"Clear Focus Ambient Space Music for Concentration - Isochronic Tones"

Jason Lewis - Mind Amend,

"Clear Focus Ambient Space Music for Concentration - Isochronic Tones"

Headphones are NOT required for this video.

"How should you listen to this? You can listen to this track with your eyes open while studying, reading or doing other activities which require a good level of concentration.

How does it work? This is a brainwave entrainment music track using isochronic tones combined with music. The music has also been embedded with amplitude entrainment effects, where the music is subtly distorted and vibrates in unison with the same frequency of the isochronic tones. This helps to add further strength to the entrainment effect. This brainwave entrainment session cycles through a frequency range of between 10Hz in Alpha, (which can help with memorization and learning), and up to 14Hz in the Beta range, (which will help with increasing focus and concentration).

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Isochronic tones are a fast and effective audio-based way to stimulate your brain. Among many of the benefits, they can help improve focus, relaxation, energy levels, sleep and more, without taking drugs or needing any special equipment. What isochronic tones essentially do, is guide your dominant brainwave activity to a different frequency while you are listening to them, allowing you to influence and change your mental state and how you feel.

How Brainwave Entrainment Works: Your brain continually produces electrical activity, even when you are asleep. Neurologists found that this activity can be recorded in the form of brainwave patterns, also known as ‘brainwaves'. Many scientific studies have shown that the brainwave activity in the brain can be influenced and corrected when it is stimulated with specific beats and tones. This process is known as ‘Brainwave Entrainment', and can be extremely effective when used correctly.

Various forms of brainwave entrainment and synchronization have been used in many different cultures for hundreds of years. Long before scientists were able to measure our brainwave patterns. Lots of historical references show that our ancestors used drums and or chanting, to induce and experience different states of mind. Some cultures still use the same methods today.

A Naturally Occurring Synchronization Phenomena: This synchronization phenomenon is not just confined to our brainwaves; it's universal and appears in chemistry, biology, neurology, pharmacology, medicine, astronomy and more. If you put a number of pendulum clocks on the wall and started them at different times, you will find that within a day or sooner, all of the pendulums will start to synchronize with each other in perfect unison. If you ever listen to an audience clapping, you will notice that if it goes on for a while, people will start to clap in tune with each other, without consciously thinking about it.

Here's a video example of metronomes 

completely synchronizing together in under 2 minutes. 

Your Different Mental States, Measured By Your Brainwave Frequency: Through the advancement of neurological research, we are now able to accurately identify what frequency ranges our brainwaves are in, during certain mental states. For example:

● Gamma 40+ Hz is experienced during extreme alertness, high energy and times of intense focus.

● Beta' 12hz – 40hz, is the most common mental state for most of us when we are awake during the day.

● The ‘Alpha' range is between 8hz – 12hz, and in this state, we are awake but relaxed, and not processing much information.

● During light sleep or deep relaxation, we are usually in between the 4hz to 8hz range. Also known as ‘Theta'.

● When we are in a deep sleep, our brainwave frequency is usually very low, between 0hz to 4hz which is also referred to as ‘Delta'.

Brainwave Entrainment Methods: With this knowledge and more in-depth research, we are now able to develop audio brainwave entrainment programs, to match the frequency range of our desired mental state, and produce brainwave synchronization. For the brain to be effectively entrained, every tone or beat has to produce an individual electrical imprint on the brain, called a ‘Cortical Evoked Response'. The stronger the beat, the stronger the entrainment effect.

Binaural Beats: The most well-known form of brainwave entrainment uses Binaural Beats. Binaural Beats are created by sending a different tone into each ear. The tones are mixed together ‘inside' your head by your brain, resulting in a pulse also called a ‘beat'. So as an example, you might send a frequency of 200hz into your left ear, and 190hz into the right. This would create a beating tone in your brain at 10hz. The lower of the two tones is called the ‘carrier' and the higher one the ‘offset'. The beat you hear is actually created inside your head, not externally. This is because your brain creates the beat after working out the differences from each ear.

Because of how Binaural Beats work, you always have to listen to them with headphones on, so that each ear can receive a different frequency. If you listen to the same Binaural Beat audio without headphones, in most cases you will hardly be able to detect a beat at all, because your ears will be able to hear both frequencies at once and the effect is lost. This can be a drawback with Binaural Beats because it's not always practical or desired to listen to entrainment with headphones on. How a typical Binaural Beat would look in your brain:

The fluctuation in the wave pattern is what creates the resulting beat.

Isochronic Tones – The Most Powerful Form Of Audio Entrainment: lsochronic tones are created in a completely different way to Binaural Beats. Instead of two different tones being combined together, just a single tone is used. The beat is created by turning the tone on and off at regular intervals. This is also referred to as Amplitude Entrainment. As you can see from the diagram below, Isochronic Tones are significantly more obvious and stronger. The resulting entrainment effect is much more powerful than Binaural Beats.

Mixed With Music: Brainwave entrainment can be mixed with normal music and white noise very effectively, which can really enhance the user experience and make the beats more pleasant and relaxing to to listen to. The image below shows an Isochronic Tone that has been mixed with music. Although the individual pulses are not separated as clearly, the resulting entrainment effect is still very effective on the brain.

Which Parts of Your Life Would You Like to Improve?

- https://www.youtube.com/results?

