Thursday, June 13, 2024

The Poet: Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear The Mask”

“We Wear The Mask”

“We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,-
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!”

- Paul Laurence Dunbar

A Comment

Moody Blues, "Don't You Feel Small?"

"See the world, ask what it's for,
Understanding, nothing more.."

A comment: I'm quite aware this blog's content has progressively turned into a virtual chamber of horrors - devastating economic and social collapse, governmental corruption and loss of civil liberties, wars and very possible nuclear war which we cannot and will not "win", exploding poverty, drug epidemics, police state surveillance, and on and on - one disaster or horror after another - everything's going to Hell in a hand-basket and it's as clearly displayed here as I can make it. The world's a complex place, so the articles are lengthy of necessity. Not by choice - I'd much rather focus on other, better things, or be doing something else, but take a glance at the main-stream liars and propagandists, you won't see any of these things covered truthfully there, just more of the sensationalistic garbage and pure propaganda from all those cheaply bought low-life money whores. I've always believed you CAN handle the truth, given the chance to know it. Of course you can find truth, or the best version of it, elsewhere on many sites, if you know where to look, and I hope you're doing that. I can only speak to what you'll find here. 

Please, don't come here expecting all sweetness and light, you'll be rudely disappointed. Anymore the blog article selection is really a threat-analysis and prioritization process, in hopes of keeping you informed about what's really happening behind the smoke screens and lies, and alerting you to imminent crises. We've run out of time, hence the sense of urgency. These things are upon us, they're here now, and you have an absolute right to know and understand how and why it's all happening as it is. That knowing may help you prepare, help you deal more effectively with things you can change, and inevitable changes we can do nothing about. But we will NOT go down without a fight! So, apologies for the sometimes grim article content, but that's real life, just how it really is, whether any of us like it or not. Stay informed, stay aware, and stay strong, always, never give up, and most of all thanks for stopping by!
- CP

"A Life of Learning: Earth School"; "Ten Rules For Being Human"

"A Life of Learning: Earth School"
by Madisyn Taylor, The DailyOm

"Earth school provides us with an education of the heart and the soul. Life is the province of learning, and the wisdom we acquire throughout our lives is the reward of existence. As we traverse the winding roads that lead from birth to death, experience is our patient teacher. We exist, bound to human bodies as we are, to evolve, enrolled by the universe in earth school, an informal and individualized academy of living, being, and changing. Life’s lessons can take many forms and present us with many challenges. There are scores of mundane lessons that help us learn to navigate with grace, poise, and tolerance in this world. And there are those once-in-a-lifetime lessons that touch us so deeply that they change the course of our lives. The latter can be heartrending, and we may wander through life as unwilling students for a time. But the quality of our lives is based almost entirely on what we derive from our experiences.

Earth school provides us with an education of the heart and the soul, as well as the intellect. The scope of our instruction is dependent on our ability and readiness to accept the lesson laid out before us in the circumstances we face. When we find ourselves blindsided by life, we are free to choose to close our minds or to view the inbuilt lesson in a narrow-minded way. The notion that existence is a never-ending lesson can be dismaying at times. The courses we undertake in earth school can be painful as well as pleasurable, and as taxing as they are eventually rewarding. However, in every situation, relationship, or encounter, a range of lessons can be unearthed. When we choose to consciously take advantage of each of the lessons we are confronted with, we gradually discover that our previous ideas about love, compassion, resilience, grief, fear, trust, and generosity could have been half-formed.

Ultimately, when we acknowledge that growth is an integral part of life and that attending earth school is the responsibility of every individual, the concept of "life as lesson" no longer chafes. We can openly and joyfully look for the blessing buried in the difficulties we face without feeling that we are trapped in a roller-coaster ride of forced learning. Though we cannot always know when we are experiencing a life lesson, the wisdom we accrue will bless us with the keenest hindsight."
"Every person, all the events of your life are there because you have 
drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you."
- Richard Bach
"Ten Rules For Being Human"

