Tuesday, March 22, 2022

“The Myth of Human Progress”

Full screen recommended.
“The Myth of Human Progress”
By Chris Hedges

“Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth – intellectually and emotionally – and continue to resist the forces that are destroying us.

The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth – as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury – as well as unrivaled military and economic power – for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship.

“There is a pattern in the past of civilization after civilization wearing out its welcome from nature, overexploiting its environment, overexpanding, overpopulating,” Wright said when I reached him by phone at his home in British Columbia, Canada.

“They tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. That pattern holds good for a lot of societies, among them the Romans, the ancient Maya and the Sumerians of what is now southern Iraq. There are many other examples, including smaller-scale societies such as Easter Island. The very things that cause societies to prosper in the short run, especially new ways to exploit the environment such as the invention of irrigation, lead to disaster in the long run because of unforeseen complications. This is what I called in ‘A Short History of Progress’ the ‘progress trap.’ We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. We have failed to control human numbers. They have tripled in my lifetime. And the problem is made much worse by the widening gap between rich and poor, the upward concentration of wealth, which ensures there can never be enough to go around. The number of people in dire poverty today – about 2 billion – is greater than the world’s entire population in the early 1900s. That’s not progress.

If we continue to refuse to deal with things in an orderly and rational way, we will head into some sort of major catastrophe, sooner or later. If we are lucky it will be big enough to wake us up worldwide but not big enough to wipe us out. That is the best we can hope for. We must transcend our evolutionary history. We’re Ice Age hunters with a shave and a suit. We are not good long-term thinkers. We would much rather gorge ourselves on dead mammoths by driving a herd over a cliff than figure out how to conserve the herd so it can feed us and our children forever. That is the transition our civilization has to make. And we’re not doing that.”

Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.

Modern capitalist societies, Wright argues in his book “What Is America?: A Short History of the New World Order,” derive from European invaders’ plundering of the indigenous cultures in the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries, coupled with the use of African slaves as a workforce to replace the natives. The numbers of those natives fell by more than 90 percent because of smallpox and other plagues they hadn’t had before. The Spaniards did not conquer any of the major societies until smallpox had crippled them; in fact the Aztecs beat them the first time around. If Europe had not been able to seize the gold of the Aztec and Inca civilizations, if it had not been able to occupy the land and adopt highly productive New World crops for use on European farms, the growth of industrial society in Europe would have been much slower. Karl Marx and Adam Smith both pointed to the influx of wealth from the Americas as having made possible the Industrial Revolution and the start of modern capitalism. It was the rape of the Americas, Wright points out, that triggered the orgy of European expansion. The Industrial Revolution also equipped the Europeans with technologically advanced weapons systems, making further subjugation, plundering and expansion possible.

Wright explained this further on our call. “The experience of a relatively easy 500 years of expansion and colonization, the constant taking over of new lands, led to the modern capitalist myth that you can expand forever. It is an absurd myth. We live on this planet. We can’t leave it and go somewhere else. We have to bring our economies and demands on nature within natural limits, but we have had a 500-year run where Europeans, Euro-Americans and other colonists have overrun the world and taken it over. This 500-year run made it not only seem easy but normal. We believe things will always get bigger and better. We have to understand that this long period of expansion and prosperity was an anomaly. It has rarely happened in history and will never happen again. We have to readjust our entire civilization to live in a finite world. But we are not doing it, because we are carrying far too much baggage, too many mythical versions of deliberately distorted history and a deeply ingrained feeling that what being modern is all about is having more. This is what anthropologists call an ideological pathology, a self-destructive belief that causes societies to crash and burn. These societies go on doing things that are really stupid because they can’t change their way of thinking. And that is where we are.

And as the collapse becomes palpable, if human history is any guide, we like past societies in distress will retreat into what anthropologists call “crisis cults.” The powerlessness we will feel in the face of ecological and economic chaos will unleash further collective delusions, such as fundamentalist belief in a god or gods who will come back to earth and save us.”

As Wright told me: “Societies in collapse often fall prey to the belief that if certain rituals are performed all the bad stuff will go away. There are many examples of that throughout history. In the past these crisis cults took hold among people who had been colonized, attacked and slaughtered by outsiders, who had lost control of their lives. They see in these rituals the ability to bring back the past world, which they look at as a kind of paradise. They seek to return to the way things were. Crisis cults spread rapidly among Native American societies in the 19th century, when the buffalo and the Indians were being slaughtered by repeating rifles and finally machine guns. People came to believe, as happened in the Ghost Dance, that if they did the right things the modern world that was intolerable – the barbed wire, the railways, the white man, the machine gun – would disappear.

We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring. It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we let oil and gas exploration rip when we knew that expanding the carbon economy was suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.

If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea.”
Related:
"Are We Headed Into Another Ice Age?" (Excerpt)
by Martin Armstrong

"Our model has projected we are entering another “grand-minimum,” which will overtake the sun beginning in 2020 and will last through the 2050s, resulting in diminished magnetism, infrequent sunspot production, and less ultraviolet (UV) radiation reaching Earth. This all means we are facing a global cooling period in the planet that may span 31 to 43 years. The last grand-minimum event produced the mini-Ice Age in the mid-17th century. Known as the Maunder Minimum, it occurred between 1645 and 1715, during a longer span of time when parts of the world became so cold that the period was called the Little Ice Age, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850."
Please view this complete article here:
Source:

The Poet: Charles Bukowski, "Roll The Dice"; “Alea Iacta Est”

“Alea Iacta Est”

“Alea iacta est is a Latin phrase attributed by Suetonius to Julius Caesar on January 10, 49 B.C. as he led his army across the Rubicon river in Northern Italy. With this step, he entered Italy at the head of his army in defiance of the Senate and began his long civil war against Pompey and the Optimates. The phrase, either in the original Latin or in translation, is used in many languages to indicate that events have passed a point of no return.

