"And The Hell Of It Is..."

"We are what we pretend to be,

so we must be careful what we pretend to be."

- Kurt Vonnegut, "Mother Night"

"People are sad. People are broke. People are worried about money, people are worried that they're not enough and not amounting to anything and they don't feel good about themselves. People have rough times, and everybody's pretending it's not true, and we need to break that veneer."

- Eve Ensler

“You go up to a man, and you say, “How are things going, Joe?” and he says, “Oh fine, fine... couldn’t be better.” And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”

- Kurt Vonnegut

"Quantitative Brainwashing"

"Quantitative Brainwashing"

by Jeff Thomas

"We’re all familiar with the term, "quantitative easing." It’s described as meaning, "A monetary policy in which a central bank purchases government securities or other securities from the market in order to lower interest rates and increase the money supply." Well, that sounds reasonable… even beneficial. But, unfortunately, that’s not really the whole story.

When QE was implemented, the purchasing power was weak and both government and personal debt had become so great that further borrowing would not solve the problem; it would only postpone it and, in the end, exacerbate it. Effectively, QE is not a solution to an economic problem, it’s a bonus of epic proportions, given to banks by governments, at the expense of the taxpayer.

But, of course, we shouldn’t be surprised that governments have passed off a massive redistribution of wealth from the taxpayer to their pals in the banking sector with such clever terms. Governments of today have become extremely adept at creating euphemisms for their misdeeds in order to pull the wool over the eyes of the populace.

At this point, we cannot turn on the daily news without being fed a full meal of carefully- worded mumbo jumbo, designed to further overwhelm whatever small voices of truth may be out there. Let’s put this in perspective for a moment.

For millennia, political leaders have been in the practice of altering, confusing and even obliterating the truth, when possible. And it’s probably safe to say that, for as long as there have been media, there have been political leaders doing their best to control them. During times of war, political leaders have serially restricted the media from simply telling the truth. During the American civil war, President Lincoln shut down some 300 newspapers and arrested some 14,000 journalists who had the audacity to contradict his statements to the public.

As extreme as that may sound, this practice has been more the rule in history than the exception. In most countries, in most eras, some publications go against the official story line and may very well pay a price for doing so. But, other publications go along with the official story line to a greater or lesser degree and are often rewarded for doing so. It should come as no surprise, then, that media outlets often come to report the news in a less than accurate manner. Mark Twain is claimed to have said, "If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you’re misinformed." Quite so.

Still, only fifty years ago, much of the then "Free World" enjoyed a relatively objective Press. Even on television, reporters such as Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, etc. presented the news in a bland manner. It wasn’t very exciting, but at least it was relatively balanced and, to this day, most people who were around then still have no idea as to whether reporters like Walter Cronkite were liberal or conservative. Although he was a committed Democrat, he never allowed that to significantly color his reporting.

But today, we have a very different corporate structure as regards the media. The same six corporations hold the controlling interest of over 80% of the media. And those same corporations also own a controlling interest in the military industrial complex, Wall Street, the major banks, Big Pharma, etc.

What we’re witnessing today is media having been transformed into something more akin to a three-ring circus than journalism of old. This is no accident. The present travesty that is the 21st century media, is journalism in name only. So, why should this be so?

Well, as it happens, people tend not to like governments dominating their lives – simple as that. And yet, the primary objective of any government is to increase its size and power as rapidly as the populace will tolerate it. The only reason that they rarely do this quickly, is that they can’t get away with it. Like boiling a frog, it takes time to lull the populace into submission, bit by bit. Once having had enough time to do so, there comes a point at which the government becomes woefully top-heavy, as well as unworkably autocratic. At such times, all that’s necessary to make people rebel is an economic crisis.

Such is the case in much of the world today – the EU, the US, Canada, etc.. Even in their arrogance, the powers that be have to be aware that they’re right at the tipping point. An economic crisis would almost certainly push the situation over the edge. When truth threatens to undermine machinations for self-aggrandizement, individuals tend to obfuscate in order to delay the inevitable fallout. Governments are no different.

