Friday, January 21, 2022

"A Look to the Heavens

“The beautiful Trifid Nebula, also known as Messier 20, is easy to find with a small telescope in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. About 5,000 light-years away, the colorful study in cosmic contrasts shares this well-composed, nearly 1 degree wide field with open star cluster Messier 21 (top right).
Trisected by dust lanes the Trifid itself is about 40 light-years across and a mere 300,000 years old. That makes it one of the youngest star forming regions in our sky, with newborn and embryonic stars embedded in its natal dust and gas clouds. Estimates of the distance to open star cluster M21 are similar to M20's, but though they share this gorgeous telescopic skyscape there is no apparent connection between the two. In fact, M21's stars are much older, about 8 million years old.”

“Get Up Off Your Knees!”

“Get Up Off Your Knees!”
On your knees you may live to see another day,
but you’ll never live to see better days.
by Robert Gore 

“Zoos are among the saddest places on earth: magnificent but confined creatures on display for gawking crowds, prevented from living out their biological destinies, fed their daily rations, and domesticated beyond where they could ever return to the wild. You have to feel pity and sorrow for these innocent prisoners; they’d flee in a heartbeat if they could.

Humans have made themselves inmates – whether of a zoo, prison, or asylum is hard to say, likely a combination of all three. Animals earn our admiration because they resist losing their freedom. Humans occasionally do too, but usually surrender theirs for promises and trifles. The promises are broken and the trifles grow more trifling as humanity for the most part gives up. Keep people amused and make sure the rations don’t stop and no outrage rousts them to try to reclaim their birthright. When they visit the zoo, the animals stare back at them with contempt.

In this country, we sing, “Sweet land of liberty,” and, “The land of the free, and the home of the brave.” We incant “freedom” and “liberty” during election seasons, but anything beyond that is considered embarrassing, bad form. A legislator denouncing a proposed law as an infringement of freedom would be regarded as a lunatic. Millions of pages of federal, state, and local laws and regulations already infringe freedom. The denouncer might be irrefutably right, but his denunciation would be irrelevant.

While wildlife should be free in the wild, coping with the risks to the best of their capabilities, humans are supposedly unsuited for freedom. Free humans might develop their own talents and capabilities, produce, exchange, exercise their rights, and engage in voluntary association and social intercourse, all unsupervised. You can argue that such activities are generally beneficial. However, there is a special class who are permitted to supervise and coerce the rest of us, to curtail our freedom. This special class ensures fairness or equality or some such thing. Who knows what might happen without them. Think of the dangers!

Just consider the concept of people deciding what’s in their own best interest. A hyphenated word lurks: self-interest. The special people are motivated by everything but self-interest, or so they say. Indeed, nobility of motive justifies their power and the destruction of your liberty. The desire to better your life is selfish, unlike the impulses supposedly animating those holding the guns to your head. After widespread surrender, few champion their right to their own lives, which is selfish after all, or challenge the special people’s moral superiority, which confers their right to hold the guns.

It might mitigate moral condemnation for liberty’s surrender if it had produced some benefit for those waving the white flag. An old bromide has it that liberty is irrelevant when people are starving. Nothing is further from the truth; it’s freedom that feeds people, creates wealth, and advances humanity. The historical record offers ample proof. It’s the absence of liberty that produces starvation, poverty, decay, destruction, genocide, and war. Here too the historical record is clear, one need go no farther back than the last century. During this ascendancy of the special people, humanity fought its two deadliest wars and over a hundred million were murdered, victims of special plans for a better world.

But somehow it’s liberty that’s dangerous. Fortunately the special people still rule, to make sure it doesn’t break out somewhere. Their reign assures that this century will challenge the last for the title: Century of Slaughter. They see their subjects are domesticated draft animals, just smart enough to keep economies running, not smart enough to challenge domestication. However, it’s been free minds and free markets, not draft animals, that have produced the wonders that make modern life modern. Welfare states are halfway houses to totalitarianism. As they grow, liberty shrinks and progress slows, stops, and reverses, the deterioration culminating in either anarchy or tyranny.

Judging from the prevalence of terms like “secular stagnation” and the “end of growth,” we are in the stop phase and reversal is nigh. People have seen their freedom shrink and have borne the consequences, although most don’t make the connection between the two. Incomes have stagnated, opportunities have diminished, life grows ever coarser, and fear of a looming apocalypse pervades the popular consciousness. Many are preparing for a future in which modernity is no longer modern, where access to necessities and conveniences cannot be taken for granted. Guns and gold are at the top of checklists, for a day when the inevitable failure of the special people leads to the inevitable tyranny or anarchy.

