Tuesday, January 11, 2022

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, a magnificent interstellar dust cloud by chance has assumed this recognizable shape. Fittingly named the Horsehead Nebula, it is some 1,500 light-years distant, embedded in the vast Orion cloud complex.
About five light-years "tall", the dark cloud is cataloged as Barnard 33 and is visible only because its obscuring dust is silhouetted against the glowing red emission nebula IC 434. Stars are forming within the dark cloud. Contrasting blue reflection nebula NGC 2023, surrounding a hot, young star, is at the lower left. The gorgeous color image combines both narrowband and broadband images recorded using three different telescopes.”

Chet Raymo, “A Sense Of Place”

“A Sense Of Place”
by Chet Raymo

“It would be hard to find two writers more different than Eudora Welty and Edward Abbey. Welty was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of stories and novels who lived all her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house in which she was born, the beloved spinster aunt of American letters. Abbey was a hard-drinking, butt-kicking nature writer and conservationist best known for his books on the American Southwest. Both writers are favorites of mine. Both were great champions of place. I always wondered what it would have been like if they got together. As far as I know, that never happened. But let’s imagine a conversation. I have taken extracts from Welty’s essay “Some Notes on River Country” (1944) and from Abbey’s essay “The Great American Desert (1977) and interleaved them.

“This little chain of lost towns between Vicksburg and Natchez.”

“This desert, all deserts, any deserts.”

“On the shady stream banks hang lady’s eardrops, fruits and flowers dangling pale jade. The passionflower puts its tendrils where it can, its strange flowers of lilac rays with their little white towers shining out, or its fruit, the maypop, hanging.”

“Oily growths like the poison ivy – oh yes, indeed – that flourish in sinister profusion on the dank walls above the quicksand down those corridors of gloom and labyrinthine monotony that men call canyons.”

“All creepers with trumpets and panicles of scarlet and yellow cling to the treetops. There is a vine that grows to great heights, with heart-shaped leaves as big and soft as summer hats.”

“Everything in the desert either stings, stabs, stinks, or sticks. You will find the flora here as venomous, hooked, barbed, thorny, prickly, needled, saw-toothed, hairy, stickered, mean, bitter, sharp, wiry and fierce as the animals.”

“Too pretty for any harsh fate, with its great mossy trees and old camellias.”

“Something about the desert inclines all living things to harshness and acerbity.”

“The clatter of hoofs and the bellow of boats have gone. The Old Natchez Trace has sunk out of use. The river has gone away and left the landings. But life does not forsake any place.”

“In the Sonoran Desert, Phoenix will get you if the sun, snakes, bugs, and arthropods don’t. In the Mojave Desert, it’s Las Vegas. Up north in the Great Basin Desert, your heart will break, seeing the strip mines open up and the power plants rise…”

“The Negro Baptist church, weathered black with a snow-white door, has red hens in the yard. The old galleried stores are boarded up. The missing houses were burned – they were empty, and the little row of Negro inhabitants have carried them off for firewood.”

“…the highway builders, land developers, weapons testers, power producers, clear cutters, oil drillers, dam beavers, subdividers.”

“Eventually you see people, of course. Women have little errands, and the old men play checkers at a table in the front of the one open store. And the people’s faces are good.”

“Californicating.”

“To go there, you start west from Port Gibson. Postmen would arrive here blowing their horns like Gabriel, after riding three hundred wilderness miles from Tennessee.”

“Why go into the desert? Really, why do it? That sun, roaring at you all day long. The fetid, tepid, vapid little water holes full of cannibal beetles, spotted toads, horsehair worms, liver flukes. Why go there?”

“I have felt many times there is a sense of place as powerful as if it were visible and walking and could touch me. A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes its little light must be sought out to be seen.”

“Why the desert, when you could be camping by a stream of pure Rocky Mountain spring water. We have centipedes, millipedes, tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, Gila monsters, the deadly poisonous coral snakes, and the giant hairy desert scorpions. Plus an immense variety of near-infinite number of ants, midges, gnats, bloodsucking flies, and blood-guzzling mosquitoes.”

“Much beauty has gone, many little things of life. To light up the night there are no mansions, no celebrations. Wild birds fly now at the level where people on boat deck once were strolling and talking.”

