So, we rise from the rubble...
Tuesday, January 11, 2022
"When Idiocy Becomes Hardwired"
"When Idiocy Becomes Hardwired"
by Jeff Thomas
"At this point, virtually all of us over the age of forty have encountered enough “snowflakes” (those Millennials who have a meltdown if anything they say or believe is challenged) to understand that, increasingly, young people are being systemically coddled to the point that they cannot cope with their “reality” being questioned.
The post-war baby boomers were the first “spoiled” generation, with tens of millions of children raised under the concept that, “I don’t want my children to have to experience the hardships that I faced growing up.” Those jurisdictions that prospered most (the EU, US, Canada, etc.) were, not coincidentally, the ones where this form of childrearing became most prevalent.
The net result was the ’60s generation – young adults who could be praised for their idealism in pursuing the peace movement, the civil rights movement, and equal rights for women. But those same young adults were spoiled to the degree that many felt that it made perfect sense that they should attend expensive colleges but spend much of their study time pursuing sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Flunking out or dropping out was not seen as a major issue and very few of them felt any particular guilt about having squandered their parents’ life savings in the process.
The boomer generation then became the yuppies as they hit middle age, and not surprisingly, many coddled their own children even more than they themselves had been coddled. As a result of ever-greater indulgence with each new generation of children, tens of millions of Millennials now display the result of parents doing all they can to remove every possible hardship from their children’s experience, no matter how small.
Many in their generation never had to do chores, have a paper route, or get good grades in order to be given an exceptional reward, such as a cell phone. They grew to adulthood without any understanding of cause and effect, effort and reward.
Theoretically, the outcome was to be a generation that was free from troubles, free from stress, who would have only happy thoughts. The trouble with this ideal was that, by the time they reached adulthood, many of the critical life’s lessons had been missing from their upbringing. In the years during which their brains were biologically expanding and developing, they had been hardwired to expect continued indulgence throughout their lives. Any thought that they had was treated as valid, even if it was insupportable in logic.
And, today, we’re witnessing the fruits of this upbringing. Tens of millions of Millennials have never learned the concept of humility. They’re often unable to cope with their thoughts and perceptions being questioned and, in fact, often cannot think outside of themselves to understand the thoughts and perceptions of others.
They tend to be offended extremely easily and, worse, don’t know what to do when this occurs. They have such a high perception of their own self-importance that they can’t cope with being confronted, regardless of the validity of the other person’s reasoning. How they feel is far more important than logic or fact. Hypersensitive vulnerability is a major consequence, but a greater casualty is Truth. Truth has gone from being fundamental to being something “optional” – subjective or relative and of lesser importance than someone being offended or hurt.
Of course, it would be easy to simply fob these young adults off as emotional mutants – spiteful narcissists – who cannot survive school without the school’s provision of safe spaces, cookies, puppies, and hug sessions.
Previous generations of students (my own included) were often intimidated when presented with course books that had titles like Elements of Calculus and Analytic Geometry. But such books had their purpose. They were part of what had to be dealt with in order to be prepared for the adult world of ever-expanding technology. In addition, it was expected that any student be prepared to learn (at university, if he had not already done so at home), to consider all points of view, including those less palatable. In debating classes, he’d be expected to take any side of any argument and argue it as best he could. In large measure, these requirements have disappeared from institutions of higher learning, and in their place, colleges provide coloring books, Play-Doh, and cry closets.
At the same time as a generation of “snowflakes” is being created, the same jurisdictions that are most prominently creating them (the above-mentioned EU, US, Canada, etc.) are facing, not just a generation of young adults who have a meltdown when challenged in some small way. They’re facing an international economic and political meltdown of epic proportions. Several generations of business and political leaders have created the greatest “kick the can” bubble that the world has ever witnessed.
We can’t pinpoint the day on which this bubble will pop, but it would appear that we may now be quite close, as those who have been kicking the can have been running out of the means to continue.