The discontent sweeping the planet is recognition that things are wrong on multiple fronts, although recognition of the root cause is rare. The idea that changing the hands on the levers offers solutions is magical thinking. The problems stem from granting the special people the levers in the first place. They may be replaced, but once the replacements have their hands on the levers, they’ll feel special, too. Power assuredly corrupts.

We’re closer to the real solution in the lament: “Why can’t they just leave us alone?” They – the special people – must leave us alone, it’s our moral right. Those who think the collapse will never come, or that freedom can be reclaimed without a fight, delude themselves. The craven adage: It’s better to live on one’s knees than die on one’s feet, offers a false choice. On your knees you may live to see another day, but you’ll never live to see better days. You may die on your feet, but liberty offers the only hope for better days. It’s worth fighting for. It’s worth dying for.”

Chet Raymo, “Half Sick Of Shadows”

“Half Sick Of Shadows”
by Chet Raymo

“Who is this woman? Her name is on the prow of her boat: The Lady of Shalott. Yes, it’s Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” from the poem of 1842, here illustrated by John William Waterhouse in 1888. By some unspecified curse this lovely maiden was confined to a tower…

“Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Through the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river”

…near Camelot, where, forbidden to look out the window, she observed the world in a mirror and wove what she saw into a tapestry. So what is she doing in the boat, with her hand-stitched creation? One day, Sir Lancelot rode by her tower alone. She saw him in the mirror and – “half sick of shadows” – couldn’t resist turning to see him unreflected.

“His broad clear brow in sunlight glow’d;
On burnish’d hooves his war-horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flow’d
His coal-black curls as on he rode…”

The mirror cracked. She left her loom, descended from the tower, found a boat, inscribed her name on the prow, and…

“Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right -
The leaves upon her falling light -
Thro’ the noises of the night”

…cast off to drift downstream to Camelot – and to Lancelot. But curses are not to be foiled.

“For ere she reach’d upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
The Lady of Shalott.”

We are all of us in a way the Lady of Shalott, all of us who seek to create an image of the world, artists, poets, scientists. We perceive the world through the filter of our limited senses, our biologically evolved brains, our nurtured preconceptions. We weave our tapestries, knowing that our creations are a reflection removed from reality. Our “curse” is to be in love with the real, yet never able to embrace it except in the cold glass of conceptualization. Our legacy? To be found in a boat lodged among the reeds, our tapestry draped across the thwart, with Camelot yet somewhere further down the stream, glistening, beckoning, inescapably out of reach. But, ah, there’s that gorgeous tapestry.

There is another curse, self made, and that is to mistake the mirrorworld for the world outside the window, to fail to recognize the contingency of our conceptualizations, to forego an honest seeking for the falsely found, and – most ominously – to want to impose our own mirrorworld on others.”

"The Essence Of Human Existence..."

"Curiosity is the essence of human existence.
'Who are we? Where are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?'
I don't know. I don't have any answers to those questions.
I don't know what's over there around the corner. But I want to find out."
- Eugene Cernan

Free Download: Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters to a Young Poet”

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are
only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.
Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence,
something helpless that wants our love.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Download “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke here:

Read online :

The Daily "Near You?"

Erskineville, New South Wales, Australia. Thanks for stopping by!

"Reflect On What Happens..."

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age breakdown. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impassible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a secular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.”
– Strauss and Howe, “The Fourth Turning”

"Inflate or Die"

"Inflate or Die"
by Bill Bonner

Normandy, France - "This week, we explored the pampas. That’s where the US is headed, we believe. Chaotic, divisive politics. Government that plays the public for a fool. Runaway spending. Mountains of unpayable debt. Persistent, and sometimes exorbitant, inflation. Are we there yet? We don’t know. But we must be close.

The US is now trapped between two very familiar features of the Argentine landscape: a rock and a hard place. “Inflate or Die,” is how the late sage, Richard Russell described it. You either keep the party going by printing more money… or you pull the plug and reckon with the consequences now rather than later.

There are not many métiers where age is a benefit. Finance is the only one we can think of. Richard Russell. Charlie Munger. Paul Volcker. Henry Kaufman. The young investor can imagine anything he wants. But the old timers are skeptical and suspicious. They’ve seen too many great businesses that went broke, too many political promises that weren’t kept… and too many innovations that later flopped.

Henry Kaufman, born 1927, is among the small group analysts who are still among the quick and still paying attention. Back in the 1970s, as chief economist for Salomon Bros., he became known as Dr. Doom for criticizing government policies.

But then, in 1980, Paul Volcker, America’s last honest central banker, got way ahead of inflation. Prices were rising at a 14% rate. Volcker pulled the plug. He put the Fed’s key lending rate at 20%. Within months, the inflation figures turned around. And in 1982, Kaufman saw that the trend of the last 30 years (towards higher inflation and higher bond yields) had reversed; he told investors that the worst was over. He was right then. He’s probably right again now.