Rule One: You will receive a body. You may love it or hate it, but it will be yours for the duration of your life on Earth.
Rule Two: You will be presented with lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called 'life.' Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or hate them, but you have designed them as part of your curriculum.
Rule Three: There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation, a series of trials, errors, and occasional victories. The failed experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that work.
Rule Four: A lesson is repeated until learned. Lessons will be repeated to you in various forms until you have learned them. When you have learned them, you can then go on to the next lesson.
Rule Five: Learning does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
Rule Six: 'There' is no better than 'here'. When your 'there' has become a 'here,' you will simply obtain a 'there' that will look better to you than your present 'here'.
Rule Seven: Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about  another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.
Rule Eight: What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you.
Rule Nine: Your answers lie inside of you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
Rule Ten: You will forget all of this at birth. You can remember it if you want by unravelling the double helix of inner knowing.
- Cherie Carter-Scott, 
From "If Life is a Game, These are the Rules"

"Do You Want..."

"Do you want to live life, 
or do you want to escape life?"
- Macklemore

"You May Wonder..."

"You may wonder about long-term solutions. I assure you, there are none. All wounds are mortal. Take what's given. You sometimes get a little slack in the rope but the rope always has an end. So what? Bless the slack and don't waste your breath cursing the drop. A grateful heart knows that in the end we all swing."
- Stephen King

"In This World..."

"In this world, the thing people fear the most, and what pains people the most - is giving more than they receive. God forbid I cut off more of my fingernail for you than you cut from your fingernail, for me! Heaven forbid I hold my breath in longer while thinking about you, than the amount of time your breath is held in for me! Not a second longer! It is a sad fact of human nature that there you stand as an Infinite Soul and yet your greatest fear is not receiving from another person in proportion to what you give. Your viewpoint is low, your vision is clouded. You have become, in your eyes, a funny little drawing on the paper pad of the universe. Indeed, this race is yet to evolve. And yet, I am surrounded by such fear, to such a great extent that I begin to fear the same!"
- C. JoyBell C.

Dan, I Allegedly, "Things are Choppy and Scary"

Dan, I Allegedly, 6/13/24
"Things are Choppy and Scary"
"Today we bring back Bob Kudla from Trade Genius. There are numerous potential Black Swans on the horizon. We will hear him talk about the state of the economy and where he feels the market is headed. This will include crypto, energy, stocks, and precious metals."
Comments here:

"NUKEMAP"

"NUKEMAP"
by  Alex Wellerstein

"We live in a world where nuclear weapons issues are on the front pages of our newspapers on a regular basis, yet most people still have a very bad sense of what an exploding nuclear weapon can actually do. Some people think they destroy everything in the world all that once, some people think they are not very different from conventional bombs. The reality is somewhere in between: nuclear weapons can cause immense destruction and huge losses of life, but the effects are still comprehendible on a human scale. 

The NUKEMAP is aimed at helping people visualize nuclear weapons on terms they can make sense of, helping them to get a sense of the scale of the bombs. By allowing people to use arbitrarily picked geographical locations, I hope that people will come to understand what a nuclear weapon would do to places they are familiar with, and how the different sizes of nuclear weapons change the results. There are many different political interpretations one can legitimately take away from such results. There is not intended to be a simple political "message" of the NUKEMAP."
Access NUKEMAP here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 6/13/24
"Russian Army's 'Electronic Launch Of Nuclear Missile' Drill: 
Putin Nuke-Ready Amid West's New Moves"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Times Of India, 6/13/24
"'Ready To Use Nuclear...': 
Russia Openly Brandishes Nukes After NATO's New 'Trigger'"
"Russia has pulled out its nuclear weapons as NATO nations permit attacks on its soil. Russian and Belarusian troops have started the second stage of tactical nuclear drills. Moscow said the drills were aimed at ensuring that the two countries' military personnel and equipment were ready to protect their sovereignty and territorial integrity."
Comments here:

Russians do not bluff, ever...

The Daily "Near You?"

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Thanks for stopping by!

"The Problem With The World..."

