Tuesday, April 5, 2022

"This Brave Ahab"

"This Brave Ahab"
by Bill Bonner

San Martin, Argentina - "Oh to be as carefree… as optimistic… and as brain dead as an American stock market investor! By our reckoning, US stocks are about $25-$30 trillion overvalued. Typically around 80% of GDP, the Wilshire 5000, which captures all US publicly-traded equities, is now almost at 200%.

What would it take to drive investors away from the stock market? A tsunami washing over Manhattan? A nuclear war? The dead rising from their graves? Already, there’s a war on… and one of the combatants has nukes in his arsenal. Inflation is already at 8%; it looks like it will hit double digits soon. The bond market has just delivered its most reliable recession signal – the dreaded ‘inverted yield curve.’

And the Biden Team has just proposed the highest income tax rates in the developed world. Fox News: "The budget blueprint that President Biden unveiled last week includes several tax hikes on the ultra-wealthy and corporations that would push the top U.S. rates on both individual and corporate income to the highest level in the developed world, according to a new analysis published by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation." Hey… it probably won’t pass! And now, the Fed is determined to stamp out inflation by raising rates.

Cometh the Clouds: Higher interest rates will put the refinancing machine into reverse. Instead of refinancing debt at lower rates, debts will be refinanced at higher rates, causing the overall debt pile (and the economy) to shrink. Many households and businesses will find that when the weather was fair and the going was good, they went a little too far. Cometh the clouds and they will be unable to refinance debt. Instead, they will default. Far and wide… public, private, questioning… asset prices will go down.

Uh oh. You’d think that would make stock gamblers a little nervous. But no… here’s the head-scratcher headline from MarketWatch: "US stock futures edge higher as investors prepare for steep rise in interest rates."

And here’s Larry Lindsey. MarketWatch again: “I do think we’re going to have a recession, probably in the next quarter,” Lindsey said, in an interview on CNBC. “Inflation is eating into consumer spending power, they’re going to have to cut back,” he said. The former Fed governor also said the U.S. central bank was “nowhere close” on being able to control inflation.

Among serious commentators (of whom, there are no more than a half dozen), the prevailing view is that the Fed will have no choice. After having recklessly goosed up stock prices for the last 14 years, the Fed must now reckon with its mistakes and goose them down. It pushed down interest rates far too low (below zero!) for far too long (almost 14 years).

The phony and unnatural interest rates created a whole phony and unnatural economy that now depends on ultra-cheap credit. The ultra-cheap credit created a culture of rampant speculating and borrowing… which led to an Everest of debt, public and private – now about $87 trillion, or roughly $50 trillion more than in 2007.

With so much debt, investors, business, households and the government are desperate to keep interest rates low. To that end, the Fed has had to make more and more cash and credit available. It and other central banks added some $25 trillion in new money since the Wall Street bailout of 2008-2009.

All this easy credit and money printing has produced the inevitable inflation… made much worse by Covid shutdowns, trade barriers, and sanctions – especially against one of the world’s largest energy exporters, Russia.

All The World’s Central Bankers: And now… faced with double-digit inflation, what’s a poor central banker to do? He has no choice. Not in Europe. Not in Britain. And not in America. He has to take the knife between his teeth and climb the rigging. David Stockman: "The fools in the Eccles Building will have no choice but to throw on the monetary brakes far harder than now planned or expected during the next 8 months. That’s because the inflation menace will be in their face via the “incoming data” at 8-10% on a Y/Y basis or higher, while the negative GDP of recession will not show up until Q4 2022 or early next year."

All the world’s major central bankers – save for those in Russia, where the key lending rate is already 20% – are in the same boat. All followed the same course. All now find themselves on rough seas…and all must now batten down the hatches, take down the sails, and ride out the storm. That would be the reasonable thing to do. That is what investors should expect.

But investors are still sans-soucis. They are still comfortably ensconced in their deck chairs… enjoying the fading light and waiting for another drink. Whatever happens – earthquake… WWIII… plague – they still believe that Captain Powell will make sure that nothing bad happens to them. And you know what? They may be right. This brave Ahab… on the high seas of high finance… may be just mad enough, weak enough, or just plain dumb enough, to turn a very bad situation into an even worse one. More to come…"

"Massive Price Increases At Meijer! Empty Shelves Everywhere! - What's Next?"

Full screen recommended.
Adventures with Danno, AM 4/5/22:
"Massive Price Increases At Meijer! 
Empty Shelves Everywhere! - What's Next?"
"In today's vlog we are at Meijer and are noticing massive price increases! We are here to check out skyrocketing prices, and a lot of empty shelves! It's getting rough out here as stores seem to be struggling with getting products!"

"How It Really Is"

 

"What Is The 'Great Reset' And What Do The Globalists Actually Want?"