“In the American Southwest, only the wilderness is worth saving.”

“There is a sense of place there, to keep life from being extinguished, like a cup of the hands to hold a flame.”

“A friend and I took a walk up beyond Coconino County, Arizona. I found an arrow sign, pointed to the north. Nothing of any unusual interest that I could see – only the familiar sun-blasted sandstone, a few scrubby clumps of blackbush and prickly pear, a few acres of nothing where only a lizard could graze. I studied the scene with care. But there was nothing out there. Nothing at all. Nothing but the desert. Nothing but the silent world.”

“Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in some essence, endure.”

“In my case, it was love at first sight. The kind of love that makes a man selfish, possessive, irritable…”

“New life will be built upon these things.”

“…an unrequited and excessive love.”

“It is this.”

“That’s why.”

The Poet: Theodore Roethke, “The Geranium”

“The Geranium”

“When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine -
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she’d lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me -
And that was scary -
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.
But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.”

- Theodore Roethke

Free Download: Jiddu Krishnamurti, “The Book of Life”

"You must understand the whole of life, not just one little part of it.
That is why you must read, that is why you must look at the skies,
that is why you must sing and dance,
and write poems and suffer and understand, for all that is life."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti

Freely download “The Book of Life”, by Jiddu Krishnamurti:

"A Long March..."

"The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery is decided. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instill faith in times of despair."
- Bertrand Russell

"The Real Threat to Democracy is Corrupting Wealth Inequality"

"The Real Threat to Democracy is Corrupting Wealth Inequality"
by Charles Hugh Smith

"Imagine a town of 1,000 adults and their dependents in which one person holds the vast majority of wealth and political influence. Would that qualify as a democracy? Now imagine that 100 of the 1,000 adults own 90% of all the wealth, collect 97% of all the income from capital and have virtually all the political power. How can a society in which 90% of the populace is decapitalized, disenfranchised and demoralized by political powerlessness be a democracy?

This is America: a kleptocratic autocracy that serves the few at the expense of the many, stripmining the bottom 90% under the guise of a fraudulent "democracy" in which only the few wield real power. Recall Smith's Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.

That our elected government responds only to the super-wealthy and corporations has been well-established: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens."

It's also a fact that the top 10% get virtually all the gains from the nation's capital, and this wealth is concentrated in the top 0.1%: "Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age."

Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.

Exactly how can a system of governance that is nothing but an invitation-only auction of political favors in which the top 0.1% own more than the bottom 80% be a functional democracy? The answer is it cannot. Politics and government have been reduced to protecting and enriching a neofeudal autocracy while claiming to serve the stripmined public.

This extreme concentration of wealth and power is not accidental; the government's policies have generated this concentration of wealth which has hollowed out democracy. The super-wealthy didn't siphon $50 trillion from those earning their living from labor on their own; government policies aided and abetted this vast transfer of wealth.

Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018: $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

The catastrophic consequences of this systemic concentration of wealth and power are also well documented. For example, Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies. Extreme inequality brings down societies, and America is now a society dominated by extreme inequality.

America is nothing but a vast moral cesspool that the public is told is a pristine pond of "democracy". Self-enrichment is cloaked as "doing God's work," profiteering is sold as "value," fraud is packaged as "finance" and rapacious monopolies are marketed as "enterprise."

Institutions have become little more than rackets enriching insiders and the wealthiest few; they have lost moral legitimacy which is the fundamental foundation of democracy and a market-based economy.

As I explain in my new book "Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States", moral legitimacy is the foundation of social cohesion. Once moral legitimacy has been lost, social cohesion unravels and the nation falls.

It wasn't just bad luck that financialization and globalization hollowed out America's economy and democracy and turned the bottom 90% into debt-serfs and tax donkeys; it was government policies implemented by elected officials and the appointed handmaidens of the super-wealthy. Virtually every major policy implemented by either party served the interests of the super-wealthy and corporations: tax cuts had trivial impacts on the bottom 90% while vastly increasing the wealth of the super-wealthy; the Supreme Court's rulings in favor of corporate "personhood" and "free speech" (a.k.a. the best government we can buy), and the evisceration of the rule of law for corporate fraud, collusion and embezzlement ("too big to fail, too big to jail").

