So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
"Keep on Truckin’"
"Keep on Truckin’"
By Bill Bonner
"Truckin’, like the do-dah man
Once told me “You’ve got to play your hand”
Sometimes your cards ain’t worth a dime
If you don’t lay ‘em down."
– "Truckin’," by Grateful Dead
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "In the year we were born – 1948 – the Ford F-Series pickup truck also made its debut. The old stove kept on trucking – with incremental improvements – over the next 72 years. The improvements were the natural consequence of technological innovations, which were incorporated into the truck design as they came along. Electric windows, power brakes, power steering, automatic transmissions, big, comfy, power-adjusted seats – these upgrades are now the source of sterile argument in the economics profession.
There are those who believe that the real price of a new truck should be adjusted downward because it is a better truck today than it was in 1948. “You get more for your money,” they say. “So inflation is not as bad as it looks.” And there are those who think a price is a price. (More on that in a future Diary.)
Rising Prices: What people care about is not their absolute wealth (how rich they are compared to a savage 10,000 years ago… or an F-Series buyer in 1948), but how rich they are compared to other groups around them, or to their own brothers-in-law. It is galling to see others get richer than you are… especially when you think they might be up to something. It is even more annoying to see yourself getting poorer, as prices rise faster than your income. And it is alarming to see your country driven into the ditch by the doo-dah diddleheads in Washington.
The recent numbers, for example, show food prices rising. The price of bacon rose 87 cents per pound in the last year, or 16.3%, according to Porkbusiness.com. At $6.22 per pound, bacon is just below its 2017 all-time high of $6.36. Retail pork prices set an all-time high of $4.32 per pound in April (up 11% on the year).
And then there’s beef. Retail prices for choice beef hit $6.76 per pound in April. Except for the period between May and July of last year – when everyone was stocking up on beef for lockdowns – that’s the highest price on record, according to Steiner Consulting. Boneless choice sirloin steaks are now at least $9.34 per pound in some American grocery stores (8.7% higher than a year ago).
Housing prices are rising even faster. And let’s not forget the year-over-year increase of 19.1% in median U.S. house prices for existing homes. That median price is now $341,600, an all-time high. And the 19.1% increase was the biggest year-over-year price gain on record. The previous year-over-year record was 16.6% in 2005 – two years before the housing bubble burst and triggered a Global Financial Crisis. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that wages for private industry workers increased 2.8% in 2020. So housing is going up nearly seven times faster than incomes.
And the Wall Street Journal adds more detail: "Home prices in the U.S. have shot up in the past year, driven by limited supply, record-low interest rates and buyer demand. Bidding wars have spread from such high-profile locations as Palm Beach, Fla., and the suburbs outside New York City to smaller cities and towns, including long-neglected locales where properties typically sat on the market for months.
The median listed price for a house jumped 24% in January from a year earlier in the metropolitan area surrounding Allentown, [PA] the Rust-Belt city whose decline was memorialized in a 1982 Billy Joel song, according to data from Realtor.com. It was the same in such spots as Martin, Tenn., a small city 150 miles from Nashville, where the median asking price went up 159% over the same period; in Kendallville, Ind., about 30 miles outside Fort Wayne, it climbed 56%."
Unaffordable Housing: These prices were no accident. They were caused by the Federal Reserve. It pushed down interest rates (just as it did before the housing bubble of 2005-2007), thus making housing speculation attractive. Many of the buyers are large corporations. They can borrow money at near-negative rates. Then, they can rent the houses out for a huge return on capital. Or they can sell them. If they borrow at 3%… and housing goes up at 19% – they enjoy a 16% win… and an almost infinite gain on real investment.
Houses today are bigger, with air-conditioning and indoor plumbing. But in terms of price and time (the ultimate… and immutable… “money”), housing is once again becoming unaffordable. In 1971, when the fake-money system began, you could buy the typical American house for about $25,000. Today, it’s almost 14 times as much.
In 1971, the average American worker earned around $3.60 per hour. So it would have taken him 173 weeks (at 40 hours per week) to buy the average house. Today, the average wage is about $25 per hour. At that rate, he’ll have to work 341 weeks to buy the house. Yes, the new house may be “better”… but so what? Existing houses – including those built before 1971 – are also expensive. And maybe – with their solid wood doors… hardwood floors… and brass fittings – even better.
More Expensive Wheels: So let’s turn to transportation. Last Wednesday, Ford unveiled its radical new F-150 Lightning. It’s all electric, with a 300-mile range on the “extended” battery version. It also allows you to work power saws and other machinery directly from the pickup, without needing a generator.
It looks like a nice truck. And with the tax credits, the basic model can be cheaper than a gasoline-powered model. Ford took more than 44,000 orders for the new truck within 48 hours of the launch. The list price is “around $40,000,” we were told. So let’s look at that in terms of time. At today’s $25-per-hour wage, it will take a working man 40 weeks to buy his new electric wheels.
Back in 1971, the old-fashioned, carbon-burning, “fifth generation” F-100 cost about $2,300. Divide that by the $3.60 wage… and you get 639 hours… or just under 16 weeks! Is the new electric model really worth nearly three times as much time? It’s got plenty of “electronics.” But our experience is that the electronics are often time wasters. They make things hard to figure out… and impossible to fix. And charging a big battery takes time. Should that be added to the cost?
Relatively Poorer: And if the cost of food, shelter, and transportation is going up – in terms of the time it takes to get them – aren’t we getting absolutely poorer, not richer? And if that is so, how come? The U.S. empire is the richest in history. But that doesn’t make it immune to the traps and temptations that have bedeviled all previous empires – including the obvious one, fake money. And even with technological progress continuing to make most things absolutely cheaper, and more abundant… man – aided and guided by his jackass elites – can still make a terrible mess of things. Stay tuned."
