Monday, November 29, 2021

"Why Inflation Is a Runaway Freight Train"

"Why Inflation Is a Runaway Freight Train"
by Charles Hugh Smith

"Inflation, deflation, stagflation - they've all got proponents. But who's going to be right? The difficulty here is that supply and demand are dynamic and so there are always things going up in price that haven't changed materially (and are therefore not worth the higher cost) and other things dropping in price even though they haven't changed materially.

So proponents of inflation and deflation can always offer examples supporting their case. The stagflationist camp is delighted to offer a compromise case: yes, there are both deflationary and inflationary dynamics, and what we have is the worst of both worlds: stagnant growth and declining purchasing power.

What's missing in most of these debates is a comparison of scale: deflationists point to things like big-screen TV prices dropping. OK, fine: we save $300 on a TV that we might buy once every two or three years. So we save $100 a year thanks to this deflation.

Meanwhile, on the inflationary side, healthcare insurance went up $3,000 a year, childcare went up $3,000 a year, rent (or property taxes) went up $3,000 a year and care for an elderly parent went up $3,000 a year: that's $12,000. Now how many big-screen TVs, shoddy jeans, etc. that dropped a bit in price will we have to buy to offset $12,000 in higher costs?

This is the problem with abstractions like statistics: TVs dropped 20% in cost, while healthcare, childcare, assisted living and rent all went up 20% - so these all balance out, right?

There are two glaring omissions in all the back-and-forth on inflation and deflation:
1. Price is set on the margins.
2. Enterprises cannot lose money for very long and so they close down.

Let's start with an observation about the dynamics of price/cost: supply and demand. As a general rule, things that are scarce and in high demand will go up in price, and things that are abundant and in low demand will drop in price. Whatever is chronically scarce and necessary for life will have a ceaseless pressure to cost more, whatever is abundant and no longer desirable will have a ceaseless pressure to cost less.

Now we come to the overlooked mechanism #1: Price is set on the margins. Housing offers an example: take a neighborhood of 100 homes. The five sales last year were all around $600,000, and so appraisers set the value of the other 95 homes at $600,000.

Things change and the next sale is at $450,000. This is dismissed as an outlier, but then the next two sales are also well below $500,000. By the fifth sale at $450,000, the value of each of the 95 homes that did not change hands has been reset to $450,000. The five houses that traded hands set the price of the 95 houses that didn't change hands. Price is set on the margins.

The biggest expense in many enterprises and agencies is labor. Those who own enterprises know that it's not just the wage being paid that matters, it's the labor overhead: the benefits, insurance and taxes paid on every employee. These are often 50% or more of the wages being paid. These labor overhead expenses have skyrocketed for many enterprises and agencies, increasing their labor costs in ways that are hidden from the employees and public.

It's important to recall that roughly 3/4 of all local government expenses are for labor and labor overhead - healthcare, pensions, etc. Where do you think local taxes are heading as labor and labor-overhead costs rise? What happens to pension funds when all the speculative bubbles all pop?

The cost of labor is also set on the margins. The wage of the 100-person workforce is set by the five most recent hires, and if wages went up 20% to secure those employees, the cost of the labor of the other 95 workers also went up 20%. (Employers can hide a mismatch but not for long, and such deception will alienate the 95% who are getting paid less for doing the same work.)

Labor is scarce for fundamental reasons that aren't going away:
1. Demographics: large generation is retiring, replacements are not guaranteed.
2. Catch-up: labor's share of the economy has declined for 45 years. Now it's catch-up time.
3. Cultural shift in values: Antiwork, slow living, FIRE - all are manifestations of a profound cultural shift away from working for decades to pay debts and enrich billionaires to downshifting expenses and expectations in favor of leisure and agency (control of one's work and life).
4. Long Covid and other chronic health issues: whether anyone cares to admit it or not, Long Covid is real and poorly tracked. A host of other chronic health issues resulting from overwork, stress and unhealthy lifestyles are also poorly tracked. All these reduce the supply of labor.
5. Competing demands of family and work. Work has won for 45 years, now family is pushing back.

Put these together - diminishing supply of labor and labor being priced on the margins - and you get a runaway freight train of higher labor costs. Add in runaway increases in labor overhead and you've got a runaway freight train with the throttle jammed to 11.

Deflationists make one fatally unrealistic assumption: that enterprises facing sharply higher costs for labor, components, shipping, taxes, etc. will continue making big-screen TVs, shoddy jeans, etc. even as the price the products and services fetch plummets below the costs of producing them.

The wholesale price of the TV can't drop below production and shipping costs for very long. Then the manufacturers close down production and the over-abundance of TVs, etc. goes away. Nation-states can subsidize production of some things for a time, but selling at a loss is not a long-term winning strategy: subsidizing failing enterprises and money-losing state-owned companies is a form of malinvestment that bleeds the economy dry.

The only thing that will still be super-abundant as demand plummets is phantom-wealth "investments", i.e. skims, scams, bubbles and frauds. The value of these super-abundant follies will trend rapidly to zero once margin calls and other bits of reality drastically reduce demand. Real-world costs: much higher. Speculative gambles: much lower. As in zero."