The historian Frances Titchener has given a stylized description of the context of Caesar’s pronouncement: “We know from [Caesar's journals] that Caesar is not taking this lightly. He knows that if he marches on Rome with his armies, then he is a public enemy, and that he will either have to win, or die. For a Roman patrician like Julius Caesar there is no life without military service; there is no life without service to the state. He cannot simply ‘go native’ and stay in Gaul, and he does realize that if he goes back to Rome, he would be killed. At this time the northernmost border of the Roman territory in Italy is the River Rubicon. Once someone crosses the River Rubicon, he’s in Roman territory. A general must not cross that boundary with his army – he must do what the Romans call lay down his command, which means surrender his right to order troops, and certainly not be carrying weapons. 

Caesar and his armies hesitate quite a while at this river while Caesar decides what to do, and Caesar tells us that he informs his soldiers that it’s a little tiny bridge across the river, but once they cross it they’ll have to fight their way all the way to Rome, and Caesar is well aware that he’s risking not just his own life, but those of his loyal soldiers, and he might not win. Pompey is a formidable enemy. It’s also impossible to avoid the fact that Caesar was attacking the state, and as a patrician Roman this would have been very difficult for him, equivalent to beating up your father. He wouldn’t have done any of this lightly. Finally he makes a decision, it’s time to go, and he uses a gambling metaphor: he says ‘Roll the dice’, ‘Alea iacta est’. Once the dice start rolling they cannot be controlled, even though we don’t know what the outcome will be as the dice roll and tumble. Julius and his men swiftly cross the river and they march double time toward Rome, where they almost beat the messengers sent to inform the Senate of their arrival.” 
"Life's a gamble. Courage is to roll the dice and go
for the gusto when all odds and bets are against you!"
- Bobby Compton
Charles Bukowski, "Roll The Dice"
Read by Tom O'Bedlam

"Acceptance..."


"Acceptance is a crucial step forward for those who prefer the idea of living this life over simply existing within it. Accept all that you've said and what you've done, because you cannot change your past. Accept the idea of the unknown, because the future is the unknown waiting patiently to reveal itself. Accept the person you have become thus far in your journey, because you are the only person who will be there with you when you finish it. Do all of this so that you may never find yourself having to accept regret that haunts you at two a.m., leaving you sweaty and broken hearted. All you have is this minute; not this hour, or this day, or this year. Live in this minute so that you won't get stuck simply existing with your guilty past, or with nothing but anxiety for the future."
- Margaret E. Rise

"Cash Is Vulnerable In A Bank; FED Playing Dangerous Game; Financial Red Flag; Home Prices To Fall"

Jeremiah Babe, PM 3/22/22:
"Cash Is Vulnerable In A Bank; FED Playing 
Dangerous Game; Financial Red Flag; Home Prices To Fall"

Gregory Mannarino, "A Shocking Admission From The FED! And A Warning From The European Union"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/22/22:
"A Shocking Admission From The FED! 
And A Warning From The European Union"

"Stock Market Crash Nobody Thinks Possible Coming In Weeks Or Months: Prepare For An 80% Crash!"

Full screen recommended.
"Stock Market Crash Nobody Thinks Possible Coming
 In Weeks Or Months: Prepare For An 80% Crash!"
by Epic Economist

"An 80% Stock Market Crash Is Approaching! Although investors are pulling their best efforts to keep propping up the massive bubble, conditions remain extremely risky. And given that stock prices have been stretched to the limit, when the crash finally occurs, it has the potential to wipe out 80% of the market’s value.

The sell-off may have paused for the time being, but the combination of several factors is likely to weigh on market sentiment sooner rather than later. And according to Peter Cecchini, the director of research at the hedge fund Axonic, the threat of a devastating recession in the U.S. and around the globe is growing.

He said that, despite the correction so far this year, major indexes are likely to still see a larger pullback over the coming weeks and months. Just like Cecchini, a number of Wall Street experts – including David Hunter, the chief macro strategist at Contrarian Macro Advisors, - are warning that the current rally is a melt-up that is merely preceding a meltdown, as some traders still hope for a slower pace of policy tightening.

The uncertain environment is precisely why stocks are still going up, according to Hunter. But one of the largest-ever stock-market crashes will follow as inflation runs rampant, he said.Given the amount of leverage in the stock market and the U.S. economy, Hunter warned that the coming stock market crash is going to be monumental. In an interview with Business Insider, the legendary investor said that an 80% pullback was already a real possibility before, but now it is already on the horizon.

At this point, propping up stocks doesn’t mean that indexes are recovering from their losses. In fact, on Monday, Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to clients that stocks remain in a bear market despite last week's rally.“Bear market rallies are the most vicious," wrote Morgan Stanley's chief US strategist Michael Wilson. "While it could go a bit higher, led by the Nasdaq and small caps, we remain convicted it's still a bear market and we would use this strength to position more defensively," Wilson cautioned.

On the same note, David Rosenberg, the founder, and chief economist of Rosenberg Research, sounded the alarm about the end of fiscal stimulus and ultra-easy monetary policy. "Nobody has a clue what the economy or the market's going to look like once those training wheels are taken off the bicycle," Rosenberg said. “So what's going to happen when all of that support is taken away?”