 

"We Are Doomed And Challenged...:

"The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin
to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less."
- Arthur Miller

Chet Raymo, “Examination of Conscience”

“Examination of Conscience”
by Chet Raymo

"I have been reading Stephanie Smallwood's “Saltwater Slavery,” a close examination of the trade in human beings between the coast of West Africa and the Americas in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is a sobering read, but if there is one thing I came away with, it was this: We have an enormous capacity to rationalize the most horrendous crimes. Everyone involved in the slave trade - the European owners of the ships, the masters of the trading companies, the ship captains and crews, the plantation owners in the West Indies and the Chesapeake, the African tribal chiefs who captured and sold their neighbors to the European merchants - knew in some part of their souls that what they were doing was wrong. All of them - good Christians among them, pillars of their communities - found ways to rationalize their participation.

Who among us is immune to self deceit? To what extent am I implicated in the horrendous tragedies that are Darfur and Iraq? What do I owe to the global environment? Is there such a thing as innocence when we are so intimately connected that people in Fiji and Japan will read these words only moments after I write them?

What about science, the favored subject of this blog? Here is Smallwood: “The littoral [of the West African coast]...was more than a site of economic exchange and incarceration. The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied upon a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas.”

Even science, like religion and democratic politics, can be pressed into the service of evil. We are all of us to some extent in the grip of economic forces as powerful and sometimes as pernicious as those that drove the saltwater slave trade. Few of us are required to personally face the direst evils. We are saved from moral anguish only by the fact that our acts of commission and omission ripple outward until their consequences are diluted and lost in the general happiness or unhappiness of humankind.”

"Everywhere in Chains"

"Everywhere in Chains"
By Joel Bowman

“Man is born free,” Rousseau reminds us, “and everywhere he is in chains.” The exiled Genevan’s point, if we grasp it correctly, is that our natural state is one of liberty... of rights unalienable... of freedom. It is the world we make, held he, that makes us unfree.

How does Rousseau, himself a scalawag of the highest order, resolve this conundrum? By supposing a “social contract,” of course, the deus ex machina of the Gordian philosophical knot, in which everyone is beholden to everyone else because of something Rousseau calls the “general will.” “Each of us puts his person... under the supreme direction of the general will.” Rousseau posits the body politic as a single entity, composed of each participating individual, in which the “common good” outweighs the rights of the component parts. Collectivism, in other words.

“Let us set equal terms for the truce” Rousseau begins his treatise (quoting from Virgil’s epic poem, "Aeneid"). Departing from Hobbes’s cynical assertion that, without the civilizing agent of government, man would be left in a state in which existed “No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Rousseau holds that force alone (such as exerted by the State) does not itself create right.

Allow us to preempt your next question, dear and incisive reader: “Then why create a state in the first place?” Perhaps it is useful here to consider the State not as a civilizing agent, as Hobbes had it, but as an expression of the many, varied and reliable ways in which man is uncivilized. This would be the inverse of what the much overpraised eugenics enthusiast, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, argued: “Taxation is the price we pay for civilization.” Properly considered, civilization is the price we surrender when permitting the gang of thieves calling itself the State to rob, coerce and enslave us, to deny us our individual sovereignty."

"Going Broke the Traditional Way"

"Going Broke the Traditional Way"
Capital cannot be consumed; it must be saved and invested
 wisely, skillfully. Everything else is distraction…fraud and fantasy.
by Bill Bonner and Dan Denning

"History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities."
- "Gerontion", TS Eliot

London - "Investors heard the lure of the Lorelei yesterday. So sweet. Irresistible. What lush pleasures they suggested. What otherworldly satisfactions they offered. Yes, word came that inflation was “cool.” Business Insider reports: "Inflation came in softer than expected, with consumer prices remaining flat over the month of May. On a yearly basis, inflation was up 3.3%. That's slightly lower than the 3.4% yearly increase recorded in April, marking the second month in a row that prices have cooled. Bond yields plunged after the report. The 10-year US Treasury dove 11 basis points to 4.287%."

"Wednesday's weaker-than-expected CPI will allow the Fed to start cutting interest rates as soon as September since we have now seen multiple encouraging inflation readings, after the concerning spike in inflation earlier this year," Skyler Weinand, the chief investment officer of Regan Capital, said in a note. "There's a clear path to a soft landing and the Fed may very well be coming to the market's rescue in as little as three months."