Gregory Mannarino, "If You Do Not Comply They Will Take Everything From You"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 11/29/21:
"If You Do Not Comply They Will Take Everything From You"

"Rising Mortgage Rates About To Pop The Housing Bubble: Prepare Yourself For Housing Crash!"

Full screen recommended.
"Rising Mortgage Rates About To Pop The Housing Bubble:
 Prepare Yourself For Housing Crash!"
by Epic Economist

"The US housing market has been silently watching the uncontrolled growth of a nationwide home price bubble over the past few months. However, third-quarter numbers suggest that the market may have been stretched to the limit as home sales significantly collapsed for the first time in almost 18 months due to sky-high prices and the prospects of higher interest rates. Worsening affordability means that fewer Americans can actually make the dream of owning a home come true, and as a result, the market slows down and prices start to come down to Earth again. The latest reports indicate that we're at the end of a euphoric market, and a downward trend is right around the corner.

Skyrocketing home prices will have to readjust and meet our economic reality. In other words, even though people are too conservative to bluntly say it these days, the US housing market is set for a crash. That's what Ivy Zelman, a housing analyst who became famous on Wall Street for calling the top of the 2008 bubble, has warned in a recent interview. Zelman revealed that she's seeing several red flags once again. In less than two years, the U.S. housing market has seen a historic run-up in property values like anything we've ever seen before. But we're now at the peak of the bubble.

She’s alerting her clients that overheated areas with heavy concentrations of investors are likely to face “corrections” -- the industry's term of choice not to spark panic on the public. But, in essence, we all know that "corrections" stand for "sharp crashes in overinflated property values". Zelman says that even a small rise of 1%, setting rates at 4%, would bring demand to a halt. In a recent interview with Bloomberg, she said that cracks are already appearing everywhere.

The analyst says that today's fundamentals are different from the last bubble, which was supported by risky subprime mortgage lending. "But the signs of trouble look familiar," she says. "Investors are distorting the market by driving up prices beyond the reach of primary buyers, and builders with growing construction pipelines are bidding up land values". Given that the Federal Reserve has signaled that it will start to roll back its bond purchasing program and raise rates in the coming weeks, Zilman says that some of her predictions may not "come to fruition this year," but probably early on 2022. "But we definitely see a storm brewing," she continues.

The analyst argues that excess liquidity in the markets led investors to fuel a speculative bubble in the housing sector, with iBuyers, private equity firms, and sovereign wealth funds propping up property values in an attempt to collect higher returns. When asked if she sees a housing market crash coming, the analyst warned that property values have to go down. "There are going to be corrections. And I think there are going to be corrections that are even more pronounced if rates go higher than 1%," she cautioned.

Just like Zilman, many others in the market are also suggesting that the third quarter of 2021 likely marked the peak for the housing market's price bubble, and from now on, real estate prices are bound to collapse. In many cases, the drop will likely be a painful one. According to economists at Fannie Mae, housing inflation is expected to drop by at least 2 percent this quarter, as the bubble loses some steam. The industry consensus right now is that there's no way to support the continuing rise in home prices.

Already, due to increasing affordability challenges and the estimates of higher mortgage rates, home sales fell 5.8% from a year ago. Fresh data from the National Association of Realtors point that actual sales of all types of existing homes fell 8.2% year-over-year to 526,000 homes, and sales of condos and co-ops dropped by 8.1% year-over-year to 57,000 units. Considering today's sky-high prices, the housing market is much more susceptible to higher mortgage rates than in prior years, which means that property prices will have to sharply readjust to reduce the affordability gap.

Some industry cheerleaders can say that today's overinflated prices are a matter of “simple supply and demand”. But the truth is that demand means having buyers who can actually afford to buy. Unfortunately, those who entered the bubble thinking they would have massive returns are set to disappointment. Millions of Americans are about to see the value of their homes dramatically crashing. Just as every bubble artificially inflated by the Federal Reserve over the past year, the housing bubble is headed to burst. And that meltdown will begin as soon as interest rates start going up."

Musical Interlude: Graham Nash and David Crosby, “Wind On The Water”

"As I rocked in the moonlight,
And reefed the sail.
It'll happen to you
Also without fail,
If it happens to me.
Sang the world's last whale."
- Pete Seeger
“Wind On The Water”
by Graham Nash and David Crosby

"Over the years you have been hunted
by the men who threw harpoons,
And in the long run we will kill you
just to feed the pets we raise,
put the flowers in your vase,
and make the lipstick for your face.
Over the years you swam the ocean
Following feelings of your own,
Now you are washed up on the shoreline,
I can see your body lie,
It's a shame you have to die
to put the shadow on our eye.
Maybe we'll go,
Maybe we'll disappear,
It's not that we don't know,
It's just that we don't want to care.
Under the bridges,
Over the foam,
Wind on the water
Carry me home."

