Sunday, November 14, 2021
"The Countdown For The Biggest Stock Market Crash In History Has Begun"
"America is Under Attack by Marxist Globalists"
Gregory Mannarino, "Markets, A Look Ahead: Must Know Now Updates"
"The Choice..."
"Gravity, Grace, and What Binds Us: Poet Jane Hirshfield’s Timeless Hymn to Love and the Proud Scars of the Heart"
"What A Privilege!"
"Compassion..."
- Frederick Buechner
"The Means Are The End"
Saturday, November 13, 2021
"Middle Class Families Moving Back To Motels; Dollar Stores Booming; America's Broken Dream"
"Get Ready for the Worst Black Friday Ever - Workers Quit at Record Rate"
Musical Interlude: Ludovico Einaudi, "Divenire"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"One Needs To Learn..."
"All The Money You Make..."
The Poet: Galway Kinnell, "Another Night in the Ruins"
"What the Tipping Point Will Look Like: 5 Signs to Watch For"
"Revenge of the Real World"
"Rather than stare at empty shelves, you have two options for distraction: You can don a virtual-reality headset and cavort with dolphins in the “metaverse” or you can trade various forms of phantom wealth that always go up (happy, happy!) because of the Fed.
Neither distraction actually solves any real-world problems, a reality we can call the “Revenge of the Real World.” We've entered a peculiar phase in American history in which illusions of wealth and control are the favored distractions from the unraveling of the real-world economy and social order.
Printing trillions of currency units can't restore the global supply chain or social cohesion. Rather, jacking phantom wealth to the moon is only accelerating the collapse of the social order and the economy even as it accomplishes absolutely nothing in terms of solving real-world problems. Let's start with the core economic realities of the 21st century…
The Facts:
1. The number of high-consumption ("middle-class") people doubled from 1 billion to 2 billion. The human populace has expanded to 7.9 billion individuals, but poor people who don't have enough money to consume large quantities of energy, goods and services delivered by the global supply chain don't have much of an impact on global consumption of energy and resources. It's the number of people jetting around the world playing their part in the landfill economy (toss the old one, buy a new one) who drive "growth" (i.e., waste is growth).
Strangely enough, there are actual physical limits to resources being transformed into junk being dumped in the landfills. Humanity's rapacious appetite for stuff has extracted all the cheap-to-extract resources and now all that are left are the increasingly expensive-to-extract resources.
2. Corporate America offshored most of the production of essentials to exploit the low labor and energy costs, minimal environmental standards and currency arbitrage of overseas production. The net result has been an astounding increase in corporate profits. But a funny thing happened on the way to Corporate Profit Nirvana: America became dependent on foreign supply chains. In essence, we traded national security for corporate profits. Now the real-world costs of that myopic greed are becoming apparent.
3. Global supply chains have been optimized for cheap energy and cheap credit. This optimization stripped away all the buffers as a means of maximizing profits. Once the system veered outside the narrow band of optimization, the entire system lost coherence and unraveled.
Counting on Magic: Now that the entire global supply chain has been optimized to maximize profits at the expense of buffers, the buffers are too thin to save the system from collapse. The entire dependency chain depends on cheap energy (all those cheap seats on wide-body aircraft were subsidizing the air cargo beneath the passengers' feet) and cheap credit, as consumers can't buy enough with earnings to keep the machine well-oiled. And firms in the dependency chain need ample cheap credit to function, as many have receivables that stretch out over 90 days. Without cheap credit, these firms would have to close down.
The status quo response would be amusing if the consequences weren't so dire: We don't need no stinking buffers! The supply chain for the landfill economy will be back up to full speed any day now, or maybe next year, but don't you worry, the conveyor belt from China to big-box stores to the landfill will be fully restored.
In the meantime, cavort with dolphins in the metaverse and trade tokens of phantom wealth to amuse yourself. We're counting on magic to put it all right, and if that doesn't work, then the real world's revenge will be something to behold. What about the precious dollar? Is it toast? Let’s think about this…
TINA: The consensus makes sense: The U.S. dollar is doomed because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury will conjure trillions of new dollars out of thin air to prop up the status quo entitlements, monopolies, cartels and debt/asset bubbles, and since little of this issuance actually increases productivity, all it will accomplish is the dilution/devaluation of the currency.
Put simply, the dollar will lose its purchasing power as the inevitable result of the need to print and borrow ever-increasing sums to pay interest on existing debts; fund bread and circuses to keep the masses placated; and keep inflating the asset bubbles in stocks, housing, bat guano, etc. to maintain the illusion of prosperity.
This destruction of the dollar is TINA writ large: There is no alternative. The only way to keep the status quo from imploding is to print as many trillions as are needed, and this inevitably devalues the currency to the point of worthlessness.