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- https://www.mindamend.com/brainwave-entrainment/isochronic-tones/

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This works, as simple as that. I cannot recommend this highly enough.

- CP

"Supply Chain Crisis Threatens To Trigger Commercial Real Estate Collapse & Bankruptcies"

Full screen recommended.

"Supply Chain Crisis Threatens To Trigger 

Commercial Real Estate Collapse & Bankruptcies"

by Epic Economist

"The U.S. commercial real estate collapse is being aggravated by the ongoing supply chain crisis as the national warehouse vacancy rate drops to the lowest level on record, shortages prevent builders from increasing capacity, leading commercial property rents to soar and businesses to take on massive loads of debt to afford for space that hasn’t even been built yet. The global supply chain crisis continues to wreak havoc on every sector of the industry. Now it is impacting commercial real estate construction at a time businesses and ports need it the most, with the worst potentially still to come.

While manufacturers and retailers struggle to restock their inventories, and consumers feel the pain of shipping delays and price increases, commercial real estate builders and landlords are losing a major opportunity to recover financially from the losses suffered over the past few years. That’s happening because most commercial real estate around ports and in metropolitan areas have already been leased and turned into warehouses, leaving vacancy rates at record lows at a time demand for space is soaring, which is pushing commercial rent prices significantly up.

Right now, there are approximately 5.6 million containers sitting at U.S. ports waiting to be picked up by truckers and delivered at warehouses to be distributed to stores all across the country. Construction companies and businesses are taking on massive loans to invest in the creation of more capacity, which includes warehouses and distribution centers, outside major U.S. ports. On a yearly basis, over 1 trillion dollars worth of goods arrives at the U.S. coast to be processed and distributed around the nation until they reach the end consumer. In that sense, it’s understandable why there’s a mad rush to build more facilities to accommodate all of these products.

However, a global shortage of raw materials is causing shortages of key construction supplies, expanding delivery times, and driving prices to unprecedented highs. That’s to say, companies are spending billions of dollars to create warehouse spaces that might take years to be built. By then, consumer demand will likely have shifted, and probably cooled off given that rampant inflation continues to compromise people’s buying power. Monetary tightening also means companies will have to pay higher rates on property loans, but slower consumer spending means that they will have less cash flow on their balance sheets. In essence, private landlords and construction companies are going to be left with a glut of commercial real estate, just as it happened before.

Warehouse vacancy in the country is currently at 3.6%, a record low, according to recent data from CBRE, an American commercial real estate services, and investment firm. "Three-and-a-half percent is effectively zero," explained John Morris, executive managing director lead for CBRE's industrial and logistics business in the Americas. "For the year, we have basically an effective shortage of space of about 300 million square feet."

According to the New York Times, the situation is getting so critical that warehouse space is the latest thing being hoarded by big retailers and corporations, further aggravating the sector’s crunch. But those expecting this new capacity to be a quick end to the supply-chain crisis are going to be bitterly disappointed. The first wave of the crisis was marked by port congestion, labor shortages, factory shutdowns, and shortages of raw materials. But the second wave looming on the horizon is going to be marked by debt. Most of these investments have been made through bank loans. Considering that since the last quarter, corporate earnings have been steadily dropping and a series of interest rate hikes is coming over the next few weeks, the commercial real estate sector is facing mounting risks of cross-debt default.

Over the past twelve months, companies have taken on more risk by pouring giant piles of borrowed money into projects whose profits are not guaranteed. In China, for example, that resulted in the bankruptcy of one of the world’s biggest property developers, triggering a commercial real estate and housing market collapse and depressing both sectors, which together, account for over 25% of the country’s GDP.

In simple words, as private companies’ access to capital goes, so does the resilience of the supply chain. At some point in the not-too-distant future, the mountain of debt made over the past year will need financing or refinancing, and many will be unable to raise liquidity at affordable rates, if at all. Cracks in the credit market are already starting to emerge. And once again, the ones who will suffer the most at the end of the day are going to be the consumers, who will end up having to pay for these companies’ debt through higher prices of goods."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com​

Live: Trucker Freedom Convoy 2022 in Ottawa, Canada, Day 22

Full screen recommended.

Live: Trucker Freedom Convoy 2022 in Ottawa, Canada, Day 22

Where are you, Americans,

 as your world comes crashing down all around you?

Gregory Mannarino, "Stock Market: How To Recognize When The Big Crash Will Happen, Before It Does!"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 2/18/22:

"Stock Market: How To Recognize When 

The Big Crash Will Happen, Before It Does!"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Jim Kunstler, "The Unmasking"

"The Unmasking"

by Jim Kunstler

Stipendium peccati mors est...

"O Canada, the Great White North, hovering ominously above Niagara Falls somewhere, is a winter wonderland, and one of the great pleasures of the season there, apparently, for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is skating on thin ice. Why is that? Perhaps in all the hollering you have forgotten how Mr. T has kicked off a civil war: by forcing government-mandated shots on his country’s working class of an alleged “vaccine” that doesn’t work and harms people, at the dwindling end of a worldwide disease scare that scientists in Canadian labs may have helped to create.