Markets Insider followed up: "US stocks rose on Wednesday as investors took in cool inflation data and the Federal Reserve's latest guidance on rate cuts, helping the S&P 500 to another record close."

But then, the Dow gave back all its gains when it became clear that Jerome Powell was not exactly on the rate-cut bandwagon. It was “certainly a better inflation report than almost anyone expected,” he said. But he added that he wanted to be sure inflation was under control before cutting rates. Boo hoo. Investors will have to wait for the lavish satisfaction they crave.

But Fed rate cuts do not magically create more real wealth. Wealth is created by increases in productivity…with more output per unit of labor and resource input. It is the result of hard work…and forbearance. Immediate pleasures must be put off…lessons must be learned. Capital cannot be consumed; it must be saved and invested wisely, skillfully. Everything else is distraction…fraud and fantasy. After revealing the Fed’s decision not to cut rates any time soon, CNN added: ‘That means borrowing costs on everything from car loans to mortgage rates will remain elevated.’

Lowering the cost of credit makes it easier to buy things….but it doesn’t necessarily make it easier to pay for them. As we’ve seen, more credit creates short-term ‘fictitious’ wealth, not long-term real wealth. Sellers record the increase in sales as a plus. The feds record the extra sales as an increase to GDP. But until the bill is settled, the transaction is incomplete.

As debt increases so does the cost of debt service (interest) and the number of debtors who won’t be able to pay – including the biggest debtor in the world, the US government. And so does the amount of wealth that is likely to vanish in the next crisis. This is especially true when the borrowing was done under false pretenses – that is, at interest rates that are unrealistically or artificially low.

And lo…the debt rises. The latest figures are out. The Congressional Budget Office says that the feds’ deficit for the month of May was $348 billion – up $108 billion from last year. Whew. The CBO is forecasting deficits between 5.2% and 6.3% of GDP over the next 10 years. This is a nation going broke in the traditional way…by adding phony wealth and real debt. And here at Bonner Private Research, we’re not the only ones to notice. The Financial Times is on the case:

The IMF’s second-in-command has urged the US to shrink its mounting fiscal burden, saying strong growth in the world’s largest economy gave it “ample” room to rein in spending and raise taxes. Gita Gopinath, the fund’s first deputy managing director, said it was time for advanced economies to “invest in fiscal consolidation” and address how they plan to bring debt burdens back down to pre-pandemic levels.

“For the US, we see ample ground for them to reduce the size of their fiscal deficits, also given the strength of the US economy,” she told the Financial Times in an interview. The warnings come as economists and investors fear that years of fiscal profligacy by both Democrats and Republicans are storing up trouble for the US economy.

Yes, dear reader, there is ‘ample ground’ to cut spending. But fraud is more agreeable than truth…and increasing debt is much more appealing than paying it off. For now, policymakers and investors are enchanted by the song of the Lorelei and the fake wealth it produces. Later, they will crash upon the rocks. Until tomorrow..."

Research Note, by Dan Denning: "Three years and two months ago, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank would like to see sustained inflation over 2% ‘for some time.’ Mission accomplished. Yesterday’s ‘cool’ CPI figure of 3.3% would have been hotter if not for the 9% fall in the used cars and trucks category (repos, perhaps).

Today I want to share three charts with you. These are the sort I’d normally share in my Friday Research Note for paying subscribers. But if you’re a new reader, you may not have seen them. And all of them are important to BPR’s investment strategy now, and for the rest of the year.

First, a slower rate of change doesn’t mean inflation is going down. It means - assuming it’s even accurate - that inflation is growing less fast (although still above the Fed’s ‘target’). The first chart below shows the entire price level shifted 22.26% higher in four years from May of 2020 to today. It’s this shift that’s killing the quality of life for the American Middle Class (by contrast, the S&P 500 is up 25% since the Fed started raising rates in March of 2022).
Click image for larger size.
Second, the velocity of money is on the uptick. The chart below shows the year-over-year change in broad money supply (M2). Money supply ballooned with the Covid stimmes and giveaways. Then it appeared to contract, even as inflation remained ‘above target.’ Now, the very latest data point shows money supply expanding again. A ‘second wave’ of inflation is building.
Click image for larger size.
When you get high inflation with a recession it’s called stagflation, a throwback to the great monetary policy mistake of the 1970s. But that’s where we may be headed. As the chart below shows, each of the last eleven recessions began either just before or right after the Fed started cutting rates (the recessions are the grey vertical lines on the chart while the blue line is the effective Fed funds rate)."
Click image for larger size.