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Sprawling emission nebulae IC 1396 and Sh2-129 mix glowing interstellar gas and dark dust clouds in this 10 degree wide field of view toward the northern constellation Cepheus the King. Energized by its bluish central star IC 1396 (left) is hundreds of light-years across and some 3,000 light-years distant. The nebula's intriguing dark shapes include a winding dark cloud popularly known as the Elephant's Trunk below and right of center. Tens of light-years long, it holds the raw raw material for star formation and is known to hide protostars within. 
Located a similar distance from planet Earth, the bright knots and swept back ridges of emission of Sh2-129 on the right suggest its popular name, the Flying Bat Nebula. Within the Flying Bat, the most recently recognized addition to this royal cosmic zoo is the faint bluish emission from Ou4, the Giant Squid nebula."

Kurt Vonnegut, "Requiem"

"Requiem"

“The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice and a sense of irony,
might now well say of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father, they know not what they do."

The irony would be that we know what we are doing.

When the last living thing has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up perhaps
from the floor of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done. People did not like it here.”

- Kurt Vonnegut

"There Are Times..."

"There are times the lies get to me, times I weary of battering myself against the obstacles of denial, hatred, fear-induced stupidity, and greed, times I want to curl up and fall into the problem, let it sweep me away as it so obviously sweeps away so many others. I remember a spring day a few years ago, a spring day much like this one, only a little more sun, and warmer. I sat on this same couch and looked out this same window at the same ponderosa pine.

I was frightened, and lonely. Frightened of a future that looks dark, and darker with each passing species, and lonely because for every person actively trying to shut down the timber industry, stop abuse, or otherwise bring about a sustainable and sane way of living, there are thousands who are helping along this not-so-slow train to oblivion. I began to cry.

The tears stopped soon enough. I realized we are not so outnumbered. We are not outnumbered at all. I looked closely, and saw one blade of wild grass, and another. I saw the sun reflecting bright off the needles of pine trees, and I heard the hum of flies. I saw ants walking single file through the dust, and a spider crawling toward the corner of the ceiling. I knew in that moment, as I've known ever since, that it is no longer possible to be lonely, that every creature on earth is pulling in the direction of life - every grasshopper, every struggling salmon, every unhatched chick, every cell of every blue whale- and it is only our own fear that sets us apart. All humans, too, are struggling to be sane, struggling to live in harmony with our surroundings, but it's really hard to let go. And so we lie, destroy, rape, murder, experiment, and extirpate, all to control this wildly uncontrollable symphony, and failing that, to destroy it."
- Derrick Jensen,
"A Language Older Than Words"

Paulo Coelho, “The Chess Game”

“The Chess Game”
by Paulo Coelho

“A young man said to the abbot from the monastery of Melk: "I’d actually like to be a monk, but I haven’t learned anything in life. All my father taught me was to play chess, which does not lead to enlightenment. Apart from that, I learned that all games are a sin."

"They may be a sin but they can also be a diversion, and who knows, this monastery needs a little of both," was the reply. The abbot asked for a chess board, sent for a monk and told him to play the young man. But before the game began, he added: "Although we need diversion, we cannot allow everyone to play chess the whole time. So, we only have the best players here; if our monk loses, he will leave the monastery and his place will be yours."

The abbot was serious. The young man knew he was playing for his life, and broke into a cold sweat; the chess board became the center of the world. The monk began badly. The young man attacked, but then saw the saintly look on the other man’s face; at that moment, he began playing badly on purpose. After all, he would rather lose, a monk is far more useful to the world.

Suddenly, the abbot threw the chess board to the floor. "You have learned far more than was taught you," he said. "You concentrated yourself enough to win, were capable of fighting for that which you desire. Then, you had compassion, and were willing to make a sacrifice in the name of a noble cause. Welcome, because the secret of life is to know how to balance discipline with compassion.”

"I Promise You This...


"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am- a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards."
- Edward Abbey

The Daily "Near You?"

Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa. Thanks for stopping by!

"Passing the Cup"

"Passing the Cup"
by Bill Bonner

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND – "It was a marvelous Thanksgiving holiday. The weather was perfect – brisk and sunny…It recalled a Thanksgiving of long ago… We were working with our uncle, “getting up” firewood. Our crew included the two of us and a black tenant farmer, Joe. We stopped for a drink at the pump. Joe pumped up the water. We held up the tin, filled it, and passed it to him. Joe pointed to our uncle. The custom then was for whites to drink first. But trees grow… and rules and customs evolve.

This Year’s Thanksgiving Project: This year, the house was full. We typically have children, grandchildren, and visitors joining us. And we typically find a “project” that keeps them busy before we sit down to dinner. In the past, these have mostly focused on barn repair. One year, we put on a new roof. Another, we shored up a foundation. The physical work – especially for those who aren’t used to it – prepares the group for evening meals, calm reflection, and early bedtimes. It also helps us solve maintenance issues at the farm.

This year, we decided to “get up” some firewood. We rented a large splitter. And we went at it for three days – with one son, one son-in-law, and one grandson. By Saturday, our pants were ripped… our fingernails were broken… and we were prepared for an Ice Age.
“Getting up” the firewood.

Suspect Celebration: Yes, it was a nice Thanksgiving. A warm fire… a grandchild’s giggles… pumpkin pie – what more could you ask for? But it was an odd one. For this year, the cause of celebration was suspect.

