Jeremiah Babe, PM 8/31/21:
“Banks Will Seize Your Money During Crisis;
Families About To Be Homeless”
So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Dan, iAllegedly, PM 8/31/21: "Huge Changes are Coming to the Economy in September - I’m Back!"
"Huge Changes are Coming to the Economy in September - I’m Back!"
"There are huge changes are coming to the Economy. The rent moratorium is finally over. There is no more pandemic unemployment. Inflation is that a 30 year high and there are a tremendous amount of people still in forbearance."
"Home Price Bubble Climbing Faster Than The Mortgage Bubble: Prepare Yourself For Housing Crash"
Full screen recommended.
"Home Price Bubble Climbing Faster Than The Mortgage Bubble:
Prepare Yourself For Housing Crash"
by Epic Economist
"The housing market euphoria seems to have gone too far and now it is flashing a danger signal, indicating that inflated home prices are at risk of facing a sharp crash. The unprecedented housing market frenzy of 2021 set one record after the other, with, of course, the help of artificially suppressed interest rates, historically low inventory levels, and the mass exodus trend in which millions of people fled away from urban centers looking for suburban and rural areas. In one year, home prices skyrocketed by nearly 17 percent, according to the national Case-Shiller index, and are now 38.1% above their 2006 peak.
The relentless price growth turned homes 25% more overvalued than residential rents, approximately 50% above normalized levels when factoring in inflation, and over 25% more overvalued than income measures like the employment cost index, according to data compiled by David Rosenberg, the chief economist and strategist at Rosenberg Research. The strategist said that a "Black Swan" event will likely lead us to a housing bubble burst. "The ‘Black Swan’ is the inevitable collapse in U.S. home prices -- they are in the stratosphere benchmarked against all the fundamental factors that drive valuations," wrote Rosenberg. This means that a real estate bubble burst is looming.
A fresh study released by Equipment Radar exposed that US home prices have surpassed the 2005-2006 housing bubble, which was followed by the catastrophic 2007-2010 subprime mortgage crisis. Although fundamentals are different today than during the previous housing bubble, the risk of a sharp drop in prices is once again here. “U.S. home prices have risen rapidly over the past 12 months due to a variety of factors including low-interest rates, shortage of available housing, and a robust economy following government fiscal stimulus,” explains the Equipment Radar report.
Another factor impacting home prices highlighted in the study is the cost of building supplies and lumber. “Input costs are rising and inflation is back – this is no secret if you visit a grocery or hardware store on a regular basis. Companies are seeing their input prices increase too, and for many, it is a much greater degree,” it says. The report concludes that the recent home price surges could be “stickier than the 2005/2006 cycle due to higher building costs and low inventory of homes available for sale".
Meanwhile, the fierce competition means that many properties are selling at prices significantly higher than their original listing price, which of course gives the upper hand to wealthy investors and firms as opposed to first-time buyers and lower-income families. For instance, about ten years ago, an average house in Columbus, Ohio would sit on the market for about 100 days before being sold. Now, a similar property sells in less than 10 days. In Austin, Texas, median home prices surged 40 percent year on year, according to online real estate brokerage Redfin. In Phoenix, Arizona, prices jumped by 30 percent, while in Detroit, Michigan, they skyrocketed by 56 percent. At this point, the house price spiral is feeding into the rental market and pushing rent prices to historic highs.
All of this illustrates how the housing boom is rapidly evolving into a housing crisis. That's why the investor Peter Boockvar is sounding the alarm on a housing price bubble brought on by the Federal Reserve’s monetary policies over the past year. Boockvar alerts that first-time homebuyers are the most vulnerable to facing dramatic losses. “I feel bad for the people who bought homes over the past year because they’re the ones that paid the very elevated prices,” said the chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group during an interview with CNBC. He argues that those who put down 5% amid historically low mortgage rates will suffer tremendous losses if home prices crash even as slightly as 10 percent. He believes that all of these imbalances are clear evidence the air has started leaking out of the housing bubble.