The approach of a crisis is doubly concerning, as, historically, whenever generations of older people destroy their economy from within, it invariably falls to the younger generation to dig the country out of the resultant rubble. Never in history has a crisis of such great proportions loomed and yet, never in history has the unfortunate generation that will inherit the damage been so unequivocally incapable of coping with that damage.
As unpleasant as it may be to accept, there’s no solution for idiocy. Any society that has hardwired a generation of its children to be unable to cope will find that that generation will be a lost one. It will, in fact, be the following generation – the one that has grown up during the aftermath of the collapse – that will, of necessity, develop the skills needed to cope with an actual recovery.
So, does that mean that the world will be in chaos for more than a generation before the next batch of people can be raised to cope? Well, no. Actually, that’s already happening. In Europe, where the Millennial trend exists, western Europeans have been growing up coddled and incapable, whilst eastern Europeans, who have experienced war and hardship, are growing up to be quite capable of handling whatever hardships come their way. Likewise, in Asia, the percentage of young people who are being raised to understand that they must soon shoulder the responsibility of the future is quite high. And elsewhere in the world – outside the sphere of the EU, US, Canada, etc. – the same is largely true.
As has been forever true throughout history, civilization does not come to a halt. It’s a “movable feast” that merely changes geographic locations from one era to another. Always, as one star burns out, another takes its place. What’s of paramount importance is to read the tea leaves – to see the future coming and adjust for it.
Editor’s Note: Polls suggest that a majority of Millennials now favor socialism. And a growing number favor outright communism. Sometime this year, Millennials are expected to surpass Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living adult generation. This is one of the reasons Bernie Sanders and other socialists are soaring in popularity. And when the next crisis hits, the situation will likely reach a tipping point."
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Gregory Mannarino, "Critical Updates: Economy, Markets, Gold, Silver, Crude"
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/11/22:
"Critical Updates: Economy, Markets, Gold, Silver, Crude"
"As Store Shelves Get Barer, Food Industry Insiders Are Warning That Supplies Will Get Even Tighter In The Weeks Ahead"
"As Store Shelves Get Barer, Food Industry Insiders Are
Warning That Supplies Will Get Even Tighter In The Weeks Ahead"
by Michael Snyder
"It is happening again. In December, Joe Biden stood in front of the American people and boldly declared that he had defeated the supply chain crisis, but of course that wasn’t true. There have been persistent shortages for months on end, and now fear of Omicron is taking things to an entirely new level once again. On Monday, the hashtag #BareShelvesBiden was trending on Twitter, and that is because shelves are alarmingly bare in supermarkets from coast to coast. We are being told that these shortages are only “temporary”, but of course that was what we were told when nationwide shortages first began to pop up all the way back in early 2020.
Unfortunately, food industry experts are warning us that supplies are going to get even tighter in the weeks to come. For example, the following is what billionaire John Catsimatidis just told Fox News… “Omicron is taking its toll at different levels of the supply chain, whether it’s the warehouses, whether it’s the selectors, the drivers the loaders – and as they call in sick there are interruptions in the system,” Catsimatidis told Todd Piro during an appearance on “Fox & Friends First.”
Catsimatidis went on to say that many of these interruptions will continue over the next 6 weeks as the COVID-19 variant impacts the labor market. The United Refining Company owner added that the Northeast in particular is seeing the price of various products, including eggs, poultry, and beef, go up because of low supply and high demand.
That sounds rather ominous. Of course he is not alone. Egg Innovations CEO John Bruunquell is specifically warning that current conditions are likely to prevent his industry from supplying enough eggs to the general population… "Meanwhile, Egg Innovations CEO John Bruunquell, who acquired the first U.S. patent for reduced fat and cholesterol eggs, echoed Catsimatidis’ sentiment on “Fox & Friends” with co-host Ainsley Earhardt, warning that an uptick in demand coinciding with labor, freight and vendor issues may soon hamper egg supply."