In Rosenberg's view, the stock market is on shaky ground and a recession is coming soon. This is definitely an uncertain time for investors. Risks continue to grow, and traders should brace for a lot more volatility in 2022 as central banks and government leaders around the world react to the worsening situation in Ukraine, its impact on gas prices, the global economy, and inflation.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., as the Fed tries to stop rising prices but risks pushing the economy into a recession, it is safe to say that the sell-off will continue and that the correction will evolve into a full-blown market crash once investors realize that we’ve already reached the point of no return. A global financial meltdown is coming next. The nightmare is far from over."

The Daily "Near You?"

Winner, South Dakota, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

Free Download: Mark Twain, "Letters From the Earth"

"Letters From the Earth"
by Mark Twain

"This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the "noblest work of God." This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it.

Moreover - if I may put another strain upon you - he thinks he is the Creator's pet. He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance. I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven!"
Mark Twain's "Letters From the Earth"
by Wikipedia

“Letters from the Earth” is one of Mark Twain's posthumously published works. The essays were written during a difficult time in Twain's life; he was deep in debt and had lost his wife and one of his daughters. Initially, his daughter, Clara Clemens, objected to its publication in March 1939, probably because of its controversial and iconoclastic views on religion, claiming it presented a "distorted" view of her father. Henry Nash Smith helped change her position in 1960. Clara explained her change of heart in 1962 saying that "Mark Twain belonged to the world" and that public opinion had become more tolerant. She was also influenced to release the papers due to her annoyance with Soviet propaganda charges that her father's ideas were being suppressed in the United States. The papers were edited in 1939 by Bernard DeVoto. The book consists of a series of short stories, many of which deal with God and Christianity. The title story consists of eleven letters written by the archangel Satan to archangels, Gabriel and Michael, about his observations on the curious proceedings of earthly life and the nature of man's religions. Other short stories in the book include a bedtime story about a family of cats Twain wrote for his daughters, and an essay explaining why an anaconda is morally superior to Man.

Textual references make clear that sections, at least, of “Letters from the Earth” were written shortly before his death in April 1910. (For instance, Letter VII, in discussing the ravages of hookworm, refers to the $1,000,000 gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr. to help eradicate the disease – a gift that was announced on October 28, 1909, less than six months before Twain's death.)"
Freely download "Letters From the Earth", in PDF format, here:

"I Am Done"

"I Am Done"
by OHMama

"I was born at the end of Gen X and the beginning of the Millennial Generation, and grew up in a middle class town. Life was good. Our home was modest but birthdays and Christmas were always generous, we went on yearly vacations, had 2 cars, and there was enough money for me to take dance classes and art lessons and be in Girl Scouts.

My 1940s born Dad raised me to be patriotic and proud, to love the war bird airplanes of his era as much as he does, and to respect our flag and our country as a sacred thing. I grew up thinking that being an American was the greatest gift a person could have. I grew up thinking that our country was as strong, and honest and true as my Dad. I grew up thinking I was free.

As an adult, I have witnessed the world I grew up in fall to ruin. I have watched as our currency and our economy have been shamelessly corrupted beyond redemption. Since we’ve been married, my husband and I TWICE had our meager investment savings gutted by the market that we were told to invest in, now that pensions no longer exist and we working stiffs are on our own. We will be working until we die, because the Social Security we’ve been forced to pay into has also been robbed from under us.

I have watched as our elected officials enter Congress as ordinary folks and leaves as multi millionaires. I have watched my blue collar husband get up at an ungodly hour every day and come home with an aching back that we pray will hold out long enough to get him to old age in one piece. Outside of shoes, socks and underwear, almost everything my family wears was bought used. We’ve been on one vacation in 12 years.

We don’t have cell phones, or cable, or any sort of streaming services, just a landline and internet. We hardly ever eat out. Our house is 1400 square feet, no air conditioning. I cook from scratch and I can and I garden and I raise chickens for eggs and meat and I moonlight selling things on Etsy. Still it is barely enough to pay the bills that go up every year while service quality and the longevity of goods goes down. What I just described is the life you can live on 60K a year without going into debt.

At last calculation, when you consider all of the federal, state and local taxes plus registration and user fees, Medicare and SS payroll taxes, almost a third of what my family earns is stolen by the govt each year. What’s left doesn’t go far, just enough to cover the basics and save a little for when the wolf howls at the door.

I watched as my family’s health insurance was gutted and destroyed. Our private market insurance, which we had to have because my husband’s employer is too small to have a group plan, was made illegal. We were left with the option of either buying an Obamacare plan with unaffordable deductibles and insanely ridiculous out of pocket maxes, or paying the very gov’t that destroyed our healthcare a fine for not buying the gov’t mandated plan that we cannot afford. We now have short term insurance that isn’t really insurance at all, and I live in fear of one of us getting injured or sick with anything I can’t fix from the medicine cabinet.

I have watched as education, which was already sketchy when I was a kid, became an all out joke of wholly unmathematical math, gold stars for all, and self-loathing anti-Americanism. My family has taken an enormous financial hit as I stay home to home school our child. At least she’ll be able to do old-fashioned math well enough to see how much they are screwing her. A silver lining to every cloud, I guess.

I’ve sat by and held my tongue as I was called deplorable and a bitter clinger and told that I didn’t build that. I’ve been called a racist and a xenophobe and a chump and even an “ugly folk.” I’ve been told that I have privilege, and that I have inherent bias because of my skin color, and that my beloved husband and father are part of a horrible patriarchy. Not one goddamn bit of that is true, but if I dare say anything about it, it will be used as evidence of my racism and white fragility.

Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence.

And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.

And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They’re probably relieved that upstart Trump is gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.