We were told, for example, that the world would be a better place if Christopher Columbus had never “discovered” America… the Pilgrims had never landed at Plymouth Rock… or Squanto had cut their throats as soon as they got off the Mayflower. Myths can be dangerous – especially those developed by people with an axe to grind. If they decide that they are a superior race, or that they have a mission to conquer the world… or spread Islam… or Democracy… they are headed for trouble.

When we were children, scarcely anyone questioned the dominant Thanksgiving myth. We were Americans, and damned proud of it. Did we handle the Indians roughly? Maybe… But that was just the price of progress. Did we keep blacks in shackles? Yes, but we saw the error of our ways… and paid for it dearly, with nearly a million white, Civil War deaths.

And while slavery was no picnic, it would have been a vast lifestyle upgrade for the million or so killed in the English conquest of Ireland…the 55 million “indigenous peoples” who died after European diseases arrived in the New World…

(Footnote: The term “Indian” was a mistake; the Spanish explorers thought they were in the East Indies. And “indigenous people” is a lie; everyone knows they were immigrants, too, not indigenous to the Americas)…

…the 40,000 who were killed in the French Revolution…or the hundreds of millions who died in the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union’s wars, purges, and gulags, Mao’s communist revolution, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

“You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs,” say the world improvers. And as bad as slavery was, the slave owner had a keen interest in keeping his slaves from getting cracked. They were valuable property.

Superiority Complex: That was the Thanksgiving zeitgeist of the 1950s and 1960s… We were unapologetic, glad to be alive… and glad to be Americans. We remembered the young tree of liberty, too, so vigorous and straight… and expected to continue our upward growth – with more wealth and more freedom – as long as we lived. We suspected, too, that the “whites drink first” custom would soon be history… And we were happy to see it go.

Even as late as the end of the 20th century, a large majority of Americans believed themselves to be a light unto the world… an “exceptional” people, with a unique position in world history. “We stand tall and see farther” than other peoples, said then secretary of state Madeleine Albright in 1998. But as the tree grew… the creed bent… and the successful tribe over-reached.

Today, American troops are all over the planet; but the U.S. has not won a real war since 1945. Millions are targeted by U.S. sanctions, but foreigners still won’t do as they are told. Trillions of dollars of fake money are printed and spent, leaving us $29 trillion in debt and with only one way to pay for it – print more money.

Day of Mourning: Now, the tree is gnarled and old. It has become a nest for scoundrels, martinets, and race baiters. And this Thanksgiving, we were told to hang our heads in shame… take the knee… and beat our chests, simply for being who we are. “We” – presumably, anyone with a majority European ancestry – almost exterminated the indigenous people… got rich on slave labor… and are working hard to destroy Planet Earth.

It was like having a huge, rotten tree limb hanging over our heads. We were urged to hang black crepe on the windows and lay the whip on our own backs. We white men have a lot to answer for; we are all racists and cads… climate change deniers and vaccine resistors. USA Today reminded us that it was a “Day of Mourning.” MSNBC told us that the Pilgrims “brought genocide and violence” to the New World.

What Matters Most: And now, the macro aggressions of the past are forgotten. The suffering of generations – before the settling of America – counts for nothing. Nor are the millions of murders and government-caused starvations outside of U.S. borders, committed in the name of the prevailing myth, worthy of mention. According to the press, public life today goes no deeper than yesterday’s news… filtered through a sour, narrow funnel of race, gender, viruses, and climate change.

The rest is mere obiter dicta. And yet, it is still “the rest” – stacks of firewood, win-win deals, and passing the cup – that really matter."




"Economic Market Snapshot 11/29/21"

"The more I see of the moneyed classes,
the more I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates

CNN Market Data:

"All The Money..."

“All the money you make will never buy back your soul. ”
- Bob Dylan

"It Is All Precarious - Stocks, Retail, Crime, Cryptos and the Economy"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, AM 11/29/21:
"It Is All Precarious - 
Stocks, Retail, Crime, Cryptos and the Economy"

Jim Kunstler, "The Narratives Fail"

"The Narratives Fail"
by Jim Kunstler

"Inevitably, it will be here. 
The question is will we be prepared for it?”
- Dr. Fauci on Omicron

"Does it finally look like Dr. Anthony Fauci is trying to carry out an assisted suicide of the United States? On the Sunday Morning TV chat circuit, the White House Covid-19 czar (a.k.a. The Science) declared that the new Omicron variant is “a clarion call” to get people vaccinated. Is that so, Dr. Fauci? Considering how well your “vaccines” work? And how many people have been maimed and killed by their side-effects? (More than all other vaccines combined over the past thirty years.) And how you knavishly outlawed effective and cheap early treatment protocols that would have put Covid-19 down by June of 2020 (and saved half-a-million lives). The Science also called on Sunday for the general re-masking of the public and averred to the possibility of more lockdowns ahead. And just at Christmas-time, you understand. What a nose this rascal has for politics!

Senator Ted Cruz (TX) called for the Department of Justice to prosecute The Science for lying to Congress, which The Science smugly laughed off, perhaps knowing that his world-beating, maliciously incompetent leadership in the Coronavirus saga would end up incriminating and delegitimizing the entire corrupt, Pharma-captured US public health bureaucracy, with collateral damage everywhere else in government - and therefore that no authority in the land would dare to swear him under oath in a court-of-law. Or so he may think for now.