The great truckers’ convoy that converged on Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, has exposed the ugly truth at the heart of this historic moment for Western Civ: that governments have declared war on their own citizens. It happens that PM Trudeau represents his country’s Liberal Party, which is suddenly the party of unchecked government power to interfere in the lives of citizens, the party of speech suppression, news management, forced unsafe vaccinations, and the seizure of citizens’ property outside due process of law.

Under the Emergencies Act, Mr. Trudeau’s police have now arrested the leaders of the trucker’s revolt, Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, on charges of “counseling to commit mischief” (O, dear…!), and seized their bank accounts, while also freezing the bank accounts of anyone who donated money to the truckers’ cause. That action led, naturally, to runs on Canada’s major banks, leading to bank shut-downs on Wednesday - d’uh… what do you expect when the authorities send the message: your money is not safe in Canada’s banks, and might not even be your money if we say it’s not?

And now everybody - including alert citizens watching from many other countries - waits to see what the next moves are. Let’s also note that it’s not just the truckers in revolt against insane government mandates; it’s also at least half the population of Canada who stand behind the truckers and against the new fashion for tyranny in what used to be called the Free West. I’d venture to guess that the next move will be a general strike that paralyzes Canada and forces its parliament to overrule the Emergency Act and get rid of PM Trudeau.

Meanwhile, like a coronavirus itself, the trucker protest movement has infected America. A “People’s Convoy” is assembling around Barstow, California (the capital of the Mojave Desert, where there’s plenty of room to assemble), with a launch date of February 23, next Wednesday, destination: Washington DC. Won’t that be… interesting? What will the government of “Joe Biden” do? Likewise invoke some sort of emergency powers? Declare yet another “insurrection” as with January 6, 2021? Mess with the truckers’ bank accounts, and those of the people who support them? Do they want to inspire a run on US banks at a juncture where the extreme fragility of the global banking system threatens to blow up financial markets? Standing by on that.

The US government, like Canada’s, has likewise been at war with its citizens. At least half the country has awakened to this unappetizing reality - even while somewhat less than half the country still catatonically follows whatever idiotic diktat the despotic bureaucracy spews out. Why, for instance, do so many still go about in face masks even where local regulations are lifted? (And especially in light of the overwhelming evidence that masks don’t work?) Answer: to signify that they are still against Trump, the evil leviathan said to be responsible for all the woes and injustices in the world and who threatens their ”safety”- meaning, their status as oppressed victims of “white supremacy,” including the guilty-and-penitent self-oppressed white people of the Left themselves. Yeah, it’s just that simple because we are in an epic episode of human social hysteria.

Except that the hysteria is dissipating for all except the most psychotic or the most politically cornered due to their record of perfidy and bad faith - the David Frums, Max Boots, and Rachel Maddows of our world, the cable news outfits, the Democratic Party hierarchy, the criminally psychopathic swine running the US public health agencies, and the craven doctors who have fecklessly murdered patients at the behest of Dr. Anthony Fauci & Company. Despite the sedulous efforts to suppress the data (O, the sacred data!) about the failure of their “vaccines,” the real news is getting out: the “vaccines” don’t prevent transmission or infection of Covid-19, and they pose lethal side-effects for the vaxxed. There it is, in plain English. And yet, “Joe Biden,” putative president of the US, is still telling the country to “go out and get vaccinated, get boosted” - ???

The companies who produced the “vaccines’ are even on the run. Pfizer withdrew its application for an emergency use authorization in India, where the public health agency insisted on seeing the safety records Pfizer was obliged to furnish - and refused to. India is a big market for pharmaceuticals, some 1.39 billion. Pfizer’s stock has crashed nearly 10 percent the past two weeks. By the way, some of the states of India are notable for having battled Covid-19 with the mass distribution of early treatment kits containing cheap anti-virals such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, Vitamin D, etc. The program was famously successful in reducing deaths there.

The CEO of Moderna, Stéphane Bancel, has sold off $400-million of his own stock in the company and deleted his Twitter account on rumors that all-causes deaths reported by US life insurance companies show a shocking and mysterious rise in mortality that just may be attributed to the “vaccines” causing strokes, heart attacks, cancer cases, and immune system failures. (Moderna’s stock is also sinking.) Neither the mainstream news media nor the US public health agencies are making any effort to investigate this now well-documented occurrence.

We’re in the midst of a tremendous shift of public opinion. Winter is not over but the truth is budding now in a thousand places. The people are done kneeling docilly to be silenced and killed. They will not let this country, and many other nations in the Western Civ club, be destroyed without a fight. The unmasked are unmasking their masked antagonists. Stand by, now, to find out who has been behind all this deadly mischief. We will rip off their masks and the rule of law will be restored."

- https://kunstler.com/

Musical Interlude: 2002, "Remember Now"

Full screen recommended.

2002, "Remember Now"

"A Look to the Heavens"

"Galaxies don't normally look like this. NGC 6745 actually shows the results of two galaxies that have been colliding for only hundreds of millions of years. Just off the above digitally sharpened photograph to the lower right is the smaller galaxy, moving away. The larger galaxy, pictured above, used to be a spiral galaxy but now is damaged and appears peculiar. Gravity has distorted the shapes of the galaxies.

Although it is likely that no stars in the two galaxies directly collided, the gas, dust, and ambient magnetic fields do interact directly. In fact, a knot of gas pulled off the larger galaxy on the lower right has now begun to form stars. NGC 6745 spans about 80 thousand light-years across and is located about 200 million light-years away."