So it was that, in 1999, the largest banks entered into a massive lending scam that would most certainly collapse within a decade. However, before putting the scam in place, they arranged for a "bailout" by the government, which would effectively pass the bill to the taxpayer, while the banks themselves simply increased their own wealth massively. Of course, QE, as massive as it was, was a mere Band-Aid solution. All those involved (big business and the government) understood that it would hang like a sword of Damocles over the economy until it inevitably came crashing down – a fate far worse than if QE had never been implemented.

And so, for those entities to have invested into the domination of the media was, in fact, essential. Had they not done so, it’s entirely likely that, with a free press, the man on the street would, by now, have figured out that he’d been hoodwinked. Thus do we see the journalistic equivalent of Quantitative Brainwashing, in which the inevitable realization is delayed for as long as possible. And, in order to make sure that the public do not figure out what’s been done to them, the news reporting becomes Orwellian in its endless repetition of a false narrative.

It is, however, true that, "You can’t fool all of the people all of the time." Eventually, the Band-Aid peels back to reveal an infection that’s far beyond what had been generally perceived. It then falls away in layers, as increasing numbers of people become aware that they’ve been scammed – that the media is entirely corrupt and that the media’s owners – big business - have, with the enthusiastic compliance of the government, robbed them on a wholesale basis.

It’s clear the Fed’s money printing is about to go into overdrive. The Fed has already pumped enormous distortions into the economy and inflated an "everything bubble." The next round of money printing is likely to bring the situation to a breaking point. We’re on the cusp of a global economic crisis that could eclipse anything we’ve seen before. Historically, that’s when the jig is up. What happens then is a matter of historic record."

- internationalman.com

The Daily "Near You?"

Troy, Virginia, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death"

"This Species is Amusing Itself to Death.

The Addictive Contaminated Media Reality"

By Dr. Gary G. Kohls

“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” – Roger Waters

“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund

“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.”

 – Dresden James

“A lie gets halfway around the world before

the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

 – Winston Churchill

"30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. (Free download below.) The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.

The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.

But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/ age-inappropriate, pornographic sex and pornographic violence-saturated televangelist/political-contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.

SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years: In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said,

“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”

Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.

Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said: “And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”

Postman ended his book by writing: “what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”

A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:

“Amused To Death”

by Roger Waters

"Doctor, Doctor what’s wrong with me?

This supermarket life is getting long.

What is the heart life of a color TV?

What is the shelf life of a teenage

queen?

Ooh western woman

Ooh western girl

News hound sniffs the air

When Jessica Hahn goes down

He latches on to that symbol of

detachment

Attracted by the peeling away of

feeling

The celebrity of the abused shell

of the belle

Ooh western woman

Ooh western girl

And the children of Melrose strut

their stuff

Is absolute zero cold enough?

And out in the valley warm and clean

The little ones sit by their TV screens

No thoughts to think

No tears to cry

All sucked dry down to the very

last breath.

Bartender what is wrong with me,

Why I am so out of breath?

The captain said excuse me ma’am,

This species has amused itself to death

We watched the tragedy unfold,

We did as we were told.

We bought and sold,

It was the greatest show on earth.

But then it was over,

We oohed and aahed,

We drove our racing cars,

We ate our last few jars of caviar,

And somewhere out there in the stars

A keen-eyed look-out

Spied a flickering light

Our last hurrah.

And when they found our shadows,

Grouped ‘round the TV sets,

They ran down every lead

They repeated every test,

They checked out all the data in

their lists.

And then the alien anthropologists

Admitted they were still perplexed.

But on eliminating every other reason

For our sad demise,

They logged the only explanation left.

This species has amused itself to death

No tears to cry

No feelings left

This species has amused itself to

death…"

- https://www.globalresearch.ca/

○

Freely download “Amusing Ourselves to Death:

 Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, by Neil Postman, here:

- https://interesi.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/amusing.pdf

"In Ordinary Times..."

"In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its way into our minds, there are plenty of things we can do to drive the intruder away. We can get the car out or go to a party or to the cinema or read a detective story or have a row with a district council or write a letter to the papers about the habits of the nightjar or Shakespeare's use of nautical metaphor. Thus we build up a defense mechanism against self-questioning because, to tell the truth, we are very much afraid of ourselves."