I will not vote again; they’ve made it abundantly clear that my voice doesn’t matter. Whatever irrational, suicidal lunacy the nanny states thinks is best is what I’ll get. What it decided I need is a geriatric pedophile who shouldn’t be charged with anything more rigorous than choosing between tapioca and rice pudding at the old folks home, and a casting couch skank who rails against racism while being a descendant of slave owners.

I’m free to dismember a baby in my womb and kill it because “my body my choice”, but God help me if I won’t cover my face with a germ laden Linus-worthy security blanket or refuse let them inject genetically altering chemicals into my body or my child’s. I can be doxed, fired, shunned and destroyed for daring to venture that there are only 2 genders as proven by DNA, but a disease with a 99+% survival rate for most humans is a deadly pandemic worth murdering an economy over. Because science. Idiocracy is real, and we are living it. Dr. Lexus would be an improvement over Fauci.

I am done. Don’t ask me to pledge to the flag, or salute the troops, or shoot fireworks on the 4th. It’s a sick, twisted, heartbreaking joke, this bloated, unrecognizable corpse of a republic that once was ours.

I am not alone. Not sure how things continue to function when millions of citizens no longer feel any loyalty to or from the society they live in.

I was raised to be a lady, and ladies don’t curse, but f**k these motherf**kers to hell and back for what they’ve done to me, and mine, and my country. All we Joe Blow Americans ever wanted was a little patch of land to raise a family, a job to pay the bills, and at least some illusion of freedom, and even that was too much for these human parasites. They want it all,  mind, body and soul. Damn them. Damn them all."

"This is Getting Scary as The Fed Does Nothing - Food Shortages and Surging Oil Prices"

Full screen recommended.
Dan, iAllegedly PM 3/22/22:
"This is Getting Scary as The Fed Does Nothing - 
Food Shortages and Surging Oil Prices"
"The Fed has a plan to do nothing. They raise the interest-rate a quarter percent and expect that to fix everything as inflation ravages our Economy."

"How It Really Is"

 

"All Hell Will Break Loose For Humanity"

"All Hell Will Break Loose For Humanity"
By Egon von Greyerz

"We are now at the end of an era of economic and moral decadence in a debt infested world built on false values, fake money and abysmal leadership. All hell will break loose. The consequences will be fatal for the world.

There are eras in history which have produced great leaders and thinkers. But sadly, the current era has produced nothing of that kind. The end of an economic cycle produces no great leadership or statesmanship but only incompetent leaders. Looking at the Western world, the only notable statesman in the last few decades in my view is Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the United Kingdom from 1979 to 1990.

But political leaders are of course instruments of their time. Sadly times as the current don’t produce Superior Men. As Confucius said: “The Superior Man thinks always of virtue, the common man thinks of comfort.” It is the buildup of a massive debt mountain which has given the Western world a false comfort based on false values. As I have pointed out many times, the US has increased its debt every year since 1930, with a couple of minor exceptions in the 1950s and 1960s. The Clinton surpluses in the late 1990s were fake and in fact deficits.

In history, when there is undue economic pressure, starting wars is popular and often felt necessary. It is convenient to blame the war for the increasing debts. The Gold Standard was an excellent method for preventing governments to spend money they didn’t have. Since money couldn’t be printed at will, deficits then had to be financed by settling debts in physical gold.

The Gold Window Has Been “Temporarily” Closed For 50 Years: As Nixon in the late 1960s had to meet the US debts to France in gold, he decided in 1971 to close the gold window temporarily. He clearly didn’t want to hand all the US gold to de Gaulle. Over 50 years later that gold window is still temporarily closed with fatal consequences for the US and the world. The chart below shows the exponential growth of US debt since 1971. As we reach the final stages, the debt curve is explosive since 2019.
Creating debts of this magnitude is only possible without the discipline of gold backed currencies.

The Fat Lady Hasn't Sung Yet: But as I have explained before, the debt explosion is not finished until the fat lady sings. And sadly a lot will happen before she finally sings. Because like most economic eras, this one will finish with a number of spectacular events, many of which will take place concurrently.

Only a few months ago, Powell and Lagarde were singing from the same hymn sheet about transitory inflation. But as these Central Bank chiefs prove consistently, they are always wrong. For years they are trying to get inflation to two percent and then, all of a sudden, it is approaching 10% and they don’t understand what has hit them. They haven’t even understood that Keynesianism was dead before it started.

Even a monkey would understand that if you print $10s of trillions and keep interest rates at zero or negative for years, the end result will be spectacular inflation. Initially we saw unprecedented asset inflation in stocks, bonds and property but it was always clear that the exponential increase in money supply would eventually reach consumer prices.

The Perfect Storm: What is coming next is the inevitable perfect storm. A perfect storm means that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. And that is not just obvious failures in many parts of society but also totally unforeseen consequences. Let’s just look at some of the obvious events that will take place in the next few years:

Financial Markets: Stocks have topped worldwide. The correction currently taking place is likely to end very soon in a devastating decline. Everyone will get slaughtered when hell breaks loose. Whether investors buy the dip or just hold on to their stocks, they won’t understand what has hit them. Just look at the chart below and the major falls starting in 1973, 1987, 1999, 2007 and 2020. They were all nail biters at the time, but today you can hardly discern many of them on the chart.
For decades every correction has recovered and reached new highs. But this time WILL BE DIFFERENT, although no one expects it! Stocks are likely to decline by 75-95% in real terms and not recover for years or maybe decades. Remember that in 1929, the Dow declined by 90% and that it took 25 years before it recovered in nominal terms. And this time the economic circumstances are exponentially worse.