Meanwhile, Virologist Barry Schoub, Chairman of South Africa’s Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19 Vaccines, declared the new Omicron Coronavirus “mild.” Could it be that the whole hoary Covid-19 narrative is falling apart now? Could Dr. Fauci and his sleazy associates in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WHO, the Big Pharma C-suites, the grifting university research labs, the despicable social media combine, and yet more sinister outfits such as the CIA and the WEF - might this unholy host of villains and fixers find themselves on-the-run? And might Omicron represent for them some final grasp at the last straw of narrative control?

It’s pretty clear that citizens of the liberal democracies are fed up with being pushed around, jabbed, driven out of business, lied-to, gaslighted, and deprived of their livelihoods. They increasingly can’t believe any of the bullshit issued by the medical establishment and its political hand-maidens, and why should they? The countries with the highest vaccination rates also happen to be the ones with the highest Covid cases. Countries with low vaccination rates and widespread use of early treatment with common drugs have low Covid cases. Two weeks after Japan okayed the use of Ivermectin in mid-November of this year, cases fell from a big surge down to near zero. What part of that is complicated?

The people are out in the streets all over the world now. They have only begun to express their rage at the Covid narrative-driven new fashion for tyrannical government - government not of, for, and by the people, but over, on top of, and in spite of them. In Austria, an opéra bouffe toyland suddenly inflamed with Nazi-style strong-arming of its own citizens, the cops and the army may be switching their allegiance away from the government to the folks moiling in the streets. This is exactly the kind of country and the type of situation where governments fall. And when Austria goes down, others will follow.

Next door, outgoing German health minister, Jens Spahn, issued a warning that by the end of winter “pretty much everyone in Germany will be vaccinated, recovered or dead.” Was that supposed to be reassuring? Somewhere out in the universe’s recurve of time, the spirit of Dr. Josef Mengele is doing an end-zone dance. Down in Australia two frisky teens called in a threat to behead the premier (i.e., governor) of West Australia (capital: Perth). The world is suddenly remembering the back-story behind the old political phrase heads will roll, namely, what happens to the folks-in-charge when they piss-off enough of the people whose affairs they are responsible for running.

More to the point, to understand what is happening in America, just catch a glimpse of what has happened. By 2019, a rogue faction of bureaucrats was bent on shoving President Donald Trump off the game-board at all costs. Trump had become the fixed object of every anxiety neurosis that afflicted the thinking-governing-and-chattering classes. Conveniently, China also needed to get rid of the Mr. Trump, for interfering with their plans to dominate the planet.

The Trump years were the narrative-formation years, as one plot after another, with their rafts of cockamamie stories - RussiaGate, UkraineGate, TaxGate - was hatched and then elaborated by the worker bees in Cable News and the WashPo/New York Times nexus. Imagine their frustration that those gambits failed. But all that narrative-shaping prepared them for the kill-shot when China gifted the world with Covid-19 (Dr. Anthony Fauci acting as midwife in the delivery). Dr. Fauci then went straight to work turning the splendid opportunity of the pandemic into history’s all-time greatest mindf**k. He did everything possible to prevent public health from controlling the disease, and then foisted on the terrorized public a set of dangerous, untested, gene-therapy treatments that he enjoyed a share of the profits in. His criminal acts have been revealed and fully documented and now he will fall. Wait for it.

The Covid-19 mindf**k worked to distract the country’s attention from the activities of characters like Lawfare avatar Marc Elias of the DNC’s Perkins Coie law firm and Marc Zuckerberg of Facebook, going all around the swing states in 2020 with sacks full of money, arranging election procedures such as mass mail-in voting with no voter ID to facilitate the victory of the obviously non compos mentis empty shell of “Joe Biden”. That did work. Just what the country needed, too, at this perilous moment of history: a fake head-of-state. The people mostly played along for two years until very lately, seeing at last how they have been robbed of their health, their wealth, their future, and very likely their children’s futures. Watch them now as they turn on the ones who made all that happen."

Gregory Mannarino, "Critical Updates"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 11/29/21:
"Critical Updates"

"How It Really Is"

 

Jim Kunstler, "Decolonize This!"

"Decolonize This!"
by Jim Kunstler

"Now that Thanksgiving with all its racist trimmings is put to bed, will Americans be able to “decolonize” their minds? Not if the masters of universal hysteria can help it. Here it comes, just in time to reignite the limbic channels in your brain with pulses of cosmic terror on the runway to Christmas: The B.1.1.529 Covid-19 variant out of Botswana. It’s a beauty, with thirty-two mutations on its decorative spike protein, supposedly making it a deadly hazard to the already-vaccinated.

Except the already-vaccinated were already catching the boring old Delta variant that so energized the year 2021, with its Fauci-inspired affronts to the Bill of Rights, working needle-in-arm with the mystery managers of “Joe Biden,” the cigar-store Indian who has decolonized the oval office from the brutish grip of western civ and all its dastardly legalities.