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap120930.html

"I Urge All Of You..."

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special. I just got one last thing... I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have.”

- Jim Valvano

The Poet: Charles Dickens, "Things That Never Die "

"Things That Never Die"

 "The pure, the bright, the beautiful

that stirred our hearts in youth,

The impulses to wordless prayer,

The streams of love and truth,

The longing after something lost,

The spirits longing cry,

The striving after better hopes -

These things can never die.

The timid hand stretched forth to aid

A brother in his need;

A kindly word in griefs dark hour

That proves a friend indeed;

The plea for mercy softly breathed,

When justice threatens high,

The sorrow of a contrite heart -

These things shall never die.

Let nothing pass, for every hand

Must find some work to do,

Lose not a chance to waken love -

Be firm and just and true.

So shall a light that cannot fade

Beam on thee from on high,

And angel voices say to thee -

 These things shall never die." 

- Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

"The Most Beautiful Lies..."

"Memories and feelings of nostalgia are nothing more than cruelties; they are the most beautiful lies we will ever convince ourselves to believe. We chase the false hope so fiercely that we nearly push ourselves past the edges of our sanity, longing for that which can never be in our possession again. These edges are blurred by our regrets and desperation all throughout the darkest hours of the night, until finally we are set free from the illusions and the ghosts of our past with the rising of the sun... and we are changed in some small, yet permanent way."

- Margaret E. Rise

The Universe

“Believe me, I know all about it. I know the stress. I know the frustration. I know the temptations of time and space. We worked this out ahead of time. They're part of the plan. We knew this stuff might happen. Actually, you insisted they be triggered whenever you were ready to begin thinking thoughts you've never thought before. New thinking is always the answer.”

“Good on you,”

The Universe

“Thoughts become things... choose the good ones!”

- www.tut.com

"16 Tons of Debt"

"16 Tons of Debt"

"Another day older... and the straw boss said,

 "Well-a bless my soul!"*

by Bill Bonner

Youghal, Ireland -  First, ‘you load 16 tons and whaddya get…?’ We reported last week that inflation is costing the typical household around $300 a month extra, just to stay in the same place. Where does that money come from? Here’s part of it; Business Insider: "Americans have been swiping their credit cards at record speed in the last few months, as rising inflation eats into the savings people accumulated during the pandemic.

The total US household debt hit $15.8 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2021, the New York Fed reported this week, seeing an increase of $333 billion from the previous quarter. Credit card balances alone hit $860 billion, up $52 billion in that same timeframe. That's the largest quarterly increase the Fed has seen in the 22 years it's been collecting data, the researchers say, adding that the surge in debt overall was driven by home and car purchases."

Yes, day by day, you get another day older. And often, deeper in debt.

There are patterns to everything in life. Look at a leaf. Listen to a song. Look at a church… or a funeral home. If you build a house that looks like a church… or a slaughterhouse… it could still function very well. But, like a cowboy hat on a Swiss banker, it won’t ‘look right.’ A house ought to look like a house. A song ought to sound like a song. You ought to get what you pay for. And, if you rob a bank… or inflate the currency… or borrow too much money, you ought to get what’s coming to you.

Sometimes, the borders shift. What makes it a song, and not just noise? That is what we wondered as we saw some of the half-time entertainment during the SuperBowl. There is always innovation… experimentation; the frontiers get pushed out… and then recede.

The most basic kind of pattern is the one we refer to often in these pages. Actions have consequences. Those consequences are often described as “common sense” or signaled to us in moral lessons, old wives tales, and Bible quotations. They establish the patterns of life that we see rehearsed in movies, novels… and even the evening news!

‘Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind’ is one. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap” is another one using the same image. Others are more practical: ‘take care of your tools and they will take care of you’… ‘watch your pennies and the nickels will look out for themselves’… ‘if your income exceeds your outgo, your upkeep will be your downfall.’

Carl Jung maintained that there were ‘archetypes’ buried deep in the human psyche. He said you could find them in folk tales and myths. Maybe. What we notice is that we have certain, almost innate, ideas about what things are worth. And we express them in market patterns. Stocks go up and down, for example, but rarely – and only temporarily – get too far out of a normal channel. This gives rise to the old-timer’s advice: buy cheap; sell dear. That advice would be useless were it not for a pattern.

But if you measure stock market trends in dollars, you will easily be confused and deceived. Like a carpenter with an elastic tape measure, it will be hard to keep things straight. The dollar has lost 96% of its value since the Fed was set up to protect it. It’s losing more everyday… currently at the rate of 7.5% (officially) per year.

Measure for Measure: A better measure, for this purpose, is to compare the stock price to the company’s earnings – the P/E ratio. A dollar’s worth of earnings – whether from a gambling casino or a steel mill – seems to have some archetypal relationship to price. Over the last century, investors have paid as little as $5 for a stock in a company that earned $1/share. Or, when they are feeling their oats, they might pay $10… or $20 for the same stock with the same earnings. So, a pattern emerges… and is reflected in the stock market cycle. In bull markets, prices go up. In bear markets they go down. The pattern repeats itself in long waves, often playing out over decades. In the bond market, for example, the last time interest rates were going up was 40 years ago.