Bonds have gone up for over 40 years and rates reached zero or negative. Rates have now turned up and we are likely to see interest rates reach at least the 1980 levels of 15-20% and probably higher in a hyperinflationary debt collapse. Many bonds will become worthless and more suitable for framing and hanging on the toilet wall as a reminder for future generations.

Credit markets will come under that same pressure as bond markets with defaulting borrowers, neither in a position to service the debt nor repay it.

Property markets have also reached extremes, fueled by cheap or free money and unlimited credit at very high leverage. In Europe mortgage rates are around 1%. These negligible and irresponsible financing costs have driven property prices to ridiculous and unsustainable levels. My first mortgage was in the UK. In 1973 the rate went up to 21% in a high inflation environment! Today, few borrowers could afford an increase to 3%, never mind 10% or 20% like in the 1970s.

As rates rise, it is absolutely certain that the residential and commercial property markets bubble will implode, leading to major defaults, very high vacancy rates and homelessness. Governments will initially subsidize these markets by endless money printing, but in the end that will fail too as money dies.

Derivatives are a major financial nuclear bomb that is likely to be a death knell for financial markets. As I wrote in a recent article “Chaos and the triumph of survival”, LINK global derivatives, primarily OTC (over the counter), are most likely in the $2+ quadrillion range. Every single financial instrument contains a derivative element with massive leverage.

Due to the current volatility in commodity markets, most large commodity trading firms as well as hedge funds are now exposed to margin calls. For example, many JP Morgan clients are currently under enormous stress in a massively over leveraged market. So if JP Morgan clients are under stress, this means that JPM and other banks will also be under pressure.

Remember that this is just the beginning of the crisis with more bad news unravelling on a daily basis. As the derivatives market blows up with counterparties failing, central banks will have to print quadrillions of worthless dollars, paving the way for massive hyperinflation.

Banks & Financial System will clearly be under tremendous pressure initially and eventually totally or partly fail as the above problems unravel.

Governments and central banks will obviously be powerless in this scenario. The rescue of the system in 2008 was just a temporary stay of execution. Global debt has trebled since early this century from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. But remember this is mostly fake money which has created false asset values standing on a foundation of quicksand.

All this is now about to collapse.

Not Just An Economic & Financial Storm, But Also Human Hell: The coming economic and financial crisis will have devastating effects on the world. Here are a few affected areas:

Commodity inflation is guaranteed. For years it has been clear that the long-term commodity cycle was bottoming and a massive surge in commodity prices would start. The cycle had already started to go up well before the Ukraine crisis, but it is fascinating how events fall into place in order to create the perfect storm. I covered some of this in my previous article “A Global Monetary & Monetary Inferno of Nuclear Proportions”.

Dollar collapse, together with most other currencies, is guaranteed. As money printing and inflation rises in an uncontrolled fashion, the dollar will quickly reach its intrinsic value of ZERO. Most currencies will follow but they will take turns.

Digital money is likely to be launched in coming years. But I don’t think that crypto currencies will play a major role except as a very speculative investment. More important will be CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) which will be another form of fiat money, but now digital. As all fiat money, CBDCs will be quickly debased by endless electronic printing.

WEF & Claus Schwab have got more prominence than they deserve. In my view they will lose whatever power they now have as financial asset values and their wealth implode. Thus, I don’t believe that their reset will happen or succeed. Governments might try resets but they will fail. The only real reset will be disorderly and as outlined above.

Unemployment will increase dramatically as world trade declines and the financial system comes under pressure. Many companies will perish.

Pension systems will fail, as the values of pension funds collapse.

Social security systems will not function as the governments run out of real money.

Human Hell breaking loose will sadly be felt by most people on earth as a consequence of the problems outlined above. And that is without a bigger nuclear war, which obviously would be fatal for the world.

Massive price increases, especially in food and energy combined with shortages, will hit everyone, both developing countries and the industrialized world. The consequences of food shortages and economic misery, combined with the failure of governments to function properly, will clearly lead to social unrest in many places, even civil war!

The War Is Not The Cause But A Very Grave Catalyst: The current financial and economic crisis was neither caused by Covid, nor by what is happening in Ukraine currently. The current crisis started with the problems in the banking system and the Repo market in Aug-Sep 2019 and then exacerbated by Covid in early 2020. The origin of the 2019 banking crisis is obviously the debt bonanza since 1971 and especially since 2006.

Also, the problems in commodity, especially food and energy markets, had already started before the war in Ukraine. But in a perfect storm, a number of very ugly catalysts will always occur at the worst possible time in order to trigger one worse crisis after the next.

No one knows how this war will end. The Western world is very badly informed about the state of the war since the media is biased pro West and anti Putin. But Putin is not likely to give up easily. Therefore, sadly the war will at best be local and protracted, and at worst lead to consequences which I won’t speculate on at this point.
For over 20 years I have written about the financial and economic problems that are about to hit the world. Most of the things are happening although I will willingly admit that matters have taken longer than I expected. The financial system was miraculously saved in 2008 which thus was a rehearsal. What will happen next will definitely be for real. What I have learnt is that we need to be patient since the end of an era and economic cycle doesn’t just happen because you can see all the signs. The process is long and arduous.

Governments and central banks are fighting with all the limited tools they have. But as fiat money has lost 97-99% of its value since 1971, this next time the current monetary system will die like it always has throughout history. Inflation and hyperinflation are likely to destroy most asset values in coming years and currencies will make that final move to ZERO.

Finally, what will hit the world in coming years will lead to tremendous suffering as all hell breaks loose, so helping family, friends and others is of extreme importance."