"How It Really Is"

 

Free Download: F.A. Hayek, "The Road to Serfdom"

"The Road to Serfdom"
by F.A. Hayek

"An unimpeachable classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, 'The Road to Serfdom' has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in 1944 - when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program -'The Road to Serfdom' was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy."
Freely download "The Road to Serfdom," by F.A. Hayek, here:

"The Corporatization Of Everything - Serfdom In Our Time"

"The Corporatization Of Everything -
Serfdom In Our Time"
by Paul Rosenberg

"I’m quite serious about the serfdom part. Please read on. If you want millions of dollars thrown at your new company, the way to do it is in “tech,” which usually means a new Internet service. If you can find a way to suck a new part of people’s lives from the world of atoms to the world of data, your odds are good… far greater than trying to launch a construction company. For the construction company you’ll have to beg for loans. For a clever new Internet service, Venture Capitalists (VCs) with huge wallets will happily listen to your pitch.

Here, in brief, is how this works: Most of the things VCs fund will fail, but the ones that work (the “unicorns”), can make them fortunes. The VCs end up owning most of the equity in the companies they finance. The people who start and operate the company bleed more equity with each new round of financing.

The VCs cash in when they take companies public. Once listed on the stock exchanges and promoted, people will pay enormous multiples of what those companies actually make. Lots of unicorns have sold billions of dollars worth of shares without ever turning a dollar of profit. The investing psychology of the age is such that people are eager to buy these stocks. For the past generation, this model has worked, and so it continues without any serious examination. This model works by corporatizing activities which were previously personal and private.

Consider these cases:
٭ Facebook corporatized friendship.
٭ Google corporatized finding information.
٭Visa corporatized payments.

And so on, some for the better in ways, but always at the expense of the private sphere. By this model, the corporation gets a cut, where previously there was no cut to be taken.

At this point, corporations are trying to rent you everything. Private ownership, after all, can’t really be corporatized. If a corporation is to make money this way, they need you to rent from them. And so they portray their systems as having some sort of added value, get you to believe that all the cool kids are doing it, and convince you to rent from them, for life. Most people no longer buy DVDs or CDs, for example. Rather they “stream” music and video, never owning anything and forever dependent upon operations like Netflix.

There’s a reason Klaus Schwab blathered on about “You will own nothing and be happy.” That’s what this model produces. This was also the model of serfdom. The Schwabbian model breaks down the populace into owners (“stakeholders”) and renters (“people”). The old words for this relationship were lord and serf.

You can see this in hedge funds buying up the houses of America, then renting them back to the old owner’s family and neighbors. The hedge funds get massively better financing that Joe Shmoe could get, and Joe’s younger relatives aren’t doing terribly well these days anyway. And if corporatization requires some regulations to be made or altered, the corporations can purchase them easily enough… while Joe’s kids can’t.

Where This Goes: Klaus Schwab may have been evil, but he was not entirely stupid. He saw where this would go, and he ran with it. The trajectory of this trend is for you to own nothing… for you to rent everything from stakeholders, leaving you beholden to them for almost everything.

Now, while the Schwab types get off on enserfing you, the corporate types usually don’t: they’re just following a model that works. They’re eager to get rich, and so they turn a blind eye to their roles in enserfing the masses. (“Hey, I’m not holding a gun to their heads.”) They get caught up in the unicorn fetish and become sociopathic in that area of their minds. (See The Mystery of Iniquity for an explanation.)

If you don’t like where this is heading, the fix is simple: Just drop out of their game. The price of that fix is to let people call you names… just as they did to those who ditched serfdom back in the day."