At this stage, the affordability crisis is getting so serious that mortgage applications to purchase a home have dropped for several weeks and declined by 19% year over year in the week ending August 13. Most Americans simply cannot afford to purchase a home anymore. And as the housing price bubble expands, the threat of a massive burst comes closer. History repeats itself and everything that goes up must come down at some point. The trick is this time around, housing is just one of the many asset bubbles inflated by the Fed's policies, and when a reckoning arrives - which can be any time now - the entire financial sector will face a meltdown never before seen in world history."
"A Look to the Heavens"
“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.
Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”
The Poet: Edward Hirsch, "I Was Never Able To Pray"
"I Was Never Able To Pray"
"Wheel me down to the shore
where the lighthouse was abandoned
and the moon tolls in the rafters.
Let me hear the wind paging through the trees,
and see the stars flaring out, one by one,
like the forgotten faces of the dead.
I was never able to pray,
but let me inscribe my name
in the book of waves,
and then stare into the dome
of a sky that never ends,
and see my voice sail into the night."
- Edward Hirsch
"Vaccine Voodoo"
"Vaccine Voodoo"
by Jim Rickards
"Many everyday Americans probably believe that the COVID vaccines will keep them from getting COVID. That’s not true and never has been true. The vaccines do not prevent you from being infected with the COVID virus. They do not keep you from spreading the COVID virus. There have been many cases of so-called “breakthrough” infections where double-vaxxed citizens get COVID anyway. That’s not uncommon. There’s even new evidence that double-vaxxed individuals who get COVID will build up huge viral loads in their noses and sinuses, causing them to become super-spreaders and infect others.
Do the vaccines do anything? Yes, they are effective at reducing severe symptoms of COVID. They also reduce the death rate among those who get infected. That’s advantageous for the most vulnerable, including those over 70 years old and those suffering from obesity, emphysema, diabetes and other conditions closely associated with fatalities due to COVID. That said, there’s almost no reason for children, teenagers and otherwise healthy individuals in their 20s or even 30s to take the vaccine. Among all individuals, vaccinated and unvaccinated, the global survival rate is 99.2%. Among those under 70, the survival rate is 99.97%. The survival rate for children is 99.995%.
The Israel Conundrum: The data indicate that the most vaccinated countries have the most cases and deaths per million people, while the least vaccinated countries have the fewest cases and deaths per million people.
Israel is providing a useful case study in the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of vaccines. Israel is one of the most heavily vaxxed countries in the world, with over 60% of the population fully vaccinated and almost 100% of the elderly. But now Israel is experiencing a massive increase in infections, including cases among the fully vaxxed. The government has also determined that the vaccines wear off after six months or less and is recommending a third shot for everyone. The problem, of course, is that the third dose will wear off too, so a fourth, fifth or sixth dose will be needed.
And with every new dose comes a new risk of dangerous side effects, including the small but real possibility of death. The vaccinated will be getting boosters for the rest of their lives, and the virus still won’t go away.
How Many Lives Could Have Been Saved? Meanwhile, effective treatments, including ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamin D, zinc and other inexpensive measures, are being suppressed by the medical establishment. How many people died because they were denied access to these therapies, especially early on in the disease cycle when treatment is more effective? It’s impossible to say, but they could potentially run into the hundreds of thousands.
A new study by the U.K.’s National Health Service and a Canadian biotech company revealed that a nitric oxide nasal spray slashed SARS-CoV-2 viral load by 95% within 24 hours and 99% within 72 hours. If further trials pan out, early treatment with a similar cheap therapeutic could cut serious cases down to almost nothing. But it doesn’t matter. The medical establishment will continue pushing the narrative that only universal vaccination will stop the virus.
Media Spreading Panic: The media continue to hyperventilate about “cases” but ignore the fact that death rates have declined since January. When one accounts for the 38 million Americans who have survived COVID and already have antibodies, then herd immunity is already here. Data indicate that people who had COVID between January and February of 2021 and recovered have 13 times more immunity to the Delta variant than vaccines provide.