Gregory Mannarino, "Important Updates: They Are Literally Trying To Destroy Us! Time To Take Every Action!"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 3/22/22:
"Important Updates: They Are Literally Trying To Destroy Us! 
Time To Take Every Action!"

Monday, March 21, 2022

“The FED Is About To Crash The Markets And Economy; Buy Emergency Food Now”

Jeremiah Babe, PM 3/21/22:
“The FED Is About To Crash The Markets And Economy; 
Buy Emergency Food Now”

"The Death and Rebirth of Human Civilization is the Narrow Path to Awakening"

"The Death and Rebirth of Human Civilization
is the Narrow Path to Awakening"
by Mike Adams

"Unless there is cosmic intervention - which is always a possibility - it is now inescapable that anti-human globalists are going to escalate conflict into World War III and use that conflict to collapse human civilization on planet Earth. This would, of course, lead to the near-extermination of the human race and a planetary-scale genocide event. (Cosmic-level ethnic cleansing.)

Every player on the global stage - Putin, Biden, Xi, Zelensky, etc. - is being maneuvered into a World War III scenario that will be used to justify the use of nuclear weapons and the total global crackdown on free speech, financial liberty and the ability of civilians to own firearms.

It is now nearly 100% certain that the U.S. deep state will stage a false flag operation to justify its own escalation into this global nuclear war scenario. Those false flags could be one or more of the following: The intentional (NATO-created) detonation of a chemical facility in Ukraine, such as an ammonia storage facility, then labeling it a “chemical weapons” attack by Russia.

The engineered assassination of Joe Biden by operators dressed up to look like Russian soldiers, followed by global outrage against Russia and a mad dash into nuclear war. (This also aids the desperate Democrats in getting rid of old Joe before he embarrasses them even further…)

A large-scale false flag cyber attack on US financial institutions, resulting in an economic collapse and widespread chaos. A cyber attack could also target the US power grid and produce similar results.

In any of these scenarios, the US and NATO are certain to respond with rapid escalation into World War III - a war that inevitably escalates into a nuclear exchange of some kind.

Planetary-scale genocide of the human race: Regardless of the path that gets us there, it is clear that the demonic, anti-human globalists in charge of the world are engineering a planetary-scale ethnic cleansing to eliminate human civilization.

Over the next several years - unless they are stopped - they will drive the global population of humans down toward one billion remaining survivors. This will be achieved through a combination of vaccine genocide, nuclear war, mass starvation, biosphere collapse, 5G weaponization, weather weapons, financial collapse, cyber attacks and of course ongoing psychological trauma from the globalist-run corporate media. After several years of such attacks, humanity will face the very real possibility of planetary-scale extinction.

It is in that moment of facing imminent and permanent death that humanity will be offered a choice: Choose LIFE or choose DEATH.

LIFE represents divinity, love, God, personal liberty, freedom to speak, freedom to think, peace, abundance, free market economics, the freedom to travel, the freedom to run a small business, and so on. In other words, the complete opposite of neocons, Democrats, globalists, the WEF, central banks, Big Pharma, the abortion industry and so on.

DEATH means destruction, suffering, abortion, infanticide, child abuse, pedophilia, psychological trauma, media lies, bombs, missiles, government tyranny, censorship, control, lockdowns, masking, forced vaccinations, weaponized food scarcity, weaponized financial systems, endless money printing and authoritarian rule. In other words, everything the political Left stands for.

It is abundantly clear that Democrats and the ruling Left are all advocates of death. They are death cultists, and they revel in the idea of mass death and self-destruction. Most of these individuals are demon-infested Satanists who voted for Biden, who love to murder their own children and who demand absolute dictatorial control over everybody else.

As I explain in today’s podcast, most of those death cultists will die in the coming years. They have set their own deaths into motion via:

● Repeated injections of mRNA depopulation bioweapons (“vaccines”).
● Utter lack of any willingness to prepare for food shortages (they are “anti-preppers”).
● Utter obliviousness about the coming financial collapse (they have total trust in the dollar and central banks).
● Total disconnection from reality and a shocking inability to process real world observations in meaningful ways (they live in their artificial bubbles of media lies and propaganda).
● Complete dependence on the very system that is conspiring to eliminate them from the future of the human race. They actually TRUST the vaccine industry, the news media and the government.

The survivors of planetary genocide will possess the wisdom to make a new choice for the future of humanity: Because of the mass die-off of the oblivious death cult masses, at the moment of near-extinction of the human race, those with the most knowledge, wisdom and preparedness will be the remaining survivors who are offered a choice for the future of human civilization. The choice is simple: Choose to continue the current system of centralized control, authoritarian rule and the denial of God and then suffer permanent extinction…

or choose LIFE, happiness, decentralized societal structures, individual liberty, ecological sanity, local food production, etc., and enjoy a golden age of abundance and wisdom in alignment with God’s goals for life on Earth.

Importantly, we now realize that humanity is incapable of making this choice until faced with the moment of final extinction. As currently populated by oblivious, demon-infested masses, humanity is incapable of choosing life, sustainability, wisdom or God. Thus, the very future of human civilization can only be determined after the death cultists destroy themselves through their global schemes of World War III, mass starvation, global vaccine bioweapons and other similar, nefarious schemes.