The Federal Reserve's free money for financiers distributes gains on the order of 20-to-1 in favor of the super-wealthy: $2 trillion in gains for the bottom 90%, $40 trillion for the top tier. The list is long and painful proof that the elected government of the United States serves the interests of the top few - a reality masked by expert PR and partisanship.

Partisanship reflects a core structural dynamic: America is now a two-tier society and economy. If you're an executive at a big Wall Street investment bank, you can rig markets and embezzle billions and you'll never face any personal legal consequences such as being indicted, convicted and imprisoned. (Bernie Madoff's conviction was a classic Soviet-style show trial to mask the fact that thousands of other white-collar criminals kept their ill-gotten gains and faced no consequences.)

But try being an employee at a local credit union and embezzle $5,000 - a prison sentence is very predictable. If a spoiled-rotten rich kid gets caught with drugs, Mommy and Daddy's lawyer kicks into gear and gets a suspended sentence plea bargain. The kid from the bottom 90% gets a tenner in the Drug War Gulag. And so on.

America is also a regional two-tier economy/society. When a society kneels down and worships financialization and globalization, it gives all the political and financial power to the already-super-wealthy and corporations who get 97% of the gains from financialization and globalization.

Since the majority of already-super-wealthy and corporate managers reside in coastal metropolitan areas, the tide of new wealth flooding into the hands of the few boosts the economies of these select regions. The real polarization is economic-financial: there are two economies in America and there's very little commonality in the two economies. One benefited greatly from financialization and globalization, and the other was hollowed out and brought to its knees by financialization and globalization.

Since income and political power flow to capital, the disparity/inequality far exceed the 70/30 split depicted in this chart. The soaring wealth of billionaires is a more accurate reflection of inequality in America. Is there any wonder that stripmined Americans who sense their powerlessness are attracted to virulent partisanship? The more extreme the pendulum swing of wealth-power inequality, the more extreme the political blowback.

America's political class has no plan to reverse this destructive tide. Our leadership's "plan" is something they know well first-hand: bribery and complicity: just send a monthly stipend of bread and circuses to all the disempowered, decapitalized households, urban and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not bother the elites' profitable pillaging of America and the planet.

The insurrection and coup happened long ago, when financialization and globalization hollowed out the real economy and disempowered the bottom 90%. When the whole rotten palace of corruption collapses in a putrid heap, look no further for the cause than the extremes of wealth-power inequality that rendered "democracy" a convenient facade for the stripmining of the bottom 90%.

Try to find a developing-world kleptocracy in which the top few collect more than 97% of the income from capital. There aren't any that top the USA, the world's most extreme kleptocracy. We're Number 1."

The Daily "Near You?"

Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Thanks for stopping by!

"You Better Decide..."

“A wise man once said you can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it. What he meant is nothing comes without a price. So before you go into battle, you better decide how much you’re willing to lose. Too often, going after what feels good means letting go of what you know is right, and letting someone in means abandoning the walls you’ve spent a lifetime building. Of course, the toughest sacrifices are the ones we don’t see coming, when we don’t have time to come up with a strategy to pick a side or to measure the potential loss. When that happens, when the battle chooses us and not the other way around, that’s when the sacrifice can turn out to be more than we can bear.”
- “Dr. Meredith Grey”, “Grey’s Anatomy"
“So, how do you beat the odds when it’s one against a billion? You’re just outnumbered. You stand strong, keep pushing yourself against all rational limits, and never give up. But the truth of the matter is despite how hard you try and fight to stay in control, when it’s all said and done, sometimes you’re just outnumbered.”
- “Meredith”, “Gray’s Anatomy”
"Our world is not safe. It is a toxic swamp populated by predators and parasites. The odds are stacked against us from the moment of conception. We survive only because we fight the elements, hunger, disease, each other. And, although civilization promises us safe harbor, that promise is a fairy tale. Only the storm is real. It comes for each of us. And we cannot win. We can only choose how we will suffer our defeat. We can meekly take our beatings, and die like lemmings, finding solace in the belief that we shall one day inherit the earth. Or, we can plunge into the chaos with eyes wide open, taking comfort instead from the bruises, scars, and broken bones which prove that we fought to live and die as gods."
 - J.K. Franko, "Life for Life"

"Believe Them..."