We’re at the stage where we can learn to live with COVID as we do with many other endemic diseases such as the seasonal flu. There’s no reason for fear. But the public health authorities insist that these people with natural immunity must also be vaccinated. It’s not “science.”
The zero-COVID policies many governments have pursued are completely unrealistic. The virus goes where it wants. The only real solutions are patience, herd immunity and effective therapies. The time has come to stop living in fear and start treating COVID as an endemic disease that will be with us for a long time, like the seasonal flu or diabetes. Unfortunately, government authorities continue to insist they can control the situation with orders and mandates.
Lockdowns Didn’t Work Before. Why Would They Work Now? But the evidence is clear that masks don’t work and lockdowns don’t work (but they do destroy economies - most lost sales were permanent losses, not temporary losses). Lockdowns don’t work to stop the spread of the virus because they keep people indoors where the virus can spread more easily.
Outdoor activity is essential for fresh air, mental and physical health and exercise. People will find a way to gather and interact even with lockdown rules. This means that lockdowns impose all of the economic costs with few of the supposed public health benefits. This was recognized in a paper in 2006 by D.A. Henderson, the greatest virologist and epidemiologist of the 20th century who led the successful effort to eradicate smallpox and won the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. He said lockdowns don’t work and provided detailed reasons why. Unfortunately, his award-winning work was ignored by politicians eager to appear to be doing something.
Biden Repeats Trump’s Mistake: Health officials should never have been put in charge of the economy. That was a huge mistake by Trump, and it’s been made worse by Biden. Immunologists saw some benefits from lockdowns, but these would have happened anyway because each viral outbreak runs a predictable eight–10-week course. What the experts ignored were the costs in terms of deaths from suicide, excessive alcohol consumption, drug abuse, domestic violence, depression, anxiety and other dysfunctional behaviors.
The benefits of public health policy were minimal, but the economic, social and psychological costs were great and are still being paid. Meanwhile, the push for universal vaccination continues, despite the evidence that it’s not nearly as effective and necessary as the government claimed.
Society is rapidly turning into a two-tier culture of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. On Wall Street, where vaccination rates are as high as 90% in some firms, the unvaccinated are being treated like lepers. One investment banker said, “If you’re someone who is not vaccinated on Wall Street, you’re considered a loser.” Even firms that do not require full vaccination to return to work are forcing the unvaccinated to undergo weekly testing, sit apart from colleagues and wear masks while others are maskless.
Vaccine Voodoo: These rules are stupid, what might be called Vaccine Voodoo. Again, vaccination doesn’t stop infection. It doesn't stop the spread. A fully vaccinated person can catch COVID and spread it to others. The unvaccinated have as much to fear in terms of catching the disease from the vaccinated as the other way around.
There are ample reasons not to receive the vaccination, including being among the 38 million Americans who have recovered from COVID and have stronger antibody protection than the vaccinated. But they’re being treated like lepers too. This vaccination discrimination will do nothing to slow the spread of the disease, but it will do a lot to tear society apart. Investors can properly understand vaccination discrimination as one more drag on productivity and economic growth. But governments will keep imposing worthless mandates, and economies will continue on a trajectory of slow growth."
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Related:
"The Long Dark"
"The Long Dark"
by Chris Floyd
"We are in the Long Dark now. Both hope and despair are the enemies of our survival. We must live in the awareness that we might not see the light come back, without ceasing to work - with empathy, anger and knowledge - for its return.
We must be here, in the moment, experiencing its fullness (whatever its horrors or joys), yet be elsewhere, removed from the madness pouring in from every side, the avalanche of degradation. We must be here, now, but also in a future we can’t see or even imagine.
We must see that we are lost, with no clear way forward, no sureties or verities to cling to, no roots to anchor us, no structures within or without that will always keep their coalescence in the chaotic, surging flow.
We must live in discrete moments of illumination and connection, pearls hung on an almost invisible string winding through the darkness. Striving, always striving, but not expecting; striving without hope, without despair, without any certainty at all as to the outcome, good or bad.