- Dorothy L. Sayers

"How It Really Is"

"7 Examples That Show How Completely And Utterly Insane Our Society Has Become"

"7 Examples That Show How Completely 

And Utterly Insane Our Society Has Become"

by Michael Snyder

"Reading the news has become like going to a freak show. You never know what you are going to see each day, but it is almost certainly going to be nutty. Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article are weird, others are infuriating, but they all point to the same conclusion. From the very top to the very bottom, America is going crazy. And I mean that in the worst way possible. We truly have become an “idiocracy”, and it seems like those that are the most incompetent of all are often rewarded by being elevated to the top of the food chain. Meanwhile, those of us that still try to approach things rationally are increasingly being pushed to the fringes of society.

If you don’t understand the point that I am trying to make, hopefully things will become clearer by the time you complete this article. The following are 7 examples that show how completely and utterly insane our society has become…

#1 At a time when global food supplies are getting tighter and tighter, Joe Biden wants to pay farmers to not grow anything in order to fight climate change… "President Joe Biden wants to combat climate change by paying more farmers not to farm. But he’s already finding it’s hard to make that work. His Agriculture Department is far behind its goal for enrolling new land in one program that has that goal, with participation being the lowest it’s been in more than three decades.

Thankfully, relatively few farmers are grabbing the cash that Biden is offering, because prices for agricultural commodities have soared as global supplies have tightened. So in a desperate attempt to get more farmers to sign up, the Biden administration has “more than doubled key incentive payments”… "Even though the USDA this summer more than doubled key incentive payments for the program that encourages farmers and ranchers to leave land idle, high commodity prices are keeping it more worthwhile for growers to raise crops. On top of that, the plan, known as the Conservation Reserve Program, takes land out of production for only 10 to 15 years - so those acres could release carbon into the atmosphere if the land is planted again and thus cancel out its environmental benefit." Considering where global trends are heading, paying farmers not to produce food is one of the stupidest things that our government could possibly be doing at this moment.

#2 We are now learning that the chaotic evacuation in Afghanistan could have been conducted much, much differently. According to the Washington Post, the Taliban actually offered a deal to the Biden administration that would have allowed the U.S. to secure the entire city of Kabul… "In a hastily arranged in-person meeting, senior U.S. military leaders in Doha – including McKenzie, the commander of U.S. Central Command – spoke with Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political wing. “We have a problem,” Baradar said, according to the U.S. official. “We have two options to deal with it: You [the United States military] take responsibility for securing Kabul or you have to allow us to do it.”

Can you imagine how much more orderly the evacuation of Americans and allied Afghans could have gone if U.S. forces had actually secured all of Kabul? Needless to say, ISIS forces would have likely never gotten close enough to bomb the airport. But instead of accepting the opportunity to secure all of Kabul, U.S. officials decided to hand Kabul to the Taliban and crowd everyone that needed to be evacuated into the airport… "On the spot, an understanding was reached, according to two other U.S. officials: The United States could have the airport until Aug. 31. But the Taliban would control the city."

It is hard to believe that our officials could actually be this incompetent, but nobody will even be held accountable for this decision because we really do live in an “idiocracy”.

#3 One of the hottest new social media trends is to show off the fact that your body is inhabited by multiple “beings”… "Several TikTok and YouTube accounts of such broken people, who refer to themselves as a “host” or “system” of multiple beings, have millions of online followers. They exhibit their various personalities for online notoriety in the guise of “educating” and “promoting awareness.” One TikToker who says she has DID explains in a Q&A about her personalities, “I can’t force anyone [inside me] to come out but I can communicate very well within the system and ask someone to come out, but sometimes it’s very involuntary.”

Why in the world would “millions of online followers” want to watch these people manifest their various “personalities”? And can’t most of those “followers” actually understand what is really going on with these people?