Thus, we are all going to have to live through the near-total collapse of human civilization. There is no stopping it. We have passed the point of no return. There are not enough sane voices to bring us back from the brink right now, since the sane voices are drowned out by the demon-infested, psychopathic, oblivious masses who are begging for mass death and destruction. (Some of those voices are difficult to understand because they are still wearing masks…)"

In today’s Situation Update podcast, I offer a more detailed discussion of these critical points for the future of the human race: 

Discover more information-packaged podcasts each day, along with special reports, interviews and emergency updates, at: 

"Chinese Lockdown Threatens 600% Freight Rates Spike As Panic Sweep Across Supply Chains"

Full screen recommended.
"Chinese Lockdown Threatens 600% Freight Rates 
Spike As Panic Sweep Across Supply Chains"
by Epic Economist

"In every link of the global supply chain, shipping problems are being severely aggravated. Freight rates are spinning out of control as ports remain extremely congested in the U.S. and China. And at the same time, rising transportation costs are worsening labor shortages and exacerbating delivery delays all around the world. The operational nightmare just keeps getting worse, and industry CEOs are alerting that consumers will be the ones paying for this unprecedented mess as retailers face a threatening dilemma: either paying higher shipping prices and passing along those increased costs to consumers or risk their business by letting shelves go empty.

The new round of lockdowns imposed by Chinese authorities is adding disruption on top of disruption to global supply chains and significantly worsening port congestion worldwide. The knock-on effects are already being felt in U.S. ports, where congestion continues to spread from the West coast to the East coast. Even though the restrictions are expected to be lifted this week, Project44 leaders argue that more slowdowns are likely to be felt worldwide in the days and weeks ahead.

As a result, hundreds of vessels are arriving all at once at U.S. ports while others have been unable to leave and make the return trip to China. Right now, the average shipping rate for a 40-foot container leaving Shanghai to Los Angeles is 125% higher than a year ago, sitting at nearly $12,000 per container, the Drewry World Container Index informed. And given that supply chain bottlenecks, including port congestion, are expected to linger and most operators have signed long-term charter contracts at high shipping rates, prices are likely to stay elevated throughout the whole year.

On top of that, the Russia-Ukraine crisis is also significantly impacting the flow of goods around the planet. Russian forces are cutting off entire shipping routes and shipping companies are suspending services, which is fueling even sharper freight rate hikes, supply chain firms said. Freight rates for a container ship have skyrocketed, with a spike from 157% to 591% since the conflict began, Alperin data shows.

The situation is triggering an even worse labor crunch. Considering that 198,123 of seafarers are Russian, while Ukraine accounts for 76,442, 15% of the world's seafarers come from the two countries, and with crew movement pretty much impossible out of both nations, shipping companies are having to extend these workers’ current contracts to fill any immediate gaps. But given that tensions between the two countries continue to rise, the work environment at these ships is becoming tense, too.

To make things worse, transportation problems on land are also compounding. In America, the CEO of Swint Logistics Group, is alerting that the rise in fuel prices will ultimately be passed on to the consumer as well. Over the past two weeks, the average U.S. price of a gallon of gasoline shot up a staggering 79 cents to a record-setting $4.43 per gallon. For truck drivers running with diesel engines, the increase has been even more pronounced, climbing $1.18 over two weeks, to $5.20 a gallon. Diesel is now $2.11 more expensive than one year ago.

The increase is likely to raise our overall cost of living given that the vast majority of the products we buy get delivered by big trucks, which cost a lot more to operate. lIn view of all this, retailers are having to make a tough choice: either paying higher prices for transport and pass along those higher costs to their customers or risk seeing their inventories collapsing and their shelves empty.

At the end of the day, there isn’t much they can do since they operate on low-profit margins. Consumers have been facing blow after blow as global events lead to more dirsuptions in every aspect of our lives. And while leaders make decisions that end up resulting in a lot more financial instability in lives of millions of people, we become more and more vulnerable to a system that is designed to fail. One thing is certain: A gloomy future is awaiting us as the world collapses into chaos."

Gregory Mannarino, "Alert! Expect Inflation To Skyrocket Faster Than Ever Before As The FED Continues To Sell The Lie"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 3/21/22:
"Alert! Expect Inflation To Skyrocket Faster Than Ever 
Before As The FED Continues To Sell The Lie"

"Questions Warhawks Must Answer"

"Questions Warhawks Must Answer"
by Brian Maher

"We have lent a grave ear to the war coverage these past three weeks. And we have concluded Mr. Putin’s unfolding crimes are atrocious. All civilized men condemn them. And let the record reflect: We are with the civilized - even if we are not necessarily among the civilized.

Yet this war coverage has likewise left us confused… and puzzled. But why? Who can be confused or puzzled? Here you have Vladimir Putin, a mighty fee-fi-fo-fum, a berserker out of time, a 21st-century Hitler. That is, the year is not truly 2022. The year is rather 1938… and a madman is limbering his legs for a mighty romp. Cede him one Ukrainian inch today, we are informed, and he will seize a European mile tomorrow.

We Must Act Now! After Ukraine he will walk several yards into the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. He will next take galloping strides into Romania and Poland. A half-mile in, he will set his cap for the finish line - another half-mile distant - Germany and France. The wind to his back, he will soon finish his mile. He will break the tape at Calais. He will then swim the channel.

A new iron curtain will thus descend upon Europe. Not of communism, but of authoritarianism. And reactionism. Homosexuals will be jailed, all genders but two will be banned, mass immigration and multiculturalism will die the death. Orthodox Christianity will spread its suffocating nets across secular Europe.

There you have the prevailing Western consensus - Putin is Hitler - and Hitler is Putin. The two are one (yet the Russian vows to sweep “Nazis” from Ukraine). Thus Ukraine is the “ground zero” of civilization itself. Fight Putin now, when you can - or fight him tomorrow - when you cannot.