In the stock market, prices went down – adjusted for inflation – for 16 years, from 1966 to 1982. Except for short-lived counter-trends, they have mostly gone up since then – again, for 40 years.

P/E ratios range from a low around 5 to around 25 at the top of the range, with an average of about 12. They sometimes go much higher, of course. In the big bubble market of 1999, the P/E of the Dow index hit 44, an all-time high. There’s a lot of ‘noise’ in P/E ratios. Individual stocks sometimes just go bonkers with Ps that have no connection to Es at all. Sometimes the companies have no earnings to measure against. Or they have negative earnings. And in today’s market, there are plenty of ‘clown stocks’ or ‘meme stocks’ that trade at absurd prices. Sometimes, too, P/Es shoot up when stock prices suddenly fall. In the panic sell-off of 2008-2009, for example, the P/E of the S&P 500 soared over a 100.

In terms of gold, the stock market as a whole has gone nowhere over the last century. In 1929, you could buy all 30 Dow stocks for 18 ounces of gold. Today, you can still buy the Dow stocks for 18 ounces of gold. So, why bother?

But while it is sometimes tempting to be out of stocks… forever… it would be leaving money on the table. Companies, driven by a profit motive, create real wealth. And people who own companies – shareholders – get much of it. Stocks pay dividends. If you had simply re-invested your dividends, since 1929, you would have multiplied your original investment by 33 times – even adjusted for inflation.

In short, it pays to be in stocks. But not all the time. When should you get in? When should you get out? That’s what we tried to figure out. And we came up with a system, based on comparing the Dow to Gold. More on that on Monday. Enjoy your weekend..."

- bonnerprivateresearch@substack.com

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* Tennessee Ernie Ford, "Sixteen Tons"

The Daily "Near You?"

Homedale, Idaho, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

"What If..."

What if when you die they ask, "How was Heaven?"

~ Author Unknown

A truly terrifying thought...

"One Can Make People Believe..."

“One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"

Of course, we know very well what to expect...

This Is The Motive..."

Full screen mode suggested.

"All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves."

- Blaise Pascal

"Are People Really Stupid?"

“All of the available data show that the typical American citizen has about

as much interest in the life of the mind as does your average armadillo.”

- Morris Berman

“Think of how stupid the average person is, 

and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

- George Carlin

"Are People Really Stupid?"

by Fred Russell

"On the face of things, judging from the general level of knowledge and understanding, not to mention the intellectual pursuits, of most of the human race one is tempted to say that the overwhelming majority of mankind lacks the intellectual capacity, the intelligence, to contribute to human progress. And it is in fact a very small elite that has carried us beyond Neanderthal Man, without whom, if the truth be told, we might still be living in caves. It is, in a word, appalling to contemplate the level at which ordinary people use their minds, what they read, if at all, what they watch on TV, the movies they go out and see, and the ease with which they are seduced and manipulated by the technicians of the psyche, namely, politicians and advertisers. 

The impression one gets when contemplating these tens and hundreds of millions of people glued to their TV screens for the reality shows and sitcoms or fiddling with their smartphones from morning till night is of complete empty-headedness. This is not to say that such people cannot be shrewd, resourceful, or, for that matter, simply decent. It is to say that at the average level of intelligence displayed by the human race, the great intellectual achievements of mankind seem to be beyond the scope of the vast majority of men and women. But are people really stupid? And if they aren't, who or what has held them back?

Now one may be inclined to place all the blame for our ignorance on the television producers and gadget makers, but the truth is that by the time they get to us the damage has already been done. All they really succeed in doing is dragging us down a little further. The problem starts in childhood. It starts in the schools with all those empty cells waiting to be filled and no one, not entire educational systems, really knowing how to fill them. In fact, the opposite result is achieved. By the time the child finishes elementary school, unless he is destined to join the intellectual or scientific or economic or political elite and is self-motivated, as the saying goes, he will have developed an aversion to the learning process that will persist for the rest of his life.

It is not hard to understand why. School bores him, and oppresses him. Its premise, fostered in the West by the Church the virtually exclusive supplier of teachers until fairly recent times, historically speaking is that as a consequence of Original Sin all men are born evil and must therefore be coerced into doing what is good. The result has been rigidly structured frameworks where teachers hammer away at the captive child until his head is ready to explode. Within just a few years, the public school system thus destroys the natural curiosity of the child and dooms him to a life of total ignorance, dependent, for whatever sense of the world he does have, on second rate journalists, who themselves lack the knowledge, understanding, discipline and integrity to be historians or even novelists and therefore shape his perception like the ignorant clerics of the Middle Ages, raining down on his head a disjointed and superficial body of information presented largely to produce effects, and even this is beyond his capacity to retain. 

The man in the street may thus be said to have a great many opinions but very little knowledge, mindlessly repeating the half-truths of experts and analysts who reflect his own biases and constructing out of them a credo of dogmatic views that remain embedded in his mind for an entire lifetime like bricks in a brick wall.

Does it matter? After all, we have all the scholars and scientists we need, and besides, a world where everyone became one would be a dull place indeed. It can even be argued that it is better for the race if progress is opposed, since, judging from its products, it mostly expresses itself materially and economically in an unholy alliance of greed and technology. However, progress of this kind cannot be fought if all that people have on their minds is to wire themselves into this technology, and that is what they will be doing until their minds are engaged in less frivolous pursuits. They are thus doubly victimized, first by the schools, whose methods are not attuned to the temperament and capacity of the average child, and then by the economic elites who control the technologies and consequently the flow of information and whose only interest in the man in the street is as a consumer of their products.

