"What can we know? What are we all?
Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite,
with the aspirations of angels and the instincts of beasts."
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
So, we rise from the rubble...
Thursday, April 29, 2021
“The Myth of Human Progress”
Full screen!
“The Myth of Human Progress”
By Chris Hedges
“Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth – intellectually and emotionally – and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury – as well as unrivaled military and economic power – for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.
Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.
“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada.
“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today – about 2 billion – is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.
If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”
Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.
Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.
Wright explained this further on our call. “The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.
And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”
As Wright told me: “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable – the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun – would disappear.
We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we let oil and gas exploration rip when we knew that expanding the carbon economy was suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.
If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”
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Related:
"Are We Headed Into Another Ice Age?" (Excerpt)
by Martin Armstrong
"Our model has projected we are entering another “grand-minimum,” which will overtake the sun beginning in 2020 and will last through the 2050s, resulting in diminished magnetism, infrequent sunspot production, and less ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching Earth. This all means we are facing a global cooling period in the planet that may span 31 to 43 years. The last grand-minimum event produced the mini-Ice Age in the mid-17th century. Known as the Maunder Minimum, it occurred between 1645 and 1715, during a longer span of time when parts of the world became so cold that the period was called the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850."
Please view this complete article here:
Source:
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"America Is Exceptionally...Kleptocratic: Wealth/Power Inequality and the Slide Into Disorder"
"America Is Exceptionally...Kleptocratic:
Wealth/Power Inequality and the Slide Into Disorder"
by Charles Hugh Smith
"The U.S. Constitution doesn't address a small elite owning most of the nation's private wealth and using a sliver of that wealth to influence the federal government so their wealth and political power increase in a self-reinforcing feedback: as a result of their campaign contributions and lobbying, the elites' wealth continues expanding, enhancing their political power to further expand their wealth, and so on.
This financial and political dominance is thus perfectly legal. As Bastiat's famous quote puts it: "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." This legalized looting has now reached such absurd extremes that kleptocracy no longer does justice as a descriptor of the U.S. Consider this excerpt from "Monopoly Versus Democracy" (Foreign Affairs):
"Like their forebears in the early twentieth century, today's Americans have experienced decades of growing inequality and increasing concentrations of wealth and power. The last decade alone witnessed nearly 500,000 corporate mergers worldwide. Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans. (emphasis added.)"
If you read that three kleptocrats held more wealth than half the residents of Lower Slobovia, that the top 0.1% own more wealth than the bottom 80% and that a near-zero 3% of all income flowing from capital trickled down to the bottom 90%, what would you think about wealth/power asymmetry in Lower Slobovia?
We now know what American Exceptionalism really means: exceptionally kleptocratic. Even as private wealth soared to unprecedented heights in the past decade of Federal Reserve largesse (endless trillions for financiers and too-big-to-jail speculators), the percentage of stocks owned by the fortunate class of the 90% to 99% fell from 39% to 35% and the percentage owned by the bottom 50% slipped to 0.6%. (Data from the Federal Reserve's FRED database)
Now there are rumblings in Washington D.C. about closing tax loopholes for corporations, which scoop 15% of the nation's GDP as profits. This is certainly very pretty political theater, but please let me know when you and I can rent a post office box in Ireland and pay no federal income taxes, while corporations are paying the total federal tax rates we pay (40+%) with 15.3% self-employment tax, 3.9% supplemental Medicare tax, etc.
The sheer weight of this outlandish asymmetry of wealth and power is pulling the nation into disorder. There are no legal or political limits on private wealth and political power, and the politicians that depend on the wealthy to fund their re-election campaigns have demonstrably little interest in harming the geese that lay their golden eggs.
The super-wealthy and Corporate America reckon that they can suppress any resistance to their dominance with virtue-signaling and political suppression, but they must have flunked history: when the bottom 90% own effectively zero income-producing capital and no political voice, and even the top 9.9% don't really have any real political power, then disorder of the uncontrollable variety arises to rebalance the extreme asymmetry."
Click images for larger size:
"How It Really Is"
Because the Universe needed an insane asylum...
“My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and
dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit.
I can't prove it, but you can't disprove it either.”
- Christopher Hitchens
“California Is Going To Hell”
Full screen recommended.
“California Is Going To Hell”
by The InfoRealm
"Californians’ net worth totals over $6 trillion or about $160,000 per resident. The state holds 17 percent of national net worth, while making up only 12 percent of the U.S. population. But with all that wealth, the United Nations compared the tent encampments of San Francisco to the slums of New Delhi and Mexico City.