#4 A 43-year-old man took his parents to court after they threw out his porn collection. Instead of laughing the case out of court, a judge in Michigan has awarded him more than $30,000 in damages… "A judge has ordered a western Michigan couple to pay $30,441 to their son for getting rid of his pornography collection. U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney’s decision this week came eight months after David Werking, 43, won a lawsuit against his parents. According to NBCDFW, he said they had no right to throw out his collection of films, magazines, and other items. Werking had lived at their Grand Haven home for 10 months after a divorce before moving to Muncie, Indiana. The judge followed the value set by an expert, MLive.com reported. The value of the collection was “set by an expert”? What kind of sick credentials does someone need to become “an expert” in that field?"

#5 After denying a transgender student the ability to use a particular bathroom, a school board in Virginia has been forced to pay out over 1.3 million dollars… "A Virginia school board will pay more than $1.3 million to the American Civil Liberties Union after losing a court battle involving a transgender student who sued the school over its bathroom policy. According to the Virginian-Pilot, the Gloucester County School Board on Thursday agreed to pay the ACLU the full amount of costs and fees associated with its representation of one of its former students, Gavin Grimm, marking the end of a lengthy six-year legal fight."

As word of this case spreads around, schools all over the nation will be deathly afraid to ever tell anyone what bathrooms they can or cannot use. Nobody will want to be the next victim to get hit with a million dollar lawsuit, and it probably won’t be too long before the “boys” and “girls” signs on school bathrooms disappear entirely.

#6 When I was growing up, the American flag was proudly displayed in our classrooms and we said the Pledge of Allegiance every day. But today the American flag is being taken down in classrooms all over America, and one public school teacher in California is urging her students to pledge allegiance to a new flag… "A Southern California public school teacher was caught admitting to encouraging her students to pledge allegiance to the LGBT pride flag as an alternative to the American flag, bragging of the indoctrination on her own TikTok account.

The teacher, identified as Kristin Pitzen of Newport Mesa School District in Orange County, recounts taking down the American flag, and then pointing to the LGBT flag as an alternative. “We do have a flag in the class that you can pledge allegiance to,” said Pitzen when a student asked about the American flag that she had removed from the classroom “because of COVID.”

#7 In recent days, Joe Biden has been encouraging officials all over the country to impose extremely strict vaccine mandates. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin is insisting that “no one should be forced to get a jab”… “Vaccination is the main weapon against the spread of the virus. Importantly, no one should be forced to get a jab. Pressure, where people may lose their jobs, is even less acceptable. People must be convinced of the need to get the vaccine,” he said."

When even Vladimir Putin is significantly less tyrannical than the guy that is running your country, you have got a major problem on your hands. When I was growing up, people would risk everything to flee the Soviet Union so that they could experience true freedom in the western world. Could we soon get to a point where Americans are actually fleeing to Russia so that they can “live free”?

It seems like such a bizarre question to ask, but this is how bad things have gotten in the United States. We live in a society where up is now down, good is now bad, and lies are now truth.

Our nation has become a giant circus, and the crazies are running the show. It will be entertaining to watch for a little while, but it won’t be too long before the entire thing comes crashing down on top of all of us."

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

"A Heedless Aftermath"

"A Heedless Aftermath"

by Jim Kunstler

"For all the seeming power of the Deep State - a.k.a. the “Intel Community” - one really has to be impressed by its stupidity and desperation. It can’t keep secrets or cover its tracks. Anyone who was paying attention to the RussiaGate operation has seen the published evidence of all the lawless behavior it spawned and knows the names of all the players. Ditto, the effort to engineer the 2020 election and install an obviously senile puppet-stooge in the White House. And ditto the effort to manufacture the Covid-19 crisis by hijacking the public health apparatus of the federal government.

Yet, this Deep State rogue menace is stumbling badly now because it didn’t figure out the basic dynamic of the long emergency: that over-investments in complexity inexorably produce disorder and collapse. This includes the complexity of the Deep State itself, a sprawling enterprise choking on the immense stream of data it feeds on and the fumbling efforts of its all-too-human agents to weaponize all that. The question now is whether the Deep State will collapse - even perhaps get forcefully defeated by Americans who oppose it - before the entire country and all its support systems collapse.