"When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you."
- Maria Popova

"Light It Up!"

"Light It Up!"
by Jim Kunstler

"We are at a strange pass in The Saga of Covid. It seems the spikey virus wants to leave center stage… is weary of all the attention… wants to fade into the eternal parade of microorganisms that cozily coexist within the human life-stream - like Tony Fauci’s HIV, a fellow traveler in the old-time throng of human viruses, now semi-retired, and yet still every bit as mysterious in the actual mechanism of AIDS as it was when Dr. Fauci pinned his NIAID distinguished service medal on its elusive bosom, so to speak (but you’d have to read Bobby Kennedy’s book on Fauci to get the drift of that).

Omicron is sweeping the country, as love once did in George Gershwin’s day. (We are a different country now, as anyone tuned into the Turner Classics Movie channel can discover.) Omicron: the 36-hour head cold that Covid-19 has been demoted to. Omicron: a mere wise-cracking gecko compared to the roaring dragon that was Covid-19 in the winter of 2020. Omicron: kind of an embarrassment to “vaccine” tyrants who still seek to jab every arm on earth, and at ever-shortening intervals - like a med school version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, only with syringes running amok instead of brooms.

The Party-of-Chaos (the one headed by the ectoplasmic “Joe Biden”) does not want to let go of Covid-19, its Swiss army knife of destruction. With Covid-19, you can push people around and mess with their lives every which way, shut down their businesses, lock them in their homes, screw them out of their livelihoods, delete their reputations, board-up their social venues, cancel their careers, revoke their licenses, drag them into court, fine them into penury, cram them into prison camps, and much more.

If Covid-19 actually does make that move to exit the scene, the Party-of-Chaos will have to find a new focus for its anxiety-driven lunacy. And if the front page of The New York Times is the party’s id, a signifier of intent, then the focus will shift to fomenting war with Russia. Notice today’s lead headline, top left above the fold (as we used to say when the darn thing was printed on paper).
“…in a bid to avert war in Ukraine…” the headline declares. Dunno about you, but to me that suggests the USA sees war as a possibility, something we’ve already gamed into our plans, like it would be something we could… handle. Forgive the rather glum reality-test, but war with Russia over Ukraine is for sure something that the USA probably can’t handle. The most likely outcome would be a king-hell embarrassment on the battlefield, not just because we would be fighting on Russia’s door-sill where sheer logistics favor our adversary (with ready re-supply and all), but because our pussified military - with gal bomber pilots in pregnancy flight-suits and other novelties of “diversity & inclusion” - will result in the most ignominious ass-kicking in our history… following a 50-year string of prior embarrassments. The second most likely outcome of this face-off with Russia would be that old familiar nuclear World War Three, with everything from Bangor to Pacific Heights turned into one big smoldering ashtray.

Underlying this lunacy is The USA’s perverse wish to enlist Ukraine in NATO - Ukraine, that mighty economic powerhouse (not). What Ukraine is… is a super-sized version of Detroit, a hollowed-out shell of place whose mojo left on the 9:10 train to Palookaville decades ago, and has been on international life-support since the DC Deep State ran its 2014 “color revolution” in the Maidan Square. The Russians object to American huggermugger in Ukraine because following the implosion of the Soviet Union, we promised the Russians no expansion of NATO in the direction of their border. Yes, we did. We said that.

Well, sure, you may be thinking, countries make all kinds of insincere cockamamie agreements all the time, in the darkness of bad faith, and so what? This is geopolitical hardball. Grow up! We want Ukraine on our side now and Russia can just go pound sand…. Okay, forgive me… that may be what Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his genius deputies in Foggy Bottom are thinking… not you. But is it really a good idea? Ukraine, when not actually a part of greater Russia, has been in its acknowledged sphere-of-influence since before George Washington even thought about chopping down any cherry trees. Russia, which has been invaded and torched by European invaders twice in modern history (Napoleon, 1812; Hitler, 1941), does not want NATO lodging missiles, troops, and Gawd-knows-what-all else right on its border.