"What Is The 'Great Reset' And 
What Do The Globalists Actually Want?"
By Brandon Smith

"I first heard the phrase “Great Reset” way back in 2014. Christine Lagarde, who was head of the IMF at the time, was suddenly becoming very vocal about global centralization. It was an agenda that was generally only whispered about in the dark corners of institutional white papers and the secretive meetings of banking elites, but now these people were becoming rather loud about it.

Lagarde was doing a Q&A at the World Economic Forum and the notion of the “Reset” was very deliberately brought up; what the project entailed was vague, but the basic root of it was a dramatic shift away from the current economic, social and political models of the world into a globally centralized and integrated system – A “New World Order,” if you will…

It’s important to remember that we had just jumped through the fires of an international credit collapse which started in 2008 and had continued to cause uncertainty in markets for years. The central banks had dumped tens of trillions of dollars worth of stimulus into the system just to keep it on life support. Some of us in the alternative media believed that these actions were not meant to save the economy, only zombify the economy through currency devaluation and inflation. Not long down the road, this zombie creation would turn on us and try to eat us alive, and only the central bankers new exactly when this would occur.

Think of the crash of 2008 as Stage 1 of the Reset agenda; the globalists were getting cocky and were ready to unveil their plans to the public.

Lagarde’s discussion at the WEF was also held around the time that Klaus Schwab was introducing his 4th Industrial Revolution concept, which is a little more forward with what the globalists really want. He talks excitedly of a true “global society” and a world in which people turn to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a better means of governance. He even suggests that laws would eventually be dictated by AI and that courts would be run by robots.

Of course, he admits that this cannot happen without a period of economic deconstruction in which people and governments will have to choose between sacrifice for the sake of stability or continued pain in the name of holding on to the “old ways.” Look at it this way: The Great Reset is the action or the chaos, and the 4th Industrial Revolution is the intended result or planned “order.” That is to say, it’s a new order created out of engineered chaos.

Yeah, it sounds like bad science fiction, but remember these are the people that enjoy the undivided attention of many of our political leaders and they rub elbows with the central bankers at the Federal Reserve. I’ll say it again: The proponents of the Great Reset and the 4th Industrial Revolution, who want to completely undermine and reconstitute our society and way of life, are close partners with our national leaders and the very bankers that could force such a reset to happen through a deliberate collapse.

The globalists have been trying to rebrand and repackage their New World Order agenda for many years, and the Reset was what they came up with. Rather than being innocuous sounding, the term threatens systemic upheaval and an erasure of the past. When you “reset” something it usually goes back to zero – A blank slate that the engineers can use to rewrite the code and the functions. But what does this really mean?

What do the globalists REALLY WANT? Here are the details, so far as I can prove or support with evidence, of what the “Great Reset” actually is and what programs they hope to enforce:

Total Global Economic Centralization: Some people might claim that we already have global economic centralization, but they don’t understand what this really means. While national central banks are all members of the IMF and the Bank for International Settlements and take their marching orders from these institutions, what the globalists want is open global governance of finance, probably through the IMF.

In other words, it’s not enough that they manipulate economies secretly by using national central banks as proxies; what they want is to stop hiding and to come out into the light as the magnanimous rulers they think they are. The ultimate goal of full centralization is to erase the very idea of free markets and to allow a handful of people to micromanage every aspect of trade and business. It’s not just about influence, it’s about economic empire. But in order to achieve a global central bank they must first implement a one world currency plan.

A One World Digital Currency System: The IMF has been talking about using their Special Drawing Rights basket as the foundation for a global currency for years (since at least the year 2000). Around a decade ago China started taking on trillions of dollars in debt just to qualify as a member of the SDR system, and the IMF has hinted that when all is said and done that system will go digital. All that is needed is the right kind of crisis to shock the public into compliance.

This was evident at the height of the covid pandemic lockdowns and the threat of economic disaster when globalist institutions began to suggest that the IMF’s SDR could be used as a safety net for nations, with strings attached, of course. But beyond the stresses of the pandemic there is a much bigger crisis; namely the stagflationary crisis now on our doorstep. With multiple national currencies in decline and the dollar’s world reserve status increasingly in question, I have no doubt that the globalists will take the opportunity to offer the public their digital currency as a solution.

The new system would be more like a phantom currency for a time. The SDR would be the glue or the backing while national currencies remain in circulation until the digital framework becomes pervasive. The IMF and the people behind it would become the defacto world central bank, with the power to steer the course of all national economies through a single currency mechanism.

On the micro-economic side, each and every individual would now be dependent on a digital currency or cryptocurrency which removes all privacy in trade. All transactions would be tracked, and by the very nature of blockchain technology and the digital ledger this would be required. The money elites wouldn’t have to explain the tracking, all they would have to say is “That’s how the technology functions; without the ledger it doesn’t work.”

A Global Social Credit System: The evil inherent in globalism was readily apparent during the recent lockdowns and the violent push for medical tyranny. Despite the fact that covid only had a median Infection Fatality Rate of only 0.27% according to dozens of official studies, the WEF contingent of politicians and world leaders were frothing at the mouth, proclaiming that the existence of covid gave them the right to take total control of people’s lives.