So if shelves that normally hold meat and eggs are already bare in your area, they may be staying that way for a while. And if the shelves that normally hold meat and eggs are not bare in your area, you may want to grab what you can while you still have the opportunity to do so. The shortages are escalating, and shelves appear to be getting emptier with each passing hour. According to Zero Hedge, Americans from coast to coast have been posting photographs of bare shelves on social media…
"Before Christmas eve, President Biden declared his administration’s efforts to eliminate supply-chain bottlenecks ahead of the holiday season had succeeded. Ten days into the new year, we can firmly say that is not the case. The hashtag “BareShelvesBiden” has been trending on Twitter for the last 24 hours. The hashtag ranked on Twitter’s most trending list as of late Sunday evening. People from around the country tweeted pictures and videos of bare supermarket shelves as Biden’s Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force fails to address pandemic-induced disruptions.
In recent months I have been writing a lot of articles about this supply chain crisis, but even I didn’t anticipate that things would be this bad in early 2022.
Outside Annapolis, Maryland today pic.twitter.com/hJrQylV2ns
— BB_RN✝️ (@bbisback_4) January 9, 2022
Apocalypse now pic.twitter.com/j48ALuYtoQ
— Kayla Tausche (@kaylatausche) January 9, 2022
If we simply had enough workers to do all of the jobs that needed to be done, that would go a long way toward resolving this crisis. In industry after industry, vast numbers of workers seem to have “disappeared” from the system, and this is causing a whole host of problems. For instance, FedEx is warning that a lack of staff will result in significant delays…"FedEx Corp warned on Friday that rising cases of Omicron variant has caused staff shortage and delay in shipments transported on aircraft. “The explosive surge of the COVID-19 Omicron variant has caused a temporary shortage of available crew members and operational staff,” the company said.
I don’t know why FedEx is using the word “temporary”, because they have been operating without enough people for many months. Of course it is just human nature to want to put a positive spin on things. So many people out there want to believe that the future is going to be brighter, because the last couple of years have really stunk.
In fact, just check out the words that Americans used when one recent survey asked them to describe 2021… Among the words volunteered in response to the open-ended question to describe 2021 in a single word:
1. Awful/terrible/bad/sucked – 23%
2. Chaos/confusing/turmoil – 12%
3. Challenging/hard/rough – 11%
4. Disaster/train wreck/catastrophe – 6%
4. (Tied) Okay/good – 6%
Looking ahead, our economy is now the number one thing that Americans are concerned about… "The U.S. economy is the top priority for Americans, with inflation worries rising and pandemic-related fears waning, a poll released Monday showed. Sixty-eight percent of Americans mention the economy in some way when asked an open-ended question about the top five priorities for the government to work on in 2022, according to a year-end poll taken by the Associated Press. Just 37 percent cited the virus, down from 53 percent a year earlier."
The American people want the supply chain crisis to be resolved, they want inflation to go back down, and they want life to return to the way that it used to be. Unfortunately, none of those things are going to happen.
It has become exceedingly clear that our health authorities are completely incapable of defeating the pandemic, and it has also become exceedingly clear that our leaders in Washington are completely incapable of fixing the economy. And if you think that things are bad now, just wait until we get a few more years down the road. Virtually everything that Joe Biden and his minions do makes things even worse, and we still have at least three more years of either him or Kamala Harris in the White House.
If you are waiting for the government to pull us out of this mess, you are going to be waiting an awfully long time. Decades of very foolish decisions have brought us to this point, and it would take a miracle of epic proportions to turn things around now."
Monday, January 10, 2022
"Breakdown: Basic Services And Supply Chains Are Rapidly Breaking Down All Over The Globe"
Full screen recommended.
"Breakdown: Basic Services And Supply Chains
Are Rapidly Breaking Down All Over The Globe"
by Epic Economist
"We can't say we haven't been warned that things would get worse in 2022. Now, this is exactly what's happening. All over the nation, basic services are breaking down and supply chains are in total chaos due to a slowdown in production and a severe shortage of workers. All of these problems already existed last year, but our leaders decided to ignore them. The mainstream media didn't pay much attention to what was going on until things have gotten too bad. And now that the emergence of a new highly-contagious variant has taken these crises to an entirely new level, that's all they talk about. Over the past few days, countless stories covering the nationwide breakdown of services have started to become popular as conditions aggravated.
The Drudge Report recently exposed that all around the country, ambulances are seeping up to hospitals and then suddenly changing direction because hospitals are full. Employee shortages are causing delays in trash and subway services and diminishing the ranks of firefighters and emergency workers. Meanwhile, airport officials are shutting down security checkpoints at some of the biggest terminals in the U.S., and schools are deeply struggling to find teachers for their classrooms.
When people get to our hospitals, oftentimes they can't get treated in a timely manner simply because there are not enough health care workers to treat them. Even though hospitals are trying to hire as fast as they possibly can, finding qualified staff is exceedingly difficult these days. For instance, in the Community Hospital of McCook Nebraska, Troy Bruntz, who runs the facility has been trying to recruit an ultrasound technician for the past six months, but so far he didn't get one single application.
He explained that for lower-level positions, the hospital has to compete with the local Walmart store, where wages are rising much faster than in his facility. He has to keep track of the pay offered by the retailer and other large local employers, including a hose manufacturer, and an irrigation equipment supplier. That's how crazy today's job market has become. Today, there are over 10 million job openings in the United States, but in December, only 199,000 workers were added to the economy, according to the latest data released by the Labor Department. That was the fewest jobs added in any month of 2021, and a major disappointment to economists that had predicted jobs growth of double that number.
In the old days, a monthly job gain of 199,000 workers would have barely kept up with population growth. But our population has been declining at an alarming pace these days. Sadly, we may lose many more Americans this year given that our hospitals are absolutely overwhelmed, with hundreds of thousands of patients checking in week after week, and many of them are being left without treatment for days. Biden's mandates for health care workers have done unprecedented damages to the system, and as hospitals scramble to hire more workers, the National Guard is being forced to serve hospital duty in some states.
That means that if you show up at your local emergency room with a serious condition or illness, you may get treated by a member of the Nation Guard that has absolutely no medical training. On top of all that, our nightmarish supply chain crisis is being intensified by lockdown mandates on the other side of the globe. Last year, our leaders have assured us that the computer chip shortage would be gone by 2022. But due to widespread factory shutdowns in China and dismal domestic production in the U.S., that shortage has gotten even worse.
The bottom line is supply chain problems are becoming more widespread and are worsening despite the government's pledge to fix the mess. And thanks to the new surge in infections, we're also witnessing extensive shortages of meat and eggs at local supermarkets from coast to coast. Food inspectors and plant workers are calling in sick but the thousands, and while production and processing slow down, several American supermarkets are reporting incidents of bare shelves.
These days, our leaders keep patronizing us without opening a window to hear what we truly want and need. They keep imposing more rules, more restrictions, and more mandates that don't do anything but more damage since our population doesn't trust them anymore. The more they clamp down, the more our society breaks down. Without a doubt, 2022 is off to an ominous start, and the weeks and months ahead don't look very promising."
"Restaurants Won't Survive; Mortgage Rates Accelerate; Housing Collapse"
Jeremiah Babe, PM 1/10/22:
"Restaurants Won't Survive;
Mortgage Rates Accelerate; Housing Collapse"
Gregory Mannarino, "Markets Crashing! The Big Meltdown! Bitcoin To Zero"
Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/10/22:
"Markets Crashing! The Big Meltdown! Bitcoin To Zero"
"A Look to the Heavens"
"These are galaxies of the Hercules Cluster, an archipelago of island universes a mere 500 million light-years away. Also known as Abell 2151, this cluster is loaded with gas and dust rich, star-forming spiral galaxies but has relatively few elliptical galaxies, which lack gas and dust and the associated newborn stars. The colors in this remarkably deep composite image clearly show the star forming galaxies with a blue tint and galaxies with older stellar populations with a yellowish cast.
The sharp picture spans about 3/4 degree across the cluster center, corresponding to over 6 million light-years at the cluster's estimated distance. Diffraction spikes around brighter foreground stars in our own Milky Way galaxy are produced by the imaging telescope's mirror support vanes. In the cosmic vista many galaxies seem to be colliding or merging while others seem distorted - clear evidence that cluster galaxies commonly interact. In fact, the Hercules Cluster itself may be seen as the result of ongoing mergers of smaller galaxy clusters and is thought to be similar to young galaxy clusters in the much more distant, early Universe. "
Chet Raymo, "On Saying 'I Don't Know'"
"On Saying 'I Don't Know'"
by Chet Raymo
“Johannes Kepler is best known for figuring out the laws of planetary motion. In 1610, he published a little book called “The Six-Cornered Snowflake” that asked an even more fundamental question: How do visible forms arise? He wrote: "There must be some definite reason why, whenever snow begins to fall, its initial formation is invariably in the shape of a six-pointed starlet. For if it happens by chance, why do they not fall just as well with five corners or with seven?"
All around him Kepler saw beautiful shapes in nature: six-pointed snowflakes, the elliptical orbits of the planets, the hexagonal honeycombs of bees, the twelve-sided shape of pomegranate seeds. Why? he asks. Why does the stuff of the universe arrange itself into five-petaled flowers, spiral galaxies, double-helix DNA, rhomboid crystals, the rainbow's arc? Why the five-fingered, five-toed, bilaterally symmetric beauty of the newborn child? Why?
Kepler struggles with the problem, and along the way he stumbles onto sphere-packing. Why do pomegranate seeds have twelve flat sides? Because in the growing pomegranate fruit the seeds are squeezed into the smallest possible space. Start with spherical seeds, pack them as efficiently as possible with each sphere touching twelve neighbors. Then squeeze. Voila! And so he goes, convincing us, for example, that the bee's honeycomb has six sides because that's the way to make honey cells with the least amount of wax. His book is a tour-de-force of playful mathematics.
In the end, Kepler admits defeat in understanding the snowflake's six points, but he thinks he knows what's behind all of the beautiful forms of nature: A universal spirit pervading and shaping everything that exists. He calls it nature's "formative capacity." We would be inclined to say that Kepler was just giving a fancy name to something he couldn't explain. To the modern mind, "formative capacity" sounds like empty words.
We can do somewhat better. For example, we explain the shape of snowflakes by the shape of water molecules, and we explain the shape of water molecules with the mathematical laws of quantum physics. Since Kepler's time, we have made impressive progress towards understanding the visible forms of snowflakes, crystals, rainbows, and newborn babes by probing ever deeper into the heart of matter. But we are probably no closer than Kepler to answering the ultimate questions: What is the reason for the curious connection between nature and mathematics? Why are the mathematical laws of nature one thing rather than another? Why does the universe exist at all? Like Kepler, we can give it a name, but the most forthright answer is simply: I don't know.”
“Luminarium”
“Luminarium”
by Anniina Jokinen
“This site combines several sites first created in 1996 to provide a starting point for students and enthusiasts of English Literature. Nothing replaces a quality library, but hopefully this site will help fill the needs of those who have not access to one. Many works from Medieval, Renaissance, Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries can be found here.
The site started in early 1996. I remember looking for essays to spark an idea for a survey class I was taking at the time. It seemed that finding study materials online was prohibitively difficult and time-consuming—there was no all-encompassing site which could have assisted me in my search. I started the site as a public service, because I myself had to waste so much time as a student, trying to find anything useful or interesting. There were only a handful of sites back then (read: Internet Dark Ages) and I could spend hours on search engines, looking for just a few things. I realized I must not be the only one in the predicament and started a simple one-page site of links to Middle English Literature. That page was soon followed by a Renaissance site.
Gradually it became obvious that the number of resources was ungainly for such a simple design. It was then that the multi-page “Medlit” and “Renlit” pages were created, around July 1996. That structure is still the same today. In September 1996, I started creating the “Sevenlit” site, launched in November. I realized the need to somehow unite all three sites, and that led to the creation of Luminarium. I chose the name, which is Latin for “lantern,” because I wanted the site to be a beacon of light in the darkness. It was also befitting for a site containing authors considered “luminaries” of English literature.
I wanted the site to be a multimedia experience in the periods. I find it easier to visualize what I am reading when there is a small illustration or a tidbit about the background of the author or his work. The music and art of the period serve to complement one’s rational experience of the site with the emotional. There are people who write to me who seem to think that if something has a beautiful wrapping, it cannot possibly have scholarly insides. But I do not see why something scholarly cannot at the same time be attractive. It is that marriage of form and function, so celebrated during the Renaissance, for which my site strives.”
“The Web Gallery of Art”
“The Web Gallery of Art”
“The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Realism periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 51,400 reproductions. It was started in 1996 as a topical site of the Renaissance art, originated in the Italian city-states of the 14th century and spread to other countries in the 15th and 16th centuries. Intending to present Renaissance art as comprehensively as possible, the scope of the collection was later extended to show its Medieval roots as well as its evolution to Baroque and Rococo via Mannerism. More recently the periods of Neoclassicism and Romanticism were also included.
The collection has some of the characteristics of a virtual museum. The experience of the visitors is enhanced by guided tours helping to understand the artistic and historical relationship between different works and artists, by period music of choice in the background and a free postcard service. At the same time the collection serves the visitors’ need for a site where various information on art, artists and history can be found together with corresponding pictorial illustrations. Although not a conventional one, the collection is a searchable database supplemented by a glossary containing articles on art terms, relevant historical events, personages, cities, museums and churches.
The Web Gallery of Art is intended to be a free resource of art history primarily for students and teachers. It is a private initiative not related to any museums or art institutions, and not supported financially by any state or corporate sponsors. However, we do our utmost, using authentic literature and advice from professionals, to ensure the quality and authenticity of the content.
We are convinced that such a collection of digital reproductions, containing a balanced mixture of interlinked visual and textual information, can serve multiple purposes. On one hand it can simply be a source of artistic enjoyment; a convenient alternative to visiting a distant museum, or an incentive to do just that. On the other hand, it can serve as a tool for public education both in schools and at home.”
"There Was A Tale..."
“There was a tale he had read once, long ago, as a small boy: the story of a traveler who had slipped down a cliff, with man-eating tigers above him and a lethal fall below him, who managed to stop his fall halfway down the side of the cliff, holding on for dear life. There was a clump of strawberries beside him, and certain death above him and below. What should he do? went the question. And the reply was, Eat the strawberries. The story had never made sense to him as a boy. It did now.”
- Neil Gaiman
The Poet: Henry Austin Dobson, “The Paradox Of Time”
“The Paradox Of Time”
“Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go;
Or else, were this not so,
What need to chain the hours,
For Youth were always ours?
Time goes, you say? – ah no!
Ours is the eyes’ deceit
Of men whose flying feet
Lead through some landscape low;
We pass, and think we see
The earth’s fixed surface flee -
Alas, Time stays, – we go!
Once in the days of old,
Your locks were curling gold,
And mine had shamed the crow.
Now, in the self-same stage,
We’ve reached the silver age;
Time goes, you say? – ah no!
Once, when my voice was strong,
I filled the woods with song
To praise your ‘rose’ and ‘snow’;
My bird, that sang, is dead;
Where are your roses fled?
Alas, Time stays, – we go!
See, in what traversed ways,
What backward Fate delays
The hopes we used to know;
Where are our old desires?
Ah, where those vanished fires?
Time goes, you say? – ah no!
How far, how far, O Sweet,
The past behind our feet
Lies in the even-glow!
Now, on the forward way,
Let us fold hands, and pray;
Alas, Time stays, – we go!”
- Henry Austin Dobson
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“Time passes in moments. Moments which, rushing past, define the path of a life, just as surely as they lead towards its end. How rarely do we stop to examine that path, to see the reasons why all things happen? To consider whether the path we take in life is our own making, or simply one into which we drift with eyes closed? But what if we could stop, pause to take stock of each precious moment before it passes? Might we then see the endless forks in the road that have shaped a life? And, seeing those choices, choose another path?”
- Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully, “The X-Files”
"Oh! Had I The Ability..."
"Oh! Had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced."
- Frederick Douglass
"Dollar Meltdown and Higher Inflation - Banks Issue Warnings"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly AM 1/10/22:
"Dollar Meltdown and Higher Inflation - Banks Issue Warnings"
"The big banks are issuing warnings on Inflation and interest rate problems. Our economy is not growing, it is shrinking, and the experts are finally admitted that employment is not an all time low."
"We Should..."
“Only the following items should be considered to be grave faults: not respecting another's rights; allowing oneself to be paralyzed by fear; feeling guilty; believing that one does not deserve the good or ill that happens in one's life; being a coward. We will love our enemies, but not make alliances with them. They were placed in our path in order to test our sword, and we should, out of respect for them, struggle against them. We will choose our enemies.”
- Paulo Coelho
"Economic Market Snapshot 1/10/22"
"Economic Market Snapshot 1/10/22"
Updated as available.
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"The more I see of the moneyed classes,
the more I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
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MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
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CNN Market Data:
CNN Fear And Greed Index:
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
Jan 8th to 12th 2022
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Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
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Daily Job Cuts
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And now, the End Game...
"Coups d’etat… for Dummies"
"Coups d’etat… for Dummies"
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - “I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy.” ~ Joe Biden
"The holiday season is over… now comes the long slog through winter… First, we would like to thank Dear Readers for sticking with us. We’re trying something new. Just straight talk. No advertising. No big promises. If we get through the coming bomb cyclone – the financial/political one – with our wits and wealth in tact, we will consider it a success.
In the days ahead, we will also give you a fuller explanation for our move… and hit the refresh button on many of the core ideas we’ve developed over the last two decades. They may seem a little exotic, or even frightening, to new readers. But here at the re-born Diary, we hide nothing. One of our almost treasonous notions, for example, is our take on modern, American democracy… and the role of America’s mainstream media in destroying it.
Last week was the anniversary of the Jan. 6 2021 ‘insurgency’ at the US Capitol. The press was in full throated alarm mode. Just google “American democracy in peril” and you will get millions of suggestions. Johns Hopkins and Harvard have convened panels of scholars to explore the idea. Joe Biden, along with almost every Democrat-leaning polemicist, politician and DC hanger-on, has warned about it. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of books have endorsed the idea. Writes one of the most popular writers on Substack, Heather Richardson Cox: "On January 6, 2021, insurrectionists determined to overturn an election and undermine our democracy carried that flag [the Confederate flag] into the seat of our government."
Horrors!
Up north, the Canadians are worried. This morning, MSNBC carries this story from Toronto’s Globe & Mail: “American Democracy Could Collapse.” It goes on to say that a ‘right wing’ dictator could take over in 2030. [A ‘left wing’ dictator, apparently, is out of the question.]
The danger is imminent! The Atlantic, that paragon of Elite Establishment Wisdom opines: "America is running out of time. One year after Donald Trump led his supporters in an attempted coup against the United States, the nation is still very much in the throes of that attack."
The Coup that Wasn't: But we all saw it on TV. What kind of coup d’etat was this? The mob invasion of the Capitol appeared to be just the opposite of a real coup. It was more like a takeover organized by the Three Stooges. The invaders had not a single weapon. Not a single preparation had been made – no plan… no supplies… no press conferences… no tanks, airplanes, TV stations… nothing had been made ready.
Even such a low IQ crowd could have searched for it on the internet: “How to engineer a successful coup d’etat in 10 simple steps.” Look it up for yourself; it’s right there. Apparently, no one did. Instead, the leaderless mob entered the Capitol building, milled around, took selfies, then… as clueless and lost as tourists without a guide, it left.
Nobody appeared on TV announcing a state of emergency and a new government. Beltway traffic was not interrupted. No columns of olive drab troop carriers crossed the 14th Street Bridge.
Caesar crossed the Rubicon with an army of loyal, hardened troops at his back…. after crisscrossing all of Gaul, on foot or on horseback, and defeating, outsmarting, and humbling dozens of barbarian tribes. He was strong, bright, and remarkably resourceful. No one doubted that he meant business.
And Mr. Trump? On Jan. 6, 2020, Mr. Trump was already firmly ensconced on the banks of the Potomac, hamburger and diet coke in hand. As Commander and Chief of the whole of US forces, he could have gone along with the media’s ‘terrorist attack’ claptrap, called out the army to restore order… suspended the transfer of power…and given his troops, as did the president of Kazakhstan, the command to ‘shoot to kill’ anyone who objected. Surely there was at least one silly colonel, passed over for promotion, who was dumb enough to follow his orders!
But no. No coup. No undermining of democracy. No nothing… except a great media hubbub, broken glass, mock anxiety, and one unarmed, and now dead woman, shot point-blank by a trigger-happy Capitol guard.
Et tu, Media? Why then does the mainstream media persist in portraying the Capitol invasion as something it wasn’t? That is our question for today… and tomorrow. It’s a question about consensual democracy itself… and how it pitches head first into something a whole lot less ‘consensual’… and how it connects to the economic collapse we see coming.
First, we need to elaborate on an idea that we take for granted… one that most people take for absurd. That is, we don’t think the right to vote is such hot stuff. Few people will say so. But given the opportunity, even in a hotly contested election such as in 2016, 43% of eligible voters didn’t bother.
We don’t want to use the government to force others to do what we want. We’d appreciate it if they would return the favor. But many people think that a ‘democracy’ is controlled by ‘the people,’ and getting a majority of these yahoos together gives you the right to tell everyone what to do.
The great Italian economist, Wilfredo Pareto showed that whatever you call your government – a monarchy, a theocracy, a democracy… it just doesn’t matter. Government it is never actually controlled by ‘the people.’ They are too busy just trying to earn a living. Instead, there is always a small group of insiders and movers & shakers – a rich, powerful elite he called “the foxes” – who take charge.
In the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Cuba and other totalitarian countries, they were the Party insiders. In pre-revolutionary France, they were the aristocracy. In strong-man dictatorships, they are the cronies, enablers and fixers. And in America today, the elite includes Wall Street, universities, the Fed, both political parties, the bureaucracy, lobbyists, think tanks, no-profits, the military/industrial/pharmacological/medical/welfare surveillance complex… and notably, the press.
Not coincidentally, these are by and large the people who own America’s public companies… and whose wealth has increased by about $30 trillion over the last 12 years – thanks to policies controlled by the elite themselves.
What makes a consensual democracy tolerable is not the democracy part, it’s the consensual nature of it. People respect each other’s opinions and their rights to do with themselves and their property as they please. When that consensus is lost, the result is misery – a civil war… oppression… resistance… a breakdown of law and order… or other disagreeable trends.
Follow the Money: Of particular interest to us is the monetary flimflam. One of our Diary dicta: when the money goes, everything goes. And as the elite tightens up its control, it inevitably strangles business and investment. And it must also bribe the discontented mobs with stimmies and giveaways. This leaves it in need of finance, which it typically gets by distributing “printing press” money… leading to further discontent and economic discombobulation.
But wait. What is the media’s role? As we will see tomorrow, the press is meant to question authority. It is supposed to represent the public in its desire to get to the bottom of things. Does this war really make sense? Should we spend the public’s money on this? Why do you think this will make voters better off? But instead of asking the tough questions, the mainstream media became a shill for the government and the leading propagandist for the whole elite agenda. Now it just passes along the party line… no matter how at odds with the reality people see before their own eyes.
Mr. Trump was never clever enough to be a real Caesar. And the press despised him for it. Even when he spoke the truth, rarely, and if only by accident, the press excoriated him. So, what were the flyover voters supposed to think? Could they depend on the elite to count the votes fairly… or the press to report the results honestly? And when the real Caesar appears, won’t the public rejoice? We don’t know. But the toady media, after a little tidying up, will make damned sure to croak his praises. Stay tuned."
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