Nearly 5,000 people live in the half square mile of Los Angeles’ Skid Row. And while the problem is most acute in California’s urban centers, homelessness is now a common fixture in many of the state’s suburbs and rural towns. While State and local officials have pledged billions in recent years to help, frustrations abound amongst residents due to lack of visible progress. So how did the golden state get so filthy?"
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Related:
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/29/21: "The Middle Class Is Being Wiped Out, And The MSM Is Loving It"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/29/21:
"The Middle Class Is Being Wiped Out,
And The MSM Is Loving It"
“Update: Fourth Stimulus Multiple Monthly Checks Starting July!”
Early Mornings LALATE 4/29/21:
“Update: Fourth Stimulus Multiple Monthly Checks Starting July!”
Wednesday, April 28, 2021
"The Great Relocation Continues: Mass Exodus Is Driving Home Prices To Insane Levels"
Full screen recommended.
"The Great Relocation Continues:
Mass Exodus Is Driving Home Prices To Insane Levels"
by Epic Economist
"The Great Relocation continues in 2021, with a large number of people moving away from the West Coast and major urban centers to find safety and comfort in smaller areas. The mass exodus that started a decade ago, has significantly intensified during the peak of the health crisis and even more so during recent months. As large swaths of the population have been migrating to more desirable regions, that, in turn, has resulted in the hottest real estate market ever. But supply can't keep up with the extraordinary demand, consequently making home prices reach new record-highs.
The real estate price bubble is at insane levels across several cities of the country. According to the Wall Street Journal, the picturesque city of Coeur d’Alene, in Idaho, has the most splendid housing bubble of all. The median home price in the region has skyrocketed 47% in the past 12 months, to a whopping $476,900.
Bidding wars are being registered all across the nation. For instance, in Denver, a new survey by a local expert reported that the overwhelming majority of more than 100 listed homes in the metro area were sold for above the asking price. "In one extreme case, a home put on the market at just over $400,000 closed at more than $500,000," said Jim Smith of Golden Real Estate, who argued that as supply continues to shrink, things are about to get a lot more intense in the coming months.
The National Association of Realtors informed that properties across the country have been typically sold in a record low time of 18 days last month, and 80% of all homes sold in March were on the market for less than a month. Many people have been leaving California and fleeing to Texas. In fact, Real estate executive Rogers Healy, who is based in Dallas, recently told in an interview that “70% of the people moving in are from California”.
The executive argues that most Americans from regions like California are motivated to move due to the state's high state taxes. But the Texas housing price bubble isn't any smaller. The median price of a home in the Lone Star State is currently at the highest level in history, at around $353,000 - a 17% increase from a year ago. Overall, U.S. home prices are incredibly more inflated today than they were last year. According to NAR, the median sale price of an existing home reached $329,100 last month, whereas the housing inventory of homes available for sale plunged by almost 50%.
Inflated prices aren't exclusive to the housing market. Also due to a supply and demand crisis, used car prices have climbed over the past year. The Manheim U.S. Used Vehicle Value Index has continued to soar through the month of April, to a new record, going up by 6.8% in the first 15 days of the month, Bloomberg noted. But the index went up a staggering 52% from the same time last year to 191.4.
Gasoline prices just keep on rising as well, jumping more than 9% in the past month, without any expectations to slow down anytime soon, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index. Even though there are numerous signs that inflation is already creating major price bubbles in several sectors of the economy, the Federal Reserve continues to argue that inflation levels are actually low and are "not a concern" for the time being. If we circle back to the housing market and consider that the price of lumber has shot up a shocking 232 percent since the start of the health crisis, we can definitely realize that inflation should be a top concern right now.
If nothing is done to reverse the damages of runaway inflation, experts are warning that we might see a housing market crash sooner rather than later. The senior economist at Fastmarkets RISI, Dustin Jalbert, alerted that "the market is in trouble and it could spiral out of control in the next few months," asserting that the real estate industry is at risk of overheating, and supply and demand imbalances may add immense pressure on the price bubble, possibly triggering a major market implosion and collapsing property values in the process.
These insane levels of inflation are already leading to dangerous cracks in the foundations of multiple markets and segments of our economy. And now, events are playing out much faster than experts anticipated. So we should keep paying close attention to the troubles that will emerge in the months ahead, and considering that our leaders keep flooding the system with more money, it seems that we're getting critically close to the point of no return."
“Broke Americans Flood Las Vegas; Horrific Financial Crisis Being Ignored; The Paper Will Get Paid”
Jeremiah Babe,
“Broke Americans Flood Las Vegas; Horrific Financial Crisis Being Ignored;
The Paper Will Get Paid”
Musical Interlude: Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feels So Bad" (Ben E-dit)
Full screen recommended.
Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feels So Bad" (Ben E-dit)
"A Look to the Heavens"
“A now famous picture from the Hubble Space Telescope featured Pillars of Creation, star forming columns of cold gas and dust light-years long inside M16, the Eagle Nebula. This false-color composite image views the nearby stellar nursery using data from the Herschel Space Observatory's panoramic exploration of interstellar clouds along the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel's far infrared detectors record the emission from the region's cold dust directly.
The famous pillars are included near the center of the scene. While the central group of hot young stars is not apparent at these infrared wavelengths, the stars' radiation and winds carve the shapes within the interstellar clouds. Scattered white spots are denser knots of gas and dust, clumps of material collapsing to form new stars. The Eagle Nebula is some 6,500 light-years distant, an easy target for binoculars or small telescopes in a nebula rich part of the sky toward the split constellation Serpens Cauda (the tail of the snake).”
The Universe
"Life is not what you see, but what you've projected.
It's not what you've felt, but what you've decided.
It's not what you've experienced, but how you've remembered it.
It's not what you've forged, but what you've allowed.
And it's not who's appeared, but who you've summoned.
And this should serve you well until you find what you already have."
- The Universe
"I Wish..."
"I had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision of the universe that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are not - that none of us - are alone! I wish I could share that. I wish, that everyone, if only for one moment, could feel that awe, and humility, and hope. But... that continues to be my wish."
- "Ellie Arroway", "Contact" by Carl Sagan
Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/28/21: "Massive Inflation: The Fed. Is BUYING IT ALL! And Goldman Is 'ALL IN' On Crude Oil"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/28/21:
"Massive Inflation: The Fed. Is BUYING IT ALL!
And Goldman Is 'ALL IN' On Crude Oil"
"Regulated Into the Ground"
"Regulated Into the Ground"
by Brian Maher
"How much wealthier - or poorer - would you be today absent 50 years of government economic regulation? That is, how much wealthier or poorer would you be... had the United States government stood paws off these past 50 years? Your choices are these:
A): 3.0 times wealthier
B): 1.86 times wealthier
C): 3.8 times poorer
D): 4.2 times poorer
Perhaps you would be identically rich or identically poor, despite the federal government’s chronic nosiness. Regulation counts neither plus nor minus. Let us then add a further selection:
E): No richer or poorer
Have you selected your letter? The correct answer shortly. First, a brief glance at today’s goings- on…
Business as Usual: The Federal Reserve concluded its FOMC confabulation this afternoon. As expected - widely - it sat upon its hands. No rate hikes. No foreseeable halt to quantitative easing. Mr. Jerome Powell babbled his usual mummeries… with winks and nods to Wall Street: "[The recovery is] uneven and far from complete… It will take some time before we see substantial further progress… Overall financial conditions remain accommodative, in part reflecting policy measures to support the economy and the flow of credit to U.S. households and businesses… The ongoing public health crisis continues to weigh on the economy, and risks to the economic outlook remain."
All inflationary bubblings, added Mr. Powell, are “transitory.” The stock market already guessed that rates would hold steady and that liquidity would keep pouring. Hence it met this afternoon’s announcement with shrugs. The Dow Jones lost 164 points on the day. The S&P took a 3-point trim… while the Nasdaq gave back 39 points of its own. Yields on the bellwether 10-year Treasury note advanced to 1.62%. Gold, meantime, worked a modest $2.80 gain.
But to return to our question: How much wealthier or poorer would you be today... absent 50 years of government economic regulation?
The Answer: Your choices, again, are these:
A): 3.0 times wealthier
B): 1.86 times wealthier
C): 3.8 times poorer
D): 4.2 times poorer
E): No richer or poorer
Here is the answer: A. That is, you would be thrice as wealthy absent 50 years of economic regulation. This we have on the grand authority of the Adam Smith Institute: "Federal regulations added over the past fifty years have reduced real output growth by about two percentage points on average...It's worth thinking about that for a moment. Each individual American, the society as a whole, would be three times richer than they are if there had not been that explosion of regulation of the economy since WWII."
Assume the calculations have accuracy… Every $1 in your wallet would be $3. Every $100 would be $300. Every $1,000 would be $3,000. If your account presently runs to $100,000… you would have $300,000 on your hands. And so on. And so on. And so on.
Maybe Some Regulations Are Worth the Cost? Are certain regulations worth their cost? Our minions have yet to complete their comprehensive cost/benefit analysis. But perhaps some are. For example: Industry may put a toxic chemical into the air - chemical X, hereforward. A less malign chemical substitute - chemical Y - may cost industry more money to implement. Yet government orders X’s replacement. The cost of business increases as Y comes in. Industry pushes these added costs onto its customers, who must reach deeper into their pockets for the identical product.