Klaus Schwab and the WEF happily announced that the pandemic was the beginning of the “Great Reset” and the 4th Industrial Revolution, stating that the covid crisis presented a perfect “opportunity” for change.

The vaccine passports were thankfully defeated by numerous conservative red states in the US, leading to the complete reversal of such policies across most of the western world. We were free for years while many blue states and other countries were facing authoritarianism and this caused a lot of problems for the globalists. It’s hard to institute a global medical dystopia when people around the world can look at the conservatives in the US and see that we are living just fine without the controls.

The vax passports need to be understood as a first step towards something else – The beginning of a massive social credit system much like the one being used in China right now. If you think cancel culture is a nightmare today, just think what would happen if the collectivist mob had the power to drop a review bomb on your social credit account and declare you to be untouchable? Imagine if they had the power to simply shut down your ability to get a job, to shop in grocery stores and even shut down access to your money? Without your compliance to the collective, access to normal survival necessities would be impossible.

This is what the globalists want, as they openly admitted at the start of the pandemic, and the vax passports would have been an introduction to that technocratic horror had we conservatives not stood our ground.

You Will Own Nothing And Be Happy By 2030: The “Sharing Economy” (also sometimes referenced in parallel with “Stakeholder Capitalism”) is a concept that has been making the rounds in the WEF for a few years now. The media has attempted at every turn to spread lies and disinformation claiming that the plan does not exist; but again, it is openly admitted.

The sharing economy is essentially a communistic economy, but distilled down to a bizarre minimalism even people who lived in the Soviet Union did not have to experience. The structure is described as a kind of commune based society in which people live in Section 8-style housing, with shared kitchens, shared bathrooms, and barely any privacy. All property is rented, or borrowed. All cars are borrowed and shared, most transit is mass transit, basic personal items such as computers, phones, and even cooking utensils might be shared or borrowed items. As the WEF says, you will own nothing. Being happy about it is another matter.

The argument for this kind of society is of course that “climate change” and the frailties of consumer economics demand that we reduce our living standards to near zero and abandon the sacred ideal of property ownership for the sake of the planet.

Set aside the fact that carbon based global warming is a farce. The world’s temperatures have only risen by 1 DEGREE CELSIUS in the span of a century, according to the NOAA. This was data that climate scientists had attempted to hide or gloss over for years, but now it is out there for everyone to see. There is no proof of man made global warming. None.

The globalists have been scheming to use environmentalism as an excuse for centralization since at least 1972, when the Club Of Rome published a treatise titled ‘The Limits To Growth’. Twenty years later they would publish a book titled ‘The First Global Revolution.’ In that document they specifically recommend using global warming as a vehicle:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

The statement comes from Chapter 5 – "The Vacuum", which covers their position on the need for global government. The quote is relatively clear; a common enemy must be conjured in order to trick humanity into uniting under a single banner, and the elites see environmental catastrophe, caused by mankind itself, as the best possible motivator.

They present the solution of the shared economy concept as if it is a new and bold idea. What the globalists ultimately want for their Great Reset, however, is a tidal wave reversal from freedom and individual prosperity back to a very old manner of doing things, similar to ancient feudalism. You become a peasant working on land owned by the elites, or by the state, and you will never be allowed to own that land.

The only difference would be that in a feudal empire of the past peasants could not own land because of the class system. This time around, you won’t be allowed to own anything, including land, because wanting to own anything is “selfish” and destructive to the planet.

Total Information Control: The truth is a rare commodity these days, but nowhere near as rare as it will be if these elitists get what they want. The globalists are far more open about their agenda today than they have ever been before, and I suspect this is because they believe they will be able to rewrite the history of today’s events with impunity after the Reset unfolds. They think they will own the world of information and will be able to edit our cultural memory as they go.

The mainstream media calls all of this “conspiracy theory.” I call it conspiracy reality. It’s hard to deny openly spoken admissions by the globalists themselves, all they can do is try to spin the information as much as possible to keep the public on the fence in terms of what needs to be done, which is a purge of the globalists from our country and perhaps the entire world.

If we do not do this, there will come a time when nothing I say here is remembered and no evidence of the Reset plan will exist. The establishment will have eliminated all notions of it from written history, leaving only a fantasy tale of how the world collapsed and a small organization of “visionary” globalists saved it from oblivion through a new religion of centralization."

Gregory Mannarino, "Blackrock Warns: Expect Much Higher Inflation And Shortages"

Gregory Mannarino, AM 4/5/22:
"Blackrock Warns: 
Expect Much Higher Inflation And Shortages"

"Economic Market Snapshot 4/5/22"

Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
"Economic Market Snapshot 4/5/22"
MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates
CNN Market Data:

CNN Fear And Greed Index:
Latest Market Analysis, Updated 4/5/22
ShadowStats
A comprehensive, essential daily read.
April 4th to 5th, 2022
Financial Stress Index
"The OFR Financial Stress Index (OFR FSI) is a daily market-based snapshot of stress in global financial markets. It is constructed from 33 financial market variables, such as yield spreads, valuation measures, and interest rates. The OFR FSI is positive when stress levels are above average, and negative when stress levels are below average. The OFR FSI incorporates five categories of indicators: credit, equity valuation, funding, safe assets and volatility. The FSI shows stress contributions by three regions: United States, other advanced economies, and emerging markets."
Commentary, highly recommended:
"The more I see of the monied classes,
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
Oh yeah...
And now... The End Game...