"What Being Governed Really Means"

"What Being Governed Really Means"
by Brian Maher

"And to be governed, noted 19th-century philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: "Is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded… registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished… drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed… repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored."

"I Am An Outsider: A Story of Freedom"

"I Am An Outsider: A Story of Freedom"
by Tessa Lena

"I am an outsider, and here’s my story of freedom. To keep my humanity, I consistently ran away from systems. Early on, I ran away from the academia even though I was promised a very bright and secure career. I then ran away from the corporate labyrinth because my soul was dying in there. I kept my heart, and because I did, I have immediate and vibrant answers to some of the big questions that Systems People are asking in their high-end keynote speeches. I have peasant senses that make it very easy to grasp the degree of murder that modern systems bring upon the soul – and it’s a Catch 22.

I have functional answers because I ran away from the machine. But because I ran away from the machine, I am not accredited by the machine, and Systems People are skeptical about the answers that come from a Non-Systems person. The things I have to say are not familiar.

It is a classic interface incompatibility problem: Questions and answers live in different dimensions, and if my answers travel to the dimension where the keynote speeches live, they will lose their heart. Real answers about happiness and humanity are humbling, they don’t help anybody’s career-building ambitions, they are so beautiful you can’t describe it, they lie in mystery, and they leave no room for pointless glitter. But simple, peasant humility is uncharted territory for a self-respecting urban educated mind!

When I talk to self-respecting educated minds about this (the famed self-respecting educated minds, the demographic that I used to be a part of – but then I ran away), I hear the following: ‘We will gladly pontificate about lost innocence and we will buy expensive retreats – but we are not going to touch the real thing.’ ‘We want answers but we don’t want to change our idea about ourselves and our self-aggrandizing intellectual paradigms’

The tragedy.

Here is the real problem. The machine annihilates the senses that we are born with, the senses that allow us to find happiness, to be fully present in the primordial state. The Machine beats up and chews up and covers up the context. The soul-eating Machine runs on broken language because language, imperfect as it is, is meant to reflect reality. If our everyday language were straightened out to be more consistent with eternal nature and our physical reality, the Machine would explode. So it keeps blocking us from expressing ourselves like children, from being free–and in the meanwhile, people who were born to be happy, keep getting together at conferences and jerking off about systems.

F*ck!

The ability to find the solution depends on trashing the interface entirely. And that is not an easy thing to do. I am an outsider with a heart, a brain, and a memory of home. I am the little guy who spent a lot of time unlearning the very qualities that make one palatable in a Systems Society.

I know a thing or two about being happy, and I know with absolute, piercing certainty that it has zero to do with what most influencers and futurologists are saying to the masses (using uplifting, accessible language). It has nothing to do with gadgets, slogans, space ships, collective affirmation chanting, pseudo-intellectualism, ’science,’ or ‘technology.’

The future is the same as the present. You are born, you bring with you a magical connection to the universe, your unique feeling that you vividly remember when you are a kid–and then forget–your purpose, your unique sound, your version of love.

You are born, like a song of uttermost beauty – and then the people who have been traumatized before you, try to shame you out of remembering your song. Most of them are not bad human beings, they simply forgot, and they want you to be an important practical goose, for your own good.

Your song that exists for your happiness, doesn’t help the Machine. If you are to remember your song, you will know with absolute, piercing certainly, just like I do, that most of what the influencers and the futurologists are telling you, is a mix of wishful thinking and ego. From A to Z, ego. It adds nothing to happiness except it maybe teaches you how to navigate the labyrinth filled from wall to wall with distorted mirrors and sad, important practical geese.

And branding? I whisper, from the bottom of my heart: ‘I am waiting for the day when people will see branding for what it is (psychic warfare), when goods and services will go back to being just goods and services, and when marketing messages will get the hell out of the sacred space.’ I know it won’t happen for a very long time–but I keep whispering, because I am right.

‘A spiritual message driven by commercial interest dies immediately. They don’t live together, they don’t eat at the same table, don’t you know?’ But it’s hard to blame the practical geese. The Machine is brutal. The problem is that everything is driven by money. The Machine has figured out how to repurpose our in-born desire of being respected to feed itself, and how to make us do unnatural things, to chase the feeling of being important.