As we’ve shown in previous Diaries… if you’re going to stop inflation you have to also stop inflation expectations. And that means getting ahead of the inflation rate, not trailing along behind as it goes higher and higher. Today, to get ahead of a 7% inflation rate, the Fed should put its key lending rate at 10% – or about 1,000% higher than it is today. That would shock the financial world… and stop inflation in its tracks. It would certainly shock us, too!

Will the Fed do it? Kaufman: “I don’t think this Federal Reserve and this leadership has the stamina to act decisively. They’ll act incrementally. In order to turn the market around to a more non-inflationary attitude, you have to shock the market. You can’t raise interest rates bit-by-bit.”

On this point, the Fed has already expressed itself. The Fed will be “data dependent,” said the Fed chief, Jerome Powell. It will not lead; it will follow where the ‘data’ leads it. But why? Do Fed jefes lack cojones? Do their hundreds of Ph.Ds. lack brainpower? Or is there something else going on? Let us see if we can connect some dots.

Beer Guzzlers vs. Wine Snobs: As we saw yesterday, traditionally, beer drinkers are more likely to pay their debts than wine aficionados. America is a country split between the two. Beer drinkers in flyover country. Wine drinkers on the coasts. Not to pretend to any precision, but you’re not likely to find a good St. Émilion at a roadside trucker restaurant in Oklahoma. You find it in the fashionable precincts… where the decision makers live and work. In America, wine drinkers make the rules. Beer drinkers follow them.

Puzzling? Irrelevant? Is this just a joke? Here’s the punchline: the most obvious downside of printing extra money is inflation. Inflation is a tax… and it falls most heavily on the beer drinkers, not on the deciders. It’s an extremely ‘regressive’ tax, in other words.

If you earn a million dollars, you may spend only $100,000 of your annual income on inflation-sensitive consumer items – including an occasional ‘grand cru’ from Bordeaux. If they go up 10%, therefore, you pay an inflation tax of $10,000… or 1% of your income. Trivial. Barely worth noticing. But if you earn $50,000 you probably spend all your income on consumer items – food, fuel, beer, rent, etc. A 10% increase in prices cuts your purchasing power by $5,000… equivalent to a 10% tax rate. As a percentage of income, that’s ten times as high as the rich fellow. And you feel it; you are noticeably poorer as a result.

And, it’s not the fellow with a can of Bud Light in his hand who is going to answer the “Inflate or Die” question. It’s the people who control and influence the government – people in the media… in Congress… in the Universities… and most important, people on Wall Street.

For these people, inflation will not bruise their daily lives… neither will it dent their balance sheets. By contrast, a real economic contraction would hit them hard. They are the ones who have gained the most from the Fed’s money-printing lollapaloozas. They stand to be the big losers when the bubble pops.

The entire stock market has a value of $48 trillion. The top 10% own about 80% of it. Since 2009, they’ve made about $32 trillion in stock market gains alone. A real bear market would erase at least half of it. By our reckoning, that’s approximately a $3 million loss for every family in the top 10%. And if the Fed refuses to come to the rescue with more printing press money, the loss will likely be permanent, not “transitory.” “Inflate or die?” A 1% annual inflation tax? Or a $3 million loss in a matter of weeks? Which way do you think that will go?

‘Til next week."

"Financial Collapse Is On The Menu - The Economy is Boiling Over"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly, 1/21/22:
"Financial Collapse Is On The Menu - The Economy is Boiling Over"

"How It Really Is"

 

"New Data From Life Insurance Companies Confirm That Americans Are Dying In Unusually Large Numbers"

"New Data From Life Insurance Companies Confirm
That Americans Are Dying In Unusually Large Numbers"
by Michael Snyder

"Death is in the air. Unless you have been living in a cave for the past 12 months, you already know that this is true. Old people are dying, young people are dying, famous people are dying, and countless hard working Americans that make up the backbone of our economy are dying. For months, I have been writing articles about “the mystery of the missing workers”. For the very first time in U.S. history, we have a severe shortage of able-bodied workers, and this is one of the biggest reasons why we are facing an unprecedented supply chain crisis today. Millions of Americans that were working prior to the pandemic seem to have “disappeared” from the system, and now it has become clear that a lot of them have simply died.

Before I discuss the new life insurance numbers that have been revealed, I want to do a quick review. Earlier this month, I wrote an article about a large life insurance company in Indiana that announced that the death rate for working age people covered by their policies was up 40 percent from pre-pandemic levels… "The head of Indianapolis-based insurance company OneAmerica said the death rate is up a stunning 40% from pre-pandemic levels among working-age people. “We are seeing, right now, the highest death rates we have seen in the history of this business – not just at OneAmerica,” the company’s CEO Scott Davison said during an online news conference this week. “The data is consistent across every player in that business.”