Monday, April 4, 2022

"They’ve Secretly Raised Your Taxes"

"They’ve Secretly Raised Your Taxes"
by Jim Rickards

"Inflation is not a guessing game anymore; it’s here. Every time you buy gas at the pump or groceries at the supermarket or book a plane ticket, the price increases are staring you in the face. The problem is that inflation cannot be isolated. It’s not limited to what you pay to fill up your car, for example. Truckers have to pay the same higher prices for diesel fuel, which add to transportation costs and to the final prices of delivered goods. It’s a clear example of the ripple effect.

That much is clear. What is less clear are the thousands of ways that inflation hurts you that are invisible. The most important of these is that inflation is a tax. The government borrows dollars, and you earn dollars. Taxation is one way that governments take money from citizens to pay off government debt. But taxes are unpopular and hard to get approved by Congress.

Inflation works much better. It reduces your real income since the dollars you earn are worth less. And it reduces the government debt because the money the government owes is easier to repay for the same reason – the dollars are worth less. So inflation works the same as a tax increase except that you can’t see it and Congress doesn’t have to lift a finger. Nice, right?

Sleight of Hand: Another damaging effect of inflation has to do with the difference between nominal income and real income. Nominal income is the amount of money you make measured in dollars. Real income is the amount those dollars are actually worth when adjusted for inflation.

For example, your wages might have gone up 5% (that’s the latest annualized wage increase as of April 1, according to the Labor Department). That’s a nice gain, but with inflation of 7.9% (also the latest data we have), your real wages actually went down 2.9% (5.0 – 7.9 = -2.9). You got a raise in nominal terms, but you took a pay cut in real terms. Many people are not familiar with this simple formula for converting nominal gains to real gains. But everyone is familiar with how long their paycheck lasts.

More and more Americans are finding that by the time they pay the rent or mortgage, put gas in the car, buy groceries and pay some medical bills, they’re out of money. They’re waiting for the next paycheck. There’s nothing left over for a dinner out, a new pair of shoes or a visit with family members. The economic consequences of this decline in real incomes are huge. If you buy coffee at the grocery store instead of going to Starbucks or go jogging instead of paying a visit to the gym, then service and retail industries all around the country start to suffer. This can be followed by layoffs at some of those outlets and even more cuts in discretionary spending as the laid-off workers tighten their belts.

China Locks Down 26 Million in Shanghai: A lot of the inflation today comes from the supply side, not the demand side. It has to do with supply chain disruptions and the cascade of consequences from the economic sanctions because of the war in Ukraine. None of these situations will show any improvement in the short run. They may actually get worse, as the situation in China suggests…

"China is currently experiencing a severe outbreak of COVID. The reason for this is China’s badly flawed and ineffective zero COVID policy. When a case does emerge, they immediately shut down the surrounding area, quarantine everyone, test everyone, trace any contacts and send the infected to isolation camps for two weeks or longer.

When an outbreak spreads, they will lock down entire cities and ban all transportation to or from that city. This is happening in Shanghai now. The entire city of 26 million has been shut down. Citizens are being ordered to stay inside. Visits outside for food and water are severely limited.

Shanghai is one of the largest cities in the world and is adjacent to Ningbo, one of the largest container cargo ports in the world. With the latest lockdown, you can expect further supply chain disruptions. China’s policies are a drag on global growth and represent another disruption to global supply chains."

There’s nothing the Fed can do to stop the inflation because it’s coming from the supply side, which the Fed has no control over. Higher interest rates won’t increase the supply of oil. The Fed has no mandate to drill for oil or discover natural gas resources. The Fed is essentially helpless.

A Drop (of Oil) in the Bucket: To help lower gas prices, Biden plans to release 1 million barrels of oil per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But that will accomplish nothing at all. Here’s why…The U.S. uses about 20 million barrels of oil per day. So the 1 million barrel release from the reserve only adds about 5% to the supply. But it doesn’t really add anything to the supply because importers will simply reduce imports or domestic drillers will reduce output to equilibrate for the new oil. There never was an oil shortage in the U.S., so adding a new source of oil doesn’t alleviate a shortage that never existed. It simply causes some oil to be redirected to other buyers.

Oil is a global market. The price is set mainly on futures exchanges in London and New York. Those markets focus on a wide variety of market variables of which the release from the reserve is only one. In fact, global output is about 92 million barrels per day, so the U.S. reserve addition is only 1.08% of total output. That’s hardly enough to affect the world price one way or the other.