Does This Make Sense? Yet we confessed at the outset to a confusion. Where then is our confusion? It is here… The same doomsdayers who match Putin with Hitler…who shriek about Putin’s vast territorial hungers… at the same time chuckle at Russia’s military incompetence. The Russians are “bogged down” in Ukraine they tell us, stymied and halted. They field an unmotivated conscript army, lacking all martial spirit. Many of these Russian pitiables - if reports are accurate - abandon their vehicles and surrender themselves to the enemy. Moreover, these Russians lack fuel, they lack food, they lack ammunition. Thus the Russian bear is proving a lumbering doofus, an oafish brute mired in the Ukrainian muck. It has taken its bites of flesh, yes. But it is choking upon the portion. It cannot worry the thing down - and it may never get it down. Is this the army that will gulp Europe?

A Toy Economy: What is more, Russia boasts a toy economy unequal to the challenge. Mr. Paul De Grauwe, chair of European political economy for the European Institute of the London School of Economics: According to the International Monetary Fund, the country’s GDP amounted to $1.7 trillion in 2021. That is barely 10% of the European Union’s GDP, or roughly the combined output of Belgium ($620 billion) and the Netherlands ($1.1 trillion).

With such a small economy, Russia is hardly equipped to win a war against a country that is fighting its forces tooth and nail, let alone to occupy that country - and face a determined insurgency - for an extended period. Russia today spends some $62 billion annually (about 4% of its GDP) on its military. That’s just 8% of what the United States spends – and not nearly enough to sustain an intense and protracted war effort.

We must conclude that the Russian bear is a bear of paper, of tissue paper. Its growl constitutes a greater menace than its bite. And yet we are told - by the identical experts - that this is the roaring and mighty bear that will take aboard all of Europe once it digests Ukraine. Which is it? We request a square answer. We are not certain we will receive one.

Go Ahead, Keep Poking: We are further informed that prodding this dual-natured bear is reasonable policy. Mr. Putin has already warned of grave consequences for nations shoveling arms into Ukraine. Yet the United States and its European allies have already sent in arms, they argue - and the Russian has sat idle upon his hands.

Thus the United States and its European allies can keep ramming their stick against the bear. He desires war with the NATO powers no more than they desire war with him. They assure us fears of nuclear war are sheer hysteria. Vladimir will not play with his nuclear toys because he realizes the United States will play with its own. That is, he is “rational.” He will go so far - but no further.

What if Putin Isn’t Rational? Yet the very gentlemen who take their stand upon Mr. Putin’s rationality label him a “madman.” A “psychopath.” He is “unhinged.” A madman… by definition… is not rational. Nor is an unhinged psychopath rational. The Russian has already executed crimes against humanity, so-called. How can anyone know what a madman will do next? Is atomic warfare beyond him? We do not know. Nor, we hazard, do the experts.

Do we need a definitive answer? Perhaps it is best to stop poking this ursine beast. Perhaps it is best to let him exhaust himself in the present rumpus. Let him diminish himself. What did Monsieur Bonaparte say? "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." It appears Mr. Putin is making a mistake. Why interrupt him?

The 10 Rules of Propaganda: Yet many in the United States appear determined to interrupt him. Rather than stand paws off, they would engage. They are of course hot to rile and inflame the American people. And so they go on television and yell about Mr. Putin’s infinite barbarities… practice the dark arts of the propagandist.

Lord Arthur Ponsonby was a British diplomat and politician, dates 1871–1946. This cagey fellow identified 10 rules of propaganda. They are these:

1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves.
2. The other guy is solely responsible for this war.
3. Our adversary’s leader is evil and looks evil.
4. We are defending a noble purpose, not special interest.
5. The enemy is purposefully causing atrocities; we only commit mistakes.
6. The enemy is using unlawful weapons.
7. We have very little losses, the enemy is losing big.
8. Intellectuals and artists support our cause.
9. Our cause is sacred.
10. Those who doubt our propaganda are traitors.

Why Defend Those Who Won’t Defend Themselves? Now we ask: How many of these rules presently manifest themselves in the media - both broadcast and print? We can identify nine at a stroke. With some slight additional time, likely all 10. Rule No. 10 is presently having itself an inning.

Please understand: Propaganda is not necessarily false. It often weaves truth into its tapestry to trick the eye. Vladimir Putin may be an abomination among men, the hellcat of hellcats. Yet those against intervention are not necessarily traitors… Sen. Romney.

Besides, why should the United States place a nuclear gamble over Europe? We observed a recent poll indicating that substantial portions of European peoples would not defend their nations upon invasion. And so we ask: If Europeans decline to defend themselves against Mr. Putin… why should the United States?"

Musical Interlude: Mecano, "Hijo de la Luna"

Mecano, "Hijo de la Luna"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“What created this unusual planetary nebula? NGC 7027 is one of the smallest, brightest, and most unusually shaped planetary nebulas known. Given its expansion rate, NGC 7027 first started expanding, as visible from Earth, about 600 years ago. For much of its history, the planetary nebula has been expelling shells, as seen in blue in the featured image. In modern times, though, for reasons unknown, it began ejecting gas and dust (seen in red) in specific directions that created a new pattern that seems to have four corners. These shells and patterns have been mapped in impressive detail by recent images from the Wide Field Camera 3 onboard the Hubble Space Telescope.
What lies at the nebula's center is unknown, with one hypothesis holding it to be a close binary star system where one star sheds gas onto an erratic disk orbiting the other star. NGC 7027, about 3,000 light years away, was first discovered in 1878 and can be seen with a standard backyard telescope toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).”