Is society poorer? No, it is not necessarily poorer. Society might have itself a good hard bargain... The higher price of widgets may be nothing against the future medical expenses to treat the cancers and other ailments resulting from the cheap - but toxic - chemical X. How much would society gain by substituting X for Y? None can say. All is guesswork. But the savings might be handsome. Here is the danger nonetheless…
The Camel’s Nose Under the Tent: The government is like the desert camel. Once the camel gets its nose under the tent, the body soon follows. It has the occupants in siege. And once the government noses its way into the economy through “sensible” regulation… it eventually has the economy in siege. ‘If this regulation, then why not this regulation? And why not the next?’
That is, why not more government? And as Monsieur Pierre-Joseph Proudhon once observed: "To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be [placed] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be 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. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
Government’s justice, yes; government’s morality, yes. But actual justice, actual morality?
Pettifoggers, Finger-Waggers and Junior Caesars: Over 70 federal regulatory agencies employ hundreds of thousands of pettifoggers, finger-waggers and junior caesars who hobble, harass and hagride enterprise. That is, over 70 federal regulatory agencies employ hundreds of thousands of pecksniffs, finger-waggers and junior caesars... to govern. Each year they put out some 3,500 fresh rules and regulations. The Federal Register bulges to an obscene 87,351 pages.
The St. James bible - meantime - runs to 1,281. Was God Almighty too lenient?
No hammer falls, no building rises, no plane, train or automobile budges without government say-so. Many of its edicts are idiotic. And idiocy is costly…
Regulation Costs $4 Trillion a Year: One study - coming by way of economists Dustin Chambers, Courtney Collins and Alan Krause - reveals this statistic:
A 10% increase in regulation raises overall prices 1%. Moreover, this trio concludes that the poor spend more on the goods and services most vulnerable to these price increases. Separate research indicates regulation subtracts some $4 trillion from the gross domestic product each year. The mathematics reduces $4 trillion to $13,000 for each man, woman, and child stabled happily within the United States.
Who Really Benefits? But if you believe all business withers under torrents of regulation, have a second guess. They sob about this or that rule. They moan about its added costs. But many cry the tears of the crocodile. The wealthiest businesses can absorb the added burden. Their lesser competitors cannot. Does an Amazon plump for the $15 minimum wage because it is hot to increase its labor costs - or to saddle competitors who cannot afford it? They must cut back somewhere else… or shutter their doors entirely. Either way, they are lesser than what they were. Competition, innovation slacken. Who wins? Not the people whom regulation is intended to benefit. And so regulation assists Goliath to butcher David.
The Seen vs. The Unseen: To judge a regulation’s visible benefits, we must investigate its hidden costs. As always, it is useful to seek the counsel of the late Henry Hazlitt. From "Economics in One Lesson:" "This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups…"
The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond… The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups. To which we would add: The bad economist cannot see the $3 in your wallet... that 50 years of regulation have reduced to $1. The good economist can see the $3 in your wallet. Alas, you never will..."
“When We Can No Longer Tell the Truth”
“When We Can No Longer Tell the Truth”
by Charles Hugh Smith
“Truth is treason in the empire of lies.”
- Ron Paul
“When we can no longer tell the truth because the truth will bring the whole rotten, fragile status quo down in a heap of broken promises and lies, we’ve reached the perfection of dysfunction. You know the one essential guideline to “leadership” in a doomed dysfunctional system: when it gets serious, you have to lie. In other words, the status quo’s secular goddess is TINA – there is no alternative to lying, because the truth will bring the whole corrupt structure tumbling down.
This core dynamic of dysfunction is scale-invariant, meaning that hiding the truth is the core dynamic in dysfunctional relationships, households, communities, enterprises, cities, corporations, states, alliances, nations and empires: when the truth cannot be told because it threatens the power structure of the status quo, that status quo is doomed.
Lies, half-truths and cover-ups are all manifestations of fatal weakness. What lies, half-truths and cover-ups communicate is: we can no longer fix our real problems, and rather than let this truth out, we must mask it behind lies and phony reassurances. Truth is power, lies are weakness. All we get now are lies, statistics designed to mislead and phony reassurances that the status quo is stable and permanent. The truth is powerful because it is the core dynamic of solving problems. Lies, gamed statistics and false reassurances are fatal because they doom any sincere efforts to fix what’s broken before the system reaches the point of no return. We are already past the point of no return. The expediency of lies has already doomed us.
Honest accounts of hugely successful corporations that implode share one key trait: in every case, managers were pressured to hide the truth from top management, which then hid the truth from investors and clients. This is the key dynamic in failed oligarchies as well: if telling the truth gets you sent to Siberia (or worse), then nobody with any instinct for self-preservation will tell the truth. If obscuring the truth saves one’s job, then that’s what people do. That this dooms the organization is secondary to immediate self-preservation.
A distorted sense of loyalty to the family, community, company, institution, agency or nation furthers lying as the “solution” to unsavory problems. Daddy a drunk? Hide the bottle. Church a hotbed of adultery and thieving? Maintain the facade of holiness at all costs. Company products are failing? Put some lipstick on the pig. The statistical truth doesn’t support the party’s happy story? Distort the stats until they “do what’s needed.” The agency failed to fulfill its prime directive? Blame the managerial failure on a scapegoat.
Pathological liars and cheats rely on self-preservation and misplaced loyalty to mask their own failure and corruption. A hint here, a comment there, and voila, a culture of lying is created and incentivized. Obscuring the truth is the ultimate short-term expediency. Now that it’s serious, we have to lie. We’ll start telling the truth later, we say, after everything’s stabilized, we hope. But lying insures nothing can ever be truly stabilized, so there will never be a point at which the system is strong enough and stable enough to survive the truth.
We are now an empire of lies. The status quo – politically, socially and economically – depends on lies, half-truths, scapegoats and cover-ups for its very survival. Any truth that escapes the prison of lies endangers the entire rotten edifice.
In an empire of lies, “leaders” say what people want to hear. This wins the support of the masses, who would rather hear false reassurances that require no sacrifices, no difficult trade-offs, no hard choices, no discipline. The empire of lies is doomed. Lies are weakness, and they prohibit any real solutions. Truth is power, but we can no longer tolerate the truth because it frightens us. Our weakness is systemic and fatal.”
"So We All Ran Around..."
“So we all ran around in mad, mindless, meaningless circles, as if we were in a cotton-candy eating contest where the grand prize was getting kicked in the face. We were oblivious to everything around us that no truly sane person would ever tolerate. And we needed someone else to tell us to stop it.”
- Edward M. Wolfe
"Biggest Rip-Off in World History"
"Biggest Rip-Off in World History"
by Bill Bonner
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "Finally, The Washington Post catches on… "The Fed helped fuel a stock market boom that benefited wealthy Americans – and left behind everyone else Ever since the Covid-19 pandemic struck, the Federal Reserve has gotten plenty of kudos for moves that have helped stabilize the economy, kept house prices from tanking and supported the stock market. But those successes have obscured another effect: the inadvertent impact the Fed’s ultralow interest rates and bond-buying sprees are having on economic inequality. Long-standing inequality in the United States has been exacerbated by the Fed’s role in touching off a multitrillion-dollar boom in stock markets – and stock ownership is heavily skewed toward the wealthiest Americans."
As we’ve been saying for years, the Federal Reserve’s money-printing is not “stimulus.” It’s a wealth transfer scheme. The rich get richer; the poor get poorer – thanks to the feds. Real economic growth actually slows down as the stimulus burden (debt and phony interest rates) grows heavier. The Fed’s key interest rate has been below the level of consumer price inflation for most of the last 11 years, while U.S. federal debt has more than doubled to $28 trillion. Yet, in the last four years, GDP grew at the lowest rate since the Great Depression.
Docile Capitalism: So, it’s not taxes… not greed… and not r > g (French economist Thomas Piketty’s observation that the return on capital generally exceeds the rate of economic growth) that is responsible for such a big gap between rich and poor in America; it’s the government. In his 2013 tome "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", Piketty claimed that the rich always get richer. He recognized that they “captured” the government and used it to help protect their wealth. But he missed the point. The elite always controls government… and always uses it to try to stay elite.
But mating capitalism with government gives birth to a corrupt and sterile offspring, where the motive force of real progress – creative destruction (the collateral damage of a constantly evolving economy) – has been bred out of it. In its new, gelded variety, capitalism becomes docile… and will do what it is told. Big businesses are no longer supposed to focus on their customers. Instead, they are expected to promote the elite agenda – money-printing, diversity, wars, global warming, racism… whatever the elite wants. In return, like young princes who will never wear the crown, they are subsidized… bailed out… made into celebrities… and treated like quasi-public institutions.
Comedy or Tragedy? Civilization is what you get when you allow vernacular rules – private property, math, speech, writing, real money, and “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – to develop naturally. These rules – these “restraints” – are what make it possible. What we call “capitalism” is merely the expression of the rules in economics – that is, it lets people get on with their lives and do their win-win deals.
But what a boring church it would be if no one ever tippled the sacramental wine! And what a dull world it would be if people just went about their business… respecting the rules of civilization… doing their win-win deals… making each other happier and richer. What would history be without a jackass like Robespierre… or a monster like Cromwell… or a beast like Mao? And what would today be like without a Trump or a Biden?
No, Dear Reader… we live in the world we are given. And it is either a comedy or a tragedy, depending on how you look at it.
Fake Wealth: We prefer to see the amusing side, trying to avoid getting huffy about the imbecility and venal sins of our fellow man. (We bid him to do likewise.) So we laugh at The Washington Post. The leading news source for the Deep State elite is not about to come to the obvious conclusion – that stimulus money-printing should be stopped. Deficits and the fake money are how the elite protect and expand their wealth. They are the rewards they get for “capturing” the government.
Yesterday, we guesstimated the value of that reward at $30 trillion. That is the difference between the value of household financial assets in a normal, civilized economy and those in today’s corrupted, financialized capitalism.
Between the end of World War II and the end of the 1980s, financial assets averaged about 350% of GDP. They are overwhelmingly owned by the elite, so when they go up faster than GDP, the rich get richer, compared to the rest of the population. Today, financial assets are around 500% of GDP. By our rough calculation, that is at least $30 trillion more than they “should” be. And since GDP did not keep up with it, it does not represent new wealth, but only a new claim on the existing wealth of the rest of society.
Here’s another way to look at it. During that same “normal” period – the late 1940s to 1990 – the value of all the publicly traded stocks in America was about 80% of GDP. Today, it is 195%... more than twice the “normal” rate. That alone has added nearly $20 trillion to the wealth of those who own stocks – again, the elite. Any way you cipher it, it’s the biggest rip-off in the history of the world.
Fix Inequality: The Washington Post and the rest of the elite media, economists, politicians, and business leaders are not about to stop it. An honest money system is the last thing they want. Instead, they propose to take the rich behind the woodshed… and give them a good talking-to. Raising taxes on “the rich” gives them a controllable… lobby-able… way to at least appear to fix the “inequality” problem, without really fixing anything… without squeezing rich party donors too hard… and without interrupting the scam.
And they put Bernie Madoff in jail! Ha! Ha! More to come…"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/28/21: "TODAY! The Supreme FREAK Speaks, And It Will Move The Markets"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/28/21:
"TODAY! The Supreme FREAK Speaks, And It Will Move The Markets"
"No Ways Tired in A Sea of Lies"
"No Ways Tired in A Sea of Lies"
by Chris Floyd
"I think we are living in a world of lies: lies that don't even know they are lies, because they are the children and grandchildren of lies. One of the hardest things to accept is that the reality of our world is buried under so many layers of official deception and well-cultivated public ignorance about our history and our political system. Even if you break through somehow, momentarily, and hold up a fragment of the truth, most people have no context for dealing with it. It's like a bolt from the blue, they can't process the information. And so the sea of lies closes over us again, and again, and again. And yet the reality of our future appears on the horizon, denial be damned, an irresistible tsunami of destruction, changing all our lives forever.
These are the facts, and they can't be altered. But how to respond to this catastrophe? Shall we weep, moan, rend our garments, cover ourselves with sackcloth and ashes? Shall we sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of republics? Shall we cower in the shadows and sing glamorous dirges for the Lost Cause, for vanished glories and broken dreams?
Or shall we come out fighting, unbowed, heads high, laughing fools to scorn, rejecting at every turn the moral authority of murderers and thieves to rule our lives, determine our reality, act in our name? Let's dispense with lamentation - give not a single moment to that emotional indulgence - and get right back to work, more determined than ever to bear down harder, dig deeper and excavate the radioactive nuggets of truth still glowing beneath the slag-heap of ruin.
Let's fight, let's reject, let's resist - without violence, the weapon of the stupid, the hormonal secretion of evolutionary backsliders in thrall to the chemical soup in their heads, dull primitives dressing up their ape-lust for power with scraps of religion, philosophy and cant. Let's fight these pathetic, malfunctioning wretches who lay their hands on our world and rape it like beasts in a mindless rut. Fight them with the truths we find, exposing their crimes and deadly hypocrisies to the people they've suckered, perverted and betrayed.
This is not an insurmountable task, no matter how impervious the Machine - that monstrous conglomeration of judicial bagmen, Congressional rubber stamps, psychopathic media moguls, dopehead radio ranters, sex-crazed theocrats, war profiteers, think-tank bleaters, Wall Street sharks, oilmen, Moonies, gun nuts and woman and man haters - might appear at the moment.
I don't know what else we can do, except to keep on telling as much of the truth as we can find, to anyone who will listen: reclaiming reality, fragment by fragment, one person at a time. It's an endless task - maybe a hopeless task - but the alternative is a surrender to the worst elements in our society - and in ourselves. It's worth the fight. Let's take it on. In the words of the old spiritual, let us be in no ways tired. The road back to sanity starts now."
Greg Hunter, "Covid Lies Cost 100,000 Lives"
"Covid Lies Cost 100,000 Lives"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
“When you don’t have the data and you don’t have
the actual evidence, you’ve got to make a judgment call."
"Michigan State Economics Professor Mark Skidmore revealed more than three years ago, there was $21 trillion in what he called “Missing Money” from government books. He’s doing some new number crunching surrounding public policy and the effects on the Covid 19 (CV19) pandemic. It’s all laid out in a brand new report. What he found is appalling. One big fact his research revealed is up to 100,000 lives could have been saved by using Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). Instead, the medical community and the mainstream media trashed it and told people it was “dangerous” and it “did not work.” That was a total lie. Dr. Skidmore explains, “So, we have all these countries that used it, and a number of countries, such as the United States, that for some reason did not use it and actually prevented it, claiming it was unsafe. So, our estimate is if the U.S. just allowed it and made it widely available from the beginning, we could have saved 80,000 to 100,000 lives.”
Dr. Skidmore said medical officials such as Dr. Fauci, who serves as the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, knew HCQ worked well against Corona Virus. In fact, Dr. Skidmore goes on to point out, “There was a paper published in the Virology Journal in 2005, this is the outfit that Dr. Fauci oversees. So, their journal published this paper that said HCQ was effective in treating the Corona Virus. The people who authored this study had been a part of the CDC at the time. So, we have known this for a long time. We also now know there are as many as 200 peer reviewed studies that say it is effective if taken early on when somebody gets sick. It’s pretty overwhelming evidence if you take it early on, it’s extremely effective.”
That’s not all that works, and this too was suppressed and trashed by most of the medical community.Ivermectin, Vitamin D, Vitamin C and Zinc are a few that are also proven scientifically effective to reduce or obliterate CV19. Dr. Skidmore says, “These are inexpensive ways to help protect yourself and your family. It’s overwhelming evidence that these different types of treatments are very effective.”
Another revelation of Dr. Skidmore’s study was the CDC changed the definition on how to count CV19 deaths. Skidmore says, “In the middle of the crisis last year, the CDC changed the definition on how you count fatalities, but they only did it for Covid. It amounts to this, basically, the way we counted how somebody died, was you ‘died of’ some disease of some condition. They changed the definition so that it was more characterized that you ‘died with.’ And, if the CDC would not have changed the definition for Covid deaths? Skidmore says, “I think we would have had far fewer deaths. The data suggests that if they used the old number, there would have been less (CV19 deaths).”
Dr. Skidmore’s study also points out that the vaccines were never approved by the FDA. Dr. Skidmore explains, “You can look it up. The vaccines are only authorized for emergency use, which means it’s experimental, and it’s still experimental. They are tracking it all. The (vaccine) fatalities are now up to 3,000, and there are many strange and unusual side effects that have occurred. It’s the same thing in Europe and other places. There are many reports of neurological problems, blood clots and a range of related issues. There are all kinds of negative reactions and the question, from a pure cost benefit, is how many lives are saved as opposed to how many lives are damaged from the treatment (vaccines), and we don’t really know what the injuries are, and we don’t know what the long run effects will be."
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One with Michigan State University Professor Mark Skidmore, founder of Lighthouse Economics. (There is much more in the 45 minute interview.)
Dr. Skidmore has a new website called Lighthouse Economics, and you can find it at Mark-Skidmore.com. Dr. Skidmore is a prolific writer, and his work and analysis are free to the public. Click the link to read Dr. Skidmore’s latest work called “A Cross-Country Analysis of the Determinants of Covid-19 Fatalities”
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Related:
Tuesday, April 27, 2021
"The Everything Bubble Burst! Stocks, Bonds & Housing Will Face A Catastrophic Crash"
Full screen recommended.
"The Everything Bubble Burst!
Stocks, Bonds & Housing Will Face A Catastrophic Crash"
by Epic Economist
"Real estate, bond, and stock markets are now in massive bubbles and all signs are pointing to a reckoning in all overly inflated assets. Homebuyers, investors, and the Federal Reserve have been fueling an unprecedented market mania, pouring more and more cash into overvalued investments. However, the frantic rally seems to be losing steam, and today we brought several evidences that indicate we're about to see a simultaneous explosion of epic proportions.
The Everything Bubble is a phenomenon that resulted from the simultaneous expansion of the amount of money made available for federal agencies, and, of course, favorable conditions provided by record-low interest rates. But speculators are not considering that nothing lasts forever. Easy money won't be delivered endlessly, interest rates won't stay down forever.