A Cheap Political Stunt: It’s also the case that U.S. refineries are not geared to process the type of oil in the reserve without significant modifications that take time. In short, the oil from the reserve does not convert easily to refined product and will have minimal impact on retail gas prices.

Finally, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is meant to be strategic. It’s not a short-term price manipulation tool; it’s meant to give the U.S. a cushion in the event of a war or natural disaster that directly affects the U.S. itself. Biden’s release will reduce the cushion and leave the U.S. more vulnerable to a true disaster. Biden’s release from the reserve will not affect the price at the pump, not affect the world price and reduce U.S. readiness. It’s a cheap and dangerous publicity stunt.

The bottom line is there is practically only one way for the Fed to stop the inflation. That’s by raising rates until they cause a recession. It’s a fair question whether the cure (recession) is worse than the disease (inflation). Since this is the incompetent Fed we’re talking about, we may even get both inflation and recession."

"Skyrocketing Food Prices Causing Pain For Millions; Blackrock: Time To Sacrifice And Suffer”

Jeremiah Babe, PM 4/4/22:
"Skyrocketing Food Prices Causing Pain For Millions; 
Blackrock: Time To Sacrifice And Suffer”

"Energy Supply Chain Breakdown Triggers Panic Buying And Leads To Massive Shortages"

Full screen recommended.
"Energy Supply Chain Breakdown Triggers Panic 
Buying And Leads To Massive Shortages"
by Epic Economist

"The catastrophic shortage of energy supplies has thrown the commodity market into complete chaos as several nations started to rush to hoard diesel and gasoline amid dwindling inventories and surging prices. On the consumer level, drivers have also been panic buying as fears of fuel rationing continue to rise.

The shortfall of critical energy supplies is having serious impacts on food production as well as on the delivery of goods across the country and even on domestic airport operations. The global supply chain stress is only getting worse, and industry insiders are warning that the stage is set for an economic slowdown and a following recession in the United States as fuel price hikes push inflation to extreme levels.

The Russia and Ukraine crisis is threatening to collapse the global supply of key energy commodities, especially gasoline and diesel. The world was already struggling with an energy shortage before the conflict began in February, but now the situation has gotten much more alarming than expected.

As the price of many leading commodities – from wheat to vegetable oils, and crude to distillate fuels – continues to skyrocket, resulting in multi-decade high inflation rates in several nations, the energy supply crunch is laying the groundwork for rationing, not only of fuels but of food, as production and deliveries get compromised.

Fuel prices will remain volatile as the conflict escalates. In every corner of the global economy, energy supply shortages are aggravating, but experts are warning that what’s going on in gasoline markets is nothing compared to the looming diesel shortage. “The systemic shortfall of diesel is already there,” cautioned Russell Hardy, CEO of energy trading company Vitol. Executives sounded the alarm about extreme conditions caused by that shortage, which is likely to result in a deep decline in global supplies for the rest of the year, requiring widespread fuel rationing.

For a truck that needs 125 gallons or more to be filled, that accounts for several hundred dollars extra at every filling and is leading to higher costs for anyone who buys anything that gets shipped, from food to home goods to electronics and cars. “Diesel is used in farming. It’s used in a lot of industrial processes. All the machinery runs on diesel. A lot of construction runs on diesel,” noted Francisco Blanch, global head of commodities and derivatives research at Bank of America. “I think it’s very problematic. Trucks run on diesel, trains run on diesel, and planes run on jet fuel which is also diesel. It does impact the backbone of everything we do, whether it’s moving things around the world or harvesting or producing anything in a factory. Almost every human activity has some element of diesel consumption,” Blanch said.

To make things worse, the amount of diesel in storage in the U.S. is at an unusually low level. “Diesel stocks have declined for the past year and a half and are down by nearly 70 million barrels, to the lowest level since 2014,” he exposed. Inventories are 20% below the pre-health crisis levels. “Right now the shortage is in diesel, and reserves are down to the ground,” the expert added. “And that could move to gasoline because everyone is going to be maximizing diesel runs.”

In view of all of these disruptions to the global energy supply chains, the Schork Group principal Stephen Schork warned on Thursday that gas prices will explode and create "very ugly" inflation. He also said that a recession is "unavoidable at this point. Every single recession in the United States, beginning with the Arab oil embargo in 1974, was preceded by a massive rise in energy costs," Schork argued. "We have never seen a massive rise like we’re seeing today, so be prepared for it," he stressed.

The pressure on energy supply chains is expected to grow, and shortages aren’t going to be resolved any time soon. We must brace for a lot more turbulence in the weeks and months ahead because global and domestic economic trends continue to deteriorate further with each passing day."

Musical Interlude: Mike Oldfield, "Tubular Bells, Finale"

Mike Oldfield, "Tubular Bells, Finale"

"A Look to the Heavens"

“These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula left of center, and colorful M20 on the right. The third, NGC 6559, is above M8, separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant.
The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20's popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. The colorful skyscape recorded with telescope and digital camera also includes one of Messier's open star clusters, M21, just above the Trifid.”
"When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged
in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams,
to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where
he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars."

