion on their credit cards as of the fourth quarter of 2023. This debt can have a ripple effect, especially when entire generations are starting their adulthoods with thousands of dollars in debt."

In many cases, people that have greatly overextended themselves now find themselves absolutely drowning in debt. One 28-year-old woman that purchased a Chevy Tahoe three years ago still owed $74,000 to GM Financial and was eventually forced to sell the vehicle…"Three years ago, 28-year-old Blaisey Arnold entered a local auto dealership and came away with the keys to an $84,000 Chevy Tahoe. But this month, the wedding photographer and mother shared a video to TikTok describing how she was forced to sell her dream car. Despite paying $1,400 a month in payments totaling more than $50,000, she still owes a balance of $74,000 to her lender – GM Financial."

Can you believe that? Of course she is far from alone. At this point, millions upon millions of Americans have gotten into trouble with debt, and credit card delinquency rates have risen to unprecedented levels…"Delinquency rates among American credit card holders are at an all-time high, while at the same time a record number of “active accounts” have “a balance of over $2,000,” according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia report."

If Americans really understood what our politicians in Washington and the “experts” at the Federal Reserve were doing to us, there would be massive protests in the streets right now.These days, a lot of Americans that had actually retired are now heading back to work due to the rapidly rising cost of living. Hope Murray is one of those people…"Hope Murray retired in 2013 after a 50-year career that ranged from game show producer to Hollywood party planner to casino executive. She settled into a life of golf, game nights and pickleball in her San Diego community, her daughter living nearby. Then things got more expensive. Gas was nearly $5 a gallon, medication costs were adding up, the grocery bill was increasing."

Can you imagine going back to work when you are 80 years old? That is what she had to do, and now she spends her retirement years handing out samples at Costco…"So last October, at the age of 80, Murray ended her retirement and got a job giving out samples at Costco. She likes observing the people – some go grocery shopping in heels and a full face of makeup and others wear pajamas and slippers. Some people take one sample and others gobble three or four. “It just comes into my checking account every other week, and I can pay for everything,” she said of her $18-an-hour paycheck."

In recent months, prices have started to surge once again. It has become clear that the cost of living crisis is not going away any time soon. The middle class in the United States is going to continue to shrink, and that is not good news for any of us."

Scott Ritter, "The Next Explosive Developments In Middle East"

Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 4/17/24
"The Next Explosive Developments In Middle East"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 4/17/24
"Alert! Israel Will Strike Iran Tonight; 
Iranian Response Would Be Devastating!"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Judge Napolitano, 4/17/24
"Larry Johnson: 
Iran Successfully Probed Israel's Air Defense Network!"
Comments here:

Tuesday, April 16, 2024

Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal 4/16/24"

Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, Trends Journal 4/16/24
"Iran, I Allow Israel To Bomb And Kill You! 
Fight Back? We'll Bomb And Kill You Too!"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present facts and truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for what’s next in these increasingly turbulent times."
Comments here:

"You May Dislike Reality But The Outcome Isn't Going To Change - We Are In Big Trouble And There's No Way Out"

Jeremiah Babe, 4/16/24
"You May Dislike Reality But The Outcome Isn't Going To Change - 
We Are In Big Trouble And There's No Way Out"
Comments here:

"Middle East Crisis, 4/16/24"

Full screen recommended.
OpenmindedThinker Show, 4/16/24
"Russian War Ships Move Closer 
To Iran as Israel Plans Strike In 24 Hours!"
Comments here:
o
Scott Ritter, 4/16/24
"Israel is Losing This War And Iran 
Will Destroy the IDF On All Fronts"
"Former Marine Corps Intelligence Officer and UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter analyzes Israel's grim future as regional forces begin to mount more pressure on the IDF to cease its gruesome war. What happens next may surprise you."
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: 2002, "A Gift Of Life"

Full screen recommended.
2002, "A Gift Of Life"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Fans of our fair planet might recognize the outlines of these cosmic clouds. On the left, bright emission outlined by dark, obscuring dust lanes seems to trace a continental shape, lending the popular name North America Nebula to the emission region cataloged as NGC 7000. To the right, just off the North America Nebula's east coast, is IC 5070, whose avian profile suggests the Pelican Nebula. The two bright nebulae are about 1,500 light-years away, part of the same large and complex star forming region, almost as nearby as the better-known Orion Nebula. At that distance, the 3 degree wide field of view would span 80 light-years.
This careful cosmic portrait uses narrow band images combined to highlight the bright ionization fronts and the characteristic glow from atomic hydrogen, sulfur, and oxygen gas. These nebulae can be seen with binoculars from a dark location. Look northeast of bright star Deneb in the constellation Cygnus the Swan."