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Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/25/21: "INCREDIBLE! Today the Fed. Says: 'INFLATION IS NOT REAL.'"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 5/25/21:
"INCREDIBLE! Today the Fed. Says: 'INFLATION IS NOT REAL.'"
"Warnings Of A Dramatic Inflationary Collapse Just Keep Getting Louder"
"Warnings Of A Dramatic Inflationary
Collapse Just Keep Getting Louder"
by Michael Snyder
"Signs of impending economic doom continue to grow all around us. For years, highly respected experts have been warning about the steady destruction of our standard of living and the death of the U.S. dollar. Perhaps you didn’t listen to those voices at first, and that is understandable. Most Americans have their hands full making a living and taking care of their families. But then housing prices started to go absolutely nuts, health costs continued to spiral out of control and a trip to the grocery store just kept getting more painful. At this point, nobody can honestly deny that inflation has become a major problem.
But even though the chorus of voices that is warning of a dramatic inflationary collapse is growing by the day, the Federal Reserve just keeps pumping more giant piles of money into the financial system, and the federal government continues to engage in the most reckless spending binge in the entirety of U.S. history.
Despite the utterly insane policies of our “leaders”, the U.S. economy continues to languish in economic purgatory. Trillions upon trillions of dollars have been poured into the economy, and yet the U.S. still has 8.2 million fewer jobs than it did last February. They had hoped to create an “economic boom”, but instead they are setting the stage for an implosion of epic proportions. In fact, John Williams of shadowstats.com insists that we are “eventually headed into a hyperinflationary economic collapse”…
So, is the choice inflation or implosion? Williams says, “That’s the choice, and I think we are going to have a combination of both of them. I think we are eventually headed into a hyperinflationary economic collapse. It’s not that we haven’t been in an economic collapse already, we are coming back some now. The Fed has been creating money at a pace that has never been seen before. You are basically up 75% (in money creation) year over year. This is unprecedented. Normally, it might be up 1% or 2% year over year. The exploding money supply will lead to inflation. I am not saying we are going to get to 75% inflation - yet, but you are getting up to the 4% or 5% range, and you are soon going to be seeing 10% range year over year. The Fed has lost control of inflation.”
And remember, when the Fed has to admit the official inflation rate is 10%, John Williams says, “When they have to admit the inflation rate is 10%, my number is going to be up to around 15% or higher. My number rides on top of their number.”
You don’t want to believe Williams? That is fine. He has just been right time after time over the years. But feel free to ignore him if you wish.
If you are determined to ignore the truth, you probably will not like what Egon von Greyerz is saying either… "As technological developments and markets go parabolic, we observe many market “experts,” even intelligent ones, forecasting that we are now in an exponential economic era. Thus many believe that this will go on forever. This is the typical attitude at market and economic tops and guarantees that THIS WILL NOT END WELL!
It is clearly absolute nonsense to believe that exponential expansion based on deficits, debts and fake money is the beginning of a new era. Anyone studying the economy and history of markets knows that exponential moves indicate the end of an era and not the beginning. As I have repeatedly said, history is our best teacher and it both rhymes and repeats itself. And history now gives us dire warnings."
If you wish to reject what these experts are telling us, can you point to another time in history when officials have wildly created new money and everything has turned out just great? “New money” is always such a tempting solution, because every time it always seems to work at the beginning. It is kind of like a tonic that instantly makes you feel better for a few hours but that ultimately kills you in the end as you keep taking it.
Now that we have greatly accelerated our journey toward an inflationary collapse, even Warren Buffett has started to sound the alarm… “We are seeing substantial inflation,” Warren Buffett told attendees at last week’s annual Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. “We are raising prices. People are raising prices to us, and it’s being accepted.”
Ordinary Americans are searching for “inflation” online more frequently now than they have in more than a decade, data from Deutsche Bank strategist Jim Reid shows. But CNN insists that everything is going to be just fine. So that means that we don’t have anything to be concerned about, right?
Personally, I am deeply concerned about the second half of this calendar year, and it appears that I am not the only one. Billionaires and corporate insiders have been offloading stocks at a very brisk pace in recent weeks… "When the country’s CEOs and billionaires start to head to the exits a little bit quicker than usual at the tail end of a 13 year bull market, it may be time to start paying attention."
That’s what we found noteworthy about a recent Bloomberg piece, which noted that stock sales by some of the world’s richest shareholders are “reaping a windfall”, thanks to our current inflated equity markets, “to the tune of trillions”. Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and Google co-founder Sergey Brin are just two of the well known names that have been offloading stock. They are joined by names like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry Ellison.
If you have been snoozing for the last few years, now is the time to wake up. Because we are steamrolling toward an economic implosion that will make the history books, and our economic problems are just one element of the “perfect storm” that our society is facing. But a lot of people out there are going to be absolutely blindsided by what is coming, because they have no interest in listening to the warnings. Instead, they have placed their trust in the talking heads that the corporate media puts on television, and those talking heads keep assuring us that everything is going to be just fine."
Monday, May 24, 2021
Musical Interlude: James Taylor, "You Can Close Your Eyes"
"You Can Close Your Eyes"
"Well the sun is surely sinking down, but the moon is slowly rising.
So this old world must still be spinning round, and I still love you.
So close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right.
I don't know no love songs, and I can't sing the blues anymore.
But I can sing this song, and you can sing this song, when I'm gone.
It won't be long before another day, we gonna have a good time.
And no one's gonna take that time away. You can stay as long as you like.
So close your eyes, you can close your eyes, it's all right.
I don't know no love songs, and I can't sing the blues anymore.
But I can sing this song, and you can sing this song, when I'm gone."