A 40 percent increase in the death rate is really bad news for a life insurance company, because they make money when people don’t die. In fact, Davison said that a 40 percent increase in a single year “is just unheard of”… “Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic,” he said. “So 40% is just unheard of.”

Davison’s remarks sent shockwaves all over the Internet, because they were one of the first hard pieces of evidence confirming the fact that Americans are dying in unusually large numbers. But of course it was going to be extremely important for other life insurance companies to confirm that such a dramatic shift was indeed taking place, and now that is starting to happen.

According to Reuters, the amount of money paid out by global life insurance companies absolutely skyrocketed during the first three quarters of 2021… "The global life insurance industry was hit with reported claims due to COVID-19 of $5.5 billion in the first nine months of 2021 versus $3.5 billion for the whole of 2020, according to insurance broker Howden in a report on Jan 4, while the industry had expected lower payouts due to the rollout of vaccines. “We definitely paid out more than I had anticipated at the beginning of last year,” said Hannover Re board member Klaus Miller."

Let’s assume that claims in the fourth quarter of 2021 came in at the same pace as the first three quarters of 2021. That would add another 1.83 billion dollars, and it would give us a grand total of 7.33 billion dollars for the year.

Wow.

So basically the amount of money that global life insurance companies will pay out for 2021 will be approximately double what they paid out for 2020. Needless to say, that suggests that the death rate for those covered by such policies roughly doubled.

In that same article, it was reported that one life insurance company actually had its claims in the Americas more than triple during the third quarter… "Dutch insurer Aegon, which does two-thirds of its business in the United States, said its claims in the Americas in the third quarter were $111 million, up from $31 million a year earlier."

This isn’t normal. But you already knew that. Reuters is telling us that claims for MetLife and Prudential also “rose”, but we were not given specific numbers for those two insurance giants… "U.S. insurers MetLife (MET.N) and Prudential Financial (PRU.N) also said life insurance claims rose. South Africa’s Old Mutual (OMUJ.J) used up more of its pandemic provisions to pay claims and reinsurer Munich Re raised its 2021 estimate of COVID-19 life and health claims to 600 million euros from 400 million."

So now we have solid confirmation. A lot of people really are dying. Interestingly, an entirely separate investigation by The Epoch Times has also shown that deaths were unusually high in 2021. They analyzed death certificate data from the CDC, and they came to the conclusion that the number of deaths among Americans aged 18 to 49 “increased more than 40 percent in the 12 months ending October 2021 compared to the same period in 2018–2019″…

Health departments in several states confirmed to The Epoch Times that they are looking into a steep surge in the mortality rate for people aged 18 to 49 in 2021 - a majority of which are not linked to COVID-19. Deaths among people aged 18 to 49 increased more than 40 percent in the 12 months ending October 2021 compared to the same period in 2018–2019, before the pandemic, according to an analysis by The Epoch Times of death certificate data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."

This is bombshell information. Americans are dying in enormous numbers, and that trend is almost certainly going to continue throughout the coming year. Most of you that are reading this article know people that have died over the last 12 months. Every time that I hear that someone that I was personally familiar with has passed away, it deeply grieves me. What we are witnessing is such a great tragedy, and a lot more death is on the horizon.

Every moment that we are given is a precious gift, and so let us endeavor to make the most out of every single day. Many people assume that they will live to a ripe old age, but that isn’t always true. Death unexpectedly came for countless Americans in 2021, and countless more will also die in 2022."
"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
 however improbable, must be the truth."
 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

And what if this is quite intentional? What then? It is...
Oh, I know, you're thinking "They would never do that!"
Well, they did...
"Wuhan Flu shots were designed to “slow kill” 
the masses through time-delayed death."
Free Download: "The Vaccine Death Report"
by David John Sorenson and Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, MD

"Purpose: The purpose of this report is to document how all over the world millions of people have died, and hundreds of millions of serious adverse events have occurred, after injections with the experimental mRNA gene therapy. We also reveal the real risk of an unprecedented genocide.

Facts: We aim to only present scientific facts and stay away from unfounded claims. The data is clear and verifiable. Over one hundred references can be found for all presented information, which is provided as a starting point for further investigation.

Complicity: The data suggests that we may currently be witnessing the greatest organized mass murder in the history of our world. The severity of this situation compels us to ask this critical question: will we rise to the defense of billions of innocent people? Or will we permit personal profit over justice, and be complicit? Networks of lawyers all over the world are preparing class-action lawsuits to prosecute all who are serving this criminal agenda. To all who have been complicit so far, we say: There is still time to turn and choose the side of truth. Please make the right choice."
Freely download "The Vaccine Death Report" here:

Jim Kunstler, "Win-Win, Lose-Lose"

"Win-Win, Lose-Lose"
by Jim Kunstler

"They all hate us anyhow…
so let’s drop the Big One now."
- Randy Newman

"The world is waiting to know: will “Joe Biden” bomb Guatemala back to the stone age for sending incursions of its (very fine) people across America’s southern border? All of a sudden borders are sacred again, you know. Of course, there’s that old problem Colin Powell used to raise back in the Iraq War days of you break it, you own it. But, hey, don’t we already own Guatemala? And isn’t it already sort of broken?