Events are on the loose well beyond the Deep State’s control now. Its front man, “Joe Biden,” sealed his fate last week with the bungled exit from Afghanistan. Thirteen dead US soldiers may only be the preview of a Grand-Guignol to come as the victorious Islamic maniacs get to stage atrocities starring the thousands of Americans and other Westerners left behind. Why wouldn’t they? For decades, they’ve promised to defeat and humiliate their “infidel” enemies. Remember the video-recorded beheadings of Nicholas Berg, Daniel Pearl and many others? The roasting of the captured Syrian pilot in a steel cage?

There’s no need to even ask the rhetorical question: who planned and executed the buggered-up evacuation of Kabul. It is self-evident: the entire chain-of-command. This is finally galvanizing half the country not in thrall to the Deep State to move against it, and that’s what you’ll see in the weeks to come. They will get rid of this imposter “Joe Biden” - if the Deep State doesn’t try do it first - and then they will “cancel” the Deep State’s attempt to manage any succession to the vacancy at the top.

Do you suppose that you will not be hearing any results of the Arizona election audit just because the endeavor went silent last week when three audit team members got sick with Covid? The process was not stopped or squashed. The report will show a gross and startling disparity between the results certified and the actual ballots counted. That will blow away the tatters of legitimacy “Joe Biden” has been wearing, revealing the larval, sightless creature hiding inside.

The CDC and its allied agencies have maxed-out on Americans willing to vax-up. The latest FDA switcheroo move to “approve” the not-yet-produced (or trialed) genetic therapy agent, “Comirnaty” was intended to fool the public into thinking that the current Pfizer-BioNTech “vaccine” was likewise approved. It is not approved. It is still being administered under the emergency use authorization. The quisling news media is lying about it. Anyway, the half of the country that declines to take a cocktail that fails to act as a true vaccine (i.e., preventing disease), and threatens to fatally attack the lining of their blood vessels… that large swathe of the public is good and goddam sick of being pushed around with mandates and threats.

We will not submit. We’re nearing the end of this medical reign of terror. The trouble is, the medical establishment won’t survive it. They’ve perverted and undermined what used to be called science - truth-driven inquiry into what’s real and what is not - and, anyway, the medical system had already poisoned itself with racketeering so outlandish and cruel that it makes the old Mafia look like a charity organization. Not only do Americans get a Covid virus whose development was funded and guided by America’s chief public health official, Tony Fauci, but if it puts them in the hospital, their doctors deny them treatment with efficacious medicines, and, if the patients happen to survive the ordeal, they’re hit up with million-dollar bills. This conduct exhibits a kind of sadism that goes beyond just adding insult to injury.

Half the country is also paying attention to the invasion of border-jumpers coming in from Mexico with the assistance of the Deep State. They’re also noticing “Joe Biden’s” failure to comply with the recent US Supreme Court decision that he must enforce the standing procedure to return “asylum-seekers” to Mexico to await any decision on their eligibility. Many of these migrants come from the farthest corners of the world, including places full of people who don’t like us or our country. How many of them are coming here to blow things up and shoot American citizens? Nobody knows. The Deep State doesn’t want to know and they don’t want you to find out.

Finally, there is the question of the financial system which, lately, has become the proxy for what used to be the productive US economy, its Potemkin false front. The various plans to spend about $8-trillion in non-existent money on more social experiments such as paying citizens to be idle, would have been enough to sink American money, the US dollar. Now that the world has witnessed the humiliating withdrawal of the US from our 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, the process will accelerate. The world sees that we can’t be depended on in any foreign crisis. They know we no longer produce things of value. What are we good for, exactly? Absurd ventures in gender confusion and race hustling? Drugs and pornography? Is that what stands behind the dollar?

Former (as of yesterday) Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller returned to YouTube yesterday. He represents exactly how pissed off that better half of the nation is, the half that refuses to bend over for the Deep State, the half that is looking to run it down and call it to account for attempting to destroy the country six ways to Sunday."

- https://kunstler.com/

Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/30/21: "Markets: Look How This Is Being Set Up! The MIC Is In Full Control"

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

Only the consequences are real - to you!

Your guide:

Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/30/21:

"Markets: Look How This Is Being Set Up!