- James Taylor
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Large galaxies and faint nebulae highlight this deep image of the M81 Group of galaxies. First and foremost in the wide-angle 12-hour exposure is the grand design spiral galaxy M81, the largest galaxy visible in the image. M81 is gravitationally interacting with M82 just below it, a big galaxy with an unusual halo of filamentary red-glowing gas.
Around the image many other galaxies from the M81 Group of galaxies can be seen. Together with other galaxy congregates including our Local Group of galaxies and the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, the M81 Group is part of the expansive Virgo Supercluster of Galaxies. This whole galaxy menagerie is seen through the faint glow of an Integrated Flux Nebula, a little studied complex of diffuse gas and dust clouds in our Milky Way Galaxy."
The Poet: James Broughton, "Quit Your Addiction"
"Quit Your Addiction"
“Quit your addiction
to sneer and complaint.
Try a little flaunt,
Call for comrades
who bolster your vim
and offer you risk.
Corral the crones,
Goose the nice nellies,
Hunt the bear that hugs
and the raven that quoths.
Stay up all night
to devise a new dawn...”
- James Broughton,
“Little Sermons of the Big Joy”
"Eventually You Understand..."
"That's where it all begins. That's where we all get screwed big time as we grow up. They tell us to think, but they don't really mean it. They only want us to think within the boundaries they define. The moment you start thinking for yourself- really thinking- so many things stop making any sense. And if you keep thinking, the whole world just falls apart. Nothing makes sense anymore. All rules, traditions, expectations- they all start looking so fake, so made up. You want to just get rid of all this stuff and make things right. But the moment you say it, they tell you to shut up and be respectful. And eventually you understand that nobody wants you to really think for yourself.”
- Ray N. Kuili, “Awakening"
"25 Basic Skills You Should Master To Prepare For The Imminent Economic Collapse"
Full screen recommended.
"25 Basic Skills You Should Master To
Prepare For The Imminent Economic Collapse"
by Epic Economist
"Wildfires, storms, floods, pest infestations, supply chain disruptions, and economic collapse can all happen unexpectedly. A disaster - whether is natural or a result of human actions - can turn life upside down and change society as we know it in a blink of an eye. Here in the United States, we have experienced all of those calamities over the past year and we became unpleasantly aware of how our leaders are unprepared to handle a national emergency. Threats of economic collapse continue to emerge as our country's vulnerabilities have been exposed to the whole world. And this might be particularly dangerous at a time of growing tensions with other economic superpowers because now they know where our blind spots are at. And as the entire globe is fragilized and leading economies are facing steep recessions, our resource-rich country becomes an obvious target. The last thing you want to do is to wait until things have gone wrong to start acting.
We have been facing exceedingly tough challenges over the past 17 months, and we've learned the hard way how much a single disaster or disruption can impact everyone's lives. And there are many more challenges ahead as we approach another season of extreme weather conditions, while widespread shortages are getting even worse, civil turbulence continues to erupt across major cities and our power grid and water systems remain vulnerable to external attacks. But something we do not need to learn the hard way is how life can radically change in a snap of fingers. It's possible to prepare in advance and to set our minds into learning skills that can ensure our survival. So that when things go south you won't get desperate trying to do everything you postponed all at once, you will only have to readapt your mindset, grab your essentials and head out.
Developing the mental and emotional capabilities needed to make it through times of crisis are also survival skills that can be learned. Many may think that this sort of ability will come naturally, as we often adapt to situations that arise unexpectedly. However, when a disaster occurs, it might become extremely hard to keep calm and to think clearly amid the rising chaos. Having some techniques of situational awareness in mind will allow you to assess the situation you're in with more care and will definitely be of great advantage to you.
We have previously discussed about the supplies you will need to ensure your survival after the imminent economic catastrophe, but just as important are the skills you need to develop to adapt to any situation and any place you're in. Supplies may be incredibly helpful, but they can be stolen, burn, or lost in a storm, but the knowledge and skills you have will stay with you no matter what. That's why today, we listed 25 basic skills you need to master before the next economic collapse or any type of disaster. Take some time to learn them and also stimulate your family members or your group members to learn them as well.
The time to get ready for the next economic collapse is not after it has already happened. It’s right now. So don't wait until it's too late, check out this list and start preparing today."
"How They Use Fear to Control You"
Full screen recommended.
Sofo Archon,
"How They Use Fear to Control You"
"Whether you know it or not, fear is constantly being used against you."
"Happy Birthday"
"Happy Birthday"
by Jim Kunstler
"We step back from the disorders and idiocies of the moment to wish Bob Dylan a happy 80th birthday. He entered the scene in a previous moment of national disorder, the Sixties, as we call that wild era when we Boomers came of age and turned the world inside out for a while, flinging our ids into a raging zeitgeist. Bob was actually a little older, not quite a boomer, born seven months before the US entered World War Two.
This is important because he was poised perfectly on the front end of that breaking wave in a particular way that I will try to explain. When he stole into New York City from his Midwest Nowheresville in the winter of 1961, he was unformed, ambitious, intelligent, cunning, and not yet grown up. He did his growing up in public over the next decade. He acted it out in the songs he wrote. It was the essence of what he meant to those of us who trailed behind him. He instructed us in the mystery of what it means to come through adolescence into consciousness, and he did it with a matchless artistry that, once he got traction, made his competitors look barely adequate. It’s easy to understand how being cast in that role irked him, but that’s how it was.