Well, you can own a dog, say, a pitiful, broke-down, half-lame, scrofulous, rheumy-eyed, junkyard kind of old dog, and that doesn’t stop the dog from taking a dump on the neighbor’s property across the street. Anyway, the only thing Guatemala is dumping in Texas and Arizona is new voters, and that just means more democracy for us - a “win-win” as they say in the cabinet room! (Though, Yamiche Alcindor might still want to ask “JB” at the next presser if he would risk the US supply of bananas. We’re having enough trouble getting auto parts, fer chrissake.) Such are the quandaries of US foreign policy.

Then there’s this Shangri-La called Ukraine. Can anyone find it on the map? It’s nowheres around here. Let’s face it: Ukraine is not sending us any new voters or bananas. What good are they? You might argue: they exported the Vindman twins to America (win-win); they supported Hunter Biden’s cocaine habit for six or seven years and paid the mortgage on The Big Guy’s beach house. So, maybe we do owe them.

But then, it’s said that Russia is lurking on Ukraine’s border like a hungry bear at the edge of a sheep pasture, licking its chops, fork and knife in its fisted paws, napkin tied around its throat, visions of mutton-filled perogies dancing in its head. The whole DC foreign policy establishment says we should take a few potshots at that bear, teach it a lesson. I say, just throw Guatemala over the fence, let the bear chew on that, including a few bananas for dessert. There it is: problem solved.

Another possibility, which the “Joe Biden” admin seems to favor a little, is World War Three. We couldn’t lose that, could we? Well, at worst it would be a “lose-lose” so at least nobody else would win. Would the US be any worse off without New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and a few more population centers teeming with homeless junkies? (Who rarely show up at the polls to vote, by the way… and if you asked, could they even tell you who’s running for president?) World War Three begins to look like our silver linings playbook. London, Paris, and Berlin are not our problem, to be blunt about it. Even as you read this, “Joe Biden” is striving to explain his thoughts on these vexing matters, but he’s talking out of his ass so much it’s hard to tell whether he is setting forth actual policy or just breaking wind.

Isn’t it refreshing to not have to lede with Covid-19? It looks like “Joe Biden’s” effort to change the channel is working. Even so, there is some interesting Covid-19 news, like: the whole endless, heartbreaking, demoralizing episode is winding down. Whoa! That’s a shock! What will Western Civ do without it? In the UK, Boris Johnson put a stop to all restrictions, mask mandates, and vaxx passports, just like that (snap) on Wednesday. Then France announced it would lift most Covid-19 restrictions in February, which is a little more than a week from now, for those of you who haven’t mastered the new maff. Then, on Thursday, Austria’s parliament voted to approve mandatory vaccinations for everybody in the country - say, what? - leading the casual observer to wonder whether half of everybody in that country is maybe super pissed-off at their government, seeing how France and the UK are going the opposite way.

Let’s be honest: it’s getting laughable to seriously advocate vaxxing up a whole goshdarn population when it’s perfectly obvious now that the vaxxes don’t work and are making a lot of people sick with everything that can go wrong in a human body, plus Covid-19. Are nations such as Austria and Germany not looking plumb insane now? Can the European Union endure such wildly contradictory policy among its member states, and not make itself ridiculous? Let’s just say, the situation in Europe is in flux and events are moving fast.

Here in our exceptional nation, it is lately discovered - to the chagrin of the elite managerial classes - that The Science personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci is not medical science after all but rather political science. Ah! I see now why so much confusion has been sown over Dr. Fauci’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic. If he actually represented medical science, he might not have killed several hundred thousand people in this country by withholding and suppressing effective treatments and promoting deadly vaccines. He might not have disgraced the entire medical establishment and half-wrecked the system it works in. But, to paraphrase another eminent political scientist of yore, Josef Stalin, while one death is a tragedy, a half-million is a mere statistic. There’s science anyone can understand!"

Gregory Mannarino, "Fear Trade Underway"

Ignore blank start screen. Click to begin.
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/21/22:
"Fear Trade Underway"

"Food Shortage Update 1/20/22"

Full screen recommended.
Let's Talk Prepping,
 "Food Shortage Update 1/20/22"
"Here is a look at the empty shelves at Walmart in Rhode Island. As you watch this video ask yourself have we resigned ourselves to seeing empty shelves and accepting it as normal now? The food shortages are still here and seem to be getting worse. We need to prep as much as we can. It is still possible to get the food you need but there are more and more empty shelves every day."