These are the conditions of the Long Dark, this is what we have to work with, this is where we find ourselves in the brief time we have in this vast, indifferent, astounding universe. As I once wrote long ago, quoting the old hymn: “Work, for the night is coming.”
So do we counsel fatalism, a dark, defeated surrender, a retreat into bitter, curdled quietude? Not a whit. We advocate action, positive action, unstinting action, doing the only thing that human beings can do, ever: Try this, try that, try something else again; discard those approaches that don't work, that wreak havoc, that breed death and cruelty; fight against everything that would draw us down again into our own mud; expect no quarter, no lasting comfort, no true security; offer no last word, no eternal truth, but just keep stumbling, falling, careening, backsliding, crawling toward the broken light.
And what is this "broken light"? Nothing more than a metaphor for the patches of understanding – awareness, attention, knowledge, connection – that break through our darkness and stupidity for a moment now and then. A light always fractured, under threat, shifting, found then lost again, always lost. For we are creatures steeped in imperfection, in breakage and mutation, tossed up – very briefly – from the boiling, chaotic crucible of Being, itself a ragged work in progress toward unknown ends, or rather, toward no particular end at all. Why should there be an "answer" in such a reality?
What matters is what works – what pulls us from our own darkness as far as possible, for as long as possible. Yet the truth remains that "what works" is always and forever only provisional – what works now, here, might not work there, then. What saves our soul today might make us sick tomorrow.
Thus all we can do is to keep looking, working, trying to clear a little more space for the light, to let it shine on our passions and our confusions, our anger and our hopes, informing and refining them, so that we can see each other better, for a moment – until death shutters all seeing forever."
"No Room For Cowards..."
“Life has no victims. There are no victims in this life. No one has the right to point fingers at his/her past and blame it for what he/she is today. We do not have the right to point our finger at someone else and blame that person for how we treat others, today. Don’t hide in the corner, pointing fingers at your past. Don’t sit under the table, talking about someone who has hurt you. Instead, stand up and face your past! Face your fears! Face your pain! And stomach it all! You may have to do so kicking and screaming and throwing fits and crying – but by all means – face it! This life makes no room for cowards.”
- C. Joybell C.
Gerald Celente, "BE READY: Market Distortions are About to Get Much Worse"
Full screen recommended.
STRONG LANGUAGE ALERT
Gerald Celente, PM 8/31/21:
"BE READY: Market Distortions are About to Get Much Worse"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."
"Let’s Drink to the Hard-Working People"
Full screen recommended.
"Let’s Drink to the Hard-Working People"
By Bill Bonner
"Raise your glass to the hard-working people,
Let’s drink to the uncounted heads.
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leading but get gamblers instead.
Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter,
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows,
And a parade of the gray-suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio..."
– "Salt of the Earth", The Rolling Stones
YOUGHAL, IRELAND – "So many jackasses. So little time. We don’t know which one to laugh at first. Labor Day is coming up. So let us continue honoring the laboring man… the salt of the Earth… the rag-taggy people, who make the lattes and drive the trucks. Upon his sweaty brow, the gray-suited grifters press down their thorny claptrap. And upon his back, they place the whole burden of their goofy plans.
Federal Reserve top dog Jerome Powell is howling for something he calls “maximum employment:” "We have much ground to cover to reach maximum employment, and time will tell whether we have reached 2% inflation on a sustainable basis." He thinks everybody should be schlepping or toting, bussing… or hod-carrying, helping us dig our way out of the hole he has dug for us. He believes his policies are the key to getting us all on the job.
Wrong Reasons: And then, there’s AOC, who thinks Powell should be replaced… for all the wrong reasons, of course. She thinks she knows what laboring people should be laboring at. MarketWatch reports: "A group of progressive House Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, on Monday called for President Joe Biden to replace Fed Chairman Jerome Powell when his term expires in February. In a joint statement first reported by Politico, the lawmakers urged Biden “to re-imagine a Federal Reserve focused on eliminating climate risk and advancing racial and economic justice.”