Yes, I am sorry to tell you that the mRNA “vaccines” are just not working that well. The already-vaccinated millions, marinated in the goodness of their obedience to authority, live in terror of the unvaccinated, who so knavishly spread disease to those vaccinated against it. Say, what? Something ain’t workin’ right here.

Half the nation can’t think straight, and for a good reason: The relentless mindf**kery abroad in this land courtesy of your politicized news media, the despotic social networks, the bottomless greed of the pharmaceutical-makers and their errand boys in the CDC, plus the malevolent generosity of sponsors like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and George Soros. Thus, the blue mommies of America follow Pied Pipers like NPR and Sanjay Gupta holding hands with Big Bird to vax-up the kids.

It’s just a cult initiation ceremony, you understand. Vaxing the kids reinforces the psychotic mass formation intoxication of the blue mommies. It does absolutely nothing good for the kids, who realistically have a near-zero chance of being harmed by Covid-19 — but have a fair chance of being harmed by the mRNA “vaccines,” which will mess with their still-developing immune systems and their various organs. All the authority of Anthony Fauci’s officialdom presses remorselessly toward the ever-receding horizon of max vax. It begins to look like enough parents are onto the game and will refuse to go along with it.

Dr. Fauci and his evil network are in the process of being smashed at long last. First, there is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s book just out, "The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health." I was up reading it at two-thirty in the morning. The Kindle version is $2.95, cheap. Get it. It’s a seamless, gripping, and lucid legal brief against a bureaucratic monster who was allowed to run amuck in forty-plus years of power-seeking, malicious money-grubbing, and death-dealing, and who has capped that career by destroying the economies of the western world and our accustomed liberties with it. RFK lays out exactly what Dr. Fauci has done, footnoted to the max with fact and numbers to back it all up, so that the people still capable of thinking cannot avoid the conclusion that they have been viciously played.

But events themselves are dispelling the cult psychosis that infected the blue half of the public consensus. The not-guilty verdict in the Kyle Rittenhouse case confirmed at least one remaining constitutional principle: that you have a right to defend yourself even with a firearm against forces of anarchy. Rack up an “L” for blue Marxists whose ultimate yearning is to disarm American citizens so that they would have no say in the further destruction of this society (accomplished by manufactured anarchy). Those forces of anarchy are on notice now, despite all the funding by George Soros and the perfidious operations of Merrick Garland at DOJ and Christopher Wray at the FBI.

The vehicular mass homicide at a Waukesha, Wisconsin, Christmas parade, carried out by a walking stereotype of a dangerously deranged antisocial maniac named Darrell Brooks, who advertised his racial animosities lavishly on public video and Twitter, is taking the starch out of the popular “white supremacy” meme brandished by the likes of President “Joe Biden” and his dwindling corps of admirers. That trend was reinforced by the flash-mob robberies all over the country last week. Observers couldn’t fail to notice, for instance, that the eighty-or-so folks rampaging out of Nordstrom’s in Walnut Creek, CA, their arms full of stolen merch, were not a manifestation of “white supremacy.” Could be we have turned the page on that hustle.

Up ahead on this runway to Christmas we’ll be waiting to see how many people get sick in the heralded latest Covid-19 surge, but especially how many of these are among the “vaccinated” and re-vaccinated. Many of the really old folks who got their shots early-on in the January-to-March 2021 period have by now lost whatever immunity those shots conferred, since the alleged protection dribbles away after six months. Dr. Fauci and his CDC will do whatever they can to confound the statistics on their illnesses, probably referring to this cohort as “unvaccinated” — which they have already been doing in their campaign to force the latest boosters. Don’t put it past them to simply not report it.

Among the non-old “vaccinated,” it remains to be seen how much their immune systems may have been damaged by the invasive mRNA magic, and whether they will meet with severe contagion as a result. On a quite separate track from the immune system issue is the question as to how much the spike proteins prompted by the vaxxes have damaged people’s bloodstreams and organs, meaning, whether we’ll see a spooky uptick in non-Covid deaths from heart attacks, strokes, embolisms, and other typical vascular dysfunction as the winter wears on. In the face of all this, how do the organs of our body politic come through? And will anybody pay for the many harms done?"

Sunday, November 28, 2021

"This Thanksgiving Weekend Proved That America Is Now Living In A Very Dark New Reality"

"This Thanksgiving Weekend Proved That America 
Is Now Living In A Very Dark New Reality"
by Michael Snyder

"The entire narrative around “Black Friday” has completely changed. In the old days, I would write a column every year about the chaos that we would see at major retailers all over America as crazed consumers fought over deeply discounted merchandise. The fact that Americans would get so crazed over cheap trinkets made in China said a lot about where we were as a society, but there was also a side to Black Friday that was fun and exciting. It was a yearly ritual that millions of Americans looked forward to, and major retailers always made a lot of money. Unfortunately, those days are now gone. This Black Friday, store traffic was 28 percent lower than it was in 2019…

Traffic at retail stores on Black Friday dropped 28.3% compared with 2019 levels, as Americans shifted more of their spending online and kicked off their shopping earlier in the year, according to preliminary data from Sensormatic Solutions.