"Perhaps..."

"One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will."
- Rachel Carson

"The Human Condition"

"The Human Condition"
by Meanings of Life

“We are all of us born, live and die in the shadow of a 
giant question mark that refers to three questions: 
Where do we come from? Why? And where, oh where, are we going?”
- Tennessee Williams

"Man remains largely unknown of himself. What are we, in our innermost recesses, behind our names and our conventional opinions? What are we behind the things we do in our lives, behind what we see in others and what others see in us, or even behind things science says we are? Is man the crazy being about whom Carl Gustav Jung spoke ironically, when he demanded a man to treat? Is man the Dr. Jerkyll that contains in himself a criminal Mister Hyde, and more than a personality, and contradictory feelings?

Are we the result of our dreams, as Prospero, in the Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” asked? Are we able to raise our nature and become the dignified beings evoked by Pico de la Mirandola (It’s the seeds a man cultivates that "will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God")?

Almost two centuries ago, Spencer characterized the contradictory features of natives from the African east coast: "He has at the same time good character and hard heart; he is a fighter, conscientious, good in a precise moment, and cruel, pitiless and violent in the other; superstitious and rudely irreligious; brave and pusillanimous, servile and dominator, stubborn and at the same time fickle, relied to honor views, but without signs of honesty, niggard and economical, but careless and improvident".

It’s probably a good definition of a certain primitive man, to whom we are undoubtedly connected. But we are also cultural and ethic beings. We are able to change our values and behaviors. As William James says, human beings can change their lives through their mental attitudes. We can grow ethically. We can dominate part of our own instincts. And that’s why we can be different from the indigenous African described by Spencer. More: our thought dignifies us ("All the dignity of man consists in thought", says Blaise Pascal). We are, in many senses, the conscience of the Universe, and its utmost elaborated product. As Edgar Morin says, "in the core of our singularity, we carry not only all the humanity, all the life, but also all the cosmos, including its mystery, present in the heart of our beings".

We are creators, creator beings, and, in a sense, we can create, or recreate ourselves. All goes through our mind. It is our mind that constructs our truths and errors, and also the most sublime things in the Universe. And yet evil and stupidity exist in us. Sometimes we fall, we are stroked, and life reveals its cruelty, and we may think as Mark Twain, and say that it was a pity that Noah had arrived late to the ark. In our innermost recesses, there is also the cruelty and the inhumanity of life. Charles Darwin showed that we are descendants of inferior life forms: we have been long ago a "bush and a bird, and a fish silently swimming in the waters", to use the poetic terms used by Empedocles in its "Purifications."

From a genetic and evolutionist point of view, we contain in us the survival reflexes and the aggressiveness of the life forms that preceded us: "All that threatened the cave man - dangers, darkness, famine, thirst, ghosts, demons – all has passed to the interior of our souls, all troubles us, grieves us, threatens us from inside." (Morin). Besides, we are also beings that can differ significantly from each other. We are equal, but also different. "The awake involve a common world, but dreams deviate each one to its own world," Heraclites rather enigmatically declares. He thought we can’t help sleeping and living in illusory worlds, even when awake.

For all these reasons, Blaise Pascal’s celebrated definition of the human being, despite the hard language, not exactly agreeable to our ears, is undoubtedly one of the most powerful that can be applied to the rather unknown being that we can’t help being to ourselves: "What a chimera then is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe! Who will unravel this tangle?"
This website no longer exists, sadly...

The Poet: Edgar Allan Poe, "A Dream Within a Dream"

Full screen recommended.
"People Don't See It - 
Anthony Hopkins On The Illusion Of Life"
o
"A Dream Within a Dream"

"Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow -
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand -
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"

- Edgar Allan Poe