We have no trouble imagining a Federal Reserve focused on “eliminating climate risk” (whatever that means) and “advancing racial and economic justice” (whatever that is). But it gives us a shiver. These old guys and gals had one main duty – protecting the integrity of the U.S. dollar and its financial system. They made a total mess of it – with the country now up to its neck in debt… and headed into deeper water. Imagine the damage they could do if they were turned loose to improve the world’s weather… its race relations… or its “economic justice.”
Vicious Cycle: And continuing in this delusional direction, perhaps the wackiest of all comes from economists themselves. Business Insider reports: "It’s inequality that dragged interest rates lower, not the other way around, NBER researchers said Friday. […]" The Fed has taken flak for the [low interest rate] trend, with economists warning that near-zero rates worsen inequality. But what if that narrative is wrong, and the wealthy are behind rates’ steady decline instead of the Fed?
The conventional argument should be flipped on its head, according to a study published Friday by the National Bureau for Economic Research. Wealthy Americans’ booming income powered the decades-long decline in interest rates, economists Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi wrote. That downtrend then lifted stocks and most recently powered the market’s rebound from 2020 lows. “It is a vicious cycle, and we are stuck in it,” Mian wrote in a Tuesday tweet. In other words, it may not be the Fed’s fault, which means it will be much harder to solve. Huh? Who paid for that “research?”
Problem Solved? The Fed has spent $7.5 billion every day for the last 18 months – $4 trillion in total – intentionally pushing down interest rates by buying bonds. That is, for every dollar the working stiffs created in the real economy (GDP growth), the Fed printed more than three dollars and fed it into the financial industry. The wavering millions saved their pennies. But they got nothing for their efforts. After inflation, they lost money on their savings accounts.
And how long does this trio – Mian, Straub, and Sufi – think real interest rates would stay below zero if the Fed announced an end to its price-fixing, money-printing, market-meddling policies? Ten seconds? Two minutes? In a flash, stocks would crash and about $30 trillion of fantasy stock market wealth would disappear. The “inequality” problem – solved. The rich would be a lot less rich; the salt of the Earth would be, relatively, richer.
And with no open spigot at the Fed, all of a sudden, millions of people would be desperate for money. They would have to line up at the only tap left to them – the real savings of real people, not the fake money of the Fed. Interest rates would go “to the moon.” It would be like a scene at Kabul airport. Chaos. Confusion. With investors desperately trying to exit their risky speculations… and no buyers on the other side to take them out.
Lazy Youth: Returning to Mr. Powell… As we saw yesterday, labor force participation has been going down for 20 years. Apparently, there are a lot of people who aren’t much interested in participating in the workaday world. But why is that any of Powell’s concern?
(We recall, mischievously, that the “maximum employment” record for modern times is probably held by Nazi Germany. There were no idle hands in that devil’s workshop! Almost everybody was required to contribute to the war effort… including millions of Poles, French, and Jews held in slave-like conditions.) In today’s world, people seem to be schlepping less than ever before. And the youngest members of the proletariat seem to like labor the least. More to come…"
Gregory Mannarino, "AM/PM 8/31/21"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 8/31/21:
"Watch For An Inflation Surge And A Big Spike With Crude Oil"
○
Gregory Mannarino, PM 8/31/21:
"THE MELTDOWN CONTINUES: Business Activity Drops,
Consumer Confidence Craters, Home Prices SURGE"
Monday, August 30, 2021
"Hurricane Ida Leaves Nearly 750,000 In The Dark In New Orleans As Power Transmission Tower Collapses"
Full screen recommended.
"Hurricane Ida Leaves Nearly 750,000 In The Dark
In New Orleans As Power Transmission Tower Collapses"
by Epic Economist
"The slow-moving Hurricane Ida has left hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents without power due to "catastrophic transmission damage," according to Entergy New Orleans. All of New Orleans is currently dark and it could take weeks for power services to be resumed. The ravaging storm took down all eight transmission lines of the area, according to spokesman Brandon Scardigli in an emailed statement. As a result, that created a massive load imbalance that "knocked all power generation in the region offline," Scardigli said. Entergy announced that it is working to "assess a path forward to restore power to those who can take it" - apparently meaning those who hadn't lost electricity for other reasons during the storm - but those repairs won't likely be completed any time soon due to the huge power demand and the unprecedented damages faced by power lines. At this point, the only power in the city is coming from generators, Homeland Security said.