In 2021, Black Friday made headlines all over the nation for a much more alarming reason. Highly organized gangs of thieves looted stores from coast to coast, and this continued a trend that we have seen rapidly growing in recent months.

For example, in Los Angeles a mob of wild teens “cleared out” all of the hammers and crowbars at a Home Depot in the Los Angeles area…"According to LASD, eight people – between the ages of 15 and 20 – stole hammers, crowbars and other tools from the store. They say the entire hammer section was cleared out… enough items were taken to be considered grand theft. The suspects took off with an approximate value of $400 worth of tools. “We tried to stop them,” store employee Luis Romo told FOX 11. “We closed the front entrance and they put their sledgehammers up and whoever got in the way, they were going to hurt them.”

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why they took hammers and crowbars. Those are the tools that are favored by “smash and grab” looters all over the country, and the next night there were so many such robberies that the Los Angeles Police Department actually declared a tactical alert for several hours…"The Los Angeles Police Department declared the alert around 8:30 p.m. Friday and lifted it at 2 a.m. Saturday. The alert followed a string of robberies in the area early in the evening, including an incident at 5:30 p.m. in which at least 10 men robbed a store at 130 S. La Brea Ave., pushed employees onto the ground and fled, according to LAPD Officer Mike Lopez."

Stores were looted all over the city throughout the night, but of course the same thing is happening just about every night these days. Sadly, things aren’t any better in northern California. The Bay Area was also hit hard throughout the long weekend, but of course organized looting has pretty much become a regular thing in the Bay Area at this point…"The mayhem of Thanksgiving week follows a three-night-long free-for-all in California’s Bay Area last weekend, previously reported by Breitbart News. Looters hit high-end stores like Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent in San Francisco’s Union Square on November 19. The next night a group of 50-80 rushed a Walnut Creek Nordstrom near San Francisco.

Top politicians in California are now promising to crack down on these thieves, and I am sure that must have them quaking in their recently looted boots. Over in the middle of the country, we are also seeing organized looters go absolutely wild. In the Minneapolis area, two Best Buy stores were targeted by “flash mobs” on Black Friday…"Dozens of looters descended on a mall in Minnesota and brazenly marched through two Best Buy locations, taking whatever they liked with them off the shelves. One incident occurred near the Burnsville mall in suburban Minneapolis with about 12 people rushing in to steal items, while a second incident occurred in Maplewood – about 25 miles northeast – on Friday night with a larger group of 30 people looting electronics."

Last year, we witnessed this sort of behavior during the George Floyd riots, but now looting has become a way of life in some of our largest urban communities. In Chicago, the looting never seems to stop. In fact, looters hit three major stores in less than an hour on Black Friday…"About 1:40 a.m., police responded to a burglar alarm at the shoe store in the 1200 block of North Milwaukee Avenue and found a shattered window and missing clothes, Chicago police said.

About 20 minutes later, police responded to another alarm at the North Face store in the 1600 block of North Damen Avenue and found the front doors pried open, police said. Numerous coats were taken, authorities said. About 2:40 a.m., police responded to a third alarm in the 2600 block of West Division Street and determined electronic devices were taken after the front door was forced open, police said."

I could go on and on, but I think that you get the point. We are now witnessing the sort of rampant lawlessness that I have been warning about for years. If these mobs of young thieves will go to such extremes now, what will they be willing to do once things get really bad in this country?

Right now, every single one of those young thieves could go out and get a job somewhere. We are in the midst of the most epic worker shortage in U.S. history, and there are literally “help wanted” signs just about everywhere you look. So these looters are not taking things because they are desperately poor and can’t find employment. Rather, these organized gangs are looting because they have made a conscious decision to do so.

Of course it doesn’t help that politicians in many major cities have passed laws that make shoplifting much easier than it once was. Even if they are caught, the thieves know that they will be dumped back on the streets very quickly.

I am so concerned about the direction that things are headed. Lawlessness appears to be increasing at an exponential rate in America, and that has very serious implications for 2022 and the years beyond."

"It Was The Best Of Times..."

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
- Charles Dickens, "A Tale of Two Cities"

"Small Retailers In Trouble As Shopping Drops; Big Players Dump Stock; New Home Buyer Shortage"

Full screen recommended.
Jeremiah Babe, PM 11/28/21:
"Small Retailers In Trouble As Shopping Drops; 
Big Players Dump Stock; New Home Buyer Shortage"

"Shipping Crisis Goes From Bad To Worse As Ports Shut Down And Push Shortages To Soar By 400 Percent"

Full screen recommended.
"Shipping Crisis Goes From Bad To Worse As Ports 
Shut Down And Push Shortages To Soar By 400 Percent"
by Epic Economist

"If you think the markets had a bad reaction to the prospects of new lockdowns and an economic slowdown, sending some stocks to crash over the past few days, you probably have no idea of the chaos that has been installed across global supply chains. For several months, conditions have significantly worsened, but many were expecting disruptions to calm down and operations to come back to normal after the winter. That hope has been successfully crushed by the emergence of a new virus strain with an alarming number of mutations.

