Wednesday, April 6, 2022
"A Look to the Heavens"
“Get Up Off Your Knees!”
"Do You Believe..."
"Ex Obscurum"
"Streets of Philadelphia: On a Cloudy Day, April 6, 2022"
"The Notion Of Democracy..."
The Poet: Mary Oliver, “Evidence”
"I Hope I End Up..."
Bill Bonner, "Parable of Plenty"
"A Recession is Going to Happen - But First, More Free Money"
"The Wealth Effect And The 92%"
Greg Hunter, "Petro-Ruble Takes Down Dollar & Drives Up Gold"
"Is Dollar Tree Still Worth It? - Best vs Worst Deals!"
"Why Most People Will Not Survive: Stimulus Check Update, Chip Shortage, Housing Market Crisis"
Gregory Mannarino, "Forget Russia/Ukraine. The Real War Is Against You!"
"20 Facts About The Emerging Global Food Shortage That Should Chill You To The Core"
Tuesday, April 5, 2022
"I Won't Buy A House Now, Hold Off; Households Are Running Out Of Money; Mortgage Rates; Gas"
Gerald Celente, "And The Loser Is Freedom, Peace And Justice"
"35 Shocking Facts About Housing's New Crisis"
"We’re in the middle of the greatest housing bubble in history, and prices are about to go even higher before a crash occurs to push them back down. Ordinary Americans are facing huge challenges to afford their mortgage or rent payments, and that is causing a lot of financial stress for millions of families out there. Hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans may lose their homes in the coming months as they become unable to keep up with soaring costs and rising interest rates.
Over the past 10 years, home prices rose by almost 70 percent, and we can say for sure that incomes did not increase accordingly. The cost of living in the United States continues to escalate to stratospheric levels, but on the other hand, working conditions continue to deteriorate and most middle-class jobs do not offer enough financial support for workers to purchase a home. In fact, even middle-class renters are also cost-burdened by surging prices, and affordability is set to get much worse this year as the inventory of vacant homes and apartments plunges to the lowest level in decades while demand stays elevated.
More and more families are getting completely priced out of the market. Meanwhile, wealthy investors have been buying entire neighborhoods and engaging in bidding wars, oftentimes offering millions above the original asking price – something most families can not do. That is helping the housing bubble to grow even larger as prices are propped up by financial speculators. On top of that, supply chain issues have been contributing to the spike in construction costs. Shortages of raw materials and shipping disruptions have pushed the price of key building materials such as plywood and lumber to record triple-digit increases over the past 12 months.
We all grew up thinking someday we would have our own homes where we would comfortably live with our families. But that dream has been removed from our reach. Tonight, many parents are going to have to sleep in their cars with their children because they’ve been evicted from their homes. A job loss or one unexpected health expense can push you into a debt spiral that can make you lose everything you own. And in the current economic environment, where living expenses continue to hit one new high after the other while our buying power continues to collapse, afford surging housing costs has become a privilege.
Liquid Mind, "My Orchid Spirit (Extragalactic)"
"A Look to the Heavens"
Chet Raymo, “Very, Very, Very, Very, Very...”
"In a short story that was published posthumously in the New Yorker, the inestimable Primo Levi meditated on the limits of language. The story was called “The Tranquil Star.” He writes "The star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous," and realizes immediately that the adjectives have failed him: “For a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. It's a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it's human. It doesn't go beyond what our senses tell us.
Until fairly recently in human history, there was nothing smaller than a scabies mite, writes Levi, and therefore no adjective to describe it. Nothing bigger than the sea or sky. Nothing hotter than fire. We can add modifiers: very big, very small, very hot. Or use adjectives of dubious superlativeness: enormous, colossal, extraordinary. But, really, these feeble stretchings of language don't take us very far in grasping the very, very, very extraordinarily diminutive or spectacularly colossal dimensions of atomic matter or cosmic space and time. We can overcome the limitations of language, Levi say, "only with a violent effort of the imagination."
I spent more than forty years trying to find ways to violently stretch the imaginations of my students (and myself) to accommodate the dimensions of the universe revealed by science. I would project onto a huge screen a photograph of a firestorm on the Sun, then superimpose a scale-sized Earth, which fit comfortably inside a loop of solar fire. I would take the class into the College Quad here near Boston, where I had set up a basketball to represent the Sun, then gathered 100 feet away with a pinhead Earth; we walked together with our pin in the great annual journey of the Earth, and looked through a telescope at the marble-sized Jupiter than I had previously installed at the other end of the long Quad (the next closest star system would have been a couple of basketballs in Hawaii). We walked geologic timelines that took us from one end of the campus to the other.
In one of my Globe essays I used this analogy: “Imagine the human DNA as a strand of sewing thread. On this scale, the DNA in the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a typical human cell would be about 150 miles long, with about 600 nucleotide pairs per inch. That is, the DNA in a single cell is equivalent to 1000 spools of sewing thread, representing two copies of the genetic code. Take all that thread - the 1000 spools worth - and crumple it into 46 wads (the chromosomes). Stuff the wads into a shoe box (the cell nucleus) along with - oh, say enough chicken soup to fill the box. Toss the shoe box into a steamer trunk (the cell), and fill the rest of the trunk with more soup. Take the steamer trunk with its contents and shrink it down to an invisibly small object, smaller than the point of a pin. Multiply that tiny object by a trillion and you have the trillion cells of the human body, each with its full complement of DNA.”
Or this description from 'Waking Zero': “The track of the Prime Meridian across England from Peace Haven in the south to the mouth of the River Humber in the north is nearly 200 miles. If that distance is taken to represent the 13.7 billion year history of the universe, as we understand it today, then all of recorded human history is less than a single step. The entire story I have told in this book, from the Alexandrian astronomers and geographers to the present-day astronomers who launch telescopes into space, would fit neatly into a single footprint. If the 200 miles of the meridian track is taken to represent the distance to the most distant objects we observe with our telescopes, then a couple of steps would take us across the Milky Way Galaxy. A mote of dust from my shoe is large enough to contain not only our own solar system but many neighboring stars.”
"It'll Do..."
"Memento Mori"
“Requiem for a Ladybug”
“You lie still less than a foot away on top of the soft mouse pad that protects me from carpal tunnel syndrome. I noticed this morning, through eyes not yet clarified by my first coffee of the day, your presence in my study. Odd, I thought, that you would even be present now. It is certainly past your time of the year in these parts.