- Walt Whitman

Chet Raymo, “A Few Words Inspired By The Tomato Plant”

“A Few Words Inspired By The Tomato Plant”
by Chet Raymo

"Mostly we think of life in terms of individuals - this person, this tomato plant, this frog, this oak tree, this gnat. And we talk about birth and death as the beginning and ending of life. But there is another sense in which life is just one thing, whose beginning is lost in the depths of time and whose end is not in sight. Life in this sense embodies itself in matter, temporarily, as a tomato or a frog, puts on matter and puts off matter as we might don or doff clothes. By this account, I am an ephemeral conglomeration of atoms that life is using to perpetuate itself.

But what is this thing called life? It cannot exist except as embodied form, but it maintains a continuity independent of any particular embodiment. It is a strange enduring wave that stirs the material world into purposeful and directed avenues. With Johannes Kepler we might call it the facultas formatrix of nature, the formative faculty, but giving something a name doesn't explain it. Whatever life is - in the unitary, enduring sense - it would be surprising if it only existed here on Earth. If I were a betting man I would bet that life is as pervasive as matter itself, or energy. Matter, energy and complexification. We have lots left to learn.

But let's be cautious. There are lots of folks out there with half-baked biocentric theories of the universe. Someone once chided the philosopher W. V. O. Quine with a quote from Shakespeare: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” To which Quine is said to have responded: “Possibly, but my concern is that there not be more things in my philosophy than are in heaven and earth.”

"The Only Absolute..."

"Never perceive anything as being inevitable or predestined.
The only absolute is uncertainty."
- Lionel Suggs
"Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us."
- Carl Sagan

Gregory Mannarino, "Must Watch: Beware And Be Ready! Have A Good Look At This"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 4/4/22:
"Must Watch: Beware And Be Ready! 
Have A Good Look At This"

"Food Crisis - The Greatest Threat to Social Stability"

"Food Crisis - The Greatest Threat to Social Stability"
by Jeff Thomas

"Recently, I was in a pharmacy and overheard the pharmacist say to someone, "There’s so much unpleasantness on the news these days, I’ve stopped watching." The pharmacist has my sympathy. I’d love to be able to ignore the deterioration of the First World. It is, at turns, tedious, depressing, disturbing, and infuriating.

Unfortunately, we’re now passing through what, before it’s over, will be the most life-altering period in our lifetimes. As much as we’d like to behave like ostriches right now, we’d better keep our heads out of the sand and be as honest with ourselves as we can if we’re going to lessen the impact that these events will have on us.

I cannot emphasize too strongly the importance of a possible shortage of food. History is filled with examples of cultures that would endure most anything and still behave responsibly… but nothing causes greater, more unpredictable, or more violent behavior in a people than a lack of food.

Interesting to note that whenever I converse with people on the finer points of the Great Unraveling, when I mention the words "famine" or "food riots," even those who are otherwise quite comfortable discussing the subject tend to want to discount the possibility that these will be aspects of the troubles that are headed our way. For this very reason, I believe that we should shine a light on this eventuality.

The Present State of the Industry: In America, the food industry is not in good shape. Normally, the food industry relies on a low-profit/high-volume basis, leaving little room for error. Add to this fact that many business owners and managers in the food industry have given in to the temptation to build up debt over the years. Following the 2008 crash, many have been struggling to get on top of that debt. Inflation has made that task especially difficult. Some have been keeping their noses above water; others have gone under.

Hyperinflation: Hyperinflation is a very real possibility. Historically, whenever a government creates massive debt and greatly increases the printing of currency, dramatic inflation, if not hyperinflation, results. Those businesses that are already on the ragged edge will find that when they’re paid, they cannot buy the same volume of goods for the same amount of dollars. This will be true throughout the entire food-supply chain. Of course, little inflationary blips are the norm in business, and businesses adjust to them. The problem comes when there are large increases that continue steadily over a period of months. When this occurs, we’ll see a greater frequency of food-supply businesses going belly up.

In a normal business climate, the failure of some businesses would aid the competition, as they would have new markets to take on, but if the remaining businesses are already having trouble, they will not be in a condition to expand. The disappearance of large numbers of providers will result in a failure of delivery to the next business down the chain. Nationwide, distribution will become inadequate. This, of course, will not be uniform. Some areas will suffer worse than others. Those types of areas that are already chronically problematic will be hit hardest.

Those who are the most likely to go down the earliest will be those who have the highest overheads and the lowest volume. Typically, these are the small stores - the ones on street corners in every city.