And, by the way, does the USA need another faraway failed state to support? We can’t even take care of the junkies, psychotics, and misbegotten lining the sidewalks of a dozen American cities, and now we propose to adopt the poorest country in that remote corner of the world? While beating down our own once-productive people, inflating away our savings, taking away our natural liberties to work, move about in a free society, and the right to decide what pharmaceuticals we can decline to put in our bodies?

Which brings us back to the virus. In The Saga of Covid there is a monster under the bed. The ballyhooed and mandated vaxxes apparently have the ability to kill and maim people who have taken them long after Covid-19 exits stage-left. We don’t really know how this works out, but we have plenty of clues: kids dropping dead of heart attacks, pro athletes, ditto, the VAERS numbers reporting over 21,000 vaccine-implicated deaths (out of a grossly under-reported actual figure) plus over a million adverse reaction reports (ditto under-reported). The time may not be far off when we make the ghastly discovery that the “vaccines” actually killed more Americans than the virus did.

Meanwhile, a report out of Indianapolis-based the OneAmerica Life Insurance company, a $100-billion outfit, announced last week that all-causes deaths in working age Americans between 18 and 64 were up 40 percent in the third quarter of 2021 and keeping the same pace in the fourth quarter. The number was described as “huge, huge… greater than a three-sigma event… unheard of,” according to company CEO Scott Davison, who added that even those figures are probably under-reported. What’s killing these people? Could it be Dr. Fauci’s prescription for vaxxing up everyone in the land? I guess, sooner or later, we’re going to find out."

"Empty Shelves At Family Dollar! - What's Coming!? - Rising Prices!"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, 1/11/22:
"Empty Shelves At Family Dollar! - What's Coming!? - Rising Prices!"
"In today's vlog we are at Family Dollar witnessing a lot of empty shelves. We are here to check out value items, but all we are finding are very high prices! It's getting rough out here as stores are struggling with getting in products!"

"Prepare for Financial Mayhem - Fake Chicken Is Here"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, AM 1/11/22:
"Prepare for Financial Mayhem - Fake Chicken Is Here"
"The News is so conflicting on our economy. We are being told that incomes are down and then they’re up. Now we are being told it’s the best economy in 40 years. You really cannot make this up."

"Partner to Power"

"Partner to Power"
by Bill Bonner

Poitou, France - "The COVID struck our family last week, the fully vaxxed and the unvaxxed alike. Joe Biden calls it the “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Apparently, the virus had not been informed. The local doctor was called to the scene. “The Covid will have to run its course,” he said. But I’ll give you some amoxicillin and prednisone to help prevent secondary infections.” He charged $50 for the home visit.

Was this a good way to handle it? We don’t know. Some of the family, unvaxxed, took nothing and hardly noticed their infections. Others, vaxxed, took the meds… and were up and about in 24 hours. One other, young, unvaxxed, took the meds but still has had lingering fevers, night sweats, sleeplessness and other annoyances. A daughter and her husband had already had the disease; they – the veterans – were untouched in the recent assault. Overall, the virus did its business. We did ours. All ended well. We are all on the mend. Many thanks to Dear Readers for their good wishes… and recommendations.


A Highly Mild Variant: We have no more insight into modern medicine than Joe Biden, but it seems logical that an over-70, vulnerable person might want to get vaccinated. He might have something to gain… and much to lose. As for young, healthy people… they have little to fear. And getting vaxxed apparently won’t help their relatives survive either. Just the contrary. We probably got the virus from an already-vaxxed family member. And the omicron version, especially, seems indifferent to vaccines.

An article in the Wall Street Journal this week tells us that 90 days after you get the shot, you’re more likely to get the Omicron virus than if you have never gotten vaxxed at all. In other words, the vaccines might make it more likely that you’ll kill your grandmother.

Still another article, in the Daily Caller, tells us that the Omicron is actually less of a threat to the over-70 crowd than the regular flu: "Before the Omicron variant, an average vaccinated 75-year-old had about a 0.5% chance of dying from COVID-19 if contracted, according to The New York Times. The typical death rate from influenza for the same age cohort, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reviewed by the NYT, falls in a similar range between 0.6% and 1.3%."

This morning, the CDC is calling for new masks to prevent the spread of the Omicron. But shouldn’t it be encouraging us to unmask completely, so that we can all get the fairly benign Omicron finally be done with it? You’d think someone would ask.