Thursday, January 20, 2022

"This Is Your Last Chance", Part 1

"This Is Your Last Chance", Part 1
by Robert Gore
This is Part One, Part Two will be posted 1/21.

"The indictment is long and strong. A cabal of politicians, governments, courts, medical authorities, pharmaceutical companies, multinational agencies, the mainstream media, academics, and foundations, particularly the World Economic Forum, have concocted responses to a virus and its variants that have robbed the people of rightful liberties, are a mechanism for the imposition of global totalitarianism, and have amplified rather than reduced the virus’s dangers, inflicting severe injury and death that will last years, perhaps decades, and afflict millions, if not billions, of victims (See “The Means Are The End,” Robert Gore, SLL, November 13, 2021).

This is their last chance. They can reverse course and pray to whatever demonic deity they pray to that it’s enough to prevent the retribution they deserve, or they can perish in the destruction they’ve created. They will reap what they have sown, their time is up.

This is it, the last gasp of the psychopaths who express their contempt and hatred for humanity by trying to rule it. Compulsion, not voluntary and natural cooperation. Power, pull, and politics, not incentives, competition, honest production, and value-for-value trade. From each according to his virtue to each according to his depravity.

The Last Gasp,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 24, 2020

Their time is up. This assertion may appear as recklessly foolish as Luke Skywalker’s ultimatum—“Jabba, this is your last chance, free us or die!”—did to Jabba the Hut at the Sarlacc Pit. It’s not, but to understand why requires an understanding of slow moving (on human time scale) but enormously powerful forces. Most history studies the wrong things and most predictions are straight line projections of the present and recent past.

The linchpin of history is innovation, not governments and rulers. We don’t know who ruled whom when humanity lived in caves, but we do know that someone tamed fire, someone planted seeds and cultivated them for food, and someone invented the wheel. With such steps humanity emerged from the caves and began building civilization. Even at this early stage one thing was clear: innovation creates new capabilities and opportunities and serves as the basis for further innovation.

Government is the acquisition of resources that enables those who govern to exercise control over those whom they govern. This presupposes resources, which presupposes production. Government is always subsidiary to production, yet most history focuses on the former and treats the latter as a secondary matter. This is looking down the telescope from the wrong end. Before a government can take someone must make.

History as studied is a dreary succession of violent takers: their kingdoms and empires, their exactions from the populace, their wars, their depredations, their monuments, and so on. Most of this is trivial compared to the innovation that gets short shrift.

Who ruled which nations in 1440 and what effect does whatever they did have on us today? There’s not one person in ten million who can knowledgeably answer those questions. Ask instead if the moveable-type printing press that Johannes Gutenberg invented that year has had an effect on their lives and most will acknowledge its inescapable importance.

The few rulers who have ruled wisely are largely forgotten. Wise rule is maintaining the conditions that allow the people themselves to create, innovate, and produce, what’s been called the night watchman state. Protecting them and their property from invasion, violence, theft, and fraud are the important but minimalist assignments for such governments. Crucially, such protection of the people extends to protection from the government itself. This type of government offers would-be rulers no opportunity for the larceny, self-aggrandizement, and power they crave, which is why they’ve been so rare.

The perfect night watchman state has never been achieved. There have only been a few that have come close. Conditions of relatively greater freedom, however, have coincided with the explosions of innovation and productivity that have bequeathed to humanity most of its progress.

The United States’ explosion was the Industrial Revolution, which launched virtually every important industry we have today and took the nation from its agrarian roots to industrial preeminence. With the exception of Theodore Roosevelt, an outlier in many unfortunate ways, the presidents who presided during the Industrial Revolution (1865-1913) have passed into obscurity, always a desirable fate for presidents. (See “The Magnificent Eleven,” Robert Gore, SLL, May 3, 2017. For a fictional treatment of the period, see "The Golden Pinnacle", Robert Gore, 2013.)

Nineteenth-century fecundity set the table for twentieth-century insanity, giving psychopathic rulers the resources for two world wars and innumerable smaller ones, history’s most totalitarian governments, genocides, and the perpetration of myriad other miseries and horrors. The twentieth century is easily history’s most tyrannical and bloody... so far. Emblematic of the century is its “greatest” invention, nuclear weaponry, which can destroy all life on earth.

In the United States, establishment of the central bank and imposition of income taxes in 1913 allowed the government to expropriate a far higher share of the nation’s incomes and wealth than it had. Shortly thereafter, ignoring George Washington’s sage advice to avoid foreign entanglements, the U.S. entered World War I. The Industrial Revolution and its comparative freedom were over, the accretion of state power that continues to this day was underway.