Unfortunately, there is very little hope that any of this will change. The wrong people control human society and will continue to do so, because they created the model and are the only ones who know how to operate it. The sad truth is that today's man in the street is neither wiser nor more knowledgeable than a medieval peasant. Calling ourselves Homo sapiens, or even Homo sapiens sapiens, seemed like a good idea once but very few of us have lived up to the billing." 

- https://www.counterpunch.org/

Apologies to armadillos for the comparison! lol

"Here's Why Our Monetary System is a Giant Ponzi Scheme"

"Here's Why Our Monetary System is a Giant Ponzi Scheme"

by Chris MacIntosh

"Ponzi schemes keep going until the perpetrator is stopped from the outside. They never stop by of their own volition. Bernie Madoff kept going until it all blew up. In the year 2000 the Nasdaq composite exceeded a P/E of 200 before collapsing 78% by October 2002. The more successful a Ponzi the more egregious the bubble and resultant pain. The granddaddy of Ponzi - far greater than anything we’ve seen before - is our monetary system.

Let’s consider what money is. It is a technology that allows us to produce and consume not just in the present but across time. It is, for this reason, that it needs to provide both a medium of exchange as well as a store of value. If for example a transaction needs to be made over a crop cycle then the value of the money needs to remain sufficiently stable over that time frame to allow the participants to make an exchange and not come out underwater. This benefits neither party to the transaction because, while in the short term party A may get an excellent deal from party B, if the deal is so "excellent" as to bankrupt party B, then no future commerce will be done and overall production declines causing less supply and a fall in the overall standard of living.

The money needs to be useful to both parties. In prisons they use cigarettes. Even if you don’t smoke enough inmates do and the cigarettes don’t change (consistency) and so they form a money. Of course, over time we’ve used all sorts of things used as money: gold, silver, copper, even slaves. At primary school I used to use marbles and Garbage Pail Kids (ah, those were the days).

To be used, money needs to be trusted, and to be trusted it needs to have integrity. But when you involve the government in money inevitably it gets corrupted. We’ve countless examples, but back in 1215 King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta, which meant that the crown couldn’t tax what the people hadn’t approved. That principle was the foundation of democracy.

Years later King Henry VIII figured out that by clipping the coins he could melt down the clipped portions, melt them into coinage and spend the money. In other words, he inflated the money supply. He was a wily bastard and later figured he could take a copper coin and coat it in silver.

Initially people thought they were getting a pound sterling, but as it turned out - because the old fart had his face emblazoned onto the coin - with his nose sticking out, it was his nose that gave him away. The silver coating specifically on his protruding nose scraped off when it rubbed in peasants’ pockets. This let the copper show through and made his face look like he had a red nose. And so peasants, whenever they looked at the coin with his red nose staring at them, knew immediately that he’s stolen from them. Trust vanished.

We’re no longer in the 1200’s but that only means the ruling class has gotten better. This time around, after they’re done with their economic killing spree (aka lockdowns) and rampant monetary inflation, the resulting stagflation will have the same effect amongst the peasants as it did in good ol’ copper nose’s time. Loss of faith.

This Ponzi too will blow up, and the catalyst will be a faltering of trust, because that’s all that’s left holding this together. It will be individuals that stop it. They’ll stop it by refusing to use the currency."

- internationalman.com

Must Watch! "The Fed Has a Plan to Crash Everything - Banks Closed"

Full screen recommended.

Dan, iAllegedly 2/18/22:

"The Fed Has a Plan to Crash Everything - Banks Closed"

"The Fed has a plan to crash all the stocks and everything with it. Will this put an end to inflation? This is a lose-lose situation. Crash the economy to contain stocks. The Fed really has no idea what to do."

"How It Really Is"

 

"SOMEBODY Must Really Want A War In Ukraine, And We Should Remember That Both Previous World Wars Were Sparked In Eastern Europe"

"SOMEBODY Must Really Want A War In Ukraine, 

And We Should Remember That Both Previous

 World Wars Were Sparked In Eastern Europe"

by Michael Snyder

"Well, that sure escalated quickly. Early on Wednesday, it was being reported that Russia was moving forces away from the Ukrainian border and that both sides would try to give diplomatic talks another chance. But somebody out there must not have been too pleased with that, because by Wednesday evening everything had changed. The Ukrainian military and the separatists in eastern Ukraine started shelling one another relentlessly, and according to the latest information that I have been able to find it is still going on as I write this article. In previous articles, I have expressed my opinion that war in Ukraine will not begin this month, but it appears that somebody out there is trying to get it going as soon as possible.

I think that this is a good time to remember that both previous world wars were sparked in eastern Europe. The assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 is generally recognized as the event that initiated World War I. And the invasion of Poland in 1939 is generally recognized as the event that initiated World War II. So will a conflict in Ukraine by the event that initiates World War III?

As far as I can determine, the widespread shelling in Ukraine began some time on Wednesday evening. On Thursday, photos of a kindergarten class that had been hit by a shell were being widely circulated by western media… "A “Kindergarten” junior school in Stanytsia Luhanska, Ukraine, was struck by shellfire that impacted several villages and towns near the Donbas region in Eastern Ukraine on Thursday morning. According to the Ukranian government, as of Thursday afternoon, there had been “42 cases of shelling” recorded which had not caused any deaths, but had seen buildings damaged and seen several people injured, including at least four civilians and one soldier."

Western news sources are focusing on the shelling that is being done by the separatists, but Russian news sources are claiming that it was actually the Ukrainians that started shelling first… "The Russian government provided their own take on events, saying in a release from state media service TASS that the shelling was not by Russian forces but from “forces of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic” - in other words forces loyal to and equipped by Moscow - and was initiated in response to Ukraine shelling them first."

I wish that I could prove to you which side started shooting first. But what we do know is that both sides are now firing at one another. Could all of this shelling be a prelude to something bigger?

During a discussion with reporters on Thursday, Joe Biden made some rather startling claims… "President Biden on Thursday said the U.S. has reason to believe that Russia is “engaged in a false flag operation,” and said he believes that an invasion into Ukraine “will happen in the next several days.” After all of the false flag operations that the U.S. has been involved in over the years, it is quite ironic that the U.S. is now publicly accusing the Russians of doing the same thing. And we shall see if Biden is correct about “the next several days”.

I don’t think that he will be. But I do think that the possibility of a major conflict in the region happening this year has just gone way up. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says that the Russians now have more than 150,000 troops in the region… ‘We see them add to the more than 150,000 troops they already have,’ Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin. ‘Even in the last couple days. We see some of those troops edge closer to that border. We see them fly in more combat and support air craft. We see them sharpen their readiness in the Black Sea. We even see them stocking up their blood supplies,’ Austin said. ‘You don’t do these things for no reason. You certainly don’t do them if you’re getting ready to pack up and go home,’ the secretary said.

U.S. officials certainly seem to be acting as if they believe that we are on the brink of war. But are they trying to prevent it, or are they actually trying to make it happen? During a meeting of the UN Security Council on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised tensions by warning that the Russians may be plotting a “false flag” chemical weapons attack… "Russia accused Secretary of State Antony Blinken Thursday of raising tensions in Eastern European after he issued a warning that Moscow’s plans for a ‘false flag operation’ may include a chemical weapons attack to manufacture a pretext for invading Ukraine."

Blinken used a meeting of the United Nations Security Council to set out the fullest account yet of what Washington knows about Russia’s plans. Needless to say, the Russians were not pleased by such a wild accusation… "In response, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin said Blinken’s scenarios were ‘regrettable.’ ‘I would even go so far as to say that they are dangerous because they bring in more tension into the unready tense atmosphere,’ he said, before repeating Moscow’s discredited claims that some troops were already heading home after completing drills.

Of course the Russians are taking actions that are raising tensions too. For example, the second most important U.S. diplomat in Russia was expelled from the country on Thursday…"Russia has expelled the second-most senior American diplomat at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as tensions between the two countries continue to rise over a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, the State Department said Thursday. “Russia’s action against our [deputy chief of mission] was unprovoked and we consider this an escalatory step and are considering our response,” a State Department spokesman said after U.S. deputy chief of mission Bart Gorman was ordered to leave the country despite having a valid visa."

In the coming days, the U.S. and Russia will trade lots of accusations of blame. I just wish that we could find a way to stop the process that has now begun. As I have stated previously, if Americans truly understood what was at stake the streets of our major cities would be filled with protesters. Because once World War III begins, nothing will ever be the same again. The time to stop it is now, and the window of opportunity is very narrow.

Unfortunately, somebody out there really seems to want this war to happen, and I have a feeling that whoever it is will eventually get their wish."

- http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/

"Prices Are Getting Crazy At Walmart! - What's Next!?"

Full screen recommended.

"Prices Are Getting Crazy At Walmart! - What's Next!?"

Adventures with Danno, AM 2/18/22

"In today's vlog we visit Walmart and are noticing ridiculously high prices. Prices on groceries continue to rise, as we are also witnessing more empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores are struggling to get in products."

Gregory Mannarino, "Bank Of America Warns Again On The Stock Market"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 2/18/22:

"Bank Of America Warns Again On The Stock Market"

- https://traderschoice.net/

"Warning: Bank Closures And Bank Runs, Get Your Money Out; Stock Market Crash; Home Loans Record High"

Jeremiah Babe, PM 2/17/22:

"Warning: Bank Closures And Bank Runs, Get Your Money Out; 

Stock Market Crash; Home Loans Record High"

"The Cost Of Living For Middle Class In The United States Is Rising To Absolutely Absurd Levels"

Full screen recommended.

"The Cost Of Living For Middle Class In 

The United States Is Rising To Absolutely Absurd Levels"

by Epic Economist

"The U.S. middle class is under a lot of pressure. With the cost of living soaring to absurd levels, even those who used to have comfortable lifestyles are now financially struggling. The cost of living has been skyrocketing into the stratosphere, and that has been particularly detrimental to the American middle-class, one of the main pillars of the U.S. economy. The middle class is responsible for the largest share of consumer spending, but ever since inflation has started to accelerate, people’s buying power has been declining at an alarming pace.