 The MIC Is In Full Control"

-  https://traderschoice.net/

"How It Really Is"

 

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 8/30/21"

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 8/30/21"

○

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will

do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

- John Maynard Keynes

○

"The more I see of the monied classes,

the better I understand the guillotine."

- George Bernard Shaw

○

MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates

- https://www.marketwatch.com/tools/marketsummary

CNN Market Data:

- https://money.cnn.com/data/markets/

CNN Fear And Greed Index:

- https://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/

○

A comprehensive, essential daily read.

- http://www.shadowstats.com/

August 29th to 31st, Updated Daily

○

Financial Stress Index

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

○

Daily Job Cuts

- https://www.dailyjobcuts.com/

○

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

○

- https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/

○

- https://wallstreetonparade.com/

○

- https://www.whatreallyhappened.com/

○

- https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/

○

Commentary, highly recommended:

- https://www.theburningplatform.com/

○

And now, the End Game...

○

Oh yeah...

Musical Interlude: Peder B. Helland, "Unknown Lands"

Full screen recommended.

Peder B. Helland, "Unknown Lands"

Beautiful fantasy music ("Unknown Lands" ) composed

 by Peder B. Helland. Enjoy relaxing music with ethereal voices,

 cello and piano while you let your thoughts wander.

"Viral Infographic Reveals The Shocking Amount Of Military Hardware Biden Handed To The Taliban"

"Viral Infographic Reveals The Shocking Amount 

Of Military Hardware Biden Handed To The Taliban"

by Tyler Durden

"When President Biden leaves billions of US military hardware in the hands of America-hating terrorists - after having seven months to "plan a withdrawal" - he doesn't mess around.

Click image for larger size.

According to a now-viral infographic from The Sunday Times, above, ongoing terror operations will benefit from the luxury of more than 22,000 Humvees, 42,000 pick-up trucks and SUVs, 16,000 night visions goggles and devices, 64,000 machine guns, and 358,000 assault rifles.

Indeed, while Biden wants to strip law-abiding Americans of their constitutional right to bear arms, he's put over 400,000 of them in the hands of terrorists. "Biden gave the Taliban 350,000 assault rifles but wants to take yours away." -https://t.co/o55Oozyp7o

- Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) August 29, 2021

Needless to say, the vast trove of US military hardware handed to America's enemies on a silver platter should, at minimum, make Raytheon - whose board Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sat on until he joined the Biden admin - very happy."

- https://www.zerohedge.com/

2500 dead Americans over 20 years... $2.3 Trillion spent...

$83 billion in weapons, vehicles just left there.

Excuse me, but WTF?!

NO ONE THOUGHT OF THIS?!

"We Are Witnessing Incompetence On A 

Colossal Scale Throughout Our Society"

We had better pray to God Almighty we 

never have a war against Russia or China...

“The FED Can’t Stop The Coming Financial Crisis; Bankruptcy Of America”

Jeremiah Babe, PM 8/29/21:

“The FED Can’t Stop The Coming Financial Crisis; 

Bankruptcy Of America”

"Get Prepared For A Massive 80% Stock Market Crash By The End Of 2021"

Full screen recommended.

"Prepared For A Massive 80% Stock

 Market Crash By The End Of 2021"

by Epic Economist

Warnings about a looming stock market crash have grown louder this week as inflation levels soared and investors are getting increasingly concerned about Fed tapering. Since hitting bottom in March 2020, the S&P 500 has rallied by more than 45%, and it just hit a new record high last week, now up more than 1% for the year. However, there are many reasons to believe that the rally is unsustainable and that overvalued stocks could face a reckoning and collapse soon. Even though many market watchers and financial strategists in Wall Street see that stock valuations are extremely extended and will end up canceling returns in the long-term, no one sees a stock market crash as sharp as the one David Hunter is calling for taking place this year as inflation spirals out of control.

The chief macro strategist at Contrarian Macro Advisors, argues that the US economy is in the middle of a massive “bust” consisting of two phases. Phase one was the initial bear market and short-lived recovery witnessed last year. We're now in the second phase of the bust, according to Hunter, which will lead us to a much steeper downturn than the first phase. The expert outlines that the government's and the Fed's stimulus measures have failed to boost many sectors of the economy that needed fiscal support. As a result, hundreds of thousands of businesses have gone bankrupt, and thousands more are still on the line. That's why Hunter Hunter predicts we’ll see much more insolvency during the second phase.