And remember, the lockdowns cost the global economy trillions of dollars of lost output. For those who live on less than $5 a day, that cutback could be disastrous. Ultimately, (though no one knows for sure) government policies in reaction to the Covid may damage more lives than they improve… especially among the poor. But today, we save our scorn for the 4th Estate – the newshounds. As we will see, they no longer ask the important questions. Instead, they bark on command.

Conflicting Interests: Sometime in the ‘90s or early 2000s, the mainstream press became the lead propagandist for the whole elite class who control US public policies. It saw its role as no longer to enlighten or to clarify… but like Pravda, to push the party line and discredit anyone who ventured beyond it. Here’s a trifling example. Reuters (whose chairman is also on the board of Pfizer): "Two officials presenting arguments on Friday to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to block vaccine mandates ordered by President Joe Biden's administration have tested positive for COVID-19 and will make their cases remotely, their offices said."

What is the connection between challenging mandatory vaccinations at the Supreme Court and coming down with the COVID-19? As far as we know, there is none. But the media loves to tell us stories about anti-vaxxers who die from covid. They do so as a subtle warning… stepping outside the box of elite opinion can be deadly.

And now, the media has a two-decade history of not asking questions, but merely telling the public what they want it to believe. Terrorism… recession… market collapse… snowmaggedon… weapons of mass destruction… the Plague – it mongered scare stories, each one bringing more decisions for the deciders to decide… and more money for the elite to spend.

Yes, each scare comes at a price. Each brings a response – a new law… a new regulation… a new program and trillions of dollars of new, ‘printing press’ money’ -- lockups, shutdowns, taxes, interest rate fixes, mandates – and another step further away from the consensual democracy that the mainstream media claims it is so eager to protect.

The elite clearly came out ahead. As owners of America’s stock and bond capital, it saw its wealth increase by more than $30 trillion since 2009. But the average citizen got, relatively, poorer. Wages stagnated while the rate of GDP growth per capita cut in half.

Shouldn’t the press have asked some questions? The ‘stimulus’ measures clearly don’t work; why do we continue with them? Where is the evidence that government planners can make an economy work better? Why does it make sense to start a war with Iraq… to send our soldiers to Afghanistan… to make war against an unknown group of people – terrorists – for unknown reasons… and at unknown costs?

How come we are still putting people in prison for drug crimes… when there is no evidence that it does any good… and much evidence that it does much harm? Why are we using the public’s money to bail out big, rich Wall Street investment firms?

What, exactly, is the rationale for making a federal case of the Covid 19? Wouldn’t it be better to treat it as a regular health matter… better addressed by doctor and patient?

How come killing George Floyd was such a big deal, but not a peep about killing Ashli Babbitt?

The press asked none of these questions. It did not ask Power for Truth… nor speak Truth to Power. Instead, it became a shill… no longer questioning the government, but parroting its claims and assertions, no matter how absurd. It became a partner to power, not the public’s gadfly.

Saw Something… Said Nothing: Reporters sat in the front rows for the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ malarkey… never asking the obvious question: ‘what business is it of ours if Iraq has weapons of mass destruction? Don’t we have WMDs too?’ Then, for twenty years, the Pentagon was allowed to waste money and lives in Afghanistan. Did any major American publication even question it? Nope; the press went along with the gag… from start to finish… even as the failed generals retired and took their comfy seats at lobbying firms, defense contractors, think tanks and hedge funds.

The media also sat on its hands as the ‘see something, say something’ terror alarm turned the US into a country of timorous snitches. It cheered spending $6 trillion to protect Wall Street’s bonuses and kept its eyes wide shut as the entire US economy was corrupted and rigged up for the benefit of the elite. And it fell in line immediately with the Capitol riot as an expression of “white supremacist terrorism.”

Is it any wonder Donald Trump’s ‘fake news’ charge stuck? Is it any wonder that by the election of 2020, the press had lost credibility… and the public could believe whatever damned fool thing it wanted? More tomorrow… on one of America’s most disappointing presidents… and the Inauguration Speech That Was Never Given."

"How It Really Is"

 

"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."

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

— 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"

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Land of Forever"

2002, "Land of Forever"

"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.”