These stores are critical. If a supermarket in the suburbs experiences a shortage, purchasers may drive across town to another supermarket. Not so in the city. If a corner store has empty shelves, or worse, closes completely, the purchasers in that neighborhood must walk to the next neighborhood to buy, and they might not be welcome there if the people in that neighborhood are already having problems with supply at their local store. Worse, should the second store also close, the number of purchasers is redoubled. When the shoppers from two stores arrive at the third store, physical conflict between shoppers is a near certainty.

Food panic doesn’t necessarily occur if a retailer carefully assesses his increased market and rations sales so that everybody gets a slightly lesser share. In fact, I’ve personally seen this work well in the event of a natural disaster in my home country. The panic does occur when the availability suddenly becomes non-existent (even for a brief time) and the shoppers are unsure when it will be resumed. In an inner city, this is exacerbated by three factors:

• Shipments from suppliers become erratic and insufficient.
• A significant increase in the number of shoppers cleans out the store.
• Individual shoppers become unreasonably demanding.

This last factor, in any inner-city situation, is almost always responsible for the chaos that evolves into a riot. It works like this: A mother complains that there is no bread for her children to have a sandwich. Her husband becomes angry at the problem and goes down to the corner store, demanding a loaf of bread. The store manager says that he cannot release the bread until the next morning, when the neighborhood knows they can each come and buy one loaf only. The man, becoming angrier, goes in the back and takes a loaf of bread. The manager resists and is shot.

The man, on his way out, grabs a carton of cigarettes and a couple of six-packs of beer for good measure. The store, now unmanaged, is looted. Those shoppers who are normally peaceful people begin to panic and realize that it’s time to grab what you can. In these situations, the food stores are generally cleaned out quickly. In a very short period of time, a full-scale riot may be in play. In most inner-city riots, the liquor stores are hit early on, then the appliance stores, and so on down the line.

But this is no ordinary riot. Unlike a riot triggered by, say, a TV news clip of some policeman beating a seemingly innocent man, the trigger is ongoing and, more importantly, it is not, at its heart, anger-based - it is fear-based. And it is self-perpetuating. Shipments are not resumed to a store that has no one running it. Worse, additional store owners close for fear that they’re next. The situation escalates very fast.

Enter the Cavalry: While the US and Europe have seen many riot situations and we can therefore study how they play out, a series of self-perpetuating riots has not taken place before. It’s likely that, within weeks, a national emergency would be declared, and rightly so. But how to deal with it?

Certainly, the president and state governors would quickly begin to work with wholesalers to ensure that food got to the cities (and any other locations that are also troubled). Needless to say, suppliers will refuse, stating that, in such a situation, they cannot get paid for any food that they deliver. Truckers will state that they cannot accept the danger that their drivers will be exposed to.

Politicians, feeling the pressure from their constituencies, will want to act decisively, even if their decisions prove ineffectual. In such cases, those politicians who are more conservative may decide to send in truckloads of food to be handed out for free, with the control of the Department of Homeland Security to (hopefully) keep order. Those politicians who are more liberal will believe that the right solution is to nationalize food supply in their states (and possibly nationally) - to take over the control of delivery.

As can be imagined, the results will vary from suburban situations in which the store staff are still in place and the provision of food at the retail level remains orderly, to inner-city situations in which trucks will be routinely ransacked. The evening news will show a clip of a "shopper" running down the street with a case of boxes of cornflakes while heads of lettuce roll on the pavement, some to be picked up, others to be trampled.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the supply chain, the wholesaler is trying to explain to the politicians that if he’s not paid in some way for the food he sends out, he simply cannot continue. Politicians (especially the more liberal ones), not understanding the workings of business, regard the businessman as simply being greedy and fail to understand that, without an orderly flow of money, business stops. The politicians place a temporary ban on all food containers being shipped overseas (even though the overseas customers may be the only truly reliable payers). The politicians advise the wholesalers that they will be paid "eventually." If the money does not exist in the state’s treasury, some politicians may even promise future tax credits as payment. As a result, the supply of food breaks down on a major scale.

How It All Shakes Out: Historically, there’s nothing so chaotic as famine. As long as people have a crust of bread and as long as it arrives regularly, there’s a chance that events may be controlled. It’s the very unpredictability of supply that causes panic. And the greater the concentration of potential recipients, the greater the panic.

Small wonder that, when I speak to friends and associates about the Great Unraveling, this one facet often makes them recoil in a desire to avoid the subject entirely. Once this particular house of cards begins to fall, it will fall much faster than the economy in general, and the results will unquestionably be extreme. So, if the politicians are unlikely to effect a workable solution (at least in the short term), how does this all play out? After all, no famine lasts forever.

What historically happens during a famine is that chaos ensues for a period of time. Some people are killed in attempting to take food from the authorities who control the distribution. Other people are killed on their way home by others who want the food they are carrying. Others are killed in their homes when raided by those who are hungry. Still others die of starvation. It’s horrific to say, but, after a time, in such situations, famine becomes "the new norm" and, as illogical as it would seem, this is the turning point. Chaos eventually devolves into hopelessness and listlessness, and the panic disappears. Then, at some point, the lines of supply are slowly restructured, generally on a more limited scale than before.