It was Bob who turned the long-playing record album into the art-form of my generation. Before that, the pop music scene in America just amounted to different sorts of adolescent fluff, clichéd hormonal yearnings of boys and girls for each other. It was a long way from the Everlys’ “Wake Up Little Susie” to Bob’s “Visions of Johanna.” He was twenty-four when he wrote it in late 1965 (and then recorded it in February, 1966). Twenty-four is about the age when the judgment region of the human brain finally develops, and the song spells out vividly the jarring wonder of becoming a fully-equipped adult - and recognizing it! The subject of the song isn’t a girl anymore, she’s a woman, with such cosmic ramifications that “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.”
Lyrics like that - and Bob generated them by the bale then - just made everybody else’s songs seem a little lightweight and silly. The Beatles came close around exactly the same time with their venture into songs of full-fledged adulthood in the album Rubber Soul, but they were not able to bring the focus of a single sensibility to it the way Bob did, and they knew it.
Anyway, Bob had been leading up to that for years lyrically. He had a comfortable childhood back in Minnesota, but it was a harsh place. He absorbed that and summed it up with dazzling concision and specificity in songs like “North Country Blues” about a failing family in a failing town where the iron ore mines are shutting down and there is no such thing anymore as the future. Similarly, “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” which is the story of a despairing farmer who kills himself and his family of six out on the lonesome South Dakota prairie. These were stories about other people and other lives, reportage from the scene, with more resonance than Walter Cronkite could ever hope to bring to it.
When Bob wrote about himself and his own strange journey, more and more he populated that dreamscape with a hallucinatory cast of characters: dwarves, madonnas, hermit monks, cowboy angels, drunken politicians, Napoleon-in-Rags, the mystery tramp… Imagine how weird it was to be Bob in those few years. He barely had to struggle to become famous, was rolling in dough before he was twenty-five, and had every jerk-off workaday Johnny journalist tugging at sleeve whenever he left the house begging him to explain how the world worked. No wonder he played cute with them, claimed he was “just a song-and-dance man,” when everybody knew better. And amazingly, he pulled it off.
Once he completed that transformation into adulthood, he had pretty much done his duty, and everything after that has been a long coda, with not a few flashes of the old brilliance like these stupendous lyrics from his 1985 song “Dark Eyes”:
A cock is crowing far away and another soldier’s deep in prayer,
Some mother’s child has gone astray, she can’t find him anywhere.
But I can hear another drum beating for the dead that rise,
Whom nature’s beast fears as they come and all I see are dark eyes
Sounds like what’s going on ‘out there’ right now, don’t you think? He deserved that Nobel Prize. I’m glad he’s persevered through all these years and still goes on stage and keeps putting out tunes. I met him once back in 1975 when I worked for Rolling Stone Magazine. It was after a benefit concert in San Francisco in the Fairmont Hotel. I couldn’t help greeting him like an old friend, and was foolishly surprised to realize that he didn’t know me from a hole in the wall. Anyway, I’m glad we shared these decades together on this marvelous planet and I salute him on his birthday for what he gave that has lived inside me all these years."
"Here's A Question..."
“Here’s a question every angry man and woman needs to consider: How long are you going to allow people you don’t even like – people who are no longer in your life, maybe even people who aren’t even alive anymore – to control your life? How long?”
- Andy Stanley
“That goes for old wounds, too, you know. I really wish we’d had the chance to talk before this,” he says, cracking the window so the smoke can escape. “There’s a Longfellow quote I have stuck on my bulletin board at the church office – ‘There is no grief like the grief that does not speak’ – and it’s true. I’ve found that keeping pain inside doesn’t give it a chance to heal, but bringing it out into the light, holding it right there in your hands and trusting that you’re strong enough to make it through, not hating the pain, not loving it, just seeing it for what it really is can change how you go on from there. Time alone doesn’t heal emotional wounds, and you don’t want to live the rest of your life bottled up with anger and guilt and bitterness. That’s how people self-destruct.”
- Laura Wiess
"Saving Civilization"
"Saving Civilization"
by Robert Gore
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed
citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
- Margaret Mead
"Imagine you had been picked as a juror for the Derek Chauvin trial. Before you hear a shred of evidence, you very well might make a decision most people would not only admit was the better part of valor, but that harmonized perfectly with prevailing morality.
Your pretrial verdict? Guilty. There had been threats since Chauvin was charged with second and third degree murder and second-degree manslaughter that acquittals would provoke rampaging riots. After the riots last summer, no one could doubt the threats’ credibility. A guilty verdict on all counts could avoid injuries, deaths, and billions of dollars in property damage. Against those consequences, what do the rights or the life of a policeman matter? You’re predetermined verdict is for the greater good.
Even if such considerations never entered your head, you’d need extraordinary courage and independence to impartially hear the evidence and if you thought it warranted, vote for acquittal. You’d have to withstand pressure from your fellow jurors. You’d run the risk that your personal information was leaked by some mainstream or social media scumbag and mostly peaceful thugs showed up at your door. You might be canceled out of a job, your business network, and your social circle. Your privacy would be obliterated and reputation ruined in the wilting glare of nonstop publicity and odium. Politicians and other public figures would denounce you.
The chance that one such person would land on the jury was remote, the chance of twelve nonexistent. Under the inverted standard of justice that prevailed, the outcome was always going to be dictated not by the facts of the case, reasoned consideration of the evidence, deliberation, and the applicable law, but by “social considerations,” which is a polite way of saying the mob.
The mob hailed the verdict as justice. It’s the same justice as John Gotti’s three acquittals after his goons intimidated jurors. Chauvin was guilty unless proven innocent beyond a “reasonable” doubt as defined by the mob. In the same vein, the policeman who shot and killed Ashley Babbitt at the Capitol is not guilty—without a trial—because that’s what the mob demanded. Such blatant contradiction is mob justice.
A morality that confers “rights” on mobs and strips those of an individual is the morality of savages. Maxine Waters is a savage, but so too are the members of the Minneapolis City Council who agreed to pay George Floyd’s estate $27 million before Chauvin’s trial had begun, the judge who recognized the prejudicial unfairness of Waters’ inflammatory statements but passed the buck for doing anything about it to the appellate courts, and the political, media, and celebrity jackals from Joe Biden on down who’ve been howling for Chauvin’s conviction since Floyd’s death.
Whatever the justifications they cite for their pre-verdict demands, they are implicitly insisting that Chauvin’s rights are of no consequence. When the “rights” of some outweigh the rights of one, anything goes. There are people who call for reducing the world’s population to 500 million, which implies a genocide of over 7 billion. That such people are on university faculties rather than denounced and shunned as advocates of mass murder shows just how far the barbarism of collectivist justification has advanced, even when the collective embraced is a fraction of the number of individuals whose lives are to be canceled!
Service and sacrifice are the watchwords of government, the ultimate mob. Who’s served and who’s sacrificed? There has never been a government that has not arrogated to itself the privilege of using force and fraud to strip individuals of their production, their property, their rights, their liberty, and ultimately, their lives. That privilege is governments’ defining essence and is the privilege that has always threatened humanity. The rationales and rhetoric are invariably collective: the demands of the mob supersede individual rights and individual justice.
Is there any other kind of justice? Injustice to one cannot be justice for the many, no matter how many “warriors” stand with the many. It’s mob rule or individual rights—there is no other choice. The savages and cannibals denying individual rights can claim no rights for themselves; there will always be more violent savages and cannibals. It’s a race to the bottom when brutality reigns. The United States government, its foundational albeit imperfectly realized commitment to individual rights completely abandoned, is fast sinking to the nadir.
The high and mighty savages among us believe they can employ the brutality of more overt savages for their own ends. However, the overt savages, because they’ve abandoned even the facade of decency, are closer to the bottom and are therefore winning the race.. Spared the effort of pretense, those who nonchalantly bash store windows or heads won’t hesitate to bash high and mighty heads that hold mistaken notions of who’s the boss. In the race to the bottom, the most ruthless and bloodthirsty win.
Nothing will be fair about the coming fight. It’s no use whining about the other side’s lack of principles, its lies, hypocrisy, unfairness, ruthlessness, and control of virtually every important institution. They’re evil totalitarians, what the hell do we expect? Their principle is absolute power and they’ll do whatever is necessary to acquire and keep it.
Robert Gore, “The Gray Curtain Descends, Part 2,” SLL, January 14, 2021
The trial for Derek Chauvin and the lack of one for the Capitol Hill policeman (name still unknown) are another reminder—not that any are needed—that savages aren’t fair. It’s pathetic and ludicrous to expect an appellate court to grant Chauvin a new trial, although it would have ample grounds to do so in anything resembling a fair judicial system.
It’s like saying, “Wait until 22 and 24!” or, “Wait until the Arizona vote audit!” after last year’s blatant election theft. The savages have instituted corrupt arrangements that will enshrine their power in perpetuity. Expecting them to tolerate anything that would jeopardize those arrangements is like expecting water to run uphill. Fair or even quasi-fair elections would threaten their power. They are, like fair trials, but a memory.
Savages beget savagery and nothing else, until they are stopped or they stop themselves. Don’t count on them recognizing the production—a civilized and thereby forbidden act—and the producers—civilized and thereby forbidden people—that keep them fed and alive. And don’t count on them not making your weaponry, your last line of defense, a use it or lose it proposition.
They recognize no limits, certainly not the constraints imposed by reality. They may have to lay waste to the world before whomever remains of the honest and productive realize that their lives are a defend them or die proposition. For decades, America’s rulers and their accomplices have said about the enemies of the day: they only understand force. It’s projection, ascribing to others one’s own motivations. They’ve dressed it up in all sorts of verbiage, from Make the World Safe for Democracy to We’re All In This Together, but force is what they understand and to which they’ll always resort. The only thing that will stop them is superior force more competently wielded.
Abandon your mind and life is one big scary mystery. In their perpetual, pervasive fear of everything, savages will always respond to superior force. The civilized are abandoning savage strongholds, seeking refuge in states that still demonstrate a vestigial respect for individual rights, the font of civilization. These aren’t nirvanas of freedom, but they’re better than what’s left behind.
Live and let live are not options for savages; they have to prey on someone. The migrants may find relief in their new locales, but unless they’re prepared to defend them that relief will prove temporary. Having run out of victims at home, the savages will invade, plunder, and destroy any place that maintains a modicum of freedom, production, prosperity, and civilization.
Unless their would-be victims repel them. The U.S. is fracturing and that should be encouraged, as may it eventually lead to de facto political separation. However, as separatists found out in 1776 and 1861, it’s one thing to declare new political arrangements, it’s quite another to establish, maintain, and defend them. However, the separatists have most of the advantages.
Governments produce nothing, they mostly destroy. The U.S. government is destroying itself and the nation with debt, confiscatory taxation, redistribution, corruption, a blizzard of laws and regulations, and maintaining a crumbling global empire in the face of challenges from Russia and China.
Government of the savages, by the savages, and for the savages doesn’t have much to draw on, and decades of propaganda have told savages to look to the government for every need. Vegetarian stew in every pot, two Teslas in every garage, paid for diplomas on every wall, a band-aid for every scratch, and a kiss for every boo-boo are just the minimum of what they’ve been told to expect. If they don’t get them it’s the selfish civilized’s fault. But who will they blame when the selfish civilized skip town or quit? And who will feed them?
The separatists will have the productive capabilities. Many of the country’s honest entrepreneurs (as opposed to its crony socialists) have already migrated. They will also have military expertise, especially after the savages eliminate retrograde rightwingerism and transform the US military into the most diverse, empathetic, and politically correct conflict resolution force the world has ever seen. (Oh, how the world trembles!) Notwithstanding the many thanks they’ve received for their service to the savages’ government, many veterans will join the civilized.
After last year’s mostly peaceful riots and the January 6 Insurrection That Nearly Overthrew The Most Exceptional Government In History, many savages bought firearms for the first time. Unfortunately for them, there’s a big difference between buying a firearm and knowing what to do with it, and most of that knowledge (and millions of firearms) are on the side of the vets and the civilized.
Many of the vets have also received on-the-job training in guerrilla warfare, against which the US government is batting zero. The government has many scary weapons, but it has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to keep such weapons out of the hands of its adversaries. Perhaps the separatists will prove as clever and capable as the Vietnamese, al Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban, and Iraqis and other groups have been at capturing US government weaponry. Notwithstanding their diversity, empathy, and political correctness, the conflict resolution forces would then find their weapons turned against them.
Among the separatists it can be assumed there will be experts in drones, robots, artificial intelligence, computer hacking, remote-controlled munitions, biological warfare, and most other future-war technologies, ready, willing, and able to employ their skills for the cause. There might even be some experts in good old-fashioned fission and fusion. While those are legacy technologies, they still have their uses.
At this point, imagination is far more important than a deer-in-the-headlights’ fixation on present realities, because those realities are changing so quickly and chaotically. When the ground is continuously shifting under your feet, you can’t know where you are with any certainty. Your chance of saving yourself depends on knowing where you want to go and having an idea of how to get there.
Skepticism about imminent revolutionary change is understandable, but often betrays a misunderstanding of how revolutions in politics, science, culture, art, philosophy, learning, and all other fields of productive human endeavor work. The explosion visible to all is almost always preceded by a long, burning fuse visible to few and understood by fewer, only generally apprehended after the explosion.
The burning fuse in this case is the awesome force of decentralization sweeping the planet; the revolution is actually well underway. Centralization is a legacy idea and government is its legacy institution. After centuries of centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government failures, and after the failure of the most centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government in history, legions of intellectuals of impaired intellect and infinitesimal imagination still hail or fear a centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical global government. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of people out there trying to institute such a government, but they’re building a three-foot-high wall of beach mud and sand against a tidal wave.
That wave will arrive, of that there can be no doubt. Afterwards people will point to some contemporaneous event as the catalyst, but the catalysts have been accumulating for decades, their leitmotif decentralization. Multi-volume sets could be written about them all. (Maybe someday I’ll give it a try, knowing multitudes of new ones will pop up after I’m gone.) Just a sampling: microchips, computer networks, 3D printing, nanotechnology, satellites, blockchains, personal computing, cell phones, cable television, GPS, charge-injecting fluids (4rysprays.com), the production and distribution of do-it-yourself video, publishing, and music, the fall of the Soviet Union, the irreconcilable tension between Chinese entrepreneurialism, brilliance, and free inquiry on the one hand and the Chinese government on the other, the bankruptcy of the welfare states, Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests, IEDs, shoulder-fired missiles, drones, hacking, blue-to-red-state migration, secessionism, the coming dissolution of the EU, and the coming collapse of governments and their fiat currencies, to name but a few.
Don’t get too attached to today; tomorrow it’s gone. The questions that will emerge from the chaotic maelstrom: Freedom or tyranny? Civilization or savagery? Anyone who chooses civilized freedom is going to have to fight for it, but it’s a fight that can and will be won."
"How to Stop Caring About What Other People Think"
"How to Stop Caring About What Other People Think"
by Mark Manson
"Every few months, I sit down and answer about a dozen reader-submitted questions on video and upload them to my website. This quarter’s most popular question was a classic, a question I might get more than any other: "How do I stop giving a f*** what other people think about me?" Like an excellent burrito, I answered this question in three layers: the short answer, the long answer, and the unexpected answer. You can watch my full response on my YouTube channel. Watch: "How to Stop Caring What Other People Think".
I also answered questions regarding advice for young people in their 20s, why the self-help industry is so fucked up, what my views are on nature vs nurture, hard discussions about sex, and much more. You can watch all of the videos, including dozens of previous videos, on my website’s Ask Mark Anything page. Note that the AMA videos on the site are for site members only. You can learn about site membership, my courses, videos, and member’s articles here.
2. Hate is proportional to audacity - An unfortunate fact of life is that you will receive hate from others in proportion to the audacity of your goals. The more ambitious and unconventional your aims, the more people will try to deter you, tear you down, criticize you, and so on It’s easy to sit here and complain that this shouldn’t happen - but actually, it should. Humans are a social species, and we are strongly biased towards the status quo. That’s because the status quo is likely more stable and beneficial than most alternatives.
Therefore, when someone comes along with a big, bold idea that challenges the status quo, most people will instinctively look for reasons why it’s wrong or won’t work. They will challenge it, criticize it, ridicule it, and make lame jokes about it on Twitter. And I would argue this is a good thing. For one, most ideas are bad. Therefore, if an idea can’t survive being dunked on a few dozen times, then it’s better off being left for dead. But second, as the audacious-idea-haver, it forces you to have a deep conviction in what you're doing.
3. The uneven distribution of awareness - This will be the last installment of my ongoing discussion of whether or not today’s society is "too aware". To catch people up real quick, two weeks ago, I suggested that perhaps social media has caused an over-abundance of awareness of social issues, which has become counterproductive. Last week, after many reader responses, I wrote that perhaps it’s not that we’re too aware of the problems of the world, but not aware enough of the solutions.
Well, after another round of discussion with a lot of thoughtful readers, I think I’ve come to a firm conclusion on what I believe about this subject:
• In the social media age, we have transitioned from a few people knowing a lot about their own particular cause, to everyone knowing a little bit about every cause.
• For a few social causes, this might be beneficial. But for many social causes, it’s probably unhelpful at best, and deeply distracting and counterproductive at worst. Most social causes likely need highly dedicated, highly informed activists working for long periods of time. This is pretty much the opposite of what social media activism is.
• The unfortunate side effect of this shallow awareness of every issue is that large numbers of people have become incredibly and irrationally pessimistic about the future. They have a superficial understanding of the problem without really knowing the facts, history, or trade-offs involved with that problem. Therefore, the internet gets flooded with bad takes and lots and lots of angry people writing mean things to each other.
• This widespread pessimism and occasional hysteria occasionally erupts into large and often misguided political movements. Protesting becomes performative - more about signalling which crowd you identify with rather than any actual cause.
• The ineffectiveness of these political movements and protests eventually generates greater pessimism and frustration, and then it’s hello darkness, my old friend.
What can we do about this? As always, follow a strict attention diet. Choose better information sources - i.e., follow experts over influencers. Get comfortable with finding and thinking in terms of statistics rather than stories (most statistics show things getting better; most stories show things getting worse). Learn to ask yourself, "What if I’m wrong?" - and then ask it all the damn time. Practice empathy, especially with those whom you disagree. Put the phone away and maybe go outside.
Eat a burrito. Pet a dog. Look at a sunset or something. You’re going to be fine."
Sunday, May 23, 2021
“Lucky Money Will Run Out; Crypto Currency Chaos; Unsustainable Lifestyles; Bitcoin Smashed”
Full screen recommended for scenic views.
Jeremiah Babe,
“Lucky Money Will Run Out; Crypto Currency Chaos;
Unsustainable Lifestyles; Bitcoin Smashed”
Gregory Mannarino, 5/23/21: "Markets, A Look Ahead: The Fed. ADMITS U.S. Economy Is Slowing"
Gregory Mannarino, 5/23/21:
"Markets, A Look Ahead:
The Fed. ADMITS U.S. Economy Is Slowing"
Musical Interlude: Giovanni Allevi, “Back To Life”
Full screen recommended.
Giovanni Allevi, “Back To Life”
"A Look to the Heavens"
“How many arches can you count in the below image? If you count both spans of the Double Arch in the Arches National Park in Utah, USA, then two. But since the above image was taken during a clear dark night, it caught a photogenic third arch far in the distance- that of the overreaching Milky Way Galaxy. Because we are situated in the midst of the spiral Milky Way Galaxy, the band of the central disk appears all around us.
The sandstone arches of the Double Arch were formed from the erosion of falling water. The larger arch rises over 30 meters above the surrounding salt bed and spans close to 50 meters across. The dark silhouettes across the image bottom are sandstone monoliths left over from silt-filled crevices in an evaporated 300 million year old salty sea. A dim flow created by light pollution from Moab, Utah can also be seen in the distance.”
"One Summer Night..."
"One summer night, out on a flat headland, all but surrounded by the waters of the bay, the horizons were remote and distant rims on the edge of space. Millions of stars blazed in darkness, and on the far shore a few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of human life. My companion and I were alone with the stars: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could be seen only once in a century, this little headland would be thronged with spectators. But it can be seen many scores of nights in any year, and so the lights burned in the cottages and the inhabitants probably gave not a thought to the beauty overhead; and because they could see it almost any night, perhaps they never will."
- Rachel Carson
"If You Do Not Know..."
"First of all, although men have a common destiny, each individual also has to work out his own personal salvation for himself in fear and trembling. We can help one another to find the meaning of life no doubt. But in the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for "finding himself." If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence. You cannot tell me who I am and I cannot tell you who you are. If you do not know your own identity, who is going to identify you?"
- Thomas Merton
"Covid-19 Pandemic Update 5/23/21"
"Covid-19 Pandemic Update 5/23/21"
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“When you don’t have the data and you don’t have
the actual evidence, you’ve got to make a judgment call."
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SUN MAY 23, AT 1:00 PM: "Fauci Finally Admits COVID-19 May Have Come From Wuhan Lab, 'Not Convinced' Of Natural Origin"
SUN MAY 23, AT 2:00 PM: "Wuhan Lab Workers Were 'So Sick They Sought Hospitalization' According To US Intelligence" "They may represent 'the first known cluster...'"
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May 23, 2021 10:08 AM ET:
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 152,347,200
people, according to official counts, including 32,419,582 Americans.
Globally at least 3,194,600 have died.
May 23, 2021 10:08 AM ET:
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"The COVID Tracking Project"
Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases,
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
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"The individual comes face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists. The American mind has not come to a realization of the evil which has been introduced into our midst. It rejects even the assumption that human creatures could espouse a philosophy which must ultimately destroy all that is good and decent."
- J. Edgar Hoover
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Related, highly recommended:
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Related:
“The Stench of Political and Financial Corruption”
“The Stench of Political and Financial Corruption”
By Jesse
“Wall Street had been doing business with pieces of paper; and now someone asked for a dollar, and it was discovered that the dollar had been mislaid. It was an experience for which the captains of industry were not entirely prepared; they had forgotten the public. It was like some great convulsion of nature, which made mockery of all the powers of men, and left the beholder dazed and terrified. In Wall Street men stood as if in a valley, and saw far above them the starting of an avalanche; they stood fascinated with horror, and watched it gathering headway; saw the clouds of dust rising up, and heard the roar of it swelling, and realized it was only a matter of time before it swept them to their destruction... But it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair, "The Moneychangers"
"You are a den of vipers and thieves. I intend to rout you out, and by the grace of the eternal God, I will rout you out." - Andrew Jackson
It was discovered that in all that blizzard of corruption, and the paper that covered it up, that the very basis of the value of things had been 'mislaid.' And then the deluge came. If you listen to the reasoning of 'free market' types, and their paid mouthpieces and demagogues, this kind of thing could not happen, because companies, being rational and focused on the long term, would not allow tainted meat with their name on it to be sold into the markets.
They would not risk the lawsuits, and damage to their reputations. It is a similar argument that holds that financial markets need only light regulations because people will manage their own behavior for the ultimate good, with almost perfect rational and altruistic self-constraint.
But alas, we know this is not true, as anyone who ever travels on a major highway can tell you. People and their tendencies to greed and careless stupidity require a certain association of people in a society for their common good, to take on not only large tasks with common and broad benefits to the pubic, but also in order for the majority to protect themselves from criminals, cheats, sociopaths, and plain old ignorant selfishness. This is why we establish police and fire departments, and have health laws, for example.
Government is never perfect. But its occasional flaws and corruption are no reason to do away with it. The power of government must be held in balance, but so must the power of private wickedness.
If you bother to look into the history of certain types of laws, especially those designed to protect the public, and the often long progressive efforts of many dedicated souls to achieve them, from civil rights to basic food safety to voting rights to consumer protections against financial fraud, you can see what they have accomplished, and how their effectiveness must be upheld and occasionally renewed, since the corrupting power of easy money respects few if any boundaries.
Goodness may occasionally falter, but evil never sleeps. And as many are now discovering, telling the truth becomes a subversive act, in times of general deceit. Notice the patterns of smears and dehumanization of certain types of people. This is how it begins.
And so it seems that every other generation forgets the lessons learned by their grandparents, and casts off their protections in fits of foolishness fuelled by the sweet words and slogans of the pampered princes of easy money, and their puppets, who will say and do anything for power and position. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, and this is surely the story of the last thirty years, especially in the area of financial regulation, and the political standards of oaths and stewardship.”
"Maybe..."
“Maybe we’re not supposed to be happy. Maybe gratitude has nothing to do with joy. Maybe being grateful means recognizing what you have for what it is. Appreciating small victories. Admiring the struggle it takes to simply be a human. Maybe, we’re thankful for the familiar things we know. And maybe, we’re thankful for the things we’ll never know. At the end of the day, the fact that we have the courage to still be standing is reason enough to celebrate.”
- “Grey’s Anatomy”
Greg Hunter, "Inflation & Implosion – Hyperinflation in 2022"
"Inflation & Implosion – Hyperinflation in 2022"
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
Economist John Williams, founder of ShadowStats.com, says the Federal Reserve has painted itself into such a tight corner with the economy it really has only two choices. Williams says it comes down to “Inflation or Implosion.” What would happen to the financial system if the Fed stopped printing massive amounts of money for stimulus and debt service? Williams explains, “You could see financial implosion by preventing liquidity being put into the system. The system needs liquidity (freshly created dollars) to function. Without that liquidity, you would see more of an economic implosion than you have already seen. In fact, I will contend that the headline pandemic numbers have actually been a lot worse than they have been reporting. It also means we are not recovering quite as quickly. The Fed needs to keep the banking system afloat. They want to keep the economy afloat. All that requires a tremendous influx of liquidity in these difficult times.”
So, is the choice inflation or implosion? Williams says, “That’s the choice, and I think we are going to have a combination of both of them. I think we are eventually headed into a hyperinflationary economic collapse. It’s not that we haven’t been in an economic collapse already, we are coming back some now. The Fed has been creating money at a pace that has never been seen before. You are basically up 75% (in money creation) year over year. This is unprecedented. Normally, it might be up 1% or 2% year over year. The exploding money supply will lead to inflation. I am not saying we are going to get to 75% inflation—yet, but you are getting up to the 4% or 5% range, and you are soon going to be seeing 10% range year over year. The Fed has lost control of inflation.”
And remember, when the Fed has to admit the official inflation rate is 10%, John Williams says, “When they have to admit the inflation rate is 10%, my number is going to be up to around 15% or higher. My number rides on top of their number.”
Right now, the Shadowstat.com inflation rate is above 11%. That’s if it were calculated the way it was before 1980 when the government started using accounting gimmicks to make inflation look less than it really is. The Shadowstats.com number cuts out all the accounting gimmicks and is the true inflation rate that most Americans are seeing right now, not the “official” 4.25% recently reported.
Williams says the best way to fight the inflation that is already here is to buy tangible assets. Williams says, “Canned food is a tangible asset, and you can use it for barter if you have to. Physical gold and silver is the best way to protect your buying power over time.” Gold may be a bit expensive for most, but silver is still relatively cheap. Williams says, “Everything is going to go up in price.”
When will the worst inflation be hitting America? Williams predicts, “I am looking down the road, and in early 2022, I am looking for something close to a hyperinflationary circumstance and effectively a collapsed economy.”
Join Greg Hunter on Rumble as he goes One-on-One
with John Williams, founder of ShadowStats.com.
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Related:
SUN MAY 23, AT 2:30 PM: "Apples-to-Apples, Consumer Price Inflation Is Nearing 1970-Type Numbers"
“The Crash Is Not Stopping; Signs Of A Failing Economy; Worst Is Yet To Come”
Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe,
“The Crash Is Not Stopping;
Signs Of A Failing Economy; Worst Is Yet To Come”
"Our True Friends..."
“Our true friends are those who are with us when the good things happen. They cheer us on and are pleased by our triumphs. False friends only appear at difficult times, with their sad, supportive faces, when, in fact, our suffering is serving to console them for their own miserable lives.”
- Paulo Coelho, "The Zahir"
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"Positively 4th Street"
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