In a repeat of the scenes seen in the 2008 Hurricane Gustav - when 13 of the 14 Entergy's transmission lines into the city failed, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes in the dark - the disaster provoked by Hurricane Ida has left more than 614,000 Entergy customers in Louisiana without power as of Sunday evening at 7 p.m., and by 7:26 p.m, almost 750,000 homes and businesses were without power across the state, reported Poweroutage.us, a company which tracks utility outages. The blackouts were mainly concentrated in the southeastern corner of the state where Ida made its devastating U.S. landfall. Entergy revealed in a statement that it was forced to shut down its 1,152-megawatt Waterford nuclear plant about 25 miles west of New Orleans and it will have to keep it offline until local grid damages are assessed later this week. “Customers in the hardest-hit areas should plan for the possibility of experiencing extended power outages,” the company warned yesterday on Twitter.
Yesterday, Hurricane Ida made landfall twice. First at around noon at Port Fourchon, and then at 2 p.m. near Galliano, where it turned into a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 150 miles per hour. Even though the storm weakened slightly from that point on, moving ashore with winds of 120 miles per hour, it developed a double eyewall, increasing the threat of severe flooding, as explained by Dr. Levi Cowan, Ph.D. in meteorology and Senior Scientist at the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. "Development of a double eyewall means that the core wind field of Ida is broader - not a great development to see just before landfall. The storm has also begun to slow down, which was expected, but begins to reveal just how big a flooding threat Ida is," he tweeted. The National Hurricane Center reported that the eye of the storm was about 25 miles southwest of New Orleans and 55 miles southeast of Baton Rouge, and started to moving northwest last night.
In addition to ripping through the city, the storm is expected to have a major impact on oil refineries, chemical plants, and ports. Consequently, as Sitka Pacific advisor Mike Shedlock noted, that will result in serious disruptions for oil production. "Ida's projected path has made it a threat to the vast oil refining and petrochemical complex situated along the U.S. Gulf Coast, though the storm's more easterly track Friday suggested it would miss the heart of those operations in Texas and along the Texas-Louisiana border," he wrote on his blog Mish Talk.
With winds strong enough to rip roofs from houses, snapping trees and power poles, and blackouts that can be extended for up to 4 weeks, Hurricane Ida caused an estimated loss of more than $40 billion in a single day and more losses based on its projected path are going to be assessed this week. When it made landfall, Ida registered stronger winds than Hurricane Katrina. Only two other storms in history have hit Louisiana with winds this powerful, Last Island Hurricane in 1856 and Hurricane Laura in 2020.
With roughly 750,000 residents now bracing for widespread power outages that could last for almost a month, consumer demand for electricity is projected to shift to gas, which could push gas prices up just as seen during the Texas storms in February - when millions of Texans were left without power amid one of the coldest winters on record. Back then, people turned to gas so that they could turn on their heating devices, and prices skyrocketed by nearly 46 percent. Our country has been facing one painful disaster after the other, and as the climate crisis has started to dramatically worsen, unfortunately, this seems to be just the beginning."
“Power Outages - Are You Prepared? Homebuyer Remorse; Leaving California”
Jeremiah Babe, PM 8/30/21:
“Power Outages - Are You Prepared?
Homebuyer Remorse; Leaving California”
Gregory Mannarino, PM 8/30/21: "Former Fed. President Warns Of IMMINENT Financial Crisis"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 8/30/21:
"Former Fed. President Warns Of IMMINENT Financial Crisis"
Musical Interlude: Liquid Mind, "Balance (Galaxies)"
Full screen recommended.
Liquid Mind, "Balance (Galaxies)"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.
Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."
"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."
"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…"
○
Freely download “Amusing Ourselves to Death:
Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, by Neil Postman, here:
"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
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