Asian countries - the world's biggest exporters, and our key trade partners - have already started to impose new work restrictions, port shutdowns, and factory closures to prevent this new variant from spreading. Some industry executives argue that we're about to see a repeat of 2020, when mandatory shutdowns disrupted manufacturing and shipping and led to shortages on a scale we haven't seen in almost a century. Just as economies started to reopen, they might have to close everything down again. Only this time, we will be locked at home already knowing that there are fewer products available for consumption and that we're facing a painful inflation rate that is likely to cause even more pain as problems intensify over the coming months. Not a very reassuring outlook, that's for sure.

If supply chains were struggling with worker shortages before, it is safe today these issues won't get any better in the foreseeable future. Right now, hundreds of cargo ships remain stuck offshore waiting to be unloaded, while increasingly more store shelves get empty, prices skyrocket, and shipping companies are warning about further delivery delays.

The whole system is falling apart. Delivery delays have been a persistent problem throughout the health crisis, with government restrictions at border crossings slowing or completely interrupting the flow of raw materials and finished products, such as lumber and electronics. Now, China's 7-week port closure mandate is only making everything worse. According to Bloomberg, in one of its latest attempts to keep the virus out, China is imposing seven-week mandatory isolation from arriving seafarers, prohibiting crew changes and suspending port operations during the confinement period. The new restrictions will have a ripple effect all over the world. But here, in America, where ports are extremely congested, loaded vessels are still piling up, and shortages are showing no signs of easing, this means companies and industries that rely on exports will have major troubles in the months ahead.

Given that industries across the globe have been struggling with shortages of labor, energy, raw materials, and surging transport costs, the emergence of a new variant is going to collapse production even further, and make it harder for companies to keep up with the growing consumer demand. Several companies are already on the edge. Although shoppers are ordering more, the cost to attend to the demand is almost bankrupting many businesses. Unfortunately, new research has shown that some confirmed cases of the new strain that were registered in Europe didn't come from South Africa, where the variant was originally spotted. That means the new outbreak is already global, and it is only a matter of time until it hits America and leads to a new round of lockdowns, work restrictions, travel bans, port shutdowns, and factory closures.

Last week, a new Bank of America report on this year’s Q3 earnings, outlined that supply chain shortages were up 412 percent year-on-year. And with more and more disruptions emerging, the situation is expected to get much worse than previously thought. If you think shortages are bad right now, over the next few weeks this crisis is bound to hit extremely concerning levels. Sadly, those who haven't listened to experts warning telling us this would happen are going to be terribly unprepared for the challenges that lie ahead. Exceedingly painful times are coming for us. We've effectively reached a point where there's no return to normal anymore."

Musical Interlude: Two Steps From Hell, "Evergreen Extended"

Full screen recommended.
Two Steps From Hell, "Evergreen Extended"
For fun, close your eyes, turn your imagination loose...
what images does this music conjure up?

"A Look to the Heavens"

“The Cat's Eye Nebula (NGC 6543) is one of the best known planetary nebulae in the sky. Its more familiar outlines are seen in the brighter central region of the nebula in this impressive wide-angle view. But the composite image combines many short and long exposures to also reveal an extremely faint outer halo. At an estimated distance of 3,000 light-years, the faint outer halo is over 5 light-years across.
Planetary nebulae have long been appreciated as a final phase in the life of a sun-like star. More recently, some planetary nebulae are found to have halos like this one, likely formed of material shrugged off during earlier episodes in the star's evolution. While the planetary nebula phase is thought to last for around 10,000 years, astronomers estimate the age of the outer filamentary portions of this halo to be 50,000 to 90,000 years. Visible on the left, some 50 million light-years beyond the watchful planetary nebula, lies spiral galaxy NGC 6552.”

Free Download: R.D. Laing, "The Divided Self"

"The Divided Self: 
An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness"
by R.D. Laing

"Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), usually cited as R. D. Laing, was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness – in particular, the experience of psychosis. Laing's views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. Laing was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label. Politically, he was regarded as a thinker of the New Left..”

"First published in 1960, this watershed work aimed to make madness comprehensible, and in doing so revolutionized the way we perceive mental illness. Using case studies of patients he had worked with, psychiatrist R. D. Laing argued that psychosis is not a medical condition but an outcome of the 'divided self', or the tension between the two personas within us: one our authentic, private identity, and the other the false, 'sane' self that we present to the world.”
Freely download “The Divided Self: 
An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness”, by R.D. Laing, here:
"Insights Of R.D. Laing"

"Decades ago, psychiatrist R.D. Laing developed three rules by which he believed a pathological family (one suffering from abuse, alcoholism, etc.) can keep its pathology hidden from even its own family members. Adherence to these three rules allows perpetrators, victims, and observers to maintain the fantasy that they are all one big, happy family. The rules are: 
Rule A: Don't talk about the problems and abject conditions; 
Rule A1: Rule A does not exist; 
Rule A2: Do not discuss the existence or nonexistence of Rules A, A1, and/or A2."

“From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.”

“Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.”


“We are all murderers and prostitutes - no matter to what culture, society, class, nation one belongs, no matter how normal, moral, or mature, one takes oneself to be.”

“Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”

“We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world - mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.”

"Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

"For The Most Part..."

"Human beings never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion."
- Michael Crichton, "The Lost World"