What we will witness is “a bear market of historic proportions,” culminating with the S&P 500 around 800 - yes, you heard that right. “Basically the biggest bear market since the ‘29 crash,” Hunter highlights. This downfall will occur very rapidly. “Faster than what we saw in 2008/9. We can go from peak to trough in less than six months". The coming crash will be a result of decades of debt buildup and other forms of leverage. "This dynamic worked great on the way up, which is why you had the highs we had, but they really punish you on the way down - and they also speed up any declines,” the investor explained.

The 48-year market veteran believes that the Fed will be forced to tighten policy much sooner than most investors anticipate. Hunter has a very specific vision of where markets could go in the months ahead. Up until this point, his predictions have been accurate. He said it before and reiterated this week that he believes the S&P 500 will top in mere weeks from now. And even though the topping process might keep investors' hopes up for a while, as stocks may test their highs again after peaking, when the fall approaches, he said, "stocks will begin their descent toward a 65-80% drop from around 4,500 levels". "So I believe in the next few months, you’ll see. I’ve been calling from 4,200-4,500 on the S&P - I think you’ll see that this year and probably by this fall. And melt up means it’s going to go parabolic. It’s going to get even steeper than it’s been out of the March trough," he said.

"I've been of the belief that inflation is going to get to a point where the Fed's going to have to tighten way sooner than people are anticipating, and that it will -- because of the fragility in the global system - it will lead to a much faster, much steeper decline than anybody expects," he concluded. Once again, his prediction seems to be right on track, especially considering that the Fed announced on Friday that they plan to begin tapering by year-end as opposed to previous statements ensuring that the taper process would only start in 2023. In response, stocks faced another jump as investors took the statement as a sign of economic strength and as proof that more strict tightening remains months away in the future.

But Hunter believes the Fed is going to be forced to take drastic action than just reducing the volume of bonds they're buying per month, which right now is $120 billion. As for when the stock market crash will happen, the market veteran believes stocks are close to a peak, and a subsequent burst will unfold over the next two-to-three months. However, he argues, if inflation indicators continue to jump higher than expected, prompting a more serious Fed reaction than anticipated and blindsiding investors, the stock market bubble will explode way before they have time to run for the exits, resulting in what can be the greatest combined wealth loss in world history. Beware the risks because things are rapidly changing and a stock market crash of major proportions is just a matter of time."

- https://www.youtube.com/

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Full screen highly recommended.

Moby, "Love Of Strings"

Life, glorious Life...

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Have you ever seen the Pleiades star cluster? Even if you have, you probably have never seen it as large and clear as this. Perhaps the most famous star cluster on the sky, the bright stars of the Pleiades can be seen without binoculars from even the depths of a light-polluted city. With a long exposure from a dark location, though, the dust cloud surrounding the Pleiades star cluster becomes very evident.

The featured exposure covers a sky area several times the size of the full moon. Also known as the Seven Sisters and M45, the Pleiades lies about 400 light years away toward the constellation of the Bull (Taurus). A common legend with a modern twist is that one of the brighter stars faded since the cluster was named, leaving only six of the sister stars visible to the unaided eye. The actual number of Pleiades stars visible, however, may be more or less than seven, depending on the darkness of the surrounding sky and the clarity of the observer's eyesight."

- https://apod.nasa.gov/

"Openings In Heaven..."

"Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven

 where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines

 down upon us to let us know they are happy."

~ Eskimo saying

"At Last..."

“At last, the answer why. The lesson that had been so hard to find, so difficult to learn, came quick and clear and simple. The reason for problems is to overcome them. Why, that’s the very nature of man, I thought, to press past limits, to prove his freedom. It isn’t the challenge that faces us, that determines who we are and what we are becoming, but the way we meet the challenge, whether we toss a match at the wreck or work our way through it, step by step, to freedom.”

- Richard Bach, “Nothing by Chance”