It’s a grinder. Nobody – not the janitor, not the president, and sadly, not even the artist – is free to say what she knows in her heart of hearts, as long as she cares about having a social status of any sort, and a source of income. Blessed be the ones who don’t think too much about any of it.

It’s a grinder, yo. 

People at the bottom of society have more freedom to talk and have dissenting opinions – but that’s only because there is almost nowhere to fall from where they already are.

If you own stock, if you are looking for a job, if you want to keep a job, if you want to get published, if you want to get a prestigious interview, and sometimes if you want to stay alive – you have to say just the right thing, palatable enough, harmless enough so as not to alert the gatekeepers of the Machine to your inadequacy or your sudden uncontrollable freedom. And it would be just fine if people with ears knew that you are using your mouth in jest, that you are just doing what you have to do, if they sympathized with your unfreedom… Unfortunately, most people with ears are trained to take the spectacle literally.

Blessed be the ones who don’t think too much about any of it. When the words that are coming out people’s mouths are polluted with self-preservation (be it basic bread or a high social status), the words are going to be distorted.

We all follow our instincts, and self-preservation takes over. When we are under pressure, we are all practical geese.

It’s a grinder.

Alas, in a world driven by financial self-preservation, truth-telling is a commercial affair. You can tell the truth – but only from a media-friendly angle, and only in a way that doesn’t piss off the sponsor, the donor, and the advertiser – and that meets the linguistic habits of your target demographic, of your very own echo chamber that feeds you. Truth, the edited version, hello.

Hello.
Can you hear me crying?
F*ck, I am an outsider.
I am married to my song, and the world is beautiful but ill.
I am an outsider.

I ran away from every machine, even though it gave me nice grades. But I can’t be running anymore. My brothers and sisters are all in here.
I was an outsider.
I was an outsider, and I still have a heart."

o
Hat tip to Glock-N-Load and 
the Burning Platform for this material.

"Jaw Dropping Kroger Sales, The Best Deals I've Seen In Years!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 6/13/24
"Jaw Dropping Kroger Sales, 
The Best Deals I've Seen In Years!"
"In today's vlog, we are at Kroger and are noticing some unbelievable sales going on. Groceries have been ridiculously overpriced, but we are seeing Kroger have some of the best deals we've seen in years! Shop with me at Kroger as we discover these great savings together!"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Travelling with Russell, 6/13/24
"Russian (German Owned) Supermarket 
After 2 Years of Sanctions"
"What does a Russian supermarket look like inside? 
Join me on a tour of Globus, a German owned supermarket." 
Comments here:

Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Canadian Prepper, "Alert! Big Things Are Happening, Time's Almost Up"

Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 6/12/24
"Alert! Big Things Are Happening, Time's Almost Up"
Comments here:

Musical Interlude: Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"

Dire Straits, "Private Investigations"

"It's a mystery to me, the game commences,
For the usual fee, plus expenses.
Confidential information, it's in a diary.
This is my investigation, it's not a public inquiry.

I go checking out the reports, digging up the dirt.
You get to meet all sorts in this line of work.
Treachery and treason, there's always an excuse for it,
And when I find the reason, I still can't get used to it.

And what have you got at the end of the day?
What have you got to take away?
A bottle of whiskey, and a new set of lies,
Blinds on the windows, and a pain behind the eyes.

Scarred for life, no compensation.
Private investigations..."

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Spooky shapes seem to haunt this dusty expanse, drifting through the night in the royal constellation Cepheus. Of course, the shapes are cosmic dust clouds visible in dimly reflected starlight. Far from your own neighborhood, they lurk above the plane of the Milky Way at the edge of the Cepheus Flare molecular cloud complex some 1,200 light-years away. 
Over 2 light-years across and brighter than most of the other ghostly apparitions, vdB 141 or Sh2-136 is also known as the Ghost Nebula, seen at the right of the starry field of view. Inside the nebula are the telltale signs of dense cores collapsing in the early stages of star formation. With the eerie hue of dust reflecting bluish light from hot young stars of NGC 7023, the Iris Nebula stands out against the dark just left of center. In the broad telescopic frame, these fertile interstellar dust fields stretch almost seven full moons across the sky."