Problems are emerging in all sectors of our debt-driven economy, and they were here long before this crazy euphoria began. That is to say, the current market frenzy and the extraordinary demand are the determinants behind bloated valuations - not real tangible earnings, but behaviorism.
Just take a look at the housing market. In a year span, home prices soared nearly 20%, with the median sale price of an existing home reaching $329,100. But in all four major regions of the country are seeing homes selling for even higher than the asking prices.
In the Northeast, listing prices are up 21.4% from the median national price, whereas the Midwest registered a 13.5% increase, the South, 15.9%, and West 16.8%. Homes that spent decades in the market without a single offer are being snatched up right away by buyers that want to take part in the bubble and see their assets grow in value. As inventory continuously shrinks and widespread shortages of construction materials, such as lumber and plywood, are adding to the cost of homes, it is clear that there's a major asymmetry between supply and demand.
Adding low mortgage rates to the picture, we can clearly see that the housing bubble wasn't formed because the housing market has grown. Properties simply cannot keep registering surging prices eternally, as some suggest. And given that the affordability crisis is already pushing people out of the market's door, the home price bubble has to burst.
As for the bond market, the recent price action suggests the market is attempting to price-in much more economic activity than it can, creating mispricing risks, as it funds zombie companies to survive for longer, but disregards the prospects of delinquency. Bonds and yields are inversely proportional. So when bonds go down, yields go up. Up until now, the Fed has been maintaining “yield spreads” low in the entire credit spectrum to supposedly bail out the bond market, regardless of the threats of rising interest rates, inflation, and the latest CPI readings.
Once again, the problem here is balance. While 10-year yields have shot up some 240% from their lows at 0.5% in August of 2020, bonds have been collapsing to levels last seen in 2006. This yield-curve inversion reveals there are critical and structural problems with the bond market, which means it is losing its status as a safe bet and this is already causing investors to move away from bonds. The last time that happened, things did not end well.
In that sense, the bond market collapse will affect every existing bubble and trigger a domino effect of widespread failures. And that leads us to probably the greatest bubble of all - the stock market bubble. Even the New York Times recently published an article highlighting that the outstanding rally is being boosted mostly by boredom and stimulus checks, resulting in “bubbles across a wide variety of esoteric categories”.
"When you have reached this level of obvious super-enthusiasm, the bubble has always, without exception, broken in the next few months, not a few years. You can’t maintain this level of near-ecstasy. It can’t be done, because you’ve put in your last dollar. You are all in. What are you supposed to do beyond that point? You can’t borrow any more money. You can’t take any more risk. How do you keep that level of enthusiasm going indefinitely?" asked no one less than legendary investor Jeremy Grantham, adding that “the bull market’s over when the last bull puts in their last dollar. When those stimulus checks are gone, we could soon see a crash of historic proportions".
When the everything bubble bursts, simultaneously collapsing all overvalued assets, the citizenry will be crushed by debt. The signs are everywhere. Getting rich quickly has engulfed the entire nation in a madness never seen before in human history. But effortless enrichment is a delusion. And all delusions end in tears."
Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal: Freedom? How Dare You, We're in Charge!"
Gerald Celente,
"Trends Journal: Freedom? How Dare You, We're in Charge!"
A Blues Musical Interlude: Foy Vance, "Make It Rain"
Foy Vance, "Make It Rain", Original
Ed Sheeran's cover version, "Make It Rain"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/27/21: "Critical Updates! A Total FReAksHOw TOMORROW! Watch for it"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/27/21:
"Critical Updates! A Total FReAksHOw TOMORROW! Watch for it"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"The W-shaped ridge of emission featured in this vivid skyscape is known as the Cygnus Wall. Part of a larger emission nebula with a distinctive outline popularly called The North America Nebula, the cosmic ridge spans about 20 light-years. Constructed using narrowband data to highlight the telltale reddish glow from ionized hydrogen atoms recombining with electrons, the two frame mosaic image follows an ionization front with fine details of dark, dusty forms in silhouette.
Sculpted by energetic radiation from the region's young, hot, massive stars, the dark shapes inhabiting the view are clouds of cool gas and dust with stars likely forming within. The North America Nebula itself, NGC 7000, is about 1,500 light-years away.”
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...”
"Surely..."
“It’s 3:23 A.M.
And I’m awake because my great great grandchildren won’t let me sleep.
They ask me in dreams,
‘What did you do while the planet was plundered?
What did you do when the earth was unraveling?
Surely you did something when the seasons started flailing?
As the mammals, reptiles and birds were all dying?
Did you fill the streets with protest?
When democracy was stolen, what did you do once you knew?
Surely, you did something…’”
- Drew Dellinger
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