Government resurfaced as the dominant institution, as it has been for most of history, not just in the U.S. but around the globe. Intellectual fashion followed the political trend. Money and power—heady prospects for many intellectuals—were to be had promoting the growth of the state and toadying to its functionaries. A few brave souls spoke out against the trend and championed freedom, but they were ignored and shunned. Today, champions of freedom are consigned to obscure corners of the Internet.

You would think that living off the Industrial Revolution’s productive legacy, with first call on incomes and accumulated wealth, rulers would command more than ample resources to do whatever they desired. Such is not the case. Their schemes and rapacity are unlimited while even in the most productive and wealthy societies, resources are not. Governments and their central banks have created a debt explosion that leaves the world in the deepest financial hole it’s ever been.

The explosion has accelerated the past few years, leaving rulers at the outer limits of what they can expropriate or borrow. Whatever growth in GDPs they now hail, the unmentioned growth in debt is greater—the hole gets deeper. This state of affairs illustrates history’s central truism: governments can’t produce. Their stock in trade, coercion and violence, only destroys. Making producers tax and debt slaves to those who produce nothing destroys both production and integrity.

The death knell sounded in 1971 when the United States government repudiated the last vestige of its promise to redeem its dollars for gold. Debt would be the coin of the realm. The bland term “financialization” hides the moral obscenity. Each year the nation’s debt has grown. Production, when netted against that debt, has shrunk, and an increasingly large portion of what remains is diverted to those who don’t produce. Washington decides who gets what, but it can’t command the what. That shrinks as productive virtue is penalized and theft, fraud, and violence are rewarded.

This increasingly precarious state of affairs has lasted for fifty years. It won’t last much longer. Only moral and intellectual bankruptcy greater than current financial bankruptcy could call this abject failure a failure of capitalism.

Capitalism is the economics of political freedom. The strangulation of both in the U.S. officially commenced in 1913. They are the antithesis of what we now have, state-directed collectivism. Capitalism and freedom didn’t fail the people, the people failed capitalism and freedom. If people can’t handle individual freedom—as collectivists like to argue—they certainly can’t handle collectivist power, as the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have amply demonstrated. It’s like the one brat in a room full of self-directed, happily interacting children seizing control of the room."
Part Two will be posted 1/21.

"Stock Market And Housing Will Be Crippled; End Of The Bubble; Americans Go Broke"

Jeremiah Babe, PM 1/20/22:
"Stock Market And Housing Will Be Crippled; 
End Of The Bubble; Americans Go Broke"
Related:

Musical Interlude: Hilary Stagg, "Pleasant Dreams"

Hilary Stagg, "Pleasant Dreams"
Full screen highly recommended.

The Poet: Carl Sandburg, "Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind"

"Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind"

“The past is a bucket of ashes.”

1
"The woman named Tomorrow 
sits with a hairpin in her teeth 
and takes her time 
and does her hair the way she wants it 
and fastens at last the last braid and coil 
and puts the hairpin where it belongs 
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it? 
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone. 
What of it? Let the dead be dead. 

2
The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold 
and the girls were golden girls 
and the panels read and the girls chanted: 
We are the greatest city, 
the greatest nation: 
nothing like us ever was. 

The doors are twisted on broken hinges. 
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind 
where the golden girls ran and the panels read: 
We are the greatest city, 
the greatest nation, 
nothing like us ever was. 

3
It has happened before. 
Strong men put up a city and got 
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women 
to warble: We are the greatest city, 
the greatest nation, 
nothing like us ever was. 

And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened 
and paid the singers well 
and felt good about it all, 
there were rats and lizards who listened... 
and the only listeners left now... 
are…the rats…and the lizards. 

And there are black crows 
crying, “Caw, caw,” 
bringing mud and sticks 
building a nest 
over the words carved 
on the doors where the panels were cedar 
and the strips on the panels were gold 
and the golden girls came singing: 
We are the greatest city, 
the greatest nation: 
nothing like us ever was. 

The only singers now are crows crying, “Caw, caw,” 
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways. 
And the only listeners now are…the rats…and the lizards. 

4
The feet of the rats 
scribble on the door sills; 
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints 
chatter the pedigrees of the rats 
and babble of the blood 
and gabble of the breed 
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers 
of the rats. 

And the wind shifts 
and the dust on a door sill shifts 
and even the writing of the rat footprints 
tells us nothing, nothing at all 
about the greatest city, the greatest nation 
where the strong men listened 
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was."