Kahlil Gibran, "The Prophet: On Good and Evil "

"The Prophet: On Good and Evil"

 "Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves,
and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

You are good when you are one with yourself.
Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.
For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.
And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among
perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.
Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.
For when you strive for gain you are but a root
that clings to the earth and sucks at her breast.
Surely the fruit cannot say to the root,
 Be like me, ripe and full and ever giving of your abundance.
For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.

You are good when you are fully awake in your speech,
Yet you are not evil when you sleep
while your tongue staggers without purpose.
And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.

You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.
Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.
Even those who limp go not backward.
But you who are strong and swift,
see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness.

You are good in countless ways,
and you are not evil when you are not good,
You are only loitering and sluggard.
Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.

In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness:
and that longing is in all of you.
But in some of you that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea,
carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.
And in others it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and
bends and lingers before it reaches the shore.
But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little,
 Wherefore are you slow and halting?
For the truly good ask not the naked,
 Where is your garment?
nor the houseless, What has befallen your house?"

- Kahlil Gibran
Freely download a PDF version of  "The Prophet" here:

"Is It Any Wonder..."

"Thomas Edison said in all seriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labor of thinking" - if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts that bolster up what we already think - and ignore all the others! We want only the facts that justify our acts - the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justify our preconceived prejudices. As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desires seems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage." Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems? Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, if we went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot of people in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that two plus two equals five- or maybe five hundred!"
- Dale Carnegie

Scott Ritter, "Israel is Being Humiliated and the IDF’s Defeat is Coming Fast"

Scott Ritter, 6/12/24:
"Israel is Being Humiliated 
and the IDF’s Defeat is Coming Fast"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Owen Jones, 6/12/24
"Israel Confesses Genocidal Intent"
Comments here:

"Israel is Evil personified. Israel Is Evil embodied."
- Scott Ritter

Stipendium peccati mors est, Israel. And it's coming...
Inshallah! So be it...

Gerald Celente, "Judge Napolitano: Political Parasites Never Met A War They Didn't Want Someone Else To Fight"

Gerald Celente, 6/12/24
"Judge Napolitano: Political Parasites Never Met 
A War They Didn't Want Someone Else To Fight"
"'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:

“The tragedy of modern war is that the young men die fighting each other -
instead of their real enemies back home in the capitals.” 
- Edward Abbey

"40 Million Americans Can't Pay Their Bills And All Hell Is About To Break Loose"

Full screen recommended.
Epic Economist, 6/12/24
"40 Million Americans Can't Pay Their Bills 
And All Hell Is About To Break Loose"

"All hell is breaking loose in America as more and more people can't keep up with their bills, and new reports show that many are resorting to desperate measures to be able to get by. The cost of living in the United States is rising much faster than workers’ paychecks, and our standard of living is rapidly deteriorating. Our country has reached a stage where only the elites are thriving while everyone else is being financially eviscerated.

For most people, it's been a real fight just to be able to put enough food on the table to feed their children. At this point, the majority of the population is deep in debt, and record high interest rates are only adding to people's problems. Millions of hard-working Americans feel like they're drowning. Sadly, many of them don’t even realize that the game was designed against them and in benefit of the few.

At the moment, about two-thirds of Americans considered middle class say they are facing economic hardship and don’t anticipate a change for the rest of their lives. That's according to a recent poll commissioned by the National True Cost of Living Coalition. In the study of 2,500 adults, 65% of people who earn more than 200% of the federal poverty level - that’s at least $60,000 for a family of four, often considered middle class - revealed they are struggling financially in 2024.

A sizable share of higher-income Americans also feel financially insecure. The survey shows that a quarter of people making over five times the federal poverty level - an annual income of more than $150,000 for a family of four - are worried about paying their bills on time. “Many Americans are still gasping for air financially,” highlights Jennifer Jones Austin, chief executive officer of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies. “They simply don’t have the breathing room to plan beyond their present needs.”