Consumer spending is going to continue to cool off as the price of necessities rises above what most people can afford. For example, a new study found that 82.2 percent, or 4 out of 5, new-vehicle buyers were forced to pay well above sticker price in January. The average price paid above sticker was $728. Just two years ago, shoppers would get an average discount of $2,648 when purchasing a new car.

On top of that, it’s getting increasingly more expensive to fuel our vehicles. Just yesterday, the average price of a gallon of gasoline hit a new record high. In California, the new average price of a gallon of gas is $4.72, and experts say a whopping $5 a gallon will likely become the norm in a matter of months, if not sooner. Though the national average of $3.52 a gallon is far lower than California's $4.72, industry executives say that the national price is rising much faster on a percentage basis. Gas prices were up 6% nationwide in just the last month and have jumped 40% over the last year.

In a recent interview, Energy Word founder, Dan Dicker, warned that drivers should brace for another surge in gas prices amid rising global tensions and years of under-investment by the oil industry.“My guess is that you are going to see $5 a gallon at any triple-digit oil prices as soon as you get to $100. And you might get to $6.50 or $7. Forget about $150 a gallon, I don’t know where we will be by then,” he said.

Housing is also increasingly unaffordable. The average price of a newly built home is nearly $19,000 higher due to a massive increase in the price of lumber. To make things worse, heating our homes, which is a major necessity during the winter, is actually becoming a privilege reserve to those who can afford rising heating costs. A new analysis released by the Heartland Institute reported that the typical American family’s home heating costs rose by as much as $1,000 as a result of the government’s energy and environmental policies.

It’s safe to say that most Americans were not prepared for such a dramatic increase in the cost of living. Currently, over 70 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. And even middle-class workers have been facing major difficulties to make ends meet.

That’s why more and more people are taking on credit card debt to pay for rising living expenses. In fact, according to the New York Fed, “the total US household debt hit $15.8 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2021, after an increase of $333 billion from the previous quarter. Credit card balances alone hit $860 billion, up $52 billion in that same timeframe. That’s the largest quarterly increase the Fed has seen in the 22 years it’s been collecting data,” the researchers say.

This is systematically destroying the U.S. middle class, and that will have enormous consequences for our economy as a whole. Most people had assumed that there would be endless prosperity for many decades to come, but now it is clear that our future is going to be extremely chaotic."

- https://www.epiceconomist.com

Gerald Celente, "The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!"

Gerald Celente, PM 2/17/22:

"The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!"

"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."

- https://trendsresearch.com/

Gregory Mannarino, "Fear Of War Hits The Market, Are You Ready?"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 2/17/22:

"Fear Of War Hits The Market, Are You Ready?"

- https://traderschoice.net/

Musical Interlude: Gnomusy, (David Caballero), "Virtuality II"

Gnomusy, (David Caballero), "Virtuality II"

"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 featured image combines both narrowband and broadband images."

- http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150513.html

"What Is Hope?"

"What Is Hope?"

"What is hope? It is the pre-sentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks. It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress us is not the last word. It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe. That the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual; and in a miraculous and unexplained way, life is opening creative events which will light the way to freedom and resurrection. But the two - suffering and hope - must live from each other. Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair. But hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté and drunkenness.

So let us plant dates even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. That is the secret discipline. It is the refusal to let our creative act be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience, and it is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints the courage to die for the future they envisage. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope."

- Rubin Alves

"Doomberg: Crisis Ahead As Market, Economic, Social & Geopolitical Pressures Reach "Tipping Point"

Full screen recommended.

"Doomberg: Crisis Ahead As Market, Economic,

 Social & Geopolitical Pressures Reach "Tipping Point"

by Adam Taggart, Wealthion, 2/17/22:

"Systemic pressures are building everywhere. Persisting inflation. Slowing economic growth. Prolonged supply chain outages. Falling consumer confidence. The trucker blockade in Canada. Kazakhstan as an energy flashpoint. Military tensions in the Ukraine. These are all interconnected signals that the status quo is unraveling.

What are the root causes? What kind of future do they portend? And what challenges & opportunities will they present? For answers, we hear from the team at Doomberg, one of the most important new voices in finance today. They suspect we are at a "precarious" tipping point, where much of the relative prosperity & tranquility we've enjoyed over the past several decades may be coming to an end."

- wealthion.com

Get Doomberg for free at https://doomberg.substack.com/

"In The End..."

"Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time;

it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable."

~ Sydney J. Harris

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "Evidence"

“Evidence”

“Where do I live?


If I had no address, as many people do not,
 

I could nevertheless say that I lived in the 

same town as the lilies of the field,
 

and the still waters.


Spring, and all through the neighborhood 

now there are
 strong men tending flowers.

Beauty without purpose is beauty without virtue.


But all beautiful things, inherently, have this function -


to excite the viewers toward sublime thought.


Glory to the world, that good teacher.

Among the swans there is none 

called the least,
 or the greatest.

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief.
 

Also in singing, 

especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

As for the body, 

it is solid and strong and curious and full of detail;
 

it wants to polish itself; it wants to love another body;


it is the only vessel in the world that can hold,
 

in a mix of power and sweetness:


words, song, gesture, passion, ideas,
ingenuity, 

devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.

Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

- Mary Oliver

•

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for! To quote from Whitman, ‘O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless - of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?’ Answer: That you are here - that life exists, and that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

- “Dead Poets Society”