OK, we get it: TINA so the dollar dies. But let's consider TINA from the perspective of the deep state...
Will the Deep State Allow the Dollar to Crash? Destroying the purchasing power of the dollar destroys the engine of America's power, which is the ability ("exorbitant privilege") to conjure "money" out of thin air and be able to trade this "money" for cobalt, steel, semiconductors, etc. supplied by other nations.
If the dollar is destroyed by overissuance, then how do we buy the cobalt and other goodies we need to keep the aircraft carriers and all their aircraft in working order? This is a problem, for if we can't conjure "money" out of thin air and persuade everyone it still has value, then America's global influence dissipates into thin air.
So what the consensus proposes as inevitable is financial trickery will destroy America's global influence and its prosperity, and there's no alternative. In other words, the deep state will just throw up its collective hands and surrender its empire so Wall Street can continue inflating its bubble of phantom wealth, even as that destroys the dollar, America's global empire and ultimately its prosperity.
Is this really inevitable? Isn't it plausible that the deep state might rouse itself from its various distractions and take notice that once the dollar loses purchasing power the deep state loses all its power? Are there really no adults left in the room who can make this basic observation?
Wall Street or Empire? For the sake of argument, let's assume there are a few adults left who understand that the dollar is the linchpin of the entire empire and so it's actually worth protecting. And let's also assume these few adults understand that boatloads of parasites, leeches, speculators, etc. will have to be sacrificed, and all manner of politically sacrosanct bubbles, skims, scams, rackets, monopolies and cartels will have to be demolished, much to the dismay of the parasites, leeches, speculators, etc. who have gotten immensely wealthy off these bubbles, skims, scams, rackets, etc.
It seems impossible that the parasites, leeches, speculators, etc. at the top of the heap could be brought down. It's certainly a stretch, given their entrenched power. It seems much more likely that the game of incrementally devaluing the dollar will continue indefinitely. But what's the endgame of this devaluation? Is it really so faraway that the banquet of consequences will never be served? These sorts of things have a way of gathering momentum as self-reinforcing feedbacks kick in, and then the consequences are served up faster than anyone believed possible.
Free Download: Hermann Hesse, "Siddhartha"
The word Siddhartha is made up of two words in the Sanskrit language, siddha (achieved) + artha (meaning or wealth). The two words together mean "he who has found meaning (of existence)" or "he who has attained his goals". The Buddha's name, before his renunciation, was Prince Siddhartha Gautama. In this book, the Buddha is referred to as "Gotama".
Plot summary: It starts as Siddhartha, the son of a Brahmin, leaves his home to join the ascetics with his companion Govinda. The two set out in the search of enlightenment. Siddhartha goes from asceticism, to a very worldly life as a trader with a lover, and back to asceticism as he attempts to achieve this goal. The story takes place in ancient India around the time of Gautama Buddha (likely between the fourth and seventh centuries BC.
Experience is the aggregate of conscious events experienced by a human in life – it connotes participation, learning and knowledge. Understanding is comprehension and internalization. In Hesse’s novel "Siddhartha," experience is shown as the best way to approach understanding of reality and attain enlightenment – Hesse’s crafting of Siddhartha’s journey shows that understanding is attained not through scholastic, mind-dependent methods, nor through immersing oneself in the carnal pleasures of the world and the accompanying pain of samsara; however, it is the totality of these experiences that allow Siddhartha to attain understanding. Thus, the individual events are meaningless when considered by themselves—Siddhartha’s stay with the samanas and his immersion in the worlds of love and business do not lead to nirvana, yet they cannot be considered distractions, for every action and event that is undertaken and happens to Siddhartha helps him to achieve understanding. The sum of these events is thus experience.
For example, Siddhartha’s passionate and pained love for his son is an experience that teaches him empathy; he is able to understand childlike people after this experience. Previously, though he was immersed in samsara, he could not comprehend childlike people’s motivations and lives. And while samsara clung to him and made him ill and sick of it, he was unable to understand the nature of samsara. Experience of samsara at this point did not lead to understanding; perhaps it even hindered him. In contrast to this, Siddhartha’s experience with his son allows him to love, something he has not managed to do before; once again, the love itself does not lead to understanding.
The novel ends with Siddhartha being a ferryman, learning from a river, and at long last at peace and capturing the essence of his journey: "Slower, he walked along in his thoughts and asked himself: “But what is this, what you have sought to learn from teachings and from teachers, and what they, who have taught you much, were still unable to teach you?” And he found: “It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, no thing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!”
FREELY download "Siddhartha," by Hermann Hesse here:
- http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/siddhartha.pdf