- Carl Sandburg

"A Market Veteran Is Warning About A January Stock Market Crash"

Full screen recommended.
"A Market Veteran Is Warning 
About A January Stock Market Crash"
by Epic Economist

"The U.S. stock market is down this month, with investors bracing for a lot of volatility as the Federal Reserve starts tightening its monetary policy to fight against rampant inflation. The tech sector has immensely benefited from the liquidity injections issued over the past two years, which helped to leverage stock prices to record highs. But as policies are rolled back, several high-flying tech stocks have been sent straight to correction territory. As Deutsche Bank’s head of thematic research, Jim Reid, highlighted in a note published yesterday, this year has been “a perfect negative storm for tech,” with higher nominal and real yields as well as “a Fed that seems strongly committed to starting quantitative tightening”. Tech stocks are extremely sensitive to lower liquidity and rising rates, for that reason, many investor favorites have sharply declined over the past two weeks. On Wednesday, the Nasdaq fell almost 2%, with the FANG Index, which includes Big Tech names such as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, and Tesla, dropping roughly 5% in the afternoon trading. During the same time last year, the FANG Index jumped about 20%.

As the burst of the tech bubble becomes evident, more and more investors are acknowledging the growing risks and admitting that there is a broader stock market bubble. In a global market poll conducted by Deutsche Bank, 49% of the respondents affirmed that U.S. stocks are in a bubble. As investors move away from risky tech stocks, the Nasdaq officially entered correction territory, defined as a minimum 10% decline from its high. The latest peak in the index was recorded on November 19. After that point, things started to go downhill and never fully recovered. And yesterday, the tech-heavy index recorded a crash of nearly 11% below the record. But experts are saying that the downturn is about to get worse in the coming weeks as companies release their quarterly earnings data and investors are forced to confront the current economic reality. Even Nasdaq strategists are warning that a broad stock market crash is fast approaching. On Nasdaq’s official website, financial analyst Sean Williams cited several reasons why a stock market crash is likely to occur in January.

Everywhere we look, all signs point to an imminent financial disaster. Now, it seems that investors’ top priority is to get out of the tech bubble before they suffer from more painful losses. According to RBAdvisors' Dan Suzuki, the risks of investing in tech stocks today are the highest they have ever been. Suzuki compared the frothiness in the sector to the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, saying: "It's never too early to sell." He believes that “any protracted sell-off in tech will reverberate across the broader equity market, given the weight tech stocks have in the major indices now compared to a decade ago”. "There's massive downside risk. I'm talking about a bubble that reaches out at least 50% of the market," he emphasized. "The only way to protect from a bubble is to get away from it," Suzuki cautioned. "We've seen this movie before. These things don't move in straight lines. I wouldn't be surprised to see a major reversal here."

"We haven't really scratched the surface of what they're really going to do to people's portfolios," he continued. Keeping in mind that millions of household portfolios are extremely exposed to these risky stocks, we’re about to witness some acute financial losses. And with soaring inflation and a looming stock market crash, it seems that Americans are already preparing for years of financial uncertainty. A recent Quicken survey shows that roughly 71% of the population inflation is among the top three issues they're most worried about at the moment, followed by the new virus variant, supply chain disruptions, and a stock market crash.

"Americans are feeling the impact of inflation across their daily expenses, which is why it's on everyone's mind," outlined Quicken CEO, Eric Dunn. "It's important to understand exactly how economic changes, such as inflation and an unsteady stock market, impact our daily lives, and to have a handle on your personal finances so that you are prepared for the uncertainties ahead," he alerted. Nearly 52% of Americans agree that a stock market crash seems near, amongst them, 58% think it will impact their finances negatively. In short, people can tell when dark times are approaching. And when the stock market finally implodes, we will find ourselves in the middle of the most devastating financial and economic crisis in modern history."

Gregory Mannarino, "What A Full-On Debt Market Implosion Will Look Like"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/20/22:
"What A Full-On Debt Market Implosion Will Look Like"

Gerald Celente, "Trends in The News"

Full screen recommended.
Strong language alert!
Gerald Celente, "Trends in The News"
"The Trends Journal is a weekly magazine analyzing global current events forming future trends. Our mission is to present Facts and Truth over fear and propaganda to help subscribers prepare for What’s Next in these increasingly turbulent times."

"A Look to the Heavens"

“Will the spider ever catch the fly? Not if both are large emission nebulas toward the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga). The spider-shaped gas cloud on the left is actually an emission nebula labelled IC 417, while the smaller fly-shaped cloud on the right is dubbed NGC 1931 and is both an emission nebula and a reflection nebula.

About 10,000 light-years distant, both nebulas harbor young, open star clusters. For scale, the more compact NGC 1931 (Fly) is about 10 light-years across.”

"A Strange Honey..."

"Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don't try and press it down. Don't hide from it. Don't escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That's the way life goes."
- Ben Okri

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "What I Have Learned So Far"

"What I Have Learned So Far"

"Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.
Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don't think so.
All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of- indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone."

~ Mary Oliver

The Daily "Near You?"

Oakes, N. Dakota, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"Above All..."

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love. "
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"