Is there a timeline for the above to occur? This is for the reader to decide. Each of us will have some general picture in our heads regarding the likelihood and timing of a second crash in the stock market, the rapidity and degree of hyperinflation, and the many other aspects that make up the Great Unraveling of the economy.

Therefore, those who accept that harder times are looming but would rather not consider the likelihood of food riots and famine would be advised to read the above article a second time and then begin to plan. Those who do not presently have "backdoor" situations in place may wish to set the wheels in motion and to internationalize themselves. One thing is certain: Once riot situations begin, there will not be enough time to plan."

"Essential Readings: "The 5 Stages of Economic Collapse”; “The 12 Rules of Survival”; "The Collapse Of Complex Societies"

 
"The 5 Stages of Economic Collapse”
by Dmitry Orlov

Excerpt: “Elizabeth Kübler-Ross defined the five stages of coming to terms with grief and tragedy as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and applied it quite successfully to various forms of catastrophic personal loss, such as death of a loved one, sudden end to one’s career, and so forth. Several thinkers, notably James Howard Kunstler and, more recently John Michael Greer, have pointed out that the Kübler-Ross model is also quite terrifyingly accurate in reflecting the process by which society as a whole (or at least the informed and thinking parts of it) is reconciling itself to the inevitability of a discontinuous future, with our institutions and life support systems undermined by a combination of resource depletion, catastrophic climate change, and political impotence.

But so far, little has been said specifically about the finer structure of these discontinuities. Instead, there is to be found continuum of subjective judgments, ranging from “a severe and prolonged recession” (the prediction we most often read in the financial press), to Kunstler’s evocative but unscientific-sounding “clusterf**k,” to the ever-popular “Collapse of Western Civilization,” painted with an ever-wider brush-stroke.

For those of us who have already gone through all of the emotional stages of reconciling ourselves to the prospect of social and economic upheaval, it might be helpful to have a more precise terminology that goes beyond such emotionally charged phrases. Defining a taxonomy of collapses might prove to be more than just an intellectual exercise: based on our abilities and circumstances, some of us may be able to specifically plan for a certain stage of collapse as a temporary, or even permanent, stopping point."
Please view this complete article here:
The 12 Rules of Survival”
by Laurence Gonzales

Excerpt: “As a journalist, I’ve been writing about accidents for more than thirty years. In the last 15 or so years, I’ve concentrated on accidents in outdoor recreation, in an effort to understand who lives, who dies, and why. To my surprise, I found an eerie uniformity in the way people survive seemingly impossible circumstances. Decades and sometimes centuries apart, separated by culture, geography, race, language, and tradition, the most successful survivors–those who practice what I call “deep survival”– go through the same patterns of thought and behavior, the same transformation and spiritual discovery, in the course of keeping themselves alive.

Not only that but it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are surviving being lost in the wilderness or battling cancer, whether they’re struggling through divorce or facing a business catastrophe– the strategies remain the same. Survival should be thought of as a journey, a vision quest of the sort that Native Americans have had as a rite of passage for thousands of years. Once you’re past the precipitating event– you’re cast away at sea or told you have cancer– you have been enrolled in one of the oldest schools in history. Here are a few things I’ve learned that can help you pass the final exam."
Please view this complete article here:
"The Collapse Of Complex Societies"
"Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such societies in both the present and future. Dr. Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses."
Freely download “The Collapse of Complex Societies” here;

The Daily "Near You?"

Fene, Galicia, Spain. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Mary Oliver, "There Is Time Left"

"There Is Time Left"

 "Well, there is time left 
fields everywhere invite you into them.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!
To put ones foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life,
and not be afraid!
To set ones foot in the door of death,
and be overcome with amazement!"

~ Mary Oliver

"What Might Have Been..."

“Space I can recover. Time, never.” 
-  Napoleon Bonaparte

“Lands can be reconquered, indeed in the course of a battle, a hill or a certain plain might trade hands several times. But missed opportunities? These can never be regained. Moments in time, in culture? They can never be re-made. One can never go back in time to prepare for what they should have prepared for, no one can ever get back critical seconds that were wasted out of fear or ego. Napoleon was brilliant at trading space for time: Sure, you can make these moves, provided you are giving me the time I need to drill my troops, or move them to where I want them to be. Yet in life, most of us are terrible at this. We trade an hour of our life here or afternoon there like it can be bought back with the few dollars we were paid for it. And it is only much, much later, as they are on their deathbeds or when they are looking back on what might have been, that many people realize the awful truth of this quote. Don’t do that. Embrace it now.”
Ryan Holiday
And in secret moments of despair, 
Too late, too late...We think what might have been, 
should have been, and we let it slip away...

Free Download: Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged "

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - what would you tell him to do?"
"I... don't know. What could he do? What would you tell him?"
"To shrug."
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged "

"Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality."
- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
"Moral compass?" This is 'Murica, fool...
And it ain't funny...
Freely download "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, here: